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.
Who are the people we pass every day, and why are they here? An appeal to remember that immigrants are our neighbors, and that we all bleed.
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.
A combat veteran says the right wing in American politics has been radicalized further than most Americans realize, and that voting out the Republicans won’t be enough. Adam G. House argues the country needs a public reckoning with white Christian supremacist violence, and that Americans should look to the abolitionists.
“Your 4th of July is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license . . . your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery.”
— Frederick Douglass (1852)
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.
Adam Hinds For years, I’ve written across different formats and through different outlets. One of my favorites has always been The Chaos Section. I enjoy the freedom that writing brings. But I’ve always lacked focus. That changes now. A Decade in the Nonprofit World I’ve spent the past ten years working in and around nonprofit…
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…
The Supreme Court just made it easier for licensed therapists to tell queer kids that who they are is a disorder that needs fixing. Cynthia Tarana has some firsthand experience with what environment actually does to a person’s sexuality.
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.
