A C-17 Globemaster left Joint Base Andrews on Aug. 25, routed by way of Riga, Latvia, and landed in Moscow. CIA Director John Ratcliffe was aboard and spent about eight hours there. The Kremlin says he did not meet Russian President Vladimir Putin. President Donald Trump called the trip semi-routine. What Ratcliffe carried there is […]
On May 29, the lower house of Poland’s parliament voted 428-3 to honor the 250th anniversary of American independence. Nobody voted against. Watching from the gallery was Tom Rose, the U.S. ambassador who had spent the previous four months in an open, personal feud with the marshal who announced the result. Rules of professional diplomacy […]
It is difficult, 20 years on, to say which is more unlikely: that flip-flopping, wind-surfing, “Jinjis” Khan-pronouncing John Kerry came within an Ohio whisper of the White House or that Kerry’s rebuke proceeded in large part from a bevy of cheesed-off veterans. Politics change in two decades, of course, and my guess is that the […]
There are few occasions in popular entertainment that are more promising, or more perilous, than the finale of a great television series. When done well, it provides resolution and closure. We understand that the characters have accomplished worthwhile things and built solid relationships but still have fresh opportunities before them — a new romance, a […]
In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas assault on Israeli civilians, President Joe Biden showed sympathy and support for Israel. Even as news of that day’s horrors, including the death of 30 Americans, continued to come out, Biden’s sympathy and support was not shared across his administration. As the war reaches its six-month […]
Alex Garland’s Civil War isn’t the movie you might expect from its trailers, which portray the film as an action blockbuster set amid an apocalyptic near-future conflict between a loose confederation of Western states and the federal government in Washington, D.C. Don’t expect massive battles over American cities. The violence is brutal but mostly brief. […]
The journey begins with sweet-and-sour pork balls. A staple of Chinese take-away restaurants in 1970s England, these were school-age Fuchsia Dunlop’s introduction to the cuisine that would change her life. Or, more accurately, one of the cuisines. For in her new book, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food, Dunlop dispels the notion […]
When asked to rank different forms of popular entertainment, modern culture critics might put professional wrestling somewhere between amateur pornography and dogfighting. Enjoyment of this grand tradition is liable to get you marked as a hopeless rube or even a symptom of malignant cultural pathologies. Right now, this takes the form of the analysis that […]
No one in America has a larger victim complex than Palestinian student activists at a liberal university, who think their egos take priority over the law. That includes the students at Vanderbilt University who think they are allowed to trespass and assault police officers because of their supposedly righteous cause. Vanderbilt ended up suspending and […]
In its everlasting bid to betray the people who elected them, Congress is engaged in a bitter fight over whether or not the federal government can spy on people without a warrant. The object of this latest congressional feud is Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which, on paper, allows federal […]
