Journalism

Q&A with Tony Schwartz, the author behind The Art of the Deal–he says Trump has always been “100 percent self-absorbed, incapable of interest in other human beings, and completely self-referential. Even 30 years ago, he had an incredibly short attention span. Lying was almost second nature to him; he did it as easily as most of us drink a glass of water.”  But now, as Special Counsel Robert Mueller closes in, he is “moving to a darker place.”
–continued at TheNation.com, HERE

A new book by 27 psychiatrists, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” expresses concern and alarm about Trump’s mental and emotional state.  They say they have an ethical “duty to warn” the public because of the danger Trump poses.  Amy Wilentz comments.
Read HERE

Ai Weiwei is the most famous political artist in the world and a tireless human-rights activist and critic of the Chinese government. Now he’s made his first feature-length documentary film, Human Flow, about the global refugee crisis.  We talked about it in Los Angeles recently.
continued at TheNation.com, HERE

A Q&A with Todd Gitlin, who says the 16-hour Ken Burns history of the Vietnam War is an extraordinary portrayal of the people who lived through the war—both Americans and Vietnamese.
Read at TheNation.com, HERE.

Elizabeth Holtzman, who served on the House Judiciary Committee that drafted the Watergate articles of impeachment, talks about Robert Mueller and his investigations of Donald Trump–and emphasizes that impeachable offenses do not have to also qualify as indictable criminal offenses.
Read HERE

A Q&A with The Nation’s Managing Editor, Roane Carey, who spent the week trapped in Houston — studying the history of 100-year floods, and developers’ fight against local groups seeking limits of development of prairie flood plains.
At TheNation.com, HERE

 Q&A with the dean of the law school at Berkeley, who explains why Trump’s move violates basic tenets of the separation of powers–and how the Supreme Court might review the pardon.
at TheNation.com: READ HERE

Jon Wiener: We heard for months about the hostility between Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner. Now Jared has won the battle. But why was this battle being fought, in the first place?
Amy Wilentz: There’s an emptiness at the center of Donald Trump.  He doesn’t like policy, doesn’t want to read about policy, doesn’t want to think about policy. What he does is take advice. If you have then two warring factions who disagree on policy and also disagree on final goals, you’re going to have huge problems.
. . . continued at TheNation.com, HERE

On August 24, 1967, fifty years ago today, Abbie Hoffman and a group of friends invaded the heart of American capitalism, the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. They threw money from the visitors’ gallery onto the floor, and the brokers and traders there leapt into the air to grab the dollar bills floating down. Trading was interrupted, briefly. News coverage was massive. . . .
. . . continued at TheNation.com, HERE

In Steve Bannon’s now-famous call to Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect the day before he was fired, Bannon described the white supremacists who had marched in Charlottesville as “losers” and “a collection of clowns.” Of course, those are the same sorts of people Bannon mobilized to vote for Trump, the most loyal part of his base. I asked Joshua Green about that . . .
. . . continued at TheNation.com HERE