In 2008, a Russian MIG shot a Georgian drone out of the sky. Minutes later, Michael Carpenter was at the crash site in Abkhazia, a breakaway region of Georgia, the former Soviet republic, standing over the smoldering wreckage. When Carpenter, Read More …

On Wednesday, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who served as the President of Brazil from 2003 to 2011, was convicted of corruption and money laundering. The case against him grew out of a long-running federal bribery investigation, known as Operation Read More …

There was a lot of dissembling and double-talk in Room 216 of the Hart Senate Office Building on Monday afternoon, when Sally Yates, the former acting Attorney General, and James Clapper, the former director of National Intelligence, testified at a Read More …

To understand how the Senate Republicans’ health-care bill would affect people’s actual health, the first thing you have to understand is that incremental care—regular, ongoing care as opposed to heroic, emergency care—is the greatest source of value in modern medicine. Read More …

In the spring of 2016, Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, were both backstage at a National Rifle Association conference in Louisville, Kentucky. The two men are political opposites. McConnell is a poor orator but a gifted Read More …

Five decades ago, in an essay in The New York Review of Books, Hannah Arendt described an exchange she had had with a “Roman chambermaid” about Pope John XXIII. The beloved pontiff had died, of stomach cancer, two years earlier, not long before Read More …

On Thursday evening last week, as members of Congress prepared for the government shutdown, Trump Administration lawyers at the Department of Justice were filing a rare petition before the Supreme Court. They were challenging the injunction of a federal judge Read More …

The old-school Mafiosi are fading into the past, pale imitations of their pharaonic forefathers. As the late Murray Kempton, the greatest of all New York columnists, once wrote, “Where are the scungilli of yesteryear?” In the late nineties, federal agents Read More …

The question is not whether the President is crazy but whether he is crazy like a fox or crazy like crazy. And, if there is someone who can know the difference, should this person, or this group of people, say Read More …

  Thirty-seven years ago, the baseball player Curt Flood, fresh off his final, dismal year as a professional athlete, published a memoir titled “The Way It Is.” It cannot be called a great book, but its literary quality was a secondary concern. Read More …