Why Republican Women Defend Brett Kavanaugh
“Elect women” became the de facto rallying cry for those opposed to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh after he was accused of sexual assaulting Christine Blasey Ford at a high school party in the...
View ArticleBrett Kavanaugh Is the Point of No Return
The American conservative movement’s long march to install a reliable five-justice majority in its own image is over. On Monday, Justice Brett Kavanaugh will take his seat on the Supreme Court for the...
View ArticleWhy Don’t We Talk About Peru’s Forced Sterilizations?
Last week, Peru’s supreme court overturned the pardon of brutal Peruvian ex-President Alberto Fujimori, tossing the leader back to his 25-year prison sentence for human rights violations and...
View ArticleThe Conservative Resistance Inside the Vatican
In August, in a letter published in the National Catholic Register, Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò blamed the Roman Catholic Church’s sexual abuse crisis on gay priests who “act under the...
View ArticleBrazil Is on the Brink of Authoritarianism
The stage is set for the second round of voting in Brazil’s presidential election. On October 7, a sprawling field of candidates was reduced to two, the extreme right-wing congressman Jair Bolsonaro,...
View ArticleDenying Women’s Ability to Know
Last week Donna Strickland, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, won the Nobel Prize in Physics. She is the third woman to be awarded the prize in its history—Marie Curie received it...
View ArticleWho Says Supreme Court Justices Get Lifetime Tenure?
A good deal of the uproar over the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court stems from the expectation that he will remain there for three, perhaps even four decades. The Constitution, most...
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How One Inuit Community Won Against Big Oil
In April 2018, the Trump administration announced Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was open for business. By June, two Alaska Native Regional Corporations and a small oil company had already...
View ArticleThe Case for Climate Pessimism
Some climate change activists oppose doom-and-gloom rhetoric. They know that, if we don’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly, the planet will soon become more habitable to flesh-eating bacteria...
View ArticleThe Good Place Comes Down to Earth
The Good Place is a show set in a special new corner of hell. The person in charge, an insubordinate demon named Michael (Ted Danson), is undergoing a crisis: For thousands of years, he was a loyal...
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In Maniac, the Human Mind Is the Only Real Place
The setting is a pharmaceutical trial of a psychiatric medication. The trial room is like the inside of a spaceship from the 1970s. From the other side of a purple-lit window, a beautiful young...
View ArticleThe Abortion Case Likely Headed for the Supreme Court
From the moment President Donald Trump tapped Brett Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court in early July, until the first allegations of sexual assault surfaced against the nominee...
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The Fearless Rise of the Black Southern Progressive
Last December, at the election-night watch party for Doug Jones in Birmingham, Alabama, LaTosha Brown and Cliff Albright were among the last to arrive. The founders of the Black Voters Matter Fund had...
View ArticleWhen the Next Recession Hits
In August 2008, just before the slow-moving financial crisis turned into outright panic, the secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson, traveled to the Summer Olympics in Beijing. At a private lunch with...
View ArticleIn Defense of Politicizing Hurricanes
Hurricane Michael made landfall on Wednesday with winds of 155 miles per hour, just shy of Category 5 strength—the most powerful hurricane to hit Florida’s panhandle in recorded history. It will also...
View ArticleIn 22 July, Paul Greengrass Misses the Bigger Picture
The British director Paul Greengrass has made dramatizations of real-life events, especially blood-spattered disasters, the mainstay of his career. The Murder of Stephen Lawrence (1999) retells the...
View ArticleThe Power Struggles Behind Jamal Khashoggi’s Disappearance
In 1978, Lebanese Shia cleric Musa Sadr disappeared on a trip to Libya. Forty years later, his fate remains a mystery. He is widely believed to have been killed by his host, Muammar Qaddaffi.The...
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The Office at the End of the World
Ling Ma’s debut novel Severance begins with the cryptic sentence “After the End came the Beginning.” The End here refers, naturally, to the end of the world. The Beginning, though, oddly points at once...
View ArticleAmerican Democracy Is on the Ballot in November
There’s a cynical old saying—often falsely attributed to Mark Twain—that if voting changed anything, it would be illegal. Over the past decade, Republicans across the country have tried to prove this...
View ArticleNicolas Cage Is on Fire
The unhinged face of Nicolas Cage is as much part of American film as the swoopy John Williams overture. Like Jack Nicholson and Willem Dafoe, his ability to inhabit the extremities of male emotion is...
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