Paul Thornton

2 months ago | smartbrief.com | Paul Thornton

4 min read CommunicationLeadership Great leaders are great communicators. They influence and inspire action by making their big ideas clear and compelling. Whether sharing ideas or listening, they connect with people in meaningful ways. Leaders have big ideas.

2 months ago | latimes.com | Paul Thornton

Good morning. It is Saturday, March 1. Changes are coming to this newsletter; read about them below. But first, let’s look back at the week in Opinion. Senators, representatives, ex-presidents, billionaires — when you think of the influential political class in America, these people probably come to mind. But right now, the powerful are acting powerless, and it’s up to the least powerful (us, the voters) to scrounge for what little influence we have and put this country back on the democratic path.

2 months ago | latimes.com | Paul Thornton

Good morning. It is Saturday, Feb. 22. Here’s what we’ve been doing in Opinion. In August 1939, according to testimony at the Nuremberg trials, German forces arrested an ethnic Pole named Franciszek Honiok, murdered him and dressed his corpse in a Polish military uniform. They left Honiok’s body with a gunshot wound to his head at a German radio tower as proof of a repelled attack by Polish saboteurs against the Nazi reich. Germany used it as justification to invade Poland.

2 months ago | latimes.com | Paul Thornton

Good morning. It is Saturday, Feb. 15. Let’s look back at the week in Opinion. There’s a word I’m starting to hear in the discourse (if you can call it that) over Donald Trump’s nearly four-week-old presidency: stupid. A letter writer mentioned it in reaction to the president’s promise to “bring God back,” specifically regarding German dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s proposition that mass stupidity — which he described as a kind of persistent, willful ignorance — enabled the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Feb 8, 2025 | latimes.com | Paul Thornton

Demonstrators protest actions taken by Elon Musk against the U.S. Agency for International Development in Washington on Monday. Good morning. It Saturday, Feb. 8. Let’s look back at the week in Opinion. Regular readers of this newsletter probably know that no kind of punditry bothers me more than contrarianism informed by little more than a writer’s political savvy. It bothered me when, in 2022, some commentators preemptively went “meh” before the House Jan.