As America went to the polls in the fall of 2008, the spirit of Abraham Lincoln and the agenda of his Republican party loomed large. The image of Lincoln as a young lawyer was invoked on a snowy afternoon as a young senator declared his presidential candidacy in Springfield, Illinois: “He tells us that […]

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  Redefining the Dream: The Case for Marriage Equality is David Boies and Ted Olson’s attempt to cast themselves as the driving force behind legalizing gay marriage. The pair write that they hoped their challenge to California’s Proposition 8 would “change the course of history” and serve as a “critical step in the process of […]

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  It is hard to remain dry-eyed reading Elizabeth Warren’s description of the pivotal moment that she considers the day she grew up. She was 12, watching her mother rubbing tissue over a tear-drenched face, then stuffing herself into the only good dress she had, struggling to get the dress “across her belly, and pulled […]

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  Our southern border is just checkers, man; the northern border is chess,” a Border Patrol agent tells Sylvia Longmire, author of Border Insecurity: Why Big Money, Fences, and Drones Aren’t Making Us Safer. A border-state Republican congressman calls it a “Whac-A-Mole game.” But it’s no game for the poor of Mexico and Central America, […]

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  We like to think of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib as nasty aberrations from American justice, but what if they’re more or less par for the course? When I was at Gitmo a few years ago covering the trial of a 15-year-old captured on the Afghan battlefield, it came out that the kid’s interrogator had […]

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