“Burnout may be our contemporary condition, but it has very particular historical origins”
Burnout may be our contemporary condition, but it has very particular historical origins. In...
Category Archives: America
“Every impeachment reinvents what impeachment is for, and what it means, a theory of government itself”
Every impeachment reinvents what impeachment is for, and what it means, a theory of...
“Because impeachment happens so infrequently, it’s hard to draw conclusions about what it does, or even how it works, and, on each occasion, people spend a lot of time fighting over the meaning of the words and the nature of the crimes”
The U.S. Senate has held only eighteen impeachment trials in two hundred and thirty...
“To believe that Presidents can do anything they like is to give up on self-government”
In 1787, the delegates in Philadelphia narrowed their list down to “Treason & bribery,...
“The ‘high’ in ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ has its origins in phrases that include the ‘certain high treasons and offenses and misprisons’ invoked in the impeachment of the Duke of Suffolk”
The “high” in “high crimes and misdemeanors” has its origins in phrases that include...
“all but one of England’s original thirteen American colonies had been founded before impeachment went out of style”
The Englishman responsible for bringing the ancient practice of impeachment back into use was...
“The Jewish-Italian connection is so central to the Mafia legend that one senses it must be operating on a kind of meta-level…”
In talking about the Mob, we airily use words like “mythological,” but there’s a...
“the Mob was really defeated not by charges but by changes”
The former Mafia prosecutor John Kroger, in his 2008 book, “Convictions,” details his team’s...
“The fact that Georgia’s Senate races will be decided by runoffs is a quirk of the state’s electoral system…”
The fact that Georgia’s Senate races will be decided by runoffs is a quirk...
“The Trump era has often come wrapped in a cloak of self-protective irony”
The Trump era has often come wrapped in a cloak of self-protective irony. We...