Evan Osnos

“There is no distinction between his personal grievances and his policy aims,” Evan Osnos says.

Three months ago, the Vice-President was fighting for respect in Washington. Can she defy her doubters—and end the Trump era?

In a valedictory speech in Chicago, the President mapped his legacy and asked to be remembered as a man who pulled the country from the maw of tragedy.

2 days ago ... Evan Osnos writes that, throughout Joe Biden's political career, the President has turned pain into purpose. Now Biden must do it again.

But the Second World War was raging, and Roosevelt was convinced that he was the person best equipped to safeguard his achievements, defend democracy, and stop future aggression. Roosevelt ordered his handlers and the Secret Service to disguise his frailties. Harry Truman, his Vice-President, told the press, “He’s still the leader he’s always been,” but privately confessed to an aide, “Physically he’s just going to pieces.” Presidents are remembered as much for how they depart the office as for…

Moments into the conversation with Stephanopoulos, it became clear that Biden had a limited desire to take away any lessons from his debate with Trump on June 27th, which pummelled the confidence of Democrats and stirred frantic talk of replacing him on the ballot. “Did you ever watch the debate afterward?” Stephanopoulos asked. “I don’t think I did, no,” Biden said. It was a casually astonishing reply. In 2012, when President Barack Obama flopped in his first debate against Mitt Romney, Obama’s…

But, at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds on Friday afternoon, Biden would address a different kind of crowd—the public and the faithful, or, for the purposes of the moment, the willing. North Carolina’s governor, Roy Cooper, preceded him, and, in a bit of a tell, he started out talking about the other guy. “Do we want to be Donald Trump’s America?” Cooper asked. “No!” the crowd answered. After a long windup, he got to Biden’s achievements, with all the majesty of checking a grocery list. “Jo…

Kennedy’s calm command of the facts was partly an illusion; he had spent days preparing with advisers, memorizing statistics from index cards—about steel production, Soviet scientists, and obstacles facing Black Americans in the job market—to make his case for a more equitable, ambitious society. Onstage, Nixon’s perceived advantage “vanished before the first debate was over,” the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin writes in her latest book, “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s…

The Shadow of Tiananmen Falls on Hong Kong

The couple, college sweethearts from Indiana University, had arrived in California seven years earlier, in search of a new life. They had started the cross-country drive with their dog, Lucy, on New Year’s Eve. In L.A., Mallory trained to be a hair stylist, like her mother and grandmother back home in Santa Claus, Indiana. Zach, who had secretly wanted to act ever since he saw his first Broadway play as a child, landed a few tiny parts: he played Demon 3 in one film, an unnamed basketball player…

W.C.K. had built a makeshift jetty to bring food ashore in Gaza, where hundreds of thousands face the prospect of famine, because Israel had resisted calls to allow more aid in by land. The seven W.C.K. workers were travelling in a convoy of three cars, at least one of which was clearly marked with the organization’s logo, when they were hit by drone-fired missiles, even though the group had coördinated its mission with the Israel Defense Forces. The Israeli military called the strikes a “traged…

Biden, always a little taller than you expect, wore a navy suit and a bright-blue tie. He passed a study off the Oval, where he keeps a rack of extra shirts, an array of notes sent in by the public, and a portrait of John F. Kennedy in a contemplative pose. (It’s one of his favorites, even though Bobby Kennedy thought that it evoked his brother during the Bay of Pigs debacle.) He continued to the Oval Office dining room, a small, elegant space where, in Biden’s eight years as Vice-President, he…

Biden, always a little taller than you expect, wore a navy suit and a bright-blue tie. He passed a study off the Oval, where he keeps a rack of extra shirts, an array of notes sent in by the public, and a portrait of John F. Kennedy in a contemplative pose. (It’s one of his favorites, even though Bobby Kennedy thought that it evoked his brother during the Bay of Pigs debacle.) He continued to the Oval Office dining room, a small, elegant space where, in Biden’s eight years as Vice-President, he…

Biden, always a little taller than you expect, wore a navy suit and a bright-blue tie. He passed a study off the Oval, where he keeps a rack of extra shirts, an array of notes sent in by the public, and a portrait of John F. Kennedy in a contemplative pose. (It’s one of his favorites, even though Bobby Kennedy thought that it evoked his brother during the Bay of Pigs debacle.) He continued to the Oval Office dining room, a small, elegant space where, in Biden’s eight years as Vice-President, he…

As a teen-ager, Carlson attended St. George’s School, beside the ocean in Rhode Island, one of sixteen American prep schools that the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell described as “differentiating the upper classes from the rest of the population.” Carlson dated (and later married) the headmaster’s daughter. His college applications were rejected, but the headmaster exerted influence at his own alma mater, Trinity College, and Carlson was admitted. He did not excel there; he went on to earn what he…

At the outset, Nixon and Kissinger were not an obvious pairing. During the Republican Presidential primaries, in 1968, while advising a rival candidate, Kissinger had described the hawkish, mercurial Nixon as “the most dangerous of all the men running.” But, after Nixon secured the nomination, Kissinger’s stature, and his ambition, brought them together, and he became a confidant. In office, they embarked on a clandestine, circuitous, and highly personalized mission. Visiting Paris, for Charles…

But there was no rodeo or donning of hats last week, when China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, met with President Joe Biden, following a gruelling year of mutual criticism and mistrust since their last encounter. During that time, Xi had accused the U.S. of seeking to “contain, encircle, and suppress” his country, and Biden had called Xi a “dictator.” The world’s two largest economies are deeply intertwined, but the governments have growing disagreements over China’s claims to Taiwan and America’…

Wang’s fiction and essays celebrated personal dignity over conformity, and embraced foreign ideas—from Twain, Calvino, Russell—as a complement to the Chinese perspective. In “The Pleasure of Thinking,” the title essay in a collection newly released in English, he recalls his time on a commune where the only sanctioned reading was Mao’s Little Red Book. To him, that stricture implied an unbearable lie: “if the ultimate truth has already been discovered, then the only thing left for humanity to do…

Maryland’s first Black governor talks about his surprise win, what working in banking taught him about power, his grandmother’s advice, and the importance of service.

Trump is not only the first former President to face federal charges but also the most confounding front-runner ever in a Presidential primary.