Denying Women’s Ability to Know
Last week Donna Strickland, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, won the Nobel Prize in Physics. She is the third woman to be awarded the prize in its history—Marie Curie received it...
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How One Inuit Community Won Against Big Oil
In April 2018, the Trump administration announced Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was open for business. By June, two Alaska Native Regional Corporations and a small oil company had already...
View ArticleThe Case for Climate Pessimism
Some climate change activists oppose doom-and-gloom rhetoric. They know that, if we don’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly, the planet will soon become more habitable to flesh-eating bacteria...
View ArticleWho Says Supreme Court Justices Get Lifetime Tenure?
A good deal of the uproar over the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court stems from the expectation that he will remain there for three, perhaps even four decades. The Constitution, most...
View ArticleThe Good Place Comes Down to Earth
The Good Place is a show set in a special new corner of hell. The person in charge, an insubordinate demon named Michael (Ted Danson), is undergoing a crisis: For thousands of years, he was a loyal...
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In Maniac, the Human Mind Is the Only Real Place
The setting is a pharmaceutical trial of a psychiatric medication. The trial room is like the inside of a spaceship from the 1970s. From the other side of a purple-lit window, a beautiful young...
View ArticleThe Abortion Case Likely Headed for the Supreme Court
From the moment President Donald Trump tapped Brett Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court in early July, until the first allegations of sexual assault surfaced against the nominee...
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The Fearless Rise of the Black Southern Progressive
Last December, at the election-night watch party for Doug Jones in Birmingham, Alabama, LaTosha Brown and Cliff Albright were among the last to arrive. The founders of the Black Voters Matter Fund had...
View ArticleWhen the Next Recession Hits
In August 2008, just before the slow-moving financial crisis turned into outright panic, the secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson, traveled to the Summer Olympics in Beijing. At a private lunch with...
View ArticleIn Defense of Politicizing Hurricanes
Hurricane Michael made landfall on Wednesday with winds of 155 miles per hour, just shy of Category 5 strength—the most powerful hurricane to hit Florida’s panhandle in recorded history. It will also...
View ArticleIn 22 July, Paul Greengrass Misses the Bigger Picture
The British director Paul Greengrass has made dramatizations of real-life events, especially blood-spattered disasters, the mainstay of his career. The Murder of Stephen Lawrence (1999) retells the...
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The Office at the End of the World
Ling Ma’s debut novel Severance begins with the cryptic sentence “After the End came the Beginning.” The End here refers, naturally, to the end of the world. The Beginning, though, oddly points at once...
View ArticleAmerican Democracy Is on the Ballot in November
There’s a cynical old saying—often falsely attributed to Mark Twain—that if voting changed anything, it would be illegal. Over the past decade, Republicans across the country have tried to prove this...
View ArticleThe Power Struggles Behind Jamal Khashoggi’s Disappearance
In 1978, Lebanese Shia cleric Musa Sadr disappeared on a trip to Libya. Forty years later, his fate remains a mystery. He is widely believed to have been killed by his host, Muammar Qaddaffi.The...
View ArticleThe Romanoffs’ Missed Opportunity
It took twenty minutes to kill the Romanovs. So many bullets had been fired on Tsar Nicholas II, that the room filled up with smoke and the gunmen couldn’t see the rest of the family. The children—the...
View ArticleNicolas Cage Is on Fire
The unhinged face of Nicolas Cage is as much part of American film as the swoopy John Williams overture. Like Jack Nicholson and Willem Dafoe, his ability to inhabit the extremities of male emotion is...
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Why the Left Needs Nancy Pelosi
At a San Francisco gala to raise money to fight climate change in September, Nancy Pelosi ran into Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist, and snapped a selfie with her “dear friend,” as the House...
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What Was Mexico Beach?
CNN journalist Brooke Baldwin struggled to describe what she was seeing from a helicopter flying over Mexico Beach on Thursday. “It’s gone,” she said. “It’s gone.”Scenes of devastation from the Florida...
View ArticleWhy Mainstream Conservatism Is Losing Ground in Germany
Before Angela Merkel decided to welcome more than a million asylum seekers to Germany in 2015, the German conservative coalition she belongs to spent years insisting that “Germany is not an immigration...
View ArticleThe Uncertain Fate of Affirmative Action
“It remains an enduring challenge to our nation’s education system to reconcile the pursuit of diversity with the constitutional promise of equal treatment and dignity,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote...
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