Tag: United States
The GOP Has Crossed An Ominous Threshold on Foreign Policy
The long decline of the Republican Party’s internationalist wing may have reached a tipping point.
Since Donald Trump emerged as the GOP’s dominant figure in 2016, he has championed an isolationist and nationalist agenda that is dubious of international alliances, scornful of free trade, and hostile to not only illegal but also legal immigration. His four years in the White House marked a shift in the party’s internal balance of power away from the internationalist perspective that had dominated every
Don’t panic about Russian space weapons
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A brief hubbub erupted in Washington this week over an unspecified “national security threat” that some sources now believe is related to a Russian plan to use nuclear weapons in space. The prospect is cause for concern but not panic.
First, here are four
In Guatemala, At Least, Democracy Is Winning
Democracy could use a win. All around the world, states have been taken over by strongmen dead set on extracting as much wealth as they can from the societies they rule. In Russia and Venezuela, Myanmar and Angola, weak electoral systems have given way to hyper-corrupt autocracies. And democrats haven’t really figured out how to fight back. Successful methods to get rid of criminal regimes are desperately needed but vanishingly rare.
Which is why what’s happening in Guatemala right now
Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out
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In its earliest decades, the United States was celebrated for its citizens’ extroversion. Americans weren’t just setting out to build new churches and new cities. Their associations were, as Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “of a thousand different types … religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute.” Americans seemed adept at forming
Bedbugs Are Getting Scarier – The Atlantic
This article was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
The stories have become horribly familiar: houses so overrun by bedbugs that the bloodsucking insects pile an inch deep on the floor. An airport shutting down gates for deep cleaning after the parasites were spotted. Fear and loathing during Fashion Week 2023 in Paris, with bedbug-detection dogs working overtime when the insects turned up in movie theaters and trains.
For reasons that almost certainly have to do with global travel and
Iran Is Not a ‘Normal’ Country
Hours after Hamas’s horrific attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, all of Iran’s parliamentarians rose from their seats to chant “Death to Israel!” and “Palestine is victorious; Israel will be destroyed!” Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and other top Iranian officials, including the former head of the country’s military forces, expressed their support for Hamas, declaring that Iran “will stay with the Palestinian freedom fighters until the liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem.”
These statements were not symbolic. Despite cleverly choreographed
Uncancel Woodrow Wilson – The Atlantic
February marks a century since the death of Woodrow Wilson. Of all America’s presidents, none has suffered so rapid and total a reversal of reputation.
Wilson championed—and came to symbolize—progressive reform at home and liberal internationalism abroad. So long as those causes commanded wide support, Wilson’s name resonated with the greats of American history. In our time, however, the American left has subordinated the causes of reform and internationalism to the politics of identity, while the American right has rejected
Milo Rau, the Theater Director Who Likes to Go Too Far
“I would not say that my art is dark,” Milo Rau tells me, and I burst out laughing. We are sitting in the office space of his theater in Ghent, Belgium, surrounded by posters of his work. In the past decade, Rau has directed plays about a homophobic murder (La Reprise), the unexplained suicide of two parents and their children (Familie), and the exploitation of the developing world (The Congo Tribunal). The Swiss-born director’s
Why Don’t We Teach People How to Parent?
There are just some things you don’t do without preparation. You’re not meant to drive a car without taking lessons and passing a test. You aren’t supposed to scuba dive without certification. You can’t teach—or practice law, or therapy, or cosmetology—without first proving your knowledge. But you can become a parent without any training at all—and that’s a pretty high-stakes position.
Parents today arguably face steeper expectations than ever before. Over the past half century or so, “intensive parenting” has
America’s Immigration Reckoning Has Arrived
In the summer of 2014, I joined a group of journalists in an organized visit to a Border Patrol warehouse in Nogales, Arizona. My daughter had just turned 5 the day before. As I walked out the door, I remember using my hands to smooth out the wrinkles on her school uniform as tenderly as if I were waking her up from sleep. I remember writing my daily note to her in our shared language—Eu te amo—with