Tag: Magazine

The Terrifying Global Reach of the American Anti-Abortion Movement

With the House controlled by Republicans, the Senate by Democrats, and an election looming, there is virtually no chance either bill will become law. Editar Ochieng didn’t tell her parents about her rape and pregnancy and didn’t go to a hospital. The stigma of abortion was too great, she told me, noting that even songs […]

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The Exvangelicals Searching for Political Change

In an evangelical upbringing, McCammon notes, there is an overwhelming emphasis on what a person truly believes. Of her sister’s infant dedication, she writes, “In our belief system, while my sister’s dedication was important, it was only a symbol. For us, the central question was what we believed in our hearts, not whether we’d participated […]

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Trump’s Cabinet of Horrors

You can’t blame the big fella for having been less than impressed with figures like Health Secretary Tom Price or Veterans Affairs chief David Shulkin, both of whom, because of ethical scandals, had resigned by the time Trump and I spoke. It was never supposed to be an administration of Prices or Shulkins. But just […]

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However Cool

However cool X may have thought he was made very little difference in the end. We are transformed as we approach the close. Everyone is subject to these laws. Ozymandias collapsed in sand, however cool he may have thought he was. We live in structures—marriage, job, or house—steered steadily toward an unknown land,slyly transfigured as […]

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Hide and Seek

I’m going to die before you return, he wanted to write her, becoming an authority on suffering, of wanting to share some of it with those he loved. Not unkindly, but to dilute the deepened passion that hid half exposed in him, like a young child behind a tree, impatient to continue the game, of […]

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Percival Everett Is Messing With You

Everett’s revisionist approach begins with the thick dialect Twain used for his Black characters, which along with that damnable N-word has been an impediment to contemporary readers’ appreciation of Huckleberry Finn. It turns out, in Everett’s telling, that the minstrel-show patois (“I doan’ hanker for no mo’ un um,” Twain’s Jim says to Huck, which […]

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Frantz Fanon’s Conflicted Vision for Decolonization

One of the more provocative elements of Shatz’s account is the suggestion that a residue of republican universalism, overlaid with existential and Marxist universalisms, left Fanon with a lasting “defiance of identity’s claims.” Fanon was, of course, well aware of the hypocrisies lurking within high-flown rhetoric of equality, and disdainful of naïvely color-blind ideologies that […]

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Has Zionism Lost the Argument?

Upward of 40 years ago, I was a chanich, a camper, at Moshava, a sleepaway camp. Mosh was the mid-Atlantic outpost of Habonim (now Habonim Dror), a progressive Jewish youth movement devoted to creating, as its website states, “a personal bond and commitment” to Israel. If my own biggest takeaway from the experience was a fondness for […]

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The Suburbs Made the War on Drugs in Their Own Image

Even as Prohibition failed, President Herbert Hoover stubbornly applied the same approach to the trade in narcotics, which soon became a robust source of income for organized crime, as bootlegging had been. In June 1930, Hoover appointed former railroad detective and Prohibition agent Harry Anslinger commissioner of a new Federal Bureau of Narcotics. This as […]

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Don’t Panic, Democrats!

Wolbrecht sees in the Swifties-will-reelect-Biden mania the kind of dismissive attitudes toward women voters—portraying them as shallow and flighty—that date back to the days of the suffragist movement. “It seems to me,” she said, “that the kind of person who won’t vote for Biden over Gaza won’t say that on one hand there is a […]

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The Hot New Luxury Good for the Rich: Air

Luxury markets have developed in other parts of the world with poor air quality, too. For Wired, Akanksha Singh described the “pay-to-breathe” economy in India, where air-filtered spaces are accessible only to affluent people. In China, the sociocultural anthropologist Victoria Nguyen reported, underground bomb shelters have been converted into communal breathing areas, while wealthier Chinese […]

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Try To Keep Up With Ed Park’s Conspiracy-Laced Epic

The second chapter leaves behind the high-concept science fiction of the first, and we enter an entirely different story stylistically, set in another world and time and with another set of fonts. The man who will turn out to be the novel’s main character, Soon Sheen, is Park’s most likely alter ego in the sort […]

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Ed Park’s Korean-American Epic Blends Conspiracy and History

The second chapter leaves behind the high-concept science fiction of the first, and we enter an entirely different story stylistically, set in another world and time and with another set of fonts. The man who will turn out to be the novel’s main character, Soon Sheen, is Park’s most likely alter ego in the sort […]

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The Israeli Settler Movement’s Ugly Postwar Plans for Gaza

At all points it is taken for granted that fewer Palestinians—not counting those already slain—will live in their homeland once the Israelis are through with them. To call this “moral and humane” or a “voluntary migration” smells of pre-emptive self-defence against the shackles of international law. But you can trust the settlers and their allies […]

