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Terrorist By Association
In the salle des assises, the Paris courtroom reserved for the examination of murders, rapes, and other serious crimes, a box of thick glass has been erected atop the old wood enclosure in which the...
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Bad Faith
Our hominid ancestors first appeared around six million years ago. They started to use symbols around 150,000 years ago, and the first of the major religions began 5,000 years ago. What are we to make...
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Identity Is the Mystery in Tana French’s New Crime Novel
THE WITCH ELM by Tana French.Viking, 528 pp., $28.00In 1943, four boys were poaching in the woods in Hagley, in the English county of Worcestershire. They climbed a wych elm and found a skull inside...
View ArticleElon Musk and America’s Toxic Cult of the CEO
Last Wednesday, Tesla CEO and chairman Elon Musk rejected a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over claims he lied on Twitter about having “secured” funding to take the automaker...
View ArticleThe Environmental Consequences of a Justice Brett Kavanaugh
How much mercury should coal plants be allowed to emit? There’s been a years-long fight in Washington, D.C., over that very question—and who wins it may ultimately depend on whether Brett Kavanaugh is...
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America’s Missing Labor Party
For nearly half a century, an air of inevitability has clung to the decline of the American labor movement. As union density has fallen to near 10 percent and strike activity has reached historic lows,...
View ArticleWhat Brett Kavanaugh Is Getting Away With
Give this to Jeff Flake: When it comes to infuriating people, he’s truly bipartisan. His denunciations of President Donald Trump have been too pointed for many on the right, and too feeble for those on...
View ArticleThe New Face of Men’s Rights
The Trump men are very worried about the fate of their kind. Before he boarded Air Force One on Tuesday, President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter, “What do you say to young men in America?” He...
View ArticleFalse Concepts of Liberty, Pt. 2
A tourist treading the streets of ancient Pompeii might well notice, viewing the buildings still extant there, that Roman dwellings, lacking in windows of any kind, were oriented entirely inward,...
View ArticleRenaming Macedonia in the Age of Nationalism
“How would you feel if your neighbor told you your nation was an artificial construct?” Macedonian foreign minister Nikola Dimitrov asked in a speech to the European Parliament in August. He had...
View ArticleWhy Amazon Raised Its Minimum Wage
It’s not every day that Bernie Sanders praises the richest man alive. But on Tuesday, Sanders did exactly that, tweeting props to Jeff Bezos for Amazon’s decision to raise its minimum wage to $15, a...
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An Opera for the City, an Opera for the Self
There are a couple of bars from The Mile Long Opera that I can’t get out of my head. “Funny how a manicure / Changes everything,” the line goes, rising up and holding at a level note in the middle,...
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How the New Democrats Could End the Drone Wars
One spring during the Obama administration, I sat with a group of Yemeni farmers in Sana’a. I’d contacted them after a U.S. drone flying over the village of al-Sabool struck a bus full of shoppers,...
View ArticleThe Water Lilies
They open in the day and close at night.They are good at appearances. They are white.I judge them, judge the study they makeOf themselves, aspirational beings, fakeIf you ask me. If you ask me, I’ll...
View ArticleSong with Shag Rug and Wood Paneling
My parents renovated that old home.It is clean as a lobotomy. The cracked linoleum’s erased.Now new hardwood floors are gleaming. Gone are gold shag rugs, the shadeof California August on which I lay...
View ArticleThe FBI’s Kavanaugh Dilemma
The FBI has completed its rushed investigation of allegations that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh committed sexual assault as a teenager. While senators will begin reading the agency’s report...
View ArticleThis Is Not the Last Kavanaugh Report
Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley summed up the FBI’s reopened background investigation into Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in a single sentence on Thursday: “There’s nothing in it that we didn’t...
View ArticleThe Kavanaugh Debate Is Dividing Never Trump Conservatives
It has become clear over the past week that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s angry and partisan testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee helped rally Republicans to his side, including...
View ArticleA Star Is Born Is the “November Rain” of the Big Screen
It is difficult to think of a recent movie that has come close to the acclaim-versus-quality ratio of A Star is Born. Between the reviews and the buzz and Lady Gaga riding to the Venice Film Festival...
View ArticleWe’re Still Living in the Boys’ Culture of Kavanaugh’s Youth
“What’s your body count?” This question might make a certain sense on the battlefield—certainly more sense than asking, “How many people have you slaughtered?” When one’s job is to kill, then it’s...
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