Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Franco’s murder – committed during the first weeks of a military intervention into the state’s security that had been ordered by President Temer and was designed to tackle rising violence among the drug gangs – seemed to epitomise the militias’ impunity. As both a lesbian and a black woman Franco represented a new kind of identity politics that, al
... See moreRichard Lapper • Beef, Bible and bullets: Brazil in the age of Bolsonaro
James Otis
@jadotis
Alaska sent to the Senate Ernest Gruening, who had made a decades-long career of opposing racism and imperialism. In 1964 Gruening achieved national fame as one of only two congressmen—out of 506 voting—to oppose the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that led to the direct U.S. entry into the Vietnam War.
Daniel Immerwahr • How to Hide an Empire
When the police captured McVeigh, he was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Abraham Lincoln and the words “Sic Semper Tyrannis.” The same words John Wilkes Booth shouted after he assassinated Lincoln, they mean “Thus always to tyrants” and are the words attributed to Brutus after he and his supporters murdered Caesar.
Heather Cox Richardson • Democracy Awakening
The oldest conflict in American politics is the one between individualism and centralism. Reagan changed the terms by inverting them: the descendants of Jefferson’s yeoman farmers, with their desire for independence, became sturdy car-company executives and investment bankers yearning to breathe free of big government. The heirs of Hamilton’s arist
... See moreGeorge Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
challenges us to rethink the classic bright-line distinction between combatants and noncombatants. This line, which lies at the core of the international law of war, has been exploited in the interest of terrorism.
Alan Dershowitz • The Case for Israel
“Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.”
Robert A. Caro • Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson III
Steve Asvitt
@montanasteve
By the peculiar logic of racial politics, King raised a cry about restaurant courtesies while accepting death threats quietly as a hazard of his work.