Privacy Is Class
When you see an ad for online gambling, it is never a matter of chance. Take, for example, the story of Sportsbet, an Australian company owned by the global gambling-industry behemoth Paddy Power. A...
View ArticleDemocracy Fights Back
Florida Republicans recently adopted a poll tax to preserve a Jim Crow statute. That such a statement should be written to describe current events—not merely actions condemned to the dustbin of...
View ArticleThe Enduring Horror of Chernobyl
From the beginning, viewers of HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl know more than the characters themselves about what’s to come—like Titanic, its very name is a spoiler. And so the opening scenes are shocking...
View ArticleTrump’s Military Threats Aren’t Going to Keep “America First”
A week ago, President Donald Trump was threatening to wipe Iran off the map: “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran,” he tweeted. This week, the president has seemed more...
View ArticleThe Green New Deal Can’t Be Anything Like the New Deal
The decade from 1929 to 1939 was hell. The Great Depression ravaged the country, leaving 15 million Americans jobless—a 25 percent unemployment rate. Industrial production fell by half. Bank panics led...
View ArticleThe Racist Origins of San Francisco’s Housing Crisis
In 1920, as a teenager, my grandfather immigrated to San Francisco from Greece with nothing to his name. He and his two brothers worked restaurant and grocery jobs before starting a store of their own,...
View ArticleRelevance Ruined The Handmaid’s Tale
“This isn’t a scene from The Handmaid’s Tale,” Kamala Harris wrote in recent a fundraising email, “This is happening in our country.” In his late night monologue, Stephen Colbert joked that a rash of...
View ArticleHow to Convince Americans to Abolish the Death Penalty
When New Hampshire abolished the death penalty on Thursday, the reaction to the news—at least nationally—was rather muted. Here was a New England state, after all, whose machinery of death had rusted...
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The Burden Is Already “Undue” for Millions of Women in America
It’s been a grim few months for abortion rights in America. Multiple states, including Alabama and Georgia, have passed a wave of draconian new restrictions on the procedure, buoyed by the perception...
View ArticleHow YouTube Became a Breeding Ground for a Diabolical Lizard Cult
On March 25, Barbara Rogers shuffled into the Court of Commons Pleas in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, with her dark hair parted neatly down the middle. She wore a plain cardigan and skirt over stockings...
View ArticleRepublicans Plan to Rig Elections for a Decade
Let’s just get this out of the way right up top: Republicans like white people. The Anglo-Saxon kind, anyway. They like them better than people of color; they like them better than people who might...
View ArticleYou Will Have to Make Sacrifices to Save the Planet
When it comes to climate change, Washington Governor Jay Inslee is unlike any other Democrat running for president. He’s based his entire campaign on addressing the crisis, and his climate plan is the...
View ArticleThe Failure to Define Fascism Today
“You can’t define it as good or bad,” Caio Mussolini, great-grandson of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, told reporters on May 8, discussing fascism during his run for the European Parliament....
View ArticleDo Democrats Actually Want to Make Drugs Cheaper?
A study published Friday in JAMA Network Open on the prices of brand-name drugs found those costs to be constantly rising, often with an insolent disregard for received economic wisdom. The authors,...
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Choose Your Own Family
Revolutionaries have long wanted to abolish the family. Marx didn’t see it surviving the eradication of capitalism. The radical feminist Shulamith Firestone viewed it as the root of all gendered...
View ArticleThe Sum of All Beards
“Saigon … shit. I’m still only in Saigon,” says a scruffy, broken Capt. Benjamin Willard, peering out through slatted window blinds while on the violent bender that opens Apocalypse Now. “Every time I...
View ArticleA Better Way to Fix the Supreme Court
What should be done about the Supreme Court? Liberals, still seething after the Merrick Garland blockade and Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, are bracing for imminent defeats from the Roberts Court on...
View ArticleBooksmart Deserved Better
In the opening scene of Booksmart, a winsome comedy about two try-hards who set out to prove they can have fun on the eve of their high school graduation, Molly (Beanie Feldstein) wakes in the...
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David Brooks’s Moral Journey
David Brooks is an easy character to dislike. In the wake of the 2000 Presidential election, he concocted ethnographies of the habits of conservative voters to tell a story about cultural divisions and...
View ArticleThe State That Liberal Dreams Are Made Of
Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak received national attention last week for vetoing a bill aimed at reforming the Electoral College. State lawmakers approved a measure that would have added Nevada to the...
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