Can the Opioid Crisis Avoid the Pitfalls of the Tobacco Wars?
This week, hours before a deadline that would have sent both cases to a single jury trial, Cuyahoga County and Summit County in Ohio reached a $260 million settlement agreement with opioid distribution...
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The Making of a White Supremacist Myth
On April 19, 2019, a man—who, in his profile picture, wears a hat emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag—posted in a Facebook group called “Black Confederates and Other Minorities in the War of...
View ArticleIn The Lighthouse, Beauty Battles the Beast
The first thing you notice about Robert Eggers’s sophomore film, The Lighthouse, is not the way it looks, but the way it sounds. Waves, then a foghorn, then wind—they bleed into one another. There’s a...
View ArticleThe Syria Withdrawal’s Other Victims
In Deir Ezzor, the largest city in eastern Syria, on the banks of the Euphrates River, protesters last week chanted and raised signs calling for the downfall of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorial regime....
View ArticleWhy Anonymous’s Trump Tell-All Is a Sham
A whistleblower may very well end Donald Trump’s presidency. The administration official who flagged Trump’s attempt to get the Ukrainian president to target one of his potential opponents in the 2020...
View ArticleTrump Is Using His Ukraine Playbook Against the Senate
There was an intriguing recurring theme in Bill Taylor’s testimony for the impeachment inquiry earlier this week. The top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine laid out in his 15-page opening statement how...
View ArticleHow Men Distort the Race Debate
In video footage that went viral this fall, the hip-hop mogul Jay-Z said that growing up in a Black single-parent household contributed directly to anti-Black police brutality. As I pondered his...
View ArticleCorporate America Has Sapped “Green” of Meaning
Every American grocery store sells a mountain of stuff bearing the dubious label “green”: sugarcane toilet paper, reusable straws, recycled Nestlé water bottles. Green is the color of solar energy and...
View ArticleThe Missing Piece in Democrats’ Health Care Plans
When Hurricane Sandy slammed into New York City in 2012, water poured into Bellevue Hospital’s basement, where the fuel pumps were stored. The elevators stopped working. At a time when its services...
View ArticleThe Real Threat to Journalism Is Not Donald Trump
Earlier this month, private equity killed another news outlet. Splinter, a news and politics website where I’d previously worked, was shut down by its owners. Seven people lost their jobs—a...
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Natasha Stagg Has No Illusions
A good millennial is hard to fool. Surveys, Natasha Stagg’s debut novel, followed a young influencer named Colleen who, in her online tryst with fame, embodied the cynicism and know-how of the digital...
View ArticleThe Cruel Lottery to Save America’s Public Lands
Last week, the Trump administration revealed its $300 million plan to preserve the health of the Great Lakes. Two years ago, President Donald Trump threatened to slash the Great Lakes Restoration...
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State Under Siege
It is an article of faith among many strategists and activists within the Democratic Party that shifting demographics will be its salvation. The Republican electorate gets older and whiter with every...
View ArticleIn Mrs. Fletcher, Porn Is the Path to Self-Discovery
I read Tom Perrotta’s Mrs. Fletcher in one day. Of course I did—the novel as irresistible trap, impossible not to devour in a sitting, is his métier. Perrotta is more entertainer than artiste, but some...
View ArticleThe Toxic Nationalism of the Pharmaceutical Industry
A few years after 9/11, while the United States was at war with Iraq and fears about national security were at a fever pitch, the drug industry embarked on a short-lived literary venture. At the behest...
View Article“Blood for Oil” Is Official U.S. Policy Now
In between playing five hours of golf on Saturday and getting booed at a baseball game on Sunday, President Donald Trump caught up on his other favorite sport: playing military. American service...
View ArticleTrump’s World Series Boo-Birds Are a Sign of a Healthy Democracy
President Donald Trump rarely ventures out in public before crowds that aren’t predisposed to like him. His Sunday evening jaunt to Washington, D.C.’s Nationals Park was a rare exception. When the...
View ArticleWhy Did CNN Hire a Moron Like Sean Duffy?
There are bad first days at work and then there is Sean Duffy’s first day at CNN. Appearing as the network’s latest pro-Trump talking head last week, the former Wisconsin congressman (and Real World:...
View ArticleThe False Comfort of Higher Seawalls
Two weeks ago, Super Typhoon Hagibis barrelled into Japan, unleashing “unprecedented” rain that caused floods and landslides. At least 80 are dead, thousands of homes in Japan’s main island were...
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What John Rawls Missed
John Rawls, who died in 2002, was the most influential American philosopher of the twentieth century. His great work, A Theory of Justice, appeared in 1971 and defined the field of political philosophy...
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