Again and again as I’ve come across some fact or story that befuddles me, I’ve thought: I need Rachel Maddow to explain this to me.

Again and again, her ability to build context through anecdote, to invoke emotion without blurring logic, to raise the issues that matter through the muddle that don’t inspires me to attempt to remain sane. And her first book—Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power—Maddow projects her always fresh insight into one of the most complex, troubling issues of our time: the creep of permanent war.

The pleasure of reading this book, which is always stimulating and occasionally hilarious, is completely at odds with the disturbing narrative it crafts.…

The antidote to email forwards from your uncle.

Conservatives have been getting their news from clowns for years. But something changed in 2009.

From 2001 till the end of January 2009, the conservative movement held the White House for eight years and the Congress for six. And by the end of Bush’s second term it was evident that the GOP had failed in nearly every imaginable way*.

Some speculated it would be decades before anyone but the reddest states let them run anything larger than a circus.

In The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine by David Brock, Ari Rabin-Havt and Media Matters for America we learn how Fox News’ chief Roger Ailes seized a perfect moment to exploit his lifetime of experience in television and politics.…