The Media’s Lousy Election Analysis Is Damaging Political Discourse
Like compulsive gamblers who react to every losing streak by changing their betting strategy rather than quitting outright, political handicappers adjust to every stunning campaign development by...
View ArticleMichael Bloomberg’s Polite Authoritarianism
Over the course of the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, the New York Police Department arrested nearly 2,000 people at protests. The mass arrests were indiscriminate. Bystanders...
View ArticleHow Pundits Manipulate Math to Dismiss Sanders
How do you tell who won an election? Most people would look to see who got the most votes. In the case of a Democratic primary, they could also dig into delegate counts.In the world of punditry—with...
View ArticleTurning Left at Darwin
A while back I purchased a little book by Princeton philosophy professor Peter Singer titled A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation. Later that day, I was reading through the volume...
View ArticleTo Dream of a Jewish President
I am writing this article because I’m a Jew. I was asked to write about what having a Jewish president of the United States might mean to me, and in the course of both writing and researching the...
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End the GOP
There are two figures in the Republican Party who best represent the state of the GOP in the Trump era. The first, of course, is Donald Trump. The second is Roy Moore. By the time Moore defeated Jeff...
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The Challenge of Sustainable Chocolate
The long black pruning poles looked cumbersome. But the farmers moved quickly, swarming over the small plot of land and hoisting the poles up to slice through cacao branches with ease. On the bottom...
View ArticleThe Hardest Decision Bernie Sanders Will Make This Year
As has been the case for some time now, Bernie Sanders is the front-runner in the Democratic primary, a position Tuesday night’s victory in New Hampshire only confirmed. While the race has just begun,...
View ArticleA Color Named After a Fruit
Before oranges were sweet, they were bitter. The whole world was more bitter then. Nights, unlit; wheat wild. Each element, bound in a rind. And then you were there, in the rift cut out of mountain....
View ArticleCloud Forest
Against the mountain slope, incoming fog— we stood near the maroon strips of bark and inhaled the aroma of a rainbow eucalyptus— in the Netherlands, a rising sea level is stressing dikes— an akepa is...
View ArticleCan Corporate America Get Behind Medicare for All?
A few days before Christmas in 2007, Wendell Potter was in his office at the health insurer Cigna’s building in Philadelphia, watching CNN. A protest was being held outside Cigna’s Glendale,...
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Remembrance of Things Condé Nast
In April 2000, I went to work at a yet-to-be-launched magazine called Lucky, which occupied the old Details offices at 4 Times Square. Details had gone through four editors in the previous six years,...
View ArticleTrump Conscripts the DOJ Into His Reelection Campaign
Four federal prosecutors quit the case against President Donald Trump’s dirty-trickster ally Roger Stone on Tuesday afternoon, after the Justice Department intervened in Stone’s favor by recommending a...
View ArticleThis Is Why the GOP Can’t Have Nice Climate Plans
California Representative Kevin McCarthy just can’t catch a break. Parts of his district were on fire last year, and—thanks partially to those blazes—climate change is a top concern for voters in his...
View ArticleThe Perils of Economic Boosterism
One of my earliest memories of economic babble was President Gerald R. Ford, in 1976, boasting that there were more Americans working than ever before. I hadn’t yet taken up the study of economics (I...
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Finding Neverland
If you wanted to boil down conservatism to a single anodyne formula, it might be “reverence for the past.” But reverence, as opposed to respect or understanding, often requires a selective memory:...
View ArticleThe Wet’suwet’en Take Another Anti-Pipeline Struggle Mainstream
Last week, Via Rail, one of Canada’s major train operators, canceled most rides across Canada after Canadian National Rail, the company that owns most of the tracks Via’s trains run on, shut down its...
View ArticleA Wildcat Strike Grows Out of a Housing Crisis
Lately, Brenda Arjona has been leaning hard on the campus food pantry. The 33-year-old single mother and third-year anthropology graduate student says she makes around $2,200 a month after taxes as a...
View ArticleThe Trump Administration Finally Broke the Anti-Trafficking Movement
When Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, 20 years ago, it was hailed as a shining example of bipartisan consensus. “You’ve got soccer moms and Southern Baptists, the National...
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Analyzing Lucian Freud
One of the principal thrills of The Lives of Lucian Freud: The Restless Years, 1922-1968 is that we are in the capable hands of William Feaver, The Observer’s longtime chief art critic. Here’s how he...
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