Ethan Epstein

The ‘Chit Chat Live’ tour is light on politics and heavy on nostalgia.

Cumulus Media, the third largest terrestrial radio chain in the country, is bankrupt, and it’s making some drastic moves. Earlier this spring, it dropped Don Imus, the legendary—if now fossilized—morning host. And now there are rumors that Cumulus is looking to cut Michael Savage, one of talk…

It’s almost as if a tight labor supply helps workers.

Seattle

In 2001, Australia's governing coalition, led by John Howard's Liberal party (who are, in fact, the country's conservative party) looked set to lose its majority. The opposition, led by the Labor party, had been leading in the polls for most of the year.

Mao Zedong characterized the relationship between China and North Korea as that of "lips and teeth." His point was that the lips provide a buffer to the teeth: Without them, China would be dangerously exposed. Despite the occasional toothache, that relationship has endured. China is North Korea's…

Kim Jong-un cut a cosmopolitan figure as a youth—Swiss finishing schools, trips abroad with his dictator dad—but he's turned reclusive as he's ruled North Korea. Indeed, he hasn't departed his country once since assuming the throne.

Talk about a Friday news dump: Chopsticks III, the “How Can Be Lounge,” a Portland, Oregon, karaoke institution will close this weekend, it was announced on Friday. (“How can be” was not a Mickey Rooneyism circa Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but a phrase uttered by proprietor David Chow.) It’s another…

The Hillary Unplugged tour made it to India this week, where the former presidential candidate modified her theory as to why she lost the 2016 election. This time, it wasn’t James Comey, or even “the Russians" that did her in. In fact, it was the Americans. Here is what she said:

There are three questions worth considering about the planned meeting:

August Snow was one of last year’s sleeper hits—and deservedly so. The beautifully written, fast-paced thriller gave readers a tour of Detroit and its suburbs, and introduced them to a charming new literary hero: the half-black, half-Mexican lead character, the eponymous Mr. Snow.

Stein’s Law—named for the late economist Herbert Stein, who was chair of Richard Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers—goes something like this: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” (His son Ben Stein’s law, by contrast, is probably this.) It’s one of the few pithy economic phrases…

Nikolas Cruz delighted in torturing animals. The Florida school shooter is reported to have killed frogs and squirrels, and sicced a dog on a neighbor’s piglets. Cruz’s social media feeds were replete with images of dead and maimed critters, apparently hurt by his own hand.

It’s relatively common for terror organizations to claim credit for atrocities that they actually had no part in. When a casino was targeted for an arson attack on the Philippines last year, for example, ISIS claimed the “credit.” (The word, in fact, should be “blame.”) Yet it later emerged that…

Speaking in Japan a couple of days before the Pyeongchang Olympics began, Vice President Mike Pence delivered a welcome message: “We will not allow North Korean propaganda to hijack the message and imagery of the Olympic Games,” he said. Unfortunately, Pence was not doing double duty as an…

America doesn’t need “more philosophers” Sen. Marco Rubio said in a 2015 presidential debate, echoing politicians on both sides of the aisle who have, unfortunately, derided education in the humanities.

In the course of what CNN informed its viewers and readers was a gold-medal-winning diplomatic performance, Kim Yo-jong, the U.S.-sanctioned sister of Kim Jong-un, signed a guest book belonging to South Korea’s president Moon Jae-in. “I hope Pyongyang and Seoul get closer in our people's hearts and…

It’s likely that only the most hardcore Vogue readers remember it—and presumably Anna Wintour and company are hoping that even they will one day forget it—but back in 2011, the venerable fashion magazine posted a glowing profile of Asma al-Assad. Yes, that Asma al-Assad: the wife of the Syrian…

At this point the Pyeongchang Olympics really should be re-christened the Pyongyang Olympics. What should have been a celebration of South Korea's titanic cultural, economic, and political achievements is degenerating into an event that will instead normalize the barbarous North Korean regime that…

Dick Durbin would like to have a word with the professoriate. It seems that the phrase “chain migration”—a technical term used for decades by university-based demographers to describe family-based migration patterns—is in fact racist. The Illinois senator suggested as much last month, after…

The Washington, D.C., metro area’s beleaguered public transit system (known as WMATA) trumpeted good news this week: “Crime on Metro in 2017 plunged to its lowest level in a more than decade,” stated a press release. “Last year, there were a total of 1,282 Part I crimes on Metro, a 19 percent…

Before there was MERYL STREEP! there was Meryl Streep: a sensitive, subtle actor who gave terrific performances in movies like Sophie’s Choice, A Cry in the Dark, and the Bridges of Madison County. But some time around the turn of the century, it became impossible to see her name in anything but…

NBC’s Lester Holt, on assignment in North Korea, is offering his viewers that most unusual of treats: a “rare look” inside the famously reclusive country. In fact, so rare was Holt’s visit to a Potemkin ski resort outside of Pyongyang—it has, after all, been visited previously only by the likes of…

At first, it seemed like a joke. Because the name of the South Korean city where the Olympics will occur in February—Pyeongchang—sounds so much like the North Korean capital—Pyongyang—many joked that scores of spectators would accidentally turn up in North Korea expecting the Olympics, only to be…

About a year ago, just as Donald Trump was waiting be inaugurated, two twentieth century novels skyrocketed up the bestseller list. One was George Orwell’s 1984, which topped Amazon’s sales rankings that week. The other was Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which repeated the feat two weeks…

There is a specter haunting American popular culture: the specter of Donald Trump.

