A 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...
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Reagan, 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,”...
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Afghanistan 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,...
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Cooking 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...
View ArticleThe Intolerable Fragility of American Hospitals
The coronavirus pandemic is permanently closing beloved businesses across the country, as they struggle to survive this necessary period of social separation without a reliable means of generating...
View ArticleJoe Biden’s Tired Feminist Shield
Tara Reade, an aide to Joe Biden in 1993, says that while working for him, Biden sexually assaulted her. Joe Biden himself has said nothing; his campaign’s position is that this never happened. It’s a...
View ArticleTurns Out Andrew Cuomo Isn’t America’s Governor After All
Andrew Cuomo has been cast as the anti-Trump in the coronavirus crisis. The governor of New York was widely praised in the national media for doing all the things that the president could or would not...
View ArticleThe Slippery Definition of an “Essential” Worker
When the Department of Homeland Security released its criteria for “Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers” in March, it included a dizzying array of jobs across a host of industries: the flight...
View ArticleHollywood Keeps Trying to Rewrite Its History
On August 6, 1969, the actress Sharon Tate was found dead in her home on Cielo Drive, Los Angeles, eight months pregnant and so bloodied that her patterned underwear appeared red to the investigating...
View ArticleThe Post-Pandemic Future of Work
The empty refrain around “heroes” in “essential” jobs—the people expected to continue to show up to work, from health care to grocery retail and sanitation, while everyone else shelters in place—has by...
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