Photographs by Tarina Rodriguez
The Decapolis Hotel advertises “spacious suites & ocean views” in a business area in Panama City. The glass tower is also one of the few hotels in the city that can accommodate 299 people on short notice. When three planes carrying non-Panamanian deportees arrived in mid-February from the United States, the Decapolis redirected its guests to partner hotels and turned over its trendy lobby to armed security personnel, who ensured that no one could get in or out.

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Why defend academic freedom even when the ideas in question are wrongheaded or harmful? “It is precisely because any kind of purge opens the gate to all kinds of purge, that freedom of thought necessarily means the freedom to think bad thoughts as well as good.

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Updated at 5:44 p.m. ET on May 22, 2025.
When Hamas stormed across the Gaza border on October 7, 2023, it knew exactly what it was doing. The group had detailed maps of nearby Israeli military bases and forces, and quickly overran them. But the terrorist group did not stop there.

Final Destination, as a horror franchise, is known for its reliable results. Each of its first five movies begins with someone having a premonition of a terrible disaster (a plane crash, a highway pileup, a roller-coaster accident), persuading a group to avoid it, and then spending the rest of the movie dodging the Grim Reaper, who seeks to collect the souls he lost. Death exists in these films as an amorphous concept; there’s no cloaked villain carrying a scythe.

Sorry to tell you this, but Google’s new AI shopping tool appears eager to give J. D. Vance breasts. Allow us to explain.
This week, at its annual software conference, Google released an AI tool called Try It On, which acts as a virtual dressing room: Upload images of yourself while shopping for clothes online, and Google will show you what you might look like in a selected garment.

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Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish priest and Franciscan friar who was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 for hiding Jews and publishing anti-Nazi tracts, then sent to Auschwitz. He might have survived the camp and the war had he looked out for himself. Instead, he volunteered to take the place of a man randomly selected to be starved to death in retribution for another prisoner’s escape.