The question is not whether the President is crazy but whether he is crazy like a fox or crazy like crazy. And, if there is someone who can know the difference, should this person, or this group of people, say Read More …
The old-school Mafiosi are fading into the past, pale imitations of their pharaonic forefathers. As the late Murray Kempton, the greatest of all New York columnists, once wrote, “Where are the scungilli of yesteryear?” In the late nineties, federal agents Read More …
On Thursday evening last week, as members of Congress prepared for the government shutdown, Trump Administration lawyers at the Department of Justice were filing a rare petition before the Supreme Court. They were challenging the injunction of a federal judge Read More …
Five decades ago, in an essay in The New York Review of Books, Hannah Arendt described an exchange she had had with a “Roman chambermaid” about Pope John XXIII. The beloved pontiff had died, of stomach cancer, two years earlier, not long before Read More …
In the spring of 2016, Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, were both backstage at a National Rifle Association conference in Louisville, Kentucky. The two men are political opposites. McConnell is a poor orator but a gifted Read More …
To understand how the Senate Republicans’ health-care bill would affect people’s actual health, the first thing you have to understand is that incremental care—regular, ongoing care as opposed to heroic, emergency care—is the greatest source of value in modern medicine. Read More …
Thirty-seven years ago, the baseball player Curt Flood, fresh off his final, dismal year as a professional athlete, published a memoir titled “The Way It Is.” It cannot be called a great book, but its literary quality was a secondary concern. Read More …
Every fifteen minutes or so, as I wrote this story, I moved my cursor northward to click on the disk in the Microsoft Word toolbar that indicates “Save.” This is a superstitious move, as my computer automatically saves my work Read More …
At first, the TV show “Younger,” which premièred in 2015, seemed like it was going to be a Funfetti cake full of millennial jokes. It centers on the forty-year-old Liza Miller, a former publishing assistant who moved to the suburbs, Read More …
At the gas station, all the women looked like Melania Trump. It was uncanny. We’d just left Hungary by car, had crossed into Slovenia, and had stopped for gas and food. In Hungary, the women had broader faces, softer features. Read More …