Featured
They Don’t Want to Live in Lincoln’s America. By Jamelle Bouie / NYT
Bouie revisits the immediate reception of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, reminding readers that it was not always treated as the untouchable cornerstone of American democracy. Some critics at the time, including newspaper editorialists, derided Lincoln’s claim that the United States was “conceived in liberty” and “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” They pointed to the Constitution’s explicit protections of slavery as evidence that Lincoln’s vision was a distortion.
Bouie uses this historical critique to highlight a persistent theme in American politics: resistance to a vision of the United States grounded in equality and multiracial democracy. Just as Lincoln’s opponents clung to the idea that the Constitution enshrined racial hierarchy, many modern conservatives reject efforts to build a more inclusive democracy. For them, Lincoln’s America — a nation re-founded on equality after the Civil War — is not the America they wish to preserve.
The essay suggests that today’s political struggles echo the same divide Lincoln faced: whether America will be a country dedicated to equality and freedom for all, or one that accepts hierarchy and exclusion as its foundation. Read more
Political / Social
What Can’t Trump Wreck? By Thomas B. Edsall / NYT
As President Trump continues his march through America’s democratic institutions, trampling constitutional restraints and silencing dissent, one of the most pressing questions is: What damage is beyond repair, and what can still be undone?
If future presidents, Democratic and Republican, follow Trump’s path, the damage he has inflicted will become permanent, integrated into the American system, corrupting it for the foreseeable future. Read more
Related: Project 2026: Trump’s Plan to Rig the Next Election. By Ari Berman / Mother Jones
Related: Goodbye, meritocracy. Hello, Trump loyalty tests. By Lisa Needham / Daily Kos
Chicago’s Mayor: The National Guard Isn’t What We Need. By Brandon Johnson / NYT
Chicagoans love and defend our city fiercely, and for good reason. From the Garfield Park Conservatory to the South Shore Cultural Center, to our more than 600 parks, to our world-renowned research and academic institutions, our pride is justified.
It is also true that Chicago’s gun violence and crime have long been a political punchline. But lowering crime rates here does not require an occupation of our city by armed members of the National Guard, as the White House continues to threaten us with. Chicagoans, including survivors of violence, have spoken out against such an extreme measure. Read more
Related: Trump is invading Chicago — just like he promised. By Chauncey Devega / Salon
Related: Trump’s Fascist Game Plan: If He Can’t Tame Russia, He’ll Take Chicago. By Michael Tomasky / TNR
Related: Trump’s Chicago Occupation Could Cost 4X Housing City Homeless. By Nick Turse / The Intercept
Sotomayor says SCOTUS ruling lets ICE “seize anyone who looks Latino.” By Garrett Owen / Salon
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted the Supreme Court’s decision to allow wide-scale ICE raids and immigration stops in Los Angeles to continue on Monday. In a scathing dissent, she said the court was giving the Department of Homeland Security a green light to “seize anyone who looks Latino.”
The Monday ruling lifted an injunction on “roving” ICE actions in Southern California. That order from a lower court judge barred agents from carrying out detentions based on ethnicity, languages being spoken, employment or location. Read more
Related: The Supreme Court Just Gave the OK to Racial Profiling. By Elie Mystal / The Nation
Related: How to Resist Trump’s Militarization of America. By Andrew Lanham / TNR
Judge temporarily halts firing of Fed governor Lisa Cook. By Andrew Ackerman / Wash Post
A federal judge late Tuesday temporarily blocked President Donald Trump from removing Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, an early victory in her push to remain on the central bank board while she challenges the president’s authority to dismiss her.
The case is drawing intense attention in Washington, with the Fed’s independence on the line. Read more
Harris says it was ‘recklessness’ to defer to Bidens on reelection decision. By Patrick Svitek / Wash Post
In her forthcoming memoir, Harris also writes about not feeling supported by Biden’s staff, who she said “rarely” defended her.
Former vice president Kamala Harris writes in an upcoming book that it was “recklessness” to leave President Joe Biden to decide with first lady Jill Biden whether he should have sought reelection at age 80, a decision between the two that ultimately unraveled in last year’s White House race. “The stakes were simply too high,” Harris said in an excerpt from the book published Wednesday by the Atlantic. “This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.” Read more
Mamdani takes big lead in NYC mayoral race, new poll shows. By Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing / Politico
Forty-six percent of likely voters said they would vote for the democratic socialist in the race for the city’s top seat.
