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Erik Tarloff

Erik Tarloff is a novelist, screenwriter, and journalist.
  • Meg Whitman's Campaign Spots

    • Erik Tarloff
    • February 17, 2010
  • Classical Cadenzas

    • Erik Tarloff
    • February 9, 2010
  • Citizens United

    • Erik Tarloff
    • January 24, 2010
  • Sundays

    • Erik Tarloff
    • January 17, 2010
  • The Loyal Opposition

    • Erik Tarloff
    • December 27, 2009
  • Health Care

    • Erik Tarloff
    • November 23, 2009
  • In Memoriam Soupy Sales

    • Erik Tarloff
    • October 30, 2009
  • A Few Words About Coughing

    • Erik Tarloff
    • October 29, 2009
  • Eyes on the Prize

    • Erik Tarloff
    • October 9, 2009
  • Close Listening

    • Erik Tarloff
    • October 5, 2009
  • For Larry Gelbart

    • Erik Tarloff
    • September 13, 2009
  • The Unbearable Stupidity of Authoritarianism

    • Erik Tarloff
    • September 2, 2009
  • In Memoriam, EMK

    • Erik Tarloff
    • August 28, 2009
  • Lockerbie Compassion

    • Erik Tarloff
    • August 20, 2009
  • Political Sex Scandals

    • Erik Tarloff
    • August 11, 2009
  • Coup in Korea

    • Erik Tarloff
    • August 4, 2009
  • The Rehearsal

    • Erik Tarloff
    • August 1, 2009
  • And the GOP...?

    • Erik Tarloff
    • July 26, 2009
  • UCB RIP

    • Erik Tarloff
    • July 22, 2009
  • Previous

Books

  • The Man Who Wrote the Book
  • Face Time

Most Popular

  • Collage of Trump, Capitol building, Supreme Court, and Insurrectionists
    Jon Key

    Donald Trump Is Out. Are We Ready to Talk About How He Got In?

    Ta-Nehisi Coates

    “The First White President,” revisited

    I’ve been thinking about Barbara Tuchman’s medieval history, A Distant Mirror, over the past couple of weeks. The book is a masterful work of anti-romance, a cold-eyed look at how generations of aristocrats and royalty waged one of the longest wars in recorded history, all while claiming the mantle of a benevolent God. The disabusing begins early. In the introduction, Tuchman examines the ideal of chivalry and finds, beneath the poetry and codes of honor, little more than myth and delusion.

    Knights “were supposed, in theory, to serve as defenders of the Faith, upholders of justice, champions of the oppressed,” Tuchman writes. “In practice, they were themselves the oppressors, and by the 14th century, the violence and lawlessness of men of the sword had become a major agency of disorder.”

    Continue Reading
  • Presidents Richard Nixon, Donald Trump, and James Buchanan
    AFP/ CORBIS / LIFE / GETTY / THE ATLANTIC

    The Worst President in History

    Tim Naftali

    Three particular failures secure Trump’s status as the worst chief executive ever to hold the office.

    President Donald Trump has long exulted in superlatives. The first. The best. The most. The greatest. “No president has ever done what I’ve done,” he boasts. “No president has ever even come close,” he says. But as his four years in office draw to an end, there’s only one title to which he can lay claim: Donald Trump is the worst president America has ever had.

    In December 2019, he became the third president to be impeached. Last week, Trump entered a category all his own, becoming the first president to be impeached twice. But impeachment, which depends in part on the makeup of Congress, is not the most objective standard. What does being the worst president actually mean? And is there even any value, at the bitter end of a bad presidency, in spending energy on judging a pageant of failed presidencies?

    Continue Reading
  • K. Tait Jarboe / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic

    The Racial Symbolism of the Topsy-Turvy Doll

    Julian K. Jarboe

    The uncertain meaning behind a half-black, half-white, two-headed toy: An Object Lesson

    The doll is two-headed and two-bodied—one black body and one white, conjoined at the lower waist where the hips and legs would ordinarily be. The lining of one's dress is the outside of the other’s, so that the skirt flips over to conceal one body when the other is upright. Two dolls in one, yet only one can be played with at a time.

