(Click here to buy season tickets.) Picking a topic for this year’s dinner series was like trying to catch a falling knife. Amid the swirling chaos of each new political controversy du jour, it became increasingly difficult to even keep track of what we were talking about. Then it dawned on us that there may be only one thing that would last the whole year for us to talk about – the chaos itself.

As we now know all too well, order is hard to build and easy to destroy. Sure, democracy is a pretty chaotic affair by definition, but this chaos now feels dangerous and destructive and harder to control with each passing day. So we’d better be talking about it if we ever want to emerge from it – and with a more constructive result than the peeps in Washington seem to be achieving.