The Rural Pandemic Isn’t Ending

Americans will soon begin to fall back into the rhythms of pre-pandemic life—attending sunny summer weddings, squishing into booths at chain restaurants, laughing together at movies on the big screen—and it will feel like a victory over the coronavirus. But the virus might not actually be gone. In pockets of the country, vaccination rates could stay...

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Biden’s Foreign Policy Starts at Home

Soon after President Donald Trump took office, Jake Sullivan and Ben Rhodes were in Myanmar helping an NGO prepare for peace talks between the government and ethnic armed groups. Sullivan had been a senior adviser to Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and had played a key role in Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Rhodes...

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Nancy Reagan’s Real Role in the AIDS Crisis

Adapted from The Triumph of Nancy Reagan, Simon & Schuster 2021.In mid-1981 the U.S. Center for Disease Control noticed a set of medical curiosities: an alert from Los Angeles that five previously healthy young men had come down with a rare, fatal lung infection; almost simultaneously, a dermatologist in New York saying that he had seen a cluster...

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Vaccine Refusal Doesn’t Just Cost Lives. It Costs Money.

Imagine it’s 2026. A man shows up in an emergency room, wheezing. He’s got pneumonia, and it’s hitting him hard. He tells one of the doctors that he had COVID-19 a few years earlier, in late 2021. He had refused to get vaccinated, and ended up contracting the coronavirus months after most people got their shots. Why did he refuse? Something about politics,...

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The GOP Is Voting Against Its Base

With their opposition to President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan, Republicans are doubling down on a core bet they’ve made for his presidency: that the GOP can maintain support among its key constituencies while fighting programs that would provide those voters with tangible economic assistance.Last month, every House and Senate Republican opposed...

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Hasidic, Devout, and Mad as Hell About COVID-19

A few weeks ago, Reuven went to a party. It was indoors. No one wore masks. No one who attended was in any rush to get a vaccine. Reuven and his wife were uncomfortable. But if they hadn’t gone, his relatives would have felt as if he were “judging them” for gathering, “and they judge me back,” he told me. “I have to weigh my options.” Reuven’s parents...

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Andrew Yang Really Might Be the Next Mayor of New York

Lauren Tamaki This article was published online on April 7, 2021.Andrew Yang is in the Throgs Neck neighborhood of the Bronx, standing next to a lectern on an empty city street.He’s just resumed his campaign for New York City mayor after taking two weeks off to recover from COVID-19. The strain of the illness shows. He’s hard to hear through his two...

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Reopening Schools Is the Easy Part

Brian Woods has seen a lot in his nearly 30 years as an educator in the Northside Independent School District, in San Antonio. Tornadoes and storms have damaged buildings and left area campuses without power for weeks. Hurricanes have sent an unexpected surge of students into the district. In hindsight, each of those disruptions seems temporary—minor,...

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The Many Lives of Grandmaster Jay

Photographs by Mark Peterson / ReduxWhen Grandmaster Jay walked into Million’s Crab, a seafood joint in suburban Cincinnati, the waitstaff looked alarmed. Million’s Crab is a family restaurant, and on that placid November evening, Jay—the supreme commander of the Not Fucking Around Coalition—was wearing body armor rated to take a pistol round directly...

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What Will Eric Swalwell Do Without Trump?

Eric Swalwell is going through some stuff. A lot of people are—and not just those who, like him, have grown a scraggly pandemic beard under their mask. Like many members of Congress, Swalwell is still working through the anger and trauma caused by the attack on the Capitol. Like so many Americans, he’s learning to live in a post-Trump United States,...

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