In his speech announcing a new Afghanistan strategy last night, US president Donald Trump said, “nearly 16 years after [the] September 11th attacks, after the…
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The most disturbing thing about Charlottesville is America’s ambivalence about it
That American white supremacism once more reared its ugly head last weekend was not shocking; it’s been experiencing a resurgence for several years. That president…
MANAGEMENT 101
Google’s response to its viral diversity memo is a classic conversation-avoidance technique
Over the weekend, a 3,000-word internal memo that went viral inside Google went viral on the internet as well. Written by an unnamed but reportedly…
WASHINGTON RHAPSODY
Easy Come, Easy Go: Scaramucci is out as White House Communications director
With apologies to Queen. Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Anthony Scaramucci’s 10-day tenure as White House communications director felt like being…
THE CULLING
Only one of the top Trump advisors in this photo is still at the White House
The picture above has an iconographic feel. It was taken almost exactly six months ago: January 28th, the ninth day of Donald Trump’s presidency. It…
TOO BIG TO FAIL
Now that the Republican health-care overhaul has failed, will Obamacare “implode”?
The Better Care Reconciliation Act is dead; long live the Affordable Care Act. But how long? US president Donald Trump predicted that the ACA, popularly…
THE MAN WHO ISN'T THERE
It’s time to start ignoring the president of the United States
Another week, another crude Twitter outburst from the US president, another torrent of outrage from his detractors. But what if we just agreed to ignore…
SETTLE DOWN
To understand where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict goes from here, look on Airbnb
It’s the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War this week, and inevitably the media are filling up with musings on the current state of the…
PLEASE HAVE MY SEAT
This week Trump practically asked China to take over from the US as chief global superpower
The US’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement will be bad, but not that bad, for the rest of the planet. Every other country but Syria…
LOST IN TRANSLATION
No, Putin does not have a “recording” of Trump giving secrets to Russia’s foreign minister
The English-language internet was briefly set aflame this morning by reports that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, had offered a “recording” of the May 10 meeting…
We’re launching “Propaganda,” a new Quartz obsession
For as long as I’ve been a journalist, whether it’s covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the science of near-death experiences, I’ve been obsessed with the…
OUR LATEST OBSESSION
21st-century propaganda: A guide to interpreting and confronting the dark arts of persuasion
“There are two kinds of propaganda,” wrote Aldous Huxley in 1958 in Brave New World Revisited, a retrospective on his famous novel: rational propaganda in…
