The cherry trees bend over and are shedding
On the old road where all that passed are dead,
Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding
This early May morn when there is none to wed.

- Edward Thomas, "The Cherry Trees"

What I’m Reading:

1. Why Russia has achieved so little in its war against Ukraine

Why you should read it: In the New York Times, British strategist Lawrence Freedman notes that despite “having all the cards,” as President Trump frequently claims, Russia remains far from achieving anything of substance in Ukraine.

• “There is nothing inevitable about a Russian victory in Ukraine. The narrative that Russia has, to quote President Trump, ‘all the cards’ and that Ukraine must make big territorial concessions in order to avoid even worse losses, has dominated negotiations. But at this point in the war, it’s fair to ask: If Russia has all the cards, why has it achieved so little? Why has its progress been so often frustrated by a much smaller army’s resilience and innovative tactics, as well as Russia’s own operational weaknesses?”

• “Some of the first steps toward any durable peace agreement are to understand that a Russian victory is not inevitable and to convince Russia of it… Neither President Vladimir Putin’s core military objectives nor his political ones for his special military operation have been met. Ukraine retains its independence. And instead of being demilitarized, it has one of the strongest, largest and most battle-hardened armies in Europe. NATO has expanded to include Sweden and Finland, and Germany is once again becoming a serious military power… Mr. Putin has been ready to pay an extraordinarily heavy price to achieve his geopolitical ambitions. Perhaps that readiness is why whenever the question of whether Russia can keep the war going is posed, the answer invariably comes back that it can. In Moscow, it may not feel like a proper defeat until Russian troops are in full retreat.”

• Why it matters: “Russia has failed at much since it began its full-scale invasion in Ukraine, but it has had some success in creating the narrative that its victory in Ukraine is but a matter of time. The first step toward a durable peace is to defeat that narrative: However hard Russia tries and however much pain it inflicts, it cannot subjugate Ukraine.”

2. Why Trump’s war with Iran is strategically incoherent—at best

Why you should read it: International security scholars Richard K. Betts and Stephen Biddle describe the strategic incoherence of Trump’s war with Iran in Foreign Affairs and show how it will prove costly to the United States.

• “Contrary to the Trump administration’s callous public relations campaign early in the onslaught against Iran, war is not a movie or a video game. Starting a war is a decision to kill real people, destroy property, and divert limited resources from other priorities. For such moral and material costs to be acceptable, they have to be for a good purpose. No purpose will be good enough, however, unless it is accompanied by a strategy that can achieve that purpose at an acceptable price. Strategy simply means a plan by which military power will produce the desired political result. The war against Iran does not have this… Too often, naive political leaders assume that devastating the enemy militarily necessarily equals strategic success. Purpose and strategy in Iran need to be aligned if there is to be any justification for the current war.“

• “The maximum aim of U.S.-engineered regime change appears implausible. The American attack did not just fail to produce a liberal popular uprising ousting the ayatollahs and Revolutionary Guards. If anything, the assault did the reverse, producing an Iranian government even more zealously hostile than the one that was decapitated. So then what about the minimum aim? Again, leave aside the big moral and economic costs. Smashing up Iran will not sufficiently reduce its ability—or its incentive, too often ignored by analysts—to damage U.S. interests. Instead, it merely displaces that purpose by exaggerating the benefits of a temporary tactical success while energizing Iran’s determination to fight back… The benefit of periodically returning to war would be to blunt Iran’s military recovery and nuclear reconstitution. Without massive on-the-ground inspections, the question on each occasion would remain how effective the blunting was. In June 2025, Trump declared the Iranian nuclear program to have been ‘obliterated,’ only to decide less than a year later that it had to be struck again. It will hardly be a surprise if the same ineffectiveness of preventive war will have to be faced when the dust settles after the current one. Keeping the Iranian threat subdued is an open-ended strategy. Iran’s incentives to keep some nuclear option open compete with U.S. and Israeli incentives to close it. Iran presumably sees its incentives as existential, especially given the war’s stated ambition for regime change and the targeted killings of Iran’s leaders. Which side’s incentives to indefinitely bear the costs of recurrent war are greater?… If the benefit of indefinite conflict with Iran is low, the cost should also be low. It is not. In just its first weeks, the war has cost many billions of dollars in direct expenditure, reduced support for Ukraine, put dangerous strains on inventories of the most advanced U.S. weapons, and shocked the global economy.”

• Why it matters: “Launching a preventive war was a bad decision in the first place. It undercut whatever claims to American moral leadership in the world that had remained under Trump. It showed other countries that reliance on U.S. power in the face of American adventurism leaves them vulnerable to severe economic disruption. It yoked U.S. national interests to Israel’s, which differ in kind and degree. It left the Iranian people holding the bag when Trump’s promises that ‘help is on its way’ proved hollow…The huge human and economic costs of the war and a naive strategy for achieving either its maximum or minimum objectives leave the United States with the prospect of managing a postwar landscape that could be as problematic as the one before it.”

3. Why an Iran war oil shock is on the way

Why you should read it: In an interview with Harvard Business Review, oil analyst Rory Johnston explains to journalist Thomas Stackpole how Trump’s war with Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz will lead to an oil shock of the sort unseen in decades.

• “Now, the important thing to remember about the global oil system is that it’s essentially a flowing chemistry set. It needs to keep flowing at a steady pace, and any big changes in that flow rate cause a bunch of chaos all through the system. That air pocket [created by the blocked supply of Gulf oil] is important because we still had tankers leaving the Gulf three weeks ago, and it’s probably going to take another week, week-and-a-half for those to finally hit land. After that, the air pocket starts really actually hammering local available supply. That’s when we’re going to start drawing down inventories very quickly… The first domino is that air pocket finally hitting. From there, I think the next big domino is going to be the market reaction, because once that physical scarcity starts to rapidly draw down inventories, there’s kind of no escaping what we are facing. Global financial markets, and particularly the paper [financial] side of the futures market, seem like they’re still in a little bit of disbelief. There’s a well-entrenched belief that, even if it is happening, [U.S President Donald] Trump’s going to wrap this up at any second.”

• “There’s a lot of alarmism in the oil market. I like to think of myself as a non-alarmist oil analyst. I’m usually the person who talks about how the system is so impressive and so dynamic in its ability to adapt to shocks. But this is just such a big shock that rather than bending, I fear it will break the system. Only I think a lot of generalist observers aren’t accepting that because, very frankly, people in the oil sector always say that everything is an existential threat. Now, we’re in a boy who cried wolf situation… In this context, ‘break’ fundamentally means demand destruction. Typically, higher prices can incentivize suppliers to realign logistics and trade routes to allow more supply, even with the same amount of production behind it. But all of those things are insufficient for the loss we’re currently facing. If we continue down this path, prices will need to rise to such a level as to actually force a physical, volumetric reduction in demand.”

• Why it matters: “In this situation, if the Strait remains closed, the price is just going to keep rising and rising and rising until you get fewer planes in the air and fewer people driving. And I think that is the kind of situation we’re kind of looking at now… It’s a completely untenable situation. I think that markets are treading water, waiting for the physics of these markets to force people’s hands. Because I think at that stage there’s no amount of jawboning that the White House can do that can counteract 10 million barrel a day draws in Asia. I think that the markets coming to terms with the physical reality of what’s happening is what people have to wait for now.”

4. What happens when a team of narcissists goes to war

Why you should read it: New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie details what happens when a president who lacks a theory of mind and a cabinet of social media-addled trolls decide to go to war.

• “If you can set aside both the unconstitutionality and the immorality of President Trump’s unprovoked war on Iran and focus on the operation itself, it is hard not to be bewildered by the utter lack of real planning or even basic strategic thinking that has gone into it… To read about the administration’s decision-making process is to learn that it did not really plan for or expect much in the way of anything that now defines the war… It appears that both the president and the White House expected token resistance, followed by the collapse of the Iranian regime, the installation of a pro-American government — or at least one we could tolerate — and a return to the status quo ante: a replay, in essence, of the president’s first intervention of the year, in Venezuela. Now that this replay fantasy has collided with a more complex, indeterminate and difficult reality, Trump is unable to explain his objectives or even give the country a sense of when the war might end. He told Fox News radio that he would ‘feel it in my bones.’ Let’s just say that that is a far cry from traditional political leadership during wartime.”

• “What’s striking is how familiar this pattern feels. The administration did not expect the public to be repelled by DOGE. It did not expect outrage over the treatment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. It did not expect Democrats to respond to threats of partisan gerrymandering with their own push to wring as many Democratic seats as possible out of so-called blue states. The administration certainly did not expect the mass mobilizations against the deployment of National Guard troops and the use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection as a roving paramilitary force. Minnesota, in particular, appears to have caught them entirely off guard — a tendency toward docility, it seems, is their base-line assumption about everyone they oppose… Why can’t the White House see what others could have easily predicted? None of this should have been a surprise. Anyone capable of thinking through the actions of other people — of imagining their perspectives and of recognizing that they have agency — should have been able to anticipate these outcomes and plan accordingly. And in the case of the war in Iran, the president ignored counsel that warned of something like the current situation.”

• Why it matters: “This gets to the real problem. Trump is famously indifferent to the concerns of those around him. He is a consummate narcissist, and he is, without question, the most solipsistic person ever to occupy the Oval Office. Over his decades on the public stage, we have seen little to no evidence that he believes in the existence of other minds… By virtue of his position, Trump is a dangerous figure. But he is also a weak and deeply unpopular president. The upshot of his impenetrable egotism, for his opponents, is that there are plenty of opportunities to make him weaker and even more unpopular. For as much as he is in love with violence — for as much as he clearly wants to terrorize the nation into submission — he is also cursed with a kind of blindness. He cannot see that his opposition is real. He cannot see that it can act.”

5. How two-and-a-half years of near-constant war has left Israel exhausted and anxious

Why you should read it: Jerusalem-based journalist Gershom Gorenberg reports for The Atlantic from an Israel that’s been stuck in a seemingly endless loop of anxiety since the October 7, 2023 attacks.

• “In Israel these days, unless your apartment has a blast-resistant room, it’s best to go to bed in something that you’re comfortable wearing in a bomb shelter. Your phone is likely to wake you with the clatter of an alert for incoming missiles: First comes a text message that says to be near a protected area. Several minutes later, a second screech brings a message to take cover… In our lives, the current war has gone on for two and a half years, with intermissions just long enough to raise hope of normalcy that is shattered when fighting resumes. This morning’s siren is a replay of June’s siren, and the siren of autumn 2024, and that of autumn 2023. This is not a new war. It is the same war on a loop of exhaustion, adrenaline, and worry for your children. To those feelings I must add despair and frustration with the apparent determination of my government to maintain the loop endlessly.”

• “Throughout Netanyahu’s career, his signature sleight of mind has been to divert attention from the unresolved conflict with the Palestinians by shouting ‘Iran!’ loudly and often. Then Israel was taken by surprise on October 7, and the prime minister avoided accountability for that intelligence failure by keeping the war going—in part by constantly changing the conditions for a cease-fire. Now he has combined both magic tricks… War is three-card monte with Netanyahu as the dealer. Strikes on Tehran divert news coverage from the bills that the ruling coalition has introduced to disempower the attorney general and subject the broadcast media to government control. A mass protest against the government was supposed to take place on the night of February 28: It never happened, because missiles began falling that morning. Most dangerous of all, those missiles are driving to the far margins of public attention the escalating campaign of terror that West Bank settlers are carrying out against Palestinian villages, with the acquiescence, or worse, of the Israeli army.”

• Why it matters: “Such callousness is the leitmotif of two and a half years of war under Netanyahu. It is also the opposite of the core value of Israeli society, weakly translated as ‘solidarity’: the conviction that each of us is in this not for herself or himself but for one another. That cohesion has always been a national strength not measurable in warplanes or divisions. Netanyahu has fractured it… A more objective indicator of the effect of the long war might be the sharp rise in emigration. Last year, according to the state’s Central Bureau of Statistics, nearly 51,000 more Israelis emigrated than returned from abroad. In the years before 2023, the number was about a third of that… This does not mean that Israel is emptying out. But it does hint at malaise, at doubts about the future. It suggests that war without a perceivable endpoint has the same effect as a missile falling far enough away from a building to leave it standing but close enough to create thin fissures.“

6. What AI hypists don’t get

Why you should read it: Francis Fukuyama argues on his Substack that there are some problems in the real world that the current crop of artificial intelligence models just can’t solve—both in principle and in practice.

• “Recently I heard a presentation by an engineer from OpenAI about the incredible transformations that will occur once we get to artificial general intelligence (AGI), or even superintelligence. He said that this will quickly solve many of the world’s problems: GDP growth rates could rise to 10, 15, even 20 percent per year, diseases will be cured, education revolutionized, and cities in the developing world will be transformed with clean drinking water for everyone… It is hard to see how even the most superintelligent AI is going to help solve these problems. And this points to a central conceit that plagues the whole AI field: a gross overestimation of the value of intelligence by itself to solve problems… Many of the enthusiasts hyping AI’s capabilities think of policy problems as if they were long-standing problems in mathematics that human beings had great difficulties solving, such as the four-color map theorem or the Cap Set problem. But math problems are entirely cognitive in nature and it is not surprising that AI could make advances in that realm. The people building AI systems are themselves very smart mathematically, and tend to overvalue the importance of this kind of pure intelligence.”

• “It is not just political and social obstacles that AI has difficulty dealing with; LLMs have limited ability to directly manipulate physical objects. AI interacts with the physical world primarily through robotics, but the latter is a field that has lagged considerably behind the development of LLMs. Robots have proliferated enormously over the past decades and are omnipresent in manufacturing, agriculture, and many other domains. But the vast majority of today’s robots are programmed by human beings to do a limited range of very specific tasks. The world was wowed recently by Chinese humanoid robots doing kung fu moves, but I suspect the robots didn’t teach themselves how to act this way… Here’s an example of AI’s current limitations. I recently had an HVAC contractor replace the furnace in my house. The contractor photographed and measured the house’s layout; he had to route the new ducts and wiring in ways specific to my house’s design. It turned out that the new furnace would not fit through the existing attic door; he had to cut a larger opening with a reciprocating saw, and then repair the doorframe after the new unit was inside. There is no robot in the world that could do what my contractor did, and it is very hard to imagine a robot acquiring such abilities anytime in the near future, with or without AGI. Robots may get there eventually, but that level of human capacity remains a distant objective.”

• Why it matters: “Policy problems are different. They require connection to the real world, whether that’s physical objects or entrenched stakeholders who don’t necessarily want changes to occur. As the economic historian Joel Mokyr has shown, earlier technological revolutions took years and decades to materialize after the initial scientific and engineering breakthroughs were made, because those abstract ideas had to be implemented on a widespread basis in real world conditions. AI may move faster on a cognitive level, but it may not be able to solve implementation problems more quickly than in previous historical periods… But the kind of explosive, self-reinforcing AI advances that some observers predict are on the way will still have to solve implementation problems for which machines are not well suited. A ten percent annual growth rate will double GDP in seven years. Yet planet Earth will not remotely yield the materials—water, land, minerals, energy, or people—to make this come about, no matter how smart our machines get.”

7. How AI companies exploit other people’s intellectual property but jealously guard their own

Why you should read it: In The Atlantic, staff writer Alex Reisner outlines how big tech companies steal the intellectual property of other people to build their own AI models while zealously and hypocritically protecting their own intellectual property.

• “In April 2024, Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO and a current AI evangelist, gave a closed-door lecture to a group of Stanford students. If these young people hoped to be Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Schmidt explained, then they should be prepared to breach some ethical boundaries… When I recently obtained a copy, I was struck by Schmidt’s readiness to say the quiet part out loud. He was articulating an attitude that is common in Silicon Valley but is usually stated as a legal or philosophical argument. When I reached one of Schmidt’s spokespeople, they defended his position by telling me that Schmidt believes that the ‘fair use’ of copyrighted work drives innovation. Others in the industry have cited the techno-libertarian idea that ‘information wants to be free,’ a frequently misunderstood credo that portrays information as a natural resource that should flow without restriction… But the credo never seems to apply to Silicon Valley’s own information, whether it’s the troves of personal data that companies have collected about us or the software they write. Photoshop, for example, doesn’t want to be free. In fact, Photoshop is one of thousands of tech-industry products that are protected by patents. Inventions such as Google’s original search algorithm and even design details, such as the ‘rounded rectangle’ shape of Apple’s iPhone, have also been patented, and companies employ teams of high-end attorneys to prosecute infringements.”

• “In the pursuit of generative AI, tech companies have recently turned their aggressive [IP] strategies toward less prepared industries. As my reporting has shown, many top AI models have been trained on data sets containing massive numbers of copyrighted books, videos, and other works. This large-scale piracy has been excused in a number of ways: OpenAI (which has a corporate partnership with The Atlantic’s business team) has claimed that the company uses ‘publicly available information’ to train its models; Anthropic has said that it has used books, but not in any commercial products; and Meta admits that it has used books in commercial products, but that doing so was ‘quintessential fair use…’ Even as they claim the right to train their models on work belonging to other people, the AI companies have rejected similar reasoning when it comes to their own products. Consider OpenAI’s terms of service for ChatGPT, which forbid use of the bot’s ‘output to develop models that compete with OpenAI.’ Anthropic, Google, and xAI have similar clauses forbidding people from using the material generated by their chatbots to train competing products. In other words: We can train on your work, but you can’t train on ours.”

• Why it matters: ““t’s worth noting that Silicon Valley has itself regularly been a victim of IP theft, in the form of software piracy. Partially in response to that problem, major companies have changed how software is distributed. Today, you cannot just buy Adobe Photoshop: Instead, you pay a rental fee to access the program, which verifies your license every time you use it. Microsoft has taken a similar approach with the 365 version of its Office suite, and Google’s office software can’t be downloaded at all. These companies have made their IP harder to steal by developing new methods of controlling access—an option that is not realistically available to the artists, authors, and open-source-software developers they take material from… Given the double standard, it’s difficult to tell whether Silicon Valley’s arguments about fair use are genuine or just legally expedient. On one hand, generative AI is a new technology that raises new questions about the use of copyrighted work. On the other hand, the AI industry’s aggressive approach is business as usual for Silicon Valley: moving fast and breaking things. And betting that the lawyers can ‘clean the mess up.’”

8. How influencers are infesting our politics

Why you should read it: The Bulwark columnist Lauren Egan prophesies a coming dark age of influencer and content-creator inflected politics.

• “For many Democratic officials, the Texas [Senate primary] episode was a startling example of the new challenges that campaigns face. Social media influencers who are posting about and even covering their races are playing by a looser set of rules and ethics than conventional journalists. And their impact is often many magnitudes greater as voters increasingly turn to social media and short-form videos for their news. The situation in Texas underscored just how tricky the relationship can be between campaigns and those influencers who are often incentivized to start drama that gains them clout, followers, and money… While some well-known influencers like Carlos Eduardo Espina—who has 22 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook—tend to be less catty and more professional, the operatives I talked to say the majority don’t exhibit those traits. And they emphasized that the internet is teeming with thousands of micro- and nano-influencers looking to make a name for themselves.”

• “As the midterms get nearer, campaigns are scrambling to figure out how to navigate these relationships. There are basic organizational questions that have to be sorted out, such as who on the campaign should manage creators… Aside from the issue of editorial standards, there are also questions about money and transparency. The Federal Election Commission does not require influencers to disclose when they are paid to promote political candidates or causes, which has allowed a network of dark money groups to buy online influence almost unnoticed. Some Democratic staffers said creators have demanded campaigns pay them thousands of dollars to post a positive video and threatened to go negative on those campaigns if they don’t agree to the fee… The opaqueness of the political influencer market incentivizes everyone to get in on the game. No candidate can know for sure that their primary opponents aren’t using social media pay-to-play against them. So the safe bet is to quietly hire some social media champions of their own.”

• Why it matters: “Between the prisoner’s dilemma of buying social clout and the amount of money that right-leaning groups are apparently spending on online influence, Democrats have plenty of reason to believe that they have to figure out how to work with content creators, however painful (or expensive) that process might be.”

9. How Trump is doing to Washington, DC what Mussolini did to Rome

Why you should read it: In the New York Times, architecture critic Paul Goldberger compares Trump’s campaign to remake Washington, DC in his own garish and tasteless image with Mussolini’s similar attempt to put a Fascist stamp on Rome a century ago.

• “President Trump’s attempt to hugely expand the White House is lumbering forward. It suffered the tiniest of setbacks when the National Capital Planning Commission decided to postpone a vote on the project to its next meeting, on April 2. But it is highly unlikely that the commission, which has been stocked with Trump appointees, will not ultimately sign off on this enormous, banal box in a vaguely classical style that, if it goes forward, will overwhelm the White House and block the view between the White House and the Capitol that has been one of Washington’s signature vistas for more than two centuries… As with most of the destructive and divisive actions that the president has committed America to this year, it is not a solution to a real problem at all but the cover for a deeper desire, which in this case is to remake official Washington in his image. The ballroom is bombastic architecture pretending to be genteel.”

• “It brings to mind not any previous American president but the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who was obsessed with rebuilding Rome into some grand new version of itself. In 1924, two years after coming into absolute power, in a talk at the Campidoglio in the city’s historic center, he said, ‘It is necessary to liberate from the mediocre disfigurements of the old Rome.’ He added, ‘Rome cannot, must not be, only a modern city in the by now banal sense of the word. It must be a city worthy of its glory.’ Rome needed, he said, more grandezza — more grandeur… As Mussolini saw Rome as a mere shadow of its ancient self, Mr. Trump sees Washington as a city insufficiently grand for his ambitions. As a builder, he has always confused size with excellence — he would often give the floors in his skyscrapers falsely high numbers to make the buildings seem taller than they were — and when he looks at Washington, he probably really believes that it is a bit humdrum and lacking in panache, as if the founding fathers could not imagine something as noble as Mr. Trump has in mind... Disorder, real or imagined, is the lifeblood of authoritarians, since they often come to power on the promise that they alone can turn chaos into order. And if those who strive for power have been known to exaggerate political disorder — or even, at times, stir it up themselves to create a pretext to impose their authority — they are every bit as likely to claim that the great cities they occupy are cesspools of decay and decline that cry out desperately for their transformational urban planning and architectural skills, which they tend to believe are as great as their political ones.”

• Why it matters: “In his attempt to make Rome imperial again, Mussolini profoundly misread Rome, which was never what he thought it was. It has always been a city of great monuments without monumental settings, a place of magnificent accidents. The essence of Rome is the way in which most of its greatest buildings hit you by surprise as you make your way through the complex maze of narrow, winding streets. It is in this that the city’s magic lies. Rome, even under the emperors, was a city of accretion, not a city of order… As Mussolini misunderstood Rome, Mr. Trump misunderstands Washington. Washington was conceived as an expression of democracy, a place in which the largest and grandest public building was the Capitol, where the representatives of the people gathered. The White House is a mansion, not a palace; it is large compared with the average house of its time, but it was never intended to intimidate… Right now, the future of our nation’s capital is being guided not by any legitimate system of architectural review but by sycophants who want only to please their leader. It’s just how things worked under Mussolini in Rome, until his power came to an end.”

Odds and Ends

• How ancient DNA confirms humans domesticated dogs before they discovered agriculture…

• Why an underwater neutrino telescope may have detected a previously unobserved but theoretically possible exploding black hole…

• How a recently-discovered medieval Byzantine shipwreck sheds light on Europe’s dark ages…

• Why it’s harder than you might think to design an aesthetically pleasing and, more importantly, functional steering wheel…

• A new study finds that a third of sharks in the Bahamas test positive for painkillers and cocaine…

What I’m Listening To and Watching

• Revisiting the bulk of Star Trek: Voyager, the fourth iteration of the science-fiction franchise that sees a Federation starship working its way back home after being stranded on the other side of the galaxy.

• Ghost Elephants, the latest documentary from illustrious and idiosyncratic German filmmaker Werner Herzog that’s as much about the KhoiSan and Luchazi people of the Kalahari as conservation biologist Steve Boyes’s quest to track down the world’s largest elephants.

• The revival of the 2000s medical sitcom Scrubs, starring Zach Braff, Sarah Chalke, and Donald Faison as quirky but hard-working doctors John Dorian, Elliot Reid, and Christopher Turk.

• The dulcet tones of Morgan Freeman narrate The Dinosaurs, a four-part Netflix documentary that traces the rise, reign, and ultimate demise of everyone’s favorite terrible lizards.

• Young Sherlock sees the titular hero (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) and his BFF James Moriarty (Dónal Finn) unravel an international conspiracy that’s intertwined with Holmes family secrets.

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Should so much come to short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whether would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where that not adheres to England,—
Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? This is the strangers' case;
And this your mountanish inhumanity.

- William Shakespeare, Sir Thomas More, Act II, Scene IV

What I’m Reading:

1. Why “multipolarity” is a fantasy

Why you should read it: Indian strategist C. Raja Mohan argues in Foreign Affairs that for all the bluster about “multipolarity,” the world remains effectively unipolar—but with a United States that does not possess any sense of international responsibility.

• “From Washington to Beijing and Moscow to New Delhi, a consensus is emerging that the world has entered a multipolar era. Political leaders, diplomats, and analysts routinely declare that unrivaled American dominance has ended and global power is now dispersed across multiple centers. The assertion has become so commonplace that it is often treated as a self-evident fact rather than a proposition to be examined… The reality is that the world is still unipolar. The illusions of multipolarity have not created a more balanced international arrangement. Instead, they have done the opposite: they have empowered the United States to shed previous constraints and project its power even more aggressively. No other power or bloc has been able to mount a credible challenge or work collectively to counter U.S. power. But unlike in the prior period of unipolarity that emerged at the end of the Cold War, the United States is now exercising unilateral power shorn of responsibilities.”

• “Claims that the world is becoming multipolar rely on observable indicators of the growing strength of emerging powers, including shifts in relative shares of global GDP and the construction of new development and governance institutions headquartered outside the United States and Europe. These changes show that power is distributed more widely today than at the end of the Cold War. But they do not necessarily signify a transformation in the structure of the international system… Constraints on American power—high national debt, domestic political division, frictions with U.S. allies, and resentment against U.S. policies in the so-called global South—are real and growing, but they do not negate the United States’ position as the only credible pole in the system. Even Trump’s threats to cut the funding of domestic universities and research agencies, for instance, are unlikely to destroy their preeminence. The depth of the U.S. private sector and the strength of its civil society limit the damage that any president can cause. And the United States’ enviable geography, which includes ample natural resources and physical distance from the Eurasian landmass that has long been the main theater of global conflict, gives the United States a large margin of error in its foreign policy choices.”

• Why it matters: “The revised world order is one in which the United States sheds the responsibilities of a unipolar power but remains the sole force that can shape the international system. Over the past decade, China and Russia have used their military advantage to alter territorial realities: China has aggressively reclaimed land in the South China Sea, for instance, and Russia has conquered and annexed large swaths of Ukrainian territory. The United States, which previously criticized such actions, now also openly employs force to advance its interests… Despite the widespread claims of its imminence, then, multipolarity is nowhere close to being realized. If anything, aspirations of multipolarity have contributed to this new order of unfettered American power. The first Trump administration and the Biden administration identified China and Russia as threats to U.S. dominance, and those two countries have talked up American weakness and been more assertive in their own foreign policies. In his second term, Trump has welcomed the drumbeat heralding the arrival of multipolarity not as a challenge but as a message that the United States no longer needs to be responsible for global order. In Trump’s multipolar vision, every country can exercise its power as it sees fit—but given the gaps in market and military power between the United States and everyone else, only Washington gets to exercise its power unconstrained. The United States is outwardly accepting the shared premise of multipolarity but reaping the benefits of continued unipolarity.”

2. How low taxes on billionaires hold back the American economy

Why you should read it: In the Wall Street Journal, reporter Carol Ryan notes that the U.S. economy has become warped by its dependence on billionaires—all while those billionaires foist the nation’s tax bill onto less-fortunate others.

• “The risk is that the U.S. economy becomes increasingly dependent on a narrow group of very rich households, whose spending is tied to the performance of the stock market. This could mean the entire economy pays a steep price in the next market correction… [D]ebate about how much tax billionaires pay is likely to grow as America’s fiscal situation deteriorates and its wealth gap widens. Data from the Federal Reserve shows that only the richest 1% of households have grown their share of overall U.S. wealth since 1990. Their share hit a record 32% in the third quarter of 2025… Gains made by the billionaire class, the very top 0.1% of households and a subset of the 1%, have eclipsed the merely extremely rich. This group’s share of U.S. net wealth has risen nearly 6 percentage points to 14.4% since 1990… Meanwhile, the bottom half of American households have lost ground. Their 2.5% cut of the country’s wealth has slipped from 3.5% in 1990. Also striking: The share owned by the decile of wealthy households that rank just below the top 1% has shrunk slightly.”

• ““The tax code may be one reason why billionaire households have raced so far ahead of mere millionaires. One argument used to push back against calls for the rich to pay more into the system is that 1% of the highest earners pay 40% of income taxes, while 40% of Americans pay no income tax at all. This is true, but billionaires aren’t captured by this picture because most of their wealth lies outside the income-tax system... Billionaires prefer to be paid in shares, which are subject to capital-gains taxes when sold. But they don’t need to sell to fund their lifestyles. Billionaires use borrowed money for living expenses, pledging their shares or other assets as collateral. The interest on the debt is much lower than a capital-gains tax bill would be, and their stock portfolios can continue accumulating paper gains… Billionaires put less into the tax pot as a percentage of their wealth than wage earners. One working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the effective tax rate for the U.S.’s 400 wealthiest individuals is 24%—compared with 45% for top labor income earners.”

