Wolf Blitzer, the improbably named CNN personality, is no one’s idea of an adroit interviewer. His questions have a certain Dada quality, strings of declarative fragments that seem to have been cut and pasted at random. Ben Carson, the suddenly notable presidential candidate, is a slightly better
The first month of the 2015 NFL season has been characterized by an onslaught of advertising for daily fantasy sports betting. Viewers have sat helplessly by as their normal football-watching experience (usually typified by beer and pizza advertisements, with occasional interruptions of extreme viol
The movement within the House Republican conference to make Paul Ryan the next speaker has evolved into a desperate clamor, with members from almost every faction practically begging him to enter the r
Yesterday, Svetlana Alexievich, a 67-year-old dissident writer who was born in Soviet Ukraine and grew up in Belarus, became the first female Russian-language writer to win the No
Bernie Sanders should be everything environmentalists want in a presidential candidate. When the senator from Vermont announced his 2016 run, their longtime best friend on Capitol Hill
Claire Vaye Watkins’s first novel, Gold Fame Citrus, contains quite a few believable projections about a nearish-future California: dehydration, sunstroke, plant life sucked of moisture and nearly fossilized in the canyons surrounding Los Angeles. Perhaps the most convincing thing about t
It was during his dime-museum days that Houdini first began to seek professional mediums. In séances attended with his grieving mother, he attempted to contact the spirit of Mayer Samuel, who had once believed communication with the dead was possible. Houdini pawned his dead father’s watch to h
Steve Jobs is not a biopic, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin recently claimed on The Daily Show. In his script, the Apple founder’s formative moments are not life events, but product launches. Divided into three scenes—the backstage preparations for the unveiling of the
Newly declassified documents released by the Obama administration confirm the long-held suspicion that in 1976 the
When I read Rupert Murdoch’s tweets about Republican presidential contender Ben Carson on Wednesday night, it made me think about the night that Barack Obama used a bit of magic to make an im
When Donald Trump barged into the Republican primary in June, calling Mexican immigrants drug smugglers and “rapists,” party leaders were
Representative Tim Huelskamp thought that something seemed a bit off about House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy when he approached him on Thursday morning at a meeting of the House Republican conference. “He was kind of nervous and uptight,” said Huelskamp, the co-founder of the House Freed
In the language spoken by the Dothraki on the violent and popular HBO show Game of Thrones, the word for cat is keli. Reasonable, you might think. The show is based on the books written by George R.R. Martin, surely he can come up with whatever words he likes for the animals living
No one knows how crazy the House Republican caucus is right now better than House Republicans. When House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy told them he was
