Tag: intervening years
Christine Blasey Ford Testifies Again
“I am here today not because I want to be. I am terrified,” Christine Blasey Ford said in the fall of 2018, introducing herself to the Senate Judiciary Committee and a television audience of millions. Early in One Way Back, the memoir Ford has written about her testimony, its origin, and its aftermath, she repeats the line. She feels that terror again, she writes. She is afraid of having her words taken out of context, of being a public
Trump Is Coming for Obamacare Again
Donald Trump’s renewed pledge on social media and in campaign rallies to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act has put him on a collision course with a widening circle of Republican constituencies directly benefiting from the law.
In 2017, when Trump and congressional Republicans tried and failed to repeal the ACA, also known as Obamacare, they faced the core contradiction that many of the law’s principal beneficiaries were people and institutions that favored the GOP. That list included lower-middle-income
Lost Boys: The Violent Narcissism of Angry Young Men
Some years ago, I got a call from an analyst at the National Counterterrorism Center. After yet another gruesome mass shooting (this time, it was Dylann Roof’s attack on a Bible-study group at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, that killed nine and wounded one), I had written an article about the young men who perpetrate such crimes. I suggested that an overview of these killers showed them, in general, to be young losers who failed to
The Court Ketanji Brown Jackson Knew
This is not an article about Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. It is, rather, a look back at the Supreme Court she once knew—knew intimately, in fact, during the 1999–2000 Court term, when she was a law clerk to Justice Stephen Breyer, the justice whom President Joe Biden recently nominated her to replace.
From a certain perspective, nothing is unique about Judge Jackson’s status as a former Supreme Court law clerk. A majority of the justices are former clerks, Breyer among
23 Great Movies the Oscars Couldn’t Help but Recognize
Every year when the Oscar nominations are announced, I have fun keeping an eye out for a particularly rare phenomenon: the “lone screenplay” nominee—that is, a movie that’s recognized only in the category of Best Original Screenplay or Best Adapted Screenplay. While every member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gets to vote on each of the winners, nominees are chosen by specific branches composed of industry professionals. AMPAS’ screenwriter group is often responsible for elevating riveting