Democrats have become newly divided over reproductive rights as they attempt to decide who they will welcome, and who they will exclude, amid soul searching over how the party should rebuild after its 2016 loss.Democratic leaders have tried to walk a fine line by emphasizing that … | Continue reading
What We’re FollowingTrump’s Tax Plan: The president released an outline of his proposed reforms to the U.S. tax code, which include reducing the number of individual tax brackets and cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 to 15 percent. Though Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is … | Continue reading
President Trump is reportedly mulling an executive order to withdraw the United States from the North American Free Trade Agreement, a major trade deal with Canada and Mexico that reshaped broad sections of the U.S. economy after going into effect in 1994. But it might not be as … | Continue reading
A proposed draft executive order that would pull the United States out of the North American Free Trade Agreement is the latest round in a now-familiar series in Trump’s White House: The friction of Donald Trump’s nationalist campaign promises against the reality of governance, a … | Continue reading
There are two compelling narratives around President Donald Trump’s first 100 days. The first is his transformation from heterodox populist to orthodox Republican. Although he ran as a mold-breaking renegade, his economic policies come straight out of the conservative mold, from … | Continue reading
Today in 5 LinesThe White House is preparing an executive order formally withdrawing the United States from the North American Free Trade Agreement, according to media reports. President Trump revealed a one-page plan to overhaul the tax code that would reduce rates for businesse … | Continue reading
In the last century, 94% of the world’s seed varieties have disappeared. Family farmsteads have given way to mechanized agribusinesses to sow genetically identical crops on a massive scale. In an era of climate uncertainty and immense corporate power, farmers, scientists, lawyers … | Continue reading
It would not have looked great. On Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee’s environment subcommittee took up a draft bill to revive the long-delayed and long controversial plan to store the nation’s nuclear waste under Yucca Mountain in Nevada. … | Continue reading
The Trump administration won’t try to wreck the Affordable Care Act on its own quite yet, telling Democrats it plans to continue making payments to health insurers considered crucial for the law’s stability.Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, informed Democratic leade … | Continue reading
The late Stanley Kunitz began his second tenure as U. S. poet laureate in 2000 at the age of 95. He remains the oldest person ever appointed to the role.Five years before the appointment, our poetry editor, David Barber, praised Kunitz for continuing to produce remarkable work ov … | Continue reading
Anti-government protests have escalated again in Indian-administered Kashmir, following violent clashes earlier this month. On April 9, an election was held for a parliamentary seat, but voter turnout was only 7 percent. Demonstrators who had gathered around polling places clashe … | Continue reading
The newest columnist at The New York Times is Bret Stephens, a 43-year-old Never Trumper and the former editor-in-chief of the The Jerusalem Post. The Times picked up from The Wall Street Journal, where he helped edit the opinion section. Five years ago, Stephens won the Pulitzer … | Continue reading
“Figure out a way to change the state that you live in.” That was the controversial advice White House budget director Mick Mulvaney offered to those worried about a proposal that would allow states to repeal required essential health benefits in health-insurance plans. That prov … | Continue reading
On the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated, perhaps 3 million Americans took to the streets in peaceful protest to register their opposition. When news of his travel ban broke, I stood at LAX watching Angelenos sing the Star Spangled Banner and Amazing Grace. Across the nation … | Continue reading
The fate of the resurrected American Health Care Act in the House might now rest with Republican moderates.Forgive them for not celebrating their newfound clout.Conservative leaders of the House Freedom Caucus have struck a deal with the White House and one leading GOP moderate t … | Continue reading
The drama that is playing out now over North Korea’s nuclear and missile program—accentuated Tuesday by that regime’s large-scale artillery drill—represents one of the most dangerous challenges for U.S. national security since the end of the Cold War. It is a crisis that has been … | Continue reading
During World War II, a generation of great German writers including Thomas Mann, Hannah Arendt, Herman Hesse, and Bertolt Brecht became exiles, fleeing abroad to escape the Nazis. So many left, in fact, that “Exilliteratur” became its own genre, shaped by intellectuals writing ab … | Continue reading
Whereas I went one day to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription, and the pharmacy was closed, and I decided a book of poetry was the next best thing to medicine;Whereas the book I selected was Layli Long Soldier’s collection titled Whereas;Whereas in January of this year, Presid … | Continue reading
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says he wants comprehensive tax reform, and he thinks the Trump administration can get it done. On Wednesday, ahead of the release of the White House’s new tax plan, Mnuchin joined The Hill’s editor in chief, Bob Cusack, to discuss the soon-to-be … | Continue reading
In early 2014, Laura Brealey was visiting her daughters in Singapore when she slipped on a marble floor and cracked her hip. She had it replaced, but in the process, the surgeons noticed that her breathing sounded odd, and told her to speak to a respiratory specialist. At her dau … | Continue reading
In the winter of 1992, a construction crew in San Diego, California started cutting into the rocks that flanked the State 54 Highway, in a bid to widen the road. Those rocks hailed from the Pleistocene period and were rich in Ice Age fossils, so scientists from the San Diego Muse … | Continue reading
Feist’s stormy and great new single “Century” is the kind of song that doesn’t let you tune out while you listen. The drums wallop in a sharp, jerky pattern that’s like a cop banging on a door. Leslie Feist’s trademark style—melting her words into high, fleeting tones—appears her … | Continue reading
The director Jonathan Demme’s career in film was defined by its versatility. He could be making a weighty drama on social issues, a madcap action comedy, a pulpy crime thriller, or just be filming a rock-and-roll concert or a one-man show. All of his movies crackled with life, pu … | Continue reading
If you want to understand why the British Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn is careening to disaster, take a look at the clip below. The day before it was filmed, Corbyn had unveiled a proposal to add four new bank holidays to the year, one each for the patron saints of England, S … | Continue reading
