News & Commentary

Ladies and gentleman, the tinsel has left the town. Last Saturday was the one event in D.C. that is guaranteed to bring the stars to our fair nation's capital: the White House Correspondent's Dinner, a.k.a. Nerd Prom.

The pain and suffering of Clayton Lockett during his gruesome execution in Oklahoma this week has been met with outrage around the world. Today the United Nations human rights chief said that Lockett's botched execution may violate international law, and called for an immediate moratorium on the administration of the death penalty across the United States.

Kaleb Winston loved to draw. A sketchpad never far from reach, he drew constantly, hoping one day to be an architect like his grandfather.

What if the government forced all clothing stores to sell only extra-small T-shirts? And what if this happened because some politicians concluded consumers should be treated "uniformly" when it came to shopping options and decided that consumers should be forced to wear the same size T-shirt, no matter whether they can actually fit?

Yesterday John Podesta, the president’s senior adviser, released a highly anticipated report addressing how the administration should tackle the challenges of big data in coming years. So how’d he do? Pretty well, actually. The report recognizes some important new realities and recommends some positive policy solutions for “a world of near-ubiquitous data collection where that data is being crunched at a speed increasingly approaching real-time.”

Assurances about lethal injection rest on the premise that inmates are sedated and unconscious before other excruciating drugs are administered. The horrifying experiences of recent executions make clear these assurances are false. The drugs used in recent executions produced not a sleep into death but many wakeful minutes of struggle and pain. Such executions are clear violations of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment and require investigation and action.

Yesterday the Fair Minimum Wage Act, legislation that would have raised federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10, was blocked by a Republican-led filibuster in the U.S. Senate. While many are focused on the partisan politicking surrounding this bill, more attention must be given to the grave impact low wages have on communities of color.

In her heartfelt dissent in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, which upheld a Michigan ballot initiative forbidding schools from considering race as one factor in admitting students, Justice Sandra Sotomayor wrote "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race."