The Real Stakes of Trump’s Trade War With China
President Donald Trump’s continuing trade war with China will escalate once more on September 1, when his administration plans to impose tariffs of 10 percent on $300 billion of Chinese imports. These...
View ArticleTrump Previews His Response to the Next Recession
There is often little use in psychoanalyzing Donald Trump: His behavior is so erratic, his thinking so shallow that any definitive assertion about his character or temperament is disproven within...
View ArticleHow David Koch’s 1980 Fantasy Became America’s Current Reality
Billionaire fossil fuel mogul David Koch died Friday. Though he will rightfully be remembered for his role in the destruction of the earth, David Koch’s influence went far beyond climate denial. Ronald...
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Vasily Grossman’s Lost Epic
In the Soviet Union, every literary work was a political statement, whether the writer liked it or not. Soviet censorship allowed some room for negotiation, but outside the USSR, official and dissident...
View ArticleCrazy Sad Asians
In her 2010 book The Promise of Happiness, the scholar Sara Ahmed describes the “happiness duty” as an expectation levied on immigrants by the liberal ideas of multiculturalism. In return for full...
View ArticleBernie Sanders Has a Plan to Save Journalism
The Bernie Sanders campaign has spent much of August squabbling with news outlets. “There seems to be a direct correlation between the media’s coverage of polls and Bernie Sanders’s specific standing...
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The Frightening Spread of Toxic Algae
Humans and animals who stumble across a brightly colored blue-green or red pool don’t always recognize the threat. Toxic algal blooms aren’t high on many people’s radar. Vacation-goers obliviously wade...
View ArticleOligarch of the Month: Charles Koch
For nearly four decades, Koch Industries has spent its time quashing the labor movement, besieging the environment, and stealing oil from the Osage Indians in Oklahoma. But in June, The Boston Globe...
View ArticleTéa Obreht Considers the Camel
Téa Obreht’s new novel Inland—an epic tale of hardbitten folks struggling against the elements in the southwestern United States in the 1890s—invites an odd question: What does the Arabian one-humped...
View ArticleThe Misogyny of Climate Deniers
Climate skeptic Bjørn Lomborg has built his global brand on keeping his cool. “Cool it,” his best-selling book told those worried about the warming planet. For some reason, however, he seems to have...
View ArticleJim Crow Returns to the Supreme Court
It’s not often that the Supreme Court gets the chance to strike down a Jim Crow law these days, but one such opportunity is fast approaching. This fall, the justices will hear Ramos v. Louisiana, a...
View ArticleDeporting Harvard Students Was Always the Goal
For Ismail Ajjawi, this should be orientation week. A Palestinian student living in Lebanon, Ajjawi was awarded a scholarship to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts by AMIDEAST, a non-profit...
View ArticleTwilight of the “Adults in the Room”
Jim Mattis has a story to tell. For the first two years of the Trump administration, he was one of a handful of high-ranking figures who more or less openly pitched themselves as necessary checks on an...
View ArticleJoe Walsh Is Running for “Morning Joe”
Twenty-five years ago, Representative Joe Scarborough was a Gingrich Republican, swept into office in the Republican wave of 1994. He was, in many respects, one of the most radical members of that...
View ArticleIt’s Not Enough to Stop Amazon Deforestation
For three weeks, swaths of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil have been engulfed in flames—2.5 million acres to be exact. Another 1.8 million acres are burning in neighboring Bolivia, and thousands of...
View ArticleThe Border Wall Is Trump’s High Crime
There are, by the latest count, at least 130 House Democrats who support impeaching President Donald Trump, a number that has risen quietly but steadily in the wake of Robert Mueller’s testimony before...
View ArticleNew Yorkers Should Thank Police for the Summer “Slowdown”
Just ahead of a beautiful August weekend in New York, NYPD Chief of Department Terence Monahan, the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the force, was dispatched to local TV outlet NY1 to contradict...
View ArticleWho Gets to Say If Warren’s Apology to Cherokee Nation Is Enough?
On Tuesday, Politico published two pieces about Senator Elizabeth Warren’s tumultuous DNA test. One featured Native voices and served as an interesting insight into the still-ongoing criticism of...
View ArticleMillennial Parents Are Failing Their Children
Parents, myself included, regularly say they’d do anything for their children. They’d step in front of a bus for them, take a bullet for them, go full mama- or papa-bear to demolish—nay,...
View ArticleHow Trump’s Justice Department Screwed James Comey
There’s a lot of delicious irony in the Justice Department inspector general’s report finding that former FBI Director James Comey violated FBI rules by retaining four memos documenting President...
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