Congress’s Bipartisanship Fetish Is Killing the Covid Relief Effort
The recent good news on the coronavirus front—the vaccines are on their way—hasn’t negated the bad. Deaths and hospitalizations are on the rise, and the economic situation remains extraordinarily dire....
View ArticleWill Democrats Get Suckered Into Mitch McConnell’s Corporate Indemnity Scheme?
Will Senate Republicans ever stop trying to indemnify employers against Covid-19 lawsuits as the price for a Covid stimulus deal? On Tuesday it seemed that they might, but on inspection that turned out...
View ArticleThe Rabid Illiberalism of Trump’s Desperate Election Deniers
Tuesday, December 8 was a minor procedural date on the 2020 presidential election calendar but also a notable symbolic one: The safe harbor deadline. At that time, which by law occurs six days before...
View ArticleWall Street Vultures Are Ready to Get Rich From Water Scarcity
Bloomberg reported on Sunday that California water futures are now officially on the Wall Street markets, with the United States–based CME Group heading up the 2021 contracts connected to the state’s...
View ArticleCalifornia’s Climate Policy Goes National
No state has weathered the brunt of the Trump administration’s climate skepticism like California. During the past four years, the president stripped the Golden State of its ability to regulate car...
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The End of the Businessman President
Donald Trump finished off the 2020 campaign in a frenzy of hastily organized rallies. From southern Florida to northern Michigan, he and a small troupe of guests and aides barnstormed 17 campaign...
View ArticleElon Musk’s Big Government Grift
The world’s second-richest man—and second-most irritating Twitter user, after the president—has moved to Texas. After months of complaining about Covid-19 shutdowns affecting his factories, while also...
View ArticleWho Gets a Say in Our Dystopian Tech Future?
Last Wednesday, Timnit Gebru, a staff research scientist and co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence team at Google, said that she had been ousted from the company over a research paper she...
View ArticleFox News Is in Trouble
Asked during an Election Day earnings call about the prospect of a Donald Trump–branded television network, Fox News CEO Lachlan Murdoch was sanguine. “We love competition,” he said. “We have always...
View ArticleThe Stubborn Classism of Classical Music
Few art forms on earth are more indebted to class privilege than Western classical music. For most of its history, it has relied on monarchs, aristocrats, and wealthy patrons even to exist. We have...
View ArticleNick Kristof and the Holy War on Pornhub
Anyone who wants to know that Pornhub has engaged in abusive and exploitative behavior toward women need only listen to the women whose videos were posted to the free porn site without their consent....
View ArticleBiden Is Finding New and Inexplicable Ways to Screw Up His Cabinet Picks
Secretary of the interior isn’t the most high-profile Cabinet post, but it might be the most glaring example of how President-elect Joe Biden’s selection process is going awry. The clear front-runner...
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Now Is When We Choose How Effective the Covid Vaccines Will Be
Imagine if the United States had quickly employed proven public health advice, updated regularly as new science came in, throughout the entire pandemic. Far fewer people would be dead or suffering...
View ArticleThe Democrats Are Too Old
In the lead-up to Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings in October, Democrats fretted that the party’s ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, Dianne Feinstein, wasn’t up to the...
View ArticleInside the Hostage Crisis of America’s Dying Restaurants
Dave was walking to work in one of Pittsburgh’s hippest neighborhoods, past the shuttered artisan candle shops and clothing boutiques that sell overpriced vintage workwear, when he noticed the sobbing....
View ArticleThe Meat Industry’s Bestiality Problem
It isn’t spoken of much, but a significant chunk of the Kansas economy depends on pervasive violations of its anti-bestiality laws. In 2010, the Kansas legislature revised the state’s “criminal sodomy”...
View ArticleThe Year We Learned to Live Like Life Doesn’t Matter
It’s bad. This week marked a record in Covid-19-related deaths, and we are currently seeing an average of 209,864 Covid cases per day. Nearly 300,000 people in the United States have died since the...
View ArticleIs Joe Biden Just Being Stubborn?
If the staggered unveiling of President-elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet has done little to enthuse the (broadly defined) left, it has also not yet been quite as disastrous as some predicted (and that will...
View ArticleThe American Fetish for Elderly Elites
I think a lot about the time Prince Philip flipped his Land Rover. Not so much about the crash itself, wherein the 97-year-old British royal collided in 2019 with another car on a country road. More...
View ArticleHUD Deserves Better Than Marcia Fudge
Almost exactly one month ago, in an interview with Politico, Ohio Representative Marcia Fudge criticized how former presidents were expected to assemble their Cabinets. “As this country becomes more...
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