How Newsmax Became Trump TV
Last week, Tucker Carlson did something remarkable: He acknowledged, albeit with no small number of caveats, that the Trump campaign had provided zero evidence to support its most recent round of...
View ArticleThe Government’s Human Cruelty Will Outlive Trump
“Our long nightmare will soon be over” is a phrase that one wouldn’t have been shocked to hear issued from the lips of liberal pundits or Joe Biden supporters as it slowly became apparent, in the days...
View ArticleIs America Trapped in a Caste System?
Three-quarters of the way into Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson describes the humiliation suffered by Black passengers on a steamship in the American South before the Civil War....
View ArticleA Vacation Enclave in the Hamptons, Two 61-Foot Billboards, and an Endless...
Past a certain point east, Sunrise Highway is a quiet drive in November. Strip malls, a hollowed-out Chuck E. Cheese, and a dwindling number of other cars making the commute back to the farthest...
View ArticlePharma Executives Are Profiting From Covid Vaccine Press Releases
Who would have thought, a year ago, that at Thanksgiving 2020 the nation would be waiting with bated breath for pharmaceutical press releases? But as companies have released increasingly positive news...
View ArticleAmerica Is Run by Geezers
Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election by a margin that, though wider than originally feared, was narrower than feels comfortable in a country on whose stability the world depends. One reason...
View ArticleThe Democrats’ Maddening Cowardice Is Carrying Over into the Biden Era
The debate over how to characterize what the country’s been put through over the past three weeks will carry on for the rest of our lives. And Donald Trump’s waddle through the stages of grief is sure...
View ArticleGod Save America From “Checks and Balances”
It is an underrated source of dysfunction in our politics that too many people believe our system of government makes any sense at all. Even when we export democracy abroad (as in Japan after World War...
View ArticlePretty Soon There’ll Be Just One Big Book Publisher Left
America’s biggest, most powerful book publisher is about to get even bigger and more powerful. On Wednesday, a number of outlets reported that Penguin Random House had reached an agreement with...
View ArticleDo You Know Your Microsoft Productivity Score?
The workplace panopticon is coming home. The societal shift to work from home and Zoom-led education has been a boon for makers of digital surveillance software. Numerous apps now sell themselves as...
View ArticleHow Weird Was Frank Zappa?
In October 1978, in what remains one of the worst episodes in the program’s history, Frank Zappa appeared on Saturday Night Live. The rock musician and controversialist worked through a trio of musical...
View ArticleThe Policy Mess Behind the Thanksgiving Feast
Strip away the myth-making and genocide erasure, and American Thanksgiving is a simple harvest festival, celebrated in various forms by cultures all over the world and across human history. This year’s...
View ArticleIt’s a Perfect Year for a Non-Thanksgiving
It seems fitting that Thanksgiving would be canceled on this, the four-hundredth anniversary of the Mayflower’s voyage. It’s historic disease event piled on top of historic disease event. As David...
View ArticleHow “The Queen’s Gambit” Reimagined Chess
At long last, the game of chess is ready for its close up. Scott Frank’s show The Queen’s Gambit, based on Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel of the same name, is the Netflix breakout success of the year,...
View ArticleThe Supreme Court Has to Choose Between Trump and the Nation’s Founders
When is an immigrant not a person? According to President Donald Trump, it’s whenever the executive branch says so. The president has spent the past four years promulgating this idea for the purposes...
View ArticleHow Does Ben Smith Sleep at Night?
Let’s be honest: Ben Smith is the best media columnist The New York Times has ever had. He instantly surpassed his poor predecessor upon landing from BuzzFeed earlier this year. He has even eclipsed...
View ArticleThe Clapping Stopped, but the Risks to Health Care Workers Didn’t
At 50 years old, and with three kids, Brígida Vidal struggles to keep up with the mountains of dirty linen she is expected to sort through each day at the industrial laundry plant where she works in...
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The Elderly Trapped in Bronxwood
When someone in the building died, a notice was often taped to a window in the lobby: WE REGRET TO ANNOUNCE THE PASSING OF OUR FRIEND. The signs did not say how or where the friend had died, and...
View ArticleThe U.S. Is Addicted to Bad Middle East Policy
Last Friday, Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was assassinated, likely by agents of Israel’s Mossad and with the approval or assistance of the United States. Ostensibly a government...
View ArticleWelcome to the Pandemic Cliff
Members of Congress reconvened this week, facing a December 11 deadline to come up with a temporary spending bill to avoid a shutdown and increasingly dire pressure to pass some version of a stimulus...
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