The Justice Department Is Getting Back Into the Business of Police Oversight....
When Mary Moriarty thinks about police reform, she always comes back to the lieutenant she met at a training session a few years ago. As Hennepin County’s chief public defender, Moriarty had been...
View ArticleMusic for Nothing
It’s easier than ever to listen to practically the entirety of recorded music. But for musicians, it’s harder than ever to make money. On Episode 31 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and...
View ArticleJay Inslee and the American Desire to Put Tribes in Their Place
Last week, Washington Governor Jay Inslee signed into law a series of historic climate-focused bills. The new measures included limitations on single-use plastic and styrofoam; a hard cap on carbon...
View ArticleOctavia Butler Wanted to Write a “Yes” Book
Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler’s penultimate novel, follows a charismatic Black woman named Lauren Olamina as she struggles to defend her commune, escapes a prison camp, and builds a religion,...
View ArticleAmazon Devours MGM in the Latest Merger of the Content Armageddon
Jeff Bezos now owns James Bond. And The Handmaid’s Tale. And Rocky (and Creed). And Legally Blonde, Robocop, The Pink Panther, Silence of the Lambs, and thousands of other films—all of which are also...
View ArticleWho Does J.D. Vance Think He’s Fooling?
There’s an arresting scene in J.D. Vance’s moving 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, in which Vance, a second-year student at Yale Law School, attends a dinner hosted by the white-shoe law firm Gibson, Dunn...
View ArticleThe Lies Cops Tell and the Lies We Tell About Cops
“Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction” was the title of the initial statement the Minneapolis Police Department released after Officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd a year ago....
View ArticleTrump Wants a New Contract With America, Which Just Revoked His Last Contract
There’s one big lesson from Donald Trump’s career in business: Think twice before making a deal with him. The former president is notorious for refusing to pay people, ranging from drapiers and...
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Billy Wilder’s Escape From the Nightmare of Europe
Plenty of Hollywood auteurs can claim a Freudian dimension to their work. But how many ever met the great man himself? When Oscar-winning director Billy Wilder was 19 years old, he was making a living...
View ArticleHow Did New York City Politics Become So Boring?
Once, mayors of New York City were towering national figures. Fiorello LaGuardia inspired a musical. John Lindsay, who exuded patrician charisma as he walked the streets of Harlem in the 1960s, was the...
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Amazon Wants to Eat Health Care Next
A few years ago, attending a tech conference that catered to an industry-friendly audience, I listened as a venture capitalist praised the upcoming possibilities for growth in the U.S. health care...
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The Surprise Court Ruling That Cut Through Shell’s Greenwashing Facade
After decades of exhausting climate change denial, we’re now in the new era of disingenuous corporate environmentalism, all while companies work furiously to delay the demise of the fossil fuel...
View ArticleMare of Easttown Finale: The Plight of the Woman Detective
If you don’t want to know the ending to Mare of Easttown (or Sharp Objects, or The Woman in the Window, or the very last case of Jane Tennison’s career in Prime Suspect), please navigate away from this...
View ArticleThe Last Thing We Need Is an Uber for Off-Duty Cops
All across the country, at grocery stores, nightclubs, and construction sites, police officers are standing guard: uniforms on, guns in holsters. But not every cop you see out in your community is...
View ArticleRepublicans Fear Trump May Wreck Their Chances to Fulfill His Darkest Fantasies
If you were to read the headlines—and the headlines alone—about former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s Thursday speech at the Reagan Library, you could only come away with one conclusion: His remarks were a...
View ArticleYou Don’t Have to Root for Melinda Gates
Since the surprise announcement earlier this month of Bill and Melinda Gates’s impending divorce, dirt has been piling up on one side. During the brain-meltingly rich couple’s 27-year marriage, Bill...
View ArticleWhat Chris Matthews Learned in Washington
Former MSNBC host Chris Matthews has made a career out of a certain image of American politics. It’s a nostalgic vision of the heyday of bare-knuckled ward bosses in and around city halls and orotund...
View ArticleDon McGahn’s Testimony Is One More Wall Quickly Closing In on Donald Trump
This Friday at 10 a.m., two years after he should have done so, former White House counsel Don McGahn will testify before the House Judiciary Committee (in a “closed, transcribed interview,” as one...
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