Day: October 21, 2019

The effects of President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from northern Syria continue to ripple throughout the country and into the broader Middle East. The last 24 hours saw a major shift in the way the US will handle the crisis there over the coming weeks.

US troops withdrew to Iraq early Monday morning as part of the Syria drawdown, leaving less as allies than abandoners: Kurds in both countries threw rotten fruit and stones at the 500-strong convoy. While American forces will continue to combat ISIS from there, regional Kurds are upset that US military power won’t …

The gray wolf has always been a point of controversy in Western culture. Children’s stories are filled with menacing “big, bad wolves” threatening to eat innocent children or destroy the houses of some hard-working little pigs. The hatred for this predator spans centuries, so it’s no surprise that when European settlers came to the United States, eradicating the wolf was high on their to-do list.

Wolves were largely seen as pests. Teddy Roosevelt referred to them as “beasts of waste and desolation.” By the end of the 19th century, early livestock lobbyists called for wolves to be …

There’s absolutely no need to read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s 12-issue graphic novel to understand what’s going on in HBO’s new Watchmen series. It’s set in 2019, decades after the events of the novel, and doesn’t focus on those characters (at least so far). In fact, most of graphic novel is equally homaged and spoofed with Watchmen having its own show within a show, called American Hero Story.

But knowing what happens in the source material makes the viewing experience much richer, weirder, and more intriguing. Spotting the references to the original Watchmen challenges viewers to fill …

Watchmen’s series premiere, officially titled “It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice,” is a slick piece of television. The episode skillfully blends real-world fears — the specter of white nationalism is invoked more than once — with the comic book trappings of the show’s source material. The Nite Owl ship from the comic (well, probably not the Nite Owl ship, but a lookalike) makes a brief appearance. And people talk about how Doctor Manhattan lives on Mars.

Yet if you’ve never read the comic, you’ll be able to follow along just fine. And even if you have …