The Law That Could Take Down Rudy Giuliani
A little over a year ago, a grip of Democratic senators penned a letter to the Department of Justice with a simple request: review whether or not Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal...
View ArticleA Liberal Legal Movement Is Stirring at Last
Conservatives have long placed a higher priority on shaping the federal courts than their liberal adversaries. Demand Justice, a recently formed liberal group that focuses on judicial nominations, is...
View ArticleThe Night of the Mad Moderates
It’s getting more difficult by the day to remember the vigor with which former Vice President Joe Biden jumped into the presidential race earlier this year. One of the important documents of that...
View ArticleThe King Is a Chaotic Coming of Age
In The King, David Michod has made a version of William Shakespeare’s Henriad as cool and competent as an advertisement for medieval history. Stately, handsome, as meticulously tooled and uniformly...
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An Early Case For Reparations
When we think about slavery, we tend to imagine freedom as its natural opposite. But this makes it difficult to comprehend the actual conditions under which un-enslaved African Americans actually lived...
View ArticleAre the Democrats Even Worried About Voter Suppression?
Twelve Democrats met for the party’s fourth presidential debate on Tuesday night in Westerville, Ohio. The location’s electoral symbolism was hard to miss. “We’re standing in the great state of Ohio,...
View ArticleThe Moderates Fight Back
One of the hardest things for a presidential candidate is to put on a smiling public face for the TV cameras after spending three hours on a debate stage inwardly seething over missed opportunities and...
View ArticleWhy the Pundits Got Impeachment Wrong
For much of this year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi used Abraham Lincoln as a human shield. Pressed by the media on calls to impeach President Trump, she regularly quoted Lincoln, who said three years...
View ArticleWarren’s Medicare-for-All Dodge Is Wearing Thin
Tuesday’s debate offered Elizabeth Warren the opportunity to feel what it’s like to be the Democratic field’s clear frontrunner, a prospect that recent movement in the polls has brought to the point of...
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Sea of Troubles
In June, I joined the crew of the rescue ship Alan Kurdi. It was a cantankerous old brute of a boat, a former East German research vessel that now belongs to a small German nonprofit called Sea-Eye....
View ArticleFukuyama’s Inner Civic Republicanism (Part 1)
In his recently published study Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, Francis Fukuyama wants to modify his best-known thesis, published first as a 1989 essay, “The End of...
View ArticleJoJo Rabbit’s Satire Fail
Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 military sci-fi film Starship Troopers—about an interstellar war between a league of human soldiers from Earth and an extraterrestrial race of arachnid-like invaders—ends on a...
View ArticleImagining a World Without Prisons
If you’re part of the ballroom scene in New York, you may have known the name of the young, trans, Afro-Latina performer Layleen Cubilette-Polanco Xtravaganza, even before her death at Rikers Island in...
View ArticleCome On, LeBron
There were many things LeBron James could have said earlier this week when asked about the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. He could have, like Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey,...
View ArticleAmerican Farming Runs on Exploitation
On Tuesday, Politico published a feature on the Department of Agriculture’s failure to prepare the nation’s farmers for climate change. Of the USDA’s $144 billion budget, Politico reported, just 0.3...
View ArticleThe Public Option Bait and Switch
Many dark and miserable months into the 2020 Democratic primary, the nation is still enduring the sight of the candidates having the same fights over health care, like an exhausted married couple whose...
View ArticleTrump’s Legal Immunity Has a Countdown Clock
This week’s most intriguing news about President Donald Trump didn’t come from the House’s impeachment inquiry. It came from a ProPublica report on unusual discrepancies in the Trump Organization’s...
View ArticleThe Freshman Democrat Who’s Making Conservatives Squirm
Unlike some of her fellow freshmen, Representative Katie Porter of California has managed to escape the ire of the current occupant of the White House. While she isn’t exactly rushing to take part in...
View ArticleOligarch of the Month: The Sacklers
Not so long ago, the Sackler name was stamped across the most rarified perches in Manhattan—in the psychobiology department at Columbia University, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and at the Museum...
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On Amazon, a Show About Modern Love
Modern Love is based on the long-running New York Times column of the same name. The show is a collaboration between the Times (once called a newspaper, now a font of all manner of content) and Amazon...
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