Section: The Atlantic (USA)
When Is a TV Channel a Foreign Agent?
Yuri Kochetkov/Reuters Where do the limits of a free press lie? If one were to ask Ilya Ponomarev, a member of the Russian parliament and the only lawmaker to vote against his country’s annexation of Crimea, the answer might be at the doorstep of RT, formerly known as Russia Today. In a recent interview with BuzzFeed, Ponomarev—who...
The Disintegration of the World
Josh Cochran Leon Trotsky is not often invoked as a management guru, but a line frequently attributed to him would surely resonate with many business leaders today. “You may not be interested in war,” the Bolshevik revolutionary is said to have warned, “but war is interested in you.” War, or at least geopolitics, is figuring more and more...
How the Media Became One of Putin’s Most Powerful Weapons
Ilya Naymushin/Reuters Vladimir Putin is a news junkie. The Russian president’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, didn’t use that expression when we talked by phone, but that’s what he described to me: a man at the center of an ever-churning machine processing vast amounts of news and data at his command. “Sometimes we’re...
Bank of the Underworld
Clay Rodery In the fall of 2011, the U.S. Secret Service orchestrated a sting operation. The target was a Vietnamese man named Hieu Minh Ngo. Investigators believed he was a big-time identity thief who sold packages of data known as “fullz,” each of which typically included a person’s name, date of birth, mother’s maiden name, Social...
How McDonald’s Became a Target for Protest
Protestors destroy a McDonald’s in Lahore, Pakistan, in 2006 following the Danish cartoon scandal. (Mian Khursheed/AP) On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that 130 McDonald’s locations in Japan would be closed due to lagging sales amid food scandals. This is the type of story we’re used to seeing about companies, a story where...
Where Does Hillary Clinton Stand on China and Russia?
Hillary Clinton in Hong Kong (Tyrone Siu/Reuters) In a recent Bloomberg View column on the policy positions Hillary Clinton will likely take in the 2016 presidential campaign, veteran political chronicler Al Hunt included a head-scratcher of a passage on international affairs: On foreign policy, she’ll take a tough line on Russia; President...
Ron Paul, Bill Clinton, and Dynastic Dilemmas
Gary Cameron/Shannon Stapleton/Reuters Rand Paul and Hillary Clinton don’t have a lot in common, and what they do have, both sides might like to downplay. But the wrangling ahead of Paul’s formal declaration that he’s running for president shows one interesting parallel between the two—the way they’re handling their...
The Case Against Robert Menendez
Joshua Roberts/Reuters “Politics as usual”—it’s a phrase that’s rooted in a cynical view of how our elected officials operate. The assumption is that even if what they’re doing isn’t exactly illegal, it’s probably untoward. The central theme of the Department of Justice’s 68-page indictment of New...
The Hidden Effects of Cheap Oil
An oil field in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk ( Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters ) What do Russia, Exxon Mobil, and ISIS have in common? Not much, except that they’re all grappling with an inconvenient but incontrovertible truth: a sudden, significant, and prolonged shift in the price of oil changes the world. That truth was on display in 1974,...
The Return of the Mercenary
Rande Archer/Flickr The use of mercenaries in warfare has a very long history—much longer, in fact, than the almost-exclusive deployment of national militaries to wage wars. Before the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended Europe’s Thirty Years’ War and marked the rise of the modern state system, medieval powers from kings to popes...
