Day: May 4, 2020

Colson Whitehead has won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his 2019 novel Nickel Boys. The win comes just three years after Whitehead won the Prize for his 2016 novel The Underground Railroad, making Whitehead the fourth writer ever to have won the Pulitzer for fiction twice.

The last time Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize, in April 2017, the award served as the crown jewel in a months-long coronation. The Underground Railroad, in which an enslaved woman makes a magical-realism-inflected journey out of the antebellum south, was easily 2016’s book of the year. In September of …

Update, May 4: New research from a group of political scientists affirms that mail-in voting in Colorado raised turnout more than 10 points among the most vulnerable demographics, including low-income voters, and benefited Republicans and Democrats equally. It’s powerful support for the argument that mail-in voting should be universally accessible for the November elections. The following piece, making that argument, was originally published on April 8, 2020.

The political climate in the US is tumultuous. The Covid-19 pandemic hangs over everything even as a dozen other issues — an oil crisis, a divided Democratic Party, and a corrupt, impeached president …

Even during the coronavirus pandemic, Mitch McConnell is laser-focused on one of his top priorities: advancing judges.

The Senate returns to the Hill this week following a month-long recess, despite concerns from the Capitol physician about testing shortages and coronavirus spread in DC. While the coronavirus stimulus is a major reason for lawmakers’ return, the current legislative agenda also includes a slate of unrelated priorities, including the confirmation hearing for a DC Circuit Court nominee.

Confirming judges, after all, is a major goal McConnell has had since the start of President Donald Trump’s term — and it’s one that …

President Donald Trump’s “America Together: Returning to Work” Fox News town hall event was a remarkably dishonest affair, replete with lies about topics ranging from the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine on Covid-19 to the trajectory of new coronavirus cases in the country to how tariffs work. At one point, Trump whined that he’s treated worse than Abraham Lincoln — a president who was assassinated.

But one moment of unusual honesty stood out.

With the US coronavirus death toll approaching 70,000 as of May 4 — a grim milestone significantly beyond the “50 or 60,000” number that Trump said the country was …

If you look around — and you don’t have to look very hard — you might have seen that there are a lot of items that now have the word “fuck” printed on them. These aren’t exotic or unusual things: socks, pencils, shirts, keychains, desk calendars, books, earrings. Even bars of soap, which might be handy for washing your mouth out after use.

I started to notice this commercial drift a few years ago when someone gave me a cup with a cartoony cat image and the statement “Cats Don’t Give a Fuck.” Not that that’s not true, but it …