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November 8, 2023
Depravity Be Damned
Rhiannon Hamam
The first legal document on which I ever signed my name as a licensed attorney was a writ of habeas corpus for a man who had been in jail for six months without ever appearing before a judge, without ever being legally charged with a crime, and without ever speaking to an attorney. I had learned about the Sixth Amendment in law school; in multiple classes I had read Supreme...
November 8, 2023
A National Seminar
Aziz Rana
American constitutional politics has a terrible bottleneck problem. Virtually all meaningful debate and reform is funneled into the judiciary. Its dominance is often defended on the grounds that, as law professor and diplomat Eugene Rostow contended in the 1950s, the bench — with the Supreme Court at the top — oversees a “national seminar.” According to this view, the Court, through a reasoned and conscientious engagement with a broad range...
November 8, 2023
A Protean Test
Ben Sobel
Supreme Court justices from Brett Kavanaugh to Sonia Sotomayor are on the record venerating “judicial restraint.” In its most generic sense, the phrase refers to the principle that courts should avoid adjudicating questions inessential to the disputes before them. But restraint is one thing, and timorousness another. For all the complaints about an imperious Court, the flaw in one recent decision is its timidity. In 1984, Vanity Fair hired Andy...
November 8, 2023
Liberal Ranting
Samuel Moyn
As the Supreme Court’s reputation among liberals has plummeted in recent years, the most common response has been ranting. Liberal ranting is defined by its more or less open desire to get the Court back for liberals, without diminishing its potency. For that reason, liberal ranting ignores or opposes proposals to disempower the Court — at most endorsing important but minor sorts of reform such as term limits for the...
November 8, 2023
A Racist Cause-and-Effect Story
Andy Liu
I remember hearing in high school that I needed to score about 200 points higher on my SATs than an otherwise equivalent white student for an equal shot at college admissions. I don’t recall my reaction at the time, but it wasn’t anger. Most likely, I felt teenage self-loathing over how nerdy the statistic implied Asians were. The memory came back to me a few years ago, when Students for...
November 8, 2023
Editors’ Note | Corrupt Organizations
The Editors
In our last issue, Piper French took aim at a statute that, she warned, was ballooning out of control. Debuted in the ’70s to curtail the Mafia, RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) enabled prosecutors to go after Mob bosses for crimes carried out by their underlings. Decades later, it’s now being deployed against targets as disparate as rappers and schoolteachers, on alarmingly shaky grounds. Since we published that...
November 6, 2023
“The Logic of Plunder” | An Interview with Verónica Gago
The Drift
Over the past five years, leftist political parties have swept into power across Latin America, in what has been called a “pink tide.” In Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, and Chile, politicians have channeled collective anger against reactionary regimes, catastrophic debt, and violence against women and Indigenous people into broad political victories. Verónica Gago is a professor of social sciences at the University of Buenos Aires and the National University...
November 2, 2023
Grief | Poetry
Harmony Holiday
There’s a video of a lynx burying another lynx in the snow in what people on the Internet perceive as a show of mourning and care. It’s gone viral as a testament to how warm and civilized the beast really is. A quiet polemic. The video is severed and missing the first part, where the one performing the burial killed and ate the carrion it’s now submerging, which it will...
November 2, 2023
Something very much like sadness and very much like develish enjoyment | Poetry
Harmony Holiday
Oblivion is full of so much optimism it’s almost time for bombs to go off and I haven’t selected to right hue of lipstick the one that suggests ripeness with a hint of ironic smoldering that I’m on the market that I’m sold and about to blow up cherry mist in the dust of biofilms white teeth chattering as debris flies by in arks of broken memory dendrites of hypothetical...
November 2, 2023
Truth to Power | Our Dissident Obsession
Alexander Wells
If you are concerned about your children — if you suspect they might be taking their freedoms for granted, or failing to sufficiently appreciate the Great American Experiment — then perhaps the Dissident Project can help. This initiative, founded in 2022 by a Venezuelan-born Columbia graduate student named Daniel Di Martino, offers to bring real-life dissidents to present at your kid’s high school, gratis. Its mission? To inform the youth...
