In January 2018, contractors working for the Department of Homeland Security will begin to fulfill what Donald Trump has promised: building “a big, beautiful wall” that will separate the United States of America from Los Estados Unidos de Mexico. The path of least resistance to breaking ground on the first segment of the controversial border […]

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In February 2016, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) announced that, with the help of some European partners, it had partially busted a “massive” drug trafficking and money-laundering operation being conducted by “Lebanese Hezbollah’s External Security Organization Business Affairs Component (BAC).” Observers familiar with repeated U.S. attempts to stigmatize Hezbollah with the narco-terrorist label should […]

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As far as relationships go, Russia was never going to be easy. “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” Winston Churchill famously told a 1939 radio audience when describing what was then the Soviet Union; indeed, relations between Moscow and the West since the ascension of the Bolsheviks in 1917 had […]

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Hitchhiking across Colombia in 2009, my friend Amelia and I received a particularly memorable ride from an upbeat truck driver who careened in carefree fashion along cliffside curves while we—perched one on top of the other on the metal fixture that served as the passenger seat—endeavored to remain upright and thereby maintain some semblance of […]

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Prior to the 2016 presidential election, I would bet that most people shared my mental image of the modern-day neo-Nazi movement: a hodgepodge of tatted-up skinheads, gun-toting militiamen, hooded Ku Klux Klan members, and miscellaneous bloodthirsty Turner Diaries cosplayers. While those people still exist, an offshoot of the movement—which calls itself the alternative right, or […]

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