An Affirming Flame: Meditations on Life and Politics

From award-winning New York Times editor and journalist Roger Cohen comes an annotated collection of his most trenchant pieces spanning his twelve years as a columnist. During this time he wrote about America's internal fracture, the Trump presidency's threat to democracy, China, refugees, Covid, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the unquenchable human quest for dignity, and much more. Throughout his career, Cohen has attempted to hold power to account in the name of freedom, decency, pluralism, and, above all, the importance of dissent in open society. The many people who followed his column and mourned its end responded above all to what they saw as the marriage in his writing of head and heart. That tenor permeates this book, introduced by a new extended essay that he has written. In it, Cohen explores themes of displacement, belonging, and his own craft of journalism where, he argues, the essential task of bearing witness endures through the tumult of technological change. His writing, at once lucid and passionate, captures the fight to defend America's openness, capacity for renewal, and promise against walls, retrogression, lies, and division. This struggle is inseparable from the battle to save the world from the creeping autocracy of the twenty-first century. As he writes, "On lies is tyranny built."