Instagram story viewer> @wamonthly> Posts

Washington Monthly

@wamonthly

540

followers

89

following

Founded in 1969, the Washington Monthly is a political magazine that illuminates the ideas and characters that animate America’s government.

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

Download All

The Washington Monthly’s 2026 College Guide and Rankings issue is here!

Since 2005, the Washington Montly has ranked colleges based on what they do for the country. Instead of rewarding schools for their exclusivity, prestige, and wealth, our 2026 Best Colleges for Your Tuition (and Tax) Dollars rankings measure how they help middle- and working-class students get ahead, and whether they encourage those students to participate in their democracy.

As a result, more than half of the top-scoring institutions are hidden gems that most students don’t know about—and that in many cases outperform elite universities. The University of Texas–Rio Grande Valley, for example, lands 16 slots above Yale University.

The Monthly’s 2026 College Guide also includes the Best Colleges for Rural America, the first and only ranking that assesses how well colleges serve rural students and their communities; the Best Colleges for Research, which grades schools on the degree to which they create the scientific and intellectual breakthroughs that cure deadly maladies, drive economic growth, and advance human understanding; and America’s Best Hispanic-Serving Colleges, which ranks schools providing affordable, effective education to the fastest-growing American student population.

Read the Monthly’s full 2026 College Guide and Rankings issue—featuring @kevincarey1111 of @newamericaorg, @kainoalowman, @_alexbronzini, @gillenmartin, @samanthaaapowers, @mattizcoop, @sarabhatia, and more—at the link in our bio. 🎨: Hope Glastris (@hope.glastris.creative). by @wamonthly

9

0

a month ago

As of October 1, per the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) Republicans in Congress passed last summer, states and counties are on the hook for 75 percent of the cost to administer the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

The change is but a small piece of the bill’s broader shift of up to $1 trillion in federal financial responsibilities for government services to the state and local level.

“Along with hundreds of billions in lost services and benefits, and trillions added to the national debt, that was the price of the 2025 law’s tax cuts, the vast majority of which benefitted the richest Americans,” Features Editor Gillen Tener Martin writes.

To balance their budgets, state and local governments running SNAP must either cut spending or raise additional revenues. “So, this fall, to fund congressional Republicans’ reverse-Robinhood reconciliation bill … counties are setting property tax levies at rates not seen since the 2008 financial crisis,” Martin continues.

For a year now, SNAP recipients (or former recipients) have lived with the OBBBA’s impacts: Additional work requirements, which took effect when Republicans in Congress passed the bill on July 4, 2025, have led over five million people in groups previously exempt, including veterans, homeless individuals, and former foster youth, to lose food benefits.

“These Americans have been feeling the bill’s pain,” Martin writes. “Now, as counties ask their residents to pay more so the rich can pay less, others will, too.”

Read at the link in our bio. 🎨: Wikimedia Commons. by @wamonthly

5

0

11 hours ago

In the past half century, thousands of books and articles have been written about mass incarceration. Some have characterized the imprisonment of millions of Americans as a tragic necessity in a high-crime society, others have celebrated it as just deserts for criminals, and still others have denounced it as a reinvention of Jim Crow policies that oppress Black Americans. But one fact remains remarkably neglected: Mass incarceration is ending.

“In a new research article, we document how the nation’s carceral system has already shrunk and how it will shrink further, with prison admissions projected to drop by 50 percent over the next decade,” Keith Humphreys, Shawn D.  Bushway and Jason Robey write. “Although sentencing reforms have had some impact, the prison population is declining primarily because crime has fallen dramatically over the past 30 years.”

Given the seismic nature of what has happened, and what is likely to happen in the years ahead, why isn’t the decline of mass incarceration front-page news?

“Facts that don’t fit neatly into dominant political narratives are, alas, orphans in public policy discussions,” Humphreys, Bushway, and Robey continue. “Loud voices who preach that Americans with darker skin are inherently criminal cannot cope with a massive fall in crime as the nation moves towards minority-majority status. Meanwhile, those who characterize America’s carceral system as an implacably oppressive lever of an inherently racist country cannot explain a nearly two-decade fall in imprisonment.”

Yet falling crime and imprisonment are real and should command our attention. “Political, bureaucratic, and financial incentives continue to preserve correctional systems built for a different time and far larger than public safety requires, imposing needless costs on individuals, families, and communities while diverting billions of public dollars from other priorities,” Humphreys, Bushway,and Robey write.

