The New Republic

As America slouches toward the midterms, there is some trepidation over what rough beast will be born. A recent poll showed that Democrats have lost ground to the Republicans, while President Donald Trump’s approval rating has clawed up to 41 percent. With a…

There’s one particularly famous scene in Fifty Shades of Grey. If you’ve read the erotic novel, published in 2011, you already know what I’m referring to: Christian Grey pulls a tampon out of Anastasia Steele’s body by string. Though perhaps the most…

In the fall of 2007, a 23-year-old named Adam Conner left his job with Virginia Governor Mark Warner’s Forward Together PAC and set up shop as Facebook’s first lobbyist in Washington, D.C. Working out of the living room of his apartment near the city’s…

Jordan Peterson is a student of mythology, so it’s not surprising that he presents his intellectual trajectory as a story of death and resurrection. As the Canadian psychologist recounts in his first book, 1999’s Maps of Meaning, his disillusionment as a…

Before he even began his sermon at the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, the Most Reverend Michael Curry rang a different note. Was that an iPad in his hands? Curry is the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, the first African-American to hold…

Every few weeks, Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress claim they’ve found something that will prove the Russia investigation was a sham—a “witch hunt,” in the president’s words—all along. Conservative media outlets build a steady…

In a matter of months, #MeToo has caused a seismic cultural upheaval. First and foremost, the movement has sparked a national, even global, reckoning for men who have engaged in a range of misconduct toward women, from verbal abuse to rape. In field after…

Farms have not really factored into the discussion of the 2018 Farm Bill. The argument surrounding the legislation, which was taken up for debate in the House earlier this week, has revolved instead around a host of other issues, like the deep cuts and “work…

It was neither the best nor the worst of times. But in contrast to the relative placidity of the 1950s, the events of 1968 opened up previously unimaginable vistas to people all across the globe. “We knew about the Paris commune,” the surrealist artist…

In a bid to offset the flurry of books critical of his presidency, Donald Trump has started something of a conservative book club, endorsing new releases that offer a rosier picture of his campaign and young presidency. One of those is The Great Revolt, by…

On the evening of January 4 2018, Patricia Gualinga was at home when she heard a crash, the cascade of cracked glass. Through her broken window, she heard a man’s voice shouting. He would kill her, he said, if she continued speaking out against natural…

President Donald Trump and his inner circle are marking the one-year anniversary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment to with a barely veiled threat: shut down the Russia investigation as soon as possible.…

If you asked me to choose the least adaptable novel of all time, I would pick Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. I bought it when it was first published in 2007, eager to while away a few hours with the reliable author of Saturday (2005), Enduring Love (1997),…

New York, NY (May 17, 2018) — The New Republic today published its June issue, which features a timely cover story that investigates why Orange County, California is a critical region for the Democratic Party as we approach the 2018 midterms in…

Last July, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán addressed members of the Hungarian right at their annual summer festival in Transylvania. Europe, he said, was being “de-Christianized” by elites who wanted a “new, mixed, Islamized” continent. “The…

This will be a paragraph to return to with The New Republic readers in the coming months and years; it’s the first we ever published, on November 7, 1914:…

To escape from any dire situation requires that you accept two truths: the truth of how you got there and the truth of how you can get out. And the sad truth is that, in less than a year and a half in office, Donald J. Trump and the squalling far-right…

It took me far too long to read Edward St. Aubyn’s five “Patrick Melrose” novels—perhaps because, around the time that At Last, the final installment of the pentalogy, appeared in 2012, a friend described St. Aubyn’s sentences to me as “cruelty…

America’s closest European allies know this much: They’re furious at President Donald Trump for withdrawing from the nuclear deal that his predecessor struck with Iran. But they have no idea what to do about it. Or, more accurately, they’re not sure they…

If President Bill Clinton acted too much like “Israel’s lawyer,” in the famous words of one of his top Middle East peace negotiators, President Barack Obama tried to act more like Israel’s doctor. Whereas Clinton reportedly advocated Israeli ideas in…

Let’s start with the bad so that we may hasten to the good: Queer swagger can be corny. The only bum note in Michelle Tea’s new essay collection Against Memoir is in a piece about her time on the road in the queer feminist spoken-word collective Sister…

Thursday marks a year since Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel to oversee the Russia investigation, and in that time I’ve written a lot about the known unknowns of his work. We don’t know everyone he’s interviewed. We don’t know what…

With hurricane season only two weeks away, I asked Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, if communities struck by last year’s devastating storms were prepared for another pummeling. His reply:…

On October 29, 1966, the Austin-based band 13th Floor Elevators…

President Donald Trump seems to be heading on diametrically opposed tracks with Iran and North Korea, both of which have long vexed the United States with their nuclear programs. On Iran, Trump has lived up to his hard-line campaign promises by withdrawing…

Two years ago,…

When I write about monopoly power, one popular complaint is that the issue feels too remote and abstract. Antitrust law is bound up in confusing terminology and complex measurements like the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index. But I reject the notion that people have…

Twenty years ago this month, India and Pakistan…

Aline Kominsky-Crumb has been an underground comics hero for a very long time, but only recently has she started to receive her proper due. Last year, David Zwirner Gallery exhibited a large selection of her work, along with art by her husband, R. Crumb. Now,…

“Oh,…