Republicans Invite America to Play the “Dear Leader” Lottery
David Bossie knew he’d fucked up as the word started to emerge from his mouth. The 2016 Trump campaign veteran, now representing Maryland in the Republican National Convention’s roll call of delegate...
View ArticleHéctor Tobar’s Radical Road Trip Novel
A quarter of the way through Héctor Tobar’s novel, his young, blond protagonist stands on the edge of National Highway Number 9 in Chile, thumb pointed south in hopes of hitching a ride. Drivers speed...
View Article“Everything Was Destroyed”
On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria, which had already devastated the island of Dominica, hit Puerto Rico as a Category 4 hurricane with winds reaching 155 miles per hour. The island had seen other...
View ArticleDonald Trump Declares Total War on the Civil Service
Monday was the first day of the Republican Party’s national convention to renominate President Donald Trump, and it dwelled on little else. The quadrennial conventions are typically used by the parties...
View ArticleCarl Hiaasen’s Secret to Writing a Good Trump Novel
Speaking to Poets & Writers in the fall of 2017, Salman Rushdie admitted that he saw a silver lining in Donald Trump’s election. “It’s an awful thing to say,” he said, “that this thing that is very...
View ArticleJerry Falwell Jr.’s Filthy, Predatory Finances
The overnight fall of Jerry Falwell Jr. from high evangelical grace feels in many ways like a Trump-era gloss on the fabled preacher sex scandals that have dogged our self-appointed Protestant...
View ArticleThe Republicans’ Love Letter to Rich Culture Warriors
The opening night of the Republican National Convention was a miserable pageant that tried in vain to insist that working people’s interests were at home in the party of big business and minoritarian...
View ArticleHow Boys State Explains Trump’s Appeal
A teenage boy fidgets on a couch, his eyes darting around behind curtains of Ashton Kutcher hair. One of the 1,000 young subjects of the documentary Boys State, this boy, Robert, has just given a...
View ArticleScientists Really Wish Trump Hadn’t Made That Covid Plasma Announcement
In 1901, Italian doctor Francesco Cenci discovered that blood infusions from recovered measles patients could keep other people from getting the illness. A few years later, he discovered that the same...
View ArticleThe Whitney Museum’s Careless Attempt to Curate a Summer of Black Uprising
In late June, the Black photographers’ collective See In Black, which formed after the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, David McAtee, Tony McDade, and other Black people earlier this...
View ArticleThe Sad Spectacle of Talking About Native Rights at Trump’s Racist Circus
On the second night of the Republican National Convention, Navajo Nation Vice President Myron Lizer made his appearance as the sole Native citizen scheduled to speak at the four-day event. Lizer, a...
View ArticleHow Tesla Punctures the Myth of the Tech Genius
The key scene in Michael Almereyda’s biopic Tesla finds Nikola Tesla (Ethan Hawke) humbling himself in the dimly lit chamber of robber baron J.P. Morgan (Donnie Keshawarz). The inventor has come, cap...
View ArticleThe Corporate Chaos Behind Republicans’ Silence on Climate Change
Republicans didn’t mention rising temperatures in their first two nights of convention programming. They didn’t even call it a hoax. Climate change doesn’t appear in Trump’s bullet-pointed second-term...
View ArticleThe Chaos of Reopening Schools
Teachers feel frustrated and afraid. Parents are overburdened. Guidance from officials has been scant. For the schools preparing to welcome students back next month, nothing about the planning process...
View ArticleThe NBA Is White Conservatives’ Favorite New Target for Racial Dog-Whistling
In the political paradigm created by the coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump and the Republican Party are having a harder time than usual executing some of the standard fare from their electoral...
View ArticleThe Surprising Boredom of Trump’s Circus Show
In theory, the Republican convention could have been thrilling television. An elaborate show of fighting family members and sycophantic aides, all breaking the norms of democracy in primetime, should...
View ArticleThe Republican Solution to Shuttered Rural Hospitals: Zoom Calls
On the opening night of the Republican National Convention, a woman named Amy Johnson Ford made the counterintuitive case that President Trump’s actions during the coronavirus pandemic had not, in...
View ArticleThe Federal Government Killed a Navajo Man Just to Prove It Could
At 6:29 p.m. on Wednesday evening, the United States executed Diné citizen Lezmond Mitchell, the first Native person since 1902 to face the death penalty at the hands of the federal government. In...
View ArticleThe Bucks Aren’t Boycotting. They’re Striking.
When the first few games of the NBA bubble started in late July, the league took great care to make sure that all the correct visuals were in place. The NBA understood that to maintain the careful...
View ArticleThe Republican National Convention’s War on Reality
In a Republican convention defined, in many ways, by the sheer number and vast array of Trumps that have been cleared to speak, it was remarkable that the least-regarded of their genetic contingent got...
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