Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Eighty-Year-Old President and AI

An interview with Brazil’s Lula becomes an unexpected lesson in leadership, education, tariffs and artificial intelligence. Along the way, AirPods translate Portuguese, Trump provides the contrast, and AI’s promise collides with a familiar problem: trusting powerful industries to regulate themselves. Continue reading →

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Shoot, Ready, Aim

Conspiracy theories no longer require particularly good conspiracies. They merely require a wisp of information—a text message, a photograph, a name, the word “Hawks”—plus enough ideological enthusiasm to spin the pieces together into conspiratorial cotton candy before anybody asks whether it is worth getting your hands sticky. Continue reading →

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E Pluribus Unum

Twenty-five years after 9/11, a reflection on leadership, unity, and the people who gave everything at Ground Zero—and on the difference between honoring courage and borrowing it for yourself. Continue reading →

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What We Gave Away

Twenty-five years after 9/11, America’s reservoir of global goodwill has badly eroded. This is a look back at the solidarity we once inspired—and a warning about what we may discover the next time we need the world to stand with us. Continue reading →

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9/11 Plus 25

Twenty-five years ago, I watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center from my office window.

What I remember most is not only the horror, but the strange quiet that followed—the empty streets, the smoke over the city, and the way people instinctively looked out for one another.

A quarter-century later, I find myself thinking less about what happened that day than about what we learned from it—and how much of that lesson we seem to have forgotten.

I wrote about that morning, the days that followed, and why September 11 still matters. Continue reading →

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Trump Canal

Donald Trump’s proposal to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America” gets the history backward and the geography sideways. Ontario was named after the lake, while “America” comes from an Italian explorer who never saw the Great Lakes. If Trump is determined to rename something in upstate New York, though, Love Canal is waiting.

Welcome to Trump Canal. Continue reading →

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Willie and Joe

With Stars and Stripes once again becoming a political target, I went back to Mauldin and wondered what Joe and Willie might make of today’s Pentagon.
Turns out, eighty years later, the material is still embarrassingly fresh. Continue reading →

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The Powerball Presidency

I didn’t win the Powerball, but somewhere around the twentieth virtual floor of the Empire State Building, I realized America may be running a different lottery. The prizes increasingly flow upward, the ladders below keep disappearing, and the biggest jackpot may now come with an oath of office in Washington. Continue reading →

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How The World Cup Defeated The Orange News Cycle

I thought marriage meant love, compromise, and pretending decorative pillows serve a purpose.

Turns out it also meant swearing lifelong loyalty to Brazilian soccer.

This one is about the World Cup, marriage, Brazil, and the blessed miracle of replacing the orange news cycle with a month of yellow jerseys, questionable officiating, and emotional damage in Portuguese.

Give it a read. Continue reading →

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The Real Screwworm:

In which the efficiency experts save fifteen million dollars and spend a billion finding out what the fifteen million was for. Continue reading →

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