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Monica Potts

Monica Potts is a senior writer for The American Prospect. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, the Connecticut Post and the Stamford Advocate. She also blogs at PostBourgie.

Recent Articles

On Borrowed Time

President Obama's new student loan plan isn't enough to help students saddled with debt.

Monica PottsOct 28, 2011
AP Photo/Ed Andrieski

On Tuesday, the Obama administration announced its new plan for student loans: new graduates can cap their student loan repayments to 10 percent of their monthly income. After 20 years, their debt will be forgiven. Graduates already repaying their loans can consolidate and get half a percent interest rate cut. These changes will go into effect next year, two years before they were already scheduled to do so, and the administration said the move was in response to an online petition drive on its “We the People” site.

It's an Ad World After All

Monica PottsSep 30, 2011

In 2006, a commercial began to air on cable television that showed happy babies gurgling through their year-one milestones. “A baby’s first smile of recognition,” a voiceover says. “That first rollover. The first step, and first word are miracles of a baby’s life.” Over graphics of a growing brain, a narrator announces that the first five years of development are critical and tells parents to “seize this small window of opportunity” to reach another milestone with their children: learning to read. The commercials direct parents to a toll-free number to buy Your Baby Can Read, a five-disc set that costs $200.

The Commons

Zipcar and Flexcar started an economic revolution in urbanized America. But how much are we willing to share?

Monica PottsSep 26, 2011
Eric Palma

In the late 1990s, when Robin Chase and her co-founders started testing names for what would become the car-sharing network Zipcar, they quickly learned to avoid the word "sharing." "Every one that had the word 'share' in it," she says, "about 40 percent of the people hated. They thought, 'It's going to be dirty -- crummy -- like the 1960s, and I'm going to have to wait.' Imagine if hotels were called bed-sharing."

The Bachmann Mystique

How can a woman be an avatar for an evangelical movement that argues that women must obey men?

Monica PottsSep 23, 2011
(Flickr/Gage Skidmore)

On August 11, at a Republican debate in Iowa held two days before she won the straw poll in Ames, Michele Bachmann deflected a question that brought boos from the audience. The moderator, Byron York of the Washington Examiner, had asked the Minnesota congresswoman whether she would be submissive to her husband in the White House.

Big Mess

A lawsuit against a Utah polygamy law is a nightmare for liberals and conservatives alike.

Monica PottsJul 28, 2011
(AP Photo/TLC, Bryant Livingston, File)

Last year, at the end of the first season of Sister Wives, a reality show about a polygamist family in Utah, Kody Brown took a fourth wife, Robyn. Rain threatened to cancel the religious ceremony. Meri, Brown's first wife and the only one to whom he is legally married, commented on the gloomy sky, "That's how my heart felt." Before then, Brown, a 43-year-old ad salesman, his three wives, and their 13 children had achieved an equilibrium of sorts. Robyn and her three kids threw this off balance, but welcoming Robyn was a nonnegotiable duty for the other women. "At that time, it really establishes itself as a patriarchal relationship," says Felice Batlan, a professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law and a fan of the show.

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