Adam Serwer

British Actor Andrew Garfield seems to have an impressive resume as an actor, but considering that the 2012 Spider-Man movie reboot was meant to place him back in high school, a 26-year-old seems like an odd choice. Like Spencer Ackerman, I was very sympathetic to Donald Glover‘s campaign for the job. The thing about Spider-Man […]

As Garret Epps has noted, the conservative case against Elena Kagan‘s treatment of military recruiters at Harvard largely relies on empathy. During a legal challenge to the Solomon Amendment, which mandates that schools allow military recruiters full access or risk losing federal funding, Kagan applied Harvard’s blanket employer anti-discrimination policy to the military because of […]

The resignation of conservative activist J. Christian Adams from the Voting Rights Section of the Justice Department has offered the conservative noise machine an opportunity to resurrect charges that the Obama administration has politicized the Department of Justice. But to understand this story, you have to understand that there are, in fact, two different [[THREADS […]

Is the “acting white phenomenon” what people think it is? Flying cars. Arizona’s “anti-racial profiling” training video for law enforcement. The NRA comes out against Kagan. Bit late, no? Obama tries his sensible centrist routine on immigration. Greg Sargent doesn’t buy the NYT‘s explanation.

Michael Calderone talks to The New York Times about that torture study, pretty much vindicating what I wrote yesterday: However, the Times acknowledged that political circumstances did play a role in the paper’s usage calls. “As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush […]

Marc Thiessen has some really abhorrent opinions–his love for torture, for instance. He also has crappy opinions about sports (via Jon Chait): The world is crazy for soccer, but most Americans don’t give a hoot about the sport. Why? Many years ago, my former White House colleague Bill McGurn pointed out to me the real […]

Kevin Drum and Glenn Greenwald both say it’s time to repeal Godwin’s Law. Drum calls it “an endlessly tiresome way of feigning moral indignation,” and Greenwald says, “The very notion that a major 20th Century event like German aggression is off-limits in political discussions is both arbitrary and anti-intellectual in the extreme.” Greenwald writes: There […]

I want to take a brief moment to go back to that independent panel review that concluded both Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley missed opportunities to ratchet down the tension before Gates was arrested. Roughly, here’s the sequence of events: The Cambridge police respond to a possible break in. Crowley and […]

Spencer Ackerman writes about al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s latest venture, which is apparently a print magazine: The magazine itself has a hefty feature well, reports The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, consistent with what any ambitious editor would want to see in a rollout issue. Osama bin Laden himself offers his thoughts on “How to Save […]

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who has been engaging one culture-war issue after another since he came into office, says he doesn’t think the 14th Amendment grants equal protection to gays and lesbians, arguing that “frankly, the category of sexual orientation would never have been contemplated by the people who wrote and voted for and […]