Jacob Brackman was a 21-year-old features editor on The Harvard Crimson when, in 1965, he wrote this vivid profile of Izzy Stone, the ingenious and curmudgeonly proprietor of I.F. Stone’s Weekly. Corporate media was ascendant even in those early years, and Stone’s independence, fearlessness, and legendary work ethic earned him a unique standing at a […]

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I’ve just lost a friend. He didn’t die. Our friendship of 41 years expired—burned up, shredded—in one email exchange. Jack—I’ll call him that—grew up in San Mateo County, California, the son of a municipal civil servant in what was a Leave-It-to-Beaver suburb that has since spawned some of the most expensive zip codes in the […]

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On a Sunday morning in September, Maryland Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ben Jealous is in church—of course. In fact, it is his third Baltimore-area church service that morning, beginning at Woodlawn’s sprawling, suburban Morning Star Baptist at 7 a.m., moving on to the nearby New Psalmist Baptist megachurch with at least a thousand congregants by 9:30 […]

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Day by day, unsealed document by unsealed document, the American people are learning in this summer of discontent a great deal about the values and vision of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, a judge of relentless conservative mien who, if confirmed, will push the Court as far right as it has been in nearly a […]

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It was ugly, it was frustrating, and now the most cynical Supreme Court confirmation hearing in American history is mercifully over. Brett Kavanaugh is going to become the next Supreme Court justice not because he’s demonstrated noticeable judicial independence or integrity or because his views of the Constitution are particularly mainstream but because Senate Republicans […]

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