Politics
Story Stream
In Defense of Tuning Out March 10, 2025
Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday was a total spectacle from both the president and his Democratic opposition. What’s the point of these speeches anymore? Politicians on both sides of the aisle acted like toddlers and Americans emerged less info...
Joan Didion, Movie Critic March 10, 2025
Writing a book about Joan Didion is a good way to discover that many people love her but far fewer people have read much of her work. In the five years since I started working on my book We Tell Ourselves Stories, I’ve surprised a lot of her admirers...
The Reading Life March 10, 2025
We live, largely, in a utilitarian world. This is not a state of affairs I welcome but it’s one, having survived the American educational system, I understand. Much of learning is framed in a fundamentally transactional way. What will this do for me?...
The Stabilization of Religious Decline Is a Big Deal March 07, 2025
It’s hard to overstate how transformative the past decade has been in American life. One need only to do a quick survey of the political and social landscape at the dawn of 2015.A decade ago, Bruce Jenner was still Bruce. The Supreme Court still allo...
Barbarians at the Gate March 06, 2025
Ten days or so ago, at the end of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, I found myself at a party. I’ve been to these sorts of things before, and more often than not they have been insufferable affairs: sweaty frat basements reeking of...
The Artificial Culture March 06, 2025
I'll start with a simple premise. If we now have direct evidence that the federal government was funneling millions of dollars into supposedly free market press organs (such as Politico, which has received federal subscription payments from agencies ...
What Ketamine Does to the Human Brain March 06, 2025
Last month, during Elon Musk’s appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as he hoisted a chain saw in the air, stumbled over some of his words, and questioned whether there was really gold stored in Fort Knox, people on his social-m...
Why Does Every Play Seem Political Now? March 05, 2025
IT’S ALWAYS BEEN a good argument starter to contend that all theater is political, even if the claim sometimes depends on stretching the definition of “political” to its vaguest outer limits. For one thing, unlike movies or television or books, theat...
The Perverse Reason We Can’t Resist 'The White Lotus' March 05, 2025
Who cares about The White Lotus? For at least eight years now, since the debut of Big Little Lies in 2017, HBO has been pumping out nominal satires of the ultra-wealthy. From the travails of the Monterey Five through Succession, Industry, House of th...
Just Another Liberalism? March 05, 2025
If critique could kill, neoliberalism would long be dead. So far, however, neither decades of intellectual opposition from the left and right nor the past decade of populist politics has done more than erode some measure of neoliberalism’s ideologica...
A Liberal Writer Fails to Do the Work March 05, 2025
Inspired by the anger she felt at the passing of her working-class grandfather, Disposable (America’s Contempt for the Underclass) by New York Magazine writer Sarah Jones, offers capsule summaries of the lives of several Americans and then accounts o...
Where Hannah Arendt Began March 04, 2025
Buried deep in Hannah Arendt’s archives in the Library of Congress are two typed and handbound books of verse—short, expressive, and written by Arendt herself. Few know that Arendt, the German Jewish political philosopher responsible for the dense pr...
Why Politics Kills Comedy February 24, 2025
Humour is a strange thing. Back when Christopher Hitchens was both alive and still playing his assigned role of Naughty Little Provocateur, he attracted some controversy over an article titled “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” But the truth is that most peop...
David Rieff Foretells the Fate of Woke February 24, 2025
Donald Trump’s relentless attempt to erase the slightest trace of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) – it used to be called “woke” – from American institutions has pushed DEI to the margins of a political conflict that is growing more intense by t...
The New Control Society February 24, 2025
Let me tell you two stories about the Internet. The first story is so familiar it hardly warrants retelling. It goes like this. The Internet is breaking the old powers of the state, the media, the church, and every other institution. It is even break...
Dylan’s Newport Performance Was a Great Political Drama February 24, 2025
Bob Dylan’s electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965 was to become, in Clinton Heylin’s words, “the most written about performance in the history of rock.” And not without cause. Dylan’s clash with the constituency from which he’d emerg...
Charles de Gaulle’s Legacy Offers Timely Lessons February 24, 2025
When Charles de Gaulle published the first volume of his war memoirs, in 1954, it looked like an acknowledgment that he no longer belonged to the present, but to history. His achievements during the Second World War were indeed historic. In June 1940...
The Rise of the New Romanticism February 21, 2025
There is a new Marvel movie out and no one seems to care. No one, of course, is an exaggeration, a provocation, since there are obviously human beings buying tickets to Captain America: Brave New World and a good number who are discussing or even lik...
The Rebel Campus Boosters Rising Up Against Wokeness February 20, 2025
In the plummy world of alumni relations, where distinguished graduates are awarded honorary degrees and major donors are fêted at the president’s mansion, it is virtually unheard of for former students to set up shop as a political counterweight to t...
Europe Has a Free Speech Problem February 19, 2025
Last week, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance shocked an A-list group of European political and military leaders at the Munich Security Conference in Germany with a blunt message: Europe has gone too far in restricting speech. According to Vance, the mai...
On the Clock February 19, 2025
It is an unusual thing for Hollywood to walk back across the ground that Steven hath trod. Whole subjects become untouchable once Spielberg folds up his director’s chair. The era of truly epic shark films began and ended with Jaws. No more boulders w...
Out on a Limb With Jeremy Strong February 14, 2025
When Jeremy Strong signed on to play Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witchfinder general Roy Cohn in The Apprentice—a man who maintained a full-body tan year-round, collected ornamental frogs, and taught Donald Trump everything he knows about attacking, de...
The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now February 11, 2025
A generation on from the fall of the Soviet Union, the intellectual and political class in the democratic world still fails to grapple with the totalitarian episode that upended civilized life and politics for most of the twentieth century. That fail...
Give the NEA Back to the Public February 10, 2025
For decades, Americans have become increasingly alienated from the American arts establishment. The main source for their discontent is clear: Academics and their allies have successfully insisted upon first modernism, then postmodernism, and finally...
James Madison, Game Theorist February 06, 2025
At least since Edmund Burke, the right has looked askance at mixing mathematics and politics. The French revolutionaries and philosophes, with their elegantly geometric counties and their 10-hour days and their Year Zeroes, were trying to squeeze the...
