In 1772, Phillis Wheatley was tried in the city of Boston for writing poetry. It wasn't the content of her poems that they objected to; it was the fact that she was a black woman, and a slave (since the North had not yet abolished slavery). The white men who tried her were ...read more

• By Jeremy Fassler
  Sep 23, 2019

It's easy to read Andrew Sullivan's column today, "The Boston Rally and the Left's Intolerance of Free Speech," and ask "what happened?" Once he was the average white liberal's favorite conservative - someone who came of age under Reagan and Thatcher but turned against his party ...read more

• By Jeremy Fassler
  Nov 9, 2018

It started before it actually started. In early January of 2007, a local Boston artist began hanging signs around town as part of a guerilla ad campaign for the upcoming Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie... To continue reading this article, please go here. A Banter Membership gets you ...read more

• By Chez Pazienza
  Nov 9, 2018

There's a pretty astounding and disturbing revelation on the real estate website Redfin at the moment. What it basically shows is that we are very much in a modern day Gilded Age in which single individuals or families could, hypothetically speaking, buy up every residential ...read more

• By Michael Luciano
  Feb 17, 2016

Mitt Romney proposed a series of steps to overhaul the public education system, reigniting the debate over school choice as his campaign intensifies its effort to introduce the presumptive Republican presidential nominee to a general-election audience. The education plan, ...read more

• By Guest Contributor
  Nov 9, 2018

The NYTimes looks at the emerging art of using old videos to go negative: It is the attack-ad technique of choice for the 2012 election: anything you have said or done on film will be held against you. And its prevalence has helped make the Republican primary campaign a ...read more

• By Ben Cohen
  Nov 9, 2018