Obamacare Works Fine — If You Want It To
Via Andrew Sprung, here are the final figures for Obamacare enrollment: Take a look at the bars on the left. These are from the states that run their own exchanges and actually care about getting people enrolled. There was no decline from 2017 to 2018, even among the unsubsidized population. Now look at the bars…
He Voted for Trump. Now He’s Running for Congress as a Pro-Pot, Pro-Coal Democrat.
Mother Jones illustration; Mark Helenowski; Getty Images On most nights during the nine-day West Virginia teacher strike last winter, Richard Ojeda could be found at his office in Logan County, gesturing wildly at his iPhone. Ojeda, a 47-year-old ex-Army paratrooper who is rarely seen outside the state Senate chamber in anything other than a tight-fitting…
A Connecticut Prison Has a Radical New Plan to Keep Young Inmates From Coming Back
This story was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Leona Godfrey was sitting down to dinner at a TGI Fridays in Orange, Connecticut, in December 2013 when she glanced at a television and saw her little brother’s name on the local news. Davon Eldemire…
Black Cube Admits It Targeted Obama Aides’ Wives
Our story so far: Team Trump hired a private intelligence firm last year to dig up dirt on Obama aides who had worked on the Iran deal. The plan is to weasel meetings with their wives and go from there. Everyone suspects the firm is Black Cube, the same one that Harvey Weinstein used to…
How Do We Get the Kids to Vote?
Andy Abeyta, Quad-City Times/Quad-City Times via ZUMA As I’m sure you all know, the latest craze among kids is the Juul, a vaping device that produces pure (flavored) nicotine hits. That’s it. No tobacco, no tar, nothing that has ever touched soil. Just nicotine. Over at the New Yorker, Jia Tolentino writes about Juuling this…
Why Do We Have So Many Short Buildings?
Tyler Cowen poses a conundrum that I’ve also wondered about: Why aren’t all tall buildings in the same neighborhood the same height? Let’s say there is a 40-story building and a 60-story building. You would think the different builders face more or less the same costs for their height decisions. If you want to own…