Joe Biden’s Immigration Acid Test
Last week, Democrats introduced the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021—a comprehensive immigration bill that will evidently be one of the Biden administration’s first major legislative battles after the...
View ArticleHow Does a State Use 40 Percent Less Water?
Arizona, California, and Nevada will need to cut their use of Colorado River water by nearly 40 percent by 2050. A study by researchers at Utah State University, which the Arizona Daily Star reported...
View ArticleWe Really Don’t Need Another Conservative News Platform
Speaking to The Nation in 2014, Ehab Al Shihabi, then the CEO of the recently launched Al Jazeera America, made the case that Americans were desperate for serious, unbiased, old-fashioned hard news....
View ArticleThe Case for a Permanent Stimulus
The $1.9 trillion recovery package set to go to a vote in the coming weeks won’t include automatic stabilizers. A perennially popular policy among left-of-center wonks and the public, automatic...
View ArticleWhat If We Pay People to Stop Using Drugs?
Tyrone Clifford Jr. remembers the first time he tried methamphetamine. “It was everything, all at once,” he said; a whirring rush of euphoric energy. It was the 1990s, and Tyrone was in his early...
View ArticleThe Bipartisan Assault on Public Schools
Two years ago, Margaret Spellings, George W. Bush’s secretary of education, and Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s secretary of education, wrote an opinion article in The Washington Post lamenting the decline...
View ArticleKyrsten Sinema’s Self-Defeating, Nonsensical Defense of the Filibuster
This year, all around the country, Republican state lawmakers are pushing an alarming array of bills that are designed to make it harder to vote. They’re targeting absentee voting, early voting, voting...
View ArticleThe Ghoulish, Bipartisan Tradition of Death at the Southern Border
It was Selina Sanchez-Cristobal’s day off, but she picked up the phone anyway. It was 2019, and she was the only employee running a 24-hour hotline for migrants who became lost crossing from Mexico to...
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The Trials of Billie Holiday
Is any genre more vulnerable to the vagaries of ideology than the lavish artist biopic? The essential dilemma is how to milk the life for drama while also accommodating what was singular enough to...
View ArticleWikipedia’s Sprawling, Awe-Inspiring Coverage of the Pandemic
The Wikipedia article for the Covid-19 pandemic didn’t exist until January 2020. By June, it was one of the site’s most visited entries of all time. It became, according to Wikipedia’s project page of...
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The Incalculable Debt That America Owes Black People
The long-standing idea of paying reparations to Black Americans for the costs of slavery, segregation, and other racist policies has lately gotten a boost. President Joe Biden has endorsed a commission...
View ArticleWelcome to the Census Crisis
For the last two and a half centuries, the only certainties in American life were death, taxes, and the census. Every 10 years, the Census Bureau would take a head count of every man, woman, and child...
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It Will Save Your Life and End This Damn Pandemic
Dr. Oni Blackstock finished seeing patients one day in late December, and then she became the patient for a few minutes: She rolled up her sleeve and got her first Covid-19 shot. But as she chatted...
View ArticleNew President, Same Old Forever War
“Biden deprioritizes the Middle East,” a Politico headline declared. The president, wrote Natasha Bertrand and Lara Seligman, “is tired of dealing with the Middle East—and, barely a month into his...
View ArticleMeltdown at CPAC as Conservatives Struggle to Reconcile Property Rights With...
I am scanning in vain the “Locke’s notebook” blog of Conservatives for Property Rights for any discussion of Friday morning’s unpleasantness at the Conservative Political Action Conference. The mission...
View ArticleThe Paris Agreement Is Already Outdated
The Paris Agreement is a paradox. On the one hand, it provides an essential, shared framework for the nations of the world to tackle the climate crisis. On the other, as those who follow climate...
View ArticleThe Democrats Are Blocking a $15 Minimum Wage
According to the Center for Economic Policy and Research, the national minimum wage in this country rose in tandem with both inflation and productivity gains in the workforce until around 1968. If this...
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