The Deep Amnesia of Our National Conscience
On Friday, the arrests of CNN’s Omar Jimenez and his crew covering the protests against the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis were carried live, with reactions in real time from two of the...
View ArticleThe Flawed Politics of a Law-and-Order Campaign
Five days of anguish and protest. Five nights of anger, broken windows, out-of-control police behavior and the nauseating television images of tear-gassed citizens and burning squad cars. As Donald...
View ArticleAmerica’s Social Contract Is Broken
So little has changed. Nearly 30 years have passed since the Los Angeles riots, and yet we find ourselves in a near-identical situation: a black man brutalized by police; the incident caught on camera,...
View ArticleThe Right’s Reign on the Air Waves
In late 1961, a Miami chiropractor named Jerome Harold became outraged when he learned that his local grocery stores were selling ham imported from Poland. The country was still firmly under Communist...
View ArticleTrump Is Bailing Out Big Meat—and Further Screwing the Planet
At an event announcing $16 billion in federal relief for food producers on May 19, Donald Trump spoke at a podium flanked by tables stacked with corn, onions, apples, and other fruits and vegetables....
View ArticleThe Rebirth of Red Power
On an early November morning in 1969, Richard Oakes, shirtless but with his boots still strapped on, leaped off the side of the three-masted boat carrying him and a group of Native student activists to...
View ArticleHow the Democrats Should Imitate the Republican Party
It’s long been an article of faith among Democrats that they have nothing to learn from Republicans. Democrats tend instead to believe that the GOP is the party of evil that achieved power through...
View ArticleBarbara Ehrenreich Still Wants to Be Surprised
“I think I was depressed,” Barbara Ehrenreich said when I asked why she wrote her novel, Kipper’s Game. Published in 1993 and reissued earlier this year, the story is part science fiction, part...
View ArticleLiving in Your Car as a Pandemic Consumes Your City
Topher Bloomquist had been living in his car for nearly a year when California imposed its stay-at-home order to combat the novel coronavirus pandemic. Bloomquist, a 43-year-old former I.T. worker from...
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Tear Gas Doesn’t Deploy Itself
Save for the rare clip of someone like Cornel West speaking God’s honest truth on CNN, mainstream media coverage of the nationwide protests against racist policing largely follows the same rules:...
View ArticleThe Political Elites’ Pointless Calls for More Leadership
It is only a slight exaggeration to say America is burning. Protests over the killing of George Floyd by police have led to destruction of property in many cities across the country over the past few...
View ArticleBill de Blasio Has Failed
In recent days, New York Police Department officers have violently thrown protesters to the ground, arrested journalists, maced a state senator, and used a car door to strike a man standing in the...
View ArticleIs Puerto Rico About to Give Another Terrible Energy Contract to an American...
On January 6 and 7, a 6.4-magnitude earthquake and aftershocks struck Puerto Rico, killing at least one person, injuring more, and causing mass blackouts across the island’s already hobbled electrical...
View ArticleThis Is Fascism
“Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes,” Umberto Eco wrote in 1995. “It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, ‘I want to reopen...
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A Profound Experience of Art
A young woman stands in front of a canvas, painting a swan nestling in tall reeds. The canvas is bigger than she is, so she must travel around its surface to fill in the details. Finally, after several...
View ArticleThe Police Were a Mistake
Contrary to most of American folklore, the Founding Fathers were not a supernaturally wise monolith. Leading revolutionary figures like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton may have shared certain...
View ArticleVaccines Don’t Make Money
Victory in the so-called race for a coronavirus vaccine rests on the skills of a handful of private companies whose primary motivation is hardly the public good. Can Big Pharma deliver what we need to...
View ArticleClimate Change Is Going to Hit Palestine Particularly Hard
Israel just made it through a brutal, record-breaking heat wave. Temperatures hit 105 degrees Fahrenheit in Tel Aviv, 98 degrees in Jerusalem, and 113 degrees in Jericho. The government had to lift the...
View ArticleA Quiet Workplace Revolution in the Shadow of Silicon Valley
The news came on a Wednesday morning: Every Dog Has Its Day Care, a luxury daycare for dogs, would be shutting down in June 2019. The staff was in the dark. An email from owner Lauren Westreich,...
View ArticleThe Police Take the Side of White Vigilantes
Who are the cops for? Over the last week, all across the country, in ways large and small, they’ve shown us.In Philadelphia on Monday night, the cops made it fairly explicit on whose behalf they police...
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