The Real Political Obstacle Facing Single-Payer

Universal health care is hitting an important snag in the U.S., but there could be a way around it; Democrats probably should give up on centrism if they want to win elections; meanwhile, as photo forgeries improve, are people getting better at spotting them? These discoveries and more below.

How to Sell Single-Payer Health Care Workers are not going to want to see employer-provided benefits disappear right as their taxes go up.

Woman Marries Calf, Believing It to Be Her Husband Reincarnated For one calf in rural Cambodia who popped out near the home of the recently-widowed Khim Hang, being (re)born was much like hitting the jackpot.

How Class in China Became Politically Incorrect “Never forget class struggle!” was Chairman Mao’s exhortation to the Chinese people.

The Media’s War on Trump Is Destined to Fail. Why Can’t It See That? The news media needs to win its war with Trump, and urgently so. But the goal should be more than just re-establishing the old rules of legitimacy.

By Fetishising Mathematical Models, Economists Turned Economics Into a Highly Paid Pseudoscience Despite the higher education funding crunch, it’s a bull market for academic economists.

Vatican Fires Shot at U.S. Religious Right An article being described as “explosive,” written by two allies of Pope Francis in a Vatican-reviewed publication, is taking on the “spurious alliance between politics and religious fundamentalism” in the United States.

Will We Ever Stop the Robocallers? Americans are “mad as hell” about telephone spam, says FCC chair Ajit Pai—but they may have to get used to it.

A New History of the Right Has Become an Intellectual Flashpoint Polemical books often provoke a strong response. But the argument over a new intellectual history of the right has played out with unusual intensity.

Those Reports on Google Funding Academic Research May Be 99 Percent Nonsense—but We Should Talk About That 1 Percent A large Silicon Valley corporation is funding research that serves its interests. But it’s not the one you think.

Say Goodbye to Spain’s Glorious Three-Hour Lunch Break Catalonia plans to shorten work hours—but don’t call it the end of the siesta.

Your Brain Doesn’t Contain Memories. It Is Memories. Recall your favorite memory: the big game you won; the moment you first saw your child’s face; the day you realized you had fallen in love.

Stuart Hall and the Rise of Cultural Studies In the summer of 1983, the Jamaican scholar Stuart Hall, who lived and taught in England, traveled to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to deliver a series of lectures on something called “Cultural Studies.”

The Biggest Attack in Jerusalem It began in 1967 with the expulsion of hundreds of Arab Jerusalemites from the area of the Western Wall, and continues with a series of Jewish triumphalist projects seeking to blot out the presence of Arabs.

The New York Times Rewrites the History of the Iraq War, Painting the U.S. as a Noble Democracy Lover and Iran as a Sinister Imperialist The paper of record advances an amazing feat of reality inversion.

Many People Can’t Tell When Photos Are Fake. Can You? So amid photo forgeries and our obsession these days with “fake news,” just how good are we at separating fact from fiction when it comes to photos?

Since When Is It Not Okay to Play Hardball With the Democrats? The real issue in the fight for single-payer health care in California is not cost—it is political will and political priorities.

How I Learned That the Courts Are Off-Limits to the 99 Percent I’m suing the Los Angeles Times. I’m the plaintiff. I’m the one who was wronged. The Times should be defending themselves from my accusations that they fired and libeled me as a favor to a police chief. But this is America.

Democrats Are Doubling Down on the Same Vanilla Centrism That Helped Give Us President Trump Once again, the Democratic Party finds itself unprepared to respond to its vocal left flank.