Chris Bray

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Birmingham, Alabama was swept by a long wave of domestic terrorism. White supremacists planted so many bombs in one African-American neighborhood that it came to be known by the nickname “Dynamite Hill.” A local Ku Klux Klan leader, ...

A little more than ten years ago, Gregory Lynch, Sr. choked back tears at his home in small-town West Virginia, “as he stood on his porch here overlooking the tobacco fields and cattle pastures.” Lots of people were doing those kinds of things in the pages of the New ...

This week, former secretary of defense Robert Gates released a long and weirdly candid book on his years in that unpleasant job. His narrative is, how does one put this gently, uneven: long stretches of incisive analysis mixed evenly with tantrums about his enemies, who were all ...

There’s just one small thing missing from the news stories that have come pouring out about the soon-to-be-published book by former defense secretary Robert Gates. But to find the omission, start with the thing all of the stories do have: the revelation that President ...

You’re sitting in an airplane, and you suddenly hear the pilot’s amplified and disembodied voice. Look, he says, we don’t have a cockpit in this thing, with all those dials and knobs and whatchamawhosit, and there’s no place for me to look out a window ...

If you thought 2013 was unpleasant, remember this one thing: at least it didn’t drop a mid-term election on us. This year’s big political event can’t be stopped, and will begin to take up twenty-three hours a day on the cable news channels no later than ...

Self-awareness: it helps. Sort-of-recently discussing the contemporary political scene with Politico’s Glenn Thrush, Obama administration macher John Podesta was sufficiently obtuse to warn that his boss faced “a cult worthy of Jonestown in charge of one of the houses of ...

I’m going to dress you up like a “whore,” and then we’re going to do it in front of an audience—wait, no, you misunderstand. It’s educational. The strange case of Patricia Adler, a respected and widely published sociologist who teaches at the ...