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- Return of the Shaman
Manvir Singh’s new Shamanism: The Timeless Religion ranges widely, introducing us to all sorts of shamans and neo-shamans and proto-shamans. We meet the cigarette-loving tribal healers among the Mentawai people of Indonesia, whom Singh, an anthropologist, has studied since 2014. We meet the psychiatry and medicine professor at Johns Hopkins who reckons that his clinical interventions and against-the-odds healings are the stuff of classic shamanic practice. And we meet the money managers and “hedge wizards” who traffic quasi-shamanically with the capricious spirits of the global market.It’s a panoramic survey: Singh has done the fieldwork, the legwork, and the drugwork. (“Then, with the immediacy of waking up, my trip ended. I became aware of my surroundings. People were watching us through the doorway. Vomit was everywhere.”) But his book lacks something I need—namely, an account of how neo-shamanism and its visionary baggage have looped around into conspiracy theory and burn-it-down far-rightism.… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago - The Visionary of Trump 2.0The opening act of Donald Trump’s second term was defined by the theatrical dismantling of much of the federal government by Elon Musk and his group of tech-savvy demolitionists. Everywhere you looked in those first 100 days, it seemed, Musk’s prestidigitation was on display. Look there—it’s Elon in a black MAGA hat waving around a chain saw onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Look here—it’s Elon introducing Fox News viewers to a teenage software engineer nicknamed “Big Balls” whom he’d hired to help slash the government. The performance had a certain improvised quality—pink slips dispersed and then hastily withdrawn, entire agencies mothballed overnight—and after a while, it started to feel like a torqued-up sequel to Trump’s first term: governance replaced by chaos and trolling.But that version of the story misses a key character: Russell Vought.Behind all the DOGE pyrotechnics, Vought—who serves as director of the Office of Management and… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
- The MAGA-World Rift Over Trump’s Qatari JetAs Air Force One glided into Doha today, it was easy to imagine President Donald Trump having a case of jet envy.Hamad International Airport, in Qatar’s capital, is sometimes home to the $400 million “palace in the sky,” a luxury liner that Trump is eyeing. Qatar’s royal family plans to give the plane to Trump as a temporary replacement for the aging Air Force One and then to his future presidential library after he leaves office. The Qatari aircraft was in Texas, not Doha, during the tarmac welcome ceremony that Trump received on the second stop of his Middle East trip. But questions about the gift’s security and ethics have shadowed the entire week.Trump has privately defended accepting the Qatari plane as a replacement for the current Air Force One, which dates to 1990. He has told aides and advisers that it is “humiliating” for the president of the United… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
- The ‘Amateur Diplomat’
Steve Witkoff emptied his backpack on the conference table in his second-floor office, in the West Wing. He wanted to show me a pager given to him by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior officials of the Mossad. The pager commemorates the intricate operation in which Israel detonated handheld devices used by Hezbollah, the Iranian-sponsored Lebanese militant group, killing or maiming thousands of its operatives.Witkoff located the gadget amid a tangle of electronics he uses to communicate abroad in his role as America’s shadow secretary of state. The back of the pager, he proudly told me, carries an inscription: Dear Steve, friend of the state of Israel. And then the acronym OTJ, for “One Tough Jew.”If one definition of Jewish toughness is the willingness to stand up to Netanyahu, who has frustrated American presidents going back to the days of Bill Clinton, then Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s special envoy… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago - The Cynical Republican Plan to Cut MedicaidA generation ago, the Republican Party’s preferred symbol of government-funded indolence was the “welfare queen,” a quasi-mythical figure who collected checks to sit at home watching television. Today’s GOP has fixated on an even stranger target: unemployed adults who take advantage of the taxpayer by collecting free … health insurance.The fiscal centerpiece of the “big, beautiful bill” now making its way through Congress is to take Medicaid away from jobless adults. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the work requirement would save $300 billion over a decade and take health insurance from 7.6 million people. This would not come close to offsetting the deficit-exploding effects of extending and expanding the 2017 tax cut, but it’s one of the only big spending reductions the congressional Republican caucus can agree on.[Jessica Riedl: Congressional Republicans might set off the debt bomb]Supporters depict work requirements as a matter of fairness and proper incentives. In… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
- America Is the Land of Opportunity—For White South Africans
When the welcome ceremony was over, and the Trump officials drove off in their black SUVs, a dozen or so newly arrived South African refugees stepped out into the parking lot of a private terminal at Washington Dulles International Airport yesterday afternoon, still carrying little paper flags they’d been handed. Now it was time for a smoke.Will Hartzenberg, a tall, sunworn 44-year-old farmer from the Limpopo region in the country’s north, was on his way to Idaho with his family to start a new life. “Relief,” he told me, when asked what he felt. “We are really relieved.”Hartzenberg said his wife, Carmen, had teased him for worrying whether it was safe to leave their young children inside the building while they stepped out for a cigarette. He needed to learn to let down his guard, he figured. “This is not South Africa, where you have to take your children with… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
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