The Coronavirus Commission in Trump’s Future
The World Health Organization declared on Wednesday that the coronavirus outbreak had become a pandemic, urging governments to take further steps to stem the now-worldwide spread of the virus. “WHO has...
View ArticleBiden’s Alienating Optimism About the “Future”
For most Democratic politicians, the future is a bright investment opportunity. Increasing funding for education is “investing in our future.” Addressing climate change does not mean reining in the...
View ArticleThe Bernie Sanders Movement Without Bernie Sanders
For Bernie Sanders’s supporters, one source of frustration in the recent round of primaries is the peculiar fact that his campaign’s agenda seems to be doing better than the candidate himself. On...
View ArticleA Better World Is Possible Without a Pandemic
In Detroit earlier this week, city officials announced a moratorium on new water shutoffs. They are also returning service to customers behind on their bills, and locking in water fees at $25 a month...
View ArticleThe Dismantled State Takes on a Pandemic
Donald Trump’s televised address to the nation Wednesday night on the coronavirus pandemic failed just about every single test of political rhetoric. It neither reassured the American people nor did it...
View ArticleThe Coronavirus Is a Test of Joe Biden’s Ideas
In a speech immediately heralded as “presidential,” Joe Biden addressed the coronavirus pandemic and laid out his proposal for limiting the “human and economic” toll of the illness. His plan includes...
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What’s So Funny About the End of the World?
I’ve flirted with vegetarianism the way you might with faith on a turbulent flight. I’ve made New Year’s resolutions; I’ve joined the mail-order bean club. Declining to eat meat may seem like a...
View ArticleA Golden Opportunity for a Green Stimulus
As Congress debated Thursday whether paid leave was worth paying for during a pandemic, the Federal Reserve announced it would inject $1.5 trillion worth of liquidity into the American economy in an...
View ArticleIt’s the End of Trump’s Presidency—Again
We are in the midst of several overlapping crises. The United States is clearly unprepared for coronavirus, which is rapidly spreading. The economy is buckling under the strain: The long bull market is...
View ArticleTrump Is Cutting Food Stamps During a Pandemic
James Murphy has spent a lot of time looking for a job—“in retail, manufacturing, anything”—but always ends up moving from gig to gig, unable to find something steady. He can’t afford permanent...
View ArticleThe President Who Wasn’t There
All I can think about are my hands: the surfaces they’ve touched, the door knobs they’ve turned, the itches they’ve scratched (always, invariably, on the face). I think about the last time my hands...
View ArticleIn Final Test of Nerves, Bernie Sanders Blinks
Tonight’s presidential debate may have been functionally the end of the Democratic primary campaign—not just because the forthcoming primaries favor Joe Biden, but because the coronavirus pandemic has...
View ArticleThe Pandemic Imagination
Daniel Defoe, that indefatigable hack, published Journal of the Plague Year in 1722. Writing about the bubonic plague sweeping through London in 1665, when Defoe himself was no more than five years...
View ArticleThe Plot Against America’s Powerful Warning
The morning after Donald Trump’s election, I boarded the subway outside my home in Brooklyn, bound for a series of drunken commiserations with shell-shocked friends. The diverse faces on the R train...
View ArticleThe Lost World of Studio 54
Last year, the Brooklyn Museum hosted Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving, an exhibition that displayed the artist’s clothing and cosmetics and some other ephemera alongside a handful of her...
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How Lindsey Graham Could Lose in 2020
If there is one political lesson Republicans have taken to heart since 2016, it is that there is no crossing Donald Trump. Perhaps no GOP official better represents Trump’s death grip on the party than...
View ArticleHow the Media Created the “Moderate” Susan Collins
In 1997, only seven months into the job as a senator, Susan Collins of Maine got what many of her colleagues wait years for: a glowing profile in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. It described “a...
View ArticleThe Risky Race for a Quick Coronavirus Vaccine
As the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 sweeps across the world, scientists are racing to find vaccines that could stop the virus in its tracks. On Monday, Moderna Therapeutics, a Massachusetts-based...
View ArticleA Case for Unity
At times during CNN’s Democratic debate on Sunday night, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders seemed like feuding former vaudeville stars arguing over which of them muffed his lines in Buffalo 43 years ago. It...
View ArticleThe Case for a Social Distancing Wage
The rapidly escalating coronavirus pandemic, and the urgent need for the populace to practice “social distancing” in order to prevent the overburdening of our health care infrastructure, has quickly...
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