A Night of Silence on Late-Night Television, and What It Revealed About Power   On a recent night at Studio 6B in Rockefeller Center, what was scheduled…

A Televised Confrontation That Revealed More Than It Claimed The studio lights were designed for spectacle, not reckoning. Yet on this particular night, a familiar talk-show set…

Trump’s Closing Argument, Imagined In campaigns, closing arguments are rarely speeches. They are habits. They are the final repetition of a story a candidate has been telling…

When Late Night Became a Legal Brief For years, late-night television has played a familiar role in American politics: a nightly pressure valve, a place where the…

When the Joke Became the Record It began, as these things often do now, with a clip designed to outrun context. A late-night monologue, a politician’s provocation,…

When Satire Becomes a Stress Test for Power Late-night comedy has always trafficked in exaggeration, but its sharpest moments often arrive not through insult, but through accumulation….

When a Brag Meets the Archive Late-night television thrives on exaggeration, but occasionally it stages something closer to civic theater. On a recent Wednesday, Jimmy Kimmel Live…

When Brilliance Becomes a Performance Donald Trump has long cultivated a singular idea about himself: that he is not merely successful or confident, but innately smarter than…

When an Insult Meets the Record Donald Trump has long relied on a particular reflex when confronted by critics: question their intelligence. It is a tactic as…