The Best Defense of Donald Trump
President Donald Trump’s lawyers will start delivering their opening statement on Saturday. Their defenses of his actions are unlikely to be cogent or persuasive. The trial brief his team filed earlier...
View ArticleJoe Biden’s Confounding Candidacy
A lunchtime town meeting in the college town of Ames, home to Iowa State, should attract a sizable crowd less than two weeks before the Iowa caucuses—especially when a former vice president, who is...
View ArticleAre Kids Bad for the Planet?
Is it irresponsible to bring a child into a warming world? For some who are plagued by this question, the problem is the carbon footprint their offspring will leave. Others anguish about the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Beyond the Growth Gospel
The history of modern economic planning doubles as a resort travelogue. In 1947, the forefathers of neoliberalism launched their world-conquering project at the Hôtel Du Parc on Mont Pèlerin in the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Limits of the Confessional Novel
Four women, all single mothers, are drinking wine together. As often happens when people sit in the same room sharing the same alcohol, they begin to exchange stories. Each woman chooses the pivotal...
View ArticleThe Enemies of Truth
In 2015, a nonprofit called the Dennis and Victoria Ross Foundation created an annual prize to honor the legacy of the late Christopher Hitchens. As described by the foundation’s website, the Hitchens...
View ArticleJohn Bolton Has Run the Trump White House’s Greatest Scam
Anton Chekhov, the nineteenth-century Russian author, did not believe in red herrings. The metaphorical gun that bears his name is a reminder to writers that everything matters, or at least that...
View ArticleThe Eternally Unvetted Bernie Sanders
As reliably as night follows day, Bernie Sanders’s Iowa surge has brought another round of lament from Washington’s elite political and media class that the new front-runner has not faced adequate...
View ArticleTo End Forever War, End the Dollar’s Global Dominance
Two days after a U.S. drone assassinated Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani outside the Baghdad International Airport, the Iraqi parliament approved a nonbinding resolution to expel the American...
View ArticleSelling the Green New Deal to Texas Unions
Texas’s 10th Congressional District stretches, improbably, from the outer fringes of the Houston metro area to suburbs west of Austin. After sending Democrats to Congress for over 100 years, it has...
View ArticleCharles Murray Is Never Going Away
Two years ago, the atheist Sam Harris told Ezra Klein that Charles Murray was cancel culture’s patient zero. The co-author of 1994’s controversial The Bell Curve, which contained a chapter arguing that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Larry Krasner’s Lonely, Radical Crusade to Solve America’s Gun Problem
This article was published in collaboration with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering guns in America.On August 14, Philadelphia police tried to serve a man named Maurice Hill with an arrest...
View ArticleBingeing on Cop Propaganda
Watching cop shows always requires a certain suspension of disbelief: the detective who, armed with a few vague details, sifts through tens of thousands of records in a matter of seconds to pinpoint a...
View ArticleTom Perez Stacks the DNC Deck Against Progressives
Ahead of the first major test for the Democratic presidential field next week in Iowa, Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez has selected his nominees for the 2020 Democratic National...
View ArticleIt’s Time to Make Virginia Whole Again
Impeachment proceedings may have dominated the headlines so far this week, but the nation’s capital isn’t the only place where rarely used portions of the Constitution are getting new attention. Over...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Laos’s Forgotten War
Though I hate to admit my own ignorance, I will: I only just learned about the Plain of Jars, a series of more than 90 archeological sites in Laos, containing hundreds of stone vessels dating from the...
View ArticleThere’s Nothing More American Than Native Mascots
On Sunday, tens of millions of Americans will tune in to Super Bowl LIV to watch Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs try to crack the nut that is the San Francisco 49ers defense. After the...
View ArticleJohn Bolton Is Trying to Make a Buck. So Is Everyone Else in Washington.
There is good reason to think that John Bolton, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, is in it for the money. Bolton has spent the last several months playing footsie with Congress, teasing...
View ArticleA Better Way to Stop Coronaviruses
It’s not known yet how, exactly, the current coronavirus outbreak got started. The viral pneumonia, called 2019-nCoV for now, belongs to the virus family that also gave birth to SARS and MERS. As with...
View ArticleHow Medicare for All Could Help Fight Pandemics
Consider the life of someone with the misfortune of contracting coronavirus in the United States. Let’s call her Mary, and let’s say she works at an airport as a baggage agent, helping travelers locate...
View Article
