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A Lonely Fight Against Sexual Harassment in Tech
Susan Fowler grew up in deep poverty in rural Yarnell, Arizona, one of seven children of a preacher and his wife in the 1990s. She once overheard her mother say the family had made just $5,000 that...
View ArticleA New Age of Destructive Austerity After the Coronavirus
The coronavirus is a once-in-a-lifetime historical crisis, but even under the most unprecedented of lockdown measures, scrolling through the news still produces an occasional shiver of déjà vu. On...
View ArticleBiden’s Path to Party Unity Begins With Concessions
Since Bernie Sanders’s campaign faltered and subsequently folded, the question of what can be done to bring young voters over to the Biden campaign has, somewhat belatedly, been the subject of some...
View ArticleWhat Happens If Kim Jong Un Dies?
It was November 17, 1986, and the headline appeared on the New York Times front page, just above the fold: “Kim Il Sung, at 74, Is Reported Dead.” But Kim, the founder of the Democratic People’s...
View ArticleLeaving No Others Behind This Ramadan
In 1999, speaking at a party for recently released political prisoners, community organizer and former Black Panther Safiya Bukhari reflected on the ambivalent nature of the occasion. It was a...
View ArticleThe Polarization Problem
Political polarization is something liberals have grown fond of naming as an obvious societal ill. And it is bad—but does it need to get worse before it can get better? On Episode 6 of The Politics of...
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My Life in Sero-Surveillance
In 2007, in the spring, after living in New York City for six months, I rode my bike from my university on the Upper East Side to a public health clinic for my annual HIV test. I’d had three sexual...
View ArticleCan Michael Jordan Fill the Huge Sports-Size Hole in Our Hearts?
The Last Dance, a new 10-part documentary about Michael Jordan’s sixth and final NBA championship season with the Chicago Bulls in 1998, is being released at a very strange moment. Live sports are...
View ArticleThe Airy Ambivalence of the Moderate Politician
In the summer of 2015, Josh Barro wrote a piece for The New York Times titled “Donald Trump, Moderate Republican.” The real estate magnate was “anything but ideologically rigid,” Barro wrote, “and he...
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When Art Becomes Self-Help
In a moment perhaps better consigned to the mists of television history, Bravo once produced a reality TV show called Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, which had its two seasons in 2010 and 2011. It...
View ArticleI Left Academia and Became a Climate YouTuber
As I wandered the corridors of San Francisco’s immense Moscone Center, my heart sank deeper and deeper. This was my first international conference—the American Geophysical Union’s 2013 Fall Meeting—and...
View ArticleThe Beastie Boys Keep It On and On
In 1987, the Beastie Boys opened for Run DMC on tour. The headliners’ song “Walk This Way” with Aerosmith was a monster hit, and the Beastie Boys’ debut album Licensed to Ill had made them frat-house...
View ArticleThe Media Is Blowing the Coverage of the Coronavirus Protests
Politico co-founder John F. Harris last week delivered a dire warning about the right-wing anti-lockdown protests that were then just beginning to spread across the country. “The wake of the...
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Turn On, Tune In, Cash In
In 2009, when she was 56 years old, Judith Goedeke, a retired acupuncturist living in the middle of Maryland who was suffering from severe depression, took psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in...
View ArticleThe “Shadow Banks” Are Back, and Still Too Big to Fail
On April 14, Nancy Wallace, a real estate professor at Berkeley, gave an interview to the University of California’s business school, during which she warned of “a looming nightmare” in the economy....
View Article“Believe Science” Is a Bad Response to Denialism
Scientists saw it coming well in advance: a crisis that, left unaddressed, could kill hundreds of thousands of people. The White House ignored it, telling the public the problem was already contained....
View ArticleThe Coronavirus and the Limits of Individual Climate Action
In the United States, the fight against climate change is often framed as a matter of individual action toward a collective goal. If only Americans would drive and fly less and consume more sustainable...
View ArticleAmerica’s Post-Pandemic Monoculture
Before the economy officially collapsed, it was easy enough to imagine that the world would resume without much of a hitch after the pandemic had dissipated: Restaurants and bars would open in time for...
View ArticleWho Will Be Joe Biden’s Pick for Vice President?
The search for a vice president follows a series of rituals as stylized as those of the Japanese tea ceremony.There are leaks, carefully orchestrated by the campaign to appease various constituencies,...
View ArticleFrom Black Power to Black Establishment
June 16, 1966, isn’t on the commemorative calendar in black American politics, but it probably should be. On that date, Willie Ricks, a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field secretary,...
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