Graeme Wood
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Ted Thai / The LIFE Picture Collection / ... Why Readers Resented Harold Bloom
I tried to stump him—and only once succeeded.
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Reuters ISIS Is Gloating
The best one could say about America’s abandonment of the Kurds is that they should have known we would sell them out eventually.
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Yves Herman / Reuters Trump’s Sickening Betrayal
Geopolitics is a contest of bad ideas. Letting Turkey take control of Kurdish territory falls somewhere between “very bad” and “extremely bad.”
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Rodi Said / Reuters I Watched ISIS Videos, and Felt My Soul Diminished
After years of reporting on violence, one worries about numbness. All carnage, all the time. If you live like this too long, it can warp your view of the world.
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Philip Montgomery John Bolton Will Hold This Grudge
His dismissal by tweet came after an unusually long prelude of disrespect, both by President Trump and by favored allies.
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Mike Hutchings / Reuters Robert Mugabe Died Too Late
His rule began brutally and ended in pathetic squalor.
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The White House / Flickr Trump’s El Paso Photo Is Obscene
The president’s callousness has reached a new low: smiling, flashing a thumbs-up next to an orphaned infant.
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Reuters Ideology Kills. How Do You Police It?
The manifesto that appeared just before the El Paso shooting opposed racial mixing.
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Leah Millis / Reuters Life in Prison, or the Death Penalty?
What Chekhov has to tell us about capital punishment
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Jerry Lampen / Reuters The Life-Changing Magic of Tripping
Mark Kleiman, the drug-policy scholar who died last week, thought certain hallucinogens should be legalized.
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Chad Batka / The New York Times / ... Sam Shepard Saw It All Coming
The family battles he described foreshadowed our current national crisis.
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Ian Langsdon / Reuters How Long Can John Bolton Take This?
The national security adviser was conspicuously absent from North Korea during the historic concession to Kim Jong Un.
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Richard Drew / AP The National Security Adviser Has No Heart
Tucker Carlson called John Bolton a “bureaucratic tapeworm.” Is his wrath justified?
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Piroschka Van De Wouw / Reuters Are Politics Regressing to Premodern Forms?
The sultan of Brunei has proposed stoning as a punishment for male sodomy.
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Bryan Woolston / Reuters I Wrote to John Walker Lindh. He Wrote Back.
The American jihadist thanked me for my interest in the Islamic State.
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Yoan Valat via Reuters Trump Was Right Not to Sign the Christchurch Call
The pledge to eliminate extremist content online is antithetical to the American understanding of free expression.
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Richard Drew / AP Harvard’s Feast of Grievance
The Ronald Sullivan affair is about everything—and nothing.
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Associated Press Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi Is Alive. Now What?
The Islamic State released a video today of the most wanted man in the world.
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Chamila Karunarathne / AP Why Sri Lanka Was Probably Not Retaliation for Christchurch
Even if the retribution argument were consistent with prior ISIS doctrine, which it is not, the timing is off.
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Reuters Why Sri Lanka Silenced Social Media
Information blackouts almost always turn into authoritarian tools, whether or not they start that way.
