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Archive: 2020

Reality Check

On the morning of May 26, Donald Trump posted a pair of tweets about voting by mail. “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than…

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Triangulation

As of this writing, the United States, which has 4.2 percent of the world’s population, accounts for nearly 30 percent of total COVID-19 mortalities. Among Americans, a common response to…

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After the Fires

From A More Perfect Reunion, which was published in June by Bold Type Books. Even before Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, many were debating the utility of pacifist resistance.…

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New Whirled Order

From In the Land of Good Living, a memoir, which was published last month by Knopf. At my Miami Catholic school, we didn’t have snow days, naturally. We had hurricane…

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Troubleshootings

From a Los Angeles Police Commission meeting held on June 2 using Zoom, a videoconferencing platform, which lasted seven hours. Richard Tefank is the executive director of the commission, Mike…

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The Report

From “No Man’s Land,” a story from her collection Many People Die Like You, which will be published this month by And Other Stories. Translated from the Swedish. The report…

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I Won’t Beg.

From Here Is the Sweet Hand, a poetry collection, which will be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I have before. I took off a skin. I put…

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Worst Responders

From a 2017 complaint filed by David and Gretchen Jessen against Fresno County and the city of Clovis, California, for damages incurred during a police raid on their home. In…

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Knife Play

From The Lost Writings, a collection of fragments, which will be published next month by New Directions. Translated from the German. I was sitting in the box next to my…

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The Art of Losing

Can Democrats win back postindustrial America?

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The Ideal State

People in Chicago will tell you that there is a happy land not far away. Sitting on the ash heap of their own miseries, they mournfully explain that just over…

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New Books

If it weren’t for the black death, the fourteenth-century merchant Francesco di Marco Datini might have left no trace in history. A workaholic Tuscan with offices from Bruges to Barcelona,…

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On Moral Injury

Can a new diagnosis help heal our souls?

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Basement Suite

Left to our use are the fixtures and appliances Repented of by the homeowners Who don’t realize this is a way to know them. In the basement one is closer…

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The Counter-Monument

Disempowering a memorial to Fascism

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All My Pronouns

How I learned to live with the singular they

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In Plain Sight

The search for Syrian war criminals in Europe

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False Dawn

A zuihitsu from the early months of the pandemic

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Nobody Gets Out Alive

Getting past the mastodon took planning. The great plated skull was wedged between the fireplace and the credenza, leaving the two ivory tusks splayed across the carpet where a coffee…

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Letters

Popular Semantics Thomas Frank’s brilliant article [“The Pessimistic Style in American Politics,” Essay, May] sheds light on the curious use of the word “populist” to describe authoritarians, and the significance…

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States of Emergency

When President Trump announced several months ago that the spread of the novel coronavirus constituted a national emergency, he invoked—whether he knew it or not—the National Emergencies Act, the 1976…

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Things to Come

On March 30, during one of the daily briefings on the COVID-19 outbreak that had so captured the hearts and minds of New Yorkers, Governor Andrew Cuomo uttered a sentence…

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Melancholy Science

From “Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment,” an essay from the collection Splinters in Your Eye, which will be published this month by Verso. On July 22, 2011, a neofascist Norwegian terrorist named…

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Soul Proprietor

From an interview with Tony Spell conducted in April by Victor Blackwell, an anchor for CNN. Spell, the pastor of Life Tabernacle Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had been cited…

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September 2020

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