From 1980: Is capital punishment ever justified?| Modern Age
We need to make sure our coverage is rooted in enduring principles and values. We need to make sure we don’t “both sides” the issues when it comes to objective truths. We need to speak and deliver news with moral clarity. (Ben Meiselas) I would imagine that most sentient people—red- or blue-leaning—would agree with […]| Teacher in a strange land
In November of 2016, right after Donald Trump was elected for the first time, seventh graders at Royal Oak Middle School were captured on video shouting “Build that wall! Build that wall!” in the …| Teacher in a strange land
Barry Schwartz and Richard Schuldenfrei— These are all complex issues. Are the tools we typically use to address them up to the task? We think they don’t come close. The... READ MORE The post Choosing the Right Frame and Its Effects on Public Policy appeared first on Yale University Press.| Yale University Press
All the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents I saw in the atrium were white, of medium height and build, and many wore plain baseball caps. They were all men and they stuck out because they displayed an exceeding level of stillness and homogeneity in a room with a flow of people from all over the world, people who were always in motion and who mostly looked different from one another.| n+1Articles – n+1
Trump was — and is — intent on creating a new future, and to gain a better sense of that vision, I needed to understand what future he was working to prevent. I asked Andil to meet that weekend, and he agreed. I would play amateur journalist and interview Andil again, this time about how he fell into the government’s crosshairs.| n+1Articles – n+1
The challenge posed by this political crisis is how to take the stupidity seriously without reducing it to a wholly mental or psychiatric, let alone genetic, phenomenon. Stupidity can be understood as a problem of social systems rather than individuals, as André Spicer and Mats Alvesson explore in their book The Stupidity Paradox. Stupidity, they write, can become “functional,” a feature of how organizations operate on a daily basis, obstructing ideas and intelligence despite the palpabl...| n+1Articles – n+1
More and bigger detention infrastructure follows a strict logic of “if you build it, they will fill it.” Larger county jails not only enable the incarceration of more people by local police; they also offer flexible detention capacity to ICE and other federal agencies. As one recent report from the Prison Policy Initiative puts it, local jails both “obscure and facilitate” mass deportation.| n+1Articles – n+1
The hardening authoritarianism of the second Trump Administration has many faces, but the most chilling is one that can hardly be seen at all.| n+1Articles – n+1
Naturally there were lots of law enforcement types hanging around the convention — men with military fades, moisture-wicking shirts, and tattoos of the Bible and the Constitution and eagles and flags distended across their arms. But there were also a handful of women ICE applicants and a lot of men of color. The deportation officer applicant pool was, I felt, shockingly diverse — one might say it looked like America. The whole place looked and felt like America.| n+1
A few years back, I was facilitating a day-long workshop of self-identified teacher leaders in a western state. The topic: Blogging as a Tool for Change. It was a room chock-full of smart, feisty, …| Teacher in a strange land
A Good Look at an Old Evil | The title of this column plays off my first book, A Good Look at Evil. There I revisited some of the main...| Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column
Semiotically, it's detached from all these kinds of things that it was originally designed for. But this kind of sign was always part of the corporate blandification of the American travel experience. The idea of the app is funny, because it turns out that apps are all like these highway signs, really. Like you're traveling on the information superhighway when you're on your phone.| n+1Articles – n+1
The mainstream media has been full of the bad news: new study shows that reading for pleasure has declined! Fewer people are reading for fun: From 2003 to 2023, the share of Americans who read for pleasure fell 40 percent, a sharp decline that is part of a continuing downward trend. It’s easy to feel […]| Teacher in a strange land
I am a big fan of Jess Piper, a veteran teacher from Missouri, who left the classroom to run for office, and has since reshaped the conversation around why red-staters vote against their own interests. Piper writes often about a childhood spent bouncing around the south, and the family values that influenced her. When people […]| Teacher in a strange land
It’s August. I admit that I am a sucker for the cute back-to-school photos—students holding little chalkboards, shiny floors and carefully stapled bulletin boards. Special props to veteran teachers…| Teacher in a strange land
