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…

On Friday morning, after a night of insomnia fueled by worries about raising children in a collapsing society, I opened my eyes, started reading about efforts by Wisconsin Republicans to seize control of the state’s elections, then paused to let my tachycardiac heartbeat subside. Marinating in the…

The climax of Kati Marton’s captivating new biography of Angela Merkel, “The Chancellor,” comes in 2015, when the German leader refused to close her country’s borders to a tide of refugees fleeing civil war and state collapse in the Middle East and Africa. “If Europe fails on the question of…

I’ll always remember Sept. 11 as something that happened in the evening. At the time I was living in a town in northern India, and I watched the towers fall on a TV someone had dragged into the street. Because I was so far away, I’ll never know the terror people in New York and Washington felt on…

In 2019, allied and government airstrikes in Afghanistan killed some 700 civilians, more than in any other year since the war’s start, according to the Costs of War Project, a group working to tally the human toll of America’s post-9/11 conflicts. US and NATO airstrikes declined in 2020 after…

A few weeks ago I posted, on Twitter, that I was increasingly furious with the F.D.A. for taking so long to authorize Covid vaccines for children under 12. Then I deleted the tweet, because I know that as desperate as I am to get my kids inoculated, I’m not qualified to make judgments about how the…