There’s No Such Thing as a “Populist”
When I read mainstream political commentary, I often think of the awkward gyrating Elaine used to do on Seinfeld, flapping her limbs in all directions in an incompetent, and yet totally confident,...
View ArticleHow David Koch Changed the World
When billionaire libertarian David Koch died this week following a decades-long battle with prostate cancer, the Arctic was rapidly melting. The Amazon rainforest was on fire. And the Earth had just...
View ArticleDavid Koch Is Gone, But His Pipelines Are Here to Stay
David Koch, the marginally less-vile of the vile duo known as the Koch Brothers, is dead. Setting aside the fact that Charles was always the more powerful and, as a result, the more interesting of the...
View ArticleKirsten Dunst’s All-American Con Artist
Krystal Stubbs, the anti-heroine of the faintly surrealist, anti-capitalist satire On Becoming a God in Central Florida, makes a great many mistakes over the first season’s brisk ten-episode run. Some...
View ArticleWhy Is the One Percent So Obsessed With Magic?
In the Rarities bar, a private lounge in a tucked-away corner of the Lotte New York Palace Hotel on Madison Avenue, Steve Cohen is adjusting his gold-button blazer and wire-rimmed glasses. As he peers...
View ArticleOne for All
As you’ve probably heard, UN scientists recently warned that we have eleven years to avert climate disaster. We face a civilizational crisis that can only be solved by unprecedented action on an...
View ArticleCherokee Nation Is Coming to Congress
On Thursday, Cherokee Nation (CN) Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. held a press conference to officially announce his intention to exercise the tribe’s treaty right to appoint a delegate to the United...
View ArticleTrump’s Latest Get-Rich-Quick Scheme
When the members of the Group of Seven (G-7), the seven nations deemed by the International Monetary Fund to have the largest advanced economies in the world, get together for their rotating annual...
View ArticleThe Real Stakes of Trump’s Trade War With China
President Donald Trump’s continuing trade war with China will escalate once more on September 1, when his administration plans to impose tariffs of 10 percent on $300 billion of Chinese imports. These...
View ArticleTrump Previews His Response to the Next Recession
There is often little use in psychoanalyzing Donald Trump: His behavior is so erratic, his thinking so shallow that any definitive assertion about his character or temperament is disproven within...
View ArticleHow David Koch’s 1980 Fantasy Became America’s Current Reality
Billionaire fossil fuel mogul David Koch died Friday. Though he will rightfully be remembered for his role in the destruction of the earth, David Koch’s influence went far beyond climate denial. Ronald...
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Vasily Grossman’s Lost Epic
In the Soviet Union, every literary work was a political statement, whether the writer liked it or not. Soviet censorship allowed some room for negotiation, but outside the USSR, official and dissident...
View ArticleCrazy Sad Asians
In her 2010 book The Promise of Happiness, the scholar Sara Ahmed describes the “happiness duty” as an expectation levied on immigrants by the liberal ideas of multiculturalism. In return for full...
View ArticleBernie Sanders Has a Plan to Save Journalism
The Bernie Sanders campaign has spent much of August squabbling with news outlets. “There seems to be a direct correlation between the media’s coverage of polls and Bernie Sanders’s specific standing...
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The Frightening Spread of Toxic Algae
Humans and animals who stumble across a brightly colored blue-green or red pool don’t always recognize the threat. Toxic algal blooms aren’t high on many people’s radar. Vacation-goers obliviously wade...
View ArticleOligarch of the Month: Charles Koch
For nearly four decades, Koch Industries has spent its time quashing the labor movement, besieging the environment, and stealing oil from the Osage Indians in Oklahoma. But in June, The Boston Globe...
View ArticleTéa Obreht Considers the Camel
Téa Obreht’s new novel Inland—an epic tale of hardbitten folks struggling against the elements in the southwestern United States in the 1890s—invites an odd question: What does the Arabian one-humped...
View ArticleThe Misogyny of Climate Deniers
Climate skeptic Bjørn Lomborg has built his global brand on keeping his cool. “Cool it,” his best-selling book told those worried about the warming planet. For some reason, however, he seems to have...
View ArticleJim Crow Returns to the Supreme Court
It’s not often that the Supreme Court gets the chance to strike down a Jim Crow law these days, but one such opportunity is fast approaching. This fall, the justices will hear Ramos v. Louisiana, a...
View ArticleDeporting Harvard Students Was Always the Goal
For Ismail Ajjawi, this should be orientation week. A Palestinian student living in Lebanon, Ajjawi was awarded a scholarship to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts by AMIDEAST, a nonprofit...
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