“The folksiness will irk some critics … But criticizing Friedman for humanizing and boiling down big topics is like complaining that Mick Jagger used sex to sell songs: It is what he does well.” –John Micklethwait, review of Thank You for Being Late, in The New York Times With apologies to Mr.…

On Friday, I almost assaulted a fan of my work. I was in the Philadelphia International Airport, and a man who recognized me from one of my appearances on a television news show approached. He thanked me for the investigative reporting I had done about Donald Trump before the election, expressed his…

One day in 2009, Henry Waxman, the Democratic congressman representing Santa Monica and Malibu, paid a visit to one of his Republican counterparts, a ruddy-faced Texan named Joe Barton. After Democrats had won back the House of Representatives the previous year, Waxman staged an intraparty coup and…

Annals of Law There has not been a liberal majority of Justices since Nixon was President. If Hillary Clinton is elected, that will change. September 26, 2016 President Obama’s judicial appointments have already transformed the lower courts.Illustration by Matt Chase History, as a rule, unfolds…

Politico Illustration: Getty; iStock Blindsided like most of America, the developer avoided financial ruin with bluster and a bizarre lawsuit. Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico. In September of 2008, as markets tanked on Wall Street, the American financial crisis intensified and…

The big New York Times scoop that Donald Trump used $916 million of tax losses to enjoy many income tax-free years raised a question the newspaper didn’t try to answer: How did Trump do it? Trump, the only major-party presidential nominee in four decades to keep all his tax returns secret, insists…

As a former player, I have grown frustrated with the oversimplification of football analysis. So this season, I will be watching the coaches’ video and analyzing the impact of all 22 players on the field and coaches’ game plan. After putting up 423 yards and four touchdowns against the Oakland…

In less than two months, the American experiment in constitutional self-government may hit the wall of history. Even if the disaster of a Trump presidency is averted, this fall’s presidential campaign suggests that the United States Constitution is gravely, perhaps terminally, ill. Trumpism is the…

Letter from Washington His campaign tells us a lot about what kind of Commander-in-Chief he would be. September 19, 2016 With the polls virtually tied, the possibility of a Trump victory is no longer the stuff of dark comedy or fan fiction. It is fair to ask: What would he actually be like as…

History will note that the guy who discovered liquid water on Mars was an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, a 20-year-old who played guitar in a death-metal band and worked in a planetary science lab. One day, while comparing different satellite images of a single Martian crater taken at…

Schools brief | Game theory The fifth of our series on seminal economic ideas looks at the Nash equilibrium |9 min read JOHN NASH arrived at Princeton University in 1948 to start his PhD with a one-sentence recommendation: “He is a mathematical genius”. He did not disappoint. Aged 19 and with just…

This story is not a good idea. Not for society and certainly not for me. Because what trolls feed on is attention. And this little bit–these several thousand words–is like leaving bears a pan of baklava. It would be smarter to be cautious, because the Internet’s personality has changed. Once it was…

On the first day of the sprawling RSA security industry conference in San Francisco, a giant screen covering the wall of the Moscone Center’s cavernous lobby cycles through the names and headshots of keynote speakers: steely-eyed National Security Agency director Michael Rogers in a crisp military…

Meet Bob Messerschmidt. Apple quietly acquired Messerschmidt’s startup in 2010 (after Messerschmidt sent Steve Jobs an unsolicited email, but that’s another story). Afterwards, Messerschmidt was place

On a sleek white coffee table in Apple CEO Tim Cook’s fourth-floor office in late July, beneath framed posters of Robert F. Kennedy, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Jackie Robinson, a rose gold iPhone 6s sits in its original box. Earlier that morning, Cook had stood in front of employees at…

Hell, yes, it was crazy. You rubbed your eyes at the sight of it, as in, “Did that really just happen?” It wasn’t what we expected. We thought Donald Trump‘s version of the Republican National Convention would be a brilliantly bawdy exercise in Nazistic excess. We expected thousand-foot light…

One Monday morning last September, Britain woke to a depraved news story. The prime minister, David Cameron, had committed an “obscene act with a dead pig’s head”, according to the Daily Mail. “A distinguished Oxford contemporary claims Cameron once took part in an outrageous initiation ceremony at…

