Photo: iStock There’s a movement afoot in some quarters to get rid of the Electoral College, the institution that really elects the president of the United States. More often than not, the winner of the popular vote also wins enough electoral votes to gain the Oval Office. But in just the last 20 years, the Electoral […]
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Screengrab of the coffee cup. Image: HBO Forget the Iron Throne. The object that attracted the most intense scrutiny in the latest episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones was a disposable coffee cup casually placed in front of Emilia Clarke, who plays Daenerys Targaryen on the show. HBO copped to the sloppy mistake with the […]
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Isaac was 12 when he was taken. He and his 18-year-old sister Marie had been living in the Liberian bush for about a month, having left Kakata, a town just beyond the perimeter of the U.S.-owned Firestone rubber plantation, when Charles Taylor’s forces launched an attack on the nearby city of Monrovia in October 1992. […]
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On January 31, Rachel Maddow, the eponymous host of The Rachel Maddow Show, returned from a commercial break. In the previous segment, she had interviewed Betsy Woodruff, a Daily Beast reporter, who had written a story on alleged connections between the Russian government and the National Rifle Association. Before that, Maddow had conducted a friendly and knowing colloquy […]
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“Donald Trump is undermining the rules-based international order.” The Economist’s headline last summer summarized a common refrain within America’s foreign policy establishment. Trump “wants to undo the liberal international order the United States built,” Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution warned on Inauguration Day in 2017. Trump could “bring to an end the United States’ […]
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In August 2013, Mark Post, a professor of physiology at Maastricht University, held a press conference in a television studio kitchen in London. Lifting the silver lid from a platter, he revealed a creation that seemed very humble by culinary-TV standards: a round, palm-size patty of dark pink hamburger meat. But as Post explained, his […]
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Director Adam McKay (left) with Christian Bale (center) on the set of ‘VICE.’ Images courtesy of Annapurna Pictures Picture the scene: A criminal mastermind is preparing to carry out the most ambitious of bank robberies—for years, he has been quietly formulating a plan. To execute his heist, this guy carefully studied his target; he looked […]
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BuzzFeed set off a cascading series of controversies last week when it reported that President Donald Trump had “directed” his longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about a Trump Tower deal in Moscow that was being negotiated during the 2016 election. The immediate takeaway was that, if the report were true, then […]
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The opening scene in VICE—Adam McKay’s new movie in which Christian Bale becomes Dick Cheney—takes place on a country road in Wyoming after sundown. It’s the late 1960s. We’re following a car as it fishtails toward the blackened mountain skyline. Cheney, young, working as a utility pole repairman, is behind the wheel, piss-drunk. The tone […]
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In February, gunmen burst into the home of an investigative reporter in Slovakia and fatally shot him in the chest. In April, ISIS suicide bombers targeted the press corps in Kabul, killing nine people in a single attack. In June, a disgruntled reader entered the newsroom of the Capital Gazette in Maryland and gunned down […]
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Since reentering politics several years ago, Donald Trump has defined himself in opposition to a single figure: Barack Obama. He was the leading proponent of birtherism in 2011, and continued to promote the conspiracy theory publicly until 2015. (He reportedly has remained a birther in private.) Some believe Trump only decided to run for president […]
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Since reentering politics several years ago, Donald Trump has defined himself in opposition to a single figure: Barack Obama. He was the leading proponent of birtherism in 2011, and continued to promote the conspiracy theory publicly until 2015. (He reportedly has remained a birther in private.) Some believe Trump only decided to run for president […]
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Photo: Astrid Riecken (Getty Images) Remember that moment during Sen. John McCain’s funeral during which former President George W. Bush handed Michelle Obama a cough drop and the two exchanged a laugh? Well, on Wednesday, that moment played out again at the funeral of Bush’s father. As Dubya was greeting the distinguished guests in the […]
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Photo: Chip Somodevilla (Getty Images) Look at this shiftless and triflin’ fuck. Sitting in the front row of a funeral, with the world’s attention on him—hundreds of millions of eyes, perhaps—and he looks like a 6th grader whose parents dragged him to Les Miserables on ice. He’s the leader of the free world (shit), and […]
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Getty Image Michael Moore has never been one to be silenced — except just once: At the Academy Awards held in 2003. When the filmmaker and political activist won the Oscar for Best Documentary, awarded to his gun control opus Bowling for Columbine, his attempt to make a fiery anti-war speech was booed, prompting the […]
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The announcement last week that that political strategists Karl Rove and David Axelrod were co-teaching a MasterClass about “campaign strategy and messaging” elicited a soft groan from nearly everyone who knew what all those words meant. Rove was the chief campaign strategist for President George W. Bush, a.k.a. “Bush’s brain,” who acquired such a reputation […]
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In August 2008, just before the slow-moving financial crisis turned into outright panic, the secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson, traveled to the Summer Olympics in Beijing. At a private lunch with Chinese officials, he learned that members of the Russian government had been urging the Chinese to join them in selling off large portions […]
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Photo of Donald Trump by Joe Raedle/Getty Images; photo of Mitch McConnell by Chip Somodevilla/Getty When Senate Republicans (plus West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin) confirmed Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court over the weekend, it ended a fiery public battle that saw the Republicans accusing the Democrats of political sabotage when the latter took the […]
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The fight over Brett Kavanaugh’s White House records is producing one of the most contentious Supreme Court confirmation hearings in a generation. Thursday’s session began with Republican senators warning their Democratic counterparts that they could be expelled from the Senate for releasing documents marked “committee classified.” Their Democratic colleagues welcomed the confrontation. “Bring it,” Democrat […]
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At a memorial service for John McCain, cameras caught George W. Bush, the former Republican president who waged a needless war on Iraq that cost 288,000 lives, take a piece of candy from his wife Laura and discreetly hand it over to former First Lady Michelle Obama. Social media users were instantly smitten by the […]
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