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Daily Bafflements
September 16, 2016
• Our friends at MuckRock will fund your pet research project on Palantir with their Thiel Fellowship, although we’re a bit skeptical that the program only lasts one year—we suspect the Paypal founder’s misdeeds and covert operations from intelligence ...

Innovator-In-Chief
September 16, 2016
Earlier this summer, President Obama told Bloomberg Businessweek that he was eyeing Silicon Valley for his post-presidential life: he wanted to become a venture capitalist. And as the summer wound down into Labor Day weekend, his efforts to transform his lame-duck term into a ...

Spreading the Bad News
September 16, 2016
For dogged observers of America’s long-running culture wars, a quiet milestone was reached this year: the fortieth anniversary of pop theologian Francis Schaeffer’s enormously influential 1976 tract How Should We Then Live? This portentously titled, slim volume ...

Fairly Unbalanced
Never do our media savants look more blatantly biased than when they’re trying to wave off complaints about how they shape, and distort, the critical flow of political information. A case in point: New York Times public editor Liz Spayd’s absurdly complacent recent ...

Daily Bafflements
September 14, 2016
• We’re a magazine, yes—a collection of bound, printed matter pocked with words. But even we, at times, are at a loss for the very things that sustain our being: words. With that in mind, meet the eighteen-hour heels that ...

A Trip to Trump’s Grocery Store
September 14, 2016
Clinton’s strangely specific phrase “basket of deplorables,” coined in reference to some of Trump’s more David Duke-ish supporters, is like jet fuel for the satirist’s imagination. What political cartoonist could resist drawing a giant wicker basket filled with ...

It Takes a Spillage
September 13, 2016
The scale of the revelations in the Panama Papers leaked this spring can lead to a feeling of helplessness. There are 11.5 million documents concerning 214,000 shell companies, which implicate hundreds of international politicians and officials including presidents, prime ...

Daily Bafflements
September 12, 2016
• Epigenetics, the idea that we can inherit some DNA changes from our parents and ancestors, is in the spotlight these days. So it would be remiss of us not to point out that Jackson Lears made the argument that scientists have a thing or two to learn from historians ...

Our New War Machines
September 12, 2016
For an institution synonymous with tradition and continuity, the American military is in quite a radical state of flux. In just the six or so years since I left the Army, two major demographic shifts that might superficially appear unrelated (or even contradictory) have taken ...

The Night Phyllis Schlafly Went Over the Rainbow
September 09, 2016
Phyllis Schlafly was one of the scariest people I ever met. I suspect her personal role model was Torquemada. Certainly she was absolutely convinced of her rectitude—while being at least as ambitious as any Spanish crusader prosecuting a holy war. She nearly succeeded in ...

Cashing in on the Culture Wars
September 09, 2016
The University of Chicago’s Dean of Students, Jay Ellison, recently became a folk hero of sorts on the right flank of the culture wars after sending out a blunt warning to the incoming U of C freshman class. To the hand-wringers worried about creeping “political ...

The Fabled and Enabled
We interrupt the cloddish accumulation of campaign effluvia to bring you Nick Bilton’s epic anatomy of the downfall of Theranos, the smoke-and-mirrors Silicon Valley startup that was allegedly poised to revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Its very name said ...