Tag Archives: politics-features

I was 35 minutes into my conversation with Patrick Wyman when he scared the shit out of me. I’d called Wyman —a European historian focused on the end of the Roman Empire and the world it left behind — to discuss his piece in Mother Jones on how societies hold …

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Gail Dunham couldn’t stop gushing about Mike Bloomberg. It was Saturday night at the North Carolina Democratic Party’s Blue NC gala, one of those lanyard-laden rubber-chicken dinners that brings together Democrats from across the state. I’d spotted Dunham, the former mayor of Summerville, in the hallway outside …

The men were frozen. Tattooed faces still beneath the fluorescent lights of the intensive care unit, eyelids taped shut. Only their stiff chests heaved, medical grade oxygen forced through tubes into their lungs. “So glad you’re here,” said the ICU attending, a doctor at least two decades my senior. “We’ve …

Hear an audio version of this story below: Fittingly enough, it was hot as blazes in Kentucky when Mitch McConnell slunk back home for Congress’ annual summer recess. One week earlier, Robert Mueller had testified that Russia was meddling in the 2020 U.S. elections. McConnell, the Senate majority leader, responded …

WASHINGTON — Imagine this: It is the evening of Sunday, November 1, 2020. In two days American voters will go to the polls and pick their next president. Seemingly out of nowhere, a strange video appears online. First on Twitter, then Facebook, then everywhere. The video shows the Democratic nominee …

Ah, the smell of democracy. The sour tang of fish and human sweat fills the air on a heat-stroke-hot Friday night in June. The 2020 presidential circus has pulled into Columbia, South Carolina, for Congressman Jim Clyburn’s “World Famous Fish Fry.” Up onstage, the candidates appear one by one like …

If you climb one of the many buttes that rise above western North Dakota, you’ll gaze upon a landscape of roaring methane flares, hidden pipelines and over 12,800 active oil wells. This is the Bakken oil boom, and it has helped make America the top world producer. But Cody Two …

Rare is the politician who will say “I don’t know” about something and mean it, including her own future. That is one reason why I despise the question, “Are you running?” It generally wastes the time of journalists everywhere; candidates rarely say “yes,” even if they secretly intend to launch …

The sea pig just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sea pigs (a.k.a. Scotoplanes, a relative of the sea cucumber) look like caterpillars in drag, with flashy horns and bright colors. They live on the deep ocean floor and feast on whale corpses, among other …

At 10:40 a.m. on Monday, January 21st, a pipeline carrying natural gas ruptured in rural Noble County, in southeastern Ohio, producing a fireball that surged 120 feet into the air and engulfed the Noll family home, with 12-year-old son Nash inside. The boy’s grandfather rushed into the inferno and rescued …