Trump’s Misguided, Jingoistic War Against TikTok
On August 6, President Donald Trump signed two executive orders declaring that the popular apps TikTok and WeChat “threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”...
View ArticleThe Nikola Scandal Is a Cautionary Tale About Green Tech’s Gauzy Promises
“There’s very few people that can out-Elon in this world, and I’m one of them,” said Nikola Motor founder Trevor Milton earlier this summer. Milton’s 35 percent stake in the hydrogen-electric vehicle...
View ArticleConservatives Are Already Whitewashing the Trump Years
Jesse Helms did not keep secrets. This is about the kindest thing that could be said about the still-steaming legacy left by the longtime senator from North Carolina, but it is and has always been...
View ArticleThe Promising New Covid-19 Therapy You Probably Haven’t Heard About
When President Trump announced an emergency use authorization for convalescent plasma as a “historic” and game-changing treatment for the coronavirus last month, experts were baffled. Although plasma...
View ArticleWhy We Can’t Ignore McConnell’s Hypocrisy
Stop the presses! Mitch McConnell has a nonsensical explanation for why his insistence that the Senate confirm a replacement for the late Justice Ruth Ginsburg six weeks before Election Day does not...
View ArticleWendell Willkie’s World Without Borders
On a brisk morning in late August 1942, Wendell Willkie—a corporate lawyer, failed presidential candidate, and media darling—got onto an airplane for a trip around the world. Soon, he’d be holding...
View ArticleTV Race Fables and the Privilege of a Raging Class
Once, in the mid-1980s, I was invited by a black undergraduate student group at Yale to lead a fireside discussion in one of the residential colleges. I was bemused to learn that the group had planned...
View ArticleThe Accelerating Attack on Trans Student Athletes
Last October, the Supreme Court heard three cases that argued that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination on the basis of sex, includes discrimination against people on...
View ArticleFour New Justices, No Matter What
The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the most influential Supreme Court justices of all time, is first and foremost a cause for national mourning. But it is also a political opportunity. The...
View ArticleWe’ll Never Know the Pandemic’s True Toll on the Working Class
The single most important thing to understand about the coronavirus pandemic so far is that it has not affected everyone the same. (Though if you are the president, you could start with acknowledging...
View ArticleWhat a Defiant Democratic Party Looks Like
On Friday night, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death shocked an already reeling country. What came next, however, was sadly unsurprising. Mere hours after Ginsburg’s passing, McConnell...
View ArticleIs Defector the Future of Media?
When the staff of Deadspin resigned en masse last fall, it felt like the end of an era of online journalism. The fun internet—best embodied by the old Gawker Media sites and The Awl—was gone, undone by...
View ArticleThe Strangely Persistent Myth of the Suburbs
While Democrats pin their electoral hopes on turning wealthy suburbs blue, Donald Trump tells “Suburban housewives” on Twitter that Joe Biden will “destroy” their “American dream.” But who are suburban...
View ArticleHow to End the Judicial Wars, Once and for All
There are two great losses in Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death. First and foremost among them is the person herself. The 87-year-old justice was a tireless and formidable figure in American law—an...
View ArticleMiranda July Takes on the Rigged System
Two closing parentheses, a “less than” sign, a “greater than” sign, then two opening parentheses: ))<>((. Anyone who has seen Miranda July’s 2005 feature debut, Me and You and Everyone We Know,...
View ArticleMcConnell Will Sacrifice Anything to Fill Ginsburg’s Seat—Even His Senate...
I promised myself that I wouldn’t make predictions in 2020. I would write about what I wanted to happen, or what I feared could happen, but I would not play the game of definitively saying what would...
View ArticleImmigrant Street Vendors Are Feeding Others to Feed Themselves During the...
On an evening in late September at Corona Plaza, an open-air commercial hub in Queens, the bachata blaring from a Boost Mobile competes with the noise of trains clattering overhead; kids on scooters...
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The Case for Calling Climate Change “Genocide”
Alberta holds one of the world’s most ravaged regions. In the north of the Canadian province, a vast sprawl of industry the size of Florida has been erected to haul tar sands from beneath the forests,...
View ArticleCorporate America Is Irrationally Enthusiastic About Carbon Capture
Between 2010 and 2018, the Department of Energy poured $5 billion worth of research and development funding into carbon-capturing technologies, which aim to extract the greenhouse gas from power plants...
View ArticleThe Forgotten Feminists of the Backlash Decade
We don’t tend to think of the 1990s as a high point for feminism. It was the decade of Jesse Helms and Jerry Falwell, of Operation Rescue and Focus on the Family, of super-skinny supermodels and highly...
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