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How Succession Skewers the Rich
The second season of Succession, HBO’s darkly funny drama about billionaire tycoon Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and his restive, grown-up children, opens with an episode called “The Summer Palace,” even...
View ArticlePramila Jayapal’s Vision of Power
In July, in the midst of messy negotiations to send billions in emergency funding to the border, a fight over the future of the Democratic Party bubbled into view. For months, Democrats had been...
View ArticleThe Also-Rans Hoping for a New Hampshire Miracle
Amy Klobuchar sat on a couch Saturday afternoon amid the used-paper-plate debris of her skybox in a hockey arena after a long day at the New Hampshire Democratic convention. The three-term Minnesota...
View ArticleThe Right Wing’s Cultural Civil War Is a Drag
A little over a week ago, seven people were killed during a shooting spree in Midland-Odessa, Texas. It was August’s third high-profile mass shooting—following attacks that killed 31 in Dayton, Ohio...
View ArticleThe Tragedy of Trump Diplomacy
After 18 years of war, the United States had a fighting chance at ending the longest continuous conflict in its history. A deal was within reach with the Afghan Taliban. Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S....
View ArticleTwo Dans, Two Elections, and No Winners
Meet Dan. Dan is in favor of increasing the ballooning military budget. He likes Medicaid expansion, but isn’t so hot on this Medicare-for-all deal. He’s a solar energy entrepreneur, so he’s in favor...
View ArticleRemember Trump’s Charlottesville Comments? Conservatives Don’t.
Joe Biden often reminds audiences that President Donald Trump once said the white supremacists who marched around Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us” were “very fine people.” But in...
View ArticleThe Trump Organization’s Hostile Takeover of the U.S. Government
Last year, I proposed that Congress eliminate the risk of pay-to-play corruption posed by President Donald Trump’s sprawling business empire by nationalizing the Trump Organization. Only by placing the...
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The Mysteriously Enduring Appeal of Friends
My friend Molly had her first baby about a month ago. She watched Friends in the hospital during labor. Then she took her baby home, where she watched more Friends—the entire last five seasons, to be...
View ArticleWhat Christine Blasey Ford Said
It has only been one year since Christine Blasey Ford appeared on Capitol Hill and for a time was the focal point of national attention, as one of the newly visible faces of the #MeToo movement. But...
View ArticleFiring John Bolton Doesn’t Make Trump a Pacifist
Nothing about Donald Trump’s contentious Tuesday tweet-firing of National Security Advisor John Bolton was hugely surprising. Bolton, a prickle of a man notorious for his whiskery affect and...
View ArticleHow Greedy Hospitals Fleece the Poor
The pundit class collapsed back in its chair last week, exhausted and spent, from a furious wonk-off session over Bernie Sanders’s rhetoric on medical bankruptcies. The Washington Post’s in-house...
View ArticleThe Democrats’ Shameful Legacy on Crime
A week before he swept the South on Super Tuesday in 1992, Bill Clinton held an event in Stone Mountain, Georgia, the site of the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915. His campaign had gathered dozens...
View ArticleFashion Week’s Labor Problem Is Our Labor Problem
In 1990, supermodel Linda Evangelista famously told a reporter that she wouldn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000. That same year, at the very height of what would become known as the golden age of...
View ArticleThinkProgress Was Always Doomed
The site ThinkProgress, long a stalwart among left-leaning news organizations, was shuttered last week by its owner, the Center for American Progress (CAP), who laid off the remaining members of the...
View ArticleAmazon Is a Logistical Disaster
The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, is undoubtedly the most anticipated book of the year. In order to have copies on hand for the book’s September 10 on-sale...
View ArticleLiberalism Is at a Crossroads, Not a Dead End
This summer was a useful study in contrasts for American politics. The American left spent the last few months debating the merits of Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and other policy initiatives...
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The Remaking of Susan Sontag
“I have always liked to pretend my body isn’t there,” Susan Sontag once wrote. But no matter how hard she tried, it never went away. She was stunningly inattentive to her physical self—surprised by her...
View ArticleKamala Harris Gets Slightly Less Tough on Crime
In this Democratic primary, it can be difficult to distinguish between the candidates’ various criminal justice reform proposals—but at least they have them. Finally, maybe, Democratic presidential...
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Inside Trump’s Border Chaos
On a weekday morning in early June, Ruben Garcia arrived at the Casa Oscar Romero building leased by Annunciation House, the hospitality center that he founded and that has served the indigent and...
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