Bard King (Polis Book 2)

There are no drugs. In other ways, however, they made huge mistakes. Both of the parents dropped out of high school. Danny Hartzell, the husband, supported the family for years as a welder and then went to work in a packaging plant. But when those blue-collared jobs disappeared from Tampa, the only jobs were at Walmart and Target. Surely these were challenging jobs for inadequate pay. But they were jobs. Did Danny hang in there and work two jobs to feed his family? He would walk off a job or mouth off to his boss and get fired. Those were catastrophic mistakes because the family fell into homelessness, and they lived in their car for four months in What does the story of the Hartzells tell you?

It says that given certain circumstances, if you make mistakes, there will be no bottom. The fall will not be broken. I graduated from high school in , the year my book begins. Since then, and to paint with a very broad brush, our country has become more free and less fair. It has become more tolerant and inclusive, and also more stratified and exclusive.

It has become more socially equal and economically unequal. It has become more about the lonely individual and the gigantic, distant corporation or government. But something else is also going on today. I see more idealism.

When I graduated from high school, the kids I knew were cynical. It was a time of utter disbelief in anyone who claimed to be doing things out of higher motives. Teaching and being around people in their teens and 20s, I sense a true spirit of volunteerism, of wanting to. So the question is, how does that fit in with the decline I am talking about? Could the next generation atone for our sins?

I want to leave you with one bit of hope. Zephyr Teachout, Roger Berkowitz, and I were talking about what was happening to America years ago, at the turn of the 20th century and into the Progressive Era. Back then, there was a lot of despair about corruption, about big corporations, about corrupt governments, and about the decline of virtue.

This was the theme of politics for which the Progressive Era was imagined to be an answer. There was no single top-down solution to these problems. It happened all over the country, in a muckraking newspaper here and in a crusading candidate there. But history can provide some answers if you know where to look for them. Can we restore U. The question, of course, is not whether we will but whether we can, and so it is a question not about what is likely to happen but what is possible to happen. Hope is not the belief that something is likely to happen, but it is worth pursuing for itself.

For me, the answer to whether we can pursue and restore American democracy is that there is a chance. It is necessary, because very much like Lawrence Lessig, I think we in the United States are in terrible shape. Part of the problem we now face is the question of how ordinary Americans can impact a political system that is increasingly dominated by immense amounts of money contributed by a small percentage of the population.

We need to take seriously a study by Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page from Northwestern University, which argues that we no longer live in a responsive democracy. First, I think that the people protesting for democracy in Hong Kong had the right idea. The second step comes from Gandhi, who urges us to tell the truth. The first thing to tell the truth about is the state of the world; the second is the state of politics. Teeth in so many ways exemplify what is wrong with modern politics. How often do you hear politicians talking about teeth?

However, teeth are essential to everything. First of all, the dental industry has done a wonderful job of lobbying so that the mouth is not part of the medical education of physicians. That is one problem. But also, teeth are essentially connected with our appearance and thus with pride—the comfort of smiling, the ability to get a job. There is a radical inequality in our society in so many areas, but I think teeth are one of the areas in which inequality is seen most vividly.

This arena that is so intimate and personal, one inherently connected to our health and our pride, is absent from our current political discussion. One way that interests me in is to connect the problems we see today to some of the issues from the time of our founding, the problems we fought a revolution to resolve. Think about your own lives for a second. If you are going to switch your job, you are going to begin thinking favorably toward the new job into which you will be moving.

I think of it as serving your future self. This is a very normal attitude. Back then, people would go into elected office and Parliament so that they could eventually get an office given to them by the King. This practice was featured at one of the most focused conversations during the Constitutional Convention. My book Corruption in America: They worried that he would have different foreign policy tendencies because he had accepted a diamond gift.

