The Republicans Are Deficit Hypocrites. The Democrats Should Be, Too.
Barack Obama is dumbfounded. The Republicans harangued him for eight straight years over the federal budget deficit. Now, under President Trump, the deficit is skyrocketing—with nary a peep from the...
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Why Animal Rights Is the Next Frontier for the Left
Last December, the Twitter account for the animal-rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) set off a full-fledged media furor. The tweet in question set out to enumerate the...
View ArticlePaul Manafort Did Not Deserve to Die in Prison
Paul Manafort, once the chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, will spend the next seven and a half years of his life in prison, barring early release or a pardon by the president. After being...
View ArticleBeyond Hard Time
On Wednesday, two decisions came down that both have serious implications for the criminal justice system in America. But the reactions to them couldn’t have been more different. Opponents of overly...
View ArticleThe Dying Howls of British Politics
In the movies, shapeshifters such as werewolves, witches, and demons show their true form when fatally wounded. This week Brexit, 33 months since conception and only a fortnight before its due date,...
View ArticleClimate Change Is This Generation’s Vietnam War
Every year, the world’s elite gather like the Illuminati in the Swiss chalet town of Davos for the World Economic Forum, where they discuss how to solve humanity’s most pressing problems. Often that...
View ArticleThe Amnesia of the U.S. Foreign Policy Establishment
“Donald Trump is undermining the rules-based international order.” The Economist’s headline last summer summarized a common refrain within America’s foreign policy establishment. Trump “wants to undo...
View ArticleThe Profound Emptiness of Beto O’Rourke
After months spent teasing his supporters and the political media, Beto O’Rourke surprised absolutely no one Thursday when he officially announced his candidacy for president. “We are truly now more...
View ArticleCourt-Packing Is Not a Threat to American Democracy. It’s Constitutional.
America’s founders probably would not have been surprised by former Attorney General Eric Holder’s statement last week that if he were president—though he’s not running—and the Democrats controlled...
View ArticleWhite Nationalism Is an International Threat
On Friday, a gunman stormed a pair of mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, showering worshippers with gunfire, and livestreaming the country’s deadliest mass killing since 1943. “I was able to hear...
View ArticleThe Longer History of the Christchurch Attacks
On Friday, an Australian white supremacist committed a monstrous act of violence against Muslim worshippers in New Zealand. The attack, which he livestreamed, was steeped in the kind of global...
View ArticleWould the Green New Deal Survive the Supreme Court?
How the United States confronts climate change will be decided whenever the Democratic Party regains control of the White House and Congress. But it may ultimately be Chief Justice John Roberts who...
View ArticleThe Outsize Imagination of Orson Welles
There’s something vaguely mournful, if not altogether sentimental, about Mark Cousins’s new documentary The Eyes of Orson Welles, a two-hour love letter to the legendary director. It starts with the...
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The Dispossessed
Shame pervades the work of the French writer Édouard Louis. The scenes of aggression in his first two novels, The End of Eddy and History of Violence, are invariably fueled by shame’s corrosive spread....
View ArticleWhat Was the Foodie?
The foodie—as a word, a concept, a person—began life in the early 1980s. New York writer Gael Greene first used the term in a restaurant review, but it was Ann Barr and Paul Levy of England’s Harper’s...
View ArticleBrexit Is Making Britain Look Weak
Brexit so far has been a story of the United Kingdom’s political class losing its authority. Last week’s three-day voting spree in the House of Commons was the culmination of a two-year effort by the...
View ArticleThe Enduring Timidity of the Democratic Party
The Democrats are about to blow it.That’s the emerging consensus of the party’s moderates, anyway. Every week brings a new Politico story in which Democrats grouse about the party’s resurgent left...
View ArticleWhy Won’t These Democrats Reject Fossil Fuel Money?
Two days before she officially launched her campaign for president, Kirsten Gillibrand made one of the smartest moves of her political career. “I signed the pledge today,” she told a group of climate...
View ArticleThe Death of Fascist Irony
In the rush of initial reportage that followed the horrific slaughter last week of 51 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, a document surfaced that purported to be the manifesto of the...
View ArticleDevin Nunes’s Ridiculous Lawsuit Is a Masterpiece of Republican Grievance
It’s no easy feat to be the most thin-skinned man in American politics these days, especially given that the country is run by a short-fingered vulgarian who compulsively tweets about every real and...
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