Leah McGrath Goodman
Why Trump’s ties to Epstein have resurfaced
Leah McGrath Goodman brings two decades of investigative journalism experience covering politics and money to a new newsletter, Column C, where she explores "cultures of corruption, climate change, crypto and other calamities."...
Can the Supreme Court decide to be ethical?
Public opinion of the court has never been glowing, but it’s hit record lows this summer with revelations about unchecked and unaccountable justices accepting gifts and violating ethical norms
Over the summer, the approval rating of the U.S. Supreme Court bottomed out at a record low of 40% in a nationwide Gallup poll, representing widespread dissatisfaction felt by many across America with its highest court. The court's losing streak began in 2021 when it upheld a restrictive abortion...
Indictment paints an objectively strange picture of Trump
Countless classified documents removed from the White House appear to still be missing, with no definitive way to fully quantify them or determine if they can ever be found
With apologies to W.C. Fields, who once said, “It's a funny old world - a man is lucky if he gets out of it alive,” the stunning indictment, arrest, and arraignment of Donald J. Trump has offered a surreal glimpse into the former president's inner sanctums, where boxes of...
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Woke capitalism meets odd reality
I grew up in a tiny New England town known for attracting the odd violent hurricane. One of my earliest experiences of a power outage was during Hurricane Gloria in the 1980s. We basically camped in our own house, tried to wash our clothes with any water we could find and cooked on the neighbor's gas stove (ours was electric). The memory of that time has been indelible - how quickly we went from living comfortably to roughing it -
Strange times, with silver linings
“After Sept. 11th, I thought I'd seen everything,” a close friend in New York confided to me this week, as President Trump threatened another quarantine. So did I. I moved to New York just after my 21st birthday. I'd landed my dream job on a national news desk at a major media organization, writing and editing stories from around the world. In the next several years, I would handle every type of breaking news imaginable: the U.S. election recount, 9/11,
The two Hillary Clintons
In 2004, then–New York Senator Hillary Clinton rang the opening bell at the New York Mercantile Exchange, the world's reigning energy market. When she arrived at the trading floor, the traders unabashedly booed her. “It wasn't because they hate Democrats,” a young man who worked in the trading pits, Ben Kaufman, told me at the time. “A lot of the traders are Democrats. They just hated her. The exchange apologized and forced all the traders to do it over again...
Salty and sweet
Last year, at the Centre Congregational Church, two literary heavyweights met on the stage: National Book Award finalist Andre Dubus III, bestselling author of House of Sand and Fog, and the soon-to-be National Book Award winner Phil Klay, who'd just published his first book, Redeployment, about serving in the Iraq War. While reading from one of his works, Dubus, clearly the more flamboyant of the two, kept catching himself swearing during off-the-cuff remarks - and looking a bit nervous about...
Snow job
For a town in Vermont, a state that gets more annual snowfall than any other in the nation, you would think Brattleboro would have snow-clearing down to a science. Or at least an art. It doesn't - and that needs to change. Just over a week ago, those gathering downtown on a crisp Friday night found this out the hard way as they emerged from local restaurants and watering holes to find their cars snatched from the streets without a...