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Resolved: The U.S. Should Stop Growing Tobacco

According to a WHO report, “More than 90 percent of the world’s tobacco is grown in low- and middle-income countries, mostly by smallholder farmers who need to use unpaid family labor to make ends meet, leading to child labor.” As the market penetration of cigarettes continues to shrink among adults worldwide, the big tobacco companies […]

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Democrats and the Phantom Menace of Woke Politics

The story starts promisingly enough, with an argument reminiscent of Judis’s recent work on populism: Neoliberal economic policy has been a disaster for working-class America, and the weakening of institutions like organized labor that once tied working-class people closely to the Democrats has left the party scrambling to find ways to appeal to voters, when […]

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Democrats and the Distraction of Woke Politics

The story starts promisingly enough, with an argument reminiscent of Judis’s recent work on populism: Neoliberal economic policy has been a disaster for working-class America, and the weakening of institutions like organized labor that once tied working-class people closely to the Democrats has left the party scrambling to find ways to appeal to voters, when […]

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Inside the Last Days of the Local Paper

Last August, police in Kansas executed questionable search warrants on the offices of the Marion County Record, a weekly newspaper that has been publishing since 1869, along with the homes of the publisher and a local city councilwoman. At issue was how the paper obtained a local businesswoman’s driving record, which revealed the woman had […]

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The State Department Is Still Pale, Male, and Yale

“Secretary Blinken’s commitment to diversity is unprecedented,” a State Department spokesman told TNR in a statement citing numerous advances and programs. “The State Department’s approach to [DEI] has been cited by the Chief Diversity Officers Executive Council as a model for other federal agencies…. The Secretary’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion (S/ODI) has, and continues […]

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Mr. Attorney General, Tear Up That Memo

Rachel Maddow, in an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross concerning Maddow’s 2020 book, Bag Man, which recounted Agnew financial misdoings while in office, offered a view of how the effort to distinguish President Nixon’s liability to impeachment from Vice President Agnew’s might have turned out differently. Prosecutors, she recounted, went through an elaborate choreography to […]

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Who Said It: Rudy Giuliani or Barry Zuckerkorn?

Rudy Giuliani is a fascist, a creep, and a pathetic, craven, evil little man. He’s also a truly terrible and incompetent lawyer. He shares the last quality (and a proclivity toward perversion) with Barry Zuckerkorn, the Bluth family’s defense attorney on Arrested Development. See if you can tell which moronic lawyer said what.

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Why Do We Know So Little About the Womb?

Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began by Leah Hazard Buy on Bookshop Ecco, 336 pp., $29.99 Of course, there were downsides, too. Internal gestation didn’t just reshape our reproductive organs, but pulled in the immune system and the metabolic system, too. As we became placental mammals, Bohannon writes, “the entire female body […]

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The New Science of the Womb

Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began by Leah Hazard Buy on Bookshop Ecco, 336 pp., $29.99 Of course, there were downsides, too. Internal gestation didn’t just reshape our reproductive organs, but pulled in the immune system and the metabolic system, too. As we became placental mammals, Bohannon writes, “the entire female body […]

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Warn Voters About the Radicalism Beyond Trump

Another amendment takes dead aim at all federal regulation since 1937 and civil rights and environmental policies since then. It would obliterate the “administrative state,” the bugbear of the hard-right coalition. The measure would in short order end fair labor standards, antitrust enforcement, environmental protections, safeguards for workers who choose to unionize, civil rights on […]

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Just Say It, Democrats: Biden Has Been a Great President

Wake up and show some gratitude. You wanted student loan forgiveness. You got it, for three million borrowers. You wanted a president who would finally pass gun safety legislation. You got the most comprehensive bill in nearly 30 years, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which passed with the support of 15 Republican senators and 14 […]

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Don’t Just Defend Choice. Play Offense Over It.

Voter frustration with abortion bans has run hot in state and local elections and has propelled backlash at the ballot box. Abortion rights ballot measures have enjoyed a clean sweep of victories across seven states. Blowouts in blue states have been reinforced by double-digit wins in reliably red states from Kansas to Ohio. In a […]

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Needed: An Unprecedented Pitch to Voters of Color

America’s electorate should continue to grow 3 to 4 points less white with each presidential election moving forward. According to 2008 exit polls, white voters made up roughly 74 percent of the electorate that year. If Democrats are able to generate turnout among voters of color, the electorate should be around 65 percent white in […]

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Resolutions

Stop playing catch-up with the new generation. Spend less money. Say: I love you, too. Transcribe events without distortion. Tell the lifeguard to teach me the flip-turn. Question not, Where, when, how? Bake bread, put on an album, turn off the cable news. Cherish those who choose honesty over flattery. Ignore plate-lickers, sycophants, and opportunists— […]

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