The idea is peppered through the writings of scholars, great thinkers, and New Atheist-types: Education is the cure for religion. Freud wrote that civilization “has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers” who have rejected religion. And “if religious instruction we … | Continue reading
Three weeks ago, ShareAmerica, a website run by the State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs, published a post about Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump’s resort in Florida. The article is, at a glance, fairly innocuous, describing some of the Palm Beach est … | Continue reading
Mike Conaway, the Republican who replaced Devin Nunes as head of the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian meddling in the U.S. election, has described his mission simply: “I just want to find out what happened,” he’s said. The more urgent question elsewhere i … | Continue reading
The documentary film is often a space for confession, or interrogation—a public forum that’s both intimate and private, where people can spill their life stories into a camera without thinking about who might one day watch the results. In Kitty Green’s new movie Casting JonBenét, … | Continue reading
People are talking about hippos this week, at least in part because the Cincinnati Zoo’s beloved baby hippopotamus, Fiona, is now three months old—a milestone that seemed uncertain when she was born prematurely in January.Fiona’s doing great—so great that she’s “a little bit dang … | Continue reading
Any real discussion of mass incarceration is impossible without addressing racism. Michelle Alexander’s widely acclaimed book The New Jim Crow cast the criminal-justice system as a successor to slavery and segregation, one that’s hamstrung the African American community’s social … | Continue reading
Just as life, for many, now takes place both online and in the physical world, so too does death. Social media has brought back the kind of public grieving often seen in ancient Greece—open performances of sadness that bring people together for communal mourning. And a new study … | Continue reading
On August 9, 2014, the police officer Darren Wilson gunned down Michael Brown on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. Wilson is white; Brown was black. He was also unarmed. Within a few days, Ferguson was engulfed in riots. In dozens of other American cities, thousands of protester … | Continue reading
When astronomers talk about the search for life elsewhere in our solar system, they usually talk about microbes, simple and resilient forms of life known to exist in the most extreme temperatures and conditions. Space probes have mapped enough of the sun’s planets and moons to sh … | Continue reading
—The U.S. military began moving parts of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system to South Korea, a move that’s likely to anger both China and North Korea.—Turkish police have arrested 1,000 people and are looking for another 2,000 in connection with last year’s fai … | Continue reading
A pair of researchers behind a system for avoiding internet censorship wants to deliver banned websites inside of cat videos. Their system uses media from popular, innocuous websites the way a high schooler might use the dust jacket of a textbook to hide the fact that he’s readin … | Continue reading
First, it was crowd size. Then, it was health-care bill size. On Tuesday, the Trump administration continued its habit of conflating quantity with quality by releasing a list detailing President Donald Trump’s “historic accomplishments” from his first 100 days in office, a milest … | Continue reading
President Trump’s first 100 days deserve at least one superlative: The Trump administration has managed to alienate the courts to a degree that some administrations take years to achieve.The latest Trump defeat came Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of C … | Continue reading
Donald Trump is not the first U.S. president to tangle with Canada over lumber. In fact, the first U.S. president to do so was the first U.S. president. George Washington’s administration saw a dispute over ownership of valuable forests on the border between New Brunswick and pre … | Continue reading
“Bring it!”A Los Angeles news anchor yelped earlier this month in response to the announcement that “the world’s strongest coffee” is now available in the United States. The product is called Black Insomnia, a playful nod to a potentially debilitating medical condition that can b … | Continue reading
“I am the king of debt,” Donald Trump famously boasted during last year’s campaign. On Wednesday, the president is going to set about proving it—but perhaps not in the way he originally meant.All indications are that the tax plan the White House is slated to unveil will include w … | Continue reading
Given his administration’s bizarre rhetorical struggles when it comes to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, the bar for Donald Trump’s speech on Tuesday at the Holocaust Memorial Museum was low. All he really had to do was show he understands that anti-Semitism is bad, and that the … | Continue reading
Mock Donald Trump’s legislative ignorance if you will, but for a brief, shining stretch during the past week, he managed to bring about a rare Washington phenomenon: House and Senate Democrats saying nice things about their GOPcounterparts. Publicly. With straight faces. That the … | Continue reading
What We’re FollowingBorder Blues: As Congress struggles to strike a deal on a spending bill this week, President Trump is renewing his calls for the government to fund a wall on the Mexican border. But for all his insistence on Twitter, Trump has indicated he’d back down on the d … | Continue reading
A federal district court in California on Tuesday blocked the Trump administration from enforcing part of a January executive order to defund “sanctuary cities,” ruling that the directive likely exceeded federal law and unfairly targeted those jurisdictions.“Federal funding that … | Continue reading
Today in 5 LinesPresident Trump insisted that the border wall “will get built,” despite backing down on demands to fund the project in this week’s spending bill. A federal judge in San Francisco blocked a portion of Trump’s January executive order on immigration aimed at cutting … | Continue reading
For restaurant workers, especially kitchen staff who don’t receive tips, a boost in the minimum wage is usually welcome. But restaurant owners don’t always see it that way. They often argue that raising the price floor for labor can cause businesses running tight margins—as many … | Continue reading
In a eulogy for James Russell Lowell, novelist Henry James wrote:He is one of the happy figures of literature. He had his trammels and his sorrows, but he drank deep of the full, sweet cup, and he will long count as an erect fighting figure on the side of optimism and beauty. He … | Continue reading
I am not the first person President Trump or his economic team looks to for advice on tax reform. But if they wanted some, this is the free advice I’d give them: Don’t cut or eliminate the estate tax—raise it.Repealing the estate tax—a tax on assets transferred from a deceased in … | Continue reading