Michael J. Sandel, “The Case Against Perfection”; P. J. O'Rourke, “The Enthusiasts”; Jeffrey Rosen, “John Ashcroft's Permanent Campaign”; Jonathan Rauch, “A More Perfect Union”; Benjamin Schwarz, “Clearer Than the Truth”; Tish Durkin, “The Buffness Deficit”; fiction by Christopher Buckley; and much more.
Our author finds Jeffrey Masson's “divertingly amateurish” style likely to broaden the audience for the animal-rights movement in a way that Peter Singer and Matthew Scully never could
"Dying is an art," said Sylvia Plath. But so is living, and she excelled at both—not that her biographers, with one wise and big-hearted exception, have noticed
The kind of body count Americans can tolerate; the aggrieved boyfriend as terrorist; why the "dirty bomb" threat is real; finally—the truth about bullies and their victims
In the liberal imagination Attorney General John Ashcroft is an authoritarian and a religious zealot, bent on sacrificing liberty to achieve the illusion of safety from terror. But those who see Ashcroft as a zealot are missing Ashcroft the canny politician—a man beholden to both his polls and his God
A year ago this month Michael Kelly, a former editor in chief of The Atlantic, died in Iraq while on assignment for the magazine. A collection of Kelly's writings, Things Worth Fighting For, will be published in April by the Penguin Press. The editor of that volume remembers his colleague and friend as a writer and as a man
If multiracial democracy cannot be defended in America, it will not be defended elsewhere.
The conservative intelligentsia flocked to the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C., this week for the National Conservatism Conference, an opportunity for people who may never have punched a time clock to declare their eternal enmity toward elites and to attempt to offer contemporary conservative nationalism the intellectual framework that has so far proved elusive.
Yoram Hazony, the Israeli scholar who organized the conference, explicitly rejected white nationalism, barring several well-known adherents from attending, my colleague Emma Green reported. But despite Hazony’s efforts, the insistence that “nationalism” is, at its core, about defending borders, eschewing military interventions, and promoting a shared American identity did not prevent attendees from explicitly declaring that American laws should favor white immigrants.
Amid a convulsive week in American politics, at one of the darkest rallies Donald Trump has ever held, his base showed up in force to tell the president he’s done nothing wrong.
GREENVILLE, N.C.—Before the rally began, I wanted to know why they’d come.
In the heavy, humid hours, I walked up and down the line winding through a parking lot at East Carolina University to interview some two dozen people who wanted to see the president. Many didn’t make it inside. About 90 minutes before Donald Trump took the stage, police announced that the 8,000-person basketball arena was full and those still waiting would have to watch on an oversize TV monitor set up outside. Rather than head home, they stuck around for a tailgate party of sorts.
Some cracked open beers and lit cigars, sitting on folding chairs in front of the TV. People walked by in shirts that read In Trump We Trust and Fuck Off, We’re Full. Earlier, in the 100-degree heat, a four-member family band called the Terry Train entertained the crowd with a song mocking CNN. Lying Wolf Blitzer and Lying John King. Don Lemon lies about everything … Erin Burnett, can you hear us yet? We’ll give you a story you can never forget. It built to this refrain: CNN sucks!
America’s urban rebirth is missing something key—actual births.
A few years ago, I lived in a walkup apartment in the East Village of New York. Every so often descending the stairway, I would catch a glimpse of a particular family with young children in its Sisyphean attempts to reach the fourth floor. The mom would fold the stroller to the size of a boogie board, then drag it behind her with her right hand, while cradling the younger and typically crying child in the crook of her left arm. Meanwhile, she would shout hygiene instructions in the direction of the older child, who would slap both hands against every other grimy step to use her little arms as leverage, like an adult negotiating the bolder steps of Machu Picchu. It looked like hell—or, as I once suggested to a roommate, a carefully staged public service announcement against family formation.
Suze Orman wants young people to stop “peeing” away millions of dollars on coffee. Last month, the personal-finance celebrity ignited a controversy on social media when a video she starred in for CNBC targeted a familiar villain: kids these days and their silly $5 lattes. Because brewing coffee at home is less expensive, Orman argued, purchasing it elsewhere is tantamount to flushing money away, which makes it a worthy symbol of Millennials’ squandered resources.
Orman’s not alone in this view. The old guard of personal finance has spent years turning the habit of buying coffee into a shorthand for Americans’ profligacy, especially that of young Americans. Dave Ramsey, a finance personality who hosts a popular radio show on getting out of debt, says that forgoing lattes is one of four keys to saving thousands of dollars. Kevin O’Leary, one of the investors on the entrepreneurial reality show Shark Tank, once told CNBC, “I never buy a frape-latte-blah-blah-blah-woof-woof-woof.” Even the official Twitter account for Chase Bank has gotten in on the fun, intimating via meme that a failure to brew at home is why young people don’t have any money.
