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Standing Rock Is Everywhere
The median income at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation is a little over $13,000. There are key issues of healthcare and economic development and education. In many ways, I think the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has really been showing how difficult and how important it is to ...

The Origins of Anger
February 07, 2017
Escape from the stultifying dualisms of East and West, religion and reason, requires us to train fresh eyes on the most fateful event of human history: the rise of an industrial and materialist civilization, which, emerging in Britain and France, spread itself over the old world ...

Daily Bafflements
February 06, 2017
• Mike Pence plans to cast a tie-breaking vote to aid the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as education secretary. As Jennifer Berkshire wrote after her journey to the heart of DeVos-land, the “DeVosian vision of school reform is the anti–New Deal offensive launched ...

You’re Fired
February 06, 2017
Only in a society with almost no safety nets, in which few people have the job security afforded by union protections or tenure, could random bullies on the internet terrify us by tagging our bosses. People who do this are not serving any kind of progressive movement; indeed ...

Holy Warriors Against the Welfare State
February 06, 2017
I’d traveled to this western Michigan hub of sanctified commerce to learn more about Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s pick to be the top education official in the land. DeVos, the name of the family that founded the multi-level marketing behemoth known as Amway, is almost ...

Daily Bafflements
February 03, 2017
• Where were you when the tragic Bowling Green Massacre happened? We can’t remember, but we do know, at least, that Kellyanne Conway was wandering around confusedly in a world of “alternative facts,” most likely nowhere near Kentucky. If it ...

The Attention Deficit
February 03, 2017
Once upon a time a lot of hope was invested in adblockers. Many saw them as a way to halt the blight of online advertising. The thinking was that if everyone got adblockers, it would not only make the ads disappear, but it might make the internet a more enjoyable place, too. We ...

The Labor Movement We Need
I don’t blame labor leaders for going to meet with Trump, but I think we should have had a much more deliberate plan for making sure that those that went to meet with Trump were representatives of a broader working class contingent that front-loaded issues that were of concern ...

Odd Time to be Evenhanded
One of the rarely acknowledged liabilities of a corporate-run media is its diehard resistance to plain speech and direct action. In one of my former, more respectable editing gigs, I was soberly instructed never to use the word “reform” to characterize pending ...

Fog Over Foggy Bottom
Welcome to This American Carnage, your weekly slice of life from the country of Trump On Monday, news broke of a fresh bureaucratic uprising—this time through a memo posted to the State Department’s Dissent Channel expressing the dissatisfaction of nearly 1000 ...

#DeleteUber, Delete Everything
February 01, 2017
Like many billion-dollar startups, Uber is notorious for its self-regard. One nugget buried in this week’s news serves as a reminder: until a few days ago, Uber had no automated system to process users’ requests to delete their accounts. That meant that every time a user ...

Originalism Is Dumb
February 01, 2017
Donald Trump has nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. If confirmed, Gorsuch will replace Antonin Scalia, whose death a year ago has left a vacancy that Republicans refused to allow Barack Obama to fill. In the minds of conservatives, Gorsuch is a worthy heir to ...