Nick Burns

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.

Aug 29, 2024 | americasquarterly.org | Nick Burns

Reading Time: 6 minutesThis article has been updated. Alexandre de Moraes might be the second-most powerful person in Brazil. He does not quite have the reach of the president. But as a judge on the Supreme Court, until recently the president of the Electoral Court, and especially as head of two sprawling investigations against groups spreading disinformation, Moraes has wielded a rare combination of judicial powers.