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Countering Putin's grand strategy

Does anyone really know what time it is? Sandy Turner I feel like Judy Jetson but look like Maxwell Smart.  When my daughter upgraded her Apple Watch, I not so subtly dropped a huge hint I wouldn't mind having one. Sure enough, and soon enough, her old one was on my wrist, already programmed, so all I had to do was learn how to use it. She made the font as large as possible so it’s easier to read than I had expected. I’d seen all these young folks talking into their watch and chuckled to myself, I’d never want to look like the guy on “Get Smart.” Next thing you know I’ll be talki...

In 1965, at the height of the Cold War, the comedy series Get Smart premiered on US television. The popular show featured the bumbling secret agent Maxwell Smart, who represented the American counterespionage agency CONTROL in its fight against its archenemy, an organisation called KAOS—one of whose agents was virtually always Russian. Today, as a recent RAND study put it, Russia is ‘a well-armed rogue state that seeks to subvert an international order it can no longer hope to dominate’. In other words, having lost control, it is seeking to sow chaos. US President Joe Biden’s adminis...

“Beechwood 4-5789, you can call me up” — two minutes and 13 seconds of pure sonic joy, recorded by the Marvelettes on May 19, 1962, with co-writer Marvin Gaye drumming its propulsive rhythm, released on July 11, soon reaching No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Its use of a telephone exchange set it solidly in the tradition of nearly a century, since Hungarian engineer Tivador Puskas ventured this notion to his boss, Thomas Edison, in 1876, the same year Alexander Graham Bell received the original patent on a telephone. Two years later, the first phone exchange linked 21 subs...

He was calm, rational, and insightful. We can hardly applaud the practice of yellowface 1 with which the character has become associated, but we can at least separate him from the grotesque Asian villains generated by the Yellow Peril. He was a pop-culture hero to North American audiences in an era when the western mass media vilified people of Asian descent and the laws excluded them from public life. And, despite his broken English and love of fortune cookieaphorisms, the character did not speak pidgin, as has often been stated by those critiquing the character. He is Charlie Chan, and he h...