A group of security heavyweights in the US has issued what it labels an “Open Letter from Former Defense, Intelligence, Homeland Security, and Cyber Officials Calling for National Security Review of Congressional Tech Legislation.” These wise custodians of the national interest employ their...
Americans typically like divided government and, on November 7, then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer gave them reason for that preference. Preceding a pair of run-off elections in Georgia that would decide whether Democrats would control the Senate in addition to the White House and the House...
Now that the internationalists and their kindred neoconservatives have had their moment in the sun and reestablished America’s “greatness” on the world stage, it is time to get back to the domestic challenge of trying to bring the reality of America into closer proximity to President Joe...
Media commentators initially gave good ratings to US President Joe Biden after his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. They expressed a sense of relief, in large part due to the contrast in tone with Donald Trump’s performance in similar situations, guaranteed to produce a sense of...
I went to a birthday party recently. The celebrants greeted each other with hugs on the patio. After an outdoor barbeque dinner, we stood shoulder to shoulder around the island in the kitchen, eating cake from small paper plates. We sang “Happy Birthday.” Ordinarily, an event like that...
Faculty experts from the Ohio State University’s Department of History hold a conversation about the first 100 days of the Biden administration.
US politics has certain steadfast traditions. Evaluating a new president 100 days into their job is one of them, a custom that began when Franklin D. Roosevelt took the helm as the 32nd president in 1933. Many a time, these evaluations tend to pit the new president’s performance against...
A significant event took place this week at the annual Boao conference, China’s version of the Davos World Economic Forum. It offered clues about the state of a changing world. Obsessed by the Chauvin trial, US media paid little attention to it. The Washington Post lazily printed a 400-word...
Representative Matt Gaetz, a brash Trump loyalist, was apparently proud of his reputation as “the most despicable member of Congress.” He presented it as a badge of honor that his electorate would appreciate thanks to the low esteem in which the general population holds Congress. But now with...
Like Gregor Samsa, the never-to-be-forgotten character in Franz Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis,” we awoke on January 7 to discover that we, too, were “a giant insect” with “a domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments” and numerous “pitifully thin” legs that...
Caligula was by all accounts a nasty piece of work. During the nearly four years that he ruled over the Roman Empire in the first century CE, Caligula was notorious for sexual predation and extravagant spending. Never one to sell himself short, he proclaimed early on that he was a god. He held the...
A high school teacher in California has earned her half-hour of fame by stepping up to expose an act of flagrant hypocrisy that took place in broad daylight during US President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Ingrid Seyer-Ochi was the first to notice the duplicity. After boldly raising the awareness...
Some of us have known for a long time that eventually the rest of the world would catch up with the lies at the core of America’s notion of itself. That we would be found out, exposed. Well, here we are. After decades of selling “democracy” at the point of a gun in other people’s lands,...
During his presidency, Donald Trump found a new way to keep the American public and its media alert. It was a kind of educational game called “Spot the Lie.” If the media had understood how the game worked, the nation and the world would have benefited. Instead, it tended to degenerate into a...
The 2017 film "Bushwick" begins like a lot of zombie flicks. An unsuspecting couple is walking through a subway station in the working-class neighborhood of Bushwick in Brooklyn. The station is eerily empty. They hear gunfire outside. The boyfriend goes out to investigate, and you know...
