August 2023

THE day before Chicago’s mayoral election in February, a recording began circulating online. It was first posted on Twitter (now X) by a newly created account called Chicago Lakefront News. It featured what sounded like Read More

The front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination is under indictment for 91 felonies in four criminal cases, and he probably is, as one of his primary opponents remarked during the recent Republican debate, the most Read More

Earplugs are available, should the music get too loud. Sure enough the volume—not to mention the tattooed front woman and bobbing crowd—evokes a country-rock concert. Only the lyrics suggest otherwise: “Fill it all up, fill Read More

In many ways the past few years have seemed biblical. First came a pandemic. Then war, followed by food shortages, fires and floods. Just when it seemed that things could not look more like the Read More

The tent city in the parking lot of Creedmoor Psychiatric Centre in Queens is far from ideal. The neighbourhood, 15 miles (24km) outside Manhattan, is mostly residential and is served by a solitary bus line. Read More

In the early 2010s a nightmarish new drug spread across Russia and Eastern Europe. Krokodil, a cheap substitute for heroin cooked up in kitchen laboratories, left users with scaly skin and rotting wounds. Now an Read More

Two hundred and fifty years ago, Thomas Jefferson wrote one of the first bills calling for universal, publicly funded education. He wanted all the children in his state of Virginia to attend classes. Not everyone Read More

In the first Republican debate of the presidential season, on August 23rd, Fox News generously granted Americans 50 minutes of escapism, or maybe denial: a glimpse of Republican politics without Donald Trump dominating the stage, Read More

WHEN THE wind catches three-year old Eli “Ginger Mane” Powell’s mullet just right, his mother said you can hear the national anthem playing and bald eagles cawing in the distance. For Easton “The Ida-Flow” Klink, Read More

When Tim Scott, a senator from South Carolina, stepped onto a stage at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines on August 15th, his first topic was how brilliant the woman interviewing him was. That Read More