Trump, Pelosi, and the Squad Are Fighting Over Who Belongs in Government
Who can govern? Every American election poses this question. Formally, the question is, who will represent the people best? But the underlying question is, invariably, who belongs in government? Can a Catholic be President? Can a black man? A white woman? A man with no government experience? A gay man? A philanderer? A man accused…
Neil Armstrong, Over the Moon Among the Pandas
In June, 2001, I took Neil Armstrong and his wife, Carol, to the National Zoo. I love pandas. As it turned out, Neil Armstrong did, too. The visit happened after my neighbor Joe Allen, another early astronaut, called to ask if I could arrange for the Armstrongs to see the young pandas, who’d recently arrived from China…
What the Superhuman Controversy Reveals About the Shifting Ethics of Software
In recent months, those attuned to the affinities of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have been hearing about a young San Francisco startup called Superhuman. Though its name suggests a nootropics concern or a purveyor of networked exercise equipment, Superhuman’s unbodied offering is productivity software for the inbox. Its e-mail client—essentially, it’s an interface…
Finding Stillness in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters in the Age of Trump
In the summer of 2014, Thomas Tidwell, who had worked for the U.S. Forest Service for thirty-seven years, the last five of those as its chief, decided to visit the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a mosaic of more than a thousand lakes and rivers on almost 1.1 million acres in northern Minnesota, along the…
Trump’s Overt Racism Is Uniting Democrats and Unnerving Some Republicans
As Donald Trump would be the first to tell you, he’s a political genius. Certainly, in a period of a little over twenty-four hours on Sunday and Monday, he accomplished three things that many observers had considered impossible. First, he made it even more clear than it was before that he is a garden-variety racist.…
Daily Cartoon: Monday, July 15th
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the 2020 Presidential Race and Why We Should Break Up Homeland Security
Listen with: iTunes WNYC Stitcher TuneIn It’s hard to recall a newly elected freshman representative to Congress who has made a bigger impact than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her primary victory for New York’s Fourteenth District seat—as a young woman of color beating out a long-established white male incumbent—was big news, and Ocasio-Cortez has been generating headlines…
The Best Cookbooks of the Century So Far
The Internet really ought to have killed cookbooks. Recipes—tidy, self-contained packets of information that for centuries were individually swapped and shared, indexed and catalogued—are ideally suited for digital transmission. As they migrated online, liberated from the printed and bound, multiplying giddily, the thousand-recipe doorstops and easy-weeknight omnibus editions that had, for so long, stood in…
Going Home with Wendell Berry
Two and a half years ago, feeling existentially adrift about the future of the planet, I sent a letter to Wendell Berry, hoping he might have answers. Berry has published more than eighty books of poetry, fiction, essays, and criticism, but he’s perhaps best known for “The Unsettling of America,” a book-length polemic, from 1977,…
How the Stress of Separation and Detention Changes the Lives of Children
The horrific accounts of the conditions under which immigrant children are being held has focussed outrage and attention on the Trump Administration’s actions and agenda. But any future reversal of policy will do little to help kids who have already been detained—many of them after being separated from a parent or other relative. The psychological…