I didn’t want to love ABC Family’s The Fosters. I tried to resist the show, which centers on an interracial lesbian couple, Stef Foster and Lena Adams, and their multiracial family of five kids, some of whom are foster children. (Get it?) But I couldn’t: It’s too g
The rise of Bernie Sanders as a policy force among liberals has forced Hillary Clinton to lurch left this presidential primary season, from opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Keystone XL pipeline to calling for a repeal of the “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health care plans. Now she’
If House Speaker John Boehner secretly had no intention to resign, and was instead using the threat of retirement to teach Republican House members that they need him—not the other way around—he's doing a masterful job. But Boehner was engaged in no such ruse, and the Republican Party is drasti
The Republican-led Congress, armed with their largest House majority since the 1920s and lined up in opposition to any further restrictions on Wall Street, nonetheless is on the verge of cutting over $16 billion in subsidies that go exclusively to big banks—and the proposal they’re using comes o
Every age generates theories of nature that faithfully reflect its own preoccupations. Sometimes eagles and lions prove that God wants us to have kings; sometimes flowers prove that the world needs poets, or fruited plains are the sign of Manifest Destiny. So it is no surprise to meet a theory today
The Belarusian novelist and journalist Svetlana Alexievich has been awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature for her “polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” Alexievich is the author, most famously, of
A feminist utopian economy would possess two major characteristics. First, it would possess a fundamentally different definition of “family.” Second, it would possess a robust public sector to regulate capital markets. Fundamental to both of these characteristics is truth: a feminist utopian eco
“I miss civilization, and I want it back.” Were these the words of almost any other writer, they would seem irascible, but coming as they do from Marilynne Robinson, they follow an earnest, eager plea: “I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we
What fascinates me about Wikipedia is not that it exists, per se, even though it is obviously extraordinary that it does. Nor is it the ever-roiling “talk” pages, with their meta-tail-wagging discussions about each and every subje
When Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace” first appeared in the pages of Le Gaulois, in 1884, it was all anybody could talk about: The instructive, seductive short story—about a socially ambitious young woman’s foolish lie and its awful consequences—obsessed French society and ala
UPDATE: Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich has won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature. The Nobel Prize for Literature will be awarded on Thursday. Unlike
