A #Caturday look at spectral mousers, fairy felines, and the soft pawprints of ghostlore

Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica says trying to be more moderate is a dead end for Democrats and the solution is for the party to be seen as fighting against corruption, oligarchy and other il...

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize.  About the award: "The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Book Prize is awarded annually to the best book in the field of American legal history by an early career scholar. The prize is designed to recognize and promote new work in the field by graduate students, law students, post-doctoral fellows and early career faculty. The work may be in any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies, but scholarship in the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference." This year's award went to Sarah L. H. Gronningsater (University of Pennsylvania) for The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture and the Making of National Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024). The citation: Elegantly rendered and beautifully constructed, Sarah Gronningsater’s  traces the experiences of a formative generation of New Yorkers – people born into the quasi-freedom granted by New York’s emancipation laws. By using a varied and creative source base, Gronningsater chronicles how their lives were shaped by gradual emancipation, and how their experiences and struggles within that legal regime translated into political activism in their later years. Gronningsater convincingly shows how legal consciousness gained early in life connected a generation of freedpeople who later used that knowledge to influence the larger national conversation about citizenship and racial equality in the United States. Congratulations to Professor Gronningsater! -- Karen Tani  

Trump’s cronies are undermining financial stability

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Welcome back to Media Matters’ weekly newsletter. This week: Podcaster Benny Johnson’s job is to have no principles — business is booming. Some right-wing figures are starting to declare “MAGA is dead...