Keith Raffel

I’ve just passed the three-year mark of writing this column. Every week. For three years. Over 120,000 words, enough for one long novel or two short ones. Why do it, anyway?

It seems appropriate on the third anniversary of the column to come up with three reasons.

First: Before turning to column-writing, I had five published novels. I wrote them in no small part to escape the violent, unjust world we live in and hang out in a fictional world where I had some control over what happened. By 2023, though, anger was boiling inside of me at a world where injustice, poverty, authoritarianism and violence all run amok. It was time to face up to reality. I had to do something, say something. I couldn’t hide any longer from the world around me, and I started writing this weekly fact-based piece.

Second: Column-writing gives me the figurative MRI to look inside my own brain to discover what I myself think. It’s like what the late Joan Didion, the essayist, novelist and fellow Californian, observed: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” For me, it isn’t the only reason, but it’s one of the three. Writing the column is my way of making sense of things and forcing me to balance between a quick reaction and a healthy respect for the events of the past. I turn to history to help figure out what’s happening in the nation’s capital, in Silicon Valley, in universities, in the Middle East, in Ukraine and everywhere else. For instance, when the news cycle hit a fever pitch about tariffs, I looked back to 1930 when President Herbert Hoover signed a bill raising tariffs on 20,000 imported goods that only deepened the Great Depression.

Third: In her splendid 2026 book “The Writer’s Room,” the British author Katie da Cunha Lewin observes, “The world, with its terrible wars and destabilised global order, feels dangerous and scary; continuing to write in the face of it all sometimes seems pointless, even unethical.” Maybe, but I don’t think so. I want to connect with readers when I write. I doubt I’ll change minds often, but I do hope I can make readers think about what’s going on around them. I want to reach people, not just to debate, but to move them. I want to urge in prose what Aretha Franklin did in song: “Think, let your mind go, let yourself be free.”

Here’s an example of one small victory. In a letter to the editor of Pennsylvania paper the Altoona Mirror, a Republican county chairman responded to my column recommending an increase in the size of the U.S. House of Representatives. He first forgave me for being from California, then endorsed my idea, and ultimately concluded, “If we Republicans who love our country want to see some badly needed progress, we need to work with Democrats with whom we can find common ground.”

Every Tuesday morning, then, I sit down at my desk to compose a rough draft of my column. Every Wednesday I send the final version to my editor. It’s the price I willingly pay to have five days when I can retreat into the fictional worlds of my novels where I do have some control over events. It leaves me time, too, to hang out with family, friends and students.

So, I need to write to avoid spending the rest of my life on an analyst’s couch, to figure out what I believe and to attempt to reach people to entertain them, provoke them, inform them and motivate them to make the world a little better.

I write for me, I write because I need to, and I write in the hope that I reach you.

Thank you.