All posts tagged: contributor

Contributor: How Democrats drifted away from the working class

Contributor: How Democrats drifted away from the working class

Published by Sam Flores

Since 2016, when Donald Trump shattered the Democrats’ blue wall by winning working-class voters across the Midwest, a cottage industry has sprung up on the left dedicated to answering a single question: How can Democrats win back the working class? The answers come in different forms. Sometimes it is veteran Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — barnstorming red districts, railing against oligarchy and corporate greed. Or it’s Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who after the 2024 election declared, “Democrats must reclaim our identity as the party of the working class.” Or the answer comes from a new generation of candidates — tattooed veterans, mechanics, bartenders — whose biography is supposed to do the political work that policy has not. Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who has become the left’s latest blue-collar savior, put the theory in its most unguarded form. “We are in a form of class war,” he says. “And if the Democratic Party is going to have a future with working people, it needs to pick the side of working people.” How does he …

Contributor: California is at the center of the fight against Parkinson’s

Contributor: California is at the center of the fight against Parkinson’s

Published by Sam Flores

What will it take to cure Parkinson’s disease? It’s one of the first questions I asked when I was diagnosed in 1991, and one that patients and families still ask today. A lot has changed in those three decades, and thanks to the tireless efforts of a global community of scientists, patients and advocates, we’re closer to a cure than we’ve ever been. But it’s no secret that finishing the job will take everything we’ve got — and the science continues to outpace the money. Right now, Californians have a massive opportunity to change things for the better. Senate Bill 895, introduced by Sen. Scott Wiener, would create the California Foundation for Science and Health Research, funded through a voter-approved multibillion-dollar bond. The proposed foundation would aim to take on some of our most pressing challenges, from diseases like Parkinson’s and cancer to climate change and wildfires. In Parkinson’s, cells that produce dopamine gradually stop doing their job. The functions our bodies rely on — including movement, mood and cognition — break down, worsening over …

Contributor: Why Trump is manufacturing a new crisis in Cuba

Contributor: Why Trump is manufacturing a new crisis in Cuba

Published by Sam Flores

With the United States’ attention fixed on Iran, Venezuela and other crises, the Trump administration’s increasing pressure campaign against Cuba has largely unfolded in the background. That may be why it has drawn less attention than other major foreign policy efforts. But the pieces add up to something larger than routine sanctions policy. In January, President Trump declared Cuba an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security and foreign policy, accusing Havana of hosting adversary intelligence capabilities, aligning with Russia, China, Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, supporting terrorism, destabilizing the hemisphere through migration and violence, and spreading communism throughout the region. Since then, the administration has tightened sanctions, disrupted shipping, amplified warnings about drones and connections to Iran, expanded the U.S. naval presence in the region and recently indicted former Cuban president Raúl Castro. Trump sent CIA Director John Ratcliffe to Havana to warn Cuban officials against hostilities while urging political change as a path to relief from U.S. sanctions. This all looks less like a response to a sudden crisis than the construction of …

Contributor: In politics after Trump, nothing is disqualifying

Contributor: In politics after Trump, nothing is disqualifying

Published by Sam Flores

After a decade of Trumpism, it should come as no surprise that President Trump’s ethos (presenting scandal as strength, outrage as authenticity and public disgrace as evidence you’re a “fighter”) has trickled down into congressional campaigns of both parties. In Maine, for example, controversial oysterman and veteran Graham Platner, a Democrat, appears poised to face Republican Sen. Susan Collins, after incumbent Gov. Janet Mills’ failure to launch led her to drop out of the Senate primary. Under old “pre-Trump” rules, Platner’s campaign would have withered instantly after revelations that he once had a Totenkopf SS tattoo, previously identified himself as a communist, said Black people were poor tippers, and wrote that white people “actually are” as racist and stupid as Trump thinks they are. Instead, after all this surfaced, Platner actually rose in the polls. Considering the circumstances, there are several reasonable explanations for this. Maybe Maine Dems have concluded that moral purity tests are politically suicidal after years of watching heterodox figures like Joe Rogan and Elon Musk drift away from the party. Maybe …

Contributor: You don’t have to be wealthy to worry about California’s wealth tax

Contributor: You don’t have to be wealthy to worry about California’s wealth tax

Published by Sam Flores

Californians will face two competing tax measures this November. The first is the Billionaire Tax Act, a one-time, 5% levy on the accumulated net worth of the state’s richest residents. Lesser known is the Retirement and Personal Savings Protection Act, which would draw constitutional lines around what Sacramento can and cannot tax, prohibiting new levies on retirement accounts, personal savings and individually owned assets and banning retroactive taxation. Everyone with even just a little bit of money set aside — not just the California billionaires targeted by the wealth tax — should understand what these two measures represent. Start with the Billionaire Tax Act. The gap between what it promises and what it would deliver is stark. Joshua Rauh of Stanford University has run the numbers with his Hoover Institution colleagues, and the results cast doubt on the prospect of any revenue gain whatsoever. Proponents claim the tax would raise $100 billion. Rauh’s team found that billionaires have already been voting with their feet: Larry Ellison left California in 2020, and six others, including Google …

