Four More Years

The Trump reelection nightmare and how we can stop it

Swat Team

The media’s extermination of Bernie Sanders, and real reform

Nor a Lender Be

Hillary Clinton, liberal virtue, and the cult of the microloan

Tears for Fears

One of the many poignant glimpses of midcentury America afforded me by a fiftieth-anniversary reading of the Warren Report was the story of an ephemeral conservative organization called the American…

Donkey Business

That the Republican Party has worked its way to a lonely and unpopular place is not news. The G.O.P.’s congressional wing has been moving rightward since the 1980s, and in…

Chicago Is the Future

It was in 1988 that I moved to the bedraggled neighborhood of Hyde Park in order to study American history at the University of Chicago. I left the city ten…

Home of the Whopper

Let me tell you about this one stretch of Hillsborough Road in Durham, North Carolina. It’s between two freeways, just a short drive from the noble towers of Duke University,…

Course Corrections

To the long list of American institutions that have withered since the dawn of the 1980s—?journalism, organized labor, mainline Protestantism, small-town merchants—?it may be time to add another: college-level humanities.…

If Memory Swerves

September 15 will mark five years since the beginning of the economic slump that defines the world we live in. Disaster was in the air already by that day in…

Ad Absurdum

Suppose we decide to take a look at the Sixties from a fresh perspective. Suppose we start not with politicians, or soldiers in Vietnam, or civil rights protesters, or Woodstock…

Trio Grande

The lady who changed the world,” was how The Economist described Margaret Thatcher in its obituary. Whether or not we believe that individuals ever wield such power over history, it…

Getting to Eureka

The writer for Harper’s Magazine had a problem. Books he read and people he knew had been warning him that the nation and maybe mankind itself had wandered into a…

Power Rangers

What, then, is the Washingtonian, this smug and satisfied man? Behold him as he ambles toward you on the sidewalks of Capitol Hill, phone clamped to his ear, talking loudly…

Broken English

The radio was tuned to NPR, the subject was austerity, and the great observers of our political moment were speaking with their customary authority. The conversation wandered to and fro,…

Blood Sport

For a time in December, it looked as though the nation was finally ready to take on the gun culture. Perhaps you recall the moment: twenty grade-schoolers, along with their…

Team America

There have been an estimated 16,000 books written about Abraham Lincoln; like the lives of the wealthy and the secrets of self-improvement, a fascination with the Great Emancipator is an…

Second Chance

Inauguration Day is upon us. And it seems like only yesterday that the colossal, overheating machinery of democracy, which had been running in high gear for almost two years, finally…

Appetite for Destruction

Apocalypses are lots of fun. They bring excitement to our otherwise boring lives. They smash through the smug façade of everyday authority. And it’s a blast to imagine the exact…

All the Rage

In the political contest now entering its final few weeks, there are numerous issues great and small being debated by the candidates. But there is only one Issue before the…

The Maintenance Crew

Remember the moment when “the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”? It was late in the spring of 2008, and that was one…

Compromising Positions

Let us review. Barack Obama, who was lifted to the presidency four years ago on a great wave of progressive fantasy, likes to say that the national budget is like…

A matter of degrees

Letter from Brownbackistan

The Price of Admission

From Ph.D. to Escort: How Debt Can Change Students

This is an excerpt from Thomas Frank’s “The Price of Admission,” which appears in the June 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine. If you’re already a subscriber, you can sign in…

Bully pulpit

It’s a Rich Man’s World

How billionaire backers pick America’s candidates

Debt, be not proud

Act of contrition

Semper infidelis

More Government, Please!

The Job Creators Strike Out

Thomas Frank’s December Easy Chair column, “More Government, Please!” focuses on the specter, raised by Republicans, of a capital strike by the nation’s “job creators.” For Harper’s online, Frank writes…

The Bleakness Stakes

Social studies

The age of Enron

Gold faithful

Profiting from paranoia with precious metals

Required reading

Scenes from the Class War in Wisconsin

On March 1, the day Governor Scott Walker was to present his budget to the assembled lawmakers of Wisconsin, I made my way toward that state’s Capitol building to obtain…

Check It Yourself

The confessions of Glenn Beck

Can Madison Avenue make us love our government?

Servile disobedience

The fatal center

Bright frenetic mills

The Wrecking Crew

How a gang of right-wing con men destroyed Washington and made a killing

Taking names

Anti-liberalism in theory and practice

Lie down for America

How the Republican Party sows ruin on the Great Plains

Get rich or get out

Attempted robbery with a loaded federal budget

The trillion-dollar hustle

Hello Wall Street, goodbye social security

To the dot-com station

Rebranding Britain with American quackery

It’s globalicious! Two servings, half-baked, of the new economy

Brand you

Better selling through anthropology

I. Pop music in the shadow of irony

The marriage of hip and square