The Madman Has No Clothes
If you pretended you oversaw the most powerful military, diplomatic corps, and liberal political system in human history, and you wanted to discover the single action that would threaten a friendly...
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Inside the “Most Incarcerated” Zip Code in the Country
Keisha Robinson’s family came to Milwaukee from Chicago in the 1980s because, as Robinson put it, “Chicago was getting out of pocket.” With crime rising and jobs disappearing in the Windy City, she...
View ArticleThe Politics of Succession
It’s hard to remember how we thought in the years leading up to 2016, but our most accessible record of that psychologically distant era will probably be the crop of “prestige” TV shows that dominated...
View ArticleBeto O’Rourke Is Out Over His Skis
Democratic presidential candidates have spent the year introducing wave after wave of new policy ideas. Some of them are excellent. Others are interesting. And a few would be disastrous. Beto...
View ArticleThe School Secession Movement Is Growing. That’s Bad News for Integration.
On Saturday, in southeast East Baton Rouge Parish, voters decided to break away from Louisiana’s capital city of Baton Rouge to create the new city of St. George. It will be the fifth-largest and...
View ArticleThe Democrats Don’t Have a Frontrunner
Before the final game of the 1944 World Series, a veteran sportswriter looked at the two bedraggled teams gathered at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis. During the last year of World War II, with their...
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The Art of the Unspeakable
In 1971, the artist Suzanne Lacy was taking classes with Judy Chicago at the California Institute of the Arts, and she had an idea: What if they created a performance that involved an audience...
View ArticleThe Connection Between Pipelines and Sexual Violence
Last Tuesday, Montana Attorney General Tim Fox announced that the state would intervene in the legal battle over the Keystone XL pipeline. “The Keystone XL Pipeline will bring jobs and economic...
View ArticleWhy Are U.S. Nuclear Bombs Still in Turkey?
The American relationship with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey has been fraught for half a decade, but never this bad. Last week, American troops were intentionally targeted by Turkish artillery units in...
View ArticleThe Law That Could Take Down Rudy Giuliani
A little over a year ago, a grip of Democratic senators penned a letter to the Department of Justice with a simple request: review whether or not Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal...
View ArticleA Liberal Legal Movement Is Stirring at Last
Conservatives have long placed a higher priority on shaping the federal courts than their liberal adversaries. Demand Justice, a recently formed liberal group that focuses on judicial nominations, is...
View ArticleThe Night of the Mad Moderates
It’s getting more difficult by the day to remember the vigor with which former Vice President Joe Biden jumped into the presidential race earlier this year. One of the important documents of that...
View ArticleThe King Is a Chaotic Coming of Age
In The King, David Michod has made a version of William Shakespeare’s Henriad as cool and competent as an advertisement for medieval history. Stately, handsome, as meticulously tooled and uniformly...
View ArticleAre the Democrats Even Worried About Voter Suppression?
Twelve Democrats met for the party’s fourth presidential debate on Tuesday night in Westerville, Ohio. The location’s electoral symbolism was hard to miss. “We’re standing in the great state of Ohio,...
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An Early Case For Reparations
When we think about slavery, we tend to imagine freedom as its natural opposite. But this makes it difficult to comprehend the actual conditions under which un-enslaved African Americans actually lived...
View ArticleThe Moderates Fight Back
One of the hardest things for a presidential candidate is to put on a smiling public face for the TV cameras after spending three hours on a debate stage inwardly seething over missed opportunities and...
View ArticleWhy the Pundits Got Impeachment Wrong
For much of this year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi used Abraham Lincoln as a human shield. Pressed by the media on calls to impeach President Trump, she regularly quoted Lincoln, who said three years...
View ArticleWarren’s Medicare-for-All Dodge Is Wearing Thin
Tuesday’s debate offered Elizabeth Warren the opportunity to feel what it’s like to be the Democratic field’s clear frontrunner, a prospect that recent movement in the polls has brought to the point of...
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Sea of Troubles
In June, I joined the crew of the rescue ship Alan Kurdi. It was a cantankerous old brute of a boat, a former East German research vessel that now belongs to a small German nonprofit called Sea-Eye....
View ArticleFukuyama’s Inner Civic Republicanism (Part 1)
In his recently published study Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, Francis Fukuyama wants to modify his best-known thesis, published first as a 1989 essay, “The End of...
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