Contributor: Almost-forgotten atrocity in Vietnam War holds lessons for the Trump era

Contributor: Almost-forgotten atrocity in Vietnam War holds lessons for the Trump era

Published by Sam Flores

One of the last major underreported stories of the Vietnam War — a six-month campaign by U.S. troops that killed thousands of Vietnamese civilians — may now get the attention it deserves, thanks to a superb Dutch documentary that premiered in the Movies That Matter⁠ Festival in the Hague in March. The movie, called “Soldier’s Bones,” explores the military operation Speedy Express, carried out by the U.S. Army’s 9th Infantry Division in South Vietnam’s Mekong Delta from December 1968 to May 1969⁠. Speedy Express was intended to eliminate a Viet Cong stronghold in the Mekong Delta, but of the nearly 11,000 people killed whom the U.S. claimed were Viet Cong, it’s likely that 5,000 to 7,000⁠ were civilians, including thousands of women and children. Whatever the number, the operation was many times bloodier than the 1968 My Lai massacre, which killed nearly 500 villagers and is usually regarded as the most egregious commission of American war crimes in Vietnam. Even worse, while My Lai was a single action carried out by an Army captain and …

Contributor: The case for a silent commute

Contributor: The case for a silent commute

Published by Sam Flores

I cross the same five-lane bridge twice a day, on the way to and from my 9-to-6 job. These crossings occur at approximately 8:40 a.m. and again, at 6:20 p.m. For just a few breaths each day, traffic is stalled on this bridge in favor of the intersecting freeway ramps. This small pause allows me to glance out my window and onto the faces of passersby — not in a creepy way, but more in an anthropologically curious way. Toyotas and Kias and Nissans and Teslas and Hondas and Jeeps. Mostly white Jeeps. All these cars find themselves on a similar commute, yet an unequivocally different journey, as me. On Monday, I catch a mother conversing with her teenage son in the passenger seat. On Wednesday, a girl not far off in age from me is delicately applying symmetrical dots of (what I assume is) the final step of her moisturizing routine. On Thursday, a puzzled face. What are they listening to in there? One can only imagine. And so, I do. Perhaps a personal …

From a minor contributor to a critical tool

From a minor contributor to a critical tool

Published by skeptic

Professor Riemer Slart discusses how nuclear medicine has evolved to play a crucial role in healthcare today, and explains how the European Association of Nuclear Medicine is helping the field to advance. Nuclear medicine – a medical discipline based on the application of probes labelled with radionuclides (radiopharmaceuticals) to diagnose and treat diseases – has undergone a profound transformation in recent years, evolving from a niche diagnostic specialty into a central pillar of modern, precision-driven healthcare. Once largely confined to gamma camera imaging and a limited set of therapeutic applications, the field was historically viewed as a relatively minor contributor to clinical decision-making. Today, however, nuclear medicine stands at the forefront of innovation, driven by advances in imaging technology, radiopharmaceutical development, and an increasingly sophisticated understanding of disease biology. Nuclear medicine now plays a critical role in guiding clinical decisions, shaping treatment pathways, and improving patient outcomes. As the field enters what many describe as a ‘golden era’, its integration into mainstream healthcare continues to deepen, supported by organisations driving standardisation, research, and collaboration across …

Contributor: What the marriage and family nostalgia is really about

Contributor: What the marriage and family nostalgia is really about

Published by Sam Flores

A majority of Americans believe our country’s culture and way of life have “mostly changed for the worse” since the 1950s, according to the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2025 American Values Survey. That includes 55% of white people, 53% of Black people and 57% of Latinos. For many, the problem lies in the collapse of the marriage system of that decade, when the majority of women married before they turned 21, only 6% of men and women reached age 35 without having married, and divorce rates fell to a postwar low of 9.2 divorces per 1,000 married women. The solution, according to the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” blueprint for family policy, is to incentivize early marriage and childbearing (for heterosexual partners only) and abolish no-fault divorce. I’ve spent much of my career as a historian criticizing any idealization of 1950s marriages. Domestic violence and child abuse were much more common then than today. It was perfectly legal for a man to forcibly rape his wife. And depression among homemakers was so widespread that by the …

Contributor: The GOP is collapsing under Trump’s loyalty tests

Contributor: The GOP is collapsing under Trump’s loyalty tests

Published by Sam Flores

Americans always say they want politicians with backbone — men and women of principle who will stand up for what they believe in, even when it’s unpopular. And every so often, the American people prove their commitment to this noble aspiration by firing anybody who actually tries it. Take Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, who just lost a reelection bid by double digits after President Trump’s affiliated committees dumped enough money into Kentucky to purchase, well, Kentucky. Massie committed the cardinal sin of modern Republican politics: He behaved as though Congress were a coequal branch of government instead of the warm-up act before a Trump rally. He bucked Trump on spending, Iran and — in what apparently qualified as political suicide — whether or not to release the Epstein files. For this display of independent thought, Massie was summarily retired by what can only be described as the Trump cult (formerly known as the Republican primary electorate). Before anybody accuses me of hyperbole, consider the remarkably revealing example presented recently on the New York Times podcast, …