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Donald Trump responded to Philip Glass’s withdrawal of his Lincoln symphony from the Kennedy Center the way he usually does when confronted by someone of real stature: with a sour-grapes, self-aggrandizing rant. The tirade was petty, frivolous, and quickly forgotten. But the episode itself deserves attention because Trump’s insult, unsurprisingly, missed the broader point of Glass’s gesture.Glass, 89, a towering figure in modern composition whose place in the history of music is secure, did not merely pull a much-anticipated work that is likely his last symphony. He pointedly sounded the symphony’s theme as a direct protest to the dangerous authoritarian rule under Trump.Glass wrote, “Symphony No. 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the symphony.… Therefore, I feel an obligation to withdraw this symphony premiere from the Kennedy Center under its current leadership.” And he announced his withdrawal on January 27—exactly 188 years to the day after Lincoln gave the speech that inspired the symphony.Symphony No. 15, Lincoln, draws centrally from Lincoln’s 1838 Lyceum Address, generally considered his first great speech. Lincoln delivered the address to a group of young professionals in Springfield, Illinois, when he was just 28—an age when Trump was still shining his father’s shoes.Trump, who one suspects has never read the Lyceum speech or listened to a Glass symphony, viewed the gesture, as he invariably does, as a personal affront. In fact, it was far more. It incorporated Lincoln’s prescient warning about democratic collapse, a warning that lands with unsettling accuracy on the dangers of Trumpian rule.In the Lyceum, Lincoln was already grappling with the question of how republics fail. He begins by asking where the danger to American self-government will come from. Not from abroad, he insists. No foreign army, no invading conqueror, no modern Bonaparte. If destruction comes, Lincoln says, “it must spring up amongst us.” If the republic falls, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”Lincoln identifies the mechanism of that self-destruction with striking clarity. It begins with an “increasing disregard for law,” a willingness to substitute “wild and furious passions” for “the sober judgment of courts,” and the replacement of lawful authority with mobs. This condition, Lincoln warns, is “awfully fearful” in any community—and it would be an insult to intelligence to deny it where it exists.The specific outrages Lincoln recounts—lynchings, burnings, mob executions—belong to his era. But his insight is structural. The deepest danger of mob law, Lincoln explains, lies not in the immediate violence but in the example it sets. When lawlessness goes unpunished, “the lawless in spirit are encouraged to become lawless in practice.” Having known no restraint but fear of punishment, they become “absolutely unrestrained.” They come to regard government as their enemy, rejoice in the suspension of its operations, and “pray for nothing so much as its total annihilation.”Lincoln also warns of a subtler and more corrosive effect: habituation. As lawlessness persists, the public grows accustomed to it. What once shocked begins to seem normal. Expectations shift, standards erode, and defiance of lawful authority becomes ambient rather than exceptional behavior. This slow corrosion is what makes democratic collapse possible without a single dramatic rupture.At the same time, Lincoln observes, law-abiding citizens begin to lose faith. When rights are held only at the “caprice of a mob,” attachment to government erodes. A republic without the affection of its best citizens, Lincoln warns, cannot endure. The danger is not merely that the lawless grow bolder but that the lawful grow disenchanted.This dynamic, in turn, creates the opening for a particular kind of leader. When reverence for law collapses, Lincoln argues, men of ambition will not be lacking. Such figures seek distinction above all. And when the glory of building has already been claimed by others, these ambitious men will seek distinction by tearing down. Lincoln’s language is stark. A man of towering ambition, he says, will pursue fame “whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.”It’s impossible to read this description without seeing how exactly it fits Trump’s conduct. His contempt for law is not episodic or rhetorical; it is foundational. Courts matter only when they serve him. He casts legal accountability as