Zohran Mamdani holds a strong lead in the race for New York City mayor, with remaining votes largely split between former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, a New York Times/Siena College poll released Tuesday showed. Read more
Gov. Wes Moore tamps down presidential talk, launches reelection bid. By Erin Cox / Wash Post
Moore, 46, promised to serve a full term if reelected next year to lead deeply Democratic Maryland — and forgo the 2028 presidential election.
Education
Emory University to discontinue DEI programs, offices. By Zoe Seller / WABE (PBS)
Emory University Interim President Leah Ward Sears announced Wednesday that the college will discontinue its diversity, equity and inclusion offices and programs.
The decision was guided by the Office of General Counsel and other campus officials, she said in a letter to the Emory community. “We will also work closely with each impacted employee to provide appropriate support and assistance through the transition,” Sears said. She added that she understands the decision will generate questions. Read more
Related: Harvard’s Mixed Victory. Jeannie Suk Gersen / The New Yorker
Don’t Let Trump Destroy Higher Education. By Kevin Light-Roth / The Progressive Magazine
Without question, this is the darkest hour for higher education in America. School administrators have no good options, and only one moral choice of action: resist. Preserve academic integrity at all costs, even if it means losing funding. Do not allow this administration to dictate what universities are allowed to teach, or whom they are allowed to enroll. And, above all, do not let it dictate what students, professors, or anyone else on a college campus is allowed to say.
I’m sure many decision-makers in higher education have assumed that any changes they agree to will be temporary and reversible. But what if they’re wrong? Read more
Related: ED Rule-Making Agenda Includes Accreditation, Title VI. By Jessica Blake / Inside Higher Ed.
In a Trump era, Black students flock to HBCUs, ‘where their history isn’t being erased’, says Spelman College president. By David Smith / The Guardian
For HBCUs these are the best of times and the worst of times. As Trump takes aim at elite institutions such as Harvard and Columbia, HBCUs are flying below the radar and witnessing a surge in applications. But they face difficulties of their own.
“As the society becomes more anti-Black in its expression, we see students seeking out HBCUs as communities where they will feel affirmed, included and not have to deal with a lot of unnecessary distractions that are rooted in their identity as Black students. As people are talking about eliminating historical references in museums, for example, all of that fuels interest on the part of Black students in HBCUs because they know that’s a place where their history is not being erased. Read more
World
Putin’s Message to Ukraine, Europe and Trump: I Won’t Back Down. Anton Troianovski / NYT
With escalating airstrikes, the Russian leader appears determined to demonstrate that he will dictate the terms for any end to the war.
On Sunday, Russia attacked Ukraine with its largest missile and drone barrage of the war. Then, on Wednesday, tensions shot up with the West, as numerous Russian drones flew over Poland in a striking aerial incursion into a NATO country. Read more
Israel says it’s bombing its way to peace. The region fears more chaos. By Ishaan Tharoor / Wash Post
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the strike on Doha could “open the door to an end of the war.” Nobody in the region is buying it. A building shows damage Tuesday after an Israeli attack that targeted Hamas members in Doha, Qatar.
Qatar is a close U.S. ally and hosts the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East. Since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel, Doha has also been a pivotal staging ground for fitful diplomatic efforts to forge a ceasefire in Gaza. Much to the ire of the Israeli political establishment and commentariat, the Qataris have allowed Hamas delegations to maintain a presence in their capital for years, as part of the petro-state’s self-styled role as a global intermediary and peace broker. Read more
Related: What to Know About Israel’s Airstrike on Hamas in Qatar. By Ephrat Livni / NYT
Pentagon Official: Trump Boat Strike Was a Criminal Attack on Civilians. By Nick Turse / The Intercept
A current DoD official and many military legal experts say the U.S. attack on a boat in the Caribbean near Venezuela broke international law.
“The U.S. is now directly targeting civilians. Drug traffickers may be criminals but they aren’t combatants,” the Department of Defense official said. “When Trump fired the military’s top lawyers the rest saw the writing on the wall, and instead of being a critical firebreak they are now a rubber stamp complicit in this crime.” Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
Traitors to the Earth: Fascism, Christian Nationalism, and the Tech Elite. By Kelly Hayes / Truthout Podcast
Today we are talking about technofascism, Christian Nationalism, and the apocalyptic politics of the right.
