“Pops!” The salutation is not limited to the emphatic, even rambunctious hellos of reunion after a few months of separation on opposite coasts, but also, when I’m already here, as a request for my attention to some matter of apparent urgency to him. Say, a proposal for my participation in some imaginary game involving fire trucks and daring rescues of pets, or for some contemplative question heavy on his 3- and 2/3-year-old mind. A couple of nights ago, on a drive down the highway, it was the latter, and the question was, “Pops! Why are there trees?” Laughing about this…
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So it turns out that the figure of the “strongman” is ascendant once again in contemporary history. Putin in Russia, Xi Ping in China, Kim (Jong Un) in North Korea, Erdogan in Turkey, Orbán in Hungary, Mohammed (bin Salman) in Saudi Arabia, Bukele in El Salvador. And of course Trump here in the United States as a kind of wannabe dictator who openly admires others on that list and often muses on dreams of becoming one of them. What unites all these men is a fierce desire to govern by the exertion of their own will, along with disdain for…
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Like multi-millions of other Americans, I spent much of the weekend thinking about Alex Pretti. Combing through countless media reports, checking for up-to-the-minute alerts, trying, flailing, really, to write something coherent yesterday that would bring a modicum of ease and a shred of understanding to the awful scene of his murder. Abhorrent as it is, I kept cueing up the raw video footage and still photos, as if at some point I could finally come to some halfway sensible conclusion about how it all came to this. How it is that eight masked, heavily armed and armored agents of our…
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So Renee Good is dead, Venezuela is under American occupation for who knows how long, United States Coast Guard boats are seizing oil tankers flying Russian flags on international waters , and on Friday, the president of the United States told a meeting of skeptical oil and gas executives whom he’s trying to convince to return to Venezuela that he also covets ownership and occupation of Greenland. About which he mused, “I would like to make a deal, you know, the easy way. But if we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.”…
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With some 64% of its population self-identifying as Christian for the 2020 census, the U.S. doesn’t even crack the top 10 Christian populations of the world. But once the camera pans out from the tiny countries comprising that list (Romania, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, et al) the picture changes significantly. Partly owing to its relatively large population (331 million in 2020) and partly to its history of being settled heavily by those fleeing religious persecution, the U.S. leads the world in the gross number of Christians. Its 64% of the U.S. translates to 213 million people, easily outdistancing Brazil at…