Unlimited access to 6,000+ magazines. One low monthly subscription.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP has sought to justify his policy of summarily executing suspected drug smugglers by arguing that the United States is engaged in an “armed conflict” with criminal organizations that supply prohibited intoxicants. Yet the Trump administration also insists that U.S. forces are not engaging in “hostilities” when they blow up boats believed to be carrying illegal drugs. Those positions are hard to reconcile with each other, but they are consistent with Trump’s disregard for legal limits on his use of the military to prosecute a literalized war on drugs. His administration has tied itself in knots to portray murder as self-defense while avoiding congressional constraints. As of early December 2025, Trump had ordered 21 attacks on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, killing a…

Venezuela’s oil industry is one of the most striking illustrations of how politics can both create and destroy economic prosperity. Endowed with the world’s largest proven oil reserves, Venezuela should, in theory, be among the most prosperous energy economies globally. Instead, it has become a case study in how political choices, institutional decay, and misaligned incentives can cripple a strategic sector and, by extension, an entire national economy. At the heart of Venezuela’s political economy lies oil. For nearly a century, petroleum has shaped the country’s fiscal structure, foreign policy, social contract, and political power dynamics. The state’s dominance over oil revenues transformed government into the primary allocator of wealth, embedding rent-seeking behavior deep within political and economic institutions. Over time, this created an economy heavily dependent on oil rents…

DRAMATIC SCENES HAVE come to define the second Donald Trump administration’s immigration policy: federal troops patrolling the streets of American cities, agents snatching international students on video, hundreds of Venezuelan migrants disappeared to a brutal Salvadoran prison. Behind those scenes, Trump is reshaping the country’s immigration bureaucracy. In just its first 100 days, the second Trump administration had “taken 181 immigration-specific executive actions,” found the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute (MPI), “a sixfold increase over the fewer than 30 actions during the same period in Trump’s first term.” Visa processing and bureaucratic rulemaking don’t grab as much attention as harsh, highly visible enforcement actions, but they’re making it harder for immigrants to work, learn, and live in the United States. De-Documenting Immigrants IN OCTOBER, THE Trump administration ended the automatic extension…

It took US forces less than two-and-a-half hours to snatch President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in the small hours of last Saturday morning, said Dan Sabbagh in The Guardian. But this “extraordinary display of imperial power” – involving 150 US aircraft, including bombers and fighter jets – was the product of months of planning. According to Gen Dan “Raizin” Caine, chair of the US joint chiefs of staff, US intelligence agencies had been working since August to establish Maduro’s “pattern of life”. Using spy drones, and information from one or more agents within the Venezuelan government, they’d discovered “where he lived, where he travelled, what he ate, what he wore, what were his pets”. As the US steadily built up its military presence in the Caribbean from…

One morning this past June, INSIDE THE MISSION CONTROL BUILDING AT NASA’S JOHNSON SPACE CENTER IN HOUSTON, 20 OR SO FLIGHT CONTROLLERS WERE SEATED AT CONSOLES ARRANGED IN NEAT ROWS. THE ATMOSPHERE WAS INTENSE, AS IN A CLASS ROOM WHEN A GROUP OF PEOPLE ARE TAKING A TEST, WHICH, IN A WAY, THESE PEOPLE WERE. WHEN I’D ENTERED AT THE BACK OF THE ROOM, NO ONE HAD GLANCED UP. They were staring at their computer monitors and occasionally looking up at three screens, each 4 feet by 8 feet, mounted on the wall. The left screen was filled with numbers. On the middle screen, an image of Orion, NASA’s new deep-space crew capsule, its solar panels deployed, appeared to float motionless in space. The right screen, which resembled an Excel spreadsheet,…

In the very first episode of the cult classic show, Gilmore Girls (2000–2007), it becomes clear that Luke and Lorelai are going to end up together. What made them so obviously right for one another? They were opposites, of course. Luke was a lone wolf that ran a diner in the town he grew up in, loved green vegetables and green tea, and grunted in response to most questions. Lorelai was a talkative, quirky single mother with a junk food addiction and coffee flowing through her veins that couldn’t turn left without making friends. Together, they had undeniable chemistry. She coaxed him out of his shell, he was her rock. They balanced each other. Look at a timeline of pop culture and you’ll find versions of this trope through time.…