The Do-Nothing President
Faced with escalating investigations—and mounting calls for impeachment—President Donald Trump has settled on a simple message: Democrats have chosen politically motivated investigations over their...
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A Novelist’s Life in America’s Underbelly
The writer Nelson Algren was an American original who, when he died in 1981, left behind a single work of literature that continues to haunt the American imagination. That work is the 1949 novel The...
View ArticleHow Can Every Democrat Be a “Progressive”?
Defining the word “progressive” is a lot like defining pornography—you just know it when you see it. Or so Walter Mondale suggested while stumping for Jimmy Carter at a rally in Syracuse in 1980. At a...
View ArticleThe Democrats Are Overthinking Trump’s Impeachment. Naturally.
It’s ironic that one of the clearest explanations for why President Donald Trump should be impeached is coming from a member of his own party. Michigan Representative Justin Amash, a devout libertarian...
View ArticleHow Should We Feel About Theresa May?
On Friday, Prime Minister Theresa May announced that she will be resigning in two weeks. It came as little surprise. After nearly three years in office, the Brexit Prime Minister failed to deliver...
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Finding Stonewall
Twenty years after the Stonewall Riots, I was graduating from Wesleyan University as a young activist. I had come out in college in 1985—first as bi, which was something of a first draft of the truth,...
View ArticleThe Democrats’ Neglect of Transgender Rights
To most political observers, President Donald Trump was never expected to champion transgender rights, but since taking office, Trump-Pence administration attacks on the trans community have been...
View ArticleBernie Sanders Is Rich
When he discusses his personal finances—specifically the fact that he became a millionaire three years ago—you could almost mistake Bernie Sanders for a pitchman for capitalism. “I wrote a best-selling...
View ArticleRiver of No Return
Willard Ruzicka saw it all in a dream. The Niobrara River, which runs a few hundred feet from his family’s farmhouse in the unincorporated village of Pishelville, Nebraska, had topped its banks. But...
View ArticleArundhati Roy on India’s Elections: “A Mockery of What Democracy Is Supposed...
“In India,” Arundhati Roy wrote in 2002, “if you are a butcher or a genocidist who happens to be a politician, you have every reason to be optimistic.” Roy was referring to Narendra Modi, the...
View ArticleIndia’s Chilling Lesson for the Left
Shortly after the election results in India last week that returned the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party and its leader, prime minister Narendra Modi, to power, a video began circulating on social...
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Fear and Loathing of the Green New Deal
One of the less-appreciated wonders of the Green New Deal—the proposal for large-scale federal investment in alternative energy sources introduced in February by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and...
View ArticleThe Judges Who See Through Trump’s B.S.
Rarely does a week pass without a federal judge ruling against President Donald Trump in one case or another. Last week, the president faced defeats on two fronts. A federal judge in Washington, D.C.,...
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The Making of the Military-Intellectual Complex
In 1947, two years after the United States emerged victorious in World War II, the 80th U.S. Congress passed the National Security Act, which created the Department of Defense (originally titled the...
View ArticleLA’s Museum for Nobody
When the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor released his original plans for the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2013, the building was meant to resemble an inkblot, oozing across Los Angeles’s...
View ArticleRacial Terror and the Second Repeal of Reconstruction
This April, PBS aired a groundbreaking documentary series on the fate of Reconstruction—and therefore of Black America. Featuring more than 40 scholars (myself among them) and Black descendants of key...
View ArticleHis Master’s Voice
Until his brief Wednesday morning announcement, Robert Mueller had become the J.D. Salinger of federal law enforcement. Since releasing his report on Russian interference in the 2016 election last...
View ArticleClimate Deniers Are the Hysterical Alarmists
The climate deniers in the Trump administration are at it again. On Monday, The New York Times reported that the president is silencing critical government research on climate change and creating a...
View ArticleLearn the Right Lessons from Naomi Wolf’s Book Blunder
Many people reacted with glee, witnessing the excruciating embarrassment of Naomi Wolf as her book was debunked on live radio last week. The forthcoming Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the...
View ArticleDemocrats Just Ran Out of Excuses on Impeachment
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s surprise press conference on Wednesday morning contained no surprises. He offered no new evidence that could be used against President Donald Trump, and reiterated what...
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