Julia Ioffe

1 week ago | puck.news | Julia Ioffe

To hear its founders tell it, the Ben Franklin Fellowship began as a scrappy, outsider effort to get conservatives their own cafeteria table at the very progressive, and very cliquey, Department of State. “There were a lot of these affinity groups,” recalled Simon Hankinson, a former longtime diplomat. There were groups for Black foreign service officers, gay officers, for women, and for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

2 weeks ago | puck.news | Julia Ioffe

On Monday, while flying back from Rome, Vice President J.D. Vance offered reporters his take on the war in Ukraine. “I think, honestly, that President Putin, he doesn’t quite know how to get out of the war,” Vance said aboard Air Force Two. “He’s got a million men under arms. He’s reengineered his entire economy. What used to be manufacturing facilities making products for people to use in their civilian lives are now making tank shells and artillery shells and drones.

3 weeks ago | puck.news | Julia Ioffe

On Monday afternoon, a group of 59 white Afrikaners waving American flags arrived at Dulles International Airport, just outside the U.S. capital. On his first day in office, Trump had frozen the admission of all other refugees, including people who had been vetted and approved, and who were already packing their bags, both literally and metaphorically.

3 weeks ago | puck.news | Julia Ioffe

Earlier this week, I got to moderate a panel on Russia’s future at the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles, featuring some of the best minds working on Russia today. We had a practitioner: Eric Green, who was the senior director for Russia on the National Security Council during the first half of the Biden administration (and at the beginning of the war).

1 month ago | puck.news | Julia Ioffe

It’s been 100 days of Trump, and the administration is, as another strongman of history once wrote, “dizzy with success.” The U.S. government is now deporting American citizen children with cancer; American universities are losing multibillion-dollar grants for life-saving research under the threadbare guise of fighting antisemitism; measles are back and burning through the country; the stock market has had its worst 100 days of any presidency since Gerald Ford took office; and G.D.P., ruddy...