In December, Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker asked Donald Trump about his threats of revenge during the campaign. He demurred. 'I'm not looking to go back into the past. I'm looking to make our country successful,' he said. 'Retribution will be through success.' During the first two months of his presidency, the prevailing theme of Trump's White House was the Elon Musk'led attempt to drastically cut federal agencies. The purge is incomplete'the U.S. DOGE Service continues to seek cuts at more agencies, and litigation has slowed or blocked some of the cuts'but we seem to have already moved into the next stage: revenge. Trump took one of his most chilling steps toward retribution last week, when he directed the government to investigate two officials in his first administration: Chris Krebs, who headed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Miles Taylor, who was chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security. The reasons Trump is out to get these two men are clear enough. Krebs, whose work focused on election security, was fired for refusing to say that fraud tainted the 2020 presidential election; as I wrote back in November of that year, Trump targeted him 'not because he did a bad job, but because he did too good a job and said so.' Taylor wrote a notable anonymous New York Times op-ed about administration officials resisting Trump, then published a book unmasking himself and worked to organize Republican opposition to Trump....

Earlier this month, the Trump administration threatened to revoke $9 billion in federal grants and contracts if Harvard did not agree to a long list of demands, including screening foreign applicants 'hostile to the American values and institutions' and allowing an external body to audit university departments for viewpoint diversity. (How screening international students for their beliefs would contribute to viewpoint diversity was not specified.) Today, Harvard announced that it would not agree to the Trump administration's terms. 'Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government,' the university's lawyers wrote in a letter to administration officials. 'Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government's terms as an agreement in principle.' When the Trump administration canceled $400 million in federal funding to Columbia'ostensibly because of the school's handling of campus anti-Semitism'it outlined a set of far-reaching changes as a precondition for getting the funding back. These included forbidding protestors from wearing masks, giving the university president direct control over discipline, and placing an entire academic department in 'academic receivership.' Columbia swiftly acquiesced to the demands, with only minor changes. 'The ability of the federal administration to leverage other forms of federal funding in an immediate fashion is really potentially devastating to our students in particular,' Katrina Armstrong, then Columbia's interim president, told faculty, according to The Wall Street Journal....

Cultural attitudes toward porn may be liberalizing, but the belief that minors shouldn't have unfettered access to it remains broadly shared. Parents are the natural guardians of their children's internet habits, but many report feeling powerless against the innumerable work-arounds and relentless societal pull toward unrestricted internet use. A new study by researchers at Stanford, NYU, the University of Georgia, and Georgia State followed the implementation of a law in Louisiana that required any website publishing a substantial amount of pornographic content to take reasonable steps to verify the age of users before giving them access. The researchers found that while search traffic to Pornhub'which complied with the law'dropped by 51 percent, traffic to its noncompliant rival, XVideos, rose by 48.1 percent. This is a classic tale of tech regulation: lots of friction while the primary aim remains unfulfilled. But one of the researchers, Zeve Sanderson, the executive director of NYU's Center for Social Media and Politics, isn't resigned to defeat. On today's episode of Good on Paper, we discuss what governments can even do to regulate the internet on behalf of minors and what doing so might cost the rest of us. Also, he explains, Louisiana's legislation shows that writing a law can be the beginning, not the end, of a policy process....

'At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up'' So begins the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa's 1969 masterpiece, Conversation in the Cathedral. What made the opening so famous and effective was the fact that many countries across Latin America, a landscape of shaky democracies, were asking themselves that question about their homeland. The number of people asking this seems to have grown in recent years all over the world. Perhaps you've asked it yourself. Vargas Llosa, who died in Lima this past weekend at the age of 89, nurtured a lifelong obsession with his native Peru: its corrupt political ecosystem, its inequality, its incapacity to make good on its promise. He dissected that obsession in many of his 30 novels. The answers he came up with never fully satisfied him, which only meant that he posed the question from another angle in the next book. I devoured his novels before and after emigrating from Mexico to the United States in the 1980s. For many of us Latin Americans, reading him was a way to demonstrate our investment in the region's future. His style was urbane, his research encyclopedic. His language was beautifully elastic; what fascinated me just as much was the elasticity, over decades of profound change, of his politics....