Early last year, the musician India.Arie posted a video on her Instagram that caused a lot of headaches for my then-employer, Spotify. It was a mash-up of the many times Spotify’s star podcaster, Joe Rogan, had used a racial slur for Black people on his show. I don’t need to tell you which slur it was. Unsurprisingly, the video quickly […]

By Paul Krugman Opinion Columnist Bernie Marcus, a co-founder of Home Depot, had some negative things to say about his fellow Americans in an interview last December. “Socialism,” he opined, has destroyed the work ethic: “Nobody works. Nobody gives a damn. ‘Just give it to me. Send me money. I don’t want to work — I’m too lazy, I’m too […]

By Paul Krugman Opinion Columnist The U.S. dollar is, in a real sense, the money of moneys — that is, in many ways it is to other national currencies what money in general is to other goods and assets. Most of us rarely engage in barter; we sell stuff for dollars, then use those dollars to buy other stuff. Similarly, […]

When Xi Jinping ascended to the pinnacle of Chinese power a decade ago, he saw Vladimir Putin as a strong leader who shared his hostility to the Western-dominated international system. They bonded over mutual paranoia about threats to their rule and exchanged best practices for imposing control at home and making the world more accommodating of their authoritarian impulses. Mr. […]

One of the most significant developments in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election has emerged largely under the radar. From 2016 to 2022, the number of white people without college degrees — the core of Donald Trump’s support — has fallen by 2.1 million. Over the same period, the number of white people who have graduated from college — […]

Long-simmering issues come to a head in France Last week, a teenage boy was killed in a fatal traffic stop outside Paris, prompting days of violent protests. Days later, France’s top administrative court upheld a ban on religious symbols that has prevented a French citizen who wears a hijab from playing soccer. The cases are different, but each touches upon […]

By Michelle Goldberg Opinion Columnist Before Covid, Gabe Whitney, a 41-year-old from West Bath, Maine, didn’t think much about vaccines. He wasn’t very political — he didn’t vote in 2020, he said, because he thought Donald Trump was a “psycho” and Joe Biden was “corrupt.” It wasn’t until the pandemic that Whitney started regularly watching the news, but as he […]

A ruling that could reshape U.S. university admissions In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court rejected race-conscious affirmative action at colleges and universities, declaring that admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were unlawful and sharply curtailing a policy that had long been a pillar of higher education. The two colleges’ “admissions programs cannot be reconciled with […]

I’d like to tell you a story about the pandemic, one that may sound so gauzily hopeful, it would qualify today as a public health fairy tale. The story is this. When Covid arrived on American shores, the United States did not have to collapse into Covid partisanship, with citizen turning against citizen and each party vilifying the other as […]

By Ross Douthat Opinion Columnist In January of 2018, just a year after Donald Trump assumed the U.S. presidency, the political theorist Patrick Deneen published “Why Liberalism Failed,” an ideally timed argument about how the inner logic of modern liberalism had led to social decay and political misrule. The book earned praise and respectful engagement from many different corners (no […]