Just a month ago, the story of two lawmakers expelled from the Tennessee legislature captured headlines across the country. Their offense wasn’t corruption or criminal activity— instead, they had joined a protest at the statehouse in favor of gun control, shortly after the Nashville shooting at a Christian school. Earlier this week, Representative Zooey Zephyr, of Montana, was barred from the House chamber after making a speech against a trans health-care ban. In the past few years, in Arizona, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, legislatures have worked to strip powers from state officials who happen to be Democrats in order to put those powers in Republican hands. Jacob Grumbach, a political-science professor and the author of “Laboratories Against Democracy,” talks about how state politics has become nationalized. “If you’re a politician, and you’re trying to rise in the ranks from the local or state level in your party,” he notes, “your best bet is to join the national culture wars”—even at the expense of constituents’ real concerns.
Plus, the contributing writer Joshua Yaffa talks with David Remnick about Evan Gershkovich, the first American reporter imprisoned in Russia on charges of espionage since the nineteen-eighties. “Evan was not sanguine or Pollyannaish or naïve about the context in which he was working,” Yaffa notes, but he returned to Russia again and again to tell the story of that country’s descent into autocracy.
Love Is Blind, and Allegedly Toxic
Miranda July’s New Novel Takes on Marriage, Desire, and Perimenopause
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Isn’t Going Away
How a Tech Executive Lobbied Lawmakers for the TikTok Ban
Wired’s Katie Drummond: The TikTok Ban Is “Rooted in Hypocrisy”; Plus, Hannah Goldfield on Culinary TikTok
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Could Swing the Election. Who Should Be More Worried—Biden or Trump?
Israel, Gaza, and the Turmoil at One American University
Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger, Who Refused to “Find” Votes for Donald Trump, Prepares for Another Election
Jerry Seinfeld on Making a Life in Comedy (and Also, Pop-Tarts)
Judi Dench on Bond and Shakespeare
Jonathan Haidt on the Plague of Anxiety Affecting Young People
Maya Hawke on the Fear of “Missing Out,” and Jen Silverman on “There’s Going to Be Trouble”
How a Republican and a Democrat Carved out Exemptions to Texas’s Abortion Ban
The Film Critic Justin Chang on What to See in 2024
The Attack on Black History, with Nikole Hannah-Jones and Jelani Cobb
Rhiannon Giddens, Americana’s Queen, on Cultivating the Black Roots of Country Music
Alicia Keys Returns to Her Roots with Her New Musical, “Hell’s Kitchen”
Percival Everett and the Reinvention of Mark Twain’s Jim
Trump’s Authoritarian Pronouncements Recall a Dark History
March Madness 2024: College Basketball at a Crossroads
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