In 2011, Muammar Gaddafi addressed world leaders with a prescient threat. If they intervened to end his shaky rule in Libya, he told a French journalist, they would be inviting "chaos, Bin Laden, armed factions . . . You will have immigration, thousands of people will invade Europe from Libya. And there will no longer be anyone to stop them."

This tactic had worked well for Gaddafi in the past. Fearing a mass arrival both of Libyans and of the millions of sub-Saharan Africans who'd left home to live and work in the oil-rich country since the 1990s, members of the European Commission had done

The pattern is wearily familiar. A person with a grudge acquires an automatic weapon, exacts his revenge in a deranged killing spree, is shot dead himself, and leaves behind an outpouring of grief, soul-searching, and fiery political rhetoric that lingers in the headlines for days. Before long, the killing is eclipsed by another horror and becomes simply another entry in the dossier of death in America. The combination of legislative inaction, a powerful, endlessly cynical firearms lobby, and a fragmented electorate has produced that sad distinction for which America is known: The nation with

How quickly talk of war turns into talk of law! When a hospital is bombed in a military action, whether by the United States in Afghanistan, Russia in Syria, or Israel in Gaza, what typically draws outrage is the "war crime"—the violation of the laws of armed conflict—while the choice to wage war itself evades condemnation or analysis. Opposition to the Iraq War was commonly voiced as a matter of respect for international law. And now that Washington is helping a Saudi-led coalition bomb Yemen, one common apologia is that American targeting assistance saves lives by bringing air strikes into

I’m tired of Hillary partisans, too—the ones who devote more energy to verbally bludgeoning Clinton’s doubters on the left than to taking on her real enemies on the right. But even if, like me, you are critical of Clinton—of her corporate centrism, cronyism, elitism, and militarism—please consider voting for her anyway. She is probably going to win, but it’s no longer a lock. Trump has a narrow but plausible path: As of this writing, FiveThirtyEight’s election forecast gives him a 33 percent chance of winning. True, FiveThirtyEight foresees a better chance than all but Trump’s zealot legions,

The theme park at the center of Westworld—HBO’s new series, adapted from the 1973 sci-fi film written and directed by novelist Michael Crichton—is a simulation of a dirt-on-the brow, snake-in-the-boot nineteenth century frontier town where the only consequence of sin and murder is profit. The park’s hosts are sentient androids covered in impeccable artificial flesh, ignorant of the fact that the “new comers” to the park’s central town of Sweetwater are human guests who pay $40,000 per day for the chance to lay a saloon prostitute or shoot a man just to watch him die. But as expected from

So what kind of book will emerge from the 2016 presidential campaign? For more than a year now, I’ve been saying a secular metaphysical cleric from deep in South America—Borges, say, or Julio Cortázar—should compose it. I recognize that they’re both “with the ancestors.” But would a Book of, or by, the Dead about Campaign 2016, complete with mix-and-match chapters and faux arcana, be any less opaque to real life than Donald J. Trump, a presidential candidate who exists in his own alternate universe, where feelings are facts and facts always lie?

As many others besides me have remarked, being