"That is what a patriot is. Someone who loves the country enough to trade the myth for the question." - Ken Woodward

We took a single question to two places: the garden of the Heurich House in Washington, DC, and a town-center street in Rockville. What are you asking, right now, about America at two hundred and fifty? We did not coach anyone. We asked, and we listened. What came back was not one mood. It was several, sitting side by side. A civility one immigrant was taught here and watched thin. A fear for the vote. An institution lost and a resolve to become one. The next two hundred and fifty years held in one hand and tonight's parking in the other. A whole country found again in a crowd at a pool.

Underneath all five runs one thread: the fear lives at a distance, and the hope lives within reach. Agency far away arrives as something done to us. Agency close enough to touch arrives as hope. The episode follows that thread back to the founding, to Frederick Douglass, and to what the word patriot is supposed to mean.

This Curated Questions episode can be found on all major platforms and at CuratedQuestions.com.

Be sure to subscribe to the weekly Curated Questions Dispatch newsletter for more fun with questions and curiosity! (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions)

Keep questioning!

"The smallest act of authorship is a question." - Ken Woodward

Nine months ago, Naomi Campbell of the Right Question Institute said one word that gave me a word I had been searching for: agency. I felt it land in my body before I understood it in my head. I promised my listeners I would come back with an answer. This episode is that answer.

Agency is the authorship of our own lives. Not control, which none of us has. Authorship is something smaller and more stubborn. It is the refusal to be only what the world wrote about us. And the smallest act of authorship, it turns out, is a question. The moment we ask, we stop receiving the world and start writing on it.

I carry two stories from my walk across Washington. A man I call Doc, raised by a mother who would not let him absorb anything without questioning it first. A woman I call Pearl, who answered the worst day of her life by building a neighborhood for the children coming up behind her.

Agency is inherent. It can be suppressed, but never removed. The whole question is whether we pick up the pen.

This Curated Questions episode can be found on all major platforms and at CuratedQuestions.com.

Be sure to subscribe to the weekly Curated Questions Dispatch newsletter for more fun with questions and curiosity! (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions)

Keep questioning!