Andrew Yang, Celebrity Politician
Andrew Yang was, briefly, a corporate attorney, then an executive at a test preparation company, then the founder of a nonprofit that encourages entrepreneurship. (It has a mixed record.) He ran for...
View ArticleRaoul Peck’s Exterminate All the Brutes Insists on Telling What Really Happened
Raoul Peck’s 2014 drama, Murder in Pacot, is a sweaty, outdoor masterpiece. It is set amid the ruins of a stylish, modern home in the chaotic days after an earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; the...
View ArticleThe Book That Stopped an Outbreak of Nuclear War
It is very likely that no work of popular history has ever informed an American president’s actions in a crisis as much as The Guns of August did in the fall of 1962. Published that spring, Barbara W....
View ArticleThe Problem With Trusting “the Science”
“The good thing about Science,” TV science evangelist and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted in 2013, “is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.” Protesters at the “March for Science”...
View ArticleBring Covid Vaccines Door-to-Door
A few weeks ago, I learned I’d qualified for a Covid-19 vaccine. I began devoting my days to shot chasing. I joined local vaccine-hunting groups on Facebook, where members reported driving all over the...
View ArticleBig Business Is a Reliable Friend of the Republican Party
On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal published a remarkable editorial framed as a breakup letter with corporate America. “We have supported big business, including Amazon and Exxon, against the...
View ArticleThe U.S. Has a Very Big Abandoned Oil Well Problem
On Thursday, the House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources held a hearing to address an issue that’s been plaguing communities from West Virginia to New Mexico for decades: abandoned and...
View ArticleMedical Risk Is Never Shared Equally. Our Health Care System Is Built to...
When the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine was temporarily paused after six people got blood clots postvaccination, one line of response was frustration that six out of around seven million people...
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The Long Fight to Cancel Student Loans
In the summer of 2007, Thomas Gokey had just graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he was thinking about how much his degree had cost him. His diploma was a simple piece of...
View ArticleWhen Richard Wright Broke With the Communists
On a Friday in early June 1941, Richard Wright addressed the opening session of the Congress in Defense of Culture in New York City. “Some of you may wonder why a writer, at a congress of writers,...
View ArticleAnother Reason to Nationalize Big Oil
What gets left behind when a major oil company opts to go net-zero? Just because greenhouse gas emissions move off a corporate balance sheet doesn’t mean they disappear. That’s the upshot of a lengthy...
View ArticleSet Us Free From Outdoor Mask Mandates!
As coronavirus cases ticked up in early November, something utterly bizarre happened in Massachusetts: In light of those rising numbers, Governor Charlie Baker issued a rule mandating that people would...
View ArticleRepublicans Have Ruined Sports for Republicans
Earlier this month, the right found the latest battle in the culture wars: America’s pastime. When Major League Baseball moved the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver after Georgia passed a wave...
View ArticleElon Musk Wants to Move Fast and Break Space
Late last month, a pair of satellites operated by Starlink and OneWeb—two companies working to launch constellations of small, low-orbiting satellites that beam internet access all over Earth—almost...
View ArticleThe Republican Party Is Already an “America First Caucus”
Last week, Punchbowl News published excerpts from a draft policy platform by the America First Caucus, a proposed legislative caucus for far-right members of Congress. Arizona’s Paul Gosar and...
View ArticleThe Chilling Persistence of Eugenics
The top-down quest for social control in America often seems to lead, by a deep-seated sort of homing instinct, to schemes of reproductive coercion. Tucker Carlson’s recent fulminations about racial...
View ArticleRepublicans’ Criminalization of Protest and Cops’ Crackdown on Journalists Go...
Before lawyers working for her news organization could find her, Carolyn Sung, a CNN producer, was zip-tied and body-scanned, searched by an officer “who put her hands down Sung’s pants and in her...
View ArticleBiden’s Disturbing Acceptance of State Violence Against Central American...
Victoria Salazar, a Salvadoran woman who had fled her country and sought refuge in Mexico, was killed by the police in Tulum late last month when an officer knelt on her neck during an arrest. The...
View ArticleCryptocurrencies Are the Next Frontier for the Surveillance State
At first, it might have sounded like manna from heaven. Chinese authorities announced they would be distributing more than $1 million to a select number of citizens, as part of a test of its new...
View ArticleThe Big Difference Between a Green New Deal and Biden’s Climate Agenda
It’s Green New Deal week on Capitol Hill. Congresswomen Cori Bush and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a Green New Deal for Cities bill Monday proposing $1 trillion for struggling municipalities to...
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