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The Next Big Idea · 2026-07-02 · 74 min · 11,545 words

As America Turns 250, Are You in the Mood to Celebrate?

Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Why times can differ in your player

When I spoke with Walter Isaacson at the end of last year. Here's what he told me. Yeah, I mean we're entering our two hundred and fiftiet birthday and we're not quite in the mood for a birthday party. We've been tearing ourselves apart. Well

The big day is finally here. And I couldn't think of a better way to mark it than replaying my conversation with Walter about his slim but powerful book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. It's a close reading of the most famous line in the Declaration of Independence. You know the one. It begins, we hold these truths to be self-evident. Yes, this country has never lived up to that sentence, not in 1776, not now, 250 years later.

But Walter reminds us how radical it was to write it down in the first place. And that it's still on us to live up to it. Let's use this birthday as a chance to try to heal some of the divides. And for me, the small contribution I make to this. Yeah.

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