Your Climate Anxiety Is Another Person’s Existential Crisis
I don’t experience climate grief—and I’ve always worried that means there’s something wrong with me.Studies show that I’m in the minority: More than two-thirds of American adults say they experience...
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The Art of Staying Home
Writers make for remarkably talented shut-ins and isolates. They’re famous for it—Proust sealed in his cork-lined room, Dickinson in her attic, Thoreau in his DIY cabin relying, or so he wrote, only on...
View ArticleA Leftist Future for Asian American Politics
About 10 years ago, I worked for a small arts nonprofit for Asian American writers that embraced a delightfully expansive definition of its target demographic. There, “Asian American” included not just...
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No Vaccine in Sight
At a press briefing in early April, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo held up a hospital-green N95 respiratory mask. He had just delivered the day’s updated Covid-19 fatality figures, a number exacerbated...
View ArticleThe Bittersweet Return of Sports
Over the last couple of weeks, I have struggled to remember the last game I watched live. Was it Atletico Madrid’s dastardly, heartbreaking victory over Liverpool in the Champions League on March 11? I...
View ArticleIs Biden Going to Repeat Obama’s Immigration Mistakes?
Last month, President Donald Trump, who has spent an uneasy year botching the U.S. response to the coronavirus, took another page out of his favorite playbook. In a late-night tweet, the leader of the...
View ArticleWork Requirements Have Always Been About Punishment
The Labor Department’s jobs report last Friday was about as bleak as predicted: The official unemployment rate is now 14.7 percent—the highest in the nation’s history since the Great Depression—with...
View ArticleThere Are Green Jobs Hiding in the Oilfields
Jobs and towns built on fossil fuel extraction appear to be headed for disaster. The Trump administration seems inclined to respond by throwing aid at the oil and gas CEOs who helped to engineer the...
View ArticleThe Election Will Not Be Judgment Day
The coronavirus pandemic has killed 80,000 Americans. More than a million have been infected. Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economic shutdowns enacted to slow the virus’s...
View ArticleIs the Supreme Court Scared of Tribal Sovereignty?
In 2003, writing a concurrent opinion in United States v. Lara, a case that determined an individual can be charged with the same crime in tribal and federal court, Supreme Court Justice Clarence...
View ArticleAl Capone, All-American Boogeyman
Al Capone is a famous American boogeyman and a symbol of that mercifully brief and long-ago nightmare Prohibition. Boogeymen make good movie villains, and Capone has proved a useful antihero to...
View ArticleCongress May Hand Bill Barr the Keys to Your Online Life
While the country is facing a daily Covid-19 death toll in the thousands, and the coronavirus outbreak snakes its way inside the executive branch, Congress is currently considering a vast expansion of...
View ArticleCoronavirus Is Making Us All Camgirls
For millions of newly remote workers in the United States, doing your job in this pandemic now involves looking presentable on camera, in a relatively pleasing setting at home. With bedrooms and...
View ArticleFor Trump, Following the Law Is an Undue Burden
If there was one word that defined the Supreme Court’s oral arguments on Tuesday, it was “burden.” President Donald Trump’s lawyers and the Justice Department alike urged the justices to reject a batch...
View ArticleHave A Good Trip Demystifies Psychedelics
In 1955, Aldous Huxley, author and early champion of the psychedelic experience, returned to reality after the effects of 400 milligrams of mescaline had settled, brimming with, “the direct, total...
View ArticleA Privatization Fever Dream for Post-Crisis Public Education
Last week, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that his state will partner with the Gates Foundation to “reimagine education.” “The old model of everybody goes and sits in a classroom, and the...
View ArticleThe Deficit Hawks Are Circling Their Old Roosts
Just two months into the United States government’s historic multi-trillion dollar response to the damage wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, leading congressional Republicans have lost their appetite...
View ArticleThe Pandemic That Changed Everything Changed Nothing
Even as the number of documented cases declines, New York City remains the hot spot of the coronavirus crisis in the United States. It’s also, in the months since the pandemic first took hold here,...
View ArticleIt Will Be Needlessly Hard to Get a Coronavirus Vaccination in the U.S.
It’s not certain that we’ll ever get a vaccine for the coronavirus, let alone that one will be available by January, as Anthony Fauci has suggested as a hopeful possibility. As Alexander Zaitchik wrote...
View ArticleDon’t Blame the Coronavirus for Quibi’s Failure
Just about everything in the world is going wrong, but it’s been a golden age for streaming. With movie theaters, bookstores, and most forms of live entertainment on ice, we have little choice but to...
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