    The topsy-turvy doll, as it’s known, most likely originated in American plantation nurseries of the early 19th century. By the mid-20th century, they’d grown so popular that they were mass-manufactured and widely available in department stores across the country, but today, they’re found mostly in museums, private collections, and contemporary art. In recent years, the dolls have seen a renewed interest from collectors and scholars alike, largely motivated by the ongoing question that surrounds their use: What were they supposed to symbolize?

    Continue Reading
  • A  photo of Donald Trump with a grainy, black-and-white filter
    Shutterstock / The Atlantic

    What to Do With Trumpists

    Graeme Wood

    The proper response to these extremists isn’t counterterrorism. It is mental hygiene.

    At noon tomorrow, our four-year experiment in being governed by the political equivalent of the Insane Clown Posse will finally end. It is ending in Juggalo style (some have called it “Trumpalo”), violently and pointlessly, with a handful of deaths, the smearing of various bodily fluids, and a riot on the way out. After any bacchanal of this magnitude, the sober dawn is almost as disorienting as the hysteria itself—and the most urgent task, after wiping the shit from the Capitol hallways, is to prevent a repeat performance.

    First, the Senate must convict Donald Trump. I confess bewilderment that the Senate will have to deliberate at all: Inciting an insurrection that threatens to kidnap and possibly murder members of the Senate (including the vice president of the United States) seems to me the kind of activity the Senate should frown upon. Enemies of Ted Cruz like to point out that Trump called Cruz’s wife a hag and insinuated that his father killed John F. Kennedy, and Cruz cuddled up to Trump anyway. Any senator who excuses his own near lynching by a shirtless, horned shaman will make Cruz’s self-debasement look dignified by comparison.

    Continue Reading
  • Secret service agents confer during a rally for Vice President Joe Biden at West York Area High School in York, Pennsylvania on September 2, 2012.
    Mark Makela / Getty

    The Secret Service Is Bracing for Dangerous Times

    Marc Ambinder

    Any chance of a normal security environment for the president-elect evaporated during the Capitol siege.

    For the first time in modern American history, the possibility of a peaceful transfer of power is in doubt. Extremists swarmed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, and at least some of them intended to hunt down and kill elected officials. During their riot, they left bloodstains on the inauguration grandstands.

    Now, in the final hours of the Trump presidency, security forces have turned Washington, D.C., into a fortified encampment in an attempt to prevent further violence. The transformation of the U.S. Capitol into a Baghdad-style Green Zone is unlike anything Washington has seen since 9/11. Joe Biden, already physically isolated by COVID-19, will be further distanced from the American people, who have traditionally crowded onto the National Mall by the hundreds of thousands to witness a presidential swearing-in.

    Continue Reading
  • A collage featuring French letters, newspaper headlines, and photographs.
    Getty / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

    France Knows How This Ends

    James McAuley

    Polarization, anger, division—French history offers a warning for what might come after Donald Trump.

    A Jewish military officer wrongfully convicted of treason. A years-long psychodrama that permanently polarized an entire society—communities, friends, even families. A politics of anger and emotion designed to insult the very notion of truth. A divide that only grew with time. A reconciliation that never was. A frenzied right wing that turned to violence when it failed at the ballot box.

    This was the Dreyfus affair, the signature scandal of fin de siècle France, aspects of which Americans might recognize as we arrive at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency: After decades of cascading political crises, debilitating financial scandals, and rising anti-Semitism, the Dreyfus affair saw the emergence of political surreality, an alternate universe of hateful irrationality and militarized lies that captured the minds of nearly half the population.

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  • A 5 x 3 grid of coronaviruses, three are red and rest green.
    Simoul Alva

    A Troubling New Pattern Among the Coronavirus Variants

    Sarah Zhang

    The most concerning versions of the virus are not simply mutating—they’re mutating in similar ways.

    For most of 2020, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 jumped from human to human, accumulating mutations at a steady rate of two per month—not especially impressive for a virus. These mutations have largely had little effect.

