Author: nick

When it comes to assessing and preventing threats, we humans often act against our best interests. A lot of people avoid going to the doctor because they don’t want to get ‘bad news’—even if that means not catching something serious sooner. In six weeks I will turn 53. During most of that time on this planet I’ve been hearing about the dangers of global warming —later relabelled as ‘climate change’, supposedly because it is more scientifically accurate, although I suspect because it was less alarmist. In the 1980s barely anyone cared about this problem, because (a) it was either considered…

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It is now official: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has flatly rejected the core conditions of the Board of Peace framework, explicitly stating that Israel will neither adhere to a ceasefire nor withdraw its forces from Gaza. During a cabinet meeting on Sunday, Netanyahu stated with unambiguous language: “Israel rejects the 15-point document published by the Board of Peace for Gaza”. In a previous conversation with lead envoy Nickolay Mladenov, Netanyahu set conditions – such as demanding unilateral operational freedom for the Israeli military to strike inside Gaza at will – that render a genuine peace agreement structurally impossible. The…

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PBS NEWSHOUR: David Brooks of The Atlantic and Kimberly Atkins Stohr of the Boston Globe join William Brangham to discuss the week in politics, including the surprising result in Wisconsin’s Democratic primary, the status of ‘woke’ politics in America and the stalemate between the U.S. and Iran. WILLIAM BRANGHAM, PBS NEWSHOUR: I mean, Kimberly, the — some Democratic critics of the president say that, yes, the Republicans do like to fetish the woke era, but they argue you also have a Republican Party that is in virtual lockstep with Donald Trump.And what they argue is his very open war on…

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I was extremely pleased to see that President Trump nominated Judge Lee Rudofsky of the Eastern District of Arkansas to a new vacancy on the Eighth Circuit. I have known Judge Rudofsky since his service as Arkansas Solicitor General nearly a decade ago. Judge Rudofsky is a committed originalist and a careful jurist. I echo the Wall Street Journal’s strong editorial in support of Judge Rudofsky: Over the past seven years, Judge Rudofsky has earned a reputation as a cerebral jurist willing to reconsider legal disputes from an originalist perspective. In 2022 he ruled that private parties can’t sue under…

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A viral interview raises an uncomfortable question: what does it mean when a high-profile US political influencer sits down with a commander tied to the Azov movement and the “clean up the optics” answer is basically no? We take that clip seriously, not as clickbait, but as a window into how the Ukraine war is sold to the public, how propaganda works when facts are inconvenient, and why the neo-Nazi imagery controversy never actually went away. From there, we pull on a bigger thread that keeps showing up in foreign policy: the push to connect wars into one narrative. We…

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