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Unchecked Power
The last forty years have seen a transformation in American business. Three major airlines dominate the skies. About ten pharmaceutical companies make up the lion’s share of the industry. Three major...
View ArticleMilkman Is a Tale of The Troubles, Told Deep From Within
The only word for this opening sentence is banging. “The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died.” It bangs...
View ArticleDon’t Hate Mississippi
It’s never a shock to see white Mississippians cover themselves in shame. They’ve been doing it reliably throughout the entire history of a place that became known as the “lynching state” long before...
View ArticleRobert Mueller Has an Impeccable Sense of Timing
Michael Cohen’s latest guilty plea is both surprising and unsurprising. The president’s former personal attorney admitted on Thursday to having lied to Congress about the extent of President Donald...
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Strange Ambitions
For an artist who specialized in the uncanny, Edward Gorey has become a little too familiar. Perhaps this is the inevitable fate of writers and artists distinctive enough to have an adjective named...
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Why Widows Is the Best Crime Movie of the Year
The charming sight of a gang of hustlers, scheming to commit robbery and then committing that robbery, is not a new one. The heist movie became a classical genre in the 1960s with cheerfully swinging...
View ArticleThe Passing of the Republican Party
On Friday night, the family of former president George Herbert Walker Bush announced his death at age 94.Statement by the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush, on the passing of his...
View ArticleThe Whitaker Solution
Chief Justice John Roberts took an extraordinary step last week by publicly reaffirming that the federal judiciary is nonpartisan and independent. Now, an unusual filing by one of the nation’s most...
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Who to Believe
One evening in January 2015, a mental health counselor named Foad Afshar met with a twelve-year-old boy inside his office in Concord, New Hampshire. Afshar was 55, a gregarious man with eyeglasses,...
View ArticleThe Whitewashing of George H. W. Bush
In the last few days, journalistic eulogies have abounded for George H. W. Bush, who died at the age of 94 on Friday night. It’s established tradition for honoring former presidents. But as Jon Allsop...
View ArticleNever Look Away Grapples With Germany’s Past
Vergangenheitsbewältigung is one of those quintessential German words: a long, clunky amalgam of syllables and ideas that expresses a concept you never imagined you’d need to name. It refers to the...
View ArticleAt The Hotel Metropole
Maids curtsied in starched peaked caps so white they hurt your eyes and you knew the war was coming from nowhere, swift and bloody. Was I a child checking in with my mother, or a boy with a lover? Who...
View ArticleWalking Dead Love Song 32
I try not to think about getting gunned down in the holiday market. I try not to think about subway grenades or suicide bombs or slender guns tucked in a duffel bag. Happier times, I think. Happier...
View ArticleOf Late
I have my bed and I have my blanket she says slim tree blue spruce so old she reads the board: Today is Sunday lurch (for lunch) snap (for snack) sky bled a month ago another...
View ArticleThe Art of the Underwhelming Deal
Nine months ago, President Donald Trump brushed off growing criticism of his escalating trade war with China and a host of traditional American allies. “When a country (USA) is losing many billions of...
View ArticleThe GOP’s Laboratories of Oligarchy
In the classic comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, the titular characters occasionally play a game known as “Calvinball.” The rules are simple: Hobbes makes them up as he goes. In one strip, the imaginary...
View ArticleThe Real Impact of George H. W. Bush’s Presidency
George H. W. Bush, who died on December 1, is remembered more for his influence on world events than for his domestic policies. That may be an inevitable byproduct of serving as president during the...
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Idra Novey’s Troubled Activists
The women in Idra Novey’s novels—activists, dissidents, and translators of fiction with high ideals—set out to do the right thing. But they often get trapped in the details. What begins as conviction...
View ArticleNetflix Won’t Save Prestige Cinema
The best movie of the year is only playing in few theaters in New York City. Alfonso Cuarón’s intimate yet epic Roma, the story of a young maid and the fracturing family she works for in early-1970s...
View ArticleThe Last Days of Rookie
On the last day of November, Tavi Gevinson announced that Rookie, the online magazine for teenage girls she launched in 2011, was shutting down. Cast in the mold of Jane Pratt’s Sassy, the heirless...
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