The Emotions of Change: A postscript to The Fragility of Democracy essays

On the phone in Tirana

The photo above has a curious back-and-forth quality. It’s of me in Albania in 2019, a country I’d wanted to visit since hearing of the bizarrely isolated communist state in the late 1980s. I’m in a cafe which pays a kind of ironic homage to the country’s half-century of authoritarianism, and I’m on the phone — the kind of dial phone I was always on during my…