Arrests have reached a record high—nearly fifty-one thousand in August alone—with agents conducting operations nationwide at hospitals, at airports, and outside schools. By Jonathan Blitzer
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain has faced rising challenges to his authority amid a migration crisis and several corruption scandals involving his inner circle.
The phrase “the X of it all” started as a joke to mock the vague lingo of studio bosses. But there’s something widely appealing about speaking “casually, broadly and vaguely in order to reduce friction.” By Nitsuh Abebe
My father dedicated his life to studying the Guna people of Panama, and they may soon allow unprecedented development through their land. I went on a trek through the jungle to find out why. By Ben Ryder Howe and Federico Rios
How Everything Became Gambling
It’s not just DraftKings and Polymarket — the logic of gambling undergirds everything coming out of Silicon Valley.
The United States wants a reactor on the moon by 2030. A Russian-Chinese alliance is working on one for 2036. Some leading scientists say the danger is great.
President Trump’s decision to hold an international summit at his golf club, an idea rejected in his first term, illustrates how much he has shattered norms.
President Vladimir Putin brought up a sale of Russian energy assets with Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. The deal raises new questions about conflicts of interest.
The Parti Québécois has vowed to hold a referendum on independence, three decades after Quebec voted “no.” Voters want change, but maybe not that much.
Records showed that campus police officers informed prosecutors that they had conducted interviews beyond taking a statement from the woman who said she was raped.
Capt. Smit Machchhar, who was stabbed by his co-pilot midair between Dubai and Tel Aviv, said he “had to act” to prevent a crash despite serious injuries.
What is the rise of AI capital, and what does it mean for contemporary work, culture, and the ecological state of our planet? John Bellamy Foster dispels the myth of a “hyperorganized AI capitalism.” As Foster writes: “We are not entering a stable new age…but rather a new, capitalist-engendered global disorder in which humanity, according to climate science, is headed ever more rapidly toward a planetary ‘point of no return.'” The only way out—the only way, that is, to ensure the survival of humanity—is a radical shift away from the catastrophically destructive regime of capital accumulation and toward sustainable human development through socialism.
Paul Buhle reviews The Radical Jewish Tradition by Donny Glickstein and Janey Stone. The book, Buhle writes, is a window onto “the antinomies of nineteenth-century Jewish life”—including the growing movement against Zionism and for socialism among Eastern European Jews. This authors, Buhle notes, also tells the story of Jewish communists in Britain, the United States, and beyond, taking into account the wide sweep of Jewish left activity globally, situating the present struggles against genocide in Palestine squarely within the legacy of radical Jews everywhere.
Today’s resurgence in U.S. imperialist interventions abroad and the concomitant so-called crisis of the “rules-based order” can be explained, Luís Eduardo Fernandes argues, through the category of “legal imperialism, which refers to how the international juridical form is internalized within societies and in the context of dependency, colonialism, unequal exchange, and monopoly capital. “International law and imperialism,” Fernandes writes, “do not stand as opposing poles. They are part of the same unity.… Violence is constitutive of the juridical form.”
“I don’t deserve to die like this,” said one passenger on Flight 1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv. The motive of the cockpit stabbing remains unknown, officials said.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the flight’s injured captain, Israeli passengers and reserve pilots, who helped secure the plane and land it safely. The attacker has not been identified.
Christa Pike was convicted of murdering a classmate in 1995. It was not clear what went wrong in the execution or what her current medical condition was.
In 1638 the king’s jester asked an archbishop, “Who’s fool now?” and was thrown out of court the same day. The fool’s license to mock has changed hands ever since. It has rarely been the fool’s to keep.
The fool’s coat set down and the pen taken up, made for the essay.
Why we’re pointing you there
Archibald Armstrong had jested for two kings when he mocked Archbishop Laud over the Scottish prayer-book revolt. The Privy Council sentenced him to have his coat pulled over his head and be banished the court. Michael Cummins starts there and asks who has held the fool’s license since kings stopped keeping fools. He follows it through Shakespeare’s “allowed fool,” a caricaturist on a party pension, and a Victor Hugo play banned after a single night. Then a British cabinet minister takes a cartoonist to lunch, and in January 2025 a Pulitzer Prize winner walks out of the Washington Post.
What we liked most is the centerpiece. In 1937 Goebbels complained about David Low’s cartoons, and Lord Halifax carried the complaint home. The newspaper said it couldn’t control Low, so the minister had to ask the cartoonist himself. Low agreed to ease off, and answered with a new character whose name was a pun on what had just happened to him. The essay grants that the cost of losing the license has fallen a long way since Armstrong’s day. It ends by asking whether a paying public is a freer master than a king, or only a larger court.
