Divided We Stand

Available June, 2026

A Road Trip in Search of the Ties That Bind Ordinary Americans No Matter What

Bill Newcott

Available June, 2026

Every day, U.S. news media – left, right, and center – inundate us with images of Americans at a war with each other. Immigration, guns, abortion, free speech; name the issue, and there will be someone warning us that that there is no hope finding any kind of common ground.

Bill Newcott – longtime senior editor/writer for National Geographic and AARP the Magazine – didn’t believe it. After more than three decades crisscrossing the nation on assignment, he saw a bigger, more generous, picture of his fellow Americans: Universally generous in times of trouble, always willing to collaborate toward common goals, hungering for reconciliation with former opponents.

WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER…. NO MATTER WHAT

In Divided We Stand, Newcott discovers a country that is not what we see in our daily doom scrolls: While Americans may well face many irreconcilable differences, when they actually come face-to-face with their political opposites, their first instinct is to find common ground.

Bill Newcott is the weekly film critic and frequent travel writer for The Saturday Evening Post. Earlier, he was Senior Editor and an award-winning Space Science and Expeditions Editor at National Geographic magazine. During seventeen years at AARP the Magazine, where he also served as Senior Editor, he received the Lowell Thomas Award for best travel coverage and created AARP’s Movies for Grownups franchise. His Gracie Award-winning “AARP Movies for Grownups Radio Show” aired weekly for twelve years.

Bill is the author of All the Right Wrong Turns: True (And Sometimes Twisted) Tales of Coastal Delaware from the Back Roads to the Beaches (2021) and its sequel, More Right Wrong Turns (2024), both honored by the National Federation of Press Women. He also contributed a chapter to the National Geographic Explorations Atlas (2000). And in what seems like another life, from 1980 to 1990, he was a writer for The National Enquirer in Lantana, Florida. He never met a space alien.

Bill lives in Lewes, Delaware, with his wife, Carolyn.