Jim Newell

Yesterday, the world witnessed a major breakthrough in contemporary United States governance: the speaker of the House of Representatives decided, for the first time in years, that it would be counterproductive and perhaps even strange to threaten the arbitrary destruction of ...

Could it be that corporate executives are among the biggest “winners” in the implementation of Obamacare? We don’t just mean health insurance company executives, either. We mean executives everywhere, from Delta to AOL to UPS, who now get to eliminate the ...

Suppose you were, say, an ex-pat living in Brazil who wanted to be free to come and go to your home country, America, without much hassle, but the potential for hassle was greater than 0 percent. See, you had been publishing documents exposing the United States ...

On December 23, 2011, the dons of Harvard University finally got to see Adam Wheeler sentenced to a year in prison. Wheeler, a twenty-five-year-old whom they admitted in 2007 on the strength of an academic record he’d fabricated out of thin air, had been caught again—and ...

The Congressional Budget Office, which partisans observe as either a neutral, omniscient force of total knowledge or a coven of innumerate hacks depending on how it scores one’s preferred policies, released a report yesterday on the effects of the Affordable Care Act. The ...

Last night’s Super Bowl was extremely America-y, even for the Super Bowl. Maybe because it was Fox’s turn to host this year? Or maybe people are just more into America than they were last year! But the whole spectacle—taped pregame segments, songs, the game, the ...

Give credit to the White House communications office: the way it billed last night’s State of the Union was one of the more successful spin jobs it’s pulled off in ages. Those jokers got the whole wide world to believe that President Obama actually has some sort of ...

Tomorrow, an American president, invited by Congress, will deliver his annual address to lawmakers on the state of the union, and literally not one person in the world really gives a shit. But that doesn’t mean it won’t be covered! Oh, it will be covered. Every news ...