• Why it matters: ““Wealth concentration is increasingly clear in economic data. The top fifth of wealthiest households now account for nearly 60% of personal outlays, up from 50% in the early 1990s, data from Moody’s shows… But the very fact of the rising concentration of wealth in the hands of the superwealthy means the issue of how to tax it won’t be going away, and pressure could build for ever-more populist measures, including at the national level. In the meantime, expect businesses that cater to billionaires to outperform those aiming at everyone else.”

3. How Putin and Xi pulled a “reverse Mao” on Trump

Why you should read it: On his Substack, historian Phillips P. O’Brien contends that unfounded assertions that Trump intended to “pull a Nixon” and detach Russia from China mask the reality that Putin and Xi pulled a “reverse Mao” on Trump and detached the United States from its own allies in Europe.

• “Do you want to know what is arguably the greatest mistake that has and continues to bedevil US foreign and strategic policy? It is that people mistake US power for competence or at times even wisdom… Over the last year we have seen another glaring example of how the US likes to think and act as if it is in control, when it clearly is not. However in this latter case the gulf between assumption and reality is even more profound. Whereas the public discussion in the US has been about whether the US can or wants to ‘detach’ or ‘split’ Russia from China, the reality has been that Russia and China together have worked hard, and successfully, to ‘detach’ the USA from its democratic allies around the world.”

• “Since Trump was elected to his second term, there was a steady drumbeat of reporting about whether this idea of detaching Russia from China, often termed a ‘Reverse Nixon’, was indeed part of US policy. Many of Trump’s loudest supporters, such as Fox News, have regularly trotted out the idea that Trump was not being pro-Putin at all, but was craftily trying to break apart the Russian-Chinese alliance. Here was how one such story justied Trump’s shameful grovelling to Putin in Alaska last August… The problem with these analyses is that they see the US as the great power trying to break up a Russia-China alliance through threats or enticement. Thus the discussion if often about whether Russia wants this and whether China can be stared down to accept it… Its completely the wrong way to look at what has happened. If you step back and realize that the US cannot control this process, what you see is actually a methodical detaching of the USA from its democratic allies and a realignment of the USA into a larger grouping with China and Russia; a ‘Reverse Mao Zedong’ as it were.”

• Why it matters: “…what has happened is that Putin and President XI of China have worked very effectively to detach the USA from its democratic allies. The Chinese have actually both stared down the USA on tariffs (showing their power with rare earth minerals) but also praised Trump and made it look that they want to have a new and better relationship. And Putin, well he has exercised enormous influence over Trump for a number of reasons (cough, cough). He has brought the USA to his side over Ukraine/Europe, to the point that just a few hours ago, the US president was putting immense pressure on the Ukrainians to make ever more dramatic concessions to Russia… Add it altogether and what we are seeing is China and Russia methodically detaching the US from its traditional democratic allies. We have now the US doing Russia’s dirty work over Ukraine, the US reaching out to China, and the US pronouncing doom on a tolerant, democratic Europe… By thinking the USA is more powerful than it is, we are missing how the US is being weakened. The US is detaching no one—it is being detached.”

4. Why China’s growth model remains broken

Why you should read it: China market researcher Dinny McMahon maintains that China’s growth model remains warped and unbalanced despite knowledge among policymakers in Beijing that it needs to change.

• “When China’s property market collapsed in 2021, its leaders scrambled to find a new driver of economic growth to replace housing construction. More investment in infrastructure, which had powered much of the country’s boom for decades, wasn’t an option: the population was peaking, and a collapse in land sales meant that local authorities lacked the funds to spend on new airports and eight-lane highways. Nor could Beijing rely on more exports. China was already the world’s biggest exporter, and with labor and land costs rising the world’s factory no longer had as significant a cost advantage for cheap goods… In reality, however, China isn’t rebalancing its economy toward consumption. That’s not to say it doesn’t want more consumption. It does. Leaders in Beijing have publicly endorsed the need to raise consumption: in February 2025, for instance, Chinese premier Li Qiang called for ‘boosting consumption to expand domestic demand, smooth the economic cycle, and drive economic growth.’ But China’s leaders envision higher consumption coming at the end of China’s economic transition, not the beginning. Rather than redistributing wealth so people can spend more now, Beijing wants to focus on creating new wealth in the hope that it spurs greater consumption in the future… But in the face of weak domestic demand from the aftermath of the deflated property bubble, China is ramping up its exports even more in the short term. This not only delays China’s own pivot toward consumption; it also promises wealth destruction for other countries trying to compete with China or find their place in the global economy.”

• “For consumption to lead China’s economy, the country’s famously frugal savers must set aside less of their income, or incomes must increase faster than the economy as a whole. Engineering that kind of transformation requires wealth redistribution… But Beijing has steadfastly refused to do the one thing that might make the biggest difference: significantly expand the social safety net. China’s system of social supports is chronically underfunded. The national social security fund, which backstops the country’s pensions, is likely to be depleted by 2035, throwing into doubt the retirement of tens of millions of people. Although nearly all of China’s citizens have some basic health insurance, low reimbursement rates mean that out-of-pocket health-care costs can be debilitating, particularly for families supporting elderly parents. And many of the 300 million people who have migrated from the countryside to the cities to work cannot access subsidized public services because they’re only registered to access services in their hometowns, where quality is often much lower. The government says that it supports granting internal migrants the residency status they need to allow them the same access to affordable housing, public schooling, health care, and pensions as their urban neighbors, but it has been unwilling to fund it… By focusing on innovation and industrial upgrading, Beijing hopes to create firms capable of generating higher profits and paying higher salaries. Bigger salaries and profits will translate into an expanded tax base for the state, which can then spend more on social supports for an aging population. More profitable companies will also lift the stock market, which will replace an oversaturated property sector as the engine of middle-class wealth creation. In this more affluent, equitable China of the future, people will—finally—be able to consume at far higher levels than they do today.”

• Why it matters: “But that vision is not only long term; it also contains a paradox. Holding on to old industries while expanding into new ones means that China’s industrial production will continue to grow. As incomes rise, however, people typically spend a greater share of what they earn on services and less on physical goods. Even if Chinese households do buy some more manufactured items, they cannot possibly absorb all of China’s massive increase in industrial production. The rest of the world will be asked to fill the gap… Advanced industrialized countries will bear the brunt of China’s revved-up export engine. Countries such as Germany, which is a major producer of cars, chemicals, and industrial machinery, face a future in which demand for their products drops and their global market share will be taken over by Chinese competitors. Developing countries face challenges, as well. As China produces low-end goods ever more efficiently, it cuts off economies with lower labor costs from embarking on the path to prosperity that China itself once trod… Increasingly, the only things that China needs from abroad are commodities, luxury items, overseas holidays, and a handful of high-tech goods it isn’t yet able to make for itself. As Chinese leaders say, they want to ensure that the economic cake gets bigger before they divide it more fairly. But it remains to be seen if they can have their cake and eat it, too.”

5. What the end of USAID means to the world—and America

Why you should read it: Refugees International head Jeremy Konyndyk details the consequences of USAID’s destruction on the rest of the world in the New York Times—and what its demise means for the United States itself.

• “Last February, Elon Musk boasted of ‘feeding USAID into the woodchipper’ as President Trump kicked off his second term with an unanticipated assault on the agency. A year later, the brutal fallout is coming into focus. Humanitarian aid last year reached 25 million fewer people than in 2024, despite rising global need. More than 2,000 health clinics have closed in crisis zones around the world. Global food aid funding dropped by 40 percent from 2024 to 2025. Millions of people have lost access to critical H.I.V. treatment and testing… The brutality of U.S.A.I.D.’s closure and the disregard for the human toll betrayed a vision of a crueler, meaner, more insular world — one in which America aspires not to any pretense of moral leadership but simply to naked power, dominance and extractive self-interest. U.S.A.I.D., after all, was not only a humanitarian endeavor; it was also a symbol of what America seeks to be in the world and the sort of world America seeks to build. Mr. Trump’s new order, inaugurated with his assault on U.S.A.I.D., is corroding America’s influence and standing and leaving global leaders with little choice but to treat the United States as an erratic adversary rather than a stable ally.”

• “Meanwhile, Mr. Rubio’s State Department has found ample funding for politicized boondoggles. Under pressure from the Israeli government, the department waived nine federal procurement requirements and circumvented credible humanitarian organizations to give $30 million to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an entity observers say contributed to the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians by sending aid seekers on dangerous routes and that was found to be recruiting personnel from an Islamophobic American motorcycle gang before shutting down amid a wave of global criticism… This kind of politicized, wasteful use of aid dollars is far removed from the vision President John F. Kennedy articulated when he started U.S.A.I.D. in 1961 with the explicit dual purpose of showcasing American values and advancing American national security. Through its six decades of work, U.S.A.I.D. was grounded in a belief that those two American aims were aligned, even overlapping. Shifting aid leadership from U.S.A.I.D. to the State Department has led to aid policy that seeks to extract concessions, not build partnerships.”

• Why it matters: “For 80 years, the legacy of World War II pushed the world toward greater collaboration. That larger philosophy unlocked the greatest period of security and economic growth in world history… Ultimately, American foreign assistance policy is a reflection of who our country wants to be in the world and of the kind of world we seek to build. Ten years from now, a world shaped by Mr. Trump’s aid policies will be meaner and more opaque — one where hunger, preventable diseases and desperation spread. It will be a world in which America stands isolated and friendless.”

6. How the Epstein emails reveal the banality and stupidity of our wealthy elites

Why you should read it: In The Times of London, columnist James Marriott observes that the respect with which financier-slash-sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s idiotic musings were treated by scientists and intellectuals reveals the profound banality of our elites.

• “Obviously, pomposity ranks low among Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. But a noteworthy feature of his inbox is the quantity of self-important philosophising it contains. In email after email Epstein and his rich acquaintances — whom one might have naively credited with a kind of malign genius — trade specious sub-TED talk musings on polling, quantum physics, life after death, global warming and international relations… The temptation is to chalk this up to ‘the banality of evil’. But it illustrates something else worth paying attention to: the vacuousness of the international business elite.”

• “For all their self-importance, these powerful and wealthy men — always at a conference or on the way to Davos (‘giving a talk tmrw about data visualization’) — display no remarkable insight into life or the world. ‘I’m wowed by people of great ideas,’ said Epstein, meaning something like ‘I am wowed by the same buzzwords as everyone else in my circle…’ Epstein belonged to an international set that displayed its status through ‘big ideas’ and ‘thought leadership’. In ideology (if not in practice) our society is a meritocracy and to feel comfortable at the top, the wealthy need to believe they’ve earned their position through creativity and brilliance… Never in history has so much money surrounded itself with so much pseudo-intellectual guff. Gusts of it drift annually through Davos with its seminars on the power of dialogue and the meaning of tipping points. The spirit is institutionalised in the large companies which, no longer content with merely making money, adopt ‘corporate philosophies’. It is all-pervading in the tech industry, with its pseudy meditations on consciousness. Sam Altman boasts that he ‘consulted, like, hundreds of moral philosophers’ when developing ChatGPT… The claim to deep thought can be a way of cowing the public. Who are we to object to a technology that bears the imprimatur of a hundred moral philosophers? Worse, cod philosophy is used to launder dangerous ideas, to lend the ordinary corruptions of power an intellectual sheen. When Epstein planned to genetically engineer a race of superhumans, he could tell himself he did so not as a deluded creep but as a transhumanist visionary. When Peter Thiel muses on the passing of the human race, he passes himself off as a futurist prophet rather than a common or garden megalomaniac.”

• Why it matters: “Our mistake is to take any of this seriously. An age in which millions of people voluntarily sit through the podcasts of venture capitalists is one which has grown altogether too credulous of the idea that wealth is evidence of special insight into the human condition. I can believe you have to be smart to make money. I don’t think it follows that making money turns you into a modern Socrates. The Epstein files remind us not only of the corruption but also the hollowness of our elite. To our horror we might add a derisive laugh.”

7. Why crypto has been, is now, and always will be pointless—except for crime

Why you should read it: Former Biden White House economists Ryan Cummings and Jared Bernstein make the case for crypto’s fundamental uselessness in the New York Times—a uselessness that not even the U.S. government can change.

• “Since its peak last fall, Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, has lost almost half its value… We have one question. What took so long? Outside of crimes and scams, the technology is useless, and its economics are even worse.”

• “The answer is that crypto was held aloft for months by a period of euphoria that followed the extraordinary support the industry gained in the Trump administration. The crypto bros who spent millions of dollars getting Donald Trump elected seemed to get virtually everything they might want: a longtime industry investor elevated to White House adviser, one type of crypto given the imprimatur of the federal government, the near annihilation of effective regulatory scrutiny, invitations to White House dinners hosted by Mr. Trump… But instead of cementing crypto’s legitimacy, the administration has only pulled back the curtain on the fundamental worthlessness of its assets. At a time when investors have grown skittish about riskier assets, the value of Bitcoin has fallen nearly 50 percent since October, dropping to below $70,000, proving it was only a matter of time before crypto faced the critical scrutiny it always needed but never truly received.”

• Why it matters: “Yet all of that financial and government support, accompanied by a period of soaring crypto values, still failed to win over consumers. The share of Americans holding crypto has been stuck at around 30 percent for the past four years. Demand is so slack that the owners of the heavy-duty hardware that mines new crypto are increasingly turning it into A.I. data centers. At the same time, investors worried about an A.I. bubble are increasingly ditching riskier, more speculative assets — the more speculative the asset, the earlier it was punished. That explains why Bitcoin started plummeting three weeks before tech stocks began to wobble. Clearly, despite its many wins in Washington, crypto has made little progress on its attempts to be integrated into the real economy… No one can say with certainty what crypto will be worth in the future. But with what we view as the most crypto-friendly administration and friendly members of Congress, its boosters have run out of excuses. They may now also be running out of time.”

8. Why the fantasy of artificial general intelligence crashed

Why you should read it: The Atlantic’s Matteo Wong shows how delusional predictions about the creation of artificial general intelligence—AGI—will go bust this year.

• “What the differences in opinion [as to when AGI will arrive] should serve to illustrate is exactly how squishy the notions of AGI, or powerful AI, or superintelligence really are. Developing a ‘general’ intelligence was a core reason DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI were founded. And not even two years ago, these CEOs had fairly similar forecasts that AGI would arrive by the late 2020s. Now the consensus is gone: Not only are the timelines scattered, but the broad agreement on what AGI even is and the immediate value it could provide humanity has been scrubbed away… ‘Yet the AI industry coalesced around the notion of AGI anyway—in large part because OpenAI, which kicked off today’s boom with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, has the goal of ensuring that AGI “benefits all of humanity” in its founding mission. At the time, it communicated about the concept constantly. (Ilya Sutskever, then the company’s chief scientist, had a habit of encouraging employees to ‘feel the AGI.) The term’s ambiguity has been a boon for OpenAI and other firms that have been able to market ‘intelligence’ without actually describing it in any meaningful way—hence the endless stream of questionable advertisements insisting that chatbots make ideal travel agents. Meanwhile, these companies have raised tremendous capital by showing the world that AI is getting better, and better at more things. As long as that seemed true—that their chatbots were progressing toward something—it was simple enough to argue that the ultimate destination was an all-powerful machine.”

• “This case is getting harder to make. Large language models already exhibit impressive capabilities, especially in technical areas such as software engineering and solving competition-style math problems. But at the same time, AI models continue to struggle with seemingly trivial tasks, such as drawing clocks and completing simple logic puzzles. For much of last year, each new generation of bots yielded only marginal improvements, rather than leaps forward, on standard benchmarks. And those benchmarks are highly gameable: It is unclear whether AI labs are really measuring general capabilities at all, or just preparing their products for the right tests. Consider that a human chess grandmaster might lack street smarts, and that a literary theorist might struggle with algebra. The biggest improvements have come from so-called ‘agentic’ frameworks that allow AI models to use other programs—write emails, search the web, deploy code—which make chatbots more useful and capable, but not necessarily ‘smarter…’ As impressive as they can be, chatbots are now a ‘normal technology,’ as the AI researchers Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor have put it: an invention that will spread across society and change it in real but gradual ways—like other new products that people pay for and benefit from using. This is becoming conventional wisdom. The White House AI adviser Sriram Krishnan recently described AI as a ‘very useful technology’ that ‘has nothing to do with “general intelligence.”’ Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, has described AI as ‘a tool’ and said that his benchmark for the technology’s success is not building AGI but achieving 10 percent global GDP growth.”

• Why it matters: ““The AI industry is undergoing its biggest commercial swing yet amid mounting concerns about just how sustainable this boom is. [AI company CEOs] Altman, Amodei, and Hassabis have all said that aspects of the current AI-spending craze are bubble-like—in other words, that the hundreds of billions of dollars being dumped into building godlike AGIs may not yield a commensurate return. The new justifications for all of these investments are much more concrete: sell products, sell ads, sell subscriptions. If AI is indeed a normal technology, then the labs developing it need to start making money like normal businesses.”

9. Why Hitler, too, had an obsession with Greenland

Why you should read it: Also in The Atlantic, historian Timothy Ryback explains Adolf Hitler’s own obsession with control over the Danish territory of Greenland.

• “Greenland appears to have been a lifelong preoccupation of Adolf Hitler’s. According to stenographic notes from a lunchtime conversation dated May 21, 1942, Hitler recalled that hardly anyone ‘interested him more in his youth’ than Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer who in 1888 led the first team to cross Greenland’s interior. A surviving volume from Hitler’s private book collection contains firsthand accounts of the geologic and Arctic explorer Alfred Wegener’s Grönland Expedition, which left Wegener dead in 1930 and inspired the 1933 adventure film S.O.S. Eisberg… By April 1934, Hitler’s government had inventoried Greenland: 13,500 Eskimos, 3,500 Danes, and 8,000 sheep, as well as the world’s largest deposit of a strategic natural resource—cryolite, a mineral essential to American aluminum production. In 1938, Hermann Göring dispatched an expedition to Greenland, ostensibly to explore the island’s flora and fauna. However, Hitler’s true intent may have been not scientific, but economic—the expedition was headed by a mining engineer, Kurt Herdemerten, who had been a member of the ill-fated Wegener expedition. Hitler had inflicted countless economic wounds on his country over his five years as chancellor, and this foray into the Arctic was part of a broader effort to remedy one of them.”

• “In a drive to move Germany toward economic self-sufficiency, Hitler had imposed draconian tariffs, refused to honor foreign-debt obligations, and sought to wean the nation off Norwegian whale-oil consumption. The problem was that Germany used whale oil not only for margarine, a staple of the German diet, but also in the production of nitroglycerin, a key component for the munitions industry. Whale-oil imports ranged from 165,000 to 220,000 tons annually, representing the country’s single largest foreign-currency expenditure. To replace Norwegian whale oil, it was proposed that ‘German ships with German fishermen using German equipment’ could harvest ‘the riches of the sea’—or Fischreichtum—’without giving a single penny to foreign countries.’ So Hitler mobilized a German whaling fleet that gradually depleted whale populations in the North. By 1938, the Germans also had 31 whale-oil-processing ships in the frozen South, off the coast of Antarctica, along with two processing stations on land supplied by 257 ‘catcher boats.’ Plans were made to declare the ‘whaling enterprises’ German colonial possessions.”

• Why it matters: “Hitler dismissed those who opposed the acquisition of land on the grounds of human rights as ‘scribblers.’ No divine authority dictated how much land a people possessed or occupied, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: ‘National borders are made by men, and they are changed by men.’ A country’s claim to territory was based on its ability to impose brute force over another, a principle that dated back, Hitler continued, to days of the ‘might of a victorious sword,’ when Germanic tribes asserted themselves with blood and iron. ‘Und nur in dieser Kraft allein liegt dann das Recht,’ Hitler wrote, a maxim that, distilled into English, translates as ‘Might makes right.’”

Odds and Ends

• How French historical preservationists aim to restore the basilica of Saint-Denis, the first major example of Gothic architecture…

• Why two research teams think they’ve found the long lost Soviet lunar lander Luna 9…

• How University of Chicago paleontologists unearthed a new Spinosaurus species in the deserts of Niger…

• Why scientists in Antarctica are using new methods to research the continent’s gradually melting glaciers…

• How a two-year-old Czechoslovakian wolfdog named Nazgul had his moment of glory during the recent Winter Olympics in Milan…

What I’m Listening To and Watching

• The second season of Hulu’s post-apocalyptic thriller Paradise.

• Days of Ash, the new, angry, and ultimately hopeful EP from legendary Irish rockers U2.

• Canadian chanteuse Sarah McLachlan’s recent Tiny Desk concert and podcast conversation with Amy Poehler.

• …and blues legend Buddy Guy’s own Tiny Desk concert.

• Stevie Nicks stares daggers at fellow Fleetwood Mac bandmate and ex Lindsay Buckingham during a live 1997 performance of “Silver Springs.”

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"...whole nations and peoples have undertaken to destroy their tyrannical rulers, both when they've suffered and when suffering has been threatened. Sometimes tyrants' own guards have risen up and treated them treacherously, impiously, savagely, and in whatever other vicious way tyrants have trained them to behave. What else can a person expect from someone he has taught to be evil?  Wickedness doesn't stay subservient for long, or misbehave only so far as it's ordered."

- Seneca, On Clemency, 1.26.1

What I’m Reading:

1. How Trump sabotaged NASA’s science mission

Why you should read it: In The Atlantic, Ross Andersen details the ways the Trump administration has tried to cripple NASA’s awe-inspiring and world-beating science missions.

• “Perseverance is among the latest in a lineage of interplanetary robotic explorers that NASA has built across almost 60 years, for about $60 billion. That’s less than what Mark Zuckerberg spent on his struggling metaverse. At NASA, it paid for hundreds of spacecraft that have flown past all of the solar system’s planets, dropped into orbit around most of them, and decelerated from flight speed to reach the surface of a few. These missions have disclosed the scientific qualities of other worlds, as well as the look and feel of them, to all humanity, and for posterity too… Last spring, President Donald Trump bluntly expressed his vision for science at NASA in his first budget request. Along with extensive layoffs, he called for 40 of the agency’s 124 science missions, including Mars Sample Return, to be defunded, and for the surviving missions to make do with less. Among NASA scientists, the request was demoralizing; within months, its major science centers lost thousands of staffers to buyouts and cutbacks… Only the governments of rich countries send robotic explorers to other planets. And only the United States has sent them past the asteroid belt to Jupiter and beyond. For decades, this has been a part of America’s global cultural role: to fling the most distant probes into the solar system, and to build the space telescopes that see the farthest into the cosmos. The U.S. has led an unprecedented age of cosmic discovery. Now Trump is trying to bring that age to an end, and right at the moment when answers to our most profound existential questions finally seem to be within reach.”

• “Work like this requires world-class scientific infrastructure and skill. By April, Trump appeared to be trying to rid NASA of both. The White House had already offered government workers a blanket buyout. Janet Petro, whom Trump had appointed acting administrator of NASA, was openly encouraging staffers to take it… Trump’s budget request, released in May, called for a 47 percent cut in funding for the agency’s science missions and deep reductions in staff at its major science centers, JPL and Goddard Space Flight Center. Congress hasn’t passed this request, and as of this writing it seems likely to reject Trump’s severe cuts… Every NASA science unit was told to draw up a new budget, [senior NASA science advisor David] Grinspoon said. It was like planning a strike on the fleet of spacecraft that the agency has spread across the solar system. If the cuts in the request were implemented, satellites that monitor the advance and retreat of Earth’s glaciers, clouds, and forests would splash down into an undersea graveyard for spacecraft in the remote Pacific Ocean. A robot that is on its way to study a gigantic Earth-menacing asteroid would be abandoned mid-flight, as would other probes that have already arrived at the sun, Mars, and Jupiter. The first spacecraft to fly by Pluto is still sending data back from the Kuiper Belt’s unexplored ice fields. It took almost 20 years to get out there, and the small team that runs it costs NASA almost nothing. It would be disbanded nonetheless, and contact with the probe would be forever lost. Future missions to Venus, Mars, and Uranus would also be scrapped.”

• Why it matters: ““A full accounting of Trump’s assault on American science will have to wait for historians, and we cannot yet say what the worst of it will be. His appointment of a charlatan to lead the country’s largest public-health agency may well prove more detrimental to Americans’ daily lives than anything he does to NASA. But his attempt to ground the agency’s science missions suggests a fundamental change in the country’s character, a turning inward. America’s space telescopes and probe missions have not only torn the veil from nature. They’ve had an ennobling effect on American culture; to the world, they’ve projected an elevated idea of Americans as competent, forward-looking adventurers, forever in search of new wonders.”

2. How Trump’s nineteenth century foreign policy will make America less secure and poorer

Why you should read it: Also in The Atlantic, foreign policy writer Robert Kagan outlines how Trump’s desire to return to the nineteenth century will make the world a more dangerous and less prosperous place—particularly for the United States.

• ““The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy made it official: The American-dominated liberal world order is over. This is not because the United States proved materially incapable of sustaining it. Rather, the American order is over because the United States has decided that it no longer wishes to play its historically unprecedented role of providing global security… Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II, one that will make the Cold War look like child’s play and the post–Cold War world like paradise. In fact, this new world will look a lot like the world prior to 1945, with multiple great powers and metastasizing competition and conflict. The U.S. will have no reliable friends or allies and will have to depend entirely on its own strength to survive and prosper. This will require more military spending, not less, because the open access to overseas resources, markets, and strategic bases that Americans have enjoyed will no longer come as a benefit of the country’s alliances… Americans are neither materially nor psychologically ready for this future. For eight decades, they have inhabited a liberal international order shaped by America’s predominant strength. They have grown accustomed to the world operating in a certain way: Largely agreeable and militarily passive European and Asian allies cooperate with the United States on economic and security issues. Challengers to the order, such as Russia and China, are constrained by the combined wealth and might of the U.S. and its allies. Global trade is generally free and unhampered by geopolitical rivalry, oceans are safe for travel, and nuclear weapons are limited by agreements on their production and use. Americans are so accustomed to this basically peaceful, prosperous, and open world that they tend to think it is the normal state of international affairs, likely to continue indefinitely. They can’t imagine it unraveling, much less what that unraveling will mean for them.”

• “Some pundits who welcome a post-­American world and the return of multi­polarity suggest that most of the benefits of the American order for the U.S. can be retained. America just needs to learn to restrain itself, give up utopian efforts to shape the world, and accommodate ‘the reality’ that other countries ‘seek to establish their own international orders governed by their own rules,’ as Harvard’s Graham Allison put it. Indeed, Allison and others argue, Americans’ insistence on predominance had caused most conflicts with Russia and China. Americans should embrace multi­polarity as more peaceful and less burdensome. Recently, Trump’s boosters among the foreign-­policy elite have even started pointing to the early-19th-century Concert of Europe as a model for the future, suggesting that skillful diplomacy among the great powers can preserve peace more effectively than the U.S.-led system… As a purely historical matter, this is delusional. Even the most well-managed multi­polar orders were significantly more brutal and prone to war than the world that Americans have known these past 80 years. To take one example, during what some call the “long peace” in Europe, from 1815 to 1914, the great powers (including Russia and the Ottoman empire) fought dozens of wars with one another and with smaller states to defend or acquire strategic advantage, resources, and spheres of interest. These were not skirmishes but full-scale conflicts, usually costing tens—­sometimes hundreds—­of thousands of lives. Roughly half a million people died in the Crimean War (1853–56); the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) resulted in about 180,000 military and up to 250,000 civilian deaths in less than a year of fighting. Almost every decade from 1815 to 1914 included at least one war involving two or more great powers… Precisely to escape this cycle of conflict, the generations of Americans who lived through two world wars laid the foundations of the American-led liberal world order. They were the true realists, because they had no illusions about multi­polarity. They had lived their entire lives with its horrific consequences.”

• Why it matters: “The consequence of a newly unreliable and even hostile United States, therefore, will likely be significant military buildups by former allies. This will not mean sharing the burden of collective security, because these rearmed nations will no longer be American allies. They will be independent great powers pursuing their own strategic interests in a multi­polar world. They will owe nothing to the United States; on the contrary, they will view it with the same antagonism and fear that they direct toward Russia and China. Indeed, having been strategically abandoned by the U.S. while suffering from American economic predation and possibly territorial aggression, they are likely to become hotbeds of anti-Americanism. At the very least, they will not be the same countries Americans know today… In a multi­polar world , everything is up for grabs, and the flash points for potential conflict proliferate. The American order for eight decades provided not only security commitments to allies and partners but also common access to vital resources, military bases, waterways, and airspace—what theorists call ‘public goods.’ In the absence of the United States playing that role, all of these once again become targets of a multi­sided competition… Trump has managed in just one year to destroy the American order that was, and he has weakened America’s ability to protect its interests in the world that will be. If Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive, wait until they start paying for what comes next.”

3. How to tell when Trump doesn’t really care about something in foreign policy

Why you should read it: On his Substack, historian Phillips P. O’Brien observes that “Donald Trump has one great tell that an issue really does not matter to him… when he acts like he cares about the human beings involved in the matter.”

• “When Trump says he wants the killings of some people to stop or the oppression of others to end, it is the clearest indication that he could not care less… Ukraine might be the clearest example of Trump’s “tell” recently, but it is certainly not the only one. Since long before his last election Trump has said repeatedly that he was desperate to see the killing of Ukrainians to end, to save the Ukrainian people from more misery and death. In fact his supposed need to preserve Ukrainian lives (and in some cases Russians) was given as a key part of his boast that he would end the war in 24 hours… Of course, what Trump has actually been doing over the last year is making it far easier for Putin to kill Ukrainians on the battlefield and the home front by protecting the Russian dictator, starving Ukraine of weapons and leaving Ukrainian cities far less well defended than they should have been. Trump helped create the humanitarian catastrophe now in Ukraine by making it much easier for Putin to freeze Ukrainians cities and he started this process almost immediately after he became president.”

