John Roberts Chooses Precedent Over Ideology in Latest Abortion Fight
Monday’s ruling in June Medical Services v. Russo is a victory for the status quo. The 5–4 decision struck down a Louisiana law that would have closed all but one of the state’s abortion clinics if it...
View ArticleDemocrats Can’t Quit Their Addiction to Big-Money Donors
In an unexpected break from American politics as usual, several of the insurgent congressional candidates who scratched out surprise wins (or are on track to winning) in last Tuesday’s primary...
View ArticleThe Fed Is Bailing Out Polluters While Cities Struggle
Ever since bailout talk began this spring, climate campaigners have worried funds would be funneled to Big Oil and other polluting giants. Now it seems that fear was more than justified. While economic...
View ArticleThe Confederates Loved America, and They’re Still Defining What Patriotism Means
In a seeming paradox, it is often the most flamboyantly patriotic Americans who appoint themselves guardians of a discredited rebel flag. A century and a half after the Union and Confederate flags were...
View ArticleUighur Lives Matter
There is a “climate of terror around having children” among China’s oppressed Uighur Muslim minority, according to a horrifying Associated Press report published on Monday. Over the last four years,...
View ArticleBig Pharma’s Got a Brand New Coronavirus Grift
With each passing day, the federal government’s pathetic response to the coronavirus pandemic becomes more and more outlandish. We have never seriously tried to implement a federal testing and tracing...
View ArticleDefund the Sheriffs, Too
The Father’s Day demonstration started peacefully. Earlier this month, Andres Guardado’s family led thousands of marchers to the Compton sheriff’s station, where they called for an independent...
View ArticleThe Democrats’ New Climate Plan Is Weirdly Isolationist
There’s a lot to like in the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis’s 538-page climate plan. Put together by nine Democratic majority members of the committee through hearings and consultations,...
View ArticleThe True Story of the Freed Slave Kneeling at Lincoln’s Feet
We live in a moment of literally falling heroes. The Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C.—a statue erected in 1876, funded by money donated by former slaves, and designed and commissioned by...
View ArticleA Satire That Demolishes the Influencer Industry
Wellness influencers are the Romantics of our age. The toned women in leggings Instagramming their flowers and muscles and bowls of miraculous grains are mimicking Shelley or Wordsworth’s rapture. Like...
View ArticleThe Viral Impotency of the Lincoln Project
Individual political action committees are rarely the subject of attack ads. But on Tuesday, the conservative Club for Growth released a one-minute spot targeting the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump...
View ArticleSearching for Consolation in Max Weber’s Work Ethic
People worked hard long before there was a thing called the “work ethic,” much less a “Protestant work ethic.” The phrase itself emerged early in the twentieth century and has since congealed into a...
View ArticleHurricane Season Traps People on the Wrong Side of the Income Gap
I was in college when I lived through my first hurricane. I don’t even remember the name of the storm. What I do remember is that those who could afford to leave campus flew home to California, New...
View ArticleElena Kagan’s Fiery Defense of the Administrative State
Selia Law v. CFPB wasn’t among the highest-profile cases of this Supreme Court term, but it was far from insignificant. In a 5–4 decision along the usual partisan lines, the court struck down part of a...
View ArticleHirokazu Kore-eda’s Ingenious Families
Two women are playing a tender scene. The brunette, who can’t be 30 yet, strokes the blonde’s hair. The blonde is in her seventies, but her lips tremble as if she’s a child trying not to cry, and she...
View ArticleCan the White People of Small-Town America Get Behind the Movement for Black...
In rural Fairfield County, Ohio, just outside downtown Millersport, a nine-year-old boy named Elijah Monroe held up a sign on the side of the road that read, “Justice for George.” Millersport has a...
View ArticleTrump’s Extraordinary Gift for Self-Sabotage
The publishing industry, knocked first by the loss of Oprah’s Book Club and then by Jon Stewart’s departure from The Daily Show, has found an unlikely savior: Donald Trump. The president’s tweets about...
View ArticleThe Democrats’ Dumb Idea to Cut Pandemic Unemployment Benefits
Unemployment fell for the second straight month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today, from 13.3 percent in May to 11.1 percent in June. This constitutes further evidence that the $600...
View ArticleConservative Austerity Created the Mask Wars
As coronavirus cases soared this week in a number of states—not a few of them red—a handful of GOP leaders and right-wing pundits had a desperate message for conservatives: Wear a mask, please. Mike...
View ArticleReckoning With Anti-Blackness in Indian Country
“Just spray the hell out of ’em,” one man shouted to the police officer standing in the middle of the road in Pembroke, North Carolina. “Goddamn pack of lazy sons of bitches,” mumbled another. The...
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