The Jewish community must extend to the Religious Right the same tolerance that Jews themselves expect and enjoy in American society. Only when Jews treat the Religious Right with respect can we demand pluralism and tolerance in return. The post From the Archives | Don’t Dismiss the Religious Right appeared first on Moment Magazine.| Moment Magazine
An appalling decision by federal judge Trevor McFadden was filed on August 4. The idea that Jews are a “race” makes one’s skin crawl.| New Politics
The Fork in the Road | A realization visited me the other day. It had to do with lost friendships. I’d always pictured these...| Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column
Maureen Dowd, in a NYT article entitled Attention, Men: Books are Sexy!: Men are reading less. Women make up 80 percent of fiction sales. “Young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally,” David J. Morris wrote in a Times essay titled “The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone.” The fiction gap makes me sad. A man […]| Teacher in a strange land
I’ve been more or less off the grid for the past two weeks, vacationing in Alaska and determined not to let the repellent Epstein Saga or other assorted travesties spoil the snow-capped mountain vi…| Teacher in a strange land
Back in the day, I used to go to ed-tech conferences, especially the Michigan Association for Computers Users in Learning (MACUL) gathering. Like everyone else, I was there to find that elusive app…| Teacher in a strange land
Michael Gubser— In March 2025, I spoke at a career day for Virginia high school students interested in international affairs. Many of the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds in my session were... READ MORE| Yale University Press
Trump loved Netanyahu’s gesture, but it is an empty move. The post Five Quick Takes on the Trump-Netanyahu Meeting appeared first on Moment Magazine.| Moment Magazine
A new documentary reveals how his Kentucky roots shape not just his politics but his life.| Modern Age
Reincarnation: Anne Frank and Me | Some years back I read a book with the title, And the Wolves Howled: Fragments of Two Lifetimes...| Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column
“There have been two major types of ‘corruption.’ First, a great number of cases, primarily political, were removed from the jurisdiction of the courts and submitted to special forms of investigation and trial. Secondly, the independence of the judges was progressively curtailed, and the courts were placed in an ever more dependent position. The government...| Public Orthodoxy
So—I am a Democrat. Not a surprise to anyone who regularly reads this blog. I think Democratic thoughts—Health care is a right! Fully support public education!—and support Democratic causes. And la…| Teacher in a strange land
A new history dismantles the conventional wisdom—and implicit premise of much pessimistic critical theory—that Marx’s ideas never gained ground in America.| Damage
Kathryn C. Lavelle— For climate scientists, the Arctic is the proverbial canary in the coal mine of irreversible global change. For many observers, President Donald J. Trump’s early 2025 statements... READ MORE| Yale University Press
My students didn’t volunteer much about the intervening six weeks, except that they had been grateful for all the reading. Time in prison is always slow, counting down, and for the prisoners, the strike was primarily experienced as an excruciating further slowdown.| n+1
I think of the people I met on canvasses. The older Polish woman in Greenpoint who took a thick stack of Zohran flyers to give out to all her friends. The hijabi Indian American mother and daughter who drove in from Long Island to knock doors for Zohran so that, the mother said, life could be as affordable for others as it was when she was growing up in the Bronx. A mobility-impaired man in Bay Ridge who said he rarely got visitors and invited me into his apartment, where he talked about his ...| n+1
The Trump Administration’s reliance on ICE underscores a transformation toward a domestic politics of domination that mirrors its lawlessness abroad. Just as Trump felt no obligation toward any kind of established diplomatic processes before invading Iran, he has positioned himself entirely against the courts, attacking the bedrock concepts of judicial review and due process as interfering with the project of mass deportation.| n+1
This is a disgusting country, I thought, irredeemable visually, psychically, morally, and ethically, and whatever is likable about our people’s warm patter does not in any way forgive what we have done to the world. Furthermore, it isn’t hard to bring politeness and evil into view at the same time.| n+1Articles – n+1
M texted me from the adjacent bedroom at 7:30 AM: “Are you awake?” In the kitchen, he combed out his beard and ate a banana, which his people’s warriors ate to feel full, he said. I pointed to a stray hair that stuck out the side of his neck. “I keep meaning to pluck it,” he said. We arrived […]| n+1Articles – n+1
Michael Pettis— In our book Trade Wars Are Class Wars, Matthew C. Klein and I argue that the root causes of global trade imbalances—and the tensions they create—are not primarily geopolitical conflicts between... READ MORE| Yale University Press
