The Making of the “Good CIA”
For decades, it’s been an article of faith among leftists that the CIA is fundamentally malign, and has been since its founding. Its purpose was to extend American hegemony; its method dirty tricks...
View ArticleWall Street’s Greedy Indifference to Human Misery
With Labor Day fast approaching, unemployment stands at 10.2 percent, gross domestic product is down 31.7 percent, and the stock market is at or near record highs. The economy, as it’s commonly...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Battle of Portland
On Day 50 of the Portland protests, in the middle of July, I caught a face full of aerosolized Mace. I didn’t yet appreciate the finer distinctions among Mace spray, pepper pellets, and tear gas. The...
View ArticleYou Might Not Know If Your Kid Has Covid-19
Yes, kids can get Covid-19. They can also spread it. They might even be better at spreading it than adults are. You wouldn’t know that from listening to the White House, though. “It’s not just that...
View ArticleWhy Matt Drudge’s Feud With Donald Trump Matters
In the summer of 2016, Matt Drudge hammered the same story again and again on his eponymous news aggregation website, the Drudge Report: Hillary Clinton was not well. She was old and sick and feeble,...
View ArticleYour State Flag Might Not Be Racist, but It’s Offensively Ugly
There are few symbols more potent in American life than the national flag. Colin Kaepernick helped fuel a movement by kneeling during a ceremony that honors it; President Donald Trump once proposed...
View ArticleOur Summer of American Nihilism
In a recent interview on The Ringer’s 10 Questions podcast, Minnesota Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins—a man who says he keeps a four-foot-tall pile of rocks outside his garage to remind him of his own...
View ArticleBig Oil’s Evil, Stupid Plan to Drown the World in Plastic
What do you do if you’re an oil company with too much oil? You find a place—any place—to put it. If people aren’t driving or flying as much, they’re certainly having things delivered. That’s where the...
View ArticleThis Is What Trumpism After Trump Looks Like
The event from this summer that best captured the chaotic energy of the GOP heading into the presidential election was not the Republican National Convention, with its high-decibel roster of party...
View ArticleA Bold New Plan to Turn the Rust Belt Blue
For decades, workers, millions of them—steelworkers and social workers, truck drivers and teachers—have been flooded with labor union phone calls and flyers every four years. But for many of them, when...
View ArticleAmerica Is Not Reliving 1968
For me, the year 1968 is symbolized by a single dark evening that haunts me to this day. I was at the campus paper, the Michigan Daily, when the bulletin came over the clattering AP newswire that Bobby...
View ArticleHow David Graeber Changed the Way We See Money
In the third edition of the college-level textbook Macroeconomics, the economists Andrew Abel and future Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke blithely assert that “since the earliest times almost all...
View ArticleThe “Law and Order” Backlash Against Biden Was a Mirage
For all the effort expended over the past 15 years to bring punditry a step or two closer to the social sciences and into communion with statistics, the art of the political take is still, for the most...
View ArticleThe American Horror of Hooding
On March 23, Joe Prude of Rochester, New York, called 911 because his visiting brother, Daniel, had fled his home while experiencing a mental health crisis. When police officers responded, they found...
View ArticleThe Future of Labor Is Growing in South Dakota
Kooper Caraway, the newly elected president of the South Dakota AFL-CIO, sees his stated duty to improve the lot of the American working class as more of a calling. Born in Alabama and raised in Texas,...
View ArticleHappy Pandemic Labor Day
Labor Day is here, which means it’s time to buy stuff. The Today Show has the latest on the “Home Decor Sales You Can’t Miss.” USA Today excitedly reported that “Home Depot’s huge Labor Day sale has...
View ArticleFox News Shares the Blame for Trump’s Deranged, Ruinous Presidency
Throughout history, presidents have singled out particular reporters for special access. Franklin Roosevelt often favored The New York Times’ Arthur Krock with inside information. John F. Kennedy’s...
View ArticleThe Monsoon Season That Drowned Chennai, India
In 2015, the winter monsoon season brought torrential rains to Chennai, in southern India. Unprecedented floods followed, and some parts of the city of six million residents experienced floodwaters as...
View ArticleThe Anti-Democratic Origins of Voter Prediction
I’m always a bit relieved when a tech company’s algorithm seems to fall short of mind reading. It’s somewhat reassuring when a so-called smart ad displays hideous shoes I would never buy just because I...
View ArticleMy 98 Days in Unemployment Purgatory
When the pandemic hit and millions of people lost their jobs, my beat as a reporter at Vice swiftly changed to covering unemployment. I spoke to workers—teachers, ride-share drivers, servers—who were...
View Article