What New Hampshire Voters Are Watching
Shortly after 5:30 Monday evening, Suzanne Roantree, a TV reporter for the New Hampshire station WMUR, did a segment on a Manchester sidewalk about the large swath of Democrats who were still up for...
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Jeff Sharlet’s Flawed Experiment in Empathy
It’s standard practice to begin a text about photography by citing Roland Barthes or Susan Sontag. In the introduction to This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers, Jeff Sharlet opts for the former:...
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The Enduring Vision of Chinatown
The first time I saw Chinatown, I was about as far as you can get from Los Angeles—sitting by myself in an old movie house in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. This was in the early 1970s, before the era of the...
View ArticlePete Buttigieg and the Democrats’ Veteran Problem
It was November in Iowa, and Pete Buttigieg was having a moment, rising in polls and talking—not quite obliquely—about his military service. “I don’t have to throw myself a military parade to see what...
View ArticleThe EU Says It Cares About Climate Change. Ireland Could Test That.
Ireland’s left-leaning nationalist party, Sinn Féin, won a historic upset this past weekend, taking the highest vote share in the country’s general election and effectively breaking a century of...
View ArticleThe New Anti-Trans Culture War Hiding in Plain Sight
In October, a little-known state lawmaker from South Dakota attended a one-day event, hosted by the Heritage Foundation, aimed at advancing “conservative solutions to protect children from...
View ArticleTrump’s Conquest of the Department of Justice is Complete
“You know, the saddest thing is that because I’m the president of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department,” President Donald Trump said in a radio interview in...
View ArticleBernie Sanders Has an MSNBC Problem
For all the talk of cord-cutting and the rise of the digital campaign, cable television remains central to politics. Donald Trump rode billions of dollars in free media to the White House in 2016....
View ArticleIn Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Love is a Work of Art
On a remote island in eighteenth-century France, a woman is about to be married off to a rich Milanese stranger. Her portrait must be painted to ensure she meets his requirements; he had agreed to wed...
View ArticleWhat Wall Street Really Means When It Talks About “Climate Risk”
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent climate change novel, New York 2140, New York City has been devastated by rising seas: The Atlantic Ocean has inundated Brooklyn and Queens, and lower Manhattan now...
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Infinite Jerk
A young woman—observant, self-conscious, harboring literary aspirations, though not quite sure where she wants to end up—meets an older novelist, and they start dating. He is as famous as it’s possible...
View ArticleIs the CIA’s Director Going Full MAGA?
When President Trump called in his State of the Union address for legislation that would allow crime victims to sue sanctuary cities for offenses committed by undocumented immigrants, CIA Director Gina...
View ArticleThe Media’s Lousy Election Analysis Is Damaging Political Discourse
Like compulsive gamblers who react to every losing streak by changing their betting strategy rather than quitting outright, political handicappers adjust to every stunning campaign development by...
View ArticleHow Pundits Manipulate Math to Dismiss Sanders
How do you tell who won an election? Most people would look to see who got the most votes. In the case of a Democratic primary, they could also dig into delegate counts.In the world of punditry—with...
View ArticleMichael Bloomberg’s Polite Authoritarianism
Over the course of the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, the New York Police Department arrested nearly 2,000 people at protests. The mass arrests were indiscriminate. Bystanders...
View ArticleTo Dream of a Jewish President
I am writing this article because I’m a Jew. I was asked to write about what having a Jewish president of the United States might mean to me, and in the course of both writing and researching the...
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End the GOP
There are two figures in the Republican Party who best represent the state of the GOP in the Trump era. The first, of course, is Donald Trump. The second is Roy Moore. By the time Moore defeated Jeff...
View ArticleTurning Left at Darwin
A while back I purchased a little book by Princeton philosophy professor Peter Singer titled A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation. Later that day, I was reading through the volume...
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The Challenge of Sustainable Chocolate
The long black pruning poles looked cumbersome. But the farmers moved quickly, swarming over the small plot of land and hoisting the poles up to slice through cacao branches with ease. On the bottom...
View ArticleThe Hardest Decision Bernie Sanders Will Make This Year
As has been the case for some time now, Bernie Sanders is the front-runner in the Democratic primary, a position Tuesday night’s victory in New Hampshire only confirmed. While the race has just begun,...
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