• “So, Trump has never cared about Ukrainian lives for a moment and the fact that he shed crocodile tears about them was the greatest tell that he was lying. The same, it must be said, has just occurred with the Venezuelans and the Iranians. In both cases, Trump acted like he cared about their well-being, that his actions in their cases would be based on his sympathy for them as human beings battling oppressive regimes… In other words, Trump simply does not care about people. He uses expressions of caring as a political tool, but nothing more. And the more he uses the expressions, the more you can be sure he does not care… He actually cares about things that reflect on his perceived greatness. This is what energizes him, obsesses him and drives his choices. It also explains his relationship with Putin. For whatever reason, Trump has determined that his relationship with Putin is the way to greater glory (and his relationship with President Xi as well). As such these relationships will always win out in the end.”

• Why it matters: “You can be sure that if Trump expresses any public sentiment or concern for people, it is a tell that he really does not give a damn. If he discusses a monument to his own greatness, that is what matters to him.”

4. Why we’re heading toward a personalist world order

Why you should read it: International relations scholars Seva Gutinsky and Semuhi Sinanoglu argue in Foreign Affairs that Trump, along with Putin and Xi, are taking the world into a new world order grounded on the personal whims of autocratic rulers.

• “For scholars of American foreign policy, the idea that a U.S. president—even Trump—would decapitate a foreign government because he felt mocked may seem shocking. But Trump is a personalist leader: one that concentrates power around himself and his inner circle. Personalists differ from ordinary autocrats or dictators in that they hollow out the governing bodies and institutions—such as political parties, militaries, and bureaucracies—that support the regime and would otherwise channel policy options through mechanisms of collective deliberation shaped by the authoritarian’s vision. Personalists are instead driven purely by their own private fixations and incentives rather than coherent national interests. In Trump’s case, those fixations include flattery, personal enrichment, gaining access to natural resources, and dominating the Western Hemisphere. And for a leader with these aims, attacking Venezuela and taking Maduro made sense. That it does not advance Washington’s global position—the strike was roundly condemned by many U.S. allies and is likely to prompt Latin America to hedge against a more menacing Washington—does not matter at all. ‘My own morality. My own mind,’ Trump told The New York Times when asked if there were limits on his global power. ‘It’s the only thing that can stop me. I don’t need international law…’ For the first time since the 1930s, the world’s most powerful countries—China, Russia, and the United States—are all governed by personalist leaders. They hoard authority and silo themselves in informational bubbles. Chinese leader Xi Jinping, for example, has centralized policymaking and repeatedly purged senior officials, discouraging deliberation among his advisers. Russian President Vladimir Putin has also concentrated power and retreated into a self-made echo chamber. Driven by a personal preoccupation with revisionist Russian history, he lectures the world on historical figures such as Rurik of Novgorod and Yaroslav the Wise, who he claims justify Moscow’s ownership of Ukraine.”

• “A personalist global system is one of uncertainty, corruption, and private bargains. Self-interested leaders are open to showy deals that discard or weaken alliances and entrenched commitments in exchange for immediate personal victories. The Trump administration’s attempt to orchestrate a comprehensive land-for-peace deal between Russia and Ukraine is one example. So is Trump’s effort to secure a grand bargain with China, in which Beijing would increase its purchases of U.S. goods and, if the past is any guide, offer commercial advantages to businesses that are connected to him. In exchange, Trump might consider reducing U.S. support for Taiwan—the president has vacillated on how much to back it—or lifting export restrictions… In a fractured personalist world, there will be far fewer checks to stop these leaders from acting on their impulses. If personalist leaders wind up squaring off against each other during a crisis, they may be more likely to escalate than would normal leaders. Personalists, after all, are reassured by sycophantic advisers and thus have fewer reasons to stand down. This tendency is alarming given that China, Russia, and the United States possess the world’s largest nuclear arsenals and that guardrails against further proliferation appear to be collapsing.”

• Why it matters: “Studies of personalist regimes consistently show they are more reckless, aggressive, and conflict-prone than other kinds of governments. They are more likely to break alliances, stumble into crises, and start dumb wars. These effects will be amplified now that the world’s strongest states are controlled by isolated and unaccountable leaders. A personalist global order, in other words, is one of increasing corruption, volatility, and violence… The emerging global system is one in which three nuclear-armed leaders, insulated from dissent, pursue risky gambits. The result will not be the relatively stable if tense competition that characterized the Cold War. It will be something more volatile: a world in which the most consequential decisions rest on the whims of men who have systematically discarded anyone willing to tell them no.”

5. What Silicon Valley doesn’t get about defense

Why you should read it: Vanderbilt professor and former Biden Pentagon official Margaret Mullins explains why Silicon Valley’s attempt to muscle into the defense industry fail to grasp how it works.

• “Defense acquisition is, indeed, broken. The United States cannot produce critical materiel at speed and at scale in a moment of crisis. Despite spending more on defense than the next nine countries combined, the United States faces a crisis of both modernization and production. Recently, an emergent group of Silicon Valley defense tech leaders and their funders, including Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir; Palmer Luckey, the founder of Anduril; and Katherine Boyle, a co-founder of the Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm American Dynamism, have blamed excessive government regulation and interventionism for this unhappy state of affairs. Too much funding, they say, flows to large legacy programs and prime contractors… Their declinist narrative is convenient, but it is inaccurate. The [post-Cold War] Last Supper did not usher in the industry’s dark era. By the time Aspin and Perry held the dinner [calling on defense contractors to consolidate], the defense industry, like nearly all U.S. manufacturing sectors, had already been weakened by globalization and the financialization of the U.S. economy, drawdowns in the defense budget since 1986, and a broader effort to remake the government in the image of private business. Indeed, after the Last Supper, policymakers repeatedly did exactly what Silicon Valley’s tech leaders suggest today as a solution for the department’s ills: they deregulated the industry and outsourced production capacity to the private sector. In fact, such strategies helped create the very problems that now plague the industry.”

• “The modern U.S. defense industrial base took shape following World War II, benefiting from the enormous investments made by the government and the decimation of foreign production capacity wreaked by the war. Before the war, the government had researched, developed, and produced most weapons in-house, at public arsenals, shipyards, and laboratories. During World War II, the government had enlisted the help of blue-chip companies such as Chrysler and IBM to manufacture a variety of defense-related products, from tanks to engines to rifles. This generally fruitful partnership between the military and industry endured after the war ended, undergirding the early Cold War effort to beat the Soviet Union in a technological competition and sparking innovation in national security with positive spillover benefits to the broader U.S. economy… By the 1970s, however, overseas manufacturing and technology markets began to reemerge. Foreign governments subsidized the domestic production of electronics, ships, aircraft parts, and more, and U.S. defense companies were forced to find ways to remain competitive. Taking advantage of lower labor costs overseas, U.S. producers moved parts of their supply chains to Asia and Europe. Then, the 1980s brought ‘financial engineering’ to defense. Threats of hostile takeovers, defensive restructuring, and ruthlessly profit-maximizing executives saddled companies such as Lockheed and Martin Marietta with debt, leaving them weak and increasingly dependent on the Defense Department’s largess to stay afloat… A defense spending boom at the heart of President Ronald Reagan’s hawkish Cold War strategy in the early 1980s masked the damaging effects that globalization and financialization had on the industry, but only temporarily. When Reagan began to draw down defense spending in 1986, the move only hastened the hollowing out of the bloated sector… Instead of compensating for U.S. defense firms’ offshoring, consolidation, and constriction by bolstering domestic capacity, the government mimicked the private sector’s trends. For the Defense Department, this meant shedding its organic production capacity. Shifting the production of several core military capabilities to the private sector resulted not in a cost-efficient transfer of production but in the outright disappearance of some production capability. Take shipbuilding. Before World War II, public shipyards managed almost half the research, design, construction, and maintenance of the U.S. Navy’s ships. From 1953 to 1960, private shipyards’ share in new ship construction and repair contracts rose from 55 to 85 percent. But by the 1970s, some large private builders had stopped bidding on navy work. Instead of reinvesting in a public option, the Reagan administration further limited the government’s role, eliminating the construction subsidy program that had underpinned the commercial shipbuilding business since the 1930s. Domestic shipbuilding, for the navy or the commercial sector, never recovered.”

• Why it matters: “Defense tech leaders’ alternative vision for procurement is likely to fail, just as previous deregulatory efforts did. Washington should not rush to accept Silicon Valley’s critique as gospel. Instead, it should accept that national defense is not a normal competitive market and never will be and invest in the government’s own capacity to oversee military production, incorporate new technology, and manage competition… If the Department of Defense wants to build a combined industrial base that can respond to the eruption of a conflict, it will have to pay for it. Washington should be willing to accept the higher costs that come with contracts that include provisions mandating that suppliers are capable of surging production if required. It should also ensure that the arsenals, shipyards, and depots that make up the Defense Department’s organic industrial base receive adequate funding. Critics may argue that expanding a near-trillion-dollar defense budget would be irresponsible, but it will cost less to maintain capacity in and outside government than to rapidly build or buy that capacity in a time of urgent need. Rather than relying on episodic crisis spending, Congress and the Defense Department should steadily invest in both the government’s and industry’s facilities, capital equipment, and manufacturing technology.”

6. Living in a clicktatorship

Why you should read it: On his Substack Can We Still Govern?, University of Michigan public policy scholar Don Moynihan posits that the Trump administration is obsessed not with governing but making content.

• “One of the strangest moments to emerge from the U.S. kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro was the flurry of images posted by President Trump on Truth Social. It felt a bit like a student who can’t decide which spring break photos look cutest, so they just upload them all… With the best intelligence systems in the world at their fingertips, they were checking X in the midst of the mission? Combined with the curtains separating some section of Mar‑A‑Lago from the rest of the President’s resort, the images create an almost surreal air. It felt as if a group of twelve-year-old boys in a basement had been handed control of the most lethal military in history—and were using it to boost their online brands… I want to suggest that what we are witnessing from the Trump administration is not just skillful manipulation of social media—it’s something more profoundly worrying. Today, we live in a Clicktatorship, ruled by a LOLviathan. Our algothracy is governed by poster brains.”

• “What do I mean by a Clicktatorship? A Clicktatorship is a form of government that combines a social media worldview with authoritarian tendencies. Government officials in the Clicktatorship are not just using online platforms as a mode of communication; their beliefs, judgment, and decisionmaking reflect, are influenced by, and are directly responsive to the online world to an extreme degree. The Clicktatorship views everything as content, including basic policy decisions and implementation practices… What I’m arguing is that the Trump administration isn’t just using social media to shape a narrative. Many of its members are deeply addicted to it. We would be concerned if a senior government official was an alcoholic or drug addict, knowing it could impair judgment and decisionmaking. But we should be equally concerned about Pete Hegseth and Elon Musk’s social media compulsions—just as much as their alcohol or ketamine use, respectively.”

• Why it matters: “I’m just scratching the surface here. Pick any federal agency, and you can find examples of poster brains making important decisions. This trend is likely to only get worse as digital natives enter key government roles. And there are likely a host of other ways these patterns are undermining the professional behavior of people in government that I have not identified. In particular, the Trump administration represents the intersection of poster brain, personalism, and authoritarianism that seems especially toxic… The bottom line is that it we need to take more seriously how social media has rewired the brains—and behavior—of those running our country.”

7. How ICE’s brutality displays the Trump administration’s weakness

Why you should read it: Berkeley politics professor Omar Wasow makes the case in the New York Times that the brutal paramilitary occupation of Minneapolis by ICE and CBP is a display of regime weakness, not strength.

• “What we are seeing is the weakness of strong states. Regimes that rely on repression face a challenge: The more force they deploy, the more they risk exposing their own brutality to politically persuadable observers. Overreach doesn’t just project strength; it also undermines legitimacy… But spectacle cuts both ways. The same cameras that broadcast enforcement operations also capture repression. Winning a physical fight isn’t the same as winning an argument.”

• “Consider Birmingham, Ala. In the early 1960s, Bull Connor’s fire hoses and police dogs were meant to restore order during civil rights demonstrations. Instead, they revealed the brutality of segregation to an international audience. Movement leaders chose Birmingham strategically, thinking Connor would overreact — and he obliged. John Lewis called it dramatizing injustice. Connor thought he was defending a way of life, but he was digging its grave… Now the Minneapolis deaths are shaping public opinion. One poll found that 82 percent of American voters have watched a video of the killing of Ms. Good. Majorities say the shooting was unjustified… The political question is not whether there has been disorder, but rather whom the public holds responsible for the killings in Minneapolis.”

• Why it matters: “This month, Renee Good was killed in her car after stopping for immigrant neighbors. Alex Pretti was killed coming to a woman’s aid. Visible state violence against sympathetic civilians was the beginning of the end for Jim Crow. It may be a turning point now, too.”

8. Why it’s so hard to hold the federal government responsible for breaking the law

Why you should read it: Also in the New York Times, conservative legal writer David French lays out just why it will prove difficult to hold the federal government responsible for the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

• “Imagine for a moment that you’re a member of Renee Good’s family. You’re mourning her death at the hands of an ICE agent in Minneapolis, and you want justice… You didn’t have high hopes that the Trump administration would hold anyone accountable, but surely the next administration could? There’s no statute of limitations for murder, right?… We can still sue the officer, can’t we? Even if the government can’t or won’t prosecute, we’ll still want to hold him liable… ‘I’m sorry,’ the lawyer replies, ‘but there is almost no chance that will work. There’s a federal statute that gives you the ability to sue state and local officials when they violate your constitutional rights, but there’s no equivalent law granting the right to sue federal officials…’ And there you have it — that’s the challenge any citizen faces when he or she tries to hold the federal government responsible for violating the Constitution. The government is defended by a phalanx of immunities and privileges, buttressed by the president’s unchecked pardon power — a vestige of royal authority that should no longer have any place in our constitutional republic.”

• “President Trump is stress-testing American law, and the law is failing the test. The health of the American experiment rests far more on the integrity of any given American president than we realized… We trusted that presidents would impose accountability on the executive branch. We trusted that presidents wouldn’t abuse their pardon power — or, if they did, then Congress could impeach and convict any offenders. And so we manufactured doctrine after doctrine, year after year, that insulated the executive branch from legal accountability… It’s hard to overstate how much this web of immunities — combined with the failure of Congress to step up and fulfill its powerful constitutional role — has made the United States vulnerable to authoritarian abuse… In the Trump era, those auxiliary precautions have utterly failed. They’ve been undermined to the point where the reverse is now true. Rather than providing additional precautions against the rise of authoritarian rule, American law and precedent seem to presume that angels govern men, and those angels would be free to do even more good if only they possessed a free hand.”

• Why it matters: “Eventually the people will elect a bad and corrupt person to the presidency, and he will wield every tool, power and prerogative that was designed for good to build his own edifice of oppression and greed… If we can endure this crisis, there will be a time of reflection and reform. It happened after the Civil War. It happened during the civil rights movement. It happened after Watergate. And when the time for reform comes again, it must focus on the abolition of the prerogative state.’

9. What the families of fallen Danish soldiers have to say to and about Trump

Why you should read it: The Atlantic’s Isaac Stanley-Becker reports on what the families of Danish soldiers lost in Afghanistan have to say about Trump’s warmongering and denigration of their nation and its sacrifices.

• “It was sunny in southern afghanistan on June 1, 2010, and the temperature quickly reached 104 degrees. Sophia Bruun was the gunner on a Piranha combat vehicle, guarding two platoons conducting a patrol near the town of Gereshk… One of the Piranhas in Sophia’s battle group had hit an IED first thing in the morning, blowing off a wheel, but no one was injured. At the outskirts of a village, they were fired on by the Taliban. They returned fire, and the situation calmed. The patrol continued. But seven minutes after noon, an IED went off under Sophia’s vehicle, flipping it. She was killed instantly, at the age of 22… But these days, Sophia’s mother [Lene] knows exactly what triggers her grief: ‘when Trump says we’re not good enough.’ Bruun is a tiny woman, with soft white hair and fine lines grooved into her pale skin. But she became flushed when discussing the American president, who has been threatening to seize Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark. ‘Keep your fingers away,’ she said with a swatting motion, as if to thwart Trump’s land grab… ‘It’s not right what he’s saying,’ Bruun protested. ‘We have done so much for America.’ For the families of Danish soldiers who died in the American-led campaign against the Taliban, their country’s partnership with the United States is not an abstraction. Denmark’s loyalty to America brought Sophia Bruun to Afghanistan, and it ended her life.”

• “Denmark is small, with a population of just 6 million. But it has tried to uphold its end of the [NATO] bargain. It lost more soldiers per capita than the United States did in Afghanistan. In all, there were 43 deaths, a sacrifice that Danes accepted as the cost of their international obligations. Sophia was the first female soldier to fall in combat in Danish history, her death a ripple effect of the September 11 attacks, the first time that NATO’s mutual-defense clause was invoked. Triggering Article 5 obligated U.S. allies to assist, including by sending soldiers like Sophia to fight. This time, if Article 5 is invoked, the United States might be the aggressor… [W]hen I traveled to Denmark this month, I found there was still fidelity to principles that seem to have vanished from the American government’s calculations, namely a sense of mutual obligation and basic morality… ‘We risked our lives by participating in an operation far from our home,’ [deputy Afghanistan commander Peter] Boysen, who is now chief of the Danish army, told me. And because the fight was in support of a NATO ally that had come under attack, he said, it was worth it… Danes are incredulous about the threats emanating from Washington, and angry. I spoke with former soldiers who said they were preparing to ditch their iPhones and Gmail accounts in favor of European alternatives. This month, officials in Denmark’s third-largest municipality vowed that they would continue funding an annual celebration of Independence Day—believed to be the largest event marking July 4 outside the United States—only if official representatives of the U.S. government were excluded.”

• Why it matters: “Danes have a sophisticated understanding of U.S. politics, and they take pains to separate the president from the rest of the population. Still, their goodwill is not infinite… It is a new world, I thought—one in which small countries, like Denmark, that have bound themselves tightly to Washington have a lot to worry about: Russia bearing down on Europe, the United States retreating to the Western Hemisphere, and China flexing its power in Asia. Denmark has been an especially generous donor to Ukraine, so much so that one U.S. official groused to me that the country had left its own cupboard bare. That’s of a piece with Denmark’s military track record. It’s been a capable and accommodating partner in foreign wars. But its capacity to defend itself, not least Europe and the parts of its territory that stretch into North America, is limited. Danes, of course, never imagined they might need to defend themselves against the United States.”

Odds and Ends

• A profile of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic-era painter Jacques-Louis David and his work…

• Why T. rex may never have stopped growing—and lived longer than paleontologists previously believed…

• How the contents of a mummified wolf pup’s last meal revealed new clues about the extinction of the woolly rhinoceros…

• Ötzi the Iceman—the 5,300-year-old ice mummy discovered in the Italian Alps in 1991—may have carried a cancer-causing strain of HPV…

• A baby boom among right whales—whose overall population numbers in the hundreds—offers a ray of hope for the endangered species…

What I’m Listening To and Watching

• Wonder Man, which sees the struggling and super-powered actor Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) team up with washed-up British thespian Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley, reprising his role from Iron Man 3) to win the lead role in the latest superhero blockbuster.

• Ponies, an espionage thriller set in late 70s-era Moscow and starring Emilia Clarke (Game of Thrones) and Haley Lu Richardson as two widows of CIA agents who become spies themselves to uncover the truth about their husbands’ deaths.

• Good Night, and Good Luck: Live From Broadway, the stage adaptation of the 2005 film depicting journalist Edward R. Murrow’s (George Clooney) fight against Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

• The Rip sees a pair of burned-out Miami counternarcotics cops (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) stumble upon a massive stash of hidden cartel cash and clash over what to do with it.

• “The Streets of Minneapolis,” a Seeger- and Guthrie-esque protest song by Bruce Springsteen on the Trump administration’s murderous paramilitary occupation of Minneapolis.

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"Every American takes pride in our tradition of hospitality to men of all races and of all creeds. One of the great achievements of the American commonwealth has been the fact that race groups which were divided abroad are united here. Enmities and antagonisms were forgotten; former opponents met here as friends. Groups which had fought each other overseas here work together; their children intermarry; they have all made contributions to democracy and peace.

"Because of the very greatness of this achievement, we must be constantly vigilant against the attacks of intolerance and injustice. We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization. If reason is to prevail against intolerance, we must always be on guard."

- President Franklin D. Roosevelt, "Greeting to the American Committee for Protection of Foreign-Born," January 9, 1940

What I’m Reading:

1. Don’t bet the U.S. military on drones

Why you should read it: In Foreign Affairs, Royal United Services Institute expert Justin Bronk details the ways drones have been over-interpreted in Ukraine and don’t fit a potential conflict with China.

• “…the assumption that large-scale acquisition of AI-enabled drones will strengthen U.S. defenses against China is misguided. For one thing, lessons from the war in Ukraine—an attritional, inconclusive struggle between two fundamentally land-centric armed forces—often do not apply directly to other kinds of conflicts. The realities of Beijing’s military arsenal and the likely nature of any potential confrontation in the Indo-Pacific mean that such a conflict would be decided by very different factors. Despite having the largest and most advanced drone industry in the world, China has actually been prioritizing crewed military hardware. Each year, the People’s Liberation Army receives eye-watering numbers of modern and highly capable combat aircraft, large warships, and cutting-edge ground-based, maritime, and air-launched missile systems. If the United States focuses too heavily on drone development and acquisition, it risks losing its slim remaining edge over the PLA in the high-end air force and navy capabilities that would dominate any Indo-Pacific conflict.”

• “Over the past few years, military analysts and defense industry executives alike have focused on the lessons that Western militaries should supposedly take from Ukraine’s remarkable defense against Russia. One result of this interest has been an oversaturation of new defense products and technologies that are being marketed to Western militaries as ‘transformational,’ based on vaguely described combat use in Ukraine. In fact, many such systems, especially Western-made drones from tech startup firms, have proved ineffective or even failed outright on the battlefield in the face of omnipresent Russian (and Ukrainian) electronic warfare and hard environmental conditions… In sharp contrast to the operational conditions in Ukraine, any likely conflict between U.S. forces and China’s People’s Liberation Army would unfold predominantly in the air and at sea, with combat between land forces likely limited to key islands such as Taiwan or the Senkakus (known in China as the Diaoyus). In this context, success for the United States would depend on the ability to rapidly and repeatedly bring decisive airborne and maritime firepower to bear at those key points at critical moments. This would mean projecting power across thousands of miles of ocean against numerous highly advanced Chinese missile, air, and maritime threats. Such operations would require highly trained personnel manning advanced fighter aircraft, bombers, and warships conducting mutually supporting actions in carefully synchronized joint operations. In other words, the conflict would involve very different kinds of forces and equipment from what either Ukraine or Russia is using in the current war… Even if small drones could be delivered rapidly across the required ranges [in the Pacific], none of the varieties currently in use in Ukraine by either side could effectively defend U.S. forces against Chinese attacks. Beijing already operates thousands of high-end ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles that would be used to strike U.S. forward bases, aircraft carriers, tanker aircraft, and other key large assets. To counter such threats, the U.S. military would unavoidably have to rely on multimillion-dollar missile defense systems such as the Patriot PAC-3 MSE, THAAD, SM-6, and SM-3. Intercepting hundreds of increasingly capable Chinese combat aircraft will, likewise, require large quantities of advanced air-to-air missiles such as the AIM-260 JATM and the AIM-174B, as well as the AIM-120D AMRAAM. These will be needed in large quantities regardless of whether they are launched by crewed fighters or, potentially, in the future by AI-enabled uncrewed systems. Small drones simply cannot intercept combat aircraft operating at high altitudes and speeds.”

• Why it matters: “…unless the United States can maintain air and maritime superiority over key contested areas, it will find that the rest of its military force structure will struggle to produce relevant combat power against China in any Indo-Pacific clash. Millions of battlefield quadcopters and tens of thousands of one-way attack drones have not enabled Russia to defeat Ukraine, or vice versa. Even if the Pentagon acquires similar capabilities, they will not change its rapidly degrading balance of power with China in the Indo-Pacific, no matter how good swarms of AI-enabled drones might look on PowerPoint slides”

2. How climate activists greenwash China

Why you should read it: In The Ecomodernist, Seaver Wang, Ted Nordhaus, and Vijaya Ramachandran show how climate activists echo Chinese propaganda when they make inaccurate claims about China’s shift away from fossil fuels.

• “In the year or so since it became clear that the second Trump administration and Republican Congress were dead set on dismantling the Inflation Reduction Act and the Biden Administration’s ‘whole of government’ climate policies, much of the left of center commentariat has undergone an about face on how the world would tackle climate change. The claim, repeated endlessly, that the passage of the IRA marked a historic inflection point in which the United States was ushering in a new era of global green industrial policy, has been memory holed. Now China is the world’s climate savior, a nascent ‘green electrostate’ that is rapidly rewriting the rules of how the global energy economy operates… The characterization of China as a rising green electrostate—in contrast to Trump’s American petrostate—serves a variety of discursive purposes in political debates. But this reading of energy geopolitics misrepresents both Chinese reality and intent. China will likely continue to dominate the green technology sector. But its industrial economy will almost certainly remain powered and heated by coal and gas for decades and Chinese nickel, alumina, metal silicon, and plastics will continue to undercut overseas producers on the basis of cheap fossil energy rather than affordable clean power.”

• “So while China’s progress on clean energy and vehicles has stoked hopes that a sweeping green transformation is not only possible but compatible with China’s economic goals—and even a key element of China’s bid for superpower status, the reality is that coal remains the ‘ballast rock’ of China’s energy supply, according to both government policy statements and domestic media reporting, providing cheap electricity, industrial heat, and chemical inputs for much of the industrial economy… China’s electrification of its economy, in other words, is not comparatively high because it has succeeded in electrifying its industrial sector to a greater degree than its competitors but because its industrial sector consumes twice the share of final energy demand compared to other major economies. At the same time, European or North American engineers likely wouldn’t view many specific drivers of Chinese industrial electrification as particularly impressive.”

• Why it matters: “Situated in advanced developed economies that consume prodigiously but have outsourced much of their industry and manufacturing, it is perhaps not so surprising that many Western observers have fixated on the finished products and not the vast supply chains and manufacturing infrastructure necessary to produce them. But it is China’s non-carbon constrained energy-industrial model, not electric vehicles, solar panels, batteries, and heat pumps, that has rewritten the rules of the global game… The current focus among Western commentators on China as a climate leader is rather a backdoor effort to recenter the climate issue in the West at a moment when other concerns have taken precedence, not least among them U.S.-China tensions, as well as the rise of artificial intelligence, and the demise of multilateralism. Beijing has fed these efforts with propaganda. Well-coordinated messaging on China’s technological primacy is everywhere, coupled with a clever cosplay of climate multilateralism. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. and European climate movements have swallowed these claims hook, line, and sinker. These ‘Spamoflauge’ social media posts tell a broader story as well, advertising China as high-tech, in implicit contrast with an American empire seemingly in decline and unable to build things or take on grand challenges like climate change… But once you come to terms with the reality that China’s development and modernization does not follow the Western model—not least because it is far easier to engineer the future in the absence of Western-style democratic pluralism—there is little reason to think that China’s energy development will be much shaped by that most Western and parochial of modernization characteristics, namely environmentalism.”

3. How China grows rich at the rest of the world’s expense

Why you should read it: Wall Street Journal columnist Greg Ip explains how China’s economic model depends on beggaring the rest of the world, especially when it comes to manufacturing.

• “Even as the U.S. rolls out tariffs, its imports are up 10% so far this year from a year earlier. And as China moralizes against protectionism, its imports are down 3%, in dollar terms… The U.S. figures might be an anomaly, reflecting front-running of tariffs. China’s are not. In the past five years, its export volumes have soared while imports have flatlined. China is swallowing up a growing share of the world’s market for manufactured goods. This reveals an uncomfortable truth: Beijing is pursuing a ‘beggar thy neighbor’ growth model at everyone else’s expense.”

• “A fundamental axiom of economics is that when two individuals or countries trade, both are better off. In the decades after World War II, the U.S. was the world’s largest exporter and economy and as it grew, it imported more, helping its partners… China is now the world’s second-largest economy and its largest exporter, but its philosophy is quite different. It has never believed in balanced trade nor comparative advantage. Even as it imported critical technology from the West, its long-term goal was always self-sufficiency… And as China expands into high-end manufacturing such as aircraft and semiconductors, [Chinese dictator] Xi [Jinping] has decreed it must not relinquish low-end production such as toys and clothes. Beijing has discouraged Chinese companies that invest abroad from transferring key know-how, such as in the production of iPhones and batteries. Xi has rejected fiscal reforms that would tilt its economy away from investment, exports and saving and toward household consumption and imports.”

• Why it matters: “Many countries are frustrated by China’s strategy, which is squeezing out their own manufacturing sectors and export opportunities. None has a solution… The most effective way to turn back China’s export onslaught would be for the U.S. to coordinate with like-minded partners, such as imposing common restrictions on its autos while maintaining low restrictions on each other.”

4. How Europe’s push for emissions reductions hit the continent’s economy

Why you should read it: Wall Street Journal reporters Tom Fairless and Max Colchester describe how Europe successfully cut its carbon emissions—but at significant cost to the continent’s economy overall.

