Going into Alex Garland’s astonishing new film, “Civil War,” I expected to be irritated by the implausibility of its premise. I’m not talking about the idea that America could devolve into vicious internecine armed conflict. That seems possible, if not probable. In one 2022 poll, 43 percent of…
Every time I write, as I did last week, that I don’t think anti-Zionism is necessarily antisemitic, I get emails from Jewish readers that are angry, disappointed or sometimes simply baffled. “Israel is the political entity through which the Jewish people exercises its natural right of self…
As infuriated as she is by President Biden’s stalwart support for Israel, Layla Elabed has not ruled out voting for him in November. A progressive Palestinian American community organizer in Dearborn, Mich., a majority Arab American city near Detroit, she doesn’t want to see Donald Trump back in…
Last fall I found myself at a dinner party that included a former Biden administration official and a Democratic donor, and the conversation turned, naturally, to President Biden’s age and his prospects for re-election. The ex-official said that from inside the White House, where people…
Two far-right members of Israel’s cabinet — the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich — caused an international uproar this week with their calls to depopulate Gaza. “If in Gaza there will be 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs and not two million the entire…
In May the literary critic Christian Lorentzen published a Substack newsletter about being bored. “Hollywood movies are boring. Television is boring. Pop music is boring. The art world is boring. Broadway is boring. Books from big publishing are boring,” he wrote.
Since I have been rather bored,…
There isn’t much good news in the world these days, so it’s worth taking time to appreciate the delightful implosion of soon-to-be former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
His 2019 landslide victory against the hapless Jeremy Corbyn of the Labor Party seemed to be ushering in a long period of right…
Andrew Breitbart, founder of the right-wing website Breitbart News, once said that “politics is downstream from culture,” and conservatives have been reverentially repeating his maxim ever since.
This belief contributes to the right’s eternal sense of victimization. Our system’s rural bias may…
America’s attempt to vaccinate the world against Covid is about to come to an end.
“We are at a point now where without additional funding we are going to have to start winding down our programming,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, the leader of the United States Agency for International Development’s…
The parents were talking about pandemic schooling, so, unsurprisingly, the conversation quickly turned to emotional devastation.
It was a Wednesday night in December, and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, was sitting in a living room in a giant suburban house in…