Here Come the Adults
Twelve years ago this week, Barack Obama’s pick of Hillary Clinton for secretary of state had everyone in Washington reading (or claiming to read) Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book on Abraham...
View ArticleHow WeWork Got Away With Spectacular Failure
Over the summer, with the pandemic death toll well on its way to 200,000 and the economy in ruins, WeWork founder Adam Neumann—cut loose from the company the year before with a gargantuan golden...
View ArticleThe Damage Is the Point
President Donald Trump’s efforts to block or overturn the election results have failed at every turn. His lawsuits are being dismissed by incredulous judges; his personal campaign to short-circuit the...
View ArticleHow to Pitch Sold Short
What is Sold Short?Sold Short is a vertical about inequality. The stories we publish focus on labor, gender, racial justice, feminism, the family and kinship beyond it, Indian Country and tribal...
View ArticleMike Pompeo Is a Global Arsonist. Can Biden Put Out His Fires?
What is Secretary of State Mike Pompeo doing, and how bad will it get? America’s top diplomat recently concluded a 10-day, seven-country overseas trip that seemed designed to cause as much damage as...
View ArticleHow Newsmax Became Trump TV
Last week, Tucker Carlson did something remarkable: He acknowledged, albeit with no small number of caveats, that the Trump campaign had provided zero evidence to support its most recent round of...
View ArticleThe Government’s Human Cruelty Will Outlive Trump
“Our long nightmare will soon be over” is a phrase that one wouldn’t have been shocked to hear issued from the lips of liberal pundits or Joe Biden supporters as it slowly became apparent, in the days...
View ArticleIs America Trapped in a Caste System?
Three-quarters of the way into Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson describes the humiliation suffered by Black passengers on a steamship in the American South before the Civil War....
View ArticleA Vacation Enclave in the Hamptons, Two 61-Foot Billboards, and an Endless...
Past a certain point east, Sunrise Highway is a quiet drive in November. Strip malls, a hollowed-out Chuck E. Cheese, and a dwindling number of other cars making the commute back to the farthest...
View ArticlePharma Executives Are Profiting From Covid Vaccine Press Releases
Who would have thought, a year ago, that at Thanksgiving 2020 the nation would be waiting with bated breath for pharmaceutical press releases? But as companies have released increasingly positive news...
View ArticleAmerica Is Run by Geezers
Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election by a margin that, though wider than originally feared, was narrower than feels comfortable in a country on whose stability the world depends. One reason...
View ArticleThe Democrats’ Maddening Cowardice Is Carrying Over into the Biden Era
The debate over how to characterize what the country’s been put through over the past three weeks will carry on for the rest of our lives. And Donald Trump’s waddle through the stages of grief is sure...
View ArticleGod Save America From “Checks and Balances”
It is an underrated source of dysfunction in our politics that too many people believe our system of government makes any sense at all. Even when we export democracy abroad (as in Japan after World War...
View ArticlePretty Soon There’ll Be Just One Big Book Publisher Left
America’s biggest, most powerful book publisher is about to get even bigger and more powerful. On Wednesday, a number of outlets reported that Penguin Random House had reached an agreement with...
View ArticleDo You Know Your Microsoft Productivity Score?
The workplace panopticon is coming home. The societal shift to work from home and Zoom-led education has been a boon for makers of digital surveillance software. Numerous apps now sell themselves as...
View ArticleHow Weird Was Frank Zappa?
In October 1978, in what remains one of the worst episodes in the program’s history, Frank Zappa appeared on Saturday Night Live. The rock musician and controversialist worked through a trio of musical...
View ArticleThe Policy Mess Behind the Thanksgiving Feast
Strip away the myth-making and genocide erasure, and American Thanksgiving is a simple harvest festival, celebrated in various forms by cultures all over the world and across human history. This year’s...
View ArticleIt’s a Perfect Year for a Non-Thanksgiving
It seems fitting that Thanksgiving would be canceled on this, the four-hundredth anniversary of the Mayflower’s voyage. It’s historic disease event piled on top of historic disease event. As David...
View ArticleHow “The Queen’s Gambit” Reimagined Chess
At long last, the game of chess is ready for its close up. Scott Frank’s show The Queen’s Gambit, based on Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel of the same name, is the Netflix breakout success of the year,...
View ArticleThe Supreme Court Has to Choose Between Trump and the Nation’s Founders
When is an immigrant not a person? According to President Donald Trump, it’s whenever the executive branch says so. The president has spent the past four years promulgating this idea for the purposes...
View Article