This Is Chander Kanta. The Government Shutdown Has Left Her All Alone.
When it comes to the work she does, Chander Kanta is indistinguishable from a regular Environmental Protection Agency employee. For the last five years, the 70-year-old administrative assistant has put...
View ArticleGive Parents Money, Not Universal Pre-K
On Tuesday night, in her State of the State address, Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo staked her second term on an ambitious promise. “Tonight, I pledge to be the governor who brings universal...
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A Vacation in the Void
The world is impossibly old and disorganized. A long time ago, we began to structure it around the holy days of religion. More recently, the state endorsed holidays for labor and gave the year the...
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In Tessa Hadley’s Late in the Day, Art and Marriage Are at War
When the last of my parents’ “cool” friends got divorced, certain things became apparent to me. First, that being a creative, interesting woman makes it more rather than less likely that your husband...
View ArticleElite Soccer’s Culture of Graft
On Tuesday Cristiano Ronaldo, smiling and bedizened in a black coat and diamond earrings, arrived at court in Madrid, Spain, to receive a $21.6 million fine for tax fraud. It is roughly what the...
View ArticleUh-Oh
Criminal indictments are typically written in the dry, terse active voice of American legalese. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s criminal indictment of Roger Stone, who was arrested by FBI agents in...
View ArticleRemembering Diana Athill
In 2009, Diana Athill, the renowned literary editor and award-winning writer who died this week at the age of 101, moved from her big flat on the edge of London’s Hampstead Heath into a retirement...
View ArticleRegulating Facebook and Google Won’t Save Journalism
This has been the journalism industry’s worst week in recent memory, with around 1,000 people losing their jobs. Layoffs at Gannett cost dozens of jobs at newspapers across the country, from the...
View ArticleBetsy DeVos Is Fabricating History to Sell a Bad Education Policy
In a speech last week to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos made her latest pitch for a radical transformation in the nature of public schooling—one that would place...
View ArticleWhat Would John Stuart Mill Do—to Fix Facebook?
Silicon Valley’s liberal branding can seem paradoxical given its political impact. The scandals that accompanied the 2016 election—Cambridge Analytica, Russian interference—revealed that Facebook had...
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How Sexism Threatens Peace in Afghanistan
What does it mean to be a man? In the United States, that’s a debate recently stoked by a Gillette ad about harmful masculine norms, as well as the American Psychological Association’s new guidelines...
View ArticleRun, Howard, Run!
After months of rumors that he was weighing a presidential bid, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz finally confirmed them on Sunday. “I love our country,” he tweeted, “and I am seriously considering...
View ArticleIs Brexit Worse Than Trump?
Everything that could go wrong with Britain’s imminent departure from the European Union seems to have done so. With only 59 days to go until the U.K. automatically crashes out of the bloc, British...
View ArticleWhy Are We Still Fascinated by Ted Bundy?
There is a rich abundance of nonfiction entertainment about Ted Bundy, America’s most notorious serial killer. In each instance, the author or television producer tells the story of Bundy’s heinous...
View ArticleRussian Doll Is a Spiky Comedy About Self-Destruction
Leslye Headland, the co-creator of the new comedy Russian Doll on Netflix, is perhaps our sharpest dramatic writer when it comes to cruelty. Headland, who created the series with Amy Poehler and the...
View ArticleHoward Schultz Learned All the Wrong Lessons From His Childhood
You could say that Howard Schultz has daddy issues. The former Starbucks CEO returns to his late father again and again in his new memoir, From the Ground Up, and often with disapproval. “My father...
View ArticleDemocrats Are About to Give Big Pharma the Big Tobacco Treatment
Since flipping the House of Representatives in last year’s midterms, Democrats have been waiting to see real oversight return to the halls of Congress. That arrived on Tuesday, with the Committee on...
View ArticleWhy This Victim of Blatant Racial Discrimination Struggled to Get a Fair Trial
The discussion around criminal justice reform these days usually centers around the same four or five themes. We need to change sentencing laws and guidelines so people aren’t thrown into prison for...
View ArticleThe Courts Are Making a Killing on Public Records
For most of the nation’s history, the most common way to read court filings was to travel to the courthouse itself, pull up a desk in the clerk’s office, and leaf through them by hand. This was hardly...
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America’s Epidemic of Vaccine Exemptions
To be a parent in the 1950s was to know that your child would at some point contract measles, a highly contagious virus characterized by fever and rash. When it happened, most parents needed only to...
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