Hope and Despair on Capitol Hill as Democrats’ Voting Reforms Die by...
Democrats’ hopes of passing federal legislation to counter a raft of measures restricting voting rights introduced in Republican-controlled states were dashed against the familiar rocks of Senate...
View ArticleWhat Happened When a Trippy Art Collective Hit It Big—Then Unionized
Meow Wolf started as an art experiment on the industrial edge of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in an old bowling alley transformed into a place called the House of Eternal Return. Ordinary household fixtures—a...
View ArticleIt Really Is Infrastructure Week. Will It Matter in November?
In recognition of hitting his one-year anniversary as president, Joe Biden held a wide-ranging (maybe too wide-ranging) press conference Wednesday afternoon where he argued his administration had...
View ArticleThe Democrats Are Now Debating Which “Chunks” of Build Back Better to Save
Shortly before Christmas, Senate Democrats, who had spent the previous few months trying and failing to pass the Build Back Better Act through reconciliation, decided to pull a switcheroo: Instead of...
View ArticleThe Century of Buster Keaton
A century has passed since Buster Keaton entered the plum decade of his career. Then in his twenties, he had outgrown his family vaudeville act, whose violent acrobatics had relied on a size contrast...
View ArticleA Good Week for the January 6 Committee Means a Bad Week for Donald Trump
Here’s What HappenedThe biggest news of the week about the House Select Committee on the January 6th Attack on the Capitol came not from the committee but from the Supreme Court. In an 8–1 ruling, the...
View ArticleWhy We’ve Succumbed to Pandemic Apathy
In March 2020, The New York Times published a photo essay titled “The Great Empty.” It was an unsettling testimony of public landscapes leached of humanity: Times Square lit up for no one, decluttered...
View ArticleBipartisanship Is Dead, and That’s Great News for Joe Biden
If anyone should have known how congressional Republicans would respond to a Democrat in the White House, it was Joe Biden. For eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president, Biden watched as the...
View ArticleLet’s Oust Congress’s Stock Market Miscreants!
This week, as the push to pass a voting rights bill got ground up in the gears of the Senate filibuster like so many other worthy pieces of legislation before it, we have cause to wonder: Why do people...
View ArticleSirhan Sirhan’s Continued Imprisonment Flies in the Face of RFK’s Ideals
Last week, Gavin Newsom made a callous decision that deserved far more backlash than it received: The California governor determined that 77-year-old inmate Sirhan Sirhan, who has been incarcerated for...
View ArticleWho Gets to Be an Expert on Student Loans?
September 2022 will mark two decades since Ashley Pizzuti took out the loans she says have “imprisoned” her and her husband. The couple met at the now-shuttered Brooks Institute, an arts college in...
View ArticleThe Supreme Court’s Conservatives Found a New Way to Wreck the Government
The Supreme Court’s decision to block the Occupational Safety and Health Administration from issuing a Covid testing mandate for many U.S. businesses continues to offer a lot to ponder. Even looking...
View ArticleThe Case for Impeaching Clarence Thomas
In a sane world, Jane Mayer’s excellent piece on Ginni Thomas in The New Yorker would set off a series of events that would lead to her husband Clarence Thomas’s impeachment and removal from the...
View ArticleThe Best of Democrats’ Bad Options?
During his press conference last week, Joe Biden seemed confident about at least one part of his proposed Build Back Better bill: “I think it’s clear that we would be able to get support for the $500...
View ArticleNo, Democracy Isn’t About to Die
We’re fast approaching the point where a subscription to The Atlantic is a risk factor for suicide. “January 6 Was Practice,” announces the cover of the current issue, flagging a story by Barton...
View ArticleThe Fight for $15 Is Moving Beyond the Minimum Wage With a Bold New Idea
In El Salvador, Ingrid Vilorio was a beautician with her own studio. But when her autistic son turned five, she and her husband chose to give up the autonomy of owning a business for a life in the...
View ArticleThe Supreme Court Gets Ready to End Affirmative Action
The Supreme Court will hear a major legal challenge to affirmative action in higher education, the justices announced on Monday, foreshadowing the near-certain doom of those policies. The move adds yet...
View ArticleRo Khanna on a Climate-Only Biden Bill: “There’s No Other Option”
It’s time for Democrats to accept that they will need to embrace a less ambitious version of the Build Back Better Act—President Joe Biden’s currently defunct bill investing in health care, childcare,...
View ArticleThe Ghosts of Céline
There was something about the anti-writerliness of Céline that attracted many readers at the end of one horrible world war and well into the next. He never tried to elevate himself over his audience as...
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The Bogus Claim That School Closures Will Doom Democrats
If you’ve read any national news stories over the past few months about the political implications of pandemic-induced school closures, you’ve likely come across Brian Stryker’s name. He’s become the...
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