Adam Serwer

My profile of Cornel West and Tavis Smiley’s Poverty Tour will be in the print edition of next month’s print edition Prospect, but I was having a conversation with Jamelle yesterday that reminded me of a portion of the interview with West I thought was interesting but didn’t make it into the final piece. Prominently […]

Just saying: What comes after Gaddafi’s fall is much more important, and much more uncertain. Now it should be said that Obama’s strategy means that one of the key factors in the emergence of suicide terrorism — a foreign occupying military, typically of a different religious background than the occupied — isn’t present in Libya. […]

I’m sympathetic to the emotional roots of Touré’s conception of “post-blackness” and I find the concept kind of ridiculous. Not just because whiteness, rather than blackness, has historically been the more exclusive ethnic identity but because even Touré writes stuff like this: All of that is why, to me, Vick seems to have a deeply […]

Yesterday Radley Balko tweeted this article on another case involving citizens’ facing consequences for recording the police. You have to love what they thought was important enough to put right at the top of the piece: A former stripper, who secretly recorded two Chicago Police Internal Affairs investigators while filing a sexual harassment complaint against […]

Conor Friedersdorf, in a very gracious and charitable critique thinks my priorities, as a liberal with some libertarianish views, are skewed with regards to Ron Paul: All I ask, as they critique Paul’s sometimes flawed conception of freedom, is that they acknowledge that they’re perfectly willing to vote for a guy who embraces most of […]

This is a bit off topic, but it’s my blog and my last week here so bear with me. I recently watched The Adjustment Bureau, a sort of sci-fi romance where the world is regularly nudged away from extinction by a covert bureaucracy of otherwordly chaperones who dress like 1950s pulp detectives. The female lead, […]

Jed Lewison has video of what I think is probably Texas Governor Rick Perry’s most glaring political weakness: From Lewison’s transcript: And listen, how many people in here are less than 50 years old in this audience? All right, I got in trouble by asking that question right off the bat, there, but these young […]

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has signed a law mandating DNA collection for people who are merely arrested for a crime. Now while the retention of DNA information of people convicted of crimes is, for obvious reasons, less controversial, it’s not clear whether or not doing so in the case of arrestees is constitutional. A […]

Earlier today, the AP reported on a massive domestic intelligence gathering operation run by the NYPD. I spoke with the Brennan Center’s Faiza Patel, author of the center’s report on domestic surveillance, about the implications of local law enforcement engaging in intelligence gathering for counterterrorism purposes and the differences between the FBI and NYPD’s legal […]

The Associated Press has an astounding story on the depth of a domestic surveillance effort conducted by the NYPD, and the possibility that it goes beyond the permissive FBI guidelines that have themselves drawn criticism from civil-liberties advocates. Freedom from the kind of oversight required at the federal level (think about that!), the NYPD, with […]