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The Shrinking Legacy of a Supreme Court Justice
Once upon a time, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was the great modern American jurist. The “Yankee from Olympus,” as Catherine Drinker Bowen’s 1944 biography called Holmes, was the first celebrity justice...
View ArticleThe Delusion and Danger of Infinite Economic Growth
“Fairytales of eternal economic growth.” That’s how climate activist Greta Thunberg depicted the dominant mindset at the United Nations last week. “How dare you,” she said, admonishing them for “empty...
View ArticleThe Far Right’s Apocalyptic Literary Canon
As tensions in Washington ratchet toward the possible impeachment of President Donald Trump, dark matters are suddenly part of the discussion. “If the Democrats are successful in removing the president...
View ArticleCan We Stop Pretending Prosecutors Are Impartial Now?
The Attorney General, it is presumed, represents the people of the United States, not the President of the United States. Yet the latter is how Attorney General William Barr will be remembered. As the...
View ArticleI Worked at Capital One for Five Years. This Is How We Justified Piling Debt...
The first thing you should know about a woman I know, who I’ll call Annie, is that she volunteers to sit at the hospital with people who are going to die alone, who have no family or friends to be with...
View ArticleThe Enduring Myth of “The Economy”
In 1992, James Carville scrawled a slogan on a whiteboard in Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign headquarters. “It’s the economy, stupid,” has since become famous as a piece of blunt, homespun...
View ArticleThe Dereliction of William Barr
Attorney General Bill Barr is keeping busy. He previously announced in May that he had appointed John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to review the origins of the Russia investigation during...
View ArticleHow the NRA Sold Out America
Last Friday, the Senate Finance Committee dropped what would have been—in any other timeline—a bombshell that might have dominated headlines and talking heads for days: A 77-page report, issued by...
View ArticleGive Rivers Legal Rights
A few months ago, the Yurok Tribe in Oregon exercised its power as a sovereign nation and granted the Klamath River the rights of personhood. The Klamath, which runs through Oregon and deposits into...
View ArticleThe Republican Party’s Deafening Silence
The Republican Party is speechless. A week after Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced the beginning of an impeachment investigation, Trump’s usual allies in the administration, in Congress, in...
View ArticleHealth Care Policy Is Always a Human Interest Story
Eli Saslow is a Washington Post reporter whose award-winning work on rural hospitals tells stories that a well-to-do Beltway reader could never even imagine. Hospital staff working without pay;...
View ArticleHow Richard Nixon Lost the Battle for Public Opinion
The case for impeaching President Richard Nixon was not open and shut, at least as far as the American public was concerned. When Gallup first started tracking opinion on impeachment shortly after the...
View ArticleNot Even the Police Union Could Save Amber Guyger
Last September, one of Amber Guyger’s friends told her that she should adopt a German Shepherd—although the dog “may be racist,” the friend texted. “It’s okay.. I’m the same,” Guyger replied. Two days...
View ArticleOligarch of the Month: Joe Ricketts
Whoever said the internet was a young person’s game never met Joe Ricketts. Over the past ten years, the 78-year-old Nebraskan financier and founder of the online brokerage TD Ameritrade has launched...
View Articlefrom Night Sky
Shattered ice on water, redwoods drinking carbon and fog. They were never yours. The evenings were never yours. The river’s opal stones. Rain thrown against the current as cities rose into the red...
View ArticleDonald Trump’s New Lost Cause
In 1992, a 24-year-old man in Lockport, New York, wrote a letter to the editor of his small local newspaper. The Gulf War veteran looked at the country’s future and saw little reason for optimism....
View ArticleSpreading the Gospel of Modern Monetary Theory
The government can spend much more money than it currently does, even given a swelling national debt that frequently makes headlines. That’s the argument that has put Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) at...
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“The Whole Town Is Finished”
At midday on January 25, 2019, the town of Brumadinho in the southern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais was hit by a mudslide after a dam break, killing over 200 people. Homes were destroyed and trees...
View ArticleThe Return of the Empowered American Worker
In 1978, resigning United Auto Workers president Douglas Fraser delivered a scathing critique of the American managerial class.“I believe the leaders of the business community, with few exceptions,...
View ArticlePete Buttigieg’s Undeniable Allure
Before Pete Buttigieg was born in 1982, the now-shuttered brokerage house, E.F. Hutton, began running a famous series of TV commercials touting their ability to predict the fluctuations in the stock...
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