George Scialabba, Radical Democrat
It may strike a reader new to George Scialabba’s writing as extraordinary that Slouching Toward Utopia, a new collection of his essays and reviews, is not a response to Donald Trump’s presidency....
View ArticleHow Obamacare Became a Winning Issue
In 2009, when Barack Obama traveled to Bristol, Virginia, for a town hall to promote the Affordable Care Act, his motorcade passed a small but turbulent protest. I was raised just outside this small...
View ArticleA Death Sentence Over a Cup of Water?
“To pardon or overturn the verdict against Asia Bibi, self-confessed blasphemer is the commission of blasphemy itself and is crime against Islam and the Constitution of Pakistan.” So read a handout...
View ArticleHow to Fix the Supreme Court: Weaken It
The confirmation of a Supreme Court justice never should matter as much as Brett Kavanaugh’s did, and that’s because the Supreme Court itself shouldn’t matter as much as it does today. That’s the...
View ArticleThe New DNA Paradigm
Big cultural changes happen slowly, then all at once. This summer, the Golden State Killer, a serial rapist and murderer, was identified through the search of a third-party consumer genomics service...
View ArticleThe Mistake Countries Repeatedly Make When Dealing With the EU
“There isn’t even a one in a million chance that Merkel will say no.” These were the words of Alexis Tsipras shortly before becoming Greece’s prime minister in 2015. He was talking about his...
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The Democrats’ Incredible Shrinking Message
In the summer of 2017, when the midterm elections were more than a year away but already on everyone’s mind, Democrats seemed to have an embarrassment of riches. President Donald Trump was historically...
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Hearing Secret Harmonies
Graham Greene famously observed that there is a splinter of ice in the heart of every writer, and certainly this is true of that generation of middle-class male novelists born in the decade before...
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The Blue Wave Might Wipe Out Voter Suppression, Too
Every state routinely prunes its voter rolls when registered voters move, die, or get convicted of a felony. But under Secretary of State Jon Husted, Ohio has taken an aggressive tack to removing...
View ArticlePoem with Birds
Oh you real effulgent frailties Looka book, a banister, a sinisteraffirmation of how littlewe achieve in looking a bog, an orchard, an icy shoreshorn of...
View ArticleMarriage
You keep complaining that there are two people inside me—the one confident, decisive, ironic; the...
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Mind Games
In April, when the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees summoned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Washington, it looked as if the nation was finally going to reckon with the outsize role that...
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Micro-Targeted
It’s not difficult to imagine the political manipulation of social-media platforms. You can see the trolls, maybe similar to the employees of the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg that Adrian...
View ArticleRepublicans Are Running Away From the Economy
The U.S. stock market’s weeklong decline reversed itself dramatically on Tuesday, producing one of the strongest climbs of the year. A gain driven by strong earnings reports from bulwarks like Goldman...
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Welcome to Camping, the Most Misunderstood Show on TV
If this is what it takes to make Julia Davis a very rich woman, then so be it. The extraordinary writer and actress got her start on British TV in the 1990s, when she sent a character reel to Steve...
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The Deceptive, Shameful, Lucratively Funded War Against Rent Control
On August 24, the tenants of two buildings near the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles received letters from their landlord notifying them of a rent increase of over $800 a month. The increase...
View ArticleRyan Zinke Is In a Real Mess
After Scott Pruitt resigned from the Environmental Protection Agency this summer, many in the media—this reporter included—wondered whether Ryan Zinke might be the next to go. The Interior secretary...
View ArticleThe #MeToo Workplace Policy That No One Is Talking About
It’s been a year since the New York Times and New Yorker published their bombshell articles outlining how Harvey Weinstein had sexually harassed and assaulted women for three decades. Since then, the...
View ArticleAre Brazil’s Businesses Cheating to Help an Extremist Win the Presidency?
Until this week, Jair Bolsonaro, the retired army captain leading the race for the Brazilian presidency, seemed like he would cruise to an easy win over his opponent, Fernando Haddad of the Workers’...
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Can Change Wait?
Ayanna Pressley’s surprise primary win over Michael Capuano—a power in Boston politics, with 20 years in Congress representing the Massachusetts 7th and the support of virtually the entire state...
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