Why Do Pundits Love the Unity Myth?
Pete Buttigieg’s surge in the polls—if you can call rocketing to fourth place in Iowa a “surge”—has been built on a simple narrative: He alone can unite a divided country. Buttigieg has warned...
View ArticleThe Weapons America Is Leaving Behind in Syria
Less than a week after President Donald Trump formally ordered the U.S. military to withdraw the majority of its forces from Syria, the Pentagon carried out an unusual mission in the northeastern part...
View ArticleJoe Biden’s Individual Mandate Madness
The Democratic Party needs to be saved from itself, or at least from its tendency to retreat into the gauzy nostalgia of the past. It’s understandable, here in the hourly news deluge of President...
View ArticleThe Senate Has No Good Reason To Acquit Trump
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is preparing for the first impeachment trial of a president in two decades. There are plenty of details to work out, but the overarching structure will likely be...
View ArticleLiberal Feminism Has a Sex Work Problem
Washington, D.C.’s city council hearing last week on decriminalizing sex work ran over fourteen hours and included nearly 200 testimonies from district residents, from community groups, and from sex...
View ArticleCan the Opioid Crisis Avoid the Pitfalls of the Tobacco Wars?
This week, hours before a deadline that would have sent both cases to a single jury trial, Cuyahoga County and Summit County in Ohio reached a $260 million settlement agreement with opioid distribution...
View ArticleWant to Vote? Pay Up.
Betty Riddle was 17 when she was first convicted of a felony, for clubbing another woman in the face during a fight. “Assault with a deadly weapon,” she told me recently. “I was adjudicated as an...
View ArticleIn The Lighthouse, Beauty Battles the Beast
The first thing you notice about Robert Eggers’s sophomore film, The Lighthouse, is not the way it looks, but the way it sounds. Waves, then a foghorn, then wind—they bleed into one another. There’s a...
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The Making of a White Supremacist Myth
On April 19, 2019, a man—who, in his profile picture, wears a hat emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag—posted in a Facebook group called “Black Confederates and Other Minorities in the War of...
View ArticleThe Syria Withdrawal’s Other Victims
In Deir Ezzor, the largest city in eastern Syria, on the banks of the Euphrates River, protesters last week chanted and raised signs calling for the downfall of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorial regime....
View ArticleWhy Anonymous’s Trump Tell-All Is a Sham
A whistleblower may very well end Donald Trump’s presidency. The administration official who flagged Trump’s attempt to get the Ukrainian president to target one of his potential opponents in the 2020...
View ArticleTrump Is Using His Ukraine Playbook Against the Senate
There was an intriguing recurring theme in Bill Taylor’s testimony for the impeachment inquiry earlier this week. The top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine laid out in his 15-page opening statement how...
View ArticleHow Men Distort the Race Debate
In video footage that went viral this fall, the hip-hop mogul Jay-Z said that growing up in a Black single-parent household contributed directly to anti-Black police brutality. As I pondered his...
View ArticleThe Missing Piece in Democrats’ Health Care Plans
When Hurricane Sandy slammed into New York City in 2012, water poured into Bellevue Hospital’s basement, where the fuel pumps were stored. The elevators stopped working. At a time when its services...
View ArticleCorporate America Has Sapped “Green” of Meaning
Every American grocery store sells a mountain of stuff bearing the dubious label “green”: sugarcane toilet paper, reusable straws, recycled Nestlé water bottles. Green is the color of solar energy and...
View ArticleThe Real Threat to Journalism Is Not Donald Trump
Earlier this month, private equity killed another news outlet. Splinter, a news and politics website where I’d previously worked, was shut down by its owners. Seven people lost their jobs—a...
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Natasha Stagg Has No Illusions
A good millennial is hard to fool. Surveys, Natasha Stagg’s debut novel, followed a young influencer named Colleen who, in her online tryst with fame, embodied the cynicism and know-how of the digital...
View ArticleThe Cruel Lottery to Save America’s Public Lands
Last week, the Trump administration revealed its $300 million plan to preserve the health of the Great Lakes. Two years ago, President Donald Trump threatened to slash the Great Lakes Restoration...
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State Under Siege
It is an article of faith among many strategists and activists within the Democratic Party that shifting demographics will be its salvation. The Republican electorate gets older and whiter with every...
View ArticleIn Mrs. Fletcher, Porn Is the Path to Self-Discovery
I read Tom Perrotta’s Mrs. Fletcher in one day. Of course I did—the novel as irresistible trap, impossible not to devour in a sitting, is his métier. Perrotta is more entertainer than artiste, but some...
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