In 2017, a coalition of Democratic activists and party leaders led a “Blue Wave” in Virginia, flipping 15 Republican-held House seats and becoming a vessel of hope for Democrats nationwide. This year, every seat in the Virginia House of Delegates is an open race, and Democrats have a shot at taking control of the state […]
Read More
Not long after the one-year anniversary of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a Supreme Court justice, he and his eight associates will devote one entire day to three cases which will determine the future of LGBTQ and women’s rights under the law. On October 8, the Court will hear oral arguments in three cases concerning protection […]
Read More
Nearly two decades before Boeing’s MCAS system crashed two of the plane-maker’s brand-new 737 MAX jets, Stan Sorscher knew his company’s increasingly toxic mode of operating would create a disaster of some kind. A long and proud “safety culture” was rapidly being replaced, he argued, with “a culture of financial bullshit, a culture of groupthink.” […]
Read More
My ancestors had no written language, so they told their stories to the trees. Ten thousand years after the Tlingit people settled Alaska’s southeastern archipelago, these islands remain stippled with monuments to their myths: totem poles, carved from massive logs of cedar and adorned with images of animals and spirits, rise up from the damp […]
Read More
Edward Snowden’s new memoir, Permanent Record, wasn’t eagerly anticipated. That’s only because hardly anyone had heard about it before Snowden’s publisher, Macmillan, announced in August that it would go on sale in 20 countries on September 17, Constitution Day. To keep the project covert, even from Snowden’s many hard-core admirers, publishers had reportedly used code […]
Read More
Five years before masterminding the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, Osama bin Laden laid out his strategy in a declaration of jihad “against the Americans occupying the land of the two holiest sites.” The aim: “Expel the infidels from the Arabian peninsula.” Bin Laden argued that the Saudi […]
Read More
It’s the year 2100. The nationalist ideology popularized by Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Boris Johnson has not only retained its hold on industrialized nations, but also expanded amid conditions of climate upheaval. Many of the world’s major powers have spent the last several decades focusing on themselves. Borders have closed. International investments in education […]
Read More
What would happen if we did not open the newspaper to find an op-ed written by an old, aggrieved white man who has turned his rage about some personal slight against him into a column? Even setting aside the obvious need for more demographic diversity at op-ed pages, what if we just had one day’s […]
Read More
On a weekday morning in early June, Ruben Garcia arrived at the Casa Oscar Romero building leased by Annunciation House, the hospitality center that he founded and that has served the indigent and immigrant community in El Paso, Texas, since 1978. He wore a striped button-down shirt and wire-rimmed glasses, his disheveled white hair loosely […]
Read More
On a weekday morning in early June, Ruben Garcia arrived at the Casa Oscar Romero building leased by Annunciation House, the hospitality center that he founded and that has served the indigent and immigrant community in El Paso, Texas, since 1978. He wore a striped button-down shirt and wire-rimmed glasses, his disheveled white hair loosely […]
Read More
A week before he swept the South on Super Tuesday in 1992, Bill Clinton held an event in Stone Mountain, Georgia, the site of the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915. His campaign had gathered dozens of mostly black inmates for a photo op in the courtyard of the Stone Mountain Correctional Institution, […]
Read More
Nothing about Donald Trump’s contentious Tuesday tweet-firing of National Security Advisor John Bolton was hugely surprising. Bolton, a prickle of a man notorious for his whiskery affect and grenade-lobbing neoconservatism, had long seen his influence fading in the White House, particularly after the latest rift opened between him and Trump insiders over the now-dead Afghanistan […]
Read More
Last year, I proposed that Congress eliminate the risk of pay-to-play corruption posed by President Donald Trump’s sprawling business empire by nationalizing the Trump Organization. Only by placing the Trump family business in public hands, I argued, could lawmakers restore some confidence in the integrity of American governance. I’m now happy to report that the […]
Read More
Amy Klobuchar sat on a couch Saturday afternoon amid the used-paper-plate debris of her skybox in a hockey arena after a long day at the New Hampshire Democratic convention. The three-term Minnesota senator had reason to be pleased; her ten-minute convention speech (“What’s the difference between Donald Trump and Greenland? Greenland is not for sale”), […]
Read More
In July, in the midst of messy negotiations to send billions in emergency funding to the border, a fight over the future of the Democratic Party bubbled into view. For months, Democrats had been demanding more robust protections for the children in overcrowded detention centers, but, cornered by moderate Democrats, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suddenly […]
Read More
The FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center was created in 2003 because, as a FAQ on its web site explains, “The 9/11 Commission report found that agencies did not share counterterrorism information in an effective and timely manner.” This is true—to a point. The executive summary of the report recommends the following: “Determine, with leadership from the […]
Read More
It’s been a week equal parts hellish and historic in the British Parliament. The Conservatives lost their majority in a dramatic mid-session defection, a “Rebel Alliance” of Conservative members of Parliament blocked their prime minister’s plans for a no-deal Brexit, and a “Remain Alliance” of the opposition parties effectively took control of the House of […]
Read More
After years of largely ignoring climate change, CNN’s seven-hour marathon forum poured a Gatorade bath of climate content all over America’s head. It was neither pretty, nor fun. And Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s presidential front-runner, emerged from it with a major metaphorical black eye, to match his physically bloodied one. In the hours leading […]
Read More
Recently, two Baby Boomers born in the mid-’50s said things that worried me. One expressed surprise when I alluded to Richard Nixon’s underhanded dealings at the Paris peace talks in 1968; he didn’t know anything about the matter. Another, a filmmaker who kept radical company in his day, and who prides himself on being With […]
Read More
The few hundred marchers and supporters who turned out for the Straight Pride Parade in Boston on Saturday were vastly outnumbered by thousands of counter-protesters—that was the main takeaway from the major media outlets that covered the event. But the parade-goers were outnumbered by police, too, as hundreds of officers from throughout the Boston area—many […]
Read More