Trading Superman's Cape for a Columnist's Laptop

Keith Raffel
Wed, 26 Nov 2025 12:08:56 -0800
Opinion

Jackie Kennedy Onassis once said, "If you produce one book, you will have done something wonderful in your life."

Even though it's my sixth book that's being published this week, I still feel I've done something wonderful. Why? Because my first five books were fiction, and "The Raffel Ticket: Betting on America" is the first book of nonfiction I have produced.

For the past two years, I've had two identities. One is as a novelist who makes things up. That's my life as a Superman where I have the power to create fictional realms where truth, justice and the American Way (usually) triumph. The other is my life as a journalist. Like Clark Kent, I write about what's going on in the real world. He does it as a news reporter; I type it on my laptop where it appears as an essay in the weekly column you're reading now.
Updated: Wed Nov 26, 2025

Jackie Kennedy Onassis once said, "If you produce one book, you will have done something wonderful in your life."

Even though it's my sixth book that's being published this week, I still feel I've done something wonderful. Why? Because my first five books were fiction, and "The Raffel Ticket: Betting on America" is the first book of nonfiction I have produced.

For the past two years, I've had two identities. One is as a novelist who makes things up. That's my life as a Superman where I have the power to create fictional realms where truth, justice and the American Way (usually) triumph. The other is my life as a journalist. Like Clark Kent, I write about what's going on in the real world. He does it as a news reporter; I type it on my laptop where it appears as an essay in the weekly column you're reading now.

Of course, there's a huge advantage in writing about the fictional world. I get to escape from the fraught times we live in. As the 19th century poet Emily Dickinson wrote, "There is no Frigate like a Book to take us Lands away."

But life as a novelist, as gratifying and satisfying as it's been over the past two decades, is no longer enough. In these fraught times, I feel an irresistible call to say what I have to say about this world. When I write my columns, I am forced to deal with a world where hunger, violence, poverty, callousness, authoritarianism, racism, antisemitism, inequality, misogyny and unfairness flourish, right alongside altruism, generosity, creativity, imagination, learning and hope. I have to wrestle with my own beliefs. As the essayist and novelist Joan Didion said, "I don't know what I think until I write it down."

"The Raffel Ticket" assembles two years of my columns in book form. When I myself read the book's page proofs for the first time, a quote from former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham came to mind: "Journalism is the first draft of history." In Thornton Wilder's drama "Our Town," Emily cries, "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it — every, every minute?" Yes, we are swimming through the ocean of history every minute of our lives.

Now I do understand only too well that a column denouncing the roundup of Americans by masked federal agents, the Supreme Court's retreat from equality and fairness, the wealth disparity of this second Gilded Age, the neglect of the humanities in our colleges or the barbarism of Hamas is not going make them disappear. Often, I am only spitting in the wind.

Still, more than anything in reading through the book, I felt thankful knowing what I wrote did reach some readers sometimes. Letters to the editor and online comments showed not all liked or agreed with what I had to say. And that's fine. Lee Child, the creator of the Jack Reacher thrillers, said this about my columns: "Keith Raffel is someone I really pay attention to — he doesn't always change my mind, but he always makes me think. We need more like him." Bingo!

And I'm thankful, too, that people with way different worldviews appreciated what I had to say. Ty Cobb, the prominent D.C. attorney and White House special counsel during Trump's first term, gets a kick out of what I draw "from diverse sources including philosophers, historians and the Marx Brothers movie 'Duck Soup.'" Rep. Jamie Raskin, also a lawyer and the House's lead manager in Trump's first impeachment, thinks, "Readers will enjoy his sharp analysis and amusing observations on every page as they time-travel the last two years of American life."

During this Thanksgiving season, I am so grateful to all who read what I write. You've made my adventures in column-writing, and now nonfiction, both possible and rewarding.