Syndicated columns

One thing I almost respect about “American Canto,” Olivia Nuzzi’s chaotic and elliptical new book about the simultaneous implosions of her life and of America, is that she doesn’t pander. The former Washington correspondent for New York magazine, Nuzzi knows what readers want from her: the story of her baffling affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and ugly breakup with her fellow journalist Ryan Lizza. She writes that when her boss at New York found out about her relationship with Kennedy, whom she’d profiled for the magazine, she was given the option to save her career by coming clean publicly. “Tell all,” she writes. “Spare no detail, spare my job and my life as it was.”

In 1980, when I was 4 years old, my family moved to Kenya. My father studied agricultural engineering in graduate school and had long dreamed of working in Africa, hoping to help subsistence farmers improve their lives. His work with organizations like the U.S. Agency for International Development, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Bank took him across Africa. I was raised believing that investment in development and international cooperation improved ordinary people’s lives.

The good news is that Americans have never been richer. The bad news is that most of them don’t feel like it.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” warned George Orwell, the famous British author of “1984.” He was referring to politicians’ dangerous tendency to ignore facts that challenge their preferences or ingrained beliefs.

Frank Bruni: Bret, steel yourself for a sentence I never expected to write, a preoccupation I never expected to have, words that shock, shake and shame me. I cannot stop wondering if I’ve sold Marjorie Taylor Greene short.

Today’s Republican Party is big on manliness and masculine virtues. The MAGA right in particular is forever obsessing over who is the biggest, the strongest, the most fearless among them.

Say that Donald Trump has by now realized that attacking, or even invading, Venezuela might turn into a disaster. He wants to back down and redeploy the mighty American armada in the Caribbean to do something more useful elsewhere in the world. Could he?

Donald Trump said Friday that he had “sort of” made up his mind about his plan for Venezuela, but he “can’t tell you what it would be.” With an aircraft carrier strike group and some 15,000 service personnel deployed to the region, it is sort of hard to imagine that the president’s decision will be to stand down and go home.

This weekend, Donald Trump picked a fight with two Republicans in Congress and lost.

Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina has made several names for herself – some of which can’t be printed – in part by rejecting the bless-your-heart paradigm of the polite Southern belle in favor of the congresswoman’s apparently more profane personality.

Jeffrey Epstein, who took his own life in 2019 while imprisoned on charges of being a sex trafficker and a pedophile, continues to haunt the Republican Party and its leader, President Donald Trump.

In one scenario for the pop cultural future, soon we’ll have movies without movie stars. In this scenario, generative artificial intelligence will produce infinite movie-like stories on the cheap, bespoke and tailored to micro-audiences, featuring “actors” created exclusively for the purpose. Maybe some of these creations will be digitally pilfered from the library of departed greats – want to see Humphrey Bogart in a “Star Wars” movie? Here you go! But mostly people will accept that the characters in any given AI-generated movie exist only for that story, not as Robert Redford or Diane Keaton once existed as recurring faces in a moviegoing life.

If owning a home is still the American dream, then it is increasingly out of reach for many young Americans. The average age of a first-time homebuyer is now 40, up from 33 just a few years ago and 29 in 1981.

By any metric, Tuesday’s elections were a blowout. Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani is the new mayor of New York City. The new Democratic governors in Virginia and New Jersey won with double-digit margins. Voter turnout was off the charts.

Charlie Kirk, the conservative influencer who was assassinated in September, and Nick Fuentes, the young Hitler-loving white nationalist at the center of a growing schism on the right, were bitter enemies.

By Patricia Lopez

This weekend, I was surprised to learn that Donald Trump seems to see himself in the same way I do: as a would-be monarch spraying the citizenry with excrement.

This weekend, I was surprised to learn that Donald Trump seems to see himself in the same way I do: as a would-be monarch spraying the citizenry with excrement.