Adam Serwer

Julian Sanchez pwns the national security state. Amber Taylor gives us moar Thrones. There’s no pleasing some people. It’s shocking that someone who helped the poor get legal representation would work on civil rights at DoJ.

Via Radley Balko, Brandon Garrett, author of Convicting the Innocent, looks at wrongful identification by eyewitnesses in the context of wrongful convictions: The Cotton case fits a larger and troubling pattern among all the DNA cases I studied. In 57 percent of the DNA exoneration trials that included eyewitness testimony, the eyewitnesses had earlier been […]

The American Enterprise Institute hosts yet another event on how some Important Piece of America Is Being Lost. This time, it’s a debate titled: “The End of Friendship: Does Social Media Destroy the Human Relationship?” At our next American Enterprise Debate, philosopher and AEI scholar Roger Scruton will make the case that new forms of […]

Last year Spain announced it was opening an investigation into six Bush administration officials over the now-defunct “enhanced interrogation” program. They recently dropped the case, citing statements from the U.S. Department of Justice that they were investigating instances of torture. What’s odd, though, is that in the U.S. statement, they clearly say that: [T]he Department […]

The conclusion of Ta-Nehisi Coates‘ piece on Malcolm X is really moving: What animated Malcolm’s rage was that for all his intellect, and all his ability, and all his reinventions, as a black man in America, he found his ambitions ultimately capped. The right of self-creation had its limits then. But not anymore. Obama became […]

The Guttmacher Institute has released a study on contraceptive use among religious women that I think explains some things about the politics of contraception and Planned Parenthood. According to the study, 99 percent of women who have been sexually active have used contraception other than “natural family planning,” including 98 percent of Catholic women, despite […]

Yesterday, Sens. Harry Reid and Dick Durbin sent a letter to the president requesting that the administration set up a process by which undocumented immigrants who might acquire a path to citizenship could apply for “deferred action,” which would give them a couple of years to remain in the country rather than being deported. The […]

David Swerdlick on the moderation of Al Sharpton. The maximalist Supreme Court. Obama orders Gitmo prisoners transferred to the next president. Kay Steiger defends short men.

I meant to link to this earlier this week, but my feature in the magazine this month is about how learning that an article I wrote was banned by the Virginia Department of Corrections led me into the world of prison censorship generally. Prisons have an obvious interest in preventing inmates from getting their hands […]

Over at The Atlantic, I’m participating in some roundtable blogging about HBO’s new Game of Thrones series. I’ve seen the first four episodes, and here‘s what I thought: Despite its setting, Game of Thrones is, as Alyssa noted, more comparable to The Wire than anything else on television. But this poses a challenge for the […]