A miracle on ice? The two Koreas have announced that they will field a joint women’s hockey team at next month’s Olympics in Pyeongchang. The two countries will march in together under one flag, though will only complete as a team in women’s hockey. Still, it will be the first time the Koreas have…

Him too. Back in the halcyon days of 2009 it was revealed that David Letterman had engaged in deeply inappropriate workplace behavior. The late night host had multiple affairs with women who worked under him, including an intern who was then just a college student.

We all know by now that retweets do not equal endorsements. But it’s apparently time for a reminder that an actor’s performance does not equal an endorsement of the character he or she is playing either.

Presumptive 2020 Democratic front-runner Oprah Winfrey is responsible for unleashing any number of ills on the world: Dr. Phil; James Frey; The Butler. But give her credit for this: In the aggressively philistine world of reality television, Winfrey has been a lone voice stressing the importance of…

Everybody agrees that it’s bad that North Korea is a nuclear state. It’s “unacceptable” as the president put it (although the world has already basically accepted it). But rarely considered is why North Korea went nuclear.

We are living in the age of the retread. From Beauty and the Beast to Baywatch, 2017 saw a Hollywood bereft of ideas and artistic courage rehashing—er, sorry, “rebooting”—long-since retired films and franchises.

On December 18, a Twitter user with a large following tweeted out a conspiracy theory: The charges against Senator Al Franken, that he had groped numerous women over several years, were “likely a Roger Stone / FOX set up job.” Three days later, the user added a sensational twist: “I didn’t accuse…

There are good arguments and bad arguments, valid arguments and invalid arguments. And then, in another category, there are sadistic arguments. Unfortunately, we’ve witnessed a few of those this week on the subject of tax reform.

Surprise! North Korea has rejected Rex Tillerson’s request for unconditional talks with the United States.

There’s a specter haunting Donald Trump’s presidency: the specter of powerlessness.

Die Hard is a Christmas movie. We know this because the American Film Institute’s Silver Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland—honestly, one of the great cultural institutions of the Washington area—screens it as part of its Holiday Classics series each December. (Though I would argue that Die Hard II…

The adjectives “Orwellian” and “Kafkaesque” (but, curiously, never Orwellesque or Kafkian) are some of the most overused and abused in the English language. They’re oft employed, one suspects, by those with hazy memories of paging through the Cliffs Notes of 1984 or The Hunger Artist a couple of…

What happened to Trumpism? Sure, we still get the oh-so-Trumpy tweets, but many of the issues that Donald Trump ran on have been cast to the wayside in the 11 months (it hasn’t even been a year yet!?) of his presidency.

A foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, as the poet had it, but a flailing inconsistency isn’t a particularly good look either.

Over the past couple of years, a succession of American tech executives have decamped to Beijing to pander to the dictatorial leadership there. Mark Zuckerberg, in particular, has shown a penchant for flattering the ruling caste in China; he has repeatedly visited the country that his company,…

Because it looks increasingly and unfortunately likely that we’re going to have to hear the phrase “Senator Roy Moore” before too long, journalists have moved on to the next question: Will the U.S. Senate make good on its threats, and perhaps refuse to seat the twice-booted judge, who has been…

Alas, if recent polls are right, Roy Moore is likely to win his Senate race in Alabama. That means we’ll have to spend at least the next two years doing something that fills me with abject dread: hearing the name "Roy Moore."

As the Trump administration seeks to prevent North Korea from becoming a nuclear power, it will probably want to close the barn door as well, now that the horse has gotten out.

The New York Times published a subtly frightening article over the weekend. The piece is a profile of a 29 year old Ohio man who is perhaps most notable for his very banality. He dines at Panera and Applebee’s. He plays video games and likes Seinfeld. Just married, his wedding registry was at…

Google honcho Eric Schmidt has announced that his ubiquitous search engine will move to “de-rank” RT and Sputnik, two Kremlin-owned news sites. At an event in Canada over the weekend, Schmidt accused RT—a television network and website—and Sputnik—an online news service and radio station—of…

The would-be Dian Fosseys who have built a cottage industry of issuing pronouncements about the Millennials In The Mist have suffered yet another blow. For the better part of a decade, these generational gurus have been prattling on about how those of us born, roughly, between 1980 and 1995, don’t…

Washington’s beleaguered public transit agency, WMATA, has curtailed service and hiked fares significantly in recent years. (Oh, and it has also killed somebody.) It has recently declared that it needs another $30 million cash infusion from the jurisdictions that subsidize it to stay afloat.

