Colson Whitehead, American Escape Artist
Ten years ago, an article in the Tampa Bay Times began telling a little-known story. Its first two lines are as searing as any in American contemporary literature: “The men remember the same things:...
View ArticleThis Is the Soul of the Democratic Party
Halfway through the Democratic presidential debate in Detroit on Tuesday night, there was an illuminating exchange between Senator Elizabeth Warren, who consistently polls in the double digits, and...
View ArticleThe Simple, Odious Reason Mitch McConnell Opposes Election Integrity
Mitch McConnell is a victim of a “modern-day McCarthyism,” he claimed on Monday, after people on Twitter called him “Moscow Mitch” simply because he has spent a week blocking legislation intended to...
View ArticleStatus Quo Joe
The first words spoken by a candidate on Wednesday’s debate stage came from Joe Biden. “Go easy on me, kid,” he joked to Kamala Harris as she walked out on stage for the candidate introductions. The...
View ArticleLet’s Get into a Fight About Foreign Policy
Pity the poor optimist who was hoping to see Joe Biden or Kamala Harris tested on a core component of the job they’re seeking. The president of the United States, as the country’s primary...
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The Sparta Fetish Is a Cultural Cancer
Last spring, 28 Tory hardliners unleashed another round of havoc on British politics, refusing to vote for Prime Minister Theresa May’s compromise Brexit plan and paving the way for her replacement by...
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Climate Change Is Finally Getting the Attention It Deserved 20 Years Ago
In many respects, the second round of Democratic presidential debates represented a step forward in the fight against climate change. The issue was not directly mentioned at all during the 2012 and...
View ArticleThe Democratic Party Is Culling the Field Too Soon
More than a half-century ago, when law schools boasted a high flunk-out rate, unsmiling deans welcomed each incoming class by saying, “Look at the student on your left. Look at the student on your...
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Quentin Tarantino’s #MeToo Moment?
As the final act of Once Upon a Time ... In Hollywood begins, the Rolling Stones’s “Out of Time” starts to play. The chorus (“baaaby, baaaby, baaaby you’re out of time”) is like a mean Ronettes song....
View ArticleHow Prisons Inflate Rural Voters’ Power
The Trump administration suffered its worst legal defeat yet last month when the Supreme Court effectively forced it to keep a citizenship question off the 2020 census. Had the effort succeeded, fewer...
View ArticleToward an Electoral College-Free Future
“Abolish the Electoral College,” Bernie Sanders recently tweeted. The Senator’s statement was in response to an op-ed authored by The Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman, who posited that though...
View ArticleThe Second-Amendment Case for Gun Control
The past week’s string of horrific mass shootings already have triggered a predictable set of reactions from across the political spectrum—but especially among Republicans. GOP leaders typically frame...
View ArticleGun Culture Has Always Been About White Supremacy
The death of Justice John Paul Stevens earlier this summer occasioned a look back at what he considered his cruelest defeat in his 35 years on the Supreme Court: the 2008 decision District of Columbia...
View ArticleHigher Education Faces a Turning Point
Late last month, President Trump spoke at an event for Turning Point USA, a right-wing student rights organization that has spent years fomenting a culture war against higher education. Trump entered...
View ArticleThe Media Is Missing the Real Story of Trump’s Racism
In August 2017, three men from rural Illinois—members of one of our country’s numerous heavily armed and rather poorly regulated “militias”—drove to Bloomington, Minnesota, just south of Minneapolis,...
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Natalia Ginzburg’s Radical Clarity
Fact and fiction are interminably wound up in Natalia Ginzburg’s novels. In a preface to an early novel, Voices In The Evening, she clarified that the characters in the story “are not alive, nor have...
View ArticleThe Incredible Shrinking GOP
A contagion has been spreading through the House Republican caucus. It began with Michigan’s Paul Mitchell, who announced on a Wednesday afternoon two weeks ago that he wouldn’t run for re-election....
View ArticleEl Paso Has Exposed the Ugly Reality of the “Immigration Debate”
In the summer of 2016 while covering Trump’s so-called illegal immigration speech in Phoenix, I spoke to an older woman in a wheelchair from Chicago. She told me in an even tone that Hispanics and...
View ArticleTrump’s Reckless New Missile Race
After 32 years, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty between the United States and Russia is dead. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the U.S.’s final withdrawal from the accord...
View ArticleIt’s OK to Talk About Mass Shooters
Mass shootings now occur so often in the United States that there’s a certain rhythm to how Americans learn about them: the initial reports of gunfire on social media, the cell-phone footage of people...
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