Subterms
On April 5, India responded to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call to light earthen lamps for nine minutes at 9 pm. Earlier on March 19, he appealed for a 14-hour “people’s curfew” three days later. On March 25, Modi imposed a national lockdown over 1.3 billion people, the biggest such exercise in the world. Bringing […] More
The Democratic Party establishment and the Joe Biden campaign are busy building the vocabulary of their electoral newspeak to guide voters’ moral thinking. The word of the month, used to describe the behavior or thinking of opponents, is “frivolous.” The latest example concerns President Donald Trump’s controversial, audacious and downright provocative transfer of the US […] More
Trump is handling coronavirus so badly, he almost makes Johnson look good Jonathan Freedland The only thing protecting the prime minister from harsher criticism of his failures is that the US president’s are even worse Coronavirus – latest updates See all our coronavirus coverage Donald Trump at a White House event concerned with protecting older […] More
You pay little attention to the systems of your body — circulatory, digestive, pulmonary — unless something goes wrong. These automatic systems ordinarily go about their business, like unseen clockwork, while you think about a vexing problem at work, drink your morning cup of coffee, walk up and down the stairs and head out to […] More
The catalog of omissions in the British government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic is well known. The decision to lock down was taken far too late in the day. Scientists have been too slow to criticize one another and too sure of their assumptions and methods. Shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) are killing nurses, […] More
Phillip Roth’s 2004 novel, “The Plot Against America,” has been made into a six-part TV series and shown recently on HBO in the United States and Great Britain. David Simon wrote the script for the television version and directed the production. Simon’s earlier credits include “The Wire,” “Treme” and “Murder: Life on the Streets,” all […] More
The Democrats and the Joe Biden presidential campaign find themselves embarrassed by an accusation of sexual assault dating back to 1993. Donald Trump and Bill Clinton before him have clearly demonstrated that allegations of sexual assault do not disqualify a candidate from becoming president. But in the era of #MeToo, following the Harvey Weinstein affair, […] More
“Can we please go back to talking about Brexit?” For the past few weeks, I got used to seeing this message on Twitter at least once a day, breaking the monopoly of news about the novel coronavirus. For some, it was a joke, half-nostalgically taking us back to the days when we couldn’t wait for Brexit to be over and the […] More
