Jack Ryan, American Imperialist
Tom Clancy was the poet of modern American empire. Starting with The Hunt for Red October, published in 1984, at the height of Ronald Reagan’s bombastic nuclear threats against the already-waning...
View ArticleRepublicans Prepare to Give Hunter Biden the Benghazi Treatment
At the end of two weeks of impeachment hearings, President Donald Trump’s defenders find themselves at a crossroads. What the president stands accused of doing is, as The Atlantic’s David Frum notes,...
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Appalachia vs. the Carceral State
The group’s first meeting was in March 2016 at Tom Sexton’s house, a spacious three-bedroom apartment a few doors down from the Harry M. Caudill Memorial Library on Main Street in Whitesburg, Kentucky....
View ArticleCould This Be the Guy Who Wrote Anonymous’s Warning?
Back in September 2018—an eternity ago in the Trump administration—a self-described “senior official” came forward with a counterintuitive but comforting message.In an op-ed in The New York Times, the...
View ArticleAmerica Lost the Iraq War. These Cables Show How.
In 2013, a decade after the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division entered Baghdad and toppled Saddam Hussein, the service undertook a major exercise in self-reflection. Commissioned by Gen. Ray Odierno, the...
View ArticleMichael Bloomberg’s Big Hedge
On Wall Street, traders who manage portfolios worth millions, if not billions, of dollars need a way to offset the risk of losing too much of that money. One way to accomplish this is to use a hedge....
View ArticleThe New Deal Wasn’t Intrinsically Racist
In recent decades, “racial disparity” has become the central framework for discussing inequities affecting African Americans in the United States. In this usage, disparity refers to the...
View ArticleNot Even Tom Hanks Can Save A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
In the aftermath of every school shooting, some well-meaning sort cites Fred Rogers—that’s Mister to you—and encourages us to look for the helpers. It’s Rogers quoting advice from his mother: It’s...
View ArticleThe Crown’s Case for the Monarchy
It would be easy to see The Crown as a show about Elizabeth II, the monarch whose nearly 70-year reign has seen the decline of Britain as a world power. It is, after all, structured around her life,...
View ArticleIf Michael Bloomberg Wants to Run for President, He Should Sell Bloomberg News
For most journalists, covering Michael Bloomberg’s late entry into the 2020 presidential race will be straightforward. Some will focus on his three terms as mayor of New York City, interrogating his...
View ArticleIs It Imperialist to “Green” the Military?
It was a bold twist on an old progressive saw. “In short, climate change is real, it is worsening by the day,” the announcement stated; then came the reveal: “and it is undermining our military...
View ArticleThe Gentle Pleasures of Terrace House
In Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, the protagonist, Aomame, a martial arts instructor, is forced to live in a safe house. Tamaru, her bodyguard, suggests that she read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: “This...
View ArticleThe War-Crimes Presidency
Eight years ago, a friend sent me a photograph of Marines in Afghanistan proudly posing with a Nazi SS flag. As a former soldier, Iraq veteran, and historian who focuses on the German military during...
View ArticleThanksgiving Is Another Reminder of What America Forgot
In a December 1862 letter to the Senate, President Abraham Lincoln ordered the execution of 39 Sioux citizens. In 1851, the Santee Sioux had ceded the land known as Minnesota to the United States in a...
View ArticleThe Surprising Maturity of Marriage Story
You appear to have been dropped in at the climax of a romcom, when the man enumerates the large, small, and idiosyncratic things he appreciates about the woman, all those reasons he can’t love anybody...
View ArticleThe Real News Crisis Isn’t Fake News
In the aftermath of the twin shocks of 2016—Brexit on one side of the Atlantic, Donald Trump on the other—many in the media identified “fake news” as the culprit and as one of the emergent evils of the...
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The Factory Is a Chilling Account of the Contemporary Workplace
There’s a scene in The Golden Girls (hear me out) where the sardonic Dorothy, teaching a professional development class, encounters a bunch of adult slackers, save one: a Mr. Tanaka. He tells her that...
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Welcome to the Monkey House
Locals call it the Monkey House. The decaying, three-story cement fortress sits among weeds in the wooded, hilly outskirts of Dongducheon, a Korean city of 96,000 that encircles Camp Casey, the closest...
View ArticleThunberg Isn’t the Only Young Voice We Should Be Listening To
Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, captured global attention with her emotional speech at the United Nations in September. Her relentless advocacy for an international focus on...
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The Lives of the Left Behind
Intermittently, Americans are beginning to get upset that their government is locking tens of thousands of human beings in camps. At present, more than 50,000 people suspected of having entered the...
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