Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

The real cost of Trump’s $100,000 visas

With one declaration, President Donald Trump upended an aspect of our immigration system. Last week, Trump announced that the US would begin imposing a $100,000 fee for all new H-1B visa applications — that is, the visa that high-skill foreign professionals use to work in the US. By hiking the fee to such an exorbitant […]

Lead batteries are poisoning millions of children. Here are 3 proven ways to stop it.

Remember the Flint, Michigan, water crisis? The public health disaster that, at its peak, poisoned nearly 5 percent of the city’s children with dangerously high levels of lead in their water? It was perhaps one of the few public health crises in the US that rose to the prominence of a national scandal, sparking outrage […]

Donald Trump’s escalating revenge campaign, briefly explained

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here. Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump’s campaign of retribution against his perceived political enemies is escalating after the Thursday evening indictment of former FBI Director James Comey.  What happened? Comey […]

Comey’s indictment is a warning to the Supreme Court justices

About two decades ago, Justice Antonin Scalia went on a duck hunting trip with then-Vice President Dick Cheney. This trip became an issue because the Supreme Court was considering a case challenging some of Cheney’s official actions within the Bush administration, and a party to that case asked Scalia to recuse because of his personal […]

The massive stakes of the big federal housing bill, explained

The US has a lot of layers of government. Some would say too many. I would say too many. Here in Washington, DC, we mercifully only have a city government and a federal government, but you state-dwellers often have to juggle a state government, a county government, a municipal government, and sometimes school districts and […]