Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Editor’s note: Our sister publication Nieman Reports is out with their new issue — go check it out. I write a column for the print edition of the magazine; here’s my latest. A few years back, around the time of the financial crisis, I remember hearing about a guy with a startup idea for a…
A cornfield near Patrick Thornton’s childhood Ohio home, taken last year. (Patrick Thornton/CQ Roll Call) I’m from the rural Midwest. I now live in Washington, D.C. All of this talk about coastal elites needing to understand more of America has it backward. My home county in Ohio is 97 percent white. It, like a lot…
View this image › Tevor Leis, exercising his Ohio open carry rights, stands armed in Public Square on Tuesday, July 19, in Cleveland, during the second day of the Republican convention. John Minchillo / AP ID: 9953393 Earlier this year, I travelled with a British friend to Louisiana. After a few days spent eating po…
Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo. Photos by Screen Gems Television/CBS Television and Saul Loeb/Getty Images. Donald Trump is a baby; a child. Like a child, he whines, seeks attention, and throws tantrums when he doesn’t get what he wants. It’s appropriate that the Access Hollywood tape takes place on a bus, since it captures…
How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind I’m going to explain the Donald Trump phenomenon in three movies. And then some text. There’s this universal shorthand that epic adventure movies use to tell the good guys from the bad. The good guys are simple folk from the countryside … Lionsgate Films … while the…
In 1987, Michael Kelly, later a celebrated editor but at the time a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, took Fawn Hall, a secretary to Oliver North, as his guest to the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Hall had been caught up in the whole Iran-contra scandal, and her arrival shocked the swells of Washington, who…
I wrote last week about the new nonfiction book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance, the Yale Law School graduate who grew up in the poverty and chaos of an Appalachian clan. The book is an American classic, an extraordinary testimony to the brokenness of the…
The national suicide rate is at its highest in nearly 30 years. Why? (Photo: Silvia Sala/Flickr) So much for a country built on boundless optimism. More Americans are committing suicide now than at any other time in the last 30 years, according to a new analysis by the National Center for Health Statistics. The NCHS…
The National Review, a conservative magazine for the Republican elite, recently unleashed an attack on the “white working class”, who they see as the core of Trump’s support. The first essay, Father Führer, was written by the National Review’s Kevin Williamson, who used his past reporting from places such as Appalachia and the Rust Belt…
While the fate of the presidential campaign that talks about the issue more than any other remains uncertain, this much is clear: Despite the general public’s mounting anxiety and awareness, the economic inequality that’s done so much to change American society over the past 40 years has not abated. It may, in fact, be getting worse. For this reason…