himwhynot

Courtney Martin says an increasing number of urban dwellers are retreating to the country — and taking the city with them. But before we write the obituary for the American outback, it behooves us to look at a contemporary twist on the urbanist tale. There’s a new “creative class” in town. Or, more accurately, out […]

Julian Sanchez says new regulations would give law enforcement a “back door” to monitor online communications, threatening civil liberties and stifling innovation in the process. The details are still being hammered out, but the Times reports that next year the Obama administration will seek legislation requiring telecoms, online services, and software companies that enable encrypted […]

Sam Petulla talks with Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson about their new book on income disparity and how Washington has abandoned the middle. Matt Yglesias criticized the book, saying that there may not be as strong a link between stagnating middle-class wages and inequality as you would have us believe. Your thoughts? JH: I think […]

Mark Schmitt says social issue extremism is a potent reminder of everything voters hated about Republican rule. One problem is that Tea Party extremism is so far out and obscure that it doesn’t immediately register as extremism. They want to repeal the 17th Amendment! That sounds odd, but most of us don’t know off-hand what […]

Pema Levy says The Social Network serves up the juicy conflicts of Facebook’s early days, but skips the pressing question of user privacy. Most of the hype around the movie has centered on how faithful writer Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher would be to the actual events. According to Sorkin, initial reaction to the […]

Gabriel Arana says that in the world of education, there’s no such thing as a Superman. While it would be nice to believe that an army of Jaime Escalantes, the famed Latin American educator who taught calculus to inner-city kids, or Dangerous Minds Michelle Pfeiffers, is all our education system — and struggling schools in […]

Matthew Yglesias says the Chinese goods tariff bill currently in Congress is a bad solution to the very real problem of the dollar’s value. The issue is trade. Over the past 30 years, China has liberalized its economy substantially relative to the Mao-era baseline. That has vastly increased China’s productive capacity — up 7 percent […]

Gershom Gorenberg says that the lesson from the latest crisis in Israeli-Palestinian talks is that Obama should be negotiating with the Israeli public. Only a bit more subtly, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu showed his own weakness on Sunday. It was the last day of the 10-month building moratorium, which Netanyahu had refused to renew despite […]

Tim Fernholz says that if Rahm Emanuel departs for Chicago, forget the compromises — remember the fights. It is fitting that Emanuel would leave the capital prior to what will likely be electoral defeat for the Democrats. These are the majorities that Emanuel helped build, by working to get conservative Democrats elected in traditionally Republican […]

Paul Waldman explains why federal spending never goes down, and why that’s not a problem: Republicans are right when they point out that federal spending increased significantly during the first two years of the Obama administration, mostly due to the stimulus bill Democrats passed in 2009 as a response to the Great Recession. Where they’re […]