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- Lincoln’s Revolution
Editor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment. Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address is a dense, technical affair. Delivered in March 1861, before the outbreak of the Civil War but after seven states had left the Union, it could hardly have been the occasion for much else. After a long treatise on the illegality of secession, Lincoln closed with a single flourish. His plea to the “better angels of our nature” is so familiar that we can miss the very particular intercession he imagines. The better angels will touch “the mystic chords of memory” reaching “from every battle-field, and patriot grave” into the hearts of all Americans and “yet swell the chorus of the union.” It is a complex, orchestral vision: angels as musicians, shared past as instrument, the nation itself stirred back into tune.We can still hear in… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.2 days ago - What the Founders Would Say NowEditor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment. When the American republic was founded, the Earth was no more than 75,000 years old. No contemporary thinker imagined it could possibly be older. Thus Thomas Jefferson was confident that woolly mammoths must still live in “the northern and western parts of America,” places that “still remain in their aboriginal state, unexplored and undisturbed by us.”The idea that mammoths or any other kind of creature might have ceased to exist was, to him, inconceivable. “Such is the œconomy of nature,” he wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, “that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.”Those illusory behemoths roaming out there somewhere beyond… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.2 days ago
- Trump’s Nobel Thirst Is Actually Great for the World“I’d kill for a Nobel Peace Prize,” the comedian Steven Wright once joked. This may be unironically true of President Donald Trump. But of course you are not meant to kill for this award. And because the prize cannot be won through threats, bribery, or any of Trump’s other customary tools, his only remaining avenue is to actually encourage peace. Which, amazingly enough, appears to be happening.The newly announced agreement between Israel and Hamas may or may not develop into a genuine peace deal. At a minimum, however, it appears likely to result in the release of the remaining hostages.It is apparent that the agreement grew directly out of Trump’s desperate thirst for the Nobel. Although he has whined in public about not getting the award—“I deserve it, but they will never give it to me,” he said at the White House in February—he seems to have grasped that winning… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.2 days ago
- How a Tiny, Inexperienced Firm Landed a $1.3 Billion Detention Deal
For our November+December issue, we investigated the brutal rollout of President Donald Trump’s immigration police state: the surge in funding and manpower, the troubling arrests by masked agents, the increasing use of problematic tech, the incessant cruelty of the messaging, and the shadowy profiteers cashing in on the administration’s anti-immigrant crackdown. Read the whole package here. When the Trump administration awarded a $1.26 billion contract this summer to build and operate a new tent city detention center in Texas, it made headlines, and not just because the facility, located at the Fort Bliss Army base, was expected to be the biggest of its kind in the country. The company that won the job, Acquisition Logistics, was so small it operated out of a single-family home in Richmond, Virginia. Almost nobody had heard of it. “A random house…just won $1.26 billion from ICE,” wrote the New Republic. Whereas many companies with ICE contracts… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago - Scientists Suspect Fracking Contaminated This Pennsylvania Town’s WellsThis story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In the summer of 2022, John Stolz got a phone call asking for his help. This request—one of many the Duquesne University professor has fielded—came from the Center for Coalfield Justice, an environmental nonprofit in southwestern Pennsylvania. They told him about New Freeport, a small town in Pennsylvania’s Greene County that had experienced what’s called a “frac-out,” when drilling fluids used in the fracking process escape their intended path and end up at the surface or elsewhere underground, in this case via an abandoned gas well nearby. Residents had noticed strange odors and discoloration in their well water. Their pets were refusing to drink it. Now they wondered if it was unsafe. Stolz, who has been testing water for signs of pollution from fracking for more than 10 years,… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago
- Brace for the Single Largest Spike in Health Insurance Premiums—EverAs the federal government enters the ninth day of a shutdown sparked by Congress’ failure to pass a continuing resolution which would fund the government for around two more months—with hundreds of thousands of workers going unpaid, federal loans to small businesses on hold, and the future of SNAP benefits at risk for coming months if the shutdown continues; soaring health care costs, the crux of the shutdown fight, are looking increasingly likely. As part of the Affordable Care Act, which paved the way for more widespread access to healthcare, the federal government uses tax credits to subsidize the premiums of tens of millions of qualifying people. “I don’t think, in health policy history, we’ve [ever] seen as big a projected increase in health insurance premiums.” But unless Congress extends them, as Democratic politicians—and a few Republicans—are demanding, those tax credits are set to expire by the end of… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.3 days ago
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