Donald Trump’s Quiet Christmas Gift to the Kleptocrats
Nearly two decades ago, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the then doughy dictator of Kazakhstan, came hat in hand to the George W. Bush White House, desperate to make a deal. The post-Soviet strongman had a...
View ArticleRepublicans Want to Make White Grievance Genteel Again
According to a certain type of Republican, the party has lost its way under President Trump. This is the foundational premise of the self-styled Never Trump Republican but also reliable fodder for...
View ArticleMike Pompeo Is the Most Dangerous Man in the World Right Now
When the United States bombed its own former air base in Baghdad to kill Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s revered Middle East paramilitary commander, just before Friday prayers last week, the pretext was that...
View ArticleTrump’s Next Impeachable Offense is Nigh
President Donald Trump threatened to commit war crimes against Iran over the weekend, less than one week after he ordered the killing of one of its top military commanders in an airstrike in Baghdad....
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How Democrats Abetted Trump’s Bloated Border Regime
In the Trump era, two interrelated agencies—Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection—have together generated some of the standout horrors of the president’s border and...
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Why We Can’t Sleep Is a Portrait of Gen X at Midlife
The journalist Ada Calhoun opens Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis with the note, “You’re not just imagining it, and it’s not just you.” It’s less a dedication than a cri de coeur....
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An Animal’s-Eye View of Mass Extinction in Progress
In 2019, Netflix’s Our Planet was widely praised for pushing the limits of the nature documentary genre. Instead of artfully depicting wild animals and glossing over the threats they face, Our Planet...
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Why Diversity Training Isn’t Enough
If you’ve consumed liberal media at any point over the last two decades or so, you’re likely aware of the growing attention to (and outrage over) the lack of racial diversity in: Hollywood movies,...
View ArticleAustralia’s Infernal Denial
It was in spring that the frightening laugh of the idiot arrived for Rimbaud. Australia’s own season in hell reached its pinnacle of stupidity a little later. Bushfires had broken out across the...
View ArticleHuman Trafficking Courts Are Not a Criminal Justice “Innovation”
New York state’s court system considers its Human Trafficking Intervention Courts—special courts sold as an alternative to jail for women facing prostitution charges—to be a national model for such...
View ArticleIran Has Not Abandoned the Nuclear Deal
As the Trump administration bumbles its way into a new security crisis with Iran, you may have gotten the impression from apocalyptic media coverage and viral social posts that Tehran has decided to...
View ArticleThe Military Views Poor Kids as Fodder for Its Forever Wars
In my high school in rural North Carolina, a plastic table was set up just off to the side of the atrium where we all congregated after lunch every day. Behind that pamphlet-strewn table was a man in...
View ArticleWhat the Media Is Getting Wrong About Soleimani’s Killing
What was the strategic goal of Donald Trump’s decision to assassinate Iranian general Qassem Soleimani? This is, on its face, a silly question. Trump’s initial public comment was a low-resolution image...
View ArticleOur Frightening Moment Was Years in the Making
We are one week into the 2020s and the last year of Donald Trump’s first term, which will see both the third-ever impeachment trial for an American president and an election that is already wracking...
View ArticleHow Political Fact-Checkers Distort the Truth
At the June 28 Democratic presidential debate, Senator Bernie Sanders said, “Three people [in this country] own more wealth than the bottom half of America.” And Glenn Kessler, who leads The Washington...
View ArticleAmerica Has Never Cared About Sacred Sites
This past weekend, President Trump repeatedly threatened to target Iranian cultural sites should Iran respond to his administration’s assassination of Qassem Soleimani. (And on Tuesday, Iran did just...
View ArticleA Better Health Care Debate Is Possible
Presidential debates are not held for the purpose of informing the public about the candidates running for president and their views. They are television shows, designed to do what other television...
View ArticleGive Kids the Money From Carbon Taxes
Children’s increasing prominence in efforts to slow climate change has provoked mixed reactions. Many, myself included, laud recent Time Person of the Year Greta Thunberg and her fellow youth activists...
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Alice Adams’s Afterlife
It’s just one of the tough truths of being an artist that you can publish 17 books and dozens of short stories—in both the big commercial magazines and the beloved literary journals—and wind up, two...
View ArticleThe Evangelicals Who Pray for War With Iran
Last Friday, a day after Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani and nine others were killed in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq, the Christian Zionist advocacy group Christians United for Israel emailed its...
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