Mitt Romney Is the New Jeff Flake
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump spent his first press conference after a midterm rebuke ranting about the media. He said CNN should be “ashamed of itself” for its coverage of his administration...
View ArticleWhat’s Next for Rent Control?
Last night, more than 100 protesters occupied the downtown Santa Monica offices of The Blackstone Group, a real estate and private equity giant that spent millions of dollars to defeat a ballot measure...
View ArticleHow Making A Murderer Reinvented Itself
It took me a long time to start watching the second season of Making a Murderer. The first season, while wildly compelling—and one of the first true crime documentaries to captivate what felt like the...
View ArticleThe 2020 Election Could Come Down to Voter Suppression
Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign scrambled the electoral map, as he won several states that some considered reliably, even irrevocably, blue. This week’s midterms, blue wave or not, reversed...
View ArticleAre 100 Years Enough?
The First World War, which ended a century ago Sunday, was supposed to be a hinge-moment in history: a war to end all wars, and a war to end the imperialism that had shaped the West’s interaction with...
View ArticleThe Republicans Broke Congress. Democrats Can Fix It.
In the great 1972 political satire The Candidate, Robert Redford plays a novice candidate who runs a slick campaign for Senate and wins an upset against an unbeatable incumbent. On election night,...
View ArticleHow Much Damage Will Matt Whitaker Do to the Rule of Law in America?
President Donald Trump makes no secret of his litmus test for an attorney general: They should be loyal to the president first, and the rule of law second. He’s invoked Robert Kennedy and Eric Holder...
View ArticleWhat Makes a Great Movie About Journalism?
Reporters make for odd movie heroes. They are traditionally untidy and unglamorous. But a journalist who is following a story—whether that journalist be Lois Lane or Bob Woodward—can always do...
View ArticleA Democrat Ran on Climate Change in a Republican Stronghold—and Won
If Sean Casten had talked about climate change once during his campaign, that would have been more than most Democrats running for Congress. But Casten didn’t talk about climate change just once, or...
View ArticleAmazon Scammed America’s Hurting Cities
For over a year, Amazon dangled the prize of a second headquarters, or HQ2, in front of cities across the country, and then watched as they duked it out. The result was a sort of hypercapitalist Hunger...
View ArticleThe Menacing Midcentury Aesthetic of Prestige TV
In an early scene in the first episode of Homecoming, Amazon’s new psychological thriller series, Julia Roberts walks through a series of rooms, talking rapidly on her phone. It is an important...
View ArticleDemocrats, Don’t Compromise With Trump
With Democrats in control of the House, they are now faced with the question of how best to use their legislative authority. Nancy Pelosi has already drafted a lengthy list of goals: lowering...
View ArticleTrump Responds to Tragedy With Cruelty
On Friday afternoon, as several counties across California were being incinerated by late-season wildfires, President Donald Trump signed a declaration providing federal money for the emergency...
View ArticleStan Lee: the Midwife of the Marvel Universe
“Stan Lee” was a fiction, a mask that eventually became a face. It was a pen name designed by a teenage boy, not to gain fame but to hide work thought would embarrass him.The man who would become the...
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Enter Boris?
Boris Johnson—former mayor of London, gadfly of the British political establishment, and, most recently, Brexit’s cheerleader-in-chief—has a colorful range of rebuttals when asked about his evident...
View ArticleIt’s Time for a New Voting Rights Act
In early 2011, when new census figures showed that Evergreen, Alabama, a small city midway between Montgomery and Mobile, had grown from 53 to 62 percent black over the previous ten years, the white...
View ArticleWhy Brazilians Elected an Aspiring Dictator
Jair Bolsonaro isn’t big on democracy. The newly elected president has dismissed the notion of human rights as a “disservice” to Brazil. He has bemoaned the fact that its police force, one of the...
View ArticleThe Backlash to the GOP’s Union-Bashing Has Begun in Earnest
Has the Republican Party’s grand experiment in union-busting finally come to an end? Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin, rose to national prominence in 2011 when he passed a landmark...
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Celebrating Independence Day With Poland’s Far Right
Early on Sunday morning, dozens of buses set off from every region of Poland, carrying tens of thousands of patriotic Poles to the capital for the centenary celebration of the country’s independence...
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A New, Wickedly Playful Voice in Crime Fiction
Korede, the narrator of My Sister, The Serial Killer, the debut novel by Oyinkan Braithwaite, is a nurse at a hospital in Lagos, the city where she lives with her mother and her sister, Ayoola. The...
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