• “Europe has succeeded in slashing carbon emissions more than any other region—by 30% from 2005 levels, compared with a 17% drop for the U.S. But along the way, the rush to renewables has helped drive up electricity prices in much of the continent… Germany now has the highest domestic electricity prices in the developed world, while the U.K. has the highest industrial electricity rates, according to a basket of 28 major economies analyzed by the International Energy Agency. Italy isn’t far behind. Average electricity prices for heavy industries in the European Union remain roughly twice those in the U.S. and 50% above China. Energy prices have also grown more volatile as the share of renewables increased.”

• “It is crippling industry and hobbling Europe’s ability to attract key economic drivers like artificial intelligence, which requires cheap and abundant electricity. The shift is also adding to a cost-of-living shock for consumers that is fueling support for antiestablishment parties, which portray the green transition as an elite project that harms workers, most consumers and regions… Across the continent, demand for electricity has fallen over the past 15 years in part because energy is so expensive. With production also declining somewhat and infrastructure lagging, companies that are looking for more power are hitting roadblocks… Some of Europe’s high energy prices aren’t the fault of policymakers or the green transition. Prices for natural gas surged after the pandemic and again after Europe heavily reduced imports of gas from Russia following its invasion of Ukraine… While sunlight and wind are free, harnessing them entails significant infrastructure investments, including in battery storage for when the sun isn’t shining or the wind blowing, and vast redundant capacity. These additional costs, obscured by subsidies and carbon taxes, mean energy prices in places like Germany and the U.K. are likely to remain higher than other countries for years to come, some economists say… Many European consumers and businesses are now stuck in the worst of both worlds. They are still at the mercy of electricity prices linked to the cost of imported fossil fuels while also shouldering big upfront costs to overhaul grids to handle the intermittent renewable power.”

• Why it matters: “Even with broad support on the continent for mitigating climate change, right-wing populist parties in France, Germany and the U.K. that are opposed to renewable energy targets and subsidies are gaining support. Germany’s government recently decided to build new gas-fired power plants. Diplomatic disputes between European countries have erupted over energy policy in recent months, while Norway’s coalition government collapsed after a revolt over the adoption of proposed EU rules to increase renewable energy… The continent’s cash-strapped governments now face a difficult choice: Press ahead with a rapid transition, or slow it down to save money but risk prolonging the pain.”

5. Why Democrats sound like they’re auditioning for gigs in Qatar

Why you should read it: Former U.S. ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro observes in The Atlantic that many of his fellow Democrats have taken anti-Israel stances that are morally and strategically foolish.

• “No one attends the Doha Forum to hear balanced discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The annual conference—the Qatari government funds business-class travel and accommodation for some 5,000 people—allows this pocket-size monarchy to showcase its central diplomatic role. And the prerogative of the host is to shape the narrative… There were plenty of calls for treating Israel as an international pariah, labeling the country’s response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion as a genocide, criticizing the United States for its support for Israel, and even treating Hamas as a legitimate ‘resistance’ organization rather than a violent terrorist group… More surprising is that such views have become prominent among Democrats in the United States. My former Obama-administration colleague Ben Rhodes argued in a lengthy essay in The New York Times that Democrats should take the lead on ending U.S. support for Israel. He grounds his case in both morality—this is the appropriate response to Israeli military operations in Gaza—and politics, arguing that this policy responds to the demands of American voters, especially younger ones. His argument fails on both of those grounds, but it fails in another important dimension as well: the strategic. But given the spread of this perspective, it’s worth following the logic of his argument, exploring what it overlooks, and seeing where the policies he advocates would lead… But to end the analysis here completely misses the broader frame of what was happening, or at least dismisses multiple things that were happening at the same time.”

• At the political level, some envision a broad coalition forged around opposition to U.S. support for Israel propelling Democrats to victory. Notwithstanding polling that shows a significant decline in Israel’s standing among various sectors of the American public, it’s a thin reed on which to build a political coalition. U.S. elections rarely hinge on foreign-policy issues, and the intense emotions of this war will compete with new outrages—Trump provides them daily—that will absorb attention. Establishing opposition to aid to Israel as a litmus test for Democratic candidates is a means of subtraction, not addition. Democrats need to find a way to assemble a governing majority, not drive out elements of their coalition… If the test of fealty for the Democratic Party becomes supporting international efforts to pressure Israel to define itself out of existence, or expressing indifference to the campaign of Israel’s enemies to destroy it, we will be in a much uglier place. That is not a policy that would meet any moral test, and it would likely be a political loser among the voters who actually determine the outcome of elections. Those calling for an end to U.S. support for Israel need to be mindful that, perhaps inadvertently, they are abetting this camp.”

• Why it matters: “There is also strategic blindness in the proposal to cut off Israel. Its advocates do not honestly wrestle with its likely consequences for U.S. interests and influence in the region… Sustaining a functional relationship with Israel, with all of its flaws, is manifestly more beneficial to U.S. interests than the alternative. And we need to keep perspective. Netanyahu will not govern forever. The Israeli public has moved rightward, but there are reasonable leaders from the center right and the center left to cultivate. A Palestinian state will not be on the agenda in the Israeli election campaign of 2026, but as the war recedes, there will be various ways to engage the Israeli public—an imperative that Israel’s critics utterly ignore but that is crucial for obtaining the outcomes we want in a democracy—to incentivize them to vote in a more moderate direction. Bidding them good riddance and telling them that they are on their own would do the opposite. Ignoring the responsibility of other actors—such as Palestinian Authority leaders who must embrace reform and demonstrate the capacity to govern and defeat extremists—would do the same… Democrats, and all Americans, face a choice in upcoming elections. We can make the moral, political, and strategic error of trying to wash our hands of a relationship with a democratic partner under stress that has made many mistakes as it has fought to defend itself. Or we can commit to working with that partner and its current, flawed leadership while we wait for new leaders to emerge. We can choose to sustain crucial aspects of a relationship that serves our moral and strategic interests, while insisting on changes that conform with U.S. values. The latter course is clearly the better choice.”

6. Why Trump’s Golden Dome is a dumb idea

Why you should read it: Conservative space advocate Robert Zubrin blasts the Trump administration’s proposed if ill-defined Golden Dome missile defense shield in The New Atlantis.

• “…if it could really protect America from destruction, Golden Dome might be worth the cost, regardless. The problem is that it won’t. On the contrary, by diverting massive amounts of funds from urgently needed defense priorities, and encouraging abandonment and destruction of America’s essential system of defense alliances, Golden Dome will make us far more vulnerable… Let’s start at the beginning. Golden Dome won’t work. This is so because the first thing any adversary undertaking a nuclear attack on the United States would do would be to explode a nuke in space. The electromagnetic pulse resulting from such an explosion would disable thousands of the Golden Dome guard satellites, as well as most of the rest of the reconnaissance, communication, and GPS satellites the U.S. military depends upon to operate. The enemy would then be free to hit us at will. Of course, we would still be able to retaliate with our own nuclear missile forces. But that would also be the case — as it is now — if we had no Golden Dome… In short, Golden Dome is a boondoggle. The only thing right about it is its name. This was derived from Iron Dome, the highly cost-effective ground-based Israeli system for countering short-range conventional missiles, but appropriately changing its metaphor from a strong, cheap metal to an alternative that is famously expensive, heavy, and weak.”

• “Trump’s Golden Dome is an illusory Maginot Line in the sky, promising false security to those who would desert the cause… Golden Dome is a waste of funds because it won’t work. But even more pernicious is its seductive offer for America to abandon her allies… In short, if the United States takes the bait offered by Golden Dome and decides to go it alone, our adversaries will be able to utterly crush us. They will outclass us both militarily and commercially, and be able to dictate both the rules and the outcomes of global business competition.”

• Why it matters: “That is why it is strategic insanity for the United States to seek security in withdrawal from the world, and why our adversaries have pulled out all the stops, mobilizing an unprecedented global array of puppet political parties, agitators, social media trolls, and bots to applaud and encourage any belief that might lead to such a fatal decision… There is no safety to be found by trying to hide under a golden dome. If we are to remain free, we must continue to be no less than what we have had the honor of being for the past 80 years: the watchers on the walls of world freedom.”

7. How Trump’s Caribbean murder spree shows the limits America’s special operations forces

Why you should read it: Retired Army general Mark Hertling argues in The Bulwark that the Trump administration’s boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific show the limits of special operations forces.

• “The controversy about American strikes on boats around the northern coast of South America has extended from the secretary of defense to multiple four-star officers, which may surprise some Americans. Unity of command is, after all, a military principle that has extended into other aspects of American life, including the business world and all kinds of leadership training. To understand the military command dynamics underlying the boat strikes—including the notorious September 2 incident facing scrutiny in Congress—requires understanding why there were multiple overlapping commands at the time. More specifically, the September 2 boat strike was conducted by special operations forces, apparently in a chain of command that circumvented the commander responsible for the area… The recent reports involving engagements with Venezuelan boats illustrate both the promise and the peril of special operations missions outside well-understood combat zones. Precision, professionalism, and partnership are hallmarks of American special operations forces. But as the history of those organizations has taught, they are most effective when embedded in a transparent command structure that aligns tactical actions with interagency and its national strategy. When they are siloed off from the tools of national power (diplomacy, information, economic measures, and military activity) the results can be calamitous.”

• “But history also teaches that special operations forces can be misapplied. During the Global War on Terror, much of SOF became a global, human-focused counterterrorism machine. For JSOC units, that mission aligned with their design. For others—especially Green Berets—years of direct-action manhunts pulled them away from their foundational mission of building partner capacity, a mission that becomes more important, not less, in a volatile international environment. Over the course of the War on Terror, the tempo of special operations missions accelerated, and the size of special operations forces expanded in tandem. What were once small, closely knit teams became more like militaries in miniature. Col. Richard D. Hooker has noted that ‘the Navy Special Warfare Community now boasts around 4,000 SEALS, ten times as many as at the height of the Cold War,’ and ‘in 2021, U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM)’s budget request was larger than the entire defense budget of Poland, one of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s largest and strongest militaries.’ This expansion roughly coincided with some members of the special operations community becoming celebrities, especially after the highly publicized raid, brilliantly planned and led by Adm. [William] McRaven, that eliminated Osama bin Laden and collected huge amounts of intelligence from his compound. The imbalance away from regular forces in favor of special operations was understandable in wartime, but difficult to unwind after two decades.”

• Why it matters: “As a conventional commander who stood alongside Special Operations Forces in Iraq, at training centers, and across Europe, my respect for them only grew during my time in service. They succeed when their missions are clear, their authorities are coherent, the communication from higher command and the battlespace owner is clear, and their employment is aligned with strategy. They struggle when we romanticize them, misunderstand them, or—worst of all—use them to compensate for a lack of policy or planning… As Congress investigates the circumstances of the September 2 boat strike, one question it might ask is whether SOCOM and Southern Command were coordinating properly, or if, for some reason, there were parallel, overlapping chains of command from Secretary Hegseth down to the troops deploying weapons.”

8. Why the most influential politics influencers don’t talk much about politics

Why you should read it: For Wired, David Gilbert notes that the most politically influential social media creators don’t share political content all that often.

• “But while Trump was speculating about alien life on Mars with [podcaster Joe] Rogan, he had a team of acolytes appearing on dozens, if not hundreds, of much smaller niche podcasts hosted by right-wing content creators who typically don’t talk about politics… At the time, there was no hard evidence behind an idea the Trump campaign appeared to understand instinctively: Social media creators, especially those who do not typically speak about politics, have an extraordinary ability to sway their audiences… A new report, shared exclusively with WIRED and published today by researchers from Columbia and Harvard, is a first-of-its-kind study designed to measure the impact influencers and online creators can have on their audiences… The results showed that exposure to these progressive-minded creators not only increased general political knowledge, but also shifted followers’ policy and partisan views to the left… In contrast, a placebo group that was not assigned any creators to follow but was allowed to scroll social media as normal ‘showed significant rightward movement,’ which researchers said was related to the right-leaning nature of social media networks… For the study’s authors, and experts who have reviewed the research, the findings confirm that not only are influencers now potentially more powerful than traditional media, but content creators who rarely share political content may be the most powerful of all.”

• “As well as trying to prove that social media influencers can shape public opinion, the researchers also wanted to find out if those creators were more or less influential when their content is more overtly political… The researchers found that exposure to content from both types of creator [political and apolitical] ‘produced unusually large and durable effects.’ But what was most striking about the results for the report’s authors was that it was the apolitical influencers who had the largest impact on survey and behavioral outcomes of their audience—three times more persuasive than political influencers per video focusing on politics or policy… The report concludes that the reason for this greater impact is likely down to the type of parasocial relationships that those influencers have built with their audiences, which are reliant on trust and authenticity… And looking back at the rival campaigns, it is clear to see that the Trump campaign appears to have understood that need for authenticity—or at least the appearance of it.”

• Why it matters: “While the non-partisan messages shared by creators in this study are not the types of messages that campaigns will be seeking to share ahead of next year’s mid-terms, there are a lot of lessons that campaigns can learn from the study’s findings, including the fact that building relationships with these creators does not happen overnight… ‘What this research is telling us is that the people who are most compelling, most persuasive when you actually consume their content, are the people who are not constantly producing political stuff—and by implication, the people who are not really bashing you over the head with [messages] like you have to vote Democrat,’ says [report co-author John] Marshall. ‘It’s telling this broader narrative. It’s having something which makes you seem independent.’”

9. Why we fall for narcissists

Why you should read it: Organizational psychologist and New York Times columnist Adam Grant outlines the ways people fall for narcissists in a diverse array of situations, from politics to sports to business, despite the fact that narcissists almost always fail.

• “We should know better. Great leaders put their missions above their egos. Narcissists do the opposite; they see themselves as special and superior and put their egos above all else. So why do we keep falling for them?… A little grandiosity can be conducive to big, disruptive ideas, but the evidence is abundant that people with high levels of narcissism make for worse leaders. To advance their own interests, they’re more willing to manipulate others, cut corners and even break laws… Narcissists are ball hogs and glory hounds. They take credit, assign blame and put themselves above the group. They see leadership as an opportunity to seize, not a responsibility to serve.”

• “A popular take is that we’re being bamboozled by these people. We’re seduced by superficial charm and fail to see the hubris that’s powering it. Yet research shows that narcissists are not hard to spot. They boast about themselves, post flattering photos of themselves, sign their names with oversize letters. They feel entitled to special treatment — and when they don’t get it, they signal virtuous victimhood, airing their grievances as if it were Festivus. Across multiple studies, people who were well aware of narcissists’ self-serving tendencies still preferred them as leaders for an unpredictable world… Psychologists find that narcissistic leaders are more appealing to people with low self-esteem. The lower our opinions of ourselves, the more insecure we’re feeling, the higher our opinions of narcissists. Supporting them makes us feel special (and makes them feel less threatened). It begins early: One study of elementary and middle schoolers found that in 96 percent of classrooms, kids who displayed narcissistic qualities were more likely to be nominated for leadership roles.”

• Why it matters: “Wise leaders balance confidence with humility. They’re secure enough in their strengths to acknowledge their weaknesses and learn from their critics. Whereas narcissists covet leadership roles, humble leaders are often reluctant to assume the mantle… One way to get more humble leaders into power is to change the default. Instead of expecting people to elbow their way into leadership, we should consider all who are qualified unless they opt out. There’s evidence that this simple shift is enough to reduce the gender gap in promotions, which would have the additional benefit of lowering the number of narcissists in high positions, since women are less likely to be narcissists and psychopaths — and more likely to prioritize the collective good… The responsibility of leadership is too important to entrust to arrogant people. Narcissistic leaders deny their weaknesses and make themselves weaker. Humble leaders admit their weaknesses and make themselves stronger. Great leaders overcome their weaknesses and make us all better.”

Odds and Ends

• Rolling Stone profiles legendary blues guitarist Buddy Guy ahead of his annual January residency at his Chicago club…

• Thousands of Triassic-era dinosaur footprints found high in the mountains of Stelvio national park in northern Italy…

• How archaeologists mapped all 187,460 miles of ancient Roman roads for a digital atlas of the empire…

• Orcas and dolphins are now teaming up to hunt salmon in the waters of the Pacific Northwest…

• Why Saturn’s moon Titan may not have a global water ocean beneath its frozen exterior…

What I’m Listening To and Watching

• The surprisingly moving six-part documentary The End of an Era, chronicling the final legs of Taylor Swift’s mammoth 2023-24 Eras Tour.

• The Insider, director Michael Mann’s classic 1999 drama about the refusal of CBS News to air a segment about a tobacco industry insider (Russell Crowe) despite the protests of a 60 Minutes producer (Al Pacino).

• Spin̈al Tap II: The End Continues, the late Rob Reiner’s sequel to his seminal 1984 mock-rockumentary This Is Spin̈al Tap.

• Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall team up in Key Largo, a 1948 thriller that sees Bogart’s WWII vet go up against Edward G. Robinson’s gangster in a shuttered hotel amidst a hurricane.

• “Antarctica,” a 2017 episode of the late chef-turned-travel-show host Anthony Bourdain’s series Parts Unknown that sees Bourdain travel to the frozen southern continent and visit its denizens at American research outposts.

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"There is a mystery in the countenance of some causes, which we have not always present judgment enough to explain. It is distressing to see an enemy advancing into a country, but it is the only place in which we can beat them, and in which we have always beaten them, whenever they made the attempt. The nearer any disease approaches to a crisis, the nearer it is to a cure. Danger and deliverance make their advances together, and it is only the last push, in which one or the other takes the lead."

- Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, IV

What I’m Reading:

1. How to salvage free trade

Why you should read it: In Foreign Affairs, Carnegie Endowment expert Michael Pettis recommends a transnational customs union to resolve some of the fundamental problems with the still-prevailing trade regime.

• “Debates over world trade often conflate two distinct issues. The first is how to expand the efficiencies that occur when international trade is broadly balanced and countries are able to benefit from trade by specializing in particular industries. As the British economist David Ricardo famously observed, when Portugal specialized in producing wine and the United Kingdom specialized in producing textiles, trade allowed them collectively to produce more than they otherwise would. The second issue is how to think about and allocate the costs of persistent trade surpluses—or when some countries export more than they import in order to resolve economic imbalances between domestic production and domestic demand… Persistent trade imbalances are thus the result of a world in which—to use the framing of the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik—countries have made different tradeoffs between global integration and economic sovereignty. Those choosing more of the former have to absorb the imbalances of those choosing more of the latter. Consider, for example, a government that runs surpluses by pursuing policies that effectively subsidize manufacturing at the expense of households. It might do so by suppressing the rate at which banks lend to manufacturers, by depreciating its currency, or by subsidizing transportation infrastructure. Unless its trade partners resist with countervailing policies, they will have to absorb this surplus either through higher domestic investment, higher consumption, higher unemployment, or some combination of the three. That is true no matter how powerful those partners might otherwise be. The United States, for example, has the biggest economy in the world. But because its market has been so open, its economy has been partly restructured by China—which heavily subsidizes its domestic manufacturers.”

• “This doesn’t mean governments should close themselves off to international commerce; people benefit from trade. But to make sure that trade serves their national interests, the United States and its allies must create a system that reduces the ability of countries to offload the cost of their domestic policies. The best way they can do so is by establishing a new global customs union whose members agree to keep their trade relatively balanced and free, while putting up barriers against countries that refuse to balance exports with imports. Within such a union, a government could still choose to subsidize certain types of investment and manufacturing, but only if it can itself absorb the resulting costs. For trade to work, every state must maintain its economic sovereignty. Otherwise, countries will have too strong an incentive to export their economic problems through beggar-thy-neighbor policies… To sustain a stable and fair global system, policymakers must recognize that shared trade entails shared constraints. All major economies must accept similar limits on their ability to manage credit, currencies, and external accounts. The world must, in other words, fashion a new trading regime that forces each member to resolve its external imbalances at home, as the economist John Maynard Keynes proposed at Bretton Woods in 1944… When trade is used by countries to expand their relative share of production, it allows individual countries to benefit from policies that are collectively harmful. Still, balanced trade can be positive for global growth, provided that it rearranges global production to maximize production efficiency. Instead of trying to restrict trade through piecemeal measures, the United States should try to impose a system similar to what Keynes proposed at Bretton Woods. Washington and its allies should organize a new global customs union open to all countries that commit to balanced trade. States would be able to join the union by agreeing to keep their current accounts with the union within a narrow band. This band would allow normal cyclical variations while preventing the externalization of policy-driven imbalances.”

• Why it matters: “Debates over ‘free trade’ cannot be separated from questions of sovereignty. To sustain a stable and fair global system, policymakers must recognize that integration entails shared constraints. Countries cannot insist on the freedom to engineer domestic imbalances while also insisting that other countries absorb them. Unless major economies accept equivalent limits on their ability to manage credit, currencies, and external accounts, the world will see recurring beggar-thy-neighbor tensions, protectionist backlashes, and a fragmented trading order. The arithmetic of global accounts guarantees it.”

2. Why “drones” aren’t the bees’ knees in Ukraine

Why you should read it: Former Australian general Mick Ryan details seven military insights from the ongoing war in Ukraine, including the persistent importance of infantry in a battlefield “saturated” by cheap drones.

• “Despite the heavy use of drones, infantry troops remain more important than ever to hold ground. And despite their growing proficiency with drones, infantry remain essential to Russian operations to seize terrain. It does so in small teams of between two and four soldiers, and sometimes, with single individuals covered with thermal blankets. An indication of how essential infantry troops remain can be found in the organization of Ukraine’s combat brigades. While nearly every Ukrainian brigade has one to two drone battalions, they all retain three to five infantry battalions as well… Ukraine is not a drone war, it is a war where drones have gained prominence. In Ukraine and elsewhere, drones do not replace human capacity—they extend it. Neither have they replaced artillery, tanks, infantry, engineers, or logisticians in Ukraine—they have complemented them. The Ukrainians view drone operations as improving existing conventional systems, changing how they are used, and covering gaps in conventional capacity, but not replacing them. They also talk of a new battle triangle with intelligence, operations, and drones and electronic warfare at the three points.”

• “This is not to suggest that drones are not important. But much of the data used by analysts is often sourced from drone units, which are constantly on the hunt for resources. Perhaps more importantly, counter-drone technologies are improving rapidly. One wonders if drones and counter-drone systems will achieve parity in many circumstances in future conflicts. As such, the dominance achieved by drones in this war, particularly in the 2022–23 period, may not be seen again… Western nations need to pay attention to this aspect [air defense against drones] of the war. Western ground forces, military establishments, and critical national infrastructure are more vulnerable than ever to attack from the air, be it drones, cruise missiles, or tactical aviation. In response to Russia’s advanced and evolving strike capabilities, Ukraine is integrating frontline and national defense, exquisite and low-cost systems, while using rapid operational analysis and the fast evolution of personnel training on new systems. This is worthy of closer study.”

• Why it matters: “Until Ukraine and its partners can fundamentally shift Putin’s view of the balance of power, and do so in a substantial manner, it is hard to see the trajectory of this war shifting significantly from its current path. This is a war where one side is fighting desperately for the existence of its culture and standing as a sovereign nation… Perhaps the best Putin can do is freeze the Ukraine conflict, and with large elements of his existing forces in addition to the many new divisions being built in the next few years, initiate something smaller that has a greater chance of generating a winnable war. The latest Russian State Rearmament Plan puts in place an objective of being ready for war with NATO by 2030 (according to a briefing by Ukrainian military intelligence). While this is a capability objective, Putin’s grand strategic vision probably sees alignment of this goal with his own intentions.”

3. Why Ireland is the weak link in Europe’s defense

Why you should read it: Financial Times writers Jude Webber and Helen Warrell observe that ostensibly neutral Ireland tacitly relies on the United Kingdom and NATO for its own defense while failing to take action against Russian provocations in its territorial waters or airspace.

• “A country whose military neutrality is totemic to its modern identity, Ireland is a bystander in its own maritime security. Worse, it is at risk of becoming an international liability, experts say — one unable to protect the essential infrastructure in its waters despite having become rich as a host for global tech and trade… Today, about three-quarters of all of the undersea cables in the northern hemisphere pass through the country’s vast marine territory, which adds up to more than 10 times its land mass… Ireland is an island nation that did not have a navy until 1946, had run out of ships by 1969 and is now so under-resourced that only four of its eight vessels are in service. Lacking security infrastructure, it is also cut off from those who might seek to help: friendly Nato nations are unable to communicate a potential hazard, such as an incoming Russian vessel, because Ireland lacks the intelligence systems to receive classified information, three European naval officers have told the FT.”

• “Indeed, despite its longevity, the concept of Irish neutrality has often been hazy and is different from that of neutral peers such as Austria and Switzerland which have well-resourced militaries… The situation has stoked frustration in the UK and among EU peers that Ireland is using its status as a neutral nation to duck its 21st-century responsibilities. Without cables, the global tech industry that Ireland relies upon for much of the corporation tax that has fuelled its recent wealth could not exist… Ireland’s military weakness is a strategic vulnerability for the UK as well — but given the political sensitivities, there is little either the British government or the armed forces can do except to offer support.”

• Why it matters: “For Ossian Smyth, a former junior minister who was responsible for subsea cables, ‘our national security is a bundle of contradictions. We say we are neutral, but we have an MoU [memorandum of understanding, on defence] with the British and an agreement with the RAF since 9/11’ for the Royal Air Force to intercept aircraft posing a threat… ‘Now we have a lot to defend. We can’t morally rely on the kindness of strangers.’”

4. Why Trump is wrong about the source of America’s fentanyl problem

Why you should read it: University of Buffalo professor David Herzberg writes in the New York Times that President Trump’s narrative about America’s fentanyl problem is wrong in just about every respect.

• “It’s one of President Trump’s favorite stories: The Democrats weakened the borders, allowing Mexican drug cartels to smuggle fentanyl into the United States, where it devastated white suburban and rural communities. To stop this ‘evil scourge,’ he has imposed tariffs on China for its role in fentanyl production. His administration is reportedly considering military strikes in Latin America. And Mr. Trump has built up the U.S. military presence in the Caribbean. ‘I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country,’ he told reporters of his campaign of deadly strikes… The fentanyl story is based on an argument about history: The United States went from greatness to crisis because open-border Democrats betrayed the honest, hardworking people of America by exporting jobs and allowing in foreign drugs. Stopping the drugs, Mr. Trump wants us to believe, will let the wholesome, traditional American culture that he idealizes flourish again. As a historian of drugs, I can tell you that this argument is wrong in almost every way.”

• “A more complex story was unfolding [post-World War II] with opioids. Many Americans had developed addiction before freewheeling markets were regulated in the early 20th century. But punitive narcotics enforcement focused on the urban working classes, leaving wiggle room for physicians practicing in rural regions. At least through the 1950s, my research suggests, an outright majority of Americans with addiction may have been rural and small-town residents quietly maintained on morphine by sympathetic physicians. One of the few major studies of nonurban opioid use during this period suggests that Kentucky had among the highest per capita rates of opioid addiction into the early 1960s… In other words, ‘real America’ is no stranger to drug crises, especially the areas served by what I call ‘white markets.’ White markets are the familiar ones that sell the prescription psychoactive drugs in your medicine cabinet — that is, legal sales by pharmacists of drugs designated as medicines to the relatively privileged consumers designated as patients… The recent fentanyl crisis is just the latest and worst of this long history of American drug crises. It was initially caused by shifts in domestic white markets. Those shifts began in the 1990s and 2000s, when the U.S. opioid industry burst free of longstanding regulatory restraints and began to market powerful opioids like OxyContin as a mostly nonaddictive solution for an expanding range of painful conditions… Research suggests that experiences of significant trauma increase the chance that a person will develop an addiction after using drugs. In the 1990s, as opioid sales boomed, rural and small-town white areas were suffering from unemployment, population decline and the erosion of social institutions such as labor unions and churches. The huge industry-driven expansion of opioid white markets in these already struggling communities led to a similarly huge rise in addiction.”

• Why it matters: “Fentanyl traffickers were responding to consumer demand. They did not create it. The opioid crisis initially struck white areas not because of a conspiracy to destroy heartland America. Rather, it was a devastatingly ironic result of white Americans’ privileged access to the medical system. Physicians’ willingness to recognize and treat their pain opened their communities to pharmaceutical companies’ flood of opioids. The drugs’ ubiquity meant that they were easy to get whether one had a prescription for them or not… Since traffickers were not the root of the problem, shutting them down won’t solve it. As far as we know, most of the chemicals and equipment used to make the fentanyl sold in this country come from Mexico and China. But even if the United States were to choke off this supply chain, history strongly suggests that it would just be replaced by newer, possibly even more dangerous supply chains. There is no shortage of global pharmaceutical production capacity. And in a world where people and goods circulate freely, there will always be ways for a tiny powder to travel with them… To reduce the overdose crisis, we need to stop exploiting drug tragedies to serve other geopolitical agendas. It wasn’t started by villainous foreign traffickers, and there is no drug-free utopia waiting for us if we shut off one illicit supply chain.”

5. How Trump’s blitz against Chicago ended in ignominious retreat

Why you should read it: Writer Garrett Graff lays out five lessons from the failure of the Trump administration’s deportation blitz in Chicago.

