Oligarch of the Month: The Sacklers
Not so long ago, the Sackler name was stamped across the most rarified perches in Manhattan—in the psychobiology department at Columbia University, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and at the Museum...
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On Amazon, a Show About Modern Love
Modern Love is based on the long-running New York Times column of the same name. The show is a collaboration between the Times (once called a newspaper, now a font of all manner of content) and Amazon...
View ArticleThe Easiest Impeachment Inquiry of All Time
President Donald Trump had a pretty bad week. Multiple current and former officials defied his defiance of the House’s impeachment inquiry to give damaging testimony about his Ukraine scheme. Rudy...
View ArticleChasing Court-Packing Could Derail Democrats’ Big Plans
The 1936 election was a stunning victory for the Democrats. President Franklin D. Roosevelt routed Republican Alf Landon, winning the popular vote by 24 points and all but two states in the Electoral...
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The Transformation of Condé Nast
Condé Nast was actually a person—a fact that might come as a surprise to readers who know the name only from the magazine publishing corporation, a company so monumental that it’s practically...
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Moments Without Truth
Six months ago, when I first started writing this piece, things were simple. I wanted to write about The Discourse—the loose set of reflexes and affronts that function as the invisible lingua franca of...
View ArticleIndian Country Deserves a Better Hero Than Richard Nixon
You only need one hand to count the number of American presidents who could be considered vaguely positive, progressive partners for Indian Country.Most of those lauded for defining the upper limits of...
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The New MoMA Is More of a Good Thing
The Museum of Modern Art was born almost a century ago, though it wasn’t until the 1930s that the place had a building to call its own. Edward Durrell Stone and Phillip L. Goodwin’s handsome edifice...
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The Forgotten Christian Terror Cult That Presaged Trump’s Memes
Last Christmas, I found myself alone, stoned, and poolside at the Trump National Doral Miami wearing a “Fake News” T-shirt under a fluffy white Trump robe. Before the noon checkout, I’d gone to catch...
View ArticleCould Betsy DeVos Cost Trump the Election?
In 2016, Darrin Camilleri was 24 and teaching at a Detroit charter school 20 miles from where he grew up, when Michigan lawmakers took up a measure to implement more rigorous oversight of the city’s...
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The White Cliffs of Brexit
The small, seaside town of Dover, where little more than 30,000 people live, has an outsized significance in Great Britain’s national psyche. The sprawling eleventh-century castle that overlooks the...
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Deborah Levy’s Time Warp
Deborah Levy’s The Man Who Saw Everything begins with a subtle instant of subversion. It is September 1988 and a 28-year-old man named Saul Adler has come to London’s Abbey Road to have his photo taken...
View ArticleIndigenous Voters Need a Reason to Care About Canada
Canada voted Monday to elect its new prime minister and House of Commons. The Liberal party lost the majority it had enjoyed the past four years but managed to maintain a minority advantage over the...
View ArticleBill Barr’s First Epistle to the Heathens
Attorney General Bill Barr is a busy man these days. When he’s not personally traveling to Italy to investigate bizarre conspiracy theories about the 2016 election or ending the de facto moratorium on...
View ArticlePicturing the Future
A few years ago, cops raided the home of a teenager in Brooklyn and arrested him for posting a sequence of emoji on Facebook. Two officers on patrol had recently been killed in the borough, and...
View ArticleThe Last Stand in Lordstown
Chuckie Denison has retired from General Motors, and the auto plant where he worked, in Lordstown, Ohio, has been shuttered since early March. But lately he’s been showing up there nearly every night,...
View ArticleWhy Do Pundits Love the Unity Myth?
Pete Buttigieg’s surge in the polls—if you can call rocketing to fourth place in Iowa a “surge”—has been built on a simple narrative: He alone can unite a divided country. Buttigieg has warned...
View ArticleThe Weapons America Is Leaving Behind in Syria
Less than a week after President Donald Trump formally ordered the U.S. military to withdraw the majority of its forces from Syria, the Pentagon carried out an unusual mission in the northeastern part...
View ArticleJoe Biden’s Individual Mandate Madness
The Democratic Party needs to be saved from itself, or at least from its tendency to retreat into the gauzy nostalgia of the past. It’s understandable, here in the hourly news deluge of President...
View ArticleThe Senate Has No Good Reason To Acquit Trump
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is preparing for the first impeachment trial of a president in two decades. There are plenty of details to work out, but the overarching structure will likely be...
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