Read at the link in our bio. 📸: Associated Press. by @wamonthly

2

0

2 days ago

Since sweeping to power in 2025, Republicans have waged an all-out war on clean energy. Congress gutted clean energy subsidies enacted under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, killed rules to spur electric vehicle adoption, and blocked legislation to ease permitting for wind power projects. The Trump administration has gone further, paying developers billions to abandon offshore wind projects and invest in oil and gas instead, freezing wind and solar development on federal lands, and terminating $20 billion in clean energy grants.

But in recent months, the clean energy industry has started to fight back. A new super PAC organized by solar investors and executives, Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC, has made waves by targeting some of the industry’s biggest antagonists in Congress. The PAC reported about $5 million in spending through August, most of it against three Republicans who led the charge to undo clean energy subsidies: Representative Chip Roy in his bid for Texas attorney general; Representative Andy Ogles in his Tennessee reelection campaign; and Representative Ralph Norman in the South Carolina Senate primary. All three lost.

“We needed to instill fear,” Peter Davidson, a founding organizer of Invest in Tomorrow, told Monthly Editor Kainoa Lowman of the group’s philosophy. Davidson wants politicians to understand that “if they cross the industry—just like crypto, just like the NRA—there would be consequences.”

Invest in Tomorrow plans to spend up to $30 million by the end of the midterms to send that message. But in our brave new world of unlimited corporate election spending, the price of fear in Washington is much higher than that. Where is Invest in Tomorrow’s backup? How could an industry suffer the beating Republicans have doled out and not mobilize a bigger response?

Lowman spoke with clean energy executives, investors, and politicos to figure it out. One answer: many in the industry believe they don’t need to play political hardball because clean energy will win on its merits. As one investor said, “You kind of feel like, once everybody gets the facts, they’re going to be there with you.”

Read at the link in our bio. 📸: Associated Press. by @wamonthly

8

0

4 days ago

A two-decade fight with monopoly power in the payment system has arrived at a moment of truth, boiling down to one simple question: Will the courts bless price-fixing?

Last week, Demand Progress (@demandprogressaction), American Economic Liberties Project (@econliberties), Consumer Reports (@consumerreports), and Small Business Majority (@smallbizmajority) asked a federal court to reject a proposed antitrust settlement that would bless the Visa-Mastercard duopoly in credit-card payment services. The case grew out of a grievance merchants and consumers have nursed for decades that has curdled into something worse over the last five years: swipe fees.

Swipe fees are, ostensibly, the cost that merchants pay Visa and Mastercard for the service of processing transactions, an essential service for any business. But those companies’ profit margins of around 50 percent highlight how they are not earning money from swipe fees so much as extracting it.

An oligopoly of five banks—JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Capital One—issue 70 percent of all credit cards, and make a habit of charging higher interest rates than their smaller rivals. Visa and Mastercard process roughly 80 percent of all card transactions. They also impose an honor-all-cards rule, a contract clause with all the subtlety of a mob shakedown: If you take one of our cards, you must take all of them. It’s an offer any merchant who wants to stay in business can’t refuse.

The proposed settlement will freeze this all in place. If enacted, it will shave 0.1 percentage points off swipe fees that already run close to 3 percent of every purchase.

“This rounding error dressed up as relief then expires in five years regardless,” Carter Dougherty writes. “In exchange, Visa, Mastercard, and the big banks walk away with sweeping immunity from future lawsuits … [They] would keep setting swipe fees and raking in the take. They’d keep splitting most of it with the megabanks that already dominate card issuance … There would be exactly as much price competition on these fees as there is today: none. This is a cartel.”

Read at the link in our bio. 📸: Associated Press. by @wamonthly

11

0

8 days ago

“One dismal morning in January 2001, I strode into a University of Oregon classroom to face 90 fresh-faced first-year law students. I had the unenviable task of explaining the ‘law’ behind Bush v. Gore, decided a month earlier,” Legal Affairs Editor Garrett Epps writes. “It was an impossible task. What could I say to these legal novices, beyond ‘It is not too late to reconsider the life choices that brought you here’?”