• “In the last few days, roving Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino decamped from Chicago, where his military-style raids have terrorized that community for weeks, for Charlotte, North Carolina — a somewhat inexplicable new target (more on that below) — and a move that underscores what has to be the growing conclusion of the now six-month-old campaign of ‘acting president. Stephen Miller to turbocharge immigration enforcement: It’s failing. Bigly… [Border Patrol commander Greg] Bovino is basically leading a rebel cavalry, a la Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who raided and terrorized communities in Kentucky and Tennessee in the Civil War. That latter analogy holds up particularly well in one specific respect: Forrest became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan after the war. In many ways, in fact, Bovino’s shock troops have the most in common with the Klan ‘night rides’ of the Reconstruction and Jim Crow era South, where hooded Klan members on horseback — often ‘respectable’ leaders of the White community like the local sheriff — terrorized Black families and abused their civil rights. Bovino seems focused on becoming the Nathan Bedford Forrest of the Trump immigration era, complete with the blatant racism, illegal tactics, and ignominious losing place in history… In fact, while the trauma and terror that Bovino’s unit instills is certainly real and damaging, it’s remarkable to note how ineffective the force has turned out to be. Time and again, these agents — and the broader DHS and White House policies behind it — are being exposed not for their strength, but their weakness. Ordinary Americas are stronger — braver and better.”

• “Bovino’s Border Patrol raiders have one playbook — terror — and it’s less effective each time they deploy it. So far, it’s aging in nuclear half-lives. The shock value is wearing off and, in fact, the targeted communities are fighting back faster and with a more tried-and-true playbook: Organize quickly, step up and document the abuses, protest loudly, and fight in the courtrooms. There’s now an established (and tested) legal playbook to go after CBP’s worst tactics; community members are finding that fighting back against the Border Patrol works, and it’s emboldening even more community members to take stands, even at risk of personal harm. Chicago’s legal strategy built on lessons learned (and even the same witnesses) from Los Angeles and other cities have faced Bovino before — and now their lessons can be applied in Chicago… While there’s a certain amount of firing-up-the-base and feeding-the-right-wing-outrage-machine that Bovino’s raids accomplish, overall the immigration raids are motivating Democrats, empowering state leaders who criticize them, and — in North Carolina — even turning faith communities against the GOP. Swing voters and independents hate the raids… Most of all, the data shows that all of the Trump administration’s ‘we’re arresting the worst of the worst’ isn’t reality at all. Of 614 people included in a recent court order, just 16 of them — roughly two percent — had a meaningful existing criminal record. Those 16 — just sixteen! — included five with domestic battery charges, two drunken driving records, one narcotics convictions, and five who faced other battery charges, two of which involved guns, and one person who is said to have a criminal history in some country overseas. Just one was deemed a ‘national security risk’ and ‘no one had any convictions for murder or rape,’ the Chicago Tribune reported. The local police in a city like Chicago or D.C. surely arrest more serious criminals in run-of-the-mill encounters across a single weekend than CBP and ICE managed to round up in weeks.”

• Why it matters: “All told, months into Bovino’s raid, it’s increasingly clear that his efforts would be a farce — except for the very real trauma being inflicted on lots of innocent Americans by their own government. Nevertheless, it’s important to realize they’re losing — not winning. History and the American people are not on their side.”

6. How Trump will make a bid for dictatorial power

Why you should read it: In The Atlantic, former federal judge Michael Luttig outlines a frightening scenario for how President Trump could make a successful bid for dictatorial power.

• “In the normal course of history, the president of the United States is a figure who inspires optimism in the American people. The 47th president prefers to stir feelings of fear, vulnerability, hopelessness, and political inevitability—the sense that he, and only he, can rescue the nation from looming peril. Since his second inauguration, Donald Trump has seized authoritarian control over the federal government and demanded the obedience of the other powerful institutions of American society—universities, law firms, media companies. The question weighing heavily on the minds of many Americans is whether Trump will subvert next year’s midterm elections or the 2028 presidential election to extend his reign… The Founders of our nation foresaw a figure like Trump, a demagogue who would ascend to the presidency and refuse to relinquish power to a successor chosen by the American people in a free and fair election. Writing to James Madison from Paris in 1787, Thomas Jefferson warned that such an incumbent, if narrowly defeated, would ‘pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government.’ Were that moment ever to come, the Founders believed, it would mark the demise of the nation that they had conceived, bringing to a calamitous end the greatest experiment in self-government ever attempted by man.”

• “With his every word and deed, Trump has given Americans reason to believe that he will seek a third term, in defiance of the Constitution. It seems abundantly clear that he will hold on to the office at any cost, including America’s ruin… Trump proved in 2021 that he would do anything to remain in the White House. Even after the violence of January 6, his second impeachment, and the conviction and incarceration of scores of his followers, he reiterated his willingness to subvert the 2024 election. That proved unnecessary. Yet since his victory, Trump has again told the American people that he is prepared to do what it takes to remain in power, the Constitution be damned… We Americans are by nature good people who believe in the inherent goodness of others, especially those we elect to represent us in the highest office in the land. But we ignore such statements and other expressions of Trump’s intent at our peril. The 47th president is a vain man, and nothing would flatter his vanity more than seizing another term. Doing so would signify the ultimate triumph over his political enemies… Trump has turned the federal government against the American people, transforming the nation’s institutions into instruments for his vengeful execution of the law against honorable citizens for perceived personal and political offenses. He has silenced dissent by persecuting and threatening to prosecute American citizens for speaking critically of him, and he has divided us, turning us against one another so that we cannot oppose him.”

• Why it matters: “Trump has always told us exactly who he is. We have just not wanted to believe him. But we must believe him now… Donald Trump is clearly willing to subvert an election in order to hold on to the power he so craves, and he is now fully enabled to undermine national elections. No one can prevent him from remaining president of the United States for a constitutionally prohibited third term—except the American people, in whom ultimate power resides under the Constitution of the United States… If America is to long endure, we must summon our courage, our fearlessness, our hope, our spirited sense of invulnerability to political enthrall, and, most important, our abiding faith in the divine providence of this nation. We have been given the high charge of our forebears to ‘keep’ the republic they founded a quarter of a millennium ago. If we do not keep it now, we will surely lose it.”

7. How MAGA and the rest of the Western right are a natural evolution of major strands of conservative thought

Why you should read it: British commentator Kenan Malik argues that the illiberal and fascistic streaks now dominant in right-wing politics in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere are manifestations of major strands of conservative thought, not mirror-images of the “woke” left.

• “The [recent] controversy [over Tucker Carlson’s antisemitism] highlighted an ongoing civil war within America’s Maga movement, between those who see themselves as mainstream conservatives, following in Ronald Reagan’s footsteps, and those they label the ‘woke right,’ hostile to liberalism and globalism, and supportive of white identity politics… On both sides of the Atlantic, we have seen the growth of more overt racism, white identity politics, hostility to migrants, and the growth of both antisemitism and anti-Muslim bigotry. To label this as ‘woke right,’ however, and to view it as a mirror of the ‘woke left,’ is to misunderstand the shift and to allow mainstream conservatism to evade responsibility for helping nurture it. Nor are these ideas being imported into Britain from America. They are homegrown and already here… Most people think of identity politics as a recent phenomenon, and one associated with the left. Its real origins lie on the reactionary right and its primary expression, long before it was called ‘identity politics,’ was in the concept of race: the belief that your being – your identity – determined your values and place in the world.”

• “Today’s conflict between the mainstream and the ‘woke right’ is the latest instantiation of a longstanding tension within conservatism. Conservatives, observed Roger Scruton, perhaps the most important conservative philosopher of recent decades, believe both in the importance of the free market, private property and individual choice, and in the overriding significance of community, tradition and place as setting limits to people’s freedom. Drawing on Edmund Burke, the founder of modern conservatism, Scruton insisted that the ideal society is built not on liberty or equality but obedience, ‘the prime virtue of political beings.’ The ‘price of a community’ for Scruton, as for Burke, was ‘intolerance, exclusion, and a sense that life’s meaning depends upon obedience.’ Illiberalism was baked into conservatism from the beginning… For liberals and the left, cultural pluralism was an argument for a more inclusive world. For the far right, it provided a vehicle for exclusion and intolerance, and for rebranding racism as white identity. Immigrants, de Benoist insisted, must always remain outsiders because they are carriers of distinct, incompatible cultures and histories. They must be debarred from citizenship, as to be a citizen is to ‘belong… to a homeland and a past.’”

• Why it matters: “What the ‘woke right’ represents are these kinds of ideas travelling from the far-right fringes into mainstream debates. They have been able to make that journey because politicians and commentators have in recent years looted the far-right ideological arsenal… This is not a case of the right mirroring the left but of old reactionary forms of conservatism reasserting themselves as more liberal strands corrode. Before we can challenge such reactionary ideas, we first have to recognise them for what they really are.”

8. Why the Fed won’t save us from an AI bubble

Why you should read it: On his Substack, economist Paul Krugman looks back at the dotcom bubble and points out that it’s difficult (if not impossible) for the Federal Reserve to rescue industries that produce financial bubbles.

• “As many people have already noted, the AI boom bears an unmistakable resemblance to the tech boom of the late 1990s — a boom that turned out to be a huge bubble. The Nasdaq didn’t regain its 2000 peak until 2014. There’s intense debate about whether AI investment is similarly a bubble… While my personal guess is that AI is indeed in the midst of a bubble, I won’t devote today’s post to that debate. Instead, I want to talk about one recent aspect of market behavior that is very striking and carries strong echoes of the tech bubble a generation ago. Namely, AI-related stocks, like tech stocks back then, are reacting very strongly to perceptions about the Fed’s short-term interest rate policy.”

• “Some of us have seen this movie before. For those who haven’t, there is a pervasive view that the deflation of the 90s tech bubble was something that happened all at once — a Wile E. Coyote moment in which investors looked down, realized that there was nothing supporting those high valuations, and the market plunged. In reality, however, it was a long, drawn-out process, punctuated with some significant dead cat bounces along the way… Why couldn’t [then-Fed chair Alan] Greenspan rescue tech stocks? To answer that question, think about why interest rates matter for asset prices: Lower interest rates reduce the rate at which investors discount expected future returns. A dollar delivered to you X years from now has a higher ‘present value’ (that is, a higher current value) if interest rates are 1 percent than if they’re 6 percent. How much higher depends on X, the number of years until you receive it… That is, the value of assets that have a short economic life is much less affected by interest rates. Not surprisingly, economists have consistently had a hard time finding evidence for any effect of interest rates on business investment… Fed policy and rumors about future Fed policy can sometimes affect AI-stock prices in the short run. But by the straight economics, these movements are more the result of market psychology than of any objective assessment of future returns.”

• Why it matters: “So as doubts about AI creep in, I’m hearing growing chatter to the effect that the Fed can and should save the industry. But the lesson from the last big tech bubble is that it can’t. In fact, I have doubts about whether the Fed can head off a broader recession if the tech boom collapses… For now, my point is that if you’re worried about an AI bubble, don’t expect Jerome Powell or his Trump-appointed successor — rumors are not encouraging — to come to the rescue. They can’t.”

9. How Trump’s deportation fetish is wrecking national security

Why you should read it: Five New York Times reporters illustrate how the Trump administration’s monomaniacal obsession with deportation has cannibalized personnel and resources from other domestic law enforcement and national security agencies.

• “The Department of Homeland Security has diverted thousands of federal agents from their normal duties to focus on arresting undocumented immigrants, undermining a wide range of law enforcement operations in response to mounting pressure from President Trump, a New York Times investigation has found… The Times investigation is based on previously undisclosed internal documents from D.H.S. — including statistical reports about department workloads, search warrants and arrests — obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The Times also spoke with more than 65 officials who have worked in the federal government during the current Trump administration, in addition to local authorities and others who collaborate with the department. Most of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters and out of fear of retribution… The Homeland Security Department was tasked with preventing terrorism, protecting the president, investigating transnational crime and responding to natural disasters, among other duties. Immigration enforcement was one of many responsibilities, but it was not envisioned as D.H.S.’s singular function.”

• “In fact, federal data shows that many immigrants being arrested do not have criminal records in the United States. Fewer than 40 percent of people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — the D.H.S. law enforcement agency leading the administration’s crackdown — have a criminal conviction, according to a Times analysis. Roughly 8 percent of those arrested had been convicted of a violent crime, while about 9 percent had a traffic conviction, the analysis found… Agency policy experts who specialize in other issues have been told to analyze immigration data to prepare for and respond to the calls. Special agents at Homeland Security Investigations — which is D.H.S.’s criminal investigations arm and a part of ICE — have been abruptly issued new orders… Even highly trained specialists have been pulled into immigration work, such as analysts who assist in money laundering and counterterrorism cases and agents who investigate the multibillion-dollar black market for looted antiquities, a source of income for organized crime and terrorist groups.”

• Why it matters: “The immigration operation has also pulled in thousands of agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation; Drug Enforcement Administration; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; and at least four other federal law enforcement agencies, documents show. In addition, agents from D.H.S. and many of those other agencies have been diverted to Mr. Trump’s anti-crime crackdown in Washington, which has functioned as a shadow immigration operation.”

Odds and Ends

• New ideas on where Theia, the Mars-sized object that slammed into the Earth to create the Moon, originated in the solar system…

• How Hubert Humphrey’s time as mayor of Minneapolis fundamentally reshaped the city…

• Are foxes domesticating themselves? Maybe, but probably not…

• How Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” became the late autumn anthem for a generation of young men…

• Why canine diversity—dog breeds—goes back much farther than previously assumed…

What I’m Listening To and Watching

• Everybody Scream, the autumnal new album from the ethereal English songstress Florence Welch.

• The American Revolution, the latest PBS history documentary series from filmmaker Ken Burns and his team.

• Death By Lightning, a limited series chronicling the unexpected ascent of James Garfield (Michael Shannon) to the presidency and his assassination at the hands of disgruntled fabulist Charles Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen).

• Pluribus, a science-fiction series by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan that sees Rhea Seehorn as one of the last sane individuals left on Earth after an alien virus welds human consciousness together.

• Norah Jones welcomes singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan to her podcast Norah Jones Is Playing Along and joins her for a couple songs.

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"I think it is more difficult these days to define what makes a good citizen then [sic] it has ever been before. Certainly all any of us can do is follow our own conscience and retain faith in our democracy. Sometimes it is the very people who cry out the loudest in favor of getting back to what they call 'American Virtues' who lack this faith in our country. I believe that our greatest strength lies always in the protection of our smallest minorities."

- Charles M. Schulz, November 9, 1970

What I’m Reading:

1. Why Trump has declared war on America

Why you should read it: Washington Monthly legal editor Garrett Epps writes that President Trump hasn’t just declared war on blue states or Democratic-run cities—he wants revenge on a nation that spurned him twice.

• “Contrary to conventional wisdom, Trump does not wish to rule as a king or impose an authoritarian regime. People around him very much want the latter. He may think that this is his aim. But it is not… The president is at war with the United States—the entire country—all of us. He seeks not to rule but to destroy… Trump’s fury with the country explains many otherwise puzzling facts about his conduct in office during his second term. Media coverage and his rhetoric suggest that his animus is directed toward blue states, while his love embraces the red. But love is as love does, and Trump’s policies have been as adverse to his allies as to his foes. His assault on the federal government has been indiscriminate, taking in federal disaster relief and cancer research, both of which benefit all Americans. He has shut down the government rather than extend health-care subsidies that rural and red-state residents rely on for medical and hospital care. In particular, the sweeping tariffs he has attempted to impose threaten devastation to agricultural areas and agricultural states—consider that he has not only managed to cut American farmers’ soybean exports to China to near zero, but is now sending $40 billion to Argentina, which has stepped in to supply the Chinese at market rates. His immigration jihad is also directed disproportionately at agricultural workers, whom Trump-loving farmers depend on to bring in the crops.”

• “What inspires such malice? This country has, in Trump’s mind, brutalized him. In 2020, Trump found Joe Biden to be such a flimsy candidate that he was in terror of being defeated by him… He did lose. He has tried to rewrite history, but he knows who won in 2020, which makes him furious… Not only did he lose to a candidate he regarded as a zombie, but he also has memories of 2016, when he lost the popular vote against Hillary Clinton by 2 percent, nearly 3 million votes. Twice, then, his fellow Americans had preferred others over him… For all his talk about ‘an unprecedented and powerful mandate,’ Trump knows that three times he has gone up against candidates he despises—a white woman, a Black woman, and a superannuated old-style pol—and that three times he has failed to secure a decisive win. Twice, in fact, he has, by some measure, lost… How can we expect such a person to forgive his fellow Americans for preferring someone else to him?… Since October 18, Trump has done something no one has done since the British burned Washington in 1814; he has gleefully depicted himself doing to peaceful Americans what the Japanese empire in 1941 did to Pearl Harbor; and he has demanded the kind of reparations that the Allies extracted from Germany at the end of World War I… That Trump is at war with the country—with all of us—lies in plain sight.”

• Why it matters: “Trump spends an extraordinary amount of time whining about how this or that person owes him an apology, and perhaps should be jailed for not giving it. His mental world is bleak, a haunted mansion of anger and grievance… The important thing about Trump is that he lacks aims or plans. What drives him are tropisms, relentless unconscious movements like those of a heliotrope turning toward the sun. Trump cabinet meetings offer clinical proof that there is not enough love and worship in the universe to fill the gaping hole in his psyche. The man is an ocean of need; no victory is enough. There will always be enemies.”

2. Why Trump is too emotional to be president

Why you should read it: In Foreign Affairs, international relations scholar Keren Yarhi-Milo notes that President Trump’s erraticism and unpredictability only undermine America’s credibility around the world—and make it more difficult to strike diplomatic agreements.

• “For decades, U.S. foreign policy has depended on credibility: the belief that Washington would honor its commitments and that its past behavior signaled its future conduct. The United States, for instance, was able to develop a large network of allies because its partners trusted that, if attacked, Washington would defend them. It could strike free-trade deals with countries around the world and negotiate peace agreements because, generally speaking, it was seen as an honest broker. That is not to say the United States has never surprised, or that it never reneged on a promise. But for most of its modern history, it has been a trustworthy actor… Trump’s theory of the case is simple. By keeping friends and foes off balance, the president believes he can secure quick wins, such as modest increases in European defense spending. Trump also thinks that unpredictability affords him greater wiggle room in international affairs by ensuring that allies and adversaries are always second-guessing his next course of action. Finally, Trump thinks that he can frighten and thus deter opponents by appearing unhinged—an idea that political scientists call the madman theory… But in the long term, Trump’s approach to global politics is not likely to strengthen the country. Other states will work to flatter Washington for a time, in hopes of avoiding U.S. penalties. But eventually, governments will look to protect themselves by aligning with other countries. The United States’ list of adversaries will, accordingly, grow. Its alliances will weaken. Washington, in other words, could find itself ever more isolated—and without any clear path to reestablishing its reputation.”

• “Trump may be aware of what his behavior is doing to American credibility, or the consequences may elude him. But either way, the reputational costs for consistency and reliability clearly do not affect his decisions. The president does not want to be credible so much as he wants to gain the psychological upper hand to score quick victories. If that requires disregarding long-standing American commitments, so be it. He wants maximum flexibility: the ability to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants to, in order to get his way… Uncertain of how to respond to Trump’s volatility, much of the world flatters Trump one day, confronts him the next, and then hedges the day after. But ultimately, none of these tactics have delivered more than temporary success. Trump continues to shift his approach to the world almost minute by minute, depending on how he feels.”

• Why it matters: “As American credibility deteriorates, it may become harder for Washington to negotiate or facilitate peace deals—as it often does—which will result in a more volatile international system… The United States might find itself with fewer close allies even without Trump, as the international system becomes increasingly multipolar. But the current president’s unpredictability is likely hastening this process. Trump may leave office convinced that his unpredictability made Washington stronger and that Americans will benefit from the resulting configurations of power and transactional deals. He may think that, by rejecting the need for credibility, he freed the United States from constraints that tied the hands of previous presidents. But history is likely to show otherwise: that Trump replaced credibility with volatility, leaving behind a United States that is less trusted.”

3. How Pete Hegseth is “living the dream” of every junior military officer whose career plateaued

Why you should read it: Strategy scholar Eliot Cohen pungently observes in The Atlantic that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has demonstrated that he remains trapped in the mindset of a junior officer whose military career stalled out in the middle ranks.

• “There is a certain kind of Army officer who, after the excitement of company command, finds his career stalled, and who perhaps leaves the service as a major in the National Guard filled with bitterness and resentment. He may then dream of one day being in a position to make all the superior officers who failed to appreciate his leadership qualities, his insight, his sheer fitness stand to attention and hear him lay down the law about what it is to be an officer, and threaten to fire those who do not meet his standards. In this respect, and this respect only, on that stage Pete Hegseth was living the dream.”

• “In all other respects, however, he was ridiculous. While much of what he said was unobjectionable (working out and getting haircuts are good things, after all), it was the kind of thing that a battalion commander might say to some scruffy lieutenants and sergeants. Indeed, Hegseth could not help himself, using we when he mentioned those in the service. The whole point of having a secretary of defense is that he or she is a civilian, first and foremost, and not a soldier. Hegseth’s examples, moreover, were drawn primarily from the only military things he knows firsthand—that is, the kind of tactics, training, and maintenance that a captain in charge of 150 soldiers has to worry about… One could not help but suspect that his time as a company-grade officer was the high point of the career of someone whose family life was ridden with multiple failures, whose attempts to run nonprofit organizations ran aground, and whose fame and wealth came from journalism, a profession he sincerely despises. He stuck with what he knows and genuinely reveres. Unfortunately for the country, he seems unable to transcend it.”

• Why it matters: “The American military will follow lawful orders and disobey unlawful ones. It will be grateful for weapons put in its hands, and the freedom to prepare itself for war. It will be disciplined, and it will respect the offices of the secretary of defense and the president. But the two men themselves? Not much respect is due them as human beings who have, at this moment and in these ways, shown themselves unfit to lead the greatest military on Earth. Nor will they get any.”

4. How Trump is making China great again—and at America’s expense

Why you should read it: At his Substack, Paul Krugman contends that Trump’s trade war is doing nothing so much as benefitting China and kneecapping America.

• “It should have been obvious from the beginning that if America were to get into a full-scale trade war with China, the Chinese would have the upper hand. For one thing, in real terms China has the bigger economy… Furthermore, while our economies are interdependent, America is more vulnerable to a rupture than China is. True, Chinese industry has relied to an important degree on sales to the United States. But the U.S. economy is dependent on China for critical inputs, above all those rare earths. And here’s the thing: China can quickly compensate, at least in part, for the loss of the U.S. export market by stimulating domestic demand. Given time, America could wean itself from dependence on Chinese inputs — but doing so would take years.”

• “That said, a year ago the United States still had some important advantages over China. Although China has made great strides in science and technology, America still had a commanding position, thanks in large part to our unmatched research establishment, our great research universities, and our ability — thanks in large part to the openness of our society — to recruit talent from all over the world… The U.S. could and did build a powerful alliance system, because America was more than a nation: It was an idea and a set of values, values we shared with the rest of the democratic world… OK, you know what’s coming: Since taking office, Trump and his minions have been systematically demolishing each of these pillars of U.S. strength.”

• Why it matters: “So we may be entering into an all-out trade war with China having destroyed the non-trade advantages America used to have in the form of scientific leadership and major allies. As a result, it’s just a question of which nation can do the most damage to the other. And if those are the terms on which a trade war is fought, it’s clear who is in the stronger position. China wants access to the U.S. market, but America needs Chinese rare earths and other inputs. America is going to lose this conflict... It’s bad when the world sees you as a bully; it’s worse when the world also sees you as weak. The man who promised to make America great again has probably ended our position of global leadership for the foreseeable future.”

5. Why “neoliberalism” is a nonsense term

Why you should read it: Rutgers University historian David Greenberg takes aim in Liberties at fashionable claims that “neoliberalism” constitutes a coherent ideology, particularly in the context of American politics.

• “It is a tall order in this age of slogans and shibboleths to select one word to expunge from our political vocabulary, but if asked to do so I would nominate ‘neoliberalism.’ A coinage of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the term remained fairly limited in its use for two decades, gaining currency at first in academic circles and then exploding in popularity after the financial crash in 2008 and Bernie Sanders’ rise to celebrity. Then, just when it was fading from overexposure, it surged back into fashion. Critics, scholars, consultants, and commentators now finger neoliberalism as the reason for practically all our political problems, especially the Democrats’ failure to keep the presidency out of the hands of Donald Trump… As it is used today, ‘neoliberalism’ contains at least three assumptions that its users hope to promulgate but which are, in fact, wrong. The first concerns what historians call periodization: reliance on neoliberalism as a historical framework depends on the flawed premise that in or about 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan, the American ethos changed. Second, the invocation of neoliberalism incorporates a critique of liberals and Democrats, who, it is insinuated, supinely acquiesced in Reaganism, creating a ‘Washington consensus’ by jettisoning the party’s historic commitment to using government to better people’s lives. Third, the neoliberal mantra implies that the economic policies pursued by Democrats when they had power were an economic, political, and even moral failure… [Democratic neoliberals] excoriated bureaucracy, public and private, and allowed themselves to defy their allied interest groups such as government workers, unions, public-interest lawyers, and pro-regulation lobbyists. They favored investments in education and research and development. Many championed what was clunkily called ‘industrial policy,’ or having the government select up-and-coming sectors of the economy for support. Technology captivated them, giving rise to the phrase ‘Atari Democrats.’ They foresaw that high-tech innovation could help maintain America’s global competitiveness. They were far-sighted, too, in acknowledging the tightening interdependence of nations — a condition that spawned the word ‘globalization,’ a close cousin of neoliberalism — and the need to adapt. In the 1970s, in deference to the unions, congressional Democrats had begun discarding liberalism’s traditional commitment to free trade; but most neoliberals, underscoring the folly of protectionism, countered that lowering trade barriers and opening markets would help both the United States and its international partners… Contrary to current mythology, the neoliberals were not libertarians, conservatives, free-marketeers, supply-siders, rampant deregulators, Reaganites, Thatcherites, Friedmanites, Hayekians, or enemies of the New Deal or the welfare state. More than other liberals, they saw a role for markets in their new policies, but they rejected the axiom that the market was all wise. ‘First of all — and most important of all — we are liberals,’ [Charlie] Peters explained, noting ‘large areas’ of policy in which neoliberals scarcely differed from other liberals. ‘We criticize liberalism not to destroy it but to renew it.’ [Bruce] Babbitt defended the ‘welfare state’ from the Republicans who would gut it, calling for sustaining ‘an activist federal government in areas such as environmental matters, health, and entitlements…’ Far from Reaganites, neoliberals were practical-minded welfare-state anti-Reagan liberals seeking to adjust their means to meet their traditional ends. Neoliberalism was a revision that took place within the liberal tradition. This may be why many of the detractors of neoliberalism on the left and the right are really just old-fashioned enemies of liberalism.”

• “In short, [Bill] Clinton’s ascent rendered ‘neoliberalism’ obsolete as a taxonomic category. A different strain of updated liberalism — call it Clintonism — now held sway. Yet just as Washington journalists were retiring ‘neoliberalism,’ it got picked up, by sheer coincidence, by European leftists — people who had no familiarity with the legislation once bandied about by Bradley, Gephardt, Hart, and the others; who were not well-versed in American policy debates about military reform or education reform or ‘reinventing government’; who hadn’t read the neoliberal books and journals. Some of them probably had not even kept up with the decades-old shift in the meaning of the word “liberalism” itself, which in the nineteenth century had meant an assertion of individual rights, including economic rights, against the state, but in the Progressive Era had also come to encompass a belief in an active governmental role in the economy. Tethering liberalism to its former and now-antiquated meaning, these left-wing European academics thus felt none of [Sen.] Chris Murphy’s addlement in applying a word rooted in liberalism to a non-liberal philosophy… [French philosopher Michel] Foucault’s application of this appellation to twentieth-century free-market economists such as Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and (later) Milton Friedman was historically ignorant — and triply so. First, Foucault seemed not to have known that, as Burgin tells us, neoliberalism as ‘a formal designation’ for the ideas at the Lippman Colloquium was ‘raised and rejecte’ at the time. Second, the Hayekians in fact did not call themselves neoliberals; those who had briefly flirted with that name were those on the center-left, like Lippmann and Rougier, not those on the right. Finally, for most of the century nobody else called these conservatives neoliberal either. Foucault’s was thus a highly peculiar and misleading usage. Yet just as with some of his other dubious theories, he got away with it… A half-knowledgeable Washington observer could see the absurdity of saddling a genuine neoliberal such as Gary Hart with the views of Milton Friedman. But the Europeans and academics bruiting about the label were not knowledgeable, or even half-knowledgeable, about these matters. And after 2000, the political climate made the merging of the two meanings of ‘neoliberalism’ irresistible to some. Cursory understandings of the concept allowed left-wing critics to brand Obama as a neoliberal because he had bailed out the banks. Clinton’s support for the North American Free Trade Agreement (even though it was negotiated by his predecessors) and his repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (enacted in 1933 to separate commercial banking from investment banking) were cast as pivotal moments when Democrats surrendered to market forces and set us on a path to where we are now. The misnomer stuck… Witting or unwitting, the wrongheaded conflation of neoliberalism with free-market conservatism has continued to flourish. The practice yokes together two groups who are clear ideological enemies. A category that embraces such stark opposites as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, or Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, can only obfuscate. And, besides, good names already exist for market-friendly economics: free-market conservatism, economic libertarianism, classical liberalism, laissez-faire. But leftists prefer ‘neoliberal’ because it enfolds liberal Democrats in their blunderbuss critique. If to a hammer everything looks like a nail, then to a Marxist every non-Marxist looks like a neoliberal. One suspects, as Jonathan Chait has written, that ‘the whole trick is to bracket the center-left together with the right as ‘“neoliberal,” and then force progressives to choose between that and socialism.’”

