Years ago, when I was a musician living in Los Angeles, I had my first close black friend. His name was Phil. He was 37 when I was 18. He was from D.C. and had lived in LA for a... Read More ›

So long, puppy. You had a good run. It was your lot to have to depend on us, a bunch of smelly primates with barely any hair at all and an unbearable knack for destruction, to provide for your well-being.... Read More ›

Being an American civil rights lawyer is a lot like being a doctor, except your patient has more moving parts than just one bipedal sack of meat and bones and is therefore easier to misdiagnose, as I did a couple... Read More ›

One basic truth is America’s Rosetta Stone: The country has always been run by people who need a lot of work done by other people and would like to have that work cost as close to nothing as possible, moral... Read More ›

My friend Jared is a lot smarter than I am. He’s the kind of guy who’s probably been told his whole life that he’s “too smart for Indiana.” He’s a grad student in cybersecurity. He lived in D.C. for a... Read More ›

Canvassers, candidates and (I suppose) certain pockets of religious enthusiasts hear things the rest of us don’t. They knock on doors. They talk to strangers. They listen to the background hum of humanity closely enough to make out instrumentation and... Read More ›

They hear you. If you ever marched in the rain and chanted because an unarmed black kid got killed in a hailstorm of government bullets... If you sang labor movement songs to the senate majority leader in your university library... Read More ›

Nearly 100 years ago, John Steinbeck wrote “The Grapes of Wrath,” a fictionalized account of what he witnessed following migrant laborers in the American West. The passage from which the book derives its name reads: The works of the roots... Read More ›

I am a civil rights lawyer who lost an important case last week. Losses are an inevitability in my line of work; you learn to take your lumps. But this one is different. Had this suit been successful, it would... Read More ›

My friend Damon (not his real name) has been a prosecutor in a major metropolitan area in the Midwest for more than six years. He’s earnest and conscientious, just like you’d hope a prosecutor would be. He went to a... Read More ›