The New Republic

The suprise of Vice President George Bush’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination is not his campaign but Bush himself. Everyone knew that Bush operatives, especially political director Richard Bond, would have states such as Iowa, Michigan,…

Political consultants have sex in the shower with their buxom assistants. They fly around the country in plush jets, which they own. They cleverly manipulate the political system. They strip candidate after candidate of their real personalities and viewpoints,…

The first season of Transparent, released by Amazon in September 2014, wasted no time in announcing the tragicomedy’s knotty thematic terrain. Even before Mort Pffeferman (Jeffrey Tambor), a retired Jewish professor in L.A.’s moneyed Pacific Palisades,…

A new documentary, Starving the Beast, recently examined the state of public higher education. Directed by Austin-based award-winning documentarian Steve Mims, the film argues that a network of right-wing think tanks, and educational reformers are undermining…

All of my neighbors and I are about to get a free book in the mail. It contains lurid passages about sex and drugs and guns and death, though it lacks characters or a plot. And we’re all going to be quizzed on it in 45 days.I’m talking about the California…

Since 1991, give or take a few coddled years, the millennial has been a fearsome thing to behold. She is somehow simultaneously “selfish” and a lover of the “sharing economy;” she has little understanding of how the political system works, and yet is…

When Hillary Clinton engages with comedians, as she did last Friday on Jimmy Fallon and Thursday with Zach Galifianakis, she plays the straight woman: the low-key, earnest, unflashy foil who lets the other guy make all the blatant jokes and reserves for…

Those of us soul-searching for reasons Donald Trump has been able to erase Hillary Clinton’s formidable mid-summer lead have homed in on several plausible explanations, from media failures to Clinton’s health scare. What has largely escaped serious…

Rita was the wife of a chemist at the Swiss drug company…

When Mike Belleme began traveling through the South to…

An idealistic liberal college student—aggrieved by money in politics, disgusted by the mainstream candidates’ empty pandering, desperate for real change—is preparing to cast his first vote for president. Despite always expecting to vote for a Democrat,…

YUMA, Colorado — White-washed grain elevators are the tallest buildings in this town of 3,500 people located about 150 miles northeast of Denver. Corn is the major commodity, most of it grown with water from the shrinking Ogallala Aquifer and spread in…

It’s probably time to start recalibrating our expectations for reboots, remakes, or whatever terminology you prefer. We mistakenly assume that filmmakers will find a new twist on the material, that they have a reason for spending millions of dollars and…

Fear of hackers reading private emails in cloud-based systems like Microsoft Outlook, Gmail or Yahoo has recently sent regular people and public officials scrambling to delete entire accounts full of messages dating back years. What we don’t expect is our…

In the opening scenes of Fox’s new high-concept sports drama, Pitch, commentators repeatedly compare Ginny Baker, a young, black pitching phenom played by Kylie Bunbury, to Jackie Robinson. She’s the first woman to join a Major League Baseball team, and…

The Mexican never said how long.¿How long? Not long. ¿How much?Not much. Never told us we’d hide in vans like matchsticks.In our town, we’d never known Mexicansbesides the women and men in soap-operas,so in our heads, we played the fence,the San Ysidro…

Since his death in a car accident on January 4, 1960, Albert Camus has led a kind of double-afterlife. In the West, he is not only remembered as one of the great writers of the post-war era, but as a hero of the resistance, a celebrity intellectual, and a…

Donald Trump has between a 25 percent and 44 percent chance of becoming president—I’ll pause while you fix yourself a stiff drink—although…

“The American people have the right to know the types of activities that their federal government performs on their behalf,” CIA Director John Brennan said on Tuesday at the Ethos and Practice of Intelligence Conference. It was the third annual installment…

Illustration by Neil WebbThe future of humanity depends on math. And the numbers in a new study released Thursday are the most ominous yet.Those numbers spell out, in simple arithmetic, how much of the fossil fuel in the world’s existing coal mines and oil…

Donald Trump built his political base on a foundation of racial agitation, from birtherism to labeling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” to proposing a ban on Muslim travel and immigration to the U.S.So it is fitting in a way that the most closely fought…

In February, Marco Rubio, desperately trying to give a jolt to his dying campaign, called Donald Trump “a con artist.” Such harsh words are common in the heat of campaigns, but what is remarkable is that Rubio now endorses Trump for president while still…

For most people, one Don King is more than enough. But for the 100 or so Republican donors who have gathered for lunch at Madame Tussauds wax museum in Times Square on the penultimate day of the GOP convention, there evidently is no such thing as too much Don…

Until recently, it was rare anyone had the gumption to make a fictional film about a sitting president. Primary Colors, the adaptation of Joe Klein’s 1996 book about Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, was lucky enough to arrive just in time for…

Having definitively established that Baby Boomers are the worst generation of all, most responsible by far for the fact that Donald Trump currently has a 43.7 percent chance of becoming president, let’s turn to the question of what role millennials are…

Idaho, a landlocked state with dreary winters and an overwhelmingly white population, might seem an unlikely destination for refugees from Africa and the Middle East. Yet every year, nearly 1,000 asylum seekers settle in Idaho, which accepts one of the largest…

In Pitch, Fox’s new…

Yesterday’s Senate Banking Committee hearing on Wells Fargo should have ended with CEO John Stumpf hauled off in handcuffs. In a little over two hours, Stumpf revealed enough information, combined with what was already known in public records and filings, to…

At 6:30 a.m., the Eyal border crossing is a picture of human misery. The official name is “border crossing”, but nobody uses this term. Israelis and Palestinians alike say “Makhsom”—meaning barrier or roadblock—which reveals the psyche of movement…

Oliver Stone has a movie about nefarious deeds from the American government and, hey, look, a found footage horror film about the Blair Witch! It’s a very ‘90s episode of the Grierson & Leitch podcast as our critics discuss the two big releases of the…