We will be hearing from Astra Taylor, who recently co-authored a piece called “The Rise of End Times Fascism” with Naomi Klein. In their piece, Astra and Naomi describe the supremacist siege mentality of the tech billionaires and Evangelical Christians who are currently working to rewrite our reality—and what it might take to stop them. Astra is a writer, organizer, and documentarian. Read more and listen here
Related: The Intellectual Vacuity of the National Conservatives. By Jonathan Chait / The Atlantic
At public hearing of White House religion panel, Trump rails against anti-Christian bias. By Jack Jenkins / RNS
In a speech on religious liberty given at the Museum of the Bible on Monday (Sept. 8), President Donald Trump vowed his administration would combat “anti-Christian bias,” spurring cheers from the crowd at an event that was almost entirely focused on Christianity.
“There is a tremendous anti-Christian bias,” said Trump at a public hearing of the White House Religious Liberty Commission, created by executive order in May. “We don’t hear about it. You hear about antisemitic, but you don’t hear about anti-Christian. They have a strong anti-Christian bias, but we’re ending that rapidly, I will tell you — we’re in a much different world today than we were one year ago.” Read more
Finding Faith In The Kite Runner’s Story Of Redemption. By Debbie Almontaser / Patheos
Some of the most meaningful moments of spiritual reflection in my life have come from unexpected places—not from the pulpit, the mosque, or a religious text, but from the soft glow of a theater screen.
For me, one film stands out: The Kite Runner, based on Khaled Hosseini’s novel. It’s not marketed as a “religious” film, but every frame drips with themes my faith holds dear—redemption, justice, mercy, and the unshakable power of truth. I remember sitting in the dark, surrounded by strangers, feeling my heart pulled into Kabul’s dusty streets and the complex web of love, loyalty, and betrayal that Hosseini so skillfully wove. Read more
Related: Faith-Based Education Is Having a Moment. By Chris Butler / Christianity Today
Historical / Cultural
Trump vs. Truth: The Fight for America’s History. By Jeffrey Toobin / NYT Podcast
Jeffrey Toobin talks with Bryan Stevenson about surviving the politics of fear in 2025.
President Trump’s attacks on the Smithsonian Museum for being too “woke” in its exhibits are part of a broader effort to control America’s story. Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer and the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, has created institutions that confront the nation’s painful past to preserve an honest vision of history. In this conversation with Jeffrey Toobin, he argues that while America has much to celebrate, whitewashing its history lets its mistakes — and their consequences — live on. Read more and listen here
The Courtroom Gladiator Who ‘Made America America.’ By Ed Rampell / The Progressive Magazine
The new documentary ‘Becoming Thurgood: America’s Social Architect’ constructs a saga for the ages.
An honest appraisal of our history reveals there has been a wide gap between the reality of the United States and the ideals toward which the country has aspired. According to author and academic Wil Haygood, Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court Justice, is one of the key individuals who has tried to close that gap by moving us closer to our lofty original aspirations. Haygood says that in doing so, this battling barrister “made America America.” Read more
U.S. Took Gullah Geechee Land in WWII. They Want It Back. By Adam Mahoney / Capital B
Harris Neck’s residents confront the legacy of federal land grabs and the struggle for reparative justice under the threat of climate change. “We need to let everybody know our history, because the more of us understand our story, this will continue and spread,” said Willie Moran, who, along with other Gullah Geechee descendants from Harris Neck, Georgia, is fighting for the return of their ancestral land decades after it was taken by the U.S. government.
For generations, Black communities across the United States have watched their land vanish under the banner of the “public good.” Perhaps there is no stronger example of this than in Harris Neck. In 1942, the federal government seized Moran’s family’s land and dozens of others in the community for a national security project and promised one day to return it. Yet, still today, it remains in the hands of the government. Read more
Facing Defunding, Indigenous Cultural Workers Say They Cannot Be Suppressed. By Marianne Dhenin / Truthout
The proposed elimination of the National Endowment for the Humanities threatens Indigenous libraries and arts programs.
