Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
It was Halloween in Orlando, and we had piled into a car to make a short trip from the Hilton to an after-party down the road, to wind up the first night of the latest edition of a gathering called the National Conservatism Conference. For at least many of the young people, the actual business…
In June, rightwing academic Kevin Slack published a book-length polemic claiming that ideas that had emerged from what he called the radical left were now so dominant that the US republic its founders envisioned was effectively at an end. Slack, a politics professor at the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan, made conspiratorial and extreme arguments…
“Margaret Atwood’s new novel is being greeted as the long-awaited feminist dystopia, and I am afraid that for some time it will be viewed as a test of the imaginative power of feminist paranoia,” the writer and critic Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in 1986, soon after the publication of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale. To…
Donald Trump thinks he can flip New Mexico, a state he lost by eight percentage points, in 2020. That task will require him to win over a significant portion of the 49.1 percent of New Mexicans who identify as Latinx, a demographic he’s having some trouble with, for some reason. So, at a rally in…
Speaking at a press conference on Monday, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley directly addressed President Donald Trump’s most recent racist tirade against them, urging Americans not to “take the bait” and instead come together to do the important business of the nation. “Our squad is big,” Pressley said, using the…
It’s been only a couple of days since President Trump tweeted a racist screed telling four congresswomen of color, three of whom were born in the U.S., to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Since then, Trump has doubled down on his attacks, and many…
It all seemed so inevitable: that Jack Dorsey, the C.E.O. and co-founder of Twitter, would appear onstage at last week’s TED ideas conference, in Vancouver; that the conference theme would be “Bigger Than Us,” an ambiguous invocation of either inspiration or fear; that Dorsey, during a session called “Power,” would calmly acknowledge the proliferation of…
end post-heading Two weeks before the 2016 presidential election, as the editorial head of Fox News online, I reviewed a draft news story that said porn actress Stormy Daniels had confirmed having an affair with Donald Trump a decade earlier. The only problem was … Stormy hadn’t said that. Daniels and her associates were playing…
In January, during the longest government shutdown in America’s history, President Donald Trump rode in a motorcade through Hidalgo County, Texas, eventually stopping on a grassy bluff overlooking the Rio Grande. The White House wanted to dramatize what Trump was portraying as a national emergency: the need to build a wall along the Mexican border….
Cathartic musings on a legal pad, a trip to the basement, and a eureka moment all led Cohen, Trump’s disgraced former lawyer, to a moment of public triumph. February 28, 2019 1:33 pm Michael Cohen is sworn in to testify before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Capitol Hill. From J Scott…