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What do you call someone who isn’t a journalist but who covers their subject better than most beat reporters?
Ah, to hell with it, let’s just call Steve Vladeck a journalist.
By day, he’s a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. And his CV shows no full-time newsroom job, though he occasionally appears as an analyst on CNN. But, fortunately for us, he does write a newsletter, One First, that is a must-read on legal matters, particularly those related to the Supreme Court’s decisions and machinations.
On Monday, he published a special edition, just hours after the Supreme Court empowered the Trump administration to deport immigrants to third countries without giving them a proper opportunity to contest their removal. This decision relied on at least five conservative judges, and drew a sharp dissent from the three liberals on the bench.
Vladeck is one of those writers who can translate complex matters into accessible prose, without dumbing down the underlying material. He is especially adept at addressing the impact of decisions made on the “shadow docket”—that is, the Court’s cryptic, unsigned rulings that are accompanied by little or no explanation from the justices. (His book exploring this trend is excellent.)
“As longtime readers of this newsletter know, I’m not prone to hyperbole,” Vladeck wrote Monday. “But the title of this piece refers to today’s ruling as ‘disastrous’”—for reasons that go beyond this particular case. “Here is one of the most stark examples to date of the Trump administration overtly defying rulings by a federal district judge.… For the Court to not only grant emergency relief in this case, but to offer nary a word of explanation either in criticism of the government’s behavior, or in defense of why it granted relief notwithstanding that behavior, is to invite—if not affirmatively enable—comparable defiance of future district court orders by the government.”
There are plenty of good SCOTUS reporters out there, but few of them can match Vladeck’s lightning reflexes and spot-on analysis. If you haven’t signed up for his newsletter, you’re missing out.
At 5am Tuesday—less than three days after the US attack on Iranian nuclear sites—CNN published a poll that showed Americans disapproved of the strikes by a margin of 56 percent to 44. To come to that conclusion, CNN pollsters interviewed 1,030 adults nationwide, with a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.
In what must be a complete coincidence, Fox News published a survey just nine hours later that came to a different conclusion: “Interviews reveal majority believe nuclear facility attacks were necessary for US security.” To report that, five Fox staffers checked in with around a dozen Americans to gauge their opinions on President Trump’s decision to attack. Most of the comments were what you’d expect:
- “Thank God we have a chief executive that has the guts and the common sense to do what’s right,” said “Ron from Tennessee.”
- The move “made America more safe,” said “Tammy from Fort Pierce, Florida.”
- “I think he did what he [had] to do as he promised to take care of this country and protect us,” said a “man in Jersey City.”
So there you have it. You can rely on an independent survey company’s eleven-page poll, complete with crosstabs and methodology, to see how Americans feel. Or you can read a grab bag of quotes from people who won’t give their last names, even when they’re telling Fox that Trump did a great job.
Nunapitchuk, Alaska, and Pointe-au-Chien, Louisiana, are nearly four thousand miles apart. Their climates, their languages, and their diets could hardly be more different. But the two Indigenous communities share a grim future, as both are being forced to relocate or “adapt in place” because climate change is making their longtime homes uninhabitable.
Two public radio reporters—Eva Tesfaye, at Louisiana’s WWNO, and Sage Smiley, at Alaska’s KYUK—teamed up to show how rising waters have created havoc in both communities, and they wove these two narratives together in an expertly done podcast that is also accessible via a transcript.
Here is how the team describes the town of Nunapitchuk, where the ancient permafrost is melting away, and even the mayor’s house is held together with duct tape: ”Crumbling infrastructure is the norm, and visible everywhere you look: Many doors don’t shut properly as houses settle into the ground. Floors tilt at an angle. The corners of buildings rot as they come into contact with the soft ground. The public safety building hangs over the river, as the bank erodes from underneath it. A section of town is blocked off, a handful of houses abandoned, where the permafrost thaw got especially bad.”
And in Louisiana, resident Erica Billiot describes her travails: “We have cracks on the side of all walls. It rains through the doors. One of my sisters, her roof, it rains in where the stove’s at, I guess because it’s not sealed or whatever. But yeah, walls are crooked. Floors are crooked.”
Journalists often succumb to the tendency to see problems in isolation from one another. This podcast, supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, shows that this doesn’t have to be the case.
(P.S. And on point, Louisiana’s governor recently signed a bill that will open more wetlands to development, following similar cues from North Carolina and Tennessee. Elise Plunk, a reporter for the Louisiana Illuminator, has the details.)
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