There are evenings when I walk through my apartment as if the apartment were a badly designed republic whose entire constitutional order depends upon the imagination of one person, and I take upon myself, with a seriousness that is immediately undermined by the absurdity of the situation, the role of the president of the United [...]

On January 14, 2026, the US Department of State announced that it would suspend immigrant visa issuance to nationals of 75 countries beginning one week later. The stated concern was public charge: the State Department described the affected nationalities as at high risk of relying on public benefits. The instructions sent to US embassies and [...]

An Iranian court has announced that crude removed from the US-owned Advantage Sweet tanker has been sold for $36 million to $37 million. The proceeds, held by Iran’s judiciary, are intended to satisfy a damages judgment for 771 Iranians with epidermolysis bullosa (EB) over sanctions-related barriers to medical supplies. The vessel was released in 2024. [...]

Allegations of sexual violence in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) keep making international headlines: a UN mission’s finding of reasonable grounds to believe rape occurred during the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks; Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times column detailing accounts of sexual abuse, including alleged gang rape, of Palestinian detainees; a Gaza flotilla activist’s [...]

Smoke fills the air, making it thick and palpable. The pollution creates an acrid stench that burns and is impossible to escape. Strikes on oil depots and energy plants cause black rain to fall from the sky, depleting the soil of the vital nutrients necessary to grow food and turning drinkable water sources acidic.  This [...]

For most people, data privacy is an abstract concern—something that matters in theory but feels distant from everyday life. That perception is changing quickly, and the legal landscape of 2026 is the clearest evidence of it. Across the world, regulators are no longer just writing rules about personal data. They are enforcing them at scale, [...]

Orchestrated voices are laying the groundwork for a constitutional amendment required to partition the four provinces. The Interior Minister, close to the Establishment (a popular term for serving generals and top bureaucrats), declared that the current system has collapsed and cannot deliver. The military spokesman, who periodically holds press conferences on state affairs, opined that [...]

The mountain was colder than she had expected. She had imagined it many times before, but always through him: through the photographs he had brought home, the fragments of routes he described, the names he gave to rocks and ridges, and the particular change that came over his face when he spoke about climbing. He [...]

In August, 128 former state and federal judges, led by a retired chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, asked the Florida Bar to discipline the general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security for social-media posts attacking four sitting federal judges. Within two weeks, the Bar declined, explaining that it does not investigate sitting [...]

Taiwan’s Executive Yuan issued a draft amendment to the National Security Act in December 2025 that would penalize public advocacy of war against Taiwan. This proposed change is widely understood to have been triggered by a series of incidents in which influencers on the platform Douyin, mostly “marriage migrants” from China residing in Taiwan, had [...]