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What they really see when they see us

It’s a story that will lacerate your heart. Indeed, you’ll watch “When They See Us,” director Ava DuVernay’s new Netflix miniseries, in disbelief and horror. That may sound like a warning. It’s actually a recommendation. DuVernay tells the story of the so-called Central Park 5, four of them black, one Hispanic, who were convicted of the brutal 1989 rape and assault of a white woman jogger. It is an unsparing re-creation of an ugly time. Halting and confused, the boys struggle to describe a crime they did not commit in order to stop police officers from yelling at ...

Horses not alone losing on racetrack

BY JENNIFER O’CONNOR These are desperate times for the horse racing industry. Even people who pay no attention to racing — which is just about everybody — are aghast by the carnage on America’s racetracks, where horses are collapsing and dying in shocking numbers. But some tracks are in such dire straits that they’re resorting to even more gratuitously cruel promotions to try to get customers through the gates: Forcing ostriches, camels and zebras to race with human jockeys on their backs. Spectators may find these races novel, but the animals always lose. Even ...

Cigarette tax saved millions of lives. A soda tax could too

Benjamin B. Lockwood, Hunt Allcott And Dmitry Taubinsky Los Angeles Times You might want to think twice before downing that 12-ounce can of Coke. Since sugary drinks can cause a host of health problems, drinking one sugar-filled soda ends up imposing about 10 cents of health costs on others because the resulting medical bills are paid through Medicare, Medicaid or private insurers. We came to this conclusion while studying what economics says about the benefits of soda taxes, which have been embraced by seven cities across the country. After Berkeley became the first city in ...

Wrong vision for the GOP and America

Conservatives are engaged in a fierce intramural debate over their future in the GOP. Like all such debates, it can seem opaque — even its participants aren’t sure what they’re arguing about — but the implications for both the tenor and content of American politics are profound. The debate is sprawling, but its contours are defined: One side wants to restore the old fusion between social and economic conservatism. The other wants to abandon it and embrace President Trump’s authoritarian traditionalist vision. There is no authoritarian traditionalist future for the ...

Candidates’ proposals on climate just the beginning

What a difference three years make. In the last presidential election, climate change was virtually nowhere to be found as a campaign issue. Donald Trump denied its very existence, and while Hillary Clinton had a platform plank dedicated to it, she didn’t spend a whole lot of campaign time talking about it. (The issue did have more prominence in the Democratic primaries, propelled by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.) And the media didn’t press the issue too much, either. Even during the televised debates, where journalists could have forced the question, they left it alone. That ...

The president’s defenders are not bad people

John Pavlovitz is a liberal, widely read Christian pastor who has composed an internet article saying good people don’t defend a bad man. And you know who he’s talking about, of course: none other than President Donald Trump, whose deplorable supporters have climbed from a basket into the crosshairs of a sanctimonious sharpshooter. Let me first respond by saying good people do not threaten the basic principles of our democracy in order to be bad to a bad man. Few see Mother Teresa in golden hair when they look at Trump. They know his narcissistic, vulgar, scatterbrained ways and ...