Moisés Naím / Politico

History, Karl Marx once wrote, repeats itself first as tragedy, and then as farce. The old quip kept coming to mind as we saw thousands of Brazilian far-right extremists stage a half-baked revolt in the capital, Brasilia. So far it amounts to a kind of low-rent reenactment of the Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington, D.C.

Moisés Naím / Politico

2022 is turning into a lean cow year. The expression is familiar to educated Latin Americans, though only the most biblically astute Anglos seem to know it. It comes from Genesis, and it goes all the way back to the age of the Egyptian pyramids.