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On August 15, 2021, the Taliban took over Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul. The Afghan president fled the country. Almost all of Afghanistan is now under Taliban control. It marks the end of an era: America’s longest war is now over, and America lost. It happened fast, stunning the world and leaving many in the country racing […]

The global supply chain is in hot water. The pandemic has made it notoriously difficult for shoppers to buy certain consumer goods, from home appliances and furniture to laptops and bicycles. And things aren’t getting better anytime soon, at least not this year. Shipments have been delayed, raw materials are in short supply, and businesses […]

In December 2018, I visited a large dyeing facility inside the Shaoxing Industrial Zone, south of the coastal city of Hangzhou, China. Twenty minutes out from the manufacturing hub, I began to smell it: the rotten-egg stench of dye effluent. The Zone, as it’s known, is 100 square kilometers, nearly double the size of Manhattan. […]

By removing all troops from Afghanistan shortly before the 9/11 attacks’ 20th anniversary, President Joe Biden sent a none-too-subtle message: He wanted America, and the world, to see that he was turning the page — that the war on terror era was well and truly over. In a speech last week justifying his decision, he […]

September 7 was Brazil’s Independence Day, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro used the occasion to continue his assault on the country’s democratic institutions. Bolsonaro had called on his hardcore supporters to rally, as he battles Congress and the judiciary over their refusal to go along with his attempts to rewrite electoral rules ahead of the […]

Covid-19 is upending our lives and forcing us to make complex decisions with little information and conflicting guidance from authorities. Summer, typically the season of staying up late and popsicles in the park, offers no escape. Many of us are already turning to the fall, and the fate of schools. What will we do with […]

Covid-19 testing in the US improved dramatically over the first half of 2020, but things now appear to be breaking down once more as coronavirus cases rise and outstrip capacity — to the point that the mayor of a major American city can’t get testing quickly enough to potentially avoid spreading the virus. “We FINALLY […]

In late March, when Covid-19 was first surging, Jake Suett, a doctor of anesthesiology and intensive care medicine with the National Health Service in Norfolk, England, had seen plenty of patients with the disease — and intubated a few of them. Then one day, he started to feel unwell, tired, with a sore throat. He […]

Many schools across the US gambled on offering in-person classes in early August, even as their states were still battling uncontrolled spread of Covid-19. In some of those schools, it hasn’t gone well. In Georgia’s Cherokee County School District, for example, there have been at least 80 positive cases since August 3, and more than […]

Part of the Escape Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world. Phil Nichols doesn’t get a lot of unannounced visitors at the long-term sober-living house in Cincinnati where he lives. The two US marshals waiting at the door on a March afternoon in 2018 told Nichols they had information […]