The Unstoppable Rise of Phoebe Waller-Bridge
In a scene about halfway through the new season of Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who writes and stars in every episode, sits inside a confession booth in an old church. The fact that her character,...
View ArticleHow Gerrymandering Leads to Radical Abortion Laws
Stacey Abrams still hasn’t conceded that she lost to Brian Kemp in last year’s gubernatorial race in Georgia, and perhaps justifiably so. Kemp, formerly the secretary of state there, administered his...
View ArticleDemocrats Already Have a Position on Tariffs... If You Know Where to Look
Donald Trump’s trade war with China is not going well. Weeks after assuring people that trade negotiations between the two countries were on the “five yard line,” a sheepish Larry Kudlow, Trump’s chief...
View ArticleShould People Be Allowed to Get Rich on Global Warming?
The Trump administration does not usually acknowledge the reality of climate change. But it’s willing to make exceptions in certain cases—namely, where it sees that the coming planetary apocalypse...
View ArticleThe Very American Case of Robert Kraft and a Florida Prostitution Sting
Before February, Robert Kraft was mostly known for two things: winning six Super Bowl rings as owner of the New England Patriots, and losing one of them to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Then...
View ArticleVideo Game Workers See Power in a Union
“I reported and he got promoted.”Those were the words on a hand-lettered sign held above nearly 200 employees of Riot Games—the publisher of the immensely popular multiplayer video game League of...
View ArticleJoe Biden Is Going Back to the Clinton Playbook
When Joe Biden made his first bid for president, he was forced to drop out after plagiarizing British Labour leader Neil Kinnock in a Democratic debate. Now, in his third run for the White House, Biden...
View ArticleNathan Glazer’s Life of the Mind
When I was 22 years old, Nathan Glazer, the Harvard professor of education and sociology who died this past January, stood for everything I was against. It was 1964, the year of the Berkeley student...
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Freeing Britney Spears
Fans of Britney Jean will already know that there are two kinds of trouble in Spears paradise. The first is an old story, the one where Britney in 2008 refused to hand over her kids to former husband...
View ArticleBernie Sanders Sets His Sights on Biden
Bernie Sanders has a Joe Biden problem. The former vice president’s formal entry into the 2020 primary has cut into Sanders’s numbers, which have lagged in recent weeks. Already underwater with older...
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The Audacity of Grief
It is easy to count the dead, harder to count the grieving. One has to estimate. Every year, almost one percent of the American population dies. The most recent available official count, from the...
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The Socialist Network
Future historians may well portray the second decade of the twenty-first century as the moment when American socialism returned from the dead. The collapse of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s had...
View ArticleArrest Me, You Alabama Cowards
I don’t remember the name of the doctor who performed my abortion. I don’t even remember what she looked like.Maybe it’s because she didn’t actually “perform” a procedure. She answered my questions;...
View ArticleThe Tenants’ Rights Movement Is Expanding Beyond Big Cities
When Lauren Sumahit answered the door of her apartment in Newburgh, New York one summer day last year, she was expecting to find an exterminator to take care of the mice and bedbugs that had become...
View ArticleThe House of Roberts
Donald Trump’s hostility toward congressional oversight is leading some of his critics to describe him in monarchical terms. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank argued that the president’s legal...
View ArticleThe Way to Trump’s Heart Is Through His Ego
When Donald Trump pardoned self-hating historical fiction writer Dinesh D’Souza last May, many assumed the move was part of a larger plan. Trump, in what quickly became conventional wisdom, was sending...
View ArticleThe Watergate Editor on How Trump “Leads the Press Around by the Nose”
Everybody’s heard of Woodward and Bernstein, if only from their portrayals by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the avenging angels of Watergate in All the President’s Men. But their editor, Barry...
View ArticleOligarch of the Month: Laurence Doud III
In 2016, Laurence Doud III had a seven-figure salary, an honorary degree from the Albany College of Pharmacy, and a beach home in Florida. As Rochester Drug Cooperative’s CEO, he’d handed out lavish...
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Reclaiming the Future
One day last February, I found myself seated on stage, rather incongruously, between the neoconservative Never Trumper–turned–Resistance hero Bill Kristol and my friend Natasha Lennard, a radical...
View ArticleJoe Biden Is the Democrats’ Safety School
At an outdoor table at a bagel shop a few blocks from the state capitol building in Concord, New Hampshire, two Democratic state representatives were gently sparring over Joe Biden.“A lot has come up...
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