It’s night-time on a Friday, and one of my Uber passengers is talking to her best friend on Facetime. “Yeah, I really miss going to concerts, but you know how it is. The panorama and all.” She says this without missing a beat, and even though the sentence doesn’t make…

New York Magazine gave a detailed account of the moment. The Senate was about to vote on changing the mechanism of the filibuster to enable the passage of voting rights legislation. Kirsten Sinema came in late, spit out her cough drop, and then popped up to shout “aye” to…

Ah yes, The Wheel of Time, the epic Robert Jordan book series that some have described as “nerd homework.” It’s the sort of thing people rave about because they need to justify having spent months of their life reading mediocre soap opera fiction. There’s a new TV series on Amazon…

Last night, a man stuck a gun through the open window of my car, pointed it at my face, and pulled the trigger. Then I woke up. I sat up in bed, my adrenaline pumping. My girlfriend stirred next to me and detected my distress. …

Try to think of the last time that American solved a problem. Pick something that you think is important to the health of the nation. Pick healthcare. Pick climate change. Pick income inequality or voting rights or the opioid epidemic that savaged communities across the country. Pick racism or the…

A new edition of an annual report by the FBI catalogs a curiously American phenomenon: active shooter incidents. The report lists 40 active shooter incidents in 2020 and shows that the vast majority of them ended because of intervention by trained professionals. Just 3 incidents were stopped by people other…

I only keep Facebook because of my Mom. Data privacy concerns aside (and they are big concerns), I don’t find much value in connecting with people from high school, but there is something satisfying about seeing my Mom sharing pictures of my son with captions like “the handsomest little man!”…

COVID didn’t make any of America’s problems go away. Instead, it just pressed pause on a wide array of issues in American life. When Americans went indoors for a year, many problems were hidden from sight, overshadowed by the urgency of the pandemic. As states reopen, the old issues will…

As an introvert, I’ve never liked people very much to start with, but after months and months of isolation, I’ve forced myself to get back out into the world. As the pandemic winds down in the United States, it’s okay if you look back on the past year with mixed…