Did Anyone Else Notice...

In 2020, the folks on the left flank of the Democratic Party are called “progressives.” For the progressives of 2020, racial justice is an urgent priority. In the years around 1900, the Progressive Movement rearranged many aspects of American governance and life. New laws regulated many aspects of the economy,...

What? We are living in a nation that is chronically unsettled and agitated by the proliferation of the darned things, and I think we should have more of them? Well, yes. But first we have to restore meaning and power to that key word: theory. A real theory is a...

This unexpected development was revealed in the New York Times on September 22, 2020, in a quotation from Jim Manley, who worked as an aide to Senator Harry Reid. Describing the context for the process of appointing Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s successor, Manley declared: “The ghost of Merrick...

In 2016, just a few days after the November election, I had the wild experience of attending the convention of the International Association of Political Consultants. Nearly every speaker confessed to being freaked out by the election results. (None of them used the term “freaked out,” but every one of...

Contact tracing—that is, the practice of talking with people who have been diagnosed with the Covid-19 and asking them to identify people who have been in their company—initially seemed very promising. If you could discover a chain of encounters, teams of workers could keep track of exposures and encourage those...