There Will Be No Emphatic Rejection of Trump
It has become an All About Eve election. Everything that happened before 1 a.m. on Wednesday has fulfilled Bette Davis’s cinematic prediction, “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy...
View ArticleElection Day Was Peaceful—Then Trump Opened His Mouth
The 2020 election was never going to be easy to conduct. This year saw a pandemic kill more than 230,000 people throughout the country, widespread protests and civil unrest over police brutality...
View ArticleThe U.S. Is Now Officially Out of the Paris Agreement
Two years after a flashy press conference in the White House Rose Garden, the United States officially filed notice last fall that it would be leaving the Paris Agreement—the international community’s...
View ArticleUber and Lyft Bought Themselves Impunity, Again
This year’s presidential race has, as initially predicted, refused to end in any kind of timely or tidy manner. But we do know a bit about what happened last night in several down-ballot campaigns. One...
View ArticleNever Trust the Polls Again!
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Heading into Tuesday’s election, the public polling told the same story, over and over again. Joe Biden had a commanding lead in the national popular vote, somewhere...
View ArticleTrump’s Legal Threats Have More Bravado Than Merit
President Donald Trump spent election night doing what everyone expected him to do: baselessly claiming that the vote counts were fraudulent and issuing vague legal threats on that basis. “This is a...
View ArticleVoters Said They’re Worried About the Climate. Many Voted for Trump Anyway.
Early Tuesday night, Fox News gave Democratic viewers rare cause for optimism. Exit polls, the network reported, had found that 70 percent of voters support increased government spending on green and...
View ArticleThe Futility of the Democrats’ Record-Breaking War Chest
If the election returns stay on track, Joe Biden will be president, but with a Republican Senate standing in his way. Good news for a president who was, in the face of all evidence before his eyes, so...
View ArticleNothing Was Inevitable About This Election
No presidential candidate had hit 270 electoral votes by the close of Election Day, which was more or less expected. Other outcomes were cleaner while holding true to prediction: Republicans were still...
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The Majestic Alaskan Rain Forest in Trump’s Crosshairs
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” wrote naturalist John Muir in 1911. Last week, news broke that the Trump administration has exempted...
View ArticleWhat If Democrats’ Message Just Doesn’t Matter?
Joe Biden supports raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour. I know this because I follow political news for a living, but also because he said so, on television, in one of his two nationally...
View ArticleThe Trump Campaign’s Farcical Attempt to Steal an Election
In the chaos following Fox News’s decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden on election night, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adult doll Jared Kushner got to work. He picked up the phone to try to find a...
View ArticleThe Cops Protested This Election, Too
Kettling is, by definition, a trap. It is a tactic most commonly used by police to surround and immobilize a group of people, often protesters, in an attempt to stymie and diffuse their momentum, even...
View ArticleGrassroots Democrats Wanted to Protect the Vote. Then National Organizers...
Late Wednesday afternoon, as Election Day stretched into Election Week, in cities and towns across the United States, grassroots Democrats took to the streets under a new banner: Protect the Results. A...
View ArticleFree Will
So letting the bath run I saton the toilet & thought aboutkeeping the plug in till the waterspilt which made me think ifall things have as their cause whathappened how can you changecourse, prior...
View ArticleWill the Democrats Ever Make Sense of This Week?
This is not how things were supposed to go. It was widely anticipated, of course, that Joe Biden would defeat President Trump in a victory that could take time to emerge given the pandemic-driven shift...
View ArticleYaa Gyasi Versus the Identity Trap
Late in Homegoing, the debut novel by the Ghanaian-American writer Yaa Gyasi, a character named Marcus is introduced. Marcus is getting a Ph.D. in sociology at Stanford University, and—as happens—is...
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Sidewalks
I saw my breath this morning from a shiver of an engine in between sleep and consciousness today I don’t need any hospital socks to stay warm my windows are not barred my door is not a...
View ArticleLet’s Take a Moment to Check in With Some Extremely Rich People
The miserable presidential race is still underway, with stress-inducing counts slogging along in a handful of swing states; the much-rumored congressional blue wave turned out only to be a sad drip....
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