Elections
Story Stream
The End of the End of Men January 17, 2025
The patriarchy died in its sleep sometime during Obama’s first term. Or so goes the argument of The End of Men, a 2012 polemic that’s being revisited in the wake of the election. As Donald Trump aggressively courted young men on his way to victory, t...
The Troubled Upbringing Trend January 17, 2025
It is fitting that Vice President-Elect J. D. Vance, having overcome a difficult upbringing himself, helped Rob Henderson with his drafts of Troubled, a memoir about Henderson’s improbable path from a troubled childhood in California to recently comp...
How to Win an Election Against the Communists January 17, 2025
Today's guest is near and dear to my heart. It's my dad, Diego Ruiz. For the record, my dad and I recorded this in person, and we both had the same cold, which you may be able to hear. At some point, you may also hear my son in the background, which ...
Public Life Beyond Politics January 16, 2025
What is public life? In the leadup to the election, the evangelical author Nancy Pearcey tweeted out an appeal for pastors to be more political. Those who do not preach politics, she argued, offer “a privatized Christianity.” At a major conservative ...
It Can’t Just Be DOGE January 10, 2025
President-elect Donald Trump’s return to Washington will surely bring with it a renewed focus on the administrative state and its excesses. Exemplifying that effort is the much–media–maligned Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, headed by El...
Will Video Kill the Audio Star in 2025? January 02, 2025
What was the big story of podcasts in 2024? If you ask outside observers of the industry, they might say Joe Rogan and the manosphere, particularly as we roll off the so-called podcast election. But when it comes to the community itself, another answ...
What We’re Reading to Start the New Year January 02, 2025
Last July, during the British general election in which the Labour Party ousted the long-ruling Conservative government in a landslide, I picked up “The Line of Beauty,” by Alan Hollinghurst, which I’d somehow neglected to read in the two decades sin...
The Ex–Tennis Stars Grinding It Out on the Pickleball Tour January 01, 2025
If you were one of the estimated 40 million people who picked up a pickleball paddle in the U.S. in 2024 and wanted to catch a little inspiration by watching its top athletes dink their way to glory, you might have ventured to Dallas, Texas, to atten...
How to Fight Tech Censorship October 16, 2024
The news that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign pressured X, formerly Twitter, to censor journalist Ken Klippenstein has reignited the controversy over tech censorship in terms that replicate, almost word for word, what transpired four years ago w...
The Plot to Manage Democracy October 16, 2024
What T. S. Eliot said of humankind, that it “cannot bear very much reality,” must be doubly true for Americans. It’s a feature of being a providential nation, protected by two oceans and mostly spared the harsher existence that habituates other socie...
Election 2024: Boys vs. Girls October 15, 2024
“If you come up to me and tell me you’re a Trump supporter, like, I’m not even gonna associate myself with you,” said 19-year-old Lamia during a series of focus groups I observed for young people split by gender in Philadelphia last month. Like the o...
The Year Without a Summer October 15, 2024
There’s a poem called “Darkness” by Lord Byron that’s been on my mind lately. To explain why that is, I have to first tell you about the eruption of Mount Tambora. Before I do either of those things, I should say why any of this is relevant.With hurr...
Even in Her Memoir, Melania Trump Remains a Mystery October 14, 2024
Back in 2012, some years before her husband, Donald Trump, was elected President of the United States, Melania Trump tweeted a picture of a beluga whale, its glistening white head emerging from the water, its toothy maw open in a half grin. “What is ...
The Spy Who Lied to Us October 11, 2024
Between 2017 and 2019, just about the only story Washington cared about was whether Donald Trump would be nailed by the Justice Department for treason. After all, he had worked with Vladimir Putin and his cronies to win the White House, hadn’t he? An...
The Poet October 09, 2024
I've had my galley of Michel Houellebecq's Annihilation for at least four months now; I've been able to stare at the tentative publication date of 10-8-24, thinking about when I'm going to get around to writing this review.There's something in Houell...
Hannah and Her Resisters October 09, 2024
One of the greatest beneficiaries of Donald Trump’s 2016 election was Hannah Arendt—or at least, her literary estate. In the first year of Trump’s presidency, sales of Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism soared by 1,000 percent. New editions of ...
Chappell Roan Got Too Famous Too Fast October 02, 2024
On September 28, the summer of Chappell Roan began its inevitable turn to fall. In a “Weekend Update” segment on Saturday Night Live, Bowen Yang appeared as Moo Deng in a bit comparing the viral hippo’s plight to Roan’s own complaints about inappropr...
In Presidential Elections, the Past Can Be Prelude May 02, 2022
American elections from more than 100 years ago may not offer much of a guide for the best digital-outreach strategy or how much money a campaign needs to raise, but the old adage “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” is as ...
History and the Road to 2024 April 22, 2022
The single most predictive factor for midterm election results is a sitting president's approval rating. According to the RCP Average, President Biden's current approval rating has dipped below the previous all-time low he recorded in November of 202...
The Man in the Middle of Georgia's Elections April 01, 2022
Secretary of state races in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and other states could prove pivotal to the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. Stakes have never been higher, in part due to the role played by Brad Raffensperger of Georgia in the 2020 pr...
The Decline of the American Election March 28, 2022
The latest installment of an ongoing interview series with contributing editor Mark Bauerlein. Hans von Spakovsky joins the podcast to discuss his book, Our Broken Elections: How the Left Changed the Way You Vote. The conversation is embedded below. ...
America's 'New' Permanent Campaigns March 21, 2022
This is the era of the "new" permanent campaign, says author and pollster Michael D. Cohen. The idea comes from a term coined by Jimmy Carter's pollster (and later Trump whisperer) Pat Caddell. Weeks after helping guide Carter to victory in the 1976 ...
What Does it Take for Democrats to Win? March 11, 2022
In today’s fast-paced news cycle, it can be hard to remember what happened last week, let alone decades ago. Michael Kazin’s "What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party" describes the party’s development as a force for advancing the inter...
Has the Left Changed the Way You Vote? January 04, 2022
Over the last year, the debate over elections and voting rights has been poisoned by name-calling and conspiracy theories, distracting from the legitimate issues concerning America’s large and complex election system. That the U.S. is a union of 50 s...
Perfecting Humanity by Destroying It November 02, 2021
This challenging and intense book offers a road map to understanding the deep roots and structures of utopianism in our culture, and how, in modernity and in the post-modern era, these tenacious roots have attached themselves, like a cancer, of poten...
