Is Puerto Rico About to Give Another Terrible Energy Contract to an American...
On January 6 and 7, a 6.4-magnitude earthquake and aftershocks struck Puerto Rico, killing at least one person, injuring more, and causing mass blackouts across the island’s already hobbled electrical...
View ArticleThis Is Fascism
“Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes,” Umberto Eco wrote in 1995. “It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, ‘I want to reopen...
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A Profound Experience of Art
A young woman stands in front of a canvas, painting a swan nestling in tall reeds. The canvas is bigger than she is, so she must travel around its surface to fill in the details. Finally, after several...
View ArticleThe Police Were a Mistake
Contrary to most of American folklore, the Founding Fathers were not a supernaturally wise monolith. Leading revolutionary figures like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton may have shared certain...
View ArticleVaccines Don’t Make Money
Victory in the so-called race for a coronavirus vaccine rests on the skills of a handful of private companies whose primary motivation is hardly the public good. Can Big Pharma deliver what we need to...
View ArticleA Quiet Workplace Revolution in the Shadow of Silicon Valley
The news came on a Wednesday morning: Every Dog Has Its Day Care, a luxury daycare for dogs, would be shutting down in June 2019. The staff was in the dark. An email from owner Lauren Westreich,...
View ArticleClimate Change Is Going to Hit Palestine Particularly Hard
Israel just made it through a brutal, record-breaking heat wave. Temperatures hit 105 degrees Fahrenheit in Tel Aviv, 98 degrees in Jerusalem, and 113 degrees in Jericho. The government had to lift the...
View ArticleThe Police Take the Side of White Vigilantes
Who are the cops for? Over the last week, all across the country, in ways large and small, they’ve shown us.In Philadelphia on Monday night, the cops made it fairly explicit on whose behalf they police...
View ArticleAre You Really Surprised by Our Authoritarian President?
Over a year and a half, or a political eon, ago the focal point of our political discourse was a caravan of migrants trekking through Central America and Mexico in the hopes of winning asylum in the...
View ArticleProtest Medics on Being Targeted by the Police, in Their Own Words
Protests can often feel like communities in miniature, and as thousands of people across the country continue to turn out in the wake of the recent police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and...
View ArticleThe Brands Don’t Care About George Floyd’s Death
Ages ago, when the country was slowly careening into the coronavirus pandemic, corporate marketing departments across the land pursued an unsubtle advertising strategy. By mid-April, seemingly every...
View ArticleDefunding the Police Is Good Climate Policy
Late Thursday, California’s Air Resources Board announced the results of the most recent auction of carbon allowances from its cap-and-trade program. It was the first such auction since the coronavirus...
View ArticleThe Militarization of the American Hometown
On Saturday, my 13-year-old stepdaughter announced with some force that she wanted to go to the first peaceful protest against police brutality in our hometown of Fayetteville, Arkansas. The protest...
View ArticleThe Stock Market Is an Engine of Civic Destruction
A weird thing happened over the last few months: The economy imploded, with 40 million Americans unemployed (and as many as 27 million lost their health insurance). Food bank lines stretch for miles....
View ArticlePolice Blinded Me in One Eye. I Can Still See Why My Country’s on Fire.
I have been weeping since Friday night, because that is the night I was shot in the face. I have, since then, begun to piece together what happened to me: It wasn’t a rubber bullet, it was a foam...
View ArticleMinneapolis in the Aftermath
I started my 10-mile walk through Minneapolis at one end of the now-infamous Lake Street, the commercial corridor that stretches east-west through South Minneapolis, from the Mississippi River on one...
View ArticleAt The New York Times, an Uprising Over James Bennet’s Incompetence
Less than two weeks ago, amid the pandemic and the explosion of demonstrations against police violence across the country, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton unveiled a shocking bill that went largely...
View ArticleAfter Defunding the Police, Nationalize Their Benefits
The staggering excess of the New York Police Department, the largest municipal police force in the country, is hard to hide at this point. The NYPD commands 36,000 officers, a bloated budget of nearly...
View ArticleWhere America Developed a Taste for State Violence
A few blocks from Capitol Hill, a woman raises a torch. She is a bronze replica of the Goddess of Democracy, a statue student protesters erected in Tiananmen Square in 1989 before being suppressed by...
View ArticleThis Is a Good Moment to Hear Joe Biden’s Thoughts on Attorneys General
President Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican Party is now so tight that it’s easy to forget the unease with which most of its establishment viewed him in 2015 and 2016. Some of that unease sprang...
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