If We Could Learn From History
Discarding the limits on a leader's time in office is a classic autocrat's move. So when Xi Jinping began to clear a path for an indefinite term as China's president, he dimmed many once-bright hopes ...
9 Mar 201849min
Goodbye Black History Month, Hello Black Future
Moviegoers across America are filling theaters to see, as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer describes it, “a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and co...
2 Mar 201852min
How Innocence Becomes Irrelevant (No Way Out, Part III)
After Rick Magnis, a Texas judge, reviewed the evidence in Benjamine Spencer’s case, he recommended a new trial for Spencer “on the grounds of actual innocence.” But Texas’s highest criminal court too...
23 Feb 201857min
Who Killed Jeffrey Young? (No Way Out, Part II)
In part one of our three-part series "No Way Out," Barbara Bradley Hagerty told the story of how Benjamine Spencer was convicted for the murder of Jeffrey Young, and how much of the evidence that led ...
20 Feb 201825min
No Way Out, Part I
In 1987, Jeffrey Young was robbed and killed, and his body was left on a street in the poor neighborhood of West Dallas. Benjamine Spencer was tried and convicted for the attack. Spencer was black, 22...
16 Feb 201855min
From 'I, Tonya' to 'Cat Person,' Is 'Based On a True Story' Better?
Conor Friedersdorf recently argued in The Atlantic that in this moment, when the truth is bitterly contested, fiction presents us an opportunity. It allows us to step into another person’s perspective...
9 Feb 201851min
Paul Manafort and How the Swamp Was Made
“Conventional wisdom suggests that the temptations of Washington, D.C., corrupt all the idealists, naïfs, and ingenues who settle there," Franklin Foer writes in his cover story for the March issue of...
2 Feb 201854min
Who Gets to be American?
Once again, immigration is at the top of America's legislative agenda, as it has been, seemingly every generation, for much of the nation's history. But while many recent discussions of immigration ha...
26 Jan 201847min
