In his newsletter Old Goats, Jonathan Alter paid tribute to Charlie Peters, the founder of The Washington Monthly: “In a world of received wisdom, Charlie was a genuinely original thinker, with a mind that forged ores of common sense into a brilliant alloy of skepticism and idealism.” (Peter Magnusson, Chico, Calif.) In The Wall Street […]
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I’ll be glued to the TV on Thursday for the debate between Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California on Fox News. (Not a plug.) It will pit a conservative Republican against a liberal Democrat, a one-time outfielder for Yale against a one-time pitcher for Santa Clara University, a fighter against […]
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Ten finance guys are drinking in a bar. Nine of them are Masters of the Universe — wheeler-dealers who make many millions of dollars every year. The tenth is what Gordon Gekko, in the movie “Wall Street,” called a “$400,000-a-year working Wall Street stiff.” Then the stiff leaves for a while, maybe to answer a […]
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Could President Biden and Donald J. Trump really be locked in a close race among young voters — a group Democrats typically carry by double digits — as the recent Times/Siena polls suggest? To many of our readers and others, it’s a little hard to believe — so hard to believe that it seems to […]
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As a local, I ought to hate anything in New York that draws a crowd. In theory, this includes the tree at Rockefeller Center. Once the tree’s lights are switched on — this year, that first happens Wednesday night, just before 10 p.m. — the plaza becomes an unholy gridlocked mob of sightseers, shoppers and […]
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In The Times, Dwight Garner noted how little a certain conservative cable network has been affected by the revelations of its bald fictions and blatant exaggerations: “Fox News, at this point, resembles a car whose windshield is thickly encrusted with traffic citations. Yet this car (surely a Hummer) manages to barrel out anew each day, […]
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It’s Thanksgiving tomorrow. At this time of year I usually thank you, my readers, for all your support, and I am once again grateful for that this year. As always, it is a privilege to be able to email you. I am also thankful for all of the ways that Interpreter subscribers are an active […]
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Do abortion and democracy matter to voters? If you look at the results of New York Times/Siena College polling, the answer often seems to be “not really.” Around 40 percent of voters agreed that Donald J. Trump was “bad” for democracy in our latest poll. Only around a quarter said that issues like democracy and […]
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People are going to be talking about the blowup at OpenAI for years. ChatGPT itself — a product of OpenAI — could not have concocted a tale as wild as the one that unfolded over the weekend. OpenAI’s board of directors fired a co-founder, Sam Altman, as chief executive officer on Friday, saying he was […]
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By the usual measures, last year’s midterm polls were among the most accurate on record. But in harder-to-measure ways, there’s a case those same polls were extraordinarily bad. Poll after poll seemed to tell a clear story before the election: Voters were driven more by the economy, immigration and crime than abortion and democracy, helping […]
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In the summer of 2008, I helped raid a hospital. As I’ve written before, I was deployed as a JAG officer (an Army lawyer) with the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment in Diyala Province, Iraq. Diyala was in the midst of a wave of suicide bombings, many of them carried out by women, that was brutal […]
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Joe Manchin III, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, has been one of the Senate’s most consistent and strident defenders of fossil fuels — except for one crucial vote. That contradiction was on full display last week when Manchin announced he would not seek re-election. His decision will have far-reaching consequences, making it more difficult […]
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In a recent essay about aging in The Washington Post, Anne Lamott fashioned one memorable sentence after another: “Getting older is almost like changing species, from cute middle-aged white-tailed deer to yak. We are both grass eaters, but that’s about the only similarity.” “Some weeks, it feels as though there is a sniper in the […]
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This week, following the guilty verdict in the Sam Bankman-Fried trial, I’ve had scammers on my mind. It’s tempting to cast scam artists as supervillains: they lie, cheat, and hurt innocent people while hiding in plain sight. There’s something darkly compelling about watching someone discard the rules and norms that limit the rest of us, […]
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If you’re looking to reconcile the surprisingly strong Democratic showing in the midterm elections with President Biden’s weakness in the polls today, consider the political attitudes of two groups of respondents from New York Times/Siena College polls over the last year. First, let’s consider the 2,775 respondents from Group A: It’s relatively old: 31 percent […]
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In The Dispatch, Chris Stirewalt observed: “House Republicans continually swapping out leaders while failing to advance the policies of the voters who elected them is a pretty tight analogy for American politics as a whole this century. The car is rusting out through the floorboards and the engine is seized up, but we’re debating who […]
