Charlie Kaufman’s Defense of Film
B, the narrator of Charlie Kaufman’s novel Antkind, is B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, a bald, middle-aged film critic with bottle-top glasses and a flowing Whitmanesque beard, who goes only by his lone...
View ArticleCovid-19 and the Limits of American Moral Reasoning
No one loses a war like the United States. Yet we start them all the time. In fact, if you pause to listen to our language—from “battleground” states in election years to “culture wars” every other...
View ArticleAll Police Can Be Secret Police
Painful images are still coming out of Portland—law enforcement wielding exterminator-like sprayers of tear gas, firing “less-lethal” munitions that have left protesters hospitalized with...
View ArticleBolivia’s Covid-19 Election Nightmare Is a Warning
Asked this past spring whether the November 3 presidential election might need to be rescheduled due to the coronavirus, senior White House adviser Jared Kushner replied, “I’m not sure I can commit one...
View ArticleThe 2020 Election Doesn’t Really Matter to Republicans
The new Republican coronavirus relief bill is abominable. From the earliest days of the pandemic, experts have insisted on closing America’s workplaces and offering workers and businesses financial...
View ArticleDonald Trump Is Terrified of Voters
Let’s be clear: President Donald Trump cannot lawfully delay the 2020 general election. He lacks the authority to make a unilateral change to the election date, which is set by Congress for the first...
View ArticlePanic in the White House as Staffers Discover There Is Some Sort of Pandemic...
There are many people in this country who are trapped in bad jobs, ranging from dangerous to exhausting to simply boring, by their financial realities. In the United States, being anything less than...
View ArticleLet’s Cancel the Presidential Debates Forever
No one, except perhaps the swampiest of DC hacks, is likely to mourn the loss of the Republican or Democratic conventions, both of which have been digitized and locked down due to America’s abysmal...
View ArticleThe Right’s Increasingly Unhinged Fight Against Black Lives Matter
In mid-July, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani took to his podcast, Common Sense, to warn listeners that Black Lives Matter would abolish “a government based on free enterprise” as well as...
View ArticleThe Future of Trust-Busting Is in Joe Biden’s Hands
Pigs are flying! Up is down! The public approves of how Congress handled something!After Wednesday’s much-anticipated hearing with the chief executive officers of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple,...
View ArticleCan Cities Do Reparations Alone?
Last week, Durham, North Carolina’s Racial Equity Task Force presented its plan, nearly two years in the making, to “understand the scope and depth of racial inequity in our city and figure out how to...
View ArticleAn Inconvenient Lesson From the Pandemic: We Have to Stop Eating Meat
In November 2019, the United Nations Environmental Programme, or UNEP, called for global greenhouse gas emissions to decline by nearly 8 percent every year until 2030 if there is to be any chance of...
View ArticleThe End of Housing as We Know It
The nail salon in Queens where Mariwvey Ramirez works reopened earlier this month, but the customers have been hesitant to return. “I went back to work for three, four days now, and yesterday they tell...
View ArticleConservative Media Is Really Struggling With the Possibility That Trump...
How did Herman Cain die? Tweets commemorating the former presidential candidate and pizza magnate, including from President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, didn’t...
View ArticleThe Dismal Politics of the Sports World’s “Wokest” League
The Bubble—the sealed-off campus at Disney World in Orlando, Florida, where the National Basketball Association has resumed its pandemic-interrupted season—is pervaded by an uneasy calm. No one there...
View ArticleWhat Joe Biden Wants
After a weekend of oppo dumps and Twitter battles over the leading vice presidential possibilities, Joe Biden could well want to throw up his hands and tell someone else to choose his running mate.It’s...
View ArticleThe Occult, Terrorizing Politics of QAnon
This July, as police in Portland, Oregon, met protesters with grenades, pepper-ball rounds, and tear gas, the acting head of the Department of Homeland Security issued a memo detailing the alleged...
View ArticleRemote Work Won’t Save Us
A hallway room in the back of my childhood home contained the sewing machine and, beginning in the mid-1990s, a succession of computers. The first computer wasn’t even a computer; it was a monochrome...
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Inside the Project Veritas Plan to Steal the Election
James O’Keefe had big plans for 2020. The founder of Project Veritas, the conspiratorial right-wing group that specializes in Fox News–friendly “stings” intended to expose supposed liberal bias and...
View ArticleThe Cyclical Psychology of White Supremacy
The killing began just after noon. On July 30, 1866, a parade of 300 Black townsfolk (with some white advocates) marched toward the Mechanics Institute in New Orleans to demand their rights: Two years...
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