No One in Kyiv Knows Whether Russia Is Bluffing
Public Life Can’t Survive Without a Center
The loudest, most prominent voices in public life are not always the most influential. Some of the people who leave the most profound impact—the ones who actually shape the thinking of a generation—do so quietly. Fred Hiatt, who died earlier this week, was one of those people. Hiatt was not exactly silent. You may have …
The Kleptocrats Next Door
Illustration by Javier Jaén In 2010, things started going wrong at the steel plant in Warren, Ohio, a Rust Belt town that went on to cast its votes twice for Donald Trump. A cooling panel started leaking, and the furnace operator didn’t see the leak in time; the water hit molten steel, leading to …
The Attack on Russia’s Past Is Also an Attack on the Future
One night in October, a group of masked men burst into the Moscow offices of Memorial, the celebrated Russian historical society and civil-rights organization, and disrupted a screening of Mr. Jones, a film about the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33. They shouted, gesticulated, and chanted “fascists” and “foreign agents” at the audience. Police were called, but …
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The Bad Guys Are Winning
Illustrations by Michael Houtz The future of democracy may well be decided in a drab office building on the outskirts of Vilnius, alongside a highway crammed with impatient drivers heading out of town. I met Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya there this spring, in a room that held a conference table, a whiteboard, and not much …
The Manufactured Migrant Crisis on Europe’s Doorstep
Wojtek Radwanski / AFP / Getty A small Kurdish boy is sitting on the ground in a damp Polish forest, a few miles from the eastern border with Belarus. The air is heavy with cold and fog. The boy is crying. Around the boy, sitting in a circle, are his parents, uncles, and cousins, all …
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Tucker Carlson’s Sinister New Documentary
Selcuk Acar / NurPhoto / Getty; Chip Somodevilla / Getty; The Atlantic All around you are swirling scenes of violence-explosions in Baghdad, ISIS operatives slitting the throat of an infidel, the chaos around the U.S. Capitol on January 6. You see jarring images of blood and brutality; you hear the grating sound of screaming; you …
Bernard-Henri Lévy Doesn’t Care If You Snicker at Him
Marc Roussel Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French philosopher who wears elegant suits, cites Hegel, and visits war zones. The first part of his new book, The Will to See, references conversations with Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze, among other French postmodernists; the latter part describes horrific scenes of violence in Somalia, …
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The Return of the Scarlet Letter
Illustrations by Nicolas Ortega “It was no great distance, in those days, from the prison-door to the market-place. Measured by the prisoner’s experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey of some length.” So begins the tale of Hester Prynne, as recounted in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most famous novel, The Scarlet Letter. As readers of …
Liberal Democracy Is Worth a Fight
Afghan National Army at the border of Pakistan. / Moises Saman / Magnum Of all the empty, pointless statements that are periodically repeated by Western politicians, none is more empty and pointless than this one: “There can be no military solution to this conflict.” That was what Ban Ki-moon, then the UN secretary-general, said back …
Tucker Carlson’s Self-Loathing International Tourism
Tucker Carlson is spending a week in Budapest in order to annoy Americans and everybody else who believes in the ideals of America: the rule of law, a free press, free elections, the conviction that democracy is preferable to autocracy. Showing how much he despises the United States, its Constitution, and its heritage, the Fox …
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The MyPillow Guy Really Could Destroy Democracy
When you contemplate the end of democracy in America, what kind of person do you think will bring it about? Maybe you picture a sinister billionaire in a bespoke suit, slipping brown envelopes to politicians. Maybe your nightmare is a rogue general, hijacking the nuclear football. Maybe you think of a jackbooted thug leading a …