The disquiet

The Athletic has live coverage of Texas vs. Washington in the College Football Playoff at the Sugar Bowl. He has come further than any star player in college football the last two years — 3,064 miles and from two wins to the College Football Playoff — but on a dreary Monday in Seattle in April, Michael Penix Jr. showed much more than tangible measurements of the depth of his journey. It’s one even his parents at the time didn’t fully realize. But now, days before Penix leads No. 2 Washington in the CFP Semifinal Sugar Bowl against No. 3 Texas, everyone can appreciate it.Penix had a spectacular debut season for the Huskies in 2022, leading the nation in passing and helping turn a 4-8 team into an 11-2 squad that finished No. 8. The lefty launching balls deep downfield didn’t just vex rival ...

When Thomas Wong set foot in the United States Embassy in Beijing this summer for a new diplomatic posting, it was vindication after years of battling the State Department over a perceived intelligence threat — himself.Diplomatic Security officers had informed him when he joined the foreign service more than a decade ago that they were banning him from working in China. In a letter, he said, they wrongly cited the vague potential for undue “foreign preference” and suggested he could be vulnerable to “foreign influence.”Mr. Wong had become a U.S. diplomat thinking that China was where he could have the greatest impact. He had grown up in a Chinese-speaking household and studied in the country. And as a graduate of West Point who had done an Army tour in the Balkans, he thought he had experi...