We run clubs, we start projects, we advocate for ourselves and for fellow students. We have watched the most documented genocide in history play out, have watched our international friends be targeted and disappeared, have watched a countrywide assault on free speech and higher education, and have been pushed to action by the social justice education we have received, and by deep fear for our friends, our community, our world. You want to believe we are the exception—that we are a few ill-i...| n+1Articles – n+1
To be free is to be a subject instead of an object, to be able to act decisively in the world rather than only to be acted upon. For Du Bois, as for young people in Gaza and on college campuses around the world, by attempting to create a new freedom in the world, they came to know the world as it was; with some courage, they could imagine it as it could be.| n+1Articles – n+1
Young recruits make ideal pupils: their minds are curious, their bodies likely tireless (and later, strong, for armed struggle), and their pasts, by definition, brief: no one needs to worry that much about a 12-year-old’s commitment to her bourgeois life, let alone about her being a Fed. (The memory of COINTELPRO was not distant for RevCom, and the group was serious about security culture.) The Party’s “Central Task,” according to the Draft Programme, was to “prepare the masses,” ...| n+1Articles – n+1
None of the following receives a substantive assessment in When the Clock Broke: NAFTA, Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Republican Party’s 1994 “Contract with America,” Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Clinton’s political career, George W. Bush, the 2000 election, September 11, the war on terror, the 2004 expiration of the federal assault weapons ban, the 2008 global financial crisis, Barack Obama, the Tea Party, the legalization of gay marriage, the presence of the Minutemen ...| n+1Articles – n+1
If the government is good for business, why destroy the government? It’s possible Musk really believes he is saving the American economy. By all accounts a fervent believer in whatever he currently believes in — stopping climate change, colonizing Mars, juicing up global birth rates — Musk may be speaking in earnest when he claims that government bloat is ruining the country.| n+1Articles – n+1
After Mahmoud was abducted by plainclothes ICE agents from the lobby of his Columbia-owned apartment building on Saturday, March 8, returning from an iftar with his eight-month pregnant wife, for about twenty-four hours where he was untraceable. Noor, his wife, had gone to Elizabeth, New Jersey, the closest detention facility to Manhattan, and was told he was no longer there. Eventually news trickled in that he had been whisked away to faraway Jena, Louisiana, to the infamous LaSalle detentio...| n+1
What scares them is something else: the realization spreading across Los Angeles that the private housing market isn’t just failing wildfire victims—it’s failing by design. That the inability to meet this moment isn’t the result of a few bad landlords, it’s a feature of a system built to extract. What landlords fear is that we might imagine something better: a world where housing isn’t a commodity at all, a world without landlords.| n+1Articles – n+1
“Nobody knows who the Houthis are,” Hegseth says in the group chat—another way of saying that, when we’re dealing with the Houthis, or the Houthi-adjacent, or anybody adjacent to anything or anyone else we find menacing, then those people also become nobody who matters, nobody we should bother knowing about, and definitely nobody whom anybody who matters should actually care about. And now that we think about it, isn’t it interesting how you want to know more?| n+1Articles – n+1
Wracked since November by a crisis of confidence, Democrats have repeatedly defaulted to autopilot in ways that embody this ethos. In Congress, that means deference to seniority and aversion to perceived risk. Democrats have been much kinder than Republicans to leaders atop their party’s caucuses. In bureaucracy, it means reverence for procedural niceties. The path of least resistance even gets celebrated as a positive good: look at us, following the rules.| n+1Articles – n+1
The teleprompter is certainly not as important as the flag pins, the red tie, the red hats and all the other visuals of the MAGA movement. But it offers an interpretive key to the moment.| n+1Articles – n+1
So if you ask me about the signature strength of the department where I work, I will tell you. It is world-caliber field-defining research, wedded to a fantastically dynamic practice of instruction, accomplished at nothing less than the scale of the institution itself—all of it operating inside financial margins so narrow, at such absurdly low cost relative to its peers, you can hardly believe it.| n+1Articles – n+1
The left understands the idea of collective provision. We understand the idea of solidarity. You don’t just go out on strike. You have a strike fund; you have alternative means of provision. But I don’t know what those are in this case, if what’s being threatened is an NIH grant that funds an entire chemistry department, for example.| n+1Articles – n+1
