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Breadwinners, Breadlosers
December 19, 2016
Like a malevolent Mr. Magoo, Donald Trump continues to barrel incompetently, obtusely, and conveniently into economic windfalls. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recently reported the lowest unemployment rate since 2007. At 4.6 percent, the American economy is ...

Tech Meets Trump
December 16, 2016
It’s clarifying to see the oligarchy assemble itself in the open. President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet selection show has offered a murderer’s row of venal billionaires, spousal abusers, wild-eyed ex-generals, Christian fundamentalists, racists, and the ...

Do Friedmans Dream of Electric Sheeple?
December 13, 2016
Thomas Friedman's books are distinctive for their awesome length and unrelenting banality—sort of like a tech-support chatbot that got a non-fiction MFA. But there's a question to resolve: Is he a human being or an android?

The Russia House
December 12, 2016
“Russians pretty bad people, Mr. Wessby,” Tiu agreed. “They stink bad.” — John Le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy I, for one, do not look forward to the rule of our new Russophilic overlords. The Trump camp is lousy with Putin apologists, including ...

The View from Abroad
December 06, 2016
Mr. Trump and Mr. Creosote, by Jake Lamar in Paris It was in October, during the third and final debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, that the memory came to me. Watching Trump spew a wild and often incoherent stream of invective on ...

Failing the Empathy Exams
December 05, 2016
There’s been a lot of talk about empathy lately. Most of this talk, though, has been disastrously misguided. Many on the beleaguered American left have been vehemently pushing back against mainstream calls to empathize with Trump supporters since the election. With ...

A People’s History of the Third Reich
December 02, 2016
Liberals should stop asking whether Donald Trump—or his chief strategist and the former head of Breitbart, Steve Bannon—is a Nazi. Not because the employees of Trump’s son-in-law and adviser said so in an embarrassing paean to the “zealous Zionist” ...

Starving in America
November 29, 2016
In the late seventeenth century, the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather laid out a vision for America in a fiery sermon: “For those who indulge themselves in idleness,” he told his congregation, “the express command of God unto us is, that we should let them starve.” Nearly ...

Begging Pardon
November 21, 2016
Edward Snowden himself has never directly asked for a pardon. The former NSA contractor and CIA employee-turned-whistleblower maintains that he would be willing to return home from Moscow to be judged by a jury of his peers, and even serve time in prison, if there were a chance ...

The Sanders Strategy
November 18, 2016
Okay, folks. This is the game. Bernie Sanders is taking the line of resisting the intolerant, warmongering Trump & Co., while simultaneously challenging the president-elect to put real money into infrastructure and to write better trade deals, Trump’s signature ...

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before
November 17, 2016
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but how could the American people have given their highest public office to a man who is so clearly an idiot? Not just any ordinary lunkhead, but someone who brutishly, bullishly, maddeningly inhabits his own stupidity, who practically ...

Are Sex Offenders Human?
November 15, 2016
In July 16, 2015, Barack Obama visited a federal prison, the first sitting president ever to do so. It was a powerful statement of support for a broad movement—stretching from Black Lives Matter to Right on Crime—to reform the U.S. criminal justice system, one of the ...