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The Shadow Over H.P. Lovecraft
Eight decades after the writer H.P. Lovecraft died of intestinal cancer, having published in his lifetime only one book, riddled with printing errors, his name appeared on billboards throughout the...
View ArticleConservatives Tried to Use the Pandemic to Crush Abortion Access. Abortion...
After declaring a state of emergency around this time last year, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves announced his intent to halt all surgical abortions in the state. “We’re doing everything in our power,...
View ArticleWhat Is Substack?
Substack, the flourishing four-year-old newsletter company, has always touted itself as a savior. It was a way to make real money from writing without the hand-to-mouth hustle of freelancing. You could...
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Is Zack Snyder’s Justice League the Worst Superhero Movie Yet?
This week, HBO Max began streaming Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a remake of the 2017 movie Justice League. With an unfathomable running time of four hours and two minutes, the new movie is one of the...
View ArticleThe Obscure House Election That’s Put Democrats in a Bitter, No-Win Situation
After Election Day last year, it was Donald Trump’s doomed, illiberal crusade to overturn his loss to President Joe Biden that preoccupied the nation. Far less attention was paid to a dispute over the...
View ArticleThe Eternal Fantasy of a Racially Virtuous America
“The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us … history is literally present in all that we do.”—James Baldwin, 1965In the weeks since the storming of the U.S. Capitol by a...
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Can OPEC Rescue the Planet?
“In less than 100 years,” Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran, told The New Republic in 1973, “this oil business will be finished.” Today, we face a different type of reckoning. Oil won’t run out...
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Philip Roth’s Revenge Fantasy
There is, among the works of Philip Roth, a book his friends urged him not to publish. The document, titled “Notes for My Biographer,” is a 295-page rebuttal of his ex-wife Claire Bloom’s 1996 memoir,...
View ArticleWhat Are Frank Pallone’s Corporate Donors Getting for Their Money?
In a sleepy virtual hearing on Monday, New Jersey Democrat Frank Pallone—chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee—introduced former Energy Secretary Ernie Moniz as the first witness to talk...
View ArticleCan Religion Give You PTSD?
When Ana Sharp Williamson came home from her honeymoon in the summer of 2019, she moved in with her husband and began the process of deciding which church they should go to. She didn’t want to go to...
View ArticleOn Teen Vogue and the “Cancel Culture” Hell We Can’t Seem to Escape
The exit of an editor in chief at Teen Vogue isn’t the kind of thing that usually gets international media pickup, but the brief tenure of Alexi McCammond—whose hiring and resignation at the magazine...
View ArticleIs This Q?
One of the more surprising resignation letters in recent history was published on the day of President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Posted on Telegram by Ron Watkins, a website administrator who emerged...
View ArticleWill Demi Lovato’s Sexual Assault Revelations Finally Put a Dent in Disney’s...
In the new docuseries Dancing With the Devil: The Art of Starting Over, which airs on Demi Lovato’s YouTube channel today and precedes the release of her new album on April 2, the singer and actor...
View ArticleBanning Chicken Cages Won’t Make Eggs Humane
“A victory for animals.” That’s what philosopher Peter Singer, a luminary of the animal protection movement, called it last week when Utah’s Governor Spencer Cox signed into law Bill 147, which...
View ArticleBiden Was Half-Right About His Power Over Republicans
In the early days of the presidential campaign in 2019, long before the pandemic and the George Floyd protests and the insurrection at the Capitol, President Joe Biden praised two former senators, both...
View ArticleSaying Never Again to the Violence in Atlanta Means Saying No to More Policing
The confessed Atlanta mass shooter, according to the Cherokee County Sheriff’s office, described his targets as “an outlet.” As police put it in a statement, he told them the crimes were “not racially...
View ArticleThe Biden Administration Needs Lisa Murkowski
Late Monday, Politico reported that Senator Lisa Murkowski, one of a handful of Republicans in the chamber who can be counted on in close confirmation votes, nixed the Biden administration’s desired...
View ArticlePaleo Con
“They must be the most contented people in the world.” This is how the 1980 comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy introduces the San peoples of the Kalahari Desert, better known as the Bushmen. They eke out a...
View ArticleThe Most Important Thing Democrats Can Do With Their Power Is Protect the Vote
It should be clear by now that the 117th Congress will go down as one of the most consequential Congresses in modern American history. Reasonable people can disagree on precisely why. Some have...
View ArticleLove and Humiliation Are Inseparable in Acts of Desperation
When Ari Aster’s breakup fantasia Midsommar was first released in 2019, many women I knew cited one of its earliest scenes as a particularly traumatizing moment—namely, a protracted argument between...
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