Sublime

Meltdown: Time weighs in with a cover showing a cartoon depiction of Trump as a featureless mouth, melting away like a hot wax statue with a one-word caption: “Meltdown.” The cover is in turn covered by other media, as if it’s news.

Technology companies drove the survivors into a mindset of engineered efficiency—the belief that data tells you everything of value. “Just like the tech companies, journalism has come to fetishize data. And this data has come to corrupt journalism,” Franklin Foer writes in World Without Mind. “Once journalists come to know what works, which stories

The narrative of Free America remained as inflexible as any ideology: tax cuts and deregulation = freedom and prosperity. Decade after decade you encountered its mantra, like the rituals of a cargo cult, on the website of the Cato Institute, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, broadcasts of The Rush Limbaugh Show, and the platform of the

of outlandish facts and quotes—he is a tenacious reporter—and a style that barely suppresses his own amusement. It works particularly well on the buccaneers who continue to try the patience of the citizenry, as proved by his profile in The New Yorker of the developer Donald Trump. Noting that Trump “had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury,

“We’ve got to call a spade a spade and a perverted human being a perverted human being,” Helms had told the Senate when he proposed an amendment adding “sexual abstinence only” to a $300 million appropriation bill for AIDS education. (The Senate supported him, 94 to 2.59