“Defunding the police” means reducing the funds going to the police. That can be as simple as slicing the budget by 10% or it can mean complete abolition, or anything in between. What you’re talking about is certainly one vision for defunding the police, but it isn’t the only one—it’s not even the only one being…

“Defund the police” polls at something like 20-25%. The concept of defunding the police—taking money from the police and putting it into other social services—polls around 50%, though, if you actually spell out what it means. But when you say “defund the police,” people don’t understand that that’s the same thing. So…

Her condition has deteriorated a lot over the last couple years. By all reports, when she was working, she wanted to be working. When she no longer wanted to be, she stopped. It’s been two years since she worked at all, so clearly no one is forcing her to.

The U.S. case is substantially weaker than the British one, for a number of reasons, and if he had good advisors around him/was actually listening to them, he wouldn’t go through with it. At this point, it would be virtually impossible to win.

She also didn’t say that she voted for Romney, just McCain, and it seems like based on the context, she would have mentioned both had she voted for both.

He was definitely religious before his son was born—he’s talked in interviews about getting converted by the Jews for Jesus at age 19 and even working for the organization at some point. I think it’s possible that, like a lot of religious people, he goes through stages where he’s more or less devout, and had been in a…

The main plot of the movie is absolutely cheesy (and that final sequence is fully, delightfully ‘80s), but I think both what made it so popular at the time and what’s made it age remarkably well are these threads of class, gender, and even religion/race that are woven through the larger plot. Most of them are handled…

To be fair, instructors who don’t normally teach online classes are already having to make a lot of time-consuming adjustments to adapt to that this year. Rewriting the tests to be open-book compatible should definitely be the long-term goal, as online learning is only going to become more common. But there just weren’…

It’s really strange that he seems to have largely avoided the stigma of being a sexual abuser.

It was also pretty clear from leaks at the time Harry and Meghan did discuss it with the royal family first—or at least with the Queen and Charles—and the royal family kept blowing them off.

That’s not true. Lots of universities as big or bigger than UMass prohibit faculty relationships with undergrads. Off the top of my head, Michigan State and UMich both do. (Michigan’s policy is, like, an insane masterwork of trying to translate the messiness of human relationships to legalese.)

Even if they rule in favor of Depp on this particular case, all the other stuff that’s come out about him during the course of the trial paints both a disturbing enough and reckless enough picture of him that he’s never going to recover his professional reputation. Those texts alone ... Plus, more importantly for the…

For what it’s worth, they did do better in 2018—for example, white women in 2016 voted 55% for Republican House candidates and 43% for Democratic ones, while in 2018 it was an even 49%/49% split. That doesn’t guarantee that shift is permanent; white women are one of the swingiest voting demographics and will probably…

False reports of sexual assault are pretty rare in the regular world, but they aren’t particularly rare in politics—there’s such an obvious incentive to falsify claims in politics that just doesn’t really exist outside of it. Pete Buttigieg was hit with a fake rape claim last year. At least one of the allegations…

I don’t know much, just that she’s supposed to be a law professor at Northwestern when people start encouraging her to run for the Senate seat.

Like, I could read the sex scenes in American Wife and not think of Bush.

Per Sittenfeld, that arc highlights Clinton’s flaws on purpose; I don’t think it’s supposed to be flattering to her. (It shows both the extent of Hillary’s ambition and her blind spots regarding race, both clear in real life as well).

There are state and local races on the ballot today as well. The biggest one is for a Wisconsin state supreme court seat, which the conservative majority currently holds and would like to continue holding.

Halper doesn’t care about sexual assault; she weaponizes it against other people all the time. She doesn’t care whether these allegations are true or not. She just cares that it’s something to hit Biden with (and if she gets to hit other liberals over their hypocrisy, even better). It’s just a game to her.

In any event, I think we can agree that there is a meaningful difference between the Post’s highly read daily news briefing, authored by a Post staffer, mentioning a story, and a random question written by a non-Post staffer making its way into a Q&A.