The Pandemic Has Been Great for the Health Insurance Industry
Much attention has rightly been paid to the millions of people whose loss of employment this year also meant a loss of health insurance, a terrible thing to happen at any time but especially during a...
View ArticleJoe Biden Doesn’t Have to Answer Your Court-Packing Question
This has probably been Joe Biden’s best week since Super Tuesday. Donald Trump’s reelection campaign is imploding, Biden’s lead is expanding (by 10.2 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s poll of...
View ArticleThe Martyrdom of Donald Trump
The president is a sick man. On its face, Trump’s appalling handling of his coronavirus diagnosis doesn’t seem to tell us much more than we already knew about him. His inability to admit to any fault...
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The Great GOP Dystopian Experiment Is Working Exactly as Planned in Florida
BESIDE A TRUMP-FLAGGED BOAT AT A DOCK IN FORT LAUDERDALE—It looms ever closer, like a poorly conceived sequel to a decades-old movie even most of its fans would like to forget. There’s a mostly new...
View ArticleOligarch of the Month: Leonard Leo
Leonard Leo is on the brink of achieving the goal he has been working toward for decades: a lasting conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court. Almost comically shadowy and conspiratorial, he can,...
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Trumpism Ate Martha McSally’s Brain
The most prominent statue outside the Capitol building in Phoenix represents an icon who touches a nerve deep in the cultural consciousness of Arizona: a fighter pilot. Frank Luke Jr., a local boy...
View ArticleThe Amy Coney Barrett Hearings Are a Gut Check for Democrats
Washington hardly needed another spectacle to go along with the ongoing election season and the last fortnight of daily news about Covid-19 infiltrating President Donald Trump’s inner circle. Monday...
View ArticleHow the Media Can Mount a War Against Voter Suppression
I get excited, a tiny blast of dopamine goes off in my head anytime a cable news host says, “New swing-state poll numbers coming up after the break.” Admittedly, the effect is enhanced when the numbers...
View ArticleThe All-American Mind of a Militia Member
On June 25, a man named Adam Fox, upset that Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer had shuttered gyms across the state as part of a pandemic lockdown order, started a livestream on a private Facebook...
View ArticleHow I Found My Voice as the Only Native Student in My Class
I’m a senior this year at a high school in Wake County, which is the largest public school district in North Carolina. I’m also a member of the Lumbee Tribe. And this year, the Wake County Board of...
View ArticleNo One’s Hands Are Clean at the Justice Department
Last week—as we close in on an election that will hopefully make Donald J. Trump a single-term president—we learned new information about one of the most dismal chapters of this period from a New York...
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Making the Supreme Court Safe for Democracy
The death of Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has sent the already fraught politics of Supreme Court confirmation into crisis. But the panic that followed the news of Ginsburg’s death, given...
View ArticleThe Town That Went Feral
In its public education campaigns, the U.S. National Park Service stresses an important distinction: If you find yourself being attacked by a brown or grizzly bear, YES, DO PLAY DEAD. Spread your arms...
View ArticleThe Obscenity of Amazon Prime Day in a Pandemic
This year, in the lead-up to Amazon Prime Day, Forbes reported that Jeff Bezos and his ex-wife, Mackenzie Scott, had respectively gotten $8.8 billion and $3 billion richer over the course of a week,...
View ArticleMitch McConnell’s Election Dreams Are Voters’ Waking Nightmares
American democracy has never been in a particularly healthy place, so it did not come as much of a surprise when, as early voting for the 2020 election kicked off this week, disastrous accounts began...
View ArticleThis Supreme Court Was Designed to Kill Climate Policies
Amy Coney Barrett, if her confirmation process goes as Republicans hope, could still be serving on the Supreme Court in 2050. By then, the United Nations estimates that anywhere between 25 million and...
View ArticleAmy Coney Barrett and the Death of the Supreme Court Confirmation Hearing
The Senate Judiciary Committee had its real first opportunity to closely question Amy Coney Barrett in person during Tuesday’s confirmation hearing. Expectations were hardly high. Over the past few...
View ArticleMy Life as an Anti-Fascist Catfisher
The following is adapted from Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Talia Lavin.It’s nearly 3 a.m. in Ukraine, but my interlocutor hasn’t gone to sleep yet. His name is...
View ArticleAmy Coney Barrett’s Gentle Deceptions
Still some hours before Amy Coney Barrett would speak before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Marsha Blackburn used her opening statement to wonder aloud: Why hadn’t more of her colleagues...
View ArticleThe Case Against Packing the Court
One Saturday evening in late December 1936, Homer Cummings, the attorney general, arrived at the White House bearing memos and briefing books and, over the next hour, proceeded to convince Franklin...
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