I like bars for the same reason I like Facebook: I can come face-to-face (literally and metaphorically) with people who have different opinions than I do. When I was growing up in the middle of Illinois, liberals were hard to come by, so I couldn't wait to head west and surround myself with other radicals. Once I arrived here and realized that everyone felt the same way, I quickly got bored. Not only that, but something really terrible happened: I began to move to the center. Being a journalist helped with that — you can have a political hypothesis, but once you actually go out and test it through reporting, you see that the world is not... More >>>