For a nation whose founding symbols were carefully engineered around the balance of peace and war, that omission is hard to read as accidental. Dropping the olive branch from the dime isn't just a design choice: it's a cultural signal.
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.
Jesse Armstrong's series about media mogul Logan Roy and his warring children, thought to be based on the Murdochs, was a gripping smash hit, and this documentary is soon excitedly matching the eldest Murdoch siblings—independent Prudence from Rupert's first marriage, dutiful favourite Lachlan, problem child James and brilliant but overlooked Elisabeth—to their Succession counterparts.
A record high of adults—80 percent—believes that Americans are divided on the most important values. National pride, trust in government, and confidence in institutions are near record lows. The Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz says the United States hasn't been this divided since the Civil War. Nearly half of Americans think another civil war is likely in their lifetime.
Perhaps sensing this wariness, the creators of some of the more politically compelling movies and TV shows of the past year have instead explored how being alive feels during a tumultuous period. They capture the atmosphere, the mood, the ambient existence of everyday people who are living through a transformative time in history, whether or not they recognize that they are doing so.
Britain once ruled over the largest empire in history. For many Britons, it remains a source of pride. Others argue its power was built on a legacy of brutality, colonial conquest and the enslavement of millions. Can Britain reckon with that past and make amends?
Anticolonialism, Ontology, and Semiotics draws upon Africana anticolonial philosophy-especially the work of Frantz Fanon and two of his most influential interpreters, Eldridge Cleaver and Sylvia Wynter-to develop a basic analytical model for doing anticolonial political theory. I wanted to show that there is something distinctive, something special, to be found in this tradition of thought that has not been fully appreciated by philosophers and theorists in other fields.
U.S. President Donald Trump, with his lust for Greenland and hectoring of Europe, thinks the world is at his mercy,and thatthe U.S. is invincible. He's right on the first point. But he discovered this week that he's wrong about the second one. In Davos at the World Economic Forum, Trump climbed down on his Greenland threats after his actions caused chaos in the markets.
The palace, rebuilt after a fire destroyed it in 1834, is falling apart. There have been 36 fire incidents since 2016. Water leaks, heating failures and sewerage problems plague the heart of this Unesco world heritage site. Fixing Westminster would save money in the long run. An upgrade is also a matter of safety and legacy.
On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron appeared before the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland the annual Alpine gathering of the global elite to declare that now is not a time for new imperialism or new colonialism. This, of course, was a reference to the current ambitions of Macron's counterpart in the United States, Donald Trump, who, in addition to recently kidnapping the president of Venezuela and repeatedly threatening to seize the Panama Canal,
But reframed as hemispheric dominance, the right's expansionist impulse fits a civilizational worldview: America as the enforcer of the West, bending weaker nations to its will. What they're saying: In the days after President Trump's stunning capture of Nicolás Maduro, even some of MAGA's loudest non-interventionists began casting strategic lands in America's hemisphere - including Colombia, Cuba and Greenland. "How can you get more 'America First' than Manifest Destiny 2.0?" "War Room" host Steve Bannon told NBC News.
Collating data from the World Bank and other sources in innovative ways, he argues that globalization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century was accompanied by then-unprecedented growth of income in both previously poor populations (notably in China) and people at the top of the world's income distribution (especially those in the West). By contrast, relative shares of world income stagnated or were thought to have declined for wealthy nations' middle and working classes, including in the United States.
I happened to be in Canada a week ago-in the cold and snowy mountains of Quebec-when President Donald Trump sent the text to the Norwegian Prime Minister, Jonas Gahr Store, in which he explained that, because he hadn't gotten a Nobel Peace Prize, he no longer felt "an obligation to think purely of Peace" with regard to Greenland. Canadians I spoke to seemed saddened by this latest outburst.
China is increasingly not the big, bad wolf in the eyes of young people, who are encountering the country through cultural touch points like the ugly-but-cute Labubu dolls and innovations like TikTok rather than national security threats. They're more focused on kitchen table issues such as a discouraging job market for entry-level workers, inflationary pressures pinching their wallets and the growing sense that America's fractured political system doesn't work for them.
Three of the four things that gave Trump a foothold, in my opinion, were failures in this century (the fourth is the legacy of slavery and the organized political violence that replaced it). The other three, though, are the War on Terror, the financial crisis, and social media. (COVID was the final catalyst, I think; having moved during the height of COVID, I can't express how much worse the US dealt with it than much of the EU.)
"It is not the critic who counts," President Theodore Roosevelt once said. "The credit belongs to the man who is in the arena." The Heritage Foundation has been in the arena for many years, fighting many battles, so it's no surprise that it has attracted many critics as well. And while Heritage cannot claim perfection, this much is certain: We have stayed true to our mission despite the critics;
Occasionally, history generates smooth changes from one era to another. More commonly, such shifts occur only gradually and untidily. And sometimes, as the former Downing Street foreign policy adviser John Bew puts it in the New Statesman, history unfolds in a series of flashes and bangs. In Caracas last weekend, Donald Trump's forces did this in spectacular style. In the process, the US brushed aside more of what remains of the so-called rules-based order with which it tried to shape the west after 1945.
At the beginning of The Sting, veteran con-man Henry Gondorff explains the way of the big con to ambitious rookie Johnny Hooker, who wants to play for a vicious mobbed up New York banker. It's not like playing winos in the street. You can't outrun [the guy]. . . . You gotta keep his con even after you take his money.
When we talk about our inability to pay attention, to concentrate, we often mean and blame our phones. It's easy, it's meant to be easy. One flick of our index finger transports us from disaster to disaster, from crisis to crisis, from maddening lie to maddening lie. Each new unauthorized attack and threatened invasion grabs the headlines, until something else takes its place, and meanwhile the government's attempts to terrorize and silence the people of our country continue.
Trump has also said taking the territory is what I feel is psychologically needed for success. In a message to the prime minister of Norway, Trump raged against the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which declined to award him the Peace Prize he has long sought. The president cryptically claimed, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.
