Opinion and Analysis

I am a writer for a variety of publications. Here is a selection of my work:

The Globe and Mail

The plague of Donald Trump (3/25/20)
As gerontocracy looms, American democracy may be running out of time (3/5/20)
Americans are the witnesses to democracy’s demise (2/3/20)
Trump’s strategy: Investigate the investigators (11/24/19)
Why the impeachment hearings need to go beyond Ukraine (11/17/19)
Mueller acted like a man terrified to speak the obvious (7/25/19)
Forget the wall, Trump is the national security crisis (1/8/19)
If the midterms were a test of the country’s character, Americans failed (11/7/18)
Kavanaugh’s appointment isn’t a step backward, but a plunge into an abyss (10/6/18)
The resistance to Donald Trump is not what you think (9/29/18)
Kavanaugh hearing: When you’re a well-connected judge, you can do anything (9/21/18)
For Paul Manafort, justice is finally served — but is it too late for America? (8/22/18)
The unspeakable cruelty of Trump’s child migrant camps (6/15/18)
No, Trump isn’t suddenly interested in Assad’s war crimes (4/14/18)
The Stormy Daniels scandal is not about sex — it’s about threats, bribes and silence (3/25/18)
After a year of Trump, women expect less from men — but demand more (1/22/18)
Trump’s racism is more than rhetoric — it forms policies and ruins lives (1/13/18)
Trump is no genius, but he’s smart at playing dumb (1/7/18)
Alabama proves that appealing to Trump voters is a lost cause. The power is elsewhere (12/13/17)
Gutting net neutrality is a death knell for the resistance (11/26/17)
Paul Manafort charges don’t ensure justice — but it’s a start (10/30/17)
Real patriotism, Mr. Trump, isn’t show you treat a flag. It’s how you treat Americans (9/24/17)
Get a grip, Democrats: Clinton’s book is not your biggest problem (9/12/17)
The Trump ship may finally be sinking (8/21/17)
There aren’t ‘many sides’. There is only one right side, and Trump is not on it (8/13/17)
First they came for trans Americans. Who will be next? (7/27/17)
Trump family troubles: Who will project Donald Jr? (7/11/17)
Don’t focus on Georgia. Voter suppression is the issue (6/21/17)
Trump is reportedly under investigation. Does that signal the end? Not so fast (6/15/17)
Comey testimony reveals Trump is running America like a crime boss (6/8/17)
GOP: It’s time to get off the Trump Train. You have nothing left to lose (5/26/17)
Authoritariansim 101: First, fire the FBI director (5/12/17)
Want to survive another 100 days of Trump? Don’t get complacent (4/29/17)
Trump craves praise. We praise him for bombings. What could possibly go wrong? (4/13/17)
At long last, a forum where Trump cannot escape the truth (3/21/17)
Some call this America’s resistance. Really, we are helping each other (3/3/17)
When Trudeau met Trump: Canadian exceptionalism, American envy (2/13/17)
Donald Trump: Our anti-American president (1/20/17)
The fake war on fake news (12/15/16)
Donald Trump’s shakedown of the American Dream (12/4/16)
A fascist’s win, America’s moral loss (11/9/16)
Trump’s strategy: Pull the fringes to the center, and mainstream extremism (11/3/16)
Curb your enthusiasm, America: It’s good for democracy (10/27/16)
A conspiratorial candidate, and Americas deferred dread (10/20/16)
It doesn’t matter who won the debate: America has already lost (10/10/16)
Kaine vs Pence: When Midwestern Nice meets Midwestern Lies (10/5/16)
How Hillary Clinton killed the Trump brand (9/27/16)
Trump’s birtherism: a national narrative of exclusion (9/18/16)
Hillary Clinton’s redemption problem (9/12/16)
Be afraid: Trump may have bought the Fourth Estate (9/9/16)
Trump’s wall guards nothing but the sanctity of bigotry (9/1/16)
Trump is right: the greatest threat is indeed from within (It’s him) (8/16/16)
In a history littered with political corpses, Trump’s assassination hint is a new low (8/10/16)
The Democrats’ America on display: flawed but not fatalistic (7/26/16)
Making America work again — for Trump’s family (7/20/16)
Black death, police brutality, caught on video: no justice, only sequels (7/7/16)
Where economic despair and xenophobia meet, you find Trumpism – and Brexiters (6/28/16)
America: Diverse in our death toll, united in fear (6/13/16)
Why Gingrich may be Trump’s running mate (6/3/16)
Why Bernie Sanders is still running (5/19/16)
Trump is the smartest candidate — he’s running on American pain (5/4/16)
Clinton, Sanders, Trump: Who really belongs to New York? (4/18/16)
The trump card for U.S. cable news: Riots, ratings and rallies (3/30/16)
Who Won the Midwest? Not the people who live in it (3/16/16)
Super Tuesday was a referendum on racism (3/2/16)

