The Pinnacle of Trump’s Foreign Policy Stupidity
For the better part of a decade, America’s main base of operations for its military occupation of Iraq was a cluster of bases and old Saddam Hussein–era palaces surrounding Baghdad International...
View ArticleJohn Roberts: Bemused Spectator of American Democracy
Every December 31, Chief Justice John Roberts releases his annual year-end report on the federal courts. It’s a unique opportunity for him to speak not as a member of a nine-person court but as the de...
View ArticleAbortion Without Roe
Earlier this week, 207 members of Congress asked the Supreme Court to revisit Roe v. Wade and take up the question of whether it “should be reconsidered and, if appropriate, overruled.” The amicus...
View ArticleThe Democrats’ Gutless Response to Trump’s Airstrike
One of the early signs that the United States had assassinated Iranian major general Qassim Suleimani on Thursday night came from President Trump’s Twitter account, which posted a low-resolution...
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Everyone Wants to Be a Bank
In 2011, when I lived in Milwaukee, the only job I held for more than a couple days was working the lunch rush at a gyro cart downtown. I was paid $60 a day plus tips, all in cash. One day, in an...
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A Man in Full
Joe Biden has been through impeachment before.Not the oversexed and overhyped Bill Clinton variety, but the real 1974 Richard Nixon smoking-gun version. And for Biden, these were moments that...
View ArticleDonald Trump’s Quiet Christmas Gift to the Kleptocrats
Nearly two decades ago, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the then doughy dictator of Kazakhstan, came hat in hand to the George W. Bush White House, desperate to make a deal. The post-Soviet strongman had a...
View ArticleRepublicans Want to Make White Grievance Genteel Again
According to a certain type of Republican, the party has lost its way under President Trump. This is the foundational premise of the self-styled Never Trump Republican but also reliable fodder for...
View ArticleMike Pompeo Is the Most Dangerous Man in the World Right Now
When the United States bombed its own former air base in Baghdad to kill Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s revered Middle East paramilitary commander, just before Friday prayers last week, the pretext was that...
View ArticleTrump’s Next Impeachable Offense is Nigh
President Donald Trump threatened to commit war crimes against Iran over the weekend, less than one week after he ordered the killing one of its top military commanders in an airstrike in Baghdad. The...
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How Democrats Abetted Trump’s Bloated Border Regime
In the Trump era, two interrelated agencies—Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection—have together generated some of the standout horrors of the president’s border and...
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Why Diversity Training Isn’t Enough
If you’ve consumed liberal media at any point over the last two decades or so, you’re likely aware of the growing attention to (and outrage over) the lack of racial diversity in: Hollywood movies,...
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An Animal’s-Eye View of Mass Extinction in Progress
In 2019, Netflix’s Our Planet was widely praised for pushing the limits of the nature documentary genre. Instead of artfully depicting wild animals and glossing over the threats they face, Our Planet...
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Why We Can’t Sleep Is a Portrait of Gen X at Midlife
The journalist Ada Calhoun opens Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis with the note, “You’re not just imagining it, and it’s not just you.” It’s less a dedication than a cri de coeur....
View ArticleAustralia’s Infernal Denial
It was in spring that the frightening laugh of the idiot arrived for Rimbaud. Australia’s own season in hell reached its pinnacle of stupidity a little later. Bushfires had broken out across the...
View ArticleHuman Trafficking Courts Are Not a Criminal Justice “Innovation”
New York state’s court system considers its Human Trafficking Intervention Courts—special courts sold as an alternative to jail for women facing prostitution charges—to be a national model for such...
View ArticleIran Has Not Abandoned the Nuclear Deal
As the Trump administration bumbles its way into a new security crisis with Iran, you may have gotten the impression from apocalyptic media coverage and viral social posts that Tehran has decided to...
View ArticleThe Military Views Poor Kids as Fodder for Its Forever Wars
In my high school in rural North Carolina, a plastic table was set up just off to the side of the atrium where we all congregated after lunch every day. Behind that pamphlet-strewn table was a man in...
View ArticleWhat the Media Is Getting Wrong About Soleimani’s Killing
What was the strategic goal of Donald Trump’s decision to assassinate Iranian general Qassem Soleimani? This is, on its face, a silly question. Trump’s initial public comment was a low-resolution image...
View ArticleOur Frightening Moment Was Years in the Making
We are one week into the 2020s and the last year of Donald Trump’s first term, which will see both the third-ever impeachment trial for an American president and an election that is already wracking...
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