In These Times

STRIKES ARE RARE these days. And winning one is almost as rare as sighting an ivory-billed woodpecker.But the three-month Writers Guild strike against the television and film studios mat ended in February won important rights for creative workers, and...

2.4 Public Affairs Journalism, ImprovedWas it deadline punchiness that made the editor do it, or was the incident one man's cri du coeur against the mental feebleness of contemporary newspaperdom?All we know right now is that the North County Times of...

JUST WHEN IT seemed like things couldn't get any worse for the polar bear, Big oil is moving into its neighborhood.On Feb. 6, the US. Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service (MMS) put almost 30 million acres of prime Alaskan habitat...

In early 2006, violence across the Islamic world rocked the quaint Scandinavian country of Denmark after one of its major newspapers, Jyllands-Posten, published inflammatory cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad months earlier. The images enraged many Muslims,some...

From He's a Stud, She's a Slut and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know (Seal Press, May 2008) by Jessica Valenti, founder and executive editor ofFeministlng.com <http://ofFeministlng.com>.I make more money than my boyfriend. A good...

Congressional mightRegarding David Sirota's "It's the Congress, Stupid" (March 2008), it may be helpful to point out that the leading treatise on the supremacy of Congress over the White House, certainly for domestic policy in the absence of a Depression-style...

CORRUPTION AND INCOMPETENCE in federal bureaucracies are enough to make your blood run thin.In February, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) admitted that it had allowed into the country tainted, reportedly untested heparin. Distributed by Illinois-based...

SEN. BARACK OBAMA is many things to the right-wing noise machine: a crypto-Muslim, a drug-addled hoodlum, a snob who disdains flag lapel pins, and the husband of an avowed America-hater.Should Obama get the nomination, we can expect Republicans-and their...

AMERICAN JEWS REMAIN, along with African Americans, the most left-leaning ethnic community in the country. While many support the State of Israel uncritically, some Jews express their concern for Israel's welfare by joining organizations and activities...

DESPITE BEING FIRST COUSINS, Tom and Mark Udall act more like brothers. Their parents were close, so die two spent plenty of time together growing up, sharing dinners with dieir siblings, cracking jokes and playing under die Arizona sun. As the boys...

IN WRITING A book about Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor, I wondered whether it was the people or the person that made the movement.I had initially subscribed to the notion that the people produce the leadership, but my look back at the...

America-first fervor could be the driving force behind economic populismYOU DON'T NEED TO listen to presidential speeches or watch party attack ads to know that full-throated nationalism is now lodged in the ideological center of American politics. Look...

RHETORICBY NOW, WE'RE used to the static that accompanies the election season.It's a streaming wave of wordplay, phrases, slogans, sound bites, jargon, half-truths, half lies, polished prose and prosaic parsing-a kind of low-register noise we tolerate,...