The congresswoman has become a handy and versatile symbol — the representative representative. For the leftward and younger wings of the Democratic Party, she serves as a figurehead and a hero; for conservative media outlets,[…]
Likability seems to have emerged as an important personality trait in the late 19th century, when it became closely associated with male business success. Before this, people liked or disliked one another, of course, but[…]
…the anti-vaccine crowd (or anti-vaxxers) aren’t trafficking in anything as concrete, mundane and quaint as facts. They’re not really engaged in a debate about medicine. They’re immersed in a world of conspiracies, in the dark[…]
Democracies depend on buy-in; citizens need to believe in certain basics, starting with the legitimacy of elections. Trump both runs the government and runs it down. The electoral system, he asserts, can’t be trusted. Voter[…]
If biology limited women’s ability to code, then the ratio of women to men in programming ought to be similar in other countries. It isn’t. In India, roughly 40 percent of the students studying computer[…]
American cultural history could probably be parcelled out as a sequence of sensational murder cases. There was nothing remotely “typical” about the Manson murders or, for that matter, about the O. J. Simpson case, but[…]
Yeshiva College has also changed along with the broader landscape of higher education. We still have impressively bright, industrious, passionate students. But as the culture of the mid-twentieth century was replaced by that of the[…]
It’s a mistake to put Netanyahu in the same category as the strongmen riding Europe’s rightist wave. But it is not a mistake to say he learned their language and cultivated ties with them, some[…]
When it finally sunk in that I’m not the next Nabokov, I got pretty depressed for a while. I started to wish that there was some magical place where a total lack of any discernible[…]
…what has to change in the world of Jewish philanthropy and fundraising to make the system less beholden to deformed power structures. Ironically, one of the shifts that Lila points out and critiques – towards[…]