Even a small gift. Even a couple of cookies from a bakery in Rhinebeck. How easy will it be tomorrow, after this wonderful conference, to rail against what you see wrong at Bard? This tendency toward gratitude is what the founders of America were concerned about; that this positive human tendency to be thankful to the gift-giver could be turned into a corrupting force if our diplomats were allowed to receive gifts from foreign powers. As a result, we have this very severe provision in the U. Constitution that forbids gifts unless the recipient asks permission of Congress.

But the founders were determined to break off from the culture of corruption in which the best parts of human nature could be turned by governments to serve the few instead of serving all of us, the poor as well as the rich. And so they included this severe provision in the Constitution. Besides junkets and campaign contributions, gifts can sometimes be independent expenditures.

I am not ashamed to tell you that after someone gives you a campaign contribution, you feel very warmly toward her or him. But you also feel warmly toward people who are spending independently on your behalf. When I learned that a few groups were doing some work on my behalf, without charge, of course I felt warmly toward them. Part of restoring American democracy is restoring our memory that we are at core committed to this anti-corruption fight. To be fair, a lot of things were wrong with how we were founded, and with the first years of this country. I think we should call on that and recognize that when we are acting with hope—not merely optimism—for change in how campaigns are funded, we are not following in just the tradition of the post-Watergate era.

We are also following in the tradition of our national history. This panel is about truth telling. An important idea is needed to tell the truth about where we are. Where we are, is here: At the same time, we also have a democratic culture. The next day, a political story by Kaplan covers only money, politics, and power. One kind of reporting assumes that we live in a responsive democracy, and that the reason why Hillary Clinton is doing so well is because people like her stance on issue x or y; the other reporting assumes the exact opposite and subscribes to the belief that we are living in an oligarchy.

You in this room are in a special position. One of the ways we can do that is change the way campaigns are funded in New York State, and this can happen if the contested State Senate races lead to a Democratic Senate in New York. You have the contested Senate races right here. So the path to the future, the path to grabbing control of the wheel, is here in the Hudson Valley. You want evidence that this is where the fight about power and the future of this country is happening? Look at where Danny Loeb is spending money.

Danny Loeb is a hedge fund manager. Another essential feature of restoring U. How we describe ourselves. In a marriage or in a relationship, even with family members, you operate on the assumption that language matters. Yet so much political science and so much political language has become unabashedly transactional.

Political language has moved away from the deeply moral words that I think are essential to describing American democracy. To be clear, I use the family as a model to discuss the importance of language in restoring American democracy not because I think we should base politics on community and family but because the family analogy sounds familiar and possible to people.

It can sound impossible if you come from a radically isolated, political experience to imagine empathy beyond a very limited sphere. So I use the moral understanding of the family as an analogy to politics. My goal, however, is not simply to reinvest America with the best parts of its history. This is partly because what I believe helps spur radical social change has to deal with identification, or the way in which people identify with a larger social movement. People respond to particular clubs or parties, which means that for someone like myself, we need to radically reform the Democratic Party as it currently exists and pull out its best strands.

If we do so, I believe, the Democratic Party can lead both to campaign finance reform and to the kind of coalition building that would move the Party outside and beyond its traditional constituency. My personal tendency is to work within an institution and then to aggressively reach out to Republicans as individuals, not institutionally, because I think there is an extraordinary hunger for honesty in politics. That itself can cut through policy differences from time to time. One of the reasons I believe the language of corruption is so powerful in American politics today is because of the resonance of the opposing ideal, dedication to the public good.

We want to use the language of the founding era in some way, and that language is very much a language of emotion, love, and the ways in which we can create sympathies and identities between those who represent us and the public at large. Extraordinary is what we need at this moment in time.

Do you keep organizing the way you were organizing in if you read a study that says government is not responsive? In , you would try to get the polling up there among the young people. You have to do something big instead. We need to risk a politics of the extraordinary. He believes, as a majority of the Court now believes, that corruption is only quid-pro-quo bribery. But I also wrote it as a letter to ourselves, to remind us of the best parts of American history. Today, most people consider propaganda corrosive to both education and democracy.

