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...
View ArticleQuentin 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 ArticleThe Case Against the Electoral College Is Stronger Than Ever
“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 has 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,...
View ArticleNatalia 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 reelection....
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...
View ArticleThe New Ruins of the Melting Alps
Photographer Tomaso Clavarino has been traveling to Italy’s Alpine glaciers to ski since he was three years old. “It’s a place I know very well,” he told me over the phone. “It’s how I knew it was...
View ArticleThe Destructive Politics of White Amnesia
For all of his bumbling verbosity and avuncular artlessness, Democratic front-runner Joe Biden serves as a remarkably elegant illustration of all that ails the Democratic Party’s bid to retake the...
View ArticleFox News Is the New NRA
In the aftermath of two horrific mass shootings—one of which occurred in his home state—Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick took to Fox News to whip up its viewers. Patrick, who has a habit of...
View ArticlePolice Killed Her Boyfriend, Then Charged Her With His Murder
Masonique Saunders has been locked behind bars in Ohio, since December, when, at age 16, she was arrested in the death of her boyfriend, Julius Tate. She celebrated her birthday in juvenile detention....
View ArticleJihadi John, Domestic Terrorist
Like me and thousands of other Londoners, Mohammed Emwazi was born in the late 1980s to parents who had moved to the city from another country in search of a stable future. Emwazi’s family are Bidoon,...
View ArticleAmerica’s Most Powerful Gun Supporter
The single greatest impediment to reining in gun violence in America isn’t the House of Representatives, President Donald Trump, or even the Supreme Court. It’s Mitch McConnell. Virtually every path to...
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