Oligarch of the Month: Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos is having a good pandemic. Amazon, the company he started in 1994, has not only resisted the economic downturn, it has thrived: Its stock price sits hundreds of points higher than it did in...
View ArticleThe Down Days Is an Eerily Prescient Pandemic Novel
In 1962, at a girl’s boarding school in rural Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania), three students started laughing. When the teachers tried to get them to stop, the girls became violent. One became so...
View ArticleFreeing Protest From the Language Police
This past Saturday marked the largest nationwide demonstrations against American police since George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis on Memorial Day. When hundreds of thousands marched across the world...
View ArticleWill My Covid Symptoms Ever End?
Amy Watson, a preschool teacher in Portland, Oregon, had been fighting a low-grade fever for almost a month when doctors started talking to her about cancer.It was April 9, right around the time that...
View ArticleMitch McConnell Is No Genius
Mitch McConnell believes in one political god: campaign cash. Since he got his start in Kentucky politics in the 1970s, masquerading as a moderate Republican, he has been the Gordon Gekko of politics....
View ArticleWho Killed Olof Palme?
In a dreary news conference broadcast live from Stockholm this morning, Swedish chief prosecutor Krister Petterson named the man he thinks assassinated Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986: Stig Engström....
View ArticleSmall Acts of Care in a Failed State
The ongoing protests against racist police violence, which have taken place in every state in the United States and are now in their third week, have offered endless illuminations of the political and...
View ArticleA Fragile Answer to the Question of “Whose Streets?”
A city is a big thing—big enough that, typically, we must manage it in chunks: as a string of favorite neighborhoods, a well-worn subway line, a local park. These personalized territories are small and...
View ArticleDon’t Support The New York Times
One can only describe what unfolded at The New York Times last week as an outright shitshow. Following the publication of an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton that advocated for military crackdowns in cities...
View ArticleThe Real Snowflakes on the Op-Ed Page
For years, conservative and centrist columnists have been depicting college campuses as if they were the settings of horror movies. A virus is incubating and spreading. Every year, more and more people...
View ArticleThe Disappearing Backlash to Black Lives Matter
Over two weeks after the protests against the killing of George Floyd began, America remains firmly in the year 2020—1968, with its sustained chaos and broad white backlash, is still a distant memory...
View ArticleReactionary Unions Don’t Just Back Police. They Also Back Fossil Fuels.
Labor unions throughout history have worked toward multiple goals. While striving to represent and protect workers through collective bargaining, they also function as part of a broader movement aiming...
View ArticleThe Police’s “Sheepdog” Problem
Derek Chauvin learned how to be a cop from the Department of Defense. For eight years, Chauvin served as a military police officer in the Army Reserve, and though he never rose above the rank of E-4—a...
View ArticleTwilight of the Cop Consensus
“I’m sorry,” the Vox writer Zack Beauchamp tweeted last week, “but ‘abolish the police’ seems like a poorly-thought out idea that’s gotten popular with shocking speed.” A short thread of similar tweets...
View ArticleThe Black Wage Gap Matters
The police killing of George Floyd has prompted a stunning increase in the public’s receptivity to the Black Lives Matter movement (which has picked up eight percentage points in public approval since...
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When Mr. Sloan Went to Washington
In 2013, for reasons that remain unclear, the Supreme Court of the United States changed its rules to forbid non-lawyers from arguing before the Court. The shift stripped away a right that had been in...
View ArticleNow Do Lincoln
Running along the southern border of North Carolina, U.S. Route 74 stretches from the state’s mountains in the west all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. And as numerous green signs reminded me while...
View ArticleAmerica’s Top General Isn’t That Sorry
Mark Milley is sorry. For the photo op, not the invasion of American streets with soldiers.Milley—the four-star Army general who, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has made a franchise of...
View ArticleThe Preachers of the Austerity Gospel Are Back
There was something of a twist in last week’s monthly jobs report: In May, the unemployment rate in the United States had seemingly declined by a few percentage points, hinting at the start of an...
View ArticleI Helped Turn an Empty Hotel Into a Shelter. Then the Owner Evicted Us.
I am a citizen of Red Lake Nation, but I was born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota. My grandparents raised me from the time I was six months old, and my grandad, who I call my dad, was a citizen of...
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