persecution. He elevates loyalty over legality, impulse over judgment, grievance over governance. Mobs are not an aberration but a tool—summoned, legitimated, and excused. The result is precisely the “mobocratic spirit” Lincoln warned would rot a republic from within and prepare the ground for despotism.Lincoln’s remedy is as important as his diagnosis. He does not call for charismatic saviors or heroic leaders. He calls for simple “reverence for the laws”; what he famously terms, in high Enlightenment rhetoric, a “political religion.” Lincoln is explicit that bad laws may exist and should be repealed. But while they remain in force, they must be obeyed, for the sake of example. “There is no grievance,” he insists, “that is a fit object of redress by mob law.” The alternative is not liberty but a descent into lawlessness that invites tyranny.The Lyceum Address is not poetry but prose—a plainspoken diagnosis of how democracies fail. Lincoln identified contempt for law as the root condition of democratic collapse and traced how it hardens into despotism from within.Glass has long aligned his work with serious engagement in democratic and constitutional life, including by making his music available to projects devoted to sustained legal and civic discussion. He has also contributed his music to Talking Feds, the podcast I host. That Trump met Glass’s gesture with bullyboy insults only sharpened the contrast between Lincoln’s gravity and Trump’s intellectual unseriousness.Glass’s withdrawal was not a partisan gesture but a civic one: To premiere a work grounded in Lincoln’s defense of law under an institution now explicitly branded with Trump’s name would have recast the symphony as an endorsement of the very lawlessness it was written to oppose. Trump’s callow response only underscored the point. Lincoln warned that contempt for law is the republic’s gravest danger. Trump, without intending to, has demonstrated exactly why.

Some people marry to obtain U.S. citizenship, while others undergo a complex and pricey naturalization process. For Nicki Minaj, it was a simple matter of panhandling the Trump administration.The Trinidadian rapper turned MAGA activist has been begging for citizenship for months. In one particularly skin-crawling social media missive in November, Minaj whimpered to “Papi Trumpo” in a bid for “honorary citizenship.”On Wednesday, her dreams came true.Shortly after appearing beside the president for the unveiling of Trump Accounts—the White House’s attempt to slyly privatize Social Security—Minaj posted an image of her reward: a newly minted Trump “Gold Card” granting her legal residency and a pathway to citizenship.“Residency? Residency? The cope is coping,” Minaj posted Wednesday night alongside an image of the Chucky doll flashing a middle finger. “Finalizing that citizenship paperwork as we speak as per MY wonderful, gracious, charming President. “Gold Trump card free of charge,” she added.For months, Donald Trump and his team pitched his Amex-inspired “gold card” as a replacement for the EB-5 visa program, which gives foreign investors an opportunity to gain permanent residency and bypass the traditional visa system. But the $5 million price tag on the slice of plastic has sparked significant backlash, as did its questionable legality.The “gold card” program officially launched in late 2025, but the novel citizenship framework has come under fire by immigration experts, who have scrutinized the Trump administration’s decision to bypass standard congressional immigration law.Minaj took a hard-right turn toward MAGA avenue three months ago, when her vaccine skepticism—which by then had become a hallmark of the far right—veered into a larger conservative ideology. Since then, her “everything must go” sellout spree has morphed her into an administration mouthpiece. She has reposted White House messaging attacking trans kids, spoken at the United Nations on behalf of the Trump administration, chastised her own LGBTQ+ fans (after initially using her allyship to propel her music career), joined Erika Kirk at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, and attacked Democrats with the White House’s talking points.

When protesters experience repression and violence, whether or not they have legal education can help determine continued involvement in a protest movement.

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The huge find offered new insights into what is known as the “Cambrian explosion,” around 530 million years ago.

