Usually, I get political wisdom from Rahm Emanuel, not his brother Ari. But a quote from Ari, the Hollywood macher, to Puck’s Matthew Belloni about the gender chasm in 2024 caught my eye. “This election is gonna come down to probably 120,000 votes,” Ari said. “You probably have 60 percent …
Read More »Opinion | The Risk of Trump’s Old Age
What should we think as Donald Trump urges people to vote in January, confuses places and names, fumbles for words, simplifies his speech patterns, describes recent experiences that did not happen and in public seems increasingly vulgar, menacing and unfiltered? When President Biden showed his age and stumbled through the …
Read More »Opinion | This Is Not the Time to Give Up Wine
Everywhere you look these days, people are turning away from alcohol. First there was Dry January. Now there’s Sober October. Who knows what month the rhyme scheme will come for next? Parched March? Modest August? I admire these teetotalers. I too have abstained from liquor for extended periods and felt …
Read More »Opinion | Democrats Finally Did What Sherrod Brown Asked For. It Might Be Too Late.
Twelve years ago, Senator Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democrat, took the stage at his election night party in Columbus to celebrate winning a second term. Barack Obama had just carried Ohio for the second time, after emphasizing his administration’s rescue of the auto industry. Mr. Brown wanted to proclaim that …
Read More »Opinion | For College Students, Giving Up on Books Is a Perfectly Sensible Choice
In 2011, I taught a college class on the meaning and value of work. It was a general-education class, the sort that students say they have to “get out of the way” before they move on to their major courses. Few of the students were avid readers, and many held …
Read More »Opinion | Our Robot Stories Haven’t Prepared Us for A.I.
This week, my newsroom colleague Kevin Roose chronicled the heartbreaking story of Sewell Setzer III, a Florida teenager who took his own life — and whose mother blames Character.AI, a role-playing app where users interact with artificial intelligence chatbots, for his retreat from normal social life and then reality itself. …
Read More »Opinion | How Donald Trump Jr. Conquered the Republican Party
In 2022, shortly before the midterm elections and the unofficial start of the 2024 presidential campaign, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo traveled to Maine to appear on Tucker Carlson’s Fox Nation streaming talk show. For the previous two years, he was a frequent guest of Mr. Carlson’s. He usually did …
Read More »Opinion | Dan Osborn Is Building a Model for Taking on Republicans in Red States
The first person I met at a Monday night meet-and-greet for Dan Osborn, the independent Nebraska Senate candidate, was a Donald Trump-voting Republican named Joe Hallett. He’d worked, alongside his wife, Sherri, with Osborn at Omaha’s Kellogg plant. Explaining Osborn’s appeal, Joe said, “He’s not a millionaire or anything like …
Read More »Opinion | Maggie Haberman on What an Unleashed Trump Might Do
This week, I released an audio essay on Donald Trump. And in a way, it was about Donald Trump’s mind and the peculiar ways in which it works, the degree to which he moves through the world without inhibition and the ways in which that is potentially worsening as he …
Read More »Opinion | “The Economy, Stupid”? Not So Much Anymore.
If every voter were an economist (ghastly thought), elections would be easy to forecast. The performance of the economy would reliably predict consumer sentiment, which in turn would predict approval ratings for the incumbent president, which in turn would predict the outcome of the election in the Electoral College. It …
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