Why the Media Is Uniquely Terrible at Covering the U.S. Postal Service
Four months ago, the United States Postal Service warned Congress that it could run out of money by September, requesting a $75 billion bailout amid an unprecedented decrease in revenue due to...
View ArticleCan Democracy Handle Charisma?
Sometimes charismatic people don’t know their own strength. And sometimes they do. In private, charismatic people light up a room and make each person feel beloved. In public life, they’re the ones who...
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Joe Biden’s Great Reclamation Project
Provided that the polling of late summer holds (a big “if” in presidential politics), on January 20 Joe Biden will—as a late bloomer on par with Grandma Moses—have finally achieved his life’s great...
View ArticleJoe Kennedy’s Utterly Pointless, Utterly Consequential Campaign
On November 4, 1979, CBS aired an hour-long primetime special on the career and anticipated presidential campaign of Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy. Incidentally, this was the very same night...
View Article“Being Vegan Doesn’t Save My Ass When Fires Come”
In late October 2019, the Kincade Fire spread from the area near a power plant in northern Sonoma County, California, to the towns of Windsor and Healdsburg and to the northeast part of Santa Rosa. It...
View ArticleDemocrats Are So Worried About the Postal Service That They Might Finally Do...
There is a growing sense of panic about what is happening to the United States Postal Service, or USPS, as well as the president’s admission that its collapse would aid his election prospects—at least...
View ArticleBernie Offers Biden His Last Hurrah
The first night of the Democratic National PowerPoint Presentation went off without a major technical hitch. But partly owing to the uncanny nature of this virtual non-event, much of it had a very...
View ArticleThe Democrats’ Eternal Wall Street Ticket
This summer, Wall Street made its peace with Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee. If Donald Trump had spoiled the financial sector rotten for four years with tax cuts and regulation...
View ArticleWilliam Faulkner’s Southern Guilt
In February 1956, William Faulkner, blind drunk, gave an infamous interview. After toiling for decades in relative obscurity, Faulkner had become a literary celebrity—he had won the Nobel Prize seven...
View ArticleNewsweek and the Rise of the Zombie Magazine
Writing in The Columbia Journalism Review last year, Daniel Tovrov depicted Newsweek, once one of America’s most distinguished magazines, as a shell of its former self. All that was left was clickbait,...
View ArticleThe World’s Dumbest Authoritarian
What would the U.S. media say if the president of another country was threatening to hobble his nation’s postal service in hopes of suppressing ballots ahead of an election?Every once in a while, an...
View ArticleThe Democrats Choose Politics Over Ideological Purity
The Danes have a word, popular these days as a design concept, called “hygge.” Loosely translated as “cozy,” it conjures up sweaters, slippers, a roaring fireplace, woolen lap rugs draped on furniture,...
View ArticleIs Trump Killing His Favorite Industry?
The Trump administration is officially opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, for business. That’s self-evidently bad for the climate; developed oilfields there stand to release some 4.3...
View ArticleThe Lazy Liberalism of Instagram Slideshows
If you logged onto Instagram in the days that immediately followed the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, you might have found the platform to be...
View ArticleThe Obvious Futility of One-Time “Stimulus” Checks
Back in March, or many lifetimes ago, Congress passed the Cares Act, which included a provision to send out one-time direct payments to people making less than $99,000 a year. This week, a team of...
View ArticleMadison Cawthorn Is the Future of the Republican Party
In a June primary, a photogenic Zoomer Republican named Madison Cawthorn beat a candidate endorsed by President Donald Trump to fill the North Carolina House formerly occupied by seat of his chief of...
View ArticleThe Everyday Inspiration for Anna Karenina
At the start of 1873, Leo Tolstoy was fresh from the success of War and Peace and aware that the world was expecting an equally monumental work of art, something that would match that book (he refused...
View ArticleQAnon Is Using the Anti-Trafficking Movement’s Conspiracy Playbook
Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), a hard-charging sex trafficking “rescue” group with conservative roots, doesn’t just accept donations to fund its multimillion-dollar mission; it also lets donors...
View ArticleThe Country’s Most Important Climate Election Is Happening in Texas
You probably haven’t heard of this year’s most important election for American climate policy. If you have, you probably didn’t realize what it was about. The Texas Railroad Commission, which will...
View ArticleA Night of Magical Thinking at the Democratic Convention
Joe Biden’s case for the presidency is not hard to understand; it may very well be the least complicated in modern American political history. He is not Donald Trump. He is, by contrast, a thinking,...
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