In Final Test of Nerves, Bernie Sanders Blinks
Tonight’s presidential debate may have been functionally the end of the Democratic primary campaign—not just because the forthcoming primaries favor Joe Biden, but because the coronavirus pandemic has...
View ArticleThe Pandemic Imagination
Daniel Defoe, that indefatigable hack, published Journal of the Plague Year in 1722. Writing about the bubonic plague sweeping through London in 1665, when Defoe himself was no more than five years...
View ArticleThe Plot Against America’s Powerful Warning
The morning after Donald Trump’s election, I boarded the subway outside my home in Brooklyn, bound for a series of drunken commiserations with shell-shocked friends. The diverse faces on the R train...
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How Lindsey Graham Could Lose in 2020
If there is one political lesson Republicans have taken to heart since 2016, it is that there is no crossing Donald Trump. Perhaps no GOP official better represents Trump’s death grip on the party than...
View ArticleThe Lost World of Studio 54
Last year, the Brooklyn Museum hosted Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving, an exhibition that displayed the artist’s clothing and cosmetics and some other ephemera alongside a handful of her...
View ArticleHow the Media Created the “Moderate” Susan Collins
In 1997, only seven months into the job as a senator, Susan Collins of Maine got what many of her colleagues wait years for: a glowing profile in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. It described “a...
View ArticleThe Risky Race for a Quick Coronavirus Vaccine
As the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 sweeps across the world, scientists are racing to find vaccines that could stop the virus in its tracks. On Monday, Moderna Therapeutics, a Massachusetts-based...
View ArticleA Case for Unity
At times during CNN’s Democratic debate on Sunday night, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders seemed like feuding former vaudeville stars arguing over which of them muffed his lines in Buffalo 43 years ago. It...
View ArticleThe Case for a Social Distancing Wage
The rapidly escalating coronavirus pandemic, and the urgent need for the populace to practice “social distancing” in order to prevent the overburdening of our health care infrastructure, has quickly...
View ArticleBiden’s Diversity Promises Are Identity Politics at Their Best
The coronavirus pandemic—and the Trump administration’s failed response to it—dominated Sunday night’s debate between former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. But one of the...
View ArticleThe Radical Empathy of the Coronavirus Panic
In certain court systems, injuring another person without intending to by taking a risk whose danger you could have foreseen is called dolus eventualis. It’s punished less severely than dolus...
View ArticleA Moderate Proposal: Nationalize the Fossil Fuel Industry
The Fed has pulled out its big guns, slashing interest rate targets to zero and announcing $700 billion worth of new quantitative easing. Republican Senator Mitt Romney seems to support giving every...
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The Education of Greta Thunberg
One Christmas, I bought my parents compact-fluorescent light bulbs and a copy of Global Warming: A Greenpeace Guide. It was 1990: I was proud of my job at Greenpeace U.K., on the climate team, and the...
View ArticleThe Perpetual Weakness of Middle East Despots
Something is stirring again in the house of Saud. In the past two weeks, as the global health crisis intensified, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), further roiled international...
View ArticleThe Electability Trap
It’s impossible to know whether a political candidate is electable until they’ve actually been elected—but that hasn’t stopped pundits from speculating ad nauseam about the question. Episode 3 of The...
View ArticleAgainst Productivity in a Pandemic
Boutique grocery stores have been raided of their oat milks, bars and restaurants have been shuttered or limited to delivery-only service, a growing pool of service and retail workers have lost their...
View ArticleThe Casualties of the “War” on the Coronavirus
“We’re at war with a virus,” Joe Biden said in Sunday’s Democratic primary debate. He was not alone. “We have to fight that invisible enemy—unknown, but we are getting to know it a lot better,”...
View ArticleWe Need Universal Voting by Mail, and We Need It Now
Countless Americans have died for democracy and the right to vote, but none of them should now have to risk death to exercise it. The coronavirus pandemic led Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and other top...
View ArticleIt’s Joe Biden’s Party Now
The race for the Democratic presidential nomination is now, for all intents and purposes, over. Former Vice President Joe Biden scored decisive and relatively quick victories in Tuesday’s primaries in...
View ArticleDon’t Let Trump Off the Hook for the Coronavirus Crisis
Donald Trump’s first State of the Union in 2017 should have served as a lesson for many in the media. CNN’s Van Jones declared his milquetoast calls for unity the moment he “became president of the...
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