OZY Daily Dose

John McLaughlin is the former deputy director of the CIA. He writes a regular column on OZY called “Global Eye: Foreign Affairs Through an Intelligence Lens,” and teaches at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Time to face it: North Korea is almost certainly going to remain a nuclear weapons state. Its nuclear capabilities are now impressive, well-documented and embraced by Kim Jong Un as regime survival tools.

Michelle Martin was a Zelda and Donkey Kong girl growing up in a Nintendo household, her parents the type to set the kids down with snacks and toys and then sneak to the living room to play video games all weekend. It wasn’t until later that the 33-year-old African American woman realized her childhood was uncommon. “I don’t think I knew anyone else who had parents who gamed,” the Baltimore County native says.

The smartphone has become the dominant piece of technology of our age, sucking even more of our attention into its brilliantly engineered clutches. It's bad enough for adults - hold on a sec, I just got six Slack messages - but keeping the phone from warping the brains of young kids can be a challenge.My 2-year-old twins are constantly grabbing at my phone because they see me doing the same - stand by, I've got to reply to this group text - and they like the way it lights up.

In Season 5 of The Thread, OZY's chart-topping weekly podcast, we explore the history-making 1999 U.S. women's soccer team and all of the unheralded athletes, policymakers and activists who made their journey possible. Subscribe now to follow The Thread on OZY.com, Spotify, Apple, Himalaya or wherever you prefer to stream your audio.Thread embedIf you have ever spent any time around sports stars of any variety, you know they're a breed apart.

See Trevor Noah at OZY Fest in Central Park on Saturday, July 20 - alongside fellow comedians like Dulcé Sloan, musical artists like John Legend, thinkers like Malcolm Gladwell, and politicians like Beto O'Rourke and John Kasich. Get your tickets here.When Trevor Noah took the reins of Comedy Central's The Daily Show, critics wondered whether he could live up to the reputation of his scathing satirist predecessor, Jon Stewart.

Fifteen years ago, Chef Fernando Ruiz was ready to give up cooking, go home to Phoenix and jump back into the dope game. But his wife, Michelle Romero, wasn't having it. "You can't," she told him. "You know exactly what's going to happen."Img 20190411 110329 886Ruiz with his wife, Michelle Romero.Ruiz spent three and a half years locked up in Arizona for gun and drug charges, earning his GED while incarcerated and going straight to culinary school upon his release in 1997.

In 2013, Texas law changed to forbid marriage by proxy, effectively ending weddings for inmates. But two years later, the constitutionally protected right to marry was reinstated, allowing wedding ceremonies on Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) property. That's the year Jo Anne Hall began performing prison marriages.The first prison ceremony I performed was a referral from the Texas Inmate Families Association (TIFA).

We all dread them, but they just keep coming - irritating, often deceptive spam and computerized autodialed calls (aka robocalls) - often several times a day. Sometimes it's an unfamiliar number, and sometimes it's "neighbor spoofing," where the phone number displayed is similar to your own. However the spammers do it, for those of us on the receiving end of the line, it's incredibly frustrating.

Johnrolinridge (1)John Rolin RidgeDarkness had fallen, but the Ridge family wouldn't find peace in slumber. John Rollin Ridge, then 12 years old, watched as his father was hauled out of their house and killed by a group of fellow Cherokee men. The murder wasn't unprompted. Ridge's father, an influential Cherokee, had signed the treaty that ceded Cherokee lands to the U.S. government in 1835 - leading to forced removal and relocation west.

Austin is losing its grip on the promise of high-income job growth and decent rent — with no major U.S. cities left to fill the void. Natives of Austin, Texas, know that if you used to stroll down Red River Street, you’d stumble upon a beloved music club called the Red Eyed Fly. It was a hole-in-the-wall — the type of establishment you wouldn’t want to walk barefoot, laughs Colin Pope, editor of the Austin Business Journal.