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The Best & The Brightest
Tara Palmeri, Julia Ioffe, Peter Hamby, Tina Nguyen, and Abby Livingston
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Monday - Thursday
The Best & the Brightest is Puck’s daily political newsletter from Washington, featuring Tara Palmeri, Julia Ioffe, Peter Hamby, Tina Nguyen, and Abby Livingston on what’s really happening in this town—inside the White House and the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill, K Street, and the campaign trail.
THE LATEST ARTICLES
MEDIA
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November 23, 2021
Murdoch’s Big Lie and Putin at the Gates
Pre-Thanksgiving reflections on the Tucker Carlson-ification of Fox News, Russia’s designs on Ukraine, and more.
WASHINGTON
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November 12, 2021
Biden’s Sinking Popularity and Putin’s New Proxy War
Reflections on the most pressing questions in Washington, and in my inbox. This week: Could the rescue of Biden’s infrastructure bill be a turning point for his administration? And what is the White House thinking about the Belarus-Poland border crisis?
MEDIA
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November 4, 2021
Tales from the CNN Trump-Era Green Room
Kirsten Powers, who went from liberal on Fox News to anti-Trump voice on CNN, explains what happens when the shouting matches end, the cameras turn off, and you’re stuck in the green room with Santorum. And how to handle it all, and more, with a little grace.
WASHINGTON
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November 3, 2021
The G.O.P.’s Critical Race Theory Bazooka
It's not taught in K-12 schools, but Glenn Youngkin rode the issue straight to the Virginia governor’s mansion. So much so that by Wednesday morning, the Republican Study Committee put out a memo that the G.O.P. must become the “party of parents” and to fight “racist C.R.T. curricula.”
WASHINGTON
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October 20, 2021
A Cold War Saga in Biden’s Washington
Members of the intelligence community are increasingly convinced that the Russian government is behind the hundreds of terrifying directed-energy attacks on diplomats and spies known as the Havana Syndrome. Will Congress respond to the “medium confidence” intelligence with countermeasures? As one member of the community told me, “We got bin Laden with medium confidence.”
WASHINGTON
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October 11, 2021
Unofficial Washington: The Media, Trump, and the Macker
Like clockwork, the Washington agenda resets every Monday. Here’s what This Town is talking about (and not talking about) this week.
WASHINGTON
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October 4, 2021
Democrats, Republicans, and the Media Squabble in a Post-Trump Malaise
As one congressman told me, “The blow-by-blow is intensely interesting to journalists and to members [of Congress], but our constituents couldn’t care less.” And yet, there is something so delightfully refreshing about it all. Could it last?
MEDIA
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September 28, 2021
The Powerbroker: How Bob Woodward Conquered Washington
At 78, Woodward has become the ultimate Washington monument: a subject of public adulation and private eye-rolling, essentially making him no different from the public figures he covers.
MEDIA
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September 17, 2021
The Divorce Heard Around Washington
The Trump administration made strange bedfellows of the left, the media, the permanent political class, and the foreign policy establishment known as The Blob. Amid the fallout from Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, the political knives are out.
PUCK
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September 12, 2021
Why I Joined Puck
At Puck, I found colleagues who believe in the same first principle: stick to the truth and everything else falls into place.