America’s Deadly Obsession With Intellectual Property
In the face of several global crises, world leaders have yet to agree on how to handle intellectual property during emergencies. This week, American officials rejected language in a World Health...
View ArticleThe Rise of the 3D-Printed Gun
In 2013, a then-25-year-old gun rights activist named Cody Wilson opened a potential Pandora’s box when his open-source gun design collective, Defense Distributed, released plans for the Liberator. The...
View ArticleBlow Up the Restaurant Industry and Start Over
March 14 would be the last Saturday shift that Sarah worked, though she didn’t know it at the time. “We were so busy, and everyone that came in was like, ‘I can’t believe how busy y’all are! It’s good...
View ArticleThe Unmattering of Black Lives
On May 20, 2015—almost five years ago to the day—the African American Policy Forum hosted #SayHerName: A Vigil in Memory of Black Women and Girls Killed by the Police, so that families from across the...
View ArticleThe Provocations of Kent Monkman
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is on all fours, his shoulders grasped by a snarling woman in dark gray chinos, his ass cheeks being spread apart by a woman in a light blue tank top, her head...
View ArticleWhy the Pandemic Is Driving Conservative Intellectuals Mad
Last week, First Things editor R.R. Reno, a prominent Catholic intellectual who backed Donald Trump for president, let the world know he’d had enough of the effete conformists following public-health...
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Jonathan Schell’s Warning From the Brink
Of the neologisms coined by early nuclear strategists to plan for World War III, “overkill” is the great crossover success. As a metaphor, it ranges as far from its original context as a word can—“The...
View ArticleWhat If Mass Unemployment Is Here to Stay?
“We will not wake up after the lockdown in a new world,” the author Michel Houellebecq recently and gloomily predicted. “It will be the same, just a bit worse.” But if the staggering death rate in the...
View ArticleFemale Scientists Are Bearing the Brunt of Quarantine Child-Rearing
I was late filing this article. While I was writing it, my three-year-old son refused to nap. When I interviewed people, he interrupted to tell them stories. He climbed on my lap as I typed and twice...
View ArticleI Lost My Job Cleaning Houses and Don’t Know Where I Go From Here
Before this pandemic hit, life was still difficult. I had to work all the time to meet my debt and keep on paying for my home and everything. I was doing house cleaning during the week, and I worked as...
View ArticleThe Two Lives of Norma McCorvey
The law is written in words, and words are not the same thing as people. In the 1973 landmark lawsuit Roe v. Wade, for example, the plaintiff “Jane Roe” was not the same person as Norma McCorvey. The...
View ArticleThe Blue Wave That Saved the Vote
When most people think about the significance of the 2018 midterms, they think about the House of Representatives. Democrats, propelled by voter antipathy toward President Donald Trump, retook the...
View ArticleSounding It Out
When my daughter began homeschooling earlier this year—a string of words that, even now, causes me to rub my eyes with disbelief—I went through something like the stages of grief, landing at acceptance...
View ArticleIs Email the Future of Journalism?
Last year was an extinction-level event in journalism. More than 3,000 jobs were lost in an industry that was already in rough shape. There were layoffs in every type of news organization: At BuzzFeed,...
View ArticleThe Intolerable Cruelty of Our Eldercare System
Residents and employees of nursing homes have emerged as one of the hardest-hit groups of the coronavirus pandemic, with a third of overall deaths taking place within nursing home walls. The facilities...
View ArticleThe Crumbling Cult of Jamie Dimon
Under the most extraordinary circumstances imaginable, Jamie Dimon, the chairman, CEO, and president of JPMorgan Chase, has noticed an incredibly obvious thing: Everything might not be going great;...
View ArticleAmerican Cities Are Built for Cars. The Coronavirus Could Change That.
As the Covid-19 crisis wears on, a surprising tool has emerged in the effort to slow transmission: city streets. The car has long been king in America’s cities, with spacious roadways edged by narrow...
View ArticleI Was Already Underwater as a Cab Driver in New York. Then the Pandemic Hit.
I live in Woodside, Queens. I’m originally from Ecuador, but I’ve been living in New York for 24 years and driving a cab in the city for almost 19 years. I realized that the coronavirus was going to be...
View ArticleDominic Cummings’s Very Trumpian Response to His Very English Scandal
Not since Thomas Becket has a counselor to the government of Britain caused so much controversy. Dominic Cummings, the chief adviser to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, was revealed over the...
View ArticleThe U.S. Can’t “Win” an Arms Race With Russia and China
The president who told the American people that “trade wars are good, and easy to win” now appears equally confident about “winning” a nuclear arms race. Last week, Donald Trump made a half-baked,...
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