Opinion

Opinion | How Bad Do You Want It, Ladies?

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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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. …

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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 …

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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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