Are You Really Surprised by Our Authoritarian President?
Over a year and a half, or a political eon, ago the focal point of our political discourse was a caravan of migrants trekking through Central America and Mexico in the hopes of winning asylum in the...
View ArticleProtest Medics on Being Targeted by the Police, in Their Own Words
Protests can often feel like communities in miniature, and as thousands of people across the country continue to turn out in the wake of the recent police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and...
View ArticleThe Brands Don’t Care About George Floyd’s Death
Ages ago, when the country was slowly careening into the coronavirus pandemic, corporate marketing departments across the land pursued an unsubtle advertising strategy. By mid-April, seemingly every...
View ArticleThe Militarization of the American Hometown
On Saturday, my 13-year-old stepdaughter announced with some force that she wanted to go to the first peaceful protest against police brutality in our hometown of Fayetteville, Arkansas. The protest...
View ArticleDefunding the Police Is Good Climate Policy
Late Thursday, California’s Air Resources Board announced the results of the most recent auction of carbon allowances from its cap-and-trade program. It was the first such auction since the coronavirus...
View ArticleThe Stock Market Is an Engine of Civic Destruction
A weird thing happened over the last few months: The economy imploded, with 40 million Americans unemployed (and as many as 27 million lost their health insurance). Food bank lines stretch for miles....
View ArticlePolice Blinded Me in One Eye. I Can Still See Why My Country’s on Fire.
I have been weeping since Friday night, because that is the night I was shot in the face. I have, since then, begun to piece together what happened to me: It wasn’t a rubber bullet, it was a foam...
View ArticleMinneapolis in the Aftermath
I started my 10-mile walk through Minneapolis at one end of the now-infamous Lake Street, the commercial corridor that stretches east-west through South Minneapolis, from the Mississippi River on one...
View ArticleAt The New York Times, an Uprising Over James Bennet’s Incompetence
Less than two weeks ago, amid the pandemic and the explosion of demonstrations against police violence across the country, Arkansas senator Tom Cotton unveiled a shocking bill that went largely...
View ArticleAfter Defunding the Police, Nationalize Their Benefits
The staggering excess of the New York Police Department, the largest municipal police force in the country, is hard to hide at this point. The NYPD commands 36,000 officers, a bloated budget of nearly...
View ArticleWhere America Developed a Taste for State Violence
A few blocks from Capitol Hill, a woman raises a torch. She is a bronze replica of the Goddess of Democracy, a statue student protesters erected in Tiananmen Square in 1989 before being suppressed by...
View ArticleThis Is a Good Moment to Hear Joe Biden’s Thoughts on Attorneys General
President Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican Party is now so tight that it’s easy to forget the unease with which most of its establishment viewed him in 2015 and 2016. Some of that unease sprang...
View ArticleThe Christian Martyrdom Movement Ascends to the White House
Four months and several thousand news cycles ago, Harvard historian James Kloppenberg wrote in Commonweal about his former student Pete Buttigieg, then the rising star in the Democratic presidential...
View ArticleThe Radically Inclusive Music of Ornette Coleman
During Ornette Coleman’s legendary 1959 run of shows at the Five Spot club in New York, there was a joke going around: “A waiter drops a trayload of drinks and a man says to his lady-friend, ‘Listen...
View ArticleNihilism and White Bliss in America’s Most Livable City
From a distance, Le Magnifique looks almost like a scene from a cartoon. The hero of the statue, former Penguins center and captain Mario Lemieux, is skating one way with the puck dangling on the blade...
View ArticleRethinking the Press’s Relationship with Police
Over the last week and a half, over 200 journalists have been maced, beaten with batons, teargassed, and arrested by police while covering anti-police protests. Many of these journalists clearly...
View ArticleDonald Trump Is Celebrating the Wrong Economic Accomplishment
The unemployment rate quite unexpectedly dropped to 13.3 percent in May, according to new data released this morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But not even the BLS really believes that.At a...
View ArticleBP Is Not Woke. It’s an Imperialist Success Story.
Bernard Looney, named CEO of the multinational fossil fuel conglomerate BP last fall, has one or two things he’d like you to know. “I hope it goes without saying, I absolutely condemn racial injustice...
View ArticleTom Cotton and the Elite Media’s Dalliance With Illiberalism
In a March essay for The Atlantic, Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule argued that the American right should abandon constitutional originalism for “common-good constitutionalism,” a legal approach...
View ArticleThe Revolt of the Center-Right
On the opening night of the 2004 Republican convention, Georgia Senator Zell Miller delivered a blistering attack on the Democratic presidential nominee. Ridiculing John Kerry’s votes to cut military...
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