The Trump administration’s efforts to reshape federal cultural institutions as part of a broader attack on what the president characterizes as “woke” or diversity, equity, and inclusion policies have left many Indigenous arts and culture institutions in a challenging position, according to leaders at those institutions as well as culture workers and advocates who spoke to Truthout. Read more
Kara Walker Deconstructs a Statue, and a Myth. Siddhartha Mitter / NYT
As part of the group exhibition “Monuments,” the artist took a Stonewall Jackson bronze and transformed it into a radically new, unsettled thing.
On Jan. 6, 2022, while an uneasy nation marked the first anniversary of the violent attack on the United States Capitol, Hamza Walker was rushing to Virginia to extract a statue of a Confederate general and move it across state lines. Then Walker made a call to Kara Walker, the renowned artist whose work has long plumbed, in an acerbic vein, the legacy of enslavement and the Civil War in the American psyche. She has pushed this method to an extreme. Offered the Stonewall Jackson statue, with no restrictions on how to use it, she has taken it apart and reassembled it — deconstructing the equestrian form, to render horse and rider in a kind of melted mutant grotesque. It is a radically new sculpture made from the old. Read more
Sports
80 Years Ago, A Jewish Radical and Two Negro League Stars Led a Crusade to Integrate Baseball That Paved the Way for Jackie Robinson. By Peter Dreier / Znetwork
The little known story about Sam Nahem, Leon Day, and Willard Brown who in 1945 played on a field in the shadow of Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Germany and broke down historic barriers.
Eighty years ago this week—on September 8, 1945—a little-known episode in the struggle to challenge racial segregation took place in, of all places, Germany’s Nuremberg Stadium, where Adolf Hitler had previously addressed Nazi Party rallies. It was led by Sam Nahem, a left-wing Jewish pitcher who had a brief career in the major leagues, and included two Negro League stars, Leon Day and Willard Brown, who, like other African Americans, were banned from major league teams. Their efforts were part of the wider “Double Victory” campaign during the war to beat fascism overseas and racism and anti-Semitism at home. Read more
Referee Danny Crawford goes into Basketball Hall of Fame with respect from players, peers. By Mia Berry / Andscape
Longtime NBA referee is the second African American official to be inducted into Hoop Hall
Danny Crawford never scored a basket in the NBA, drew up a play or wore a team’s jersey. Yet after more than three decades officiating, his calm demeanor, consistency and command of the game made him one of the NBA’s most trusted officials. Now, the longtime referee is receiving the sport’s highest honor. Read more
Consider the Quarterback. By Louisa Thomas / The New Yorker
The position is a uniquely American institution—a calling, connected to foundational myths about leadership and manhood. Why does it matter so much?Jalen Hurts, of the Philadelphia Eagles.
“The very idea of the quarterback was and remains bound up with who we are and how we see ourselves on a national scale,” the journalist Seth Wickersham writes, in his new book, “American Kings,” which sounds grandiose until you realize just how much pressure rides on the shoulders of a quarterback, on and off the field. There is no one else who has to manage such a distinctive mix of violence and spectacle, and who is exposed to such risk of public failure week after week. Read more
Related: Jalen Hurts: New season, same challenge. By William C. Rhoden / Andscape
‘Linsanity’ out: Jeremy Lin, first Asian American NBA champion, retires. By Des Bieler / Wash Post
Point guard captured lightning on an NBA floor for two sizzling weeks with the Knicks in 2012 before winning a title with Toronto in 2019
Jeremy Lin, the pioneering point guard who came out of nowhere to spark “Linsanity” while with the New York Knicks in 2012, has retired from basketball. “It’s been the honor of a lifetime to compete against the fiercest competitors under the brightest lights and to challenge what the world thought was possible for someone who looks like me,” Lin wrote Saturday in a social media post. “I’ve lived out my wildest childhood dreams to play in front of fans all around the world. I will forever be the kid who felt fully alive every time I touched a basketball.” Read more
Trump Is Met With Mostly Boos at U.S. Open as Security Delays a Match. David Waldstein / NYT
The U.S. Open men’s tennis final got off to a slow and confusing start on Sunday as thousands of fans were forced to wait outside Arthur Ashe Stadium because of enhanced security for President Trump’s visit.
When he was shown on the video screens, fans unleashed a loud round of mostly boos, with some cheers mixed in. The president was on the screens only briefly as he stood and saluted. After the first set, he was shown on the screens again, and that time was met with louder, more sustained booing, as well as some cheers. Read more
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