We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of halftruths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. If we are not careful, our colleges will produce a group of close[d]-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists, consumed with immoral acts.

As King suggests, propaganda can be conceived as antithetical to genuine political education. Propaganda paralyzes free thought, distorts politics, and diminishes civic life. In contrast, education in the name of democracy seeks to enlighten and empower us as citizens living in a complex world. How might we undertake this type of education?

Such an education helps us learn to think for ourselves and to develop political judgments, relations, and commitments to act. I draw on these ideas to illuminate the theoretical underpinnings of an open inquiry imperative that must guide any legitimate effort for civic education.

I also summarize my research on some efforts designed to promote such learning. This research shows that when civic education operates from an open inquiry imperative, it can help students from many walks of life become more politically engaged without pushing them into any particular political ideology. Historical Perspectives When we hear the term propaganda, we typically imagine pejorative connotations: Illustrative synonyms include disinformation, hype, newspeak, and proselytism.

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As framed by King and Arendt, propagandizing seeks to propagate the views held by narrow-minded conformists who cannot or do not think or act for themselves. Propaganda has not always been a suspect concept, however. Until the 20th century, it held a largely neutral connotation of mere persuasion. Indeed, education and propaganda were often treated as synonymous terms, and there was no sustained debate over risks of propaganda in education. These and other thinkers suggested that lying and controlling access to information, i. So how has propaganda come to be considered a threat to education and democracy in our times?

History has demonstrated the dangers of deceit and manipulation—however philosophically or patriotically garbled—when it comes to modern democratic life. The Idea of an Open Inquiry Imperative The crises borne of those and other manipulations have provoked the criticism that all forms of propagandizing—benignly intended or not—violate truth-seeking, healthy debate, and the project of self-governance.

This critique is potent. As Arendt,9 King, and George Orwell10 all recognized, propaganda is not limited to the messages of totalitarian regimes. In any society, those with power—parties and leaders, the press, civic groups, corporations, cultural or educational institutions—can use propaganda to distort democratic politics when they convey messages that encourage, among other things, uncritical acceptance of the status quo, blind patriotism, xenophobic nationalism, racial or cultural prejudice, or rampant consumerism and materialism.

Can civic education avoid propaganda and instead provide us with tools for navigating and confronting it? Teaching for political engagement does entail certain risks,12 but while some concerns about biased educational institutions are warranted, often they are hyperbolic. Their ideas help reveal the importance of critical thinking and political judgment, acceptance of diversity, and an ethic of responsibility and mutual respect. Free Discussion, Critical Thinking, and Political Judgment In her writings, Arendt highlights the importance of certain types of thinking, learning, and discussion that foster political judgment.

For, as Arendt and King both observed, the growth of German National Socialism in the s was enabled in part by citizens who lacked independent minds and spirits. This stunting stands in direct contrast to the essential goals of a serious liberal education: To encourage such academic and ethical learning, factual knowledge must be complemented by a deep capacity for critical judgment. Or, as King urged: To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.

We must also learn approaches for evaluating the political information, evidence, and arguments that we encounter. Free discussion and critical thinking can turn our learning about the world into a dynamic and personally relevant enterprise, one that encourages informed political judgment. Grappling with Diversity and Plurality of Opinion Additionally, Arendt identifies our need for social settings and educational climates in which students can explore a plurality of experiences and viewpoints, thereby giving way to the formation of new perspectives and sympathies.

Informing this recommendation is her opinion of Eichmann, who. Self-chosen Responsibility, Commitment, and Action Finally, Arendt and others convey overlapping concerns for the relationship of education to political responsibility, commitment, and action— including capacities to hold leaders to account, influence institutions, and pursue reform. She also holds that a valuable education should provide knowledge and understanding of the world, its historical developments, and its challenges so that future generations may assume personal responsibility for the world they inherit: Examples from the Political Engagement Project Dialogues with these thinkers help convey just how important is open discussion, critical thinking, grappling with pluralism, and embracing a sense of responsibility to the project of democracy.

