Seattle is in King County, Washington, where Joe Biden got 75 percent of the vote in the 2020 election. King County had more than 1,000 drug overdoses involving fentanyl in 2023. These two facts are almost certainly related, but which…
SACRAMENTO — A front-page Washington Post investigation provides, as reporter Kyle Swenson promotes it in an X post, “an inside look at a well-funded effort on the political right to target, vilify, and defund a key piece of the social safety net, the ‘housing…
Americosis: A Nation’s Dysfunction Observed from Public Transit By Sam Forster (Sutherland House, 146 pages, $26) One of poststructuralism’s simplest dictums — if you can say any French literary theory seeks simplicity — speaks to why the world and our…
In 2020, after Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon won office with nearly 54 percent of the vote, advocates for so-called reforms in the criminal justice system could exhale. When he runs for reelection in 2024, however, Gascon’s sweet…
We shouldn’t be in a situation where suburban, exurban, and rural conservatives laugh with schadenfreude over the pain and tragedy that blue cities are inflicting on their own people. We shouldn’t be in that situation, but we are. And while…
The District of Columbia has always been valued as a beautiful city, both by its residents and its millions of international visitors. The district is world-famous for its museums, cemeteries, cherry blossoms, galleries, architecture, hotels, churches, statues, harbors, Rock Creek…
As it happens, my office overlooks the main drag of Kansas City’s counterculture/ homeless hub. On one lonely day during the weird COVID spring of 2020, I heard screaming out on the street, not unusual here, but when it persisted,…
As I wrote in my previous essay, one of the most profound and deeply damaging impacts of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was the destruction of the family for the poor — and especially for poor African Americans. This defines…
If there is one thing artificial intelligence should be great at, it’s treating everyone equally. As far as the algorithm is concerned, everyone in the human race can be represented by 0s and 1s. AI doesn’t necessarily see black and…
Wandering through Life: A Memoir By Donna Leon (Atlantic Monthly Press, 193 pages, $26) When a writer charms, instructs, amuses, or simply mightily entertains us, it’s natural enough to wish to know more about the creator behind the creation. What…