Scenes From an American Pandemic
Things change quickly in a pandemic. I started interviewing people for this piece a little more than a week ago as a way to capture this moment for people on both sides of our health care crisis—a...
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The Imitation Games That Authoritarians Play
In their book The Light That Failed, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes tell a story that they attribute to Gleb Pavlovsky. He is a Russian “political technologist” who aided both Boris Yeltsin and...
View ArticleThe Pandemic Economy in American Prisons
On Sunday afternoon, 45 people incarcerated at Rikers Island released a statement declaring that they would not be leaving their rooms for work or meals due to the jail’s inadequate response to the...
View ArticleWe Can Save Lives and the Economy at the Same Time
With the mayor of America’s largest city desperately warning the new coronavirus pandemic is on the verge of overwhelming the local hospital system, leading to deaths from untreated illness, you might...
View ArticleJoe Biden Pivots to Video
At his debate with Bernie Sanders earlier this month, which was roughly an eternity-and-a-half ago in news time, Joe Biden repeatedly stressed the need for leadership on the coronavirus crisis while...
View ArticleThe Republican Plot to Save the Rich
The first confirmed case of a coronavirus infection in the United States was announced on January 21. Two days later, with the World Health Organization recording 581 confirmed cases worldwide, the...
View ArticleSeeing No Evil
When the dust settles on the 2020 Democratic primary season, it may well serve as a guide for deciphering the limits and rigidity of mainstream gender discourse. We saw, in Barack Obama’s 2008 fight...
View ArticleHistory Won’t Save Us
History will judge Donald Trump harshly. That, at any rate, is what many of his critics predict. No less harsh, in this prediction, will be history’s judgment of those who abetted Trump’s evils, who...
View ArticleTrumpworld Embraces the Death Wish Economy
The coronavirus pandemic is a nightmare, and the worst is still to come. It is also a moment of clarity about our world. In recent days, President Donald Trump and his allies began laying the...
View ArticleThe Rural Coronavirus Crisis to Come
The news that Berea College was closing sent a wave of confusion and fear through the campus. “Some of my friends were in their dorms, and they just heard people screaming when they found out,” Lily, a...
View ArticleToward an Economic Democracy
The most fundamental tragedy of the coronavirus crisis is human. It is lives being lost. Somewhere close behind is the feeling of desperation shared by working people. In an economy where it is...
View ArticleRight-Wing Ghouls With Graduate Degrees Take on the Pandemic
The power of a pithy phrase to sway the ignorant is not to be underestimated. This is one of the less-urgent lessons of President Trump’s recent reversal on whether the coronavirus pandemic is really...
View ArticleWhat Climate Grief Taught Me About the Coronavirus
I’ve been crying a lot. So much I worry that my neighbors can hear me through the plaster walls of my apartment building in the South Bronx.The hardest part of every day is when my eyes first open and...
View ArticleThe Cult of the Shining City Embraces the Plague
President Donald Trump answered questions Tuesday afternoon for a Fox News virtual town hall surrounded by a frame of graphics. In the lower right-hand corner, a box documented the market’s delirious...
View ArticleGive Me Capitalism or Give Me Death
I don’t remember doing it, but at some point in the last week I must have turned on my Apple News alerts. “The Dow fell more than 900 points on Friday,” one read. Then another: “Who will be saved, and...
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The Ethical Failures of Modern Architecture
Even if you haven’t heard of Bjarke Ingels, you’ve probably seen his work. The Danish designer is perhaps the world’s most successful living architect. He has designed parks, apartment buildings, four...
View ArticleAn Emergency Decades in the Making
How does an outbreak evolve into an epidemic and finally a pandemic? In Episode 4 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene discuss how the coronavirus crisis has been...
View ArticleHow Andrew Cuomo Became a Media Darling
A consensus has started to emerge in the media: Cable news networks must stop airing the president’s daily coronavirus briefings in full, which are dense with dangerous quackery. “There is a very real...
View ArticleAmerica’s Eldercare System Is a Tinderbox
One of the earliest signs that the coronavirus was about to overtake the United States was the February outbreak at a nursing home facility outside of Seattle. At the Life Care Center in Kirkland,...
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The Other Latif and the Radiolab Problem
The Other Latif—a new serialized podcast and radio show by Latif Nasser, a producer at the WNYC subsidiary Radiolab—is about a case of overlapping identities. After discovering that a detainee at...
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