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Wednesday night’s Democratic-primary debate in Detroit will, in some sense, be the memorial service of the first phase of the 2020 Presidential race. This is the last time that the front-runners will be forced onto a stage beside challengers polling below levels detectable with mortal instruments. At the next official debates, scheduled for mid-September, the…

Anybody who doubts the power of artists to effect real-world change is not keeping up with the news. Earlier this month, the Louvre became the latest major museum to cut financial ties with the Sackler family, following pressure from the photographer Nan Goldin and her crew of anti-opioid activists. And, last week, on July 25th,…

With Donald Trump using his Twitter feed as a flamethrower on a daily basis, other significant developments, particularly policy ones, often don’t get the attention they deserve. Take last week’s G.D.P. report from the Commerce Department, which detailed a sharp slowdown in capital spending by American businesses during the second quarter of this year. To…

Give this to the Democrats, at least: they’ve chosen the sites for their Presidential debates brilliantly. The first round, last month, was in Miami—a twenty-first-century city in both hopeful and bleak ways, with a population that resembles the hemisphere and rising seas lapping at the streets, where the candidates, with a morning off, staged protests…

If you wanted to make a lot of money, quickly, you could not have done much better than to have bought bitcoin in September, 2017. At the time, the cryptocurrency was trading at just under four thousand dollars; three months later, it topped out at more than nineteen thousand dollars. Bitcoin’s volatility (it is now…

It’s a sign of the psychic costs of America’s ongoing epidemic of gun massacres that we have all learned to parse the casualties of the latest gun massacre within the frame of all the gun massacres that have gone before. People discussing what will become known as the Gilroy Garlic Festival massacre, which occurred on…

This article was published in partnership with ProPublica and The Trace. In 2018, accountants for the National Rifle Association began cataloguing for its board of directors questionable financial arrangements that had led to millions of dollars in payments to a group of the organization’s top executives and consultants. The N.R.A. was experiencing cash-flow problems, and…

This past Wednesday, during Robert Mueller’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Representative John Ratcliffe, a Republican from Texas who was previously a federal prosecutor, accused the former special counsel of illegally smearing President Trump. Ratcliffe demanded to know why Mueller had stated in Volume II of his report—which investigated whether the President had obstructed…

Listen with: iTunes WNYC Stitcher TuneIn Tana French was an actor in her thirties when she sat down to write a novel, about a mystery that takes the lives of two children, which became the global blockbuster “In the Woods.” With her subsequent books about the Dublin Murder Squad, French became known as “the queen…

Jackson Pollock’s “Mural,” an eight-by-twenty-foot painting that the artist completed in 1943, has been on a continuous world tour since 2014. It’s travelled a lot of miles. Legally, the painting belongs to the state of Iowa, because the University of Iowa is where it ended up after Peggy Guggenheim, the person who commissioned it, left…