Omnivore
Trump declares a national emergency
From Vox, Li Zhou on why Trump is signing a border security deal and declaring a national emergency at the same time. Mitch McConnell just set a hugely dangerous precedent on national emergencies (and more and more and more and more). Trump’s face-saving way out of crisis raises fears over rule of law (and more and more). Let’s say Trump declares a national emergency — what happens next? If Trump declares a national emergency, Pelosi can jam Republicans — here’s how. Trump’s emergency powers
…
Paper Trail
The Swedish ambassador to China is under investigation after “she was accused of arranging unauthorized, secret talks” between imprisoned publisher Gui Minhai’s daughter and “two Chinese men who had offered to help free him, but instead pressured her to keep silent,” the New York Times reports. At the New York Times, Alexandra Alter explains why …Syllabi
Love Letters
I’m not the first, and certainly won’t be the last, person to unhelpfully ask, “Why doesn’t anyone write letters anymore?” Some of the best and most interesting writing has been done for an audience …- Outrageous Clarity: The Fictions of Amélie Nothomb Charlotte Shane
- The Roots of the Alt-right Mike Wendling
- Marriage Reimagined Laura Smith
Daily Review
Mothers
The fiction writer who is also a critic is cursed with the predicament of having strewn about the very tools for his own dismemberment. Hold up the analytic knives to a purely creative output, and the fruits of artistic labor too readily slacken and yield. Susan Sontag … 
- Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
by Roger McNamee
Interviews
Sam Lipsyte
Anyone familiar with Sam Lipsyte's work knows to expect somersaults of sentences, language twisted line after line into laugh-inducing poses. In his new novel, Hark, those poses have names: “Ithaka, Persian Rain, Moonlight Diana Number Three, Wheel of Tartars.” But this isn't pilates—it’s a form of self-actualization called “mental archery,” propagated by a man named Hark Morner.
…- Victor Tausk was one of the more restless of the many bright young men and women …
- When did Facebook start to seem evil? Was it last March, when United Nations investigators …
- The last lines of the last story in David Means’s new collection, “Two Ruminations on …
- Michael Tomasky wants his readers to understand right up front that If We Can Keep …
- Like stereotypical versions of the people the book maligns, the title of Blythe …
- LIKE MUCH OF THE READING WORLD, I rejoiced when Marlon James published his third novel …
- Terrible things happen in Kristen Roupenian’s You Know You Want This, a fact hinted …
- here is a scene in Douglas Keeve’s 1995 documentary, Unzipped, in which Keeve films …
- As Denis Diderot’s lengthy and preposterously productive run approached its end in …
Reviews
Excerpt
More, More, More
Greg Grandin
With his eye on the longer game, Ronald Reagan hedged against the nativists then filling Republican ranks. Even as his administration was carrying out workplace raids that critics were comparing to Operation Wetback in the 1950s, he bet the party’s fortunes on courting the Latino vote. “Hispanics are Republicans,” Reagan once said, on the idea that they were inherently conservative, “they just don’t know it."
…
