Attention to the Unseen

Annie Lowrey writes: Two years ago, the city of Stockton, California, did something remarkable: It brought back welfare. Using donated funds, the industrial city on the edge of the Bay Area tech economy launched a small demonstration program, sending payments of $500 a month to 125 randomly selected individuals living in neighborhoods with average incomes lower than the city median of $46,000 a year. The recipients were allowed to spend the money however they saw fit, and they were not…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: The F.B.I. director warned senators on Tuesday that domestic terrorism was “metastasizing across the country,” reaffirming the threat from racially motivated extremists while largely escaping any tough questions about the bureau’s actions before the siege of the Capitol. The director, Christopher A. Wray, who had largely remained out of public view since the riot on Jan. 6, condemned the supporters of former President Donald J. Trump who ransacked the Capitol, resulting in five deaths and…

Read More Read More

Alex Shephard writes: Cuomo’s aggressive, bullying style has now become one of many scandals engulfing him. His attempts to threaten and cajole his critics have only ended up reinforcing his political problems. Cuomo’s treatment of these critics was something of an open secret—any journalist who has covered his administration, even in passing, has stories about the governor, his press shop, or both that can fill an entire happy hour. For political rivals, the threats were existential. Given Cuomo’s stranglehold on…

Read More Read More

SPLC’s Hatewatch reports: Before multimillionaire conspiracy theorist Alex Jones riled up Donald Trump’s fans with lies about a stolen election, he privately expressed revulsion over the 45th president, a video leaked to Hatewatch reveals. “It’s the truth and I’m just going to say it. That I wish I never would have fucking met Trump,” Jones said on camera in January 2019, while shooting a documentary in Austin, Texas. “I wish it never would have happened. And it’s not the attacks…

Read More Read More

Timothy Noah writes: My morning newspapers were so transfixed by Sunday night’s vindictive speech by the president who lost reelection in November that they neglected to take note of Sunday night’s historic remarks by the president who’s running the country right now. Perhaps it was just a matter of early Sunday print deadlines, but I observe with interest that USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, and Axios didn’t post their stories about Biden’s remarks online until this morning. Allow me to…

Read More Read More

Robin Wright writes: As a Presidential candidate, Joe Biden called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state with a government of “no redeeming social value.” He even charged that the kingdom’s flashy Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, had masterminded the murder and gruesome dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a longtime Saudi insider and journalist who had fled to Washington in fear of the Crown Prince’s vindictive wrath. Khashoggi became a highly visible voice of the Saudi opposition in a column for the Washington…

Read More Read More

Zack Beauchamp writes: The Republican Party is the biggest threat to American democracy today. It is a radical, obstructionist faction that has become hostile to the most basic democratic norm: that the other side should get to wield power when it wins elections. A few years ago, these statements may have sounded like partisan Democratic hyperbole. But in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol and Trump’s acquittal in the Senate on the charge of inciting it,…

Read More Read More