The Short-Lived Rebellion of Nancy Mace

Lauren Tamaki Nancy Mace was on a mission to find a gun that would fit inside her purse. It was the first Friday in March, and we’d come to a shooting range in North Charleston to try out the Sig Sauer P365. She strode to a shooting lane, her high-heeled leather boots clomping across the concrete, slapped a magazine into the squat black pistol, and...

2d

The Threat of an Unvaccinated South

Frank Scott unbuttoned his shirt, rolled up the exposed white T-shirt sleeve beneath, and prepared to get the jab. On March 12, Scott, the mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas, was sitting in a wooden chair in the Express Rx pharmacy surrounded by cameras in an effort to help ease his constituents’ fears about the COVID-19 vaccine. Scott has never been a...

3d

Joe Biden and the Thin Veneer of Bipartisanship

The much-ballyhooed bipartisan infrastructure agreement was always a shaky proposition. When President Joe Biden announced the accord last month—“We have a deal,” the beaming president proclaimed outside the White House, flanked by 10 beaming senators—all the negotiators had agreed to was an outline, a three-page sketch of how to spend $1.2 trillion...

4d

Two Ways to Think About the New Mask Debate

We are a nation of under-doers and over-doers. Every time the government has issued COVID-19 guidance throughout the pandemic, one slice of America has ignored it, while another slice has followed it to the letter, and then some. The government says stay six feet apart? Some Americans scoffed, while others didn’t set foot inside a restaurant for a year....

4d

‘The Last Acceptable Prejudice’

In early July, The New York Times published two articles that had seemingly little to do with one another. One covered the Entomological Society of America’s decision to stop using the terms gypsy moth and gypsy ant. The other was about a new movie by the director Paul Verhoeven featuring an affair between two 17th-century nuns. “Forgive them, Father,...

5d

Biden’s Strategy: Treat Trump Like a ‘Crazy Person’

He’s banned from Twitter and Facebook, yet Donald Trump continues to be the dominant figure in Republican—and American—politics. Multiple times per day, his super PAC blasts out his pouty statements, a range of dictations that can be trivial or seemingly end a prospective GOP primary campaign. According to White House aides I’ve spoken with, the strategy...

5d

Republicans Like Bob Corker Have Nowhere to Go

Senator Bob Corker had just gotten out of a hot-yoga session with his wife on a Sunday morning in 2017 when his phone started blowing up. President Donald Trump was tweeting about him, falsely claiming that the Tennessee Republican supported the Iran deal (he did not) and that he had begged Trump for a reelection endorsement (Corker says he never did...

2w

Biden’s Spaghetti-at-the-Wall Vaccine Campaign

What will it take? Eighty-year-old Anthony Fauci is on TikTok trying to reach the young and unvaccinated. Dating apps are steering people toward health clinics. The first lady, Jill Biden, is venturing into red America to coax the unwilling into getting shots. White House aides regularly swap messages on an email chain dubbed “Ideas” that flags inventive...

2w

Cash for Kids Comes to the United States

On a weekday evening in early July, Jim Lysen, a retired health-clinic director, and Ed Fallon, a grandfather and veteran, ignored the pouring summer rain as they knocked on the front door of a townhouse in an affordable-housing development on the banks of the Androscoggin River in Lewiston, Maine.“I am a volunteer with the Maine People’s Alliance,...

2w

What’s Missing From Joe Biden’s Voting-Rights Defense

For all the passionate words President Joe Biden delivered in defense of voting rights in his speech yesterday, it was the one word he never mentioned that provoked the strongest response from civil-rights advocates: filibuster.Nowhere in his remarks did Biden utter what may go down as the political word of the year. The Senate procedure known as the...

2w