A Mile Wide, An Inch Deep

Snap judgments walking home from the metro: Black man = bad. Latino man = bad. White man = bad. Black man in a suit = good. Black person of indeterminate gender carrying Hello Kitty backpack = very, very good. Yes, this is the person I will be keeping up with on the path!

Sitting on the beach at the Ritz Carlton discussing with Jesse the futility of saving for the boys' college, I'm reminded again of the need for a "confiscatory" top marginal tax rate. (The Ritz plays no small part in my thinking.) What? I'm going to save and save so that university presidents can collectively raise tuition 1,200% over three decades and reward themselves with multimillion dollar salaries? Truly, I'd be more inclined if it all didn't seem so laughably impossible to think we could ever put aside enough to keep up with the tuition explosion. But if there's a solution, it's not in more federal grants to students or cheaper loans -- wherein I agree with my conservative brethren that federal policies have helped enable the universities. It's in getting at the root cause of the problem. Then Jesse alludes to the old blackmail race-to-the-top (or bottom) dilemma that results in Wall Street CEOs getting 6-figure bonuses while taking...

Democratic control of Congress, 2007-2010 (two years with Pres. Bush and two with Pres. Obama), was among the most productive in US history. As a staffer, it left me exhausted but with a tremendous feeling of accomplishment, like when a burst of energy lets you get through a 5-page list of household to-do items you've been putting off for months. In contrast, the last four years of Republican control of the House, 2011-2014, have been like those days where you can't even buy bread -- just about the most basic act of adulthood -- without drama because your 4-year-old has taken off his shoes and is lying in the aisle screaming for candy. Every single act of governing has been a struggle and a crisis, no matter how elemental or routine. I'm left feeling exhausted, but with nothing accomplished, because I've been forced to use up all of my energy just passing a straight funding bill, the household equivalent of putting on socks. Will next Congress under a united Republ...

The theft of Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities’ personal photos has prompted a now-predictable online discussion about victim-blaming, with self-appointed moralists condemning Lawrence for taking nude or sexually-explicit pictures in the first place and her defenders objecting to any discussion of taking reasonable precautions against becoming a victim. It’s a repeat of the societal conversations we have around rape, and while I get it, it wears me down. The Huffington Post posted a tweet from Farhad Manjoo , “I’ve never heard anyone respond to financial hacking by saying, Just don’t use online banking. That’s what you get for using credit cards.” But the truth is that we blame victims—of crime, of misfortune—all the time, blaming them for risky behavior, for bad one-off decisions, even as we ignore how many risks we take ourselves, or how many of our own stupid decisions turn out well when they might just as easily have been deadly. And here’s a test case: If you hear that s...