This is the last Morning Jolt of 2021. I’ll see you January 3. Let’s close out the year by looking at what 2021 brought us and what 2022 is likely to bring. I think the one word that will most succinctly summarize 2022 is “reckoning.”

Lost in the play-by-play coverage of the Democrats’ internecine Build Back Better battles the past few months is how foreseeable their current debacle was.

I am a black American intellectual living in an age of persistent racial inequality in my country.