America was born with the twin infections of greed and slavery, but its founders embraced intellectualism and science. The new infection of anti-intellectualism was the spirit of January 6, 2021.

I say that any writer who claims they started with a theme in mind is lying. Theme is much harder to develop than you might think. And when you see it in your work it is a revelation.

China is killing itself, for profit, for pride, for reasons that we may not understand today, but wrestled with in the past. The US created agencies like the EPA, and it has worked. A City like Los Angeles, our Beijing of the 1970s, is livable today. The irony is that in the 1970s the citizens of…