How Tiffany Cabán Would Reshape The Criminal Justice System
I first met Tiffany Cabán just before Valentine’s Day, in a crowded cafe not far from the downtown Manhattan court where she was still working cases as a public defender. Two weeks before, she had...
View ArticleCory Booker Chooses the Wrong Side in a New Jersey Street Fight
Democrats, The Washington Post recently told us, are frustrated—even a bit anxious—that their ambitious policy agenda is failing to attract the notice of the public. People don’t even seem to know that...
View ArticleThe First Democratic Debate Failed The Planet
For the last month, the Democratic National Committee has faced intense pressure to hold a debate specifically focused on the climate crisis—not just from environmental activists, but also from...
View ArticleMiami Moonglow for Booker and Klobuchar
It may be remembered as the Wretched Excess Debate with ten candidates, five moderators, one ludicrous White House backdrop, and enough technical glitches to make you nostalgic for the TV test pattern...
View ArticleThe Death of Taboo
In 1988, a German journalist for the left-wing paper Die Tageszeitung (a.k.a. Taz) described a busy discotheque as “gaskammervoll,” meaning that it was as packed as a gas chamber (literally,...
View ArticleThe Loudest Voice Stars A Very Simple Monster
If in 2019 you haven’t had enough of old white men yelling, you can now watch them do it on Showtime. The Loudest Voice is a miniseries based on by Gabriel Sherman’s best-selling book, chronicling the...
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How John Hersey Bore Witness
Some writers are known for their oeuvre. Some are known for their personality. John Hersey, as the subtitle of Jeremy Treglown’s biography attests, is known as the “author of Hiroshima.” Taking up most...
View ArticleAdvocates Want Everyone Counted, No Matter the Fate of the Citizenship Question
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Commerce Department has the authority to add a question to the 2020 census asking about the citizenship status of respondents, but it needs a better reason to...
View ArticleThe Supreme Court Seems Oddly Ambivalent About Being Lied To
On Thursday, five justices handed the Trump administration its first major defeat in the high court, narrowly rejecting the administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census....
View ArticleA Partisan Supreme Court Upholds Partisan Power
To say that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause is bad for American democracy would be an understatement. In a 5–4 decision along the usual ideological lines, the justices held that...
View ArticlePelosi Bows to Conservatives on Border Funding
Nancy Pelosi began Thursday by promising to remember the children. By midafternoon, she forgot them—and called it a “battle cry.”While much of the media was focused on the first Democratic debate, the...
View ArticleJoe Biden: Bruised Over Busing, But Still Standing
It was the great nineteenth-century American poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who gave this advice to would-be literary upstarts: “Never strike a king unless you are sure that you can kill him.”In...
View ArticleBiden’s Big Night Belonged to Others
Joe Biden had one job at his first Democratic debate. He didn’t have to win, but he couldn’t lose. He was there to remind everyone that he was a jovial grandpa—someone who would take his gloves off for...
View ArticleEric Bolling Is Failing Up
In 2007, Eric Bolling was new to Fox News; after a successful run as an oil trader on Wall Street, he had landed a job as a financial analyst on Fox Business. The jauntily named show he hosted, Happy...
View ArticleBig Little Lies Gets Tough
In the third episode of the second season of Big Little Lies, an eight-year-old girl named Amabella goes into a “coma” in her school classroom. It’s not really a coma—it’s more like a panic attack—but...
View ArticleTake Marianne Williamson Seriously
The Democratic debate last night wasn’t actually America’s introduction to Marianne Williamson. She has multiple New York Times best-selling books and was a regular fixture on The Oprah Winfrey Show...
View ArticleHow to Stage a Successful Revolution
A few months ago, the world lost two long-serving autocrats in quick succession: Algeria’s President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who resigned on April 2, and Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir, who was...
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The Meat Mogul’s Case For Lab-Grown Beef
In the fall of 2018, a few weeks after I interviewed Tyson Foods’ Tom Hayes, he suddenly and unexpectedly resigned as CEO. The official word was that he did so for “personal reasons,” but I had a hard...
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#ETTU?
The fall of 2017 dumps you roundly in the wrong. You catch yourself musing aloud to a friend, regarding Louis C.K.’s admission of masturbating in front of a large minority of his industry, about...
View ArticleWhat Kamala Harris Didn’t Say
When she stepped onto the debate stage in Miami last Thursday, Kamala Harris was running a presidential campaign that could best be described as “fine.” After entering the race with a huge rally in...
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