Can Senate Democrats Run Out the Clock on Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee?
The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg should inspire a week of public mourning and reflections on her enduring legacy. With just 45 days to go before an election, there should be bipartisan agreement that...
View ArticleRuth Bader Ginsburg and the End of the One Great Woman Myth
In the last decade of the life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she saw herself crowned a feminist icon. The memefication of the precedent-setting women’s rights attorney and judge first...
View ArticleThe Man Who Is Determined to Stop Trump From Rigging the Election
It’s only a few hours into Election Day, and things are already coming undone. In Michigan, Republican groups have instructed dozens of people to stand outside polling places and watch menacingly as...
View ArticleHow to Save the Pandemic Generation
There’s a looming student debt cliff awaiting us in 2021. With America in the teeth of the Covid-19–enabled economic downturn, lawmakers suspended federal student loan payments for 80 percent of...
View ArticleThe Libertarian Ideas That Wrecked the Fed
Last week I explained the pernicious long-term effect of Milton Friedman’s theory of the corporation. But the famed libertarian economist’s baleful legacy doesn’t end there: Friedman’s ideas about...
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Inside the FBI’s File on Soviet Poet-Dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko
In October 1961, the FBI decided a poem could be a weapon. Agents at the bureau had learned about “Babi Yar,” a provocative piece of verse written by the wily young Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko,...
View ArticleTrump’s Misguided, Jingoistic War Against TikTok
On August 6, President Donald Trump signed two executive orders declaring that the popular apps TikTok and WeChat “threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”...
View ArticleThe Nikola Scandal Is a Cautionary Tale About Green Tech’s Gauzy Promises
“There’s very few people that can out-Elon in this world, and I’m one of them,” said Nikola Motor founder Trevor Milton earlier this summer. Milton’s 35 percent stake in the hydrogen-electric vehicle...
View ArticleConservatives Are Already Whitewashing the Trump Years
Jesse Helms did not keep secrets. This is about the kindest thing that could be said about the still-steaming legacy left by the longtime senator from North Carolina, but it is and has always been...
View ArticleThe Promising New Covid-19 Therapy You Probably Haven’t Heard About
When President Trump announced an emergency use authorization for convalescent plasma as a “historic” and game-changing treatment for the coronavirus last month, experts were baffled. Although plasma...
View ArticleWhy We Can’t Ignore McConnell’s Hypocrisy
Stop the presses! Mitch McConnell has a nonsensical explanation for why his insistence that the Senate confirm a replacement for the late Justice Ruth Ginsburg six weeks before Election Day does not...
View ArticleWendell Willkie’s World Without Borders
On a brisk morning in late August 1942, Wendell Willkie—a corporate lawyer, failed presidential candidate, and media darling—got onto an airplane for a trip around the world. Soon, he’d be holding...
View ArticleThe Accelerating Attack on Trans Student Athletes
Last October, the Supreme Court heard three cases that argued that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination on the basis of sex, includes discrimination against people on...
View ArticleTV Race Fables and the Privilege of a Raging Class
Once, in the mid-1980s, I was invited by a black undergraduate student group at Yale to lead a fireside discussion in one of the residential colleges. I was bemused to learn that the group had planned...
View ArticleFour New Justices, No Matter What
The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the most influential Supreme Court justices of all time, is first and foremost a cause for national mourning. But it is also a political opportunity. The...
View ArticleWe’ll Never Know the Pandemic’s True Toll on the Working Class
The single most important thing to understand about the coronavirus pandemic so far is that it has not affected everyone the same. (Though if you are the president, you could start with acknowledging...
View ArticleWhat a Defiant Democratic Party Looks Like
On Friday night, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death shocked an already reeling country. What came next, however, was sadly unsurprising. Mere hours after Ginsburg’s passing, McConnell...
View ArticleIs Defector the Future of Media?
When the staff of Deadspin resigned en masse last fall, it felt like the end of an era of online journalism. The fun internet—best embodied by the old Gawker Media sites and The Awl—was gone, undone by...
View ArticleThe Strangely Persistent Myth of the Suburbs
While Democrats pin their electoral hopes on turning wealthy suburbs blue, Donald Trump tells “Suburban housewives” on Twitter that Joe Biden will “destroy” their “American dream.” But who are suburban...
View ArticleHow to End the Judicial Wars, Once and for All
There are two great losses in Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death. First and foremost among them is the person herself. The 87-year-old justice was a tireless and formidable figure in American law—an...
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