National Review’s Strained Defense of Trump
Last Monday, I wrote that President Donald Trump’s supporters haven’t mounted a plausible enough defense of his involvement in the Ukraine scandal to avoid impeachment. His surrogates tripped and...
View ArticleJoe Biden’s Case for the Presidency Is Collapsing
Joe Biden is in trouble. It’s not his actual campaign that’s in truly dire straits. Although Elizabeth Warren has risen steadily, troubling donors already troubled by Biden’s age, he’s still first or...
View ArticleWho Will Win the 2019 (or the 2018!) Nobel Prize in Literature?
Two years ago, when the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro, the institution appeared to be in the midst of an evolution. After decades of stubborn and curmudgeonly devotion to...
View ArticleThe White House Knows It’s Losing on Impeachment
President Donald Trump’s biggest problem in the impeachment battle is that the facts aren’t on his side. The White House’s own memo shows him pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to...
View ArticleThe Grim Lottery of Surprise Medical Bill Stories
In April 2017, a man named Drew Calver thought he was dying. A heart attack had pinned him to the floor of his bedroom. His neighbor took him to St. David’s Medical Center in Austin, where he was...
View ArticleHow the Drug War Blob Took Over The Washington Post
For more than two years, The Washington Post has relentlessly pursued the story of how a combination of corporate greed and government inaction fueled the deadliest drug overdose epidemic in recorded...
View ArticleThe Gripping Class Horror of Parasite
At the Cannes Film Festival in May, the actress Elle Fanning walked down the red carpet in a silk Gucci gown, with cape sleeves and a crystal appliqué flower at the waist. The cost of this soigné...
View ArticleThe Tragedy of Diego Maradona
There has always been a touch of the divine about Diego Armando Maradona. Despite the doping, the drugs, the slow slide into corpulent decadence, some supernatural aura still clings to our image of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Olga Tokarczuk’s Gripping Eco-Mystery
Murder mysteries, however else they might differ, rely on one major, shared belief: that murder matters, and is worth looking into. Whoever did the killing, whoever was killed, the investigation moves...
View ArticleThe Nobel Prize in Literature Is Just Trolling Now
After a one-year absence brought on by an ugly and convoluted sexual abuse and financial malfeasance scandal, the Nobel Prize in Literature returned in 2019 with a charm offensive. The Swedish...
View ArticleWarren’s Plan to Spurn Big Money Donors Has a Catch
A few weeks ago, I wrote that Senator Elizabeth Warren should not raise funds from millionaires at private fundraising events if she is the Democratic nominee, and argued that she “cannot spend a...
View ArticleFox and Foes
In August, President Donald Trump noticed something odd on Fox News—a poll had shown multiple Democrats beating him in an election. Enraged, he told reporters that there was “something going on” at the...
View ArticleThe Moral Dilemma of a Left-Right Antiwar Alliance
“Let’s do a little experiment,” the featured speaker told the crowd at the National Press Club in Washington. It was March 2016, the election was still up for grabs, and the audience had assembled for...
View ArticleIn Its Fight With China, the NBA Shows Its True Colors
Freedom is good and worth fighting for. From what we know, this was the platitude that was sloshing around Daryl Morey’s brain on Sunday when the Houston Rockets general manager posted an image on...
View ArticleAn All-American Campaign Finance Scandal
There is nothing particularly special about Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who were indicted by federal prosecutors on Thursday for violating campaign-finance laws. The two Ukrainian-born Florida...
View ArticleJoe Biden Is Right About The New York Times
Early Thursday, the Biden campaign sent a letter to The New York Times criticizing the paper for its coverage of President Trump’s allegations about Hunter Biden. The letter spotlighted recent...
View ArticleClik here to view.
“It’s a Prison”
Bulelani Mfaco arrived in Ireland in November, 2017, fleeing anti-gay violence in South Africa. He hoped to pursue a PhD in politics, find a job, and build a new life. First, though, came his asylum...
View ArticleThe Fight to Occupy Alcatraz
Persecution of Native peoples in the United States accelerated in the 20th Century. Allotment laws, which had started with the Dawes Act of 1887, broke up tribal lands; specialized,...
View ArticleBernie Sanders Takes Aim at Wealth—and Warren
Since his heart attack earlier this month, the press has begun loudly asking how long Senator Bernie Sanders can stay afloat in the Democratic primary and why, moreover, he should bother trying. After...
View ArticleTrump Turns Back the Clock in America’s Meat Plants
It was more than a century ago that Upton Sinclair went undercover in Chicago’s stockyards, resulting in his reported novel The Jungle. A blood-splattered portrait of the American meatpacking industry,...
View Article