“There was no explanation for Bush v. Gore other than the obvious: The Supreme Court took the election away from the people because five of its members didn’t like Al Gore,” Epps continues. “No decision in my lifetime has shown such contempt for the law or so consciously torn a catastrophic hole in the self-governing institutions the Constitution supposedly aims to sustain. “

Even today, a quarter-century after the Court’s worst blunder since Dred Scott, no explanation fits the ruling into the fabric of American constitutional law. Instead, lawyers, scholars, and judges have treated this travesty as a human body treats a foreign object trapped in a wound. It is not incorporated but encysted: surrounded by protective tissue that limits the damage and pain.

“Back in 2001 I would have welcomed the chance to offer my students a careful, clear explanation, written by credible constitutional lawyers, of exactly what was bogus about the decision,” Epps writes. “Yet when a useful rebuttal was most needed, no one stood forth with one.”

In her new book, Fordham University Law Professor Julie C. Suk offers a mechanism that could have filled this vacuum: a “shadow court,” with nine “shadow justices” who publish their own judicial opinions, based on their own lines of constitutional reasoning, which could speak with democratic legitimacy to the nation as a whole.

“Her proposal has many virtues: It is entirely legal, requires no amendment to the Constitution, and might very well help rebuild the national commitment to democratic self-government,” Epps writes.

Read Epps’s review of @juliecsuk’s “The Shadow Court” at the link in our bio. 📸: Associated Press. by @wamonthly

5

0

14 days ago

The 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks has passed, marked by solemn remembrances and harrowing footage. Fond memories of President George W. Bush lifting America’s spirits atop the World Trade Center rubble through a bullhorn and with a World Series first pitch strike at Yankee Stadium leavened the commemoration’s sadness. The words “never forget” rang throughout the day.

But we have forgotten the main strategic blunder by the Bush administration that left America vulnerable to a major terrorist attack. We have forgotten it because we never had much of an opportunity to remember it.

For a few weeks in the spring of 2002, the public was stunned by the news that President Bush received a memo one month and five days before the attack titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” Yet the public’s interest in the White House’s mishandling of counterterrorism before 9/11 quickly faded after Bush, hoping to move past the controversy, proposed the creation of a Department of Homeland Security to better prevent future terrorist attacks.

“Bush’s dismissive response to the briefer who provided the memo—‘All right. You’ve covered your ass now’—was indicative of a deeper strategic failure: His administration did not believe counterterrorism was as important as national missile defense,” Politics Editor Bill Scher writes. “In fact, during the 48 hours before Al Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Bush administration was amid a coordinated campaign to convince the public and Congress that the federal government already spends enough on counterterrorism and not enough on national missile defense.”

Read at the link in our bio. 📸: Associated Press. by @wamonthly

4

1

16 days ago

For a full decade after 9/11, Osama bin Laden was the most wanted man in the world. A few weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington, in mid-December 2001, the al-Qaeda leader felt so endangered by a vengeful United States that he decided to dictate his will.

In it, he took the extraordinary step of telling his children not to have anything to do with al-Qaeda,” the organization he had founded. “Bin Laden felt he’d failed,” journalist Peter Bergen writes in his new book, “All the Presidents’ Wars: Twenty-Five Years of America’s War on Terror.”

Bin Laden’s American pursuers came within just a few hundred yards of snagging him at Tora Bora, yet the general in charge, Tommy Franks, let al-Qaeda’s top men slip away across the border into Pakistan. In the years that followed, the U.S. built up a vast counterterrorism apparatus aimed, in part, at hunting down the man who had organized the largest foreign attack on the homeland in American history.

“Bergen is unsparing in his critique of the twenty-first century’s greatest villain, but he is also quite skeptical—to varying degrees—about the four presidents who figure in the story,” Christian Caryl writes.

Read Caryl’s review of Bergen’s “All the Presidents’ Wars” the link in our bio. 📸: Associated Press. by @wamonthly

1

0

22 days ago

I talked to Beau Tremitiere of @protectdemocracy for this week's @wamonthly podcast. While Beau acknowledged that the threats to this fall's elections are unprecedented - so is civil society's response. Defenders of free and fair elections are ready, and citizens can educate themselves. And here's the #1 tip: VOTE EARLY IN PERSON to ensure your vote is counted. by @wamonthly

2

0

24 days ago

In the summer of 2023, the British journalist Jon Ronson’s adult son Joel attended what was billed as a party at a real-life castle in Connecticut. But there was no party. Inside, the guests learned they’d wandered into the orbit of Chris Mark, an aging heir to a Gilded Age manufacturing fortune who had built a medieval-style stone monstrosity for his TikTok star daughter.