Fast Company

Scooter Libby’s pardon: In this White House, loyalty trumps the law (4/14/18)
Donald Trump will do anything to avoid prosecution — and John Bolton will help (4/12/18)
Will the indictment of Iranian hackers prove the pretext for John Bolton’s war? (3/21/18)
Why former Trump staffers may be walking security threats (2/15/18)
Could false alerts and fake news start a nuclear war? (2/1/18)
The other scary foreign hacking threat Trump is ignoring (1/11/18)
With Trump, the GOP is playing a game of diminishing returns (12/13/17)
It’s time to purge the pervs from politics, and let women step in (11/17/17)
How Data Can Save Us From the Trumpocalypse (10/16/17)
Why Puerto Rico Is Not Trump’s Katrina (9/29/17)
Steve Bannon may be a bigger asset to the White House outside of it than in it (8/19/17)
Why Trump blames “both sides” for Charlottesville (8/16/17)
Welcome to the Third Nuclear Era: Trump and the Point of No Return (8/14/17)

De Correspondent

Voter ID laws, hackers, gerrymandering — just how much can a democracy take? (11/10/17)
How Trump fullfilled a 30-year fantasy of becoming president, with a little help from the Kremlin (7/26/17)
Trump is the best autocrat. The best. No one has a better autocrat (6/24/17)
The tale of the dictator’s daughter and her prince (4/24/17)
Why Trump’s ties to Russia would be bigger than Watergate (3/30/17)
Our kids may never get to know America (1/19/16)
Donald Trump, Russia, and the mystery of “these people” (12/14/16)
We’re heading into dark times. This is how to be your own light in the age of Trump (11/18/16)
Our fate was sealed long before November 8 (and not because the election’s rigged) (11/3/16)
To Donald Trump, we are all bit players in a fantasy America starring Donald Trump (10/19/16)
Meet Darren Seals. Then tell me black death is not a business (10/1/16)
How do you become ‘white’ in America? (9/1/16)
Clinton Derangement Syndrome: Diagnosing the real reason that so many Americans hate Hillary (8/11/16)
On the ground in flyover country (7/15/16)
What I had to tell my daughter about the America of her black classmates (7/15/16/)
How nostalgia blinds Trump to the reality of working-class America (7/28/16)

Shondaland

“Freedom is ours, we just have to keep fighting for it” (1/21/20)

NBC News

Trump’s first State of the Union was classic reality TV. So who’s really running the show? (1/31/18)
What’s next for Steve Bannon? Nothing good for America (1/11/18)
Russia’s Social Media Propaganda Was Hiding in Plain Sight (11/2/17)
Jeff Sessions’ testimony proves how little the truth matters under Trump (11/15/17)

