1/ Why are so many people so angry? And what can we do about it? I spent much of the last year reporting a story for @theatlantic on who is to blame for all of the fury coursing through our politics and our personal lives. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
2/ The first surprise: I went into this project thinking of anger as a negative emotion. But when I looked at the social science, I learned that anger can be a powerful force for good.
3/ One @UMassAmherst psychologist conducted a study of a sleepy little Massachusetts town. He found that its residents were frequently livid—but that their anger often made things better, not worse.
4/ Expressing anger can help you get complaints off your chest, force others to listen to you, and it can lead to compromise that might otherwise have been impossible. There’s also a powerful feeling of catharsis that follows an expression of anger. 
5/ But there are downsides to anger as well. The occasional fit of pique may provide a healthy sense of release. But when anger is a constant drumbeat in our lives, it becomes a burden.
6/ Lately, it seems like anger has become the dominant emotion in America. We see it in on cable news, on social media, violence in the public square. Something has shifted—our anger now threatens not just to make us unhappy, but to drag down civil society.
7/ President Trump, of course, is a master at manipulating anger. He won his office by channeling voter discontent, and incites it on Twitter. He owns a fair share of the blame for our state of affairs. But I came to see him as a symptom, not the cause, of our angry present.
8/ So why ARE we so angry? In short, because our anger is being used against us—by politicians (on both sides of the aisle), by cable news, social media companies, and by businesses who profit from our ire.
9/ I talked to a business school professor who told me about his experiences with bill collectors, who are trained to make people angry on purpose—because it makes them more likely to pay up.
10/ I watched cable news talking heads—on the right and left—as they deliberately ratcheted up their viewers’ anger as a way of keeping them tuned in. Anger is their business model.
11/ I interviewed political consultants—perhaps the most devoted proselytizers of rage—who told me that their job is not so much to make the case for their candidate. It’s to make voters angry so they go to the polls.
12/ With our anger stoked at every turn, we’re in real danger of turning on one another. Already, we’ve seen an uptick in ugly political violence, and more could be on the way. It’s a scary world right now.
13/ So where do we go from here? How do we pull back from the edge and tame our anger before it explodes? Can we make anger a positive force in our lives again?
14/ The good news is that it’s possible. In examples from the past and the present, I found stories about anger being harnessed to positive ends.
15/ Cesar Chavez, for example, inspired a moral indignation in his followers that fueled labor protests that won rights for disadvantaged workers. More recently, righteous anger has powered the #metoo and #blacklivesmatter movements.
16/ We can get back to a place where our anger is a force for progress—in our personal lives and in politics—but it’s going to take work. We need to be on guard against our anger being used to pad someone else’s bottom line.
17/ And we need to understand the mechanisms by which anger works. The science of anger has shown how what is often a positive emotion can degrade into a negative one.
18/ If you’re angry, and you don’t know how to stop being angry, you’re far from alone—but it doesn’t have to be this way.
theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
