People are always changing their minds, day to day. But over the past 20-odd years one group has shifted to an astounding degree: highly educated white Democrats. I’m not sure I understand why this group has undergone such a transformation, but it has, and the effects are reshaping our politics.
My colleagues at T Magazine had a very good idea. They gathered some artists and museum curators and asked them to name the artworks that define the contemporary age — pieces created anywhere in the world since 1970.
So apparently Donald Trump wants to make this an election about what it means to be American. He’s got his vision of what it means to be American, and he’s challenging the rest of us to come up with a better one.
The Mueller report is like a legal version of a thriller movie in which three malevolent forces are attacking a city all at once. Everybody’s wondering if the three attackers are working together. The report concludes that they weren't, but that doesn’t make the situation any less scary or the threat any less real.
Suppose one night there is a knock on your door. You open it to find 100 bedraggled families shivering in your yard — exhausted, filthy, terrified. The first cry of your heart would be to take them in, but you’d know there were too many.
In Willa Cather’s novel “My Antonia,” there are two kind Russian farmers named Peter and Pavel who have settled on the Nebraska prairie. On his deathbed, Pavel tells the story of how they came to emigrate there.
In her essay “Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?” Kate Julian takes a question that seems to have a simple answer (porn) and shows that it has a complex answer. In one striking part of the essay, which appeared in The Atlantic, Julian shows that fewer young people are having the kind of relationships that lead to sex. In 1995, 74 percent of 17-year-old women had had a special romantic relationship in the preceding 18 months. By 2014, only 46 percent of 17-year-olds had ever had a roma...
At the end of every year I give out the Sidney Awards to celebrate and recommend great examples of long-form journalism. I do it so that we can step out of the daily rush of events and read things that are broader and more reflective.
Are you optimistic or pessimistic about America’s future? I’m optimistic. I say that because there have been many moments in our history when old ideas and old arrangements stopped working and people chopped them up. Those transition moments were bumpy, and it was easy to lose hope, but then <em xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">people figured it out. </em>Never underestimate the power of human ingenuity.
I’ve only been around Phil Anschutz a few times. My impressions on those occasions were that he was a run-of-the-mill arrogant billionaire. He was used to people courting him, and he addressed them condescendingly from the lofty height of his own wealth.
There is some sort of hard-to-define spiritual crisis across the land, which shows up in rising depression rates, rising mental health problems. A survey that the Pew Research Center released late last year captures the mood. Pew asked people to describe the things that bring meaning to their lives. A shocking number of respondents described lives of quiet despair:
Moderates have a different story to tell, but in both parties moderates are afraid to tell it. Moderates are afraid to break from the gloom and carnage mindset that populists like Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders insist on.
The progressive narrative is dominating in part because progressives these days have a direct and forceful story to tell and no interest in compromising it. It’s dominating because no moderate wants to bear the brunt of progressive fury by opposing it.
One area where AI can most immediately improve our lives may be in the area of mental health. Unlike many illnesses, there’s no simple physical test you can give someone to tell if he or she is suffering from depression.
Over the past year and a half, the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida have handled themselves with a fervor and commitment that has, most of the time, inspired the nation.
Building any community requires exercising power. America’s leaders made some terrible mistakes (Vietnam, Iraq). The nation never got to enjoy the self-righteous sense of innocence that the powerless and reclusive enjoy.
Ella is a British woman who grew up in a broken home and was abused by her stepdad. Her eldest son got thrown out of school and ended up sitting around the house drinking. By the time her daughter was 16, she was pregnant and had an eating disorder. Ella, though in her mid-30s, had never had a real job. Life was a series of endless crises — temper tantrums, broken washing machines, her son banging his head against the walls.
Our system of checks and balances requires that political leaders hold two opposing ideas in their heads simultaneously. If you’re a political leader, the first is that your political opponents are wrong about many things and should be defeated in elections. The second is that you still need them. You need them to check your excesses, compensate for your blind spots and correct your mistakes.
On Monday I was honored to speak to the graduating students at Arizona State University. It was an intimidating occasion. ASU is the most innovative university in the world. Plus, there were 35,000 people in the football stadium.
