The New Republic

If there’s one thing Joe Biden wants people to know about his new health care plan, it’s this: It is not Medicare for All. “Read the plan,” he told reporters about his proposal, which would bolster Obamacare and add a public option. “I’m not…

Virtually every state in the Union elects its governor and other statewide offices by popular vote. Mississippi does something different. First, a candidate must win a majority of the statewide popular vote. Second, they must also win a plurality of the vote…

The idea that Donald Trump plays “3D chess” has never been particularly plausible; still, it was one of the most persistent themes of the 2016 election. The concept was (and is), to be fair, quite appealing: Trump’s public persona may appear, on the…

The Democratic Party has moved left on myriad issues in recent years, but perhaps nowhere more dramatically than on the minimum wage. It wasn’t long ago that President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress were agitating for $10.10, while the demands of the…

In the nineteenth century, there was a lot of money to be made tracking…

John Paul Stevens, who died on Tuesday, served on the Supreme Court for 35 years. His tenure, the second-longest in the court’s history, placed him in the middle of the great legal controversies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: on…

On…

The Supreme Court’s 5–4 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause last month dealt a harsh blow to American democracy. For the last decade, federal courts were the strongest bulwark against partisan gerrymandering in the states, but Chief Justice John Roberts closed…

For most of this year, Joe Biden has strutted across stages in New Hampshire and Iowa, and at swanky fundraisers in New York and California, as if he were already the Democratic nominee. Questions about attacks from his rivals were, more often than not, met…

Kirkus Reviews recently called Lila Savage’s debut novel Say Say Say, about a care worker who tends to a middle-aged woman with a serious brain injury, “tedious,” condemning her as “an author who is maybe a little bit too in love with her heroine, not…

Hillary Clinton had a point. In September 2016, the Democratic presidential candidate criticized some of her rival’s supporters for backing him. “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the…

The World’s Only Corn Palace was crowded on this post–Independence Day weekend when I visited to see it thank me for my service. An estimated half-million tourists a year trek to Mitchell, South Dakota, to admire the odd, onion-domed sports and concert…

In spite of his confused account of U.S. history, his partisan snipes, and his dictatorial posturing, Donald Trump’s parading and speechifying in Washington on July 4 attempted to glom onto one of the last consensus issues in a broken American culture: We…

Dale Peck’s post “My Mayor Pete Problem” has been removed from the site, in response to criticism of the piece’s inappropriate and invasive content. We regret its publication.

Trump, ever the reality-TV showman, governs through spectacle. What could be more spectacular than a massive nationwide raid against undocumented immigrants? Set aside the morality or ethics for a moment, as the president regularly does. Sunday’s planned…

Donald Trump’s war against the media reached perhaps its weirdest point on Thursday afternoon when the president hosted a “social media summit” that excluded Facebook and Twitter, but included a number of right-wing conspiracy-mongers, provocateurs, and…

It’s been said before, but it bears repeating: The first round of Democratic presidential debates failed the planet. In a combined 240 minutes of discussion—at an event held in a city poised to sink into the ocean—the moderators devoted a combined 15…

When Harold Jones first bought his home in Canarsie in 1991, he was struck most by the tall trees lining the street. Today, he’s more struck by the “For Sale” signs standing in their place.The trees went first, and quickly. During Hurricane Sandy in…

On Wednesday, Nancy Pelosi reminded her caucus who the real enemy is, telling them that they needed to present a united front in the fight against Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump. “Without that unity, we are playing completely into the hands of the other…

There are two major kinds of Arctic narratives. There are those of heroic and doomed adventurers, and there are the environmental stories. In one class are books like Hampton Sides’s In the Kingdom of Ice or Anthony Brandt’s The Man Who Ate His…

When we look back on the horrible summer of 2019, we might find that what seemed to be a minor event at the time turned out to be a watershed. On June 6, more than 300 workers at Vox Media staged a walkout in protest of management’s refusal to accede to…

It was already clear before this week that Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta, as a federal prosecutor a decade ago, had mishandled the Jeffrey Epstein case: He gave the well-connected hedge-fund manager the deal of a lifetime for sex-trafficking underage…

What, precisely, does Donald Trump want to do with Iran? It’s increasingly clear that even he doesn’t know the answer to that question.Last month, the president seemed close to taking military action against Iran over the still-mysterious bombing of two…

The moon belongs as…

The 2019 hurricane season has barely begun, and a troubling storm is already brewing. Heavy rains paralyzed New Orleans on Wednesday, with as much as ten inches falling in just a few hours, and the National Weather Service declared a “flash flood…

What would you do if you suddenly received a check for $100 million? Many Americans would probably embrace a more lavish personal lifestyle: a bigger house, more expensive car, fancy overseas trips. Most would probably use the opportunity to pay off…

One month before Donald Trump launched his presidential bid, the Supreme Court agreed to consider a bid by conservative legal activists to rejigger the boundaries of American electoral politics in their favor. The plaintiffs in the case, Evenwel v. Abbott,…

Aside…

Pete Buttigieg made more than a few jaws drop last week when he released quarterly donation tallies that outperformed his place in the opinion polls by a large margin. Between April and July, Buttigieg raised a staggering $25 million from nearly 300,000…

a thousand ripe plums gape down at me

where squattingin the dirt I pinch

each beetle pill ladyuncap a jam jar

drop them inside
I love this hot

house smell
sometimes

I forget how
         not to breathe