Democrats Have Failed Urban Black Americans
On the first night of the Republican National Convention on Monday, viewers were treated to a taped speech by Kimberly Klacik, a young, Black candidate for Maryland’s 7th House district, which includes...
View ArticleWhy the GOP Didn’t Write a New Platform
One theme unites last week’s Democratic National Convention and this week’s Republican National Convention: The GOP is Donald Trump’s party now. For Democrats, this was an elegy and an invitation....
View ArticleThe Real, Paranoid Housewives of the Republican Convention
As Donald Trump imagines them and as the Republican National Convention presented them, the suburbs are a woman, pointing a gun. Specifically, they are Patricia McCloskey, the Missouri woman who was...
View ArticleMike Pence Is a Parody of a Politician
In 2011, at the height of his Comedy Central period, Stephen Colbert launched a parody Super PAC called “Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow.” Wednesday night, the gravely serious Mike Pence...
View ArticleBiden’s Distracting Parade of Celebrity Boomers
With the tiresome necessity of political convention season concluding, we now enter the homestretch of a long two years of presidential campaigning. Here, we will see exactly how Joe Biden plans to...
View ArticleWho Will Get Rich Off of Hurricane Laura?
Hurricane Laura—one of the most powerful storms ever to hit the United States—made landfall early this morning, just a few hours after the end of the Republican National Convention’s third night. Those...
View ArticleDonald Trump Is Rooting for Chaos
Over the last four days, Republicans have painted a bleak portrait of life in Donald Trump’s America. Cities are on fire. Race relations are at an all-time low. Free speech is under attack. The economy...
View ArticleMeander/ΜΑΙΑΝΔΡΟΣ
decorative hellenic borderson paper coffee cups on a silver ring I used to wear it feels nationalist now /it was always nationalist actually I would say dawn is fruitynot milky, not goldwhat to do with...
View ArticleESL
After Roger Reeves’s “Cymothoa Exigua”The tongue as a debut ribbon to slice and applaud: to lose consciousness & wake up indoors: when the smell of cooked chicken creeps into your nose, & teeth...
View ArticleThe Queen’s Room
San Francisco, 1849 Note the tasteful draperies over the windows, the view of the canneries. Salt air-gagged, we arrived west. Sunburnt necks. Teenagers, most of us.Like tanagers. Over the sea, we...
View ArticlePrivate Equity Is Cannibalizing the Post-Pandemic Economy
In April, just after the coronavirus had transformed into a full-blown public health emergency in the United States, The New York Times reported that investment firms were eyeing the unfolding disaster...
View ArticleThe Women Who Built an Alternative to Bloomsbury
A lot of people found Mecklenburgh Square by accident. T.S. Eliot, who taught at nearby Birkbeck College, described it, on discovering it in 1917, as “a most beautiful, dilapidated old square, which I...
View ArticleThe Exclusionary White Men of the American Legion
Nestled in the heart of Indianapolis is the national headquarters of the American Legion, the largest and most influential veterans’ service organization in the world. Indianapolis is second only to...
View ArticleThe Risk of Watching the World Burn on TV
Fire is a natural element of many landscapes of the American West. It provides periodic ecological resets, infuses the soil with nutrients, allows the growth of new vegetation, and rejuvenates the...
View ArticleLarry Kudlow’s Economic Hallucinations
Thanks to the Covid-19 lockdown, convention speeches this year are crafted for the camera rather than a crowded exhibition hall, a limitation that makes them seem more intimate. Many commentators saw...
View ArticleThe Police Are Pretty Sure They’re Going to Get Away With It
As my colleague Adam Weinstein noted a few weeks ago, it has become a minor cliché in American political rhetoric to ask your audience to imagine how the media would cover some domestic development if...
View ArticleThe Republicans Still Don’t Know How to Run Against Biden
Since Donald Trump fancies himself a president comparable to Abraham Lincoln, we can describe his marathon acceptance speech in words that are lifted from the Gettysburg Address: “The world will little...
View ArticleThe Violent Delights of the Trumpian Right
Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old gunman who shot and killed two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday night, is now a folk hero for some conservatives even as he awaits trial...
View ArticleThe NBA Strike and the Limits of the Left’s Class-Centric Politics
Reeling from the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last weekend and the violent unrest that followed, the Milwaukee Bucks opted not to take the court for their playoff game against...
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The Hell of Being a Black Cop
Bill Monroe, now 75 years old, completed his service in the U.S. Army in 1967. The same year, he joined the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. He told me about an altercation from those early...
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