Quartz

Trump’s sparring with North Korea is a reminder that foolishness really can kill (9/27/17)
America’s highest-ranking legal professional is more interested in protecting his boss than protecting the law (6/15/17)
There are many reasons to oppose a Mike Pence presidency — but his skill at lying is the biggest (5/26/17)
Trump played nice for a night — a tactics right out of the autocrat’s playbook (3/1/17)
Trump and Putin: The worst case scenario (12/23/16)
How to cope with Election Day violence (11/7/16)
Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories are making his supporters paranoid — and dangerous (10/13/16)
Who won the presidential debate? (9/28/16)
Missouri’s new permitless gun law will put black Americans in even more danger (9/23/16)
What is a Trump rally like without Trump? Very different (9/6/16)
The Baton Rouge flooding proves just how little coastal elites care about the rest of America (8/23/16)
Donald Trump’s bromance with Vladimir Putin underscores an unsettling truth about the two leaders (8/19/16)
Donald Trump and his racist followers could destroy America even if he loses (8/5/16)
How Trump punked American by manipulating our obsession with useless polls (7/28/16)
The myth of millennial entitlement was created to hide their parents’ mistakes (6/30/16)
Most women won’t be able to follow in Hillary Clinton’s footsteps — unless they’re rich (6/16/16)
US officers who kill rarely get punished, but they might get rich (5/23/16)
How state politicians are quietly working to steal the US presidential election (5/20/16)
The term “anti-establishment” has lost all meaning (5/12/16)
Geography is making America’s uneven economic recovery worse (4/28/16)
Why America’s impressive 5% unemployment rate feels like a lie (4/21/16)
Why does St. Louis care more about Syrian refugees than its black population? (9/16/15)
How boycotts hurt the cities they are supposed to help (3/3/15)
There’s another community upset in St. Louis over a senseless killing (12/11/14)
In Ferguson, there are no malls left to boycott (11/30/14)
Why Ferguson has been in a state of emergency for years (11/23/14)
The real reason Ferguson is boarding up its storefronts (11/17/14)
“I am Darren Wilson”: St. Louis and the Geography of Fear (10/21/14)
How baby boomers ruined parenting forever (11/11/14)

Foreign Policy

Welcome to Donald Trump’s America (8/3/16)
Why young Americans are giving up on capitalism (6/16/16)
Dashcams for Freedom (8/5/15)
‘We Are Not Afraid’ (7/14/15)
Hey, J. Lo, Thanks for Serenading That Dictator (7/2/13)
The Curse of Stability in Central Asia (2/19/13)
Stop Talking About Civil Society (12/3/12)

Centre for International Governance Innovation

Never again: Muslim ban echoes authoritarian states (1/31/17)

 

Teen Vogue

Why we should fear environmental destruction under Trump (4/25/17)

The Baffler

It’s already happened here (2/9/17)

 

World Policy Journal

From Andijon to Bowling Green: Fabricated terrorism in Uzbekistan and the United States (3/26/17)

Marie Claire

What the Trump campaigns’ potential collusion with Russia really means — and why it’s so scary (5/31/17)
The healthcare bill exposes Trump’s chilling authoritarian agenda (5/8/17)

City AM

With escalating tensions between the US and North Korea, is there a real risk for nuclear action? (9/1/17)
Was Trump wrong to hire his son-in-law, Jared Kushner? (6/1/17)

POLITICO

Ferguson’s Never-Ending Nightmare (8/11/15)
Ferguson, Inc. (3/4/15)
Ferguson Won’t Heal (12/1/14)
Burning Ferguson (11/26/14)
Ferguson’s Trial (11/25/14)
After Ferguson (8/26/14)
The Princess Effect (7/02/14)
The Day We Pretended to Care About Ukraine (2/20/14)

The Guardian

Trumps’ America, where even parks employees are enemies of the state (1/28/17)
Metropolis, the hometown of Superman, has a new hero: Donald Trump (4/6/16)
Trump supporters in St. Louis: How ‘midwestern nice’ became a sea of rage (3/12/16)
Suburbanites are becoming the new face of homelessness in America (10/14/15)
‘Bring them here’: the case for St Louis to welcome Syrian refugees (9/14/15)
‘We’re surrounded by murders’: a day in St Louis’s most dangerous neighborhood (8/19/15)
Ferguson’s radical knitters (8/6/15)
Hey neighbor! A ‘Black Lives Matter’ sign on your lawn is an act of solidarity (6/1/15)
The US payday loans crisis: borrow $100 to make ends meet, owe 36 times that sum (5/9/15)
Down and out in Beverly Hills, Missouri (4/22/15)
Inside St. Louis’s lurid crime tabloid (3/31/15)