There may well be normalcy again. But it lies on the other side—not in accommodation to this malevolent insanity, run by lackeys and toads. The risk of overreaction is trivial compared to the risks of accommodation.| n+1Articles – n+1
Like Critical Race Theory before it—but with a supercharged intensity, since each new campaign of right-wing hate has been more aggressive than the last—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has come to stand in for efforts and programs that have nothing at all to do with these words’ putative definitions or implications. The DOGEistes, in combing through personnel data on the hunt for “women,” “historically,” and “status,” have made it very clear that they’re not particularly ...| n+1Articles – n+1
Perhaps because, unlike the Green New Deal, they actually exist, transgender people have been especially easy to single out and harm. Signed on the day of his inauguration, Trump’s executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” requires all parts of the federal government to share the same definition of sex: “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.” Female “means a pe...| n+1Articles – n+1
Decenas de millones de trabajadores quieren un sindicato. La encuesta nacional más reciente, de 2017, concluyó que casi la mitad de todos los trabajadores no sindicalizados en Estados Unidos se afiliarían a uno si pudieran.| n+1
Labor’s future will also be decided by its response to a reactionary political climate, and whether it can overcome two sinister and mutually reinforcing dynamics that are now at play in the movement: opportunistic collaboration with Trumpism along narrow sectoral lines, and the embrace of an “America First” nationalist agenda targeting immigrant workers. Left unchecked, these forces promise to further fracture labor by dividing native from immigrant workers, and to consolidate a tenuou...| n+1Articles – n+1
“When did we beat Japan at anything?” Trump railed in 2015. “They send their cars over by the millions, and what do we do? When was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo? It doesn’t exist, folks. They beat us all the time.” Commentators at the time laughed at Trump’s Japan fixation. They called it “anachronistic,” “out-of-date,” and “odd.” But Japan has in fact been foundational to Trump’s worldview, as historian Jennifer M. Miller has argued, dating back to his...| n+1Articles – n+1
The Roman historian Tacitus once chronicled the last speech of Calgacus, a Caledonian chieftain rousing his troops to resist the foreign invaders of their land. “To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire,” Calgacus said of the Romans; “they make a wasteland and call it peace (ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant).” Much the same might be said of the contemporary invaders of the former Roman province of Palaestina Prima. The Israelis spent 470 days feverish...| n+1
Originally written for a book review contest, here's my take on a revisionist Watergate history that offers wild and fascinating theories on the reasons for the break-in that changed American history.| Jim Nelson
You can almost hear the chattering class’s chattering teeth as they balance the need to generate clicks with their sanctimonious shock at the public’s hatred for Brian Thompson, the company he ran, and the industry he represents. Mangione (allegedly) took a straight shot at capital, and now popular ire is being directed at CEOs rather than Congress, the free market rather than the immiserating state. This won’t do.| n+1Articles – n+1
Chicago 1968 was where the New Left anti-war movement’s increasingly radical trajectory finally crashed headlong into the Democratic Party, setting the terms of a debate we’ve been stuck in ever since—a debate that's grown particularly acute in the past several months. Our generation’s convention playing out as a geographic rerun of the older one is just an uncanny coincidence.| n+1
I knew lots of people like that—unloved because unlovable. Toward them I was always cold. Maybe I held them at arm's length to disguise from myself our shared predicament. And so, by trying to disguise something from yourself, you declare it to everyone else—because part of what makes a person unlovable is his inability to love.| n+1
More than four years ago, in April 2020, I wrote this ridiculously optimistic piece: A Dozen Good Things that Could (Just Maybe) Happen as a Result of this Pandemic. Every now and then, I pull…| Teacher in a strange land
On Friday's episode of "Real Time with Bill Maher" the Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, was asked about Trump's VP pick JD Vance, as well as Vance's main backer, venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Buttigieg explains how men like Vance end up in positions of power, and where we've seen this all play out before.| Gay Pride - LGBT and Queer Voices
I am a patriot and I love my country. Because my country is all I know. Jackson Browne Of all the things manifested by the upheaval dividing this nation politically, the appropriation of the concep…| Teacher in a strange land
