Dwight Eisenhower is said to have counseled that if a problem can't be solved, you should enlarge it.

Is Vladimir Putin now applying that maxim perversely? I'll bet you a ruble the CIA thinks so.

The problem Mr. Putin can't solve is, of course, Ukraine. In 2014, the Russian strongman invaded, occupied, and annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula. The "international community" merely tut-tutted.

In August 2021, Mr. Putin witnessed President Biden's shambolic and shameful withdrawal from Afghanistan. I'm convinced that led him to believe the U.S. was in retreat and posed no obstacle to his neo-imperialist ambitions.

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In a small museum in northern Azerbaijan sit two objects that tell a surprisingly long story. They are a pair of tefillin so tiny that the black boxes are barely a centimeter wide. During the Soviet era, when openly observing Judaism invited trouble, Jews could conceal them beneath a hat or sleeve.

Today, the tefillin are displayed in the Museum of Mountain Jews in Qırmızı Qəsəbə, or Red Village, across the Kudyal River from the Muslim city of Quba. The museum occupies the restored Karchag Synagogue and opened in 2020.

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President Donald Trump has tried everything from negotiations to military force to blunt Tehran's nuclear, missile, and regional aspirations. He has now settled on economic pressure. The president deserves significant credit for his willingness to tackle this challenge, including his decision to strike the Islamic Republic with the aid of the Israelis earlier this year.

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Fifty years ago today, Ronald Reagan gave one of the most important speeches of his life. While speaking to the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri, Reagan asked a powerful question: What would people of the future think if they opened a time capsule in 100 years? Would they believe Americans had met the challenges of the moment?

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Great Britain's revolving door of prime ministers accelerated in June with the resignation of Keir Starmer, its 6th leader 10 years. As Andy Burnham, the popular former mayor of Manchester, hovered in the wings, and Starmer's approval ratings plunged to an all-time low, the former prime minister was living on borrowed time.

Weak and indecisive and with his domestic policies in shambles, the media had nicknamed him Keir Stumbler.

And then there was his embarrassing feud with President Donald J. Trump over defense and foreign policy.

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This has been a terrible year for the higher education industrial complex. Among the many crises are a year and a half of assaults by the Trump administration against research grants and foreign money, discriminatory hiring and admissions policies and reliance on foreign students.

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Pope Leo XIV began an official visit to Spain (June 6–12) by urging Spaniards to embrace multicultural coexistence with Islam and stop "fanning the flames of polarization" over mass migration from the Muslim world. He said that Christians and Muslims can live together as friends and proceeded to present medieval Spain—which was occupied by Islamic invaders for nearly 800 years—as an interfaith utopia that led to advancements in astronomy, medicine, and science.

The Pope declared:

"Your own history suggests that a culture of encounter, not confrontation, is what fosters stability and prosperity....

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A century ago, the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard and one of the founders of the NAACP, W.E.B. DuBois published The Gift of Black Folk, a book that was commissioned by the Catholic organization the Knights of Columbus, as part of a series intended to help Americans appreciate the contributions of minority groups.

DuBois was highly educated and an avid reader of great texts from Plato to Frederick Douglass. The irony of the present moment is that if DuBois were currently a student in a core philosophy class at Texas A&M University, he would be assigned only a redacted version of Plato's great work, The Republic.

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Imagine your physician walks into the exam room, recommends a prescription medication, and casually mentions she's being paid by the company that makes the drug to say so. You'd probably have questions.

You might even find a new doctor.

Now imagine that same scenario playing out on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube — except the advice is coming from a celebrity "influencer" who's very familiar to you, who has an emotional backstory, and a financial arrangement buried somewhere in a sea of hashtags. Millions of people encounter exactly this situation every day, and most of them have no idea it's happening.

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ANYONE WHO spends time with me knows me knows how much I despise litter. For as long as I can remember, I have fumed at the sight of trash on sidewalks, beer cans in the gutter, or garbage flung from passing cars. I often pick up litter when I'm walking, and when my kids were young I made them pick it up, too.

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