The New Republic

The United States has a meat problem. The average American will eat about 220 pounds of meat this year, including around 60 pounds of beef. The cattle needed to support that consumption require vast amounts of land and feed. They emit huge quantities of…

Just two weeks before the election, the Justice Department rolled out a series of high-profile white-collar cases and settlements that include an antitrust complaint against Google, a settlement with Purdue Pharma over its marketing of the drug OxyContin, and…

More than 200,000 lives lost in the United States, and counting. The worst economic downturn of the century. Armed gunmen invading state legislative sessions. Journalists beaten by police officers. Domestic terrorists coddled by cops. Protesters swooped up by…

The Bear fire was one of the largest of the over 8,000 wildfires that have beset California this year. Now incorporated into the still-burning North Complex Fire, the Bear started in the Plumas National Forest, sparked by a series of lightning strikes on…

Joe Biden finally has a court-packing answer—sort of. After dodging the question of what he would do about the Supreme Court, he told CBS’s Norah O’Donnell he would create a “bipartisan commission” to study and recommend possible reforms and report…

“I get it,” Mondaire Jones says into the camera, shaking his head. He is speaking on a Thursday night four weeks out from the election, to the virtual audience of a virtual rally hosted by Our Revolution, the PAC created by Bernie Sanders after his first…

American political debates began in 1858 with Abraham Lincoln taking on Stephen Douglas over the future of slavery. And 162 years later, in what will hopefully be the final debate of Donald Trump’s career, Lincoln again took center stage.Trump, with the…

Earlier this month on the stump, Joe Biden tried some Bernie-style class war on for size. “If every investment banker in New York went on strike, nothing would much change in America,” he said at a union hall event in Erie, Pennsylvania. “If every…

For more than four years—ever since it became clear that Donald Trump would actually be the Republican nominee for president—pundits have fixated on one question: Is Donald Trump about to pivot to normalcy? Will he, at long last, stop behaving like a…

For days we’ve been hearing President Donald Trump fulminate about his “FAKE and BIASED interview” with Lesley Stahl of CBS News’s 60 Minutes. It was a “vicious attempted ‘takeout’” full of “bias, hatred, and rudeness” that made Trump so…

One advantage of a vague slogan like “drain the swamp” is that it can mean different things to different people. Does it mean ousting elected officials from their comfy seats in Washington, D.C., which is often said (and wrongly at that) to be built on a…

There’s been a bit of common wisdom circling among green groups in Washington. If Biden gets elected and Democrats take back the Senate—both, granted, big ifs—then any climate legislation they might hope to pass will have to squeeze by conservative…

There are two dominant political traditions in the West and the United States: that of liberalism, which dates back to seventeenth-century England, and that of republicanism, with its roots in ancient Athens and Rome. Adherents of the former tradition, which…

How do you solve a problem like Martin Amis? Like Maria from The Sound of Music, he’s a clown to his detractors and a musician to his fans—the music of the well-tuned sentence, that is, and the clownery of the literary egomaniac. I’ve already checked to…

The Marathon County Historical Society sits in an old church building in Wausau, just up the Wisconsin River from the town of Mosinee. The lobby is large, a gift shop with books and paraphernalia in one area and temporary exhibitions in another. “Milking…

Over the past few weeks, when Diego Isaacs hasn’t been at his job in the produce department at the grocery store Harris Teeter in Charlotte, North Carolina, he’s been busy contacting as many people as he can about the upcoming election. Isaacs, an…

No one knows what to do about the crisis in local news. Recent research from Pew Research Center includes a host of depressing statistics: More than 50 percent of all newsroom jobs have been lost since 2009. One in five media workers lives in New York or Los…

Speaking with The Washington Post for a cringe-inducing piece about the influx of people moving to Montana, Candace Carr Strauss, the CEO of the Big Sky Chamber of Commerce, offered a potential selling point: “We are 98 percent Caucasian,” she told the…

Even if he’s handed a defeat in November, there probably won’t really be anything like a truly “post-Trump” politics for a long while: Donald Trump himself is likely to stick around one way or another and so, too, obviously, will the Republican voters…

There is a battle brewing over the shape of a potential Biden administration between the center and the left. Broadly speaking, the left, defeated in the primaries, is pushing from the sidelines for Biden to aim for a bigger presidency, to follow through on…

I’m not very good at math, which is probably how I ended up writing for a living. Fortunately, the statisticians over at FiveThirtyEight do not share this shortcoming. Nate Silver’s famed poll-processing models currently predict that there’s a roughly 80…

The University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media recently released a report titled “The Expanding News Desert,” which showed that over the last 15 years, more than a fourth of America’s newspapers and half of its journalists…

The United States is the world’s overwhelming military power, and it’s not even close. The country controls about 750 overseas bases (China, by comparison, has only one foreign base, in Djibouti). It spends around $730 billion on its military, which is…

With the likely confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett this week to the Supreme Court, conservatives will secure a majority they can use to strike down liberal legislation for years to come. Why do nine people who are not elected hold so much power over laws in…

Donald Trump didn’t actually give Exxon drilling permits in exchange for $25 million in campaign donations. He just wants you to know that he could, if he wanted to. That was the message behind a viral clip of the president at a rally on Monday, in which he…

This year has brought an unprecedented race to develop, test, and manufacture vaccines and treatments for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. Experts say they’ve never seen anything like it: the international collaboration, the round-the-clock work,…

In 1982, Joan Didion famously wrote of El Salvador that “terror is the given of the place.” At the time, the country was in the midst of a civil war, which pitted the leftist guerrillas of the Faribundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN, against…

Over the weekend, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave the White House a deadline of 48 hours to complete negotiations on a new pandemic relief package to be passed before the election, which is now two weeks away. This was the latest volley in the ongoing…

The Constitution is a remarkably vague document, and American courts have spent the last two hundred years trying to make it more specific. What counts as “cruel and unusual punishment,” either in 1789 or in 2020? What makes a search and seizure…

On May 31, as another night of disruptive protest overtook New York City streets, the Sergeants Benevolent Association, one of the unions representing NYPD officers, posted a photo of an arrest record on Twitter. Derived from an internal police database, the…