Wrong Sort of Citizen

Aziz Huq, 2 April 2026

The Trump administration has introduced two new policies that aim to turn citizens into migrants who can be expelled. The first, a narrowing of birthright citizenship, has attracted considerable public...

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Short Cuts: From Gaza to Iran

Amjad Iraqi, 2 April 2026

It’s no surprise that Operation Roaring Lion (Israel’s name for its campaign) and Operation Epic Fury (as the US calls its own) bear the hallmarks of Israel’s offensives on the Gaza...

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‘The name’s Steele, Christopher Steele.’ That’s the way a former MI6 operative who wrote the notorious dossier alleging collusion between Trump and Putin introduced himself at...

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Diary: Serbia’s Student Movement

Vincent Bevins, 2 April 2026

On​ 1 November 2024, the canopy of a recently renovated train station in Novi Sad collapsed, killing sixteen people. In the weeks that followed, a new protest movement coalesced. For its leaders,...

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Short Cuts: Tactical Voting

William Davies, 19 March 2026

Despite the misinformation and alienation that have led so many citizens to regard democracy in general with despair or contempt, a majority of people have a clear understanding of what Nigel Farage stands...

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Iran, Week One

Tom Stevenson, 19 March 2026

It may well be true that Israeli officials told the White House they planned to attack Iran with or without American help. But to suggest that the US has been led by Israel into a war in which it...

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Short Cuts: Versions of Melania

Deborah Friedell, 5 March 2026

The enduring liberal fantasy that Melania Trump is unwilling, trapped, in need of rescue, #FreeMelania, has never squared with the most rigorous reporting about her. Gestures that commentators read during...

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Globaloney: Brzezinski’s Cold War

Jackson Lears, 5 March 2026

As a Polish émigré and fervent Polish nationalist, Zbigniew Brzezinski focused most of his fear on the Soviet Union. A visceral hostility to the USSR became the driving force behind his...

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Why​ did a man whose political expertise was acquired in the departed era of broadcast television maintain such influence over Labour? Peter Mandelson tended his own mythology and influence over...

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Călin Georgescu’s entire political programme, in so far as he has one, is based on the need to heal Romania by creating – or, as he portrays it, restoring – a synthetic medieval...

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Thought Control

Jameel Jaffer, 19 February 2026

Ideological exclusion at the border seems anachronistic now, when all human knowledge is accessible online, video-conferencing software is installed on every laptop, and ideas and information can be shared...

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Short Cuts: Winter in Kyiv

Jen Stout, 19 February 2026

It was -10ºC outside and only 10ºC in Yulia’s flat, but she told me this was a good day: the radiators weren’t stone cold. Engineers had reconnected the building to the district...

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Guns, Money and Opium

Laleh Khalili, 19 February 2026

There is an undeniable symmetry between surges in drug use in the US and the country’s covert operations overseas. The wars in Indochina gave the US heroin epidemics; Latin America, a plague of...

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Short Cuts: Japan at the Polls

Christopher Harding, 5 February 2026

Assuming she remains prime minister after this month’s election, Takaichi Sanae will focus on the immediate economic challenges facing Japan: high taxes, inflation, low wages and the cost of living....

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Made in Tehran: Iran’s Crises

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, 5 February 2026

Years of austerity alongside the rise of an increasingly kleptocratic and predatory elite have steadily eroded the state’s capacity to respond to crises, while the language of ‘resistance’...

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Diary: In the Amazon

Alexander Clapp, 5 February 2026

As the journalist Dom Phillips came to see it, the deforestation of the Amazon was the work of a stupendously profitable interlocking network of corporate and political actors. ‘You don’t...

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In a country plagued by corruption, China’s national college entrance exam, the gaokao, is remarkably clean. ‘Open and competitive’ are the watchwords of democratic elections,...

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Another Country: Visions of America

Adam Shatz, 5 February 2026

Is America a dream or a nightmare, a democratic paradise or a bastion of white supremacy and religious intolerance? Is it a geographic territory or a phantasmagorical hyperreality in Baudrillard’s...

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