Stop Overthinking Impeachment Politics
At 9 a.m. on Tuesday morning, House Democrats formally unveiled two articles of impeachment that they would bring against President Donald Trump. The announcement brought the House one step closer to...
View ArticleThe Irishman and Parasite: Two Paths for the Hustle
You have to respect the hustle. No matter what else you might think of Robert De Niro’s Frank Sheeran, the titular anti-hero of Martin Scorsese’s twentieth-century gangster saga The Irishman, you have...
View ArticleScenes From the Ragged Edge of American Health Care
It’s 5:30 a.m., and Michael and Lancelot have been sitting on a metal bench in the dark for two and a half hours. At the Beltway Church of Christ in Suitland, Maryland, the two brothers are wrapped in...
View ArticleIf Elected, Joe Biden Should Be President for Five Minutes
On Wednesday, Politico reported that former Vice President Joe Biden has suggested to aides that he intends to serve only one term if he wins the 2020 presidential election. “According to four people...
View ArticleDoes It Really Matter That Buttigieg Worked for McKinsey?
On the 30-minute drive across eastern Iowa from Mount Vernon to Cedar Rapids on Saturday afternoon, Pete Buttigieg began (albeit with some prompting) by reciting Robert Frost: “Whose woods these are I...
View ArticleThe Heavy Burden of The Report
The Report is just an okay movie, which is too bad, because it needed to be great. Very few of the policymakers who enabled the grotesque, systematic torture of terror suspects in the aftermath of 9/11...
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The Tragedy of the Yale Commons
When 18-year-old Stephen A. Schwarzman, the son of a Philadelphia dry-goods store owner, entered Yale in 1965, he took his meals, like all freshmen, in the Commons, a vast, baronial dining hall in a...
View ArticleThe Dramatic Detachment of The Crown
About halfway through the new season of The Crown, Peter Morgan’s sweeping drama about the interior lives of the royal family, Prince Philip (Tobias Menzies) makes a drastic publicity move. It is the...
View ArticleWhat’s Lost When a Language Disappears
The cultural practices and locales that define the hundreds of Native communities dotting the North American landscape are grounded in languages. Each is unique, with distinct dialects, accents, and...
View ArticleBritons to Decide Whether to Prolong Tories’ Carnival of Austerity
It feels a bit like today is the end of the world; or, at least, the end of Britain. The general election being held in my home country today feels like the last shot we have at becoming a...
View ArticleWhy the Media Is Ignoring the Afghanistan Papers
This week, The Washington Post published the Afghanistan Papers, an extensive review of thousands of pages of internal government documents relating to the war in Afghanistan. Like the Pentagon Papers,...
View ArticleOligarch of the Month: Michael Bloomberg
Michael Bloomberg entered the presidential race in November with all the blinkered confidence of a billionaire who has heard time and again of his own business prowess and shrewd political instincts....
View ArticleTrump’s Loyal Apprentice in Congress
On October 23, a gaggle of House Republicans, led by Matt Gaetz of Florida, stormed the Capitol’s Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. Gaetz had hoped to expose the supposedly secretive nature...
View ArticleThe Heavy-Handed Moralism of Terrence Malick’s New Film
It should be hard nowadays to make art set in Europe just before or during World War II without arousing some suspicion. Too often in such films and books there’s a longing, however concealed, for some...
View ArticleGlenn Beck, the Nutty Professor
Today, Glenn Beck looks almost nothing like the clean-shaven pundit who became famous delivering tearful Fox News monologues and emceeing Tea Party rallies. He has traded his signature dress shirts for...
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Science Fiction’s Wonderful Mistakes
From the mid-1920s, when Hugo Gernsback coined the term “science fiction,” several fallacies became associated with the increasingly vigorous commercial genre and never entirely went away. The first...
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Patrick Modiano Explains Himself
Whenever I catch myself proselytizing about the work of Patrick Modiano—which happens, it turns out, quite often—I realize I sound, like every evangelist, a little crazy. I’ll say, “His books are...
View ArticleMeet Trumpworld’s Next Top Ukrainian Grifter
Ever since Rudy Giuliani decided to torch his legacy, by gallivanting across Europe in search of potential “dirt” on former Vice President Joe Biden, the repercussions have been as swift as they’ve...
View ArticleDoes Amy Klobuchar Have a Path to the Nomination?
In every stump speech, Amy Klobuchar uses a joke sequence that invariably gets chuckles and knowing nods from Iowa Democrats. She begins by saying that many caucus-goers believe that the best thing a...
View ArticleI Captain a Rescue Ship. Global Warming Is Sparking a Whole New Refugee Crisis.
For my first voyage on an icebreaker ship in 2011, I was a ship’s officer and had just completed my bachelor’s degree in Nautical Sciences. I had an idea of what it would be like: There would be lots...
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