Over at Slate, Barry Friedman and Dahlia Lithwick’s two-part series on the future of progressive politics has sparked, as they put it, a “tiny firestorm.” In the first piece, “What’s Left?: Have progressives abandoned every cause save gay marriage?” they accuse progressives of having serially abandoned choice, the death penalty, religion in the schools, gun […]

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For most of Mad Men‘s five seasons, Don Draper—the super cool, super successful Madison Avenue creative director—has been something of a superhero, with the seemingly infinite ability to reinvent himself. But in season six, which ended last month, Don Draper has come closer to the edge, as his tragic childhood comes back to haun him […]

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It seemed altogether fitting that on June 26 an African-American woman became the 500th person executed by the State of Texas since it resumed capital punishment in 1982. Since the death penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1976, Texas leads the nation in official government executions. The next closest state is Virginia with […]

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On election night last November, a shell-shocked Republican Party began the process of accepting its need to move to the center on issues relevant to specific constituencies like women and Hispanic voters. The conventional wisdom radiating out of Washington was that congressional Republicans, even in the House, would have no choice but to get on […]

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Proponents of immigration reform are rethinking their support for a bill that could give 11 million undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship. The reason? Attached to the legislation is the most draconian border enforcement strategy in American history. By all available statistics, the border is already the safest it has ever been. Last year the […]

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