David Brooks, “One Nation, Slightly Divisible”; Robert D. Kaplan, “Looking the World in the Eye”; Penny Wolfson, “Moonrise”; William Langewiesche, “Storm Island”; Marshall Jon Fisher, “Pixels at an Exhibition”; fiction by Lesley Dormen; Mona Simpson on Alice Munro; and much more.
Samuel Huntington is a mild-mannered man whose sharp opinions—about the collision of Islam and the West, about the role of the military in a liberal society, about what separates countries that work from countries that don't—have proved to be as prescient as they have been controversial. Huntington has been ridiculed and vilified, but in the decades ahead his view of the world will be the way it really looks
A distinguished jurist advises us to calm down about the probable curtailing of some personal freedoms in the months ahead. As a nation we've treated certain civil liberties as malleable, when necessary, from the start
Even before the September 11 attacks heightened our fears of bio-terrorism, a biologist came up with a sensible strategy for coping with one of the most fearsome possibilities
Pentagon mavericks have been trying for decades to reorient military strategy toward a new kind of threat—the kind we're suddenly facing in the war on terrorism. Now that we've got the war they predicted, will we get the reforms they've been pushing for?
The electoral map of the 2000 presidential race became famous: big blocks of red (denoting states that went for Bush) stretched across the heartland, with brackets of blue (denoting states for Gore) along the coasts. Our Blue America correspondent has ventured repeatedly into Red territory. He asks the question—after September 11, a pressing one—Do our differences effectively split us into two nations, or are they just cracks in a still-united whole?
More Americans are telling their boss to shove it. Is the workplace undergoing a revolution—or just a post-pandemic spasm?
Quitting your job is hot this summer. More Americans quit in May than any other month on record going back to the beginning of the century, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For every 100 workers in hotels, restaurants, bars, and retailers, about five of them quit last month.
Low-wage workers aren’t the only ones eyeing the door. In May, more than 700,000 workers in the bureau’s mostly white-collar category of “professional and business services” left their job—the highest monthly number ever. Across all sectors and occupations, four in 10 employees now say they’ve considered peacing out of their current place of work.
Why the sudden burst of quitting? One general theory is that we’re living through a fundamental shift in the relationship between employees and bosses that could have profound implications for the future of work. Up and down the income ladder, workers have new reasons to tell their boss to shove it. Lower-wage workers who benefited from enhanced unemployment benefits throughout the pandemic may have returned to the job and realized they’re not being paid enough. Now they’re putting their foot down, forcing restaurants and clothing stores to fork over a higher wage to keep people on staff.
When a flagrantly unreliable narrator narrated his own story, people across the media spectrum responded as if he could be trusted. Why?
In November 2018, The Washington Post published a disturbing headline: “‘They Were Threatening Me and My Family’: Tucker Carlson’s Home Targeted by Protesters.”
The Post story quoted the prime-time Fox News host at length. “Someone started throwing himself against the front door and actually cracked the front door,” Carlson claimed. “It wasn’t a protest. It was a threat … They weren’t protesting anything specific that I had said. They weren’t asking me to change anything. They weren’t protesting a policy or advocating for legislation … They were threatening me and my family and telling me to leave my own neighborhood in the city that I grew up in.”
Even more alarming, according to the Post, “A woman was also overheard in one of the deleted videos saying she wanted to ‘bring a pipe bomb’ to his house, [Carlson] said.”
And how The Mandalorian can restore the true power of George Lucas’s galaxy
This article was published online on June 21, 2021.
When I look out my window, a few floors up in New York City, I see Star Wars. Rooftop bouquets of dirty satellite dishes, jumbled architectural styles united by peeling paint, variously shaped (and largely face-masked) life-forms jostling on the sidewalk—each sign of shabby modernity feels like something I glimpsed in childhood while hypnotized by George Lucas. In the director’s 1977 space fantasy, wizards lived in what appeared to be crumbling stucco huts, and moon-size superweapons had onboard trash compactors. As a kid, I believed that Earth was just another planet in Lucas’s universe. Today, I’m still susceptible to that lovely illusion.
Recently released emails reveal a helter-skelter pressure campaign on the Justice Department.
In October 2006, just as bankers all over Wall Street were realizing that maybe, just maybe, they should be a little more circumspect about their adventures in subprime-mortgage bundling, some financiers at Goldman Sachs dreamed up a code for use in email: LDL. “Let’s discuss live.” In one notorious example, someone on the mortgage-securities desk mentioned Goldman’s urgent need to sell off “junk nobody was dumb enough to take the first time around.” His superior shot back, “LDL.”
The latest rogues freestyling with geopolitics missed that lesson of the financial crisis: Don’t put it in email. Last week, the House Oversight Committee released emails and attachments related to its investigation of Donald Trump’s efforts to reverse his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. The docs reveal a helter-skelter pressure campaign on the Justice Department and a peek into the email folkways of a range of eccentric Trumpites. Above all, they expose inanity, at the highest levels of power, when the republic was fragile.
There’s no way of knowing how bad things will get in the U.S. In a way, that’s a luxury.
This much is clear: The coronavirus is becoming more transmissible. Ever since the virus emerged in China, it has been gaining mutations that help it spread more easily among humans. The Alpha variant, first detected in the United Kingdom last year, is 50 percent more transmissible than the original version, and now the Delta variant, first detected in India, is at least 40 percent more transmissible than Alpha.
What’s less certain, however, is how the virus’s increased transmissibility will affect the pandemic in the United States. Alpha’s arrival prompted worries about a new surge in the spring, but one never came. The proportion of Alpha cases kept going up, but the total number of cases kept going down. People got vaccinated. Alpha became dominant in the U.S. Cases fell even further. The virus had become more biologically transmissible, but it wasn’t being transmitted to more people.
