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Moments Without Truth
Six months ago, when I first started writing this piece, things were simple. I wanted to write about The Discourse—the loose set of reflexes and affronts that function as the invisible lingua franca of...
View ArticleIndian Country Deserves a Better Hero Than Richard Nixon
You only need one hand to count the number of American presidents who could be considered vaguely positive, progressive partners for Indian Country.Most of those lauded for defining the upper limits of...
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The New MoMA Is More of a Good Thing
The Museum of Modern Art was born almost a century ago, though it wasn’t until the 1930s that the place had a building to call its own. Edward Durrell Stone and Phillip L. Goodwin’s handsome edifice...
View ArticleCould Betsy DeVos Cost Trump the Election?
In 2016, Darrin Camilleri was 24 and teaching at a Detroit charter school 20 miles from where he grew up, when Michigan lawmakers took up a measure to implement more rigorous oversight of the city’s...
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The Forgotten Christian Terror Cult That Presaged Trump’s Memes
Last Christmas, I found myself alone, stoned, and poolside at the Trump National Doral Miami wearing a “Fake News” T-shirt under a fluffy white Trump robe. Before the noon checkout, I’d gone to catch...
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The White Cliffs of Brexit
The small, seaside town of Dover, where little more than 30,000 people live, has an outsized significance in Great Britain’s national psyche. The sprawling eleventh-century castle that overlooks the...
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Deborah Levy’s Time Warp
Deborah Levy’s The Man Who Saw Everything begins with a subtle instant of subversion. It is September 1988 and a 28-year-old man named Saul Adler has come to London’s Abbey Road to have his photo taken...
View ArticleIndigenous Voters Need a Reason to Care About Canada
Canada voted Monday to elect its new prime minister and House of Commons. The Liberal party lost the majority it had enjoyed the past four years but managed to maintain a minority advantage over the...
View ArticleBill Barr’s First Epistle to the Heathens
Attorney General Bill Barr is a busy man these days. When he’s not personally traveling to Italy to investigate bizarre conspiracy theories about the 2016 election or ending the de facto moratorium on...
View ArticlePicturing the Future
A few years ago, cops raided the home of a teenager in Brooklyn and arrested him for posting a sequence of emoji on Facebook. Two officers on patrol had recently been killed in the borough, and...
View ArticleThe Last Stand in Lordstown
Chuckie Denison has retired from General Motors, and the auto plant where he worked, in Lordstown, Ohio, has been shuttered since early March. But lately he’s been showing up there nearly every night,...
View ArticleWhy Do Pundits Love the Unity Myth?
Pete Buttigieg’s surge in the polls—if you can call rocketing to fourth place in Iowa a “surge”—has been built on a simple narrative: He alone can unite a divided country. Buttigieg has warned...
View ArticleThe Weapons America Is Leaving Behind in Syria
Less than a week after President Donald Trump formally ordered the U.S. military to withdraw the majority of its forces from Syria, the Pentagon carried out an unusual mission in the northeastern part...
View ArticleJoe Biden’s Individual Mandate Madness
The Democratic Party needs to be saved from itself, or at least from its tendency to retreat into the gauzy nostalgia of the past. It’s understandable, here in the hourly news deluge of President...
View ArticleThe Senate Has No Good Reason To Acquit Trump
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is preparing for the first impeachment trial of a president in two decades. There are plenty of details to work out, but the overarching structure will likely be...
View ArticleLiberal Feminism Has a Sex Work Problem
Washington, D.C.’s city council hearing last week on decriminalizing sex work ran over fourteen hours and included nearly 200 testimonies from district residents, from community groups, and from sex...
View ArticleWant to Vote? Pay Up.
Betty Riddle was 17 when she was first convicted of a felony, for clubbing another woman in the face during a fight. “Assault with a deadly weapon,” she told me recently. “I was adjudicated as an...
View ArticleCan the Opioid Crisis Avoid the Pitfalls of the Tobacco Wars?
This week, hours before a deadline that would have sent both cases to a single jury trial, Cuyahoga County and Summit County in Ohio reached a $260 million settlement agreement with opioid distribution...
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The Making of a White Supremacist Myth
On April 19, 2019, a man—who, in his profile picture, wears a hat emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag—posted in a Facebook group called “Black Confederates and Other Minorities in the War of...
View ArticleIn The Lighthouse, Beauty Battles the Beast
The first thing you notice about Robert Eggers’s sophomore film, The Lighthouse, is not the way it looks, but the way it sounds. Waves, then a foghorn, then wind—they bleed into one another. There’s a...
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