It also indicates how much these learning processes and experiences differ from propaganda and being taught what to think. What might an education that incorporates these elements look like? In a second national study, Educating for Democracy, we offer three further contributions to these debates: We closely studied 21 courses and programs on a variety of college campuses across the United States. These ranged from a semester in Washington, D. At the most general level, the efforts we surveyed were designed to help students hone their ability to make informed political judgments grounded in concrete knowledge.

Most of the efforts also helped to humanize politics and convey the importance of commitment and motivation for political engagement, such as by inviting guest speakers to discuss their political experiences. In many of the initiatives we studied, students took what they learned in an academic setting and applied it to the complex world of politics — to arenas of community debate, policy work, or group initiatives and collective action. As they did so, participants often connected with people who were interested in similar political issues.

Those relationships can be inspiring, often helping to demystify and personalize otherwise abstract issues and strengthen support for a common goal. Trying to provide this type of education is inherently challenging. As educators, we hold our own political views, yet must respect the open inquiry imperative.

We are also torn between helping students find political issues they care about and encouraging them to think critically, consider competing perspectives, and keep an open mind. Those risks notwithstanding, we found that most of the high-quality civic education efforts we surveyed benefited students. Participants from less advantaged backgrounds as well as those with more advantages made significant gains in their political learning, including their sense of political efficacy and agency for political involvement.

Of special note, those who were less politically interested or advantaged at the outset often made the largest and most consistent gains. Our study shows that, far from propagandizing, many civic educators are particularly outspoken in emphasizing the value of open inquiry and vibrant debate in their classes and on campus. In fact, many deliberately sought to ensure that their students encountered a wide array of political views via guest speakers, discussions, and other activities.

Rather, as Arendt urges, it requires that alongside our own deeply held views, we must hold a strong commitment to pluralism and an ability to seriously engage with competing viewpoints, remain open to thoughtful criticism, and avoid. For instance, many students discussed how much their political learning was shaped by meeting and talking with people of different political persuasions. These experiences were of course a source of difficult disagreements in some situations, but more often than not, they helped create a space for sympathy, common ground, and shared concern.

This heightened sense of respect, tolerance, and community allowed many students to develop their political convictions in a way that reduced the balkanization and stereotyping that can accompany ideological differences. Understanding how democratic education can operate from the open inquiry imperative is vitally important. As Arendt and King suggest, engaging in open inquiry is a necessary element of learning to think and judge for oneself and an enlightening, empowering education.

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It is equally important for assuming joint responsibility for the world. We sorely need such an educational model if we are to build a more engaged citizenry, a more inclusive polity, and a healthier democracy. Oxford University Press, Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. University of Chicago Press, Brett Gary, The Nervous Liberals: Columbia University Press, Portraits of the Nazi Leadership New York: Edward Bernays, Propaganda Brooklyn: Elizabeth Kiss and J.

Peter Euben, Debating Moral Education: Duke University Press, Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education Chicago: Renewing Our Common World, Gordon, ed. Westview Press, , — Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: Elizabeth Beaumont, The Civic Constitution: Colby et al, Educating for Democracy. In the early years of our federal, constitutional, democratic-republican experiment, cobblers, lawyers, and yeoman farmers participated in town hall meetings.

They would judge how much to pay in taxes in order to pay for the services of teachers and firemen. By engaging citizens in governance, town hall meetings imbued citizens in the habit of democratic self-governance. Today, few of us have the experience or even the desire to govern, and we have, it seems, lost the habit of weighing and judging those issues that define our body politic. Why is this so? Are we suffering an institutional failure to make clear that participation in governance is a personal responsibility? Or do the size and complexity of bureaucratic government mean that individuals are so removed from the levers of power that engaged citizenship seems rationally to be a waste of time?

