When Alabama last week passed an outright abortion ban, with no exceptions for rape or incest, it drove home a frightening reality: The Republican Party, if given enough power, will fully rob women of their reproductive rights—indeed of their agency as human beings. The state also potentially upset a quieter conservative legal strategy across America […]
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What is Democratic Socialism? I read considerable talk about “the democratic” as applying to the process of getting socialism; damn little about it as an adjective applying to socialism when you get it. — John Dewey to James T. Farrell, 8 November, 1948 Socialism, the political economy that for a century dared not speak its name […]
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When Harvard Law School professor Ron Sullivan lost his esteemed position as faculty dean of Winthrop House last weekend, and withdrew from Harvey Weinstein’s defense team, he secured a new one in the process: poster child in the war against campus political correctness. Throughout this week, prominent pundit-lawyers and right-of-center journalists have mourned Sullivan’s fate […]
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Let’s start by acknowledging that women are not things. Before we talk, like we have to, about what the attacks on abortion access mean for this anxious, awful political era, let’s establish as a ground rule that women are not vessels, or incubators, or an undifferentiated natural resource. Women are human beings whose human rights […]
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At an outdoor table at a bagel shop a few blocks from the state capitol building in Concord, New Hampshire, two Democratic state representatives were gently sparring over Joe Biden. “A lot has come up about Biden’s role during the Anita Hill hearings,” said Richard Komi, first elected from Manchester in 2008. “Biden said that […]
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One day last February, I found myself seated on stage, rather incongruously, between the neoconservative Never Trumper–turned–Resistance hero Bill Kristol and my friend Natasha Lennard, a radical anti-fascist writer and activist I first met at Occupy Wall Street back in 2011. We had all made our way to the New School for the closing panel […]
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Future historians may well portray the second decade of the twenty-first century as the moment when American socialism returned from the dead. The collapse of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s had supposedly sealed the overarching terms of political dispute within the confines of the “end of history”—the abrupt cessation of ideological hostilities stoked […]
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Before February, Robert Kraft was mostly known for two things: winning six Super Bowl rings as owner of the New England Patriots, and losing one of them to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Then Florida prosecutors charged the 77-year-old with soliciting prostitution after secretly videotaping his encounters with masseuses at a day spa in Jupiter, Florida. […]
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A constitutional crisis, like a good first date, is typically self-evident. That’s what makes top Democrats’ sudden embrace of the term so jarring. “Certainly, it’s a constitutional crisis, although I don’t like to use that phrase because it’s been used for far less dangerous situations,” Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said […]
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The most powerful labor leader in the country right now is about 5’5” in sneakers, though her work uniform generally adds an extra inch or two. As the president of the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) and veteran flight attendant who has worked for United Airlines since 1996, Sara Nelson is no stranger to wearing […]
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Denver received national attention this week after voters there passed Initiative 301 to decriminalize hallucinogenic mushrooms. The result of Initiative 300, which would have repealed the city’s ban on public camping and sleeping under a blanket, passed with almost no notice beyond the local press. Initiative 300’s proponents described it as a “right to survive” […]
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In late February, the self-proclaimed commander of a rightwing militia group based in northern New Mexico issued an urgent proclamation to listeners of the group’s YouTube radio show. “We have 2,500 people getting ready to come across at [the] El Paso-New Mexico state line,” said Larry Mitchell Hopkins, speaking under the alias Johnny Horton Jr., […]
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Any dwindling belief that Donald Trump’s business career represented anything other than “The Art of the Scam” died Tuesday night when The New York Times reconstructed the president’s federal tax returns from 1985-1994. In a feat of forensic work worthy of a TV crime series, reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig revealed that Trump lost […]
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Almost exactly 56 years ago, Gloria Steinem published an investigative tell-all in Show magazine titled “A Bunny’s Tale.” She had applied for a job as a Playboy Bunny under the name Marie Catherine Ochs, chosen because it was “too square to be phony.” Whether it was the name that did it, or the fact that […]
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Is there life after President Donald Trump? Former members of his administration are struggling to find out. The president is burning through subordinates at a far greater clip than any other recent predecessor, with eleven cabinet-level departures so far. In the White House alone, there have been three chiefs of staff, four national security advisors, […]
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Is there life after President Donald Trump? Former members of his administration are struggling to find out. The president is burning through subordinates at a far greater clip than any other recent predecessor, with eleven cabinet-level departures so far. In the White House alone, there have been three chiefs of staff, four national security advisors, […]
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There’s a certain rhythm to Donald Trump’s presidency over the past two years. First he does something even more egregious than usual, like defend violent white nationalists or side with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Then he hunkers down for the barrage of public criticism. The wave crests, and things return to normal, or at least […]
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Ninety-three trillion dollars is a lot of money. It’s more than the entire globe’s gross domestic product. It is also, if you ask many Republicans, how much the Green New Deal would cost over the course of a decade. Senators Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell, and Thom Tillis have cited that number of late, as have […]
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Ninety-three trillion dollars is a lot of money. It’s more than the entire globe’s gross domestic product. It is also, if you ask many Republicans, how much the Green New Deal would cost over the course of a decade. Senators Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell, and Thom Tillis have cited that number of late, as have […]
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Attorney General Bill Barr is doing the job that President Donald Trump appointed him to do, even if it’s not the job that’s in the public’s best interest. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 488-page report filled in many of the blanks surrounding Moscow’s interference in the 2016 campaign, the Trump campaign’s role in it, and how […]
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