Former New Republic editor Peter Beinart has an exquisite, anguished, self-flagellating meditation at the Atlantic’s website Tuesday. Beinart, a white, Yale-educated man, has come to the realization that he benefited from a certain kind of affirmative action in his New Republic days. “White men…

I used to despise the relative obscurity of my alma mater, Reed College. The name of the Portland, Oregon, liberal arts school has spurred more than a few quizzical looks in Washington when I’ve mentioned it. “Reed? Where’s that?” This has been a persistent source of chagrin and insecurity about my…

In the mid 1950s, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev initiated the process of “De-Stalinization.” Much of this was political: Khrushchev liberalized the Stalinist political system (without, alas, dismantling it) and freed many gulag prisoners. But a big part of De-Stalinization was purely aesthetic.…

Noting the universally negative coverage that he garners from the national media, Donald Trump recently declared that he loves “regional media.” At this point, he probably loves South Korean media as well.

Violence is endemic to American life. We know this because people are largely inured to it, at least when it happens to other people.

Toothpaste, a 7,000-year-old product, is rarely a leading indicator. But the world’s top purveyor of the stuff—along with laundry detergent, dish soap, diapers, and other sundries—made a decision earlier this year that could portend a big shift in the advertising industry.

I guess it’s not altogether surprising, given that the most famous political figure to emerge from Rhode Island in modern political history was the notoriously corrupt (and violent) Buddy Cianci, the long-time mayor of the city that I grew up in. But as a member in good standing of the Rhode Island…

Hong Jun-pyo may be diminutive in stature, but he visited Washington this week with a tall order. The prominent South Korean politician—he finished in second in this year’s presidential election, and currently leads the conservative opposition Liberty Korea Party—wants U.S. nukes. And he wants them…

Have there ever been unlikelier rock stars than Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, the duo behind Steely Dan? The unabashedly intellectual Bard College grads—in high school, they were probably the bookish kids dressed in black, smoking cigarettes behind the gym—have certainly never looked the part:…

One of the more surprising revelations about Russia’s reported meddling in the 2016 election is that its government supported objectively anti-Donald Trump, left wing causes. First we learned that the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-linked organization, bought social media advertisements that…

Signs of China’s economic strength abound: from the increasing number of Hollywood movies that are designed to pander to Chinese tastes to the political class’s silence in the face of Chinese cyber-aggression. Consider the non-reaction to Beijing’s stunning plundering of OPM personnel data compared…

The late North Korean tyrant Kim Jong-il had thousands of Hollywood movies in his personal collection, furnishing him with what he thought was a deep knowledge of a country he would never see. He was particularly fond, reportedly, of The Godfather—so much so that he ran his country like a Mafioso.…

Donald Trump may have played golf with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe earlier this year, but when Chinese president Xi Jinping made his own visit to Mar-a-Lago, a visit to the links was decidedly not on the agenda.

The late North Korean tyrant Kim Jong-il had thousands of Hollywood movies in his personal collection, furnishing him with what he thought was a deep knowledge of a country he would never see. He was particularly fond, reportedly, of The Godfather—so much so that he ran his country like a Mafioso.…

North Korea’s inexorable march toward nuclear weapons has been treated as something akin to a malign meteorological phenomenon. Sure, it’s bad. But there’s also nothing we can do to stop it, the standard line has gone. After all, by the time Barack Obama took office, the “heavily isolated” country…

The cry has gone out: If only Las Vegas murderer Stephen Paddock—instead of being a nihilistic scumbag who wasted his golden years in windowless casinos—had been an Islamic extremist, even the most intransigent of Republicans would be backing gun control measures now. Piers Morgan said as such;…

For months we’ve been hearing that the Russian government meddled in last year’s presidential election to aid the candidacy of Donald Trump. And now news has emerged that part of that dastardly campaign was supporting ... Black Lives Matter?

Few if any Americans are associated with more apocryphal quotes than Thomas Jefferson, but the false notion that he said, “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” is among the easiest to dispel. Because Jefferson never would have said something so idiotic. Of course dissent can be patriotic, but…

Communism had some good parts, and the New York Times is on it.

President Trump tweeted the following about North Korea on Sunday morning:

Long before I ever even picked up a golf club, I wanted to be the kind of person who golfed regularly. A Real Golfer, in other words. Even as a child, I loved the manicured, tightly controlled aesthetic of golf courses—​just the right (which is to say, minimal) amount of “nature” for my…

Long before I ever even picked up a golf club, I wanted to be the kind of person who golfed regularly. A Real Golfer, in other words. Even as a child, I loved the manicured, tightly controlled aesthetic of golf courses—​just the right (which is to say, minimal) amount of “nature” for my…

Many Americans, particularly on the right, have comforted themselves with the notion that fears of an oncoming Chinese century are overblown. Per capita incomes in China remain well below those in the capitalist West, and the country’s arguably irresponsible stimulus policies have led to a…

A vote is expected Monday evening on a new round of U.N. sanctions against North Korea. Unfortunately, in a bid to win Russian and Chinese support for the resolution, the measures proposed by the United States have been watered down. Removed has been what would be one the most useful tools in…

Donald Trump’s remarks following the killing of a young paralegal by a white supremacist in Charlottesville, Virginia, generated widespread opprobrium—and no one was more cutting than many of the president’s fellow Republicans. Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio were just a few among the…

