The Limits of Barack Obama’s Idealism
The grinding quality of American presidential memoirs owes to the cross-purposes they serve: to deliver a point-by-point defense of the administration’s record, while trying to persuade the public that...
View ArticleThe Capitol Riot Killed “Both Sides” Journalism
On January 6, terrorists—encouraged by former President Donald Trump and enabled by his Republican supporters in Congress—attacked the United States Capitol. And as they came for the republic, they...
View ArticleThe Predictable Politics Behind Trump’s Second Impeachment Acquittal
One of the long-running jokes of the Trump era was the notion that its bizarre twists and turns unfolded as though they’d been scripted by a troupe of hack screenwriters, laughing and typing away...
View ArticleWhy West Virginia’s Vaccine Rollout Puts New York and California to Shame
At the beginning of 2020, Maj. Gen. Jim Hoyer was ready to retire. He was turning 60, the usual age limit for leading the National Guard in West Virginia. He’d led responses to every major disaster in...
View ArticleThe Non-Hypocrisy of QAnon’s Sexual Politics
When Ruben Verastigui, a digital strategist who had worked for the Republican National Committee creating social media ads to promote Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, was arrested earlier this month...
View ArticleNevada’s Sales Pitch to Silicon Valley: You Can Create Your Own Government Here
Drive east from Reno, Nevada, on Interstate 80 and you’ll soon hit Storey County, a sparsely populated district of around 4,000 people that hosts some of the state’s most ambitious commercial...
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Can Historians Be Traumatized by History?
In 1997, the historian Iris Chang published her important, incendiary book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. It was a vital work of salvage, resurrecting for a new...
View ArticleConservatives Are Seriously Accusing Wind Turbines of Killing People in the...
At least two million people were left without power in Texas as temperatures plummeted and snow piled up on Monday. Wholesale power prices careened toward all-time highs. Worryingly, some 60 percent of...
View ArticleAndrew Cuomo Wishes He Were Ron DeSantis
Not long ago, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was amiably shrugging off speculation that he was the leading candidate for the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential nomination. An August poll found that...
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The Retrograde Quest for Symbolic Prophets of Black Liberation
One little-examined legacy of the broader intellectual embrace of race-reductive thinking is something we might call the Quest for Moses(es)—the shorthand branding exercise of privileging the content...
View ArticleThe Consolations of the Illness Memoir
What is writing about sickness for? In the 1990s, Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, a professor of humanities at Penn State, undertook a study of what at the time was a new, and burgeoning, genre: illness...
View ArticleDon’t Let Amazon and Airbnb Get Their Tentacles in Vaccine Distribution
The vaccine rollout in the United States has been a national embarrassment. A doctor in Houston was fired for using ten doses of vaccine that would have otherwise expired and gone to waste. Local and...
View ArticleMistakes Were Made, but Not by Us
What’s it like to be wrong? We have no idea. On Episode 25 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene discuss being right all the time. TNR staff writers Walter Shapiro and Matt...
View ArticleTrump Will Be Haunted by the Law for Years to Come
Donald Trump has once again wriggled his way out of his latest jam. Fifty-seven senators voted on Saturday to find the former president guilty of inciting the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill,...
View ArticleTranscript: On Being Wrong
A transcript of Episode 25 of The Politics of Everything, “Mistakes Were Made, but Not by Us” Walter Shapiro: Stage one is anonymity: You want to be the invisible man, you hope no one will notice. Then...
View ArticleTeenagers Deserve a Place at Biden’s Climate Table
The youth vote is one of the biggest what-ifs in American politics. The crucial 18-to-29 bracket typically doesn’t participate at levels comparable to groups over the age of 30, skewing national...
View ArticleRush Limbaugh Made America Worse
Twenty-five years ago, Rush Limbaugh graced the cover of Time magazine. Wearing a striped shirt, an expensive suit, and a look of total contempt, he held his trademark cigar between two stubby fingers....
View ArticleBoeing’s Disgraced Ex-CEO Returns to the Aerospace Industry—Backed by $240...
In December 2019, reeling from the growing fallout of two crashes that killed 346 people, Boeing fired its CEO, Dennis Muilenburg. While he departed in disgrace, he was hardly frog-marched to the exit:...
View ArticleI Was a Rush Limbaugh Whisperer
As most of my readers know, I was a card-carrying conservative for many years. I was working in the Reagan White House when Rush Limbaugh went on the air in 1988 and remember having to go out and buy a...
View ArticleThe Deep Rot of the Massachusetts Democratic Party
Massachusetts’s road to failure runs straight through the digital waiting room of the Democratic State Committee’s video calls. During long, slur- and expletive-filled gatherings, a vanguard of wizened...
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