Cities have distinctive capacities to transform conflict into the civic. In contrast, national governments tend to militarize conflict. This does not mean that cities are peaceful spaces. On the ...
Tag: The Big Picture
The Big Picture: Building the Wall
Since November 2016, I’ve unfriended one family member on Facebook, and have been tempted to unfriend others. I blocked a cousin who lives in Texas and posted about Mexicans taking American jobs. It ...
The Big Picture: Confronting Manhood after Trump
If it were fiction, it would have been dismissed as preposterous. America elected a grotesque, slobbering id to the highest office of the most powerful country in the world: a thundering narcissist ...
The Big Picture: Trump’s Charisma
Accepting the presidential nomination at the 2016 Republican convention, Donald Trump painted a picture of America in crisis, with “poverty and violence at home” and “war and destruction abroad.” ...
The Big Picture: Unequal America
The US was once widely—and quite uncynically—viewed as a land of prosperity and opportunity. During the expansionary decades of the mid-20th century, it was treated as the world’s test case on the ...
The Big Picture: Violence and Criminal Justice
On a rainy day in December of 2013, I visited the Heritage Foundation, one of the country’s most prominent conservative think tanks, to talk about how to reform the criminal justice system. I sat at ...
The Big Picture: Rule by Misrule
Posters declaring “No Trump, no KKK, no Fascist USA!” and the like feature in most anti-Trump rallies. Viscerally, it’s clear what the posters mean: no more threats to children of illegal immigrants ...
The Big Picture: Evangelical Voters
In the 2016 US presidential election over 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump—more even than for Mitt Romney in 2012 or for John McCain in 2008. Candidate Hillary Clinton had her …
The Big Picture: School of Trump
Since Trump’s inauguration in January, education policy has not been a priority for the new administration. And, given his views on the matter, including an obsession with promoting alternatives to ...
The Big Picture: Coalthink
If we trust the president, we believe that he is, if nothing else, a businessman. Towers glittering across real estates seem to proclaim the truth of this; but when it comes to coal, both business ...
The Big Picture: Trump on Twitter
On its face, Twitter appears to be a quintessentially democratic medium. It promotes individualized expression, helps build social networks, and, until recently, seemed to epitomize the decentralized ...
The Big Picture: Protest, Violent and Nonviolent
Contemporary protests renew debates about whether or not violence is justified, raising questions about what even counts as violence. The demonstrations planned by right-wing groups for late August ...
The Big Picture: Resource Extraction
Trump has a range of cons going, but one of the most outrageous is this: he is about to fleece his working-class supporters in the Rust Belt, coal country, and the rural Pacific Northwest ...
The Big Picture: The Office of the Presidency
To borrow a phrase from his own reckless comment on North Korea, Donald Trump has debased the office of the Presidency to an extent “like the world has never seen.” His policies are capricious, often ...
The Big Picture: Defending Society
Why, today, are many of the most antidemocratic voices in the United States not merely protected by Constitutional freedoms but draping themselves in them? Neoliberal political culture, now almost 40 ...
The Big Picture: Multiracial Cooperation
During periods when people are beset with economic anxiety, they become more receptive to political messages that deflect attention away from the real and complex sources of their problems. To ...
The Big Picture
This public symposium is a collective effort to assess the rise of Trump and the impact of America’s unsettling turn toward authoritarian rule. It’s a call for us to pull back from the deluge of tweets …