America’s Next Top Town Halls Are No Way to Pick a President
One of the few lessons that could be drawn from the first debate between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden, which occurred approximately 60 years ago, was that the traditional head-to-head format...
View ArticleSupreme Court Justices Are Politicians, Too
If you have been watching Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings for insight into how the nation’s highest court will interpret the law once she sits on the bench, you should shut them...
View ArticleHunter Biden and the Hunt for a New “Hillary’s Emails”
With less than three weeks to go until the election, The New York Post published what it apparently thought would be a bombshell report. The tabloid newspaper claims it obtained a cache of emails by...
View ArticleWhat Did Carlos Lozada Learn From Reading 150 Trump Books?
Over the past four years, there have been dozens of books published about Donald Trump. Some have recorded his numerous failures and general incompetence, others his Churchillian magnificence and...
View ArticleJeff Bezos and the Golden Age of Climate Hypocrisy
Of course Jeff Bezos is giving money to Republicans. On Tuesday, during Amazon’s annual sale event known as Prime Day, E&E News reported that the same month that Amazon announced a Climate Pledge...
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Inside the Republican Plot for Permanent Minority Rule
Here’s one all-too-plausible way that Election Night 2020 might play out. It’s just after 11 p.m., when Fox News cuts live to President Trump’s reelection party. Millions of mail-in ballots remain to...
View ArticleThe Mysteries of Emily in Paris
The ruinous effect contracting Covid-19 has had on my short-term memory is, happily, not a problem when it comes to remembering the key plot points of Netflix’s soapy, flimsy sitcom Emily in Paris,...
View ArticleThe Devastatingly Low Bar of “Official” Poverty
We now have new numbers to confirm what everyone who received a $1,200 stimulus check or extra unemployment benefits over the summer likely already knows: Additional government money is a good thing...
View ArticleNBC Did Joe Biden a Big Favor
Before Thursday evening’s dueling town halls began, the conventional wisdom was that, once again, Donald Trump, the greatest showman, had hoodwinked the news media. The second presidential debate had...
View ArticleDiary of a Channel Surfer
Donald Trump’s bumptious, boisterous, blustering performance in his first face-to-face debate with Joe Biden changed the trajectory of the presidential race—giving the former vice president a hefty...
View ArticleThe Fiercely Despairing Fiction of Susan Taubes
A woman lies dead, decapitated by a passing taxi on a Paris street. Or maybe she is just dreaming. For a moment, she is window-shopping in Paris, but then she is in her lover’s bedroom in New York and...
View ArticleThe Media’s Obsession With the Mythical Republican Swing Voter
In September, as the presidential campaign entered its final weeks, a woman named Danielle Pletka published an op-ed in The Washington Post entitled “I never considered voting for Trump in 2016. I may...
View ArticleThe Democrats Aren’t Serious About Campaign Finance Reform
This week, Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon announced that the campaign had $432 million in cash on hand. This is a truly absurd amount of money for any campaign to have. It is mental....
View ArticleThe Dishonesty of Amy Coney Barrett’s “Textualist” Pose
In their two days of interrogating Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats deftly executed Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s messaging strategy: “Health care, health...
View Article“Over Half of the People Who Used to Grow Crops Here Can’t Do It Anymore”
Since 2017, extreme drought has ravaged Canyon de Chelly, on the Navajo Nation in northeastern Arizona. In normal years, the area receives an average of 12 inches of rain. That’s not the case recently....
View ArticleFacebook and Twitter Have Made a Mess of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden Story
Twitter and Facebook knew this was coming. For the last four years, they have ostensibly been preparing for foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election. Pressed by lawmakers, executives from...
View ArticleBen Sasse Is a Fraud
Right on time, Senator Ben Sasse has done it again, and by “it” I mean the one thing he’s good at: generating positive media coverage for himself. In a telephone town hall with his constituents this...
View ArticleThe Media’s Both-Sides Brigade Is Wrong About the Covid-19 Stimulus Deal
One of the more irritating manifestations of both-sidesism in the political press in recent days has been the vilification of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for refusing to accept the compromises that the...
View ArticleSelf-Help Hacks at the End of the World
At the beginning of the lockdown I came across a meme that made me laugh and laugh. It was Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but each level above physiological—safety, belongingness and love,...
View ArticleThe Constitution Is the Crisis
It is an almost entirely foregone conclusion that Amy Coney Barrett will be seated on the Supreme Court, cementing a 6–3 conservative majority that will serve as an obstacle to Joe Biden’s policy...
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