(Image courtesy of the Buffalo News) Barry Friedman and Dahlia Lithwick, writing at Slate, inquire whether progressivism has abandoned every cause except gay marriage. I would argue, paraphrasing Twain, that rumors of progressivism’s demise are exaggerated. Rather than a retreat from principles, progressivism is experiencing a period of transition. The largest attack on U.S. soil […]

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I wonder what it is that other people see about Secretary of State John Kerry’s Israeli-Palestinian breakthrough that I’m missing. The fundamentals haven’t changed. The Palestinian Authority’s goal is to achieve a peace agreement with Israel in which it (again) recognizes Israel and Israel agrees to the establishment of a Palestinian state in the occupied […]

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General David Petraeus’ abortive campaign to seize the sinecure of a $200,000 teaching deal at the City University of New York serves as a reminder of a seemingly unchanging fact of American political life: nothing quite shows your membership in the elite like a propensity for unabashed rent-seeking. It also serves to illustrate the truth […]

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Imagine you hear gunshots down the street and you call the police, but they take an hour to show up. Imagine the victim is your son, and you don’t call the ambulance because you know it isn’t coming, so you drive to the hospital yourself. These are real stories from Detroit, a city so broke […]

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Our fantasies of the predatory and non-conscious undead have something to do with the impasses in our social-political lives. Our social-political-economic world is founded on predation and unshakeable hierarchies. No other world is imaginable. How can it be changed? We find ourselves unable to say. But we can imagine how it could be destroyed. Asteroids, […]

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