The British Museum’s ‘Looting’ Problem
This weekend, headlines across the internet announced that the British Museum was to “return looted antiquities to Iraq.” Eight tiny artifacts, some of them 5,000 years old, were handed to Iraqi...
View ArticleViral Ads Don’t Guarantee Victory
On Twitter, where his handle is @IronStache, Randy Bryce seems like he’s already the Democratic nominee for Wisconsin’s 1st congressional district—retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan’s seat. He isn’t....
View ArticleA New Golden Age for Trophy Hunters
President Donald Trump’s proposal last month to weaken the Endangered Species Act has sparked a familiar debate. Environmentalists say he’s shilling for the fossil fuel and logging industries, which...
View ArticleTV’s True Crime Voyeurism Reaches Its Crude End
American culture is in love with murder. It has always been this way: People like watching killers cavort in the movies, and trashy true-crime documentaries pull in the numbers. There’s a whole network...
View ArticleWhat France Means When It Talks About ‘Anti-Semitism’
“They spit when I walked in the street,” Joanna Galilli, 28, a French Jew, told the New York Times late last month. She, like many Jews in recent years, had left a suburb of Paris to move to the 17th...
View ArticleWhat Democrats Should Really Ask Brett Kavanaugh
Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominees are often described as “battles,” but they usually turn out to be dramatic theater rather than a theater of war. Nominees are more than happy to...
View ArticleWhen a Young Trump Went to Russia
On a frigid December day in 2017, Oleg Kalugin opens the door of his house in Rockville, Maryland, an upper-middle-class suburb of Washington, D.C., to meet me. Nothing in particular distinguishes his...
View ArticleHow to Cure Corporate America’s Selfishness
Corporations have always been “creatures of the State,” as Teddy Roosevelt once called them. But they have become a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, unmoored from their creators to wreak havoc on the...
View ArticleMoments Like This
There’s something about a first national election of the Trump presidency that focuses the mind. For now, at least, anxious rhetoric about contemporary America’s proximity to Weimar Germany and...
View ArticleDon’t Abolish ICE
In an interview after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory in June over incumbent Congressman Joe Crowley, Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, called the 28-year-old “the future...
View ArticleCan the Democrats Fix Washington?
For Democrats, the stakes for this year’s congressional elections have risen more dramatically than anyone could have foreseen even just a short time ago. All the weighty factors are still there—the...
View ArticleThe New Republic September Issue: Identity Crisis
New York, NY—(August 16, 2018)—The New Republic today published its September issue, which features a cover package that explores who the Democrats need to be in the Trump era and poses the question,...
View ArticleCan Washington’s Least Favorite Former Congressman Stage a Comeback?
In September of 2009, Alan Grayson—a freshman Democrat from Central Florida—stood in the well of the House, flanked by an easel, and told Americans that “if you get sick … the Republican health care...
View ArticleFree the Whales
If you designed a job to embody a kind of old-school masculinity, you couldn’t do much better than orca capture, which combines elements of hunting, fishing, rodeo, and unfettered capitalism. Chasing,...
View ArticleThe Soccer Mom Strikes Back
Chrissy Houlahan has almost everything Democratic strategists look for in a candidate: A political newcomer, she served in the military and has experience in both the public and private sectors. But...
View ArticleNo Trend Is Spared in Younger
There is a joke that I have started hearing around New York City, in the (admittedly small) publishing circles I travel in: that if you hear a good tidbit of gossip, you can almost guarantee it will...
View ArticleCan the Catholic Church Reform From Within?
The numbers alone are staggering: 1,000 victims, 300 priests. On Tuesday, to collective horror, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court released the results of its grand jury investigation into child sexual...
View ArticleIs Elon Musk Losing It?
Elon Musk is burnt out. He has been working for 120 hours a week, he told The New York Times in a deeply personal and occasionally alarming interview. He has not taken a week off since 2001, when he...
View ArticleThe Kavanaugh Confirmation Fight is Getting Messy
Replacing Anthony Kennedy should have been easy for Republicans. His retirement in June gave the party a historic opportunity: to replace the Supreme Court’s swing justice with a more doctrinaire...
View ArticleThe Modern Automobile Must Die
Germany was supposed to be a model for solving global warming. In 2007, the country’s government announced that it would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by the year 2020. This was the...
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