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The End of the University
Since coming down south to be closer to family, I’ve taken many walks around the University of North Carolina’s Greensboro campus, where my father works as a professor of chemistry. I arrived not long...
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Donald Trump Is the Military-Industrial Complex
Everybody knows Donald Trump is an opportunistic, lying asshole. Hell, that was his defenders’ main point this weekend, when they tried vainly to save the president from Jeffrey Goldberg’s September 3...
View ArticleTrumpian Politics Is the Greatest Threat to a Coronavirus Vaccine
Donald Trump has figured out the One Weird Trick to winning the 2020 election: a working vaccine, announced just in time for the election and teased throughout the campaign. Having failed to control...
View ArticleThe Incredibly Obvious Way to Win Elections and Weather the Recession
Last week, seizing upon a slightly better-than-expected jobs report as proof of an economic recovery underway, Republicans once again pushed a stimulus deal to the back burner. States, whose budgets...
View ArticleTrump’s Fire Sale of Public Lands for Oil and Gas Drillers
On Tuesday, the Bureau of Land Management auctioned off oil and gas leases to 11 parcels of land totaling around 15,000 acres in Nevada. It’s the latest event in a troubling trend in the Trump...
View ArticleHari Kunzru’s Reckoning With the Far Right
Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill is a ghost story. It’s different, though, from Kunzru’s previous book, 2017’s White Tears, a parable of race in America with a (genuinely frightening) supernatural dimension. I...
View ArticleThe Instant Nostalgia of the Televised Campaign
“What are we hearing, my friend?” asks Fox News host Neil Cavuto. He is speaking from a bright Fox studio. On the other side of the split screen is Peter Doocy, a Fox reporter, live from Rehoboth...
View ArticleThe Two Joe Bidens
Campaign leaks about Joe Biden’s intentions as president so far seem to follow two completely incompatible paths. On one track, Biden has been reinvigorated by the scale of the coronavirus pandemic and...
View ArticleHealth Care in America Is Exactly Like a “New Dress Shirt”
At the start of the pandemic, Bev Veals, a three-time cancer survivor and Carolina Beach resident, found herself in a very American predicament: Her husband had been furloughed, which put his...
View ArticleTrump Is Waging a One-Sided Judicial War Against Democrats
The Supreme Court’s most recent term ended without any unexpected retirements leaving a seat to be filled, but that hasn’t prevented President Donald Trump from sending some election-year signals about...
View ArticleAcademia Was Built on White Theft
Last week, a white professor at George Washington University outed herself in a years-long charade in which she told people she was Black and built an academic career around this lie. Jessica Krug, who...
View ArticleThe Emptiness of Matthew Yglesias’s Biggest Idea
What is a book? A novel, a biography, a popular science story—I think I know what these are, even at the far edges of formal experimentation, where categories are tricky. But what does it mean when a...
View ArticleDangers of the Lame Duck
Why is the period between Election Day and inauguration so long in the United States? What kind of trouble have past outgoing presidents made during the interregnum? And in the event Joe Biden wins,...
View ArticleWhy Doesn’t Michael Cohen Get to Be an Anti-Trump Crusader?
Michael Cohen knows you don’t trust him. In his tell-all memoir, Disloyal, he frequently acknowledges that he is “the least reliable narrator on the planet.” Having spent more than a decade lying,...
View ArticleSusanna Clarke’s Piranesi Is a Hall of Wonders
Susanna Clarke is the author of two literary legends. The first is fictional. In Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, her 2004 debut novel, Clarke created an alternative England where magicians conjure...
View ArticleDrilling for Oil While California Burns
Democrats now control every branch of government in California, which is home to what are arguably the most ambitious climate policies in the country. California is currently burning. Some 900...
View ArticleBen Sasse’s Plan to Save the Senate Will Bury It Instead
No one can blame Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse for his disillusionment with the Senate. Under Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the chamber is little more a well-oiled machine for stacking the federal...
View ArticleBob Woodward’s Critics Are Missing the Point
For Donald Trump, every story about him is a media story. Good stories come from good reporters with good sources working for good organizations—though every once in a blue moon, a good story comes...
View ArticleThere Is No Such Thing as a Conservative Workers’ Movement
The “statement on a conservative future for the American labor movement,” released just before Labor Day by the fledgling think tank American Compass, opens, naturally, with a celebration of “economic...
View ArticleThe Problem With Redemption for Wagner
At the beginning of Siegfried, the third opera in Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung cycle, the dwarf Mime is trying to repair a magic sword that was broken to pieces in the previous installment....
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