Brett Kavanaugh Said the Quiet Part Out Loud
Most of the attention on the Supreme Court this week focused on the court’s decision to hear a major abortion-rights case this fall. As I noted on Monday, it’s likely that the court’s conservative bloc...
View ArticleJohn Kerry Doesn’t Understand How Cows Work
John Kerry’s interview with the BBC’s Andrew Marr on Sunday was a masterclass in equivocation. The first-ever Special Presidential Envoy for Climate replied to each of Marr’s clear, direct questions on...
View ArticleTom Stoppard Versus Mike Nichols
In 1983, the director Mike Nichols was rehearsing Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing on Broadway. The cast included Glenn Close, Jeremy Irons, Christine Baranski, Peter Gallagher, and Cynthia Nixon, then 17...
View ArticleHow a Nevada Town’s Racist “Sundown” Siren Became a Quaint Dinner Bell in the...
In Minden, Nevada, a cherry-red siren, perched atop the town’s volunteer fire department, sounds every evening at 6 p.m. on the dot. If you listen to town manager J.D. Frisby tell it, the siren is a...
View ArticleA Holocaust Documentary Interviews the Perpetrators
What atrocities a human being is capable of and the psychic torments she might or might not suffer in consequence are, to a disturbing degree, social questions. In Joshua Oppenheimer’s disorienting...
View ArticleBitcoin Keeps Falling, but Everything Is Fine Among the Crypto True Believers
It was almost cryptocurrency’s Black Wednesday. In the space of a few hours, Bitcoin’s price fell by up to 30 percent, from about $43,000 to around $31,000, before rebounding. As of now, it’s far from...
View ArticleThe Republicans Would Like You to Please Forget That January 6 Ever Happened
When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, there was a commission. When an assassin killed John F. Kennedy, there was a commission. Each time a Space Shuttle exploded, there was a commission. The U.S....
View ArticleThe Other Black Girl Reinvents the Office Novel
The office novel is a deceptively orderly genre. Its settings are quiet cubicles and solitary glass towers; its characters share a carefully circumscribed world, governed by its own set of rules and...
View ArticleThe American Victims of Washington’s Anti-China Hysteria
On Chinese New Year a few months ago, my parents showed me President Joe Biden’s Lunar New Year greeting. Against a backdrop of traditional red-and-gold silk cushions, the president and first lady Jill...
View ArticleWhy Is Wall Street Profiting From Clean Energy Tax Credits?
Since they were first introduced in the 1970s, tax credits for renewables have helped scale up and dramatically reduce the cost of clean power in the United States. But in recent years they have also...
View ArticleBill Gates and Matt Gaetz Reveal the Shallow, Dangerous Truth About the...
There is almost no schadenfreude in the Matt Gaetz downfall. The latest chapter unfolded Monday, with the Florida congressman’s ostensibly now-former wingman, Joel Greenberg, pleading guilty to sex...
View ArticleBlake Bailey Had Exclusive Access to Philip Roth’s Personal Papers. Roth’s...
Celebrated author Philip Roth made a startling admission while speaking to a French interviewer nine years ago: He had asked his executors, the uber-powerful literary agent Andrew Wylie and...
View ArticleAre Democrats Giving Up on the Dream of Universal Childcare?
It didn’t garner any “Dems in Disarray” headlines, but an important fault line emerged in April as Democratic leaders put forward dueling legislative proposals. As the country waited to find out the...
View ArticleIt Shouldn’t Take a Pandemic to Boost Worker Wages
A central problem in labor economics is how to raise wages without first killing off a significant portion of the workforce. Plagues have historically reduced income inequality by reducing the labor...
View ArticleAngelina Jolie’s Those Who Wish Me Dead Is a Different Kind of Disaster Movie
There’s a scene in Those Who Wish Me Dead where Allison Sawyer, a heavily pregnant side character played by Medina Senghore, blasts a bad guy in the face with a lit aerosol can before riding away...
View ArticleThe White Men Who Wanted to Be Victims
The title of Joseph Darda’s new book, How White Men Won the Culture Wars, may land awkwardly for weary followers of recursive debates over cancel culture, wokeness, and the like. The loudest and most...
View ArticleIndigenous Land Management Is the Best Answer to the Wildfire Crisis
Last August, as yet another season of historic wildfires ripped through the West and sent plumes of smoke drifting across the continent, reporters and editors everywhere began asking a version of the...
View ArticleWhy “Social Justice” Triggers Conservatives
“Social justice” might seem, at first, like a perfectly innocuous phrase, safe enough for brands like Aflac, Mountain Dew, Disney, and Pizza Hut to use in their public statements about racism and...
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How Washington Got Hooked on Flying Saucers
On April 30, the online UFO community lit up with excitement. The New Yorker, the most luxe of news magazines, published a major UFO article by Gideon Lewis-Kraus alleging there was good reason for the...
View ArticleThe Associated Press Gives in to Right-Wing Trolls
At the Associated Press, college activism is apparently a fireable offense. On Thursday, the venerable news organization sent an email informing staff that Emily Wilder, a news associate based in...
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