Trump Owns a Government Shutdown. So What?
On Tuesday, on live television, President Trump took ownership of a potential government shutdown over his demand for $5 billion in border wall funding. “You want to know something? I’ll take it,”...
View ArticleThe Criminal-Justice Reform Bill Is Both Historic and Disappointing
Congress is on the brink of a first for the Trump era: the passage of a major piece of bipartisan legislation. It may also be the last.Lawmakers have wrangled for five years over criminal-justice...
View ArticleJust Hold Another Referendum
Rousseau did not believe that representative democracy was democratic. “The people of England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of...
View ArticleEscape From the Trump Cult
On December 20, 1954, some 62 years before Donald Trump would be sworn in as president of the United States, Dorothy Martin and dozens of her followers crowded into her home in Chicago to await the...
View ArticleEnter Stumbling, Stage Right
Even by Brexit’s shambolic standard, this week has been a doozy. First, on Monday, a member of parliament incensed by the delayed Brexit vote seized the chamber’s seventeenth-century ceremonial mace,...
View ArticleRobert Mueller’s Legal Masterpiece
It’s been 18 months since Robert Mueller took over the Russia investigation, and still nobody really knows what he’ll do next. The Daily Beast reported on Thursday morning that the special counsel’s...
View ArticleTrump Is Undoing Much More Than Obama’s Legacy
Since reentering politics several years ago, Donald Trump has defined himself in opposition to a single figure: Barack Obama. He was the leading proponent of birtherism in 2011 and continued to promote...
View ArticleIs It Ethical to Post Pictures of Your Kids on Instagram?
In France, a child can sue her parents for posting pictures of her on Instagram. On any social media network, in fact, it is the responsibility of the French parent to protect a child’s image. The...
View ArticleThis Is As Good As It Gets for Joe Biden
Joe Biden is feeling so good about his 2020 chances, he’s already thinking about a running mate. Last week, the Associated Press reported that Biden’s advisers have discussed the possibility of teaming...
View ArticleHow American Right-Wingers Are Driving Britain Toward a Hard Brexit
The popular perception of Brexiteers as lacking a rational vision—as being motivated, rather, by naïve and nostalgic fantasies—is widespread. In November, the London Times published an illustrative...
View ArticleBeto Will Have to Defy History to Win the White House
Beto O’Rourke is running, or so it increasingly seems. After coming closer to winning statewide office than any Texas Democrat in decades, the three-term congressman from El Paso acknowledged that he...
View ArticleImagine Trump’s America With Australia’s Severe Defamation Laws
The #MeToo movement has toppled dozens of prominent men in American society over the past 18 months. Some other English-speaking countries, however, have only seen modest or muted reckonings. As...
View ArticleThe Story Behind Roma
Latin America’s poor, black, and indigenous women perhaps best understand what it means to be marginalized. Although one in four wage-earning women in the region are household workers—around 18...
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Lobbyists Are Feasting in Trump’s Swamp
Let’s say Washington is a swamp, as Trump calls it. Then lobbyists are the gators, and strong ethics rules are the fence that keeps Americans from getting bit. In President Donald Trump’s swamp, the...
View ArticleTrump Is Being Exposed for the Grifter That He Is
The Donald J. Trump Foundation was an audacious grift, even by the standards of its namesake. Charitable foundations are supposed to operate under a simple premise: They receive certain tax exemptions...
View ArticleEverything Is Possible in Mary Poppins Returns
Disney’s Mary Poppins Returns, the feverishly anticipated sequel to the 1964 original, is incandescent. In the opening scene, the camera looms above the flame of a street lamp, just before Jack...
View ArticleTrump Is Outsourcing the Migrant Crisis to Mexico
In late November, a group of migrant women from Central America stood outside the Enclave Caracol community center in Tijuana, and announced the beginning of a hunger strike. They would not eat, they...
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How to Survive Howard Hughes’s Hollywood
Karina Longworth’s long-running podcast about classic movies, You Must Remember This, sets out to tell the “secret, and/or forgotten history” of Hollywood in its much-mythologized golden age. Her new...
View ArticleBen Is Back, Beautiful Boy, and Hollywood’s New Obsession With Drug Abuse
When we say that a movie or a book “romanticizes” a harmful activity, we usually mean that it irresponsibly makes drug use or violence seem like something that the viewer might also like to do....
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Fighting Authoritarianism, One Mass at a Time
In Kinshasa’s Saint Joseph parish on an August afternoon, a crowd gathered to give thanks: The man they had risked their lives to oust was stepping down from the presidency. Just a week earlier,...
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