On Thursday morning, CNN published a story in which eight women accused Morgan Freeman of sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior, both on and off set. The critically acclaimed actor and producer is described by women and witnesses as touching women inappropriately and making lewd comments. Employees at…
The Penobscot Indian Reservation, established through a settlement with the state of Maine in 1980, begins about 12 miles north of Bangor at the foot of a bridge that stretches across the Penobscot River. Technically, the boundaries of the tribal territory stretch in a thin line 60-odd miles up the river from there.…
The Senate Judiciary Committee released thousands of pages of transcripts, texts, and emails related to the much-scrutinized June 2016 Trump Tower meeting today. For me, though, there is but one single page.
Seven people were found dead on a rural property in Western Australia on Friday, including a mother and her four children.
Today, the excellent ProPublica and NPR investigative series on maternal mortality published a story about the estimated 80,000 women a year who almost die after giving birth.
Yesterday, the New York Post published a story about a longstanding habit of certain members of our legislature: Sleeping in the office. Paul Ryan does it for the convenience. Some refuse to rent in Washington because they want to rise above the corruption of the “swamp.” (Or, more likely, because DC is a truly awful…
This week, as anti-choice protesters and GOP lawmakers urged President Trump to reinstate a domestic abortion “gag rule” and entirely defund Planned Parenthood, Kellyanne Conway approached the president with a handy infographic.
This week, the Trump administration is inching toward its long-promised reshaping of Title X legislation, a change that would entirely cut out clinics offering abortion referrals from the federal grant program.
Recently, I talked to women about what it was like to be pregnant and uninsured. Shortly after my story was published, Reyhan Harmanci, an editor over at Topic, mentioned that she was billed a little over $6,000 for services rendered during her hospital stay. The bills were in her recently delivered infant’s name:
Michigan gubernatorial candidate Shri Thanedar is having a bad month. The self-styled “fiscally savvy Bernie” (what that is supposed to signal to voters, I really couldn’t tell you) reportedly decided to run as a Democrat rather than as a Republican on the advice of a political consultant. But whoever is giving him…
A few years ago, when I was a naive writer at a very different publication, I decided to do a story about an energy drink that also happened to be a respected patron of the arts.
Yesterday Kansas secretary of state and noted racist lawyer-for-hire Kris Kobach was found in contempt of a U.S. district court for failing to notify thousands of state residents that they were, in fact, quite eligible to vote. He was ordered to pay attorney’s fees for the litigation of yesterday’s motion after being…
No one told Catherine Emery what labor would feel like. Just past her 24th birthday and about as optimistic as a person can be, she had done what most expectant mothers making quick calculations about out-of-pocket health care costs do: She hoped for the best. Giving birth was a natural process, she reasoned. The body…
The State Policy Network, a rightwing coalition of think-tanks, has released a playbook to help anti-union activists combat such viral hits as “I’m a teacher who works six jobs to pay the rent” and “We would like some textbooks, please.”
A recent paper in the New England Journal of Medicine describes how the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal agency that typically enforces civil rights disputes, has intervened on behalf of anti-vaxxers over the last few years. The paper, published last month, was written by two alarmed professors of…
Today is Equal Pay Day, a symbolic and sad holiday invented in the ‘90s to remind us yearly of how little women are paid for their labor in comparison to men. A few weeks ago, ESPN published a list of the highest-paid public employees in each state, as of 2017, along with their salaries during that year. (You can see…
This week, Rafael L. Espinal, the New York City Council member who brought the city its very first nightlife czar, introduced another eminently reasonable piece of legislation: one that would allow employees to ignore their bosses after work hours without being retaliated against. As the Associated Press reports:
The protests I attended in the early aughts were, for the most part, pretty underwhelming: My fellow teens and I would gather at one large empty public space or another, march and/or chant in unison to demonstrate our displeasure with whatever horrors the military industrial complex had unleashed that month, and…
