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Daily Bafflements
February 03, 2017
• Where were you when the tragic Bowling Green Massacre happened? We can’t remember, but we do know, at least, that Kellyanne Conway was wandering around confusedly in a world of “alternative facts,” most likely nowhere near Kentucky. If it ...

The Attention Deficit
February 03, 2017
Once upon a time a lot of hope was invested in adblockers. Many saw them as a way to halt the blight of online advertising. The thinking was that if everyone got adblockers, it would not only make the ads disappear, but it might make the internet a more enjoyable place, too. We ...

The Labor Movement We Need
I don’t blame labor leaders for going to meet with Trump, but I think we should have had a much more deliberate plan for making sure that those that went to meet with Trump were representatives of a broader working class contingent that front-loaded issues that were of concern ...

Odd Time to be Evenhanded
One of the rarely acknowledged liabilities of a corporate-run media is its diehard resistance to plain speech and direct action. In one of my former, more respectable editing gigs, I was soberly instructed never to use the word “reform” to characterize pending ...

Fog Over Foggy Bottom
Welcome to This American Carnage, your weekly slice of life from the country of Trump On Monday, news broke of a fresh bureaucratic uprising—this time through a memo posted to the State Department’s Dissent Channel expressing the dissatisfaction of nearly 1000 ...

#DeleteUber, Delete Everything
February 01, 2017
Like many billion-dollar startups, Uber is notorious for its self-regard. One nugget buried in this week’s news serves as a reminder: until a few days ago, Uber had no automated system to process users’ requests to delete their accounts. That meant that every time a user ...

Originalism Is Dumb
February 01, 2017
Donald Trump has nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. If confirmed, Gorsuch will replace Antonin Scalia, whose death a year ago has left a vacancy that Republicans refused to allow Barack Obama to fill. In the minds of conservatives, Gorsuch is a worthy heir to ...

Quick-Fire
January 31, 2017
In many ways, President Donald J. Trump has followed a script set down by President Richard M. Nixon. As a candidate for the presidency, Trump cribbed lines liberally from his Republican predecessor. Like Nixon, he claimed to speak on behalf of an aggrieved “silent ...

Presumed Terrorists
January 31, 2017
Welcome to the United States! These are words that hundreds of thousands of people traveling to America yearn to hear after they hand their documents to the immigration officials sitting in glass box at the airport. The moments until they are uttered are pregnant with dread and ...

Extreme Hating
January 30, 2017
I had always hoped, our nation’s first President wrote to one of its first refugees, “that this land might— become a safe and agreeable Asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.” It was 1787 and François Van der Kemp, ...

High on the Apocalypse
Maybe we all just decided it was cooler to be George Orwell (who came from money) than H. G. Wells (who did not)—cooler to be the smirker saying, “Pah, it'll never work,” than to be the kid chirping, “Here is what we can do.” The H. G. Wells we find profiled in Krishan ...