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Feb 20, 2025 | 
nybooks.com | Nicholas Lemann
Last year the Tel Aviv Museum of Art mounted an exhibition, entitled “Shattered Hopes and Roads Not Taken,” of a dozen monumental drawings by the Israeli artist Netta Lieber Sheffer, who lives and works in Tel Aviv. The drawings are an expression of a wish on the Jewish left that history had not made Israel the prosperous, powerful, ethnically restricted, violence-plagued, and widely despised state that it is today.
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Oct 29, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Ian Crouch |Nicholas Lemann
In today’s newsletter, how Joe Biden came to guide the largest economic overhaul since the New Deal, and why it seems to have been completely overlooked. Plus:The Administration has passed legislation spending trillions of dollars on manufacturing and infrastructure across the country. “The biggest mistake we made, we didn’t put up signs saying ‘Joe Did It,’ ” Biden said.
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Oct 28, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Nicholas Lemann
Among Joe Biden’s afflictions and miseries, his wormwood and gall, there are the insults (about his diminished capacities), and then there are the compliments unpaid (about his achievements). We are exposed to more of the first, but it seems that to him the second are more painful.
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Oct 28, 2024 | 
flipboard.com | Nicholas Lemann
21 hours agoThe Electoral College isn't worth saving — even if it blocks a Trump winThe polls show a close race, one where Donald Trump’s electoral lead is fading even as Kamala Harris could potentially lose the popular vote.
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Sep 25, 2024 | 
cjr.org | Nicholas Lemann
Editor’s note: The following article was first published in Dædalus vol. 153, no. 3, Summer 2024 (“The Future of Free Speech”). It has been lightly copyedited to conform to CJR house style but is otherwise presented as it appeared in that journal. The First Amendment’s press clause has long played second fiddle to the speech clause.
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Sep 17, 2024 | 
kirkusreviews.com | Nicholas Lemann |Alok Vaid-Menon
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader. In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House. In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates.
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Sep 9, 2024 | 
chronicle.com | Nicholas Lemann |Silke-Maria Weineck |Adam Gjesdal |Len Gutkin
In 2017 the theologian Paul J. Griffiths quit his chaired position at Duke following a dispute over diversity-training sessions.
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Sep 6, 2024 | 
chronicle.com | Nicholas Lemann |Justin Metz
Through all these decades of controversies about admissions and about affirmative action, there has been the idea, shimmering like the mirage of a desert oasis on the horizon, that there might be some way of selecting students for elite universities that everyone would agree is fair. It’s the ever-elusive admissions equivalent of the Holy Grail, or the universal solvent, or the Northwest Passage. The main conservative version of this is to eliminate consideration of race in admissions.
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Aug 25, 2024 | 
washingtonmonthly.com | Nicholas Lemann
If you’re reading this, you probably remember the utter shock you felt on Election Night 2016, when it became apparent that Donald Trump was going to win. What may be harder to imagine today is that in the liberal world, the shock level was almost that high on Election Night 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter.
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Feb 3, 2024 | 
freakonomics.com | Michael Sandel |Robert Frank |Nicholas Lemann |Angela Duckworth
DUCKWORTH: Does anybody ever say that?!* * *DUCKWORTH: I’m Angela Duckworth. MAUGHAN: I’m Mike Maughan. DUCKWORTH + MAUGHAN: And you’re listening to No Stupid Questions. Today on the show: is meritocracy a fair system? DUCKWORTH: What it shines a light on is how much all of life is a lottery!* * *MAUGHAN: Angela, I’m super excited to talk to you today. We’ve got an amazing question from Patrick Gilmartin, which I almost want to just say in a British accent the whole time.
