The Real Costs of the War in Afghanistan
Now in its nineteenth year, the Afghanistan war just won’t end. Negotiations between the U.S. and the Taliban are now dead, according to President Donald Trump. The president, who once clamored for an...
View ArticleThe Fetishization of Employer-Provided Health Care
Earlier this month, at a town hall event for Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, a military veteran named John told the senator that he was going to kill himself because the cost of...
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How The Politician’s Ruthless Satire Misses
“It was a waking dream—the kind that arrives in the twilight between sleep, and the real world,” the high-school student Payton Hobart recalls brightly, in the opening lines of Ryan Murphy’s Netflix...
View ArticleThe Next Big Labor Strike Hits Oregon
Just over a century ago, the city of Seattle went on strike. Some 25,000 workers walked out of their jobs and hit the streets, joining another 35,000 shipyard workers who had already been called out....
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The Failed Political Promise of Silicon Valley
July 1945, the engineer Vannevar Bush—one of the founders of the Raytheon electronics corporation, and director of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War...
View ArticleThe Rot on The Hill
There are many things about life inside the Beltway (physical and metaphorical) that people in the rest of America might find strange. The subway system has ads from defense contractors boasting about...
View ArticleThe Right Way to Impeach Trump
Let’s start with the good. The Democratic Party’s response to a whistleblower’s report that President Trump urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to interfere in next year’s presidential...
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The Tyranny of Economists
In 1984, a two-year-old named Joy Griffith climbed onto her grandfather’s reclining sofa chair to watch cartoons. At one point, she fell between the collapsible footrest and the seat. The footrest...
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Jake Skeets Finds the Beauty in Brutality
Drunktown, USA. The Indian Capital of the World. Home. Nuzzled in the northeast corner of New Mexico, Gallup is for many people a dot on the map, known mostly for its high rates of violence and crime...
View ArticleTrump’s Nuclear China Option
On October 1, Chinese President Xi Jinping will preside over a major military parade in Beijing to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The parade...
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Calm Before the Storm
Mayor Phil Stoddard keeps enough potassium iodide on hand for all the children of South Miami. The lanky, bespectacled biology professor-cum-municipal politician fears an accident at the Turkey Point...
View ArticleTrump’s Defense Is Not Ready for Prime Time
How do you defend the indefensible? The task proved difficult even for President Donald Trump’s staunchest supporters over the weekend, as the media pressed them to explain why Trump pressured...
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The Shrinking Legacy of a Supreme Court Justice
Once upon a time, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was the great modern American jurist. The “Yankee from Olympus,” as Catherine Drinker Bowen’s 1944 biography called Holmes, was the first celebrity justice...
View ArticleThe Delusion and Danger of Infinite Economic Growth
“Fairytales of eternal economic growth.” That’s how climate activist Greta Thunberg depicted the dominant mindset at the United Nations last week. “How dare you,” she said, admonishing them for “empty...
View ArticleThe Far Right’s Apocalyptic Literary Canon
As tensions in Washington ratchet toward the possible impeachment of President Donald Trump, dark matters are suddenly part of the discussion. “If the Democrats are successful in removing the president...
View ArticleCan We Stop Pretending Prosecutors Are Impartial Now?
The Attorney General, it is presumed, represents the people of the United States, not the President of the United States. Yet the latter is how Attorney General William Barr will be remembered. As the...
View ArticleI Worked at Capital One for Five Years. This Is How We Justified Piling Debt...
The first thing you should know about a woman I know, who I’ll call Annie, is that she volunteers to sit at the hospital with people who are going to die alone, who have no family or friends to be with...
View ArticleThe Enduring Myth of “The Economy”
In 1992, James Carville scrawled a slogan on a whiteboard in Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign headquarters. “It’s the economy, stupid,” has since become famous as a piece of blunt, homespun...
View ArticleThe Dereliction of William Barr
Attorney General Bill Barr is keeping busy. He previously announced in May that he had appointed John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to review the origins of the Russia investigation during...
View ArticleHow the NRA Sold Out America
Last Friday, the Senate Finance Committee dropped what would have been—in any other timeline—a bombshell that might have dominated headlines and talking heads for days: A 77-page report, issued by...
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