Over the weekend, the Department of Defense stepped into one of the more delicate questions in American religiosity: who gets to be called “Christian.”  More specifically, does the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (commonly called the Mormon Church), fit the bill? The brouhaha started with Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to simplify and reform […]

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here. Welcome to The Logoff: The World Cup starts this week, and the Trump administration is already creating problems.  What’s happening? On Monday, BBC Sport reported that a Somali referee, […]

At its outset, the war known as Operation Epic Fury in the United States and Operation Roaring Lion in Israel marked a historic first: the first time the two countries’ militaries went to war fighting side by side. By all accounts, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was one of the key voices — if not the […]

As the world waits to see if President Donald Trump will give his final approval to a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and, perhaps, finally bring the 2026 US-Iran conflict to a close, it’s already clear that one of the more surprising developments of the conflict has been the prominent role of Pakistan […]

In just 10 days over the summer of 1854, 500 people died of cholera in the Soho neighborhood of London. The city’s population had more than doubled to 2.3 million people in the first half of the 1800s, and its sewage system could not keep up. But the streams of human waste flowing into the […]