Soon after I moved to my current house in Washington, DC, in 2021, I heard about the porch party list. A neighbor across the street, a former newspaper editor who had lived here for decades and seemed to know everyone’s business down to their income and political affiliations, told me I had to get on it. It was key to the whole neighborhood.

The porch party list was an informal mailing list of residents within a few square blocks, who in principle gather occasionally on someone’s front porch to drink wine, get to know one another, talk neighborhood business, and gossip. In practice, it took me a few years to actually find the person running the list and get myself added, and even today I still have yet to show up on any stranger’s porch. But the idea of it stayed in the back of my head. It was a kind of idyllic vision of community and open doors, with refreshments.

In the intervening time, a lot happened. I got a job as an opinions editor at the Washington Post, whose audience had swelled thanks to its accountability reporting during Donald Trump’s first term. Within two and a half years, however, the paper got a new editorial page editor, then a new publisher, then a new editor, as owner Jeff Bezos started to reconsider his priorities in what had previously been for him mostly a civic project. By the time early voting in the 2024 election began, Bezos had quietly held up an endorsement of Trump’s opponent, then, when a reporter noticed no endorsement had run, claimed he had suddenly turned against presidential endorsements in general. Soon after, when Trump was elected president again, the owner tweeted out, “Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory.”

If our readers were upset by this enthusiasm, imagine how it struck colleagues who had feared for their lives as they covered the violent coup Trump had instigated to overturn the results of the last election, or staffers who had simply put years into covering Trump’s misdeeds in office. It was clear now that our owner’s sympathies lay not with those reporters (or, say, Congress or the Capitol Police, who had had a much worse January 6), but with the instigator of the coup. For some reason Bezos was, and still is, allowing the news side of the Post to continue to do some fine accountability journalism, but by this point it was clear he was going to be repurposing the formerly independent editorial department to deliver the opposite: a defense of power.

Anyway. By the time inauguration day arrived, I had left the Post, somewhere in the middle of hundreds of staffers leaping from or being pushed out of the building. Like many of those people, and many outside journalism as well, I felt exhausted, burned out, and deeply disappointed.

What was it that was so bothersome? I had always accepted the premise that journalists should be reporters first, not activists or ideologues, but also believed we were free to uphold certain implicit values, and that this was, in fact, an inherent part of the job. Even as an investigations editor, for example, you were allowed to select for stories intended to uphold public safety and health; honest dealing in business and politics; human rights; the right to vote, and other Constitutional rights; fair and lawful treatment, especially of the vulnerable or lower-status; respect for elections, and so on. This is ideology, of course, but at least in principle it’s not a particularly partisan one. It’s the same kind of generic pro-social values you find guiding a university honor code, or a civics textbook, or a Disney Jr. series. 

The set of values being upheld by Trump and his government (and apparently approved by Bezos), however, were very different. And they are worth outlining, since they are now steering our almost entirely unchecked executive branch. Might makes right; get what you can, while staying ahead of the law; the more dominant or normative group in any binary deserves protection, elevation, and enrichment, while the more vulnerable or alternative population should be marginalized, punished, mocked, and taken for all they’re worth. I sometimes shorthand all this as “overdog politics” – in this worldview, the only direction worth punching is down, and anyone who doesn’t buy into that is a sucker. (To be clear, these are not values consistent with free markets or personal liberties, which Bezos claimed were his north stars. Free markets traditionally depend on competition and the rule of law; personal liberties are pretty much the opposite of detaining and deporting people based on their race, cracking down on the independence of universities, shooting protesters, etc.)

While many of my friends and neighbors did not work in journalism, reorienting the country around this different set of priorities was upending their lives, too. Some of the upheaval arose from how federal government was mutating across the country: the ICE kidnappings and tariffs and guttings of scientific research and crackdowns on civil rights. But in the DC area, things were extra bad, since a disproportionate number of residents work within federal functions or in organizations heavily dependent on them. Washington, DC, alone saw more than 300,000 jobs lost from the beginning of last year to October – incredibly, more than a quarter of the nation’s total job loss in that period, all based in one city.

My departure from my job coincided with this sea change. All of a sudden, every social interaction seemed full of wild stories. At school pickup, I chatted with laid-off human rights lawyers, agricultural engineers contemplating Elon Musk’s “fork in the road” email, and terminated Fulbright grantees preparing to pull their kid from school and leave the country. The school therapist sent out an advisory email suggesting that parents “Tell the truth in simple terms, but skip gory details.” and “Avoid anticipating bad news.” “It's okay to say you don't know the answer,” she added. Two different acquaintances, both naturalized citizens, told me the successful small businesses they’d respectively started were nearly frozen, with workers terrified to cross an ICE checkpoint even if they had papers. At a friend’s backyard get-together, I met a smart and conscientious young lawyer at a government agency who asked me if I’d seen “Andor.” “You know the blond lady, the bureaucrat helping build the rationale for the Death Star?” she asked. “That’s me.”

The stories I was hearing were dire, but a lot of what people told me was also fascinating and blackly humorous. And it was notable that much of it simply wasn’t hitting the news at all. For one thing (as many have noted!), local news has reached an advanced state of decay, and for another, more and more of the centralized news outlets on which we increasingly rely are under some degree of capture by the same billionaires funding and benefitting from the Trump regime. Even at those outlets, reporters are valiantly trying to cover these very interesting times in which we’ve been cursed to live – take the Washington Post’s Hannah Natanson, whose massive reporting project on Trump’s toll on the federal workforce so piqued the administration that it raided her house, and whose essay about how this beat consumed her I find hard to forget. Still, with many A-list journalists, like A-list civil servants, now on the sidelines, too few of these stories were reaching me through the news. I was more likely to hear them on someone’s porch.

So, that’s the origin of this Porch Party: let’s take these gatherings and invite more people in. I have plenty to say about what’s going on right now, but it’s overwhelmingly apparent that you all do, too. I’ve been lucky to have a succession of jobs where I get to solicit and edit pieces from smart and thoughtful people, so if that’s what I can offer in this moment, so be it. If you have information or an experience of what’s happening that you want to write about, or you know someone whose perspective can illuminate this moment for all of us, please get in touch.

I hope that we can offer each other some insight or, at the least, the textual equivalent of a cold drink on a summer evening. Because if we’re going to get through these strange times, and maybe even someday restore the social assumptions our kids learn about in kindergarten to adult life, too, we are only going to be able to do it together.

Speaking of porches: Despite everything, this is what the DC looks like right now. There are those who think azaleas are not worthwhile because for 50 weeks a year they just look like a bush. I am not one of those people.