The first meeting between Mark Carney as Canada’s elected prime minister and President Donald Trump could have gone better, but it was far from a disaster. Trump opened the May 6 press conference that preceded the more formal White House meeting by congratulating Carney on winning a “very big election in Canada” at the beginning […]
It has long been an unwritten rule of the Catholic Church that no citizen of a world superpower can be pope. The informal logic is that such an arrangement would risk putting preeminent temporal and spiritual authority into the hands of the same clan. It is always safer to pick a pope from a more […]
LATAKIA, Syria — At first glance, Latakia looks to be one of the better places in Syria. Nestled on the Syrian coast, it was spared the worst horrors of the country’s 14-year civil war. A former stronghold of the Assad regime, the city was never the scene of the devastating fighting that took place elsewhere. […]
New Jersey Transit locomotive engineers went on strike early Friday morning as negotiations between the transportation company and union workers failed to produce a contract agreement. It is the Garden State’s first transit strike since 1983. The work stoppage is expected to cause hundreds of thousands of people in the New York Metropolitan area to […]
Their images and videos became Exhibit A for the winning 2024 campaign of President Donald Trump and his loyal followers, as Democratic rival Kamala Harris struggled to steer her party toward a more centrist presentation. Younger and louder representatives of the Left’s farthest-flung fringes seemed unable to suspend their very public and performative shows of […]
It’s remarkable to watch Jon Hamm, a decade after the finale of Mad Men aired on May 17, 2015, navigate the treacherous waters of Post-Iconic-Role Syndrome that other actors have drowned in. While the ghosts of Harry Potter and James Bond haunt Daniel Radcliffe’s and Daniel Craig’s subsequent work, Hamm has somehow managed to acknowledge […]
Between 2009 and the beginning of last week, dramatist and author David Mamet released 16 new plays and books, some of them exceptional. During the same span, filmmaker David Mamet directed either one or zero feature-length pictures, depending on whether one counts the 2013 made-for-TV movie Phil Spector. To say merely that this imbalance saddened […]
In a world of grandstanding and gavels, David Souter was a whisper — a Granite State recluse who slipped onto the Supreme Court in 1990 like a shadow through a side door, only to leave an indelible mark on American law and the politics of judicial selection. Appointed by President George H.W. Bush, Souter, who […]
A small but powerful California agency that oversees the state’s 840-mile coastline is facing scrutiny for decisions that critics say exceed its mission, which includes protecting Pacific Ocean access for beachgoers and staving off waterfront development. First established via voter initiative in 1972, the California Coastal Commission’s mandate is “to protect, conserve, restore, and enhance […]
When candidates for political office need a reboot, most campaigns turn to the consultant class. But during the 2024 presidential contest, former President Joe Biden ought to have excavated the archives of the Onion. Last year, Biden’s image as a slumberous, easily dumbfounded senior citizen could only have been helped by the Onion‘s legendary fictitious […]
