Elliot Ackerman on the Withdrawal from Afghanistan

For the past two weeks, I’ve worked alongside an ad hoc group of veterans, journalists and activists with connections to Afghanistan who are trying to coordinate the evacuation of not just our Afghan friends but also strangers, like Ahmad and N., whose lives are under imminent threat.

Interview with human rights activists Natalia Kaliada and Nikolai Khalezin, founders of Belarus Free Theatre.

Join New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, “Liberties” Editor Leon Wieseltier, and Managing Editor Celeste Marcus for this enlightening discussion.

“As the forum was getting underway, several dozen police officers marched into the conference room. The commanding officer seized the floor… and announced that our meeting was ‘illegal’ and that all its participants were being taken into police custody. The initial burst of laughter from the audience quickly changed to chants of “shame” and “fascists” as officers grabbed each of us by the arms and escorted us outside to waiting prisoner vans.”

“The year 2022 will mark 200 years of official relations between Mexico and the United States. But before we’re able to celebrate this milestone, we must first work to safeguard freedom, democracy and the rule of law in Mexico under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s illiberal rule.”

“American society is more willing than ever before to speak out against racism and to embrace Black history, but we continue to make the fatal mistake of taking the concept of race itself for granted.”

“[F]or a few seconds, I listened to the voice of the man whose job, it appears, is to physically eliminate people like myself, opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin.” This month, after an investigation conducted by Bellingcat, the Insider, and Der Spiegel identified the operatives likely responsible for attempting to poison him, Vladimir Kara-Murza called one of the men who tried to kill him.

For the TLS, Becca Rothfeld reviews Slavoj Zizek’s monograph Pandemic!.

Shawn McCreesh talks with Celeste Marcus about what it was like to grow up in a suburb of Philadelphia ravaged by the opioid crisis.

Michael Ignatieff, rector of Central European University, chats with Celeste Marcus about what it was like to watch America desecrate its own sacred institutions from Europe, and what that desecration represents for the United States and the world.

Leon Wieseltier and Celeste Marcus discuss where we are.

Can Old-School Intellectualism Make a Comeback In A New Era?

Three years after #MeToo allegations sank his Laurene Powell Jobs–funded magazine, Leon Wieseltier wants back in.