A Case for Unity
At times during CNN’s Democratic debate on Sunday night, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders seemed like feuding former vaudeville stars arguing over which of them muffed his lines in Buffalo 43 years ago. It...
View ArticleThe Case for a Social Distancing Wage
The rapidly escalating coronavirus pandemic, and the urgent need for the populace to practice “social distancing” in order to prevent the overburdening of our health care infrastructure, has quickly...
View ArticleBiden’s Diversity Promises Are Identity Politics at Their Best
The coronavirus pandemic—and the Trump administration’s failed response to it—dominated Sunday night’s debate between former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. But one of the...
View ArticleThe Radical Empathy of the Coronavirus Panic
In certain court systems, injuring another person without intending to by taking a risk whose danger you could have foreseen is called dolus eventualis. It’s punished less severely than dolus...
View ArticleA Moderate Proposal: Nationalize the Fossil Fuel Industry
The Fed has pulled out its big guns, slashing interest rate targets to zero and announcing $700 billion worth of new quantitative easing. Republican Senator Mitt Romney seems to support giving every...
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The Education of Greta Thunberg
One Christmas, I bought my parents compact-fluorescent light bulbs and a copy of Global Warming: A Greenpeace Guide. It was 1990: I was proud of my job at Greenpeace U.K., on the climate team, and the...
View ArticleThe Perpetual Weakness of Middle East Despots
Something is stirring again in the house of Saud. In the past two weeks, as the global health crisis intensified, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), further roiled international...
View ArticleThe Electability Trap
It’s impossible to know whether a political candidate is electable until they’ve actually been elected—but that hasn’t stopped pundits from speculating ad nauseam about the question. Episode 3 of The...
View ArticleAgainst Productivity in a Pandemic
Boutique grocery stores have been raided of their oat milks, bars and restaurants have been shuttered or limited to delivery-only service, a growing pool of service and retail workers have lost their...
View ArticleThe Casualties of the “War” on the Coronavirus
“We’re at war with a virus,” Joe Biden said in Sunday’s Democratic primary debate. He was not alone. “We have to fight that invisible enemy—unknown, but we are getting to know it a lot better,”...
View ArticleWe Need Universal Voting by Mail, and We Need It Now
Countless Americans have died for democracy and the right to vote, but none of them should now have to risk death to exercise it. The coronavirus pandemic led Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and other top...
View ArticleIt’s Joe Biden’s Party Now
The race for the Democratic presidential nomination is now, for all intents and purposes, over. Former Vice President Joe Biden scored decisive and relatively quick victories in Tuesday’s primaries in...
View ArticleDon’t Let Trump Off the Hook for the Coronavirus Crisis
Donald Trump’s first State of the Union in 2017 should have served as a lesson for many in the media. CNN’s Van Jones declared his milquetoast calls for unity the moment he “became president of the...
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Why You Should Watch Movies About Pandemics, During Pandemics
There are a few reasons you might not want to watch a movie about an infectious disease right now. The most obvious is instinctive: Why walk into a fictional, trivializing version of one’s own...
View ArticleGreen Jobs Are the Answer to the Coronavirus Recession
The American economy is headed for a recession. As many as three million people could be out of work by summertime, even with a modest stimulus, the Economic Policy Institute predicted on Thursday. A...
View ArticleInoculating the Coronavirus Vaccine Against the Profit Pandemic
This week, scientists at the Kaiser Permanente Research Institute in Seattle, Washington, administered the first injection of a trial vaccine for the coronavirus. As The Associated Press reported it,...
View ArticleFacing Deportation in a Pandemic
On Friday afternoon in New York City, the day after Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a state of emergency to help limit the spread of the novel coronavirus, attorneys huddled with their clients in the...
View ArticleThe Brilliant Fault Lines of Little Fires Everywhere
Elena Richardson is pretty, white, and rich; a mother to four children and a wife who schedules sex with her clean-cut, hardworking husband as if she were scheduling a haircut. She has one son...
View ArticleCivic Republicanism: Good for the Jews
In 2016, the Jewish magazine Tablet marked the pending Thanksgiving holiday with an essay outlining the Jewish influences on the nation’s great day of civic-minded feasting. In “Thanksgiving, the...
View ArticleAfter Bernie
It is never really enough to be right. One of the standout moments of Sunday’s primary debate came when Bernie Sanders compared his record on some of the most consequential votes of the last 30 years...
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