The Radical Possibilities of Not Paying Your Student Loans
I left college $25,000 in debt, a fact I’m reminded of every month when an email from Great Lakes Borrowers Services informs me that “Your Automatic Payment Will Be Made Soon.” But relative to most...
View ArticleThe Lodge Is a House of Horrors With Nothing Inside
Horror destabilizes, but it follows rules. It is illicit and thrilling but temporary: like taking drugs, only safe. So I tell myself, anyway, when I have to watch a horror movie. Just in case, I saw...
View ArticleThe Empire Strikes Back
One day after the Senate acquitted him in 1999, Bill Clinton spoke from the White House about the grueling impeachment battle. It had been a bitter ordeal. He had lied to the country and broken the...
View ArticleDuncing About Architecture
On February 4, 2020 the Architectural Record reported that it had obtained a draft copy of a proposed executive order titled “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again.” The order would, essentially,...
View ArticleJoe Biden Is Collapsing
Joe Biden brought his “No Malarkey” tour to a New Hampshire debate stage on Friday night. But in promising to tell the truth, he accidentally exposed his own doleful (or I should say, Bob Dole-ful)...
View ArticlePsychopath Nation
If the news in the hours after the Trump administration assassinated the Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani felt like the six months leading up to the Iraq War squeezed into one evening, then the...
View ArticleHow Ditching the Iowa Caucus Could Remake the Biofuels Debate
In the wake of Iowa’s caucus vote-counting disaster, political staffers and pollsters alike are reconsidering the state’s “first in the nation to vote” status. The quaint caucuses and infamous...
View ArticleWe’re Debating Climate Predictions While Rome Burns
Are we on track for a catastrophe or a meltdown? This somewhat gnat-straining debate has emerged around new modeling, some of which suggests that a much-dreaded “worst case scenario” of five degrees...
View ArticleThe Dissonance of a Land Acknowledgment at the Oscars
There is something obviously insane about Parasite, a Korean film about the violence of wealth inequality, winning the top honor at an event that sends its honored guests home with $225,000 gift bags....
View ArticleThe Obsolete Politics of James Carville
Ahh, 1994. What a time to be alive. Ill Communication, Monster, and Superunknown were blaring from every boom box and Chevy Cavalier cassette deck. Final Fantasy 3 had a generation of socially awkward...
View ArticleThe Non-Fascist Case for Classical Architecture
Federal design guidelines for government buildings aren’t normally front-page news. But a draft executive order that aims to rewrite the rules for federal buildings is attracting widespread attention...
View ArticleWhat New Hampshire Voters Are Watching
Shortly after 5:30 Monday evening, Suzanne Roantree, a TV reporter for the New Hampshire station WMUR, did a segment on a Manchester sidewalk about the large swath of Democrats who were still up for...
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Jeff Sharlet’s Flawed Experiment in Empathy
It’s standard practice to begin a text about photography by citing Roland Barthes or Susan Sontag. In the introduction to This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers, Jeff Sharlet opts for the former:...
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The Enduring Vision of Chinatown
The first time I saw Chinatown, I was about as far as you can get from Los Angeles—sitting by myself in an old movie house in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. This was in the early 1970s, before the era of the...
View ArticlePete Buttigieg and the Democrats’ Veteran Problem
It was November in Iowa, and Pete Buttigieg was having a moment, rising in polls and talking—not quite obliquely—about his military service. “I don’t have to throw myself a military parade to see what...
View ArticleThe EU Says It Cares About Climate Change. Ireland Could Test That.
Ireland’s left-leaning nationalist party, Sinn Féin, won a historic upset this past weekend, taking the highest vote share in the country’s general election and effectively breaking a century of...
View ArticleThe New Anti-Trans Culture War Hiding in Plain Sight
In October, a little-known state lawmaker from South Dakota attended a one-day event, hosted by the Heritage Foundation, aimed at advancing “conservative solutions to protect children from...
View ArticleTrump’s Conquest of the Department of Justice is Complete
“You know, the saddest thing is that because I’m the president of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department,” President Donald Trump said in a radio interview in...
View ArticleBernie Sanders Has an MSNBC Problem
For all the talk of cord-cutting and the rise of the digital campaign, cable television remains central to politics. Donald Trump rode billions of dollars in free media to the White House in 2016....
View ArticleIn Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Love is a Work of Art
On a remote island in eighteenth-century France, a woman is about to be married off to a rich Milanese stranger. Her portrait must be painted to ensure she meets his requirements; he had agreed to wed...
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