Ever since the current occupant of the White House blamed mainstream journalists for generating fake news, some of us have countered by blaming social media and armies of trolls and bots (robotic tweets). But it’s as silly to blame social media for causing fake news as it would be to blame the internal combustion engine […]

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In September 2015, two months after Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy, I asked in these pages if he could accurately be described as a fascist. I decided against the designation. The true fascist states, I concluded—Germany, Italy, Spain, Argentina, Chile—“suffered weakness in their institutions that are just about unimaginable in the United States. For […]

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“Texas is the national testing ground for bad public policy,” the journalist Molly Ivins used to say. It was a Texas attorney general, Gregg Abbott, who sued in federal court in Brownsville, Texas, challenging Barack Obama’s 2014 executive memorandum that attempted to provide temporary legal status for undocumented parents of children born in the United […]

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We are at a moment of profound societal transition, not just with respect to science and technology, but in the way we work, live, and think. No sector will be spared. No one’s life will go unaltered, even if the impacts are uneven. With advances in computing power and storage and improvements in machine learning […]

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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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