My freshman year of college at California State University, Northridge, I took a class called General Logic. I remember little of the class, in no small part because two weeks into the semester I fell off my bike at 40 MPH, sustaining […]
In two weeks, voters across the country will decide whether to keep control of the House and Senate in the hands of Democrats, or give one or both chambers of Congress back to the party of Trump, insurrection, election denialism, […]
As I begin this essay, the Senate is on the verge of passing historic legislation to tackle the climate crisis, reduce prescription-drug prices, raise taxes on big corporations, and extend Affordable Care Act subsidies, among other things. (Update: the legislation […]
For most of us, when faced with a law or policy we don’t like, our options are to comply with it, or, failing to do so, risk fines, imprisonment, job-loss, and ostracism. But for the powerful, it’s very different: they can comply, sure, but they can also lobby to change the rules, bend them, or simply ignore them–and rarely face consequences.
I started using the Internet in the late 90s, when I was in my early teens and services like CompuServe, Netscape, and AOL were becoming, if not ubiquitous, at least more common. I remember the thrill of joining AOL chat […]
It is a fallacy to claim that because only one political party opposes this rising threat, fighting for the preservation of American democracy is a partisan issue. If a train is on the verge of crashing into a group of pedestrians, the political affiliation of the conductor is immaterial to the task at hand: saving lives.
“The earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.” – Utah Phillips Of all that the so-called Facebook Papers revealed, most interesting, I think, is the fact that on social […]
The Big Lie that fueled an attempted coup now forms the basis of an entire political party’s strategy for holding on to power: make it hard for people who are likely to vote the “wrong way” to cast a ballot, label any election they lose as fraudulent, and slowly give themselves the power to overturn elections they disagree with.
Justice can only be achieved by the judicious application of power. Yet all around me I see emergencies–climate change, a Republican party rapidly descending into full-on authoritarianism, a shockingly unequal global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines–and good people failing to use […]
The passage of the American Rescue Plan Act is good news for a nation still reeling from the ongoing pandemic and resultant economic crisis, but it is perhaps even better news for another element of America that is sick: our democracy.