Is Anyone Surprised Iran Has Returned to Enrichment?
The United States continues to have one strategic overriding objective with Iran: to prevent it from acquiring the capability to build nuclear weapons. If that one objective is achieved, then the...
View ArticleThe Meaning of Trump’s Historic North Korean Jaunt, in One Image
The symmetry would appear to say it all: the way their bellies slope toward each other, the navels nearly kissing; the idiosyncratic hairstyles that could only be worn by a gaudy showman or a...
View ArticleCan the Left Win YouTube?
Kevin Peterson is deliberate when he speaks. He pauses frequently, as though chewing over his next thought. In life as on YouTube, where he is one of a growing number of leftists and progressives who...
View ArticleAntifa Is Arming Itself Against a Trump Crackdown
Liberals are notoriously loath to take their own side in a fight. But their reticence may well be changing in an age of vigilante, white nationalist terror—openly condoned and supported by an incumbent...
View ArticleRestoring Democracy is Not Open to Debate
Hours before Thursday’s Democratic presidential debate, the Supreme Court issued two rulings that could greatly affect our democracy. One decision failed to stop the drive toward increasingly partisan...
View ArticleThe Growing Toll of the Global Gag Rule
Xai-Xai, a peaceful coastal town a few hours north of Mozambique’s capital, sits in a province with the highest rate of HIV/AIDS in the country. One-quarter of the population in this region is...
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America’s Once and Future Concentration Camp
The sidearm-clad Army military police officer peered through the back window of my car, and Bella the Dog, my 110-pound Anatolian-Shepherd–Saint-Bernard hybrid, peered back at him from the rear seat....
View ArticleThe Kids Aren’t Alright
The annual G20 summit is a dry, diplomatic affair that rarely offers viral moments. This year’s gathering in Japan was an exception, thanks to Ivanka Trump. The French government posted a clip last...
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Democratic Rot and the Origins of American Conspiracism
At the end of 2016, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, The Oxford English Dictionary made “post-truth” its word of the year, Merriam-Webster picked “surreal,” and Dictionary.com chose...
View ArticleTanks, But No Tanks
Two thousand and sixty-eight years ago, a Roman magistrate named Julius Caesar crossed a river in Italy. The Senate long forbade its proconsuls from commanding Rome’s legions outside of their...
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Midsommar Is a Nightmare in Broad Daylight
Are you afraid of the dark? If so, Ari Aster’s debut movie, last year’s Hereditary, may have been too much to take. Its tale of familial dysfunction and repressed trauma was enriched by its gloomy...
View ArticleHow Washington’s Elite Learned to Love Policy Wonks
If David Brooks of The New York Times were alive in the Eisenhower era, rather than a mere intellectual artifact of it, we might have called him a “meatball.” Today, we must settle for “policy wonk.”...
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Did the Mexican People Really Win?
On July 1, 2018, the night of the election of president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, I joined several friends to make our way to Mexico City’s Zócalo—the central square of this sprawling...
View ArticleDo Democrats Really Want To See Trump’s Tax Returns?
On Tuesday, House Democrats finally, at long last, took the Trump administration to court over its steadfast refusal to obey a subpoena for the president’s tax returns. The move came almost exactly six...
View ArticleDemocrats Should Attack the Trump Economy
Donald Trump tried to turn Independence Day into a celebration of himself. It was—thanks to poor planning, bad weather, and his hubris—a catastrophe. But a day later, Trump found another, less...
View ArticleTo Beat the Gerrymander, Think Outside the Lines
Voters in North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Maryland deserve fair maps that don’t lock in a partisan advantage for either Republicans or Democrats. Federal courts nationwide had recently...
View ArticleAn Economy in Waiting
The 2020 Democratic field now teems with proposals to mitigate rampaging wealth and income inequality, from Kamala Harris’s plan to increase tax credits for low- and moderate-income families to...
View ArticleThe Toxic-Gas Catastrophe Hiding Beneath Your Home
In October 2015, a fragile well casing ruptured at the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage field in Los Angeles, California—and no one could figure out how to stop it. For 118 days, 100,000 metric tons of...
View ArticleTrump Tries to Gaslight Planet Earth
The Republican Party’s approach to climate change used to be wholesale denial. Global warming was a hoax perpetrated either by greedy climate scientists or foreign countries that wanted control over...
View ArticleLindsey Graham’s “Achilles’ Heel”
Aside from Maine’s Susan Collins—who is a “moderate” until the moment Mitch McConnell needs her vote to Kavanaugh-ize the Supreme Court—Lindsey Graham is the most duplicitous Republican senator running...
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