The Toddler Who Toppled an Empire

I never thought it would happen like this. If you'd asked me years ago what the beginning of collapse might look like, I would have guessed something cold and efficient. A smooth-talking ideologue. A polished politician with a lawyer's brain and a preacher's cadence.…

We Let It Happen: A Quiet History of Collapse

Some things collapse all at once. Others drift there slowly, while no one is looking. This is a memory of the drift — and a refusal to pretend we didn't see it. I was born in the late 1980s, just far enough back to remember a different country. Not…

Crossed Out

It happened again. This time it was a two-year-old girl, an American by birth, carried off to a place she had never chosen, by a system that doesn't even pretend to recognize her anymore. No trial. No hearing. No real process at all. They bundled her up alongside…

When Protecting the Law Becomes a Crime

I spent most of the day pacing. Sometimes you get hit with a piece of news so wrong it feels like it lands in your chest instead of your head. Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested this week. Two felony charges: obstruction of a U.S. agency and harboring an undocumented…