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Daily Bafflements
November 21, 2016
• At the alt-right confab in DC last weekend, “while much of the discourse at the conference was overtly racist and demeaning toward minorities . . . the focus was on how whites were marginalized and beleaguered.” We know how this one goes. Susan Faludi ...

Begging Pardon
November 21, 2016
Edward Snowden himself has never directly asked for a pardon. The former NSA contractor and CIA employee-turned-whistleblower maintains that he would be willing to return home from Moscow to be judged by a jury of his peers, and even serve time in prison, if there were a chance ...

Daily Bafflements
November 18, 2016
• As news rolls in on the president-elect’s cabinet picks and White House staff, there’s not much to smile about. The selections have been described as a “team of racists,” “as bonkers as you thought,” and “a total sausagefest.” ...

The Sanders Strategy
November 18, 2016
Okay, folks. This is the game. Bernie Sanders is taking the line of resisting the intolerant, warmongering Trump & Co., while simultaneously challenging the president-elect to put real money into infrastructure and to write better trade deals, Trump’s signature ...

Against Bargaining
November 18, 2016
What does it mean to be mentally healthy in a world gone mad? Sirens are blaring, lights are flashing, and we have been whisked out of the territory of metaphor onto the hard ground of fact. The rise to power and election of Donald J. Trump is the sick recrimination of a society ...

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before
November 17, 2016
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but how could the American people have given their highest public office to a man who is so clearly an idiot? Not just any ordinary lunkhead, but someone who brutishly, bullishly, maddeningly inhabits his own stupidity, who practically ...

Poll Axed
As America’s diehard corps of data journalists and omni-explainers wail over the smoldering ruin of their shiny, digital forecasting models, the time seems ripe for the rest of us to ask why the activity of polling is tethered to the news business in the first place. Yes, ...

Advice for a Trumpland Thanksgiving
Conventional wisdom holds that “kitchen table activism” with kith and kin is somehow easier than talking to strangers, but I’ve never found that to be true. In my experience, people—especially conservative people—are more likely to accept disagreement from a stranger ...

Are Sex Offenders Human?
November 15, 2016
In July 16, 2015, Barack Obama visited a federal prison, the first sitting president ever to do so. It was a powerful statement of support for a broad movement—stretching from Black Lives Matter to Right on Crime—to reform the U.S. criminal justice system, one of the ...

Daily Bafflements
November 14, 2016
• And so it begins. Over the weekend Mr. Trump, when asked how many immigrants he wanted to deport (or jail), threw out a cool three million figure. He gave a top job to Steve Bannon, a man who makes your common-or-garden spin doctor look quaint. We suggest you do not ...

Crash of the Pop-Culture Party
November 14, 2016
To hear some pundits insist, with perfect seriousness, that it was important for Taylor Swift to speak out on Hillary Clinton's behalf ahead of the election was to realize how celebritized our virtue-signaling politics has become. When disappointed liberals quote The Hunger ...

Show Me Where It Hurts
November 11, 2016
History hurts. That is how we know it. That is how we must understand our place in it. It may not hurt for everyone all the time, but that doesn’t mean the bones aren’t broken under the skin. Too often we may not feel it, and that is probably by design. Because so ...