Rent Strike Nation
Last week, the head of the St. Louis Federal Reserve, James Bullard, predicted that in the second quarter of 2020, the U.S. economy could see a 30 percent unemployment rate and a 50 percent drop in...
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The Caged Ballot
A week before last Thanksgiving, a group of Republican attorneys gathered at the tony Madison Club a few blocks from the Wisconsin State Capitol to learn what they could do to help reelect President...
View ArticleDon’t Worry About Supermarket Shelves. Worry About Farmers.
For longtime central Michigan farmer Bob Thompson, the coronavirus comes at a particularly bad moment. “It has been a tumultuous period these four or five years in agriculture. It has pushed many...
View ArticleA Tale of Two Stimulus Packages
As Congress rushed to pass a $2.2 trillion stimulus package last week, many in the press could only marvel. Not only was the size of the bill itself unprecedented—dwarfing 2009’s $831 billion stimulus...
View ArticleThe Backstreet Boys Can’t Help You
In the United Kingdom, the government has pledged to cover 80 percent of the wages of workers left unemployed as the result of the coronavirus. Ireland has enacted an emergency nationalization of its...
View ArticleThis Is Crisis Colonization
On Saturday morning, as hundreds of tribes were mobilizing their emergency responses to the coronavirus, a shock wave reverberated through Indian Country: Mashpee Wampanoag Chairman Cedric Cromwell...
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Welcome to the Zoom Party
In 2011, a New York Times piece announced the rise of videoconferencing. Skype had been around since 2003, but Microsoft had just bought the company, and a “critical mass” of businesses was starting to...
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Policing and the English Language
Just before dawn on a cold April Saturday, Officers Thomas Shea and Walter Scott were patrolling the neighborhood of South Jamaica, Queens, where a rash of parked cars had recently been broken into and...
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How America’s Newspapers Covered Up a Pandemic
When Donald Trump first declared that the coronavirus shutdown would be over by Easter, he was embracing a hallowed American tradition of happy-talk denial. As the polymath president (part wartime...
View ArticleThe Health Insurance Crisis at Our Doorstep
The coronavirus pandemic has placed America squarely in the middle of two major crises: A public health crisis, with millions poised to become severely sickened; and an economic crisis, as necessary...
View ArticleThe Paranoid Style of America in a Pandemic
Last week, as I waited in the social-distance line outside a medical pot store on Martin Luther King Boulevard in Fayetteville, Arkansas, I overheard two men in front of me talking. Both, like me, were...
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The Hollow Politics of Minimalism
In 2009, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus were childhood friends living in Ohio and working hard toward achieving the American dream. They had corporate jobs making six figures, suburban...
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Woody Allen’s Memoir Is Shrouded in Secrecy. Why?
It takes a long time to make a book. Publishers generally trumpet projects upon the acquisition of a manuscript or the signing of a deal. So when on March 2 of this year, Grand Central Publishing, an...
View ArticleGo for the Jugular, Joe Biden
It can no longer be said that Joe Biden is missing in action. Over the course of the last week, the Biden campaign, sensitive to criticism from progressives and bafflement from political reporters, has...
View ArticleImagining a Better Life After the Coronavirus
Last week, I posed an admittedly taboo question to my followers on Twitter: “Is anyone enjoying this? Any parents, in particular? Are there any ways your life is better in this situation?” I was...
View ArticleGermany Gets It
Emergencies clarify. At an interpersonal level, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed our values and assumptions, the state of relationships, our judgments of responsibility and risk. Politically, it...
View ArticleSunderland ’Til I Die Is TV’s Best Show About Failure
In the movies, underdog sports teams always come from gritty, struggling, preferably post-industrial places. Major League wouldn’t work if it were set in Miami, instead of Cleveland. Rocky’s...
View ArticleThe U.S. Military Can Barely Protect Itself From the Coronavirus
At the Naval Academy, officers in training memorize “The Laws of the Navy,” a many-lined poem by a Victorian English admiral that prescribes teamwork, obedience, and prudence at all times. “Dost think,...
View ArticleThe Next Pandemic Could Be Hiding in the Arctic Permafrost
In the summer of 2016, a heatwave washed over Europe, thawing permafrost in the north. In the Arctic soil of Siberia, bacteria began stirring—anthrax, to be specific. The thawing, shifting ground...
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A Fragmented Novel for the End of the World
I know a lot of people who think we are teetering on the edge of an apocalypse. This possibility feels so close, in fact, that many of the jokes about it have already worn thin from overuse. When is...
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