The New Republic

The $1.9 trillion recovery package set to go to a vote in the coming weeks won’t include automatic stabilizers. A perennially popular policy among left-of-center wonks and the public, automatic stabilizers can refer to any program that’s there when you…

Two years ago, Margaret Spellings, George…

Tyrone Clifford Jr. remembers the first time he tried methamphetamine. “It was everything, all at once,” he said; a whirring rush of euphoric energy. It was the 1990s, and Tyrone was in his early twenties. He was HIV-positive, watching as the AIDS epidemic…

This year, all around the country, Republican state lawmakers are pushing an alarming array of bills that are designed to make it harder to vote. They’re targeting absentee voting, early voting, voting by mail, and virtually every other means to cast a…

Speaking to The Nation in 2014, Ehab Al Shihabi, then the CEO of the recently launched Al Jazeera America, made the case that Americans were desperate for serious, unbiased, old-fashioned hard news. “If we do the kind of reporting that is considered ‘back…

Arizona, California, and Nevada will need to cut their use of Colorado River water by nearly 40 percent by 2050. A study by researchers at Utah State University, which the Arizona Daily Star reported this past Sunday, noted that Colorado, New Mexico, Utah,…

Last week, Democrats introduced the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021—a comprehensive immigration bill that will evidently be one of the Biden administration’s first major legislative battles after the coronavirus relief fight is finished. If passed, the Act…

Every year, my colleagues and I get to go through “libel training.” Every year, I also make the insufferable joke to my co-workers that we’re going to be trained to commit libel. Unfortunately, it’s not quite that exciting. A lawyer who’s worked with…

In early December, conservative commentators tried to drum up social media controversy over a sweatshirt. The shirt, merchandise for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional campaign, read simply “Tax the rich” and was branded with the initials…

Halfway through a recent New York Times story about Governor Andrew Cuomo’s long (but perhaps not widely known) history of governance-by-bullying, an ally tried to defend his signature political style. He didn’t say that Cuomo’s behavior was ethical, or…

Law enforcement ably played the role of both problem and solution at Tuesday’s Senate oversight hearing on the January 6 riot at the Capitol. “Was this an intelligence breakdown,” asked Senator Jacky Rosen from Nevada, “or a resource issue?” A litany…

Last week, Facebook went nuclear. As Australia considered legislation to force tech giants to compensate media outlets, the social media company cut off access to news for Australian users and globally banned sharing of Australian news sources. It was a…

On May 31, 1953, 20-year-old Sylvia Plath arrived in New York City. She was a rising senior at Smith College and already a published author, with three poems sold to Harper’s; she was also just a few months away from her first suicide attempt. Stepping off…

Consider a steak. When it hits the hot oil in the pan, your mouth can’t help but water at the aroma. That familiar crackle of fat beginning to fry and render is the sound of the maillard reaction: that wondrous molecular dance of the steak’s amino acids…

Jonathan Karl, the guest host of ABC’s This Week, knew exactly what he was doing on Sunday when he asked Republican Representative Steve Scalise if the 2020 election was stolen. This was, on its face, a simple and straightforward question. No evidence of…

On…

Blending fiction and philosophy is more akin to chemistry than art: It involves creating a synthetic element that rarely occurs in nature in stable form. Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, and Ursula Le Guin have successfully married the two disciplines, but like…

If Merrick Garland is confirmed by the Senate and becomes the next attorney general, his first priority, according to the testimony he offered on Monday, would be supervising “the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on…

In the wake of the winter storm that decimated Texas’s energy infrastructure and left millions without power or water, the predictable storylines have come and gone one by one: There was the early attempt by conservatives to shift the blame from the…

A new billboard looms over the I-80 freeway in San Francisco, near Twitter’s headquarters. A blown-up screenshot of a tweet, it reads, “Thinking of moving to Miami? DM me.” While the billboard itself was reportedly paid for by a group of tech investors,…

Cartoonist…

Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial is over, and Washington is now congealing around some sort of august body to investigate the January 6 insurrection. Earlier this week, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she would support creating an “outside,…

In July 2017, Donald Trump gave a speech in Warsaw that seemed, at the time, to herald a new age. In remarks dredged from the imagination of adviser Steve Bannon, the president drew a rhetorical line in the sand and enlisted his host—the Eurosceptic,…

Deb Haaland could be the next secretary of the interior. Her hearing is scheduled for Tuesday and, if seated, the congresswoman from New Mexico and citizen of the Laguna Pueblo will make history. Her name will be etched into the minds of young Native women…

Although Donald Trump’s status as a bestower of brilliant nicknames was always overrated, the GOP is clearly lost without his marketing savvy. On Friday, House GOP Whip Steve Scalise released a statement lambasting the $1.9 trillion stimulus package that’s…

A real estate agent might call our apartment in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston cozy with a sun-drenched bedroom. The reality is that it’s a small, cheap, window-heavy garage conversion. But it’s ours. We’ve filled it with art, good food, books,…

“The electricity would come on and then turn off immediately. Every 30 minutes or hour, you would get this moment of hope,” said Paris Moran, of San Antonio, Texas. “I think that was the worst part, mentally.” Moran and her parents, who both have…

In The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a classic 1943 film that traces, in vaguely allegorical fashion, half a century’s evolution in England’s national character, the actress Deborah Kerr plays a series of roles that represent changing incarnations of…

This month marked the thirtieth anniversary of Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy,” not that anyone was keeping track. The song remains, for me at least, the high-water mark of what came to be known as trip hop, a bastard genre of languorous tempos…

The astronomical event referenced in the title of Shirley Hazzard’s novel The Transit of Venus occurs in two installments—eight years apart, every 243 years—when Venus passes between Earth and the nearest star twice. For a short while, Venus is visible…