Another possibility still, do gerrymandered districts with homogenous populations insulate those elected to Congress from the need for compromise? Whatever the cause, educated elites today are contemptuous of common people and increasingly imagine that American people are no longer qualified for self-government.

On the other hand, the American people increasingly distrust the educated elite that has consistently failed to deliver the dream of a well-managed government that provides social services cheaply and efficiently. What would an educated citizen look like today? He or she is dismayed at the power of money, the legal corruption of lobbyists, and a bureaucracy that seems impervious to popular control.

Such a citizen might very well in look and sound a lot like Eric Cantor, the majority leader of the House of Representatives. To be clear, no claim is being made here that Hannah Arendt would be or should be a supporter of the Tea Party. She was not the type to join any movement, certainly not one with as much ugliness and racism circulating around it. But as we stare blankly upon the theater of the absurd that is occupying Washington, D. A little digging shows it was in real estate development.

But I ask you, not to sit here at Bard and be snarky and condescending. President Barack Obama— another highly educated citizen—has put the matter clearly. The country had a debate about health care. The President and his party won. The President was reelected. The health care law is now the law of. As the president says, if he negotiates with the Republicans now, every future president will be subject to the same kind of shakedown on any issue every time an important piece of legislation needs to be passed. This is hardly a recipe for good governance.

Educated citizens must ask, though: Is the shutdown of government evidence of coercion instead of persuasion, as many have argued? The American people will weigh in. And if Americans weigh in on the side of the president and the Democrats, the consequences for the Republican Party will be disastrous. Cantor and his colleagues are not actually threatening anyone. They are with utter clarity of purpose standing up for a principle, and they are taking a huge risk that they can convince the American people that the Affordable Care Act and other entitlements are part of the general overreaching and enlargement of government that has eroded the power of individual selfgovernment and thus brought about a crisis in educated citizenship.

It is further corrupted by association with racist elements. Moreover, it is dishonest to the extent that it refuses to own up to the pain that his plans will cause. For all these reasons, it is likely that the House Republicans will fail. But I would suggest that success or failure here is beside the point. The educated citizen must ask himself today whether good governance is what is called for.

Certainly, the Freedom Riders of the civil rights movement did not think good governance was called for. It will be easy to say that there is a difference between fighting for civil rights and fighting to take away health insurance. There is a difference. And yet both fights are waged in the name of freedom, albeit two very different ideas of freedom. To be free, Arendt thought, was to be human. Politics exists because it is in and through politics that human beings can build common worlds in which we can speak and act together in ways that are new and surprising.

Some may be geniuses and others loved. Some are liberals and others conservatives. Some may be racist, and some may hate rich people.

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But whatever our private feelings, in politics we encounter each other on the field of equality and respect as equally educated citizens. Arendt worried that when politicians, pundits, or people talk about educating voters—when they complain that other citizens are ignorant or condescend to speak and argue with those they demean—they are really seeking to use the rhetoric of education to achieve a unanimity that is foreign to politics.

During the recent presidential election, the candidates frequently appealed to education as the panacea for everything from our flagging economy to our sclerotic political system. How do we solve poverty? How do we address global warming? How do we heal our divided country? Behind such arguments is the unspoken assumption: Education will not make people see eye to eye, and it will not end political paralysis or usher in a more rational polity. What, then, is the value of education?

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And why should we have great schools and great teachers? The educator must love the world and believe in it if he or she is to introduce young people to that world as something noble and worthy of respect. In this sense, education is conservative not in a political sense but in the sense that it conserves the world as it has been given. But education is also for Arendt revolutionary, insofar as the teacher must realize that education is part of that world and that it is young people who will change the world.

We simply teach what is. We leave to the students the chance to transform it. For Arendt, education teaches self-thinking. Education propels us from the darkness of private life into the bright light of the public sphere. In short, education leads us into a common world in which we can take our place as equal, free, and already educated citizens.

