Why Would Anyone Climb This Insane Cliff Face?
Vertigo is a sensation experienced in the stomach and the mind—though some sufferers feel it as sharp pains in the soles of the feet. At the edges of precipices I feel it as a sudden absence, a classic...
View ArticleWhy Populists Reject Evidence
The participation of former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon at The Economist’s Open Future festival this month caused a great deal of controversy. But the actual interview he gave was fairly...
View ArticleThe Hurricane Damage That Didn’t Have to Happen
Several areas of southeastern North Carolina are still facing dangerous conditions from Hurricane Florence, the catastrophically wet storm that crawled over the state more than a week ago. But the...
View ArticleThe Rise of West Coast Democrats
In July, Jeff Merkley, the junior senator from Oregon, traveled to Iowa. The trip was his third in twelve months—a sign, political commentators said, that he was preparing to launch a presidential...
View ArticleHow Red States Stifle Blue Cities
In 2014, years before he became the Democratic nominee for governor of Florida, Andrew Gillum was targeted by two gun-rights organizations, Florida Carry and the Second Amendment Foundation, which...
View ArticleGlobalism Helped Make America Great
President Trump’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday rejected more than 70 years of American historical experience. Although the speech repeated the phrase “national interest,” it...
View ArticleWhy Conservatives Want Kavanaugh at All Costs
Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination is taking on water with every passing moment. Two women have accused him of sexually assaulting them in the early 1980s, while a third says she witnessed him...
View ArticleWhy Won’t Democrats Move Left in the Suburbs?
The sprawling 10th district of Virginia stretches from the conservative West Virginia border to the wealthy and more liberal D.C. suburbs. With a median household income of more than $120,000, it is...
View ArticleBrett Kavanaugh Disqualified Himself From the Supreme Court
Brett Kavanaugh’s opening statement before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday was unlike anything in the Supreme Court’s history. In what can only be described as an angry and vengeful tirade,...
View ArticleA Pivotal Election for Abortion Rights
Before Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh faced multiple allegations of sexual assault, his views on abortion were seen as the biggest threat to his confirmation. Democrats and many legal analysts...
View ArticleThe Enduring Scam of Corporate Tax Breaks
In June, Donald Trump traveled to Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, for the groundbreaking ceremony of the Taiwanese electronics company Foxconn’s new manufacturing plant—a 20 million-square-foot complex that...
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How Republicans Stole #MeToo
There is a photo of Christine Blasey Ford from her Thursday appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee that captures why her testimony about Brett Kavanaugh—the Supreme Court nominee she has...
View ArticleJoan Armatrading Is Stronger Than Ever
At a performance in England earlier this month, the singer-songwriter Joan Armatrading was dressed in black, with her hair shoulder-length and cut into a frame around her face. During the first half of...
View ArticleAmerican Vandal’s Uncanny Portrait of Generation Z
In the second episode of American Vandal’s new season, a teenager named Kevin McClain (Travis Tope) gives a lyrical speech about the Mexican spiced milk drink, horchata. He is sitting in front of a...
View ArticleThe Man Standing Between Brazil and Authoritarianism
When Fernando Haddad ran for a second term as mayor of São Paulo in 2016, he was mocked for wearing cheap baggy suits to televised debates, and even his supporters found him uncompelling. Although...
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Terrorist By Association
In the salle des assises, the Paris courtroom reserved for the examination of murders, rapes, and other serious crimes, a box of thick glass has been erected atop the old wood enclosure in which the...
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Bad Faith
Our hominid ancestors first appeared around six million years ago. They started to use symbols around 150,000 years ago, and the first of the major religions began 5,000 years ago. What are we to make...
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Identity Is the Mystery in Tana French’s New Crime Novel
THE WITCH ELM by Tana French.Viking, 528 pp., $28.00In 1943, four boys were poaching in the woods in Hagley, in the English county of Worcestershire. They climbed a wych elm and found a skull inside...
View ArticleElon Musk and America’s Toxic Cult of the CEO
Last Wednesday, Tesla CEO and chairman Elon Musk rejected a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over claims he lied on Twitter about having “secured” funding to take the automaker...
View ArticleThe Environmental Consequences of a Justice Brett Kavanaugh
How much mercury should coal plants be allowed to emit? There’s been a years-long fight in Washington, D.C., over that very question—and who wins it may ultimately depend on whether Brett Kavanaugh is...
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