A book announcement!

CAPABLE, coming spring 2027

Hi everyone

I’m going to keep this short-ish as I’m on my honeymoon (!) in Northern California but have some big news to share: I’m writing a book!

It was announced today, though I’ve been officially working on it now for several months. The book, CAPABLE, is really a culmination of my years of reporting and thinking about policy and agency, and how we desperately need a new way of talking about the two together.

I love policy, I write every day about policy, and I also have come to realize that our expectations of what policy can do, and what it should do, are way too high. We’re hoping for things policy was never meant to deliver, and then when it doesn’t meet those expectations, people are left feeling frustrated, cynical, and increasingly powerless.

There’s so much being written these days about mental health, loneliness and overwhelm. But I think a big underrated factor in all of this societal malaise is the fact that things increasingly feel so out of our control, such that people really feel like spectators in their own lives.

This book is going to lay out my case for why agency is so important, and not just for individual well-being, though that’s certainly true. But also for policy change, for structural change. I know there’s a general distrust of agency to many people on the liberal/left. It smells like bootstrapping, like meritocracy, like victim-blaming and a denial of systemic barriers. It reeks of hyper-individualistic podcast bros, fitness influencers, and Silicon Valley snake oil. But that (understandable and well-intentioned) skepticism has gone too far, and needs to stop. It’s making the collective goals we want to achieve much harder, and leaving everyone else feeling like crap. We don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and it’s time people started taking more responsibility for how we affect feelings of agency in others.

This wasn’t a book I thought I’d ever write ten years ago, but the more I reported on policy the clearer it became. I aim for this to be a constructive book, a positive one.

I think that’s it for now, and I will keep you all posted on it! I’ll have more to share about the book- writing / book proposal process, journalism vs. nonfiction writing, and so much else in the coming weeks/months. Some people who read this newsletter have already provided me with such valuable counsel and consultation on this project, so thank you.

I hope this is a book you’ll all read one day, perhaps in the spring 2027 :)