LA’s Museum for Nobody
When the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor released his original plans for the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2013, the building was meant to resemble an inkblot, oozing across Los Angeles’s...
View ArticleRacial Terror and the Second Repeal of Reconstruction
This April, PBS aired a groundbreaking documentary series on the fate of Reconstruction—and therefore of Black America. Featuring more than 40 scholars (myself among them) and Black descendants of key...
View ArticleHis Master’s Voice
Until his brief Wednesday morning announcement, Robert Mueller had become the J.D. Salinger of federal law enforcement. Since releasing his report on Russian interference in the 2016 election last...
View ArticleClimate Deniers Are the Hysterical Alarmists
The climate deniers in the Trump administration are at it again. On Monday, The New York Times reported that the president is silencing critical government research on climate change and creating a...
View ArticleLearn the Right Lessons from Naomi Wolf’s Book Blunder
Many people reacted with glee, witnessing the excruciating embarrassment of Naomi Wolf as her book was debunked on live radio last week. The forthcoming Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the...
View ArticleDemocrats Just Ran Out of Excuses on Impeachment
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s surprise press conference on Wednesday morning contained no surprises. He offered no new evidence that could be used against President Donald Trump, and reiterated what...
View ArticleDemocracy Fights Back
Florida Republicans recently adopted a poll tax to preserve a Jim Crow statute. That such a statement should be written to describe current events—not merely actions condemned to the dustbin of...
View ArticleDigital Privacy Is a Class Issue
When you see an ad for online gambling, it is never a matter of chance. Take, for example, the story of Sportsbet, an Australian company owned by the global gambling-industry behemoth Paddy Power. A...
View ArticleThe Enduring Horror of Chernobyl
From the beginning, viewers of HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl know more than the characters themselves about what’s to come—like Titanic, its very name is a spoiler. And so the opening scenes are shocking...
View ArticleTrump’s Military Threats Aren’t Going to Keep “America First”
A week ago, President Donald Trump was threatening to wipe Iran off the map: “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran,” he tweeted. This week, the president has seemed more...
View ArticleThe Green New Deal Can’t Be Anything Like the New Deal
The decade from 1929 to 1939 was hell. The Great Depression ravaged the country, leaving 15 million Americans jobless—a 25 percent unemployment rate. Industrial production fell by half. Bank panics led...
View ArticleThe Racist Origins of San Francisco’s Housing Crisis
In 1920, as a teenager, my grandfather immigrated to San Francisco from Greece with nothing to his name. He and his two brothers worked restaurant and grocery jobs before starting a store of their own,...
View ArticleRelevance Ruined The Handmaid’s Tale
“This isn’t a scene from The Handmaid’s Tale,” Kamala Harris wrote in recent a fundraising email, “This is happening in our country.” In his late night monologue, Stephen Colbert joked that a rash of...
View ArticleHow to Convince Americans to Abolish the Death Penalty
When New Hampshire abolished the death penalty on Thursday, the reaction to the news—at least nationally—was rather muted. Here was a New England state, after all, whose machinery of death had rusted...
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The Burden Is Already “Undue” for Millions of Women in America
It’s been a grim few months for abortion rights in America. Multiple states, including Alabama and Georgia, have passed a wave of draconian new restrictions on the procedure, buoyed by the perception...
View ArticleHow YouTube Became a Breeding Ground for a Diabolical Lizard Cult
On March 25, Barbara Rogers shuffled into the Court of Commons Pleas in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, with her dark hair parted neatly down the middle. She wore a plain cardigan and skirt over stockings...
View ArticleYou Will Have to Make Sacrifices to Save the Planet
When it comes to climate change, Washington Governor Jay Inslee is unlike any other Democrat running for president. He’s based his entire campaign on addressing the crisis, and his climate plan is the...
View ArticleRepublicans Plan to Rig Elections for a Decade
Let’s just get this out of the way right up top: Republicans like white people. The Anglo-Saxon kind, anyway. They like them better than people of color; they like them better than people who might...
View ArticleThe Failure to Define Fascism Today
“You can’t define it as good or bad,” Caio Mussolini, great-grandson of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, told reporters on May 8, discussing fascism during his run for the European Parliament....
View ArticleDo Democrats Actually Want to Make Drugs Cheaper?
A study published Friday in JAMA Network Open on the prices of brand-name drugs found those costs to be constantly rising, often with an insolent disregard for received economic wisdom. The authors,...
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