Monica Potts

As today’s primaries unfold, watch for more of the conventional wisdom that it’s an anti-incumbent year, an anti-Democratic year, an anti-Obama’s-health-care year, or whatever political catch-phrase serves as a synonym for anti-establishment. We’ve argued against that kind of oversimplification before, and it’s worth remembering today, especially because two vulnerable incumbents — Harry Reid of Nevada […]

In its latest effort to deal with traffic in Manhattan, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration announced the creation of special bus lanes along First and Second avenues in Manhattan, two crowded north-south thoroughfares on the city’s un-subwayed, far-east side. The buses allow people to load in more quickly because there are more doors, and passengers aren’t […]

The latest installment in how technology is ruining our brains comes from The New York Times. In typical fashion, the Times takes an example of an extremely wired family to talk about recent research that shows excessive multitasking is bad for us, that technology is addictive, and that it can erode our traditional social structures, […]

The BP Gulf disaster is clearly becoming the worst oil spill in U.S. history and is on pace to become one of its worst environmental disasters — at least as a finite event. But it’s useful to remember how exploitative companies and ineffectual regulatory systems have environmentally ravaged other countries as well. Today, an Indian […]

On Tuesday, voters will finally decide between Bill Halter and incumbent Sen. Blanche Lincoln as the Democratic nominee for one of Arkansas’s Senate seats (some are already deciding, since early voting has started). Lincoln, who’s nearing the end of her second term, came under fire when she helped squander a Democratic supermajority that could have […]

Last week, David Roberts at Grist wrote that the BP Gulf disaster should really be something we’re already used to. Strip mining, rising seas, melting arctic ice — all of which are also the effects of our bottomless desire for energy — cause disasters every day; it’s just that they’re harder to see, he writes. […]

The new national education standards (you know, the ones commissioned by state governors and school chiefs that somehow amount to federal government overreach if you live in Virginia) were released, and they sound like the kind of standards one probably already thought schools followed. The standards suggests books that are appropriate to read for certain […]

This is what the Gulf oil spill would look like if it were placed on top of Washington, D.C. — except, as you can see, it wouldn’t just cover D.C. It would spread all the way to West Virginia, up to central Pennsylvania, out to the bay east of Delaware, and down almost to Richmond. […]