How Richard Nixon Lost the Battle for Public Opinion
The case for impeaching President Richard Nixon was not open and shut, at least as far as the American public was concerned. When Gallup first started tracking opinion on impeachment shortly after the...
View ArticleNot Even the Police Union Could Save Amber Guyger
Last September, one of Amber Guyger’s friends told her that she should adopt a German Shepherd—although the dog “may be racist,” the friend texted. “It’s okay.. I’m the same,” Guyger replied. Two days...
View ArticleOligarch of the Month: Joe Ricketts
Whoever said the internet was a young person’s game never met Joe Ricketts. Over the past ten years, the 78-year-old Nebraskan financier and founder of the online brokerage TD Ameritrade has launched...
View Articlefrom Night Sky
Shattered ice on water, redwoods drinking carbon and fog. They were never yours. The evenings were never yours. The river’s opal stones. Rain thrown against the current as cities rose into the red...
View ArticleDonald Trump’s New Lost Cause
In 1992, a 24-year-old man in Lockport, New York, wrote a letter to the editor of his small local newspaper. The Gulf War veteran looked at the country’s future and saw little reason for optimism....
View ArticleSpreading the Gospel of Modern Monetary Theory
The government can spend much more money than it currently does, even given a swelling national debt that frequently makes headlines. That’s the argument that has put Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) at...
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“The Whole Town Is Finished”
At midday on January 25, 2019, the town of Brumadinho in the southern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais was hit by a mudslide after a dam break, killing over 200 people. Homes were destroyed and trees...
View ArticleThe Return of the Empowered American Worker
In 1978, resigning United Auto Workers president Douglas Fraser delivered a scathing critique of the American managerial class.“I believe the leaders of the business community, with few exceptions,...
View ArticlePete Buttigieg’s Undeniable Allure
Before Pete Buttigieg was born in 1982, the now-shuttered brokerage house, E.F. Hutton, began running a famous series of TV commercials touting their ability to predict the fluctuations in the stock...
View ArticleThe Coveted, Overpriced Missile at the Heart of Trump’s Ukraine Scandal
However narrow the managers may try to make it, the impeachment inquiry that has finally engulfed the presidency of Donald Trump after nearly three years of malfeasance is a scandalous goulash: a bald...
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The Forgotten Father of the Abortion Rights Movement
I first met Bill Baird in Hempstead, Long Island, on a freezing December night in 1968. This was 18 months after he was arrested and jailed for handing a can of contraceptive foam to an unmarried coed...
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The Next Standing Rock Is Everywhere
There won’t be another Standing Rock. At its height, the mobilization against the Dakota Access Pipeline, beginning in 2016, was a historic Native-led movement against the same kind of land grabs...
View ArticleThe Atlanta Braves Drag Their Feet as Fans Keep Chopping Their Arms
Last Friday, Ryan Helsley could have said nothing.A 25-year-old rookie pitcher in the relief rotation for the St. Louis Cardinals, Helsley is currently playing in his first-ever Major League Baseball...
View ArticleAmerica Is Screwing the Kurds Yet Again
The United Nations had just opened its general assembly in late September last year when President Donald Trump gave a rare, 81-minute press conference. Kurdish journalist Rahim Rashidi, who was born...
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The Bittersweet Joy of Fat Bear Week
Every October for the past five years, Fat Bear Week has showcased some of the healthiest, hungriest, and chonkiest bears in Katmai National Park and Preserve, a four-million-acre expanse of wilderness...
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The Disaster Novelist
In the summer of 2016, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh published The Great Derangement, a book-length essay on climate change. The title was an indictment of his vocation. Ghosh argued that there were...
View ArticleThe Plot Against Medicare for All
Last week, at a huge and frightening retirement community in Florida known as The Villages, Donald Trump promised to protect seniors from two of the most menacing monsters lurking under their beds:...
View ArticleNational Review’s Strained Defense of Trump
Last Monday, I wrote that President Donald Trump’s supporters haven’t mounted a plausible enough defense of his involvement in the Ukraine scandal to avoid impeachment. His surrogates tripped and...
View ArticleJoe Biden’s Case for the Presidency Is Collapsing
Joe Biden is in trouble. It’s not his actual campaign that’s in truly dire straits. Although Elizabeth Warren has risen steadily, troubling donors already troubled by Biden’s age, he’s still first or...
View ArticleWho Will Win the 2019 (or the 2018!) Nobel Prize in Literature?
Two years ago, when the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro, the institution appeared to be in the midst of an evolution. After decades of stubborn and curmudgeonly devotion to...
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