Earl O'Garro

The country turns two hundred and fifty years old today. That is not a small number. Most countries do not last two hundred and fifty years, and the ones that do are the ones that were willing to argue with themselves in the open, out loud, at the kitchen table, in the courthouse, and on the anniversary of their own founding. So I want to argue with mine today, in the way arguments with family are offered on birthdays, which is to say with the door still open and the coat sti

Three Septembers ago, before mBridge had cleared its first sixty billion dollars and before the President of the United States had signed an order forbidding the federal government from so much as studying a sovereign digital dollar, I wrote that the political convulsions then crossing the African continent looked, to my eye, like the opening of a window. The regime changes in Niger and in Gabon, the cracking of old French commercial arrangements, the visible exhaustion of th

There is a particular kind of grief reserved for the moment a man who knew better decides, in full view of the country, to pretend he did not. It is not the grief of the fool, who never understood. It is the grief of watching understanding itself bend, quietly, under the weight of a title and a flag and the warm approval of powerful rooms. Consider Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon's chief of policy, who spent the better part of two decades teaching anyone who would listen that th

There is a particular American habit, older than any of us and more durable than our memory, of beginning a thing we do not intend to finish and calling the beginning a victory. We did it again this winter. On the twenty-eighth of February, under the name Operation Epic Fury, the United States and Israel opened the largest air campaign the region had seen since the buildings of Baghdad came down in 2003, and a country that had spent the cold months watching the Iranian regime