Fox News Is in Trouble
Asked during an Election Day earnings call about the prospect of a Donald Trump–branded television network, Fox News CEO Lachlan Murdoch was sanguine. “We love competition,” he said. “We have always...
View ArticleThe Stubborn Classism of Classical Music
Few art forms on earth are more indebted to class privilege than Western classical music. For most of its history, it has relied on monarchs, aristocrats, and wealthy patrons even to exist. We have...
View ArticleNick Kristof and the Holy War on Pornhub
Anyone who wants to know that Pornhub has engaged in abusive and exploitative behavior toward women need only listen to the women whose videos were posted to the free porn site without their consent....
View ArticleBiden Is Finding New and Inexplicable Ways to Screw Up His Cabinet Picks
Secretary of the interior isn’t the most high-profile Cabinet post, but it might be the most glaring example of how President-elect Joe Biden’s selection process is going awry. The clear front-runner...
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Now Is When We Choose How Effective the Covid Vaccines Will Be
Imagine if the United States had quickly employed proven public health advice, updated regularly as new science came in, throughout the entire pandemic. Far fewer people would be dead or suffering...
View ArticleThe Democrats Are Too Old
In the lead-up to Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings in October, Democrats fretted that the party’s ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, Dianne Feinstein, wasn’t up to the...
View ArticleInside the Hostage Crisis of America’s Dying Restaurants
Dave was walking to work in one of Pittsburgh’s hippest neighborhoods, past the shuttered artisan candle shops and clothing boutiques that sell overpriced vintage workwear, when he noticed the sobbing....
View ArticleThe Year We Learned to Live Like Life Doesn’t Matter
It’s bad. This week marked a record in Covid-19-related deaths, and we are currently seeing an average of 209,864 Covid cases per day. Nearly 300,000 people in the United States have died since the...
View ArticleThe Meat Industry’s Bestiality Problem
It isn’t spoken of much, but a significant chunk of the Kansas economy depends on pervasive violations of its anti-bestiality laws. In 2010, the Kansas legislature revised the state’s “criminal sodomy”...
View ArticleIs Joe Biden Just Being Stubborn?
If the staggered unveiling of President-elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet has done little to enthuse the (broadly defined) left, it has also not yet been quite as disastrous as some predicted (and that will...
View ArticleThe American Fetish for Elderly Elites
I think a lot about the time Prince Philip flipped his Land Rover. Not so much about the crash itself, wherein the 97-year-old British royal collided in 2019 with another car on a country road. More...
View ArticleHUD Deserves Better Than Marcia Fudge
Almost exactly one month ago, in an interview with Politico, Ohio Representative Marcia Fudge criticized how former presidents were expected to assemble their Cabinets. “As this country becomes more...
View ArticleThe Man Who Wants to Take Down Bashar Al Assad
Wolfgang Kaleck, a 60-year-old human rights lawyer with large blue eyes and a wave of sandy brown hair, smiles a lot for someone who has spent his life litigating some of the world’s worst atrocities....
View ArticleThe Desperate Last Days of Local News
In 2018, in an act of defiance that would become known as the Denver Rebellion, a group of current and former Denver Post staffers wrote and designed a six-page Sunday spread of op-ed pieces aimed at...
View ArticleHow Biden Distributes the Vaccine Will Define His Presidency
As the president who will be in charge of the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine for almost all Americans, Joe Biden could preside over the greatest public health victory in our nation’s history. Or the...
View ArticleBut Really, the White House Should Get Vaccinated
Of all the ways the White House has received special treatment during this pandemic—the gatherings, the low mask use, and the experimental treatments—jumping the vaccine line might seem like the most...
View ArticleIt’s Too Easy to Hack the U.S. Government
In a video posted to YouTube five years ago, a team of cybersecurity experts listens as one of their colleagues reels off some major recent hacks of corporate systems: Sony, Target, Home Depot. “They...
View ArticleThe Year That Killed the Native Mascot
On Sunday evening, The New York Times reported that Cleveland’s Major League Baseball team will soon be dropping its “Indians” moniker, which the franchise has clung to for 105 years. The decision...
View ArticleSorry, the Hunter Biden Story Is Still Not a Thing
Last week, America’s worst opinion page took a victory lap. “So Hunter Biden’s business is news after all,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board crowed after news broke that the FBI had been...
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What Black People Really Think About the Police
In 2020, the widespread protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd took both the news cycle and the American conscience by force. The result was an immediate and seismic shift in public...
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