What It Means to be Kind in a Cruel World
George Saunders is one of America’s greatest living writers. He’s the author of dozens of critically acclaimed short stories, including his 2013 collection, “Tenth of December”; his debut novel, “Linc...
19 Feb 20211h 15min
What ‘Drained-Pool’ Politics Costs America
“The American landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time,” writes Heather McGhee in her new book, “The Sum of Us: What Ra...
16 Feb 20211h 8min
The Senate Is Making a Mockery of Itself
The Senate is where Joe Biden’s agenda will live or die. More specifically, the intricacies of archaic Senate rules — the budget reconciliation process, the filibuster, the majority leader’s ability t...
12 Feb 20211h 9min
Should We Dim the Sun? Will We Even Have a Choice?
“We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” Stewart Brand famously wrote in “The Whole Earth Catalogue.” Human beings act upon nature at fantastic scale, altering whole ecosystems, terraforming...
9 Feb 202156min
An Appalled Republican Considers the Future of the G.O.P.
"I don’t think conservatism can do its job in a free society in opposition to the institutions of that society,” Yuval Levin told me. “I think it can only function in defense of them.”Levin is the dir...
5 Feb 20211h 25min
To Understand This Era, You Need to Think in Systems
As my colleague Ben Smith wrote in an August profile, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has “made a habit of being right on the big things.” She saw the threat of the coronavirus early and clearly. She saw t...
2 Feb 20211h 9min
What’s Happening to Our Economy Is Like a Natural Disaster
The Biden administration’s first legislative priority is a $1.9 trillion economic rescue package. It’s the kind of mega-package where the individual policies contained inside it — a $15 minimum wage, ...
29 Jan 20211h 8min
The Man With the Plan to Beat the Pandemic
I’ve never covered a moment that simultaneously merits so much despair and so much hope. It’s dizzying. The Biden administration takes office with over 25 million Covid-19 cases nationwide, over 420,0...
26 Jan 20211h 20min
