June 11, 2018

Greitens, Trump—and us.

Or, how to make the duties of social workers even more difficult

Our southern border is safe. It’s secure. And the region has far bigger problems than people trying to get across the river to find work. 

The tension between peaceable nations and the Russian Federation intensifies with each passing week. It is the path Vladimir Putin has chosen. The latest development is more serious than it may sound: Russian billionaire and Putin crony Roman Abramovich has had his visa renewal application…

How Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko was forced to fake his death.

If you’re tired of being overwhelmed by the presence of President Trump, you’ve come to the right place. The subject here is Gerald Ford, the so-called accidental president who took over when Richard Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, and served until January 20, 1977.

A political establishment of long standing always suffers from a kind of mental illness. No matter how unambiguously it is repudiated or how joyously it is driven from office, its members will continue to remember the episode as accidental, temporary, and unjust. This week in Italy such arrogance…

Time is running out to confirm top federal judges in 2018.

The real action with spies nowadays lies not with Russia but with China.

An eyewitness account from an unmanned border crossing.

Will we witness the strange death of conservative—or liberal—America?

A community organizes against his library plans.

Gordon S. Wood on Arnold’s path from wartime hero to resentful traitor—and why it’s a story worth remembering.

Philip Terzian: A new book defending Jimmy Carter’s presidency reveals how his supposed strengths became liabilities.

Joseph Epstein on the scandal that ended the tennis great’s career—and the challenge it creates for biographers.

Victorino Matus: From toast to fancy guac, the green fruit’s moment is ripe at last.

The real reasons the latest Star Wars movie flopped.

Social media are full of people who, under the impression that their political fulminations are witty, spend much of their days collecting likes and retweets from the hordes of barking-seal partisans. And so it was that Yvonne Mason, a retired English teacher in South Carolina, wrote a letter…

Since the invention of videotape, law enforcement across the developed world has fallen prey to the same folly: If you install enough security cameras, criminals won’t do bad things because they’ll know the cops are watching. The trouble with that view is that it ain’t so, as anybody who’s spent…

The Scrapbook remembers the days before social media and the Internet, and they weren’t marked by civility and well-informed dialogue. Even so, when someone in the pre-Internet era responded in print to an article or essay, he or she had usually read the article. Nowadays you just read the…

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who famously and without evidence claimed Native American ancestry and thus minority status in her pre-Senate days—and whom Donald Trump still calls “Pocahontas”—now wants badly to put the whole controversy to rest. Who wouldn’t? Our advice would be to ignore the past and…

Eric Felten's long-ago summer reading.