The Paranoid Style of America in a Pandemic
Last week, as I waited in the social-distance line outside a medical pot store on Martin Luther King Boulevard in Fayetteville, Arkansas, I overheard two men in front of me talking. Both, like me, were...
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The Hollow Politics of Minimalism
In 2009, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus were childhood friends living in Ohio and working hard toward achieving the American dream. They had corporate jobs making six figures, suburban...
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Woody Allen’s Memoir Is Shrouded in Secrecy. Why?
It takes a long time to make a book. Publishers generally trumpet projects upon the acquisition of a manuscript or the signing of a deal. So when on March 2 of this year, Grand Central Publishing, an...
View ArticleGo for the Jugular, Joe Biden
It can no longer be said that Joe Biden is missing in action. Over the course of the last week, the Biden campaign, sensitive to criticism from progressives and bafflement from political reporters, has...
View ArticleImagining a Better Life After the Coronavirus
Last week, I posed an admittedly taboo question to my followers on Twitter: “Is anyone enjoying this? Any parents, in particular? Are there any ways your life is better in this situation?” I was...
View ArticleGermany Gets It
Emergencies clarify. At an interpersonal level, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed our values and assumptions, the state of relationships, our judgments of responsibility and risk. Politically, it...
View ArticleSunderland ’Til I Die Is TV’s Best Show About Failure
In the movies, underdog sports teams always come from gritty, struggling, preferably postindustrial places. Major League wouldn’t work if it were set in Miami, instead of Cleveland. Rocky’s...
View ArticleThe U.S. Military Can Barely Protect Itself From the Coronavirus
At the Naval Academy, officers-in-training memorize “The Laws of the Navy,” a many-lined poem by a Victorian English admiral that prescribes teamwork, obedience, and prudence at all times. “Dost think,...
View ArticleThe Next Pandemic Could Be Hiding in the Arctic Permafrost
In the summer of 2016, a heatwave washed over Europe, thawing permafrost in the north. In the Arctic soil of Siberia, bacteria began stirring—anthrax, to be specific. The thawing, shifting ground...
View ArticleThe Emerging Right-Wing Vision of Constitutional Authoritarianism
The Atlantic, a magazine for which I once worked, recently teamed up with the National Constitution Center for a series entitled “The Battle for the Constitution.” The project draws upon a wide range...
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A Fragmented Novel for the End of the World
I know a lot of people who think we are teetering on the edge of an apocalypse. This possibility feels so close, in fact, that many of the jokes about it have already worn thin from overuse. When is...
View ArticleLearning to Love the Mask
I never much liked the mask. What I used to think of as the “sanitary mask”—with all the fussy, germophobic implications that clinical word entails—is ubiquitous in the places where I and members of my...
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Grim Reapers
After two months of refusing to face the true proportions of the coronavirus pandemic head-on, President Donald Trump sought to reassure panicked citizens—and financial markets—in an address to the...
View ArticleThe Devastating Clarity of a Pandemic
The first of the month has come and gone. For many people in this country, the anxiety that the day usually brings was compounded by the nationwide pandemic that’s upended life as we know it. Rent,...
View ArticleDisinvestment Made Our Cities a Powder Keg in a Pandemic
On a sunny Saturday in March, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said he was horrified to find people were still gathering in city parks. “It’s insensitive, it’s arrogant, it’s self-destructive, it’s...
View ArticleDeath Industry Predators Eye the Spoils of a Pandemic
It’s hard to look at Robert Waltrip, the 89-year-old founder and chairman emeritus of death-care giant Service Corp International and not see a striking resemblance to Henry Waternoose, the CEO of the...
View ArticleJoe Biden Is Wasting a Crisis
A genuine national emergency has broken out in a presidential election year. The Trump administration’s handling of that emergency has been disastrous, beginning with its glaring failure to track and...
View ArticleThe Enduring Delusion of a Chastened Trump
“I just spoke to our great General [James] Mattis, just now,” Donald Trump said near the end of his first State of the Union address back in 2017, “who reconfirmed that—and I quote—‘Ryan was a part of...
View ArticleThe States Are Stepping Up
During the early days of the coronavirus crisis, President Donald Trump couldn’t make up his mind about the governors who were closing schools, banning large gatherings, and shutting down businesses...
View ArticleThe Pandemic’s Shameless Profiteers
To treat the Black Death, some doctors in the Middle Ages recommended ingesting “potable gold,” a vile tonic of gold compounds dissolved in ether. One might think that we had progressed past such bogus...
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