Thinking about...

There’s lots to like about Mark Hamill. He starred in the greatest film epic of all time. He came back late in his career to reprise the role of his youth, Luke Skywalker, and did so extremely well. As a person, he gracefully transforms the burden of being identified with that role into acts of generosity. He speaks out for what he believes. He helps Ukraine.

Dear Friends, We are now two months from the American midterm elections, probably the most consequential election since the eighteenth century. Given that the presidency is held by an oligarch who wishes the bring our republic to an end, a victory of the opposition is a prerequisite for the maintenance of the rule of law and anything resembling political decency.

After each World War, the structure of global empire changed. At the end of the First World War, the victorious maritime empires condemned the land empires—the Germans, the Habsburgs, the Ottomans—for their imperialism, and supported, with many qualifications, the rights of nations to have states. The maritime empires continued. In the Second World War, victory was not enough: in the decades that followed, all of the European maritime empires lost their direct overseas power.

It’s not difficult to see why Trump would want a trade war with Canada. He has lost his war with Iran, but the depth of his humiliation of our country has not yet set in. Best to change the subject while possible to a conflict that he thinks he can win by the midterms. Except that he can’t. As Trump proves again and again, it is entirely possible to be both morally wrong and geopolitically weak. And his weakness becomes our weakness, his nihilism our national embarrassment, or really tragedy.

At the center of the history of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were their policies of mass killing. The Soviets began first with terror during and after the revolution, the construction of a huge system of concentration camps, and then mass starvation. An organized political terror followed in the late 1930s. The Germans, after Hitler came to power in 1933, were most able to repress and then murder people defined as enemies, Jews above all, after they destroyed the states around them.

‘Grind the country to a halt’: Democratic Senator urges national strike if Trump meddles in midterms. From The Guardian, February 5, 2026 “The Democratic senator from Arizona ,Ruben Gallego has proposed that, should Donald Trump try to sabotage the midterm elections, Americans should respond with a general strike that would “grind the country to a halt”.

Ukraine has to be at the center of a class on Hitler and Stalin, because it was at the center of both men’s mental worlds. Each of them saw Ukraine as the key to a global transformation: be it the Stalinist plan to collectivize agriculture and build industry, or the Hitlerian plan to treat Ukraine as a breadbasket. In both cases, hugely ambitious ideologies found their axial point in a certain place; and in both cases, the attempt to transform Ukraine led to mass death.

Dear Thinkers, Hard as it is to believe, today marks 164 days since President Trump dragged the United States into war with Iran — a war that has produced devastating and deeply humiliating consequences. To make sense of where we are, Tim recently sat down with former U.S. Ambassador and Domestic Policy Advisor Susan E. Rice (Ambassador Susan E. Rice) for a wide-ranging thirty-minute conversation about the war, American power, and what this moment says about the state of our democracy.

Communism was a lived reality for hundreds of millions of people in the twentieth century and remains a lived reality for many in the twenty-first century. It is based in an analysis of capitalism and a theory of history proposed by Karl Marx, which is the main subject of this lecture. Marx's ideas were revised by Vladimir Lenin so as to allow the individual (or the party elite) much greater latitude to choose the timing and the place of revolution.

For about twenty years, fascism seemed like the future for millions of people. It was a way of appealing to the past that was mystical and inspiring; it was a way of seizing the future by taking technology and pushing it towards dreams of rapid military conquest. Fascism reacted to and in some ways admired Bolshevism: it borrowed the idea of the one-party state and of a revolution based not so much on interests and history as on will and conjuncture.