Vann R. Newkirk II
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Charles Krupa / AP Trump, Warren, and America's Racial Essentialism
The senator’s release of DNA-test results inadvertently validates the president’s taunts about her claimed Native American ancestry.
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Kevin Lamarque / Reuters Kanye West’s Quixotic Quest
The man who once declared that a president and a party had no use for black people is now a pawn in a game dedicated to marginalizing those same people.
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Letitia Stein / Reuters In the Georgia Governor’s Race, the Game Is Black Votes
The Republican candidate and Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp denies charges that he is attempting to suppress African American turnout for political advantage—but advocates say barriers to the ballot help his cause all the same.
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Whitney Curtis / Reuters The Trump Era Is Destroying Black Civics, but Delivering Black Votes
A new survey from The Atlantic and the Public Religion Research Institute finds that the past two years have eroded African American participation in politics and activism, even in a watershed election year for minorities.
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Leah Millis / Reuters The Fate of Obamacare’s Most Popular Provision
In the 2018 elections, Republican lawmakers are torn between their ongoing pledges to repeal or oppose the health-care reform, and overwhelming support for its protections for people with preexisting conditions.
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Win McNamee / Getty Kavanaugh Could Carry On Trump’s Agenda for Decades
The Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh played to the president in unflinchingly partisan testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
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J. Scott Applewhite / AP The Kavanaugh-Ford Hearing Is About the Tyranny of Male Power
Thursday’s hearing could serve as a breaking point in American politics. Or not.
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NASA The 150-Year Mission to Reforest Puerto Rico
One year after Hurricane Maria, community efforts to replace trees downed by the storm reflect optimism about the island’s future and a focus on sustainability.
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Carlos Barria / Reuters The Situation in Puerto Rico Is Untenable
Although the effort to rebuild Puerto Rico has made progress, the island is still confronting questions of status, economics, and emigration that Hurricane Maria helped expose.
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Jonathan Ernst / Reuters Donald Trump Doesn’t Care About Puerto Rico
Recent comments by the president that serve to erase the severity of Hurricane Maria’s death toll on the island confirm that he’s never really seen the disaster as anything more than a conspiracy against him.
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Morgana Wingard / Getty Cape Town Is an Omen
Climate change is going to revolutionize politics in cities across the world.
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Patrick Semansky / AP A Heat-Check for Progressive Democrats
In Thursday’s Senate primary in Delaware, Kerri Evelyn Harris hopes to capitalize on a grassroots energy that has seen black, female, and LGBTQ candidates redefining the left wing of the Democratic Party.
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Yuri Gripas / Reuters The Farm Bill’s Threat to Food Security
The major agricultural and welfare proposal currently before a conference committee would reduce poor Americans’ access to nutrition, even as the USDA acknowledges its food-stamp program has been instrumental in fighting hunger.
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Chuck Burton / AP North Carolina's Gerrymandering Drama Is Only Going to Get Worse
Federal judges have ruled—again—that the state’s congressional map is unconstitutional. But it just used that map to elect candidates for November.
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Carlos Giust / AP A Year After Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico Finally Knows How Many People Died
A new, definitive study from George Washington University finds that almost 3,000 people lost their lives—and highlights the government’s failures before and after the storm.
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Jim Urquhart / Reuters Trump’s White-Nationalist Pipeline
The most enduring scandal in and around the White House might not be corruption, but rather the administration’s constant embrace of bigotry from white-supremacist and far-right groups.
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Gosia Wozniacka / AP The Victims of Climate Change Are Already Here
With a new global summit approaching, communities in the southern United States are calling attention to the disaster scenarios they currently face.
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Karen Pulfer Focht / AP Trump Can't Even Honor Aretha Franklin Properly
The president described the deceased soul legend first as a person who “worked for me,” a telling remark in his ongoing disparagement of black women.
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Associated Press Aretha Franklin’s Revolution
The soul singer was an architect of the civil-rights movement as much as a witness to it.
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AP Washington, D.C., Is the Next Front for the Alt-Right
The city’s fraught racial history is a perfect parallel for the ways that white supremacy actually shapes spaces and could change the country.
