Rights talk gets used loosely enough that it’s worth being exact about what a right is before applying the word to information. The distinction that matters here is Isaiah Berlin’s: negative liberty is freedom from interference — a space others […]
In 1840 a handful of abolitionists meeting in Albany nominated James G. Birney for president under the name Liberty Party. They had no ballot lines, no money and almost no votes, under seven thousand that fall. They built the party […]
“Govern a large country,” says the sixtieth verse of the Tao Te Ching, “as you would cook a small fish.” A small fish falls apart if it’s poked and turned too often. One way to read the line is as […]
Few words carry as much weight on their own as death. One syllable, closed off at the end by a breath through the teeth, and a conversation changes temperature. People go a long way to avoid saying it. Someone passed, […]
My phone buzzed four times on the evening of November 3, all of them texts from campaigns, all of them asking for money, and three of them using the same word. A progressive champion needed me before midnight. A progressive […]
Arden, Delaware, is a village of a few hundred houses under oak and tulip poplar, a few miles north of Wilmington. Nobody there owns the ground under a house. Since 1900 residents have leased their lots from trustees and paid […]
Three days after the election, the phrase in every newsroom is the Trump wipeout. Democrats hold at least 54 Senate seats and a House majority that may run past 250, and the losing side has already begun the sorting that […]
Palo Alto and Menlo Park sit on either side of San Francisquito Creek, in two counties, with two city halls about two miles apart. Each is a somewhere: a city with its own streets, its own quarrels and its own […]
On November 3, 2026, the governing party lost both chambers of Congress, by margins beyond 2006. After the Shellacking gives two readings of the loss. In the first, it was the six-year itch, and the cycle will turn by itself. […]
On November 3, 2010, the morning after his party lost sixty-three House seats, Barack Obama stood at a White House podium and called it a shellacking. He didn’t recommend that future presidents take one, he said. Sixteen years later to […]
Two students sit at two pianos down the hall from each other, working on the same eight bars. The first has the metronome at 72 and has played the passage, by the tally marks penciled in the margin, forty-one times […]
In March 2025 a travel writer, Simon Buckby, published a guide called “The Arabian Peninsula is waking up and opening up.” The whole peninsula was opening, it said, except Yemen, “still stuck in civil war.” A single tourist visa for […]
Texas’s 15th Congressional District runs from the eastern suburbs of San Antonio down to McAllen, and the Texas Tribune has called it Republicans’ greatest success story with Texas Latino voters. Monica De La Cruz won it by fourteen points in […]
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