Before I get to the dialogue and the book, I wanna open with some preliminary thoughts about a domestic subject. And that is this extraordinary moment where Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins informed a TV interviewer that her department had run thousands of simulations, and good news, it was possible to feed an American person for less than $3 if that person ate a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla, and one other thing.
Hit me like, as my high school English teacher liked to say, "like a MAC truck." The episode starts with the tale of Icarus. You know, the kid who flew too close to the sun with his wax wings and plummeted into the sea. Or the little cherub NES character. Either way. And I'm sitting there thinking: has anyone in Washington actually read this story? Played the game?
In President Donald Trump's second term, everything is content. Videos of immigration raids are shared widely on X by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), conspiracy theories dictate policy, and prominent right-wing podcasters and influencers have occupied high-level government roles. The second Trump administration is, to put it bluntly, very online.
Almost 20 years ago, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the iPhone as "an iPod, a phone, an internet communicator." The world swooned at the time because that one device was all those things, and more. Today it is our wallet, our identity, our social media, our likes, dislikes, fitness levels, bank accounts, as well as our personal, sexual, and political identity.
Donald Trump's allegedly ailing health has been the subject of media speculation for months, which analysts have said is interrupting the president's quest to be seen as an unflinching strongman. Salon writer Chauncey DeVega suggested in a recent column that Trump's invasion of Venezuela was a "prime opportunity" for the president to "get his swagger back." But the problem, he said, is that Trump can't hide his clear mental and physical decline.
These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us: that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
Goldberg quoted Leah Greenberg, a founder of the resistance group Indivisible, who said that while Donald Trump "has been able to do extraordinary damage that will have generational effects, he has not successfully consolidated power. That has been staved off, and it has been staved off not, frankly, due to the efforts of pretty much anyone in elite institutions or political leadership but due to the efforts of regular people declining to go along with fascism."
You may have read in your colourful newspapers that my country's president would like to shut me up because I don't adore him in the way he likes to be adored. The American government made a threat against me and the company I work for, and all of a sudden we were off the air. But then, you know what happened? A Christmas miracle happened. Well, it was September. It was a September miracle.
If we are to believe Hegel - or Collingwood - no age, no civilization, is capable of conceptually identifying itself. This can only be done after its demise .... Lescek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial p. 3.
As you know, there was another school shooting this week, this time at Brown University. The coverage has been what we've all come to expect: Republicans act like there's nothing we can do about it, and Democrats make meek noises about gun control. Nothing happens, and nobody even expects anything will happen. The suspected shooter was caught, after apparently killing himself, late Thursday night.
that incentivizes stories designed to polarize rather than illuminate. This flattening doesn't just distort our work; it enables erasure and makes authoritarianism's job easier. Authoritarianism thrives on main-character energy. It needs a hero story - a single person to valorize, platform, co-opt, discredit, or remove. Journalism has leaned hard into these toxic individualistic tropes, perpetuating a form of narrative kingmaking that creates a momentum of inevitability that feels impossible to escape.
Courts play an important role in authoritarian regimes. They legitimize the actions of despots by declaring them "legal" or "constitutional." They ensure institutional compliance with the regime's rules. And they make politically unpopular decisions that align with the authoritarian's goals while giving the authoritarian political distance from those goals. Quite simply, you can't instigate a strongman takeover of a constitutional democracy without having a robust judicial power that's willing to play along.
Alex Rikleen grew up in Wayland and now lives in Acton with his wife and two children. He graduated with an education degree from Boston College in 2009 and taught history for years. On the side, Rikleen wrote about fantasy sports, covering basketball and football. He pivoted in 2016 to pursue sportswriting, and since 2020 has balanced professional writing with an adjunct teaching position at Framingham State University.
If 2025 was the year the world woke up to democratic backsliding, 2026 may be the year journalism decides whether it will face that crisis alone or survive it together. Around the globe, authoritarians have learned to use the law to criminalize dissent through courts that perform an apparent due process while they dismantle it. The new authoritarian playbook includes a captured judiciary, economic suffocation of independent outlets, media capture and the slow erasure of collective memory.
The vote is carefully managed from start to finish so that only one outcome is possible: a longer lease on power for el-Sisi. It is difficult to overstate the importance of Egypt's ongoing House of Representatives elections. The voting results will not only decide the composition of the next parliament but will also determine whether, and for how long, the rule of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi will be extended.
Pop music may have been central to the New Left, but today's listeners are mostly reduced to hunting for Easter eggs, finding anti-Trump messaging in the likes of octogenarian Neil Young's tossed-off anthems. The eager critical embrace of Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, based on a 1990 Thomas Pynchon novel steeped in the backwash of curdled 1970s left-wing militance, serves chiefly to underscore the film industry's studious disregard of the way America lives now.
Wicked: For Good is Ariana Grande's movie. And the film knows it, bending toward her every chance it gets. If the first Wicked centered Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), the shy outcast whose discovery of her magical powers and the sinister machinery behind the land of Oz led to her being branded the Wicked Witch of the West, Wicked: For Good focuses intently on her opposite number and best friend, Glinda (Grande), now positioned by the powers that be as the good (but secretly powerless) witch who
Perryman said the stakes go beyond courtroom victories. The real challenge is demonstrating that the public truly holds the power to counter and often stop the White House's seemingly unstoppable march toward authoritarian rule. "The real thing for us was, how are we going to show people that you actually still get to be in charge in your country-the people get to be in charge," Perryman told moderator and host of the podcast Pod Save America, Jon Favreau.
Svetlana Alexievich, the Belarusian author who writes in Russian and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, lives in the same Berlin apartment, with its high ceilings and spacious rooms, where EL PAIS visited her four years ago. The author of Voices from Chernobyl, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War, and Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets continues to write by hand.
I first became interested in silence over 15 years ago when an overdose of New York City noise got me wondering if and how I could find refuge in its opposite, in absolute quiet-something that was not merely a reduction in or lack of noise, but a vibrant counterpoint to the sounds which we assume define and shape our lives.
The online celebrity, legal woes, and final liberation of the irate, ICE-defying DC resident known throughout the world as Sandwich Guy seem tailor-made for late-night TV wisecracking. But given that we're presently slogging through the world's stupidest fascist timeline, the Sandwich Guy set piece can give us some surprisingly useful lessons in how to mount protests that can deflate the Mussolini-style self-regard of the MAGA power elite.