• Why it matters: “The historian Tara Zahra has written about the backlash against progressivism and globalization in the aftermath of World War I. Where goods and people had moved freely across borders, restrictions now limited exchange. Governments framed migration not as an opportunity but as a threat to national strength and social cohesion. Nations pulled back from international bodies and treaties. Democracies and dictatorships alike preached self-reliance. This inward turn promised order amid chaos, rootedness in place and tradition, and protection from the dislocations of global capitalism. Fascism, communism, and anti-semitism flourished. It was not the age of Trump, but it was the age of Ford, Lindbergh, Coughlin, and Mussolini… Now, too, an anti-globalization backlash is in flower. Liberal democracy is regularly derided. Elites are demonized. Strongmen are admired. Pluralism is regarded as weakness. Trade is blamed for poverty. Borders are walled and fortified. Illegal immigrants are targeted. On the left, voters flock to fantastic promises of free rent, free buses, and free food. Or they hear prophecies of a future liberated from work, so that we can all enjoy a government-provided universal basic income. On the right, Trump recklessly plays around with tariffs, wreaks economic havoc, and impulsively decimates government agencies. These are only a few of the latest proposed replacements for what has come to be disparaged as neoliberalism. If we persist now in trashing the many things that liberals, whatever their failings and flaws, have done rightly and reasonably well, we will breathe life into the poisonous ideologies that liberalism once rose up to defeat.”

6. How the Trump administration facilitates transnational repression

Why you should read it: For Foreign Policy, former Freedom House director of research Nate Schenkkan details how the Trump administration has put the United States on the side of autocrats who seek to repress their erstwhile citizens beyond borders.

• “A few weeks ago, prominent Russian opposition leaders in exile made a startling plea to the Canadian government: Please accept hundreds of asylum-seekers currently detained in the United States before they are summarily returned to Russia. Apparently, Russian asylum-seekers are being deported en masse to their country of origin, where many are imprisoned upon arrival due to their involvement in opposition and anti-war campaigning. Then last week, reporters learned that hundreds of Iranian nationals already in immigration detention would be deported to Iran… Over the last several years, experts, civil society, and governments have embraced a name for when countries reach across borders to silence dissent. It is called transnational repression, and the U.S. government used to be very much against it. Now, as these stories demonstrate, Washington has become an eager collaborator… With these [recent] deportations, the United States has proactively embraced the return of dissidents as a matter of policy. While there were previous examples of transnational repression on U.S. soil, these usually involved systems failing due to effective manipulation by the origin state or unilateral acts like assassination plots on U.S. soil. The recent Russian deportations are different because they appear to involve proactive cooperation. The fact that several of the deported Russians were arrested immediately upon arrival suggests that the United States informed Moscow of who was being returned and when.”

• “The United States’ participation in these acts of transnational repression is a significant breach of its human rights responsibilities. International law provides an ironclad prohibition against refoulement, or the return of someone to a place where they are likely to face torture or ill treatment. Refoulement is explicitly banned under U.S. law through the country’s accession to the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT). Indeed, unlike many international treaties, this one was signed and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1990, so there is no question that it is law… It is also a major reversal of years of policymaking on a topic that had bipartisan support. Under the Biden administration, but with clear interest and support from Republicans in Congress, there was a ‘whole-of-government’ policy push to counter transnational repression as a matter of foreign and domestic policy. The administration raised the issue with allies and in multilateral forums, and the Justice Department and the intelligence community built out complex streams of work to address it. The United States was widely recognized as a leader on the topic, and its interventions helped push other democracies to take it up themselves, which was most recently evident in a leaders’ statement from the 2025 G-7 summit, but also in a slew of new domestic policy initiatives in countries around the world. According to current U.S. officials, countering transnational repression remains a State Department priority, but that is hard to believe given the Trump administration’s actions.”

• Why it matters: “Choosing to participate in transnational repression signals that the government will break international norms at the expense of rights and will work with overtly authoritarian governments to establish new illiberal norms… The future they are building is one in which states cooperate in a global condominium to suppress transnational dissent, trading favors and swapping opponents across borders. It is one in which a fundamental means of continuing the struggle against dictatorships—fleeing to a more democratic country and advocating from there—is foreclosed. U.S. participation in this behavior—which is already widespread in Central Asia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and increasingly East Africa—would be a tremendous blow to the possibility of exile as refuge. This couldn’t come at a worse time, as the spread of digital technologies and authoritarian impunity have already facilitated transnational repression at a scale and scope never seen before…A full-throated condemnation of U.S. President Donald Trump’s actions by allied governments in Europe and elsewhere would demonstrate their intent to fight transnational repression regardless of who the perpetrators are. As bizarre as it would have sounded two years ago, states should also rapidly adopt policies to accept dissidents forced to flee the United States. Naming what the United States is doing, pledging to fight its institutionalization, and ensuring other countries remain safe havens against global authoritarianism would help pro-democracy advocates continue their global struggle.”

7. Why Trump can’t just send troops wherever he wants, whenever he wants

Why you should read it: Georgetown law professor Stephen Vladeck outlines the reasons why “our constitutional ideals, to say nothing of common sense” deny presidents the ability to deploy troops against the American people “based on facts that they contrive.”

• “The Constitution’s drafters were not averse to domestic use of the military. One of the immediate catalysts for the 1787 Constitutional Convention had been the embarrassing inability of the national government to respond to Shays’s Rebellion — a relatively modest uprising that began in Western Massachusetts in the summer of 1786. That episode exposed for all to see the impotence of the government created by the Articles of Confederation — and it highlighted the need for a stronger, centralized federal executive. To that end, one of the powers the new Constitution expressly gave to Congress was the power ‘to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions…’ Until this year, Congress’s 230-year-old choice had been borne out. Presidents of both parties have been especially careful to use the military domestically only in contexts in which there was a clear factual predicate, whether because local authorities were overwhelmed by riots or were refusing to enforce civil rights laws. Indeed, until this year, there was virtually no judicial precedent on the scope of these powers, because their factual limits had not been seriously tested.”

• “…the federal government is trying to use dubious factual claims about what’s true on the ground in these cities to justify federalizing National Guard troops both from within those states and from outside of them… Typically, our constitutional system resolves these kinds of factual disputes through litigation. Neutral judges and juries hear legal arguments and factual testimony and decide for themselves what has, and what has not been, established. But the president’s advisers and supporters have spent the past few days arguing that this is not an appropriate role for the federal courts to play — because the president’s determinations in national security cases should be, and (they claim) historically have been, conclusive… This, then, is the real legal test Mr. Trump’s deployments raise: Can the courts meaningfully scrutinize the president’s claims, or must they blindly defer? To date, we’ve seen fairly aggressive pushback to the administration’s arguments from the courts — from Judge Charles Breyer in the Los Angeles case and from Judge [Karin] Immergut in Portland.”

• Why it matters: “The Supreme Court will no doubt have the last word. And the question is going to be whether the president can use a contrived crisis as a justification for sending troops into our cities. In other words, the issue is going to come down to who decides the facts when it comes to domestic use of the military. That question meant one thing when we had presidents who, for whatever reason, were constrained to acknowledge reality. It means something else altogether in an administration for which, to borrow from George Orwell, 2 + 2 = 5.”

8. Why we should remember the Palmer Raids

Why you should read it: Former Wall Street Journal political correspondent Gerald F. Seib compares the present political moment to the febrile atmosphere that engulfed the country after World War I and produced the Palmer Raids in the New York Times.

• “Anti-immigrant sentiment runs high, encouraged in significant measure by the president. In reaction, federal officers, sometimes with the help of local police departments, round up immigrants in American cities by the thousands. Many are detained without clear legal authority; hundreds are deported… This is a story of 2025, of course. It is also a story from a century ago, when zealous officials pursued immigrants in an uncannily similar fashion, a little-remembered episode that didn’t end well for the federal government. There are strong clues that the Trump administration might face a similar outcome… Those earlier immigrant roundups, in late 1919 and early 1920, are known in history books as the Palmer raids, after A. Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general who ordered them. He was aided in his efforts by a young Justice Department attorney named J. Edgar Hoover, whose experience helped lead to the emergence of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. President Woodrow Wilson set the table for the actions with his own harsh talk about subversives lurking within America’s borders, while a compliant judiciary gave the executive branch’s leaders every reason to think it wouldn’t stand in the way… Eventually, the Wilson administration overreached, and the Palmer raids came to be seen as folly. Only about 800 of the more than 4,000 people detained were deported. The raids failed to achieve their main law-enforcement goal. The F.B.I.’s own history of the episode refers to them as a ‘nightmare.’ In short, America was here before — and has come to regret it.”

• “The Palmer raids were born of the country’s first big Red Scare — the fear that subversives who migrated from Russia and Eastern Europe would launch an American version of the Bolshevik Revolution. These fears began in the years leading up to World War I, persisted during the war and rolled into the war’s aftermath, when Communists in Moscow talked of global revolution… Using wartime authorities Congress had provided, federal agents struck in early November, bursting into apartments and meeting houses across 11 cities and arresting more than 1,000 immigrants, many of them Russians, some taken simply because their accent was deemed suspicious (for today, substitute suspicious tattoos). ‘Sometimes they had arrest warrants, but usually they simply arrested everyone they found,’ the author and historian Christopher M. Finan wrote in his book ‘From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act…’ Weeks later, in January 1920, Palmer and Hoover oversaw a broader wave of arrests and detentions. In pursuit of what Palmer called ‘alien filth,’ an estimated 3,000 people, including citizens and legal residents, were rounded up on suspicion of being members of Communist political parties seeking the overthrow of the government… Doubts about the constitutionality of the exercise grew within the Wilson administration, in Congress and in the courts and press. Officials in the Labor Department, who initially were part of the effort, came to see it as legally unjustifiable. They concluded that most of those arrested had no interest in government overthrow and canceled most of the deportation orders. Congressional hearings were called to investigate. The raids also failed in their central mission: The government never found out who was responsible for the string of bombings.”

• Why it matters: “History also shows that skirting civil liberties and due process can be effective and even popular in the short run — and tends to produce a backlash eventually… For the Trump administration, there are similar warning signs. Recent polls have found that Americans generally approve of deporting people who came to the country illegally, but don’t like the lack of due process surrounding deportations or sending immigrants to prisons in other countries. It’s true there is little sign a Republican-controlled Congress has any interest in putting the brakes on Trump policies, but even partisan lawmakers eventually respond to public sentiment, as they did after the Palmer raids… Palmer didn’t think he had overstepped. Rather, he chided Congress for not giving him more tools to help in the ‘sweeping processes of arrests and deportation of seditious aliens.’ He did succeed in setting off a new national sensitivity to civil liberties. In direct response to the Palmer raids, a small group of lawyers, social workers and activists created the American Civil Liberties Union.”

9. Why NASA can build spacecraft just as inexpensively as the private sector

Why you should read it: In the Financial Times, aerospace engineer and Harvard Business School researcher Sinéad O’Sullivan reports on recent research showing that NASA builds spacecraft just as efficiently and sometimes less expensively than private companies like SpaceX—especially when the missions are high-profile and risky.

• “Industry-built spacecraft were indeed cheaper, but only for lower-risk projects: the so-called Class C and D missions, where the scientific stakes are modest and the chance of failure is acceptable. Once the analysis moved up to Class A and B missions, the high-profile, flagship science projects where budgets balloon and timelines stretch, the difference evaporated. Nasa and industry came out roughly equal. In some cases, Nasa was cheaper… Complexity and risk class drove cost. Who built the spacecraft did not… This matters, because it breaks the story the industry has been selling for a decade: that private space is inherently more efficient.”

• “So if Nasa can sometimes build spacecraft just as cheaply as private industry, why is there a private space sector at all? The answer is that efficiency is the wrong metric… Space and deeptech industries, like finance, are best understood as a portfolio. Nasa is the bond: stable, slow, unlikely to default. SpaceX is the high-beta equity: volatile, chaotic, potentially transformative. Blue Origin is the long-dated option, underwritten by Jeff Bezos’ stock sales, with no clear payout horizon. The dozens of failed small launch start-ups? Penny stocks. Most went to zero; one or two delivered returns that reshaped the market… That redundancy looks messy on a balance sheet, but it makes systems resilient. And when you’re building rockets, chips, or cancer cures, resiliency is what matters. Europe’s Ariane 6 delays left no backup. NASA’s Shuttle grounding meant buying Russian seats until SpaceX. Today, if Falcon 9 fails, at least two other rockets are waiting.”

Why it matters: “The lesson is simple: Stop asking whether public or private is cheaper. Winners emerge from redundancy, not efficiency. That’s true in space, in cars, in chips, in biotech. Innovation isn’t about picking the cheapest horse, it’s about running enough of them that one crosses the finish line.”

Odds and Ends

• A look back at the first generation of astrophotography taken by the Apollo astronauts while they walked on the Moon…

• To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, a writer and a photographer from the New York Times spent a week plying the Great Lakes on the iron ore steamer SS Wilfred Sykes…

• How French archaeologists discovered 12,000 year old petroglyphs depicting camels and donkeys in the deserts of northern Saudi Arabia…

• NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic test jet took to the skies for the first time on October 28…

• How Star Trek’s warp drive appears to be inching closer and closer to reality…

What I’m Listening To and Watching

• Taylor Swift’s new album The Life of a Showgirl, obviously.

• “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding,” the epic opening track(s) to Elton John’s seminal 1973 double album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road—plus some live covers by Dream Theater and Metallica.

• Presenter Dan Snow interviews British naval historian Andrew Lambert about the Battle of Jutland, the titanic World War I clash of British and German dreadnoughts, for his History Hit podcast.

• The New York Times Popcast podcast talks with Paramore frontwoman Hayley Williams about her new solo album, touring as a teen, and the future of her band.

• Task, an HBO crime thriller starring Mark Ruffalo as the washed-up, barely-sober ex-priest FBI agent heading a task force investigating drug-related robberies in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.

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"A black character, an unmanly character, a stubborn character, bestial, brutish, puerile, fatuous, deceitful, coarse, mercenary, tyrannical."

- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.28

What I’m Reading:

1. How Trump’s dealmaking hastens American decline

Why you should read it: Former Biden White House official Vivek Viswanathan writes in The Atlantic that President Donald Trump’s self-proclaimed dealmaking degrades America’s foreign policy and hastens national decline.

• “His signature style, which involves breaking trust with America’s friends while alternately cozying up to and lashing out at its competitors, rests on a notion central to his self-conception: the deal… Yet Trump has little to show for his methods: no end to the war in Ukraine, no new modus vivendi with Russia or China, no progress on Middle East peace, no breakthroughs on trade, and certainly no Nobel Peace Prize. The recent rupture in relations with India follows breaches with Europe and Canada. Mexico may be next.”

• “Why is Trump’s dealmaking backfiring so spectacularly? The answer may lie in his dismissal of an important bit of American dealmaking folklore: namely, that a deal is a deal… He hesitates to make long-term commitments and has a penchant for acting alone—traits he shares with a unilateralist strain in U.S. foreign-policy making that persisted well into the 20th century… But a crucial difference separates these statesmen from Trump’s team: They were credible. They knew that American power and influence depended on the conviction, among both friends and enemies, that if the U.S. reached an agreement, it would keep its word. And they knew that America would cease to be able to reach agreements if it could not be counted on to deliver on its commitments… When America goes back on its word, leaving allies exposed, such countries learn their lesson and start hedging. Having paid a price for relying on America, they draw closer to others they may need to depend on in the future. They are less receptive when America asks them to take costly action to serve American interests, because the payoff of America reciprocating the goodwill is no longer there. America may then try to extract concessions with threats in place of promises, but even this may be ineffective, because a country that can’t be trusted to fulfill a promise also can’t be trusted to rescind a threat.”

• Why it matters: “Trump has now been the primary actor in both American and global politics for more than a decade. No one can argue that he, or the MAGA movement he leads, is a passing phenomenon. And no country’s leadership is under any illusion about what a deal with Trump is worth… Marco Rubio, Trump’s national security adviser and secretary of state, once suggested that his predecessors in the Biden administration would be ‘polite and orderly caretakers of America’s decline.’ The irony is that while Trump has taken pride in being neither polite nor orderly, the decline in America’s position has been swifter than nearly anyone imagined. There is no easy way to reverse it—but a president who knows how to strike a deal could make a worthy start.”

2. Why Trump’s new war against boats in the Caribbean marks an ominous turn to lawlessness

Why you should read it: In Defense One, former Navy captain John Duffy warns that the Trump administration’s recent strikes against speedboats in the Caribbean cross dangerous moral and legal lines.

• “Last week, an American military platform destroyed a small vessel in the Caribbean, killing 11 people the Trump administration claims were drug traffickers. It was not an interception. It was not a boarding with Coast Guard legal authority. It was a strike—ordered from Washington, executed in international waters, and justified with little more than ‘trust us…’ This was not a counterdrug operation. It was not law enforcement. It was killing without process. And it was, to all appearances, against the letter and the spirit of the law.”

• “International law does not permit such action. A vessel in international waters is not a lawful target simply because officials say so. Contending that narcotics pose a long-term danger to Americans is at best a weak policy argument, not a legal justification for force. Unless this boat posed an imminent threat of attack—which no one has claimed—blowing it out of the water is not self-defense. It is killing at sea. A government that ignores these distinctions is not fighting cartels. It is discarding the rule of law… By redefining traffickers as legitimate military targets, the administration has plunged the United States into another war without limits.”

• Why it matters: “The U.S. is drifting into an undeclared war of assassination across half a hemisphere, led by unaccountable officials who equate explosions with effectiveness… The cost will not be measured in a destroyed boat. It will be measured in the corrosion of law, strategy, and trust. Legally, the U.S. has abandoned the framework that distinguished interdiction from assassination. Constitutionally, presidential immunity has been laid bare: the commander-in-chief of the most destructive military power in history has been placed beyond the reach of law. Strategically, we have entered another endless war against a concept, not an enemy. Internally, the erosion of boundaries abroad feeds the erosion of boundaries at home… The strike in the Caribbean is not the action of a strong nation. It is a warning. This is about whether the U.S. military remains an institution of law and principle, or whether it becomes an obedient weapon in the hands of a lawless president.”

3. How Trump’s vibes-based approach to policy undermines the American economy

Why you should read it: The Bulwark columnist Jonathan Cohn examines the Trump administration’s war against wind power and finds its vibes-based approach to economic policy threatens to undermine the economy as a whole.

• “The Trump administration’s official rationale for suspending construction [on the Revolution Wind farm] is that the project requires a new review from federal regulators, to ‘address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States.’ But Trump officials have never specified what those interests are, or why the multiple previous reviews by state and federal authorities were insufficient… No, the real reason seems to be that Donald Trump simply hates wind power. And it’s not hard to imagine the reasons—even above and beyond his well-known pique about offshore wind turbines visible from his Scottish golf resort. For Trump, opposing wind energy could be another way to stick it to tree-hugging libs or to undo a Democratic legacy item—or to signal his class loyalty. In the MAGA cultural universe, getting power from wind or the sun or any other renewable source is somehow less authentically blue-collar than pulling petroleum out of the ground.”

• “There are a lot of difficult-to-explain elements about Trump’s decision on the Rhode Island wind farm. But the most striking may be the extent to which it undermines what he claims to be his most important goals: making America strong and energy-independent while lowering the cost of living and helping the forgotten working class. It’s just one example of the self-destructive way he’s been making decisions affecting broad swaths of the economy, and of the costs those decisions are likely imposing on the country already… Inflation is up. Employment is down. Consumers have become pessimistic. For the first few months of Trump’s presidency, there was a pretty big gap between data like unemployment claims (a so-called ‘hard’ indicator) and the confidence Americans have in the economy (a so-called ‘soft’ indicator). That difference has narrowed, and not in a direction that bodes well… Tariffs are a perfect example. Most economists will tell you that tariffs are bad for the economy overall, in part by raising the prices of goods. And there are plenty of signs that’s happening right now, because the sectors where prices are rising include cars, electronics, furniture, and food—in other words, those dominated by imported goods and domestic goods made with parts from abroad. Also, manufacturing jobs are down… But it’s not just the financial penalty of the tariffs holding back growth. It’s also the fact that Trump has thrown out so many different numbers for what tariffs will be, sometimes through speeches or announcements, sometimes through tweets and interview quips. And it’s the way Trump keeps suggesting he’s open to cutting deals with specific countries—or, for that matter, specific companies—based on non-economic factors like which party’s lobbyist spoke to him last, or who figured out what gift to give him.”

• Why it matters: “That kind of deal-making [needed to restart the Revolution Wind project] would mean giving in to cronyism, and accepting economic policy by Trump whim. It would mean acknowledging, reluctantly, that the future of an entire energy sector—one with incredible promise and tens of thousands of employees—could very well depend on whether the president can let go of his outdated views and his personal animus… But as long as Trump sits in the White House, with nobody checking his power, there aren’t lots of alternatives.”

4. How the world turned on non-governmental organizations

Why you should read it: International relations professor Suparna Chaudry observes in Foreign Policy that non-governmental organizations face a new, more hostile environment after years being treated as indispensable partners by governments and international institutions around the world.

• “But while the U.S. government’s actions have posed the biggest and most unexpected challenge for these groups, the reality is that the heyday of NGO influence was already long over. NGO revenue streams have dried up—and not just from the United States. France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom had already begun their aid retreat before U.S. President Donald Trump took office a second time. In 2020, the U.K. effectively closed its equivalent of USAID, the Department for International Development, by merging it with the Foreign Office. Foreign aid dropped by about $6 billion after the merger, a decline expected to hit $11 billion by 2027… Concurrently, global democratic recession and authoritarian resurgence have created a troubling environment for NGOs. In the face of fewer democratic constraints, these governments are also eroding the norms that supported these groups for much of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.”

• “Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the wave of democratic transitions across Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe, Western aid agencies channeled significant resources to NGOs in the 1980s and ’90s. NGOs increased in number, size, and funds received and emerged as key actors in development, democratization, and humanitarianism. A coalition of NGOs, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, played a key role in the adoption of the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention in 1997. Their efforts won them the Nobel Peace Prize that same year. Médecins Sans Frontières won the prize shortly after, in 1999, in recognition of its pioneering humanitarian work… By the early 2000s, though, major NGOs began to struggle to operate at a larger scale while maintaining the grassroots contacts and input that contributed to their early successes. The growth of international NGOs raised concerns about how accountable these groups were to the communities they served, as locals felt excluded from agenda setting, implementation, and evaluation of NGO programs… Today, more than 130 countries have cracked down on NGOs, many through administrative means. An administrative crackdown uses the law to create barriers to entry, funding, and advocacy. In 2012, the Russian government forced organizations receiving foreign funding and engaging in ‘political activities’ to register as ‘foreign agents.’ The designation subjected groups to onerous financial requirements and placed them under government monitoring. Similarly, in 2010, Indian lawmakers amended the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA), enabling the government to target nonprofits of a ‘political nature.’ Neither Russia nor India clearly defined ‘political…’ As a result, discourse around NGOs has dramatically shifted from the optimism of the 1990s. This July, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio referred to the ‘globe-spanning NGO industrial complex’ that, in his estimation, had little to show since the end of the Cold War. And following the change in the foreign-policy priorities of major Western powers, development NGOs face even greater challenges. Overseas development assistance by top donor countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development fell by more than 7 percent in 2024. Some governments retreated due to strategic realignments that prioritized national interests such as defense spending over foreign aid. Others did so due to fiscal pressures and budget deficits.”

• Why it matters: “If the era of NGOs is indeed coming to an end, the effects will be devastating for vulnerable communities, particularly in the global south. Many countries, especially non-democracies, had often tolerated development NGOs because of the services they provided. Increasing anti-NGO rhetoric on both the left and right, and Western donor governments scaling back on aid, means that development NGOs may face an even narrower civic space. Repressive governments may become even more emboldened to enact restrictive laws—ones that undermine advocacy and development NGOs alike.”

5. Why Democrats can’t follow their own advice on cultural moderation

Why you should read it: The Atlantic writer Marc Novicoff contends that Democrats are too afraid of activists and primary challenges to follow their own advice when it comes to moderation on unpopular cultural issues.

• “Immediately following the 2024 presidential election, Democrats seemed to be in rare agreement: They had moved too far to the left on cultural issues, and it had cost them. The day after Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump, for example, Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts told The New York Times, ‘I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.’ In that moment, the floodgates seemed poised to open. Moulton’s perspective, though taboo among much of the party’s activist base, placed him firmly in the American mainstream. Surely more Democrats would start coming out of the woodwork to advertise their moderate cultural views, and the idea of a radical Democratic Party would begin to fade away… With a few exceptions—notably California Governor Gavin Newsom and, less notably, former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who hasn’t won an election since 2015—Democrats have avoided making comments similar to Moulton’s, whether regarding trans athletes or other high-profile social issues on which the party is vulnerable, such as immigration and climate.”

• “This is a sign of a strange dynamic that has emerged in Democratic politics. Many pundits, strategists, and even elected officials recognize that the party has weakened itself by being out of touch, or at least perceived to be out of touch, on cultural issues… But for the most part, the very same Democrats making that argument haven’t followed it to its natural conclusion by moving significantly rightward on any major issue… By and large, however, even the elected Democrats most insistent on the need for change seem focused on adjustments to the party’s communication style, rather than to its substantive positions… Why didn’t more Democrats follow Seth Moulton’s lead after the election? The answer might lie in what happened to him after his comments about trans athletes. In the weeks that followed, his campaign manager resigned, protesters swarmed his district office, and the chair of the local Democratic committee in Salem, Massachusetts (where Moulton was born and resides), referred to him in an email as a ‘Nazi cooperator.’ The committee promised to find a primary challenger. Over the summer, the threat came true: Moulton will defend himself in a primary for the first time since 2020… system. Because the overwhelming majority of elected Democrats at the federal level are in safe seats, they’re more likely to lose to a primary challenger from their left than to a Republican in the general. Everyone knows what must be done to improve the party’s image, but each individual actor’s incentive is to do nothing—or, if not do nothing, then settle for rhetorical adjustments without taking any controversial positions.”

• Why it matters: “For Democrats to appeal to cultural conservatives, some of them probably have to actually be more culturally conservative than what the party has offered in recent years, and not just adopt a different affect or ignore social issues entirely. Or they could simply cross their fingers and hope voters spontaneously adopt new perceptions about the party. That strategy offends no one and incurs little risk. That’s why it’s unlikely to work.”

6. Why Trump might well fail to kill American democracy

Why you should read it: Political scientist Jonathan Schlefer makes the case in Politico Magazine that American democracy may well prove more resilient than many of us believe right now.

• “For the last 10 years, we’ve been hearing that President Donald Trump will preside over the end of democracy in America. In liberal circles, that assertion is often accepted as fact. For many, the proof is in the evidence from other countries’ democratic declines… But the United States is different from many of the countries that feature prominently in the ‘death of democracy’ literature. And for Americans concerned about what Trump will do in his second term, the ways other democracies have died isn’t the central concern. Those accounts are a bit like detailing how Covid can kill people but not assessing the chances, depending on age and risk factors, that the disease will kill you… But Trump’s authoritarianism also resembles that of dangerous populists who failed to kill democracy. Careful studies that never seem to get much press find that only about a fifth of dangerous populists actually kill democracy, including in different regions and across different time spans. If you’re serious about weighing the Trump threat, you should be asking what makes the difference between countries where democracy died and countries where it survives.”

• “A careful comparison with countries that fought off autocratic attempts, as well as those that succumbed, suggests that American democracy might be more resilient than you think. At a minimum, it has crucial advantages over democracies that failed. Three main things stand out: None was nearly so rich. None was nearly so long-lived. And none had a legal establishment tracing its genealogy back to the Magna Carta in 1215… Along with American democracy’s wealth, longevity and legal tradition, the people are its bulwark. Authoritarians don’t have to be political scientists to know that if they lose public support, they can fall — sometimes ousted at a sudden tipping point, as in Eastern Europe in 1989. To try to manufacture an appearance of strength, Trump exaggerates his support, broadcasts favorable lies, attacks critical media and tries to cow opponents… Large, peaceful protests also signal to powerful elites in the military, business, courts, legislature, even the ruling coalition, that the current state of affairs is going badly. Elites are citizens, too, and often divided, even in military governments. Protests give some permission to powerful elites and allies to at least remain neutral, if not abandon support for a regime. Other coalition members, strategically calculating odds based on what they see, may keep an eye out for signs they should desert so as not to be caught on a sinking ship.”

• Why it matters: “Despite his bluster, Trump is probably worried. He should be. American democracy is wounded. But, however awful its deterioration feels, it’s a long way from dead.”

7. Why the “fever dream” of artificial general intelligence is breaking

Why you should read it: Computer scientist Gary Marcus notes in the New York Times that the fantasy of artificial general intelligence seems finally to be giving way to the reality of the limits inherent to current approaches to the challenge.

• “GPT-5 is a step forward but nowhere near the A.I. revolution many had expected. That is bad news for the companies and investors who placed substantial bets on the technology. And it demands a rethink of government policies and investments that were built on wildly overinflated expectations. The current strategy of merely making A.I. bigger is deeply flawed — scientifically, economically and politically. Many things, from regulation to research strategy, must be rethought. One of the keys to this may be training and developing A.I. in ways inspired by the cognitive sciences… Fundamentally, people like [Open AI head Sam] Altman, the Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei and countless other tech leaders and investors had put far too much faith into a speculative and unproven hypothesis called scaling: the idea that training A.I. models on ever more data and using ever more hardware would eventually lead to A.G.I. or even a superintelligence that surpasses humans… Large language models, which power systems like GPT-5, are nothing more than souped-up statistical regurgitation machines, so they will continue to stumble into problems around truth, hallucinations and reasoning. Scaling would not bring us to the holy grail of A.G.I.”

