I came to your house with a gun. At least imagine I did. I tied you to a chair, took a step back and repeatedly fired. But my arm twitched; every bullet missed. Meanwhile, you slipped your knots and fled.
Without courting attention or even familiarizing Americans with the sound of his voice, Robert Mueller became a celebrity, portrayed by Robert De Niro on “Saturday Night Live,” and a potent political symbol: of the stubborn hope for truth and justice if you believed in his cause; of the indefatigable persecution of Donald Trump if you bought the president’s deceits and delusions.
There’s nothing terribly surprising about how Elizabeth Warren’s campaign is playing out. She’s scoring big points for her seriousness, reflected in a raft of detailed policy proposals. But many Democratic leaders and voters experience her as too strident, and she scares big donors, especially those in the financial industries.
How do Democrats properly vet their candidates for president without cannibalizing them? How do they rightly insist on sensitive and inclusive leaders while making allowances for past mistakes, present quirks, human messiness and the differences in the conversation and the culture now versus 10 or 20 or 40 years ago?
One of the funniest stories I ever heard about the college admissions madness came from an independent consultant who was paid handsomely to guide families through it and increase the odds that Harvard or Yale said yes.
How many studies do you have to throw at the vaccine hysterics before they quit? How much of a scientific consensus, how many unimpeachable experts and how exquisitely rational an argument must you present?
Maybe the best book I read last year was “Bad Blood,” about the epic sham of the biotech startup Theranos and its delusional creator, Elizabeth Holmes. I had trouble shaking it, and it roared back into my mind on Wednesday, when Michael Cohen testified publicly before the House Oversight Committee and retraced the mountain of lies buttressing Donald Trump’s business empire and the clouds of fiction preventing any clear view of it. This country of ours doesn’t lack for frauds, I thought. We we...
Marveling at the mysterious sanctum that his new book explores, French journalist Frédéric Martel writes that “even in San Francisco’s Castro” there aren’t “quite as many gays.”
Kirsten Gillibrand confronted a piece of fried chicken in South Carolina over the weekend. She began to eat it with a fork, realized that others around her were using their hands, asked if she should do likewise and ditched the utensils. Reading the reports of this, you got the sense that she would have grabbed that chicken with her pinkie toes if she’d been told to; she would have sucked it through a very large straw if those were the cues. Anything to conform. Anything to please.
The Super Bowl arrives and, with it, so many questions big and small. Is Tom Brady part cyborg and maybe even immortal? Will the Los Angeles Rams be hamstrung by the knowledge that they got this far by the grace of several sleepwalking referees?
I’m not really sure why they’re bothering with a Super Bowl this year. Sure, a bunch of people will make a boatload of money, tens of millions of us will reflexively tune in and we’ll find rare common ground over how cheesy the halftime show is. But are we believers anymore? Will we really see the winner as the winner — or just as the charmed survivor of a grossly tarnished process? Be it the New England Patriots or the Los Angeles Rams, the team will have an asterisk after its name. And that...
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — I did it. I found a significantly accomplished, defensibly qualified Democratic officeholder who isn’t flirting with — and hasn’t fantasized about — a presidential run in 2020. I had to take the train to Rhode Island, where we talked over pizza and eggplant parmigiana. We drank wine, too. It helps these days.
Donald Trump hungered for applause — the more frequent and louder, the better. He found that campaign rallies were a source of it like none that he had ever savored.
Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, who couldn’t be much clearer about his values if he went around in a conical white hood, said last week that “white supremacist” and “white nationalist” were inoffensive if not honorable terms, and now his fellow party members in Congress are coming down on him like a ton of bricks.
It’s funny that we are still talking about the physical features of what President Donald Trump wants or will settle for on our country’s southern border — about whether it will be concrete or steel, solid or slatted, a fancied-up fence or, in Nancy Pelosi’s hilariously acerbic dig, a “beaded curtain.” Because it’s not really a wall that Trump is after, if indeed it ever was. It’s a victory for victory’s sake. It’s a show of his might. It’s proof of his potency.
Promise me something: Over the coming weeks, whenever you hear a pundit or read a poll on the subject of who the 2020 Democratic nominee might be, you’ll flash back four years. You’ll remember predictions about the Republican nominee at this same point before the 2016 election.
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