The New Republic

In February of 1873, James Shepherd Pike, a radical Republican journalist and longtime advocate for black suffrage, was assigned by the New York Tribune to cover a Deep South state legislature in the midst of Reconstruction. At the time, governments across the…

After nine months of negotiation, Nancy Pelosi has unveiled her proposal to reduce drug prices. The bill would allow the Secretary of Health and Human Services to negotiate with drug companies on the Medicare prices of between 25 and 250 drugs, setting an…

Two Christmases ago, my friend Doug Laux asked me to drive with him on Nevada 375, the Extraterrestrial Highway, to stay in the haunted Clown Motel and then roll to the back gate of Area 51. Naturally, I said yes, but on one condition: My cat Marie Claire had…

Two hundred years ago, the Founding Fathers made a mistake. They decided that the president of the United States should be elected by a popular vote held among the entire country’s citizens. The results of this flawed system speak for themselves. Under the…

Ben Lerner writes novels about Ben Lerner. This sentence might have once sounded like a criticism. But since writing that collapses the distance between fiction and author—so-called autofiction—is au courant, it is nearer an endorsement. The hero of…

Whenever the subject of climate policy comes up in the…

Rejoice, Democratic lovers of Plans, for your presidential field’s second-string wonk candidate Pete Buttigieg has produced details for his health care plan. (To be fair, this is more than can be said for the field’s starting wonk, Elizabeth Warren.)…

How a political film should aim to make you feel is a tricky question. There’s the Ken Loach approach, worthy and moving but, in this overcrowded landscape, arguably not fashioned to persuade (or even attract) those viewers not already on-side, and there’s…

In 2017, a coalition of Democratic activists and party…

Not long after the one-year anniversary of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a Supreme Court justice, he and his eight associates will devote one entire day to three cases which will determine the future of LGBTQ and women’s rights under the law. On…

On Sunday, Miami real estate developer Craig Robins introduced Joe Biden at a fundraiser by telling prospective donors that Biden is a candidate seeking “a solution that could just make things normal again.” It’s a pithy description for the campaign that…

It’s hard to see how The New York Times could have handled a new allegation against Justice Brett Kavanaugh any worse. Two of the Times’ reporters, Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, wrote a book on last year’s corrosive confirmation battle. The paper…

The post popped up in select Instagram feeds shortly before the election in 2016. Its photo depicted an anonymous black-clad woman on an airport tarmac, crying over a metal casket covered in an American flag. “Killary Clinton will never understand what it…

Nearly two decades before Boeing’s MCAS system crashed two of the plane-maker’s brand-new 737 MAX jets, Stan Sorscher knew his company’s increasingly toxic mode of operating would create a disaster of some kind. A long and proud “safety culture” was…

The story by now is near-common knowledge: In the throes of the last recession, the nation’s Big Three automakers—General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford—accepted a $51 billion bailout from the federal government, allowing the companies to stave off…

Convicted Russian national Viktor Bout spent years perfecting the art of international arms smuggling. At the height of his powers, he boasted a clientele that ranged from Central African dictators and their cronies, to warlords ransacking Libya, to the…

Global warming far and away is the most pressing issue…

My ancestors had no written language, so they told their…

“Everybody knows that the dice are loaded,” sang Leonard Cohen, who died the day before Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, which he had confidently predicted. “Everybody knows the fight was fixed / The poor stay poor, the rich get rich / That’s how it goes…

For many women—those who have experienced assault, who generally believe that it happens, or who were not already politically predisposed to not believe this instance occurred—the debacle of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination was not just outrageous and…

Edward Snowden’s new memoir, Permanent Record, wasn’t eagerly anticipated. That’s only because hardly anyone had heard about it before Snowden’s publisher, Macmillan, announced in August that it would go on sale in 20 countries on September 17,…

Eight…

The National Rifle Association (NRA) may be dedicated to armed self-defense, but the organization itself is largely indefensible. NRA leader Wayne LaPierre, who billed the group for his luxury clothing and lavish vacations, spent the summer purging…

At the United Nation’s climate conference in Poland last…

In 2017, Stefanie Albrecht, an investigative reporter for German broadcaster RTL, was in the midst of what would become a prize-winning investigation of Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party that would go on to shock the world by winning seats in…

There’s laziness, there’s racism, and there’s lazy racism. About 45 minutes into IT: Chapter Two, which remained atop the box office last weekend, the three-hour movie reveals it’s aiming for the latter. For this sequel to the 2017 film,…

Five years before masterminding the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, Osama bin Laden laid out his strategy in a declaration of jihad “against the Americans occupying the land of the two holiest sites.”…

It’s the year 2100. The nationalist ideology popularized by Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Boris Johnson has not only retained its hold on industrialized nations, but also expanded amid conditions of climate upheaval. Many of the world’s major powers…

The ongoing contretemps between President Donald Trump and the intelligence community forces a dismal and daunting question: Whose side must be taken in a power struggle between a legion of professional liars and a consummate bullshit artist? Both the…

Under siege from thousands of lawsuits from federal, state, and local governments for its role in the deadly opioid addiction crisis, drug manufacturer Purdue Pharma reached a tentative settlement with some of the plaintiffs last week. In the deal, Purdue…