All posts tagged: single person

The Supreme Court’s Colorado Opinion Is About Fear, Not Law

The Supreme Court’s Colorado Opinion Is About Fear, Not Law

Published by skeptic

This is The Trump Trials by George T. Conway III, a newsletter that chronicles the former president’s legal troubles. Sign up here. You can’t always get what you want. What Mick Jagger said about life applies with equal, perhaps even greater, force to litigation. Like life, litigation has its ups and downs. It reflects human fears and frailties—because judges, lawyers, and litigants are human. Law is never perfect, and never will be. And so it is with the United States Supreme Court’s decision yesterday in Trump v. Anderson, which unanimously reversed the Supreme Court of Colorado’s decision barring Donald Trump from the state’s presidential-primary ballot. Trump’s brazen effort to end constitutional democracy in America should have been the textbook example of the sort of behavior that would lead to someone being barred from holding public office under the Fourteenth Amendment. But it was not to be, and never was to be. I talked with a lot of people about the Colorado case over the past three months, and I didn’t come across a single person …

90 Minutes in a Van With Dean Phillips

90 Minutes in a Van With Dean Phillips

Published by skeptic

Like many politicians, Representative Dean Phillips likes to look people in the eye. And because he’s a politician, Phillips can glean things, just as President George W. Bush did when he peered into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and saw his soul. “I’ve looked Benjamin Netanyahu in the eye,” Phillips told a group of students at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, last week. And? “I did not like what I saw,” Phillips said of the Israeli prime minister. “I do not like his government. He’s got to go.” Philips has also looked into Donald Trump’s eyes. That, too, was ominous. It was a few years ago, and the former president had invited a bunch of new House members to the White House for an introductory visit. “I looked him in the eye for the better part of an hour,” Phillips told me. And? “I saw right through him,” Phillips said. “I know exactly how to handle weaklings like Donald Trump.” How? “You’ll see,” he said. “Why would I give away my special sauce?” Phillips was telling …

An album about fatherhood and healing

An album about fatherhood and healing

Published by skeptic

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Vann R. Newkirk II, a senior editor and the host of the podcasts Floodlines and Holy Week. Vann is spending time with Sampha’s new album, about the starts and stops of healing; marveling at the storytelling in The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois; and sneaking off to build his son’s Legos while he’s asleep. First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: The Culture Survey: Vann R. Newkirk II A musical artist who means a lot to me: I have to give a shout-out to Sampha, whose new album, Lahai, has been playing nonstop around here. I’m a major Sampha fan, and his previous album, Process, was a meditation on grief, prompted by …

If You’re Worried About the Climate, Move Your Money

If You’re Worried About the Climate, Move Your Money

Published by skeptic

A decade and change ago, as the world woke up to the catastrophe of climate change, campus activists were looking for ways to heal the environment at scale. They landed on an unusual one: the free market. Climate change is the world’s biggest unpriced externality, in that neither the producers nor the consumers of fossil fuels pay for the damage they cause to the environment. Gas is too cheap; ultimately, every living thing on the planet bears the cost. Perhaps activists could get the market to price that externality in by nudging investors to divest. Students at dozens of universities, galvanized by the nonprofit 350.org, began protesting at academic-leadership and investment offices, asking for endowments to quit holding shares in fossil-fuel companies. The students picketed. They marched. They conducted sit-ins. They held votes. “You do not want your institution to be on the wrong side of this issue,” Stephen Mulkey, the president of Maine’s Unity College, the first to divest using 350.org’s guidelines, told Inside Climate News in 2012. “We realized that investing in fossil …

It’s Time to Bring Back Landlines

It’s Time to Bring Back Landlines

Published by skeptic

Until last month, I hadn’t kept a landline phone at home since 2004. I deemed it so useless that for a while I even used the digital phone service that came with my cable subscription as a fax line instead. I did eventually hook up a home telephone in 2013, but only briefly, on a lark: It was a Western Electric 500 that I’d bought for my daughter at a vintage shop. The device was just a curiosity, and a way to re-create the lost catharsis of “hanging up” a call. Even then, the home telephone was long dead. According to the CDC’s National Health Interview Survey, which has been tracking American telephone use since 2003, fewer than 30 percent of American adults lived in a home with a landline phone last year. Those who still have one may have set it up ages ago—more than half of Americans over the age of 65 rely on landlines, and fewer than 2 percent of Americans use them as their only telephone. None of this is surprising. …