What Democrats Should Really Ask Brett Kavanaugh
Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominees are often described as “battles,” but they usually turn out to be dramatic theater rather than a theater of war. Nominees are more than happy to...
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When a Young Trump Went to Russia
On a frigid December day in 2017, Oleg Kalugin opens the door of his house in Rockville, Maryland, an upper-middle-class suburb of Washington, D.C., to meet me. Nothing in particular distinguishes his...
View ArticleHow to Cure Corporate America’s Selfishness
Corporations have always been “creatures of the State,” as Teddy Roosevelt once called them. But they have become a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, unmoored from their creators to wreak havoc on the...
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Moments Like This
There’s something about a first national election of the Trump presidency that focuses the mind. For now, at least, anxious rhetoric about contemporary America’s proximity to Weimar Germany and...
View ArticleThe New Republic September Issue: Identity Crisis
New York, NY—(August 16, 2018)—The New Republic today published its September issue, which features a cover package that explores who the Democrats need to be in the Trump era and poses the question,...
View ArticleDon’t Abolish ICE
In an interview after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory in June over incumbent Congressman Joe Crowley, Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, called the 28-year-old “the future...
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Can the Democrats Fix Washington?
For Democrats, the stakes for this year’s congressional elections have risen more dramatically than anyone could have foreseen even just a short time ago. All the weighty factors are still there—the...
View ArticleCan Washington’s Least Favorite Former Congressman Stage a Comeback?
In September of 2009, Alan Grayson—a freshman Democrat from Central Florida—stood in the well of the House, flanked by an easel, and told Americans that “if you get sick … the Republican health care...
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Free the Whales
If you designed a job to embody a kind of old-school masculinity, you couldn’t do much better than orca capture, which combines elements of hunting, fishing, rodeo, and unfettered capitalism. Chasing,...
View ArticleThe Soccer Mom Strikes Back
Chrissy Houlahan has almost everything Democratic strategists look for in a candidate: A political newcomer, she served in the military and has experience in both the public and private sectors. But...
View ArticleNo Trend Is Spared in Younger
There is a joke that I have started hearing around New York City, in the (admittedly small) publishing circles I travel in: If you hear a good tidbit of gossip, you can almost guarantee it will appear...
View ArticleCan the Catholic Church Reform From Within?
The numbers alone are staggering: 1,000 victims, 300 priests. On Tuesday, to collective horror, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court released the results of its grand jury investigation into child sexual...
View ArticleIs Elon Musk Losing It?
Elon Musk is burnt out. He has been working for 120 hours a week, he told The New York Times in a deeply personal and occasionally alarming interview. He has not taken a week off since 2001, when he...
View ArticleThe Kavanaugh Confirmation Fight Is Getting Messy
Replacing Anthony Kennedy should have been easy for Republicans. His retirement in June gave the party a historic opportunity: to replace the Supreme Court’s swing justice with a more doctrinaire...
View ArticleThe Power of Truth in a ‘Post-Truth’ Age
When the tanks of the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations rumbled into Czechoslovakia on August 20, 1968, Czech philosopher Ivan Sviták had a fateful decision to make.Support for gradual reform...
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After the Financial Crisis, A Decade of Damage
We already know much of the story that Adam Tooze tells in Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, his ambitious study of the causes and effects of the financial meltdown that...
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The New Campus Novel
As working conditions in the academic humanities have deteriorated, the job of satirizing them has gotten more complicated. Elif Batuman’s memoir of Russian studies, The Possessed, came out eight years...
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The Modern Automobile Must Die
Germany was supposed to be a model for solving global warming. In 2007, the country’s government announced that it would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by the year 2020. This was the...
View ArticleRepublicans Don’t Own Patriotism Anymore
Before the 2016 election, a woman showed up at Hillary Clinton’s headquarters in Flint, Michigan, asking for a lawn sign and offering to canvass. She was told those efforts were not “scientifically”...
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Is Democracy Really Dying?
In the middle of the 1970s, Zbigniew Brzezinski approached his friend, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, with a question: Is democracy in crisis? It was a subject of much concern at the...
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