Big Oil’s Evil, Stupid Plan to Drown the World in Plastic
What do you do if you’re an oil company with too much oil? You find a place—any place—to put it. If people aren’t driving or flying as much, they’re certainly having things delivered. That’s where the...
View ArticleOur Summer of American Nihilism
In a recent interview on The Ringer’s 10 Questions podcast, Minnesota Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins—a man who says he keeps a four-foot-tall pile of rocks outside his garage to remind him of his own...
View ArticleThis Is What Trumpism After Trump Looks Like
The event from this summer that best captured the chaotic energy of the GOP heading into the presidential election was not the Republican National Convention, with its high-decibel roster of party...
View ArticleA Bold New Plan to Turn the Rust Belt Blue
For decades, workers, millions of them—steelworkers and social workers, truck drivers and teachers—have been flooded with labor union phone calls and flyers every four years. But for many of them, when...
View ArticleAmerica Is Not Reliving 1968
For me, the year 1968 is symbolized by a single dark evening that haunts me to this day. I was at the campus paper, the Michigan Daily, when the bulletin came over the clattering AP newswire that Bobby...
View ArticleHow David Graeber Changed the Way We See Money
In the third edition of the college-level textbook Macroeconomics, the economists Andrew Abel and future Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke blithely assert that “since the earliest times almost all...
View ArticleThe “Law and Order” Backlash Against Biden Was a Mirage
For all the effort expended over the past 15 years to bring punditry a step or two closer to the social sciences and into communion with statistics, the art of the political take is still, for the most...
View ArticleThe American Horror of Hooding
On March 23, Joe Prude of Rochester, New York, called 911 because his visiting brother, Daniel, had fled his home while experiencing a mental health crisis. When police officers responded, they found...
View ArticleThe Future of Labor Is Growing in South Dakota
Kooper Caraway, the newly elected president of the South Dakota AFL-CIO, sees his stated duty to improve the lot of the American working class as more of a calling. Born in Alabama and raised in Texas,...
View ArticleHappy Pandemic Labor Day
Labor Day is here, which means it’s time to buy stuff. The Today Show has the latest on the “Home Decor Sales You Can’t Miss.” USA Today excitedly reported that “Home Depot’s huge Labor Day sale has...
View ArticleFox News Shares the Blame for Trump’s Deranged, Ruinous Presidency
Throughout history, presidents have singled out particular reporters for special access. Franklin Roosevelt often favored The New York Times’ Arthur Krock with inside information. John F. Kennedy’s...
View ArticleThe Monsoon Season That Drowned Chennai, India
In 2015, the winter monsoon season brought torrential rains to Chennai, in southern India. Unprecedented floods followed, and some parts of the city of six million residents experienced floodwaters as...
View ArticleThe Anti-Democratic Origins of Voter Prediction
I’m always a bit relieved when a tech company’s algorithm seems to fall short of mind reading. It’s somewhat reassuring when a so-called smart ad displays hideous shoes I would never buy just because I...
View ArticleMy 98 Days in Unemployment Purgatory
When the pandemic hit and millions of people lost their jobs, my beat as a reporter at Vice swiftly changed to covering unemployment. I spoke to workers—teachers, ride-share drivers, servers—who were...
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The End of the University
Since coming down south to be closer to family, I’ve taken many walks around the University of North Carolina’s Greensboro campus, where my father works as a professor of chemistry. I arrived not long...
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Donald Trump Is the Military-Industrial Complex
Everybody knows Donald Trump is an opportunistic, lying asshole. Hell, that was his defenders’ main point this weekend, when they tried vainly to save the president from Jeffrey Goldberg’s September 3...
View ArticleTrumpian Politics Is the Greatest Threat to a Coronavirus Vaccine
Donald Trump has figured out the One Weird Trick to winning the 2020 election: a working vaccine, announced just in time for the election and teased throughout the campaign. Having failed to control...
View ArticleThe Incredibly Obvious Way to Win Elections and Weather the Recession
Last week, seizing upon a slightly better-than-expected jobs report as proof of an economic recovery underway, Republicans once again pushed a stimulus deal to the back burner. States, whose budgets...
View ArticleTrump’s Fire Sale of Public Lands for Oil and Gas Drillers
On Tuesday, the Bureau of Land Management auctioned off oil and gas leases to 11 parcels of land totaling around 15,000 acres in Nevada. It’s the latest event in a troubling trend in the Trump...
View ArticleHari Kunzru’s Reckoning With the Far Right
Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill is a ghost story. It’s different, though, from Kunzru’s previous book, 2017’s White Tears, a parable of race in America with a (genuinely frightening) supernatural dimension. I...
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