Edgar Allan Poe, Crank Scientist
There’s never been a more curious work in Edgar Allan Poe’s oeuvre than his 1848 epic, Eureka: A Prose Poem. A freewheeling attempt to describe the origins of the cosmos, filled with lofty abstractions...
View ArticleHow Tucker Carlson and a Story About a Possibly Fictional Trans Person Fueled...
The scene at Los Angeles’s Wi Spa on Saturday was disorienting: Anti-trans feminists carrying signs with slogans like “protect female spaces” mingled with QAnon adherents chanting “Save our children”;...
View ArticleThe Corporate Surveillance Industry Has Become a Global Monster
It’s never been easier for governments covertly to access and monitor the phones of activists, journalists, dissidents, politicians, and, well, anyone they want. “Zero-click” tools, easily purchased...
View ArticleChuck Schumer Is Done Waiting on Republicans
Almost exactly one month ago, Joe Biden stood outside the White House flanked by a bipartisan group of senators and announced they had reached an infrastructure deal. “We all agree that none of us got...
View ArticleDoes Anyone Understand the Democrats’ Mind-Bendingly Complicated Carbon...
In the past week, the United States and Europe have tossed a once-obscure climate policy into the spotlight: carbon tariffs, or “border adjustment mechanisms,” as they’re called. Last week, politicians...
View ArticleBiden Finally Finds His Trustbuster in Jonathan Kanter
After six months of indecision, President Joe Biden announced on Tuesday—finally—a nominee for one of the most crucial positions in his administration. Jonathan Kanter, a plaintiff’s lawyer critical of...
View ArticleJeff Bezos, Space Marxist?
“I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer,” Jeff Bezos said Tuesday on returning from the edge of outer space, “because you guys paid for all of this.” This unexpected...
View ArticleHow to Live in a Burning World Without Losing Your Mind
It was the middle of June, and my mother had just died.“It’s 112 degrees in Seattle,” someone told me.“Fuck you,” I recall responding. “My mother just died. I can’t take this shit.”It wasn’t the first...
View ArticleMitch McConnell Dusts Off the GOP’s Debt Ceiling Scam
With much of Washington focused on griping over an infrastructure bill and the makeup of a House committee that will investigate the January assault on the U.S. Capitol, Senate Minority Leader Mitch...
View ArticleDid FBI Informants Thwart or Encourage the Plot to Kidnap Gretchen Whitmer?
“OK, well how’s everyone feel about kidnapping?” a 37-year-old weight lifter and militia member named Adam Fox asked last July, over an encrypted chat with a militia group called the Wolverine...
View ArticleThe Left Is the Only Reason We’re Talking About Climate Change at All
Smoke from raging, climate-fueled wildfires out West blanketed East Coast skies this week. Siberia is burning, too. And flooding in China has displaced some 1.2 million people. In Jacobabad, Pakistan,...
View Article“Both Sides” Journalism Will Never Die
Over the last six months, Republicans have tried to rewrite the history of the January assault on the Capitol, casting a violent attempt to overturn the presidential election as a love-in, a peaceful...
View ArticleCuba’s Elites Have Failed Their Country
When the protests against the Cuban government broke out across the island on July 11, one of President Miguel Díaz-Canel’s first reactions was to refer to the behavior of the protesters as “totalmente...
View ArticleThe Infrastructure Bill Needs to Succeed Where Tech’s Utopian Promises Failed
As the multitrillion-dollar infrastructure bill wends its way through Congress, its exact parameters and legislative outcome remain uncertain. But whatever the eventual contours of the final bill, a...
View ArticleThe Wicked Wit of Shirley Jackson
In late July 1957, America’s finest writer of horror stories replied to a certain Mrs. White, “If you don’t like my peaches, don’t shake my tree. Sincerely, Shirley Jackson.” Snappy and juicy at the...
View ArticlePig Cuts Straight Through American Foodie Hypocrisy
It’s about time America became disenchanted with foodies. Pig, Michael Sarnoski’s foodie noir about loss, love, and labor in Portland, Oregon’s restaurant scene, doesn’t leave them much room for...
View ArticleMichael Pollan’s All-Natural Highs
On New Year’s Day in 1889, a religious leader of the Northern Paiute Indigenous tribe had a dream during a solar eclipse. He was whisked to another world where, according to an 1896 account by the...
View ArticleThe Pandemic Cliff Is a Manufactured Crisis
Millions of renters who have been unable to pay their rent during the Covid-19 pandemic received a temporary, last-minute reprieve last month when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...
View ArticleThe Revenge of the Cars
It would be callous to suggest that in the dark, early, and deadly days of the Covid-19 pandemic there were bright spots or signs of hope. But thinking back to the spring of 2020, it’s easy to remember...
View ArticleMaybe Mitch McConnell Is Just an Evil Mediocrity
Finally, no joke, it’s Infrastructure Week. At least, that was last week’s scuttlebutt—senators from both parties dismissed last Wednesday’s failed procedural vote as nothing to worry about and talked...
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