Trump Is Giving America a Grisly Preview of a Second Term
I’m not very good at math, which is probably how I ended up writing for a living. Fortunately, the statisticians over at FiveThirtyEight do not share this shortcoming. Nate Silver’s famed...
View ArticleThere Are No Good Republicans for a Biden White House
There is a battle brewing over the shape of a potential Biden administration between the center and the left. Broadly speaking, the left, defeated in the primaries, is pushing from the sidelines for...
View ArticleThe Emerging, Tenuous “Essential Worker” Vote
Over the past few weeks, when Diego Isaacs hasn’t been at his job in the produce department at the grocery store Harris Teeter in Charlotte, North Carolina, he’s been busy contacting as many people as...
View ArticleCan Podcasts Save Local News?
No one knows what to do about the crisis in local news. Recent research from Pew Research Center includes a host of depressing statistics: More than 50 percent of all newsroom jobs have been lost since...
View ArticleCultural Resentment Is Conservatives’ New Religion
Even if he’s handed a defeat in November, there probably won’t really be anything like a truly “post-Trump” politics for a long while: Donald Trump himself is likely to stick around one way or another...
View ArticleThe Native Vote Is Crucial This Election—and Under Threat
Speaking with The Washington Post for a cringe-inducing piece about the influx of people moving to Montana, Candace Carr Strauss, the CEO of the Big Sky Chamber of Commerce, offered a potential selling...
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Martin Amis, the Accidental Memoirist
How do you solve a problem like Martin Amis? Like Maria from The Sound of Music, he’s a clown to his detractors and a musician to his fans—the music of the well-tuned sentence, that is, and the...
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The Small, Midwestern Town Taken Over by Fake Communists
The Marathon County Historical Society sits in an old church building in Wausau, just up the Wisconsin River from the town of Mosinee. The lobby is large, a gift shop with books and paraphernalia in...
View ArticleYes, You Have a Duty to Vote
There are two dominant political traditions in the West and the United States: that of liberalism, which dates back to seventeenth-century England, and that of republicanism, with its roots in ancient...
View ArticleWill Joe Manchin Ruin Democrats’ Best Chance to Fight Climate Change?
There’s been a bit of common wisdom circling among green groups in Washington. If Biden gets elected and Democrats take back the Senate—both, granted, big ifs—then any climate legislation they might...
View ArticleTrump’s Scorched-Earth War Against Federal Employees
One advantage of a vague slogan like “drain the swamp” is that it can mean different things to different people. Does it mean ousting elected officials from their comfy seats in Washington, D.C., which...
View ArticleLesley Stahl Blew Her Chance to Eviscerate Trump
For days we’ve been hearing President Donald Trump fulminate about his “FAKE and BIASED interview” with Lesley Stahl of CBS News’s 60 Minutes. It was a “vicious attempted ‘takeout’” full of “bias,...
View ArticleIn Memoriam: The Trump Pivot
For more than four years—ever since it became clear that Donald Trump would actually be the Republican nominee for president—pundits have fixated on one question: Is Donald Trump about to pivot to...
View ArticleThe Working Class Goes Missing From Yet Another Debate
Earlier this month on the stump, Joe Biden tried some Bernie-style class war on for size. “If every investment banker in New York went on strike, nothing would much change in America,” he said at a...
View ArticleThe Righteous Anger of Joe Biden
American political debates began in 1858 with Abraham Lincoln taking on Stephen Douglas over the future of slavery. And 162 years later, in what will hopefully be the final debate of Donald Trump’s...
View ArticleHas the Forest Service Been Making Wildfires Worse?
The Bear fire was one of the largest of the over 8,000 wildfires that have beset California this year. Now incorporated into the still-burning North Complex Fire, the Bear started in the Plumas...
View ArticleJoe Biden and the Return of the Dreaded Bipartisan Commission
Joe Biden finally has a court-packing answer—sort of. After dodging the question of what he would do about the Supreme Court, he told CBS’s Norah O’Donnell he would create a “bipartisan commission” to...
View ArticleThe Bernie Organizers Who Want to Elect Biden—Then Defeat Him
“I get it,” Mondaire Jones says into the camera, shaking his head. He is speaking on a Thursday night four weeks out from the election, to the virtual audience of a virtual rally hosted by Our...
View ArticleDon’t Reboot the 2016 Horror Show
More than 200,000 lives lost in the United States, and counting. The worst economic downturn of the century. Armed gunmen invading state legislative sessions. Journalists beaten by police officers....
View ArticleThe Justice Department’s Very Convenient Corporate Crackdown
Just two weeks before the election, the Justice Department rolled out a series of high-profile white-collar cases and settlements that include an antitrust complaint against Google, a settlement with...
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