David Frum’s Hold Over the Center
I will grudgingly admit that I underestimated the Never Trump conservatives. Like many on the left, I shared the view summarized by Jeet Heer in The New Republic on the eve of the 2016 election—that...
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The Coronavirus Was Here
I live three miles from ground zero for coronavirus-shaming in America. Eons ago, in early March, the reality of the pandemic was taking hold, and public officials—at least, the ones who hadn’t...
View ArticleMy Life on Rent Strike
I moved up to Philly from North Carolina, just south of Charlotte, about two years ago for school. I loved it but had to drop out in 2018 because it’s hard to manage going to school and keeping up with...
View ArticleThe Trump Administration Has Abandoned Worker Safety at the Worst Moment
As “essential workers” labor under dangerous conditions through the coronavirus pandemic, they might be curious to learn that the terms of their employment are in technical violation of federal law....
View ArticleI Gave Birth While Incarcerated During a Pandemic
I got to Bedford Hills in the beginning of February, but I was hearing a little bit about coronavirus beforehand. It really didn’t seem to be that major. It had been a good week or so that I was in...
View ArticleNo More Cop Unions
When Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department killed 46-year-old George Floyd in cold blood last week, he showed the world exactly what kind of man he is. Chauvin has been cited multiple...
View ArticleThe Racist Gatekeepers of American Land
The way many white Americans consider others in relation to public spaces, public lands, and nature is inherently proprietary. This is in large part because the history behind all of these spaces, and...
View ArticleTrump’s One Constant Is a Fetish for Bloodshed
Earlier this month, armed white protesters bearing Confederate flags and semiautomatic rifles strode through the halls of Michigan’s capitol building to challenge the state’s stay-at-home order. State...
View ArticleMark Zuckerberg Comes to Trump’s Defense
Appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in April 2018, a contrite Mark Zuckerberg insisted that Facebook was still a force for good, as long as the company ensured that its tools were not used...
View ArticleThe Deep Amnesia of Our National Conscience
On Friday, the arrests of CNN’s Omar Jimenez and his crew covering the protests against the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis were carried live, with reactions in real time from two of the...
View ArticleThe Flawed Politics of a Law-and-Order Campaign
Five days of anguish and protest. Five nights of anger, broken windows, out-of-control police behavior and the nauseating television images of tear-gassed citizens and burning squad cars. As Donald...
View ArticleAmerica’s Social Contract Is Broken
So little has changed. Nearly 30 years have passed since the Los Angeles riots, and yet we find ourselves in a near-identical situation: a black man brutalized by police; the incident caught on camera,...
View ArticleThe Right’s Reign on the Air Waves
In late 1961, a Miami chiropractor named Jerome Harold became outraged when he learned that his local grocery stores were selling ham imported from Poland. The country was still firmly under Communist...
View ArticleThe Rebirth of Red Power
On an early November morning in 1969, Richard Oakes, shirtless but with his boots still strapped on, leaped off the side of the three-masted boat carrying him and a group of Native student activists to...
View ArticleTrump Is Bailing Out Big Meat—and Further Screwing the Planet
At an event announcing $16 billion in federal relief for food producers on May 19, Donald Trump spoke at a podium flanked by tables stacked with corn, onions, apples, and other fruits and vegetables....
View ArticleHow the Democrats Should Imitate the Republican Party
It’s long been an article of faith among Democrats that they have nothing to learn from Republicans. Democrats tend instead to believe that the GOP is the party of evil that achieved power through...
View ArticleLiving in Your Car as a Pandemic Consumes Your City
Topher Bloomquist had been living in his car for nearly a year when California imposed its stay-at-home order to combat the novel coronavirus pandemic. Bloomquist, a 43-year-old former I.T. worker from...
View ArticleBarbara Ehrenreich Still Wants to Be Surprised
“I think I was depressed,” Barbara Ehrenreich said when I asked why she wrote her novel, Kipper’s Game. Published in 1993 and reissued earlier this year, the story is part science fiction, part...
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Tear Gas Doesn’t Deploy Itself
Save for the rare clip of someone like Cornel West speaking God’s honest truth on CNN, mainstream media coverage of the nationwide protests against racist policing largely follows the same rules:...
View ArticleThe Political Elites’ Pointless Calls for More Leadership
It is only a slight exaggeration to say America is burning. Protests over the killing of George Floyd by police have led to destruction of property in many cities across the country over the past few...
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