The Airy Ambivalence of the Moderate Politician
In the summer of 2015, Josh Barro wrote a piece for The New York Times titled “Donald Trump, Moderate Republican.” The real estate magnate was “anything but ideologically rigid,” Barro wrote, “and he...
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When Art Becomes Self-Help
In a moment perhaps better consigned to the mists of television history, Bravo once produced a reality TV show called Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, which had its two seasons in 2010 and 2011. It...
View ArticleI Left Academia and Became a Climate YouTuber
As I wandered the corridors of San Francisco’s immense Moscone Center, my heart sank deeper and deeper. This was my first international conference—the American Geophysical Union’s 2013 Fall Meeting—and...
View ArticleThe Beastie Boys Keep It On and On
In 1987, the Beastie Boys opened for Run DMC on tour. The headliners’ song “Walk This Way” with Aerosmith was a monster hit, and the Beastie Boys’ debut album Licensed to Ill had made them frat-house...
View ArticleThe Media Is Blowing the Coverage of the Coronavirus Protests
Politico co-founder John F. Harris last week delivered a dire warning about the right-wing anti-lockdown protests that were then just beginning to spread across the country. “The wake of the...
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Turn On, Tune In, Cash In
In 2009, when she was 56 years old, Judith Goedeke, a retired acupuncturist living in the middle of Maryland who was suffering from severe depression, took psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in...
View ArticleThe “Shadow Banks” Are Back, and Still Too Big to Fail
On April 14, Nancy Wallace, a real estate professor at Berkeley, gave an interview to the University of California’s business school, during which she warned of “a looming nightmare” in the economy....
View ArticleThe Coronavirus and the Limits of Individual Climate Action
In the United States, the fight against climate change is often framed as a matter of individual action toward a collective goal. If only Americans would drive and fly less and consume more sustainable...
View Article“Believe Science” Is a Bad Response to Denialism
Scientists saw it coming well in advance: a crisis that, left unaddressed, could kill hundreds of thousands of people. The White House ignored it, telling the public the problem was already contained....
View ArticleAmerica’s Post-Pandemic Monoculture
Before the economy officially collapsed, it was easy enough to imagine that the world would resume without much of a hitch after the pandemic had dissipated: Restaurants and bars would open in time for...
View ArticleWho Will Be Joe Biden’s Pick for Vice President?
The search for a vice president follows a series of rituals as stylized as those of the Japanese tea ceremony.There are leaks, carefully orchestrated by the campaign to appease various constituencies,...
View ArticleFrom Black Power to Black Establishment
June 16, 1966, isn’t on the commemorative calendar in black American politics, but it probably should be. On that date, Willie Ricks, a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field secretary,...
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How Democrats Let the Right Win on Immigration
A theme of Daniel Denvir’s book All-American Nativism is the role that liberal political journals have played in giving cover to deeply reactionary ideas. In the 1990s, The Atlantic published a long...
View ArticleDon’t Let Larry Summers Block Climate Progress Again
There are many reasons the average news reader might not like Larry Summers. A longtime friend of convicted predator Jeffrey Epstein, Summers deregulated the banking sector as Bill Clinton’s Treasury...
View ArticleErasing the Dead
Tucked down near the end of a recent New York Times piece praising New Mexico’s response to the coronavirus was the fact that, “While Native Americans account for about 11 percent of New Mexico’s...
View ArticleThe Grim New Relevance of Workers Memorial Day
The United States loves a good holiday, and depending on how detailed a calendar one keeps, there are daily opportunities to celebrate everything from gumdrops to argyle. (I finished writing this on...
View ArticleThe Supreme Court Eyes an Escape Hatch From Trump’s Corruption
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments next month in perhaps its highest-profile set of cases this term: whether the House Judiciary Committee and Manhattan’s district attorney can lawfully...
View ArticleChuck Schumer Is Allergic to Politics
In what Politico describes as part of a “broader Democratic effort to conduct oversight over the Trump administration amid the pandemic,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced this week that...
View ArticleA Woman’s Worth in a Pandemic
At recent protests demanding that states drop stay-home orders and other coronavirus prevention measures, events engineered for maximum viral potential on social media, a kind of paean to personal care...
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Reagan, Gay Porn, and Family Secrets Star in Circus of Books
Some time in the mid-1980s, a kid named Micah Mason swiped a dirty VHS tape from the back seat of his parents’ car. He waited months to watch it in secret, only to find, at the fatal moment, that he’d...
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