• “Scaling worked for a while; previous generations of GPT models made impressive advancements compared with their predecessors. But luck started to run out over the past year. [Elon] Musk’s A.I. system, Grok 4, released in July, had 100 times as much training as Grok 2 had, but it was only moderately better. Meta’s jumbo Llama 4 model, much larger than its predecessor, was mostly also viewed as a failure. As many now see, GPT-5 shows decisively that scaling has lost steam… Many of generative A.I.’s shortcomings can be traced back to failures to extract proper world models from their training data. This explains why the latest large language models, for example, are unable to fully grasp how chess works. As a result, they have a tendency to make illegal moves, no matter how many games they’ve been trained on. We need systems that don’t just mimic human language; we need systems that understand the world so that they can reason about it in a deeper way. Focusing on how to build a new generation of A.I. systems centered on world models should be a central focus of research. Google DeepMind and Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs are taking steps in this direction.

• Why it matters: “The government has let A.I. companies lead a charmed life, with almost zero regulation. It now ought to enact legislation that addresses costs and harms unfairly offloaded onto the public — from misinformation to deepfakes, A.I. slop content, cybercrime, copyright infringement, mental health and energy usage… Large language models have had their uses, especially for coding, writing and brainstorming, in which humans are still directly involved. But no matter how large we have made them, they have never been worthy of our trust. To build A.I. that we can genuinely trust and to have a shot at A.G.I., we must move on from the trappings of scaling. We need new ideas. A return to the cognitive sciences might well be the next logical stage in the journey.”

8. Why artificial intelligence isn’t magic, no matter what its boosters say

Why you should read it: Author Cody Delistraty maintains that talking about artificial intelligence as if it’s supernatural—as many of its prominent boosters do—creates a new form of magical thinking and technological mysticism.

• “At times, A.I. can indeed feel magical. But treating it as anything other than a mere machine can have serious consequences. How many pose their deepest questions to chatbots, as if to an omniscient oracle? They ask Claude or ChatGPT: What should I do about this relationship? This job? This problem? Technology’s supposed promise of salvation — whether it’s Mars colonization, eternal life or achieving the A.I. ‘singularity’ — has become a kind of secular religion, a mix of utopian beliefs that borders on the mystical… Much of this is savvy marketing. This kind of constant upping of the stakes has itself become something of a magic trick. We can’t yet see the promised breakthrough, but we are told repeatedly that it’s just around the corner… Whether this radical way of thinking is based in any kind of provable reality is almost beside the point. As with any form of magic, its psychological power lies in what we don’t know but what we choose to believe. To perceive in A.I. either atomic-bomb-like significance or world-altering positivity, we’re inventing possibilities that don’t yet and may never exist — ghosts in the machine.”

• “Humans have a history of thinking magically about technological breakthroughs. Take the invention of the telegraph in the mid-19th century. Its ability to turn words into transportable electricity and back again led many to believe in an unseen world, the scholar of media and film Jeffrey Sconce has written. Not long after, Spiritualism — a social-religious movement whose adherents sought to commune with the dead — took off in upstate New York. It quickly spread throughout the United States, picking up pace amid the Civil War, crossing the Atlantic Ocean to continental Europe, Britain and beyond… The use of these new technologies revealed a perennial truth: There is a difference between what they can actually do and how a culture chooses to conceive of their abilities. That bridge is where we find the magical thinking… A large language model rapidly responding to a question might appear as though it’s arrived from some other world, not unlike how words flowed from the pens of Spiritualists’ automatic writing. These hopes for magic, then and now, allow adherents to embrace an ambitious belief in human invention, a heady possibility that can make people feel as though they’re on the precipice of something supernatural... One of the great shames of the enchantment with A.I. is the narrowness of ambition it instills. There are other enchantments to be had in relationships, in nature, in beauty, in creativity. In a commodity-first culture like ours, those are always going to be harder sells than the release of the next piece of software. What would it mean to set our goals beyond the realm of this kind of technological mastery?”

• Why it matters: “The better way forward, I’d wager, is both simple and drastic: to consider A.I. as the constructed piece of code it fundamentally is, not a mystical black box with unlimited potential. There is so much good that A.I. can achieve, from predicting diseases to automating repetitive tasks and translating languages. But if we focus on its supposed mystical aspects — if we come to believe we might love it like a person, replace our creativity with it, or bow to its alleged potential as though it were a nuclear bomb — then we not only dupe ourselves but also waste its strengths, locking ourselves once more into the historical cycle of magical thinking.”

9. Why the U.S. military remains silent in the face of Trump’s abuses

Why you should read it: Washington Post national security columnist David Ignatius avers that the Trump administration’s evisceration of the military’s legal branch—the judge advocate general corps—makes it more difficult for military leaders to stand up to Trump when he abuses power and authority.

• “…the Trump team has gutted the JAGs — judge advocate generals — who are supposed to advise commanders on the rule of law, including whether presidential orders are legal. Without these independent military lawyers backing them up, commanders have no recourse other than to comply or resign… [Secretary of Defense] Pete Hegseth’s campaign against the military’s traditional legal structure has been one of the most-significant but least-reported aspects of his tenure as defense secretary. In February, he fired the top Army, Air Force and Navy lawyers, calling them ‘roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.’ In March, he commissioned his personal lawyer, Tim Parlatore — one of the people included in the leaked Signal chat for discussing military operations against Yemen — into the JAG corps to review its training. In September, he began planning to transfer up to 600 JAG officers to temporary duty as immigration judges… Hegseth has a 20-year beef with military lawyers. He ridiculed them in his 2024 book, ‘The War on Warriors,’ writing that the JAGs ‘are often not so affectionately known as “jagoffs.”’ He claimed that ‘most’ JAGs prosecuted U.S. troops rather than ‘bad guys’ because ‘it’s easier to get promoted that way.’ His resentment, by his account, dates from a 2005 JAG briefing in the south of Baghdad, where his platoon was advised not to shoot someone carrying a rocket-propelled grenade unless it was ‘pointed at you with the intent to fire…’ Hegseth’s antipathy deepened when he became a Fox News commentator. His friend Parlatore, who had represented him in a divorce proceeding, was a lawyer for a Navy SEAL named Eddie Gallagher who was accused of war crimes in the 2017 death of an Islamic State prisoner in Mosul, Iraq… The Gallagher case was Hegseth’s ‘origin story’ as defense secretary. During his confirmation hearing in January, he didn’t budge in his opposition to what he called ‘burdensome rules of engagement.’ And a month after he took office, the attacks on military lawyers began.”

• “The U.S. military has always emphasized obeying the laws of war, for all the difficulties that might cause. George Washington appointed the first judge advocate only a few weeks after taking command of the Continental Army… But President Donald Trump and Hegseth appear to have overridden normal legal procedures. When Trump federalized the California National Guard to assist with immigration enforcement, his subordinates cited an unspecified ‘constitutional exception’ to the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act banning the military from enforcing domestic law. When Trump ordered a strike on the first alleged Venezuelan drug boat this month, killing 11 suspected traffickers, he bypassed the usual search-and-seizure procedures of the U.S. Coast Guard… The military’s difficulty in resisting even the most questionable orders became clear in June, when Trump federalized 4,000 members of the California National Guard to assist in an immigration crackdown there. In a forceful Sept. 2 opinion, U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer ruled that Trump’s actions were ‘part of a top-down, systemic effort … to use military troops to execute various sectors of federal law,’ in ‘serious violation’ of the Posse Comitatus Act…’ Breyer’s opinion bristles with scorn for what the administration did. The Trump Pentagon ‘willfully’ violated the 1878 statute. Officials ‘knowingly contradicted their own training materials.’”

Why it matters: “Military officers, current and retired, don’t like to speak out publicly about divisive issues, especially in a polarized time like this. But in nearly four decades of reporting and writing, I have never seen commanders so concerned about issues that could tarnish the U.S. military’s independence and standing. They swear an oath to the Constitution, not a president, and they don’t want to break it.”

Odds and Ends

• How one former software coder and a gaggle of former major leaguers are bringing baseball to Egypt…

• How archaeologists are filling in the gaps in our knowledge of the ancient Phoenicians…

• How migratory bison have helped restore Yellowstone National Park’s ecosystem…

• How dogs conquered cinema…

• Why orcas are once again playfully ramming boats…

What I’m Listening To and Watching

• Better Broken, the first album of new music from Canadian chanteuse Sarah McLachlan in 11 years—plus Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, a documentary on the all-female late 1990s music festival founded by McLachlan.

• Hard Road, the new album from blues guitar virtuoso Christone “Kingfish” Graham.

• Highest 2 Lowest, director Spike Lee’s modern-day New York adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s classic High and Low featuring Denzel Washington as a music executive confronting the kidnapping of his son.

• An 30th anniversary IMAX refresh of Apollo 13, director Ron Howard’s thrilling 1995 film about the ill-fated Moon mission starring Tom Hanks as the late astronaut Jim Lovell.

• Only Murders in the Building, the entertaining murder-mystery dramedy starring the charming trio of Selena Gomez, Steve Martin, and Martin Short, returns for its fifth season.

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"Rage will seize you on one person's account on this side, on another's on the other, and your frenzy will continue as new sources of irritation continually arise. Come, unhappy man, will you ever feel love? Oh, how you're wasting good time in a bad business! How much better it would be now to make friends, soothe enemies, serve the public interest, shift your energy to domestic concerns, than to look around for a bit of mischief to do someone by harming his status or his estate or his person, when you can't succeed without a dangerous struggle, even if you're in conflict with a lesser man!"

- Seneca, On Anger, 3.28.1-2

What I’m Reading:

1. How Trump’s destruction of NASA will cripple America’s imagination

Why you should read it: In Wired, Toronto Star columnist Richard Warnica details the damage Trump’s proposed evisceration of NASA will do to the American imagination.

• “If you work at NASA long enough, you get used to swings of ideology and priorities as different administrations come and go. This is something bigger, something unprecedented. ‘It was NASA's being deconstructed,’ [ex-NASA engineer Steve] Rader says. The American space agency—the one that put humans on the moon, that landed robots on Mars, that sent a probe past Jupiter into the Kuiper Belt and beyond—was being taken apart… What’s being undercut isn’t just NASA’s technical ability to carry out missions, although that would be bad enough. It is America’s—and the world’s—capacity to wonder, to believe, to know. ‘It's almost like a diminution of our own vision and ambition to say we're literally, I mean, again, not figuratively, literally, closing our eyes to the cosmos and turning inwards,’ says Casey Dreier, the space policy chief at the nonprofit Planetary Society. ‘It's like witnessing a death of an ideal.’”

• “Much has been written about what the proposed budget cuts and job losses will do to NASA. To begin with, they would mean the end of 41 planned or current missions, according to the Planetary Society. Those include an audacious, and long-underway plan to gather pristine soil samples on Mars and return them to earth, a probe exploring the solar system beyond Pluto, and a lander set to catch and study a giant asteroid that will barely miss the earth in 2029. They would also force NASA to essentially get out of the business of tracking climate change… I’ve been writing about Trump since the Iowa Caucuses in 2016. I’ve become used to the idea of bad news—of cruelty, incompetence and needless suffering. I know NASA cuts are not the worst thing happening under his administration. (Foreign aid cuts could resurrect the AIDS epidemic; children are being locked up in immigration jails; Medicaid is now at risk for millions.) But slashing NASA seems to represent something different and more ethereal to me. It’s less an accretion of new bad, perhaps, than an absence not just of good but of the possibility of good.”

• Why it matters: “The worry is the damage being caused now, not just to the brand, but to the actual agency, is permanent. NASA is already losing its reputation as a place brilliant people can go, not to make the most money or get the best stock options, but to work on things no one else has done… One of my favorite images from the James Webb Space telescope is of the Southern Ring Nebula. Released in the summer of 2022, the picture seems almost contained at first. It's an ocean-blue egg surrounded by halos of orange dust and gas. But zoom in and entire galaxies appear: infinite pinpricks of light set off against a kind of colossal orange cloud. I see in that picture the best of what NASA was and the opposite of what it risks becoming. It is an ambition at once humble and endless, rooted in the idea that we can learn anything, see anything, but we will never know everything. There’s too much of it. It is too vast.”

2. How Trump undermines 80 years of American greatness

Why you should read it: For the New York Times, journalist Garrett Graff argues that the Manhattan Project shows just how the Trump administration’s science and immigration policies attack the real sources of American greatness.

• “The 80th anniversary last week of the atomic bombings that helped end World War II came at a most peculiar time. That is in part because we can’t mark that anniversary without also noting the astonishing Manhattan Project that built atomic weapons… At no other time in modern history has a country so thoroughly turned its back on its core national strengths. The very elements that made the Manhattan Project such a success are today under assault. With devastating cuts to science and health research, the administration is turning its back on a history of being powered and renewed by the innovation and vision of immigrants. What America may find is that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project — which, in the end, wasn’t the bomb but a new way of looking at how science and government can work together.”

• “Out of [the Manhattan Project and other World War II science efforts] grew a tradition of government-supported science, technology and education efforts… Organizations like the national labs at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Berkeley that grew out of the Manhattan Project became the backbone of a stunning period of scientific and technological advances in the decades after the war. They were joined by the National Science Foundation (founded in 1950); Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA (founded in 1958); and the National Institutes of Health, which became a major grant-maker after the war — not to mention a host of other agencies like NASA… The return on a relatively modest government investment has been astounding; DARPA alone helped birth the internet, GPS and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine.”

• Why it matters: “Today, just as China’s own research and development efforts take off, the Trump administration has been erasing this legacy. Agencies like the National Science Foundation have been gutted, and the administration’s war on universities is already leading to huge cuts at science and health labs around the country; the Republican Congress and Trump administration are squashing progress in technologies like solar panels and electric vehicles that the rest of the world is mostly keen to adopt, likely leaving the United States not only behind but potentially not even in the game… If China is able to capitalize on our self-inflicted wounds to invent and secure the future of the 21st century instead, we may find that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project.”

3. Why Trump’s demand for a quick end to the war in Ukraine backfire

Why you should read it: History professor Michael Kimmage writes in Foreign Affairs that Trump’s attempts to force a rapid resolution to the war in Ukraine only hinder efforts to actually end the conflict.

• “In trying to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, which Donald Trump once promised he could do “within 24 hours,” the U.S. president is presenting himself as a kind of emperor. He has tried to make his administration the conflict’s diplomatic fulcrum… But the Trump administration has no plan for ending the war. The president vacillates from one position to another, discarding policies like gloves—a cease-fire one day and a comprehensive settlement the next, with threats of disengagement along the way. The United States struggles to find leverage over Russia, not least because it has preemptively rejected any form of escalation, such as additional sanctions or more military aid to Kyiv. It also struggles to find leverage over Ukraine because Ukraine is fighting for its life and has many governments beyond Washington that support it. Yet the U.S. president insists on being the peacemaker, and an international public is asked to admire his nonexistent plan. On and on the procession goes.”

• “There are profound limits to what Trump can do for Russia. Putin is a dictator. He does not need photo-ops with an American president to secure his domestic political position. U.S. aid to Ukraine via intelligence sharing, battlefield targeting, and the provision of hardware (now paid for by Europeans) is militarily quite consequential. But the United States cannot force Ukraine to surrender. Even if Putin could somehow convince Trump to withdraw all support for Kyiv, Ukraine would fight on, backed by its European partners. Lacking a path to victory that runs through Washington, Russia has no incentive to make real concessions… A rudderless American diplomacy is nonetheless helpful to the Kremlin. Conditions are placed on Russia and then suddenly dropped, while Trump’s muddled and inconsistent messaging lets Russia portray its designs on Ukraine as more modest than they truly are, to obscure its intentions, and to play for time. The Trump administration is also, by its own volition, suggesting a reduced American military footprint in Europe—another one of Moscow’s key ambitions. Russia’s task is not to interfere with Trump’s fantasies or his fraught relationship with Europe. It can best do this by flattering the president’s image of himself. Putin does not at all mind pretending, at times, that Trump is the consummate peacemaker… Any time spent speculating about land swaps to which Ukraine cannot agree, or parsing security guarantees that the Trump administration will only vaguely and fitfully underwrite, is time not spent on the logistics of helping Kyiv. Today’s war may at some stage be wound down by diplomats elaborating confidence-building measures, outlining ten-point plans, and drafting treaties. At the moment, however, the essential conversation is about helping Ukraine with its drones, manpower needs, and air defenses. If Washington is going to continue to pull back, as seems likely, Europe will have to focus intently and productively on these details. Just five days before Trump and Putin met in Alaska, U.S. Vice President JD Vance declared that his country is ‘done with the funding of the Ukraine war business.’ That is the chilling reality.”

• Why it matters: “The final cost to Trump’s diplomatic charade will be measured in the currency of American power. Washington has a rich history of peacemaking in Europe. President Woodrow Wilson’s journey to Versailles in 1918 to help broker the end of World War I may not have made the world safe for democracy, but his proposal for a world based on deliberation rather than war came to inform the European Union, the United Nations, and the best of intentions of twentieth-century American foreign policy. In the final months of World War II, Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman did not get everything they wanted at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, but they did erect the NATO alliance, ensuring a Western Europe at peace with itself. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush pursued artful diplomacy with the Soviet Union and, along with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, they found a peaceful end to the Cold War. Postwar Europe is the crown of American foreign policy, and Trump is tarnishing it…Trump’s efforts will cost Washington influence. Methods and manners matter in international relations. Trump’s processes are too chaotic, his speech too riddled with falsehoods, and his policy shifts too abrupt for foreign leaders to trust him. Without trust, there is no persuasion and no genuine cooperation; without trust, alliances lose their validity. If its trustworthiness is a fully spent commodity, all Washington will have left is the limited tool of hard power.”

4. Why drones cannot replace conventional airpower

Why you should read it: RUSI airpower expert Justin Bronk pushes back against wild claims that first-person-view drones offer a viable substitute for conventional airpower, offering evidence from the war in Ukraine.

• “Since 2023, first-person view (FPV) uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) and one-way attack (OWA) drones have played an increasingly critical role in Ukraine’s successful defensive efforts against Russia’s grinding offensives. Russian forces have also scaled up their UAS and OWA manufacturing and development capabilities by many orders of magnitude since the start of the full-scale invasion. As a result, the war in Ukraine in 2025 is overwhelmingly characterised by the use of millions of FPV UAS on the battlefield and thousands of OWA drones supplementing conventional cruise and ballistic missiles for long range strike campaigns… It is certainly essential for European NATO members to prioritise rapid expansion of their own counter-UAS capabilities, as Russian forces would certainly use UAS on a vast scale and fire large salvos of Geran-2/3 OWA drones in any future direct clash. However, there are several reasons why it would be a mistake for NATO forces to rely heavily on massed small UAS and long range OWA drones to replace traditional weapons systems in pursuit of improved lethality and thus deterrence against future Russian aggression.“

• “The first reason is that Russian forces currently field the most formidable counter-UAS (C-UAS) or ‘counter-drone’ capabilities on earth. They have a wide range of dedicated C-UAS electronic warfare systems, modified infantry weapons and short-range air defence (SHORAD) systems integrated at all levels of their ground forces. These have already been refined over three years of high-intensity combat experience against a steadily increasing and evolving Ukrainian UAS and OWA drone threat… The second reason is that as Ukrainian forces have been forced to depend ever more heavily on UAS and OWA systems due to personnel, ammunition and traditional equipment shortages after years of brutal attritional fighting, Russian forces have been able to focus steadily greater attention on refining their C-UAS capabilities… The third reason why betting heavily on massed UAS for lethality is a dangerous strategy for NATO nations is that Ukraine is still taking heavy casualties and slowly losing ground to Russian assaults despite being a world leader in developing, using and innovating with military UAS… Ukraine has achieved very impressive defensive results against larger Russian forces, but has not managed to retain the strategic initiative or operational momentum despite deploying millions of UAS that are constantly iteratively developed by a system honed by multiple years of desperate fighting. Western forces are highly unlikely to achieve transformative lethality and thus deterrent credibility against Russian forces by procuring several tens or even hundreds of thousands of similar drones more slowly and with less practical experience.”

• Why it matters: “A fourth reason is that there is far greater potential to deter Russia by investing to fill in the gaps and enable NATO’s areas of existing military strength – specifically the capability to gain and exploit air superiority through high-end airpower, and thus greatly multiply the power of professional armies optimised for manoeuvre warfare. A recent demonstration of how potent conventional airpower is when applied well is what the Israeli Air Force was able to achieve against Iran - a nation with thousands of advanced long range ballistic and cruise missiles and hundreds of thousands of drones of all kinds. Small UAS deployed by Special Operations Forces and loitering munitions played an important role in enabling access for far more potent traditional fast jets and armed medium-altitude long endurance (MALE) UAVs… Fundamentally, it is far technically and tactically easier to counter a force that primarily relies on massed, cheap FPV and OWA drones for its primary lethality than it is to counter well-employed airpower, long range fires, armour, artillery and mortars within a professional joint force.”

5. How not to win the war on drugs

Why you should read it: In The Bulwark, retired Gen. Mark Hertling observes that military force—as now apparently contemplated by the Trump administration—won’t do much to stanch the flow of drugs into the United States.

• “Trump’s idea of using America’s military strength to attack the supply side of the drug trade has visceral appeal. It certainly did for me when I advocated a similar policy 35 years ago. The cartels are heavily armed, brutal, and sophisticated. Fentanyl deaths in the United States are killing Americans. And the U.S. military, on paper, has unmatched capabilities to hit these networks… In any operation inside Mexico, or any other country, U.S. forces would have to be part of a host-nation–led multinational force—invited, integrated, and under a framework that respects a foreign nation’s sovereignty. Anything less would almost certainly fail diplomatically and could fail strategically.”

• “More broadly, using the military as the Times report suggests Trump has ordered is fraught with legal and political problems. At home, the Posse Comitatus Act limits the role of federal military forces in domestic law enforcement. Soldiers cannot, without explicit congressional authorization, search, seize, or arrest suspects on U.S. soil… On the other side of the border, the legal ground is even shakier. Sending U.S. troops into Mexico without its consent would violate international law and rupture relations… The Trump administration has designated several Mexican and Venezuelan cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, but that status only applies to American domestic law. It makes it a crime to aid these organizations and allows the government to freeze their assets, but it doesn’t provide a casus belli under international law. And if the administration were to attack them anyway, military operations would still be bound by the law of armed conflict—requiring proportionality, distinction between combatants and civilians, and accountability for every use of force. As a colleague sardonically asked me when I was writing my 1990 article [on the military’s role in the war on drugs], ‘What rights does a drug smuggler have when he’s facing the wrong end of a .50 caliber machine gun?’ The answer, then and now, should be clear: He still has rights.”

• Why it matters: “The U.S. military is trained to fight the nation’s enemies—uniformed combatants in recognized conflicts. As decades of recent experience have shown, the military is less effective at fighting irregular groups of non-state combatants, especially when asked to do it with insufficient diplomatic, economic, and intelligence support. Criminal organizations would strain the military operationally, doctrinally, and morally even more than Islamist terrorist groups did: A cartel operative may be a shooter one day and a civilian the next… From the Opium Wars to today’s cartel fight, the lessons aren’t complicated: Unilateral military action in another country without consent can backfire catastrophically. Destroying drugs is easier but less permanent than diminishing demand. Any U.S. military role must be as part of a host-nation–led, multinational force. Posse Comitatus is not a loophole—it’s a safeguard against the militarization of domestic policing. Rules of engagement and the laws of armed conflict apply, even to drug smugglers. Soldiers should not be tasked in ways that blur the line between combat and policing without clear legal authority and oversight.”

6. Why DOGE’s “cracked coders” failed miserably

Why you should read it: At The Dispatch, Jeremiah Johnson describes how Silicon Valley’s mythology of the supergenius coder failed when DOGE attempted to apply it to government.

• “In the mythos of the tech world, no figure looms larger than the ‘cracked coder.’ To be cracked is to be absurdly talented, to master the logic of programming, to transcend time and space writing code that sings, and to do so with such speed and efficiency as to defy belief. In Silicon Valley fables, these young prodigies don’t just build great software. They break through systems, leap past obstacles, and rewrite the rules of the world. How is it that some kids can build billion-dollar startups in their dorm rooms? Because they’re cracked… But the myth of the cracked coder goes beyond founding tech companies. It assumes that elite coders, by virtue of their raw intellect and technical prowess, can solve any problem. And this assumption, now increasingly embedded in the thinking of major tech firms and in our government, is causing immense harm… Why would members of the tech-right freak out like this in response to a relatively anodyne article [about DOGEling Luke Farritor]? Because the experience at DOGE, taken seriously, destroys the myth of the cracked coder and undermines their entire worldview.”

• “DOGE was almost a lab-perfect experiment for the idea that brilliant techies can tackle any challenge. Elon Musk claimed he could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. All America needed was the world’s most accomplished tech billionaire and a team of boy geniuses to take power from the hapless bureaucrats and ‘solve’ government like they solved software or rocketry… Just put the cracked coders in charge and watch them go. It’s a nice idea. But in the real world, the DOGE project failed on every possible level: micro, macro, institutional, and personal… DOGE found vanishingly little ‘waste, fraud, and abuse.’ What it actually accomplished was gutting American scientific research, undermining American soft power abroad, crippling critical agencies, and causing an enormous number of unnecessary deaths abroad. Credible, careful models estimate that hundreds of thousands have already died as a result of cuts to USAID, and The Lancet medical journal estimates that 14 million people could eventually die as a result of those cuts… The whole DOGE project was a test of the tech elite’s theory of government. Musk had the money, the clout, the world’s most vaunted coders. And he still failed catastrophically.”

• Why it matters: “…to reform the government, you need more than just coding skills. The kids at DOGE were responsible for decisions that affected hundreds of billions of dollars of public funds. These are life-or-death decisions. Being a public servant at this level means that your actions will have vast ramifications for real people in the real world. Depending on what you do, people could lose their jobs, children might go hungry, and pregnant mothers might lose access to life-saving medication. Important services could break down and entire sectors of the economy buckle… These choices require deep subject matter knowledge of the programs in question. They require thoughtfulness, prudence, wisdom, judgment, and a strong moral compass. Most of all, they require caution and humility when one wrong step could devastate millions of people’s lives. All the technical wizardry in the world won’t help you if you lack these qualities… Nobody would argue that just because a painter can create a moving rendition of the Virgin Mary that he’s qualified to be pope. But that’s the logic used in the tech world to justify Musk’s DOGE. And instead of reckoning with DOGE’s failure, the right-leaning tech world is digging in deeper and repeating its mistakes.”

7. How AI fosters delusions

Why you should read it: The Atlantic tech writer Charlie Warzel explains that the greatest achievement of the current generation of large-language model artificial intelligence programs may be the ability to make users feel like they’re going crazy.

• “It is a Monday afternoon in August, and I am on the internet watching a former cable-news anchor interview a dead teenager on Substack. This dead teenager—Joaquin Oliver, killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida—has been reanimated by generative AI, his voice and dialogue modeled on snippets of his writing and home-video footage. The animations are stiff, the model’s speaking cadence is too fast, and in two instances, when it is trying to convey excitement, its pitch rises rapidly, producing a digital shriek. How many people, I wonder, had to agree that this was a good idea to get us to this moment? I feel like I’m losing my mind watching it... The interview triggered a feeling that has become exceedingly familiar over the past three years. It is the sinking feeling of a societal race toward a future that feels bloodless, hastily conceived, and shruggingly accepted. Are we really doing this? Who thought this was a good idea? In this sense, the [reporter Jim] Acosta interview [of Oliver] is just a product of what feels like a collective delusion. This strange brew of shock, confusion, and ambivalence, I’ve realized, is the defining emotion of the generative-AI era. Three years into the hype, it seems that one of AI’s enduring cultural impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.”

• “Just the beginning. Perhaps you’ve heard that too. ‘Welcome to the ChatGPT generation.’ ‘The Generative AI Revolution.’ ‘A new era for humanity,’ as Mark Zuckerberg recently put it. It’s the moment before the computational big bang—everything is about to change, we’re told; you’ll see. God may very well be in the machine. Silicon Valley has invented a new type of mind. This is a moment to rejoice—to double down. You’re a fool if you’re not using it at work. It is time to accelerate… Breathlessness is the modus operandi of those who are building out this technology. The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is quote-tweeting guys on X bleating out statements such as ‘Everyone I know believes we have a few years max until the value of labor totally collapses and capital accretes to owners on a runaway loop—basically marx’ worst nightmare/fantasy.’ How couldn’t you go a bit mad if you took them seriously? Indeed, it seems that one of the many offerings of generative AI is a kind of psychosis-as-a-service. If you are genuinely AGI-pilled—a term for those who believe that machine-born superintelligence is coming, and soon—the rational response probably involves some combination of building a bunker, quitting your job, and joining the cause. As my colleague Matteo Wong wrote after spending time with people in this cohort earlier this year, politics, the economy, and current events are essentially irrelevant to the true believers… There are maddening effects downstream of this rhetoric. People have been involuntarily committed or had delusional breakdowns after developing relationships with chatbots. These stories have become a cottage industry in themselves, each one suggesting that a mix of obsequious models, their presentation of false information as true, and the tools’ ability to mimic human conversation pushes vulnerable users to think they’ve developed a human relationship with a machine. Subreddits such as r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, in which people describe their relationships with chatbots, may not be representative of most users, but it’s hard to browse through the testimonials and not feel that, just a few years into the generative-AI era, these tools have a powerful hold on people who may not understand what it is they’re engaging with.”

