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The Sameness of Cass Sunstein
Say you want to write a book. Assume that you’ve written books before. Before beginning, you face a choice: Either you can research new material for the book, or you can write about similar topics and...
View ArticleAmerica, We Need to Talk
Speaking to a room full of obscenely wealthy people on Tuesday, Joe Biden took a break from asking for money to praise a segregationist—in the name of civility, of course. Echoing one of his already...
View ArticleThe Green New Deal: A Capitalist Plot (Part 1)
Those of us who grew up in the 1950s retain an enduring image of President Dwight D. Eisenhower as an avuncular old fellow who accomplished little in his two terms, spending most of his time on the...
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Give War a Chance
Senator Elizabeth Warren’s plan to address America’s opioid epidemic has one unusual component, something that sets her dramatically apart from nearly everyone else running for the 2020 Democratic...
View ArticleJoe Biden’s Racial Dog Whistle
On the eve of Juneteenth, Joe Biden made the perplexing decision to praise two long-dead segregationist senators for their civility. “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” he told a room of donors...
View ArticleNeil Gorsuch Scorns the “Offended” Atheists
A broad majority of the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that an enormous Christian cross standing on public land, and funded by public money, does not violate the Constitution’s separation of church...
View ArticleThe Clinton Administration Did Not Fix the Balkans
Kosovo reached peak euphoria last week when Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright descended on the capital Prishtina. The ceremony marked the anniversary of the 1999 NATO bombing that ended Serbia’s...
View ArticleOligarch of the Month: Viktor Orbán
During a busy May that saw his “infrastructure week” flop and his bellicose posturing toward Iran temporarily thwarted, President Donald Trump found time to roll out the red carpet for Viktor Orbán,...
View ArticleJoe Biden’s Soft Center
Earlier this month, Joe Biden made a major change to his political platform—and no one noticed. Extrapolating on his criminal justice position—which, given his pivotal role in the drafting of the 1994...
View ArticleThe Polling Industry Is in Crisis
The polls were unequivocal. In 2016, two days before Michigan’s Democratic primary, the respected Marist poll predicted that Hillary Clinton would win in a landslide, with 57 percent of the vote to...
View ArticleThe Supreme Court’s Covert Plan to Gut the EPA’s Powers
Nearly four decades ago, Anne Gorsuch Burford resigned as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Though at the helm for less than two years, she left behind a notorious anti-environment...
View ArticleFire John Bolton
Thursday night, The New York Times reported, we narrowly avoided a first step toward what could become a regional war in the Middle East. President Trump’s go-ahead—reportedly quickly revoked—for...
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Remembering Stonewall as It Actually Was—and a Movement as It Really Is
By the time of the Stonewall uprisings, Sylvia Rivera already considered herself a revolutionary, a radical, and an activist—concerned not merely with the fight for queer liberation but also the fights...
View ArticleWhy It Matters How Powerful Men Treat Women
“I don’t think they want to hear about that kind of thing.” That’s how Boris Johnson, the man about to become the United Kingdom’s prime minister, whether the public likes it or not, responded when a...
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The Road Not Taken
Chuckie Denison took the podium at the United Steelworkers hall in Canton, Ohio, in his ever-present blue Good Jobs Nation T-shirt, flanked by people holding protest signs. One handmade sign read...
View ArticleWaist-Deep in the ‘Big Muddle’
John Hickenlooper exudes a refreshing level of candor that is rare in the 2020 presidential hunt. Late Saturday afternoon, the former two-term Colorado governor was wandering—almost unrecognized—on the...
View ArticleCould Obama’s Iran Playbook Save Trump From War?
President Donald Trump was conned. He thought his foreign policy advisers had given him an effective strategy to force Iran to renegotiate its nuclear deal with the United States; in reality, this...
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The United States’ Debt to Immigrants
This spring, while on break in London, I rode the train two hours north to Birmingham and back in one evening to see an exhibit by the British artist Hew Locke. I’d seen his work in New York and was...
View ArticleCan Married Priests Help Save the Amazon?
Last week, The New York Times reported that Pope Francis had “open[ed] the door to limited ordination of married men as priests.” Specifically, in trying to meet the pastoral needs of the Pan-Amazon...
View ArticleWhite Mom’s Burden
Cindy McCain was buying sari cloth for her daughter from a “tiny wooden kiosk” in Kolkata, India, some years ago, she said, when she saw “little eyes” through the floorboards, peering up at her. The...
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