A Democrat Ran on Climate Change in a Republican Stronghold—and Won
If Sean Casten had talked about climate change once during his campaign, that would have been more than most Democrats running for Congress. But Casten didn’t talk about climate change just once, or...
View ArticleAmazon Scammed America’s Hurting Cities
For over a year, Amazon dangled the prize of a second headquarters, or HQ2, in front of cities across the country, and then watched as they duked it out. The result was a sort of hypercapitalist Hunger...
View ArticleDemocrats, Don’t Compromise With Trump
With Democrats in control of the House, they are now faced with the question of how best to use their legislative authority. Nancy Pelosi has already drafted a lengthy list of goals: lowering...
View ArticleThe Menacing Midcentury Aesthetic of Prestige TV
In an early scene in the first episode of Homecoming, Amazon’s new psychological thriller series, Julia Roberts walks through a series of rooms, talking rapidly on her phone. It is an important...
View ArticleTrump Responds to Tragedy With Cruelty
On Friday afternoon, as several counties across California were being incinerated by late-season wildfires, President Donald Trump signed a declaration providing federal money for the emergency...
View ArticleStan Lee: the Midwife of the Marvel Universe
“Stan Lee” was a fiction, a mask that eventually became a face. It was a pen name designed by a teenage boy, not to gain fame but to hide work thought would embarrass him.The man who would become the...
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Enter Boris?
Boris Johnson—former mayor of London, gadfly of the British political establishment, and, most recently, Brexit’s cheerleader-in-chief—has a colorful range of rebuttals when asked about his evident...
View ArticleIt’s Time for a New Voting Rights Act
In early 2011, when new census figures showed that Evergreen, Alabama, a small city midway between Montgomery and Mobile, had grown from 53 to 62 percent black over the previous ten years, the white...
View ArticleWhy Brazilians Elected an Aspiring Dictator
Jair Bolsonaro isn’t big on democracy. The newly elected president has dismissed the notion of human rights as a “disservice” to Brazil. He has bemoaned the fact that its police force, one of the...
View ArticleThe Backlash to the GOP’s Union-Bashing Has Begun in Earnest
Has the Republican Party’s grand experiment in union-busting finally come to an end? Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin, rose to national prominence in 2011 when he passed a landmark...
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Celebrating Independence Day With Poland’s Far Right
Early on Sunday morning, dozens of buses set off from every region of Poland, carrying tens of thousands of patriotic Poles to the capital for the centenary celebration of the country’s independence...
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A New, Wickedly Playful Voice in Crime Fiction
Korede, the narrator of My Sister, The Serial Killer, the debut novel by Oyinkan Braithwaite, is a nurse at a hospital in Lagos, the city where she lives with her mother and her sister, Ayoola. The...
View ArticleWill Trump Check His Executive Privilege?
While pundits debate whether there was a blue wave in last week’s midterm elections—there was—the White House is bracing for an onslaught from the new Democratic majority in the House of...
View ArticleDon’t Blow This, Democrats
Nancy Pelosi made herself more than clear. For over a year, the Democratic leader of the House of Representatives wanted nothing to do with the growing interest in impeaching President Donald Trump....
View ArticleGrand Old Paranoia
In the months before the midterms, the GOP began sounding the alarm that the Democrats, should they take back the House, were planning a slew of investigations into nearly every aspect of the Trump...
View ArticleChess Is Back
Tuesday, in central London, as Theresa May unveiled a freshly forged Brexit deal, American Fabiano Caruana and Norwegian Magnus Carlsen played out a procedural draw in game four of their World Chess...
View ArticleFacebook Betrayed America
Seven months ago, Mark Zuckerberg sat before Congress and said he was sorry about the fake news and the data breaches—and that it wasn’t really Facebook’s fault. The company’s founder and CEO had been...
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The Struggle to Save Our Schools
In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court identified America’s system of public education as “the very foundation of good citizenship.” An educated public is critical to a system that relies on...
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Ukraine’s Fall From Hope
In Kiev, you can walk up the stairs from the metro onto a square that’s been home to three revolutions in thirty years, and any number of protests large and small. With its memorials, monuments, and a...
View ArticleCalifornia’s Wildfires Don’t Have to Be So Deadly
Rescue teams are still searching through burned rubble for bodies after a massive wildfire devastated Butte County, California, last week. About 100 people are still missing. But already the Camp Fire,...
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