For all the attention paid to the Georgia Senate races, don't think it's fully sunk in how wild it is that the candidates for the party that *is* becoming more working-class in orientation are the former CEO of Dollar General and wife of the billionaire head of NY Stock Exchange.
Like so much else this past year, if you wrote that into the script, it would be thrown out of the writers room.
Many responses to this are contesting the fact that the Republican Party has become more working-class under Trump. The question is not which party is MORE working-class. It's whether GOP has shifted that direction under Trump. And one needs serious blinders to deny that it has.

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More from @AlecMacGillis

3 Jan
Amidst the terrible nationwide homicide surge, it's worth keeping in mind that those providing the initial first aid to shooting victims are often cops. Compelling @DanRodricks account of one recent rescue: baltimoresun.com/opinion/column…
"Coursey arrived and found Torres with his hand on the victim’s chest and a finger in a bullet hole. Coursey pulled the scissors from the first aid kit strapped to his leg and started cutting the victim’s shirt away. 'Get a chest seal,' Torres said, telling Coursey to pull..."
"...from his kit a round plastic sticker to close the victim’s sucking chest wound. Torres pressed the seal against the man’s chest, but there was a lot of blood, too much for the seal’s adhesive to take hold..."
Read 5 tweets
31 Dec 20
This is a really good and disconcerting @aoscott and @ManohlaDargis dialogue on the post-pandemic future of movies. nytimes.com/2020/12/30/mov…
"The industry has always found a way of circumventing calamity. The threat posed by streaming is on another order of magnitude: the internet changed everything, including how people watch entertainment. The rest is history, and another couple of gazillion bucks for Jeff Bezos."
This is key, following from @aoscott Q, "What about the small and midsize movies that depend on the theatrical system to find their audiences?"
Read 4 tweets
29 Dec 20
Just stunningly awful numbers here. Chicago gets so much attention, but look at Philadelphia, up more than a third to 469, Memphis up more than half to more than 300, and St Louis, up more than a third to 261, which is jaw-dropping for a city whose population is down to 300,000.
Must be said, has national media coverage this year (and I count myself as culpable as anyone) reflected the scale of what's been happening on this front, that many cities are returning to late-1990s levels of violence?
I tried to get at it here: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… and here: propublica.org/article/how-do…. But there's so much more to be said, given the scale of the devastation.
Read 6 tweets
25 Dec 20
I don't normally tweet on Christmas, but there were several lovely stories in today's papers deserving of note.
One, @crampell's column about her 6th grade English teacher, who's still imparting lessons at 88 and champing to get back into the classroom: washingtonpost.com/opinions/price…
"Once we mastered Mr. Greco’s rules—learned who from whom, and whatnot—they were liberating. He taught us the masonry of language. Now we could build whatever we liked. I remember realizing, at age 12, how awesome it was that words and sentences could do my bidding." Such a gift.
"Writing well requires more than understanding proper sentence structure. It also takes moral courage. 'If you are a critical thinker,' he reminded me, 'you are going to find you are sometimes at odds and disagreement with your peers...You must be brave enough to stand apart.'"
Read 6 tweets
19 Dec 20
What a fascinating and depressing @NoreenMalone tale about the school reopening fight in the 2nd-most-educated town in America, where not even the profusion of top-tier local public-health experts was able to prevent things from descending to a "shitshow."
slate.com/human-interest…
"When COVID came to Brookline, it didn’t pit virus-denying Trump supporters against pro-mask blue staters. It instead exposed and heightened the dysfunction and conflict in a place where everyone was theoretically on the same team."
The piece is so good on intra-liberal- bubble dynamics. This is the local union head:
Read 5 tweets
18 Dec 20
All these ethical debates over whom to vaccinate first are certainly invigorating, but what if I told you that the far more immediate challenge to deal with is not who gets it first, but that many nursing home CNAs--who are as frontline worker as it gets--are refusing to take it?
This piece touched on it, but it should be getting even more attention. This is where the real action is right now... nytimes.com/2020/12/16/bus…
Bottom line: we need a public-health campaign to put these workers, some of the most vulnerable and crucial of all, at ease.
Read 7 tweets

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