Cognoscenti: 2024 Election
Cognoscenti's essays and commentaries about the 2024 election.
What is the role of women's anger now?
The anger many women feel about Trump's victory can spur renunciation and offer moral clarity, writes Leigh Gilmore. Anger isn’t the only important emotion, but it is the right response...
Processing the election
There is a rush to know and understand all of this. I don’t have many answers at the moment, but I’m also not convinced it’s a good idea to try...
The way forward runs through the places we call home
It might seem counterintuitive, to devote more focus to our local leaders and surroundings as the horizon burns, writes Miles Howard. But localized political action yields the most visible changes...
This is who we are now
This was never about the price of eggs, writes Eileen McNamara. If only “inflation” did explain the nation’s historic embrace of a wannabe dictator who stokes racial division and celebrates...
Let us hold fast to the politics of mercy
This election is best understood as a referendum on cruelty, writes Steve Almond. How much cruelty will be allowed in America?
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An American (voter) in Paris
Laura Hertzfeld is living abroad this election season. She visited Harry's New York Bar, in central Paris, to cast a ballot in that establishment's presidential straw poll, which has been...
What happens when a woman takes power?
This woman who wears pant suits and pearls, sneakers and stilettos, is demonstrating that even traditional 'femininity' is a powerful credential for leadership, writes Julie Wittes Schlack. Harris’ victory would...
The weight of decisions my patients make behind exam room doors
Most pregnant patients will never meet a maternal-fetal medicine physician, but for those that do, the conversations can be fraught, writes Luke P. Burns. Access to abortion procedures is as...
'Joy, in fact, is a platform. Every woman knows this'
Women laugh in the face of adversity and terror because they know it is the first step on the path out of paralysis, the first step on the road back...
American democracy needs a redesign
The engine of American democracy is rusty, sputtering, and no longer able to take us where we want to go, writes Ismar Volić, a mathematician who directs the Institute for...
The gendered fault lines defining the 2024 election
All in all, the political press of 2024 is closer than ever before to portraying women’s experiences as American experiences that reverberate across the electorate and throughout the halls of...
Kamala Harris' closing message: It's his record, stupid
Kamala Harris seems to have settled on a closing argument that focuses on Trump’s increasingly menacing rhetoric, writes Steve Almond. It is incumbent upon our free press to remind voters...
Please don't vote for a third-party candidate
In a presidential election as close as this year's, three left-wing candidates could keep Kamala Harris out of the White House, writes Ed Siegel. If Trump wins, we can expect...
Trump pits immigrants and working-class Americans against each other. But they both need the same things
Our immigration system is broken, writes Julie Wittes Schlack. But perhaps an even bigger problem lies in this country’s lack of affordable housing.
The choices we made for our family
Miguel and Kelly Cervantes have lost two children — one to a neurodegenerative condition at age 3, one in utero, at 21 weeks. I made the same heart-wrenching decision for...
Dispatch from a swing state: Going door-to-door in Scranton, Pa.
Steve Almond canvassed for Kamala Harris with his teenage daughter and her two friends in Scranton, Pennsylvania, earlier this month. He left the weekend impressed by Harris' robust ground game,...
Fossil fuels are as American as apple pie
American voters have always lived in a society where fossil fuels rule, writes Frederick Hewett. To realize the transition to a decarbonized future, we must first untangle the cognitive knots...
Kamala Harris is more than vibes. Here's a primer on her policies
The current GOP attack on Kamala Harris -- that she's all vibes no substance -- is being reinforced by the media, writes Steve Almond. America’s publishers and producers could cover...
Donald Trump, the candidate, is a media fiction
The press isn’t responsible for Trump’s lies or his crimes or his blatant incoherence, writes Steve Almond. But they have fallen into a pattern of ignoring and sanitizing, and thus...
'In the room where it happens' — a day in the life of a DNC delegate
There's nothing ceremonial about the role of delegate at this year's Democratic National Convention, writes Kaivan Shroff.