The New York Times

Independence Day for a Scared Nation (9/1/16)
Uzbekistan’s Forgotten Massacre (5/13/15)

POLITICO Europe

Uzbekistan’s real problem is not terrorism — it’s politics (9/6/16)

The Diplomat
Trumpmenbashi: What Central Asia’s spectacular states can tell us about authoritarianism in America (3/22/16)

World Politics Review

The Death of Islam Karimov and the Unraveling of Authority in Uzbekistan (11/1/16)

The Chicago Tribune

Trump’s legacy will continue even if he loses (8/3/16)

Blue Nation Review

AP tweets (then deletes, then reposts) deceptive Trump family puff piece (8/20/16)
Donald claims he was sarcastic about Russia — no one’s buying it (7/28/16)

Alive Magazine

Birth of a Movement (9/10/16)
“A Place Where We Can Be Ourselves“. Print magazine; story on Nashville. (5/11/16)
Freedom to be with our Children (7/7/16)

The Chronicle of Higher Education

The Contingent Faculty Retirement Crisis (5/16/16)
The Paradoxical Success of The Professor Is In (7/16/15)
Lip-Syncing to the Academic Conversation (3/27/15)
Academia’s One Percent (3/6/15)
The Adjunct Crisis is Everyone’s Problem (10/17/14)
The Job Market Recovery That Never Came (9/26/14)
Should You Have a Baby in Graduate School? (6/16/14)
Who is Obama’s ‘Middle-Class College Student’? (2/18/14)
What’s the Point of Academic Publishing? (1/24/14)
Professional Identity: A Luxury Few Can Afford (12/3/13)
Should Academics Write for Free? (10/14/13)

The Brooklyn Quarterly

Generations Left Behind (10/27/15)

Al Jazeera

2014

The wages of discrimination (9/23/14)
St. Louis’s sons, taken too soon (8/27/14)
The telegenically dead (8/14/14)
Water is a human right, but who is considered a human being? (7/23/14)
Mourn the fall of the mall (7/1/14)
The peril of hipster economics (5/28/14)
College is a promise the economy does not keep (5/14/14)
US foreign policy’s gender gap (3/20/14)
Blame it on the internet (2/4/14)
When mainstream media is the lunatic fringe (1/22/14)

2013

Expensive cities are killing creativity (12/17/13)
Charity is not a substitute for justice (12/6/13)
Surviving the post-employment economy (11/3/13)
The immorality of college admissions (10/29/13)
A government above the people (10/14/13)
The men who set themselves on fire (10/7/13)
A government shutdown, a social breakdown (10/4/13)
Zero opportunity employers (9/23/13)
Who is a ‘journalist’? People who can afford to be (9/17/13)
The danger of data: Not the information, but the interpretation (9/9/13)
Justice in a ‘nation of laws’: the Manning verdict (8/23/13)
Mothers are not ‘opting out’ — they are out of options (8/19/13)
Snowden and the paranoid state (8/5/13)
When MOOCs profit, who pays? (7/29/13)
The American dream: Survival is not an aspiration (7/22/13)
In the trial of Trayvon, the US is guilty (7/14/13)
An American dream, an exile’s nightmare (6/30/13)
In defense of complaining (6/15/13)
The millennial parent (5/29/13)
The view from flyover country (5/12/13)
Meritocracy for sale (5/3/13)
The wrong kind of Caucasian (4/21/13)
Academia’s indentured servants (4/11/13)
Academic funding and the public interest (4/2/13)
Iraq and the reinvention of reality (3/24/13)
Managed expectations in the post-employment economy (3/11/13)
Does it matter if the West gives military aid to Uzbekistan? (3/5/13)
The unaffordable baby boomer dream (2/26/13)
Twitter’s dangerous lack of transparency on terrorism (2/10/13)
Sexual violence and the paradox of anonymity in the digital age (2/4/13)
The political consequences of academic paywalls (1/17/13)
A child’s right to online privacy (1/1/13)

