My dad was a difficult guy, and our relationship was strained. My parents had separated when I was six, my mom taking me and my sister with her to Florida while my brother stayed with my dad in Marion, Arkansas. A mutual silence held throughout most of my teens, broken only by my reaching out to him through email in my early twenties, in a spirit of curiosity and clemency. It was a strange reencounter, an adult son getting to know his dad for the first time as a person rather than simply a parent. We wrote each other about our lives and dreams; he shared insights on music, gleaned from a lifetime of being a virtuoso tenor saxophonist. But I was soon surprised to find that one of every three emails he sent had to do with politics…

Dad’s obsession with outrage media gradually alienated him from nearly everyone.