Donald Trump’s remarks following the killing of a young paralegal by a white supremacist in Charlottesville, Virginia, generated widespread opprobrium—and no one was more cutting than many of the president’s fellow Republicans. Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio were just a few among the…

Herewith a few subjects pertaining to North Korea that have all but vanished from public discourse: the country’s gulag (thought to hold upwards of 200,000 political prisoners); chronic malnutrition in the countryside while a ruthless dictator grows morbidly obese; and intensified efforts to…

I’m a Guam hipster: I knew about it before it was cool. In fact, back in the halcyon days of June 2017 I was invited to the U.S. territory by a local business group. In those innocent times, the biggest safety risk seemed to be brown tree snakes: The Pacific island is utterly dominated by the…

As well, Donald Trump can tell you, New York theater is one tough business. Even the most critically acclaimed shows can struggle to make a buck. Just this year, Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat lasted barely 100 performances on the Great White Way. (Though in that case, the market was…

Millennials are responsible for more killings than Jeffrey Dahmer. At this point, my generation—those us born, roughly, between the 1982 and the year 2000—have been accused of killing dinner dates, golf, napkins, running, and Applebees. (OK, that last one is justifiable homicide.)

The King and I is on borrowed time. The 1951 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical—a staple of the stage since debut—feels downright subversive in 2017.

Liu Xiaobo’s deeply depressing death coincides with the long, slow demise of the cause he so bravely championed: Chinese liberalism.

Among the industrialized nations, Japan has been notably resistant to immigration. Only 2.3 million foreigners reside in the country of 126 million—less than 2 percent of the total population. (By contrast, about 13 percent of U.S. residents are thought to be foreign-born.) And in Japan, the vast…

The response was typical Trumpism—with a soupçon of Mean Girls. Just as he had called jihadists “losers” a few weeks prior, the president reacted to North Korea’s test launch of a midrange ballistic missile on July 3 with a gibe that cut to the quick. “Does [Kim Jong-un] have anything better to do…

The increasing repression being visited upon Hong Kong by Beijing is well documented. The Chinese regime is muddling in the city’s politics, which are supposed to be off limits. Beijing has also kidnapped several people from Hong Kong, even though the Chinese police legally have no jurisdiction…

James Clapper has this right: An "alternative approach" to North Korea is needed. The former director of national intelligence made the claim in Seoul this week at a seminar hosted by the Joongang Ilbo (a major South Korean newspaper) and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Hagatna, Guam

When you travel to a country like France, Spain, or South Korea, you notice something about the lifestyles of the professional classes there: Unlike in America, they still smoke cigarettes. The U.S.'s lawyers, professors, and bankers, meanwhile, long ago gave up the devil's weed.

Donald Trump's tweets offer a window into his mind; they tell us, in real time, what occupies his consciousness (at least between the hours of 5 and 9 a.m., generally). But often more revealing than what the president does tweet is what he doesn't tweet.

Margaret Chan was quite taken by what she saw on her visit to Pyongyang in 2010. North Koreans had "something which most other developing countries would envy," she noted: a first-rate medical system with plenty of doctors and nurses. Not only that, there were no obesity problems, she enthused,…

The impulse to do something after a horrific event is universal, and perhaps even more pronounced in politicians than typical civilians. And so, in the wake of the horrific murder of two commuters on a Portland, Oregon, light rail over the weekend, it's not entirely surprising to see that city's…

It's been a banner week for the World Health Organization (WHO), the lavishly funded global health agency that somehow botched the biggest health crisis in years back in 2014, when it failed to respond to the Ebola crisis that was then ravaging west Africa. (Oh, and the AP reported this week that…

It's the quintessential Churchillian remark—particularly in the sense that there's no evidence that Winston Churchill ever actually said it: "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after they've exhausted all other options." But perhaps the adage should be updated to this: You…

China may only be implementing sanctions against North Korea in fits and starts, but it has shown no trouble sanctioning its democratic neighbors, South Korea and Taiwan. South Korea, for the "crime" of trying to protect itself from North Korean missiles—Beijing loathes the THAAD missile defense…

In the end, self-interest defeated collective interest. The South Korean presidential election, which concluded Tuesday, featured one strong left-wing candidate, Moon Jae-in, and three credible centrist-to-conservative contenders. (Notably, all three of the center-right candidates professed hard…

In the end, self-interest defeated collective interest. The South Korean presidential election, which concluded Tuesday, featured one strong left-wing candidate, Moon Jae-in, and three credible centrist-to-conservative contenders. (Notably, all three of the center-right candidates professed hard…

North Korea is a notoriously difficult country to escape from, not only because of the physical barriers the country erects along its northern border, but because of a sickening form of hostage-taking: High-ranking officials are not allowed to bring their whole families on overseas postings. That…

Despite decades of public campaigning, steady increases in penalties, and even the advent of ride-sharing apps, some 10,000 Americans are killed each year by drunk drivers. These are preventable deaths, each one an outrage and a tragedy. The Washington Post, for its part, has therefore…

Regrets—we've all had a few. L'esprit de l'escalier—that wonderful line coming to mind a moment too late—is a common annoyance after failed dates and dud job interviews; dented fenders and bum shoulders attest to avoidable failures of depth perception and misjudged forays into backyard football…

It's almost as if Donald Trump "looked into Xi Jinping's soul" when the Chinese president visited Mar-a-Lago a few weeks ago. What else can explain the U.S. president's bizarre affinity for the repressive Chinese dictator, which he laid out in a disturbing interview with Reuters on Thursday?

