The Romanoffs’ Missed Opportunity
It took twenty minutes to kill the Romanovs. So many bullets had been fired on Tsar Nicholas II, that the room filled up with smoke and the gunmen couldn’t see the rest of the family. The children—the...
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Why the Left Needs Nancy Pelosi
At a San Francisco gala to raise money to fight climate change in September, Nancy Pelosi ran into Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist, and snapped a selfie with her “dear friend,” as the House...
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What Was Mexico Beach?
CNN journalist Brooke Baldwin struggled to describe what she was seeing from a helicopter flying over Mexico Beach on Thursday. “It’s gone,” she said. “It’s gone.”Scenes of devastation from the Florida...
View ArticleWhy Mainstream Conservatism Is Losing Ground in Germany
Before Angela Merkel decided to welcome more than a million asylum seekers to Germany in 2015, the German conservative coalition she belongs to spent years insisting that “Germany is not an immigration...
View ArticleGeorge Scialabba, Radical Democrat
It may strike a reader new to George Scialabba’s writing as extraordinary that Slouching Toward Utopia, a new collection of his essays and reviews, is not a response to Donald Trump’s presidency....
View ArticleThe Uncertain Fate of Affirmative Action
“It remains an enduring challenge to our nation’s education system to reconcile the pursuit of diversity with the constitutional promise of equal treatment and dignity,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote...
View ArticleHow Obamacare Became a Winning Issue
In 2009, when Barack Obama traveled to Bristol, Virginia, for a town hall to promote the Affordable Care Act, his motorcade passed a small but turbulent protest. I was raised just outside this small...
View ArticleA Death Sentence Over a Cup of Water?
“To pardon or overturn the verdict against Asia Bibi, self-confessed blasphemer is the commission of blasphemy itself and is crime against Islam and the Constitution of Pakistan.” So read a handout...
View ArticleHow to Fix the Supreme Court: Weaken It
The confirmation of a Supreme Court justice never should matter as much as Brett Kavanaugh’s did, and that’s because the Supreme Court itself shouldn’t matter as much as it does today. That’s the...
View ArticleThe New DNA Paradigm
Big cultural changes happen slowly, then all at once. This summer, the Golden State Killer, a serial rapist and murderer, was identified through the search of a third-party consumer genomics service...
View ArticleThe Mistake Countries Repeatedly Make When Dealing With the EU
“There isn’t even a one in a million chance that Merkel will say no.” These were the words of Alexis Tsipras shortly before becoming Greece’s prime minister in 2015. He was talking about his...
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The Democrats’ Incredible Shrinking Message
In the summer of 2017, when the midterm elections were more than a year away but already on everyone’s mind, Democrats seemed to have an embarrassment of riches. President Donald Trump was historically...
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Hearing Secret Harmonies
Graham Greene famously observed that there is a splinter of ice in the heart of every writer, and certainly this is true of that generation of middle-class male novelists born in the decade before...
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The Blue Wave Might Wipe Out Voter Suppression, Too
Every state routinely prunes its voter rolls when registered voters move, die, or get convicted of a felony. But under Secretary of State Jon Husted, Ohio has taken an aggressive tack to removing...
View ArticlePoem with Birds
Oh you real effulgent frailties Looka book, a banister, a sinisteraffirmation of how littlewe achieve in looking a bog, an orchard, an icy shoreshorn of...
View ArticleMarriage
You keep complaining that there are two people inside me—the one confident, decisive, ironic; the...
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Mind Games
In April, when the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees summoned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Washington, it looked as if the nation was finally going to reckon with the outsize role that...
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Micro-Targeted
It’s not difficult to imagine the political manipulation of social-media platforms. You can see the trolls, maybe similar to the employees of the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg that Adrian...
View ArticleRepublicans Are Running Away From the Economy
The U.S. stock market’s weeklong decline reversed itself dramatically on Tuesday, producing one of the strongest climbs of the year. A gain driven by strong earnings reports from bulwarks like Goldman...
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Welcome to Camping, the Most Misunderstood Show on TV
If this is what it takes to make Julia Davis a very rich woman, then so be it. The extraordinary writer and actress got her start on British TV in the 1990s, when she sent a character reel to Steve...
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