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Behind Every Republican Man
Joni Culver was born in Iowa in 1970 and raised by a mother who felt, at times, isolated by a farm life spent cooking and cleaning. At seven, asked as part of a second-grade project to name a potential...
View ArticleThe Cultural Permanence of Donald Trump
It was in 2014 that the “rolling coal” phenomenon was first brought to our attention. Conservative drivers, a flurry of articles reported that summer, had taken to modifying their trucks to produce...
View ArticleBill Barr’s Titanic Lack of Self-Awareness
On Wednesday afternoon, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported that Attorney General Bill Barr instructed federal prosecutors last week to pursue harsher charges against alleged...
View ArticleThe Generation That Was Exhausted
Everyone hates millennials. To Baby Boomers, millennials are lazy, entitled, spoiled, narcissistic, simultaneously stuck in our parents’ basements and wielding enough economic clout to “kill” entire...
View ArticleThe Cult of Presidential “Leadership”
We live in an anxious society almost pathologically obsessed with leadership. Self-help books package its secrets for frustrated middle managers. Websites offer listicles of tips for how to make...
View ArticleWhat Trump Taught America About the Bible
Five years ago this week, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign hit a snag. The second Republican primary debate had not gone well, and he was taking so much flak for failing to correct an Islamophobic...
View ArticleBarack Obama’s Memoir Is Set to Be the Biggest Book This Year
Book publishers have had a chaotic year. There have been protests and walkouts over Woody Allen’s memoir and the industry’s lack of diversity—unprecedented activism in an industry with little history...
View ArticleThe Psychological Perks of Joining a Revolution
Workdays in fiction aren’t like real workdays at all. Office novels will never adequately capture the deadening experience of exchanging your time for money, of watching your hours, like elastic bands,...
View ArticleI’m Living Under the Weight of Nearly Four Months of Back Rent
I left a job as a secretary at a local Pasadena church in January in order to start working independently as an interpretive translator. My timing wasn’t the greatest. By March, everything shut down....
View ArticleJared Kushner’s Psychopathic Incompetence
The Jared Kushner Phenomenon—how this unpleasant and widely loathed man, the perpetual son, became so important to the Trump administration—would be very interesting if it weren’t so deadly. It would...
View ArticleRuth Bader Ginsburg and the Failure of Democratic Politics
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the pioneering lawyer, judge, and Supreme Court justice, died on Friday at the age of 87. Nominated to the Court by Bill Clinton in 1993, Ginsburg’s legacy stretches back six...
View ArticleThe Consequences of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Death for American Democracy
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the leader of the Supreme Court’s liberal wing and a trailblazer for women’s rights in the law, died on Friday at the age of 87. According to NPR, Ginsburg dictated a...
View ArticleThe Wildfires Changed How She Sees Life
Close to 200 bushfires ignited in Australia in early October 2019. They torched nearly 15 million acres of land and destroyed more than 2,000 homes in the states of Victoria and New South Wales along...
View ArticleThe Mighty Ruth Bader Ginsburg
The first thing to say about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whether you agreed with her jurisprudence or not, is that she was a mensch, a good person, full of compassion and empathy. Infused with honor and...
View ArticleCan Senate Democrats Run Out the Clock on Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee?
The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg should inspire a week of public mourning and reflections on her enduring legacy. With just 45 days to go before an election, there should be bipartisan agreement that...
View ArticleRuth Bader Ginsburg and the End of the One Great Woman Myth
In the last decade of the life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she saw herself crowned a feminist icon. The memefication of the precedent-setting women’s rights attorney and judge first...
View ArticleThe Man Who Is Determined to Stop Trump From Rigging the Election
It’s only a few hours into Election Day, and things are already coming undone. In Michigan, Republican groups have instructed dozens of people to stand outside polling places and watch menacingly as...
View ArticleHow to Save the Pandemic Generation
There’s a looming student debt cliff awaiting us in 2021. With America in the teeth of the Covid-19–enabled economic downturn, lawmakers suspended federal student loan payments for 80 percent of...
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Inside the FBI’s File on Soviet Poet-Dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko
In October 1961, the FBI decided a poem could be a weapon. Agents at the bureau had learned about “Babi Yar,” a provocative piece of verse written by the wily young Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko,...
View ArticleThe Libertarian Ideas That Wrecked the Fed
Last week I explained the pernicious long-term effect of Milton Friedman’s theory of the corporation. But the famed libertarian economist’s baleful legacy doesn’t end there: Friedman’s ideas about...
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