The Vanishing Idealism of Burning Man
Last summer, 69,493 people went out into the desert to build a city. They brought with them supplies not only for erecting a temporary infrastructure (tents and RVs, roads, signage, bathrooms), but...
View ArticleThe Winners and Losers of the Longest-Ever Bull Market
Six months ago, people were very worried about the stock market. In January, it was rocketing upwards, thanks in part to a $1.5 trillion Republican tax bill that gave away hundreds of billions of...
View ArticleTrump’s Climate Plan Could Do More Damage Than No Plan At All
President Donald Trump supports the coal industry and denies climate change, so it surprised few last year when he announced his intention to kill the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration’s...
View ArticleWhat Makes Hunting So Divisive
In 1909, after the end of his second term as president, Theodore Roosevelt went on safari in Africa with his son Kermit. Financed by Andrew Carnegie and a $50,000 advance from Scribner’s Magazine, the...
View ArticleAmerica Enters the Great Unknown
The United States may not quite be in a constitutional crisis, but it certainly feels like one. With Michael Cohen’s guilty plea this week, and his admission in court that he paid illegal hush money to...
View ArticleFalse Concepts of Liberty
A few years ago, at a panel discussion I attended among labor leaders about the condition of unionism in America, one of the speakers launched into a diatribe against the Koch brothers and their...
View ArticleWhat’s Missing From the Medicare for All Debate
Medicare for All is no longer just a left-wing pipe dream. With polling increasingly in its favor and a record number of Democratic senators and representatives onboard, the idea of expanding...
View ArticleIs Trump Trying to Bribe Paul Manafort?
It’s been an especially turbulent week for Donald Trump’s presidency, but consider this particular sequence of events:First, a jury in Alexandria, Virginia, found Paul Manafort guilty Tuesday on eight...
View ArticleThe Bold Dreaminess of To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before
I started to notice the Peter Kavinsky tweets on Saturday morning, at first as a trickle, and then as a flood. This happens from time to time: The Internet collectively swoons over a fictional...
View ArticleThe Politics of Pointless Burqa Bans
When former British foreign secretary Boris Johnson spoke out against Denmark’s burqa ban earlier this month, he made it clear he still wasn’t a fan of the veils; the women who wear the “oppressive”...
View Article(un)documents
years ago, in an archive somewhere in a file folder, a ream of white fibre andblack ink stains my name, place of birth, country of origin none of them sound anywhere like herein a file...
View Article/’mīgrent/
Of an animal, especially a bird. A wandering specieswhom no seas nor places limit. A seed who survives despitethe depths of hard winter. The ripple of a herringsteering her band from seas of ice to...
View ArticleESL
If you’re reading this in English,it already means we’re far awayfrom each other. Maybe we’re far away togetherbecause English is the only language I write in.But sometimes my thoughts pop out in...
View ArticleWould Trump’s Impeachment Crash the Stock Market?
Cornered criminals have been known to take hostages. In an interview that aired on Thursday morning on Fox & Friends, President Donald Trump appeared to take one worth more than $30 trillion. “If I...
View ArticleWhy Brutalism and Instagram Don’t Mix
A big red kiosk greets you at the entrance of the new MoMA exhibition Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980. It’s a 1966 model of a modular design by Saša Janez Mächtig, made...
View ArticleFiddling With Travel Schedules Won’t Make North Korea Denuclearize
On Thursday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced his trip next week to Pyongyang with former White House and congressional staffer Steve Biegun, the Trump administration’s new Special...
View ArticleHow John McCain’s Nationalist Vision Was Eclipsed by Trump’s
John McCain, who died Saturday at the age of 81, lived a long and eventful life, but the Arizona senator’s defining legacy may well be the feud he had in his last three years with Donald Trump. That...
View ArticleElizabeth Warren vs. the Roberts Court
Elizabeth Warren unveiled her package of anti-corruption reforms last week at an auspicious moment. On the day the Massachusetts senator released the 289-page bill, two former members of President...
View ArticleRed-State Voters Take Medicaid Expansion Into Their Own Hands
Nebraska may be one of the most conservative states in the country, but in November, the state’s voters could advance a liberal cause. On Friday, Nebraska Secretary of State John Gale confirmed that...
View ArticleA Pioneer of Paranoia
When Joan Didion came out to the San Francisco Bay Area in the late ‘60s, she saw decline and decadence, a center no longer holding. In her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” she chronicled the moral...
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