Author

Jay Bookman

Jay Bookman

Jay Bookman covered Georgia and national politics for nearly 30 years for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, earning numerous national, regional and state journalism awards. He has been awarded the National Headliner Award and the Walker Stone Award for outstanding editorial writing, and is the only two-time winner of the Pulliam Fellowship granted by the Society of Professional Journalists. He is also the author of "Caught in the Current," published by St. Martin's Press.

COMMENTARY

Bookman: Top Republicans embrace Marjorie Taylor Greene’s violent rhetoric

By: - October 21, 2022

In a recent campaign video, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican from Georgia, likened Democrats to destructive feral hogs allowed to range free and destroy the American countryside. But Marjorie had a solution: As the camera followed her, she grabbed a rifle and climbed aboard a waiting helicopter, where she tracked down and shot a […]

COMMENTARY

Bookman: ‘We the people’ are in dangerous territory

By: - March 4, 2022

The state of our union is precarious. It is precarious not because of some outside threat – outside threats we can still handle. It is precarious because we have forgotten our way, because we find ourselves increasingly seduced by a perverted, stunted and selfish notion of freedom. It is precarious because some of us have […]

COMMENTARY

Eastman memo shows how close Georgia GOP chair came to enabling Trump coup

By: - September 27, 2021

Eleven months after the election, and nine months after the Jan. 6 insurrection attempt, we are only now beginning to understand how organized, intentional and dangerous the Trump coup attempt had been, and how dangerous it remains. Take, for example, the events of Dec. 14 at the Georgia State Capitol. On that date, Democratic electors […]

COMMENTARY

We could we be witnessing the deciding battle of the culture wars

By: - July 1, 2020

GEORGIA — We are living through history, through a tumultuous time in which change accelerates, the once-solid becomes fluid and no one has any real idea of where this thing is headed. Living in chaos, trying to make daily sense of it, has been frightening, exhilarating and confusing.  Someday our grandchildren, reading about this era […]

COMMENTARY

Bookman: Arbery case’s true horror is safe harbor given for modern lynching

By: - May 13, 2020

Only in recent years has white American culture become willing to stare the horror of lynching in the face, or at least glance at it sideways. It has done so only because time’s passage has made it feel safe to do so, allowing us to pretend that it was perpetrated by people utterly unlike ourselves. […]

COMMENTARY

Climate change threat doesn’t get the Y2K urgency

By: - January 6, 2020

Take a moment to think back to simpler times, to a long-gone era exactly 20 years ago this week, when we celebrated the dawn of a new millennium under the shadow cast by Y2K. Remember all that? Y2K was a universal computer glitch that threatened to shut down power grids, paralyze banking systems and incapacitate […]