Their expansion abroad holds important lessons for Western incumbents
Stepping back starts with a ceasefire in Gaza
Visitors are a boon, if managed wisely
Peaceful protests and judicious diplomacy offer some hope
Expect lots of booze, sweat and plexiglass
Fifty years after Shirley Chisholm ran for the Presidency, we find ourselves yet again questioning the durability of outmoded presumptions about race and gender. By Jelani Cobb
In Milwaukee, with a candidate who had just cheated death, the resentment rhetoric of Trump’s 2016 campaign gave way to an atmosphere of festive certainty. By Anthony Lane
She became famous playing buttoned-up Agent Scully. But in midlife her characters often have a strong erotic charge—and now she’s edited “Want,” a book of sexual fantasies. By Rebecca Mead
Joe Biden’s vice-president has an extraordinary opportunity. But she also has a mountain to climb
Fans may be cooling on the Olympics, but elsewhere technology is transforming how sport is watched
Don’t stop the buck
It is hard to cast America as a victim of the global financial system
Biden imperilled his candidacy at the debate because of his inability to speak coherently. At the convention, Trump was doing something similar, and couldn’t stop. By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Months of fighting at the border threaten to ignite an all-out conflict that could devastate the region.
Our carceral system is characterized by frequent brutality and ingrained indifference. Finding a better way requires that we freely imagine alternatives. By Adam Gopnik
The Drift Magazine (July 19, 2024): The latest issue features Maybe fortresses come to violence like an addiction. Maybe the water is just water. The tide abandons what it leaves. We have absolutely no way of controlling the cane toad. “I love anyone who hears my screams.” You ever cry with that knowledge? Do they kiss on the mouth? What will the bears say? I am not yet a trampoline. No doors exist and nobody’s home. Simply because they are eternally young, beautiful, and dead.
The anti-globalist MAGA enthusiast is more consequential than the average veep pick
Investors’ exuberance in the face of political ructions is unlikely to pay off
Researchers are figuring out how large language models work
What does Labour’s win mean for British foreign policy?
Joe Biden is failing to silence calls that he step aside
France is desperately searching for a government
The new age of American exorcisms by Sam Kestenbaum
The pastor is pacing back and forth, a cordless microphone in one hand, the other extended before him. He says, “This is the awakening the American church has been waiting on,” and keeps pacing. He has readied himself before taking the elevated stage, donning a paisley shirt, top button undone, and speaks now from the wood pulpit of his revival tent.
Seamus Heaney and the end of the poetic career
The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 848 pages. $45.
This buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Night after night I’m waking with Seamus Heaney sizzling through—not me, exactly, but the me I was thirty-four years ago when I first read him, in a one-windowed, mold-walled studio in Seattle, when night after night I woke with another current (is it another current?) sizzling through my circuits: ambition. Not ambition to succeed on the world’s terms (though that asserted its own maddening static) but ambition to find forms for the seethe of rage, remembrance, and wild vitality that seemed, unaccountably, like sound inside me, demanding language but prelinguistic, somehow. I felt imprisoned by these vague but stabbing haunt-songs that were, I sensed, my only means of freedom.
Less than six weeks before Democrats formally choose their nominee, the President is marching down a path of constant peril.
A network of well-funded far-right activists is preparing for the former President’s return to the White House. By Jonathan Blitzer
From the time of the Revolutionary War to the fires of the nineteen-seventies, the history of the borough has always been shaped by its in-between-ness.
By Ian Frazier
The UK isn’t the global power that it was in 1997. But if the new government makes smart choices, we might still avoid drifting into irrelevance
For months we had been complaining about the damage the Games would inevitably bring to our city
What does Labour’s win mean for British foreign policy?
Joe Biden is failing to silence calls that he step aside
France is desperately searching for a government
Researchers are figuring out how large language models work
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