Senator Elizabeth Warren delivered this speech on the Senate floor last Friday night: “Democrats don’t like Wall Street bailouts. Republicans don’t like Wall Street bailouts. The American people are disgusted by Wall Street bailouts “And yet here we are, five years after Dodd-Frank with Congress on the verge of ramming through a provision that would …
“I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence. I know that victims of torture will offer intentionally misleading information if they think their captors will believe it. I know they will say whatever they think their torturers want them to say if they believe it will …
Frank Rich interviewed Chris Rock this week in New York magazine. Rock was brilliant–creative, provocative, and enormously perceptive. He said things about race in a way that should change the discussion forever. Here is one comment: “Here’s the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are …
Last week I had the pleasure of going to the theater with one half of my Loose Lips co-writers, the gemultlict Lisa Birnbach. What fun! We had dinner on Bond Street in a brick-walled basement level restaurant called The Smile, which had the atmosphere and trappings of the kind of archetypal Greenwich Village that Edna …
If you were an editor, and you wanted to have someone review two books about drinking in America, you would look for one of the more abstemious writers in captivity, right? Well, whether they knew it or not, that’s what the editors of The American Interest got when they asked me to review America Walks …
Please feel free to discredit this post for opinions based on naked favoritism, but here goes: I like teachers. I think teaching is an honorable profession, often conducted under very challenging circumstances. Now it t is true that my wife is a teacher, that my sister was a teacher, that I have cousins who are …
Congratulations to my friend A.J.Baime, whose new book, The Arsenal of Democracy, has just been published. I finished it last night, in a whoosh of excited reading. A.J. has done a tremendous job of telling story whose great sweep includes the rise of Nazism and the war in Europe; the development of the automobile, the …
Just ten short days ago, lawyer/slumlord/billionaire racist Donald Sterling was heard on a covertly recorded tape saying that he didn’t want his mixed-race girlfriend to bring black athletes to L.A. Clippers basketball games. (Among other things: read the full transcript here.) Since then, volumes of outrage were expressed, much of it by NBA players; and …
There is a sad, fascinating, hilarious article in The Atlantic about Frank Luntz, a “public-opinion gure” who has been a highly effective servant of the Republican party since the largely content-free, package-rich Contract With America triumph of 1994. In the article, Luntz reveals to Writer Molly Ball that he is having some sort of crisis–in …
Last night on 60 Minutes (December 1st) Amazon chief Jeff Bezos said the company is testing delivering packages using drones. The idea would be to deliver packages as quickly as possible using the small, unmanned aircraft, through a service the company is calling Prime Air, the CEO said. This idea will never happen, of course. …