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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 ...

Born and Bred
November 07, 2016
This election cycle has been rife with punditry on the anger of the white working class, supposedly fueling Donald Trump’s rise to prominence. But like many of the overblown narratives rounding out the cable news cycle in this bizarre election, it’s not quite true. In White ...

Hill, No? — Round 2
November 03, 2016
Update, November 3: We’re pleased to provide second installment in our hypothetical debate on what a blowout win for Hillary Clinton might mean for her critics on the left. Read Tuesday’s opening arguments (parts 1 and 2), and today’s closing exchange (parts 3 ...

2016: A Liberal Odyssey
October 31, 2016
In a heart-wrenching letter published in the New York Times, U.S.-born journalist Michael Luo described his family’s recent encounter with the kind of bigoted outburst—culminating with the admonition that Luo’s family should “go back to China”—that, sadly, is quite ...

Flight or Fight
October 28, 2016
When I arrived in Athens in July, I sent an email to Delphina, an activist and blogger who was following the anarchist activities in the city. I was hoping she could show me around and fill me in on some of the nuance that I, as a non-Greek speaker, was missing in the political ...

Tom Hayden and the Vocation of Politics
October 26, 2016
There’s a revelatory scene in a hard-to-find documentary, Troublemakers, shot by Norm Fruchter and Bob Machover in 1965 in the poor wards of Newark, N.J. Tom Hayden and some 100 others had left their rather comfy college-kid lives when Students for a Democratic ...

Just Plain Nasty
October 25, 2016
“It wasn’t just Hillary Clinton you insulted,” they say, “it was me. I’m a nasty woman too.” This was inevitable. As soon as Donald Trump interrupted Clinton in Vegas, in the middle of a deeply boring section on “entitlement ...

Cars Entering and Leaving Mosul
October 21, 2016
What they don’t tell you about the battle for Mosul is how boring it is, hour by hour, day by day. From my vantage point near the Iraqi village of Bartella, ISIS positions are visible in the smoke-filled distance, across the crinkled flatness of Nineveh; in front of me, gangs ...

Beverly Hillbilly Elegy
October 14, 2016
Imagine if you discovered one day that your father was a closeted polygamist, that your brother secretly sold meth, or that your sister the schoolteacher had an affair with one of her fifth graders. A similarly dark family secret confronted me recently, when I learned that my ...

Workaday Woes
October 11, 2016
In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell describes advertising firms as “the fungi . . . that sprout from a decaying capitalism.” The same might well be said for American equity funds, 90 percent of which underperformed the market last year. And yet, for most ...

The Snarxist Temptation
October 04, 2016
This is a letter to all those who, like me, have been foolish enough to spend this election season feeling something about it (hopeful, committed, angry, you name it). More than anything, though, it’s a letter to those—particularly those on the left—who chose ...