Search

Wednesday's certification of California's second attempt to recall a governor finally makes the dreary choice facing voters official. We can endorse the status quo in the form of an overly financed, endlessly triangulating, vaguely annoying establishment Democrat. Or we can mistake our forgivable lack of enthusiasm for doing so as justifying the incalculable risk of handing power to an untested reactionary supported by an electoral minority. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Given prospects of being sickened by a fellow supermarket shopper, impoverished by a coronavirus-induced depression or ruined by an extreme-weather-fueled wildfire, many of us are too scared to hope for much at what looks like the beginning of the end of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

About the president's drinking [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The protests and violence roiling America's cities speak to a tragically missed opportunity of the nation's response to the pandemic that has killed more than 100,000 of us while providing a grim backdrop for the strife. Apart from the need for apartness, and in contrast to the racism rending us all over again, the contagion could hardly be a more potentially uniting crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The coronavirus pandemic is a horrible natural experiment in which every world leader's competence may be gauged against the same crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Gov. Gavin Newsom followed the lead of San Francisco Mayor London Breed and other local officials in discouraging large gatherings Thursday to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, but his order came with a Mickey Mouse exception: Disneyland and other amusement parks were explicitly excluded. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Democratic Party's nomination process remains an undemocratic spectacle, and not just in its privileging of unrepresentative rural states staging inscrutable quasi-electoral rituals. There's also the antiquated reliance on potentially narrow pluralities in overpopulated races (looking at you, Tom Steyer) to declare the "winner" of each of these compromised contests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Space Force majeure [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Trump disorders the courts, too [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Week after week, Sean Spicer debased himself performing awkward gyrations in an ill-fitting get-up for a tawdry travesty of a reality show. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Let's empathize for a moment with the East Coast journalist, a victim of poor choices not only of career but also of location. This being late October, the two weeks of decent weather promised per year have long gone, with months of miserable winter precipitation ahead, to be followed by slightly less miserable spring precipitation and, if he makes it that far for another year, the reward of a miserable-in-a-completely-different-way summer. The crowds are awful, the people are mean, and I haven't even gotten to the rats. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An uproar of unusual size [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Writer on the storm [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Constituent service of a sort [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

O'er the ramparts he botched [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Congressman's lawyers have an arduous task [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Beating up on flacks, which is what the powerful people behind them want us to do, is usually misguided. It's the rare mouthpiece who goes so far beyond the call of duty as to earn derision in his or her own right. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

First they came for my conditioner [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Congressman has a cow [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Roads to perdition [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Space is going to do us good [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I'm thankful for: superb Scandinavians [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Trump's mail chauvinism [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Grounds for celebration [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Trump's 1812 overturn [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Endorsed by Trump and Gavin Newsom [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In which California ruins your coffee [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Take it from the president, kids: Sex is risky [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An unhappy Easter at Peeps [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Video giant's last rites give pause [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The color of Trump's ignorance [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Dead trees are reason for season [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Message is the medium [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

No call for a bar brawl [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

He of little faith [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

White House chief of staff generally mistaken [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Republicans' pajama rebellion [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On a mission to avoid homework [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Fossil fuel for prehistoric unity [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Trump critics mince words for a change [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Early in the presidential campaign, when Donald Trump told a rally, "I know words - I have the best words," wordsmiths across the country delighted in the irony: an assertion of literary supremacy expressed in the most rudimentary language imaginable. This week, in his bizarre fashion, Trump backed up his boast. On what happened to be the first day of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, he unveiled a word unknown to all the nation's writers, editors, and lexicographers: "covfefe." [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]