North Carolina Sends Democrats a Wake-Up Call
When it comes to North Carolina politics, there’s not much left to say, and yet there is everything to shout.Tuesday night, right-wing Republican Dan Bishop claimed the 9th district over moderate...
View ArticleA Hypocrite Accuses Elizabeth Warren of Hypocrisy
What would happen if we did not open the newspaper to find an op-ed written by an old, aggrieved white man who has turned his rage about some personal slight against him into a column? Even setting...
View ArticleJoe Biden Doesn’t Seem to Understand Health Care
If we are going to keep having these grim circuses that we call debates, and begin each one with an extended segment about health care, it would be nice if we could stop asking the same questions again...
View ArticleSanders and Warren Plot Their End Run Around the Senate
Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren agree on many things, at least when compared to their fellow candidates. But Thursday’s debate included a quick moment that highlighted how they diverge in...
View ArticleIt’s Not That Hard to Have a Substantive Exchange About Global Warming
The third Democratic primary debate, at least for the first 90 minutes, wasn’t half-bad. The candidates were asked surprisingly tough questions by the ABC debate moderators, challenged to defend the...
View ArticleSecond Tier in Top Form at Democratic Debate
Thursday’s Democratic debate was billed as a kind of battle royal. The first four nights of debates? They were preseason. Now, at long last, the ten leading candidates would appear on the same...
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The Water Wars Are Here
Everyone remembers the scene in Chinatown when Jack Nicholson almost gets his nose sliced off, but many do not recall what the dispute was about. It wasn’t drug smuggling or gun running that got...
View ArticleWhat the Press Gets Wrong About Primary Debates
The morning following a Democratic debate is like waking up after a loud cocktail party and trying to piece together the discordant images from a long night. You recall Bernie Sanders, true to form,...
View ArticleJulián Castro Is Not Here to Make Friends
For all the plans and white papers the Democratic presidential candidates have released—for all of the vigorous back and forth between the field’s progressives and moderates on health care, climate,...
View ArticleDemocrats Are Trapped in Trump’s “Deep State” War
The ongoing contretemps between President Donald Trump and the intelligence community forces a dismal and daunting question: Whose side must be taken in a power struggle between a legion of...
View ArticleThe Case for a Public Option for the Drug Industry
Under siege from thousands of lawsuits from federal, state, and local governments for its role in the deadly opioid addiction crisis, drug manufacturer Purdue Pharma reached a tentative settlement with...
View ArticleSchrödinger’s Impeachment
It’s one of the most famous thought experiments ever devised. “A cat is penned up in a steel chamber,” the physicist Erwin Schrödinger wrote in a...
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The Blood-Dimmed Tide
It’s the year 2100. The nationalist ideology popularized by Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Boris Johnson has not only retained its hold on industrialized nations, but also expanded amid conditions...
View ArticleThe Curse of Osama Bin Laden
Five years before masterminding the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, Osama bin Laden laid out his strategy in a declaration of jihad “against the...
View ArticleIT: Chapter Two and the Great American Tradition of Selling Native Spirituality
There’s laziness, there’s racism, and there’s lazy racism. About 45 minutes into IT: Chapter Two, which remained atop the box office last weekend, the three-hour movie reveals it’s aiming for the...
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How Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Novel Reckons With the Past
Eight years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an essay in The Atlantic asking why so few black people studied the Civil War. Coates noted that he himself had only recently become an avid reader of Civil War...
View ArticleThe NRA Is Not a Domestic Terrorist Organization
The National Rifle Association (NRA) may be dedicated to armed self-defense, but the organization itself is largely indefensible. NRA leader Wayne LaPierre, who billed the group for his luxury clothing...
View ArticleJonathan Safran Foer on Our Moral Obligation to Eat Better
At the United Nation’s climate conference in Poland last year, I sat around a dinner table with a group of Polish forestry experts, environmental journalists, and two climate deniers—female radio...
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The Obscure Newspaper Fueling the Far-Right in Europe
In 2017, Stefanie Albrecht, an investigative reporter for German broadcaster RTL, was in the midst of what would become a prize-winning investigation of Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party...
View ArticleEdward Snowden’s Novel Makeover
Edward Snowden’s new memoir, Permanent Record, wasn’t eagerly anticipated. That’s only because hardly anyone had heard about it before Snowden’s publisher, Macmillan, announced in August that it would...
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