New Yorker

Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio put media bias on the front burner at CNBC’s Republican presidential debate, but conservatives and liberals differed sharply on whether what was in the pot smelled appetizing. Several lefty bloggers turned up their noses at the idea that in last night’s event and in general, the media favor Democrats.

In recent years, some advocates of increased gun control have called for repeal or revision of the Second Amendment, but Adam Gopnik believes that either would be superfluous. In a Friday article, Gopnik asserted that “the only amendment necessary for gun legislation…is the Second Amendment itself, properly understood, as it was for two hundred years in its plain original sense. This sense can…

Among the insights: Fiorina "has a notable facility for delivering answers that thrill conservatives but fall apart under close examination"; a discussion of childhood vaccines showed that the party is "fervid, claustrophobic, recklessly insinuating, and, at the same time, utterly timid when it comes to extremism in its own ranks”; and the GOP as a whole is "wedded to the tenets of [George W.]…

Call it Trump paranoia. Or Trump Derangement Syndrome Be afraid. Be very afraid. That is the unsubtle message from The New Yorker magazine this last week as its cover flap promoted the notion in big and bold white letters. "TRUMP And The White Nationalists: By stoking paranoia about immigration, Trump has energized the far right and is creating chaos in the G.O.P."

The Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor famously and emphatically rejected the idea that the host used in the Communion rite is a mere symbol. Gun owners might have a similarly negative response to Adam Gopnik’s claim that guns “have an almost entirely symbolic function.” “No lives are saved, and no intruders are repelled [by the use of guns]; the dense and hysterical mythology of gun love has…

With Planned Parenthood’s back against the wall following the advent of more videos exposing the selling of baby parts, their apologists are growing desperate in their attempts to prevent its defunding. Case in point is Michael Specter, a staff writer at The New Yorker and former New York Times and Washington Post reporter, who spreads the usual counterintuitive spin that defunding Planned…

Only on PBS would it be considered part of a Fourth of July celebration to have the editor of The New Yorker gush over Barack Obama’s most “progressive” accomplishments. It’s also quite like PBS to have this journalist conclude that he feels about Obama just like you would feel about  “your favorite ball team.” The program was the late-night talk show Charlie Rose, and the gushiest moment from…

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…