The Emerging Right-Wing Vision of Constitutional Authoritarianism
The Atlantic, a magazine for which I once worked, recently teamed up with the National Constitution Center for a series entitled “The Battle for the Constitution.” The project draws upon a wide range...
View ArticleLearning to Love the Mask
I never much liked the mask. What I used to think of as the “sanitary mask”—with all the fussy, germophobic implications that clinical word entails—is ubiquitous in the places where I and members of my...
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Grim Reapers
After two months of refusing to face the true proportions of the coronavirus pandemic head-on, President Donald Trump sought to reassure panicked citizens—and financial markets—in an address to the...
View ArticleThe Devastating Clarity of a Pandemic
The first of the month has come and gone. For many people in this country, the anxiety that the day usually brings was compounded by the nationwide pandemic that’s upended life as we know it. Rent,...
View ArticleDisinvestment Made Our Cities a Powder Keg in a Pandemic
On a sunny Saturday in March, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said he was horrified to find people were still gathering in city parks. “It’s insensitive, it’s arrogant, it’s self-destructive, it’s...
View ArticleDeath Industry Predators Eye the Spoils of a Pandemic
It’s hard to look at Robert Waltrip, the 89-year-old founder and chairman emeritus of death-care giant Service Corp International (SCI) and not see a striking resemblance to Henry Waternoose, the CEO...
View ArticleJoe Biden Is Wasting a Crisis
A genuine national emergency has broken out in a presidential election year. The Trump Administration’s handling of that emergency has been disastrous, beginning with its glaring failure to track and...
View ArticleThe Enduring Delusion of a Chastened Trump
“I just spoke to our great General [James] Mattis, just now,” Donald Trump said near the end of his first State of the Union address back in 2017, “who reconfirmed that—and I quote—‘Ryan was a part of...
View ArticleThe Pandemic’s Shameless Profiteers
To treat the Black Death, some doctors in the Middle Ages recommended ingesting “potable gold,” a vile tonic of gold compounds dissolved in ether. One might think that we had progressed past such bogus...
View ArticleThe States Are Stepping Up
During the early days of the coronavirus crisis, President Donald Trump couldn’t make up his mind about the governors who were closing schools, banning large gatherings, and shutting down businesses...
View ArticleKiwi
As if the flesh had come apart in my hands to tell of it—light come through the vague furred frame then coming through deeper, as I cutthe skin away, so that it seemed deep...
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No One Disagrees With Rebecca Solnit
It is often said of the writer Rebecca Solnit that her work “resonates.” It’s hard to find an article about her that doesn’t include that word. At a time when feminism is about finding others who have...
View ArticleCorporations Are Salivating Over the Coronavirus Pandemic
While many Americans worry about how much longer they can pay rent and avoid contracting Covid-19, corporations are within striking distance of controlling our basic political institutions. The recent...
View ArticleConfessions of a Demigod
You said in your last meeting you figured out the map of the planets. The lonely orbits. Cosmic dust. In my last meeting, a future meeting was discussed. How to kick out the un-paid children—holes...
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Watching South Park at the End of the World
Writing about South Park, a silly cartoon, in the middle of an eminently predictable and yet entirely unanticipated global pandemic has an uncanny quality, like meeting a time traveler and realizing...
View Article[An iron pan is burning; the witch]
An iron pan is burning; the witchhas left her house. The childrenwalk hand in hand through aforest of reagents. In the subterraneanworld, bolts of silk, yellow pillsand moths the size of dinner...
View ArticleSneering While the South Is Dying
At a press conference Thursday morning, Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp made the astonishing claim that until the “last 24 hours,” he and his team were unaware that asymptomatic people can...
View ArticleImpeach Him Again
Over the next few months, the United States will be tested by a reality that moves much faster than our imaginations. Things are already changing in ways that seemed impossible months ago: Unemployment...
View ArticleThe Coronavirus Coups Are Upon Us
As enabling acts go, Viktor Orban’s might be one of the most sweeping since Hitler got his in 1933. On Monday, Orban—the quasi-fascist former communist who has dragged Hungary to the far right since...
View ArticleA Death Toll That Cannot Be Forgotten
On Tuesday, the number of American coronavirus casualties reached a grim milestone. Over 4,000 deaths had been recorded, officially surpassing the number of Americans killed on September 11. The shock...
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