Do 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...
View ArticleHow Trees Made Us Human
Chicago, in 1871, was alive to the giddy possibilities of modernity. The city had shot up from a flat expanse of grasses and wild garlic plants nearly overnight. In 1830, it had possessed a population...
View ArticleHow to Cover a Normal Cabinet
President-elect Joe Biden promised a return to normal on the campaign trail. His early picks for Cabinet and other high-level administration positions have, in their own way, delivered on that promise....
View ArticleWhy Joe Biden Can Stop Worrying and Start Spending Like Crazy
The last four years have seen no shortage of irony, but it still spins your head to think that the incoming administration might turn out to be more fiscally conservative than the last one. Ted...
View ArticleThe Problem With Putting a BlackRock Alum in Charge of Greening the Economy
This week, the Biden campaign is expected to announce officially that it’s tapped former Obama adviser and current BlackRock executive Brian Deese to head the National Economic Council. The appointment...
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Wong Kar-wai’s Masterpieces of Political Uncertainty
A green young tailor’s assistant is summoned to see a high-flying prostitute. Their encounter lasts a few minutes, but his ensuing fixation on her is permanent. That’s a good investment on her part: He...
View ArticleThe Most Unpardonable Presidential Power
President Donald Trump took a break from undermining American democracy last week for a symbolic errand of mercy: granting a ceremonial pardon for two turkeys, Corn and Cob, in a televised White House...
View ArticleAmerican Military Supremacy is Not Inevitable
The country with the most powerful military in the world likes to pretend it has no choice in the matter. If the United States didn’t maintain order, the story goes, disorder would prevail. But as...
View ArticleTranscript: Questioning U.S. Military Primacy
A transcript of Episode 21 of The Politics of Everything, “American Military Supremacy is Not Inevitable”Laura Marsh: Today, the United States has the most powerful military in the world. It has more...
View ArticleThe Girlboss Feminism of Joe Biden’s Cabinet
To date, the Biden-Harris administration has named 17 women to top posts, some of them firsts, many of them contingent on Senate confirmation. Heading in the direction of gender parity in hiring has...
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