This article is adapted from Until the Last Gun Is Silent: A Story of Patriotism, the Vietnam War, and the Fight to Save America’s Soul (published January 2026 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, all rights reserved). Dwight “Skip” Johnson, 19, returned home from his shift at a General […]

Two series in 2016, two paths for serial television. The first is Stranger Things.Stranger Things debuted on Netflix in the summer of 2016. That’s a long time in human years, but even longer in TV years. The show was only the seventh non-MCU original drama the platform had produced—it was early enough that Netflix was still in experimental mode, fishing around for prestige but also a firm identity to rival the Premium Cable giants that still monopolized the conversation. With Stranger Things, more than any of the other original series of that era, Netflix seemed to find both. While technically an original concept, the show’s calling card was always its intense, nonstop, nostalgic referentiality. From its first frames, Stranger Things was a pastiche, paying homage to Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, and the terrifying suburban landscape of 1980s horror cinema. The show was derivative, but that was its genius.Ten years later, Stranger Things has finally come to an end, but Netflix has been reborn in its image. Netflix knows what you like to watch, with sweeping data on your viewing habits and algorithmic anticipation of your moods, and Stranger Things’ naked appeals to the most beloved media objects of your childhood helped the streamer realize it could simply produce content that it already knows you’ll like. At the time, there was a lot of consternation about shows like Stranger Things and USA Network’s cult hit Mr. Robot being too derivative, too tethered to texts its audiences had already consumed. But Stranger Things seemingly broke the seal, its popularity normalizing this kind of creative approach, intimate emotional narrowcasting. As Aaron Bady wrote in his review of the show’s first season, “when have we last seen such a lack of anxiety when it comes to influence?” As the decade has wound on, we’ve watched the rise of an industrywide obsession with existing IP—reboots and revivals and extended universes. What Stranger Things helped Netflix understand was that the most valuable, reliable existing IP is the data you give to your favorite streaming service.Just a few weeks after the finale of Stranger Things, another series from 2016 has shockingly come back to life. AMC co-produced the John le Carré adaptation The Night Manager 10 years ago with the BBC as part of the rising tide of limited series anchored by A-list movie stars and helmed by acclaimed film directors. HBO had scored a hit in this micro-genre two years earlier with True Detective, and the massive sensation of Big Little Lies would explode the following year. Airing in the interregnum between these two major successes, The Night Manager—starring Tom Hiddleston, face gleaming from the reflected light of Thor and the Avengers—was a clear proof of concept that this was a repeatable approach.As planned, The Night Manager finished its limited run, releasing its stars back into the world. But, 10 years later, it’s back. Hiddleston’s star has dimmed a bit in the past decade, but this new iteration of The Night Manager—based on an original story only “inspired by” le Carré’s original novel—strangely feels more indebted to Stranger Things than to its own predecessor. Reemerging in 2026, the show is less a star vehicle or a prestige adaptation or a tribute to le Carré than it is a sometimes elegant, sometimes egregious mash-up of recent popular media phenomena, from Slow Horses to Challengers. It is content adapted from your viewing data more than anything else. Ten years later, this is The Night Manager in the Upside Down.John le Carré, who died in 2020, apparently had an idea for the second season of The Night Manager. According to Simon Cornwell, le Carré’s son, after the first season’s success, the author sent a note to producers with a few ideas sketched out for where and how a sequel might emerge. Cornwell, who is himself an executive producer on the show, won’t reveal his father’s concept, but he has certainly been willing to divulge one detail: They threw it out.The initial 2016 adaptation of The Night Manager was already a dramatic departure from its source text. The new series brought the novel from its 1990s setting into the present, changed some significant locations, traded out Colombian drug lords for Middle Eastern warlords as the big bads, and gender-swapped a main character, but otherwise executed and enlivened le Carré’s outline in a way the author himself publicly lauded. The Night Manager’s first season told the story of Jonathan Pine (Hiddleston), a British army veteran working as the night manager of a ritzy hotel in Cairo at the height of the Arab Spring in the early 2010s. Pine is diligent, discreet, and devoted to his service work at the hotel. It’s this fastidiousness, as well as his ability to serve as a kind of handsome cipher—a symbol of Western elegance and convenience