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It has been an intense couple of weeks here at Interpreter HQ. “India’s Daughters,” the special newsletter series that I created with my colleagues Emily Schmall and Shalini Venugopal Bhagat, premiered last week. There will be a new chapter on Friday, and you can catch up with the first installment here if you missed it. […]
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In 2022, according to F.B.I. numbers, there were 370 violent crimes reported for every 100,000 Americans. Even allowing for some underreporting, this likely means there was less than one violent crime for every 200 people. So the great majority of Americans haven’t been victims lately, or probably ever. What this implies is that public views […]
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Nearly every day, there is confounding news to make us question whether the world is pushing hard enough to transition away from fossil fuels. Yesterday, Chevron announced a $53 billion acquisition of a midsize rival, as Big Oil consolidates and doubles down on the bet that fossil fuel demand will continue to increase. But if […]
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Up until a few weeks ago, no member of the House Freedom Caucus had ever gotten close to becoming House speaker. After Jim Jordan’s bid, it’s hard not to wonder whether a right-wing speakership might be a matter of when and not if. Yes, Mr. Jordan fell short of winning the gavel three times. But […]
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Electric vehicle sales are booming, and an effort is underway to blanket the country with new charging stations. But despite all that, the nation’s E.V. infrastructure is not ready for prime time. I recently found this out the hard way. I’ve been renting electric cars ever since Hertz started offering Teslas as an option a […]
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Andy Ayers of St. Louis recommended another passage in The Times, from Peter Beinart’s effort to envision some peace and progress following that slaughter: “It will require Palestinians to forcefully oppose attacks on Jewish civilians, and Jews to support Palestinians when they resist oppression in humane ways — even though Palestinians and Jews who take […]
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Once put in place, though, these types of changes are difficult to roll back, said Paul Hill, the founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. Schools don’t work like businesses — beta testing a particular practice, looking at the results and moving forward based on the outcome. Instead, these types of realignments can become […]
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The instant I understood the scale of Hamas’s attack on Israel, I understood the probable response. As I read reports of Hamas terrorists murdering entire families, raping Israeli women beside the bodies of their dead friends and dragging Israeli hostages into Gaza, it was apparent that Hamas had chosen to behave like ISIS, and if […]
Read MoreI’m not exactly optimistic about human nature. Yes, I certainly believe that human beings are capable of great good, but consider me in agreement with the Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton, who wrote that the doctrine of original sin was “the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” Or, to quote a more […]
Read MoreSeveral teachers whom I spoke with or who responded to my questionnaire mentioned policies stating that students cannot get lower than a 50 percent on any assignment, even if the work was never done, in some cases. A teacher from Chapel Hill, N.C., who filled in the questionnaire’s “name” field with “No, no, no,” said […]
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Pay attention to your partner’s reaction. When one person is bristling, both people need to examine their roles in the scenario, Howard said. If you repeatedly encounter bristles when you make a move, it might be time to change up your tactics and “read the room,” she said. Approaching while your loved one is cooking […]
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At the same time, a competent Republican Party could make a strong case that the Biden approach itself has hamstrung Ukraine — by providing stepped-up aid slowly, often after weeks and months of Ukrainian pleading. Ukraine would likely be in a substantially better position if it had received F-16s, Abrams tanks and ATACMS missiles sooner, […]
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In Vanity Fair, Carl Hiaasen put Trump and DeSantis side by side: “Some claim Trump has a better sense of humor, but it was DeSantis who appointed a Jan. 6 rioter to the state board that oversees massage parlors.” (Sue Jares, Los Angeles) In The Times, Pamela Paul examined the embattled House speaker: “As Kevin […]
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At last week’s Climate Forward event, I asked Bill Gates how he offsets his own substantial carbon footprint. Gates mentioned paying for direct air capture, funding heat pumps and installing solar panels. He also told me what he wasn’t doing. “I don’t use some of the less proven approaches,” he said. “I don’t plant trees.” […]
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With the benefit of hindsight, there was one big winner of the first Republican presidential debate: Donald J. Trump. He has gained more support in the post-debate polls than any other candidate, even though he didn’t appear onstage last month. He’s up 3.5 percentage points in a direct comparison between polls taken before and after […]
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