Conservatives are lining up to condemn House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy—the leading candidate to replace Speaker John Boehner—for making plain what everyone knew but Republicans are never supposed to say aloud: that the
There never seems to be a shortage of new evidence at hand that the Republican Party is willing to either tolerate or actively promote racism. (Or, if you’re feeling particularly generous: “racially coded language.”) Whether it’s in a cynical attempt to fire up a shrinking white base or anta
As John Roberts begins his second decade as the chief justice, a number of Supreme Court rulings during his tenure are once more in the news, perhaps none more so than Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission. The 5-4 decision, which applied First Amendment guarantees of fre
President Barack Obama was in no mood to merely play "mourner-in-chief" on Thursday, after the massacre at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. In his 15th public statement as p
Bernie Sanders has bragged about his ability to draw disillusioned people into the political process. One such person, a thirty-one year-old Louisiana rapper named Anthony LaVarry—who performs under the moniker I.S.A., which
From the first few chapters and the jacket copy, you wouldn’t necessarily expect The Heart Goes Last to differ from the standard apocalyptic program: Stan and Charmaine are living in their car, having uncomfortable backseat sex following the collapse of civilization, knowing that roving g
Children are time-consuming and expensive. They need food, clothing, and shelter; they need schooling and health care. If you're poor, the additional burden of a child, or lots of children, will likely make you poorer. Poverty is bad; and poverty for children is even worse. Therefore, poor people sh
“Show, don’t tell” is one of the writing instructor’s most sacred maxims. This is especially true in film, where sight is at the core of the medium; in cinema’s early years, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton once competed to see who could make the silent film with the fewest subtitles. (Ch
I contacted Rachel Murch, a Las Vegas native who was recruited five years ago as a change manager, to see if things were beginning to settle down at work. “No one knows how to get things done anymore,” she wrote to me in an email. “It’s easy when there are bosses with budgets. Now we still d
Two years ago, and a few days after Aaron Alexis killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard in D.C., Alex Goldman of NPR’s On the Media posted his “Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook.” His nine simp
Really, why would anyone who loves food—discovering it, hunting for the elusive ingredient, researching how to treat it right—give up the pleasure of finding and fondling it? Why, that is, would anyone
Every time there's a mass shooting in America, Republican politicians respond in a strikingly similar way. Thursday was no different. Presidential candidates Jeb Bush, John Kasich, and Mike Huckabee responded to news of the
When the final fatality count comes in, today’s shooting at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College may be one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history. The New York Times reports that the
