The Socially Distanced Protester
Much of the emotional power of a march or demonstration comes from being there. Successful labor organizing likewise depends in part on the intimacy and convenience of people working near one another....
View ArticleThe Profound Simplicity of Bernie Sanders’s Vision
Bernie Sanders was always demanding too much, the argument went. “What he’s proposing is very much pie in the sky,” Joe Biden, now the unopposed Democratic nominee, said at the start of March. “If you...
View ArticleI Tried to Get Tested for Coronavirus in a Major City. It Was a Maze of Dead...
I currently live in Salt Lake City, but I’m originally from the New Mexico side of the Navajo Nation and still have cultural connections and citizen connections there—I’m still voting there. There are...
View ArticleThe Coronavirus Recession Is a Critical Test for the Labor Movement
It’s become increasingly common to hear people say that America has been shut down by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. This isn’t really true: Large sectors of the American workforce have been asked...
View ArticleThe Perilous Mess of Applying for Unemployment Right Now
Jonathan Canales has been working in service on and off since he was 17, and was a chef at an Atlanta bar called Georgia Beer Garden until about a month ago. Canales, who is 32 now, said his employers...
View ArticleAlone in the City of Sirens
In normal times, life in any city means a constant barrage of sounds: car horns, yowling cats, heated arguments from windows overhead—often over inconsequential things. For the past few weeks, the most...
View ArticleJoe Biden’s New Podcast Is So Bad
At this rate, every American will soon have a podcast. Two weeks ago, struggling to break through the noise of the coronavirus crisis, Joe Biden, like so many before him, plugged an SM57 microphone...
View ArticleThe Staggeringly Complicated Ethics of Ventilating Coronavirus Patients
On Wednesday, STAT News published an influential story asking whether ventilators are being overused for Covid-19 patients. The United States is facing a dire shortage of ventilators for coronavirus...
View ArticleThe New American Death Sentence
Worldwide, New York’s jail complex at Rikers Island has the highest rate of cases of the novel coronavirus—as of April 8, 287 in total. That’s 6.65 percent of people jailed there. Two people have died....
View ArticleDemocrats Decide, Again, Not to Try Anything New
It won’t be official until the 2020 Democratic National Convention—brought to you (perhaps) by Cisco Telepresence—but it is very nearly so: The Democratic Party’s leadership vacuum will persist for, at...
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Bringing Out the Dead in New York City
In one of the world’s largest churches, just north of Central Park, the pews have been replaced by beds. A sprawling tennis complex that hosts the U.S. Open likewise has been converted into a field...
View ArticleGod Save the Florida Governor From His Stupidity
Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, had heard the recommendations to hunker down from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and looked on as other major coastal states from California...
View ArticleAn Airline Bailout Should Have More Strings Attached Than a Harp
Airlines and airports got $50 billion worth of loans and grants in the stimulus approved by Congress last month, along with a tax break that also extends to private jets. They might get more soon; the...
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The Rise of the Lurker
If you’re over a certain age and you were ever on Facebook, you’re on your way off it. Every time Mark Zuckerberg does something creepy or bows to pressure from the Trump administration, one...
View ArticleBailouts Won’t Save the Economy. More Coronavirus Tests Will.
No sooner had the ink dried on the last $2 trillion round of economic relief from the devastation wrought by the coronavirus pandemic than President Trump and Congress began contemplating the next bill...
View ArticleHow Donald Trump Ruined the Navy
No communications firm, pressed to design a case study on public-relations disasters, could likely top the Navy’s recent bungling of a coronavirus epidemic on the USS Theodore Roosevelt and the firing...
View ArticleThe Problem With Shrimp
In 2015, a bombshell story from the Associated Press reported that Burmese migrants, including children, were spending upwards of 16 hours per day peeling shrimp in Thailand, helping to sustain the...
View ArticleTrump’s Women Are Trapped in a Cult of “Empowerment”
At the end of the second week of April, Women for Trump, an auxiliary arm of the Trump campaign, hosted another of its trademark “Hour to Empower” sessions to rally the female faithful. In keeping with...
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What Causes Schizophrenia?
Thanksgiving 1972 was a bad one for Mimi Galvin. When she and her husband Don went out to dinner with his Air Force colleagues and their wives, she liked to project the image of a proud mother of an...
View ArticleOut of Prison With Nowhere Safe to Go
John Mele didn’t expect to get out of jail so soon. The 48-year-old had three months left in his sentence, serving time for theft, burglary, and driving with a suspended license, when he was released...
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