Photo by Sunguk Kim The US has a long history of not knowing how to end or peacefully resolve vexing international crises and conflicts with less powerful nations. A triumphalist attitude in the national character is partly to blame, but in part, at least, it is also...
Photograph Source: Defense Dept. photo by Helene C. Stikkel – Public Domain Former CIA director Robert M. Gates was on “Face the Nation” last month and demonstrated that there has never been a better truckler in the federal bureaucracy over the past four decades. ...
Photograph Source: Casa Presidencial – CC0 Our offshore concentration camps, for now, are in El Salvador and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But don’t expect them to remain there. Once they are normalized, not only for U.S.-deported immigrants and residents, but U.S. citizens,...
Photograph Source: Casa Presidencial – CC0 Our offshore concentration camps, for now, are in El Salvador and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But don’t expect them to remain there. Once they are normalized, not only for U.S.-deported immigrants and residents, but U.S. citizens,...
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair I wonder what lance corporal Ricardo Sanchez thinks about Jaime Dominguez staring at him from across the line, what staff sergeant Renee Rousseau thinks about Jean Duvalier leaning up against that building, what private Winston Chang,...
Photograph Source: U.S. Northern Command – Public Domain US president Donald Trump, Axios reports, “is edging closer than ever to invoking the Insurrection Act, driven by a vision of executive power free from the guardrails, governors and generals who stifled him in...
The 2025 Gaza Freedom Flotilla departing Catania, Sicily, on 1 June 2025. The latest incident with the Madleen vessel, pictured as a relief measure by celebrity activists and sundry accompaniments to supply civilians with a modest assortment of humanitarian aid, is...
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair The May jobs report indicated that the labor market is still solid, even if there are some concerning signs like the rise in unemployment among Black women and the sharp fall in labor force participation. Whatever problems the Trump...
Photograph Source: U.S. Northern Command – Public Domain In Trump’s America, the bar for martial law is no longer constitutional—it’s personal. What is unfolding right now in California—with hundreds of Marines deployed domestically; thousands of National Guard troops...
Image by Emad El Byed. The photographs are unbearable. Hollow-eyed children staring into cameras, their faces etched with a hunger that reaches beyond the physical. Families huddled in makeshift shelters, their possessions reduced to what they can carry. These images...
Image by Michael Schofield. In an aphorism sometimes attributed to Leo Tolstoy, sometimes to John Gardner, all literature relies on one of two plots: a person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Let me offer my own version. We might summarize the entire...
Image by Ted Griswold. I’ve seen this story before. The images coming out of Los Angeles—militarized streets, protesters met with force, another round of justifications for escalation—hit me with the dull weight of déjà vu. It’s not that I’m shocked. It’s that I...