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How the Barbizon Hotel Defined Women’s Ambition
On May 31, 1953, 20-year-old Sylvia Plath arrived in New York City. She was a rising senior at Smith College and already a published author, with three poems sold to Harper’s; she was also just a few...
View ArticleThe Sadism of Eating Real Meat Over Lab Meat
Consider a steak. When it hits the hot oil in the pan, your mouth can’t help but water at the aroma. That familiar crackle of fat beginning to fry and render is the sound of the maillard reaction: that...
View ArticleThe Sunday Shows Are Hopelessly Broken
Jonathan Karl, the guest host of ABC’s This Week, knew exactly what he was doing on Sunday when he asked Republican Representative Steve Scalise if the 2020 election was stolen. This was, on its face,...
View ArticleWhy Are Literature and Philosophy Such an Awkward Match?
Blending fiction and philosophy is more akin to chemistry than art: It involves creating a synthetic element that rarely occurs in nature in stable form. Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, and Ursula Le...
View ArticleFacebook Just Successfully Bullied the Sovereign Nation of Australia
Last week, Facebook went nuclear. As Australia considered legislation to force tech giants to compensate media outlets, the social media company cut off access to news for Australian users and...
View ArticleThe Depressing Whiplash of the Senate’s Capitol Riot Hearing
Law enforcement ably played the role of both problem and solution at Tuesday’s Senate oversight hearing on the January 6 riot at the Capitol. “Was this an intelligence breakdown,” asked Senator Jacky...
View ArticleDominion Voting Systems’ Legal Rampage Against Trump’s Grifters
Every year, my colleagues and I get to go through “libel training.” Every year, I also make the insufferable joke to my co-workers that we’re going to be trained to commit libel. Unfortunately, it’s...
View ArticleThe Unholy Alliance That Fuels American Nativism
In early December, conservative commentators tried to drum up social media controversy over a sweatshirt. The shirt, merchandise for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional campaign, read simply “Tax...
View ArticleThe Andrew Cuomo Show Has Lost the Plot
Halfway through a recent New York Times story about Governor Andrew Cuomo’s long (but perhaps not widely known) history of governance-by-bullying, an ally tried to defend his signature political style....
View ArticleJoe Biden’s Immigration Acid Test
Last week, Democrats introduced the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021—a comprehensive immigration bill that will evidently be one of the Biden administration’s first major legislative battles after the...
View ArticleHow Does a State Use 40 Percent Less Water?
Arizona, California, and Nevada will need to cut their use of Colorado River water by nearly 40 percent by 2050. A study by researchers at Utah State University, which the Arizona Daily Star reported...
View ArticleWe Really Don’t Need Another Conservative News Platform
Speaking to The Nation in 2014, Ehab Al Shihabi, then the CEO of the recently launched Al Jazeera America, made the case that Americans were desperate for serious, unbiased, old-fashioned hard news....
View ArticleThe Case for a Permanent Stimulus
The $1.9 trillion recovery package set to go to a vote in the coming weeks won’t include automatic stabilizers. A perennially popular policy among left-of-center wonks and the public, automatic...
View ArticleWhat If We Pay People to Stop Using Drugs?
Tyrone Clifford Jr. remembers the first time he tried methamphetamine. “It was everything, all at once,” he said; a whirring rush of euphoric energy. It was the 1990s, and Tyrone was in his early...
View ArticleKyrsten Sinema’s Self-Defeating, Nonsensical Defense of the Filibuster
This year, all around the country, Republican state lawmakers are pushing an alarming array of bills that are designed to make it harder to vote. They’re targeting absentee voting, early voting, voting...
View ArticleThe Bipartisan Assault on Public Schools
Two years ago, Margaret Spellings, George W. Bush’s secretary of education, and Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s secretary of education, wrote an opinion article in The Washington Post lamenting the decline...
View ArticleThe Ghoulish, Bipartisan Tradition of Death at the Southern Border
It was Selina Sanchez-Cristobal’s day off, but she picked up the phone anyway. It was 2019, and she was the only employee running a 24-hour hotline for migrants who became lost crossing from Mexico to...
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Wikipedia’s Sprawling, Awe-Inspiring Coverage of the Pandemic
The Wikipedia article for the Covid-19 pandemic didn’t exist until January 2020. By June, it was one of the site’s most visited entries of all time. It became, according to Wikipedia’s project page of...
View ArticleThe Trials of Billie Holiday
Is any genre more vulnerable to the vagaries of ideology than the lavish artist biopic? The essential dilemma is how to milk the life for drama while also accommodating what was singular enough to...
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