Two Senate races from the November 3 midterms are still uncalled, a full week after election day: Alaska and Mississippi. Saturday’s anchor on this page walked through what to expect in both of them, and what it expected was a wait. The wait is what happened. Here is where the counting stands tonight.
Continue readingPicture a demon. Horns, wings, a tail, red skin, maybe a pitchfork — every horror movie draws the same creature, and every Halloween costume rack sells it. Dr. Matthew Larsen, a historian of early Christianity at the University of Copenhagen, recently spent a fifteen-minute video asking where that picture came from. The answer turns out to be stranger than the costume: the parts are older than the Bible itself — and the Bible, the book you’d expect to settle the question, never describes a demon at all.
Last month I wrote a short post called The Proof is Out There (But Not Where You Think) about an exchange on X. The Pope had condemned capital punishment, plainly and in so many words. Commenters answered with New Testament verses they said proved the death penalty biblical. My objection then, and now, was simple: read the verses they offered, and not one of them said “capital punishment.” Not one of them said “execution.” I linked a Dan McClellan video and left it there, which was doing the thing I complain about — handing my readers homework instead of an argument. So here is the argument, in full, in my own words.
I watched a soccer match from England this morning, and before a ball was kicked, the whole stadium stood in silence for the war dead. A bugler played the Last Post — their version of Taps. The players had poppies ironed onto their jerseys. In the television studio, every presenter wore a little poppy pin. It’s like that all over Britain this time of year, for weeks. You cannot miss it.
Continue reading
Yesterday in Jerusalem, Israel’s president handed Gadi Eisenkot the job of forming a government. The recommendations ran 67 for Eisenkot, 46 for Benjamin Netanyahu, and if the score were the story, the story would be over. It isn’t — because 67 recommendations are not 61 seats, and the distance between those two numbers is where this now lives.
Continue reading