Biden’s Bipartisan Dream Is Already Over
In December 2017, President Trump signed an executive order dramatically reducing the size of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah, opening the door to oil and gas...
View ArticleOur Vaccine Rollout Has an Inequality Problem
When Washington, D.C., announced that it would soon prioritize people who are overweight for the Covid-19 vaccine, experts and commentators were perplexed. Nate Silver tweeted that “there’s basically...
View ArticleThis Might Be a Good Time for Democrats in Congress to Stop Trading Stocks
As GameStop’s share price seized the internet’s attention this week, another set of news stories about the stock market went all but unnoticed. Senator Dianne Feinstein, according to a report published...
View ArticleThe Trump Era Could Have Been Much, Much Worse
It’s been almost three weeks since Donald Trump began his exile from public life on a Florida golf course. I thought this would be a moment of relief after years of exhaustion and misery. But as we...
View ArticleThe GameStop Saga Is the First Post-Trump Story
For much of the past week, one story has dominated the news: The share price of GameStop, a brick-and-mortar retail chain that sells physical copies of video games in the cloud computing age. A few...
View ArticleI Bought Tens of Thousands of Dollars of GameStop Stock. And I Have No Regrets.
The first rule of r/WallStreetBets is YOLO. There is no second rule.This isn’t the land of enlightenment, it’s the borough slum of loss porn. I’m here for the goods: Show me the screenshot where your...
View ArticleUntangling the Legacy of The Color Purple
During my sophomore year of college, my mom drove up to New York to take me to see The Color Purple on Broadway. We were not then and are not now a Broadway family: It remains the only musical I have...
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QAnon and the Cultification of the American Right
“I think that the TNT is about to go off.” An Oregon woman named Jo Rae Perkins was livestreaming to Facebook at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, sipping occasionally from a metal water bottle so...
View ArticleDon’t Treat Climate Change as a National Security Risk
What does it mean to “elevate climate change as a national security priority?” President Joe Biden is already well on his way to keeping this campaign promise, tapping John Kerry for a new...
View ArticleAmerican Agriculture Is Broken, and Tom Vilsack Is Not the Man to Fix It
Somewhere on Earth 2, President Boe Jiden, after committing to a thorough review of the groaning, creaking, top-heavy agriculture industry, has decided that the time has come to start fresh. There, the...
View ArticleThe White Tiger Inverts the Indian Rags-to-Riches Story
At first it may seem like Ramin Bahrani’s The White Tiger is another “poverty porn” film, a rising Hollywood genre in the mold of Slumdog Millionaire and Million Dollar Arm, in which Indian street...
View ArticleAndrew Cuomo Needed Donald Trump
In a Friday news conference, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was asked about a report from the state’s attorney general that showed that nursing home deaths from Covid-19 had been severely...
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The Forever Disease: How Covid-19 Became a Chronic Condition
Covid-19 is a trickster. Those who have lived with it the longest often describe the disease as if it knows what mischief it’s making. Miel Singletary Schultz, a 48-year-old “long hauler” and former...
View ArticleBlow Up the Donor-to-Ambassador Pipeline
Would you like to become a U.S. ambassador to a foreign country? You have two options. You can join the State Department as a career officer in the Foreign Service and spend a couple of decades rising...
View ArticleBiden Is Wise to Negotiate With Senate Republicans
The scene Monday night was not high on the list of Democratic fantasies about a Joe Biden presidency: A smiling Susan Collins, flanked by Republican Senate colleagues, stood in the icy White House...
View ArticleTranscript: The Unsolved Mystery of Havana Syndrome
A transcript of Episode 24 of The Politics of Everything, “The Case of the Sick Spies”Tim Weiner: The building that houses American diplomats and spies in Havana is a heavily fortified compound, a big...
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Originalism Is Dead. Long Live Catholic Natural Law.
In October, The New York Times published an opinion essay by Berkeley law professor (and law school dean) Erwin Chemerinsky originally titled “Amy Coney Barrett’s Originalism Threatens Our Freedoms.”...
View ArticleGavin Newsom Is Blowing It
Few figures in recent American history have found a smoother path to power than California Governor Gavin Newsom. His father, a state appeals judge appointed during Jerry Brown’s first stint as...
View ArticleThe Rich Mothers of the Insurrection
One of the scariest female characters in English literature is Madame DeFarge, the wine shop owner whose face is the blank, pitiless gaze of the French Revolution’s Terror in Dickens’s A Tale of Two...
View ArticleThe Case of the Sick Spies
In late 2016, staff at the American Embassy in Havana began hearing strange noises and experiencing a range of odd symptoms: headaches, dizziness, ringing in the ears. Suspicion arose that they had...
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