ehm1212

Peter Dreier on the importance of activism: On March 9, at least 5,000 protesters picketed outside the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Washington, D.C., where America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the powerful industry trade association, was holding its annual lobbying conference. About 50 public figures — including writer Barbara Ehrenreich, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Secretary-Treasurer Anna […]

Mark Schmitt on the strange potential coupling of the right and left: During the ugly late days of the debate on health reform, a minor skirmish broke out when a savvy journalist-of-the-right, David Weigel, got an organizer of a Tea Party event protesting the legislation to acknowledge that she’d been working with Jane Hamsher, who […]

Anna Clark talks with Robin Black about making older women complicated heroines in fiction: Rarely are older women centered as protagonists in American fiction, a fact that mirrors their marginalized role in society. In If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, her new collection of stories, author Robin Black pushes back against this […]

Craig Ferhman explains how ghostwriting went from scandal-in-waiting to acceptable political reality: In October 2007 — the same month that Random House emerged from a four-day auction with a $9 million deal for Tony Blair‘s memoirs — Robert Harris published his sixth novel, The Ghost. It centers on a cynical, self-aware ghostwriter who must finish […]

Monica Potts on the world of high-end D.C. salons: A politician’s hair is, pardon the expression, an extension of her politics. When housewives across the country began imitating Sarah Palin‘s signature updo, it was seen as support for the self-styled populist. The New York Times interviewed Palin’s hairdresser in Alaska, who said, “We would talk […]

Monica Potts on the foster-care system: After the January earthquake in Haiti, 10 American missionaries, all white, were jailed after attempting to take 33 Haitian children to the United States for adoption. “The American mind has been shaped by the positive vision of families saving bereft orphans from a grim life in a Dickens-esque institution […]

Mark Schmitt on the legislative giants of yore: It’s starting to look like there’s a pattern when a Democrat becomes president: The president’s party starts with huge majorities in Congress. He puts forward an agenda, one that seems modest by progressive standards. Nonetheless, the agenda meets endless trouble, much of it from the president’s own […]

Tim Fernholz on the Catholic Church’s continuing complicity in sexual abuse: Forgive me for this parochial digression, but I will not be going to Mass this Easter Sunday. You’ll know why if you’ve been reading the papers. The rash of newly uncovered sexual-abuse scandals in the United States and Europe paints a terrible picture of […]

Paul Waldman on the president’s ability to keep things in perspective: On March 4, 2008, Hillary Clinton won surprise victories in primary elections in Texas and Ohio. At first, it seemed to be a momentous shift of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, making Barack Obama‘s victory seem not so inevitable after all, as […]