Bernie Offers Biden His Last Hurrah
The first night of the Democratic National PowerPoint Presentation went off without a major technical hitch. But partly owing to the uncanny nature of this virtual non-event, much of it had a very...
View ArticleThe Democrats’ Eternal Wall Street Ticket
This summer, Wall Street made its peace with Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee. If Donald Trump had spoiled the financial sector rotten for four years with tax cuts and regulation...
View ArticleWilliam Faulkner’s Southern Guilt
In February 1956, William Faulkner, blind drunk, gave an infamous interview. After toiling for decades in relative obscurity, Faulkner had become a literary celebrity—he had won the Nobel Prize seven...
View ArticleNewsweek and the Rise of the Zombie Magazine
Writing in The Columbia Journalism Review last year, Daniel Tovrov depicted Newsweek, once one of America’s most distinguished magazines, as a shell of its former self. All that was left was clickbait,...
View ArticleThe World’s Dumbest Authoritarian
What would the U.S. media say if the president of another country was threatening to hobble his nation’s postal service in hopes of suppressing ballots ahead of an election?Every once in a while, an...
View ArticleThe Democrats Choose Politics Over Ideological Purity
The Danes have a word, popular these days as a design concept, called “hygge.” Loosely translated as “cozy,” it conjures up sweaters, slippers, a roaring fireplace, woolen lap rugs draped on furniture,...
View ArticleIs Trump Killing His Favorite Industry?
The Trump administration is officially opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, for business. That’s self-evidently bad for the climate; developed oilfields there stand to release some 4.3...
View ArticleThe Obvious Futility of One-Time “Stimulus” Checks
Back in March, or many lifetimes ago, Congress passed the Cares Act, which included a provision to send out one-time direct payments to people making less than $99,000 a year. This week, a team of...
View ArticleThe Lazy Liberalism of Instagram Slideshows
If you logged onto Instagram in the days that immediately followed the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, you might have found the platform to be...
View ArticleThe Everyday Inspiration for Anna Karenina
At the start of 1873, Leo Tolstoy was fresh from the success of War and Peace and aware that the world was expecting an equally monumental work of art, something that would match that book (he refused...
View ArticleMadison Cawthorn Is the Future of the Republican Party
In a June primary, a photogenic Zoomer Republican named Madison Cawthorn beat a candidate endorsed by President Donald Trump to fill the North Carolina House seat formerly occupied by his chief of...
View ArticleQAnon Is Using the Anti-Trafficking Movement’s Conspiracy Playbook
Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), a hard-charging sex trafficking “rescue” group with conservative roots, doesn’t just accept donations to fund its multimillion-dollar mission; it also lets donors...
View ArticleThe Country’s Most Important Climate Election Is Happening in Texas
You probably haven’t heard of this year’s most important election for American climate policy. If you have, you probably didn’t realize what it was about. The Texas Railroad Commission, which will...
View ArticleA Night of Magical Thinking at the Democratic Convention
Joe Biden’s case for the presidency is not hard to understand—it may very well be the least complicated in modern American political history. He is not Donald Trump. He is, by contrast, a thinking,...
View Article“This Is a Paradise, but a Temporary One”
Hurricane Dorian slammed into Grand Bahama island on September 1, 2019. The storm’s 200 mph winds and torrential rains stalled over the island for more than 40 hours as water levels rose 18 to 23 feet...
View ArticleA Constitutional Weapon for Biden to Vanquish Trump’s Army of Judges
We are now less than 90 days away from an election that President Donald Trump is openly attempting to steal. From that vantage, it may seem premature—bordering on presumptuous—for Democrats to start...
View ArticleAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Right to Warn of “Fascism in the United States”
On Tuesday, after television coverage of the Democratic National Convention drew to a close, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez expanded on her 97-second recorded convention message by taking to...
View ArticleThe Stories Kamala Harris Won’t Tell Anymore
The third night of the Democratic National Convention was memorably described by one late-night C-SPAN caller from California as “spooky … like a drive-in with no cars.” Still, the producers were doing...
View ArticleThe Puzzlingly Substanceless Democratic Convention
Barack Obama has not always been the soaring convention orator of legend.His acceptance speech at the 2012 Democratic Convention was flat and themeless. In fact, it was Bill Clinton who saved that...
View ArticleThe Israel-U.A.E. Deal Puts the “Forever” in “Forever War”
It is by now almost a formality: In the Middle East, nothing either good or bad can transpire without Washington pointing to Tehran’s alleged hegemonic designs as the force behind it. So it was with...
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