The Political Scene “The Art of the Deal” made America see Trump as a charmer with an unfailing knack for business. Tony Schwartz helped create that myth—and regrets it. July 18, 2016 “I put lipstick on a pig,” Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter, says. He feels “deep remorse.”Illustration by Javier Jaén…

“I’ve been waiting 40 years for someone like you.” Those were the first words Daniel Ellsberg spoke to me when we met last year. Dan and I felt an immediate kinship; we both knew what it meant to risk so much — and to be irrevocably changed — by revealing secret truths. One of the challenges of…

Friday, August 30, 2013, the day the feckless Barack Obama brought to a premature end America’s reign as the world’s sole indispensable superpower—or, alternatively, the day the sagacious Barack Obama peered into the Middle Eastern abyss and stepped back from the consuming void—began with a…

There Was no Republican Establishment After All Can we please retire the notion that Donald Trump is hijacking someone else’s party? Photo-illustration by Joe Darrow A few of the broken power brokers, from left: David Koch, Paul Ryan, Charles Koch, Miutch McConnell, and Rupert Murdoch. In mid-July…

Kubrick recalled by influential set designer Sir Ken Adam Published 16 August 2013 Share page About sharing Image caption, Peter Sellers, pictured with Sterling Hayden, played three roles in Dr Strangelove ByVincent Dowd Arts correspondent, BBC World Service Steven Spielberg told production designer…

West Des Moines, Iowa, Jan. 15. Jim Young/Reuters Photo from "Postcards From America" by Mark Power/Magnum Photos “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win,” goes the line attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. Typically, you’ll find this pearl adorning a classroom or…

The day after the massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., where Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik shot to death 14 people and wounded 22 others at a holiday luncheon for the county department of public health, an FBI Evidence Response Team descended on the couple’s townhouse in nearby Redlands. They…

The first thing you notice at Donald Trump‘s rallies is the confidence. Amateur psychologists have wishfully diagnosed him from afar as insecure, but in person the notion seems absurd. Donald Trump, insecure? We should all have such problems. At the Verizon Giganto-Center in Manchester the night…

Science Inside the wild—and wildly successful—early years of Mission Control A new book tells of early flight directors, from biergartens to horses on campus. Eric Berger – Feb 17, 2016 11:59 am | 32 Mission Control, on the third day of Apollo 8. Seen on the TV monitor is a picture of Earth telecast…

Earlier today, a federal judge ordered Apple to comply with the FBI’s request for technical assistance in the recovery of the San Bernadino gunmen’s iPhone 5C. Since then, many have argued whether these requests from the FBI are technically feasible given the support for strong encryption on iOS…

Corey Atad on the fans who restored the original, unaltered "Star Wars" for a new generation. [Updated: Feb 17, 2016] I have never seen Star Wars. Most people haven’t. Unless you were alive and aware in 1977, the movie we call Star Wars is not, in fact, the same Star Wars that crowds lined up around…

Annals of Technology After decades of speculation and searching, a signal came through. It promises to change our understanding of the universe. February 11, 2016 A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of moving ripples in space and time.Illustration by Aleks Sennwald Note: On…

Illustration by Piotr Lesniak Glenn Thrush is chief political correspondent for Politico and senior staff writer for Politico Magazine. Noah Weiland contributed to this report. For most of 2014, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough oversaw a stealthy effort to prod Defense Secretary Chuck…

We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to publish internationally bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson’s first stand-alone short story in twenty-five years. In it, we get a glimpse of a very green future through the lens of a Supreme Court transcript. Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the…

David Simon didn’t produce or direct Spotlight, the journalism drama that’s gotten enough good word of mouth to have made it onto your mom’s must-see list and is Vulture’s pick for Best Picture front-runner, but it’s safe to say that the movie in its current form wouldn’t exist without him. It all…

The “Doomsday Plane” weighs 800,000 pounds when fully loaded and can withstand the effects of a nuclear bomb or asteroid blast while remaining aloft for 12 hours without refueling. First deployed in 1974, the Boeing E-4B has been the preferred mode of long-range transportation for US secretaries of…

Dept. of Technology Unfollow November 15, 2015 It was easy for Megan Phelps-Roper to tweet things that made people cringe—she knew that they were evil or deluded by God.Photograph by Katy Grannan for The New Yorker On December 1, 2009, to commemorate World AIDS Day, Twitter announced a promotion: if…