The New York Times Discovers a Manhattan Makeover for Nu-Tenant Farming
It all starts out harmless enough: A Manhattan couple, after years spent frequenting the city’s farmers markets, became increasingly focused on eating local and understanding where their food came...
View ArticleBlack Cinema Matters
In the fall of 1960, Melvin Van Peebles stood on the Champs-Élysées with wet cheeks and three reels of film under his arm. His life was in shambles. Hours before, the aspiring film director had been...
View ArticleWhat Is Covid-19 Doing to Our Hearts?
Brady Feeney hadn’t even taken any classes at Indiana University when he fell ill with Covid-19. Three weeks after he moved to Bloomington, the incoming freshman was in the emergency room, struggling...
View ArticleWhat If Democrats Just Promised to Make Things Work Again?
Writing for The New Republic, Clio Chang recently described her three-month attempt to receive unemployment benefits in New York after being laid off from her job at Vice. As a journalist who had been...
View ArticleAmerica’s Callous Indifference to Death
If one thing is clear about American history and politics, it is this: The United States has never honored the idea that everyone is created equal. It has never valued every human life the same, and...
View ArticleTrump’s OSHA Is Fining Companies Pennies for Pandemic Violations
If it feels to you as though the Covid-19 emergency is never going to end, that may be because September 13 will mark its six-month anniversary. Six months is a very long time for a public health...
View ArticleDoes Trump Care That the American West Is Aflame?
I spend a lot of time writing about what President Donald Trump says. But sometimes I have to write about what he’s not saying: In this case, he’s saying virtually nothing about the wildfires engulfing...
View ArticleThe Ridiculous War-Gaming of the 2020 Election
Commentators have worried from the moment his presidency began that Trump might challenge the 2020 election results or even stay in the White House in the event of a loss; anxieties about this are so...
View ArticleHow Corporations Pillaged the Free Market
To conservatives, corporations are the pinnacle of capitalist development. That’s the reason the American right affords them such deferential treatment in terms of taxation and government regulation....
View ArticleThe Democrats’ Excessive Bed-Wetting Over Joe Biden’s Campaign
After Ronald Reagan’s meandering performance in his initial 1984 debate with Walter Mondale, the political press corps responded with the joyous discovery that there was indeed a horse race. A...
View ArticleThe Rhetorical Weapons of Liberal Nimbyism
The West Side Community Organization describes its mission as twofold: to “advocate for a restored quality of life for residents, visitors, and the small business community” and “advance safer and more...
View ArticleWhy Aren’t Voters Blaming Donald Trump for the Bad Economy?
Even by Donald Trump’s standards, his September has been dismal. No convention bump; allegations that he called soldiers killed in the line of duty “losers”; a bombshell Bob Woodward book in which...
View ArticleThe Biden Adviser Who Gives Climate Activists Nightmares
If you haven’t heard of Ernest “Ernie” Moniz, there’s still a good chance you’ve seen a picture of him. The 75-year-old nuclear physicist, MIT professor emeritus, multimillionaire, and former energy...
View ArticleThe Most Hysterical Worst-Case Election Scenario
Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has surveyed the state of the 2020 election and drawn an unusual conclusion from it. “As someone who has argued against catastrophism—I don’t...
View ArticleHow White-Collar Criminals Get Away With It
Over a decade since the financial crisis revealed an unimaginable level of white-collar crime by some of the highest-status people in our society, a major question remains unanswered. Why did no one go...
View ArticleThe Era of Disaster Militiaism in America
Sunday night, wildfires still had most of Clackamas County, Oregon, under a “level 3” evacuation order—which comes with the guidance of “Go! Evacuate now!”—while the sheriff’s office has been juggling...
View ArticleAmerican’s Food Supply Chain Was Already Deadly. Then Came the Wildfires.
In a video shared by the United Farm Workers on Friday evening, the sky was orange and the air hazy. In Oregon City that day, the Air Quality Index was hovering between 201 to 300, deemed “very...
View ArticleThe Personal History of David Copperfield and Emma Are Perfect Movies for a...
Critics rarely recommend movies their readers have little chance of seeing in the near future. Nonetheless, you can only watch Armando Ianucci’s new film, The Personal History of David Copperfield, by...
View ArticleA Diversity of Terrible Bosses
A visual feature recently assembled by The New York Times reveals in stark detail the dearth of people of color, in the year 2020, in the country’s halls of power. Of the 24 people in the Trump...
View ArticleThe Good Life That Keynes Promised America Got Stolen
A century ago, economic experts thought everybody living in the present era would have it made. And broadly speaking, we do: We live longer, we seldom try benightedly to “cure” gay people, we no longer...
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