The Trump Shutdown Is an Environmental Crisis
The Environmental Protection Agency employs about 13,000 people to protect Americans from pollution. Last week, fewer than 900 were working, the rest having been furloughed due to the government...
View ArticleWant to Pass Medicare for All? Fix American Democracy First.
The federal government’s partial shutdown enters its second month this week, and there is no end in sight. It does not matter that the American public largely wants the government to reopen, or that...
View ArticleTrump and Xi: A Tale of Two Egos
Amid the many tributes paid to the late George H.W. Bush last November, an understandable minority dwelt on the moment when Bush became the first sitting president to throw up on a major ally. After 16...
View ArticleTrump’s Cruel Proposal to End the Shutdown
Senate Republicans and Democrats on Tuesday announced the first hint of progress in negotiations over the government shutdown. The chamber has scheduled procedural votes on two separate bills for...
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Gray Ladies
Jill Abramson’s new book, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts, is billed as a “definitive report on the disruption of the news media over the last decade,” even as Abramson...
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This Is Nancy Pelosi’s Finest Hour
Just a few months ago, it seemed like Nancy Pelosi’s bid to become speaker of the House of Representatives was in trouble. While attacks from the right had been commonplace for years, she came under...
View ArticleHow Trump Suborns Perjury
BuzzFeed set off a cascading series of controversies last week when it reported that President Donald Trump had “directed” his longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about a Trump...
View ArticlePlease Don’t Let Venezuela Be Trump’s Shutdown Distraction
The fraught situation in Venezuela seems to be coming to a head. On Wednesday, 35-year-old opposition leader Juan Guaidó declared himself interim president following widespread protests calling for the...
View ArticleKing Donald’s Royal Moment
Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, recently handed President Donald Trump a way to cancel next week’s State of the Union address without losing face....
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The Conflicted Soul of Modern Liberalism
“In the United States at this time,” Lionel Trilling asserted in 1950, “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.” A few years later, in his highly influential book...
View ArticleWhy Are Democrats Freaking Out About “Electability”?
Ben Terris calls it “Pundititis.” Democrats still haven’t recovered from the trauma of Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump, and it’s causing them to wring their hands about every candidate emerging...
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A Vacation in the Void
The world is impossibly old and disorganized. A long time ago, we began to structure it around the holy days of religion. More recently, the state endorsed holidays for labor and gave the year the...
View ArticleThis Is Chander Kanta. The Government Shutdown Has Left Her All Alone.
When it comes to the work she does, Chander Kanta is indistinguishable from a regular Environmental Protection Agency employee. For the last five years, the 70-year-old administrative assistant has put...
View ArticleGive Parents Money, Not Universal Pre-K
On Tuesday night, in her State of the State address, Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo staked her second term on an ambitious promise. “Tonight, I pledge to be the governor who brings universal...
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In Tessa Hadley’s Late in the Day, Art and Marriage are at War
When the last of my parents’ “cool” friends got divorced, certain things became apparent to me. First, that being a creative, interesting woman makes it more rather than less likely that your husband...
View ArticleElite Soccer’s Culture of Graft
On Tuesday Cristiano Ronaldo, smiling and bedizened in a black coat and diamond earrings, arrived at court in Madrid, Spain, to receive a $21.6 million fine for tax fraud. It is roughly what the...
View ArticleUh-Oh
Criminal indictments are typically written in the dry, terse active voice of American legalese. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s criminal indictment of Roger Stone, who was arrested by FBI agents in...
View ArticleRemembering Diana Athill
In 2009, Diana Athill, the renowned literary editor and award-winning writer who died this week at the age of 101, moved from her big flat on the edge of London’s Hampstead Heath into a retirement...
View ArticleRegulating Facebook and Google Won’t Save Journalism
This has been the journalism industry’s worst week in recent memory, with around 1,000 people losing their jobs. Layoffs at Gannett cost dozens of jobs at newspapers across the country, from the...
View ArticleWhat Would John Stuart Mill Do—to Fix Facebook?
Silicon Valley’s liberal branding can seem paradoxical given its political impact. The scandals that accompanied the 2016 election—Cambridge Analytica, Russian interference—revealed that Facebook had...
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