Regrets—we've all had a few. L'esprit de l'escalier—that wonderful line coming to mind a moment too late—is a common annoyance after failed dates and dud job interviews; dented fenders and bum shoulders attest to avoidable failures of depth perception and misjudged forays into backyard football…

The notices are in, and they're brutal. Donald Trump's nascent North Korea policy—announcing the end of "strategic patience" (Barack Obama's code for sitting around and doing nothing about the North's pursuit of nuclear weapons), leaning on China to rein in Pyongyang, strengthening sanctions, and…

It must have seemed like a problem from hell: When Samantha Power served as Barack Obama's ambassador to the United Nations, she tirelessly highlighted the depredations of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, publicizing his various barbarities—his indiscriminate killing of civilians, his use of…

The innocuous-sounding Global Times is basically the id of the Chinese Communist party. A stridently nationalist tabloid newspaper with a flair for Breitbartian excess, the CCP-owned Times has, in recent weeks alone, referred to Australia as an "offshore prison," warned of a "large-sale war" should…

For a whole host of reasons explained in my story in the current issue of the THE WEEKLY STANDARD, South Korea is likely to elect a left-wing president on May 9. This near certainty, however, has had the benefit of clarifying things: The race's most conservative candidate, Hong Jun-pyo, has just…

Seoul

Seoul

Seoul

The Washington Post editorial board picked the wrong day to call Secretary of State Rex Tillerson "silent." Speaking in Seoul Friday, the newly minted diplomat delivered a loud message.

For roughly two decades, the United States enjoyed a marked decline in its crime rates. Burglaries, murders, other violent crimes—they all fell steadily. That promising age ended as 2014 gave way to 2015. For the past two years, crime has been rising. And alarmingly, it is violent…

For roughly two decades, the United States enjoyed a marked decline in its crime rates. Burglaries, murders, other violent crimes—they all fell steadily. That promising age ended as 2014 gave way to 2015. For the past two years, crime has been rising. And alarmingly, it is violent…

Donald Trump is undeniably a skilled salesman—his powers of persuasion are a big part of how he got to the White House. Yet despite being a bestselling author himself, the president is not much of a bookseller. Friday morning, the writer Nick Adams received what you might expect to be pretty much…

Since 2009, each edition of the State Department's annual Country Reports on Terrorism has contained a cheerful fiction: State has given the nation that it insists on calling the "DPRK"—using the anti-democratic, anti-people, and anti-republican Pyongyang government's laughable official…

Since 2009, each edition of the State Department’s annual Country Reports on Terrorism has contained a cheerful fiction: State has given the nation that it insists on calling the "DPRK"—using the anti-democratic, anti-people, and anti-republican Pyongyang government's laughable official…

North Korea's apparent assassination of Kim Jong-un's exiled half-brother Kim Jong-nam at Kuala Lumpur's airport was many things: A hideously cruel act; a brazen act of international terrorism; and another sign of the paranoia of the young North Korean dictator.

It was North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un who ordered the killing of his half-brother Kim Jong-nam at Kuala Lumpur's airport earlier this week. That's according to South Korea's intelligence chief, who also said that the assassination had been a "standing order" for some five years. Malaysian…

At one point, Kim Jong-nam was slated to succeed his father Kim Jong-il as North Korea's leader. Then there was that unfortunate incident at Narita Airport outside Tokyo—Kim was detained there in 2001 for travelling with a fake Dominican passport.

Donald Trump was flayed Friday morning for allegedly misreading a New York Times article. Trump tweeted that the "failing" NYT published "fake news" when it wrote that Chinese president Xi Jinping "has not spoken to Mr. Trump since November 14." Yet, as the president pointed out, this isn't true:…

Dan Mogulof, a vice chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, must boast X-ray vision. After about 150 people rampaged through his picturesque campus in early February, setting fires, smashing windows, and launching fireworks at the police—all ostensibly to protest an appearance by an…

It might be surprising to learn that Stalinist North Korea actually has a private university. But it's true: Since 2010, the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), which is funded largely by western donors, has been educating many sons of the country's political elite.

A report in a Mexican newspaper earlier this month suggested that, as part of a mooted NAFTA re-negotiation, the Trump administration may offer to help Mexico bulk up border security along its southern frontier with Guatemala.

