The Beginning of the End of Meaningless Work
“When was the last time we really had terms with which or the occasion for questioning the quality of people’s work?” Kathi Weeks, professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke...
View ArticleThe End of the 40-Year War on Government
Joe Biden’s inaugural speech was primarily about unity, an appropriate theme after the pathologically divisive presidency of you-know-who. But Biden also reaffirmed that government can address the...
View ArticleYou Don’t Have to Love Your Job
“You don’t have to like it,” my late father would tell my siblings and me when we complained about our jobs. “That’s why it’s called work.” His career began in typewriter repair in the 1950s and, after...
View ArticleWe Regret to Inform You That Republicans Are Talking About Secession Again
A Democratic president just entered the White House, so it’s time for Republican state officials to start discussing secession once again. After Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012, disaffected...
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Sea Shanties and the Whale Oil Myth
With 400,000 dead from Covid-19 and the nation still reeling from the raid on the U.S. Capitol, an odd corner of the internet has emerged to provide temporary comfort and distraction in the past few...
View ArticleCan the White House Press Briefing Be Saved?
Just how low has the bar been set for the Biden administration? Look no further than the reaction to new press secretary Jen Psaki’s first day on the job. Psaki has held two briefings in her first 36...
View ArticleDon’t Worry About Joe Manchin
There is now a new most powerful person in the United States: Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. With the Senate evenly split, Manchin, a Democrat representing a state in which nearly 70 percent of...
View ArticleThe Essential Worker Strike Wave
Energy was high, and the night air was cold, so people were dancing. The music switched between Anuel AA and Pop Smoke, while Teamsters wearing thick layers—hats, gloves, masks—chanted in call and...
View ArticleKill Coal to Save Lives
On Tuesday, the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that the Affordable Clean Energy, or ACE, rule—the Trump administration’s attempt to relax (or rather, erase) standards for carbon dioxide emissions from...
View ArticleDon’t Fire People for Dumb Tweets
On Wednesday, Will Wilkinson, a New York Times contributor and vice president at the center-right think tank the Niskanen Center made a joke on Twitter. “If Biden really wanted unity,” he tweeted,...
View ArticleMitch McConnell Is Killing the Filibuster
A good rule of thumb over the past five years is that if something strange can happen, then it probably will happen. One of those strange things happened earlier this month when the Democrats won two...
View ArticleDemocrats Can Preach “Unity” and Still Kill the Filibuster
“His position has not changed,” White House press secretary Jenn Psaki said Friday when asked whether the president thought the Senate should stop requiring supermajorities to pass most legislation—a...
View ArticleAgainst the Consensus Approach to History
In the mid-1940s, Edmund S. Morgan, a mild-mannered young historian, was teaching at Brown and making a name in the quiet field of early American studies. Having published a slim, well-received...
View ArticleThe Very Serious Appeal of Call My Agent
In the days immediately following the publication of the not-exactly-positive review of Netflix’s Emily in Paris I wrote for this very website last October, friends and strangers alike had one burning...
View ArticleRight to Work on a Hot Planet
By 1961, Charles Koch had stacked up three engineering degrees and was back home in Wichita, Kansas, to join the family business of oil refining, pipelines, and manufacturing. His father, Fred, was at...
View ArticleBan Trump and Break Up Facebook
Donald Trump wants back on Facebook, and he’s willing to go to court over it. Except in this case, it’s a strange kind of judicial authority: the Facebook Oversight Board, a Facebook-funded body that...
View ArticleHow Do You Deradicalize a Cop?
Even before the violence at the Capitol on January 6, when supporters of Donald Trump drawn from the ranks of MAGA rallygoers, anti-government militias, and QAnon stormed the building and breached the...
View ArticleWhat Happened to the Intern Revolution?
“Do you think we’ll ever use unpaid interns?” a friend once asked while we were being used as unpaid interns. It was 2011, in the thick of the long slog of the Great Recession, and we were both working...
View ArticleThe Fossil Fuel Industry Thinks It Will Have a Good Year Under Biden
The oil industry spent much of Joe Biden’s first week in office publicly squawking in protest. The American Petroleum Institute called his decision to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline a “significant...
View ArticleThe True Cost of Energy Monopolies
For the vast majority of North Carolina’s 10 million–plus residents, there is only one option if they’d like to heat their home, turn on the lights, or charge their phone: Duke Energy. The largest...
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