Tag: May 2024

The Racist Origins of America’s Broken Immigration System

Despite Trump’s repeated and explicit promises to target Muslim immigration on the campaign trail, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in 2018’s Trump v. Hawaii that the third version of the policy—which functionally suspended immigration from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and North Korea, with some restrictions on Venezuela thrown in to further muddy the waters—was […]

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Keith Haring and the Art of Being Everywhere

Bill T. Jones, the Black choreographer whose nude body Haring famously painted in 1983, noted that Haring “loves people from a class lower than his own” but seemed incapable of meeting the emotional demands of such a disparity. Haring and Dubose separated in 1985, partly because Dubose was using heroin and cocaine. He’d “lost his […]

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The 10 Types of Dems Who Will Decide the 2024 Election

Head-in-the-Sand Democrats: This rare breed takes its inspiration from Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss, who believed that “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” That’s a hard doctrine to follow for 2024, but you have to admire these oblivious Democrats for trying to maintain a smiley face. In their view, Trump cannot […]

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Can We Become a Country of “Joiners”?

We also talk about how clubs are the place where people learn civic skills. It’s associations where we practice how to run a meeting, give a speech, plan an event, organize a protest, resolve tensions, recruit collaborators, spread ideas, build bridges, and gather and wield power. There have been many explanations for the broad atomizing […]

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25 Political Influencers to Watch in 2024

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner, that lavish, storied fundraiser held every April at the Washington Hilton to honor journalists covering the capital, confers on its deep-pocketed attendees the implicit assurance that they belong among the powerful. Buy a ticket, and between your terrine of jumbo lump crabmeat and your foraged wild mushroom ragout you will […]

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The Liberating Frankness of the Divorce Memoir

Reading the grisly details of other people’s fractured intimacies can be perversely fascinating, though in this case also disquieting, because C’s identity is no secret. And because, as Jamison explains in a brief paragraph, she’s agreed with C’s request not to write about his child from his first marriage. In other words, there was another […]

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AI and the End of the Human Writer

In this notion of distributed intelligence, there is something both democratizing and destabilizing—a sneaky but egalitarian mode of murdering the author. Tenen insists, though, that we shouldn’t agonize too much over the source of intelligence. Who cares if our thinking is closer to the synthesis of LLMs, rather than the divinely ordained originality held dear […]

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Yes, Joe Biden Can Win the Working-Class Vote

Canvassers travel door to door engaging with residents who are neither strong Democrats nor strong Republicans. “We are organizers, and that is different than being a communicator in the political space,” Matt Morrison, Working America’s executive director, explained to me. “Every conversation starts with, ‘What issue is most important to you and your family?’” The […]

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The Crisis

Each must act for his or her own reasons. The windfalters at nightfall but there’s fury in dry leaves. Vehemence of a dream no one can rememberleaches into statistics. Flora will leave for France.Jill stays indoors and won’t answer texts or email.Henry oils a Glock. Duane calls Jesus. Father gulps a red pill. With a […]

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The Feeling Is Mutual

So is the road, the vehicle, the painted line, the shoulder. So are the clouds, the gaps between, the labor below, the trenching, the depth and what we worked and what we found. So is the time it took to strike bedrock, to step on the shovel, dig the spade, to forge the ditch, to […]

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Judith Butler’s Reckoning With The Right

Where Butler’s earlier work focused on the potential for liberation, their new book is more concerned with understanding these fears. A lot of the relief that people feel reading Gender Trouble, for instance, comes from changing the relationship between their body and their identity, and being able to imagine that relationship changing over time. Conversely, […]

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My Weird Night With RFK Jr.’s Most Devoted and Deranged Supporters

The weirdness of Kennedy’s base—Reagan Republicans and environmentalists holding hands with anti-vaxxers—makes it difficult to assess precisely what type of spoiler he is. With RFK on the ballot, a March Harvard CAPS-Harris poll found, Trump’s lead increases over Biden by 1 point. Trump scored 44 percent to Biden’s 37 percent, while Kennedy raked in 18 […]

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I Spent a Weird, Unsettling Night With RFK Jr.’s Die-Hard Supporters

The weirdness of Kennedy’s base—Reagan Republicans and environmentalists holding hands with anti-vaxxers—makes it difficult to assess precisely what type of spoiler he is. With RFK on the ballot, a March Harvard CAPS-Harris poll found, Trump’s lead increases over Biden by 1 point. Trump scored 44 percent to Biden’s 37 percent, while Kennedy raked in 18 […]

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