Lane Greene

Ali Khamenei grabbed power and held it, at bloody cost Iran’s supreme leader died on February 28th, aged 86

“The man who kept Iranians isolated from the world for more than three decades, who ruined their economy and who, when they dared speak out against his misrule, ordered them slaughtered by the thousands, is gone.”
economist.com/obituary/202...

I had missed your "easter egg" post. Here's a picture of The The to make up for it.

not THE hoi polloi smh. (kidding. I'll see myself out. But as someone who did a bit of Greek I can't make myself write "the hoi polloi" and can't make myself write "hoi polloi". So, just like beg the question, I just don't use it ever.)

Any idea how many of those reports were in paywalled sources (and were unique reporting)?

This was a nice reflection, and I'm looking forward to the book version.

Not for the first time, I realized he has absolutely no sense of speaking to the historical record. (Churchill of course actually wrote histories as well as making it.)

I wrote last June about the difference between preventive and preemptive strikes

Their entire point was to show the power of the truth over propaganda. Not to be counter-propaganda…

Hungry for Affirmation, Vulnerable to Scams: As a Writer, I Know the Feeling

Yep. Like lonelyhearts being pig-butchered...

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/b...

When I get a spam call I like to hit the hang-up button extra hard, to show them how mad I am.

Thanks! Awesome stuff.

Gotcha, so it's written with ש and no ל in Hebrew?

What is the balsamic story?

The war is now longer than America's part in WW2, and has cost Russia about as many lives.

All while MAGA politicians have swaggered around belittling Ukraine's efforts, and its chances.

www.economist.com/graphic-deta...

Donald Trump’s envoys failed to reassure Europe A gathering of world leaders in Munich shows how trust has collapsed

"As a strategy for managing allies, the message 'You’re on your own, suckers, but do as America tells you', has a number of flaws."

Lovely lead from our geopolitics column, The Telegram.
www.economist.com/internationa...

Danish PM on Facebook this morning:

“I am happy to live in a country where there is free and equal access to healthcare for everyone. Where insurance and wealth do not determine whether you receive proper treatment. The same approach exists in Greenland. Happy Sunday to you all”

Trump demands Netflix remove former Obama official from board US president steps back into fight between streamer and Paramount Skydance to acquire Warner Bros Discovery

This is not a free-enterprise party. This is a big-business-buddies party. Not the same thing, at all.

www.ft.com/content/1658...

‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks Karen Newton was in America on the trip of a lifetime when she was shackled, transported and held for weeks on end. With tourism to the US under increasing strain, she says, ‘If it can happen to me, i...

A retired British primary school administrator with a British passport and a valid visa was shackled, chained and detained for six weeks by ICE

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

I haven’t read the other statutes. But if they give the admin the power to do a thing, we have to lump it until we change it. That’s democracy. At least that would be the rule of (a bad) law.

Have already seen several versions of this, as if tariffs don’t hit workers.

So much of the news has felt unreal—a nightmare, a bad trip or you name it—that it is bracing to see the decision restore some semblance of reality.

Presidents can’t do this. Congress has powers. Words have meanings.

This is an excellent analysis by Sophie of a great European conundrum. French leaders, from De Gaulle, through Chirac to Macron, have been prescient about the need for greater European independence from the US. They are getting grudging, belated credit from other Europeans. BUT…1/

In what sport??

I get this when I try at the moment. Perhaps OpenAI have already fixed this or maybe it’s very sensitive to the query you put.

Can you show the questions you put to ChatGPT and Google? (Not razzing you in particular, but I think this should be standard practice when people show the chatbots doing dumb things.)

(No, nobody in the family speaks Slovenian. I looked them up.)

Because Slovenian (like other Slavic languages) allows r to be the nucleus of a syllable, like a vowel, these are all real words.

When your cabin only has Scrabble in Slovenian.

Engraved on a red heart shape: Roses are red, violets are blue, singular they's older than singular you.

A timely valentine from Dr Grammar: pronouns have histories.

That, and do people think the voting patterns of regular NYT readers *are*? There’s a folk belief around here that the Times and its apologists are right wing. My only question is whether Times readers are 90–10, 95-5 or 98-2 Democrat.