Making Sense of the Facebook Menace
Every day, a Twitter account run by Kevin Roose, a technology reporter for The New York Times, posts a list of the top 10 sources of the highest-performing links on Facebook in the United States.On one...
View ArticleWho Really Loses When America Phases Out Natural Gas?
On Sunday, The New York Times published a piece profiling a handful of recent college grads, all outfitted with varying forms of geology or engineering degrees and struggling to find a foothold in the...
View ArticleThe Dangerous Historical Precedent for Ted Cruz’s Shameless Electoral College...
One hundred and forty-five years ago, the United States was locked in a constitutional crisis. Bloodshed and intimidation against Black voters and their white Republican allies in the South had...
View ArticleCrying at Work Isn’t the Answer
It all started with an Instagram ad. The item for sale was a graphic tee with large, feminine typography that said: I cry at work. The shirt, by the Los Angeles–based company ban.do, cost $38. By the...
View ArticleTrump Is Finally Tearing the GOP Apart
Tom Cotton has been one of Donald Trump’s most loyal and consistent supporters. He has defended Trump repeatedly, even when the president in September refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power....
View ArticleCan Oysters Save Our Seas?
You know who had a weirdly great 2020? “Oysters,” Rachel Dean told me. Oysters grew fatter and faster than expected last year, and diners frequently weren’t around to eat them.Rachel and her husband,...
View ArticleA Shrine to the Most Tasteless Man in America
As Donald Trump’s time in the White House comes to an end, some creative folks have already begun to imagine his presidential library. A Florida man has offered Trump his trailer park as the site. And...
View ArticleA Novelist’s Reckoning With Identity Politics
When Trump won the 2016 presidential election, an editor I worked with asked me: What did I think as a Muslim American? The question troubled me, because I had never thought of myself as a “Muslim...
View ArticleThe Exciting New Trick That Converts Good Jobs Into Crappy Gig Work
The highly contentious and wildly expensive Prop 22 is already doing what it was designed to do, and Californians are seeing the grim reality of an economy saturated with independent contractors. (Or...
View ArticleThe Corporations Funding the End of Democracy
What are we going to do about what’s happening in Congress today? If we’re honest with ourselves, most of us will do nothing. There are, granted, different varieties of nothing. And one of the...
View ArticleSaving Lisa Montgomery’s Life Requires More Than Stopping Her Execution
When Donald Trump leaves the White House on January 20, 2021, he will be known, among other dishonors, for having executed more federal prisoners in a single year than any other before him. This may...
View ArticleGeorgia Shows the GOP’s Dismal Future Without Trump
In the bewildering, seemingly interminable period between the conclusion of voting in the 2020 election and the networks’ declaration that Joe Biden had won, one thing seemed clear: The GOP had a...
View ArticleModerate Democrats Rule Washington Now
The apparent Democratic Senate sweep in Georgia is a fitting coda to the destructive narcissism and strutting authoritarianism of the Donald Trump years. It was Trump’s refusal to accept his rightfully...
View Article“Bipartisanship” Is Climate Poison
Democrats are about to enjoy the most power they’ve had in years. A president has just been elected with a huge popular mandate. The House and Senate are both under Democratic control. The country is...
View ArticleThe Violent Crescendo of the MAGA Conspiracies
“For one day, on January 6th, you, Vice President Pence, will be the most powerful man on earth…On that day, you and you alone will have the power to set not just America, but all of humanity free—or...
View ArticleThis Isn’t an Insurrection. It’s an Alliance.
President Trump solicited the march to the Capitol. He would be with them, he said. Instead he abandoned his cult within minutes: The presidential motorcade arrived at the White House just as his...
View ArticleBanish Trump and His Co-Conspirators—Forever
America’s two-hundred-year streak of peacefully transferring power came to an end on Wednesday after President Donald Trump incited thousands of his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol, where...
View ArticleA Sickening Day in American History
A dazed feeling, somewhere between nausea and numbness, washed over me Wednesday afternoon. It conjured up the way I felt after the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968. And it...
View ArticleThis Is the Conservative Tradition
Edmund Fawcett has remarkable timing. His book Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition appeared two weeks before the U.S. election and a few weeks before a Brexit deadline. With Donald Trump’s refusal...
View ArticleA Very American Coup
There was a brief moment on Wednesday—before hundreds of MAGA goons stormed the Capitol and chased out lawmakers certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, before cable networks and social...
View Article