On Friday morning, after a night of insomnia fueled by worries about raising children in a collapsing society, I opened my eyes, started reading about efforts by Wisconsin Republicans to seize control of the state’s elections, then paused to let my tachycardiac heartbeat subside. Marinating in the…

The climax of Kati Marton’s captivating new biography of Angela Merkel, “The Chancellor,” comes in 2015, when the German leader refused to close her country’s borders to a tide of refugees fleeing civil war and state collapse in the Middle East and Africa. “If Europe fails on the question of…

I’ll always remember Sept. 11 as something that happened in the evening. At the time I was living in a town in northern India, and I watched the towers fall on a TV someone had dragged into the street. Because I was so far away, I’ll never know the terror people in New York and Washington felt on…

In 2019, allied and government airstrikes in Afghanistan killed some 700 civilians, more than in any other year since the war’s start, according to the Costs of War Project, a group working to tally the human toll of America’s post-9/11 conflicts. US and NATO airstrikes declined in 2020 after…

A few weeks ago I posted, on Twitter, that I was increasingly furious with the F.D.A. for taking so long to authorize Covid vaccines for children under 12. Then I deleted the tweet, because I know that as desperate as I am to get my kids inoculated, I’m not qualified to make judgments about how the…

On a Friday night last month, I moderated a debate in Manhattan about whether we should scrap capitalism. It was organized by the socialist magazine Jacobin; defending capitalism were editors from the libertarian publication Reason. Tickets for all available 450 seats sold out in a day. So Jacobin…