So You Won’t Get an Early Covid-19 Vaccine. That’s OK.
When I plug my information into models predicting when I might get the Covid-19 vaccine, I have to scroll almost to the end, past 268 million or so other Americans, until I see my place in line. Health...
View ArticleThe Elusive Promise of the Underground Railroad
For enslaved Black Americans contemplating escape before the Civil War, the North increasingly looked like a bad option. Though Northern states had abolished slavery by the early nineteenth century,...
View ArticleTrump Will Finally Get What He Wanted All Along
During his speech at an Allentown, Pennsylvania, rally, a week before the 2020 election, President Donald Trump briefly became distracted by one of his favorite sights: big trucks. “By the way, nice...
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Selling the American Space Dream
When the Covid-19 pandemic arrived, it invited Americans to choose their path to salvation. Would it be scientific reason, predicated on patience with process and trial and error? If so, eminent minds...
View ArticleThe Georgia Runoff Elections Are a Referendum on Political Corruption
Some people collect stamps in their free time. Others play chess or go bird-watching. David Perdue, the senior senator from Georgia, trades stocks. An analysis by The New York Times earlier this month...
View ArticleWhy Biden Should Declare a Climate Emergency
Last week, New Zealand became the latest country to declare climate change an emergency. Across the planet, local, regional, and national emergency declarations including those in New Zealand, Japan,...
View ArticleWhy Harriet the Spy Had to Lie
Leslie Brody’s Sometimes You Have to Lie is the second biography we have of Louise Fitzhugh, the author of the beloved children’s novel Harriet the Spy. The other appeared in 1995 to little fanfare....
View ArticleNeal Katyal and the Depravity of Big Law
The United States has a political class that mistakes its professional norms for ethics. Mainstream political journalists mindlessly grant anonymity to professional liars. Elected officials put...
View ArticleNorth Carolina’s Labor Commissioner Abandons Workers One Last Time on Her Way...
“We’re working on the line and shoulder-to-shoulder. We have no space on the line, in the break-room, and in the lockers,” Sarah Seibert, who debones hams at a Smithfield’s Food plant in Sioux Falls,...
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Beyond the Great Awokening
This year marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of publication of Black Metropolis, St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton’s landmark study of Chicago. Black Metropolis appeared as World War II neared its...
View ArticleCongress’s Bipartisanship Fetish Is Killing the Covid Relief Effort
The recent good news on the coronavirus front—the vaccines are on their way—hasn’t negated the bad. Deaths and hospitalizations are on the rise, and the economic situation remains extraordinarily dire....
View ArticleWill Democrats Get Suckered Into Mitch McConnell’s Corporate Indemnity Scheme?
Will Senate Republicans ever stop trying to indemnify employers against Covid-19 lawsuits as the price for a Covid stimulus deal? On Tuesday it seemed that they might, but on inspection that turned out...
View ArticleThe Rabid Illiberalism of Trump’s Desperate Election Deniers
Tuesday, December 8 was a minor procedural date on the 2020 presidential election calendar but also a notable symbolic one: The safe harbor deadline. At that time, which by law occurs six days before...
View ArticleWall Street Vultures Are Ready to Get Rich From Water Scarcity
Bloomberg reported on Sunday that California water futures are now officially on the Wall Street markets, with the United States–based CME Group heading up the 2021 contracts connected to the state’s...
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The End of the Businessman President
Donald Trump finished off the 2020 campaign in a frenzy of hastily organized rallies. From southern Florida to northern Michigan, he and a small troupe of guests and aides barnstormed 17 campaign...
View ArticleCalifornia’s Climate Policy Goes National
No state has weathered the brunt of the Trump administration’s climate skepticism like California. During the past four years, the president stripped the Golden State of its ability to regulate car...
View ArticleElon Musk’s Big Government Grift
The world’s second-richest man—and second-most irritating Twitter user, after the president—has moved to Texas. After months of complaining about Covid-19 shutdowns affecting his factories, while also...
View ArticleWho Gets a Say in Our Dystopian Tech Future?
Last Wednesday, Timnit Gebru, a staff research scientist and co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence team at Google, said that she had been ousted from the company over a research paper she...
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