Roundup

Pop Culture Roundup: This Week

This week ... Edward Snowden, Leopold and Loeb, the Revenant, Andrew Johnson, and Stalin.

Why Is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations?

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Vermont senator’s political imagination is active against plutocracy, but why is it so limited against white supremacy?

Where has this Barack Obama been? If Obama had governed like this in 2009, he’d be a transformational, historic president

by Rick Perlstein

He sought common ground and to get past red states and blue states for too long. Free of that, look at the progress.

What religion is Barack Obama?

by Edward J. Blum

"When it comes to the religion of Obama, neither I, nor Google, nor any of us will ever ‘know.’ "

Natural-Born Presidents

by Jill Lepore

To cling to the narrowest possible meaning of “natural born citizen” is to cling to the narrowest possible understanding of citizenship.

The Pentagon’s Misplaced Priorities

by Max Boot

Defense Secretary Ash Carter is thinking of penalizing David Petraeus once again.  This is wrong.

America’s Other Original Sin

by Rebecca Onion

Europeans didn’t just displace Native Americans—they enslaved them, and encouraged tribes to participate in the slave trade, on a scale historians are only beginning to fathom.

We have always been good haters: Our Donald Trump problem goes all the way back to the Founding Fathers

by Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg

The battle between fear and hope is as old as America. We have always been idealists -- and suspicious

Ronald Reagan made it all worse: How Republicans — the real party with their hands out — convinced white America that government was out to get them

by Heather Cox Richardson

Anti-government diatribes from the prime beneficiaries of government programs? How the GOP lies to white America.

Infographic: The Founding Fathers Wouldn’t Be Happy with the Power Corporations Exert

by Akio Tanaka

A computer chip designer’s vision of what went wrong.

Trump follows in the footsteps of man he claims to despise

by Bruce J. Schulman

A Washington outsider, anathema to his party’s establishment, rides a wave of discontent with politics-as-usual to an early lead in the presidential nominating contest. Donald Trump in 2016? No, Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Pop Culture Roundup: This Week

This week ... Nixon and Elvis (The Movie) ... and do we really need to say anything else to get you to click on this?

The ongoing threats to free expression in Hong Kong

by Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Then they came for the booksellers.

Doubling Down on a Failed Strategy

by David Vine

The Pentagon’s Dangerous “New” Base Plan

Roundup Top 10!

This week's broad sampling of opinion pieces found on the Internet, as selected by the editors of HNN.

Thank Goodness There’s No Obama Doctrine

by Nick Danforth

American presidents have spent decades laying out grand strategies for handling the world. They haven’t worked.

Jimmy Carter's Blood-Soaked Legacy Part 2

by Matt Peppe

Despite campaigning on a promise to make respect for human rights a central tenet of the conduct of American foreign policy, Carter’s actions consistently prioritized economic and security interests over humanitarian concerns.

Sorry, Ranchers, You’re Actually Big-Time Government Moochers

by Josh Zeitz

What Ammon Bundy doesn’t get about U.S. history.

A Century of Political Spin

by David Greenberg

Since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, presidents have been using tools like photo ops, speechwriting and polling—and often for their biggest achievements

Ted Cruz is not eligible to be president

by Mary Brigid McManamon

When discussing the meaning of a constitutional term, it is important to go beyond secondary sources and look to the law itself. And on this issue, the law is clear: The framers of the Constitution required the president of the United States to be born in the United States.