A few days, a freelance journalist named Nancy Levine tweeted inaccurately that Sherillyn Fisher, the wife of well-known investor Ken Fisher, had donated to the campaign of Doug Mastriano, the GOP nominee in Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial race. Shortly thereafter, she got a threatening letter from a lawyer representing the Fishers, a…

The past few days has given us what feels like a very 2022 political spectacle, with comedian Jon Stewart and Texas Senator Ted Cruz exchanging potshots with each other via videos on social media. The source of the squabble is a new bill the Senate is considering called the PACT…

Andrew Yang’s new political venture can’t succeed. But in trying to reinvent American politics, it’s likely to do more harm than good. — To hear the founders of the new Forward Party — a would-be third party that was announced on Wednesday by Andrew Yang, Christie Todd Whitman, and David Jolly — tell it, the basic problem with American politics is that the system has been “torn apart by two increasingly divided extremes.”…

The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade and allow states (and, perhaps, the federal government) to pass laws restricting abortions or even banning them outright should be a political boon to Democrats. Overturning Roe is unpopular with voters. Banning abortion, which trigger laws that have gone into effect…

It’s hard to overestimate the power of laziness and procrastination, particularly when it comes to dealing with things like making appointments and dealing with paperwork. One consequence of this is that a surprising number of people end up not doing things they actually want to do (or at least believe…

When HB1557, the new Florida law prohibiting any classroom instruction on “sexual orientation or gender identity” in kindergarten through third grade, became law in March, its supporters insisted that the “Don’t Say Gay” monicker that activists had bestowed on the law was inaccurate. Even though the preamble to the bill…

When Cassidy Hutchinson, the former aide to Donald Trump’s chief of staff, testified before the Jan. 6 Select Committee, she provided a detailed look at what the lead-up to January 6, and the day itself, were like from the inside. It was not a pretty, or reassuring, picture. Hutchinson painted…

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” I’ve been thinking about that quote, which is from D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, a lot in the weeks since the Buffalo and, then, Uvalde shootings, particularly as Republican politicians, in their…

Greg Sargent at The Washington Post has an interesting interview today with the former firearms executive Ryan Busse, who talks about the way the AR-15 conquered American culture over the last 18 years and became the most ubiquitous rifle in the United States. Between 1994 and 2004, the AR-15 and…