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The Retrograde Quest for Symbolic Prophets of Black Liberation
One little-examined legacy of the broader intellectual embrace of race-reductive thinking is something we might call the Quest for Moses(es)—the shorthand branding exercise of privileging the content...
View ArticleThe Consolations of the Illness Memoir
What is writing about sickness for? In the 1990s, Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, a professor of humanities at Penn State, undertook a study of what at the time was a new, and burgeoning, genre: illness...
View ArticleDon’t Let Amazon and Airbnb Get Their Tentacles in Vaccine Distribution
The vaccine rollout in the United States has been a national embarrassment. A doctor in Houston was fired for using ten doses of vaccine that would have otherwise expired and gone to waste. Local and...
View ArticleMistakes Were Made, but Not by Us
What’s it like to be wrong? We have no idea. On Episode 25 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene discuss being right all the time. TNR staff writers Walter Shapiro and Matt...
View ArticleTrump Will Be Haunted by the Law for Years to Come
Donald Trump has once again wriggled his way out of his latest jam. Fifty-seven senators voted on Saturday to find the former president guilty of inciting the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill,...
View ArticleTranscript: On Being Wrong
A transcript of Episode 25 of The Politics of Everything, “Mistakes Were Made, but Not by Us” Walter Shapiro: Stage one is anonymity: You want to be the invisible man, you hope no one will notice. Then...
View ArticleTeenagers Deserve a Place at Biden’s Climate Table
The youth vote is one of the biggest what-ifs in American politics. The crucial 18-to-29 bracket typically doesn’t participate at levels comparable to groups over the age of 30, skewing national...
View ArticleRush Limbaugh Made America Worse
Twenty five years ago, Rush Limbaugh graced the cover of Time magazine. Wearing a striped shirt, an expensive suit, and a look of total contempt, he held his trademarked cigar between two stubby...
View ArticleBoeing’s Disgraced Ex-CEO Returns to the Aerospace Industry—Backed by $240...
In December 2019, reeling from the growing fallout of two crashes that killed 346 people, Boeing fired its CEO, Dennis Muilenburg. While he departed in disgrace, he was hardly frog-marched to the exit:...
View ArticleI Was a Rush Limbaugh Whisperer
As most of my readers know, I was a card-carrying conservative for many years. I was working in the Reagan White House when Rush Limbaugh went on the air in 1988 and remember having to go out and buy a...
View ArticleThe Deep Rot of the Massachusetts Democratic Party
Massachusetts’s road to failure runs straight through the digital waiting room of the Democratic State Committee’s video calls. During long, slur- and expletive-filled gatherings, a vanguard of wizened...
View ArticleThe Supreme Court Could Demolish Another Pillar of the Voting Rights Act
The Supreme Court’s docket is lighter than usual this term, though it’s hard to blame the justices for it. After Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death and Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation, the pace of new cases...
View ArticleFacebook Is a Global Mafia
Facebook and Australia are at war. Though the country’s Parliament has yet to pass a proposed law that would require tech giants to pay for sharing others’ content, Facebook has already retaliated by...
View ArticleTed Cruz Should Have Stayed in Cancun
On Wednesday evening, as millions of Texans were without power during a historic and catastrophic cold spell, the state’s junior senator was on his way to Cancun, where it was 84 degrees and sunny, no...
View ArticleMassive Attack Has Never Sounded So Good
This month marked the thirtieth anniversary of Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy,” not that anyone was keeping track. The song remains, for me at least, the high-water mark of what came to be known...
View ArticleThe Polite Rage of Shirley Hazzard
The astronomical event referenced in the title of Shirley Hazzard’s novel The Transit of Venus occurs in two installments–eight years apart, every 243 years–when Venus passes between Earth and the...
View ArticleHow to Stop Poisoning Children
Residents of the West Calumet Housing Complex in East Chicago, Indiana, have been poisoned for decades. The federal government built the public housing complex in 1972 on land that had formerly housed...
View ArticleRush Limbaugh and the Nineties Roots of “Cancel Culture”
If you weren’t around for it, it’s a little hard to explain how and why Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing broadcaster who died this week, was (very briefly) a member of the commentary crew for Sunday NFL...
View ArticleThe Mothers Leading the Battle Against Trans Student Athletes
To the extent that there is a real national debate about the participation of trans people in sports, it is almost exclusively concerned with teenagers in student athletics programs. This is despite...
View ArticleThe Rise and Fall of the L. Brent Bozells
In The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a classic 1943 film that traces, in vaguely allegorical fashion, half a century’s evolution in England’s national character, the actress Deborah Kerr plays a...
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