Mark Gongloff

Everybody knows you should never let a good crisis go to waste, and Nancy Pelosi gave China all the hardware it needed to construct a golden chariot of crisis and ride it to glory. But the People’s Republic promptly crashed its crisis chariot into a ditch. Today was Day Two of our long national…

That Sinking Feeling Mad magazine, the foundational text of my diseased worldview, once ran a famous infographic of Richard Nixon making promises about the Vietnam War as he slowly sank into a body of water. It came to mind today as I read about Fed Chairman Jay Powell’s latest testimony in…

Contemplating Orbs: Imperialism Edition Vladimir Putin might aspire to be the reincarnation of Peter the Great, but another model of an OG empire-builder he might want to consider is James Monroe. America’s fifth president bought Florida for roughly the modern-day price of Max Scherzer’s MLB…

Unhappy Coup Day to All Who Celebrate A year ago today, a group of energetic tourists, decorated with bracelets and other festive garb and chanting amusing slogans, visited the Capitol to express their feelings about the prospect of Donald Trump no longer being president. In their zeal, they might…

Booster Shots: Who Needs Them? Navigating the coronavirus pandemic has never been easy for people, corporate people, governments or, uh, deer. But the cocktail of vaccines and variants makes it more befuddling than ever. For the unvaccinated, the answer is obvious: Get vaccinated. But what…

South of Safe Heaven One comfort of our ridiculous investing age is that all the gambling on GameStonk or Dogecoin or whatever feels like it’s being played with Monopoly money. Yes, people are taking losses and getting ripped off, such as the poor saps in this must-read Bloomberg News story on…

Space Wars! For being vast, mysterious and deadly, space is also somehow sort of hilarious. Even science fiction fans know this (see “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” all volumes). Thus we’ve spent years laughing at America’s new Space Force, especially when it unveiled its Starfleet logo…

Maybe because people of a certain age (mine, roughly) create so much of our entertainment, we never seem to stop reliving the 1980s, like we’re a whole culture of Uncle Ricos. And mostly it’s fine. “Cobra Kai” is our era’s “Anna Karenina,” for example, and many of the 47 other ’80s-themed TV shows…