This anthropologist traveled America to explore our dividedness. Here’s what he found

Jonathan M. Pitts, The Baltimore Sun

When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. Anand Pandian knew almost no one who had voted for him. He had a hard time grasping what the result meant about the country he grew up in.

That election became the springboard for a sprawling project by the Johns Hopkins anthropologist. Pandian’s new book, “Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down” chronicles the eight years he spent crisscrossing the United States, meeting hundreds of people of varying beliefs and occupations in places ranging from Las Vegas to Hoosick Falls, New York , from Fargo, North Dakota, to Denton, Texas , trying to knit together a sense of what it means to be an American in 2025.

What the author, the son of Indian immigrants,