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What TV Says About Race and Money

Salamisha Tillet New York Times
Taken together, these sitcoms remind us of the centrality of race, not just to our conversations but to policies around income inequality.

The Captive Aliens Who Remain Our Shame

Annette Gordon-Reed New York Review of Books
The author argues that a key factor in unifying the fractious 13 colonies in opposition to British rule during the Revolution was the patriots' effort to link British oppression to extant colonial fears about insurrectionary slaves and homicidal Indians. America's founders were chief among those spreading tales of British agents inciting blacks and Indians to take up arms against the American rebellion, making racial prejudice a foundation stone of the new republic.

Art in the Age of Masculinist Hollywood: Damien Chazelle’s “La La Land”

Morgan Lee Davies Los Angeles Review of Books
La La Land is not, in the end, so very different from Whiplash (an earlier Chazelle film) for all their tonal differences. Above all, the vision they paint of the artistic life is masculine. In Damien Chazelle’s movies, men have power, and they get (almost) everything they want... And women? All they get to do is listen.

8 Reasons The Senate Must Reject Jeff Sessions

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II Common Dreams
Senator Sessions’ record suggests a remarkable consistency in support of policies that contradict and subvert the Reconstruction amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantee citizenship, equal protection under the law, and the ballot to all Americans.

How to Repeal and Replace ObamaCare Today? Use Medicare

Robert C. Hockett The Hill
I have a very simple, even modest, proposal, one that offers us means both of having the cake and of eating it too. Why not, in the very same legislation that repeals ObamaCare, instantly entitle all who lose their insurance coverage under the ACA immediately to enroll in Medicare? The enrollment might be permanent, and at the prices that Medicare currently costs its participants, or it might be simply until such time as a viable replacement for ObamaCare is found . . .

The Burn Pits, A Book Review

H. Patricia Hynes Truthdig
In his no-holds-barred book, “The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America’s Soldiers,” former Marine and Army Joseph Hickman exposes the knowing contamination of thousands of soldiers stationed on bases with these lethal pits.