Confessions of a Demigod
You said in your last meeting you figured out the map of the planets. The lonely orbits. Cosmic dust. In my last meeting, a future meeting was discussed. How to kick out the un-paid children—holes...
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Watching South Park at the End of the World
Writing about South Park, a silly cartoon, in the middle of an eminently predictable and yet entirely unanticipated global pandemic has an uncanny quality, like meeting a time traveler and realizing...
View Article[An iron pan is burning; the witch]
An iron pan is burning; the witchhas left her house. The childrenwalk hand in hand through aforest of reagents. In the subterraneanworld, bolts of silk, yellow pillsand moths the size of dinner...
View ArticleSneering While the South Is Dying
At a press conference Thursday morning, Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp made the astonishing claim that until the “last 24 hours,” he and his team were unaware that asymptomatic people can...
View ArticleImpeach Him Again
Over the next few months, the United States will be tested by a reality that moves much faster than our imaginations. Things are already changing in ways that seemed impossible months ago: Unemployment...
View ArticleThe Coronavirus Coups Are Upon Us
As enabling acts go, Viktor Orbán’s might be one of the most sweeping since Hitler got his in 1933. On Monday, Orbán—the quasi-fascist former Communist who has dragged Hungary to the far right since...
View ArticleA Death Toll That Cannot Be Forgotten
On Tuesday, the number of American coronavirus casualties reached a grim milestone. Over 4,000 deaths had been recorded, officially surpassing the number of Americans killed on September 11. The shock...
View ArticleKeeping Up With the Cuomos
Culture is in a deep freeze. Streaming TV may be gleefully releasing bingeable properties at a pre-crisis clip, but even Netflix will, at some point, run out of shows, since nothing is being produced....
View ArticleThe Republican Plot Against Voting Turns Deadly
The coronavirus pandemic has upended primary elections across the country. Most states have moved their remaining elections to late May or June—dates which now seem a little too optimistic. The Alaska...
View ArticleOn Being White and Broke in America
I’m what one therapist called a “class-straddler,” which I prefer to “class-transitioner,” because the truth is, there’s never not a foot of mine planted firmly in Valley View, eating processed food,...
View ArticleCould the Coronavirus End Jair Bolsonaro’s Presidency?
Brazil’s first known fatality was a 63-year-old housekeeper named Cleonice Gonçalves whose boss contracted Covid-19 in February while on vacation in Italy. The employer, who lives in the expensive Rio...
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Karl Marx’s Prophetic Longing
Karl Marx was born more than two centuries ago, in 1818, and, given the enormous impact of his ideas, it should hardly surprise us that we are still trying to make sense of his life and legacy. In the...
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Bailing Out
The Brooklyn Community Bail Fund opened for business in 2015, a heady time for criminal justice reform. The protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore had helped catapult conversations about police...
View ArticleThe Vanishing Public Square
As the Great Pandemic takes hold of our world and forces all of us to separate ourselves from our closest family and friends, does politics become impossible? As I write, states are postponing their...
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In The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel Finally Takes Cromwell to the Block
Hilary Mantel’s trilogy—Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and now The Mirror and the Light—concerns the rule of Henry VIII, but the protagonist of all three books is his adviser, Thomas Cromwell. The...
View ArticleThe Brands Feel Your Pain
Last week, the famously stoic Anna Wintour said she “broke down” upon hearing from her friend Ralph Lauren, the designer and businessman worth approximately $6 billion, that the philanthropic wing of...
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How the Republican Party Took Over the Supreme Court
For 230 years, the Supreme Court of the United States has been a political institution, but only rarely a partisan one. More than a century ago, the court controversially concluded that the...
View ArticleDrag Trump Over the Coals
Congress is out of session and out of town until late April, even as the coronavirus pandemic continues to exact a mounting death toll and inflict significant economic damage on the public. Federal...
View ArticleThe Shock Doctrine Came for Bail Reform
It was death at Rikers Island, the awful emblem of New York State’s jail and prison system, that propelled calls for cash bail reform. Those demands achieved some success: Beginning this January,...
View ArticleStop Panicking About Joe Biden
In early April 1992, a news headline in The Wall Street Journal captured the depressed mood surrounding a certain presumptive presidential nominee: “Democratic Leaders Resignedly Begin to Rally Around...
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