New Yorker Editor David Remnick recently had several interviews with President Obama, and at a certain point the two of them got to talking about pot: When I asked Obama about another area of shifting public opinion—the legalization of marijuana—he seemed even less eager to evolve with any dispatch and get in front of the […]
Eli Sanders
Eli Sanders is The Stranger's associate editor. His book, "While the City Slept," was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He once did this and once won this, but he also once crashed his bike into a parked car while on his way to a staff meeting, never mind this, so… His website, which probably hasn't been updated in a while, is www.elisanders.net.
Posted inNews
We May Have To Start Sucking Carbon Dioxide Out of Our Warming Air If We Keep This Up
So says a new U.N. report on climate change: OSLO — Governments may have to extract vast amounts of greenhouse gases from the air by 2100 to achieve a target for limiting global warming, backed by trillion-dollar shifts towards clean energy, a draft U.N. report showed on Wednesday. This is because we’re not at all […]
Posted inTech
The Worst Obamacare Web Site in the Nation?
Oregon: Several states and the federal government have struggled with exchange technology, but none as much as Oregon. Cover Oregon’s online enrollment system still doesn’t work more than three months after it was supposed to launch, and the state has hired or reassigned hundreds of workers to manually process applications. Officials say they hope the […]
Posted in$$$
$20 Billion in Penalties? No Problem.
JPMorgan Chase, ladies and gentlemen: To settle a barrage of government legal actions over the last year, JPMorgan Chase has agreed to penalties that now total $20 billion, a sum that could cover the annual education budget of New York City or finance the Yankees’ payroll for 10 years. It is also a figure that […]
Posted inPolitics
President Obama’s Speech on Inequality
Worth watching in full if you haven’t yet. Ezra Klein calls it “perhaps the single best economic speech of his presidency.”
Posted inTech
Amazon Really Thinks It Can Deliver Packages by Drone?
The company’s calling the service Prime Air, and CEO Jeff Bezos says it could be a reality in four or five years. Bezos also suggested to 60 Minutes that the biggest obstacle to achieving drone delivery will be the government: The hardest challenge in making this happen is going to be demonstrating, to the standards […]
Posted inThe Twitter
A Call for Socializing Social Media
Benjamin Kunkle at n+1 has issued a manifesto: 1. Social media should be socialized because services tend to be or become monopolies. Most private enterprises, whatever their business, have at least a few competitors. Large social media companies—Facebook, Twitter—tend to lack competitors, for the simple reason that their platforms are not compatible. I can’t create […]
Posted inPolitics
Will Elizabeth Warren Challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Nomination?
As briefly mentioned in Good Morning, News… Ii’s not too early to wonder. And Noam Scheiber at The New Republic seems to think she might: In addition to being strongly identified with the party’s populist wing, any candidate who challenged Clinton would need several key assets. The candidate would almost certainly have to be a […]
Posted inJerk
If John Boehner Says Totally Contradictory Things Three Days Apart, What Does It Mean?
October 3, 2013: Speaker John A. Boehner has privately told Republican lawmakers anxious about fallout from the government shutdown that he would not allow a potentially more crippling federal default as the atmosphere on Capitol Hill turned increasingly tense on Thursday. October 6, 2013: Speaker John A. Boehner stood his ground on Sunday alongside the […]
Posted inJerk
What Happens to the Economy If the Government Shuts Down?
Bad things at first, and then worse things down the road: A prolonged government shutdown — followed by a potential default on the federal debt — would have economic ripple effects far beyond Washington, upending financial markets, sending the unemployment rate higher and slowing already tepid growth, according to a wide range of economists. A […]
Posted inHealth
The Adorable Care Act
Are irresistibly cute animals about to melt the Affordable Care Act into the hearts of online Americans? The White House has announced that it’s not behind this. Which is a great way to get more people to look at this, and this, and oh man a kitten!
Posted inPolitics
Boehner Caves To the Tea Party on Obamacare
The hard-right conservatives in the House of Representatives want to defund Obamacare, and House Speaker John Boehner has decided to let them try—even though he knows their measure can’t pass the Senate, and even though he knows that taking their measure seriously in the House could lead to a government shutdown and more. In March, […]