What Is Truth? | The question, famously put to Jesus by Pontius Pilate, was prompted by Jesus’ self-report that he had come to bear witness...| Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column
The debate’s enforced vacuity made little room for sustained discussions of policy—much less for the relationship between policy and daily life. Biden tried where he could, but he didn’t mention his transformative NLRB or FTC appointments, and he was in no position to force a conversation about the child care tax credit or reshoring manufacturing jobs on anything like his own terms, whatever those might have been.| n+1
I have to say this: the left side of the aisle has WAY better memes than the right side. From the bold, white-on-black “I Dissent” to the Martha Gelhorn quote–“If we mean to keep any control …| Teacher in a strange land
I mostly stay out of the Reading Wars. Not because I don’t have opinions on reading instruction. I emphatically do. I avoid the controversy because—as a lifelong music teacher—expressing that…| Teacher in a strange land
As the ascendant far right attempts to assert its hegemony, it has identified universities and academics as important obstacles to its success. In this, the enemies of academic freedom and scholarly inquiry are correct. But it is not enough only to defend the institution from the intensifying siege: our divisions are magnified in defensive struggles, and the terms of debate, such as they are, are set by those who’d burn the libraries down if they could. It is only by going on the attack, an...| n+1
The architecture of Columbia University enhances spectacle, a fact that historically has been both useful and not for protestors. Since 1968, the campus has been bolstered with riot-proof architecture: large gathering space is limited to the center of the campus, which makes visual performance, and the suppression of it, easy. The peculiar American fetish for the Ivy League turns this campus into a tourist attraction in the summer months, when it is impossible to avoid large groups of visitor...| n+1
It is now crystal clear to me that we must pivot our strategy and get on offense. We need to articulate and fight for what we want the university to be, and we need to create targeted campaigns to achieve it.| n+1
Those of us opposed to the vision of Rufo and Walsh ought to ask why the right wing is so scared of the political power of organized teachers — scared to the point that they have organized their movement leaders into blaming teachers unions for kids coming out as trans.| n+1
Speaking as another son of a Tennessee industry lawyer—a country music lawyer; it was TVA power that helped turn Nashville into a radio and recording mecca—I think the prime darkness at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s fiction, always precariously perched over oblivion, began with his father, a fixer behind the laboratory that powered the possibility of human extinction.| n+1
We had told the man he would have a warm place to stay the night, and had emphasized the city’s right to shelter. Every five minutes or so my teammate called to see whether the transport was coming, and soon fifteen minutes passed, and then twenty, then thirty, then forty.| n+1
As Israel’s ground operation in Gaza nears its close, the next major struggle is coming into view. The battle over the provision of essential humanitarian aid, already so brutal over the past few months, will become increasingly central to the conflict.| n+1
The movement in Atlanta is not exceptional for either its militancy or its broad-based community organizing. It is exceptional for fusing these elements in the midst of a relatively depoliticized period of “restoration,” and for doing so in a durable way.| n+1
Vance’s form of far-right politics is so ominous because it responds in a primal, perverted way to something actual. We are caught under a heap of wreckage, an accumulation of social and historical trauma that we are largely without means of getting out of. Millions are dead, and millions more permanently sick, from a pandemic that everyone now pretends didn’t happen, and even more vigorously pretends is not still happening.| n+1
By embracing “design thinking,” we attribute to design a kind of superior epistemology: a way of knowing, of “solving,” that is better than the old and local and blue-collar and municipal and unionized and customary ways. We bring in “design thinkers” — some of them designers by trade, many of them members of adjacent knowledge fields — to “empathize” with Kaiser hospital nurses, Gainesville city workers, church leaders, young mothers, and guerrilla fighters the wo...| n+1
Reputation Doctor® LLC is a top, global and virtual, public relations firm founded in 2014 by industry leader, Mike Paul. We specialize in crisis public relations, reputation management, corporate communications, media relations, nonprofit communications, government relations, event communications, entertainment public relations, sports public relations, as well as digital, film, T.V. and media production services for leading clients worldwide.| Reputation Doctor® LLC