This Is a Good Moment to Hear Joe Biden’s Thoughts on Attorneys General
President Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican Party is now so tight that it’s easy to forget the unease with which most of its establishment viewed him in 2015 and 2016. Some of that unease sprang...
View ArticleThe Christian Martyrdom Movement Ascends to the White House
Four months and several thousand news cycles ago, Harvard historian James Kloppenberg wrote in Commonweal about his former student Pete Buttigieg, then the rising star in the Democratic presidential...
View ArticleThe Radically Inclusive Music of Ornette Coleman
During Ornette Coleman’s legendary 1959 run of shows at the Five Spot club in New York, there was a joke going around: “A waiter drops a trayload of drinks and a man says to his lady-friend, ‘Listen...
View ArticleNihilism and White Bliss in America’s Most Livable City
From a distance, Le Magnifique looks almost like a scene from a cartoon. The hero of the statue, former Penguins center and captain Mario Lemieux, is skating one way with the puck dangling on the blade...
View ArticleRethinking the Press’s Relationship with Police
Over the last week and a half, over 200 journalists have been maced, beaten with batons, teargassed, and arrested by police while covering anti-police protests. Many of these journalists clearly...
View ArticleDonald Trump Is Celebrating the Wrong Economic Accomplishment
The unemployment rate quite unexpectedly dropped to 13.3 percent in May, according to new data released this morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But not even the BLS really believes that.At a...
View ArticleBP Is Not Woke. It’s an Imperialist Success Story.
Bernard Looney, named CEO of the multinational fossil fuel conglomerate BP last fall, has one or two things he’d like you to know. “I hope it goes without saying, I absolutely condemn racial injustice...
View ArticleTom Cotton and the Elite Media’s Dalliance With Illiberalism
In a March essay for The Atlantic, Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule argued that the American right should abandon constitutional originalism for “common-good constitutionalism,” a legal approach...
View ArticleThe Revolt of the Center-Right
On the opening night of the 2004 Republican convention, Georgia Senator Zell Miller delivered a blistering attack on the Democratic presidential nominee. Ridiculing John Kerry’s votes to cut military...
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He Is Even Dumber Than We Thought
A Washington Post–ABC News poll taken the last week of May 2020 asked Americans, “Do you think Trump has the mental sharpness it takes to serve effectively as president?” Fifty-two percent of...
View ArticleBill Barr’s Invisible Crusade
When scandal has engulfed past American presidencies, the Justice Department’s independence proved critical to upholding the rule of law. The textbook case was the Saturday Night Massacre, when...
View ArticleThe Pernicious Influence of Big Oil on America’s Universities
As multiple crises converge—the global pandemic, racist state violence, and ever-growing economic and political inequality—the fossil fuel–driven climate catastrophe rumbles irreversibly forward. As in...
View ArticleThe Limits and Dangers of a Fixation on “Nonviolence”
In the immediate aftermath of the Twin Cities protests following the police killing of George Floyd, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter claimed that all of the arrests tied to rioting in the area were from...
View ArticleNo Slogan Is Safe From Politicians
The moment we have all been waiting for has arrived: Willard Mitt Romney, a man who claims his favorite meat is “hot dog,” showed up at this weekend’s protests in Washington, D.C. It’s easy to mock...
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The Lost Rebellious Spirit of Keynes
Over the past few months, as the orderly operations of the world economy have been superseded by panic, fear, and lockdown, as the circuit breaker has paused trading on Wall Street more than once, and...
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Will 2020 Finally Kill America’s War Fetish?
How many wars can the United States handle at any one time? The question became pertinent last week as the Trump administration, along with the president’s most militant supporters in Congress, rushed...
View ArticleAmerican Psycho
To understand how Jared Kushner received the opportunity to fail at managing the federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic, you mostly need to know that he is married to the president’s daughter. But...
View ArticleThe Rush to Redefine “Defund the Police”
Before Minneapolis protesters briefly occupied and then set fire to a police station, activists’ calls to defund the police were considered—including by some more institutionally minded criminal...
View ArticleThe Glaring Hole in the Democrats’ Police Reform Bill
There’s been a sea change in the American public’s perception of law enforcement since the killing of George Floyd last month. A Washington Post survey on Tuesday found that 69 percent of Americans...
View ArticleThe NFL Is for Cops
“We were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said Friday in a hastily composed video statement on the police and white vigilante killings of George Floyd,...
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