Attention to the Unseen

David Runciman writes: On 6 January 2021, two weeks before he was due to leave office, Trump encouraged his supporters to march on the Capitol in a bid to prevent the congressional ratification of his election defeat. Though Trump claims he was not responsible for what happened next, the riot that followed – with his supporters storming government buildings and elected officials fleeing for their lives – echoed some of the darkest chapters of modern European history. This is how…

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By Nathan H. Dize, Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance continues to defend the false claim that migrants in Springfield, Ohio, have been abducting and eating area cats and dogs. That outlandish idea has been thoroughly debunked since former President Donald Trump repeatedly raised it as an anti-immigrant talking point in the Sept. 12, 2024, presidential debate. Trump never mentioned where the migrants allegedly “eating the pets” came from, but many…

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  Israeli historian Ilan Pappe launched his new book, “Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic,” on 11 June at an event organised by The Cordoba Foundation, MEMO and One World Publications in London, UK. At the event, Pappe spoke about historical and present antisemites who have supported Zionism.

Megan Kang writes: In 1970, amid a national confrontation with the United States’ gun culture following the assassinations of Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, the historian Richard Hofstadter struggled to make sense of how the country had become the ‘only industrial nation in which the possession of rifles, shotguns, and handguns is lawfully prevalent among large numbers of its population.’ Writing for the magazine American Heritage, he expressed grave concern for a country ‘afloat with weapons –…

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Teresa Wiltz writes: For most of its history, America decreed that anyone with any African ancestry was Black — and rumors of purported Blackness could derail a career, a marriage, a life. Now, the irony is that some feel comfortable accusing those same people of making up their Blackness altogether — or not being “fully Black” if they come from multiple racial backgrounds. But the problem with trying to decide who qualifies as Black and who doesn’t is that there…

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Tim Adams writes: A couple of years ago, in the Atlantic magazine, journalist Anne Applebaum wrote an era-defining cover story called “The Bad Guys Are Winning”. Her argument was not only that democratic institutions were in decline across the world, but that there was a new version of old threats to them: rogue states and dictatorships were increasingly linked not by ideology, as in the cold war, but by powerful currents of criminal and mercenary interest, often enabled by western…

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Nick Bryant writes: The advice I used to impart to young correspondents arriving at the BBC’s bureau in Washington was to remember that the United States had fought a civil war in the mid-19th century and was still arguing over the terms of a fractious peace. Much like the modern-day phrase “sorry but not sorry,” which is used sarcastically to indicate a lack of remorse, the brief ceremony at Virginia’s Appomattox Court House in April 1865, which brought the armed…

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Elif Shafak writes: There is Orwell the human being. There is Orwell the novelist. There is Orwell the intellectual, the critic, the journalist, the essayist, the radical. But lately, George Orwell—who was born Eric Arthur Blair and who never fully abandoned his original name—has increasingly come to be regarded as a modern oracle, a gifted soothsayer who predicted with terrifying accuracy how fragile and fallible our political systems were, how close the shadow of authoritarianism. His body of work has…

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  If you mention the Israel lobby in the mainstream media then, more often than not, you’ll face accusations of antisemitism. There are of course people who talk about the Israel lobby in antisemitic terms, but that doesn’t undermine the fact that it exists, and has existed for well over a century. This week’s guest is Israeli historian and author Ilan Pappé. His new book details the origins of zionism and the struggles against it throughout the 19th and 20th…

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Robert Reich writes: I’ve shared some of this with you, but today marks 60 years since it happened — when the Klan murdered my protector. I was always the shortest kid in school, which made me an easy target for bullies. To protect myself, I got into the habit of befriending older boys who’d watch my back. One summer when I was around 8 years old, while visiting my maternal grandmother at her cabin in the Adirondack Mountains, I found…

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