Meet the Villain of In the Heights: Alexander Hamilton
As a lifelong fan of musical theater, it gives me no pleasure to admit that it’s an art form with often iffy ideological undercurrents—a landscape surely made worse by its fanbase: A 2019 report found...
View ArticleThe Performative Rhetoric of “Allyship”
In the September 1970 issue of the radical feminist magazine off our backs, an anonymous author asked, “Who are our real allies in a revolutionary struggle?” Half a century later, a writer posed a...
View ArticleLet’s Tax Dead People
President Joe Biden has proposed a tax increase that you may not have heard about. It would make the tax code more progressive without extracting even one cent from the wages of the rich or the poor....
View ArticleMoving to Janet Malcolm’s America
I started reading Janet Malcolm the year I came to the United States. Encountering her work felt like emerging from ignorance—revelatory and more than a bit humbling. At 23, I was embarrassed not to...
View ArticleIn the Malcolm Archives
Paper TrailIn the fall of 2019, on my first visit to Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library, an exhibition of Janet Malcolm’s writings, curated by Eve Sneider, lined the corridor leading to the...
View ArticleThe Fatal Flaw in Joe Manchin’s Voting Rights Package
Last week, I criticized West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin for announcing that he would vote against the For the People Act on purely performative grounds. Manchin’s op-ed criticizing the bill did not...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Since When Is Being an Election Official a Job to Die For?
Do you remember last November, when Arizona’s electoral votes hadn’t yet been called in the presidential election, and pro-Trump forces gathered outside the Maricopa County Recorder’s office? It’s been...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Can Criminal Justice Reform Survive a Wave of Violent Crime?
Last year was a disturbingly violent one for New York City, which suffered nearly 150 more homicides and around 750 more shootings than in 2019. The killings have been heartbreaking: a man on a...
View ArticleWho Are the Police Protecting and Serving at Pride?
The queer right to assemble has long existed in tension with the state, and that’s not resolved with the inclusion or exclusion of police at Pride. This ongoing debate was recently stumbled upon by The...
View ArticleWhat Made Gilded Age Politics So Acrimonious?
The politics of Gilded Age America has always lent itself to a certain mock-heroic streak in historical storytelling; the name of the era comes down to us, after all, from an 1876 satirical novel by...
View ArticleConservative Bishops’ Attack on Biden Is an Attack on the Majority of U.S....
After some Republican-leaning bishops condemned John Kerry, the Catholic presidential candidate in 2004, for his support of abortion rights, Senator Ted Kennedy organized an off-the-record meeting of...
View ArticleEngland Now Has a Junior Varsity Version of the Fox News Channel
In mid-April, Rupert Murdoch’s News UK announced that it would be scaling back its plans to launch a new television service in Britain, aimed at serving up right-wing opinion programming in the model...
View ArticleThe NCAA Is Screwed
The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision on Monday that the National Collegiate Athletic Association cannot restrict certain education benefits from student athletes—such as free computers, internships,...
View ArticleWhy The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It Is this Year’s Perfect Summer Movie
When large numbers of people all watch the same thing, like the Olympics or a news channel, it binds them together into what Benedict Anderson called an imagined community. Participating in a mass...
View ArticleEven Emergency Measures Won’t Save the West From Megadrought
Last week was a difficult one in the American West, a region now facing three overlapping climate crises: a megadrought rounding the corner into its third decade, a record-setting heat wave, and an...
View ArticleThe Millionaires Who Want to Abolish Extreme Wealth
It’s fairly easy by now to identify the problems that extreme wealth creates in a society: the way it corrupts politics, the way it sequesters resources among a small group of people, and the way it...
View ArticleHow Dumb Does Kyrsten Sinema Think We Are?
I’ve frequently criticized West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s approach to the filibuster. But I’m not blind to his unusual electoral situation. In his 2018 Senate race, Manchin won by 3.3 percent in a...
View ArticleMaybe the Democrats Don’t Care That Much About Voting Rights, After All
Speaking to reporters about the For the People Act, the Democrats’ signature voting rights bill, in March, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer made it clear that the measure must pass. “We will see if...
View ArticleWill We Ever Know What Ghislaine Maxwell Knows?
There are two ways to try to answer the question of who is Ghislaine Maxwell, the defrocked British socialite now sitting in a Brooklyn jail awaiting trial for sex crimes related to her relationship...
View ArticleLike Airbnb, but for Flophouses
Kathleen SayVon had spent weeks hunting for a new place to live in 2018, sleeping in her car and showering at the gym, when she finally caught a break. As she scrolled her phone in her car one evening,...
View Article