Philip Pullman’s Defense of Free Thought
In his essays and speeches over the years, Philip Pullman has argued that fantasy stories have the power to change their audience and remake the world. His own stories are certainly getting a chance to...
View ArticleFixating on “Cancel Culture” in an Age of Transphobia
Last weekend, The New York Times published a rogue’s gallery of the allegedly “canceled”: that is, a group largely composed of writers who have faced profound public criticism, mostly online. In one...
View ArticleCelebrating 150 Years of Simulated Warfare
On November 6, 1869, Rutgers and Princeton—which, just two weeks earlier, had changed its name from the College of New Jersey—played America’s first official college football game. They followed London...
View ArticleSingle-Payer Advocates Are Being Drawn Into the Wrong Debate
A premature baby costs almost a million dollars. A mental health crisis costs $30,000. A few months of dialysis costs half a million. These are the absurd charges billed to American patients for the...
View ArticleTrump’s Impeachment Allies Are Staring Into The Void
Imagine, if you will, that you’re unlucky enough to be President Donald Trump’s lawyer. Sometime in the next few months, you’ll have to stand in front of the U.S. Senate—not just the chamber itself,...
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A Dream of Homeownership, Undermined
In 1971, Annie Jeminson had good reason to believe that the house she was buying in Detroit was nicer than her small, moldy apartment in public housing. It had been approved for mortgage insurance by...
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We Are All Female Now
Reading Andrea Long Chu feels a bit like being on the fault line of an earthquake—the ground is undeniably shifting. Her essay “On Liking Women” last year in n+1 kicked off what some have called the...
View ArticleIs James O’Keefe Good Now?
Speaking to Politico last year, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe claimed that all he really wanted was to be taken seriously by the mainstream media. The conservative activist and dark arts...
View ArticleHoney Boy Is a Taste of Stardom’s Bitter Reality
People who make movies love to make movies about the people who make movies. I suppose it makes sense; “silver screen” is another way to describe a mirror. Honey Boy is director Alma Har’el’s movie,...
View ArticleThe Death of the Rude Press
In April, Great Hill Partners, a private equity firm, purchased Gizmodo Media Group, the collection of websites formerly known as Gawker Media, from Univision. Great Hill’s leaders also acquired The...
View ArticleWhy Leftists Hate Harris’s School Day Plan
On Wednesday, Senator Kamala Harris released a plan. The goal was to offer a tentative step towards a solution for one of the most vexing problems facing working parents: The hours-long gap between...
View ArticleAgainst Debt Hysteria
Last week, Elizabeth Warren released her plan for fully financing Medicare for All, which her campaign estimates could cost the government $20.5 trillion over ten years. Notably, Warren claims that the...
View ArticleThe “Deep State” Is a Political Party
It was, in the eyes of Trump World, the very clubhouse of the Deep State: the plush, blue-carpeted, wood-paneled 13th floor auditorium of the National Press Club, located in the heart of the Washington...
View ArticleThe Sinister Privilege of Burning Billions
By the time Adam Neumann arrived in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood in 2008, most of the creatives who’d once lived and worked on the borough’s waterfront were gone. They’d been exiled years earlier, as...
View ArticleThe Surprising Success of an Irreverent Emily Dickinson
Here is a show that looks at Emily Dickinson—one of the greatest poets in American literature, a woman infatuated with death and dying, queer and forced to hide or kill her own desires, a near-recluse...
View ArticleRich Americans Are Interfering in Our Elections
Imagine this: One of the largest companies in Russia and the world, with billions of dollars in contracts with the Russian government, dumps $1.5 million into an American local election with the intent...
View ArticleThe Republican Plot Against the Popular Will
Democracy’s central principle is that the people should decide their own future by electing their own leaders. A growing number of conservatives disagree. Take this week’s off-year elections, for...
View ArticleThe Media Has a Right-Wing Bias. Politico’s Founder Just Admitted It.
Getting the headline right is often the hardest part. Politico took several stabs at the inaugural entry of John F. Harris’s new column, “Altitude,” which aims to offer “weekly perspective on politics...
View ArticleThe Billionaire’s Burden: Running for President
The news that Michael Bloomberg is expected to file to be on the presidential ballot in Alabama was not greeted on Thursday night with explosions of public joy and gratitude. There were no street...
View ArticleTrump Has Squandered the Legacy of the Berlin Wall
Thirty years ago this weekend, a dour and rumpled East German apparatchik named Günter Schabowski faced a smattering of reporters and cameras for a press conference in East Berlin. Rifling confusedly...
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