Her silence on the border crisis and on her father’s racist tweets shows she has abandoned even the pretense of being a voice of reason inside the White House.
Ivanka Trump wants it both ways.
Since joining her father’s White House as a senior adviser in early 2017, the first daughter has reserved the right to toggle between a strict and loose construction of her portfolio. When flashy opportunities arise—such as the chance to play diplomat with Kim Jong Un—the edges of her purview, which she often defines as “women’s economic empowerment,” become conveniently blurry. But when the issue du jour is particularly messy, she is quick to clarify its limits, thus absolving herself of accountability for problems that exist outside it. When The View’s Abby Huntsman, for example, asked Trump in February why she didn’t speak up about family separations along the U.S.-Mexico border, she objected that she is “not president of all women’s issues.”
The Korean supergroup’s devoted following and chart-topping success have won them comparisons to the Beatles. Why was I surprised to get swept up in their magic?
I was already yawning when I sat down to watch Saturday Night Live one evening this past April. The host that night was Emma Stone, and the musical guest was BTS. I knew little about the seven-member South Korean supergroup—even though they had millions of fans worldwide, released multiple Billboard 200 chart-toppers, and recently delivered a speech at the United Nations. On Twitter, I saw plenty of enthusiasm, but also mockery directed at BTS and their followers. While I knew they would be the first K-pop act to perform on SNL, I had never listened to a BTS song before Stone introduced the first musical break.
The oh whoa ooh whoa backing vocals floated in, and a teasing bass line began as the lights went up to reveal seven figures—their backs to the camera—in dark suits and an array of hair colors. They swayed from side to side and spun around. Then the one with the pink hair started singing.
What new research reveals about sexual predators, and why police fail to catch them
Robert Spada walked into the decrepit warehouse in Detroit and surveyed the chaos: Thousands of cardboard boxes and large plastic bags were piled haphazardly throughout the cavernous space. The air inside was hot and musty. Spada, an assistant prosecutor, saw that some of the windows were open, others broken, exposing the room to the summer heat. Above the boxes, birds glided in slow, swooping circles.
It was August 17, 2009, and this brick fortress of a building housed evidence that had been collected by the Detroit Police Department. Spada’s visit had been prompted by a question: Why were police sometimes unable to locate crucial evidence? The answer lay in the disarray before him.
No one has done more to dispel the myth of social mobility than Raj Chetty. But he has a plan to make equality of opportunity a reality.
Raj Chetty got his biggest break before his life began. His mother, Anbu, grew up in Tamil Nadu, a tropical state at the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent. Anbu showed the greatest academic potential of her five siblings, but her future was constrained by custom. Although Anbu’s father encouraged her scholarly inclinations, there were no colleges in the area, and sending his daughter away for an education would have been unseemly.
But as Anbu approached the end of high school, a minor miracle redirected her life. A local tycoon, himself the father of a bright daughter, decided to open a women’s college, housed in his elegant residence. Anbu was admitted to the inaugural class of 30 young women, learning English in the spacious courtyard under a thatched roof and traveling in the early mornings by bus to a nearby college to run chemistry experiments or dissect frogs’ hearts before the men arrived.
Even though both sides insist they don’t want war, the existing tensions, combined with Iran’s anger at being denied the benefits of the nuclear agreement, mean that one miscalculated provocation could lead to a larger conflagration.
Updated at 5:45 p.m. ET
Something like this was bound to happen.
The U.S. Navy destroyed an Iranian drone over the Strait of Hormuz after President Donald Trump said it came within “threatening” range and ignored “multiple calls to stand down.”
Trump said the action taken by the USS Boxer, a Wasp-class amphibious assault, was “defensive.” “This is the latest of many provocative and hostile actions against vessels operating in international waters,” Trump said.
The confrontation came amid escalating provocations by the Iranian government, lashing out against the Trump administration’s ‘maximum pressure’ campaign. Still, Trump has been reluctant to use force— on a recent occasion pulling back on a strike after Iran shot down an American drone, saying the U.S. response wouldn’t have been proportionate. Today’s action allows the Trump administration to appear tough, but, given the tensions, also risks escalation in an already volatile region.
Whether the president’s tweets about four Democratic congresswomen of color are bigoted cannot be decided solely by dictionary definitions.
Last night, while President Donald Trump was keeping up his attacks on four Democratic congresswomen of color at a rally in North Carolina, Merriam-Webster tweeted out that the most searched term in its online dictionary at that time was racism.
It’s been that kind of week—though hardly the first of its nature in the Trump era—when bigoted comments from the president have dominated the national discourse, and have led many to label the remarks as racist. That includes Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats (along with a few Republicans) in the House of Representatives, who passed a nonbinding resolution denouncing Trump’s “racist comments that have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.”
