Secretary of state

Monday

Ben Domenech

Antony Blinken embodies decades of failure

There is no sign marking the entrance to Barman Dictat. The bar under 44 Khreshchatyk Street in Kyiv boasts the largest mezcal collection in Eastern Europe. On a typical night you can find it by noting the crowd of people wafting cigarette smoke into the evening air. Inside, you’ll find shelves of more than 400 glowing bottles perched above a steel bar stretching more than thirty feet. You’ll find bespoke cocktails — Kraken, Smoky Voice and Tickle Balls. And, on one particular May evening, you’ll find the seventy-first secretary of state of the United States of America at center stage. Clad in black and wielding a scarlet electric guitar, Antony Blinken seemed less enthused about the moment than his staff had perhaps anticipated.

Blinken

Thursday

John Pietro

Massachusetts Republicans pay the price for Trumpism

Massachusetts voters are known to be pragmatic. Despite being one of the most liberal states in the country, Massachusetts has had only one Democratic governor between 1991 and 2022. Yet the state’s Republican Party is anything but pragmatic. Hence the inevitable defeat of Republican Geoff Diehl in the gubernatorial race against Democrat Maura Healey. For those not from Massachusetts, there are a few things about the state’s political dynamics that need to be understood. First, it is overwhelmingly Democratic — the GOP holds three out of 40 seats in the state senate and 29 of the 160 seats in the state house. Before the midterms, Democrats controlled every statewide office except for the governorship, and now they control that too.

Sunday

Dominic Green

Antony Blinken’s soundtrack to failure

Antony Blinken, the secretary of state and first guitarist, has broken with the tired protocols of the past, faced the complexities of the multipolar twenty-first century world, and issued a Spotify playlist. This may be a better way of reaching new audiences than bombing them. But shouldn’t public figures be judged on their records, not their record collections? “The thread that runs throughout my life is probably music,” Blinken told Rolling Stone last year as he meditated his mixtape. Hitler would probably have said the same about painting had Rolling Stone been around to profile the Viennese amateur who was turning the art world upside down.