Not so long ago, the Sackler name was stamped across the most rarified perches in Manhattan—in the psychobiology department at Columbia University, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and at the Museum of Natural History. Lately, though, we’ve been seeing the Sackler moniker in far less esteemed venues, as a cluster of lawsuits have uncovered […]
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Unlike some of her fellow freshmen, Representative Katie Porter of California has managed to escape the ire of the current occupant of the White House. While she isn’t exactly rushing to take part in the Squad’s frequent Twitter smackdowns with the president, she is on friendly terms with the four women who make up the […]
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Yves here. For those of you who have friends and colleagues who would go on tilt if you tried educating them about MMT, a simpler approach to persuade them that Medicare for All is affordable is to sell them on another worthy goal, cutting the military-surveillance state down to size. Even then, I still encourage […]
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By Marshall Auerback, a market analyst and commentator. Produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute From the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt onward through to the 1990s, the Democrats had long been considered the party of the working class. That perception lingered long after the fact that by the 1990s, […]
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Apparently, we all need to “get over it” when it comes to notions of wrongdoing with regard to Donald Trump using his political office to enrich himself or his own personal agenda. So said Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, on Thursday when he basically blew Trump’s cover of apparently feigned innocence as to why […]
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This week’s most intriguing news about President Donald Trump didn’t come from the House’s impeachment inquiry. It came from a ProPublica report on unusual discrepancies in the Trump Organization’s finances. Those revelations, in turn, show why the 2020 election—as well as the prospect of impeachment—are such a threat to not just his political future, but […]
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Many dark and miserable months into the 2020 Democratic primary, the nation is still enduring the sight of the candidates having the same fights over health care, like an exhausted married couple whose quarrels will always come back to What Was Said at that party in 2008. It seems we are doomed to push the […]
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There were many things LeBron James could have said earlier this week when asked about the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. He could have, like Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey, expressed tepid support for the protesters. He could have, like new Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai, made the case that this was a complicated […]
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The Wall Street Journal tonight, in Inside Facebook’s Botched Attempt to Start a New Cryptocurrency, offers some additional details on how Facebook came up with the barmy idea of Libra, which it set forth in a short document that mouthed a whole bunch of finance and business gimmick-speak without showing much understanding of banking or […]
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If you’re part of the ballroom scene in New York, you may have known the name of the young, trans, Afro-Latina performer Layleen Cubilette-Polanco Xtravaganza, even before her death at Rikers Island in June. Her name has traveled far now, from New York City’s Pride season, to presidential candidate forums, as a cry against abuse […]
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In his recently published study Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, Francis Fukuyama wants to modify his best-known thesis, published first as a 1989 essay, “The End of History?,” then as a book-length treatment in 1992, The End of History and the Last Man. The word “end,” he now says, was […]
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In June, I joined the crew of the rescue ship Alan Kurdi. It was a cantankerous old brute of a boat, a former East German research vessel that now belongs to a small German nonprofit called Sea-Eye. “You are an eye on the sea,” the crew manager told us at our first briefing on board, […]
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Yves here. The authors of this study get points for finding a natural experiment on privatizing Medicaid, namely Texas starting in 2007. Although the findings and detail are valuable, I have doubts about the way they framed one of their conclusions. One reason privatized Medicare delivered better results in Texas than the old government-run version […]
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Maybe it was seeing House Republicans give him the thumbs-down on his pullout game in Syria that pushed him over the edge, but Donald Trump reportedly had a “meltdown” while meeting Wednesday with Democratic congressional leadership after the vote. As CNN reports: “He was insulting, particularly to [House Speaker Nancy Pelosi]. She kept her cool […]
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The House budget committee today told NASA Chief Jim Bridenstine it would not fund the administration’s efforts to change the Moon landing timeline from 2028 to 2024. The reason? NASA won’t put a final price tag on the program. The project is called the Artemis Program. Originally it was slated to launch a crewed mission […]
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Tuesday’s debate offered Elizabeth Warren the opportunity to feel what it’s like to be the Democratic field’s clear frontrunner, a prospect that recent movement in the polls has brought to the point of likelihood. Throughout the night, her rivals pointedly forsook Joe Biden as their main target and instead took pointed jabs at her. Warren […]
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“Dude got to go,” Sen. Kamala Harris said at last night’s debate in Ohio when asked about Donald Trump and his mishandling of Syria and Turkey. “What Donald Trump has done because of that phone call with Erdogan is basically giving 10,000 ISIS fighters a get-out-of-jail-free card,” Harris said. “And you know who the winner […]
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Remember when Elon Musk got high with Joe Rogan during an interview last year? It seemed like good, legal fun at the time. It turns out that toke cost US taxpayers five million dollars. NASA Chief Jim Bridenstine initiated a safety and culture review of SpaceX the moment he found out that Elon Musk, a […]
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For much of this year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi used Abraham Lincoln as a human shield. Pressed by the media on calls to impeach President Trump, she regularly quoted Lincoln, who said three years before becoming president: “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.” It was a […]
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One of the hardest things for a presidential candidate is to put on a smiling public face for the TV cameras after spending three hours on a debate stage inwardly seething over missed opportunities and mangled lines. It is one reason why many candidates never appear in the Spin Room after a debate and why […]
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