Mutant Liberalism
“In times such as these, you always have experts who believe that they know best for everybody. You have some folks who think that government ought to take over everything in times of crisis—that they,...
View ArticleThe Nonprofit Grifters Who Want a Cut of the Coronavirus Bailout
On April 14, a mask-wearing mother sat in the near-empty gallery of the Minnesota Legislature and prayed. Nicole Smith-Holt was there to advocate for the Alec Smith Emergency Insulin Act, named in...
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Building an Economy That Works Again
It’s not often we get to see the U.S. economy shaken to its core, but many of us have now seen it happen twice in just over a decade. This spring, the American economy quite literally shut itself down...
View ArticleThe Coronavirus and the Republican War on Knowledge
In his appearance before the hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, or HELP, on Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and...
View ArticleTrump’s Deportation Flights Are Inflaming the Pandemic
In the midst of a historic pandemic, an ICE Air flight to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, left Alexandria, Louisiana, on Monday morning, with some 50 Haitian nationals aboard.For James, one of the passengers,...
View ArticleAmerica’s Eternal Stockholm Syndrome
At some point during the pandemic (what is time anymore, anyway?), Sweden—a high-tax, welfare-loving country where citizens generally seem to like and listen to their government—found a surprising...
View ArticleThe Great’s Empowerment Problem
Though better known for partitioning Poland and touring Potemkin villages, Catherine the Great was also an accomplished writer, and not just of political tracts. She wrote fairy tales for her...
View ArticleAmerica Is Not as Resilient as It Thinks It Is
This year’s Atlantic hurricane season could be one of the most active on record, according to models from Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Center. Hurricane season officially begins...
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Rebuilding the Constitution
In May 1987, Justice Thurgood Marshall delivered a speech at the annual seminar of the San Francisco Patent and Trademark Association. That year marked the two-hundredth anniversary of the...
View ArticleObamagate Is the Ultimate Republican Non-Scandal
What is “Obamagate” anyway? No one seems to really know, least of all Donald Trump, even though he has tweeted about it dozens of times over the last week. Asked by The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker...
View ArticleThe Minimized Life
For the majority of us, consuming art is a destination appointment. Museums and galleries put on physical demonstrations of an artist’s importance, arduously assembling exhibitions of figures like...
View ArticleJared Kushner Is a National Disaster
Trump administration villains flit in and out of the limelight depending on what particular disaster is most visibly unfolding at any moment. Sometimes these are members of his Cabinet, receiving more...
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A Beach Read With Teeth
Before picking up her new novel, All Adults Here, I did not think that Emma Straub was for me. A Vogue profile in 2016 described meeting up with the writer “in a tiny café” in Cobble Hill—the most...
View ArticleWhite Witness and the Contemporary Lynching
We are presently embroiled in a redundant public debate about whether it’s appropriate to watch and/or circulate images of black people being murdered by the police and other, nonstate killers. The...
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The Unsuitable Passions of J.M. Coetzee
Men and their desires. Do we really need more on the subject? It is ground that has been plowed so often, by Roth, Updike, and others who came of age during the sexual revolution and its aftermath....
View ArticleMaking Life Cheap
Even in an age of social distancing, you’ll still find the strangest people getting into bed with each other. In mid-March, the U.K. government’s behavioral insights team—known as the “nudge...
View ArticleHouse Democrats Are Blowing Their Chance at Student Debt Relief
Holistic student debt relief was supposed to be part of House Democrats’ 1,800-page Heroes Act, the follow-up to the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or Cares, Act that passed the...
View ArticleThe Deranged Civic Religion of the Lockdown Protesters
Over the weekend, The Washington Post published a chilling description of the first day of reopened business at a mall in an upscale suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. Bored rich people wandered the aisles of...
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The Flawed Fantasy of a Different Hillary Clinton
To think about Hillary Clinton is to enter a maze of counterfactuals. The smaller what-ifs and the bigger, more fundamental ones chain together in infinite combinations. There is the flurry of 2016...
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André Leon Talley Corrects the Record
“I live on a relatively grand scale, because that’s the way fashion is,” André Leon Talley wrote in his 2003 memoir, A.L.T. “By its very nature, it is larger than life. It’s fickle, it’s flamboyant,...
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