Joe Biden’s White Privilege
Michael Brochstein/ZUMA On Tuesday night, former Vice President Joe Biden told a room full of wealthy New York donors about the good old days. When he first arrived in the Senate in the 1970s, Biden recalled, he joined a Democratic caucus that included staunch segregationists, such as Herman Talmadge of Georgia and James Eastland of…
How Is California Doing? Really?
Typhus is on the rise in California, and this has prompted Victor Davis Hanson to conclude that California is now a third-world country: If someone predicted half a century ago that a Los Angeles police station or indeed L.A. City Hall would be in danger of periodic, flea-borne infectious typhus outbreaks, he would have been…
There Is No Such Thing as Clean Coal
The final version of President Trump’s jihad against clean power has been released: Under Trump, the Environmental Protection Agency has branded the rewrite as the Affordable Clean Energy rule and designed it to fulfill the president’s campaign promise to bring back the coal industry. This kind of Orwellian branding has been around for a long…
In Martin Scorsese’s “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story,” the Masks Drop, and the Women Disappear
Circuit Films/Zuma Around the midway point of Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, now out on Netflix, the actress Sharon Stone tells a story. It seems that at some point in 1975, Stone had been invited to tag along with Bob Dylan and crew on his Rolling Thunder Revue tour. She would…
The Los Angeles County DA Has Put 22 People on Death Row. Not One of Them Was White.
Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie LaceyAlex J. Berliner/AP In Los Angeles County, only people of color have been sentenced to death in the last seven years. In a new report titled “The California Death Penalty Is Discriminatory, Unfair, and Officially Suspended: So Why Does Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey Still Seek to Use…
Suburbs Aren’t Only Conformist, White-Bread Clichés. They’ve Also Been Radical, Green, and Visionary.
Margaret Bourke-White/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty The typical suburb as it is stereotyped in the popular imagination is white, wealthy, and conformist. The Monkees’ 1967 song “Pleasant Valley Sunday” captured the cliché by describing a place with “rows of houses that are all the same and no one seems to care,” where there’s a TV in…