    But recently, three distinct versions of the virus seem to have independently converged on some of the same mutations, despite being thousands of miles apart in the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Brazil. (A mutation is a genetic change; a variant is a virus with a specific set of mutations.) The fact that these mutations have popped up not one, not two, but now three times—that we know of—in variants with unusual behavior suggests that they confer an evolutionary advantage to the virus. All three variants seem to be becoming more common. And all three are potentially more transmissible.

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  • Joe Biden's head, in blue, divided into vertical slats, in front of a coronavirus
    Shutterstock / The Atlantic

    A Tragic Beginning to a Presidency

    Whet Moser

    On the eve of Biden’s inauguration, the pandemic’s toll has reached nearly 24 million cases and 400,000 deaths.

    Tomorrow, America inaugurates a new president. With the transfer of power comes the transfer of responsibility for the COVID-19 pandemic. On the eve of Joe Biden’s inauguration, the toll of the pandemic stands at 23.9 million cases and 392,428 deaths, according to the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. There are 123,820 people hospitalized. Today alone, states reported 144,047 cases and 2,141 deaths.

    Ron Klain, the incoming president’s chief of staff, has warned that, by the end of February, COVID-19 may have taken 500,000 American lives. To reach that marker, the country would have to average 2,689 deaths every day until then, all too plausible a scenario. The seven-day average of deaths in the U.S. first surpassed that number on January 7. It’s currently at 2,988.

    Continue Reading
  • Artwork of an elephant falling into a Q-shaped hole
    Getty / The Atlantic

    QAnon Is Destroying the GOP From Within

    Ben Sasse

    Until last week, too many in the Republican Party thought they could preach the Constitution and wink at QAnon. They can’t.

    Eugene Goodman is an American hero. At a pivotal moment on January 6, the veteran United States Capitol Police officer single-handedly prevented untold bloodshed. Staring down an angry, advancing mob, he retreated up a marble staircase, calmly wielding his baton to delay his pursuers while calling out their position to his fellow officers. At the top of the steps, still alone and standing just a few yards from the chamber where senators and Vice President Mike Pence had been certifying the Electoral College’s vote, Goodman strategically lured dozens of the mayhem-minded away from an unguarded door to the Senate floor.


    The leader of that flank of the mob, later identified by the FBI as Douglas Jensen, wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a red-white-and-blue Q—the insignia of the delusional QAnon conspiracy theory. Its supporters believe that a righteous Donald Trump is leading them in a historic quest to expose the U.S. government’s capture by a global network of cannibalistic pedophiles: not just “deep state” actors in the intelligence community, but Chief Justice John Roberts and a dozen-plus senators, including me. Now Trump’s own vice president is supposedly in on it, too. According to the FBI, Jensen “wanted to have his T-shirt seen on video so that ‘Q’ could ‘get the credit.’”

    Continue Reading
  • Senator Josh Hawley
    Francis Chung / E&E News / Politico / AP

    They Should Have Taken Them at Their Word

    David A. Graham

    Supporters are recoiling from some Republican politicians, not because they betrayed their campaign-trail promises, but because they fulfilled them.

    They never saw it coming.

    Ben Goldey resigned as Representative Lauren Boebert’s communications director after the January 6 attempted coup. Lauren Blair Bianchi quit the same job in Senator Ted Cruz’s office. George Erwin Jr. had rallied local law-enforcement backers for Representative Madison Cawthorn and was preparing to take a job working for him, but has now disavowed him. Charles Johnson, the owner of the San Francisco Giants, maxed out to Boebert’s campaign but now wants his money back.

    There’s a story as old as politics: A leader comes to power promising one thing, then does another, leaving behind a disappointed crew of supporters. From Brutus’s misgivings about Julius Caesar’s nascent dictatorship to Adolphe Thiers’s misjudgment of Louis Napoleon to David Stockman’s realization that Ronald Reagan wasn’t completely sincere about shrinking government, the same thing has happened time and again. Mentors, supporters, financial backers, and eager young aides have become disillusioned and complained that their hero has changed.

    Continue Reading
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