Donald Trump, apparently sad! at having lost the popular vote in his race against Hillary Clinton, has announced on—where else?—Twitter, "a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD, including those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal, and even those registered to vote who are dead."…

Let's start with the big stuff: As the pioneering judge Michael Kirby demonstrated in his landmark Commission of Inquiry, the North Korean government commits "systematic, widespread and grave violations of human rights," through its use of prison camps, torture, and enforced disappearances, among…

The Gideon Bible it isn't. At a chain of mid-tier hotels in Japan—roughly equivalent to the Holiday Inn—guests are treated to another form of bedtime reading. Each room includes a book, penned by the chain's founder and CEO, that claims, among other things, that the Nanjing Massacre was "fabricated…

And they worried he wouldn’t be bipartisan! Last week, President-elect Donald Trump met with that scion of America's premier Democratic dynasty, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The confab, which reportedly occurred at Trump's request, centered on the issue of childhood vaccines and their (nonexistent)…

In late December 2015, Japan and South Korea reached an agreement regarding Korean sex slaves taken during World War II—the thousands upon thousands of rape victims whom the Japanese imperial forces euphemistically referred to as "comfort women." After decades of denial, obfuscation, and…

The New York Times style guide must make for interesting reading. Surely, there's an admonishment somewhere near the top: Insert into any article, no matter how unrelated to the president-elect, a slam on Donald Trump. And if you can dress it up as a "fact check," all the better.

Far be it for me to mock another publication's typos. But this screamer from Thursday's Express, a free daily tabloid put out for the Washington Post for subway commuters, deserves some kind of recognition. Here it is:

Stop if you've heard this one before: A prominent Democrat has been found to have used a private email account to conduct public business. This time it was Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who agreed to release 2,700 pages of heretofore unreleased emails on Wednesday. The Chicago Tribune notes that…

Donald Trump is poised to shake up many policies, foreign, domestic—and, well, literally domestic—but on one issue he looks set to stick with President Obama's approach: North Korea. Joseph Yun, a State Department envoy on North Korea policy, confirmed to reporters in Seoul the other day that he…

Andy Puzder, Donald Trump's nominee for Labor Secretary, is the CEO of CKE Restaurants, which operates Hardee's and Carl's Jr. When attempting to foist his garbage food on the public, Puzder's company has often employed racy—if not outright sexist—advertising. (Here's an example.)

Thirty-seven years is a long time to wait for a phone call. That's how it must have felt to the Taiwanese people when their president, Tsai Ing-wen, had a 10-minute talk with Donald Trump on December 2—the first direct conversation between a Taiwanese leader and a U.S. president or president-elect…

Thirty-seven years is a long time to wait for a phone call. That’s how it must have felt to the Taiwanese people when their president, Tsai Ing-wen, had a 10-minute talk with Donald Trump on December 2—the first direct conversation between a Taiwanese leader and a U.S. president or president-elect…

2016 had been a tough year for Taiwan, the jewel of an island nation that China views as an illegitimate breakaway province. In January, it elected a new president–a progressive female law professor who takes a decidedly dim view of the Communist tyranny a few hundred miles from Taiwan's shores.…

Helene Cooper, a New York Times journalist, says we should avoid taking an "American-centric" view of Fidel Castro's regime. She has a point: Ideally, we would take a Cuban-centric view of his rule, given that it was the Cubans themselves who either suffered or prospered under Castro's rule. And on…

Montreal

State-run North Korean media—the only kind there is in that Stalinist country—often make hay of bad news out of the South. When a ferry sank off of South Korea in 2014, killing 300, for example, it drew attention to shoddy rescue efforts. And now with Seoul in the midst of a bona fide political…

In the state of Oregon, the secretary of state is charged with auditing public accounts, managing elections, and administering public records. It's a glorified administrative role, which for whatever reason is an elected office in the Pacific Northwestern state.

Opponents of the death penalty have made a serious tactical error. Rather than stress what is by far their strongest argument—the partially persuasive claim that the government should not, ethically, be in the business of killing people—they have instead stressed the "cost" of executions. The fact,…

An infographic on the front page of Tuesday's Financial Times informs us that "just 3 percent of [Trump or Clinton] voters expect their spouse or partner" will vote for a different presidential candidate than they will.

Las Vegas

Las Vegas

It is, as my sister put, the epitome of #BarringtonProblems. In Barrington, Rhode Island, a ritzy suburb of Providence, a letter to the editor chastising women who wear yoga pants has spurred mass protests.

Perhaps he just wants to take David Carr's old media criticism job at the New York Times when his term is up. (Sorry, Jim Rutenberg!) But whatever his motivations, it's become increasingly clear that Barack Obama enjoys nothing so much as playing media critic.

Las Vegas

Roger Waters—predictably—got there first. The uncomfortably dumb former Pink Floyd singer took a break from his usual anti-Semitic antics last weekend to instead lay into Donald Trump. Closing out the Desert Trip festival in Indio, California, on Sunday night, Surrey-born Waters branded the…

Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen's National Day address—Monday marks the 105th birthday of the Republic of China—was remarkable in the issues that it foregrounded. What was notable, in fact, was how utterly quotidian Taiwan's first female leader's remarks were. The large majority of the recently…

As doubts have grown over the accuracy of polling, many have argued that there's a better gauge for predicting electoral outcomes: betting markets. The idea is that the wisdom of crowds—especially when those crowds are putting their money where their mouths are—trumps surveys that are hobbled by…

RETRACTION: The following post was based on an erroneous news report from KING 5 television. Arcen Cetin is in fact a United States citizen.

