The Ethical Dilemma of My Parents’ Death Wish
When my mother is about to sob in the middle of a sentence, she has a tic where she punctuates the last thing she’s saying by sternly pointing her finger—at your chest, almost as if to ascribe...
View ArticleThe Truth About Trump’s Evangelical Support
Donald Trump has never pretended to practice traditional Christian virtues. Yet in 2016 he earned 81 percent of the white evangelical vote—a higher percentage than George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, or John...
View ArticleTwitter Is Not Prepared for the 2020 Election
That Twitter was caught flat-footed by the unprecedented security breach that occurred on Wednesday evening, in which a number of prominent accounts—including those of Joe Biden, Kanye West, and Elon...
View ArticleTrump’s Campaign Doesn’t Need a New Manager. It Needs a New Candidate.
Being the guy who resets a “Days/Hours/Minutes Without Donald Trump Firing Someone” sign could be a full-time job, though given the turnover that has plagued Trump’s campaigns and administration, it...
View ArticleThe Forever War Over War Literature
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs Jim Webb might have seemed like a weird candidate to give the keynote speech to a roomful of antiwar activists, journalists, creative writers, and...
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The Empathy of Black Voters
Last month’s Democratic primaries in New York likely made history—for all of American politics. Mondaire Jones won in the 17th Congressional District, which includes Rockland County and parts of...
View ArticleThe Threat of a GOP That Accepts Climate Change
As the Trump administration rushes to tick off as many polluters’ wish-list items as possible before November, there are some quiet, if symbolic, changes afoot. On Monday, the American Petroleum...
View ArticleWill Big Philanthropy Defang Our Radical Moment?
This week, billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations announced plans to grant $220 million to racial justice initiatives and Black-led organizations over the next five years. The recipients,...
View ArticleThe Trump Administration Is Treating U.S. Cities Like Occupied Territory
In an outcome absolutely no one could have predicted, President Trump’s decision to send federal Department of Homeland Security agents into Portland, Oregon, ostensibly to protect statues, has led to...
View ArticleOur Towns Aren’t Equipped to Handle Climate Emergencies
Imagine, briefly, that you’re charged with coordinating a small town’s response to disaster, developing contingency plans and staying in close contact with local agencies. For the last few months,...
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The Whiners Who Earn $200,000 and Complain They’re Broke
On July 11, MarketWatch published a letter, presumably real, from a reader complaining that she and her husband didn’t qualify for a stimulus payment because they make too much money. Said the upset...
View ArticleMoving Beyond Good and Evil in the Middle East
The chaotic and conflict-ridden Middle East is a scene of American failure. In recent decades, the United States has lavished more resources and attention there than on any other region. It has...
View ArticleI Scored Worse Than Donald Trump Did on That Brain Test
President Donald Trump has once again pulled off another feat of political strategery that Democrats can’t possibly match: He has created another news cycle that’s largely concerned with whether or not...
View ArticleThe Only Person Who’s Figured Out How to Interview Trump
Chris Wallace’s interview with Donald Trump on this past Sunday’s edition of Fox News Sunday ended up being a bigger bombshell than it should have been. Sure, Wallace did his job—he asked tough...
View ArticleUnsolved Mysteries Is a Story of American Television’s Evolution
“What you are about to see is not a news broadcast.” So ran the voiceover at the start of each episode of the classic 1980s Unsolved Mysteries, a pioneer docuseries thriving at the intersection of the...
View ArticleJohn Lewis’s “Good Trouble” Is Happening in the Streets Right Now
Reflecting in 1985 on the Mississippi Freedom Summer and the radical moment he came up in, Congressman John Lewis described the endurance required in movement work. “You knew that you had to prepare...
View ArticleGreen Jobs Can Be Just as Good as Fossil Fuel Jobs
Conversations about jobs and the environment tend to play out along predictable lines: Fossil fuel jobs are havens of well-paid, unionized employment, so the story goes. Any move away from them will...
View ArticleTrump Has Brought America’s Dirty Wars Home
In 1963, the U.S. Agency for International Development released a training film for police called First Line of Defense. Designed to teach cops from Third World countries how to recognize the signs of...
View ArticleThe Ultimate White Fragility
Lately, the term “white fragility” has been much in the news. Coined by the scholar Robin DiAngelo, it has garnered her profiles in numerous publications, including the New York Times and the New...
View ArticleTrump’s Polling Decline Is Tying the Conservative Media in Knots
The New York Times noted Monday that the former Vice President has held a lead of about nine points in national polls for over a month—the largest sustained lead for a presidential candidate in almost...
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