D.G. Martin

What will our most recent former president be doing these next few weeks? Barack Obama will be reading and encouraging us to join him. In the week before he left office, he talked to The New York Times’ chief book reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, about the importance of books in his life. “At a time,” Obama told Kakutani, “when so much of our politics is trying to manage this clash of cultures brought about by globalization and technology and migration, the role of stories to unify–as opposed to divide, to engage rather than to marginalize–is more important than ever.” Obama explained why...

  Why have the attitudes of people in our state towards gay and transgender people changed so quickly and so dramatically? Before even trying to answer, I should acknowledge that many people have not changed so quickly and some have not changed at all. That said, there has been a dramatic and almost unbelievable change in many people, something you would not have predicted only a few years ago at the turn of the millennium. Why so fast? A powerful factor in changing our attitudes has been what we learned from people we came to know and admire. Whether...

Did you ever feel so let down after an election? Many North Carolina Democrats have been asking each other this question every day since they learned the results of the latest presidential election. Some old timers remember other times when they felt like they had been hit in the stomach by disappointing election results. There are still people around who remember the way they felt after the primary election in 1950 when the legendary progressive, former university and incumbent U.S. Senator Frank Graham lost his bid to keep his office. Others will tell you the empty feeling they felt...