Politics

What happens when a Republican congressman turns his primary election into a referendum on Donald Trump? What happens when he turns it into a referendum on Israel? The answer to those questions should be stunningly obvious. There was never a reason to expect Kentucky to return a different verdict than anywhere else. Quite the contrary – it’s a staunchly red state. Asked to choose between Trump and a congressman who’d lately been garnering favorable coverage in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times, Republican voters were not about to abandon the president. The very things Thomas Massie’s newfound friends liked about him made him unacceptable to the people who actually vote in Republican primaries.

The long war in Ukraine has morphed into a new and decisive phase, one that could lead to Ukraine’s upset victory over its much larger, more aggressive neighbor. The global consequences of Russia’s loss – and Vladimir Putin’s humiliation – would be enormous. What is this new phase? Is there really evidence the tide has turned in Ukraine’s favor? To sort out the answers and understand what’s new about the war’s current phase, we need to do a brief tour of the three phases that preceded it. The first phase began well over a decade ago, in February 2014, when Barack Obama was president. Ukraine fatefully signaled it wanted much stronger ties with Europe and the United States, not Russia, at the very moment US deterrence was weak.

Middlemarch, which a Guardian poll of "experts" has named as the best novel ever, is overrated. I enjoyed reading it when I was seventeen. I probably re-read it in my twenties. Then I grew up. I became a bit more skeptical of the para-religious sentimentalism-on-stilts that defines George Eliot’s oeuvre, and this novel in particular. This is a pile of nonsense with a grain of truth in it Of course I was in love with Dorothea Brooke as a teenager. So high-minded, and considerate and so wisely accepting of her misfortunes, and rather pretty too. But nowadays she strikes me as a blue-stocking bore (I far prefer the feisty Gwendolyn from Daniel Deronda (partly thanks to Romola Garai’s portrayal of her). Let’s put it simply.