Phoebe Connelly

During the 2008 presidential campaign, we argued that Barack Obama offered, “the most sweeping liberal foreign-policy critique we’ve heard from a serious presidential contender in decades.” This first year was his chance to show how it would affect the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here are our smartest commentaries on the conflicts: Will Obama’s […]

You come to TAP for health care, Afghanistan, and, well, pure policy wonkery. We get that. But sometimes, even the most devoted political observers need to take a break to catch a movie. This past year we dived into: Was Susan Sontag a bad mother because she walked away from family to chase her intellectual […]

Barack Obama entered office wanting to fix our long-ignored and mostly broken health-care system. Now, after countless compromises and roadblocks, the Senate has passed its health-care reform bill. Here are our top articles explaining the stakes: Health-care reform was never really about tacking years to our lives: It was about giving us financial security. Through […]

For as many set-backs as the gay rights movement suffered in 2009, there have been some triumphs. Supporters remain committed to the fight. As Gabriel Arana wrote here, “[E]quality isn’t a once-and-for-all achievement … Nor is it an eventuality. Despite Martin Luther King Jr.’s assurance, the arc of history does not bend in any direction […]

The annual Jane Austen festival in Bath, 2008. Jane Austen was born today in 1775. Her work has most recently been revived through a series of horror mash-ups of her novels, including Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is being made into a feature film. (Flickr/Obenson)

Rep. Bart Stupak’s amendment to the health care bill became a flash point for conversation about how health care overhaul could affect women’s access to reproductive care. In San Francisco, supporters of health care reform gathered to protest limits on abortion coverage. (Flickr/Steve Rhodes)

I’ve got a piece up today over at The Daily Beast on why Jenny Sanford‘s decision to divorce South Carolina Gov. Mark “hiking the Appalachian trail” Sanford doesn’t automatically make her a feminist hero: The heart of feminism is choice—that a woman is the agent in her own decisions, political and otherwise. Being the victim […]

“I realized many years later that in my life and actions, of course I was a feminist. I was a woman studying engineering and I held my head up.” –Nathalie Provost, one of the women who survived an attack on students at L’École Polytechnique in Montreal. In 1989, Marc Lepine opened fire on a classroom […]

El tracks, downtown Chicago. From the Prospect archives: Did the stimulus screw commuters? And why we’re eating Europe’s dust on high-speed rail. (Flickr/ReneS)

President Obama‘s own instincts on the conundrum of jobs versus deficit continue to be better than those of many of his own economic advisers. He is under heavy pressure from the commentariat, the deficit hawks in Congress and the think tanks, and from the budget balance faction at the White House, to define deficit-reduction as […]