Welcome to The Context, a new weekly podcast. If there’s something happening in the world, The Context will to tell you why it’s happening: its immediate causes, its deeper origins, and its implications. Every week I’ll take some news item and dig deep into its origins. I’m not here to tell you what I think about things, I’m here to arm you with comprehensible, need-to-know historical background so you can speak intelligently about things that are happening in our world. A new episode of The Context will drop each Friday.