The Power of Truth in a ‘Post-Truth’ Age
When the tanks of the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations rumbled into Czechoslovakia on August 20, 1968, Czech philosopher Ivan Sviták had a fateful decision to make.Support for gradual reform...
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The New Campus Novel
As working conditions in the academic humanities have deteriorated, the job of satirizing them has gotten more complicated. Elif Batuman’s memoir of Russian studies, The Possessed, came out eight years...
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After the Financial Crisis, A Decade of Damage
We already know much of the story that Adam Tooze tells in Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, his ambitious study of the causes and effects of the financial meltdown that...
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Is Democracy Really Dying?
In the middle of the 1970s, Zbigniew Brzezinski approached his friend, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, with a question: Is democracy in crisis? It was a subject of much concern at the...
View ArticleRepublicans Don’t Own Patriotism Anymore
Before the 2016 election, a woman showed up at Hillary Clinton’s headquarters in Flint, Michigan, asking for a lawn sign and offering to canvass. She was told those efforts were not “scientifically”...
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Trump’s Staggering Impact on Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Lukas Schulze/Getty ImagesThe National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Monday released yet another dismal monthly report on the state of the global climate, concluding that last month was the...
View ArticleAsia Argento, Avital Ronell, and the Integrity of #MeToo
In the past week two prominent women have been accused of sexual abuse, resulting in questions about the #MeToo movement’s integrity. The first was Avital Ronell, a professor of German and Comparative...
View ArticleWomen Are Rebuilding the Democratic Party From the Ground Up
Republicans outnumber Democrats two to one in the western Pennsylvania district where Lisa Boeving-Learned, a veteran and retired police sergeant with a wife and deep family ties in the region, is...
View ArticleWhy Jack Dorsey’s Apology Tour Backfired
It has been a banner year for corporate apologies. June’s NBA Finals, for example, featured advertisements from Wells Fargo, Facebook, and Uber that all asked their customers for forgiveness. The CEO...
View ArticleDemocrats’ Responsibility for America’s Forever War
Earlier this month, 40 Yemeni schoolchildren and 11 adults were killed by a bomb—one that has a legible genealogy. As CNN reported, it was a 500-pound laser-guided MK 82 bomb. And while Saudi Arabia...
View ArticleManafort Down
For more than a year, President Donald Trump has railed against the Russia investigation as a partisan “witch hunt” organized by his political enemies to bring down his administration. Twelve jurors in...
View ArticleThe Worst Day Yet of Trump’s Presidency
Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s longtime personal attorney, told a federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday that he broke the law at Trump’s behest during the 2016 campaign, paying off two women with whom...
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The Vanishing Idealism of Burning Man
Last summer, 69,493 people went out into the desert to build a city. They brought with them supplies not only for erecting a temporary infrastructure (tents and RVs, roads, signage, bathrooms), but...
View ArticleThe Winners and Losers of the Longest-Ever Bull Market
Six months ago, people were very worried about the stock market. In January, it was rocketing upwards, thanks in part to a $1.5 trillion Republican tax bill that gave away hundreds of billions of...
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Trump’s Climate Plan Could Do More Damage Than No Plan At All
President Donald Trump supports the coal industry and denies climate change, so it surprised few last year when he announced his intention to kill the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration’s...
View ArticleAmerica Enters the Great Unknown
The United States may not quite be in a constitutional crisis, but it certainly feels like one. With Michael Cohen’s guilty plea this week, and his admission in court that he paid illegal hush money to...
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What Makes Hunting So Divisive
In 1909, after the end of his second term as president, Theodore Roosevelt went on safari in Africa with his son Kermit. Financed by Andrew Carnegie and a $50,000 advance from Scribner’s Magazine, the...
View ArticleFalse Concepts of Liberty
A few years ago, at a panel discussion I attended among labor leaders about the condition of unionism in America, one of the speakers launched into a diatribe against the Koch brothers and their...
View ArticleWhat’s Missing From the Medicare for All Debate
Medicare for All is no longer just a left-wing pipe dream. With polling increasingly in its favor and a record number of Democratic senators and representatives onboard, the idea of expanding...
View ArticleIs Trump Trying to Bribe Paul Manafort?
It’s been an especially turbulent week for Donald Trump’s presidency, but consider this particular sequence of events:First, a jury in Alexandria, Virginia, found Paul Manafort guilty Tuesday on eight...
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