Why is it that the only Americans upset enough at what is going on in Washington to protest, mobilize, and get involved are members of the Tea Party? Where is the new left that pundits like Peter Beinart argue is in ascent? Where is Occupy Wall Street? Are they biding their time? Are they waiting for the right time to pounce and to respond? In my world, they are kvetching on Facebook and Twitter.

Or might it be that Americans on the left—especially younger Americans, many of whom are here—have grown up in an era of statesponsored capitalism and Occupy Wall Street, and harbor a deep cynicism toward the federal state and government, and that their true support for entitlements is deflated by their equally true disdain for government?

We are witness today to a widespread distrust and disdain for government. Few people seem to care. On both left and right, government and politics no longer embody our collective aspirations to care for the common good. Government is administratively necessary, but it is an irritant to daily life. It is a set of services that we outsource rather than an activity in which we engage. Confronting unprecedented challenges, from the environment to terrorism and the decline of the middle class, we need to resurrect our political institutions. We need to inspire citizens to once more care about the common world that we—through politics—build together.

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New institutions are needed—political, technological, and social, maybe even educational— to bring citizens together to speak and act alongside those with whom we disagree but share a more fundamental commitment to a common good. Our goal over the next two days is to think together about what it means to be an educated citizen. In the most literate and technologically savvy society of all time, we have produced politically sterile citizens.

What would it mean to reverse that trend? And how do we do so? These are the questions I ask you to keep in mind as you listen to the excellent speakers who have generously agreed to guide and provoke us over the next two days. Education—as well as its political consequences, or its place in society—is not a subject about which I know much beyond the experiences of trying to do it.

I am to education what a volunteer combat officer is to war in contrast to an officer who attended West Point to study the art, science, and history of war. I have merely fought in wars an appropriate metaphor, given the conditions in which education is expected to occur. What I know comes completely from that point of view. It is interesting to consider what Hannah Arendt thought about education, given her understanding of what her own education had been like. A forewarning is in order. I think that is one of the primary dangers in the current debate about education: Most individuals form ideas about education from an internal conversation with themselves about their own experience that is never subject to critical scrutiny.

So it is as if we were to understand medicine primarily from a crucial yet mostly illinformed and frequently self-serving account of having been a patient. My own view is that the memory of the private experience does not locate what really took place in the past and it should not frame the norms of a public good, which is what education surely is.

Personal experience— subjectively narrated— cannot be a basis by which we can judge what we are actually doing in education policy. In education, we must learn to subordinate our private memories and points of view our sense of triumphs, slights, deficiencies, and virtues in our experience in order to forge a conversation, using a shared language, with others. Our interlocutors, when we are in school as children and young adults, are going to be different from ourselves in many respects.

We need to learn how to be empathetic without having to recognize a personal experience in others, without having to find a link between our personal encounter and the legitimacy of what is claimed by others or even argued as valid for the population as a whole. The challenge and the substance of education are defined by one question: How ought we to we live, side by side, not as lone individuals but as citizens? But how do we, through education, help individuals answer that question? Answering this is hard, particularly in the United States, where many seem to view citizenship as an unfortunate necessity.

The rampant distrust of government and the public sector is overwhelming. We answer the question in purely economic terms, linking education to work and productivity. Nonetheless, citizenship is more than economic; it is a political fact of life that should not be eliminated. And it may be the indispensable foundation of individual happiness, justice, freedom, and civility. To return to the seeming inevitability of the personal as the basis of how we think about education.

From early kindergarten, a child so the American progressives who held sway in the s and s believed should be able to think for oneself and to express him- or herself. Learning was achieved not by rote or spoon-feeding a set standardized materials, but by active trial and error—by doing. This approach, tragically, has been under attack for decades.

That kind of learning does not happen as much anymore in public systems, having given way to teaching as drilling for high-stakes standardized testing. A good education was neither purely cognitive nor subject matter—based. It was actually measured by how well one learned to live as a citizen. The nation, by its very self-definition, was pluralistic and diverse; citizens—in the best sense of Rousseau—were not born. They had to be made.

