Republicans: The New Confederacy
Democracy works best when politics don’t mirror the country’s deepest social divisions, and all sides can accept defeat and a transition of government. As Trump flags...
The Burning West
I knew that moving back to California this summer would be a funeral, but living the funeral is another thing entirely. Not long after I arrived...
A Decent America
One lazy afternoon a few years ago, a woman my age was giving me acupuncture. We were talking about our childhoods and how America used to...
As Bad as It Gets
When I was six, an aunt gave me a book of fairy tales in which I discovered Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Fir Tree.” The story, which...
The Illusion of Invincibility
People who have lived under the rule of a charismatic autocrat—caudillo may be the most precise word—have no trouble recognizing the nature of Donald Trump’s grip...
The Lie of American Asylum
At the beginning of August, as coronavirus cases continued to spike across the country, I interviewed a Mexican asylum seeker as part of a project to...
How the Awful Stuff Won
We all could have ignored the Westboro Baptist Church, theoretically, but the opportunity to be party to a morality play seemed unusual and interesting, back then....
Disorders of the Heart
In an essay about short story collections called “Only Collect,” Peter Ho Davies discusses two different ways a writer might put together such a book. There...
Thinking Outside the ‘Pico Box’
Learned men in the Renaissance loved oratory as deeply as politicians did in the nineteenth century, and they practiced it with skill and dedication. They wrote...
