False Concepts of Liberty, Pt. 2
A tourist treading the streets of ancient Pompeii might well notice, viewing the buildings still extant there, that Roman dwellings, lacking in windows of any kind, were oriented entirely inward,...
View ArticleRenaming Macedonia in the Age of Nationalism
“How would you feel if your neighbor told you your nation was an artificial construct?” Macedonian foreign minister Nikola Dimitrov asked in a speech to the European Parliament in August. He had...
View ArticleWhy Amazon Raised Its Minimum Wage
It’s not every day that Bernie Sanders praises the richest man alive. But on Tuesday, Sanders did exactly that, tweeting props to Jeff Bezos for Amazon’s decision to raise its minimum wage to $15, a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
An Opera for the City, an Opera for the Self
There are a couple of bars from The Mile Long Opera that I can’t get out of my head. “Funny how a manicure / Changes everything,” the line goes, rising up and holding at a level note in the middle,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How the New Democrats Could End the Drone Wars
One spring during the Obama administration, I sat with a group of Yemeni farmers in Sana’a. I’d contacted them after a U.S. drone flying over the village of al-Sabool struck a bus full of shoppers,...
View ArticleThe Water Lilies
They open in the day and close at night.They are good at appearances. They are white.I judge them, judge the study they makeOf themselves, aspirational beings, fakeIf you ask me. If you ask me, I’ll...
View ArticleSong with Shag Rug and Wood Paneling
My parents renovated that old home.It is clean as a lobotomy. The cracked linoleum’s erased.Now new hardwood floors are gleaming. Gone are gold shag rugs, the shadeof California August on which I lay...
View ArticleThe FBI’s Kavanaugh Dilemma
The FBI has completed its rushed investigation of allegations that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh committed sexual assault as a teenager. While senators will begin reading the agency’s report...
View ArticleThis Is Not the Last Kavanaugh Report
Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley summed up the FBI’s reopened background investigation into Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in a single sentence on Thursday: “There’s nothing in it that we didn’t...
View ArticleThe Kavanaugh Debate Is Dividing Never Trump Conservatives
It has become clear over the past week that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s angry and partisan testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee helped rally Republicans to his side, including...
View ArticleA Star Is Born Is the “November Rain” of the Big Screen
It is difficult to think of a recent movie that has come close to the acclaim-versus-quality ratio of A Star is Born. Between the reviews and the buzz and Lady Gaga riding to the Venice Film Festival...
View ArticleWe’re Still Living in the Boys’ Culture of Kavanaugh’s Youth
“What’s your body count?” This question might make a certain sense on the battlefield—certainly more sense than asking, “How many people have you slaughtered?” When one’s job is to kill, then it’s...
View ArticleWhy Republican Women Defend Brett Kavanaugh
“Elect women” became the de facto rallying cry for those opposed to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh after he was accused of sexual assaulting Christine Blasey Ford at a high school party in the...
View ArticleBrett Kavanaugh Is the Point of No Return
The American conservative movement’s long march to install a reliable five-justice majority in its own image is over. On Monday, Justice Brett Kavanaugh will take his seat on the Supreme Court for the...
View ArticleWhy Don’t We Talk About Peru’s Forced Sterilization?
Last week, Peru’s supreme court overturned the pardon of brutal Peruvian ex-president Alberto Fujimori, tossing the leader back to his 25-year prison sentence for human rights violations and...
View ArticleThe Conservative Resistance Inside the Vatican
In August, in a letter published in the National Catholic Register, Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò blamed the Roman Catholic Church’s sexual abuse crisis on gay priests who “act under the...
View ArticleBrazil Is on the Brink of Authoritarianism
The stage is set for the second round of voting in Brazil’s presidential election. On October 7, a sprawling field of candidates was reduced to two, the extreme right-wing congressman Jair Bolsonaro,...
View ArticleDenying Women’s Ability to Know
Last week Donna Strickland, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, won the Nobel Prize in Physics. She is the third woman to be awarded the prize in its history—Marie Curie received it...
View ArticleThe Case for Climate Pessimism
Some climate change activists oppose doom-and-gloom rhetoric. They know that, if we don’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly, the planet will soon become more habitable to flesh-eating bacteria...
View ArticleWho Says Supreme Court Justices Get Lifetime Tenure?
A good deal of the uproar over the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court stems from the expectation that he will remain there for three, perhaps even four decades. The Constitution, most...
View Article