Living in fraught times, and how to survive them

Consequential history is on the march, whether we like it or not

Thanks to the hundreds of people who have signed up for History Keeps Happening, most of you before I even gave it a name. I’m not sure what form or frequency this newsletter will take, but welcome to all of you. I appreciate your openness to yet more political writing at a time when we should all be trying to leaven our lives with good news and enjoyable experiences. Even as we worry desperately about what’s to become of America.

As many of you may know, I have had a long journalism career as a political reporter, editor and opinion writer, almost all of it at the most mainstream of news organizations—The Associated Press and USA Today—with a couple of years at National Journal and many years as a free-lance analyst and columnist for The Daily Beast, U.S. News, and Creators Syndicate.

I’ve also written a book of case studies about successful bipartisan negotiations on Capitol Hill (which grew out of a project for the Brookings Institution). Most recently I’ve been writing mostly, though not entirely, for The Bulwark.

You can find out a lot more about me at my website, in this 2021 AP Q-and-A (which gave me a title for this newsletter) and in this Q-and-A with Ryan Teague Beckwith at his Your First Byline Substack about how I got started in the field (a clear how-not-to lesson, and not just for journalism).

My current plan is to flag and link to new work at The Bulwark and other outlets in this newsletter. The Bulwark and History Keeps Happening are accessible directly at substack.com/@jilllawrence.

If you want to get serious over this holiday weekend, and you haven’t seen it yet, my latest Bulwark piece is about the urgent need for major Supreme Court reforms, from a binding, enforceable ethics code to 18-year term limits and, at some point, maybe even court expansion. The upside-down American flag on Justice Alito’s lawn was the last “last straw,” I wrote. And that was before the news of the similarly insurrectionary “Appeal to Heaven” flag at his New Jersey beach house.

If you are, like me, always in search of escapist entertainment, I may also use this platform to make recommendations from time to time. Right now we are watching The Brokenwood Mysteries, a detective procedural set in a small New Zealand town. It’s funny and pleasant and scenic. And have I mentioned, it’s in New Zealand? We’ve finished the first nine seasons and we’re now in the middle of the new Season 10. Yes, it’s that funny, pleasant and scenic.

Full disclosure: My husband has lured me off the fun path to watch A Gentleman in Moscow, which is brilliant but deeply disturbing. I am three-quarters Russian, with family who fled to America in the late 19^th and very early 20^th centuries. After all those years, all that upheaval, there has been no happy ending for Russia—just continuing brutality and hardship.

I do occasionally fantasize, while watching this drama centered on a wealthy, important man under house arrest at a luxury hotel, about another (theoretically) wealthy, important man whose actual home is, in fact, a luxury golf resort.

Could it happen? A Gentleman in Moscow is based on a novel. Fiction. But as we all have learned, truth can be stranger.

The pro-democracy, 51-star flag in front of my house in Washington, DC.