2012
The price of inequality in higher education (12/23/12)
Why email is and must remain private (11/27/12)
An internet conference in a surveillance state (11/13/12)
The power of the meme (10/30/12)
Why cyber-bullying endures (10/18/12)
Academic paywalls mean publish and perish (10/2/12)
The freedom to criticise free speech (9/25/12)
The fallacy of the phrase, ‘the Muslim world’ (9/16/12)
The axe murderer who became a Facebook hero (9/5/12)
Does celebrity activism matter? (8/30/12)
The closing of American academia (8/20/12)
Where following the law is radical (6/14/12)
The subjectivity of slacktivism (4/5/12)
Russia’s election, Kony2012, and online voyeur justice (3/11/12)
Breeding an ‘activism without activists’ in Central Asia (3/5/12)

Medium

The Minimum Wage Worker Strikes Back (4/14/14)
The Jewish and Palestinian Activists of the Ferguson Movement (9/17/15)

HRDCVR (print only)

“Heal STL” (10/10/15)
An interview with Brittany Packnett (10/10/15)

New York Daily News

Grief remains in Ferguson year after Michael Brown’s death (8/9/15)
Fight breaks out at Ferguson meeting one year after shooting (7/31/15)
Spotlight shines on Ferguson, MO, but racial conflicts grip many US cities (8/24/14)

The Common Reader

Can Minor Languages Make Revolution? (10/1/14)
Ferguson in Focus (10/30/15)
The Prestige Economy (2/1/17)

The Atlantic

Manic Pixie Dream Dissidents: How the World Misunderstands Pussy Riot (8/20/12)
Kim Kardashistan: A Violent Dictator’s Daughter on a Quest for Pop Stardom (8/8/12)
Worlds Unknown: The Regions Ignored by Google Translate (5/1/12)
The Day Yahoo Decided I Liked Reading about Child Murder (4/17/12)
Censorship as Performance Art: Uzbekistan’s Bizarre Wikipedia Ban (2/23/12)
The Reverse Orientalism of Looking For an ‘Arab Spring’ in Central Asia (1/20/12)
The Strange Saga of a Made-Up Activist and Her Life—and Death—as a Hoax (12/20/11)

Radio Free Europe

Commentary: Why Policy Forums Should Be Held in Authoritarian States (11/15/12)

Slate

How Azerbaijan Demonizes the Internet To Keep Citizens Offline (5/11/12)

Alternet

Professors Making $10,000 a Year? Academia Becoming a Profession Only the Elite Can Afford (8/23/12, Al Jazeera reprint)

Registan.net

Why is Twitter censoring the Islamic Jihad Union? (1/31/13)
Manic Pixie Dream Dissidents (8/18/12) (reprinted in Atlantic)
Why Dictators’ Daughters Still Can’t Have It All (8/7/12)
What Happened in Andijon? (7/24/12)
When Everyone’s a Spy: Talking About the SNB Online (2/12/12)
How Twitter’s New Policy Rewards Elite Activism (1/29/12)
Central Asia: An Exception to the “Cute Cats” Theory of Internet Revolution (1/8/12)
Rumors, Lies and the Uzbek Internet: More on a Facebook Suicide (12/10/11)
Facebook and the Surveillance State: The Death of Gulsumoy Abdujalilova (12/7/11)
Happy Birthday, Uzbekistan (9/1/11)
Digital Memory and a Massacre (6/23/10)
Why Didn’t We See It Coming? (6/17/10)
Why Kyrgyzstan’s Social Media Matters (4/8/10)
Let the Revolution Be Archived (4/7/10)

Opinio Juris

Kony 2012: Catching Warlords with the Stars (4/18/12)

Ethnography Matters

On Legitimacy, Place and the Anthropology of the Internet (2/13/13)

Caucasus Edition

‘This is What Can Happen to You’: Networked Authoritarianism and the Demonization of Social Media in the Republic of Azerbaijan With Katy Pearce. (12/1/11)

La Stampa

Kirghizistan: salvaguardare la memoria storica su internet (4/8/10)
Kirghizistan: come prevedere (e prevenire) certe violenze etniche? (6/25/10)

CA-News.org

Почему онлайн активность в Центральной Азии не смогла вдохновить общественность на “арабскую весну“? (1/12/12)