Long, Strange TRIPS: The Grubby History of How Vaccines Became Intellectual...
Even within the walls of the World Trade Organization, the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement, or TRIPS, is a paradox and a freak: a temple to monopoly inside the church of...
View ArticleTrump’s Republicans Want a Coup
Michael Flynn, the retired general who briefly served as Donald Trump’s national security adviser before being fired for lying about conversations he had with the Russian ambassador, spent Memorial Day...
View ArticleThe Overthrow of American Democracy Begins in Texas
Two bad omens for American democracy appeared in Texas over the Memorial Day weekend. One of them involved Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, retired general, and active MAGA...
View ArticleCharlie Brown Tried to Stay Out of Politics
Like many of us, Charlie Brown and his not entirely devoted dog, Snoopy, were always looking for ways out of the difficult and sometimes ugly world they lived in, through fantasies of sports stardom...
View ArticleRon DeSantis Is the Depressing Future of “Climate-Friendly” Republicans
Republican governor and former MAGA acolyte Ron DeSantis has focused more on climate during his first term than would be expected of most right-wingers of his ilk. It’s not because he wants to—in fact,...
View ArticleWant to Stop Ransomware Attacks? Ban Bitcoin and Other Cryptocurrencies.
Let’s say you’re a hacker who wants to extort money from a big corporation. A decade or two ago, you might have hacked into their systems, stolen some data, and sold it for pennies on the dark web or...
View ArticleThe Biden White House Is Strangely Calm About Our Burning Planet
Last week, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm joined San Francisco–based radio station KQED’s Political Breakdown to talk about the task of running the Department of Energy at this critical juncture in...
View ArticleBiden’s Infrastructure Week Is Turning Into a Joke, Too
Gird your loins, folks, because it’s infrastructure week again. White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre told the media that this, the first week in June, was “incredibly critical” to getting an...
View ArticleThe Green New Dealers Propose Their Own Infrastructure Idea: Socialize Your...
One day at work, well before being elected to Congress, Cori Bush got a call from her godmother. “She had a dream my house burned down,” Bush recalled to me over the phone. Her godmother urged her to...
View ArticleBiden’s Shameful, Conservative Stance Against Legal Pot in D.C.
President Joe Biden is fond of using a quote from his father to criticize Republicans: “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” Late last month, the Biden...
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Elizabeth MacDonough Is the Most Quietly Consequential Person in Washington
When the United States Senate was called into recess on January 6 at 2:13 p.m., Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough stood from her seat behind the dais, adjusted her mask, and looked toward the...
View ArticleOligarch of the Month: Bill Gates
Not so long ago, you could be forgiven for thinking of Bill Gates as the good tech billionaire. Microsoft, the software company he co-founded in 1975, was a juggernaut, but hardly the big bad of the...
View ArticleDan Crenshaw’s Paranoid Delusions of a “Woke” Military
It cannot be said enough that—beyond installing Federalist Society–approved judges and lowering taxes for corporations and the rich—today’s Republican Party simply has no ideas and no intent to govern....
View ArticleRepublicans Are Accidentally Suppressing Their Own Voters
An unnamed Democratic congressional aide told The Washington Post this week that the mood in his party is “panic.” The cause of that panic is a raft of legislation in various Republican-controlled...
View ArticleMalcolm Gladwell’s Fantasy of War From the Air
There’s a scene in the 2011 film Moneyball where Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane is mentoring young Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) on how to cut a professional baseball player from the roster: bluntly, without...
View ArticleBiden’s Foreign Policy Doctrine Is Stuck in the Twentieth Century
As Israel prepared to remove Palestinian families to make way for settlers in East Jerusalem, and launched airstrikes on Gaza that demolished homes and killed hundreds of Palestinians, including scores...
View ArticleUnited Airlines’ Supersonic Jet Is a Bad Idea
United Airlines announced this week that it will purchase at least 15 supersonic Overture jets, at $200 million a pop, from a startup called Boom, which—having yet to put a single one of its fast new...
View ArticleFacebook Finally Decides Your Worst Uncle and Donald Trump Deserve the Same...
For years, Facebook has had two sets of rules—if not more—for its users. One set applied to everyday people on its platform: your mom, your friend doing low-key MLM scams, that guy you knew in high...
View ArticleTrump’s War on the Press Isn’t Over Until Biden Ends It
President Donald Trump infamously labeled the press the “enemy of the people” and routinely suggested that negative stories about him were invented out of whole cloth by “nasty” reporters who were out...
View ArticleYes, Take This Seriously: It’s Time to Kill the Senate
Well, it’s looking pretty grim. Last week, Kyrsten Sinema said that the filibuster, which for decades was used chiefly to sustain apartheid in the South and in our time has been used to block passage...
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