When I was in high school, in the mid 2000s, the height of the Bush years, I declared myself a conservative. This wasn’t the result of any actual ideological conviction, but instead just a reaction to the liberal California where I grew up, a desire to be different from everyone…
This past week, the big gossipy news story of the 2020 Democratic Primary was the end of the non-aggression pact between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. First, Politico reported on a volunteer script floating around the Sanders campaign slack channels that (very mildly) criticized Elizabeth Warren (“I like Elizabeth Warren,”…
One of the biggest problems with the new Disney Star Wars films is the way they rely on fan service for their biggest emotional moments. Whether it’s Han Solo’s death in The Force Awakens, Luke Skywalker’s surprising character arc in The Last Jedi, or the return of Emperor Palpatine in…
One of the clearest signs that George Lucas actually cared about his movies is the time he took to make them. Whereas Disney set itself a ridiculous timeline of releasing a new Star Wars movie every year since they purchased the franchise, Lucas took three years between The Phantom Menace…
I was only 10 when The Phantom Menace came out in 1999, and while I saw the movie in theaters four times, I didn’t appreciate until I was an adult how unsettled it must have made older Star Wars fans feel. It had been sixteen years since Return of the…
When it comes to presidential elections, Californians have grown accustomed to the idea that their votes don’t really matter, except in a symbolic sense. Given the structure of American electoral politics, this resignation is understandable. California may be the biggest state in the country, with almost 40 million people and…
In my debut novel Portrait of Sebastian Khan, a coming-of-age story about a Muslim American art history student, I spend a good amount of time satirizing Model United Nations — that strange academic extracurricular activity in which high school and college students pretend to be diplomats and participate in simulations…
Fifty years ago, on November 3, 1969, President Richard Nixon gave his famous “silent majority” speech, a televised address in which he asked Americans to support his plan to end the Vietnam War, what he would later in 1973 describe as “peace with honor.” “And so tonight,” Nixon said on…
Like most political science concepts, the term “open primary” is a bit confusing and isn’t always used consistently. Technically, an open primary is one in which you don’t have to be affiliated with a political party to vote in that party’s primary — but, because states have all kinds of…
A campaign ad can tell us a lot about a candidate — not about their policies, which can be hard to get across in only sixty seconds, but instead about their aesthetic, the way they present themselves and their campaign, the subtle signifiers meant to appeal to specific voters. …
