The Supreme Court’s Unconscionable Rush to Kill a Prisoner

The federal government ended its 13-year moratorium on executions on Tuesday morning by killing Daniel Lewis Lee at the federal death chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana. Lewis is the first in a series of federal prisoners slated to die in the next few days as part of a renewed push by the Trump administration to carry out death sentences at the federal...

10h

Ivanka Trump and Lockheed Martin Want You to Reach for the Stars and Stop Collecting Unemployment

Two weeks ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a record 4.8 million people were hired in the month of June. “Our economy is roaring back,” the president said at the time as CNBC marveled that the number “smashes expectations.” All of this was, for the kind of person who only cares about The Economy and not the ongoing public health crisis, welcome...

10h

The Dark Obsessions of QAnon Are Merging With Mainstream Conservatism

The online furniture seller Wayfair is not engaged in child sex trafficking. The high prices of some of its industrial-grade cabinets do not mean that they conceal children. And yet these absurd, evidence-free claims circulated so widely online that on Monday, Reuters published an extensive fact-check to disprove them, and Wayfair temporarily removed...

11h

Donald Trump Jr. Wages a Culture War on the Publishing Industry

There have been smoother book announcements than the one for Donald Trump Jr.’s second book, Liberal Privilege. After Axios’s Mike Allen reported that the book, focused on tarring Joe Biden, will be released during the Republican convention, the book quickly went viral—because of a glaring typo on the cover, which read Joe Biden and the Democrat’s Defense...

12h

A Window of Possibility on Self-Managed Abortion

Following what reproductive rights and justice advocates have long fought to secure, a federal judge in Maryland ruled this week that, for now, people seeking a medication abortion do not need to visit a health care provider in person to obtain the required medications. The ruling comes in response to a civil suit brought by the American College of...

13h

The Tragic Politicization of Hagia Sophia

Last Friday, the Turkish Council of State overturned the 1934 ruling that had allowed Hagia Sophia, Istanbul’s soaring cathedral-turned-mosque, to be converted into a museum. Minutes later, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan decreed that the Great Mosque of Ayasofya (its other name) will open for Muslim prayer in late July this year, righting what he framed...

15h

Throw the Bums Out

Earlier this month, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled the Covid-19 mountain, a three-dimensional foam mound representing the pandemic’s toll on his state. He had used the “mountain” metaphor before and had apparently decided to make it tangible. Referring to the chart of daily new infections statewide, he said that New Yorkers had climbed the...

18h

The Pioneers of the Misinformation Industry

There is an hour on the west side of Los Angeles, before the evening traffic slows to a crawl, when the falling light turns thin and clean. But young Andrew Breitbart often had to drive all day. After barely graduating from Tulane, Andrew had gotten hired as a runner at a low-budget production company in Santa Monica through a friend, and now he was...

22h

American Individualism Is My Climate Fear

For years you were a bore and a doomsayer if you mentioned climate change at a party. It wasn’t even the elephant in the room: There were no elephants. Just people.When an unapologetic denier of reality took over the White House, and media outlets finally decided to run with those little climate change end-times features that had been cooking along...

22h

In Defense of Free Stuff During (and After) the Pandemic

There’s nothing the American government hates more than handouts, at least those that are intended for anyone who isn’t already rich. In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson stressed that the War on Poverty was meant to be a “hand up, not a handout”; in 2012, Mitt Romney famously derided the “47 percent” of Americans living off the government’s largesse at a private...

22h