NATO Is Expanding, and Everyone Is Curiously Silent
North Macedonia has existed, technically, for only about a year. Not the nation itself—that country, an outgrowth of the Yugoslavian collapse, will soon be entering its fourth decade as an independent...
View ArticleLet Them Fight!
Nothing twitches the loins of a Beltway take-monger quite like those three little words: Dems in Disarray. Pundits have no better reason to get out of bed and race to their sun-dappled desks than to...
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The Silicon Valley Economy Is Here. And It’s a Nightmare.
Vanessa Bain was less than a year into her gig as an Instacart shopper when the company announced it would no longer allow tipping on its app. Instacart instead began imposing a 10 percent “service...
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An Experiment in Reading Elena Ferrante
“Read as little as possible of literary criticism,” Rilke warned Franz Xaver Kappus, the 19-year-old military cadet and addressee of Letters to a Young Poet. “Works of art are of an infinite solitude,”...
View ArticleCan Amazon Finally Crack the Bestseller Code?
As the last decade concluded, book publishers breathed a sigh of relief. The 2010s were characterized by a series of Amazon-related shock waves—the growing power of the retail behemoth, the rise of...
View ArticleThe Equal Rights Amendment May Have Found Its Moment
As the Virginia General Assembly prepared to vote on the Equal Rights Amendment on Wednesday, Democrat Jennifer Carroll Foy posed a question to her colleagues: “Which side of history do you want to be...
View ArticleWe Have Reached Peak VetBro Brand
Of course professional vetbro Patch Baker’s epiphany—that everyone needs to capitalize the V in veteran—came while he was writing an opinion column for Entrepreneur magazine titled “Building a Business...
View ArticleThe New U.S. Trade Deal Is Climate Sabotage
If this week is the “Super Bowl” of trade policy—as Republican Senator Rob Portman called it Wednesday—the planet won’t be getting a ring. The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the Nafta...
View ArticleClemency Grapples With the Banal Evil of the Death Penalty
In a recent documentary, a member of the Border Patrol Union of El Paso, Texas, described separating the children of migrants from their families as “the most horrible thing I have ever done.” It was,...
View Article“Electability” Is a Poisonous Political Shibboleth
We are several days now into a spat between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—the Democratic primary’s two progressives who, as has been widely reported, have observed a pact of nonaggression against...
View ArticleThe Colonizer Always Comes Out
A soft piano tune twinkles in the background. The words “Coastal GasLink Pipeline Project” appear and then fade to white. Edward, a member of the Gitdumden clan of the Wet’suwet’en Nation and a...
View ArticleIs Joe Biden a Climate Radical Now?
Joe Biden may have stumbled into supporting one of the most radical climate proposals of the primary.The moment came in an interview, published Friday, with members of The New York Times’ Editorial...
View ArticleEducated Fools
Here’s a little thought experiment: What would happen if, by a snap of the fingers, white racism in America were to disappear? It might be that the black and Latino working class would be voting for...
View ArticleThe New York Times’ Endorsement Charade
The New York Times has created a spectacle around one of the stodgiest features of presidential primary season: the newspaper endorsement. In years past, the Times has simply splashed the name of the...
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Michel Houellebecq’s Fragile World
Is man an animal? If there is a question that reverberates through the entire oeuvre of the French writer Michel Houellebecq, one presented with great emphasis in his most recent novel, Serotonin, it...
View ArticleThe Senate Itself Is on Trial
Last week, Chief Justice John Roberts appeared before the Senate and took a solemn oath. Then he requested that the assembled senators do the same. “Do you solemnly swear,” he asked, drawing upon the...
View ArticleThe Windbag of War
In the two weeks since Donald Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani, it’s both true enough and obviously, howlingly inaccurate to say that things have returned to...
View ArticleDemocrats Should Embrace a Few Purity Tests
Depending on the year of your birth and your streaming media habits, you may have a different point of reference—Bill Murray or Natasha Lyonne—for the phenomenon of living the same day of your life,...
View ArticleHow Impeachment Could Reshape the Presidential Race
Impeachment has yanked the three senators seriously competing in the Iowa caucuses back to Washington for a trial that could last weeks, with only Sundays off for good behavior. This past weekend,...
View ArticleRepublicans’ Climate Change Plan Is Big Oil’s Climate Change Plan
On Tuesday, a pack of Republican Congressmen went public with a new suite of measures to fight global warming. Previewed by Axios, the plan is being heralded as a “sea change” in how the party thinks...
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