The Man Who Wants to Take Down Bashar Al Assad
Wolfgang Kaleck, a 60-year-old human rights lawyer with large blue eyes and a wave of sandy brown hair, smiles a lot for someone who has spent his life litigating some of the world’s worst atrocities....
View ArticleThe Desperate Last Days of Local News
In 2018, in an act of defiance that would become known as the Denver Rebellion, a group of current and former Denver Post staffers wrote and designed a six-page Sunday spread of op-ed pieces aimed at...
View ArticleHow Biden Distributes the Vaccine Will Define His Presidency
As the president who will be in charge of the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine for almost all Americans, Joe Biden could preside over the greatest public health victory in our nation’s history. Or the...
View ArticleBut Really, the White House Should Get Vaccinated
Of all the ways the White House has received special treatment during this pandemic—the gatherings, the low mask use, and the experimental treatments—jumping the vaccine line might seem like the most...
View ArticleIt’s Too Easy to Hack the U.S. Government
In a video posted to YouTube five years ago, a team of cybersecurity experts listens as one of their colleagues reels off some major recent hacks of corporate systems: Sony, Target, Home Depot. “They...
View ArticleThe Year That Killed the Native Mascot
On Sunday evening, The New York Times reported that Cleveland’s Major League Baseball team will soon be dropping its “Indians” moniker, which the franchise has clung to for 105 years. The decision...
View ArticleSorry, the Hunter Biden Story Is Still Not a Thing
Last week, America’s worst opinion page took a victory lap. “So Hunter Biden’s business is news after all,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board crowed after news broke that the FBI had been...
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What Black People Really Think About the Police
In 2020, the widespread protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd took both the news cycle and the American conscience by force. The result was an immediate and seismic shift in public...
View ArticleBill Barr Will Go Down in History as Trump’s Worst Enabler
When Attorney General Bill Barr appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee in January 2019, he sold himself as a principled servant of the law. Barr told senators that he would “not permit partisan...
View ArticleDeath to the Negative Restaurant Review
Last February, I had the honor of being publicly snubbed by Jay Rayner, the fiery restaurant critic for The Guardian, who dismissed my essay about the “crisis” of the American restaurant review as...
View ArticleSteve McQueen and the Art of Gathering
Mangrove, the first film in Steve McQueen’s five-part anthology series, “Small Axe,” begins with Frank Crichlow (Shaun Parkes), the proprietor of a local West Indian restaurant, walking through the...
View ArticleTranscript: The Vaccine Pipeline
A transcript of Episode 22 of The Politics of Everything, “How Pandemics End”Laura Marsh: This week I did something I never imagined doing: I logged on to The New York Times, entered my age, my job,...
View ArticleWhy Can’t the SEC Just Agree That Bribing Foreign Governments Is Bad?
Back in 2010, a little-known section of the major Dodd-Frank financial reform act looked poised to upend the way fossil fuel and mining companies did business abroad. Section 1504, also known as the...
View ArticleHow Pandemics End
On December 11, the Food and Drug Administration authorized Pfizer to begin distributing its vaccine for Covid-19. The triumphant moment comes on the brink of a grim winter, amid record case levels...
View ArticleThe Climate Fight Needs Both Technocrats and Firebrands
Climate campaigners on Tuesday received a rarity amid President-elect Joe Biden’s appointment announcements: good news. Former Environmental Protection Agency administrator and current National...
View ArticleNicole Krauss’s Difficult Men
The protagonist of Nicole Krauss’s “Switzerland,” the first short story in her new collection, To Be a Man, is a 13-year-old girl shipped by her parents to a private school in Geneva, placed under the...
View ArticleHow The New Yorker Fell Into the “Weird Japan” Trap
It has not been a good year for anyone, but it’s been an especially bad year for the fact-checkers of highbrow magazines. In November, The Atlantic appended an extraordinary editor’s note to a story...
View ArticleRepublicans Will Never Accept the Election Results
Speaking to outgoing Republican Senator Lamar Alexander on Sunday’s Meet the Press, Chuck Todd asked a question that has featured prominently ever since it became clear that Joe Biden had won the...
View ArticleWhat America Needs Now Is a President Who Will Go Nuclear on the Justice...
As President-elect Joe Biden takes office in January, the Justice Department will be probing more than a few sensitive political matters. His son Hunter Biden said last week that he is under...
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“No Choice but to Do It”: Why Women Go to Prison
Tanisha Williams met Kevin Amos on December 29, 2002, the last day of his life.Kevin, 19, lived with his parents, but sometimes visited his girlfriend and their infant daughter at the red-shingled...
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