The New Republic

Earlier this month, a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that suicide rates among middle-age Americans have surged over the last decade: an increase of nearly 30 percent, to 17.6 deaths per 100,000 people, among ages 35-64. READ MORE >>

According to pretty much everybody, last week was a rough one for White House spokesman Jay Carney READ MORE >>

One reason the idea of gay marriage, or “marriage equality,” spread so fast is that it seems obvious once you think about it. It was a genuinely new idea when it first appeared in this publication in 1989. As was not the case with civil rights for African Americans, feminism, or for that matter gay rights themselves, there was no long history of opposition to be overcome. The challenge was simply getting people to think about it a bit. READ MORE >>

There was some initial Beltway confusion this week in the search for a larger, unifying meaning to justify our monomaniacal coverage of the scandal trifecta. The scandals showed that Barack Obama was too political. No, they showed that he was not political enough. READ MORE >>

Feeling perhaps that columnist Paul Krugman hasn't made the point emphatically enough, The New York Times Monday published an op-ed shocker by two academics with the title, "How Austerity Kills." Kills? Yes, kills. READ MORE >>

In Washington, it’s almost a rite of passage for a president to be compared to Richard Nixon, and this week the current occupant of the White House got his. The lawyer who represented the New York Times during the Pentagon Papers ordeal wrote a piece comparing the president’s dealings with the press to Nixon’s, only to conclude that Obama is worse. READ MORE >>

Since news broke Monday that the Justice Department had secretly accessed the phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors over a two-month period—likely as a result of its anonymously sourced story on a foiled al Qaeda plot to blow up a U.S.-bound plane—no watchwords have gotten more READ MORE >>

The early years of the last century saw something of a golden age for the political press in England, with half a dozen serious daily papers published in London, another half dozen provincial morning papers as good if not better, as well as a clutch of evening papers with small circulations read intently by the West End equivalent of Beltway folk. But there were also the weeklies, with a mixture of politics and literature. READ MORE >>

The anti-abortion movement's defining medium used to be the poster, typically featuring a misleading photo of a stillborn fetus much older than most states' abortion laws allowed. These days, it's probably the undercover video. READ MORE >>

Yesterday, Slate tech columnist Farhad Manjoo slipped outside of his beat, which he does infrequently, to rail against dogs. Clearly, the man had had enough. READ MORE >>