A Brief Criminal History of the Mask
Last week, Jennvine Wong, staff attorney for the Cop Accountability Project at the Legal Aid Society, told me there were cops walking around outside of her Brooklyn apartment who weren’t wearing masks....
View ArticleThe Right Way to Push Biden to the Left
Most presidential nominees leave the primary season behind with a sprint to the political center. It’s a testament to the power progressives have built within the Democratic Party since 2016 that Joe...
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The Exclusivity Economy
If you can make it in New York, the cliché goes, you can make it anywhere. But there’s making and then there’s making it. A recent feature in Eater identified a trend in the habits of a sliver of New...
View ArticleCoronavirus Emergency Aid Has Become Its Own Disaster in Indian Country
In Indian Country right now, like so much of the country, the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed itself as a series of overlapping and compounding crises: Tribal leaders have rushed to secure personal...
View ArticleThe Urgent Message of Negative Oil Prices
For the first time ever, oil is trading at negative prices after plummeting sharply yesterday. In other words, because it costs money to store and transport oil, drillers—and, specifically in this...
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Fiona Apple Gets Free
There are some records that sound as if their creators were hit over the head, forgot how to put together a song, then had to rebuild the whole thing from scratch. Think of Van Morrison’s mad...
View ArticleBiden’s Incoherent, China-Bashing Attack on Trump
If someone gave you two minutes, as well as an experienced crew of advertising professionals, and asked you to produce a video explaining how and why Donald Trump bears personal responsibility for the...
View ArticleGenerational Warfare in a Pandemic
If you graduated college or high school at the nadir of the Great Recession and then had to cobble together a living in a decimated job market with ruinous amounts of student debt, odds are good that...
View ArticleKeep Calm and Carry On—Right Into a Pandemic
For the past few weeks, it has sometimes felt as if Britain is being governed less by a team of politicians than by a slogan: “Stay home. Protect the NHS. Save Lives.” This mantra, adopted with the...
View ArticleThe Media’s Coronavirus Coverage Exposes Its Ignorance About the Working Class
We are living in a situation where everything in the world should, by all rights, be falling apart. Anything that isn’t currently in the process of disintegrating is only being held together by the...
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He Was Wrongly Imprisoned for 25 Years. It Wasn’t DNA Evidence That Got Him Out.
The murders took place in a vacant house on Detroit’s east side—a drug spot. Two women shot dead with a .380 gun. It was January 1994. As America approached the height of the modern era of mass...
View ArticleThe World Order Is Broken. The Coronavirus Proves It.
Ecuador is home to the highest per-capita death toll from Covid-19 in Latin America and the Caribbean. Its largest city and commercial hub, Guayaquil, has seen a fivefold increase in mortality rates,...
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...
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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 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...
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...
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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...
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