Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Cory Booker was feeling good. The one time Newark, N.J., mayoral candidate had just given a widely lauded speech at a youth vote event at the Democratic convention in Boston. The party’s kingmakers and talent scouts, who had taken an interest in the career of this young, handsome African-American Rhodes scholar during his campaign two […]

I hadn’t expected this line from him. My friend is the kind of tough-minded partisan who screens dates for political affiliation and who says that whenever he gets weeping calls from retired constituents about too-expensive prescription drugs, he thinks to himself, “You should have saved more then, shouldn’t you?” A year ago, he was gearing […]

It is this cultural difference that explains one of the mysteries of the current presidential race: John Kerry, the Massachusetts Yankee, is doing rather well here. He launched his campaign at Norfolk Naval base with an aircraft carrier in the background, and went on to crush Sen. John Edwards, a native from North Carolina, in […]

Sportswriters of a particular liberal-sensitive cast have spent three decades patiently pressing upon their readers the demographic inevitability of soccer’s conquest of the American sporting scene. First, they say, there are the participants: millions of suburban soccer kids, who will as adults lock onto the sport they grew up playing. Next, there are all those […]

In early May, Niall Ferguson, the celebrity Scottish historian, looked out at a packed house seething with antagonism. He had come to Washington to deliver a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations defending his idea that the war in Iraq had not only been the right thing to do, but also ought to be […]

You’ll be sitting in the audience listening to a sensible speech by, say, Gingrich, and all of a sudden you get the notion that aliens have captured his brain. Befuddled, you’ll turn to your friend next to you, the libertarian true-believer, and he’ll shrug his shoulders and whisper back: “Oh, it’s just Newt.” And then, […]

They talked, almost wearily, about unsuccessfully trying to pick up the waitresses at the bar down the block; about the best restaurant bathrooms in which to blow cocaine; about a prep school friend who’d been pulled over for weaving along a Connecticut road and acted more drunk than he really was, hoping the cops would […]

This spring, two economists, Ian Ayres of Yale and John J. Donohue III of Stanford, published a paper charging Lott with falsifying his statistics. Then things really got weird. Someone named “Mary Rosh” started turning up on Web sites where Lott’s work was being discussed, claiming to be a former student of the embattled academic […]

There’s a line in the chorus that goes “I gladly stand up next to you/ and defend her still today,” and when the singer hit “stand up” for the first time, the soldiers stiffened to attention. On the second chorus, the officers and dignitaries who had addressed the soldiers stood up, as one. The third […]