july/august 2021

First comes the piece of timber. Then the strip of leather. Then the fence, the mountain, the trees, the river. The pictures whirl, like icons in a Western-themed slot machine, until they land on their final image: the smiling face of Tucker Carlson.

This spring, Carlson began hosting a new show on Fox Nation, the network’s digital streaming service. Tucker Carlson Today features interviews, one-on-one and in-depth, with Carlson’s preferred guests—skeptics of multiculturalism, skeptics of science, skeptics of “the system” as it currently operates. The show is pretty much what you’d expect it to be, save for one thing: It takes place in a Foxified version of Frontierland.

It begins, episode after episode, with that reel of images. And Carlson hosts it from a gaudy facsimile of a log cabin. The set is constructed almost entirely of wood, or a wood-like substance. Just behind Carlson’s chair is a backlit American flag. The space is otherwise spare: a shelf with a display of tattered books, a sepia-toned globe, a rug, a large desk (made of thick glass, the set’s one concession to cable). A screen mounted on the wall sometimes serves as a portal for the guests who do not come to Carlson’s cabin in person. Its default image, however, offers a window into the cabin’s imagined environs: a farmhouse and a field, overlaid with the words—rendered in lowercase, because all things are casual in the daytime—tucker carlson today.

Eras of music are commonly defined by particular sounds. The ’80s had gated reverb, the aughts had Timbaland’s beats, and the early 2020s have had the froggy, rasping splendor of Doja Cat’s voice. On a slew of recent hits and on her new, third album, Planet Her, the 25-year-old rapper and singer continues to prove she has an extremely now sensibility: steeped in online humor, thrilled by physical pleasure, and adaptable to whatever sound or situation gets thrown at her. She also continues to build upon the legacy of her viral hit “Mooo!” by making a number of amusing comparisons between food and sex.

Doja Cat’s entertaining rise, however, has enabled something uncomfortable: the rehabilitation of Dr. Luke’s career. In other words, it has enabled the music industry—which was notoriously slow to react to #MeToo—to quietly move past one of the most famous sexual-abuse accusations in its recent history.

The caterpillar is roughly an inch and a half long with a fuzzy coat, brown but for two white stripes that flank its back and two red-orange dots near its rear. It has a soft visual texture that makes it seem harmless, charming even, tempting enough to stroke.

But touch a browntail-moth caterpillar at your own peril.

“Browntail-moth-caterpillar hairs are barbed and hollow. And inside that hollow tube, there’s a reservoir of a toxin,” says Allison Kanoti, the state entomologist for Maine, which is in the middle of a massive browntail-moth outbreak. Until recently, the insect was constrained to a few coastal areas of the state. This year, they’ve been spotted in nearly every one of Maine’s 16 counties.

To many Americans, Brad Raffensperger is one of the heroes of the 2020 election. Georgia’s secretary of state, who is a conservative Republican, refused then-President Donald Trump’s direct pleas to “find” the votes that would overturn his defeat in the state. “I’ve shown that I’m willing to stand in the gap,” Raffensperger told me last week, “and I’ll make sure that we have honest elections.”

As he bids for a second term as Georgia’s top election administrator, however, Raffensperger is not so much standing in the gap as he is falling through it. A Trump loyalist in Congress, Representative Jody Hice, is challenging him in a primary with the former president’s enthusiastic endorsement, and the state Republican Party voted last month to censure him over his handling of the election. GOP strategists in the state give Raffensperger no chance of prevailing in next May’s primary.

The United States is not in the midst of a “culture war” over race and racism. The animating force of our current conflict is not our differing values, beliefs, moral codes, or practices. The American people aren’t divided. The American people are being divided.

Republican operatives have buried the actual definition of critical race theory: “a way of looking at law’s role platforming, facilitating, producing, and even insulating racial inequality in our country,” as the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who helped coin the term, recently defined it. Instead, the attacks on critical race theory are based on made-up definitions and descriptors. “Critical race theory says every white person is a racist,” Senator Ted Cruz has said. “It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin,” said the Alabama state legislator Chris Pringle.