Nick Burns

Jan 30, 2025 | nickburns.substack.com | Nick Burns

Chaos has been lately unleashed upon the two-million-strong American federal workforce by … the new management. Don’t let them tell you that Twitter isn’t real life when what happened to its workforce is now attempting to be wrought upon the employees of Uncle Sam!This turbulence is as good a reason as any to recall the most famous work of American literature about losing your government job: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous prologue to The Scarlet Letter, about his time in the Salem custom house.

Nov 25, 2024 | americasquarterly.org | Nick Burns

Reading Time: 5 minutesRicardo Monreal likes to talk about the constituyente permanente, the legislative power to rewrite Mexico’s constitution. It’s a power that his Morena party is currently making full use of—and Monreal is at the head of the charge. As leader of the Morena-led coalition in the country’s lower house, which has a dominant supermajority, Monreal is pushing through sweeping reforms that are shaking Mexico’s political system to its foundations.

Nov 8, 2024 | nickburns.substack.com | Nick Burns

I wrote down some observations after roaming around the margins of the Trump rally in the south Bronx in May. But I wanted to wait to develop some photos I took before publishing, and it ended up taking so long that the subject didn’t seem timely anymore, so I never did. Now that Trump has won a second term—improving his performance in the Bronx by 22 points, the biggest swing of any New York county—I thought it would be worth sharing them here. I haven’t made any changes to the below text.

Nov 4, 2024 | nickburns.substack.com | Nick Burns

Eve of another American election. Four years ago I was staying with my grad student friends in Baltimore when the election arrived. We wandered through cold deserted boarded-up Washington, D.C. and then drove back and wandered around cold deserted Mount Vernon, stood in front of the Washington Monument there—like much about Baltimore’s old neighborhoods, much more attractive than its D.C. counterpart—and contemplated the American past and future in an attitude of mock graveness.

Sep 4, 2024 | nickburns.substack.com | Nick Burns

The other day I found myself back in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn, in a café on the border between Crown Heights and Prospect Heights, drinking a glass of wine and eating chips, waiting to meet a friend for dinner. People came and went … including a woman who, as if to draw a line under a stereotype, came in carrying a bottle of natural wine, with a baby bound to her chest by means of one of those wraparound contraptions popular among the Brooklyn hipster parent class.