By Susannah Luthi

The last issue of the Cambodia Daily — “News Without Fear or Favor” — appeared September 4 with the headline: “Descent Into Outright Dictatorship” and a photograph of government opposition leader Kem Sokha in handcuffs and the grip of a policeman. Kem Sokha looks disgusted. The newspaper sold rapidly, people massed to get their copies all over the streets of Phnom Penh. And then there were none. Kem Sokha is locked up in a high security prison in an eastern province of the country. Continue reading →

By Micah McCrary

One afternoon in France this summer, I saw a man wearing a red baseball cap, branded with the slogan “Make America Great Again.” And a few days later, in Prague, I saw a few men on the street wearing the same cap, all in the same afternoon. One of the men in Prague even noticed me looking at his cap, which then committed him to eye contact. Continue reading →

By Colson Lin

I.

One of the most striking features of the modern public ritual initiated when a candidate is named by the President to the Supreme Court is the celerity with which all of the relevant actors snap into place. A general spirit of merriment and free-wheeling parlor speculation mutes one day, quite suddenly, into an aperient tremor across the Beltway papers that that the vetting is now “closed,” that a decision “has been made,” that a nomination is “imminent,” culminating finally in a colorless statement issued by the White House establishing a date and time for the coming-out ceremony: fumata bianca. As the clock strikes the hour of coronation, through Cross Hall and into the East Room will walk the President and the triangulated product of what has for weeks been referred to inevitably by the national press as a “tricky political calculus,” often alongside a beaming wife or husband or mother. And so begins the nominee’s elevation out of obscurity—at least briefly—into the highest reaches of celebrity our political media has to offer. We call this showering of attention the “Supreme Court nomination process,” and it is perhaps, with the exception of our presidential elections, our democracy’s single most elaborate exercise in self-deception. Continue reading →