The fight against climate change returns to the streets

The fight against climate change returns to the streets

Bill McKibben writes: Keeping movements alive is hard work—they run on volunteer energy, and they can be derailed by too much success, too much failure, too much internal strife, too many competing interests. Or they can be hindered by a pandemic, which largely brought the climate movement to a halt just months after its biggest single day, in September of 2019, when millions of people around the world, most of them young, took to the streets; in New York City,…

Read More Read More

Trump’s televised confession

Trump’s televised confession

Politico reports: Former President Donald Trump said Sunday that he didn’t respect lawyers and members of his campaign who told him he lost the 2020 presidential election, and that it was his decision to buy into the theory that the election was rigged. “In many cases, I didn’t respect them,” Trump said during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” when asked why he decided to ignore his lawyers and advisers who told him he lost the 2020 election to…

Read More Read More

Top Democrats’ bullishness on Biden 2024 collides with voters’ worries

Top Democrats’ bullishness on Biden 2024 collides with voters’ worries

The New York Times reports: As President Biden shifts his re-election campaign into higher gear, the strength of his candidacy is being tested by a striking divide between Democratic leaders, who are overwhelmingly unified behind his bid, and rank-and-file voters in the party who harbor persistent doubts about whether he is their best option. From the highest levels of the party on down, Democratic politicians and party officials have long dismissed the idea that Mr. Biden should have any credible…

Read More Read More

Do liberals think this Supreme Court will save us from Trump?

Do liberals think this Supreme Court will save us from Trump?

Ankush Khardori writes: The public debate over the applicability of the [14th] amendment kicked into high gear following the release last month of a law-review article written by William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, two conservative constitutional law professors who argue that, under an originalist interpretation of the provision, Trump is barred from running for office. The notion picked up steam in some quarters of the press, as well as an endorsement from two prominent legal thinkers, but it has since drawn vocal objections from the right…

Read More Read More

My mother survived Hitler’s crimes; my father survived Stalin’s

My mother survived Hitler’s crimes; my father survived Stalin’s

Daniel Finkelstein writes: “Should I mention that I saw Anne Frank in Belsen? Do you think they’d be interested in that?” I was in my late teens when my mother was first asked to give a talk about her experiences as a German refugee and Dutch Jew in the Second World War. Until the late 1970s, people rarely asked her about it, and she didn’t want to be a bore. Then things began to change. Within a few years of…

Read More Read More

Libya’s unnatural disaster

Libya’s unnatural disaster

Frederic Wehrey writes: Footage and eyewitness accounts have conveyed harrowing scenes from the storm-struck Libyan town of Derna: overflowing morgues and mass burials, rescuers digging through mud with their bare hands to recover bodies, a corpse hanging from a streetlight, the cries of trapped children. Two aging dams to Derna’s south collapsed under the pressure of Storm Daniel, sending an estimated 30 million cubic meters of water down a river valley that runs through the city’s center and erasing entire neighborhoods. Some 11,300 people are…

Read More Read More

Princeton is accused of treating the abduction of graduate student as mainly a ‘PR problem’

Princeton is accused of treating the abduction of graduate student as mainly a ‘PR problem’

  PBS’s Amna Nawaz: [Elizabeth Tsurkov] was [in Iraq] doing work as part of her degree at Princeton. It was reviewed by Princeton in advance, approved by Princeton in advance. What have your conversations been like with them so far? Emma Tsurkov: Unfortunately, they have been very frustrating. I expected Princeton to be a strong ally of mine and help get my sister back. But, in fact, what they have done is treat it mainly as a P.R. problem. I…

Read More Read More

Borges and Heisenberg converged on the slipperiness of language

Borges and Heisenberg converged on the slipperiness of language

William Egginton writes: [A]s war raged around him, and as he worked to produce (or to hinder the production of, we may never know for sure) an atomic weapon for Germany, [Werner] Heisenberg was secretly working on a philosophical book. The ‘Manuscript of 1942’ would be named not for the year it was published, which wouldn’t be until long after his death, but for the year he finished and circulated it among close friends. From that work, it would seem…

Read More Read More

People are dramatically underestimating the prospect of a second Trump presidency

People are dramatically underestimating the prospect of a second Trump presidency

Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes: When the Republican Presidential-primary season began this spring, one element seemed different than in past cycles: the Party’s donors—its billionaires and multimillionaires and assorted invisible hands—were lining up against the front-runner, Donald Trump. Ron DeSantis’s super PAC, Never Back Down, raised an eye-popping hundred and thirty million dollars before the Florida governor’s campaign was two months old. Leaders from the Club for Growth, the influential small-government lobby, launched a pac devoted to moving the Party’s voters past…

Read More Read More

How should Judge Chutkan respond to Jack Smith’s request for a ‘narrowly tailored’ gag order on Trump?

How should Judge Chutkan respond to Jack Smith’s request for a ‘narrowly tailored’ gag order on Trump?

The 1st Amendment doesn’t protect witness intimidation, jury tampering, or threats to the presiding judge or the prosecution The narrowly tailored gag order that Special Counsel Smith has requested is well within the U.S. Constitution’s limits. About time!https://t.co/nXz0EQzXim — Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) September 15, 2023 Jack Smith was smart to put Trump’s misconduct in front of the judge. She is not going to like it, and it certainly won’t make her more inclined to rule in his favor….

Read More Read More

Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis turns on ‘malignant narcissist’ ex-president

Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis turns on ‘malignant narcissist’ ex-president

The Guardian reports: Jenna Ellis – the Donald Trump lawyer who like the former president faces criminal charges regarding attempted election subversion in his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020 – says she will not vote for him in the future because he is a “malignant narcissist” who cannot admit mistakes. “I simply can’t support him for elected office again,” Ellis said. “Why I have chosen to distance is because of that frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that…

Read More Read More

California goes on legal offense against Big Oil

California goes on legal offense against Big Oil

Politico reports: Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a lawsuit Saturday against five major oil companies and their subsidiaries, seeking compensation for damages caused by climate change. The suit, filed in San Francisco County Superior Court by Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta, accuses the companies of knowing about the link between fossil fuels and catastrophic climate change for decades but suppressing and spreading disinformation on the topic to delay climate action. The New York Times first reported the case Friday….

Read More Read More

We thought we were saving the planet, but we were planting a time bomb

We thought we were saving the planet, but we were planting a time bomb

Claire Cameron writes: At first, it looked like a sunset. It was just after five o’clock in June. I was running in Toronto beside Lake Ontario when I stopped to glance at my watch and noticed that the sky was no longer blue but a rusted orange. It took only a few breaths to realize the bonfire smell in the air was the drifting product of faraway wildfires. It’s quite possible you had a similar experience this summer: The plumes…

Read More Read More

Don’t expect a ‘theory of everything’ to explain everything

Don’t expect a ‘theory of everything’ to explain everything

Dennis Overbye writes: What good are the laws of physics if we can’t solve the equations that describe them? That was the question that occurred to me on reading an article in The Guardian by Andrew Pontzen, a cosmologist at University College London who spends his days running computer simulations of black holes, stars, galaxies and the birth and growth of the universe. His point was that he and the rest of us are bound to fail. “Even if we…

Read More Read More