The 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 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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Wikipedia’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...
View ArticleThe 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...
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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...
View ArticleHow a Gas Company Grossly Underestimated One of the Biggest Pipeline Spills...
Last year, on August 14, two teenagers riding their ATVs through the woods in Huntersville, North Carolina, noticed a strange liquid bubbling from the earth. They stopped to take a look. The pair, who...
View ArticleThe FinTech Industry Wants to Give Desperate Workers an Advance on Their Next...
In a video filmed for his millions of Twitter followers, the celebrity preacher T.D. Jakes, posing in a double-breasted suit with a conspicuous gold watch on his wrist, asks his audience, “Do you...
View ArticleThe Subtle Joy of the Small Horror Movie
Horror movies have sidled into a dominant place in entertainment; you can hardly have missed how many of them are available on Netflix or wherever you get your online thrills. On the broadest level,...
View ArticleEither We Break Our Pandemic Debts or Our Pandemic Debts Break Us
When the pandemic hit last year, 53-year-old Richard Ault was treading water. A longtime technologist in Silicon Valley, Ault had taken a break from the industry a few years back to work as a public...
View ArticleAndrew Cuomo Is Screwed
Eight months ago, Andrew Cuomo unveiled a poster celebrating New York state’s triumph over Covid-19. Embossed on a mountain, symbolizing the state’s journey over the preceding four months, were a host...
View ArticleTrump Renews His Vows With the Republican Party
Ten years ago, Donald Trump gave a speech at CPAC that electrified his fans and teased a future run for the presidency. On Sunday, he did it again. An extraordinary decade in American politics and...
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