himwhynot

Eric Alterman says that as editor-in-chief of The New Republic, Martin Peretz spread the virus of liberal self-hatred. Well, it’s finally over. Martin Peretz, who, according to David Horowitz’s Frontpage webzine, “has been a pillar of responsible liberalism since buying The New Republic magazine in 1974,” has finally been shown the door. He did not […]

Harold Meyerson says America’s leading corporations have found a way to thrive even if the American economy doesn’t recover — and this is very, very bad news. When he was CEO of General Electric, in 1998, Jack Welch pithily summarized his vision for corporate America: “Ideally, you’d have every plant you own on a barge […]

Adam Serwer says conservatives are afraid of our own laws, even when the system works. On Tuesday, former Guantánamo Bay prison detainee Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the 1998 American embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, in which 224 people were killed. Conservatives were quick to remind […]

Jamelle Bouie says that in his second State of the Union, Obama managed to speak about everything but joblessness and the nation’s employment crisis. Here is what doesn’t matter about the State of the Union and its attendant spectacle: the instant polls of people who watch, the approval polls that follow, and — when it […]

Shani O. Hilton says O: A Presidential Novel doesn’t get the 24-hour news cycle. And perhaps that should tell us something. The disdain journalists are showing for O is amusing, if unsurprising. David Weigel at Slate called it “execrable” and mocked the publisher’s request that political journalists not comment on whether they authored the novel. […]

Nancy Scola says our conversations about the transformative power of tech are maturing. Tunisia’s citizens have spent the last several weeks gathering their collective strength to depose their corrupt president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, and his sclerotic regime. Throughout the turmoil, the populace has been tweeting, blogging, and using Facebook. Mindful of how quickly many […]

Gabriel Arana says nothing in the public debate over marriage seems to touch on what it actually means. Sure, whenever National Organization for Marriage president Brian Brown talked about “protecting marriage” in the abstract, I knew he was protecting it from me. When the Maryland Catholic Conference said it would fight tooth and nail to […]

Kay Steiger talks with Nancy Northup about how nearly 40 years after Roe v. Wade, the battle to ensure reproductive rights has gone local. What other challenges to reproductive health care will we see this year? There’s going to be a continued attempt to restrict private insurance plans from covering abortion services. We also expect […]

Dalton Conley asks when a creature is deemed alive enough for people to experience an ethical dilemma if it is distressed. Taken together, the Web, social media, cell phones, peer-based production models, and ubiquitous computing have created a new social landscape. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation report found, for example, that on average, children ages […]

Matthew Yglesias says the United States’ long-term interests are much better served by almost any conceivable decision-making process other than so-called G2 summits with China. Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to Washington this week is being widely billed in the media as a “summit” with Barack Obama, and that fact may be more important — […]