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Fintan O’Toole
The Protection Racket
For his supporters, Donald Trump’s misogynist attacks against Kamala Harris turn his own history as a predator into an asset.
Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson
The Peril of Civil Breakdown
The US political situation radiates instability. How likely is extremist violence in the aftermath of the election?
On the Election
Ten New York Review contributors consider the United States’ sixtieth presidential election, on subjects ranging from the psyches of undecided voters to America’s foreign policy failures, the country’s ongoing housing crisis, and the candidates’ silence on climate change and Palestine.
Susan Faludi
Laugh-In
On the joyful Kamala Harris and the mirthless Donald Trump
Jonathan Lethem
The Forty-Fourth Year of the Reagan Administration
What would it sound like if the Democratic elite said the quiet part out loud?
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Nicole Rudick
‘A Woman Who Wins’
In her series of historical novels about the life of Saint Hilda of Whitby, Nicola Griffith explores how a woman of modest means became one of the most influential people in seventh-century Britain.
Semi-Arid
Free from the Archives
On December 4, 2015—two months before the Iowa Republican presidential caucuses kicked off the primary contest that would eventually nominate Donald Trump—Charles Simic took the measure of “presidential primary time in the United States, when truth is spoken sparingly, if at all.” Surveying the field of hopeful autocrats and the unchallenging coverage they received in the press, Simic remembered how, in Yugoslavia, “many intelligent and otherwise kind people fell for some vile nationalist and tried to convince me that we needed a tough man for tough times…. One beloved aunt of mine even tried to convince me that Milošević was good-looking…. It was like hearing your mother or your sister say to you that she thinks Donald Trump is cute.”
Charles Simic
Sticking to Our Guns
“Every country in the world has dimwits and crooks in politics, but no country treats them with greater respect than we do—or with such gutlessness. Some con man who claims on a Sunday morning talk show that…if the rich in this country paid no taxes, their wealth would trickle down to the rest of us, is treated with respect and mildly queried, without being reminded that what he is proposing has not only been discredited repeatedly, but known back in the old days as the horse-and-sparrow theory of economics: If you feed the horse enough oats, some of them will pass through for the sparrows.”
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