For two weeks, I wore a Veterans for Talarico shirt all over deep red Texas, and 95% of the reactions were positive. Something feels different this year. But good polls and good vibes don’t win elections. Here’s why we need to show up on Election Day in numbers too big to argue with.
Trump won in 2024 promising to bring prices down and stay out of new wars. Two years later, gas is over $4, the cost of living keeps climbing, and we’re at war with Iran. Meanwhile, he and his family are cashing in on the presidency to the tune of billions while working Americans pick up the tab.
More than a million pamphlets posing as trans advocacy, urging Texas kids toward emancipation from their parents, landed in mailboxes as early voting began. Someone paid a lot of money to scare those parents. Who benefits?
When a friend told me he’d never voted, despite being eligible through both Trump terms, my first reaction was judgment. I decided to be useful instead.
Nick Allison I’ve been on vacation for the past two months. It was only supposed to be one month when I planned it. In a country where paid vacation is perhaps the most coveted and least distributed benefit in our particular version of capitalism—doled out by corporate masters who have spent decades training us to…
In 2004, my mom wrote about what war costs—not just for those who fight, but for those who wait, worry, and live with the aftermath. Twenty-one years later, I’m sharing her words again, along with my reflections as a veteran, son, and father.
In the wealthiest country in human history, people are dying because they can’t afford insulin while billionaires buy elections. The ladder has no visible top and a functionally invisible bottom, and almost everyone is looking up at someone while looking down at someone else.
At the end of March, with the Iran war entering its second month and the casualty count already climbing, I attended the No Kings protest in Austin looking for veterans. I found plenty of them. After the piece ran at Slate I heard from several others who weren‘t at the protest but wanted to add…
W.P. Kinsella wrote that the one constant through all the years has been baseball. It may be one constant, but I’m reluctantly starting to think it’s not the only one.
We can afford a billion dollars a day for another war in the Middle East, but making sure a working mother can take her sick kid to the doctor? That’s where we draw the line on fiscal responsibility.
The Trump administration wants $50 billion to fund an unauthorized war in Iran. Democrats have one tool left to stop it, and some of them are thinking about giving it away.
Like most everything authoritarian regimes do, this latest sideshow stems from a place of fear. Trump is arguing for federal control because some states are producing outcomes that frighten him.
Alex Pretti’s death shows what happens when armed federal agents are given political cover to operate above the law and the public is told to ignore what it can plainly see. When the state kills in public and lies about it afterward, neutrality is no longer an option.
President Trump has a long history of disparaging members of the military who disagree with him. Back in 2015, he shrugged off John McCain’s five and a half years as a POW with “He’s not a war hero… I like people who weren’t captured,” and kept sniping at him even after he died. It runs…
