Trump’s Legal Threats Have More Bravado Than Merit
President Donald Trump spent election night doing what everyone expected him to do: baselessly claiming that the vote counts were fraudulent and issuing vague legal threats on that basis. “This is a...
View ArticleVoters Said They’re Worried About the Climate. Many Voted for Trump Anyway.
Early Tuesday night, Fox News gave Democratic viewers rare cause for optimism. Exit polls, the network reported, had found that 70 percent of voters support increased government spending on green and...
View ArticleThe Futility of the Democrats’ Record-Breaking War Chest
If the election returns stay on track, Joe Biden will be president, but with a Republican Senate standing in his way. Good news for a president who was, in the face of all evidence before his eyes, so...
View ArticleNothing Was Inevitable About This Election
No presidential candidate had hit 270 electoral votes by the close of Election Day, which was more or less expected. Other outcomes were cleaner while holding true to prediction: Republicans were still...
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The Majestic Alaskan Rain Forest in Trump’s Crosshairs
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” wrote naturalist John Muir in 1911. Last week, news broke that the Trump administration has exempted...
View ArticleWhat If Democrats’ Message Just Doesn’t Matter?
Joe Biden supports raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour. I know this because I follow political news for a living, but also because he said so, on television, in one of his two nationally...
View ArticleThe Trump Campaign’s Farcical Attempt to Steal an Election
In the chaos following Fox News’s decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden on election night, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adult doll Jared Kushner got to work. He picked up the phone to try to find a...
View ArticleThe Cops Protested This Election, Too
Kettling is, by definition, a trap. It is a tactic most commonly used by police to surround and immobilize a group of people, often protesters, in an attempt to stymie and diffuse their momentum, even...
View ArticleGrassroots Democrats Wanted to Protect the Vote. Then National Organizers...
Late Wednesday afternoon, as Election Day stretched into Election Week, in cities and towns across the United States, grassroots Democrats took to the streets under a new banner: Protect the Results. A...
View ArticleFree Will
So letting the bath run I saton the toilet & thought aboutkeeping the plug in till the waterspilt which made me think ifall things have as their cause whathappened how can you changecourse, prior...
View ArticleWill the Democrats Ever Make Sense of This Week?
This is not how things were supposed to go. It was widely anticipated, of course, that Joe Biden would defeat President Trump in a victory that could take time to emerge given the pandemic-driven shift...
View ArticleYaa Gyasi Versus the Identity Trap
Late in Homegoing, the debut novel by the Ghanaian-American writer Yaa Gyasi, a character named Marcus is introduced. Marcus is getting a Ph.D. in sociology at Stanford University, and—as happens—is...
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Sidewalks
I saw my breath this morning from a shiver of an engine in between sleep and consciousness today I don’t need any hospital socks to stay warm my windows are not barred my door is not a...
View ArticleLet’s Take a Moment to Check in With Some Extremely Rich People
The miserable presidential race is still underway, with stress-inducing counts slogging along in a handful of swing states; the much-rumored congressional blue wave turned out only to be a sad drip....
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North Carolina Keeps Breaking My Heart
This article was ostensibly going to be all about how Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina seems to have come back to defeat Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham after trailing in the polls...
View ArticleTrump’s Divorce From Fox News Is Getting Ugly
Over the last four days, Fox News’s normal hierarchy has been inverted. Ordinarily, its opinion side—anchored by Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham—is the network’s beating heart, an...
View ArticleThe Philadelphian Left Holds the Line
On Friday morning, after a full night spent counting and tabulating mail-in ballots, votes from Philadelphia may have delivered the final blow kicking President Trump out of the White House. Thursday,...
View ArticleThe Power of the “Something Else” Vote
For all the praise that CNN’s graphics department has been raking in for its Trump-correcting chyrons, it was another visual from election night that caught my eye. Providing a breakdown of the Trump...
View ArticleRacial Tolerance Was on the Ballot—and Won
The defining story of the 2020 election is, of course, Joe Biden’s apparent victory over Donald Trump. Though Democrats fell short of a once-in-a-generation landslide victory, they convinced a...
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