He stood at his little podium in Marietta, Georgia, and the heat did what four years of consequence never managed. The makeup gave way. Rivulets of bronzer ran the length of his jaw and pooled at his collar, a gob of brown-tinged mayonnaise sliding out the side of a tuna sandwich left too long in […]
Month: July 2026
Spain did not stumble into winning the 2026 World Cup. For two years running now, the same nation has stood at the summit of the sport the rest of the world actually cares about, and the summit has held. Euro 2024 belonged to them. The 2026 World Cup, contested across a sprawling, overstuffed, forty-eight team […]
Shakespeare gave us the phrase for nights like this one: A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Thursday night, in a primetime address he demanded the networks carry (but most didn’t anyway), the President of the United States told his tired tale again. He shared not one fact that […]
Privately, Graham may have been a good man. Publicly, he was an atrocity.
Ten. That is the count now, in this administration alone, of human beings shot and killed by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. Not accidents. Not natural causes. Shot. Ten. And the tenth barely made the news cycle before it moved on to something else. His name was Lorenzo Salgado […]
Standing beside Volodymyr Zelensky in Ankara on Wednesday, Donald Trump told reporters that an American aircraft carrier had been fired on by “the Islamic Republic of Japan.” One hundred and eleven missiles, he said, launched at the USS Abraham Lincoln by a nation he meant to call Iran and instead called Japan. A NATO summit. […]
Twenty-one kindergartners stood on a stage in St. Paul, Minnesota, in caps and gowns, singing the song five-year-olds sing when they’ve survived their first year of school. Most of the girls wore hijabs. Their families sat with phones raised, doing what families do at that age and that milestone: recording proof that their child made […]
The Independence of Conscience
Every Fourth of July, Americans light fireworks to celebrate a piece of paper. It is wise remembering what that paper was. The Declaration of Independence was not a legal filing. It was fifty-six men committing treason against the Crown, in writing, names attached, knowing failure meant the gallows. Jefferson did not hedge. He signed his […]
She lived a few miles from where I am writing this: Irondequoit, New York. A (reasonably) quiet suburb of Rochester, the kind of place with lawns and school pickup lines and absolutely nothing that looks like a terror cell. Federal prosecutors say Catherine Beth Washburn ran one anyway. On Tuesday, the FBI arrested the 37-year-old […]