Political Commentary

President Obama arrived at the climate conference in Glasgow like a spirit from another time. He wore a black suit and gray shirt, tieless. A crowd of star-struck delegates parted like holy water around him. They all remembered the happy days of the Paris climate agreement in 2015, when he …

At the height of last year’s Black Lives Matter uprising, a recording surfaced of a call President Trump held with state governors. In it, he made a comparison: “This is like Occupy Wall Street.” He urged them to waste no time in repeating the coordinated police assaults that had swept …

During his seminal “House of Many Mansions” address, Winston Churchill identified the problem with appeasement in one of history’s most momentous mixed metaphors. “Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their …

The first day of the Biden administration brought a sensation somewhere between satisfaction and joy. Watching the day’s ceremonies felt like a kind of cleansing, as if the patriotic emblems, rituals, and all the rest on display had had an exorcism, as if things were back to something like normal. …

Kelly Loeffler had been a senator for just a few weeks when she found herself at the pulpit of the Rev. Raphael Warnock’s church in Atlanta. He was only 10 days from entering the race for her senate seat, but she was still included as part of the speaking lineup …

Now what? After four years of manias and catastrophizing, with constant warnings about the “existential threat” posed by Donald Trump, the monster is dead. Trump, the democratic Saddam, has lost, and his metaphorical statue will soon be dragged out of the White House, to the cheers of nearly every pundit …

The following op-ed has been signed by dozens of leading climate and science journalists, listed below. We are science and climate journalists. We are researchers and weavers of information, creating a fabric that explains the work of scientists who themselves are working to describe our natural world and universe. We …

Oregon governor Kate Brown, until Friday, could not get President Donald Trump on the phone. She noted this the day before, when she also revealed her state has never seen this amount of uncontained wildfire. The skies have turned into a literal hellscape and more than one million acres have …

Emmett Till was lynched 65 years ago, but it has been only three since Carolyn Bryant Donham admitted that her lie got him killed. She copped to what, I’d wager, most black Americans had already figured when she gave a rare interview to Duke University professor Timothy B. Tyson, who …

His handling of this pandemic is how history will remember Donald Trump. Fifty years from now, historians will not spend much time on Russiagate, Robert Mueller, or dirty dossiers and alleged pee tapes, nor will massive tax cuts for the rich or the endless petty insults and the litany of …