Adam Serwer

The conservative writer Bethany Mandel, a co-author of a new book attacking “wokeness” as “a new version of leftism that is aimed at your child,” recently froze up on a cable news program when asked by an interviewer how she defines woke, the term her book is about.On the one hand, any of us with a public-facing job could have a similar moment of disassociation on live television. On the other hand, the moment and the debate it sparked revealed something important.

Give President Joe Biden democracy, self-rule, and statehood for Washington, D.C. But not yet.Yesterday, Biden announced that he would not veto Congress’s override of a new criminal code for D.C. passed by its city council. “I support D.C. Statehood and home-rule—but I don’t support some of the changes D.C. Council put forward over the Mayor’s objections—such as lowering penalties for carjackings,” Biden tweeted.

The way conservatives tell it, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is a hive of anti-Trump villainy, filled with agents looking for any excuse to hound the former president with investigative witch hunts. But the thing to understand about Donald Trump’s legal troubles is that they exist not because federal agents are out to get him, but despite the fact that the FBI is full of Trump supporters who would really like to leave him alone.

Fox News lies to its viewers. Its most prominent personalities, among the most influential in the industry, tell their viewers things they know not to be true. This is not accusation, allegation, or supposition. Today, we know it to be fact.Early in the Trump era, news organizations were torn over whether to refer to Donald Trump’s false statements as lies, because it is difficult to know an individual’s state of mind, to know what they know.

This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.Japan beat two World Cup champions, Germany and Spain, on its way to the knockout stage. But the Samurai Blue will go no further, defeated on penalties by the 2018 finalists Croatia after more than 120 minutes of play, including the first shootout of this year’s tournament.

This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.Yesterday, the FIFA-ranked No. 2 team in the world, Belgium, exited the World Cup after a narrow victory over Canada, a loss to group winner Morocco, and a scoreless draw with the 2018 finalists Croatia.But it was not just that it went out, but the way it went out that is torturous for Belgium fans.

This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.When Ghana meets Uruguay tomorrow, the Black Stars will be out for redemption—or vengeance, depending on how you look at it.Twelve years ago in South Africa, Ghana were on the verge of becoming the first African team to make it to the semifinals of a World Cup, the first in the tournament’s history to be hosted by an African nation.

Updated at 7:38 p.m. ET on November 16, 2022This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.In August, the Argentine footballer Lionel Messi scored the first bicycle-kick goal of his long, decorated career, and the internet thought it was hilarious.

This story contains spoilers for the entire Star Wars franchise, including the Disney+ series Andor.In the eighth episode of the Star Wars prequel series Andor, the mysterious art dealer turned Rebel leader Luthen implores the extremist fighter Saw Gerrera to unite with other factions against the evil Galactic Empire.“Aren’t you tired of fighting with people who agree with you?” Luthen pleads with Gerrera. “There’s no chance any of us can make it real on our own.

Updated at 4:50 p.m. ET on September 1, 2022.Mary Peltola was declared the winner of Alaska’s special congressional election last night, defeating the former GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin. A Democrat hasn’t held the seat in 49 years, and Peltola will be the first Alaska Native elected to Congress.The election was the first in Alaska to utilize ranked-choice voting, a system adopted by the state’s voters in 2020.

Among the documents disclosed in a Justice Department filing last night in the case involving former President Donald Trump’s possession of classified documents is a striking photograph, one showing documents marked secret and top secret strewn across the floor of Mar-a-Lago.When the search of Trump’s home by the FBI was first announced, conservatives howled that the former president was a target of political persecution.

A former president’s home was raided by federal law enforcement yesterday, reportedly over possession of classified documents. Although prosecution of former heads of state has occurred in other democracies, a form of government in which ostensibly no one is above the law, it has never happened in America, a place that did not even punish the leaders of a rebellion in defense of human bondage.

Every American child in public school learns that the U.S. political system is one of checks and balances, in which the judicial, executive, and legislative branches constrain one another to ensure that no one branch of government exercises too much power. One pending case before the Supreme Court asks: What if they didn’t?In Moore v.

During former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment, even when Republicans insisted that the assault on the Capitol was an unfortunate consequence of heated rhetoric, most did not attempt to defend Trump’s conduct on the merits. Instead, they relied on the absurd technicality that the president was no longer in office, and therefore could not be convicted.

The Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, allowing state governments to force women to give birth, is the result of decades of right-wing political advocacy, organizing, and electoral victory. It is also just the beginning of the Court’s mission to reshape all of American society according to conservative demands, without fear of public opposition.Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v.

