basically runs a press release from the Urban Institute, but since I wanted to read that press release I won’t complain: The Urban Institute report, “The Color of Wealth in the Nation’s Capital,” said the Great Recession and housing crisis of 2007 to 2009 exacerbated long-persistent disparities, with black and Hispanic households losing about half of their wealth. In 2013 and 2014, white households in the D.C. area had a net worth of $284,000 while black households had a net... Read more
dispatch: …On any list of the most consequential Catholic nations today, the Philippines would easily finish in the top five, and there’s a good case to be made that it’s #1. It’s the third largest Catholic nation on earth, and unlike its two larger peers, Brazil and Mexico, its levels of faith and practice remain robust. For another, given the swelling Filipino diaspora, in a staggering number of places today, from the Arabian Peninsula to Malaysia, Hong Kong, and beyond,... Read more
It’s not because I think DC should be a state. “I don’t even think that’s the real point, frankly,” D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton says, in the very first quote of this depressing piece. My ballot tomorrow is going to be a fractal of civic helplessness. Let’s explore! So first of all, even if the statehood proposal wins in a landslide, it will not happen. It is a pure protest vote. For some people it’s a protest vote for left-wing... Read more
some thoughts, from the Marshall Project, on the complexity and importance of the DA position: Sklansky, the Stanford professor, agrees that there is “something uncomfortable” about how individual cases can drive an election campaign, and that this underscores the need to find better ways to measure how prosecutors do their jobs, including more data on charging and convictions. But overall he sees the current competitiveness as a sign that people are paying attention to how the criminal justice system works.... Read more
In a sense, we’re all in this: A good magazine presents a robust discussion of the national life, and The American Conservative has aimed since the beginning to show that conservatism cannot be reduced to a checklist or mere partisan formula. To that end, we have always encouraged a wide-ranging examination of the choices our political system offers—and fails to offer. This symposium is not an endorsement and is not necessarily representative of TAC‘s editors or contributors a whole: rather, it’s a collection... Read more
with a moving piece at Slate. I would I guess add the cautionary note that somebody has written this piece once a year since I became pro-life. (I even sort of wrote one!) This iteration would’ve been strengthened, I think, by some historical context. Talk to Feminists for Life, for example; people have been approaching abortion as a peace/justice issue for a long time, and they might have insights on why this approach still seems novel. Anyway, though, the stories... Read more
I’m not especially satisfied with that post I did about sex ed, and this email exchange gets at part of the reason. A reader: This wouldn’t normally clear my “worth emailing about” threshold, but you specifically solicited comments, and I do have a question. When you discussed pros and cons for the ownership framework, one of the things you liked was the way it helped the student relate to other actors. The examples, though, were people doing things that were... Read more
Good times, good times. “Police Accidentally Record Themselves Conspiring to Fabricate Criminal Charges Against Protester”: The ACLU of Connecticut is suing state police for fabricating retaliatory criminal charges against a protester after troopers were recorded discussing how to trump up charges against him. In what seems like an unlikely stroke of cosmic karma, the recording came about after a camera belonging to the protester, Michael Picard, was illegally seized by a trooper who didn’t know that it was recording and... Read more
writes: Nobel Peace Prize recipient Barack Obama is now facing some tough decisions about two countries he is bombing in the Middle East. Watching the demoralizing carnage in Syria and an uptick in the hostilities in Yemen, an itchy press corps and policy class are starting to demand that Obama sack up and really fight. They warn him that he is the president who did nothing while Iran burned down the Middle East. But listening to that advice could radically... Read more
Over the weekend I drove to a wedding with a bunch of strangers. We got to talking about our memories of middle and high school. One of us went to either a small-town public school or a private religious school (can’t remember which), one to a single-sex Catholic school, and two of us to an intensely progressive private school. And none of us had had any kind of sex ed that struck us as even marginally relevant or insightful. So... Read more
Eve Tushnet
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