May 30, 2024
Collective memory -- what our society chooses to remember, honor, or erase from our past -- is perpetually mediated. For generations Confederate statues and monuments stood in public squares until a new racial reckoning compelled cities and towns to remove them. But that wasn't the end of the story -- at least not in...
May 28, 2024
The death of Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi has left a power vacuum to be filled in snap elections in less than 50 days. The death of the man once called the "butcher of Tehran" comes at low point in U.S.-Iran relations, and as the theocratic regime's legitimacy at home is under severe stress. In this...
May 23, 2024
In the United States and in capitals across the world, liberal democracy is under pressure. We are told that fascism is on the rise. Commentators rummage through the past on the hunt for analogies to explain our current predicament. How does democracy die? What does creeping fascism really look like? Maybe there...
May 21, 2024
In an essay for Foreign Affairs, the Israeli historian Tom Segev argues that a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is impossible. As early as 1919, the future prime minister David Ben-Gurion observed that both nations' competing claims to the land created an unbridgeable abyss. In this episode,...
May 16, 2024
President Joseph Biden's decision to pause bomb shipments to Israel over its planned invasion of Rafah provoked a curious charge from Republican legislators. They accused Biden of "abandoning" Israel despite his steadfast support of the Jewish state not only for much of the past seven months (since the 10/7 Hamas...