Thanks

First and foremost, I want to thank my partner, first-reader, and sounding-board Cecilia Bitz for patiently putting up with my meandering thoughts for the last two decades. I also owe a special thanks to my editor, Dr. Mariana Funes whose insightful and razor-sharp feedback on multiple drafts of the book helped me figure out my what, who, and how.

A big, big, grateful THANKS to my family, friends, and colleagues who kindly waded-through and commented on various drafts of the book, in alphabetical order: Julia Christensen for guiding me through the complexities of research in political polarization. Navid Fallah, for his careful and comprehensive technical critique; my brother Khalil for sanity-checks and advice on my recollections; and Paul Shannon, for pointing me to many buried treasures that I had missed in my initial research.

This may seem a little unusual, but I want to take this opportunity to also thank the Seattle Public Library and the Libraries at the University of Washington for being wonderful resources staffed by amazingly helpful people. A shout out also to Wikipedia and the Internet Archive, for the diversity of thought that they serve freely, and to Yihui Xie and the RStudio team for the free and open-source book authoring tool bookdown.

Some writers of fiction say that their characters gradually take over and dictate the narrative. Others say that they become so absorbed in a story/character that they have no choice but to stop doing anything else and let their stories tell themselves. I have no illusions about being such a consummate Writer. All the same, over the years, the ideas described in this book came to dominate my thoughts so much that I started to feel that I had to get them out of my head if I wanted to breath freely again. To all my family, friends, and colleagues: I realize I have been boring the hell out of you with my one-track conversations for many years. Thanks for putting up with me with humor and grace.

Research scientists are trained to constantly look for hidden assumptions and biases in explanations that may otherwise seem intuitive and obvious. It is too easy to make up “just-so” stories of how the giraffe got its long neck, or to confuse correlation with causality. This book is the result of many different ways in which I have tried to verify my reasoning and assumptions. It is also my attempt to further verify my hypotheses by subjecting them to review, first by my friends and colleagues, then by independent editors and reviewers. The ultimate test of my work will be the reaction of readers from diverse backgrounds to the points I put forward here. So, I want to thank you in advance. With bated breath, I look forward to your comments and insights.