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Europe is the most popular destination for American travelers this summer. The number of U.S. visitors was expected to jump 55 percent over last year,

I was following in the footsteps of generations of Americans before me who had come to “Europe”: a place that, though it has always existed for us, doesn’t quite exist for Europeans. It’s that mythical place where New World people come to lead different lives. For centuries, and no matter how much it has changed, Europe, for us, has meant art and architecture, science and philosophy, fashion and fame, sex and perfume — and some connection to the past that, in an unbridgeable way, is unavailable to us back home.

To come abroad is to understand yourself as a product of your own culture, and to see just how specific that culture is. So much of what I thought of as my personality — whatever made me different from other people — turned out to pale in comparison with what made me similar to other people, especially other Americans

Open-seat presidential elections are shaped by perceptions of the style and personality of the outgoing incumbent. Voters rarely seek the replica of what they have. They almost always seek the remedy, the candidate who has the personal qualities the public finds lacking in the departing executive.

As the 2008 campaign began, many Americans and most Democrats saw Mr. Bush as rash, bellicose, divisive — oblivious to the demands and opportunities of a rapidly changing world. His presidency had come to be defined by the momentous decision to invade Iraq, which became a quagmire.

Senator Obama had publicly opposed the war from the start, which separated him from most of the Democratic field. But more than that, his profile, temperament and approach offered the sharpest departure from those of the embattled, retiring president he would ultimately replace

Obama plans to herald the contributions of Muslims to American society while issuing a forceful counterpoint to the language favored by some Republican presidential candidates like Donald Trump, according to White House officials.

We've seen an alarming willingness on the part of some Republicans to try to marginalize law-abiding, patriotic Muslim Americans,"

Obama has visited mosques in the past, but never inside the United States, which is home to 2.75 million Muslims, according to the Pew Research Center

There was a time when international travelers had to carry a small yellow booklet called an "International Vaccination Certificate." I still have mine, with stamps inside indicating I'd been vaccinated against typhoid, cholera, yellow fever, smallpox, even bubonic plague. Waves of pandemics involving many of these diseases were the reason for launching this requisite counterpoint to the omnipresent passport. But in 1980 the World Health Assembly declared that the world was free of smallpox and -- other than in a few countries still requiring proof of yellow fever immunization -- the need for vaccination certificates has largely faded as well.

The other concern is an ethical one: that it could lead to a two-class society, divided between those who have had the Covid vaccine, and those who haven't or can't get it.

"Requiring a vaccine passport would be placing a penalty on those countries that have not been able to get vaccines. This penalty will be most felt by low-income countries, as high-income countries are the ones with greatest access to vaccines."

Many of us didn’t see, and still don’t see, how Yglesias’s signing of the letter is supposed to increase the likelihood that VanDerWerff suffers harm. This is VanDerWerff’s most significant complaint against Yglesias

because it comes in the form of a worry over personal safety, rather than as an intellectual challenge to the letter’s contents, this has the effect of preempting critical engagement with VanDerWerff’s response, since disagreement with her no longer seems morally appropriate.

this is my second point — disagreement with her no longer seems logically appropriate, since what’s been offered is not so much a counterpoint to the Harper’s letter but something less cognitive, less vulnerable to the forms and checks of reason and argument

the coronavirus is inspiring a surge of N.W.O. paranoia, a renewed fear of elite cabals that aspire to rule the world. But at the same time, the actual new world order, the dream of global integration and transnational governance, is disintegrating before our very eyes.

The phrase “New World Order” was lifted by the conspiracy-minded from the optimistic rhetoric of George H.W. Bush

The fantasy is looming totalitarian control, black helicopters descending, secret Bilderberg plots. But it’s been encouraged by various undeniable realities — the growth of transnational institutions, the manifest power of a global overclass, the often undemocratic expansion of the European Union and the rise of digital surveillance and the ties binding China and the U.S. into “Chimerica.”

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stopped the progression of the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline following Moscow’s actions in eastern Ukraine. The pipeline, which would have increased European reliance on energy from Russia, has been a major source of contention in Europe and the United States for years. Without undergoing the certification or approval process, the pipeline cannot start running. 

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has unveiled the "first tranche" of British sanctions on Russia, condemning Vladimir Putin's Ukraine aggression.

The European Commission proposed sanctions to EU members states and placed a particular emphasis that would mirror sanctions taken in Crimea after the 2014 annexation by Moscow.

Can anyone teach you how to think? Aren’t we all thinking all the time; isn’t the proof of our existence found in our think-think-thinking, one banal thought at a time?

The truth of the matter is that no one can teach you how to think; but what they can do is teach you how to think for yourself.

my father would say—gently, because there was zero need to say it any other way: “And what is the best argument of the other side?”

What happens next in American history, according to Andersen, happens without malevolence, or even intention. Our national character gels into one that’s distinctly comfortable fogging up the boundary between fantasy and reality in nearly every realm.

Enterprising businessmen quickly figure out ways to make money off the Americans who gleefully embrace untruths. The 1800s see an explosion of water cures and homeopathy and something called mesmerism,

Cody was in this way the father of Hollywood, the industry that did the most, Andersen says, to break down the mental barriers between the real and unreal.

By drawing upon the authority of Montaigne, who begins his essay “Of Books” with what would be regarded on both Wall Street and Capitol Hill as a career-ending display of transparency:

I have no doubt that I often speak of things which are better treated by the masters of the craft, and with more truth. This is simply a trial [essai] of my natural faculties, and not of my acquired ones. If anyone catches me in ignorance, he will score no triumph over me, since I can hardly be answerable to another for my reasonings, when I am not answerable for them to myself, and am never satisfied with them. . . .

When I was thirty I assumed that by the time I was fifty I would know what I was talking about. The notice didn’t arrive in the mail. At fifty I knew less than what I thought I knew at thirty, and so I figured that by the time I was seventy, then surely, this being America, where all the stories supposedly end in the key of C major, I would have come up with a reason to believe that I had been made wise. Now I’m seventy-five, and I see no sign of a dog with a bird in its mouth.