American Cowardice

Scot Peterson, condemned as the "Coward of Broward," stood by as a slaughter unfolded at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Does the blame lie with him, his training or a society in denial about what it would take to stop mass shootings?

Raina Telgemeier Gets It

The wildly successful cartoonist turned the anxious kid into a hero.

How Marilynne Robinson Reads Scripture

In her hands, the Book of Genesis becomes a precursor to the novel.

The Disorienting Beauty of "Africa & Byzantium"

A landmark exhibition offers a new history of art.

Shelf Life

An incisive satirist of literary Brooklyn takes on the American big-box store.

The James Bond Trap

Ian Fleming created the superspy and then couldn't get rid of him.

Lost Photographs of Black America

Ernest Cole was born in 1940 to a Black family in the Eersterust township, near Pretoria, South Africa.

THE DESPOTS OF SILICON VALLEY

The tech world has its own ascendant political ideology, and it's past time we call it what it is.

The Curious Case of the Contested Basquiats

Twenty-five \"masterpieces,\" an FBI raid, and the maddening, sometimes impossible task of rooting out fakes and forgeries

IN DEFENSE OF WOODROW WILSON

Despised as a racist by today's left and a tyrant by today's right, the 28th president championed a set of values that our politics sorely lack.

Meet Me in the Eternal City

Silicon Valley has always dreamed of building its own utopias. Who's ready to move in?

The Radical Self-Awareness of Michael R. Jackson

He's become one of the most surprising and incisive-and misunderstood-social critics of our time.

A Plan to Outlaw Abortion Everywhere

The year 2022 was a triumphant one for the anti-abortion movement. After half a century, the Supreme Court did what had once seemed impossible when it overturned Roe v. Wade, stripping Americans of the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy.

A Military Loyal to Trump

If Donald Trump wins the next election, he will attempt to turn the men and women of the United States armed forces into praetorians loyal not to the Constitution, but only to him. This project will likely be among his administration's highest priorities. It will not be easy: The overwhelming majority of America's service people are professionals and patriots. I know this from teaching senior officers for 25 years at the Naval War College. As president, Trump came to understand it too, when he found that "his generals” were not, in fact, mere employees of a Trump property.

When Science Becomes a Slogan

The president of the United States cannot control the trajectory of a hurricane, but he can we learned in 2019-force the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to endorse a trajectory that he invented.

America Will Abandon NATO

"I don't give a shit about NATO." Thus did former President Donald Trump once express his feelings about America's oldest and strongest military alliance. Not that this statement, made in the presence of John Bolton, the national security adviser at the time, came as a surprise.

Climate Denial Will Flourish

On the last Saturday before Donald Trump took office, in January 2017, I watched the controlled chaos of a hackathon unfold in a library at the University of Pennsylvania.

What Does the Working Class Really Want?

Vying for the support of a multiracial working-class coalition, neither Democrats nor Republicans are focusing on the crucial question.

The Demise of the "IBM Way"

The companys peculiar culture fueled its success, and eventually its fall from industry dominance.

Zombie History Stalks Ukraine

In a haunted novel, memories of a brutal past transform bodies as well as psyches.

The Bizarro Buddy Comedy of Please Don't Destroy

How SNUs video sketches spoof the rituals of male bonding

THIS IS WHO WE ARE

In the last spring of the Obama administration, Michelle Obama was delivering her final commencement address as first lady, at City College of New York.

THE PSYCHIC TOLL

There were times, during the first two years of the Biden presidency, when I came close to forgetting about it all: the taunts and the provocations; the incitements and the resentments; the disorchestrated reasoning; the verbal incontinence; the press conferences fueled by megalomania, vengeance, and a soupçon of hydroxychloroquine. I forgot, almost, that we'd had a man in the White House who governed by tweet.

THE LEFT CAN'T AFFORD TO GO MAD

The Trump years had a radicalizing effect on the American right. But, let's be honest, they also sent many on the left completely around the bend. Some liberals, particularly upper-middle-class white ones, cracked up because other people couldn't see what was obvious to them: that Trump was a bad candidate and an even worse president.

TRUMP WILL STOKE A GENDER PANIC

After decades of gains in public acceptance, the LGBTQ community is confronting a climate in which political leaders are once again calling them weirdos and predators.

CIVIL RIGHTS UNDONE

In late 2020, even as the instigators of insurrection were marshaling their followers to travel to Washington, D.C., another kind of coup-a quieter onewas in the works. On December 21, in one of his departing acts as attorney general, Bill Barr submitted a proposed rule change to the White House. The change would eliminate the venerable standard used by the Justice Department to handle discrimination cases, known as \"disparate impact.\"

A WAR ON BLUE AMERICA

During his term in the White House, Donald Trump governed as a wartime president with blue America, rather than any foreign country, as the adversary. He sought to use national authority to achieve factional ends to impose the priorities of red America onto Democratic-leaning states and cities. The agenda Trump has laid out for a second term makes clear that those bruising and divisive efforts were only preliminary skirmishes.

TRUMP WILL SUPPRESS AMERICAN HISTORY

This past fall, in a small southern foundry, Robert E. Lee's face was placed on a furnace that reached a temperature of more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. As the heat mounted, a haunting orange-red glow appeared across Lee's severed visage, and the cracks that split his bronze cheeks began to look like streams of dark tears beneath his eyes.

THE TRUTH WON'T MATTER

\"I have a gut,\" Donald Trump announced in 2018, \"and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else's brain can ever tell me.\" The president's gut would go on to inform him that climate change is partisan propaganda; that COVID-19 might be cured through the injection of bleach; that any election that fails to produce a Trump victory must be rigged.

EXTREMISTS EMBOLDENED

Until the very end of his presidency, Donald Trump's cultivation of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and other violent far-right groups was usually implicit. He counted on their political support but stopped short of asking them to do anything.