On the fourth floor of Selfridges, in London, is the children’s toy department. Most of the vast space is given over to soft toys – mounds of synthetic fur, thousands of little beady eyes – and when I visited last Saturday afternoon the customers were almost all adults. I spent two hours there, standing by
During a visit to Zimbabwe in 1989, Jesse Jackson was walking down the dirt trail leading to Victoria Falls when a group of three African men hunkered in the shade of a scrubby tree stood up to point at him. One asked, “Is this… is this the great Reverend Jesse Jackson?” His fame was global.
Nancy Guthrie had been missing for less than 48 hours when the game began. Not the investigation, which was already under way, with FBI agents crawling the Catalina Foothills and more than 30,000 tips flooding in from the public, but the thing building around her disappearance, the thing that one could generously call “journalism” in
The latest “trans violence” was committed by a heterosexual man who went to a hockey game in Rhode Island and shot his family, then himself. His daughter described him as sick and mentally ill. Robert Dorgan, who preferred the name Roberta, is just the latest in a long line of violent people claiming to be
Elon Musk knows something Jeff Bezos doesn’t. Each has had turns as the world’s richest man, and both are media overlords. But whereas Musk’s purchase of Twitter arguably won a presidential election and briefly put the fate of the United States federal government in Musk’s hands, Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post has bought him nothing but
Remember the old quip about economists? “That’s all very in practice,” they say, “but how does it work out in theory?” Nobel laureate Paul Krugman of the New York Times is a splendid example of that sort of folly. On the evening of November 9, 2016, Krugman skirled that the election of Donald Trump would
The debacle of the Washington Post’s hara-kiri last week dispatched the myth that a tech billionaire could save journalism. Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the paper in 2013 was greeted with euphoria, not just because he was a big fat wallet who would absorb the losses, but because we thought his Amazon wizardry was transferable to
If you rent a cheap Airbnb house in Las Vegas, you might not be altogether surprised to find dead crickets in the garage. But a thousand vials of medical samples in several freezers – and a centrifuge? After the cleaner and one guest fell ill at a property in the city’s Sunrise Manor neighborhood last week, federal agents raided it
The BBC reported terrible news recently about polar bears: they are thriving. This is very annoying of them as it goes against the interests of environmental activists, polar bears being the very emblem, mascot and clickbait of climate change cataclysm. But the bears’ stubborn refusal to get the memo and starve has become too obvious
There’s something very religious about nihilism. For proof, look to the new capital of American nihilism, Minneapolis. A callousness toward death and danger has fallen over the city. Of the many disturbing videos to come out of Minnesota’s anti-ICE protests, one of the stranger examples shows a white man walking up to a line of
From the very start, there was something weird about Operation Absolute Resolve. The official story went something like this: after a whirlwind air attack, which included the use of suicide drones for the first time, special operators from the US Army’s renowned but shadowy SFOD-D unit (“Delta Force”) were helicoptered into the Fuerte Tiuna military
After two deadly shootings in confrontations between Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and the activists obstructing them, Minneapolis was starting to remind people of Kent State. By “people” we mean progressive baby boomers, inclined to make the Vietnam War the measure of all things. For them, the massacre of four student protesters by
On a cold January night in New York City, Chris Hayes walked off the set of CBS’s Late Show with Stephen Colbert only to face a pressing ethical dilemma. As he left the Ed Sullivan Theater and walked on to Broadway, he got a text from a friend who covers technology for NPR with a
How might the ayatollahs know an American strike force is coming? Advanced radar technology, perhaps, or a mole somewhere in the Pentagon. Or they could just look at Polymarket. There is currently around $125 million wagered in the largest market predicting when the US will next strike Iran. Given the current odds, traders reckon an
“We gotta win the midterms,” President Donald Trump told the crowd in Iowa at the end of last month. “I’m here because we’re starting the campaign to win the midterms. That means Senate and it means House.” Trump is, by all accounts, obsessed with the upcoming elections in November. Having been distracted by various foreign
Where is it that the chickens go to roost? If you said “home,” you don’t quite get it. The correct answer is “Fulton County, Georgia.” At least, that’s where the chickens were congregating at the end of January when the FBI raided a Fulton County election office and made off with some 700 boxes of
Late last year, I published the first theoretical physics paper in which the main idea originated from artificial intelligence – from an AI. And my experience working with the most powerful AI models left me both impressed and wary. The most accurate analogy I can offer is that it’s like something familiar to anyone who
Last month, during the Arctic Blast that still has a few states trapped under ice (greetings from Illinois), someone posted an altered Google Earth screenshot to Facebook. The image displayed a snake-like shape in the Atlantic Ocean, east of Virginia. “The Leviathan is waking up,” the caption read. “This is why they are creating a
When the Artemis II mission eventually blasts off, it will take humans back to the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years. Americans Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian Jeremy Hansen will travel further out into space than anyone before when they loop 4,700 miles beyond the Moon, seeing parts
Late in January, while the Washington Post was gearing up for the Olympics, staffers got an email from managing editor Kimi Yoshino. “As we assess our priorities for 2026,” she wrote, “we have decided not to send a contingent to the Winter Olympics.” A few days later the Post announced that it would send four