How Democrats Let the Right Win on Immigration
A theme of Daniel Denvir’s book All-American Nativism is the role that liberal political journals have played in giving cover to deeply reactionary ideas. In the 1990s, The Atlantic published a long...
View ArticleDon’t Let Larry Summers Block Climate Progress Again
There are many reasons the average news reader might not like Larry Summers. A longtime friend of convicted predator Jeffrey Epstein, Summers deregulated the banking sector as Bill Clinton’s Treasury...
View ArticleErasing the Dead
Tucked down near the end of a recent New York Times piece praising New Mexico’s response to the coronavirus was the fact that, “While Native Americans account for about 11 percent of New Mexico’s...
View ArticleThe Grim New Relevance of Workers Memorial Day
The United States loves a good holiday, and depending on how detailed a calendar one keeps, there are daily opportunities to celebrate everything from gumdrops to argyle. (I finished writing this on...
View ArticleThe Supreme Court Eyes an Escape Hatch From Trump’s Corruption
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments next month in perhaps its highest-profile set of cases this term: whether the House Judiciary Committee and Manhattan’s district attorney can lawfully...
View ArticleChuck Schumer Is Allergic to Politics
In what Politico describes as part of a “broader Democratic effort to conduct oversight over the Trump administration amid the pandemic,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced this week that...
View ArticleA Woman’s Worth in a Pandemic
At recent protests demanding that states drop stay-home orders and other coronavirus prevention measures, events engineered for maximum viral potential on social media, a kind of paean to personal care...
View ArticleReagan, Gay Porn, and Family Secrets Star in Circus of Books
Some time in the mid-1980s, a kid named Micah Mason swiped a dirty VHS tape from the back seat of his parents’ car. He waited months to watch it in secret, only to find, at the fatal moment, that he’d...
View ArticleHow Normal People Captures a Hyper-Aware Romance
In the three years since her first novel was published, the 29-year-old Irish writer Sally Rooney has been called variously “the Jane Austen of the precariat,” “Salinger for the Snapchat generation,”...
View ArticleAfghanistan May Soon Have Peace. And the Cost Is Democracy.
On a sunny day last July, thick fumes poured into the sky over Shahid Square in central Kabul. Half a dozen gunmen stormed up a building into the office of Afghanistan’s former intelligence chief,...
View ArticleConfessions of a PPE Smuggler
“I’m worried I’m exposing myself to more of this crap,” my friend Irfan texted me from his shift in the intensive care unit at a hospital in New York. A month since the first confirmed case in the...
View ArticleThere Is No Hiding Trump
Over the weekend, Donald Trump’s critics and his advisers were, possibly for the first time, on the same page: The president’s daily coronavirus briefings, which stretch on longer than Grateful Dead...
View ArticleIt’s Time to Build a Better Political Culture
In a recent essay titled “It’s Time to Build,” venture capitalist Marc Andreessen urges Americans to learn from the failures of our response to the coronavirus pandemic and recover our national...
View ArticleThe Bipartisan Appeal of “Yellow Peril” Politics
Kaiser Wilhelm II did not originate the term “Yellow Peril,” but after his “Hun speech” of 1900, he became forever synonymous with it. The German monarch was addressing soldiers who were shipping off...
View ArticleGive Me Meat and Give Them Death
Invoking the Korean War–era Defense Production Act, Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday mandating that American meat production keep running at all costs—workers and grave threats to public...
View ArticleThe Democrats’ Very Revealing Angst About Justin Amash
The news on Tuesday that Representative Justin Amash, the independent congressman from Michigan, had formed a committee to explore running for president as a Libertarian was, if nothing else,...
View ArticleCooking While the World Falls Apart
Remember restaurants? I do, but dimly: candlelight, cloth napkins, a basket of warm bread. Food delivered in courses, by a smiling stranger’s hand. Food prepared offstage, invisibly, materializing at...
View ArticleThe Morbid Ideology Behind the Drive to Reopen America
Photos of the small “reopen America” protests, which have made the rounds on social media over the past week, have revealed a spectacle as cartoonish as it is macabre: a rogue’s gallery of right-wing...
View ArticleThe Era of the Endless Rent Strike
According to the National Multifamily Housing Council, 11 percent of tenants across the United States didn’t pay rent in April—a 4 percent jump from the same time period the previous year. While a...
View ArticleDylan vs. Beyoncé: Quarantine Showdown
Two music titans—one old, one young—snuck out new songs in the past month. In headline form, the news is that Bob Dylan is writing songs about dying and Beyoncé is consolidating her credibility as a...
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