If you believe in freedom and justice, there is no sanitized whataboutism that can erase war crimes from history’s ledger, no matter how much our out-of-touch cable news talking heads, keyboard warriors, and clout-chasing politicians try. There is only what we do now, what we pursue as the truth, and how we, as a society, treat the people with the courage to stand up to powerful institutions that are not oriented toward the faithful protection of human rights.

It this summer has revealed anything, it’s that, just like the Scott Walkers of yore, we are watching the national media short-circuit before our very eyes. They are insular. They are unprepared. And after years of watching Morning Joe and searching for their birthdays in the Politico Playbook, they do not see their role as speaking to us, but rather speaking to themselves. While this may seem ancillary to the main plotline of our national politics, the mainstream media own-goaling themselves out of civic relevance is a net negative for anyone who believes in the outcome of better, more representative, good government.

The press has seemed to strain mightily to avoid making a plainspoken observation about these events, preferring instead to merely transcribe and amplify these remarks as if they were stray and unconnected threads as opposed to what they are: braided strands in a burgeoning web of hatred similar to that which nearly engulfed our democracy in 2021; a web that’s growing in stickiness and strength as we catapult into the midterm elections. We are three weeks from Election Day, and no one seems to want to acknowledge a wave of antisemitic commentary from powerful right-wing figures or who it is designed to energize.

People who don’t believe in government are stacking that government with politicians, who at best, boast about not even having the slightest clue about the basics of their job or public policy, and who, at worst, think of public service as the most effective tool for grifting and trolling. Furthermore, this phenomenon has arrived at a moment in which the ability of the political press to provide a check on this slide into illiberalism has atrophied. For too many reporters clustered inside the Beltway, the emergence of comically unqualified candidates—or outright QAnon-pilled seditionists—is just one more interesting moment in American politics; the fuel for bemusement, rather than a clanging alarm.

There is no pussy hat, catchy slogan on a poster board, or pithy tweet that can save us now. Only the people who have power can try to leverage it, and as these out-of-touch elected officials have clearly demonstrated, women and marginalized Americans across the country don’t even have political power to motivate them to do the right thing. Maybe today is the wake-up call. Or maybe the Democratic Party is going to keep hitting the snooze button and hope the republic holds until morning.

The people clamoring for a return to the White House Correspondents Dinner as a “return to normal” are the people professionally trained to turn their proximity to power into personal power for themselves, and who now see a legitimate avenue to profit off pseudo-celebrity gained through politics as a spectacle…. When Spotify and HBO deals are the end goal for public service, what does that say about the motives of those who should be on the front lines for the fight for democracy?

In 2022, in America, it seems to me as if we’ve decided that some unnecessary severe illness or death among children under five is acceptable to diminish any guilt felt by these White Men With Newsletters when they look out at restaurant dining rooms that aren’t at 100 percent capacity and are reminded there is still a pandemic. Meanwhile, I spend most of my spare time looking at our son, knowing his preciousness to us and thinking of other children’s preciousness to their parents, and no sacrifice feels too big.

It’s easy and convenient to isolate the images, violence, and memories of Jan. 6, to remove them from their ongoing context and package them into produced speeches or television segments that look back. It’s much more difficult to speak the truth about the modern Republican party… harnessing the power of white supremacy, propaganda, and violence to fundamentally reshape America and destabilize the institutions that once buttressed the principles of democracy Biden declared on Thursday still endure.

Should journalists doing live shots from roughly the same place where they thought they might die, divorce themselves and their lived experience from coverage of the current group of congressional Republicans or future investigations of the Capitol insurrection, as if they were not witnesses to, and survivors of, this very traumatic case at hand? Should they pretend now that there are two sides to this story, that a retreat to a nowhere-view is rational or defensible? Who is actually served by continuing this approach?

If the role of the Senate moderate was once to cool the passions of the rabble, it is now to provide cover for the extremism of Collins’s party—to utter empty words in bad faith while abandoning her duty to act as a check on the executive branch. If Collins’s moderation is a fiction—and it is—that means the Senate, as currently constituted, has outlived any use it once had…. The Senate, contrary to Biden’s stated beliefs, cannot overcome years of cynical partisanship with a little bipartisan grease and a handshake.

On the occasion of MLB’s much-delayed and highly anticipated Opening Day, it’s time for us to reckon with American sports culture, the way we’ve normalized the risks that athletes incur for the sake of our entertainment and how the glorified Moneyballification of sports—in which wonky former McKinsey consultants build dream teams based on the way statistics dance on spreadsheets—have all contributed to dehumanizing players into commodifiable assets. If the rampaging pandemic has brought a new innovation to this diabolical design, it’s the way this dehumanization now reaches down the organizational chart, drawing in “players” both on field and off, and of every asset class.

Ultimately, the myth of Susan Collins says much more about Washington than it does about the senator herself, because if the playwrights stopped to think about the political theater they were crafting, they would have to acknowledge that a central theme of their coverage—the dramatic moment when a senator crosses party lines and changes the course of history—rarely happens..

House Republicans under your leadership are scheduled to hold a minority-only hearing on this bill, which would force intervention on babies born alive without any consideration of individual circumstance, medical standards, or quality of life for the child. And while voices like mine likely will not be heard, I want to be clear: this legislation is anti-science, anti-women, and anti-family. Its mere existence threatens doctors who entered their profession because of the desire to bring new life into the world by vilifying them and criminalizing their most difficult work. And it perpetuates a culture of silence and isolation we create for pregnant women by making them feel blame or shame when they lose a pregnancy.

Her pieces provide not only incisive views of the struggles at ESPN at the time, but also a crystal ball onto the broken industrial media complex that nearly a decade later would help usher Donald Trump into office. Her headlines alone told an important, familiar story: “At ESPN, conflict of interest is business as usual”; “Too much shouting obscures the message”; “ESPN guilty of teller becoming the tale”; “ESPN’s excess root of fan frustration.” They presaged the Jamie Horowitz-ification of ESPN and of political news coverage, and they should be required reading for every member of the 2020 campaign press corps.

Rep. John Lewis sits in a circle of chairs among 20 incarcerated teenagers in the makeshift chapel of a Washington, D.C., correctional facility less than 2 miles from the United States Capitol. Unlike most of his colleagues in Congress, Lewis knows what it’s like to be in jail. In the 1960s, he was arrested 40 times as a result of his work as a nonviolent protester in the civil rights movement. A half century later, he sits in this jail on a hill, in a city where 535 members of Congress serve but few take the time to learn anything about the people who actually live here. These 16- and 17-year-olds live here.