The Nobel Prize in Literature Is Just Trolling Now
After a one-year absence brought on by an ugly and convoluted sexual abuse and financial malfeasance scandal, the Nobel Prize in Literature returned in 2019 with a charm offensive. The Swedish...
View ArticleWarren’s Plan to Spurn Big Money Donors Has a Catch
A few weeks ago, I wrote that Senator Elizabeth Warren should not raise funds from millionaires at private fundraising events if she is the Democratic nominee, and argued that she “cannot spend a...
View ArticleFox and Foes
In August, President Donald Trump noticed something odd on Fox News—a poll had shown multiple Democrats beating him in an election. Enraged, he told reporters that there was “something going on” at the...
View ArticleThe Moral Dilemma of a Left-Right Antiwar Alliance
“Let’s do a little experiment,” the featured speaker told the crowd at the National Press Club in Washington. It was March 2016, the election was still up for grabs, and the audience had assembled for...
View ArticleIn Its Fight With China, the NBA Shows Its True Colors
Freedom is good and worth fighting for. From what we know, this was the platitude that was sloshing around Daryl Morey’s brain on Sunday when the Houston Rockets general manager posted an image on...
View ArticleAn All-American Campaign Finance Scandal
There is nothing particularly special about Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who were indicted by federal prosecutors on Thursday for violating campaign-finance laws. The two Ukrainian-born Florida...
View ArticleJoe Biden Is Right About The New York Times
Early Thursday, the Biden campaign sent a letter to The New York Times criticizing the paper for its coverage of President Trump’s allegations about Hunter Biden. The letter spotlighted recent...
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“It’s a Prison”
Bulelani Mfaco arrived in Ireland in November, 2017, fleeing anti-gay violence in South Africa. He hoped to pursue a PhD in politics, find a job, and build a new life. First, though, came his asylum...
View ArticleThe Fight to Occupy Alcatraz
Persecution of Native peoples in the United States accelerated in the 20th Century. Allotment laws, which had started with the Dawes Act of 1887, broke up tribal lands; specialized,...
View ArticleBernie Sanders Takes Aim at Wealth—and Warren
Since his heart attack earlier this month, the press has begun loudly asking how long Senator Bernie Sanders can stay afloat in the Democratic primary and why, moreover, he should bother trying. After...
View ArticleTrump Turns Back the Clock in America’s Meat Plants
It was more than a century ago that Upton Sinclair went undercover in Chicago’s stockyards, resulting in his reported novel The Jungle. A blood-splattered portrait of the American meatpacking industry,...
View ArticleThe Madman Has No Clothes
If you pretended you oversaw the most powerful military, diplomatic corps, and liberal political system in human history, and you wanted to discover the single action that would threaten a friendly...
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Inside the “Most Incarcerated” Zip Code in the Country
Keisha Robinson’s family came to Milwaukee from Chicago in the 1980s because, as Robinson put it, “Chicago was getting out of pocket.” With crime rising and jobs disappearing in the Windy City, she...
View ArticleThe Politics of Succession
It’s hard to remember how we thought in the years leading up to 2016, but our most accessible record of that psychologically distant era will probably be the crop of “prestige” TV shows that dominated...
View ArticleBeto O’Rourke Is Out Over His Skis
Democratic presidential candidates have spent the year introducing wave after wave of new policy ideas. Some of them are excellent. Others are interesting. And a few would be disastrous. Beto...
View ArticleThe School Secession Movement Is Growing. That’s Bad News for Integration.
On Saturday, in southeast East Baton Rouge Parish, voters decided to break away from Louisiana’s capital city of Baton Rouge to create the new city of St. George. It will be the fifth-largest and...
View ArticleThe Democrats Don’t Have a Frontrunner
Before the final game of the 1944 World Series, a veteran sportswriter looked at the two bedraggled teams gathered at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis. During the last year of World War II, with their...
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The Art of the Unspeakable
In 1971, the artist Suzanne Lacy was taking classes with Judy Chicago at the California Institute of the Arts, and she had an idea: What if they created a performance that involved an audience...
View ArticleThe Connection Between Pipelines and Sexual Violence
Last Tuesday, Montana Attorney General Tim Fox announced that the state would intervene in the legal battle over the Keystone XL pipeline. “The Keystone XL Pipeline will bring jobs and economic...
View ArticleWhy Are U.S. Nuclear Bombs Still in Turkey?
The American relationship with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey has been fraught for half a decade, but never this bad. Last week, American troops were intentionally targeted by Turkish artillery units in...
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