Mark had lured Joel and his friends inside the castle as part of a half-baked plan to film a reality show called “101 Princesses,” in which women from around the world compete for the favor of their crowned host. “But we soon learn that the scion’s motivations are more sordid than producing reality TV—he’s on a mission to collect pliable young women to serve his sexual and emotional needs. In short: a personal harem,” writes Ryan Zickgraf.

“If this sounds like a story custom-built for Ronson, it is,” Zickgraf continues. “The gonzo journalist has spent much of his career wandering into strange subcultures and the company of cranks, extremists, and outcasts, following their private obsessions until they reveal something larger about the world outside.”

Yet, Ronson’s latest book, “The Castle,” has much more on its mind than telling the story of a single eccentric rich asshole; it’s merely the drawbridge that leads into the lives of a host of other lost boys and a larger societal conundrum: “Is the American man passing through a dark night of the soul?” Or, to borrow the snotty parlance of social media: “Are men, like, okay?” And if so, why are so many males dying in middle age, dropping out of the workforce, retreating into online bubbles of the manosphere, or withdrawing completely into themselves?

Read Zickgraf’s review of Jon Ronson (@jonronson)’s “The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men” at the link in our bio. 📸: Chrismarkscastle/Instagram. by @wamonthly

9

0

24 days ago

Gloria Steinem, the feminist icon, author, activist, and organizer, died on Wednesday at 92.

“I last saw Gloria just five months ago, in April, at a gathering in her Upper East Side apartment,” Clara Bingham writes. Bingham brought a copy her book, “The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973,” which she interviewed Steinem and 100 others for.

“She instantly gravitated to the photo insert, and we started flipping through the glossy black-and-white pictures together,” Bingham continues. “A palpable moment of understanding passed between us: Almost all of her dear friends and sisters-in-arms were gone.”

Steinem first considered joining the feminist movement in 1969, when, working as a journalist, she covered a speak-out for abortion rights in Greenwich Village.

“There, Gloria had her now-famous epiphany: The personal is political, and the collective power of women telling their stories can change the world,” Bingham writes. “Gloria had never told a soul about her much earlier abortion in London, and watching women stand up in public telling their harrowing abortion stories raised Gloria’s conscience and changed her life.”

“Though Gloria was always reluctant to be the front woman for a huge, diverse movement, her warm personality, nimble sense of humor, and radiant beauty made her a magnet for the male-dominated press, and she quickly became a worldwide feminist celebrity,” Bingham continues. “But most of all, Gloria was an inveterate organizer who spent her adult life on the road listening to groups of women across the country and urging them to change their lives and communities.”

Read Bingham’s full tribute at the link in our bio. 📸: Associated Press. by @wamonthly

37

2

a month ago

“Imagine you’re a prospective college student in small-town or rural America looking to earn a degree at an institution you could likely get into and afford, weighing commute times from home,” Features Editor Gillen Tener Martin writes. “Or perhaps you’re a lawmaker trying to understand which colleges and universities best serve constituents in the less populated reaches of your state or district.”

“You check out the college rankings in publications like U.S. News & World Report, Forbes, Money Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal, and quickly realize you’re out of luck. None of these outlets specifically rank schools in rural America,” Martin continues. “So, you Google ‘best rural colleges.’ Here, you find some online sites that do rank such schools. But these serve you up lists of elite colleges like Dartmouth or Middlebury that, while located in bucolic settings, overwhelmingly admit upper-middle-class urban and suburban students with above-perfect GPAs.”

“Congratulations. You have just encountered example number 179 of how rural people get screwed in contemporary America,” Martin writes.

Rural colleges are load-bearing pillars of local tax bases, essential infrastructure for rural communities, and anchors of civic life. But today, they are being left to fall into a self-reinforcing cycle of distress, with declining admissions leading to shrinking tuition revenue followed by downsizing: cutting majors, combining programs, and laying off faculty and staff.

For these reasons, the Washington Monthly is debuting a new set of rankings: “Best Colleges for Rural America,” which measures rural colleges that are not highly selective in admissions on how they serve middle- and working-class students and the taxpayers that fund public higher education in the United States.

Check out the Best Colleges for Rural America and Monthly’s full 2026 College Guide and Rankings issue at the link in our bio. 📸: Wikimedia Commons. by @wamonthly

8

0

a month ago