Think Past the Establishment
The West is more than a geographic or military alliance. It rests on the inheritance of Athens, Rome, Jerusalem and the Enlightenment: reasoned debate, law, human dignity, individual freedom and limits on state power.
Changing presidents has not necessarily changed the federal enforcement culture. Prosecutors who served under Biden are continuing cases built around aggressive statutes, expansive searches and convictions dependent on cooperating defendants facing their own legal jeopardy.
America stopped producing pennies after each one became more expensive to manufacture than its face value. The nickel now costs nearly 14 cents to produce, prompting proposals to change its metallic composition and offering a small but revealing measure of how thoroughly inflation has eroded the value of the currency.
New secondary sanctions seek to isolate Iran by penalizing foreign banks and companies that continue doing business with it. The strategy may reduce Tehran’s revenue without another military escalation, but it also imposes costs on allies, encourages alternative payment systems and could weaken cooperation with…
Women are nearly twice as likely as men to listen regularly to true-crime programming, and murder-centered books dominate popular publishing for female audiences. The fascination appears to combine fear, identification with victims, an effort to understand dangerous behavior and the transformation of real tragedies into participatory online entertainment.
Socialists discovered that institutions could be transformed without revolution or an explicit public mandate. Through patient influence over political parties, universities, local governments and the civil service, ideological goals could be presented as neutral administration and expert reform.