The Infernal Logic of Professional Sports in a Pandemic
“Please don’t take me,” said four-time Major League Baseball All-Star and Braves franchise first baseman Freddie Freeman, as he described to reporters the prayers he offered on his worst night of...
View ArticleHere’s What It Would Take to Reopen Schools Safely
Schools need to reopen in the fall. Schools cannot reopen in the fall.As both a parent and a science and health journalist, I feel torn between these twin truths. And it’s clear I’m not the only...
View ArticleThere’s Never Been a Better Time to Be a White-Collar Criminal
In mid-June, a reporter at an Israeli news outlet gave me some startling information about an international criminal investigation that I had led while working as a prosecutor at the Justice...
View ArticleRich Republican Nihilists Don’t Care If You Can’t Pay Rent
While the op-ed pages of The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and apparently at least one dinner party at a million-dollar Brooklyn brownstone, are increasingly obsessed with the sharpening...
View ArticleCongress’s Steadfast and Stupefying Refusal to End Surprise Billing
The stories abound: Patients break their legs, or have heart failure, or experience a mental health crisis, and they go to the hospital, as they’re supposed to. As is required in the United States,...
View ArticleThe Problem With Putinology
By most accounts, the Cold War came to end in 1991. Soviet defeat equaled the victory of the West. The Washington consensus set the economic terms. Democracies were proliferating after 1991, and on the...
View ArticleHow Taxpayer Dollars May Have Bought a Kurdish Strongman’s Beverly Hills...
Bribing one politician is bad. Bribing all the politicians is worse. The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating a group of companies in Kurdistan, Iraq’s semi-independent northern region, that...
View ArticleTrump’s Greatest Liability Is His Own Incumbency
On Wednesday night, Trump campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn posted a video on Twitter that appears to show masked protesters marching outside a graffiti-covered federal building in Portland. The...
View ArticleThe Limits of Mask Ordinances
Washington, D.C., has become the latest major city to require masks outside the home. Mayor Muriel Bowser signed the executive order on Wednesday; it will last for at least the next two and a half...
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What the Americans With Disabilities Act Has to Teach Today’s Protesters
Judy Heumann, Brad Lomax, Chuck Johnson. Can you picture their faces? Although these three activists each played a crucial role in the fight for the rights of disabled Americans, who represent the...
View ArticleWhat $600 Can Do
Despite early promises from the president of a swift economic bounce back from the pandemic, the Labor Department’s jobs report on Thursday estimated that more than 31 million people were claiming...
View ArticleTrump and the GOP Are About to Push the Economy off a Cliff
The unemployment provision in March’s Cares Act that granted laid-off workers an additional $600 a week is set to expire in one week. With tens of millions unemployed, this is a looming catastrophe....
View ArticleEven Milton Friedman Would Oppose Trump’s Latest Federal Reserve Appointment
“It would be hard to pack more error into so few words.”—Milton Friedman, in 1994, commenting on an article by Judy Shelton supporting a gold standard.This week, the Senate is expected to take up the...
View ArticleThe Growing Fight Against the School Death Trap
A special education teacher at a public high school in Queens remembers a week in April when, almost every day, she learned another student at her school had lost a parent or grandparent to Covid-19....
View ArticleThe Lincoln Project Doesn’t Matter
On Friday, the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump conservative group, released two new ads both focused on President Trump’s recent comments about arrested Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who,...
View ArticleIt Was Insane to Restart Sports in America
For the sports-deprived American discontent with watching Premier League games, last week was something of a reprieve: The National Basketball Association, ensconced in its Orlando bubble, began...
View ArticleThe Bloody, Manufactured Crisis in Portland
The chaos on the streets of Portland, Oregon, where President Donald Trump’s deployment of federal agents has resulted in violent unrest, was made for TV—or, perhaps more accurately, for Twitter....
View ArticleZadie Smith Takes On the Pandemic
What have you done with your quarantine? Those of us who aren’t nurses find ourselves rich in time, and being dutiful citizens, we work: nurturing scallions in cups of water or Duolingo-ing our way to...
View ArticleIt’s Shaping Up to Be a Horrific Election Season for Republican Women
Running for Congress as a Republican woman has never been easy. In 2020, it must feel like someone put a hex on your campaign.Consider the current outlook in the U.S. Senate, a necessary and...
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When the Bad Guys Are Everywhere
It’s 1980, and Joe Cantamessa is dressed as a television repairman. He’s actually with the Federal Bureau of Investigation: Paul Castellano, head of the Gambino mob family and the New York City Mafia’s...
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