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He Is Even Dumber Than We Thought
A Washington Post–ABC News poll taken the last week of May 2020 asked Americans, “Do you think Trump has the mental sharpness it takes to serve effectively as president?” Fifty-two percent of...
View ArticleBill Barr’s Invisible Crusade
When scandal has engulfed past American presidencies, the Justice Department’s independence proved critical to upholding the rule of law. The textbook case was the Saturday Night Massacre, when...
View ArticleThe Pernicious Influence of Big Oil on America’s Universities
As multiple crises converge—the global pandemic, racist state violence, and ever-growing economic and political inequality—the fossil fuel–driven climate catastrophe rumbles irreversibly forward. As in...
View ArticleThe Limits and Dangers of a Fixation on “Nonviolence”
In the immediate aftermath of the Twin Cities protests following the police killing of George Floyd, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter claimed that all of the arrests tied to rioting in the area were from...
View ArticleNo Slogan Is Safe From Politicians
The moment we have all been waiting for has arrived: Willard Mitt Romney, a man who claims his favorite meat is “hot dog,” showed up at this weekend’s protests in Washington, D.C. It’s easy to mock...
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The Lost Rebellious Spirit of Keynes
Over the past few months, as the orderly operations of the world economy have been superseded by panic, fear, and lockdown, as the circuit breaker has paused trading on Wall Street more than once, and...
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Will 2020 Finally Kill America’s War Fetish?
How many wars can the United States handle at any one time? The question became pertinent last week as the Trump administration, along with the president’s most militant supporters in Congress, rushed...
View ArticleAmerican Psycho
To understand how Jared Kushner received the opportunity to fail at managing the federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic, you mostly need to know that he is married to the president’s daughter. But...
View ArticleThe Rush to Redefine “Defund the Police”
Before Minneapolis protesters briefly occupied and then set fire to a police station, activists’ calls to defund the police were considered—including by some more institutionally minded criminal...
View ArticleThe Glaring Hole in the Democrats’ Police Reform Bill
There’s been a sea change in the American public’s perception of law enforcement since the killing of George Floyd last month. A Washington Post survey on Tuesday found that 69 percent of Americans...
View ArticleThe NFL Is for Cops
“We were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said Friday in a hastily composed video statement on the police and white vigilante killings of George Floyd,...
View ArticleOligarch of the Month: Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos is having a good pandemic. Amazon, the company he started in 1994, has not only resisted the economic downturn, it has thrived: Its stock price sits hundreds of points higher than it did in...
View ArticleThe Down Days Is an Eerily Prescient Pandemic Novel
In 1962, at a girl’s boarding school in rural Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania), three students started laughing. When the teachers tried to get them to stop, the girls became violent. One became so...
View ArticleFreeing Protest From the Language Police
This past Saturday marked the largest nationwide demonstrations against American police since George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis on Memorial Day. When hundreds of thousands marched across the world...
View ArticleWill My Covid Symptoms Ever End?
Amy Watson, a preschool teacher in Portland, Oregon, had been fighting a low-grade fever for almost a month when doctors started talking to her about cancer.It was April 9, right around the time that...
View ArticleMitch McConnell Is No Genius
Mitch McConnell believes in one political god: campaign cash. Since he got his start in Kentucky politics in the 1970s, masquerading as a moderate Republican, he has been the Gordon Gekko of politics....
View ArticleWho Killed Olof Palme?
In a dreary news conference broadcast live from Stockholm this morning, Swedish chief prosecutor Krister Petterson named the man he thinks assassinated Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986: Stig Engström....
View ArticleSmall Acts of Care in a Failed State
The ongoing protests against racist police violence, which have taken place in every state in the United States and are now in their third week, have offered endless illuminations of the political and...
View ArticleA Fragile Answer to the Question of “Whose Streets?”
A city is a big thing—big enough that, typically, we must manage it in chunks: as a string of favorite neighborhoods, a well-worn subway line, a local park. These personalized territories are small and...
View ArticleDon’t Support The New York Times
One can only describe what unfolded at The New York Times last week as an outright shitshow. Following the publication of an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton that advocated for military crackdowns in cities...
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