The Atlantic and the Limits of Reasonableness
The Atlantic is perhaps the quintessential American magazine. Founded by Boston abolitionists in 1857, its role in the media ecosystem stands in contrast to that of The New Yorker, which, despite...
View ArticleThe Overblown Alarmism About a Trump Coup
Signs of the apocalypse are everywhere. It’s not just the worsening pandemic and Donald Trump’s determination to hold superspreader events in every swing state, but also the daily end-is-nigh stories...
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How Police Unions Bully Politicians
On May 31, as another night of disruptive protest overtook New York City streets, the Sergeants Benevolent Association, one of the unions representing NYPD officers, posted a photo of an arrest record...
View ArticleThe Trump Case That Will Test the Supreme Court’s Newest Originalist
The Constitution is a remarkably vague document, and American courts have spent the last two hundred years trying to make it more specific. What counts as “cruel and unusual punishment,” either in 1789...
View ArticleThe Cruelty of Washington’s Cynical Stimulus War
Over the weekend, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave the White House a deadline of 48 hours to complete negotiations on a new pandemic relief package to be passed before the election, which is now two...
View ArticleA Covid-19 Vaccine Doesn’t Need to Be Perfect
This year has brought an unprecedented race to develop, test, and manufacture vaccines and treatments for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. Experts say they’ve never seen anything like it:...
View ArticleConfronting the Deep Roots of Violence in El Salvador
In 1982, Joan Didion famously wrote of El Salvador that “terror is the given of the place.” At the time, the country was in the midst of a civil war, which pitted the leftist guerrillas of the...
View ArticleCan the Supreme Court Be Fixed?
With the likely confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett this week to the Supreme Court, conservatives will secure a majority they can use to strike down liberal legislation for years to come. Why do nine...
View ArticleExxonMobil’s Real Quid Pro Quo With the Government
Donald Trump didn’t actually give Exxon drilling permits in exchange for $25 million in campaign donations. He just wants you to know that he could, if he wanted to. That was the message behind a viral...
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America Has No Duty to Rule the World
The United States is the world’s overwhelming military power, and it’s not even close. The country controls about 750 overseas bases (China, by comparison, has only one foreign base, in Djibouti). It...
View ArticleLiberals Are Losing the Journalism Wars
The University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media recently released a report titled “The Expanding News Desert,” which showed that over the last 15 years, more than a fourth of...
View ArticleTrump Is Giving America a Grisly Preview of a Second Term
I’m not very good at math, which is probably how I ended up writing for a living. Fortunately, the statisticians over at FiveThirtyEight do not share this shortcoming. Nate Silver’s famed...
View ArticleThere Are No Good Republicans for a Biden White House
There is a battle brewing over the shape of a potential Biden administration between the center and the left. Broadly speaking, the left, defeated in the primaries, is pushing from the sidelines for...
View ArticleThe Emerging, Tenuous “Essential Worker” Vote
Over the past few weeks, when Diego Isaacs hasn’t been at his job in the produce department at the grocery store Harris Teeter in Charlotte, North Carolina, he’s been busy contacting as many people as...
View ArticleCan Podcasts Save Local News?
No one knows what to do about the crisis in local news. Recent research from Pew Research Center includes a host of depressing statistics: More than 50 percent of all newsroom jobs have been lost since...
View ArticleThe Native Vote Is Crucial This Election—and Under Threat
Speaking with The Washington Post for a cringe-inducing piece about the influx of people moving to Montana, Candace Carr Strauss, the CEO of the Big Sky Chamber of Commerce, offered a potential selling...
View ArticleCultural Resentment Is Conservatives’ New Religion
Even if he’s handed a defeat in November, there probably won’t really be anything like a truly “post-Trump” politics for a long while: Donald Trump himself is likely to stick around one way or another...
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Martin Amis, the Accidental Memoirist
How do you solve a problem like Martin Amis? Like Maria from The Sound of Music, he’s a clown to his detractors and a musician to his fans—the music of the well-tuned sentence, that is, and the...
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The Small, Midwestern Town Taken Over by Fake Communists
The Marathon County Historical Society sits in an old church building in Wausau, just up the Wisconsin River from the town of Mosinee. The lobby is large, a gift shop with books and paraphernalia in...
View ArticleYes, You Have a Duty to Vote
There are two dominant political traditions in the West and the United States: that of liberalism, which dates back to seventeenth-century England, and that of republicanism, with its roots in ancient...
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