Recent Articles

King Charles III arrives in Washington on April 27th. The state visit lasts four days. There will be a banquet at the White House and a joint address to Congress

On madness, the Strait of Hormuz, and the question of who, exactly, is steering. There is a particular kind of dread that arrives not with a bang but with a slowly dawning recognition—the moment you realize the person holding the wheel is not, in any meaningful sense, driving.

From Iran’s nuclear capabilities to global security, the war in Iran has numerous unintended consequences for those who initiated it. Nine of Trump’s miscalculations

What distinguishes this war from the cleaner disasters of recent memory is not the firepower deployed or the civilians killed, though both are considerable, but the structural impossibility of its ending.

There is a particular kind of incompetence that announces itself as strength. It arrives not with hesitation but with volume, not with strategy but with spectacle.

They called it Operation Epic Fury, which is to say, they named it the way empires name their violence—with the breathless grandiosity of men who confuse destruction with destiny.

The Politics of Distraction and the Epstein scandal individualize corruption, creating a spectacle that redirects anger away from structural power. Something has shifted in the architecture of American power, and the Epstein scandal—or rather, what has been made of it—offers a revealing aperture into the nature of that shift.

Few spectacles in democratic life are quite so revealing as a leader who, sensing the ground shift beneath him, resolves not to look down. President Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday evening—one hour and forty-eight minutes of it, the longest in modern American history—was such a performance: a marathon of assertion delivered into the teeth of accumulating evidence that very little of what was being asserted bore much resemblance to the country people are actually living in.