In 1920 the New Republic ran “A Test of the News,” a special supplement to the magazine (published soon after as the book Liberty and the News) by Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz showing that in the three and a half years since the Bolshevik revolution, the New York Times had reported “not what was, […]

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The weak employment report out today reinforces the view that the Federal Reserve should not ease up on monetary policy soon. The strength of this economic recovery is not yet clear, and the Fed is the only game in town due to sequestration of government funds. Waiting another three or four months to tighten policy […]

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A simple “letter” can cement a tradition, forge alliances, defend the voiceless. Indeed, Catholic Social Teaching began with one. James Gibbons, the Archbishop of Baltimore, hand-delivered a letter to Pope Leo XIII in 1887, protesting the Archbishop of Quebec’s earlier condemnation of the newly formed Knights of Labor. In it, Gibbons positions himself and the […]

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Economic inequality, we suspect, may have crept into more conversations in 2013 than ever before. But people aren’t just talking about how unequal we’ve become. They’re talking about antidotes to the avarice all around us. We’ve assembled out of those discussions a list that samples 2013′s most promising and provocative inequality-busting ideas, proposals, and campaigns. […]

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  “We’re not blocking traffic, we are traffic.” The refrain, of the bicycle activist movement Critical Mass, comes from a (potentially apocryphal) story about one of their eponymous monthly street rides. As the story goes, the flotilla of dozens of bicycles—a “Critical Mass”—careen down a main thoroughfare of a major American city. They are confronted […]

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