10 Comments

Jen - my cancer treatment gave me definite chemo brain -- yours seems to be sharpening your insights. Or maybe it's that the situation gets ever clearer. Thank you for giving voice to how the thicket of laws and policies has become counter-productive to Life. After my body lived through purposeful poisons, I started drafting "Integrative Democracy." This is the time to equally focus on the overall wellness of our shared public body. Only in 2018 was the Interstitium discovered by scientists who sidestepped the usual process of extracting and dehydrating tissue to look at it under the microscope (perhaps similar to the typical style of opinion polls?). There is layer of cells and fluid that holds the body all together - and most place-based communities have interstitial flows of trust and helping hands that are completely outside of the very visible bones and structures of governance, and, as you note, are grappling with how to move despite the locked up fascia of service delivery. My great wish for this next era is to invite us to stop treating everything as "talking to the other side." This obsession with political sides is the inflammation that keep the fluids in our connective tissue from flowing with more natural ease.

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Thank you, dear Jennifer, for this wonderful post, which I shared on Facebook. I recently subscribed after reading your amazing book, Recoding America, which I told all my friends to read. I'm sorry about your cancer and wish you a full recovery. You are a national treasure and we can't do without you. You should be in charge of DOGE!

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I had no idea you were fighting cancer, as I’ve only discovered your work in the last two months. I am currently reading your book, and think that yours is one of the most important voices in the country. I’m not sure how big your followership is, but I intend to increase it. I am sending you so much gratitude. You are an incredible human being, and knowing what you are going through as you write with such power and clarity just takes my breath away. Thank you, and sending 🙏, ❤️, and ✨. Ps— more than my emojis, I know you want to know that I’m in, with sleeves rolled up. I am.

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Really incredible article and wishing you all the best with your cancer treatments!

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Thank you for this, and more importantly, good luck on your journey.

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Wonderful article. I hope you have a full recovery.

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Nice article. Wishing you all the best Jennifer.

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Thank you and may you be well soon!

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There's an old quote about being a lawyer, "If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law."

When we have procedure on our side and pound the procedure, ordinary people will assume it's because we don't have the facts. And pretty often, they're right. So we need to think carefully about the better future and go get the facts on our side, then pound the facts.

Wishing you the best.

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First, wishing you the best on the health front. I don't know how you can write so eloquently in the circumstances, but you do.

Second, this newsletter is such a comfort/lodestar for me. I've been working in the policy or policy-adjacent world, in a lot of different contexts, since I started working in the 90s. Back in the day, it was the Contract with America that had "right-thinking" classical liberals like me aghast. Even then, I couldn't help noticing that the Weekly Standard (as it then was) and other such outlets were so much more interesting than most of what the left had to offer. It seemed weird that a party supposedly commited to the idea of progress should be so reactionary and hidebound, but I assumed that I was young and stupid and missing something.

Now I'm old, experienced (but often ignorant and/or baffled), and afraid that we've put ourselves in a baby/bathwater situation. I consider myself an environmentalist, but I have long feared that the environmental review process (in which I work) has become so absurdly overbroad and unworkable that the reaction will make it difficult or impossible to put something better in place anytime soon. I appreciate your clear-eyed analysis of what's at stake and the call to us to do everything we can to help make it happen. Thank you.

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