Attention to the Unseen

Jill Lepore wrote earlier this month: Jefferson Davis, the half-blind ex-President of the Confederate States of America, leaned on a cane as he hobbled into a federal courthouse in Richmond, Virginia. Only days before, a Chicago Tribune reporter, who’d met Davis on the boat ride to Richmond, had written that “his step is light and elastic.” But in court, facing trial for treason, Davis, fifty-eight, gave every appearance of being bent and broken. A reporter from Kentucky described him as…

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Ian Ward writes: In late August, Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy took a break from his typical campaign events to make a pit stop at an unusual venue for mainstream Republicans: The Richard Nixon Presidential Library. Speaking before a packed house, Ramaswamy was slated to deliver a speech on foreign policy. But his opening remarks served the more provocative purpose of challenging Nixon’s much-maligned status in the annals of conservative history. “He is by and away the most underappreciated president…

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Masha Gessen writes: There are now dozens of antisemitism commissioners throughout Germany. They have no single job description or legal framework for their work, but much of it appears to consist of publicly shaming those they see as antisemitic, often for “de-singularizing the Holocaust” or for criticizing Israel. Hardly any of these commissioners are Jewish. Indeed, the proportion of Jews among their targets is certainly higher. These have included the German-Israeli sociologist Moshe Zuckermann, who was targeted for supporting the…

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Azadeh Moaveni writes: When Americans look back and take stock of their most impressive first ladies, they rarely think of Rosalynn Carter. In a 2020 poll that asked historians and other experts to rank first ladies on a score of exemplary characteristics, Mrs. Carter came in ninth, trailing Dolley Madison, Betty Ford and Jackie Kennedy. When Apple TV+ produced “First Ladies,” a series of six documentary portraits, in 2020, it ignored Mrs. Carter entirely. So too did Showtime’s 2022 drama…

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Max Fraser writes: On April 29, 1954, a cross section of Cincinnati’s municipal bureaucracy—joined by dozens of representatives drawn from local employers, private charities, the religious community, and other corners of the city establishment—gathered at the behest of the mayor’s office to discuss a new problem confronting the city. Or, rather, about 50,000 new problems, give or take. That was roughly the number of Cincinnati residents who had recently migrated to the city from the poorest parts of southern Appalachia….

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Anne Applebaum writes: Thirty-four years ago, in June 1989, Poland woke up to a surprise. Despite a voting process rigged to favor the Communist Party, despite decades of propaganda supporting Communists and smearing anti-Communists, despite the regime’s control of the army, the police, and the secret police, the democratic opposition won, taking all of the seats that it was allowed to contest. A team of former dissidents took control of the government two months later—the first non-Communist government in Soviet-occupied…

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The New York Times reports: Former President Donald J. Trump said undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” in a recent interview, language with echoes of white supremacy and the racial hatreds of Adolf Hitler. Mr. Trump made the remark in a 37-minute video interview with The National Pulse, a right-leaning website, that was posted last week. It drew broader scrutiny on Wednesday after the liberal MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan surfaced the quote in a post on X….

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Joanne Freeman writes: Without a doubt, the Republican ousting of Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy is a banner of dysfunction. Sifting through the chaos for its meaning is more complex. It certainly signals that something is broken, but what? It’s not the Republican Party’s fracture in and of itself. Fractured political parties are hardly new; the 19th century was the great age of splintering parties. We’ve had contentious speakerships before (though a party ousting its own speaker is something special). Extremism…

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David Rothkopf writes: There have been MAGA true believers shitting on the floor of the Congress ever since Jan. 6, 2021. But the right wing’s active desecration of the U.S. government extends far beyond ugly recent events on Capitol Hill, and dates back long before the Trumpist insurrection of two and a half years ago. In fact, the origins of the attacks on the government date back at least four decades to the Reagan administration, when the former president popularized…

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Diane McWhorter writes: The bane of raw intelligence – and history – is that you can always look back and find the signs, but you can’t necessarily look ahead and see where they’re pointing. Many questions remain about the intelligence failures that enabled an insurrectionist mob to lay siege virtually unimpeded to the US Capitol. But here’s one sign that’s been flashing in my head since 6 January 2021. Four days before the 2020 election, a “Trump Train” of motorists…

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