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Let's say you're wandering through the grocery store, packing your basket with ingredients for another chicken thigh dinner, when all of a sudden, you get an email in your inbox encouraging you to make, hmmmm… esquites.
You've speedrun through the store and collected corn, cotija, crema, and cayenne pepper. Congratulations! Not only have you shopped, but you've also completed a side quest.
This is perhaps the most fun of the slang words currently seeping out of video games and into everyday life, a trend Gen Z linguist Adam Alexic explains in another commentary on how young people speak:
There are a few things you might want to try: “Spawns” are unexpected appearances, “Side Quests” are surprise tasks, and “Speed ​​Runs” are completing trials quickly.
Before you resort to archaic slang, consider that it's simply a new interpretation of how language has always worked. You may think you're free from archaic slang, but if you tell your spouse that you “failed” to find that cotija, you're also using game slang — slang for baseball, which was once the hot new game in town.
Two bad boys like Russia and North Korea getting along sounds like something out of a B-grade video game, but Max Boot writes that the recent Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between the two countries gives a very real impetus to the growing “alliance of evil” that Israeli academic Yoel Guzansky describes as cooperation between Russia, Iran, North Korea and China.
Max details the web of arms transfers, economic aid, and other support that these autocracies provide to one another. It is complex and extensive. “The world's leading illiberal countries, recognizing their convergence of interests, are moving closer to undermine the rules-based international order,” he writes. “The democratic world must respond with as much unity as the autocracies are showing.”
While all this is happening in the open, Russia is waging a “covert campaign of sabotage and hybrid warfare against supporters of Ukraine” in the shadows, reports David Ignatius.
What does this mean? David points to the arson attacks on Ukrainian-owned warehouses in the UK and Spain, and planned attacks on supply lines to Ukraine from Europe. Even civilians in Poland and the Czech Republic appear to be at risk of being targeted by Russia, he warns.
President Vladimir Putin is clearly climbing the ladder of provocation, and “with each step higher the risk of one wrong step increases,” David writes.
Chaser: In another column, David examines how the White House had to balance sanctions on Russian oil with domestic inflation concerns.
From Kate Cohen's column about the proposed Arkansas Unborn Baby Memorial: Kate thinks of everyone who has experienced an ectopic pregnancy, who has attempted a self-abortion, and who has endured the depression and illness that comes with carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term.
“We will never know how many lives Dobbs has altered, stunted, constrained, and burdened,” she writes. “How many educations have been postponed or denied, how many careers have been ruined, how many families have been shattered.”
These countless victims deserve our attention, and Kate ponders with poignancy what their memorial might be.
The Chaser: A cartoon by Ann Ternes about what it really means when the state of Louisiana mandates that the Ten Commandments be placed in every classroom.
The trajectory of the UK Conservative Party ahead of the July 4 general election is not only a disaster to look away from, but it may also tempt you to fly across the ocean to see it for yourself. Fareed Zakaria has done just that.
Fareed diagnoses the problems of the Conservative Party (which polls suggest will win only 50 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons) as, first, a loss of seriousness, and, second, a loss of identity. The British right is fragmenting, he writes, as politics move “from a left-right division over the economy to an open-closed division centered around cultural issues like immigration, identity and multiculturalism.”
But what's most interesting to Fareed is the strategy behind Labor's star power, one that should interest President Biden and the Democrats if they want to win this fall's elections, he writes.
A key Arab ally is losing democracy, the editorial board writes, but Biden remains silent. Megan McArdle writes that now is the perfect time to repeal a tax deduction hated by economists and loved by real estate agents. Israel's definition of war victory is too broad, the U.S.'s is too narrow. The two countries need to compromise, write former U.S. government officials Dennis Ross and David Makovsky.
It's goodbye. It's a haiku. It's… “goodbye.”
Complete a successful voting speed run
And what's more, instead of Friday, I'd like to go into a bit more detail.
Post Opinions wants to know how global warming has changed how you think about summer. New gardening choices? Have your cooking habits changed? (Do you like esquites more?) Write it here, and we might use your answers in an upcoming project.
Please email me with any questions, comments or concerns you may have. Have a great weekend!
