The Electoral College Is an American Humiliation
At a time when the daily news cycle reliably delivers a fresh source of mortification for most Americans, some moments of shame are stinging and acute. The United States is now seeing a steady rise in...
View ArticleKill the Tipped Minimum Wage
Most people who live paycheck to paycheck can still usually plan in two-week increments, but Sarah May-Seward plans “shift to shift.” She earns $40 per shift at a bar in White Lake Township in...
View ArticleTrump’s Reopening Agenda Is Upending International Students’ Futures
In what has become an increasingly familiar pattern, the Trump administration set off a wave of confusion, anguish, and uncertainty on Monday as Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced changes to...
View ArticleReproductive Coercion Wins at the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court has affirmed the rights of certain employers to deny contraceptive coverage in their health plans in a case involving a private Catholic health service challenging a long-fought-over...
View ArticleReading the Literature of Grief During a Pandemic
In April, New York magazine’s Molly Young wrote that the ravages of the pandemic had fostered a taste for a milder kind of book. “Now is the time for books that go down like rice pudding,” she said....
View ArticleThe Shallowness of the Self-Aware Novelist
It’s never a great time to publish a book in which all or nearly all the characters are white, but now would seem to be a particularly bad time to do so. If you were to do such a thing, the book in...
View ArticleInside the VA’s Long-Standing Racism Problem
The last straw for many black employees at the Kansas City Veterans Affairs hospital was its Juneteenth celebration. To commemorate the date in 1865 when word of emancipation reached slaves in Texas, a...
View ArticleWhen Cops Kill White People, Black Lives Still Matter
On August 10, 2016, Tony Timpa, a 32-year-old white businessman, called the police, claiming he needed help. As Timpa told the dispatcher, he had recently stopped taking his medication for...
View ArticleFear of a Forever-Trump Administration
In the past few years, various writers have posed what should be an unthinkable question: If President Donald Trump is defeated in this November’s election, what happens if he refuses to leave office?...
View ArticleNeil Gorsuch Affirms That Treaties With Tribal Nations Are the Law
The United States Constitution established unequivocally in 1789 that treaties are the “supreme law of the land.” On Thursday, the Supreme Court stood by the nation’s original promise.Ruling on McGirt...
View ArticleThe Limits of Democrats’ Climate Progress
Thursday morning, the World Meteorological Organization released a report projecting that there is a one in five chance of global temperatures rising by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) in...
View ArticleThe Supreme Court Brings the Presidency Back From a Lawless Brink
The Supreme Court spent 117 pages on Thursday to underscore what can be summed up in a single sentence: President Donald Trump is not above the law. In two major cases, the justices rejected Trump’s...
View ArticleTrump Is Numbing America to the Pandemic’s Ravages
It should be plain to all by now that America has not only lost control of the coronavirus pandemic, it has also given up on the possibility of regaining the upper hand. On Wednesday, over 59,000 new...
View ArticleThere’s No Such Thing as Pandemic Austerity for Billionaires
Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus from the very start was more or less willful neglect, and lately, according to White House officials, he’s banking on that strategy for reelection. The...
View ArticleThe Law Was Never Meant for Ghislaine Maxwell
Ghislaine Maxwell, the accused conspirator in the sexual abuse of minors with the deceased Jeffrey Epstein, was transferred to federal detention this week. She will face a bail hearing early next week,...
View ArticleMary Trump Diagnoses the President
Diagnosing Donald Trump with any number of psychological defects has become an armchair sport. Despite guidelines prohibiting psychiatrists from diagnosing patients they have not personally examined,...
View ArticleWhat Was the Dive Bar?
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets seems like a familiar kind of story, at first. Although it’s not fiction, like Charles Jackson’s novel The Lost Weekend or Eugene O’Neill’s play The Iceman Cometh, the...
View Articleyour whole body is slanted
why did you touch me there between my fingers “it feels like a mountain range” well I’m very sick these days I keep telling my friends I’m not a liberal not a conservative what are you then? I can be...
View ArticleThe Puppet Tiger Masculinity Is
When I say tiger: I mean the catatonic one,of William Blake, its roar stalled while risingbetween the diaphragm and the uvula.Or I could mean my Daniel, the flattened,ineffectual puppet tiger of my...
View ArticleNo
Hoping to just live quietly unnoticed—holed upsmoking pot and listening to old musicafter work, trying to wait outthe regime—dreaming of tyrants in exhaustedsleep, sick of having to...
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