End the Cops’ Cannibalization of Our Budgets
Six months ago, after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, the city moved to defund the department. That was the headline in June, but the story in the months since has been more complicated....
View ArticleHow to Make Kleptocrats Fear America Again
Four years ago, the United States was widely viewed as the towering, swaggering leader of global anti-corruption efforts. While other countries struggled with money-laundering banks and corrupt...
View ArticleCarbon Capture Is Not a Climate Savior
In December, the Vatican became one of the latest entities to unveil a plan to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, joining far less pious actors like BP, Shell, and President-elect Joe Biden. Net-zero...
View ArticleSimply Talking About the Pandemic the Right Way Can Help Rebuild American...
It’s democracy’s death knell: The feeling that the future is beyond us, the sensation that we’ve lost, as citizens, the ability to direct our lives together in a meaningful way. Sometimes it feels as...
View ArticleRevenge Is Sweet in Promising Young Woman
Sexual violence and misogyny have for so long provided mainstream film and television with a wellspring of entertaining tropes, that when writers and directors set out to examine their workings...
View ArticleWe’re Outsourcing Our Self-Awareness to Silicon Valley
Would you like to give your friends and loved ones the gift of surveillance this holiday season? Your options abound. The market for “smart” devices is booming: There are smart toothbrushes that...
View ArticleLabor Power Is the Key to Racial Equity
When President-elect Joe Biden takes office in January, he’ll inherit a country that’s riven with divisions along ethnic and socio-economic lines. The central tenets of his “Build Back Better” plan...
View ArticleJoe Biden Doesn’t Need the GOP’s Permission to Fix Our Broken Immigration System
The state of affairs that President-elect Joe Biden will inherit when he’s sworn into office next month already has many on the left, along with anyone just generally interested in governance, staring...
View ArticleThis Beleaguered Federal Agency Is America’s Best Hope to Curb Guns
The ATF is a federal law enforcement agency that focuses on gun crimes. It also inspects gun dealers and manufacturers to make sure they follow the law. Despite this incredibly important mission, the...
View ArticleOperation Santa Is a Horror Story About American Poverty
On a cloudy Christmas Eve in 1907, Mary McGann, a 10-year-old Irish girl living in Hell’s Kitchen with her younger brother and mother, wrote a letter to Santa Claus. “I am very glad that you are coming...
View ArticleThe Case for Biden to Muddle Through America’s Political Crisis
Even as America hits low ebb with an out-of-control pandemic and staggering economic pain, there is, at least, the comfort that the nation can wrest itself out of its current situation if only it can...
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Can Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock Make History?
If you speak with people who have long known Reverend Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff—the Democratic candidates hoping to flip Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats in tightly contested runoff elections on...
View ArticleThe Year When Everyone Bullied Their Mayor
A few days after Thanksgiving, as the number of coronavirus cases surged to alarming new levels in Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti tweeted out an advisory that, on its face, should have been fairly...
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Buy Every American an Electric Moped
President-elect Joe Biden says he has an ambitious climate change strategy, with his advisers promising “a whole government approach” to addressing the rapidly worsening crisis. Some observers have...
View ArticleThe Urgent Case for Shrinking the Economy
In July 1979, shortly after installing a set of solar panels over the West Wing, Jimmy Carter did something peculiar for a peacetime president. He asked Americans to sacrifice: to consume less, take...
View ArticleFrance Is Flooding Africa With Fake News
On May 5, 2017, the French political scene was upended by what became known as MacronLeaks, a cache of more than 21,000 emails hacked from Emmanuel Macron’s political associates. It was two days...
View ArticleHas an American President Ever Been Worse at Politics?
Unless he overthrows the republic in the next 23 days, President Trump carried out his last two major official acts over the past week. There will probably be a last-minute fusillade of pardons for...
View ArticleLife in the Post-Internet Dystopia
In my speculative fiction course this fall, my students identified a place and time we referred to as Dystopia TM, a sort of abstracted postapocalyptic landscape that has become as familiar a backdrop...
View ArticleHow to Make the Paris Agreement Really Work
The Paris Agreement, which celebrated its fifth birthday on December 12, is among the most remarkable diplomatic achievements in world history, representing decades of work to arrive at a common...
View ArticleWorkers of the Facebook, Unite!
“I think Facebook is hurting people at scale,” said a software engineer when he left the company in the summer. “I know that I have blood on my hands by now,” lamented a data scientist who policed...
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