Not since Washington jailed former and future Mayor Marion Barry for crack cocaine possession has the capital city seen such a scandal. On Oct. 23, protesters and city politicians gathered outside a local business to decry a great injustice. One speaker branded the business full of “racists.” “I am upset, regardless of my previous employment, […]
Several years after being drummed out of polite progressive society because of his accurate political predictions, the statistician, pundit, and poker player Nate Silver is riding high. Silver’s hugely popular Substack and highly precise (and proprietary) election forecasting model have vaunted him to the pinnacle of public figurehood. And while his departure from mainstream media […]
The year is 1945 and a future world-famous actor is honing his craft in a tiny sixth-story apartment in the South Bronx, where he lives with his grandparents and single mother. He is reenacting a scene from The Lost Weekend, a movie he recently saw with his mom. It’s the scene where the main character, […]
In July of last year, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office triggered panic when it warned that projected payments on interest on the national debt would outpace defense spending, as well as nondefense discretionary spending. And that interest payment would outpace Medicare spending by 2046. Just 14 months later, the cost of interest on our $35 […]
Part of the difficulty horror writing faces has to do with the defenses that modern readers bring to genre fiction. Like virtually every other genre, horror only came into its own as a discrete mode of fiction with the great literary branching that took place in the era of modern publishing. But we find elements […]
Joe Biden was never known for his fidelity to the truth. Prior to his ascension to the presidency, previous bids for the White House had yielded a plagiarism scandal and a number of notable fibs about his academic record. There is much more. The Washington Post has called his story about being arrested while trying […]
Some things, unfortunately, once heard cannot be unheard. “You know what my favorite Star Wars movie is?” an accomplished and intelligent person said to me last week as we were making polite chitchat before a meeting got underway. “It’s The Phantom Menace. I just love that one.” “This meeting is over,” is what I did not say in response, […]
If you walked into an Abercrombie & Fitch in the late 1990s through the mid-2010s, believing you were simply walking into a clothing store, you would quickly realize that it wasn’t primarily selling polos and jeans. It was selling sex — to children. So, if you ever visited an Abercrombie & Fitch store during those […]
When I was 9 years old, long before I read Great Expectations, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, or anything at all by Louisa May Alcott, my favorite author was Stephen King. How and why I first latched on to King remains something of a mystery to me, but I suspect that I had been exposed […]
Amber Nicole Thurman was a 28-year-old who lived in Georgia at the time of her death in 2022. Thurman, a single mother to a young son, became pregnant with twins and sought an abortion “to preserve her newfound stability,” according to ProPublica. A trip to a North Carolina abortion clinic was hampered by delays. By […]