The Year When Everyone Bullied Their Mayor
A few days after Thanksgiving, as the number of coronavirus cases surged to alarming new levels in Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti tweeted out an advisory that, on its face, should have been fairly...
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Buy Every American an Electric Moped
President-elect Joe Biden says he has an ambitious climate change strategy, with his advisers promising “a whole government approach” to addressing the rapidly worsening crisis. Some observers have...
View ArticleThe Urgent Case for Shrinking the Economy
In July 1979, shortly after installing a set of solar panels over the West Wing, Jimmy Carter did something peculiar for a peacetime president. He asked Americans to sacrifice: to consume less, take...
View ArticleFrance Is Flooding Africa With Fake News
On May 5, 2017, the French political scene was upended by what became known as MacronLeaks, a cache of more than 21,000 emails hacked from Emmanuel Macron’s political associates. It was two days...
View ArticleHas an American President Ever Been Worse at Politics?
Unless he overthrows the republic in the next 23 days, President Trump carried out his last two major official acts over the past week. There will probably be a last-minute fusillade of pardons for...
View ArticleLife in the Post-Internet Dystopia
In my speculative fiction course this fall, my students identified a place and time we referred to as Dystopia TM, a sort of abstracted postapocalyptic landscape that has become as familiar a backdrop...
View ArticleWorkers of the Facebook, Unite!
“I think Facebook is hurting people at scale,” said a software engineer when he left the company in the summer. “I know that I have blood on my hands by now,” lamented a data scientist who policed...
View ArticleHow to Make the Paris Agreement Really Work
The Paris Agreement, which celebrated its fifth birthday on December 12, is among the most remarkable diplomatic achievements in world history, representing decades of work to arrive at a common...
View ArticleThe Midwives of Appalachia Get Organized
When Laura Browning was pregnant for the first time, she knew what she wanted from her birth experience. She wanted a home birth with a midwife, ideally, and if that wasn’t possible, she wanted a...
View ArticleRon DeSantis Is TNR’s 2020 Scoundrel of the Year
For so many of us, the person of the year is Nothing. The thing that killed mom or laid out the elementary school teacher was Nothing. Nobody saw it. Either dad tracked nothing home from the grocery...
View ArticleMitch McConnell Is Giving Us a Sneak Preview of the Political Hell to Come
President Trump says he wants most Americans to receive $2,000 checks from the federal government. So does the Democratic-led House of Representatives, which voted Monday to bump up the total from $600...
View ArticleThe Pragmatism of the Radical Climate Left
Even before the 2020 election cycle, centrist Democrats had a habit of portraying leftists and progressives as unflinching ideologues imposing purity tests on their fellow party members....
View ArticleGetting to Denmark
In his 2011 book, The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama says, “The problem of creating modern political institutions has been described as the problem of ‘Getting to Denmark.’” He goes on to...
View ArticleInstacart Is a Parasite and a Sham
The pandemic has devastated wide swaths of the U.S. economy, causing more than 22 million job losses and about 25 percent of small businesses to close, many of them for good. But some companies have...
View ArticleThe Year of Magical Thinking in American Politics
Never in living memory has late December been so welcome; 2020, the year that lasted centuries, is nearly done. A lot of us didn’t make it. But for all the anxiety that mounted throughout the summer...
View ArticleWhen Historical Fiction Is a Crime
Ahmet Altan, one of Turkey’s most skillful historical novelists, lives in solitary confinement in a cell four meters long, at Silivri Prison, Europe’s largest penal facility. In I’ll Never See This...
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How to Fix the House of Representatives
In 2021, every state will use the results of the 2020 census to redraw the maps of American political power. Some states give independent commissions or nonpartisan officials the power to redraw their...
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This Year’s Underground Sensation: Modern Monetary Theory
At the close of 2020, it’s hard to think of another year in living memory that has forced such a radical rethinking of our politics and social life. The Covid-19 pandemic will be remembered as a dire...
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