In my reporting, I've found that real change escapes many change-makers because powerful illusions guide their projects.
To have come of age during and after the global financial crisis of 2008 is to belong to a generation often unable to do what an American could once expect, and to do what was once expected: Get a job, pay off student loans, and find a place of your own.
Our societies have experienced the magic that occurs when pluralism flourishes and the marginalized assume their proper powers. But loss stalks those victories, as millions revolt against change and supremacies resurface.
My hairstyle is not common in India, where my parents come from.
I have always found it jarring to encounter people born and raised in, say, Switzerland, who are denied its citizenship and still considered Algerians or Turks.
Mr. Trump is an entertainer, bringing a rawness and wildness to the presidential race that no other candidate can come close to matching.
America has deep, fundamental institutions that take a long time to replicate.
Democracy doesn't automatically safeguard women and minorities.
I worry when each of us is seduced by visions of the future that have no place for the other.
Wealth plays out in the political sphere in all kinds of ways, often personally. Can Hillary Clinton represent the interests of working people when she and her husband have taken so much money from Wall Street? Was Mitt Romney's private-equity business too ruthless with workers?
Right after college, after growing up in the United States, I moved to India, broadly telling the story of how an old and stagnant country was suddenly waking up. And I came home, back to America, in 2009 after telling that story and writing a book about that.
As a teenager growing up in the suburbs of Washington, I ritually watched the Sunday-morning political talk shows with my family. We parsed and argued and jeered at the screen as national figures delivered careful, poll-tested talking points.
In an economy increasingly dominated by network effects, peer-to-peer transactions, self-regulation, and contract labor, the old frameworks are woefully irrelevant.
There is an unwritten social rule now that you can harangue the wealthy to give money away, but you mustn't ask how the money was made. There are no galas celebrating the money people knew better than to seek. Charity begins after profit.