(Source: ABC News) The latest reports of the use of chemical weapons in Syria—by Assad’s regime against civilians—render a consideration of the arguments for intervention in Syria ever more urgent, especially as part of the existent case against intervention has rested on a skeptical assessment of previous reports of the use of chemical weapons. In […]

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This article originally appeared in TomDispatch.com. So much has changed since that hot day in August 1963 when Martin Luther King delivered his famous words from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. A black family lives in the White House and official segregation is a thing of the past. Napalm no longer falls on the […]

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(Source: Pete Souza) I am not against excellence. I just think it’s over-rated as an aspiration. In fact, I think aspiration itself may be over-rated. When I see excellence—when I’m competent to recognize it (and in many fields, like science and opera, I am not)—it is thrilling and heartening, as a friend once said, to […]

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(Illustration: Edel Rodriguez) July 23 was the kind of day journalists who work for the brash New York tabloids—and their increasingly tough internet and cable TV competitors—live for. Disgraced-congressman-turned-mayoral-frontrunner Anthony Weiner had called a late-afternoon news conference at a vacant office in Chelsea and confirmed reports that he had continued to send lewd photos of […]

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(Sheldon Adelson | Cource: Wikipedia) Fifty years ago, Americans lived in a society that had been growing—and had become—much more equal. In 1963, of every $100 in personal income, less than $10 went to the nation’s richest 1 percent. Americans today live in a land much more unequal. The nation’s top 1 percent are taking […]

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