On October 27 of this year, Elon Musk completed his $44 billion takeover of Twitter and became the company’s CEO. Earlier that day, the stock of Tesla — the electric-car company that Musk also runs — hit $233 a share. That put it down about 33% from where it had…

The George Santos story just keeps getting weirder, because the list of lies he’s told over the past few years just keeps getting longer. Santos is the congressman-elect from New York’s 3rd District, which covers parts of Queens and northern Long Island. He won the race by eight points, which…

2022 was, you might say, the year when grifters got their just deserts. The year began with the conviction of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, and ended with the arrest on fraud charges of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, and the revelation that newly-elected Republican House member George Santos had essentially invented…

In the wake of Republicans’ disappointing performance in this year’s midterm elections, when they netted only a handful of House seats and failed to take back the Senate despite what seemed like ideal conditions for the opposition party (an unpopular president in the White House and inflation at 8%), there…

Disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s live interview today with the New York Times’ Andrew Sorkin at the paper’s Dealbook conference was predictably odd, with Bankman-Fried at once appearing contrite and apologetic for his many failures as FTX’s C.E.O. …

Running hard-right MAGA candidates in swing states is a recipe for defeat. But the GOP base loves them. — With inflation near 8% and an unpopular president in the White House, history suggested that Tuesday’s midterm elections were going to be a wipeout for Democrats, as the 1994 and 2010 midterms had been. Instead, as we now know, Democrats did very well by historical standards — while, once all…

Since taking over Twitter last week, Elon Musk has found himself embroiled in multiple controversies, including his clashes with two of the most high-profile users on the site, novelist Stephen King (who has 6.9 million followers) and congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who has 13.5 million followers. …

Why do we sometimes miss what’s right in front of us? — This is a post about a neurocognitive bias that I regularly fall prey to but don’t fully understand how to remedy. There are different labels for it, but I think it’ll be more useful for me to just describe it. In any case, one example of what I’m talking about…

One of the great coinages in the lexicon of American politics is the Kinsley gaffe, which the political columnist (and old friend of mine) Michael Kinsley described as a moment when a politician accidentally tells the truth. And in last week’s Pennsylvania Senate debate between John Fetterman and Dr. …