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Dynasties of Neoliberalism
January 24, 2017
Always a spouse, never the president might be how we end up remembering Hillary Clinton, whose near-thirty-year career ended, dramatically punctuated with a period, at Donald Trump’s inauguration. Her appearance was everything we expected: the tight, frozen smile, the deep ...

Chelsea Manning’s Existential Threat to American Innocence
January 23, 2017
You know the story: a court-martialed soldier of an unpopular war granted clemency as the very last act of a U.S. president amid great public controversy. I refer, of course, to Lt. William Calley, the soldier of the Vietnam War who on March 16, 1968 led the systematic slaughter ...

Pissologies
January 17, 2017
Why didn’t Donald Trump just piss on the bed himself? Everything else about the story makes sense; it doesn’t really matter whether it’s accurate or not. The rest of the allegations against Trump—that he’s a long-standing Russian asset, that his entire campaign was run ...

Not Unwinnable
January 16, 2017
As a general rule, it’s wise to steer clear from analyzing memes that originate and evolve on the Twittersphere. Users wield the medium in different enough ways that Twitter is at best a fractured discourse, it moves too quickly to be relevant longer than a day, and the ...

Russia to Our Right
January 11, 2017
Russian interference in U.S. politics during the elections of 2016 and beyond is one big, fat, ugly squirrel. It commands attention but distracts from the related but more important matter of rising, Russian-supported far-right movements throughout the world, which support ...

Humane Billboards
December 30, 2016
Ever pass through a city and feel punched in the face by adverts? Descending into London’s tube network it can seem like I’m the product, one unit among thousands dropping down a human conveyor belt. Here I am presented to corporation after corporation, then a break, and the ...

Your Political Correctness Is Showing, Conservatives
December 29, 2016
President-elect Donald Trump and his chief strategist Steve Bannon keep confirming an argument I’ve been making for a while: conservatives are just as “politically correct” as they claim liberals and the left are. They’re just as touchy about it, too—in fact, they ...

Be Afraid
December 23, 2016
In the final minutes of Doomocracy—a piece of immersive theater styled after a haunted house that ran in Brooklyn during the month leading up to Election Day—audience members were confronted with three doors. One was labeled “Clinton,” one ...

Decent Drapery
December 20, 2016
The first time it happened was a sunny afternoon early in the spring just after Barack Obama’s inauguration. I was fetching my mail from the post office, located in the wing of a house in the center of the village, right across the road from the town green. I was standing ...

Breadwinners, Breadlosers
December 19, 2016
Like a malevolent Mr. Magoo, Donald Trump continues to barrel incompetently, obtusely, and conveniently into economic windfalls. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recently reported the lowest unemployment rate since 2007. At 4.6 percent, the American economy is ...

Tech Meets Trump
December 16, 2016
It’s clarifying to see the oligarchy assemble itself in the open. President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet selection show has offered a murderer’s row of venal billionaires, spousal abusers, wild-eyed ex-generals, Christian fundamentalists, racists, and the ...

Do Friedmans Dream of Electric Sheeple?
December 13, 2016
Thomas Friedman's books are distinctive for their awesome length and unrelenting banality—sort of like a tech-support chatbot that got a non-fiction MFA. But there's a question to resolve: Is he a human being or an android?