Why Is Chuck Schumer Protecting the Rich From Flood Insurance Hikes?
As last week was winding to a close, The New York Times reported on an odd instance of power brokering by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Ahead of a planned April 1 rollout, the New York senator...
View ArticleWhy Are Freelancers Organizing Against the PRO Act?
Shortly after the House of Representatives passed the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, a sweeping labor-law reform bill, on March 9, freelance writers began expressing concerns about the bill,...
View ArticleThe Nail-Biting Story of Obamacare
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A Democratic president takes power amid a national crisis, his power bolstered by Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. The economy is in the tubes,...
View ArticleThe New Republic Names Michael Tomasky as Top Editor
New York, NY (March 25, 2021)—The New Republic announced today it has tapped Michael Tomasky as its top editor. The iconic liberal news, commentary, and opinion outlet also announced that a majority...
View ArticleVaccine Denialism Is the Right Wing’s Favorite New Conspiracy Theory
Right-wing movements ranging from QAnon to the Plandemic, Stop the Steal to the Boogaloo Bois, have always drunk from the same toxic wellspring of paranoid alienation, even as they sometimes differ in...
View ArticleThe Republican Legal Assault on Biden’s Covid Relief Plan Could Be...
From President Biden’s first day in office, when he sent his American Rescue Plan Act to Congress, until March 11, when he signed the $1.9 trillion economic relief package into law, his top officials...
View ArticleAre Climate Progressives Organized Enough to Force Biden’s Hand?
So far green groups have largely praised the Biden administration—its quick cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, its recommitment to the Paris Agreement, and other early steps. But now, as Biden...
View ArticleHow Housing Activists Took On Philadelphia and Won
In late June, in a video on the news site Unicorn Riot, the activist Jennifer Bennetch was standing around, waiting to announce an occupation. The video showed her in front of the headquarters for the...
View ArticlePrince Harry’s New Fake Mental Health Care Job Is a Farce
Having dramatically exited one country’s putrescent ruling class, the former Duke and Duchess of Sussex have officially leapt into another: After landing multiyear content deals with both Netflix and...
View ArticleDerek Chauvin’s Defense Puts Black Lives Matter on Trial
Not long into the official opening of State v. Derek Chauvin on Monday, the voices of community members who protested police violence in Minneapolis were invoked, starting with those at the scene of...
View ArticleSharon Stone and the Fantasy of Female Domination
It was the summer of 1992, and Sharon Stone was learning to play tennis on the French Riviera. Basic Instinct had opened the Cannes festival that spring, and Stone, who would henceforth be famous...
View ArticleLiving Through Detroit’s Perpetual Housing Crisis
My family moved to Detroit in 1998, when I was seven years old, and to the house where we live now on the west side of the city in 2005. Since then, the house to our right has seen a rotating cast of...
View ArticleWhy We’re Obsessed Once Again With Covid-19’s Origin Story
Just like that, we’re back to arguing about the coronavirus’s origins. Last week, Newsweek explored the idea that a group of virus-hunting researchers went out looking for coronaviruses in China (to...
View ArticleThe Supreme Court’s Conservatives May Have Found a Tool to Restrict Abortion
The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it would hear its first abortion-related case since Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation last fall. The case, Cameron v. EMW Women’s Surgical Center, is...
View ArticleThe Republican Poseurs Who Claim to Be True Texans
Earlier this week, a campaign video emerged out of Texas showing a brawny bull-rider trying to buck his way into Congress. The ad, featuring Republican candidate and former professional wrestler Dan...
View ArticleThe Agony and the Ecstasy of Living Nowhere
The “RV Entrepreneur Summit,” held at a mountaintop lodge overlooking Alabama’s Lake Guntersville in the summer of 2019, promised attendees a long weekend of networking with full-time R.V.ers,...
View ArticleThe End of Infrastructure Week
On Wednesday, President Joe Biden is expected to give a speech in Pittsburgh laying out the contours of his Build Back Better infrastructure plan. The details on what he’ll specifically propose remain...
View ArticleHow an Upper West Side Hotel Came to Embody the City’s Failure on Homelessness
Last March, before the coronavirus was declared an emergency in the state, New York City seemed to be on the cusp of a gorgeous seasonal change. Thousands of hotel rooms across the boroughs had been...
View ArticleA Rust Belt City’s New Working Class
To grow up in Pittsburgh in the 1990s and 2000s—as I did—was to experience something paradoxical: slow-motion whiplash. In my early childhood, everyone seemed to agree that the city was dying around...
View ArticleDon’t Fall for the Carbon Tax Trap
After a few weeks of being compared to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, Joe Biden seems to be losing some of his transformational zeal. The administration is reportedly walking back from...
View Article