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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Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III: From commanding the war against immigrants to crusading in defense of the travel ban; from sabotaging the deployment of science on behalf of those wrongly accused to giving urban police departments a free hand to murder blacks; by pioneering new lows in criminalizing dissent and waging jihad against even the medical […]

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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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Don’t believe the fashionable notion that linear narrative is passé. Heather Ann Thompson’s essential and heart-stopping new book, Blood in the Water, hurtles through the horrific story of the Attica uprising and its consequences like a freight train, all 571 pages. If Charles Dickens were writing nonfiction, this is how it would read. It’s a […]

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In the emerging American dystopia, reaching for the gun has become the order of the day. From Ferguson and the militarizing of police equipment, through the execution-style killings in Charleston, through the uniformed immigration dragnet bringing fear to 11 million undocumented residents, to serial executions in Arkansas, to Trump’s April speech to the NRA convention, […]

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