Newsroom

Fight over minimum age illustrates web of industry ties Just four blocks from the White House is the headquarters of the Employment Policies Institute, a widely quoted economic research center whose academic reports have repeatedly warned that increasing the minimum wage could be harmful, increasing poverty and unemployment. But something fundamental goes unsaid in the institute’s reports: The…

Colorado and the future of the Democratic Party Last month, Colorado opened its first retail marijuana shops. At the Colorado Springs airport, there are now bins to help departing travellers remember to drop their pot before flying off to less liberated states. The law legalizing marijuana in Colorado was the result of a long grass-roots…

Oglala Sioux vow to stop Keystone XL on the ground if Obama won’t say no In the latest in a series of announcements escalating resistance to oil and gas development in North America, the Oglala Sioux nation and its allies have committed to stopping the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline on their territory if…

Texas’ next governor? Meet Wendy Davis’ opponent, Greg Abbott There’s been a lot of talk in national political circles about how Texas will inevitably turn blue. The state is already majority-minority and the Hispanic population continues to grow rapidly. Democrats have pinned their main hopes on Wendy Davis, a state senator who became a party and…

Alive in the sunshine There’s no way toward a sustainable future without tackling environmentalism’s old stumbling blocks: consumption and jobs. And the way to do that is through a universal basic income. For as long as the environment has existed, it’s been in crisis. Nature has always been a focus of human thought and action,…

The middle class IS steadily eroding; just ask the business world In Manhattan, the upscale clothing retailer Barneys will replace the bankrupt discounter Loehmann’s, whose Chelsea store closes in a few weeks. Across the country, Olive Garden and Red Lobster restaurants are struggling, while fine-dining chains like Capital Grille are thriving. And at General Electric,…

Forget the GDP; some states have found a better way to measure our progress GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, measures the market value of all goods produced within a country. It was first developed in the heart of the Great Depression, a context of dramatic declines in economic activity and scarce information about what was…

Is fracking about to arrive on your doorstep? For the past several years, I’ve been writing about what happens when big oil and gas corporations drill where people live. “Fracking”—high-volume hydraulic fracturing, which extracts oil and methane from deep shale—has become my beat. My interviewees live in Pennsylvania’s shale-gas fields; among Wisconsin’s hills, where corporations…