Clarence Thomas’s Unprecedented America
The Supreme Court began this week by correcting an injustice. A local prosecutor in Mississippi tried and convicted Curtis Flowers six times for allegedly murdering four people at a furniture store in...
View Article“Stop Telling Me Your Opinion”: An Exit Interview With C-SPAN’s Founder
When Brian Lamb launched C-SPAN in 1979, he set into motion a multi-decade experiment in news media that was both maximalist and minimalist: wall-to-wall coverage of the American government, but...
View ArticleGive Democrats a Chance to Get Serious in Their First Debates
Tonight and Thursday night will mark the start of a new stage in the 2020 presidential primary. With a pair of debates in Miami, 20 of the now 25 Democratic hopefuls will take their cases (and their...
View ArticleFifty Years After Stonewall, Many States Still Lack LGBTQ Protections
With New York City’s West Village looking as though someone dropped a leaflet bomb filled with rainbows, it’s hard to ignore the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, recognized as a...
View ArticleJay Inslee Would Like Your Attention, Please
On the eve of the first-ever presidential primary debate of the 2020 election, Washington Governor Jay Inslee wasn’t holed up in a hotel room preparing talking points with his team. He was at the Frost...
View ArticleHow Tiffany Cabán Would Reshape The Criminal Justice System
I first met Tiffany Cabán just before Valentine’s Day, in a crowded cafe not far from the downtown Manhattan court where she was still working cases as a public defender. Two weeks before, she had...
View ArticleCory Booker Chooses the Wrong Side in a New Jersey Street Fight
Democrats, The Washington Post recently told us, are frustrated—even a bit anxious—that their ambitious policy agenda is failing to attract the notice of the public. People don’t even seem to know that...
View ArticleThe First Democratic Debate Failed The Planet
For the last month, the Democratic National Committee has faced intense pressure to hold a debate specifically focused on the climate crisis—not just from environmental activists, but also from...
View ArticleMiami Moonglow for Booker and Klobuchar
It may be remembered as the Wretched Excess Debate with ten candidates, five moderators, one ludicrous White House backdrop, and enough technical glitches to make you nostalgic for the TV test pattern...
View ArticleThe Loudest Voice Stars A Very Simple Monster
If in 2019 you haven’t had enough of old white men yelling, you can now watch them do it on Showtime. The Loudest Voice is a miniseries based on by Gabriel Sherman’s best-selling book, chronicling the...
View ArticleThe Death of Taboo
In 1988, a German journalist for the left-wing paper Die Tageszeitung (a.k.a. Taz) described a busy discotheque as “gaskammervoll,” meaning that it was as packed as a gas chamber (literally,...
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How John Hersey Bore Witness
Some writers are known for their oeuvre. Some are known for their personality. John Hersey, as the subtitle of Jeremy Treglown’s biography attests, is known as the “author of Hiroshima.” Taking up most...
View ArticleAdvocates Want Everyone Counted, No Matter the Fate of the Citizenship Question
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Commerce Department has the authority to add a question to the 2020 census asking about the citizenship status of respondents, but it needs a better reason to...
View ArticleThe Supreme Court Seems Oddly Ambivalent About Being Lied To
On Thursday, five justices handed the Trump administration its first major defeat in the high court, narrowly rejecting the administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census....
View ArticleA Partisan Supreme Court Upholds Partisan Power
To say that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause is bad for American democracy would be an understatement. In a 5–4 decision along the usual ideological lines, the justices held that...
View ArticlePelosi Bows to Conservatives on Border Funding
Nancy Pelosi began Thursday by promising to remember the children. By midafternoon, she forgot them—and called it a “battle cry.”While much of the media was focused on the first Democratic debate, the...
View ArticleJoe Biden: Bruised Over Busing, But Still Standing
It was the great nineteenth-century American poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who gave this advice to would-be literary upstarts: “Never strike a king unless you are sure that you can kill him.”In...
View ArticleBiden’s Big Night Belonged to Others
Joe Biden had one job at his first Democratic debate. He didn’t have to win, but he couldn’t lose. He was there to remind everyone that he was a jovial grandpa—someone who would take his gloves off for...
View ArticleEric Bolling Is Failing Up
In 2007, Eric Bolling was new to Fox News; after a successful run as an oil trader on Wall Street, he had landed a job as a financial analyst on Fox Business. The jauntily named show he hosted, Happy...
View ArticleBig Little Lies Gets Tough
In the third episode of the second season of Big Little Lies, an eight-year-old girl named Amabella goes into a “coma” in her school classroom. It’s not really a coma—it’s more like a panic attack—but...
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