Education made children into citizens. Clearly, Arendt encountered America in the s, at a time where there was considerable hypocrisy about demographic diversity, particularly on the matter of race. Since the mid s, the qualities and categories that people once killed each other about as differences apart from skin color have become less significant.

The ethnic, religious, and national differences of the late 19th century and mid 20th century among whites that inflamed hatred and prejudice e. But in the s these prejudices could not be so easily dismissed. Nevertheless, in the midst of segregation and institutionalized racism in the s, and in large measure because of it, white America appeared quite diverse and tolerant, from a European point of view.

The country seemed bent on tolerance and intent on harmonizing the melting pot of immigrant white-skinned citizens through schooling. Once the prospect of racial integration and notion of breaking down the barriers of color dominated politics in the late s, center-stage differences between and among whites began to fade and become benign by contrast. A much more threatening challenge to American conceits about tolerance and equal citizenship emerged.

Although the public schools were placed on the front lines in the effort to end segregation and racism, they were never given the proper resources or political support to complete the task successfully. When it came to the university system, which was shocking to a European in terms of its one unique creation unknown in.

Europe —undergraduate education and the liberal arts college—the American university system otherwise seemed immensely flexible and open to new ideas. The university was able to create new fields, and new positions. Not only was there less hierarchy and formality, but even less deference to authority than in the U. The dissenter, rebel, and entrepreneur were prized more than in Europe. In terms of graduate education and academic career advancement, American university practice still stands in contrast to the European. The Acropolis Fund is holding their ball to determine who they will endorse for the next mayoral race.

Daemon Skye refuses to let the age of the rulers end. He enjoys the perks that Ringgold rulers such as him have earned. The story centers on a small group of teens: Ericca is the odd one out. Part of the Ringgold community, she lives in much poorer conditions as compared to her friends. Her father's whereabouts are shrouded in mystery. The group gets sucked into a battle to save the world as they know it. Daemon Skye controls an unknown group called the Terrors.

The Terrors are to protect the Silver Umbrella. The Umbrella is what gives Daemon his power over the Sapling world. Unless the Silver Umbrella can be destroyed, chances are, Nicholas will not win the election. The Ringgolds inhabit the human Sapling world, but also exist in another realm only accessible to them and distinguished Sapling leaders.

Wright creates an imaginative world with many layers. The Quinotaur Exchange is elaborately explained and vital to the action that comprises the second half of the story. My party ended up with two mages, one rogue, and one bard, with no fighter because I was an idiot and sent my solitary fighter off on a task. I wanted to keep the story characters so I developed a strategy to deal with a softer squishier front line.

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My approach was to buff the party in the first round and use magic to debuff the foe, one mage as crowd control, the other for aoe damage and debuff, and the rogue for massive spike damage. The bard played true support by throwing up low cost shields and resetting powerful cooldowns. Before I had sent my fighter off and I gained the second mage, I was using a completely different strategy that involved taunts and him as a damage sponge.

The flexibility and variety adds a lot of fun to the combat. InXile did many things right with this game and the way they approached and tied lore, backstory, and character development together is nothing short of masterful. In the undercity of Skara Brae I walked down familiar streets, past familiar shops, and streets and even the main square. It made me feel like I was back in that same Skara Brae seeing it anew. It was more than nostalgia. It felt like everything was in its place and appropriate and it fit together in a way that made sense of the history and the current story at the same time.

Overall, the narrative and world feel cohesive and well assembled. There are a few pointy corners here and there. The UI comes to mind first. Sometimes interactive objects get mouse fiddly. For example, when operating a mechanism it might move two ways and the UI will sometimes stutter between the two even when repositioning the mouse.

An example that comes to mind are detail water reflections near a more stylistically presented interactable object. The worst offender is the Review Board. This classic lore trope is the level up mechanism and is a core piece of the franchise.