Edel Rodríguez   Ted Cruz, who ran for the Senate to run for president, is back in the Senate. During his year on the national stage, Cruz’s singular accomplishment as a United States Senator, his one-man shutdown of the federal government over one issue, was correctly treated as newsworthy. Beyond that, and the over-reported story that […]

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  Mitchell Duneier’s Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea is not so much a full history of the ghetto as a place as it is an intellectual history of those who have studied it. Duneier profiles four black social scientists and community leaders who engaged with the physical spaces frequently […]

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Photo Credit: Tristan Bowersox   Donald Trump keeps on upping the ante. Consider what he said at a rally last week in Fresno, on the subject of California’s apocalyptic drought. Make that “drought,” for according to Donald J. Trump, there isn’t one. Never mind that the years between late 2001 and 2014 have been the […]

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Edel Rodríguez   David Cameron is the most unusual leader of any major power, due to his background, his unsuitability for his position, and his seeming success at it so far. Not only did he go to Eton and Oxford, but he may have, as was once written, “placed his non-parliamentary member inside the mouth of a […]

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Edel Rodríguez   Donald Trump’s first tentative run for the presidency (1999–2000) ended almost as fast as it began. Video clips of interviews at the time reveal a progressive corporate executive, unlike the caricature Trump has devolved into. In excerpts from a February 24, 2000, interview with NBC News’s Matt Lauer, and an October 24, […]

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