‘Can You Learn Anything From a Void?’

For American Jews, the problem of the “ordinary German” is especially troubling, because it brings us directly to the darkest and most unassuageable suspicions about Jewish vulnerability. The most controversial books about the Holocaust, from Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, have been the ones that try to explain how the Germans—citizens of an advanced society, famous for its culture and education—could be led in the space of a few years to commit a genocide of the Jews. For if this people could do it, the strong implication is that under the right (or, better, the wrong) circumstances, any people could do it. And the history of the world since 1945 seems to bear out this implication. Cambodians, Serbs, and Rwandans have all shown that people do not have to be Nazis, or anti-Semites, in order to slaughter their neighbors.

Published: Aug 2, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,451 words)

Stop Blaming Wall Street

Much of what liberals blame on financialization is a result of profound changes to both the United States and the global economy that date from as early as 1968—well before the onset of financialization. In fact, the growth of the finance sector was partly a product of these developments. It is true that the speculative disruptions caused by financialization have to be addressed if we don’t want to suffer another crash down the road. But, if policymakers truly want to arrest America’s decline in the world and attend to the various ills that have accompanied it, then they must come to terms with the much broader story of what has happened to American industry and global capitalism in the last four decades. Simply cracking down on Wall Street won’t be enough.

Published: Jul 13, 2011
Length: 14 minutes (3,633 words)

A Good Joke Spoiled

It is hard to think of another writer as great as Mark Twain who did so many things that even merely good writers are not supposed to do. Great writers are not meant to write bad books, much less publish them. Twain not only published a lot of bad books, he doesn’t appear to have noticed the difference between his good ones and his bad ones. Great writers are not meant to care more about money than art. Twain cared so much about money that what little he writes about his art in his autobiography is almost entirely, and obsessively, about the business end of things: his paychecks, his promotional tours, his financial disputes with publishers, his venture capital investments in publishing and printing technology.

Published: Jul 2, 2011
Length: 12 minutes (3,232 words)

Transgender: America’s Next Great Civil Rights Struggle

On April 18, a transgender woman named Chrissy Lee Polis went to the women’s bathroom in a Baltimore County McDonald’s. When she came out, two teenage girls approached and spat in her face. Then they threw her to the floor and started kicking her in the head. As a crowd of customers watched, Polis tried to stand up, but the girls dragged her by her hair across the restaurant, ripping the earrings out of her ears. The last thing Polis remembers, before she had a seizure, was spitting blood on the restaurant door. The incident made national news—not because this sort of violence against transgender people is unusual, but because a McDonald’s employee recorded the beating on his cell phone and posted the video on YouTube.

Author: Eliza Gray
Published: Jun 28, 2011
Length: 22 minutes (5,721 words)

The Battle for Tora Bora

Tora Bora was not yet a familiar name to many Americans. But what would unfold there over the subsequent days remains, eight years later, the single most consequential battle of the war on terrorism. Presented with an opportunity to kill or capture Al Qaeda’s top leadership just three months after September 11, the United States was instead outmaneuvered by bin Laden, who slipped into Pakistan, largely disappeared from U.S. radar, and slowly began rebuilding his organization. #Sept11

Published: Dec 1, 2009
Length: 22 minutes (5,542 words)

The Fire Last Time

A century ago, on March 25, 1911, 146 garment workers, most of them Jewish and Italian immigrant girls in their teens and twenties, perished after a fire broke out at the Triangle Waist Company in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Even after the fire, the city’s businesses continued to insist they could regulate themselves, but the deaths clearly demonstrated that companies like Triangle, if left to their own devices, would not concern themselves with their workers’ safety. Despite this business opposition, the public’s response to the fire and to the 146 deaths led to landmark state regulations.

Published: Mar 24, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,139 words)

The Worst Case

How health care reform really could get repealed—and why the repercussions would go well beyond health care. “The legal debate surrounding repeal is complicated and multi-dimensional. But part of it revolves around a novel philosophical twist: a distinction between activity and inactivity that, repeal advocates say, makes the insurance requirement an illegitimate exercise of federal authority.”

Published: Jan 19, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,477 words)

The Idealist

Jeff Smith was a rising political star. Then the FBI started asking questions about his past. “That evening, Smith gave a speech at a fund-raiser in a downtown loft. He found it difficult to focus. ‘As I was talking, I had an ominous sense of foreboding about what was to come,’ he says. ‘I looked around the crowd and thought to myself, “This is going to be our last fund-raiser.”‘”

Source: Slate
Published: Jan 14, 2011
Length: 24 minutes (6,150 words)

What’s Eating David Axelrod?

The disillusionment of Obama’s guru.

Published: Sep 27, 2010
Length: 21 minutes (5,415 words)

Nuclear Standoff

What happens when you discover uranium in your backyard.

Published: Mar 12, 2010
Length: 16 minutes (4,215 words)