A Dutiful Citizen
Gary Hart, the Democratic presidential candidate I worked for in 1984 and would have supported again in 1988, has been back in the news. The Front Runner, a film that presumes to explain the murky sex...
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Wildfire Smoke Could Shorten Californian Lifespans
Every day, rescuers at the ongoing Camp Fire in Northern California are discovering a new body of somebody’s loved one, burned or suffocated to death. They’re often pulling these people from the ashy...
View ArticleMonica Lewinsky’s Very Long Road to Vindication
For three consecutive days in April of 2001, a then 27-year-old Monica Lewinsky sat on the stage of New York’s Cooper Union auditorium, answering questions from a packed audience composed of law...
View ArticleCan a Republican Lose in Mississippi?
Almost exactly a year ago, Democrats did the unthinkable: They won a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama. Doug Jones, a former prosecutor, knocked off Roy Moore, the Alabama Supreme Court chief justice whose...
View ArticleThanksgiving
They have come again to graze the orchard,knowing they will be denied.The leaves have fallen; on the dry groundthe wind makes piles of them, sorting all it destroys. What doesn’t move, the snow will...
View ArticleMoral Holiday Shopping Is Harder Than You Think
Back in 2012, Julie Keith was pulling out decorations for a Halloween-themed birthday party in Damascus, Oregon, when a handwritten letter dropped out of the box containing a fake tomb stone kit. It...
View ArticleThe Strange Ethics of Killing John Allen Chau
Did John Allen Chau, the Christian missionary killed two weeks ago by an indigenous tribe on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, deserve to die? There is the sense that, at the very least, the...
View ArticleWho Is John Roberts Kidding?
I wish John Roberts was right.Last week, after President Trump denounced a federal judge who ruled against his administration’s asylum policy as an “Obama judge,” the Chief Justice replied with a...
View ArticleThe Art of the Spectacle
For any authoritarian government, defining reality is crucial to exercising power. History becomes a series of myths that justify and animate the regime’s actions; truth becomes a weapon to be wielded...
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The Pathology of Prejudice
Driving around the part of Fresno, California, where Shannon Brown spent much of her life feels a bit like entering an alternate, more insular version of America, something out of an earlier time. We...
View ArticleFinding a Way
At the end of If Beale Street Could Talk, Barry Jenkins’s film adaptation of the James Baldwin novel of the same name, the main characters, Tish and Fonny, sit with their son in the visiting room of...
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The Profound Alienation of the Amazon Worker
In propounding one of his most intuitively appealing theories, Marx asked, “In what, then, consists the alienation of labor?” Alienation is the emotional state that takes place when capitalism divorces...
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Stop Letting Republicans Lie on TV About Climate Science
Despite the Trump administration’s decision to release it on Black Friday, a new federal government report about climate change made headlines anyway. The 1,600-page Fourth National Climate Assessment,...
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Battle Lines
In October 2017, President Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, declared that “a lack of an ability to compromise” brought on the Civil War. This remark outraged a number of historians, who told The...
View ArticleHow One Murder Could Reshape Oklahoma
Carpenter v. Murphy isn’t one of the more high-profile Supreme Court cases in recent years, but it may lead to one of the most consequential decisions this term. The dispute, for which the court heard...
View ArticleThe Biggest Question Mark for the New Congress
The 116th Congress won’t begin for another month or so, but we already know the session’s most important vote. It won’t be about health care or the environment or the technology industry, although it...
View ArticleThe New Republic December Issue: The Racist Brain
New York, NY—(November 27, 2018)—The New Republic today published its December 2018 issue, which features an incisive cover story by Erika Hayasaki that explores what neuroscience can explain about the...
View ArticleThe State of Indiana May Be About to Lose a Land Rover
Forecasting the Supreme Court’s final decision based on oral arguments is risky at best. The justices’ questions during the hour-long sessions don’t always reflect their actual views. Not all of...
View ArticleWhat Is Chuck Schumer Thinking?
When the 116th Congress begins in just over a month, President Donald Trump’s dream of a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border will be all but dead. Massive gains in the midterm elections will give Democrats...
View ArticleFighting for Liberalism—and a University
Viktor Orban is on a roll. Since his landslide re-election in April, Hungary’s prime minister has been promoting himself as a European mouthpiece of the nationalist populism sweeping the continent. Now...
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