Right Wing Attacks on The Hunt Are a Bad Faith Distraction
Only a handful of people have seen the most controversial movie in the country. After Universal Pictures canceled the release of The Hunt following an outcry led by Fox News and other conservative...
View ArticleThose Profiting off the Vaping Epidemic Should Pay to Stop It
“Why are there toilets in the Juul room?” read the caption of a Snapchat photo showing two urinals. I’m a senior in college, and that question made me feel old. Back in my day, cigarette smoke didn’t...
View ArticleDonald Trump’s Guide to Racism
President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed is, among other things, a gift to historians. No major historical figure has provided so thorough a public, real-time account of their daily thoughts and feelings....
View ArticleNative American Imposters Keep Corrupting the “Redskins” Debate
This past Friday, I was sitting in the backyard of a cheap dive bar, enjoying a round of drinks with new acquaintances. After about 30 minutes and a few rounds of drinks, while my partner was at the...
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Pioneers of Cultural Relativism
The core of Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, a complaint about the nature of higher education, is an argument against cultural relativism. “There is one thing a professor can...
View ArticleThe Pretzel Logic of Trump’s Immigration Policy
Donald Trump’s top immigration official tried his hand at poetry Tuesday, revamping “The New Colossus”—the Emma Lazarus sonnet immortalized inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty—to fit the...
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The Last of the Ayn Rand Acolytes
Eight rules governed the original Ayn Rand clubs that proliferated across college campuses in the 1960s, as they sought to seed Objectivism—Rand’s philosophical glorification of laissez-faire...
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The Family’s Big Secret Is Hiding in Plain Sight
We are in a high season of political showboating. On the debate stage, candidates for the Democratic nomination tussle for our attention, straining to exploit their allotted seconds of screentime. But...
View ArticleThe Supreme Court’s First Major Gun Case in a Decade
It’s been nearly a decade since the Supreme Court has issued a ruling on the Second Amendment’s scope. But the court may have to resolve a dispute over New York City’s strict restrictions on handgun...
View ArticleStacey Abrams Is Smarter Than Tom Steyer
If you have $10 million or so lying around, you can buy your way into a Democratic debate. That, at least, was one lesson from Tom Steyer’s announcement Tuesday that he had—after spending $7 million on...
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Jeffrey Epstein Chose New Mexico for a Reason
If there’s a secret, New Mexico will try to keep it. The Land of Enchantment has gotten a lot of practice over the years, well before the now-late Jeffrey Epstein purchased the Zorro Ranch south of...
View ArticleIs Cy Vance the Next Invincible New York Democrat to Lose?
Longtime Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance will be forever attached to a handful of bold-faced names—Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Ivanka Trump, and Donald Trump, Jr.—not because he took them...
View ArticleThe Green New Deal: A Capitalist Plot (Part 2)
Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong, two key thinkers behind the development of the Green New Deal, have called Alexander Hamilton the “founding father of the American economy.” In their book...
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Arguing the World
Over the past four decades, the American political landscape has been littered with the wreckage of booster rockets from eagerly anticipated presidential campaigns that failed to successfully take...
View ArticleIsrael’s Decision to Ban U.S. Congresswomen Is Self-Defeating
With predictable insouciance, President Donald Trump cheered on the Israeli government’s decision to bar entry to Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib due to their advocacy for the Boycott,...
View ArticleThe Danger of a Domestic Terrorism Law
Two words immediately came to mind after a white-nationalist gunman killed 22 people and wounded 24 others at an El Paso Walmart earlier this month: domestic terrorism. News organizations, elected...
View ArticleDo Democrats Have a Plan for the Next Recession?
The recession alarm bells are sounding. Anxiety about the direction of the global economy has been growing for some time, amid concern about President Trump’s trade war with China, economic slowdowns...
View ArticleIlhan Omar Is Already Changing Washington
This week, Donald Trump opened a new front in his war against women of color in Congress. “It would show great weakness if Israel allowed Rep. Omar and Rep. Tlaib to visit,” the president tweeted...
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Active Duty
Statues of men in uniform, Union and Confederate, astride their big horses, still dot the landscape of the North and the South: Brave men, no doubt, but where were the women during those bloody years?...
View ArticleWhy Amazon’s Twitter Ambassadors Are So Sad
On Wednesday evening, conversations between members of the general public and Amazon’s so-called Fulfillment Center Ambassadors began to circulate on Twitter. One particularly bleak tweet from the...
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