New Yorker

Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change. Last week’s Supreme Court decisions on Obamacare and same-sex marriage. California’s new mandatory-vaccination law. What all these have in common, according to Michael Specter, isn’t merely that they’re correct, but that they’re manifestations of “rational thought.” Three of those events, of course, were highly unpopular on the right (the vaccination…

Racial issues, not gun issues, understandably have been at the forefront of most media coverage of the Charleston massacre, but Adam Gopnik suggests that in any such mass shooting, the firearm is the salient factor. “Mental health, the enduring structures of racism—these are issues that we have to deal with, too,” wrote Gopnik in a Tuesday column. “But they are not at the heart of the tragedy.…

The screencap shows New Yorker editor David Remnick, on today's Morning Joe, raising his hand to proudly plead guilty to condescending to Donald Trump, whom he had just called a "comical blowhard" in regretting that he was "conceivably a player" in the presidential race. Mika Brzezinski is no fan of The Donald on the issues, so give her extra credit for sticking up for his relevance to the race…

Old stereotypes die hard — especially the ones which have long been false. The June 1 cover of The New Yorker Magazine depicts the Republican Party's current crop of declared and undeclared 2016 presidential candidates as an all-white-boys affair, showing seven of them in different locker-room postures, with Hillary Clinton peeping in through a window. How is this possible, you ask? Where are…

Via Instapundit, we learned CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin has a piece in The New Yorker called “Obama’s Game of Chicken with the Supreme Court.” He imagines who will suffer if the Supreme Court rules against the Obama Administration in the Obamacare subsidy case, King v. Burwell. If individuals in more conservative states without state health exchanges lose their subsidies, Toobin says the…

On Monday's New Day on CNN, the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza asserted that there was no wrongdoing in former President Bill Clinton helping his brother-in-law, Tony Rodham, get a job with former DNC head Terry McAuliffe (who's now the governor of Virginia): "Bill Clinton was not in office. It doesn't seem to conflict with her [Hillary Clinton's] job as secretary of state. If Bill Clinton helped out…

One of many LGBT darlings in the “mainstream” media is Alison Bechdel, the Maddowesque lesbian cartoonist who invented the “Bechdel test” in her comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For" in 1985 – that a movie “must have at least two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man.” Her autobiographical musical Fun Home is playing in New York, and Judith Thurman at The…

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin blasted Antonin Scalia in a Tuesday column for The New Yorker, after the conservative Supreme Court justice cracked a joke during the oral arguments regarding the same-sex "marriage" cases. Toobin asserted that Justice Scalia's "rather refreshing" line in reaction to a pro-traditional marriage activist's disruption during the hearing was a "shocking, ugly moment…

In a desperate attempt to spin the escalating Clinton Foundation scandal as a positive for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, The New Yorker's John Cassidy argued in a Wednesday article that bombshell revelations about the controversy in the new book Clinton Cash "could end up benefitting Hillary."

Screenwriter and actress Lena Dunham has managed to put herself back in the limelight amid a new controversy. Dunham finds herself in the news not because her show Girls had season premiere ratings that plummeted by 40 percent, or the questionable incidents from her book Not that Kind of Girl that included passages of molesting her sister or falsely accusing an innocent man of raping her. No.…

The New Yorker’s Borowitz and Esquire’s Pierce trash the Texas senator (Pierce claims that Cruz “represents politics and a vision of government that was out of date in 1860” and that he’s “connected, rhetorically for the most part, to the darkest manifestations of the American political Id”).

Jelani Cobb, who’s also a professor at the University of Connecticut, writes that even though it’s “tempting” to think of Carson as the new Herman Cain, ultimately it’s superficial. He suggests that if you look past skin color, you’ll see that Carson’s “radically paranoid” worldview makes him more analogous to another 2012 GOP candidate, Michele Bachmann. Cobb blasts Carson’s “sweaty-palmed…

In a piece headlined “The Supreme Court vs. Reality,” Jeff Shesol claims that when the SCOTUS agreed to hear King v. Burwell, it showed that “most or maybe all of the Court’s Republican appointees will entertain any argument, no matter how silly, that can derail or dismember the supposed abomination that is Obamacare.”

John Cassidy calls the Wisconsin governor “an odious politician whose ascension to the Presidency would be a disaster” but admits, “For all his awfulness, Walker is a serious contender. We’d better get used to it.”