How Prisons Inflate Rural Voters’ Power
The Trump administration suffered its worst legal defeat yet last month when the Supreme Court effectively forced it to keep a citizenship question off the 2020 census. Had the effort succeeded, fewer...
View ArticleToward an Electoral College–Free Future
“Abolish the Electoral College,” Bernie Sanders recently tweeted. The Senator’s statement was in response to an op-ed authored by The Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman, who posited that though...
View ArticleThe Second-Amendment Case for Gun Control
The past week’s string of horrific mass shootings already have triggered a predictable set of reactions from across the political spectrum—but especially among Republicans. GOP leaders typically frame...
View ArticleGun Culture Has Always Been About White Supremacy
The death of Justice John Paul Stevens earlier this summer occasioned a look back at what he considered his cruelest defeat in his 35 years on the Supreme Court: the 2008 decision District of Columbia...
View ArticleHigher Education Faces a Turning Point
Late last month, President Trump spoke at an event for Turning Point USA, a right-wing student rights organization that has spent years fomenting a culture war against higher education. Trump entered...
View ArticleThe Media Is Missing the Real Story of Trump’s Racism
In August 2017, three men from rural Illinois—members of one of our country’s numerous heavily armed and rather poorly regulated “militias”—drove to Bloomington, Minnesota, just south of Minneapolis,...
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Natalia Ginzburg’s Radical Clarity
Fact and fiction are interminably wound up in Natalia Ginzburg’s novels. In a preface to an early novel, Voices In The Evening, she clarified that the characters in the story “are not alive, nor have...
View ArticleThe Incredible Shrinking GOP
A contagion has been spreading through the House Republican caucus. It began with Michigan’s Paul Mitchell, who announced on a Wednesday afternoon two weeks ago that he wouldn’t run for re-election....
View ArticleEl Paso Has Exposed the Ugly Reality of the “Immigration Debate”
In the summer of 2016 while covering Trump’s so-called illegal immigration speech in Phoenix, I spoke to an older woman in a wheelchair from Chicago. She told me in an even tone that Hispanics and...
View ArticleTrump’s Reckless New Missile Race
After 32 years, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty between the United States and Russia is dead. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the U.S.’s final withdrawal from the accord...
View ArticleIt’s OK to Talk About Mass Shooters
Mass shootings now occur so often in the United States that there’s a certain rhythm to how Americans learn about them: the initial reports of gunfire on social media, the cell-phone footage of people...
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The New Ruins of the Melting Alps
Photographer Tomaso Clavorino has been traveling to Italy’s Alpine glaciers to ski since he was three years old. “It’s a place I know very well,” he told me over the phone. “It’s how I knew it was...
View ArticleThe Destructive Politics of White Amnesia
For all of his bumbling verbosity and avuncular artlessness, Democratic front-runner Joe Biden serves as a remarkably elegant illustration of all that ails the Democratic Party’s bid to retake the...
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Fox News Is the New NRA
In the aftermath of two horrific mass shootings—one of which occurred in his home state—Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick took to Fox News to whip up its viewers. Patrick, who has a habit of repeating...
View ArticlePolice Killed Her Boyfriend, Then Charged Her With His Murder
Masonique Saunders has been locked behind bars in Ohio since December, when, at age 16, she was arrested in the death of her boyfriend, Julius Tate. She celebrated her birthday in juvenile detention....
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Jihadi John, Domestic Terrorist
Like me and thousands of other Londoners, Mohammed Emwazi was born in the late 1980s to parents who had moved to the city from another country in search of a stable future. Emwazi’s family are Bidoon,...
View ArticleAmerica’s Most Powerful Gun Supporter
The single greatest impediment to reining in gun violence in America isn’t the House of Representatives, President Donald Trump, or even the Supreme Court. It’s Mitch McConnell. Virtually every path to...
View ArticleThe Sound and the Silence of Toni Morrison
It was early spring and snow was melting along the curbsides with a slow, metronomic drip. Around three-thirty in the afternoon, I left the library, and made my way across Harvard’s campus to Sanders...
View ArticleIndia’s Looming Ethno-Nationalist Catastrophe
In the long list of enemies maintained by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party of India (BJP), the Muslims of the northwestern state of Kashmir have always held a special place. The only Muslim-majority...
View ArticleMarianne Williamson’s Spiritualism Has Deep, Liberal Roots
It all started in the sleepy upstate town of Hydesville, New York. There, in March of 1848, the Fox sisters—10-year-old Kate and 14-year-old Maggie—convinced their older sister, 34-year-old Leah, that...
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