Three years ago, when a white-supremacist fanatic killed dozens of people in El Paso, Texas, the reaction from the right was unreserved condemnation. When another white-supremacist fanatic killed 10 people at a supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, last week, the reaction from some figures on the right was to acknowledge that the guy had a point about this whole “replacement” thing.

If you are an American with a young daughter, she will grow up in a world without the right to choose when and where she gives birth, and in which nothing restrains a state from declaring her womb its property, with all the invasive authorities that implies.That is the significance of the draft Supreme Court opinion leaked to Politico, which shows that the right-wing majority on the Court intends to discard Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v.

Conservatives on Twitter have greeted Elon Musk as a liberator. The mega-billionaire is in the process of purchasing the social-media platform and reorienting it toward what he calls “free speech.” The conservative columnist Ben Shapiro celebrated the news of the new free-speech era by insisting that Musk engage in politically motivated mass firings of Twitter workers based on their perceived political leanings.

Updated at 12:58 p.m. ET on March 25, 2022.The apocalypse has come again for the Italian national soccer team. Italy has won more World Cups than any other nation save Brazil and Germany, but for the second time in a row, it has failed to qualify for the Mondiale, after Aleksandar Trajkovski, of North Macedonia, scored at the 92nd minute to end the contest 0–1.It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

It made sense, to the New York Daily News sports editor, that these guys dominated basketball. After all, “the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smartalecness,” not to mention their “God-given better balance and speed.”He was referring, of course, to the Jews.In the 1930s, Paul Gallico was trying to explain away Jewish dominance of basketball.

If you read the legal language in the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which authorizes the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to act in an emergency capacity when workers face “grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards,” and when “such emergency standard is necessary to protect employees from such danger,” you might think that the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate stood a g

As 2022 begins, the risk American democracy faces is not just that Donald Trump supporters will repeat the events of January 6, 2021—attempting to overturn a free and fair election to illegitimately install Trump as president. It is that Trump will win outright, and use his second term in office to further erode popular sovereignty.During the four years of the Trump presidency, his opponents could draw comfort from the fact that a majority of Americans had rejected him.

According to right-wing media figures, the January 6 sacking of the Capitol that disrupted the counting of the 2020 electoral votes was “a false-flag operation.” It was just “politicians” having their “jobs disrupted for two hours.” It was “mostly peaceful.” It was a “setup,” or perhaps it was the work of “antifa,” but those who were arrested and prosecuted are definitely “political prisoners.

Gavin Newsom wants to believe that what’s good for Texas is good for California. Shortly after the conservative majority on the Supreme Court allowed a narrow challenge to Texas’s anti-abortion law to go forward while the law remains in force, the Golden State governor vowed that he would pursue passage of gun restrictions modeled on the Texas law’s unusual structure.

Women’s constitutional right to decide whether to bear children appears to be hanging by a thread. At yesterday’s oral argument in the case of ​​Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed justices displayed an eagerness to overturn Roe v. Wade, the legal precedent that prevents states from banning abortion.

The men who killed Ahmaud Arbery will not get away with it. Yet the most surprising aspect of the trial is not the verdict, but the fact that the trial happened at all.On Wednesday, a Georgia jury convicted Travis McMichael; his father, Gregory McMichael; and their friend William Bryan of felony offenses after the trio chased down and then shot Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia, in February of last year.

The United States is a nation awash in firearms, and gun owners are a powerful and politically active constituency. In state after state, they have helped elect politicians who, in turn, have created a permissive legal regime for the carry and use of firearms, rules that go far beyond how courts originally understood the concept of self-defense.

John Henry Ramirez is going to die. The state of Texas is going to kill him. The question that came before the Supreme Court this week is whether Dana Moore, his longtime pastor, will be able to lay hands on him as he dies.Given the grand, even alarmed pronouncements about religious liberty made by the right-wing justices recently, you might think this would be an easy decision.

The state of Florida is silencing those opposing its efforts to disenfranchise its own citizens.A lawsuit filed by a coalition of civil-rights groups contends that Florida’s Republican-controlled government has repeatedly attempted to restrict the franchise, including curtailing third-party registration campaigns, cutting early voting, and imposing an onerous poll tax on formerly incarcerated Floridians after the state voted overwhelmingly to restore their rights.

Governor Greg Abbott is afraid. Not of COVID-19, which is killing thousands of Texans, but of losing his primary.Last week, Abbott announced that he was banning COVID-vaccine mandates by “any entity” in Texas, a policy so absurd that you’d be forgiven for thinking, as the running joke on social media goes, that the coronavirus wrote the executive order itself.