Opinion

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

How do you get rid of the Electoral College? The easiest path is for both parties to suffer an Electoral College inversion — to win more popular votes nationwide but lose the election — in proximity to each other. That way everyone experiences the unfairness of the system, providing the …

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 …

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. …

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 …