How Good Is Your Electronic Trackpad Signature?
What was your signature like at eighteen? Is it still the same? In the wake of the 2018 midterms, the American electoral system is under scrutiny again—as, in fact, it seems to be almost every two...
View ArticleThe Punctured Myth of Sheryl Sandberg
It’s been five years since Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, published her manifesto, Lean In, urging women not to sell themselves short at work or doubt their ability to...
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The Chilling Neo-Nazi Trial That Exposed the Dark Side of a New Germany
On June 27, 2001, Ali Taşköprü drove to the market in Hamburg to buy cigarettes. When he returned to his family’s store he noticed a dark liquid on the floor: a pool of blood. Behind the counter lay...
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Retirement in America? Too Expensive.
Donald Trump has encouraged a vision of Latin America as a land of endless chaos where one can never be too careful. The Sicario movies summarize these fears: Trips to Mexico always take place in...
View ArticleThe Truth Behind the Toothless Rebellion Against Nancy Pelosi
On Monday, 16 conservative Democrats took their shot at Nancy Pelosi, who is expected to easily win the speakership when the 116th Congress convenes in January. It’s an odd, futile rebellion, one that...
View ArticleThe Case for the Union
One hundred and fifty-five years ago this week, Abraham Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to give a two-minute speech. He and other dignitaries gathered to honor at least 23,000 Union...
View ArticleRebranding Nazism
As German chancellor Angela Merkel arrived in the eastern Saxon city of Chemnitz on Sunday, Mustafa B., a Turkish medical student who had moved to the city two months ago, was trying to figure out if...
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Wildfire Smoke Could Shorten Californian Lifespans
Every day, rescuers at the ongoing Camp Fire in Northern California are discovering a new body of somebody’s loved one, burned or suffocated to death. They’re often pulling these people from the ashy...
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Candles, Camera, Action!
Our world is lit by electricity. Even at night, the city sky is clouded by the orange haze of anthropogenic light. The words for different types of light pollution are magnificent: light clutter,...
View ArticleA Dutiful Citizen
Gary Hart, the Democratic presidential candidate I worked for in 1984 and would have supported again in 1988, has been back in the news. The Front Runner, a film that presumes to explain the murky sex...
View ArticleMonica Lewinsky’s Very Long Road to Vindication
For three consecutive days in April of 2001, a then 27-year-old Monica Lewinsky sat on the stage of New York’s Cooper Union auditorium, answering questions from a packed audience composed of law...
View ArticleCan a Republican Lose in Mississippi?
Almost exactly a year ago, Democrats did the unthinkable: They won a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama. Doug Jones, a former prosecutor, knocked off Roy Moore, the Alabama Supreme Court chief justice whose...
View ArticleThanksgiving
They have come again to graze the orchard,knowing they will be denied.The leaves have fallen; on the dry groundthe wind makes piles of them, sorting all it destroys. What doesn’t move, the snow will...
View ArticleMoral Holiday Shopping Is Harder Than You Think
Back in 2012, Julie Keith was pulling out decorations for a Halloween-themed birthday party in Damascus, Oregon, when a handwritten letter dropped out of the box containing a fake tomb stone kit. It...
View ArticleThe Strange Ethics of Killing John Allen Chau
Did John Allen Chau, the Christian missionary killed two weeks ago by an indigenous tribe on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, deserve to die? There is the sense that, at the very least, the...
View ArticleWho Is John Roberts Kidding?
I wish John Roberts was right.Last week, after President Trump denounced a federal judge who ruled against his administration’s asylum policy as an “Obama judge,” the Chief Justice replied with a...
View ArticleThe Art of the Spectacle
For any authoritarian government, defining reality is crucial to exercising power. History becomes a series of myths that justify and animate the regime’s actions; truth becomes a weapon to be wielded...
View ArticleFinding a Way
At the end of If Beale Street Could Talk, Barry Jenkins’s film adaptation of the James Baldwin novel of the same name, the main characters, Tish and Fonny, sit with their son in the visiting room of...
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The Pathology of Prejudice
Driving around the part of Fresno, California, where Shannon Brown spent much of her life feels a bit like entering an alternate, more insular version of America, something out of an earlier time. We...
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The Profound Alienation of the Amazon Worker
In propounding one of his most intuitively appealing theories, Marx asked, “In what, then, consists the alienation of labor?” Alienation is the emotional state that takes place when capitalism divorces...
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