It may seem like a minor, technical issue, but it became clear to me on a visit to Taipei earlier this month that the Taiwanese government was furious that it might be blocked from even observing the triennial meeting of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which is just getting…

Taibo City, Taiwan

It's well known that China, despite its increasing annoyance with Kim Jong-un, does not want the North Korean regime to collapse. Beijing has its own geopolitical—if utterly amoral—reasons for holding this position, primarily that it fears a united Korea with a U.S. military presence. More…

When Donald Trump has occasionally alluded to America's rising crime rates, Democratic partisans and the media elite—but I repeat myself!—have torched the Republican nominee. Crime is at historic lows, they cry. We know they're really serious, because they even brandish charts—though, curiously,…

Taibo City, Taiwan

Jorge Castañeda, the esteemed Mexican intellectual who served as his country's secretary of foreign affairs from 2000 to 2003, used a Wednesday appearance in Washington not only to declare that Donald Trump could easily make Mexico pay for a border wall, and to refute recent studies showing a…

Jorge Castañeda, who served as Mexico's secretary of foreign affairs from 2000 to 2003, and who is currently a professor at New York University, appeared at the Hudson Institute in Washington on Wednesday. Castañeda, who cuts a debonair, cosmopolitan figure, exploded a couple of bits of received…

Hillary Clinton gave a speech Monday addressed to, well, me. In Philadelphia, the Democratic candidate for president delivered an address aimed explicitly at "millennials"—those of us born, roughly, between 1982 and 1998. (Like all bogus pseudoscientific categories, who exactly constitutes a…

An article in Sunday's Washington Post takes a look at mooted plans to expand the D.C. Streetcar's route network. For the fortunately uninitiated, the D.C. Streetcar is a 2.2 mile form of "transportation" that 1) is slower than walking 2) cost upwards of $200 million to construct and was years late…

Observers of the Clintons have often noted that they shade the truth even when a) there's no possible benefit they could derive from a particular bit of dishonesty, or b) their falsehoods are easily disproven. Hillary Clinton's famous tale of landing in Bosnia under sniper fire (refuted by, yes,…

When awful floods inundated large swaths of Louisiana last month, thousands of Americans volunteered to travel to the southern state to aid in recovery efforts. Now that terrible flooding has inundated parts of North Korea, meanwhile, Kim Jong-un's regime is "deploying" 100,000 residents to the…

A group of lawmakers from South Korea's Saenuri party—the conservative-leaning party that President Park Geun-hye belongs to—has called for what even a few of years ago was an idea safely relegated to the fringes of Korean political discourse: for Seoul to pursue its own nuclear weapons program.…

To some, it might read like one of those "too-weird-and horrible-to-be-true stories" about North Korea—remember the myth that Kim Jong-un had his uncle mauled to death by a pack of hungry dogs? (That's not to say that Kim will be winning any nephew of year awards anytime soon: He "merely" had his…

Powell's Books, which bills itself as the world's largest independent bookstore, is a Portland, Oregon, institution. (Though I've always been more partial to nearby Cameron's.) Its popularity among Portlanders ranks up there with bikes and beer. But now Powell's finds itself in direct conflict with…

As the ride-hailing outfit Uber has continued its assault on the established taxi industry—oftentimes with dubious legality—the company's CEO, Travis Kalanick, has often repaired to an essentially humanitarian argument to make his case for the company. Specifically, Kalanick says that Uber is great…

It's a truth universally acknowledged that laws requiring voters to show some form of identification have only one purpose: to suppress minority turnout and help the Republican party. The official line, after all, is that there has…

Mexico has a serious obesity problem, with seventy percent of adults and thirty percent of children overweight or obese. Indeed, Mexico recently surpassed the United States to become the fattest major country in the world. We don't win anymore!

They're having a close-out sale at the Clinton Foundation. The New York Times reports:

Steven Rattner, a New York Times columnist who was also the Obama administration's "auto czar," has a piece out Thursday morning defending the auto bailout. This being the New York Times, the piece can't just make an argument about the bailout: It also has to serve as a rebuke of Donald Trump. And…

So there is a reason for countries to host North Korean embassies after all. Sure, rather than the spade work of actual diplomacy, North Korea's "diplomats" use their embassies to export counterfeit cash, go on illegal shopping sprees for their leader, and issue terrifying threats against…

Police were called to a meeting of the Multnomah County, Oregon, Democrats late last week. According to the Oregonian, a "scuffle" broke out when a handful of Bernie Sanders supporters, led by one Leigh LaFleur (a prominent Wiccan supporter of the Vermont senator) disrupted the meeting by shouting.…

In an economic address delivered in Michigan this week, Hillary Clinton tore into Donald Trump. No surprise there, of course. But what is notable is precisely what Clinton excoriated her Republican opponent for: Per Hillary, Trump is just too darn negative about the current state of the country.

