The Lincoln Project Doesn’t Matter
On Friday, the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump conservative group, released two new ads both focused on President Trump’s recent comments about arrested Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who,...
View ArticleIt Was Insane to Restart Sports in America
For the sports-deprived American discontent with watching Premier League games, last week was something of a reprieve: The National Basketball Association, ensconced in its Orlando bubble, began...
View ArticleThe Bloody, Manufactured Crisis in Portland
The chaos on the streets of Portland, Oregon, where President Donald Trump’s deployment of federal agents has resulted in violent unrest, was made for TV—or, perhaps more accurately, for Twitter....
View ArticleZadie Smith Takes On the Pandemic
What have you done with your quarantine? Those of us who aren’t nurses find ourselves rich in time, and being dutiful citizens, we work: nurturing scallions in cups of water or Duolingo-ing our way to...
View ArticleIt’s Shaping Up to Be a Horrific Election Season for Republican Women
Running for Congress as a Republican woman has never been easy. In 2020, it must feel like someone put a hex on your campaign.Consider the current outlook in the U.S. Senate, a necessary and...
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When the Bad Guys Are Everywhere
It’s 1980, and Joe Cantamessa is dressed as a television repairman. He’s actually with the Federal Bureau of Investigation: Paul Castellano, head of the Gambino mob family and the New York City Mafia’s...
View ArticleBill Barr Battles Democrats to a Draw
The House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic members spent more than a year trying to haul Attorney General Bill Barr into a hearing room. They had no shortage of topics to cover when he finally appeared...
View ArticleThe Emperor’s New Tone
Last Friday was a momentous day in American politics. After months of doing everything he could to ignore the severity of the coronavirus pandemic and its profound impact on American life—and,...
View ArticleBetween Thomas Chatterton Williams and Me
A few weeks ago, we took a summer vacation on one of those island towns beloved by the East Coast elite. The stores and restaurants on Main Street had just emerged from the hibernation of lockdown....
View ArticleThe Coronavirus Is Blowing Up Our Best Response to the Opioid Crisis
On Mondays, Dr. Kimberly Sue would see patients at a syringe service program on the Lower East Side in New York, prescribing medications like buprenorphine that treat opioid addiction. Other days, she...
View ArticleThe Problem of the Not-Quite-One Percent
“We aren’t wealthy people with a very big Hamptons home, but it’s beautiful to us,” the owner of a rather large house in Southampton recently told The New York Times in an article on Manhattan...
View ArticleCongress Has the “Dumbest Idea Ever” for the Unemployed
Senate Republicans want to ditch the $600 weekly add-on to state unemployment benefits that they ratified in March to support laid-off workers through the Covid crisis. In its place, they’ve proposed a...
View ArticleStop Fretting About Biden’s VP Choice
We are entering the silly season of vice presidential speculation, filled with ill-sourced rumors and Talmudic interpretations of what Joe Biden means every time he says that his running mate must be...
View ArticleThe Worst Answer to Climate Anxiety: Wellness
The coronavirus turned the world inside out. Essential workers continued to report to duty, often at great personal risk. The rest of the United States was stuck indoors, with only the internet to...
View ArticleMonopoly is Tyranny
The economy as we know it is populated by gigantic corporations, behemoths that have bought up not only their competition but also the businesses supplying or otherwise supporting them. Such monopolies...
View ArticleIvanka Trump’s Empty Spectacle on Violence Against Native Women
The picture tells a nice story: Ivanka Trump—smiling with a big golden key in hand—stands alongside assistant secretary for the Bureau of Indian Affairs Tara Sweeney, Lower Sioux Indian Community Vice...
View ArticleCovid-19 and the Limits of American Moral Reasoning
No one loses a war like the United States. Yet we start them all the time. In fact, if you pause to listen to our language—from “battleground” states in election years to “culture wars” every other...
View ArticleCharlie Kaufman’s Defense of Film
B, the narrator of Charlie Kaufman’s novel Antkind, is B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, a bald, middle-aged film critic with bottle-top glasses and a flowing Whitmanesque beard, who goes only by his lone...
View ArticleAll Police Can Be Secret Police
Painful images are still coming out of Portland—law enforcement wielding exterminator-like sprayers of tear gas, firing “less-lethal” munitions that have left protesters hospitalized with...
View ArticleBolivia’s Covid-19 Election Nightmare Is a Warning
Asked this past spring whether the November 3 presidential election might need to be rescheduled due to the coronavirus, senior White House adviser Jared Kushner replied, “I’m not sure I can commit one...
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