Could the Coronavirus End Jair Bolsonaro’s Presidency?
Brazil’s first known fatality was a 63-year-old housekeeper named Cleonice Gonçalves whose boss contracted Covid-19 in February while on vacation in Italy. The employer, who lives in the expensive Rio...
View ArticleOn Being White and Broke in America
I’m what one therapist called a “class-straddler,” which I prefer to “class-transitioner,” because the truth is, there’s never not a foot of mine planted firmly in Valley View, eating processed food,...
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Karl Marx’s Prophetic Longing
Karl Marx was born more than two centuries ago, in 1818, and, given the enormous impact of his ideas, it should hardly surprise us that we are still trying to make sense of his life and legacy. In the...
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Bailing Out
The Brooklyn Community Bail Fund opened for business in 2015, a heady time for criminal justice reform. The protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore had helped catapult conversations about police...
View ArticleThe Vanishing Public Square
As the Great Pandemic takes hold of our world and forces all of us to separate ourselves from our closest family and friends, does politics become impossible? As I write, states are postponing their...
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In The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel Finally Takes Cromwell to the Block
Hilary Mantel’s trilogy—Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and now The Mirror and the Light—concerns the rule of Henry VIII, but the protagonist of all three books is his adviser, Thomas Cromwell. The...
View ArticleThe Brands Feel Your Pain
Last week, the famously stoic Anna Wintour said she “broke down” upon hearing from her friend Ralph Lauren, the designer and businessman worth approximately $6 billion, that the philanthropic wing of...
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How the Republican Party Took Over the Supreme Court
For 230 years, the Supreme Court of the United States has been a political institution, but only rarely a partisan one. More than a century ago, the court controversially concluded that the...
View ArticleDrag Trump Over the Coals
Congress is out of session and out of town until late April, even as the coronavirus pandemic continues to exact a mounting death toll and inflict significant economic damage on the public. Federal...
View ArticleThe Shock Doctrine Came for Bail Reform
It was death at Rikers Island, the awful emblem of New York State’s jail and prison system, that propelled calls for cash bail reform. Those demands achieved some success: Beginning this January,...
View ArticleStop Panicking About Joe Biden
In early April 1992, a news headline in The Wall Street Journal captured the depressed mood surrounding a certain presumptive presidential nominee: “Democratic Leaders Resignedly Begin to Rally Around...
View ArticleHow Hydroxychloroquine Became Conservative Media’s Coronavirus Miracle Drug
President Trump’s championing of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential miracle cure for Covid-19—despite a lack of clinical trials and a lengthy list of side effects, such as cardiac...
View ArticleDoes Big Oil Need Big Government to Survive?
One hot morning in 1931, rural townspeople awoke to the sound of an invading army: The government had sent some 800 mounted troops to impose martial law and enforce state-mandated production orders....
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Don’t Look For Patient Zeros
On March 30, the New York Times flagship podcast, The Daily, released an episode titled “New Jersey’s Patient Zero.” What followed was a wrenching and compassionate story about New Jersey’s first...
View ArticlePlanned Parenthood Is the Real Star of Never Rarely Sometimes Always
Across the United States, institutions calling themselves Crisis Pregnancy Centers advise their clients not to pursue abortion, but instead either to parent or surrender their child for adoption. As...
View ArticleGig-Working Through the Apocalypse
Last May, Postmates notified Darren Lyn in an email that it had “updated” its payment structure. From that point on, he found, a given delivery job no longer came with a $4 minimum guarantee. Soon...
View ArticleThe Amateurs and Yes-Men in Trump’s Army of Judges
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is generally considered to be the second most powerful court in America. By virtue of its location in the nation’s capital, it hears more...
View ArticleBernie Sanders’s Gift to the Democratic Party
Hope—sometimes desperate hope—sustains all presidential campaigns. Even when a candidate withdraws in the face of daunting electoral odds, as Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren did...
View ArticleDon’t Mourn. Organize.
On the day of the Iowa caucuses in February, the now disgraced and retired MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews made a remark about Bernie Sanders’s chances of winning the general election that unintentionally...
View ArticleThe Planet Can’t Afford a Coronavirus Feud
It could have been an opportunity to set aside differences and work together. Instead, the coronavirus outbreak has further strained relations between the United States and China. In the past few...
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