Bill Barr Will Go Down in History as Trump’s Worst Enabler
When Attorney General Bill Barr appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee in January 2019, he sold himself as a principled servant of the law. Barr told senators that he would “not permit partisan...
View ArticleDeath to the Negative Restaurant Review
Last February, I had the honor of being publicly snubbed by Jay Rayner, the fiery restaurant critic for The Guardian, who dismissed my essay about the “crisis” of the American restaurant review as...
View ArticleSteve McQueen and the Art of Gathering
Mangrove, the first film in Steve McQueen’s five-part anthology series, “Small Axe,” begins with Frank Crichlow (Shaun Parkes), the proprietor of a local West Indian restaurant, walking through the...
View ArticleTranscript: The Vaccine Pipeline
A transcript of Episode 22 of The Politics of Everything, “How Pandemics End”Laura Marsh: This week I did something I never imagined doing: I logged on to The New York Times, entered my age, my job,...
View ArticleWhy Can’t the SEC Just Agree That Bribing Foreign Governments Is Bad?
Back in 2010, a little-known section of the major Dodd-Frank financial reform act looked poised to upend the way fossil fuel and mining companies did business abroad. Section 1504, also known as the...
View ArticleHow Pandemics End
On December 11, the Food and Drug Administration authorized Pfizer to begin distributing its vaccine for Covid-19. The triumphant moment comes on the brink of a grim winter, amid record case levels...
View ArticleThe Climate Fight Needs Both Technocrats and Firebrands
Climate campaigners on Tuesday received a rarity amid President-elect Joe Biden’s appointment announcements: good news. Former Environmental Protection Agency administrator and current National...
View ArticleNicole Krauss’s Difficult Men
The protagonist of Nicole Krauss’s “Switzerland,” the first short story in her new collection, To Be a Man, is a 13-year-old girl shipped by her parents to a private school in Geneva, placed under the...
View ArticleHow The New Yorker Fell Into the “Weird Japan” Trap
It has not been a good year for anyone, but it’s been an especially bad year for the fact-checkers of highbrow magazines. In November, The Atlantic appended an extraordinary editor’s note to a story...
View ArticleRepublicans Will Never Accept the Election Results
Speaking to outgoing Republican Senator Lamar Alexander on Sunday’s Meet the Press, Chuck Todd asked a question that has featured prominently ever since it became clear that Joe Biden had won the...
View ArticleWhat America Needs Now Is a President Who Will Go Nuclear on the Justice...
As President-elect Joe Biden takes office in January, the Justice Department will be probing more than a few sensitive political matters. His son Hunter Biden said last week that he is under...
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“No Choice but to Do It”: Why Women Go to Prison
Tanisha Williams met Kevin Amos on December 29, 2002, the last day of his life.Kevin, 19, lived with his parents, but sometimes visited his girlfriend and their infant daughter at the red-shingled...
View ArticleThe New Language of Forever War-Making
“History, unfortunately, is a forever war,” according to Clifford D. May and Bradley Bowman, who seem never to have encountered a war they don’t like. This faux profundity comes midway through an essay...
View ArticleGive Joe Biden a Break
We have reached the stage in the unveiling of Joe Biden’s Cabinet and top White House staff when virtually every Democrat—with the possible exception of Kamala Harris—is upset by at least one pick and...
View ArticleBiden Isn’t a Lost Cause for the Left
New Mexico Congresswoman Deb Haaland—a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo nation, and among the first class of Native women elected to Congress in 2018—will reportedly be nominated by the Biden...
View ArticleHow to Win Hearts and Minds in Climate Politics
The climate emergency doesn’t feel great. We fear violent weather events and mourn vanishing seasons and species. We’ve had to name new conditions, like ecological grief and climate despair. Shaming...
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A Blueprint for a Trust-Busting Biden Presidency
Joe Biden has the opportunity to be America’s first trust-busting president in at least 50 years. He could go down in history as the smiling man on the back of an Amtrak train, declaring war, as...
View ArticleIs Dolly Parton the Voice of America?
On July 5, 1996, the world’s first cloned mammal was born in a lab at the University of Edinburgh. The lamb, carried to term by one ewe and carrying the cloned genetic code of another, represented an...
View ArticleRepublicans for Recession
Do congressional Republicans want to prolong the recession to hurt President-elect Joe Biden?Four years ago, I might have judged any such conclusion to be too cynical. But after watching Republican...
View ArticleTrump’s Most Vicious Cultists Aren’t Done With America
When spent nuclear fuel rods are removed from their reactor and cooled, they are typically surrounded in inert gas and sealed into thick steel and concrete casks that are intended to last for decades....
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