Chris Bray

Eric Holder’s Justice Department has been a disappointment more often than not. The reefer madness, an absurd and abusive political foray into sensitive academic archives, that ghoulish speech about the power of the federal government to kill U.S. citizens overseas in ...

A sharp piece of reporting in the New York Times this week pulls the very thin mask off the expertise-for-hire industry that clusters around the District of Columbia. Reporter Eric Lipton paid a visit to the Employment Policies Institute, a nonprofit “economic research ...

I’ll admit it: I had a long, blank moment. The New York Observer reported this week on “how deeply the liberal-leaning reporters at the New York Times resent the liberal-leaning editorial page of the New York Times,” and I couldn’t bring the opinion pages ...

Barack Obama’s personal journey begins, and it is instantly made meaningless. Sometime in the first half of 1966, Obama’s stepfather was mysteriously forced to return to Indonesia from grad school in Hawaii. Lolo Soetoro went home to a long episode of political violence, the ...

Stranded referents, a shotgun spray of clashing claims and jumbled ideas, half-completed gestures. If you put two potted geraniums side by side and pointed a television camera at them, they would trade as much information as Bill O’Reilly and Barack Obama exchanged in the ...

There are those moments when a news story eats its own premise, but the people writing and editing the story don’t seem to notice: “Obama’s Puzzle: Economy Rarely Better, Approval Rarely Worse,” the New York Times announced in a headline on Monday. Yeah, ...

Sean Wilentz contains multitudes. Back in 2006, in a cover story that has since vanished from the Rolling Stone website, the Princeton University historian took up the cudgel against George W. Bush. “The Worst President in History,” the headline of Wilentz’s ...

Let us assume, for the sake of kindness rather than on any available evidence, that an editor at the New York Times had a bad morning. Maybe there was a hangover, or a new baby who cried all night, and the editor to whom we’ve decided to grant our narrative charity went to ...