Posts:
By Chris Hedges During the war in Bosnia, I worked my way through the seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” The novel, populated with 400 characters, was not an escape from the war. The specter of death and the expiring world of La Belle...
By José Luis Sampietro The dispute currently pitting Ecuador against Colombia, framed as a trade war, is in fact a symptom of something more delicate: it could mark the beginning of the collapse of the practical cooperation needed to govern a border and a regional...
By Matthew Connelly Science fiction has long depicted a future in which artificial intelligence (AI) becomes so strong, it overpowers humanity. In fact, the battle between bots and brains has already begun, and educators can see how it might end. Young people are...
By Carolina Mella January 20 began like any other day for the Conejo family in Minnesota. Five-year-old Liam got into the car, shouldering his Spider-Man backpack, and went to school. A few hours later, his dad picked him up. When they arrived at their home,...
Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to read, disagree, agree, and comment. Charlie Larga and the staff here at Larga Towers appreciate the range of views here, even when they are sharply opposed. One point I would like to clarify is this: for roughly twenty...
By Chris Hedges One hundred and four years ago this week, Sylvia Beach, who ran the bookstore Shakespeare and Company on 12 rue de l’Odéon in Paris and nurtured a community of expatriate writers that included Richard Wright, T.S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Thornton...
After my recent column on ICE and migration ran, it attracted nearly seventy comments within a day or two, many of them passionate, angry, supportive, dismissive, ideological, conspiratorial, and occasionally thoughtful. What they mostly were not, however, was engaged...
By Katie Notopoulos It's 2026, and I say it's time to bring back just calling people. No calendar appointment, no text first. Just pick up the phone and call. We must do this to save the very fabric of our society. It's time for us to take back what was promised to...
Every few years, usually around election season, someone digs up the old slogan “Make America Great Again” and waves it around as if it were a detailed policy document rather than a vague memory of something that may never have existed. If we could actually wind the...
By Saman Zonouz The darkness that swept over the Venezuelan capital in the predawn hours of Jan. 3, 2026, signaled a profound shift in the nature of modern conflict: the convergence of physical and cyber warfare. While U.S. special operations forces carried out the...
By Global Initiative staff Ecuador’s prison system has undergone a profound transformation over the past decade. According to a study by the Global Initiative Against Internation Crime, criminal groups in the country have consolidated control inside prisons, reshaping...
There are a few things in life that can make even a tolerant person feel like banging a few heads together. One is the price of imported cheese in Ecuador. Another is standing in line at immigration with a folder of documents thick enough to stun a mule. And the...
By Cédric Durand The stock market valuation of AI-related firms has increased tenfold over the past decade. As John Lanchester noted recently, all but one of the world’s ten largest companies are connected to the future value of artificial intelligence. All but one of...
By Caitlin Flanagan I turned 60 last week, and I feel vaguely embarrassed about it, like I’ve somehow let myself go, like I’ve been bingeing on decades and wound up in this unappealing condition. Chances are, most of you haven’t crossed this border station yet, so...
By Andrew Stuttaford In a recent article for National Review on neoprohibitionism, I touched on the controversy over a report on alcohol and health that had been commissioned by the Joe Biden administration. The story begins with the World Health Organization: In...
You can learn a lot about modern geopolitics by reading the news with a cup of coffee and the same suspicion you reserve for used-car salesmen. It began, as these things often do, with President Trump “inviting” Greenland to become the 51st state of the United States....
By Steven Boykey Sidley In early December, in a corner of Yunnan Province near the Myanmar border, something rather extraordinary happened. While most of the Western tech world was busy arguing about whether AI would take their jobs or merely make them obsolete, China...
By Ryan Zickgraf Fictional vampires are dark, dangerous, and, crucially, sexy. From Bela Lugosi’s hypnotic stare in the first Dracula film to the tortured emo vibe of Edward Cullen, the silver-skinned heartthrob of Twilight, the undead have often been seen as the apex...
By Cody C. Delistraty There’s a certain sinking feeling one gets when thinking of the perfect thing to say just a moment too late. Perhaps a witty parting word could have made all the difference. There is no English word to express this feeling, but the French have...
By Will Douglas Heaven Some disillusionment was inevitable. When OpenAI released a free web app called ChatGPT in late 2022, it changed the course of an entire industry — and several world economies. Millions of people started talking to their computers, and their...
