Kathleen Geier

Today’s New York Times has a really fascinating pair of articles that center on working women and how they balance their jobs and family lives. I’m pretty sure they weren’t meant to be read side by side, but doing so is an instructive exercise in compare-and-contrast. Article one amounts to one of the rich-people-porn pieces […]

Here are some recent blog posts and articles you might find interesting: — Michael Tomasky has a nice reminiscence of his boss, and later colleague, Andrew Cockburn. — Wow, Penn State has removed the statue of Joe Paterno; I really did not think they would do that. Meanwhile, the NCAA is reportedly about to announce […]

Yesterday I mentioned that attention-getting New York Times story from last week which blamed inequality on single mothers, which Katha Pollitt effectively demolished. The worst thing about that story is that it’s led to a new round of concern-trolling about single mothers. And right on schedule, at Concern Troll Central — sorry, I mean Slate […]

Hey, remember that annoying piece in the New York Times last week — you know, the one about a single mom who worked a child care center, who struggled to scrape by and support three kids with poorly paid job? The piece was so exasperating because it implicitly endorsed the sexist and patronizing frame that […]

I was saddened to hear today about the passing of left-wing journalist/provocateur Alexander Cockburn, who died of cancer at the age of 71. Cockburn was a difficult, frequently exasperating figure. First, some of the awful things: as this right-wing website gleefully notes, the man ended his days as a climate change denialist. Throughout his career, […]

File this one in the “it’s about bloody time” department: the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Obama administration, in the form of a report issued by the Education Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is recommending that “Congress to make it easier for people to discharge a portion of certain student debt […]

Here we are, a day after the horrifying events that took place in Aurora, Colorado, and the thing that chills me to the bone is how ordinary it has come to seem. A deranged gunman coolly and methodically shoots up a college campus, a high school, a military base, a museum, a supermarket at a […]

Question: does the New York Times op ed page have any quality control mechanisms? At all? Okay, we all know that there are major problems with some of their op ed columnists. First off, there’s David Brooks, that shallow, insufferably smug propagandist for the 1 percenters whose only interesting moments occur when he drops the […]

Back in grad school, I took a class in human rights policy. One aspect of the class that fascinated me was the prominence of labor and economic rights in so many of the seminal human rights documents. While the U.S. has a strong civil liberties tradition, starting with the Bill of Rights, our labor and […]

We lost two very important writers this week, and I wanted to make sure I paid my respects. The first of these was the great film critic Andrew Sarris, who died earlier this week at age 83. Sarris was among the last of a sort of “greatest generation” of influential American film critics (others in […]