Melania Trump’s Charmed Pandemic Life
Last week, Melania Trump managed to avert a potential P.R. disaster by contracting Covid-19. On Thursday, CNN released audio secretly recorded by Melania’s former friend and adviser Stephanie Wolkoff,...
View ArticleImagining the Post-Trump Internet
On Monday, Trump declared victory in his battle with the coronavirus. By Tuesday, he had moved on, fighting the invisible enemy he apparently blames for keeping his (false) Covid-19 tweets from the...
View ArticleIs California Doomed to Keep Burning?
What will it take to save California? Around the world, fire season is growing increasingly severe and increasingly lethal. This year, wildfires have destroyed more than five million acres in the...
View ArticleWhy Trump’s Experimental Covid-19 Treatment Could Be Bad News for Everyone Else
Soon after President Trump spiked a fever, shares of Regeneron, a pharmaceutical company he has previously invested in, also shot up—along with interest in the company’s experimental Covid-19...
View ArticleOur President Is Literally Toxic
In 1978, Susan Sontag published a famous essay titled “Illness as Metaphor,” which argued against perceiving illness metaphorically. “Illness is not a metaphor,” Sontag wrote. “The most truthful way of...
View ArticleThe Final Message of a Dying Campaign
With a month to go before the November election, Donald Trump has returned to the Covid-19 message he, his administration, and his allies pushed in the early spring. “Don’t let it dominate you,” Trump...
View ArticleChaos Engulfs White House as Trump Learns That the Coronavirus is Contagious
The White House Coronavirus Superspreader Week is now among the biggest governmental outbreaks in the world, with the president’s residence ranking as one of the worst hot spots in the city of...
View ArticleKamala Harris and Mike Pence Tried to Have a Normal Debate. It Didn’t Quite...
Believe it or not, while it seems like an eternity has passed since the first presidential debate, it was actually only eight days ago. After the lights went down on that frenetic affair—which was...
View ArticleDonald Trump Has Lost His Ability to Short-Circuit the News
Twelve days ago, The New York Times published a story based on documents that reporters had wanted to see for years: Donald Trump’s tax returns. The story revealed that the president was deeply in...
View ArticleMaybe Trump Just Doesn’t Want to Be President
On Tuesday, not long after he had concluded an astonishing performance of dexamethasone-fueled theatrics from Walter Reed Hospital, President Donald Trump announced he would be quashing further...
View ArticleThe White House Coronavirus Outbreak Won’t Stop the Barrett Confirmation
Two weeks ago, the White House held an event with more than 200 attendees where President Donald Trump formally announced his nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Since then, the...
View ArticleThe Social Dilemma and the Rise of the Clickbait Documentary
The Social Dilemma, director Jeff Orlowski’s buzzworthy Netflix documentary about Big Tech, starts casually, with the interviewees settling down in their chairs, taking their last sips of coffee, and...
View ArticleA Petulant Trump Squanders His Best Chance for a Breakthrough
On Thursday morning, Donald Trump, the king of real estate bankruptcy, declared political bankruptcy. Trailing Joe Biden by double-digit margins in recent national polls, the Covid-stricken president...
View ArticleWhy Are Democrats So Afraid to Say Fracking Is Bad?
If you’re freaked out about the climate crisis, it might be nice to live in Mike Pence’s imaginary world. There, the Paris Climate Agreement is a muscular international treaty capable of shaping trade...
View ArticleNorth Carolina’s Labyrinthine Voting Nightmare
Guilford County, the third most populous in North Carolina, is currently facing something of an electoral crisis. Earlier this month, data provided by the U.S. Elections Project at the University of...
View ArticleNo, Regeneron Did Not Cure Donald Trump of Covid-19
On Wednesday afternoon, President Trump tweeted a nearly five-minute video in which he directly attributed his progress recovering from Covid-19 to a monoclonal antibodies treatment from Regeneron, a...
View ArticleA Thrilling Week Inside Trump’s Flailing Masculinity Death Cult
It’s been a week since we learned that the president and first lady both tested positive for Covid-19, right after appearing at a series of possible superspreader events, including the largely...
View ArticleThe Sweet Fantasy of the Female Pop Star
The first time Mariah Carey sang on television in her whistle register—the very tippy-top of the human vocal range, higher than a falsetto—was during a performance of “America the Beautiful” at Game...
View ArticleThe Anti-Social Novelist
A man writes a book. It is, he feels, “a kind of outpouring,” written from the same impulse “that makes him sing or try to go to bed with all beautiful ladies.” But then the critics blame the book for...
View ArticleDonald Trump Will Kill Us All
Donald Trump has, for most of the pandemic, merely abetted the spread of the coronavirus—through what has alternately been called “misinformation,” incompetence, and “stupidity.” His indoor rally in...
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