On August 11, 2014, officers from the Caldwell, Idaho Police Department asked for Shaniz West's permission to enter and search her home. They were looking for her ex-boyfriend. West authorized the search and handed over her keys.

Dr Bandy Lee, a psychiatrist affiliated with Yale University, posits a "'shared psychosis' among just about all of Donald Trump's followers." Her claim came in the context of a discussion of Alan Dershowitz's use of the word "perfect" to describe his sex life, mirroring Trump's use of that word regarding a well-known phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

In March of 1804, French dragoons secretly crossed the Rhine into the German Margraviate of Baden. Acting on orders from Napoleon himself, they kidnapped Louis Antoine de Bourbon, Duke of Enghien. After a hastily-convened court-martial on charges of bearing arms against France, the duke was shot. "C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute," a French official (supposedly, but probably not, Talleyrand) said of the duke's execution: "It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake."

As the calendar prepared to flip from 2019 to 2020, protesters stormed the US embassy in Baghdad. As I write this, the action — a response to US airstrikes in Iraq and Syria which killed at least 25 and wounded more than 50 — hasn't yet become a reprise of the Iran hostage crisis of 40 years ago, but it's eerily reminiscent. Although few Americans seem to notice, Iraq is arguably the second-longest war in US history.