Trump’s Cloud of Gossip Has Poisoned America
“So, I just heard that,” the President of the United States said at a White House press conference last Thursday. The conference, like the rest of Trump’s regular press briefings, was ostensibly about...
View ArticleJoe Biden Finds His Voice
Throughout his entire political career, stretching from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, Joe Biden has been searching for his voice and for words that were authentically his own.Thursday night, flanked...
View ArticleHealth Care Reform Is Being Slashed Into Oblivion
If one issue dominated the Democratic presidential primaries this cycle, it was health care. Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All proposal set a standard that other candidates vied to match while...
View ArticleBan Yachts
It’s been a big week for yacht news. Yesterday, white supremacist shirt-layering aficionado Steve Bannon was arrested on a $28 million, 150-foot yacht in Connecticut for defrauding donors to his Build...
View ArticleWhen the Republican Party Was Sane
After five losses in a row, Republicans were desperate to regain the White House following the 1948 election, when Harry Truman surged in the polls at the eleventh hour to defeat GOP standard bearer...
View ArticleTrump’s Incredible Ignorance of Suburbia
It says a lot about President Trump’s misunderstanding of the suburbs that the Republican National Committee has designated Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the Midwestern couple who two months ago pointed...
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How to Break a Big Pharma Monopoly on a Covid-19 Vaccine
In mid-July, the U.S. media lit up with a big story about the global race for a Covid-19 vaccine. State-backed Russian hackers, it was alleged, were poking around the vaccine trade secrets of U.S.,...
View ArticleRepublican Voters Embrace Trump’s Cult of Destruction
There is a certain kind of sputtering disbelief that characterizes a lot of liberal reactions to Trump, for good reason. Even after four years of this routine, it can still seem unbelievable to watch...
View ArticleWhen “Police Reform” Came to Kenosha, Wisconsin
Six years before Jacob Blake was shot and critically injured by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the city made national headlines for a case that became the impetus for groundbreaking reforms concerning...
View ArticleRepublicans Invite America to Play the “Dear Leader” Lottery
David Bossie knew he’d fucked up as the word started to emerge from his mouth. The 2016 Trump campaign veteran, now representing Maryland in the Republican National Convention’s roll call of delegate...
View ArticleHéctor Tobar’s Radical Road Trip Novel
A quarter of the way through Héctor Tobar’s novel, his young, blond protagonist stands on the edge of National Highway Number 9 in Chile, thumb pointed south in hopes of hitching a ride. Drivers speed...
View Article“Everything Was Destroyed”
On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria, which had already devastated the island of Dominica, hit Puerto Rico as a Category 4 hurricane with winds reaching 155 miles per hour. The island had seen other...
View ArticleDonald Trump Declares Total War on the Civil Service
Monday was the first day of the Republican Party’s national convention to renominate President Donald Trump, and it dwelled on little else. The quadrennial conventions are typically used by the parties...
View ArticleCarl Hiaasen’s Secret to Writing a Good Trump Novel
Speaking to Poets & Writers in the fall of 2017, Salman Rushdie admitted that he saw a silver lining in Donald Trump’s election. “It’s an awful thing to say,” he said, “that this thing that is very...
View ArticleJerry Falwell Jr.’s Filthy, Predatory Finances
The overnight fall of Jerry Falwell Jr. from high evangelical grace feels in many ways like a Trump-era gloss on the fabled preacher sex scandals that have dogged our self-appointed Protestant...
View ArticleThe Republicans’ Love Letter to Rich Culture Warriors
The opening night of the Republican National Convention was a miserable pageant that tried in vain to insist that working people’s interests were at home in the party of big business and minoritarian...
View ArticleHow Boys State Explains Trump’s Appeal
A teenage boy fidgets on a couch, his eyes darting around behind curtains of Ashton Kutcher hair. One of the 1,000 young subjects of the documentary Boys State, this boy, Robert, has just given a...
View ArticleScientists Really Wish Trump Hadn’t Made That Covid Plasma Announcement
In 1901, Italian doctor Francesco Cenci discovered that blood infusions from recovered measles patients could keep other people from getting the illness. A few years later, he discovered that the same...
View ArticleThe Whitney Museum’s Careless Attempt to Curate a Summer of Black Uprising
In late June, the Black photographers’ collective See In Black, which formed after the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, David McAtee, Tony McDade, and other Black people earlier this...
View ArticleThe Sad Spectacle of Talking About Native Rights at Trump’s Racist Circus
On the second night of the Republican National Convention, Navajo Nation Vice President Myron Lizer made his appearance as the sole Native citizen scheduled to speak at the four-day event. Lizer, a...
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