The Women Who Built an Alternative to Bloomsbury
A lot of people found Mecklenburgh Square by accident. T.S. Eliot, who taught at nearby Birkbeck College, described it, on discovering it in 1917, as “a most beautiful, dilapidated old square, which I...
View ArticleThe Exclusionary White Men of the American Legion
Nestled in the heart of Indianapolis is the national headquarters of the American Legion, the largest and most influential veterans’ service organization in the world. Indianapolis is second only to...
View ArticleThe Risk of Watching the World Burn on TV
Fire is a natural element of many landscapes of the American West. It provides periodic ecological resets, infuses the soil with nutrients, allows the growth of new vegetation, and rejuvenates the...
View ArticleLarry Kudlow’s Economic Hallucinations
Thanks to the Covid-19 lockdown, convention speeches this year are crafted for the camera rather than a crowded exhibition hall, a limitation that makes them seem more intimate. Many commentators saw...
View ArticleThe Police Are Pretty Sure They’re Going to Get Away With It
As my colleague Adam Weinstein noted a few weeks ago, it has become a minor cliché in American political rhetoric to ask your audience to imagine how the media would cover some domestic development if...
View ArticleThe Republicans Still Don’t Know How to Run Against Biden
Since Donald Trump fancies himself a president comparable to Abraham Lincoln, we can describe his marathon acceptance speech in words that are lifted from the Gettysburg Address: “The world will little...
View ArticleThe Violent Delights of the Trumpian Right
Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old gunman who shot and killed two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday night, is now a folk hero for some conservatives even as he awaits trial...
View ArticleThe NBA Strike and the Limits of the Left’s Class-Centric Politics
Reeling from the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last weekend and the violent unrest that followed, the Milwaukee Bucks opted not to take the court for their playoff game against...
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The Hell of Being a Black Cop
Bill Monroe, now 75 years old, completed his service in the U.S. Army in 1967. The same year, he joined the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. He told me about an altercation from those early...
View ArticleThe Climate Activists Who Dismiss Meat Consumption Are Wrong
Last month, the United Nations set off a furor in the climate community when it clumsily tried to raise awareness about the global problem of meat consumption. “The meat industry is responsible for...
View ArticleA Pandemic Winter Could Blow Up the Housing Crisis
“Coronavirus hasn’t devastated the homeless as many feared,” the Associated Press reported earlier this month. The piece went on to detail how some public health officials were surprised that they had...
View ArticleTrump’s Republican Party Is Erasing Reagan’s Memory
From 1964, when he first took the political stage as a supporter of Barry Goldwater, until some point during the last four years, Ronald Reagan was among the most dominant figures in the Republican...
View ArticleThe Violent Contradiction of California’s Reliance on Incarcerated Firefighters
The lightning storm started in the early hours of August 15, electricity snaking the sky, looking for a place to land. California’s fire season is traditionally a six-month affair lasting from May to...
View ArticleFar-Right Militias Are Learning Impunity From the Cops
There have only been 12 days in 2020 in which police did not kill someone in the United States. As of August 22, the day before Officer Rusten Sheskey of the Kenosha Police Department shot and...
View ArticleThe “Oath Keepers” Are Today’s Blackshirts
Hours after the body of Donald Trump supporter Aaron Danielson began growing cold on the streets of Portland, Oregon, the latest casualty in the ongoing domestic unrest of the Trump era, frothing...
View ArticleThe Haunting of Joe Kennedy III
Much of the public discussion about Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary in Massachusetts has focused on an unusual question: Why is four-term Congressman Joe Kennedy III attempting to unseat Senator Ed...
View ArticleThe Bush Rehabilitation Trap
Viewers who tuned in to the Democratic National Convention a few weeks ago could have been forgiven for assuming that the spectacle they saw unfolding on their screens wasn’t so much the coronation of...
View ArticleRotting Produce, Vacant Luxury Apartments, and Fake Scarcity in a Pandemic
The other day my landlord mentioned that he was having trouble filling several open apartments in the building. “It’s the first time the units have been vacant in 20 years,” he said glumly. Though the...
View ArticleCould the United States Break Up?
In the wake of Brexit and Trump’s election, many Americans began to ask if the United States might soon break apart. In 2016, progressive activists in Portland, Oregon, submitted a petition calling for...
View ArticleThe Media Is Falling for Trump’s Law and Order Con
At last week’s Republican National Convention, the GOP made its election strategy very clear: It would do everything in its power to amplify violence and cheer on disorder in order to reelect Donald...
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