to late-arriving guests—more than his military past that make him suited to the kind of espionage he soon finds himself swept up in.His lover is murdered at the hotel, but only after passing along paperwork that proves billionaire philanthropist Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie) to be an international arms smuggler. Roper gets away with it, despite Pine’s efforts to involve the British Foreign Office. To deal with his grief, Pine leaves Africa for Switzerland, where, four years later, he runs into Roper again. Working with Angela Burr (Olivia Colman), his contact in the Foreign Office, Pine goes undercover to infiltrate Roper’s family and his organization. He becomes a mentee to Roper and secret lover to Roper’s wife, calmly walking a tightrope but ultimately bringing Roper down.The second season—now on Amazon Prime Video rather than AMC—takes place nine years after the first. Pine has taken on a new identity and now works directly for British intelligence. Out of action, he’s got a desk job leading a ragtag group of agents called the Night Owls, who specialize in nocturnal surveillance operations. If this sounds anything like Apple TV’s recent hit spy series Slow Horses to you, that’s likely not a coincidence. While this MI6-on-the-margins drama lasts only a short time, it manages to completely reinvent Pine in a way that subverts some of what made the original Night Manager so compelling. For one, Pine is never really alone in this new season. As he infiltrates a Colombian crime organization with apparent ties to the old Roper syndicate—and possibly the British intelligence service itself!—he goes deep undercover yet again. But, this time, he’s got the support of some of his Night Owls as well as some loyal agents higher up the food chain. Pine gets caught in a number of sticky wickets throughout the new season, but rarely do we find him as completely isolated and helpless as he was in the first series. This adventure feels meaningfully less dangerous than the last.The Night Manager has gone from a series about a regular guy who must survive only on his wits and charm to one about a regular spy who’s doing spy stuff.It’s also both goofier and more professional. No longer drawing on the skills of a good hotelier, Pine now draws on—checks notes—six years of managerial experience in British intelligence. The Night Manager has gone from a series about a regular guy who must survive only on his wits and charm to one about a regular spy who’s doing spy stuff. This might seem like a quibble, but it’s part of a larger move away from the idiosyncratic specificity of the first season into a kind of generic blandness. Where le Carré’s twists came consistently by surprise, you’ll spot the twists in season two from a mile away. By the time each of the principals is introduced—Hiddleston’s Pine alongside Diego Calva’s kingpin Teddy Dos Santos and Camila Morrone’s compromised femme fatale Roxana Bolaños—their turns will be eminently guessable to any viewer who’s ever watched a spy TV show. The vistas are gorgeous, some of the performances are fun—in particular, Indira Varma as the chief of MI6—but what you’ll find is a smoothed-over caper in a sexy outfit. As the mystery unfolds, the question you’ll ask yourself most is an unanswerable one: What was John le Carré’s idea after all? As it tunneled further and further into its own lore, Stranger Things lost a good bit of its early crackling energy. What it became is what a lot of Netflix shows ultimately became: comfort food. Beginning as a mesh of nostalgic symbols, the show itself became an object of nostalgia. When many of the show’s most devoted viewers began watching, they were the same age as its tween protagonists. Much has been made of how unnaturally old that cast looked by the end of the series, but the same is true of its audience. What kind of experience is it to be a 22-year-old watching the long-awaited series finale of a show you started watching when you were 12? Among the top-line emotions, I imagine one of them is comfort: the comfort of seeing your old friends one more time, of disappearing into a world that captivates you as an adult but helped define your adolescence.One would not usually describe the works of John le Carré as “comfortable.” Indeed, if there’s a distinguishing feature of his oeuvre, especially those novels of his that have been adapted for the screen, it’s a pronounced sense of discomfort. His stories are potboilers of bureaucracy, compromise, devastating defeat, and Pyrrhic victory. His greatest works are thrilling but disquieting. You don’t finish Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy feeling comforted. And yet, for all its dark turns, this second season of The Night Manager is a comfortable affair. It hits all the right beats, from knotty departmental drama to basic cable erotica, but it does so without much friction or sense of fun. In 2016, The Night Manager, with its big names and auteur sensibility, prophesied a newly ambitious era of TV. In 2026, it feels a little old.

The push to reshape education has gained considerable momentum under the second Trump administration.