And yet Baconi does not allow himself the pat comparison of likening his move to London—that is, his escape after coming out and realizing that he will not be able to become who he wants to be, should he stay—to forced migration. Mapping the twists and turns of his self-analysis, he writes: “It is easy […]
Read More
Early last year, polls and media commentary suggested that crime would be the defining issue of the New York City mayoral race. Then, Zohran Mamdani’s campaign started to take off. By the end of the race, the news organizations that conduct exit polls asked voters to choose the top issue animating their votes among these […]
Read More
Janet Mills, the 78-year-old moderate who has served as Maine’s governor since 2019, is staid and a little boring—which is exactly why, last fall, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee pushed her to run against progressive upstart Graham Platner in the state’s Senate primary. Mills was reasonably popular and polled well against Susan Collins, the Trump-enabling […]
Read More
If all politics is spectacle in the era of Donald Trump, few episodes illustrate this more vividly than that created by Republican governors who bused asylum-seeking immigrants from their states into Northern cities during Joe Biden’s presidency. Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida ensured that in the run-up to Trump’s 2024 reelection […]
Read More
When the cop cars’ spotlights roved the bankwhere we’d been skinny-dippingall those years ago we ducked into the field,lay parallel in a furrowto wait them out. My arm brushedyours. That much I recall. Our nakednessbright against the spinning darkof that wind-tossed field. And though the past still springs uplike a Swiss Army blade,I see us […]
Read More
A fourth and final answer has to do with Biden as a communicator. His heart was in this fight. He just wasn’t a forceful articulator and promoter of these ideas. Heather Boushey, who served on the Council of Economic Advisers for the entire Biden term, told me: “There were too many times, as I traveled […]
Read More
Recent polls show approval of Donald Trump hovering in a deep unlit trough around 40 percent. Yet his dismal ratings have done little to bolster the reputation of the opposition party. Commentators across the political spectrum have overwhelmingly agreed that the Democratic brand is shot. The American Prospect called it “damaged.” NBC said it was […]
Read More
What gives the book its bite is its reading of “Putnam from the left.” In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000), the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam traced how the decline of community groups and civic ties in the United States had produced an atomized polity. For Putnam, writing in and […]
Read More
Borrowers most likely to be in default are the working- and middle-class Americans who have little room in their budgets. As of September, the Education Department warned that 5.3 million borrowers were in default. A survey by the Institute for College Access and Success found that 42 percent said they were making trade-offs between paying […]
Read More
Hong Kong’s pro-democracy newspaper, Apple Daily shut down after authorities used the national security law to arrest its top editors. Readers lined up to buy the final edition on June 24, 2021. Kyle Lam/Bloomberg/Getty Media outlets such as Apple Daily and Stand News were raided, and their editors were convicted in the first sedition cases […]
Read More
As is the case with so many tech platforms, Netflix has simply re-created twentieth-century technology for the digital age, and made it worse. In truth, Netflix is a global television company. As America’s go-to provider for low-level, mass entertainment, the streamer is no different from any of the major broadcast networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, and […]
Read More
John Le Carré, who died in 2020, apparently had an idea for the second season of The Night Manager. According to Simon Cornwell, le Carré’s son, after the first season’s success, the author sent a note to producers with a few ideas sketched out for where and how a sequel might emerge. Cornwell, who is […]
Read MoreSome of these young women—part of a corps of thousands of young Mormons on assignment around the world, including the church’s own headquarters—sport U.S. flags, but on a recent weekday evening most did not, instead wearing flags from Malaysia, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and South Korea, among others. As these international arrivals converge on Salt […]
Read MoreGirls Play Dead: Acts of Self-Preservation by Jen Percy Buy on Bookshop Doubleday, 272 pp., $29.00 These weren’t, perhaps, “normal” reactions, but what is normal about being raped—except that it is horrifyingly and statistically commonplace? In the United States, someone is sexually assaulted every 74 seconds; a rape is reported every 4.1 minutes. That some […]
Read MoreMeanwhile, Larson made her case to the cameras. At a July 7 press conference, she labeled the protest “a planned ambush with the intent to kill ICE corrections officers.” Johnson County District Attorney Timothy Good, a Liberty University law school graduate who had recently ousted a 32-year Republican incumbent, also expounded the case to the […]
Read MoreThe credit card companies countered by developing more secure chip and “tap-to-pay” features, and by loading credit cards onto cell phones. Adoption of the new technology was initially slow, but demand skyrocketed during the Covid pandemic as customers sought contactless forms of payment, especially at grocery stores, the most difficult type of retail establishment to […]
