David McElroy

This is how a lot of today’s Internet is created. Since this is a growing concern, let’s talk about that briefly.

I started writing professionally as a minimum-wage part-timer at a newspaper when I was a freshman in college. The video terminals on which we typed our news stories were barely smart enough to retain what we wrote. The idea that a machine could make up articles of its own would have seemed like pure science fiction to us.

I’ve been paid quite nicely for my writing over the years. I was first paid poorly as a newspaper writer and editor (and eventually publisher). I was paid far better for the ridiculous spin that I wrote when I was a political consultant. And I’ve been working for myself — for free — on this website for the past 15 years.

But I want to be clear about this. The idea that I would need a machine to write for me after all these years is actually offensive to me. Whether you like my writing or not, it’s my writing. My words. My style. My ideas. Keep Reading

By the standards of my younger self, I’ll always be a failure. And that’s fine with me.

Our culture is obsessed with riches and status. We unconsciously judge people according to their level of success. We’re envious of those who get ahead and those who have more than we do. We judge others harshly — sometimes loudly and sometimes silently — for not living up to their “potential.”

I grew up this way. Maybe you did, too. I wanted success and power and money. I saw those things as the path to status and freedom. And I expected myself to be very successful.

But something happened along the way. I learned there was a tradeoff between worldly success and personal satisfaction with life. I learned that I couldn’t “have it all.” I struggled for years to find a compromise between the two — to see a way to follow incompatible values. And I failed.

When I crashed, I crashed hard, like a train jumping off its tracks. I went off the rails about 15 years ago — metaphorically speaking — and refused to move until I could figure out what had gone so terribly wrong. Why I felt like a failure.

I finally discovered that my culture had lied to me.

Keep Reading

As the November elections get closer, I feel as though I’m living in a place waiting to get slammed by a destructive hurricane.

Anxious and angry people all around me are preparing for the onslaught of pent-up political energy. Most people fall into one of two camps. Those in one group are eager to stick it to a politician they hate. Those of the other group hate that first group.

All of them are completely sure that the bigger evil is on the other side.

I’m one of the few who is only mildly interested in the approaching hurricane — because I know it won’t matter which side wins. Not in the long run.

I say this as a political expert, but not the kind of “expert” who gets quoted on television or in newspaper stories. It’s true that I worked for 20 years as a political consultant, so I could give you a pretty realistic analysis of what’s going to happen in the congressional elections in about six weeks.

But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not going to tell you who’s going to win or how it’s going to affect U.S. politics between now and the 2028 presidential campaign. I’m going to predict something far more certain.

Nothing that happens in the November elections will fix the world around us, no matter what happens.

Keep Reading