Subterms
Some 600,000 Wisconsinites, five polling stations. Do the math. For as long as I can remember, I eagerly watched my parents connect arrows, mark their votes and mail off their ballots. It seems seamless, but in many states, only once you request a ballot by mail can the at-home voting process proceed. Imagine thousands filing […] More
As the revolt was beginning to brew on streets across the nation on May 30, US President Donald Trump was celebrating the success of SpaceX’s launch of a manned mission to the international space station, the first time a private company has put human beings in space. Although it increasingly appears that Trump may come […] More
Amy Cooper worked at my firm when I was a paralegal. She was a cohort member in my PhD program, a professor whose class I took, a professor in the department I taught in and on the faculty I interviewed with for a job. Amy Cooper is a character type. She votes democratically, lives in […] More
As protests unfold night after night in city streets across the United States, President Donald Trump, never previously accused of being camera shy, was nowhere to be seen. The New York Times reports on his newfound taste for discretion: “The president spent Sunday out of sight, berating opponents on Twitter, even as some of his […] More
Across America, people are coming out in hordes to protest the death of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, at the knee of a white policeman, Derek Chauvin, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Chauvin choked Floyd with his vicious stranglehold, pressing his knee against Floyd’s neck for an interminable eight minutes and 46 seconds, even as Floyd […] More
“If you had to choose a time to be, in the words of Lorraine Hansberry, young, gifted, and black in America, you would choose right now,” Barack Obama told a graduating class at Howard University in Washington DC four years ago, drawing attention to Hansberry’s 1996 collection of plays, interviews and letters that bore a […] More
Poor Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate. He currently holds no political office and can’t even circulate in public. In contrast with his Republican rival, US President Donald Trump, he is a mere spectator of the news. Worse, with a raging pandemic now complemented by nationwide violent protests over yet another act of police […] More
When the COVID-19 pandemic is dissected in the 2020 presidential election debates, Donald Trump will be at a disadvantage. The coronavirus has killed over 100,000 Americans and maimed thousands more. The caveat is that deaths per capita, rather than total deaths, better measure national failure, and by that metric the US fares better than Belgium, […] More
