Timothy Noah is the author of The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It and a Contributing Editor of the Washington Monthly. This article originally appeared on Backbencher
Honoring the Brilliant Caricaturist, Vint Lawrence
Vint Lawrence, a brilliant caricaturist for the Washington Monthly, the New Republic, and the Washington Post, died April 9th at the age of 76 of complications from acute myeloid leukemia. At a dinner at the Dupont Circle restaurant Otello in the late 1980s I once heard Christopher Hitchens introduce Vint as “the cartoonist in this… Read more »
The Monthly Interview: Ralph Nader
In his new book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, the consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader argues that on many issues, from undeclared wars to unprosecuted Wall Street crimes, liberal and conservative citizens increasingly agree with each other, and that, by working together, they can take back Washington…. Read more »
The Ethics of Dog Crap Disposal
The mayor of San Marino, Calif., resigned June 17 after he got caught picking up a bag of dog feces lying near a public sidewalk and tossing it onto his neighbor’s property. The neighbor, Philip Lao, had posted two “No Poop Zone” signs that the mayor, Dennis Kneier, may have viewed as a provocation. Kneier… Read more »
Stay Put, Young Man
Americans used to be exceptional for how often they moved. But that once-powerful source of both efficiency and upward mobility is now in steep decline.
The Glory of the Commons
Jonathan Rowe’s brilliant posthumous meditation on the shared, non-commercialized realms of life that sustain us.
