The New Republic

Just minutes after white nationalist Richard Spencer finished his speaking engagement at the University of Florida on Thursday, the Los Angeles Times published a report that made clear who had won in the latest overhyped battle of anti-fascists and college…

Rain is falling on leaves, a whole forest full of them. The frame is filled with stems and green. Then the camera moves and it turns out it wasn’t a forest after all; that we were in Thibault’s windowbox all along. He is just giving his plants a little…

At the end of July, the White House was at rock bottom. The president was tweeting at all hours of the day and night. Everyone was leaking anything they could get their hands on. Anthony Scaramucci was hired as communications director and fired ten days later.…

Me too. But I’m done dredging up my painful experiences.After The New York Times and The New Yorker unveiled decades of predatory behavior by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, women who have experienced sexual harassment and assault were encouraged to…

President Donald Trump has turned the Environmental Protection Agency into a department at war with its core mission. His pick to run the agency, Scott Pruitt, relentlessly sued the EPA as Oklahoma’s attorney general, has close ties with polluting companies,…

Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention was a love letter to her husband, for his accomplishments both as a president and a family man. “Today, after so many struggles and triumphs and moments that have tested my husband in ways…

Writing about Joni Mitchell is difficult. The first and clearest fact about her is that she recorded eight genius records in a row in the late 1960s and 1970s: Song to a Seagull (1968), Clouds (1969), Ladies of the Canyon (1970), Blue (1971), For the Roses,…

There are no trenches, no German submarines, no gas attacks in Blood Dark, yet Louis Guilloux’s epic novel ranks among the most powerful French depictions of the First World War. By 1935, when it was published, suffering on the front line had already…

On Thursday night in Richmond, Virginia, his first day back on the campaign trail since Donald Trump’s inauguration, Barack Obama will give a stump speech for the state’s Democratic nominee for governor, Ralph Northam. The former president will inject…

Illustration by Meghan WillisSam Fox, Pamela Adlon’s television alter ego on FX’s Better Things, is not like a regular mom. She’s a cool mom. You know this because she dresses like Patti Smith, all steel-toed ranch boots and distressed canvas blazers,…

It’s hard to accurately characterize President Donald Trump’s habit of making consistently false, frequently self-contradictory, often hypocritical, and always flamboyant statements. No word quite captures their all-encompassing magnitude, their frequency,…

In 1987, Saul Bellow gave an interview about the controversial book The Closing of the American Mind by his friend Allan Bloom. During the conversation, Bellow delivered a now-infamous line that was widely read as a flippant profession of cultural…

This is a strange time for a genre of American history that is sometimes derisively referred to as “dad history.” These approachable tomes about the great men of the past are a fixture of airport bookstores and Barnes & Noble wishlists, and they have never…

At a town hall meeting in New York City early this year, Nancy Pelosi fielded a thorny question about the direction of her party. Trevor Hill, a dapper New York University sophomore sporting a light purple shirt and suspenders, wanted to know where the House…

Last week, the public got a rare glimpse at the art of spinning a federal natural disaster response. On Friday, Bloomberg reporter Christopher Flavelle published excerpts from internal Pentagon emails he accidentally received, in which officials at the Defense…

The economist Arthur Laffer appeared early Monday on the Fox Business Network to defend the current president’s proposed tax cuts. “I’m hoping the Democrats vote with it. They should vote with it, they believe in it, they want it,” he said, wrongly.…

When President Trump decided to commit additional troops to the war in Afghanistan—now entering its seventeenth year—he contradicted his own position on the conflict. After years of deriding the war as a “total disaster” and a “complete waste,” and…

There is a point during every Values Voter Summit when the unconverted observer fights stupor. The old white men are interchangeable, distinguished only by the different colors of their ties. Even the yearly cameo by Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson makes…

In a basement conference room in the Ronald Reagan Center in Washington, D.C., on November 19, 2016, following one of the first alt-right press conferences after the 2016 election, F. Roger Devlin (the “F” stands for Francis) took to the stage with a…

In 2006, anti-war progressive Ned Lamont defeated Joe Lieberman in Connecticut’s Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. Lieberman promptly started a “Connecticut for Lieberman” party and ran as its nominee in the general election, creating a headache for…

Tom Steyer has his own litmus test for Democrats. The billionaire environmentalist and major donor from California called last week for his party’s lawmakers and candidates to pledge to impeach Donald Trump. A “clear and present danger to the republic,”…

On September 28, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved on a party line vote the nomination of Brian Benczkowski to be the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division. The vote put President Donald Trump one step closer to installing a potential mole…

If Northern California’s famous wineries could survive Prohibition, there’s no doubt they’ll make it through this year’s wildfires. That’s the attitude of Michael Honig, chairman of the Napa Valley Vintners trade association, who told New England…

During Barack Obama’s two terms in office, Democrats lost ground at the state level—a lot of ground. Republicans now dominate state legislatures to a greater degree than at any time since the Civil War, making it nearly impossible for Democrats to enact…

President Donald Trump is a terrific leader, if he does say so himself. There’s never been a commander-in-chief so prone to extravagant self-praise, which is all the more striking given the paucity of his achievements to date. “We’ve done a great job,”…

Canadians…

If you are not the sort of person who is already likely to read a 500-page book on the  former Greek finance minister’s efforts to save his country from the machinations of the International Monetary Fund, then you aren’t going to become one because I…

Earlier this month, voters in the autonomous Spanish region of Catalonia overwhelmingly approved a controversial referendum to secede from the country, though the consequence of the vote remains unclear. In an address to the Catalan Parliament, the region’s…

President Donald Trump on Friday did what he does best: He threw a temper tantrum on national TV. To address what he called “the increasing menace posed by Iran,” he announced his refusal to send Congress a routine certification required by law that Iran…

On Tuesday, Martin Scorsese graced the online pages of The Hollywood Reporter with a guest column on the way that America judges films now. He’s not happy with the rise of box office sales as the arbiter of a film’s worth. This process has been on the rise…