"Life was pretty good in those days, he says, at least if you lived in one of the lands around the Mediterranean and Near East that constituted what he calls the 'ancient G8.'"
Mistakes are almighty: you can't ever guarantee that the next moment will host no manifestation of a mistake. According to evolution theory, the diversity of life on Earth entirely emerges from copying mistakes of DNA polymerase.
U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson described Iran's majority faith tradition, Shiite Islam, as a 'misguided religion' while discussing the ongoing U.S. strikes against Iran on March 4, 2026.
"Once the Declaration of Independence is issued by Congress, then it kind of changes the calculus. Then, both sides are putting pressure on Native people to join one side or the other."
Starting next month, the cost of renouncing your U.S. citizenship will go down dramatically - a boon for people already shouldering the burden of paying for a major overseas move. Anyone wishing to formally shed their American citizenship is required to obtain a form called a Certificate of Loss of Nationality, and right now it comes with a whopping $2,350 fee. In April, that fee will drop by 80% to $450.
It wasn't until Whitmarsh had been herded into the main hall that he grasped what he'd signed up for: 'a geopolitical event, not an intellectual one,' as he put it, with hosts including Greece and China's ministries of culture.
The same deep forces that afflict many Western nations have wrenched us apart: the transition to a postindustrial economy and the attendant erosion of working-class security, the demographic shift toward a "majority minority" nation, the cultural upheaval that has dethroned men, and especially white men, from their age-old dominance - and the rise of entrepreneurs of outrage eager to exploit all that free-floating anger.
In the autumn of 2022, Max and I walked up the iconic steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to visit Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color. As the young son of a professional classicist, and a burgeoning one himself, my museum partner already knew about the ancient history of painted statues when we began to explore the galleries. Max's knowledge seemed the exception rather than the rule.
Some citizens might see themselves as Christian nationalists simply because they are Christian and patriotic. Others, however, assert that the United States is rightfully a Christian nation that ought to be governed by Christian leaders, ethics and laws. As a historian, I'm aware that Christian nationalism relies upon a selective and often distorted view of American history.
U.S. president Donald Trump shared a racist video on his Truth Social account in which former American president and first lady Barack and Michelle Obama were depicted as apes. I was unsurprised, yet nonetheless disgusted. U.S. senator Jon Ossoff also found the video unacceptable. He said during a rally in Atlanta that Donald Trump was "posting about the Obamas like a Klansman."
The street plan of the Valley is 'the street plan of America.' By this, he means that streets in cities across the U.S. offer rectilinear uniformity: 'broad, arrow-straight avenues, regularly spaced and perfectly parallel to one another, are met at fixed intervals by equally straight and parallel streets that intersect them at precise right angles.'
The recent tensions between local authorities in Minnesota and the immigration enforcement agencies of the Trump administration, particularly Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are not merely the stance of rebellious cities or states. They are the latest manifestation of a dispute as old as the nation itself: the resistance of local power against a federal center that periodically attempts to govern by imposition. To interpret what is happening today in Minneapolis and its consequences as an isolated episode of immigration policy is to remain on the surface.
As authoritarianism accelerates - as government-sanctioned violence becomes more overt in immigration enforcement, in policing, in the open deployment of federal force against civilians, and in the steady erosion of civil rights - people are scrambling for reference points. But instead of reckoning with the long and violent architecture of U.S. history, much of this searching collapses into racialized tropes and xenophobic reassurance: This isn't Afghanistan. This isn't Iran or China. This is America. We have rights. This is a democracy. This isn't who we are.
The librarian sat me in front of a microfilm reader and brought out roll after roll of film. I stayed there for hours, squinting to decipher the archaic handwriting in the Free Negro Book, which was published annually in South Carolina before the Civil War. The names in each year's edition were alphabetized, but only roughly-all of the surnames starting with A came before all of the surnames starting with B, but Agee might come before Anderson, or it might come after.
The real Führer is always a judge. Out of Führerdom flows judgeship. One who wants to separate the two from each other or puts them in opposition to each other would have the judge be either the leader of the opposition or the tool of the opposition and is trying to unhinge the state with the help of the judiciary.
