Government

Persons of Interest

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:00:45 -0500

The idea that a certain kind of people are worthy of credit is entirely a social construct based around an idealized vision of society. Those same people who got credit also got all the other benefits of living in postwar America.

The Fourth Estate

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:45 -0500

I don’t believe we’re confined to the media business models that we know. As the information landscape evolves, there will still be journalism about what is happening now, and that will help people in the future who are trying to make sense of it. This work has value.

Sleeping Children

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

What was happening in and to Gaza was not really about democracy at all—or any kind of universal, God-given values. It was simply about power.

Sunbeams

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0500

The press must be free. It has always been so, and much evil has been corrected by it. If government finds itself annoyed by it, let it examine its own conduct, and it will find the cause.

Thomas Erskine

Stirring the Pot

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0500

Leading a strike, starting trouble between sisters, feeding strangers

Back Cover

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0400

One Landscape Divided

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0400

President Trump’s increased militarization of the US border with Mexico is certainly a step beyond those taken by the past few administrations—and in line with the family-separation policies the first Trump White House deployed. But the detainment of people fleeing violence, poverty, and persecution is not unique to this moment.

The Golden Door

mcdermon@gmail.com — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Our nation’s founders attained political power by invading this land, killing most of the people who were already living in it, stealing large swaths of land from other countries, and then saying, “This is ours, and no one else can come in.” It’s hard to defend that moral claim.

Airborne

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400

Studies done with animals in labs don’t totally replicate the way humans get infected, which involves mucus, saliva, and other pathogens. We don’t know the full complexity of that interaction.

Sunbeams

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0400

In every election in American history both parties have their clichés. The party that has the clichés that ring true wins.

Newt Gingrich

Opportunity Knocked

dgmlewis@gmail.com — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:00:00 -0400

A lot of the Biden administration’s pitch was “In ten years, we promise you you’re going to have a job.” Most people can’t afford to have that long-term view.

After All This

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500

When twenty first graders were slaughtered and the country responded without a national gun-buyback program, national red-flag laws, universal background checks, a national wait period, a gun registry, an assault-weapons ban, disarming all domestic abusers, ending legal immunity for gun manufacturers, instituting mandatory yearly classes for gun ownership (list all your ideas that could help here), we became complicit.

Crossroads

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 12:00:14 -0500

The South is made to carry the nation’s slop jar. That’s deliberate, because then the United States doesn’t have to actually contend with all of its violence. We just put the blame on that region where bad stuff happens and where those backward people are. I don’t think it’s incidental, either, that it is the Blackest region culturally (and demographically) speaking. So it is at once seen as the most racist and the Blackest.

To the Arresting Officer

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 12:00:00 -0500

You patted me down roughly, went through my pockets and pulled out three crumpled twenties, some guitar picks, my stepfather’s pocketknife. “You got drugs, son?”

Past Futures

dgmlewis@gmail.com — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0400

It just takes the right person, at the right time, to light the right spark and make what previously would have seemed impossible the law of the land. When I was a child, Somalia had a government. They might not have one again for the rest of my life.

Thoreau and Me

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0400

Thoreau was the same sort of hippie I am. The main difference between us is that I do not want my writing to be as absolutely sexless as his. I want to be a Thoreauvian capable of lust.

Enemies of Freedom

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0400

Like the breeze that blew through the campus that day, whipping up the leaves and our hair, the student strike had stirred me, as if from sleep. Certainly, in deciding to march despite my fears, I woke up a little: I saw more clearly than I had before that my teachers weren’t my parents and my parents weren’t God and that I could risk a little disapproval without my world falling apart.

Penumbra

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0400

If Roe was created in the liminal space of the penumbra, Dobbs is the total eclipse that makes all go dark.

Mind the Gap

mcdermon@gmail.com — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:00:00 -0400

The lion’s share of Gen Z organizing on the Left is being done by young women, because they care passionately about the issues. I think there’s less of that drive among young men. Instead there’s a sense of rootlessness. We’ll have to see whether that actually translates into conservative voting behavior or support for certain policies.

Blind History

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

China is racist. Russia is racist. The US is racist. . . . Africans need to bet on each other. The Black Diaspora and the Global South need to bet on and support each other.

Returning

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0400

The fact is, “green” is the way we buried our dead over 150 years ago in the US. It’s the way many Indigenous peoples in North America have cared for their dead. This other, more recent, method is the anomaly.

Uniforms

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

For a job at Burger King, a prison in North Carolina, a girls’ school in Iran

Guardians

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

His inability to tell me when he’s sick, the most baseline, possibly the easiest thing to express, means he isn’t expressing a million other needs that are harder to pin down: If his shoes are too tight. If his ear hurts. Once, my son was walking funny. When I looked at his foot, he had a bee stinger sticking out from his toe. Being a parent of a disabled child means I can’t assume anything. I am taking care of his needs, and if I miss a need he can’t express, I’m failing him. I’m always failing him.

Home Sick

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Once we start to recognize that most of us will, at some point, have to step out of our professional role to provide care, then we have to transform how we’re running our economies. At the moment, our economies are relying on these hidden tragedies that befall women behind closed doors. All to keep the wheels of industry turning.

Down in the Valley

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Once I saw the development of new technology in class terms—how a particular kind of technology gives one group of people power over another—it started to feel more sinister.

The Bleeding Woman

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 05:05:00 -0500

So, Maryam the elder goes on, they arrest Yeshua and some of his followers and bundle them off to our dear high priest, Caiaphas, who decides it’s better for Yeshua to die than to cause problems with the Romans. The high priest is always sucking Roman cock—can’t help himself—so he turns Yeshua over to the governor, lots of bureaucracy, you know how these things go.

Is This Desire?

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0500

Being honest or open about your Pornhub habits is not the same as telling someone, “I’ve just seen Call My Agent! on Netflix. I think you’d like it.” Part of the reason for that is that most people don’t spend terribly long on Pornhub.

Sunbeams

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0500

From our earliest beginnings, we have been a nation obsessed with sex, titillated by it at the same time that we fear it, elaborating rules to contain it at the same time that we violate them.

Lillian Rubin

Tangled Avenues

dgmlewis@gmail.com — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 05:00:00 -0500

Cities are social, so they have the same problems we do. The mistake we always make in our culture is thinking that cities are somehow separate from us and that if we conceive of the right design for them, they will magically relieve us of our problems. By investing this theoretical power in cities, we can avoid confronting the flaws in the way we have built the world: with inequality and oppression and systems that make some people’s lives miserable while other people’s lives are good.

Burning Questions

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 04:00:00 -0400

A fire manager making a decision may look like they’re in a position of power, but often they really have only one choice: to suppress the fire. If they don’t, they are opening themselves up to a Russian roulette of consequences depending on how the wind blows, quite literally.