The Psychological Perks of Joining a Revolution
Workdays in fiction aren’t like real workdays at all. Office novels will never adequately capture the deadening experience of exchanging your time for money, of watching your hours, like elastic bands,...
View ArticleBarack Obama’s Memoir Is Set to Be the Biggest Book This Year
Book publishers have had a chaotic year. There have been protests and walkouts over Woody Allen’s memoir and the industry’s lack of diversity—unprecedented activism in an industry with little history...
View ArticleWhat Trump Taught America About the Bible
Five years ago this week, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign hit a snag. The second Republican primary debate had not gone well, and he was taking so much flak for failing to correct an Islamophobic...
View ArticleI’m Living Under the Weight of Nearly Four Months of Back Rent
I left a job as a secretary at a local Pasadena church in January in order to start working independently as an interpretive translator. My timing wasn’t the greatest. By March, everything shut down....
View ArticleJared Kushner’s Psychopathic Incompetence
The Jared Kushner Phenomenon—how this unpleasant and widely loathed man, the perpetual son, became so important to the Trump administration—would be very interesting if it weren’t so deadly. It would...
View ArticleRuth Bader Ginsburg and the Failure of Democratic Politics
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the pioneering lawyer, judge, and Supreme Court justice, died on Friday at the age of 87. Nominated to the Court by Bill Clinton in 1993, Ginsburg’s legacy stretches back six...
View ArticleThe Consequences of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Death for American Democracy
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the leader of the Supreme Court’s liberal wing and a trailblazer for women’s rights in the law, died on Friday at the age of 87. According to NPR, Ginsburg dictated a...
View ArticleThe Wildfires Changed How She Sees Life
Close to 200 bushfires ignited in Australia in early October 2019. They torched nearly 15 million acres of land and destroyed more than 2,000 homes in the states of Victoria and New South Wales along...
View ArticleThe Mighty Ruth Bader Ginsburg
The first thing to say about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whether you agreed with her jurisprudence or not, is that she was a mensch, a good person, full of compassion and empathy. Infused with honor and...
View ArticleCan Senate Democrats Run Out the Clock on Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee?
The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg should inspire a week of public mourning and reflections on her enduring legacy. With just 45 days to go before an election, there should be bipartisan agreement that...
View ArticleRuth Bader Ginsburg and the End of the One Great Woman Myth
In the last decade of the life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she saw herself crowned a feminist icon. The memefication of the precedent-setting women’s rights attorney and judge first...
View ArticleThe Man Who Is Determined to Stop Trump From Rigging the Election
It’s only a few hours into Election Day, and things are already coming undone. In Michigan, Republican groups have instructed dozens of people to stand outside polling places and watch menacingly as...
View ArticleHow to Save the Pandemic Generation
There’s a looming student debt cliff awaiting us in 2021. With America in the teeth of the Covid-19–enabled economic downturn, lawmakers suspended federal student loan payments for 80 percent of...
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Inside the FBI’s File on Soviet Poet-Dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko
In October 1961, the FBI decided a poem could be a weapon. Agents at the bureau had learned about “Babi Yar,” a provocative piece of verse written by the wily young Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko,...
View ArticleThe Libertarian Ideas That Wrecked the Fed
Last week I explained the pernicious long-term effect of Milton Friedman’s theory of the corporation. But the famed libertarian economist’s baleful legacy doesn’t end there: Friedman’s ideas about...
View ArticleTrump’s Misguided, Jingoistic War Against TikTok
On August 6, President Donald Trump signed two executive orders declaring that the popular apps TikTok and WeChat “threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”...
View ArticleThe Nikola Scandal Is a Cautionary Tale About Green Tech’s Gauzy Promises
“There’s very few people that can out-Elon in this world, and I’m one of them,” said Nikola Motor founder Trevor Milton earlier this summer. Milton’s 35 percent stake in the hydrogen-electric vehicle...
View ArticleConservatives Are Already Whitewashing the Trump Years
Jesse Helms did not keep secrets. This is about the kindest thing that could be said about the still-steaming legacy left by the longtime senator from North Carolina, but it is and has always been...
View ArticleThe Promising New Covid-19 Therapy You Probably Haven’t Heard About
When President Trump announced an emergency use authorization for convalescent plasma as a “historic” and game-changing treatment for the coronavirus last month, experts were baffled. Although plasma...
View ArticleWhy We Can’t Ignore McConnell’s Hypocrisy
Stop the presses! Mitch McConnell has a nonsensical explanation for why his insistence that the Senate confirm a replacement for the late Justice Ruth Ginsburg six weeks before Election Day does not...
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