One of Donald Trump’s signature rhetorical moves—and there are many—is wrapping his most heinous and controversial public statements in the faintest patina of ambiguity. Not enough to obscure his point. Not even enough to give actual plausible deniability. But enough for Trump and his followers to wave away their critics as hysterical.
In 2015, when Trump famously said that Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists, he also said, “Some, I assume, are good people.

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A Donald Trump rally is always a strange spectacle, and not only because of the candidate’s incoherence and bizarre detours into mental cul-de-sacs.

Very few podcasters would apologize to their fans for clogging up their feed by interviewing a presidential candidate. But Alex Cooper—the host of a podcast variously described as “raunchy, “sex-positive,” “mega-popular,” and “the most-listened-to podcast by women”—is an exception. “Daddy Gang,” she began her latest episode, “as you know, I do not usually discuss politics, or have politicians on this show, because I want Call Her Daddy to be a place where everyone feels comfortable tuning in.

Over the past three years, as I worked on a book about the history of the video-game company Blizzard Entertainment, a disconcerting question kept popping into my head: Why does success seem so awful? Even typing that out feels almost anti-American, anathema to the ethos of hard work and ambition that has propelled so many of the great minds and ideas that have changed the world.
But Blizzard makes a good case for the modest achievement over the astronomical.

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In her new short story, “The Ghosts of Wannsee,” the author Lauren Groff captures the precise moment when a friendship changes forever. “Wannsee” follows two friends from high school who reunite one afternoon after many years apart; the encounter alters their understanding of each other in ways that neither anticipated.