UPDATE: This article was published at the same time that Texas Senator Wendy Davis (above) was filibustering a bill in Texas that would have placed the most restrictive limitations on abortion in any state in the country. She succeeded. As of midnight this morning, the bill was dead. As I write, Wendy Davis, a state […]

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Google operates its own system of private buses. The coaches zip up and down the San Francisco peninsula five days a week. The buses are sorting mechanisms. They help re-organize the Bay Area geographically, residentially, racially, between the tech industry’s uber-haves, and the rest who have not the luck to be employed by a company […]

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George Orwell’s great dystopian novel, 1984, was published in 1949. The U.K. and the rest of Europe were recovering from years of devastating war. And in eastern Europe, the genocidal dictatorship of the Nazis was being replaced by the rival totalitarian rule of Stalinist USSR. 1984 has become a template of subsequent visions of modern […]

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If you hear somebody talking about the U.S. “jobs problem,” ask which one. Let’s talk about three: First, even as unemployment has inched down, the economy has created barely enough jobs to match population growth. Second, this enormous labor-market “slack” has stifled workers’ bargaining power and kept wages low. Third, even with a “tighter” labor […]

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Affirmative action occupies a telling place in a nation painfully aware of its racial inequities yet painfully divided over how to solve them. Great numbers of Americans support the overarching goals of assuring equal access to educational opportunity and maintaining racial diversity in the country’s institutions of higher learning. At the same time, polls show […]

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