Rush Limbaugh Made America Worse
Twenty-five years ago, Rush Limbaugh graced the cover of Time magazine. Wearing a striped shirt, an expensive suit, and a look of total contempt, he held his trademark cigar between two stubby fingers....
View ArticleBoeing’s Disgraced Ex-CEO Returns to the Aerospace Industry—Backed by $240...
In December 2019, reeling from the growing fallout of two crashes that killed 346 people, Boeing fired its CEO, Dennis Muilenburg. While he departed in disgrace, he was hardly frog-marched to the exit:...
View ArticleI Was a Rush Limbaugh Whisperer
As most of my readers know, I was a card-carrying conservative for many years. I was working in the Reagan White House when Rush Limbaugh went on the air in 1988 and remember having to go out and buy a...
View ArticleThe Deep Rot of the Massachusetts Democratic Party
Massachusetts’s road to failure runs straight through the digital waiting room of the Democratic State Committee’s video calls. During long, slur- and expletive-filled gatherings, a vanguard of wizened...
View ArticleThe Supreme Court Could Demolish Another Pillar of the Voting Rights Act
The Supreme Court’s docket is lighter than usual this term, though it’s hard to blame the justices for it. After Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death and Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation, the pace of new cases...
View ArticleFacebook Is a Global Mafia
Facebook and Australia are at war. Though the country’s Parliament has yet to pass a proposed law that would require tech giants to pay for sharing others’ content, Facebook already has retaliated by...
View ArticleTed Cruz Should Have Stayed in Cancun
On Wednesday evening, as millions of Texans were without power during a historic and catastrophic cold spell, the state’s junior senator was on his way to Cancun, where it was 84 degrees and sunny, no...
View ArticleMassive Attack Has Never Sounded So Good
This month marked the thirtieth anniversary of Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy,” not that anyone was keeping track. The song remains, for me at least, the high-water mark of what came to be known...
View ArticleThe Polite Rage of Shirley Hazzard
The astronomical event referenced in the title of Shirley Hazzard’s novel The Transit of Venus occurs in two installments–eight years apart, every 243 years–when Venus passes between Earth and the...
View ArticleRush Limbaugh and the Nineties Roots of “Cancel Culture”
If you weren’t around for it, it’s a little hard to explain how and why Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing broadcaster who died this week, was (very briefly) a member of the commentary crew for Sunday NFL...
View ArticleHow to Stop Poisoning Children
Residents of the West Calumet Housing Complex in East Chicago, Indiana, have been poisoned for decades. The federal government built the public housing complex in 1972 on land that had formerly housed...
View ArticleThe Mothers Leading the Battle Against Trans Student Athletes
To the extent that there is a real national debate about the participation of trans people in sports, it is almost exclusively concerned with teenagers in student athletics programs. This is despite...
View ArticleThe Rise and Fall of the L. Brent Bozells
In The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a classic 1943 film that traces, in vaguely allegorical fashion, half a century’s evolution in England’s national character, the actress Deborah Kerr plays a...
View ArticleTexas’s Energy Crisis Is America’s Future
“The electricity would come on and then turn off immediately. Every 30 minutes or hour you would get this moment of hope,” said Paris Moran, of San Antonio, Texas. “I think that was the worst part,...
View ArticleI’m Tired of Living Through Extraordinary Times in Texas
A real estate agent might call our apartment in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston cozy with a sun-drenched bedroom. The reality is that it’s a small, cheap, window-heavy garage conversion. But it’s...
View ArticleThe Tech Bros Take Miami
A new billboard looms over the I-80 freeway in San Francisco, near Twitter’s headquarters. A blown-up screenshot of a tweet, it reads, “Thinking of moving to Miami? DM me.” While the billboard itself...
View ArticleThe GOP Is Imploding in Spectacular Fashion
Cartoonist Al Capp, famous for the twentieth-century comic strip Li’l Abner, created a visually memorable character named Joe Btfsplk who walked around under his own rain cloud. That mood of persistent...
View ArticleThe Desperate Need for a Covid-19 Commission
Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial is over, and Washington is now congealing around some sort of august body to investigate the January 6 insurrection. Earlier this week, Speaker Nancy Pelosi...
View ArticlePankaj Mishra’s Reckoning With Liberalism’s Bloody Past
In July 2017, Donald Trump gave a speech in Warsaw that seemed, at the time, to herald a new age. In remarks dredged from the imagination of adviser Steve Bannon, the president drew a rhetorical line...
View ArticleDeb Haaland’s Ascent and the Complicated Legacy of Native Representation
Deb Haaland could be the next secretary of the interior. Her hearing is scheduled for Tuesday and, if seated, the congresswoman from New Mexico and citizen of the Laguna Pueblo will make history. Her...
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