February’s test launch of Elon Musk’s new Falcon Heavy rocket was probably the most expensive and most glorious publicity stunt in the history of advertising: flame and smoke, and then videos of the space-suited mannequin in the cherry-red Tesla Roadster, David Bowie on the stereo, Hitchhiker’s “DON’T PANIC!” on the dashboard screen. Behind this promotion was the promise that Musk’s company SpaceX will soon be sending colonists to the planet Mars. But although the car is on a trajectory that will pass the orbit of Mars later this year, it won’t get anywhere close to the Red Planet, and the

A number of my fellow journalists are saying privately and publicly that Michael Wolff’s book is no big deal—“nothing we didn’t know already.” This response makes me think of people who see some piece of modern art, a Jackson Pollock or an Ellsworth Kelly, and say, “I could do that.” Yeah, but did you? I don’t […]

The word totalitarianism has an ominous ring. At the height of the Cold War, in the 1950s and ’60s, Western social scientists began using it to describe the political structure of the USSR, as part of an ideological effort to equate the Soviet system in general, and Stalinism in particular, with Nazism. That effort was very successful. The “totalitarian model” gained such a powerful grip on people’s imaginations that when, in the ’80s, a new generation of scholars began poking holes in it, they took a pummeling, accused of being Communist sympathizers or apologists for Stalin’s crimes.

How did South Korea grow from one of the poorest countries in the world circa 1960 into the one that has the eleventh-largest economy today? The “Miracle on the Han” has been studied by economists in search of the secret sauce to apply to other impoverished and war-torn nations. Most agree that Korea’s success stemmed from the authoritarian policies of Park Chung Hee, the general who came to power via a military coup in 1961 and was president until 1979, when he was assassinated. His playbook has been emulated by regimes around the world: an anticommunist government that keeps tight

The Osage were warriors, buffalo hunters, harvesters, farmers—one of the great nations of the Great Plains. Europeans who encountered them early on described them as uncommonly tall, well-built, imposing: The “finest men we have ever seen,” Thomas Jefferson said in 1804, after meeting a delegation of Osage chiefs in the White House. By the time of Jefferson’s death, they’d been stripped of their ancestral lands—”forced to cede nearly a hundred million acres,” David Grann writesin Killers of the Flower Moon, “ultimately finding refuge in a 50-by-125-mile area in southeastern Kansas.” And in the years immediately following the Civil War, American

It didn’t take long following the first utterance of those dreadful four words almost no one expected to hear—president-elect Donald Trump—for political shock to give way to an onslaught of analyses of how an event so recently unimaginable had been hiding in plain sight. Like the banking crisis in 2008 and the terrorist attacks of 2001, the surprise was amplified by the sense that all our certainties—political, economic, cultural—seemed to melt before our eyes. While some commentators focused on the short term and the days, weeks, and months leading up to the election, most played the long game, mining the

The Women’s March on Washington If the Republican National Convention—with its blood-chilling chants of “Lock her up!” reverberating off stadium ceilings, and vendors selling shirts reading “Trump That Bitch!” like hotcakes—was a revivalist megachurch concert from hell, Inauguration Day had the feeling of a quiet, solemn Easter Sunday. There were no chants, no celebratory posters. […]