Attention to the Unseen

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Russian national anthem blares from loudspeakers each morning at the IK-17 penitentiary in Russia’s Mordovia region, awakening prisoners to another day in a labor camp known for hazardous work, limited nourishment and summary stints in solitary confinement. Guards and inmates refer to IK-17 as a “fashion colony,” mainly for its brightly painted exteriors meant to impress occasional visitors. But accounts from current American inmates paint a much darker picture of the remote penitentiary, 300…

Read More Read More

George Soros in a 2017 photo. Olivier Hoslet/EPA via AP By Armin Langer, University of Florida Billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros is handing control of his US$25 billion holdings, including his Open Society Foundations, to one of his sons, Alexander Soros. As a sociologist who researches immigrants and minorities in Europe and conspiracy theories about them, I study how Soros became a scapegoat and bogeyman for nationalists and populists and a target of people who harbor and spread antisemitic…

Read More Read More

The Guardian reports: In 2015, many liberal residents in Hamtramck, Michigan, celebrated as their city attracted international attention for becoming the first in the United States to elect a Muslim-majority city council. They viewed the power shift and diversity as a symbolic but meaningful rebuke of the Islamophobic rhetoric that was a central theme of then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign. This week many of those same residents watched in dismay as a now fully Muslim and socially conservative…

Read More Read More

Jennifer Palmieri writes: “He did this for one reason and one reason only, to throw you off your game.” That’s what I told Hillary Clinton backstage at Washington University in October 2016, moments away from her second presidential debate with Donald Trump. Two days prior, the world had learned, thanks to the Access Hollywood tape, that Trump liked to assert power by assaulting women. Trump retaliated by showing up at a pre-debate appearance with women who had accused Bill Clinton…

Read More Read More

The Guardian reports: For years, there has been an element of the ridiculous to Patriot Front and their rallies, which can look like a sort of cosplay version of a white nationalist movement. At a Patriot Front demonstration in Washington in May, more than a hundred Patriot Front members marched along the National Mall wearing matching outfits of beige or brown chinos and blue button-up shirts. The ensemble was topped off with the sort of affected accessorizing that parents subject…

Read More Read More