Why This Anti-Science Fanaticism Is Dangerous for Democracy
Check out these state vaccination numbers. Here are the top 10, with the percentage of the adult population that has received both shots: Vermont, 64.6 percent; Maine, 60.5; Massachusetts, 60.4;...
View ArticleThe People vs. Agent Orange Exposes a Mass Poisoning in Plain Sight
In 1975, shortly after moving to Oregon’s Siuslaw National Forest, Carol Van Strum began seeing tank trucks and helicopters spraying something pungent. “No one knew what they were spraying, or what it...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Swashbuckling Lawyer Who’s Taking on the Sackler Family
When I called Mike Quinn this winter, he had just found out a client of his had died. She was 90, and she’d lost her husband, a playwright and writer who was also Quinn’s client, a couple of years...
View ArticleThe Republican Plot to Ban LGBTQ History in Public Schools
This Pride month, as revelers hit the streets to celebrate LGBTQ history, Republican state legislatures are hard at work trying to erase it. And it’s not just epochal events like the Stonewall riots,...
View ArticleThe Success of Medicaid Expansion Could Break It
With the coronavirus pandemic waning across the United States, a new government report has kicked up a surprising and groundbreaking health statistic: Medicaid enrollment now tops 80 million people....
View ArticleThe Immigrant Families Separated by Trump Are Stuck in Legal Limbo Under Biden
Amid the efforts to reunify the migrant families that were separated by President Donald Trump’s notorious zero tolerance policy, one question has consistently hovered in the background like an...
View ArticleWe’re Already Forgetting the Trump Era. His Supporters Won’t Forget Us.
1. Trying to remember the dreamWhen we wake up on a certain morning, and we know that we just had a long, strange, complicated dream, and we want to remember it, we try to grab onto a few specific...
View ArticleCan Zola Capture the Delights of A’Ziah King’s Twitter Saga?
If you tried removing from Hollywood history any film that portrayed or otherwise depended on selling sex, there might not be a whole lot left. But the framing is all; it helps, when using sex for...
View ArticleThe End of American Politics
It’s hard to think of an issue that’s inspired broader center-left consensus than the Republican threat to the right to vote. Jacobin informs us that “There’s Less Than Two Years to Save American...
View ArticleThe Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory
In the past month, we’ve seen a second wave of interest in the theory that the Covid-19 pandemic began with a lab leak. Last spring, the media accurately reported the scientific consensus that Covid...
View ArticleThe Damning Truth Behind Cop “Walkout” Stories
“For many, you enjoy calling the police officers [sic] path ‘a job.’ I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong,” wrote Asheville, North Carolina, police officer Lindsay Rose, in an October blog post...
View ArticleWhere LGBTQ Equality Legislation Goes to Die
In mid-March, Stella Keating, a 16-year-old rising junior from Tacoma, Washington, addressed a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, detailing her life as a trans teen and student. Stella told the...
View ArticleThe Rise of the Very Online Novel
If an experience occurs online, how much of an experience is it really? The sociologist Nathan Jurgenson has used the phrase “digital dualism” to critique the fallacy that what happens online is less...
View ArticleYes, It’s Still a Conservative Supreme Court
The Supreme Court’s October 2020 term wraps up this week, and it wasn’t as bad as some liberals may have had reason to fear. This has led some observers to question if the court is as conservative as...
View ArticleThe Crucial, Little Understood Science of the Seafloor
In her 1951 book The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson wrote that when she imagined the seafloor, “the single, overwhelming fact” that captured her imagination was “the accumulation of sediments.” The...
View ArticleThe Delta Covid Variant’s Urgent Message for America
Last week, Israel, with one of the highest Covid-19 vaccination rates in the world, reported something troubling: The so-called delta variant was driving another Covid-19 spike in the country—and half...
View ArticleWho Gets Left Behind as We “Return to Normal”?
A few weeks ago, Paul Gibbs, a health care activist and father in West Valley, Utah, was invited to his eight-year-old nephew’s baptism. Gibbs was eager to see his relatives, and his five-year-old son,...
View ArticleThe Supreme Court Gives a Green Light to Voter Suppression
The Supreme Court narrowed Americans’ ability to fight racial discrimination in election laws on Thursday, upholding two Arizona measures that had been challenged under a key provision in the Voting...
View ArticleThe Betrayal of Justice That Set Bill Cosby Free
In 2005, Bill Cosby and Bruce Castor—supposedly—struck a deal.At that point in pop culture history, Cosby was still the beloved creator of Cliff Huxtable and famous for his influential standup; he was...
View ArticleWork Really Sucks When It’s Hot
Rick works 12-hour shifts at an unair-conditioned food manufacturing facility outside Portland, Oregon, whose products are shipped on in shelf-stable Tetra Paks found in grocery store aisles around the...
View Article