Living With White Supremacy in a Swing State
For most of the summer, downtown Columbus, Ohio, looked like the downtown of many other cities. Depending on the day, protesters might secure some small victory against the ever-growing presence of...
View ArticleA Broken Census Can Break Democracy
As the 2020 census winds down, it’s important to remember why it matters and what’s at stake. Its primary purpose is to allocate seats in the House of Representatives and provide geographical...
View ArticleSusan Collins and the Death of the Senate
The political epitaph for Susan Collins of Maine, who is in the fight of her career to keep the U.S. Senate seat she has held since 1997, may well read: “Susan Collins is disappointed.”Collins’s...
View ArticleI’m a Cleaner at a New York City Public School. The Pandemic Has Thrown My...
I’m a local guy from the Rockaways, and my school is located in Far Rockaway, Queens. I’ve been in the system for 22 years. I like my job; some people try to put us down—They’re janitors—but I know we...
View ArticleThe Socialist Win in Bolivia and the New Era of Lithium Extraction
Just under a year after Evo Morales’s government was ousted by U.S.-backed far-right forces, his Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, party looks almost certain to take back power after Sunday’s...
View ArticleScientists Are Finally Denouncing Trump. What Took So Long?
Editors at the nation’s top science journals have been on a bit of a tear lately. For months they’ve been working overtime to publish urgent research analyzing the coronavirus pandemic. Now, in the...
View ArticleAn Anti-Rape Movement Without Police
When a domestic violence organization in Wisconsin put up signs reading “Black Lives Matter,” they did not know that it would lead to a backlash from police and the loss of a $25,000 grant to provide...
View ArticleThe Anguish of Watching the Election From the Purgatory of a Border Camp
It’s been nearly a year now that Luis Adrian Martinez Reyes has lived in a tent with his wife (who is pregnant), child, and godchild in the migrant camp for asylum-seekers in Matamoros, Mexico, on the...
View ArticleThe Atlantic and the Limits of Reasonableness
The Atlantic is perhaps the quintessential American magazine. Founded by Boston abolitionists in 1857, its role in the media ecosystem stands in contrast to that of The New Yorker, which, despite...
View ArticleMeet Your New Would-Be Resistance Republicans, John Cornyn and Ben Sasse
If Donald Trump is voted out of office next month, expect the ranks of the Resistance to suddenly swell. For all the chaos of the last four years, Republican support for President Trump has been...
View ArticleThe Overblown Alarmism About a Trump Coup
Signs of the apocalypse are everywhere. It’s not just the worsening pandemic and Donald Trump’s determination to hold superspreader events in every swing state, but also the daily end-is-nigh stories...
View ArticleHow Police Unions Bully Politicians
On May 31, as another night of disruptive protest overtook New York City streets, the Sergeants Benevolent Association, one of the unions representing NYPD officers, posted a photo of an arrest record...
View ArticleThe Trump Case That Will Test the Supreme Court’s Newest Originalist
The Constitution is a remarkably vague document, and American courts have spent the last two hundred years trying to make it more specific. What counts as “cruel and unusual punishment,” either in 1789...
View ArticleThe Cruelty of Washington’s Cynical Stimulus War
Over the weekend, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave the White House a deadline of 48 hours to complete negotiations on a new pandemic relief package to be passed before the election, which is now two...
View ArticleA Covid-19 Vaccine Doesn’t Need to Be Perfect
This year has brought an unprecedented race to develop, test, and manufacture vaccines and treatments for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. Experts say they’ve never seen anything like it:...
View ArticleConfronting the Deep Roots of Violence in El Salvador
In 1982, Joan Didion famously wrote of El Salvador that “terror is the given of the place.” At the time, the country was in the midst of a civil war, which pitted the leftist guerrillas of the...
View ArticleCan the Supreme Court Be Fixed?
With the likely confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett this week to the Supreme Court, conservatives will secure a majority they can use to strike down liberal legislation for years to come. Why do nine...
View ArticleExxonMobil’s Real Quid Pro Quo With the Government
Donald Trump didn’t actually give Exxon drilling permits in exchange for $25 million in campaign donations. He just wants you to know that he could, if he wanted to. That was the message behind a viral...
View ArticleAmerica Has No Duty to Rule the World
The United States is the world’s overwhelming military power, and it’s not even close. The country controls about 750 overseas bases (China, by comparison, has only one foreign base, in Djibouti). It...
View ArticleLiberals Are Losing the Journalism Wars
The University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media recently released a report titled “The Expanding News Desert,” which showed that over the last 15 years, more than a fourth of...
View Article