The New Republic

When lawmakers and pundits debate policy, they are invariably talking about people’s lives. Every policy enacted by the federal government has an impact, large and small, for better or worse, on citizens and their quality of life, and entails some cost.…

James McGill Buchanan, the political economist who died in 2013, had a hand in some of the most important ideological developments in the American right in the 20th century. From the 1950s to the late 1990s, when a spat with the influential billionaire Charles…

An airplane is the perfect, and perhaps the only, place to actually read Monocle, the globe-trotting lifestyle magazine founded in 2007 by Tyler Brûlé, a Canadian editor and erstwhile war correspondent. Its logo, an “M” with a twisted loop inscribed in a…

Lately, the novelist Arundhati Roy has been receiving death threats. Last month, the popular Bollywood actor Paresh Rawal took to Twitter to condemn her support of Kashmir’s bid for azadi (autonomy) from the Indian state. In his tweets, Rawal, who is also a…

The Republican health care effort is, like the Democratic effort before it, largely about making significant changes to Medicaid, the nation’s largest insurer. Some 20 million Americans got coverage under the Affordable Care Act, three-quarters of them…

Lisa Durden, an adjunct professor at New Jersey’s Essex County College, appeared on Tucker Carlson’s primetime Fox News show earlier this month to debate the merits of a blacks-only Memorial Day party held by a New York City chapter of Black Lives…

When it comes to accommodating religious individuals or groups, the government has always been given a significant amount of discretion. For example, churches don’t pay many taxes, and they’re exempt from certain anti-discrimination laws when it comes to…

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is just a few votes away from passing legislation that would reduce health insurance coverage by 22 million people.Ironically, the impact would be most severe in his home state of Kentucky, where the Affordable Care Act…

Not so long ago, Lake Chad was one of the largest bodies of water in Africa. The thick reeds and vital wetlands around its basin provided vast freshwater reserves, breeding grounds for fish, fertile soil for agriculture, and grasslands where farmers grazed…

The health care legislation proposed by Senate Republicans is a moral abomination—one that leadership is trying to pass through undemocratic means. Some of the villains responsible for this are obvious, starting with Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, and Mitch…

It is infuriatingly easy to imagine Senate Republicans passing legislation that throws millions of people off of their health plans to finance a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans this week, just days after introducing it—without holding a single hearing…

When I asked Alexandra Petri, The Washington Post’s humor columnist, to imagine a world without Twitter, she saw endless possibility. “I have no idea what I would do with that spare time. Probably rethink my life, finish my book proposal, and, uh, reaffirm…

Ever since Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign in 2015, critics worried about his authoritarian tendencies. He’s done much to justify those fears. At his rallies, he whipped crowds into such a frenzy that protesters were beaten. As president,…

Earlier this month, the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group’s Lee Drutman released a fascinating study that challenged many of the dominant assumptions about the 2016 election. Drutman’s data suggested that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders voters were…

Gore is a new element in the work of Sofia Coppola. There’s…

Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press, a documentary about the death of Gawker premiering Friday on Netflix, opens with A.J. Daulerio, the former editor of the site, reading an email from his bank: “We placed a hold on your account.” Daulerio can’t help…

President Donald Trump’s position on repealing and replacing Obamacare has been all over the place. After the House narrowly passed the American Health Care Act in May, he and the chamber’s Republican leadership celebrated in the Rose Garden. Trump…

On…

To call Blood Drive a…

It has been nine days since a gunman opened fire on Republican members of Congress during an early-morning baseball practice in Northern Virginia, nearly killing House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. Scalise was only struck once, far from his most vital organs,…

Jon Ossoff’s disappointing loss in Tuesday’s special election in Georgia has triggered rebellious feelings within the Democratic rank-and-file, as some call for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to step aside. “I think you’d have to be an idiot to…

How many buildings have been designed but never built? Countless cities, whole extra urban universes. Every time a sketch or a blueprint is scrunched up and thrown in the bin, it’s like a wrecking crew has razed it. But in the ghostworld of imaginary…

Mamie Till-Mobley wrote her memoir, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America, in 2003, the same year she died of heart failure, and 47 years after the lynching of her son, Emmett Till. “When I am out and about,” she explained,…

It is 1996 in Brooklyn. The crime rate is on the decline, artists are fleeing Manhattan and its staggering rents for neighborhoods such as DUMBO, Williamsburg, and Greenpoint, immigrants are flocking to the borough, and you could still buy a brownstone for…

On June 18, Wisconsin ironworker Randy Bryce announced his campaign to unseat Speaker Paul Ryan with a campaign ad that instantly went viral. In it, he talks about his own battle with cancer and his mother’s needs as a patient with multiple sclerosis. He…

Rahm Emanuel has a battle plan for Democrats, and it looks mighty familiar. On Tuesday, just hours before two special congressional elections were called for Republican candidates, the mayor of Chicago and political operative Bruce Reed published a piece in…

In 2014, when Paul Ryan was trumpeting his soon-to-be-released…

Until a modest breakthrough this week, supporters of the Affordable Care Act had spent the month of June desperately trying to make issue of the Senate Republicans’ secret plan to take health insurance away from millions of Americans.On May 31, I described…

Karen Handel’s narrow victory over Jon Ossoff in last night’s special election in Georgia shows how Republicans can keep their coalition together despite President Donald Trump’s unpopularity. True, Trump was a drag on Handel, who won by four points in a…

While congressional Republicans are busy working on their secret health care bill, President Donald Trump is already undoing pieces of Obamacare on his own. He pledged during the campaign that he would roll back a regulation issued as part of the Affordable…