The news media can't help but leave out a certain personal element from every story. Reading fiction gives us the freedom to envision unlikely connections between characters, overhear conversations in bedrooms and on neighborhood streets, focus in on a child's thoughts, and linger in unfamiliar places. Politically Inspired is a collection of thirty original short stories, cartoons, and illustrations that illuminate many of the political events and questions of our time. Each of these inventive fictional worlds offers a new perspective on today's politics of fear, desire, and destruction. We see the President of the United States wake up as a fifth-grader in Minneapolis, peek into a classroom where young boys wear burqas, and read an endearingly eccentric letter to a girlfriend lost on a hijacked plane. Both highly imaginative and deeply relevant, Politically Inspired reveals the myriad ways in which politics shapes our everyday lives. Book jacket.