Given Donald Trump's penchant for bashing all thing China—or even his obvious relish in enunciating the country's name—one might expect Beijing to worry about the prospect of the real estate mogul rising to the presidency. And yet, there are also reasons to believe that China would welcome a Trump…

An anti-Donald Trump super PAC is filing an immigration complaint against Melania Trump. According to a press release sent out Monday morning:

At a fraught time—with Beijing blundering through the South China Sea, despite a Hague panel smacking down its bogus territorial claims, and North Korea firing ballistic missiles into Japanese waters, for example—it might behoove Japan to embrace a more conciliatory stance towards the other great…

If Bill Clinton truly did fall asleep during his wife's speech at the Democratic convention on Thursday night, you can hardly blame him. And that's not (only) because of the soporific content of the remarks. Rather, Clinton's speech went late into the night, not wrapping up until around midnight,…

Philadelphia

Philadelphia

Philadelphia

Philadelphia

Philadelphia

What happens when a major global power—one that will soon boast the world's largest economy to boot—refuses to accept legally "binding" arbitration decisions? We're about to find out.

Evidently Ruth Bader Ginsburg doesn't like that her colleague Sonia Sotomayor has recently surged past her to become the most popular Supreme Court justice among denizens of the Internet left. Justice Ginsburg granted an interview to the New York Times over the weekend seemingly designed to shore…

A rule of thumb for researchers: If you create a super-smart algorithm to determine, say, the best movie of 2015, and you come back with Mortdecai, that might be a sign that there's something wrong with your research methods—not that the American people inexplicably failed to appreciate the genius…

Four Dallas police officers and one Dallas Area Rapid Transit officer have been killed in what the Dallas Morning News called a "coordinated attack during [a] demonstration against recent shootings of black men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota." Altogether, 11 officers and one bystander were…

It's chang ma in Korea right now—monsoon season. Every summer, torrential rain clouds park over the Korean peninsula for about month, rendering huddling indoors with soju and some dried anju even more enticing than usual.

After news of ISIS's last atrocity broke over the weekend—this time, the terror group slaughtered some 150 Iraqis, including scores of children, who happened to be out celebrating the end of Ramadan—State Department spokesman John Kirby weighed in on the matter.

From the Foundation for Constitutional Government:

My phone buzzed with a "news alert" from the New York Times Friday morning. Normally, these alerts are reserved for truly breaking, earth-shattering news, like the rise of "man buns" in Brooklyn.

The relationship between motorists and bicyclists in major American cities is, er, "complicated," as the euphemism has it. Most U.S. cities lack any real bike infrastructure—think distinct, separated lanes, like in Amsterdam and Copenhagen—which means that cars and cyclists are forced in most cases…

Sunday's Washington Post contained a book review of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson, Ph.D. (A good rule of thumb: Be wary of authors who broadcast their academic achievements on the cover of their books.) The review, by Pamela Newkirk, included the following…

Following the "Brexit" versus "Bremain" debate from afar (and by the way, now that the referendum is finally over, can we please retire those hideous portmanteaus?), one got the sense that the two opposing camps were arguing on entirely different grounds. They weren't so much debating as making two…

It would be irresponsible to speculate as to whether Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor had grown envious of her colleague Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Internet celebrity. (The octogenarian Ginsburg was been widely feted as the "Notorious RBG," and there's even a popular line of t-shirts that sports…

Given the hyper-partisan era in which we live, one would expect a Democrat to cheer when the presumptive Republican nominee for president appeared open to legislation she was championing.

A surprise fifteen hour filibuster led by Connecticut Democratic senator Chris Murphy has apparently proven successful. Politico reports:

Hillary Clinton clobbered Bernie Sanders in the District of Columbia's presidential primary on Tuesday. The former secretary of state took 79 percent of the vote to Sanders's 20 percent.

You've got to hand it to Alejandro Cao de Benos. While most Western apologists for North Korea obscure their sympathies with platitudes about wanting to "promote dialogue" or foster "cultural exchange," de Benos, a Barcelona native, is out of the closet as a pro-regime activist. In 2000, he founded…

Hillary Clinton is no fan of Donald Trump's rhetoric regarding ISIS. In fact, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has repeatedly suggested that her likely opponent's public utterances are actually aiding the terror organization.

Thousands of Americans participated in that most benign of civic rituals in San Jose, California, on Thursday night: seeing a presidential candidate speak. Of course, that candidate was Donald Trump, so as these engaged citizens streamed out of the arena, they were subjected to astonishing levels…

President Obama's remarks on Wednesday in Elkhart, Indiana, appear to have been drafted long before the current political season began in earnest. Obama claimed, for example, that the Republican party is "beholden to China," the New York Times reported. That revelation comes as a surprise to those…

Stop the presses: A British-born lifelong leftist doesn't much care for Donald Trump. In other news, a dog has bitten a man.

This week comes yet more evidence—as if any were needed—that North Korea is not actually a functioning nation-state, but rather a criminal enterprise masquerading as a country. A spectacular bank heist earlier this year, which saw the South Asian nation of Bangladesh robbed of $81 million, has now…

Latino voters, we have been told ad nauseam, are uniquely hostile to Donald Trump. As conventional wisdom has it, the property magnate's hostility to illegal immigration will doom him with this crucial, and growing, voting bloc. (This despite the fact that half of Latino voters say they are willing…