BRASÍLIA, Brazil — André Borges’s aunt was pregnant when they took her. Borges, now 50, grew up under Brazil’s military dictatorship. In power from 1964–1985, the regime was violently censorial — banning any speech it deemed subversive or leftist. Borges’s aunt was arrested simply for owning a book by a Marxist author. Unlike many others, her […]

President Donald Trump spent much of the past year engineering price increases, financial panics, and trade wars. Nonetheless, despite his best efforts, he is presiding over a pretty good economy. Or so the headline statistics would suggest.  Last week, a pair of government reports showed robust job growth and slowing inflation. Employers added 130,000 jobs […]

Rev. Jesse Jackson — a titanic civil rights leader, politician, and activist — died on Tuesday at the age of 84.  Over the course of a career that spanned decades, Jackson twice ran for president, in 1984 and 1988, though he later stepped back from electoral politics.  To get a better sense of Jackson’s legacy […]

Brazil’s former president was sentenced to 27 years in prison late last year for plotting a coup. The details may sound familiar: Jair Bolsonaro lost an election. He claimed it was stolen from him and rallied supporters to storm the nation’s capital, Brasilia. The insurrection even took place in early January (2023).  However, the parallels […]

American democracy is not in a good place. Institutional breakdown and mistrust define our political moment. Polarization has broken our politics, and President Donald Trump has elevated fealty to him — as opposed to the Constitution — as the core principle of governance.  And the American story is part of a global story. If the […]