Discussions

Photo: Dafydd Jones In 1991, I was named the editor of the New York Observer, a desperately sleepy Upper East Side weekly broadsheet that I hoped to turn into a must-read. About a half-year in, the paper was where I wanted it to be, it was getting noticed, and so I started sending a couple […]

Photo: Bryan Dozier/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty Images For decades, the Republican Party has sought to shutter the federal Department of Education, arguing that education policy should be left to the states. Now, President Donald Trump has signed an executive order calling on his Education secretary to begin doing so — but fully closing the agency will

Photo: Win McNamee/AFP/Getty Images In 1994, Democrats lost both chambers of Congress for the first time since 1952 as well as many down-ballot races. Afterward, journalist E.J. Dionne penned a book about the Democratic Party titled They Only Look Dead. Indeed, a comeback began before the ink was dry on this optimistic message. Right now,

Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images After an interview with Laura Ingraham in which he continued bullying Canada and declined once again to rule out a recession, President Trump took the Fox News host on a tour of the Oval Office that felt like a nightmare version of MTV Cribs. In the segment, which aired Wednesday night

Photo: Paul Christian Gordon/Alamy Stock Photo Across the country, critics of Elon Musk have taken to town-hall meetings and sidewalk demonstrations to protest the Tesla CEO’s outsize role in the federal government that has resulted in mass layoffs and steep cuts among agencies. But some detractors have escalated their dissent, vandalizing Tesla dealerships and charging

Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 on a promise to launch the “largest mass deportation in history” of undocumented immigrants. It was one of his more popular promises, too, though polls show varying degrees of support for this effort depending on how sweeping it is and how much collateral damage to rights

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: YouTube/Mark Rober This week, engineer and practical joker Mark Rober, best known for a series in which he pranks package thieves with glitter bombs, released a characteristically elaborate two-part video. In the first section, he sneaks a lidar camera into Disney’s Space Mountain to get a 3-D scan of the ride’s design.

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer/ANDRII BILETSKYI Jim Acosta, the frequent Donald Trump antagonist who was all but pushed out by CNN earlier this year, may not be the type of person you’d suspect would be a hit on Substack. In fact, when he signed off from his CNN show for the final time at the end of January,

Photo: Casey Steffens In 2020, at the height of the COVID pandemic, the global advertising conglomerate WPP started to slash almost one-third of its New York office space. Different WPP agencies maintained separate Manhattan headquarters: Ogilvy was on 11th Avenue, Grey on lower Fifth, VML in Columbus Circle. But those buildings were all empty, and

Photo: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images When you think about it, J.D. Vance has one of the tougher jobs in American politics: being the faithful understudy to the greatest narcissist ever to hold the presidency. Not only must he support the Sun King through thick and through thin, he must also avoid stealing any of the limelight