Polio Ravaged My Family. Forget Its Horror at Your Peril
Jana Kozlowski, The Free Press

“Those are your two brothers,” she said. “They died of polio.”

On October 21, 1945, two and a half years before my mom was born, her brother—my uncle, Ronald Winard—died of polio at the age of three. Four days later, his older brother, Howard, died at the age of seven.

“Are they in heaven?” my mother remembers asking. She never forgot the answer that came back: “No, they are in the ground.”

The Most Alarming Development Yet
ABC’s decision to settle a defamation suit with Trump represents a truly ominous moment.
William Kristol and Jim Swift
There’s been plenty to be alarmed about in the six weeks since Donald Trump’s election. But nothing has been more alarming than the announcement Saturday of ABC’s settlement of Trump’s defamation lawsuit. This was a true fire bell in the Trumpist night, an awful herald of so much that may lie ahead

The German Model is Failing
The country is in its deepest crisis since World War II. Neither Angela Merkel nor her successors have any idea how to fix it.
Yascha Mounk

I came away from reading Merkel’s memoir fully convinced that she is as decent as she is dogged. But when Merkel starts to discuss the key turning points of her time in office, a feeling of tragedy descends. Although she always strived to do the right thing, she ultimately got nearly everything wrong—a lesson she refuses to learn to this day. “If it helps someone to say, ‘It was Merkel’s fault,’ then let them do that,” she sullenly suggested at the official presentation of her book in Berlin. “I just don’t think that’s going to help the country.”

Taiwan and the Lessons from Ukraine
My latest piece for the Lowy Institute explores just some of the lessons that the government of Taiwan is learning from its observations of the war in Ukraine.
Mick Ryan, Futura Doctrina

A key lesson for Taiwan in the past three years has been the maintenance of national will. This has political, military and societal elements. Significant effort has been invested to improve military and civil defence capacity, while expanding the interaction between the two. As Taiwan’s representative in Australia, Douglas Hsu, told me in a recent interview, the Taiwanese government has “strengthened civil defence capabilities, including mobilisation, human resource deployment, training, and emergency preparedness. This aims to ensure prompt response to emergencies or dynamic changes in disasters, enhancing civilians’ self-defence and self-rescue capabilities to maintain social safety and order.”

The Rich, The Powerful, The Cowardly
We are witnessing media companies, journalists and billionaires bowing down to Trump and his hostile takeover—seeking access, favors and security. They are doing us a favor.
Steven Beschloss, America, America

On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder warned us. “Do not obey in advance,” he wrote, explaining that those who do are teaching authoritarians what they can get away with. But not everyone who should have gotten the message has heard him. Here are just a few examples:

• ABC News journalist George Stephanopoulos said in May, “I am not going to be cowed out of doing my job because of a threat by Donald Trump,” and Stephen Colbert’s late night audience gave him a rousing ovation. Yet on Saturday, Stephanopoulos and his employer ABC News settled Trump’s defamation lawsuit with an agreement to donate $15 million to a Trump presidential library (seriously), pay $1 million to cover Trump’s attorneys’ fees and publish a statement regretting that he used the word rape even though—as he noted in May—”a judge said that’s in fact what did happen.”

There is power in a union
And other Billy Bragg songs we sang on the Guardian’s picket line
Carole Cadwalladr, The Power

The Guardian’s decision to gift a chunk of its news organisation to a rival into which it intends to funnel £5m of readers’ money continues to baffle all onlookers. Yesterday, Oliver Shah, the Sunday Times’s business editor, chimed in with an article in which he compared the Guardian’s management to the disgraced retail magnate, Sir Philip Green and said the deal defied all financial and strategic logic. In an article with many choice lines, this was the standout:

‘Tortoise is a thinly capitalised vanity project in search of a commercial model.’