Read MoreKraus’s third person provides enough distance between author and protagonist to allow a reader to forget, if they happened to already know, that she, too, was born in the Bronx, moved to Connecticut as a child, and went to high school in Wellington. But once the novel’s second section picks up, we are squarely back […]
Read MoreBorn Equal is on firmer ground in narrating the ways antebellum anti-slavery politicians hewed closely to the Constitution. To his credit, Amar doesn’t argue that the original Constitution was inherently anti-slavery. Instead, he maintains that, despite its many pro-slavery features, it had just enough Easter eggs for future anti-slavery politicians to utilize. The Adams family—beginning […]
Read MoreShortly after the raids on Home Depot parking lots and car washes began in L.A., civil and immigration rights groups filed a lawsuit accusing the administration of racially profiling Latino people. Notably, a federal judge ordered the government to stop, and arrests dropped dramatically. The Supreme Court eventually ordered a pause on that temporary restraining […]
Read More
Carol: What do you love about them?Larry: Everything. Your books are an expression of you, and we love you.Carol: Need you to be more specific. Character arcs, plot turns …Larry: Oh, yes, yes, we love the character arcs and the plot turns …Carol: Which ones?Larry: All of them. Understandably, this exchange makes Carol suspect that […]
Read More
Unlike her contemporary Louise Bourgeois, whose work often explicitly depicted motherhood as a bodily passion play, Asawa rarely made motherhood the subject of her work. Rather, motherhood was its amniotic fluid: As curator Helen Molesworth has memorably put it, her lobed sculptures, with their forms-within-forms, connected and continuous, have a “fetal energy.” As Troeller discusses […]
Read More
Now compare that with Miller’s twin claims that if you “import the Third World, you become the Third World,” and that electing Biden would represent the “assisted suicide of Western civilization.” The United States is steward and inheritor of this disappearing civilization: Miller recently declared that “our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to […]
Read More
ICE has also turned on those residents who dare document and track them across the city. On October 20, reported The TRiiBE, a local independent news site, an attorney named Scott Sakiyama, who had been following immigration agents in his car, was detained by them at gunpoint. Sakiyama had defended a man who had faced […]
Read More
Hamnet is the director’s first period piece, and while the glancing, magic-hour lyricism of the cinematography (by the excellent Łukasz Żal, who shot The Zone of Interest) connects it to its predecessors, Mescal’s and Buckley’s performances exist in a new register. Instead of trying to penetrate the hardened exteriors of amateur actors—or coaxing an old […]
Read More
Seeing the astonishing innovations in painting of the time encouraged Stein, who was already writing fiction, to experiment more radically in her own work. Cézanne, she later remembered, “gave me a new feeling about composition … it was not solely the realism of the characters but the realism of the composition which was the important […]
Read More
One point that everyone from conservatives like Krikorian to immigrant activists can often agree on is that more resources should be put into enforcement of existing labor laws, particularly laws against worker misclassification. But policymakers at every political level are hesitant to do anything that would act as red tape and slow down new construction. […]
Read More
It may be a pedantic distinction, but Davis tends to exclusively reach for the term “police violence” even when he is talking about, say, retaliatory prosecutions or judicial bias. U.S. courts and district attorneys’ offices are also weighted in favor of the status quo, but not in exactly the same way the police are; Davis […]
Read More
The ordeal was a sign of things to come. Since Trump took power, his administration has waged a multifront war on its ever-growing list of political enemies. In July, Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBB, repealed much of the Inflation Reduction Act’s nearly $400 billion worth of climate- and energy-related grants, tax incentives, […]
Read More
The Kremlin, staking most of Russia’s economy to the military, can, for now, afford to mass-produce and waste its drones, particularly its variants of Iranian Shaheds, at scale. Shaheds, which are essentially slower, smarter, and cheaper missiles, are launched without fear of waste. Frequent swarms of Russian projectiles have turned all of Ukraine into a […]
Read More
From there, things moved quickly. In the winter of 1895, Lowell returned to Boston, where he delivered four lectures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He proclaimed that “the telescope presents us with perhaps the most startling discovery of modern times—the so-called canals of Mars.” He urged that the canals were, in fact, evidence of […]
Read More
The Kremlin, staking most of Russia’s economy to the military, can, for now, afford to mass-produce and waste its drones, particularly its variants of Iranian Shaheds, at scale. Shaheds, which are essentially slower, smarter, and cheaper missiles, are launched without fear of waste. Frequent swarms of Russian projectiles have turned all of Ukraine into a […]
Read More