Author: nick

Screengrab from unclassified footage of the first airstrike on vessels in the Caribbean Sea in September 2025. More than any other U.S. president in decades, Donald Trump has aggressively pursued military interventions in Latin America. On Jan. 3, 2026, U.S. special forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on charges of narco-terrorism. In the months before the operation, U.S. Southern Command began targeting small, fast-moving boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The death toll from the continuing war on these alleged narco-terrorists has risen to over 200 people. At the heart of these events is the Trump administration’s stated goal…

Both President Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed an interim peace agreement to end the War in Iran, which entered its 111th day on Thursday. Posting the text of the 14-point agreement on X, Pezeshkian wrote that the agreement “is a historical document and a message from a powerful Iran: Peace will be realized in the shadow of mutual respect.” The terms include “the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon… and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon,” the removal of the U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz,…

Today the Supreme Court decided T.M. v. University of Maryland Medical System Corp., a case concerning the application of the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, under which federal district court review of state court decisions is generally barred. The justices split 5-4 on the application of the doctrine here. Justice Sotomayor wrote for the Court. She summarized the issue in T.M. this way: Under what has become known as the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, federal district courts lack jurisdiction over “cases brought by state-court losers complaining of injuries caused by state-court judgments rendered before the district court proceedings commenced and inviting district court review and rejection of…

Was it worth it? Of course not. But comparing his Iran deal with Obama’s or decrying the terms risks falling into the same traps as previous presidents Trita Parsi Responsible Statecraft I have spent years fighting against Trump’s push toward war with Iran, and I have the scars to prove it. When Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018, I warned that it would eventually bring us to this moment. Ever since, I have consistently argued against the confrontational path he set the United States on. That record speaks for itself, which is why I can say what follows without any…

In May 2025, a new gospel was preached on the internet. Albert Einstein supposedly had endorsed Buddhism in a 1954 interview, claiming he had scientific proof of a kind of afterlife with reincarnation. Over fifty versions of this gospel appeared, many of them resembling AI-generated memes. The YouTube channel “Secrets of the Beyond” has attracted almost a million views with their version. Almost half the others just paraphrase this version. The others are wildly different, some even including the Men in Black. I won’t even address the ludicrous double bottom of Einstein’s friend’s safe or how an interview that lasts…

Yesterday I was engaged in my typical morning routine. Scanning the internet for interesting stories to read and news to soak in. Reading a few things here and there and watching a couple of videos. I settled in after a bit of this to write an article for my Substack “Shrew Views.” The topic is unimportant—typically something to do with something that caught my fancy during my news scanning, or something someone said to me yesterday about whatever, all mixed in with my learned and experienced knowledge of archetypal psychology. Nothing earth-shattering, mind you, but hopefully an insight some people…

When I began my PhD studies around 2000, I carried a clear, romantic vision of what it would mean to be a researcher. I imagined long hours in the lab, the hum of centrifuges and classical music from an old radio my constant companion. I pictured myself making careful observations, formulating novel hypotheses, and designing elegant experiments to unravel nature’s most stubborn secrets. As a pharmacologist, I dreamt of the unique thrill of discovery—that electrifying moment when disparate data clicks into a coherent pattern, revealing a medicinal (or harmful) effect of a drug no one had ever observed before. Bone…

Most 20th century institutions are unfit for 21st century problems. Will this generation’s winning innovators build new ones, or get hoodwinked by the old ones? Source link

Has Chicago Learned Nothing From Jussie Smollett? Source link

Children walking by a destroyed mosque in the Gaza Strip. © 2009 UNRWA Photo by Shareef Sarhan. CC BY-SA 3.0 igo Another month passes, and Gaza is barely in the news: the inert, so-called Board of Peace is doing its job. You might have thought that job involved reconstruction so Gazans could use the water, roads, food markets, hospitals and schools that make life livable, but if so, you would have been mistaken. The Orwellian-named Board of Peace (or Board of Empire or Board of Genocide, whichever is most apt) was intended to blunt public opinion by disappearing Gaza, while…