From the Editors Archives - Page 61 of 170

Feature

One Year after Las Vegas

Where does the gun control debate stand?

October 9, 2018 • by Christopher Howard-Woods

Within a period of about ten minutes, 64-year old Stephen Paddock, positioned from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, fired 1,100 rounds of ammunition into an open crowd one year ago last week. The deadliest of its kind to date, the incident took the lives ...

Feature

Space Race Remixed

The mythical war between capitalisms

October 9, 2018 • by Sarah Murphy

For centuries we have tried to unravel the mysteries of the universe and images have been vital to that unravelling. At different points in history the moon has been held responsible for insanity, fertility, and even home to alien life. But mostly, these celestial bodies have remained a mere twinkling in ...

Blue Monday

Courts, Kavanaugh, and Constitutional Hardball

October 8, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

On November 22, 1895 Eugene V. Debs stepped outside of the Woodstock Jail in Chicago, where he had been imprisoned for six months. Debs, the President of the American Railway Union, had been one of the leaders of the Pullman Strike of 1894, considered by many to be the first ...

Courts, Kavanaugh, and Constitutional Hardball

Democracy

The Legitimacy of the Supreme Court?

The system is working and that is the problem

October 8, 2018 • by Ajay Singh Chaudhary

We Americans are “constitutional fetishists” in the apt phrase of the lesser-known mid-20th century critical theorist of law and economy, Franz Neumann. We tend to think that a particular order of state institutions -- for example, our current incarnation of the separation-of-powers -- embodies the essence of democracy instead of looking ...

Feature

“1933,” or What Hitler’s Ascendency Teaches Us About Authoritarianism

10 Historic Lessons for the Age of Trump

October 8, 2018 • by Jürgen von Mahs

2018 marks the 85th anniversary of the birth of the perhaps the most strident authoritarian regime in Western history: Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler’s rise to power makes this year a good occasion to reflect on the lessons that can be learned from the fateful series of events that unfolded in Germany ...

“1933,” or What Hitler’s Ascendency Teaches Us About Authoritarianism

Feature

Better Jobs, Cleaner Air, Safer Streets

How To Revamp Commercial Waste Pickup

October 7, 2018 • by Justin Wood

New York City is poised to launch a major reform of its sprawling commercial waste system, in which dozens of private haulers now deploy thousands of garbage trucks every night to collect about three million tons of waste per year from about 200,000 businesses. For the past five years, a coalition ...

Feature

Picking Less Partisan Candidates

Boosting election participation is tricky, but there are easy ways to reform to produce candidates who reflect a broader swath of voter sentiment

October 6, 2018 • by John Lawrence

September is over, and with it summer, Labor Day, the celebration of National Potato Month… and the 2018 primary election season. Just two month before the November election that could decide the nation’s political course for the next two years, candidates have finally been selected in a process that began in some ...

Feature

Protesting Kavanaugh

Hundreds of women, plus a few men, arrested protesting Kavanaugh confirmation

October 5, 2018 • by Jo Freeman

The confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court stretched out for the month of September as the Hart Senate Office Building was repeatedly occupied by protesters. Led by the Center for Popular Democracy but mobilized by several different groups, the protesters were overwhelmingly female, ...

Feature

Wearing It On Our Sleeves

A Millennial’s Response to Christine Blasey Ford

October 4, 2018 • by Hannah Leffingwell

Lately I’ve taken to wearing t-shirts, buttons, and pins that clearly identify me. “Dyke,” reads one, succinctly. “Black Lives Matter,” reads another, a gift from my girlfriend. “Fesbian Leminist” I include for an element of humor. It isn’t enough, I convince myself in the wake of the 2016 election, to merely ...

Democracy

Why Do Authoritarian Leaders Appeal Today?

The age of the strongman

October 4, 2018 • by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Ours is the age of the strongman. In Hungary, Russia, and many other places, authoritarian leaders attempt, with varying degrees of success, to undermine the rule of law, purge state bureaucracies of non-loyalists, make public office a vehicle for private profit, use propaganda to spread their versions of reality, and ...

Feature

Post-Kavanaugh Stress Disorder

Ending our political suffering will be a bigger project than winning the next election

October 3, 2018 • by Claire Potter

Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday, and Brett Kavanaugh’s unhinged response to her charges, was an epic installment of the Trump Show, now in season two. It’s probably safe to say that neither Kavanaugh or the GOP leadership care whether they alienate women voters by ...

Feature

2018 Brazilian Elections

The end of a crisis or the beginning of another?

October 3, 2018 • by Theo Almeida

The Brazilian presidential election of this year has the potential to scale back the political crisis that the country has been facing for the last 4 years. Alas, it seems that it will also increase the political division of the society even more. Lula’s representative, Fernando Haddad, affiliated with the ...