Court-Packing Is Not a Threat to American Democracy. It’s Constitutional.
America’s founders probably would not have been surprised by former Attorney General Eric Holder’s statement last week that if he were president—though he’s not running—and the Democrats controlled...
View ArticleWhite Nationalism Is an International Threat
On Friday, a gunman stormed a pair of mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, showering worshippers with gunfire, and livestreaming the country’s deadliest mass killing since 1943. “I was able to hear...
View ArticleThe Longer History of the Christchurch Attacks
On Friday, an Australian white supremacist committed a monstrous act of violence against Muslim worshippers in New Zealand. The attack, which he livestreamed, was steeped in the kind of global...
View ArticleWould the Green New Deal Survive the Supreme Court?
How the United States confronts climate change will be decided whenever the Democratic Party regains control of the White House and Congress. But it may ultimately be Chief Justice John Roberts who...
View ArticleThe Outsize Imagination of Orson Welles
There’s something vaguely mournful, if not altogether sentimental, about Mark Cousins’s new documentary The Eyes of Orson Welles, a two-hour love letter to the legendary director. It starts with the...
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The Dispossessed
Shame pervades the work of the French writer Édouard Louis. The scenes of aggression in his first two novels, The End of Eddy and History of Violence, are invariably fueled by shame’s corrosive spread....
View ArticleWhat Was the Foodie?
The foodie—as a word, a concept, a person—began life in the early 1980s. New York writer Gael Greene first used the term in a restaurant review, but it was Ann Barr and Paul Levy of England’s Harper’s...
View ArticleBrexit Is Making Britain Look Weak
Brexit so far has been a story of the United Kingdom’s political class losing its authority. Last week’s three-day voting spree in the House of Commons was the culmination of a two-year effort by the...
View ArticleThe Enduring Timidity of the Democratic Party
The Democrats are about to blow it.That’s the emerging consensus of the party’s moderates, anyway. Every week brings a new Politico story in which Democrats grouse about the party’s resurgent left...
View ArticleWhy Won’t These Democrats Reject Fossil Fuel Money?
Two days before she officially launched her campaign for president, Kirsten Gillibrand made one of the smartest moves of her political career. “I signed the pledge today,” she told a group of climate...
View ArticleThe Death of Fascist Irony
In the rush of initial reportage that followed the horrific slaughter last week of 51 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, a document surfaced that purported to be the manifesto of the...
View ArticleDevin Nunes’s Ridiculous Lawsuit Is a Masterpiece of Republican Grievance
It’s no easy feat to be the most thin-skinned man in American politics these days, especially given that the country is run by a short-fingered vulgarian who compulsively tweets about every real and...
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Adventures in Modernism
What was it like to be a queer child in South Carolina during the Great Depression? Guy Davenport, with his incomparable gift for re-creating lost pockets of time, offered one plausible glimpse in his...
View ArticleThe Problem With Trying to Be Like China
For decades, the Republican economic creed has revolved around low taxes and free markets. The sacred dual directives had to be vigorously defended and market regulations of any kind aggressively...
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The Rise and Fall of the New York Wheel
In 2008, Meir Laufer, a small-time New York real estate developer, was taking a spin aboard the London Eye, the 443-foot ferris wheel on the banks of the Thames, when he decided on a scheme: He would...
View ArticleMaking #MeToo Work in Pakistan
In Pakistan, it is all too easy to become discouraged at a seeming lack of progress when it comes to women’s rights. As in America, the rot starts at the top. Shortly before assuming office in 2018,...
View ArticleThe Seductive Stupidity of Andrew Wheeler
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler is not your average climate denier. Unlike President Donald Trump, he’s admitted that global warming is real and caused by humans. And...
View ArticleWho Said It: Beto O’Rourke, Howard Schultz, or a Punk Rock Band?
Much has been made of Beto O’Rourke’s punk rock bona fides, or lack thereof. On the one hand, he used to play in a punk band and cites Ian MacKaye—the Pete Seeger of the American punk movement—as an...
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Mitch McConnell, Young and . . . Moderate?
After a failed attempt to run for the House of Representatives (he was tossed from the ballot for failing residency requirements), Mitch McConnell’s first real campaign was for judge-executive of...
View ArticleBill de Blasio’s Embarrassing Quest for National Fame
It’s rare for The New York Post to understate a story in a headline, but late Sunday, the tabloid posted a piece titled “De Blasio speaks to crowd of only 20 people in New Hampshire.” The reality was...
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