Clik here to view.
The Road Not Taken
Chuckie Denison took the podium at the United Steelworkers hall in Canton, Ohio, in his ever-present blue Good Jobs Nation T-shirt, flanked by people holding protest signs. One handmade sign read...
View ArticleWaist-Deep in the ‘Big Muddle’
John Hickenlooper exudes a refreshing level of candor that is rare in the 2020 presidential hunt. Late Saturday afternoon, the former two-term Colorado governor was wandering—almost unrecognized—on the...
View ArticleCould Obama’s Iran Playbook Save Trump From War?
President Donald Trump was conned. He thought his foreign policy advisers had given him an effective strategy to force Iran to renegotiate its nuclear deal with the United States; in reality, this...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The United States’ Debt to Immigrants
This spring, while on break in London, I rode the train two hours north to Birmingham and back in one evening to see an exhibit by the British artist Hew Locke. I’d seen his work in New York and was...
View ArticleCan Married Priests Help Save the Amazon?
Last week, The New York Times reported that Pope Francis had “open[ed] the door to limited ordination of married men as priests.” Specifically, in trying to meet the pastoral needs of the Pan-Amazon...
View ArticleWhite Mom’s Burden
Cindy McCain was buying sari cloth for her daughter from a “tiny wooden kiosk” in Kolkata, India, some years ago, she said, when she saw “little eyes” through the floorboards, peering up at her. The...
View ArticleBeto O’Rourke’s “War Tax” Is Classic Democratic Militarism
In the annals of terrible American militarist policy proposals, few are sillier and less punk than self-identified Fugazi fan Beto O’Rourke’s de facto patriotism tax. Before roasting him, let me first...
View ArticleWhy Georgia Brings Out Putin’s Insecurities
Emotions are running high in Georgia’s capital, where protesters over the weekend took to the streets for a sixth day in a row. Violence broke out late last week, as citizens unhappy with the ruling of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Miriam Toews’s Quiet Revolution
Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, the Lord God said. Let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over...
View ArticleClarence Thomas’s Unprecedented America
The Supreme Court began this week by correcting an injustice. A local prosecutor in Mississippi tried and convicted Curtis Flowers six times for allegedly murdering four people at a furniture store in...
View ArticleGive Democrats a Chance to Get Serious in Their First Debates
Tonight and Thursday night will mark the start of a new stage in the 2020 presidential primary. With a pair of debates in Miami, 20 of the now 25 Democratic hopefuls will take their cases (and their...
View Article“Stop Telling Me Your Opinion”: An Exit Interview With C-SPAN’s Founder
When Brian Lamb launched C-SPAN in 1979, he set into motion a multi-decade experiment in news media that was both maximalist and minimalist: wall-to-wall coverage of the American government, but...
View ArticleFifty Years After Stonewall, Many States Still Lack LGBTQ Protections
With New York City’s West Village looking as though someone dropped a leaflet bomb filled with rainbows, it’s hard to ignore the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, recognized as a...
View ArticleJay Inslee Would Like Your Attention, Please
On the eve of the first-ever presidential primary debate of the 2020 election, Washington Governor Jay Inslee wasn’t holed up in a hotel room preparing talking points with his team. He was at the Frost...
View ArticleHow Tiffany Cabán Would Reshape The Criminal Justice System
I first met Tiffany Cabán just before Valentine’s Day, in a crowded cafe not far from the downtown Manhattan court where she was still working cases as a public defender. Two weeks before, she had...
View ArticleCory Booker Chooses the Wrong Side in a New Jersey Street Fight
Democrats, The Washington Post recently told us, are frustrated—even a bit anxious—that their ambitious policy agenda is failing to attract the notice of the public. People don’t even seem to know that...
View ArticleThe First Democratic Debate Failed The Planet
For the last month, the Democratic National Committee has faced intense pressure to hold a debate specifically focused on the climate crisis—not just from environmental activists, but also from...
View ArticleMiami Moonglow for Booker and Klobuchar
It may be remembered as the Wretched Excess Debate with ten candidates, five moderators, one ludicrous White House backdrop, and enough technical glitches to make you nostalgic for the TV test pattern...
View ArticleThe Loudest Voice Stars A Very Simple Monster
If in 2019 you haven’t had enough of old white men yelling, you can now watch them do it on Showtime. The Loudest Voice is a miniseries based on by Gabriel Sherman’s best-selling book, chronicling the...
View ArticleThe Death of Taboo
In 1988, a German journalist for the left-wing paper Die Tageszeitung (a.k.a. Taz) described a busy discotheque as “gaskammervoll,” meaning that it was as packed as a gas chamber (literally,...
View Article