The Predictable, Preventable Mess of Reopening Schools in Indian Country
In August, as families across the country prepared for the new school year, Smithsonian magazine spoke to more than a dozen anonymous tribal citizens about remote learning, public health protocols, and...
View ArticleWelcome to the New Era of Cops Driving Teslas
Elon Musk isn’t known for being a practical, by-the-book guy. At different points, the newly minted second-richest person on earth has started a company to implant computer chips into human brains,...
View ArticleWhy We Love the Monolith
On Monday, airborne sheep surveyors in San Juan County, Utah, observed a three-sided, 11-foot-tall reflective metal object nestled in the orange rock. After the Bureau of Land Management issued an...
View ArticleThe Media Is Finally Tuning Trump Out
On Wednesday, for 46 minutes, President Trump gave perhaps the most deranged speech of his political career—which means it was arguably the most deranged speech of any presidency since a drunk Andrew...
View ArticleDown With Slack
Salesforce is paying $28 billion to purchase Slack, the intraoffice texting service that has turned the American workplace into a dystopian micro-Twitterverse. Sold as a tool to improve communication...
View ArticleWe Need More Than Antitrust Law to Tackle Big Tech
The frightening power of Big Tech is one of the few issues Democrats and Republicans still agree on, even if they don’t agree on the specifics. Conservatives often claim to be victims of a type of...
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The Tangled Legacy of James Beard
The quest for authenticity is perhaps the central obsession of modern food culture. Food today is a vehicle not only for sustenance or pleasure, but for a certain type of truth—for tastes and...
View ArticleAn Epidemic of Arrogance on the Supreme Court
Earlier this year, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote one of the finest opinions in the Supreme Court’s recent history. His majority ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma recognized that a large swath of that state is...
View ArticleSo You Won’t Get an Early Covid-19 Vaccine. That’s OK.
When I plug my information into models predicting when I might get the Covid-19 vaccine, I have to scroll almost to the end, past 268 million or so other Americans, until I see my place in line. Health...
View ArticleThe Elusive Promise of the Underground Railroad
For enslaved Black Americans contemplating escape before the Civil War, the North increasingly looked like a bad option. Though Northern states had abolished slavery by the early nineteenth century,...
View ArticleTrump Will Finally Get What He Wanted All Along
During his speech at an Allentown, Pennsylvania, rally, a week before the 2020 election, President Donald Trump briefly became distracted by one of his favorite sights: big trucks. “By the way, nice...
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Selling the American Space Dream
When the Covid-19 pandemic arrived, it invited Americans to choose their path to salvation. Would it be scientific reason, predicated on patience with process and trial and error? If so, eminent minds...
View ArticleThe Georgia Runoff Elections Are a Referendum on Political Corruption
Some people collect stamps in their free time. Others play chess or go bird-watching. David Perdue, the senior senator from Georgia, trades stocks. An analysis by The New York Times earlier this month...
View ArticleWhy Biden Should Declare a Climate Emergency
Last week, New Zealand became the latest country to declare climate change an emergency. Across the planet, local, regional, and national emergency declarations including those in New Zealand, Japan,...
View ArticleWhy Harriet the Spy Had to Lie
Leslie Brody’s Sometimes You Have to Lie is the second biography we have of Louise Fitzhugh, the author of the beloved children’s novel Harriet the Spy. The other appeared in 1995 to little fanfare....
View ArticleNeal Katyal and the Depravity of Big Law
The United States has a political class that mistakes its professional norms for ethics. Mainstream political journalists mindlessly grant anonymity to professional liars. Elected officials put...
View ArticleNorth Carolina’s Labor Commissioner Abandons Workers One Last Time on Her Way...
“We’re working on the line and shoulder-to-shoulder. We have no space on the line, in the break-room, and in the lockers,” Sarah Seibert, who debones hams at a Smithfield’s Food plant in Sioux Falls,...
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Beyond the Great Awokening
This year marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of publication of Black Metropolis, St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton’s landmark study of Chicago. Black Metropolis appeared as World War II neared its...
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