• Why it matters: “This is the language that the technology’s builders and backers have given us, which means that discussions that situate the technology in the future are being had on their terms. This is a mistake, and it is perhaps the reason so many people feel adrift. Lately, I’ve been preoccupied with a different question: What if generative AI isn’t God in the machine or vaporware? What if it’s just good enough, useful to many without being revolutionary? Right now, the models don’t think—they predict and arrange tokens of language to provide plausible responses to queries. There is little compelling evidence that they will evolve without some kind of quantum research leap. What if they never stop hallucinating and never develop the kind of creative ingenuity that powers actual human intelligence?… Good enough has been keeping me up at night. Because good enough would likely mean that not enough people recognize what’s really being built—and what’s being sacrificed—until it’s too late. What if the real doomer scenario is that we pollute the internet and the planet, reorient our economy and leverage ourselves, outsource big chunks of our minds, realign our geopolitics and culture, and fight endlessly over a technology that never comes close to delivering on its grandest promises? What if we spend so much time waiting and arguing that we fail to marshal our energy toward addressing the problems that exist here and now? That would be a tragedy—the product of a mass delusion. What scares me the most about this scenario is that it’s the only one that doesn’t sound all that insane.”

8. Why even Silicon Valley types are growing wary of the AI hype

Why you should read it: Former Google chief Eric Schmidt and tech analyst Selina Xu warn in the New York Times that Silicon Valley is getting high on its own supply when it comes to artificial intelligence.

• “Building a machine more intelligent than ourselves. It’s a centuries-old theme, inspiring equal amounts of awe and dread… To many in Silicon Valley, this compelling fictional motif is on the verge of becoming reality. Reaching artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I. (or going a step further, superintelligence), is now the singular aim of America’s tech giants, which are investing tens of billions of dollars in a fevered race. And while some experts warn of disastrous consequences from the advent of A.G.I., many also argue that this breakthrough, perhaps just years away, will lead to a productivity explosion, with the nation and company that get there first reaping all the benefits… It is uncertain how soon artificial general intelligence can be achieved. We worry that Silicon Valley has grown so enamored with accomplishing this goal that it’s alienating the general public and, worse, bypassing crucial opportunities to use the technology that already exists. In being solely fixated on this objective, our nation risks falling behind China, which is far less concerned with creating A.I. powerful enough to surpass humans and much more focused on using the technology we have now.”

• “That’s how we get to this strange place where Silicon Valley’s biggest companies proclaim ever shorter timelines for how soon A.G.I. will arrive, while most people outside the Bay Area still barely know what that term means. There’s a widening schism between the technologists who feel the A.G.I. — a mantra for believers who see themselves on the cusp of the technology — and members of the general public who are skeptical about the hype and see A.I. as a nuisance in their daily lives… While some Silicon Valley technologists issue doomsday warnings about the grave threat of A.I., Chinese companies are busy integrating it into everything from the superapp WeChat to hospitals, electric cars and even home appliances. In rural villages, competitions among Chinese farmers have been held to improve A.I. tools for harvest; Alibaba’s Quark app recently became China’s most downloaded A.I. assistant in part because of its medical diagnostic capabilities. Last year China started the A.I.+ initiative, which aims to embed A.I. across sectors to raise productivity… Many of the purported benefits of A.G.I. — in science, education, health care and the like — can already be achieved with the careful refinement and use of powerful existing models. For example, why do we still not have a product that teaches all humans essential, cutting-edge knowledge in their own languages in personalized, gamified ways? Why are there no competitions among American farmers to use A.I. tools to improve their harvests? Where’s the Cambrian explosion of imaginative, unexpected uses of A.I. to improve lives in the West?”

• Why it matters: “It’s paramount that more people outside Silicon Valley feel the beneficial impact of A.I. on their lives. A.G.I. isn’t a finish line; it’s a process that involves humble, gradual, uneven diffusion of generations of less powerful A.I. across society… While America’s flagship tech companies race to the uncertain goal of getting to artificial general intelligence first, China and its leadership have been more focused on deploying existing technology across traditional and emerging sectors, from manufacturing and agriculture to robotics and drones. Being too fixated on artificial general intelligence risks distracting us from A.I.’s everyday impact. We need to pursue both.”

9. How lawyers hamstring American state capacity

Why you should read it: In an extract from his new book in The Atlantic, author Dan Wang contends that the dominance of lawyers in American politics explains America’s inability to build things at reasonable cost and on schedule.

• “How did America lose so much productive capacity to China and end up in such a vulnerable position? Think about it this way: China is an engineering state, which treats construction projects and technological primacy as the solution to all of its problems, whereas the United States is a lawyerly society, obsessed with protecting wealth by making rules rather than producing material goods. Successive American administrations have attempted to counter Beijing through legalism—levying tariffs and designing an ever more exquisite sanctions regime—while the engineering state has created the future by physically building better cars, better-functioning cities, and bigger power plants.”

• “The United States, by contrast, has a government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers. More than half of U.S. presidents practiced law at some point in their career. About half of current U.S. senators have a law degree. Only two American presidents worked as engineers: Herbert Hoover, who built a fortune in mining, and Jimmy Carter, who served as an engineering officer on a Navy submarine… Lawyerly instincts suffused Joe Biden’s economic policy, which brushed aside the invisible hand in favor of performing surgery on the economy—a subsidy scheme for one corporation, an antitrust case against another. Biden hoped to reindustrialize America via landmark bills such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, but his administration’s legalistic commitments repeatedly tripped up the pace of construction. Executive agencies were so obsessed with designing rules for how to do things that little ended up being built. Efforts to connect rural areas to broadband or create a network of electric-vehicle-charging stations barely broke ground before voters reelected Donald Trump… The United States has made the geopolitical mistake of bringing lawyers to a showdown with China on trade and technology. The first Trump administration levied an initial round of tariffs on Chinese goods and added scores of Chinese tech companies to trade blacklists. The Biden administration refined technology-export controls, designing exquisite webs to ensnare Chinese chipmakers, telecommunications firms, and any company hoping to deploy AI.”

Why it matters: “The United States has lost the ability to get stuff done as it focuses on procedures rather than results… The United States wasn’t always like this. It once had the musculature of an engineering state, where lengthy train tracks, gorgeous bridges, beautiful cities, weapons of war with terrible power, and rockets to the moon were built. When the United States had surging population and economic growth through the 19th century, political elites agreed that its wide territories needed canals, rails, and highways. America’s construction boom slowed down after the 1960s… A righteous impulse from that era has convinced many Americans that physical dynamism is undesirable and has robbed society of its ability to improve itself. Rather than expanding new subway systems, building nuclear-energy plants or rare-earths-processing facilities, or designing the path for a new transmission line, many of the country’s smartest engineers have been seduced by Wall Street and Silicon Valley, where they can have more fun and make a lot more money.”

Odds and Ends

• How an excavation at the Tower of London may have uncovered the earliest victims of the Black Death…

• They’re just like us! Ancient Romans apparently collected fossils, too, although not for scientific reasons…

• How a cow’s tooth helps further elucidate the Welsh origins of Stonehenge’s standing stones and the possible role of pack animals in their transport…

• What an archaeologist learned from three years sailing nine different replica Viking ships on twenty-six voyages across the North Sea…

• How Trump’s budget cuts will leave the United States without an Antarctic research icebreaker…

What I’m Listening To and Watching

• Eighty-nine year-old blues guitar legend Buddy Guy’s latest album, Ain’t Done With the Blues.

• “Hard,” the latest not-exactly-unplugged solo effort from Paramore frontwoman Hayley Williams.

• “As Alive As You Need Me To Be,” a new Nine Inch Nails track from the act’s forthcoming Tron: Ares soundtrack.

• “The Great Crusader Siege: Kerak” sees History Hit proprietor Dan Snow travel to the ruins of the great Crusader fortress in modern Jordan to detail its construction and tell the story of its fall to Saladin.

• John Cena returns as the titular anti-hero in writer-director James Gunn’s Peacemaker, joined once more by his pet eagle, delightfully psychotic sidekick Vigilante (Freddie Stroma) and dysfunctional support crew (Danielle Brooks, Jennifer Holland, and Steve Agee).

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We are the hollow men 
We are the stuffed men 
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when 
We whisper together 
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass 

- T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men," I.1-8

What I’m Reading:

1. How Trump’s science cuts threaten American leadership

Why you should read it: In the Washington Post, Haverford College astronomy professor Bruce Patridge details the damage the Trump administration’s budget cuts will do to American leadership in scientific discovery.

• “In just a few months, the Trump administration has undermined U.S. dominance in science, built up over many decades. The federal funding that made America the world’s science leader is threatened with crippling reductions, not just for astronomy and space science but also for fundamental research in energy, chemistry, computer science and preventive medicine.”

• “Consider, for example, the proposed budget for the National Science Foundation, the federal agency that has funded many U.S. contributions to astronomy (including mine), as well as research in physics, chemistry and computer science. Last year, NSF supported more than 330,000 scientists, students and teachers; next year, the budget allows for only 90,000. The funding rug will be pulled out from under nearly a quarter of a million American scientists, engineers and future scientists… Does science cost too much? I’ve been involved in some of the discoveries listed above. The total cost to the average American taxpayer for all of my research, from my first article in 1961 to now, is less than a penny. The entire National Science Foundation budget for all research in astronomy costs each American about $1 a year.”

• Why it matters: “If, instead, the gutting of science and so much else the federal government does for us is just a whim, it is a costly one. Investments in basic research have been one of the most cost-effective expenditures of government money in my lifetime. It is not just the faster computer chips, the better weather forecasts, the cheaper batteries and the more potent vaccines American science has pioneered. Scientists at colleges and universities across the country have trained the scientists and engineers who go on to found companies that now employ millions… Thomas Jefferson pointed to the value of ‘the light of science.’ Whatever the reasons are — real or proffered — for dimming this light, we risk surrendering leadership in an enterprise of proven value to our health, prosperity and sense of wonder at the marvels of the natural world.”

2. How NASA became a symbol of America’s diminished ambition

Why you should read it: The Atlantic editor Franklin Foer argues that NASA embodied the golden age of American ambition in the 1960s, while today those ambitions have been outsourced to commercial ventures like Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

• “When [John F.] Kennedy voiced his ambitions, he stumbled into tautology: ‘We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.’ He charged the American government with executing an engineering task more difficult than any other in human history, for no higher reason than to prove that it could be done. That was the animating spirit of ‘New Frontier’ liberalism… On Kennedy’s own terms, Apollo was a world-historic triumph. The legendary NASA chief James Webb and his deputies helped create a whole new philosophy for running immense organizations: systems management. NASA simultaneously micromanaged its engineers—knowing that an unwanted speck of dust could trigger catastrophe—while giving them wide latitude to innovate. Complex flowcharts helped coordinate the work of dozens of teams across academia, corporations, and government laboratories. Despite using untested technologies, NASA achieved a near-perfect safety record, marred only by the 1967 fire that killed three astronauts in their capsule as they prepared for the first crewed Apollo mission. Even then, NASA’s relentless culture kept pushing toward its goal… The space program then was a projection of prowess and self-confidence. ‘Space was the platform from which the social revolution of the 1960s was launched,’ Lyndon B. Johnson wrote in his memoir. ‘If we could send a man to the moon, we knew we should be able to send a poor boy to school and to provide decent medical care for the aged.’ Apollo was a model for planned social change and technocratic governance—the prototype for tomorrow.”

• “At the dawn of the 21st century, disruption was the magic word, incanted by investors and fetishized in the media. It was only a matter of time before the government began chasing the same trendy idea, betting that a new group of entrepreneurs would arrive on the scene to create companies [like SpaceX] that would shatter all the old models… Despite its strengths, SpaceX couldn’t triumph in this new age, because the idea of commercialization was inherently flawed. There wasn’t a market for rocket launches, asteroid mining, or spacesuit design. For his very expensive product, there was one customer, with a limited budget: the U.S. government. That realization ultimately prodded Musk into another line of business. In 2015, he created Starlink. His rockets would launch satellites into orbit to supply Earth with internet service, a far more lucrative business… President Kennedy was also willing to take absurd risks in pursuit of cosmic ambition, invoking the Cold War imperative to ‘bear any burden.’ But he did so to demonstrate national greatness. Musk is seeking to spend trillions—and risk human lives—to demonstrate his own. Because his reality emerges from fiction, Musk is untethered from any sense of earthly constraints. His sense of his own role in the plot emerges from his desire to leap into myth... Using a concept borrowed from [Isaac] Asimov’s fiction, Musk says that Martian colonists will serve as ‘the light of consciousness.’ They are humanity’s last hope, the counterweight to a dark age that could follow Earth’s destruction. But what’s dark is his vision of abandoning Earth and investing the species’ faith in a self-selected elite, one that mirrors Musk’s own values, and perhaps even his traits. The idea is megalomaniacal, and is the antithesis of the old NASA ideal: for all mankind.”

• Why it matters: “Every time I see Musk, I think of [Carl] Sagan—because Musk is his opposite. He is a creature not of science but of engineering. He owes his fortune to the brute force of his rockets, and the awe they inspire. There’s nothing humble about his manner. Rather than celebrate the fragile, improvised nature of human existence, Musk seeks to optimize or overwrite it—in the name of evolution, in pursuit of profit, in the vainglorious fulfillment of his adolescent fantasies. Where Sagan envisioned cooperation, Musk embodies the triumph of the individual. Where Sagan cautioned against the unintended consequences of technology, Musk charges headlong into the next disruption. That rush will eventually sweep away many of the old strictures confining him… The story of Elon Musk can be told using the genre of fiction that he reveres most. In an act of hubris, NASA gave life to a creature called SpaceX, believing it could help achieve humanity’s loftiest ambitions. But, as in all great parables about technology, the creation eclipsed the creator. What was meant to be a partner became a force of domination. The master lost control. And so begins a new part of the tale: a dystopian chapter written in the language of liberation.”

3. How Trump is “enshittifying” American power

Why you should read it: In Wired, political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman contend that the Trump administration’s foreign policy exhibits Silicon Valley’s tendency to lock in customers and “start squeezing their users for everything they can get, even as the platform fills with ever more low-quality slop.”

• “People don’t usually think of military hardware, the US dollar, and satellite constellations as platforms. But that’s what they are. When American allies buy advanced military technologies such as F-35 fighter jets, they’re getting not just a plane but the associated suite of communications technologies, parts supply, and technological support. When businesses engage in global finance and trade, they regularly route their transactions through a platform called the dollar clearing system, administered by just a handful of US-regulated institutions. And when nations need to establish internet connectivity in hard-to-reach places, chances are they’ll rely on a constellation of satellites—Starlink—run by a single company with deep ties to the American state, Elon Musk’s SpaceX. As with Facebook and Amazon, American hegemony is sustained by network logic, which makes all these platforms difficult and expensive to break away from… Ever since Trump retook office in January, in fact, rapid enshittification has become the organizing principle of US statecraft. This time around, Trumpworld understands that—in controlling the infrastructure layer of global finance, technology, and security—it has vast machineries of coercion at its disposal. As Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, recently put it, ‘The United States is beginning to monetize its hegemony.’”

• “So what is an ally to do? Like the individual consumers who are trapped by Google Search or Facebook as the core product deteriorates, many are still learning just how hard it is to exit the network. And like the countless startups that have attempted to create an alternative to Twitter or Facebook over the years—most now forgotten, a few successful—other allies are now desperately scrambling to figure out how to build a network of their own… Of course, the American tech industry has famously cozied up to Trump this year, with CEOs attending his inauguration, changing content moderation policies, and rewriting editorial missions in ways that are friendlier to administration priorities. And as always, what Trump can’t gain through loyalty, he’ll extract through coercion. Either way, the traditional platform economy is being reshaped as commercial platforms and government institutions merge into a monstrous hybrid of business monopoly and state authority.”

• Why it matters: “But the reality is that, for many allies, simply declaring independence isn’t really a viable option. Japan and South Korea, which depend on the US to protect them against China, can do little more than pray that the bully in the White House leaves them alone… If allies keep building atop US platforms, they render themselves even more vulnerable to American coercion. But if they strike out on their own, they may pay a steeper, more immediate price. In March, the Canadian province of Ontario canceled its deal with Starlink to bring satellite internet to its poorer rural areas. Now, Canada will have to pay much more money to build physical internet connections or else wait for its own satellite constellations to come online… In time, US citizens may find themselves trapped in a diminished, nightmare America—like a post-Musk Twitter at scale—where everything works badly, everything can be turned against you, and everyone else has fled. De-enshittifying the platforms of American power isn’t just an urgent priority for allies, then. It’s an imperative for Americans too.”

4. Why the left needs to get on board with nuclear abundance

Why you should read it: For the left-wing publication Jacobin, Fred Stafford writes about New York state’s recent tussle over nuclear power construction and what the debate says about the priorities of the state’s environmental groups.

• “‘So to power New York’s future, we need three things: reliability, affordability, and sustainability,’ [Gov. Kathy] Hochul said. She had a specific solution in mind, one that blue-state liberals like her have all but consigned to the past: nuclear energy. The state would be returning to the power of the atom, thirty-seven years after its last nuclear unit was built, and four years after her predecessor in Albany closed one of the state’s four plants. It’s a seismic shift in New York State energy policy… Rather than clearing regulatory paths and hoping a private energy company sees fit to invest, Hochul is directing the state power authority to get to work developing and building a nuclear plant upstate. The New York Power Authority (NYPA), a public power utility originally set up in 1931 by Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt to harness the potential of the state’s rivers, will now be tasked with harnessing the potential of the atom. In this pursuit, NYPA will be like the state’s ‘special forces,’ a Hochul spokesperson tells me… But Kathy Hochul’s plans paint a picture of the future. Whereas [Ezra] Klein and [David] Thompson imagine abundant rooftop solar panels on homes, she imagines nuclear-powered industrial manufacturing and generational careers for the working class, led by an ambitious public institution. It’s a shift in liberal politics that should be embraced, not dismissed.”

• “The state’s return to nuclear has overwhelming support among New York’s industrial unions. The state AFL-CIO, the building trades, the laborers’ union, the Utility Workers Union of America (UWUA), and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) all heaped praise in the official press release… Not everyone is excited though. Many of the state’s environmental groups fanatically oppose nuclear power, despite its lack of greenhouse gas emissions. Food & Water Watch, for example, slammed the announcement as a ‘reckless distraction.’ Alliance for a Green Economy dismissed it as a ‘bill-raising boondoggle’ that still leads to ‘dangerous toxic waste.’ Last year, a letter urging the state not to consider new nuclear was signed by 153 groups… It is unclear how these [ambitious renewable energy targets] could be achieved, although much of the environmentalist left seems unconcerned with these practical questions. Its priority is instead creating bureaucratic procedures that they can oversee and proving to their funders that their work must continue.”

• Why it matters: “Whereas the environmental left’s slogan =’Build or Burn’ called on Hochul to ‘build’ public renewables or ‘burn’ in an overheated climate dystopia, the industrial labor unions, and now the Hochul administration, understand it differently: either ‘build’ nuclear or ‘burn’ more fossil fuels… The Left now faces a choice between siding with the environmental groups or rising to the defense of a muscular state, of public development, of realistic decarbonization, and of reindustrialization, alongside organized labor. This is the future liberals want, as the meme goes. If it’s not an appreciable step toward the future the Left wants too, then we have a problem.”

5. How the next China shock will be even worse

Why you should read it: Economists David Autor and Gordon Hanson warn in the New York Times that a new China shock involving advanced manufactured industries like semiconductors and aerospace could prove far more devastating than the original.

• “The first time China upended the U.S. economy, between 1999 and 2007, it helped erase nearly a quarter of all U.S. manufacturing jobs. Known as the China Shock, it was driven by a singular process — China’s late-1970s transition from Maoist central planning to a market economy, which rapidly moved the country’s labor and capital from collective rural farms to capitalist urban factories… China Shock 1.0 was a one-time event. In essence, China figured out how to do what it should have been doing decades earlier. In the United States, that led to unnecessarily painful job losses. But America was never going to be selling tennis sneakers on Temu or assembling AirPods. China’s manufacturing work force is thought to be well in excess of 100 million, compared with America’s 13 million. It’s bordering on delusional to think the United States can — or should even want to — compete with China in semiconductors and tennis sneakers alike.”

• “China Shock 2.0, the one that’s fast approaching, is where China goes from underdog to favorite. Today, it is aggressively contesting the innovative sectors where the United States has long been the unquestioned leader: aviation, A.I., telecommunications, microprocessors, robotics, nuclear and fusion power, quantum computing, biotech and pharma, solar, batteries. Owning these sectors yields dividends: economic spoils from high profits and high-wage jobs; geopolitical heft from shaping the technological frontier; and military prowess from controlling the battlefield. General Motors, Boeing and Intel are American national champions, but they’ve all seen better days and we’re going to miss them if they’re gone. China’s technological vision is already reordering governments and markets in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and increasingly Eastern Europe. Expect this influence to grow as the United States retreats into an isolationist MAGAsphere… The world’s largest and most innovative producers of EVs (BYD), EV batteries (CATL), drones (DJI) and solar wafers (LONGi) are all Chinese start-ups, none more than 30 years old. They attained commanding technological and price leadership not because President Xi Jinping decreed it, but because they emerged triumphant from the economic Darwinism that is Chinese industrial policy. The rest of the world is ill prepared to compete with these apex predators. When U.S. policymakers deride China’s industrial policy, they are imagining something akin to the lumbering takeoff of Airbus or the lights going out on Solyndra. They should instead be gazing up at the nimble swarms of DJI drones buzzing over Ukraine.”

• Why it matters: “There is no economic policy that can make job loss painless — especially when it cuts the heart out of your industry or hometown. But when industries collapse, our best response is getting displaced workers into new jobs quickly and making sure the young, small businesses that are responsible for most net U.S. job growth are poised to do their thing. Tariffs, which narrowly protect old-line manufacturing, are terribly suited for this task… While gazing in the rearview mirror, we’ve lost sight of the road ahead. Some mile markers on our current route include the ebbing of U.S. technological, economic, geopolitical and military leadership. Managing China Shock 2.0 requires playing to our strengths, not licking our wounds. We must nourish industries that have high potential for innovation, funded by joint investments by the private and public sectors. These industries are in play globally, something China figured out a decade ago. We should stop fighting the last trade war and meet China’s challenge in the current one.”

6. Why only Russia benefits from an American withdrawal from Europe

Why you should read it: Foreign policy experts Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Jim Townsend, and Kate Johnston detail in Foreign Affairs how Vladimir Putin will seize on an American withdrawal from Europe as a golden opportunity to expand Russian power and influence on the continent.

• “The relatively positive headlines coming out of the [recent NATO] summit obscure the storm brewing across the Atlantic. The Trump administration is undertaking a sweeping force posture review slated for release in late summer or early fall that could fundamentally reshape the U.S. military’s global footprint. If that process results in a significant and swift reduction of U.S. forces in Europe, an outcome that administration officials have publicly suggested is possible, the alliance will become more vulnerable to further Russian aggression… Even if Moscow does not march across Europe, Russia will pose a threat to NATO. The Russian military, although not without its flaws, is no longer the disorganized force it was just over three years ago, when it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Since February 2022, Putin has transformed Russia’s economy and military to support prolonged confrontation. Russian defense spending in 2025 amounts to 7.7 percent of GDP, a 12 percent increase from 2024. Moscow’s defense industrial base is running at full capacity. As Rutte said at Chatham House in June, ‘The facts are clearly there that Russia is able, within five years, to mount a credible attack against NATO territory.’ Multiple European intelligence agencies have arrived at similar conclusions. Washington can ill afford to rapidly reduce its presence in Europe just as Russia is gearing up for further aggression.”

• “Should U.S. military capabilities be removed from NATO defense plans, Europe would be unable to quickly fill the resulting gaps, creating vulnerabilities that Putin would be tempted to exploit. U.S. intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms, for example, are essential for NATO’s awareness of Russian activity. Their withdrawal would leave the alliance especially vulnerable to Russian hybrid attacks, such as undersea cable sabotage, jamming, or cyberattacks. Fewer such resources would also limit early warnings about incoming attacks and hinder NATO’s ability to select, prioritize, and engage Russian targets in the event of conflict. The personnel that process, analyze, and fuse this intelligence—many of them American—are too specialized to replace quickly and often in short supply… The Kremlin would likely see a rapid U.S. drawdown in Europe as a golden opportunity. Moscow has long sought to undermine NATO, seeing its demise as a critical step toward reasserting Russia’s position as a global power. Most immediately, the Kremlin would seize on any U.S. retreat to amplify Europeans’ anxiety that Washington is abandoning them. With Europe feeling vulnerable, Moscow would ratchet up its coercive tactics to intimidate European publics and pressure their governments to be more accommodating to Moscow… Russia has long viewed Europeans as supplicants of Washington, unable to function effectively without U.S. direction. If the United States goes forward with a rapid reduction in forces, Moscow might judge that European unity would collapse, fueling Putin’s propensity to overestimate Russia’s ability to achieve its goals.”

• Why it matters: “Pulling back as Russia is ramping up its military capacity and before Europe is ready to defend itself would embolden the Kremlin and raise the risk of another war—this time on Trump’s watch. The best way to prevent a future war in Europe is to make sure Moscow never dares to start one. And that will require Washington and its European partners to design a careful and coordinated handoff. The United States must tell its partners exactly where any new gaps will be—long before they appear.”

7. Why small states should be more like Denmark when it comes to defense

Why you should read it: On Phillips O’Brien’s Substack, European defense analyst Minna Ålander looks at how Denmark punches well above its weight as a small power and NATO ally.

• “Denmark is a fascinating example of what Trump has triggered in Europe. A staunchly transatlantic small European state, Denmark has been one of America’s most reliable allies on the continent. The Danish NATO policy used to be, in a caricaturized nutshell: send a small but fiery Viking squad to fight along the Americans in all US wars, and make sure that Americans remember their Danish brothers in arms, so that you can then skip investing more in your own military capability. Indeed, Denmark had the highest killed in action ration in Afghanistan after the US – something that has made the Danes feel extra bitter about Trump’s audacious suggestions to take Greenland by military means if necessary. In a recent Europe-wide poll by ECFR, Danes were unsurprisingly the most critical toward the Trump administration… A second pillar of the Danish NATO policy used to be, again in a caricaturized nutshell (I expect a lot of angry messages from Danes after publishing this): look at what Germany promises to do but does not implement and then also don’t do the same thing. However, what comes to Ukraine, Denmark has chosen a radically different approach than Germany – despite also having a Social Democrat as leader, like Germany did in the previous government. But [Danish Prime Minister] Mette Frederiksen and [former German Chancellor] Olaf Scholz are from quite different planets.”

• “Denmark has been a strong supporter of Ukraine from the very beginning of the Russian full-scale invasion, donating its entire artillery (that consisted of, erm, 19 Caesar howitzers – but if you don’t go into details it sounds really impressive) to Ukraine in 2022. Since then, Danish support to Ukraine has reached a volume of $10.5 billion, not only in relative but also in absolute terms more than many larger countries’ total support. Denmark has also been a leading innovator in terms of finding new ways to support Ukraine in more sustainable ways than simply donating equipment (that Denmark run out of pretty fast): it coined the ‘Danish model’ of financing directly Ukraine’s own defence industry, which has been adopted on the EU level now, and was the first European country to sign an agreement with Ukraine to host parts of Ukrainian companies’ production lines… Denmark’s commitment to Ukraine is exceptional and if more European countries matched Denmark’s contribution, Ukraine would be in a very different place. But Denmark is nevertheless also a good case in point what comes to past mistakes. It baffles me deeply how come Denmark started seriously investing into its own defence capability only this year, and not in 2022 the very latest. Denmark initially tried to stick to its usual approach: throwing everything it has and a lot of money at Ukraine, hoping that the war will stay far away from Denmark – and it seems that Danes did feel at a sufficiently safe distance. Like so many Western European countries, only Donald Trump’s return to the White House jolted Denmark into action. Being so late to the party means that Denmark is in a great hurry to improve its military capability.”

• Why it matters: “Denmark is by no means alone in Europe with its insufficiently small armed forces as a result of the peace dividend decades focused on expeditionary warfare. But Denmark is certainly leading by example in how to fix the situation… The list [of new military hardware purchases] is long and impressive but it also gives an idea of all the capabilities Denmark is lacking as a result of 30 years of downscaling and a slow awakening to the new reality post-2014. Finland, for example, is not under such pressure to build up capacity because it never downgraded to the same extent. In Europe, late is nevertheless better than never, so my advice to all European countries is: if you can’t be like Finland, then be like Denmark.”

8. How artificial intelligence rots students’ brains

Why you should read it: Yale creative writing professor Meghan O’Rourke makes the case in the New York Times that large language model artificial intelligence programs like ChatGPT dehumanize students and leave them unable to fully express themselves.

• “If you have not been using A.I., you might believe that we’re still in the era of pure A.I. ‘slop’ — simplistic phrasing, obvious hallucinations. ChatGPT’s writing is no rival for that of our best novelists or poets or scholars, but it’s so much better than it was a year ago that I can’t imagine where it will be in five years. Right now, it performs like a highly competent copywriter, infusing all of its outputs with a kind of corny, consumerist optimism that is hard to eradicate. It’s bound by a handful of telltale syntactic tics. (And no, using too many em-dashes is not one of them!)… At first glance, [ChatGPT’s writing] is not horrible writing — it’s concise, purposeful, rhythmic and free of the overwriting, vagueness or grammatical glitches common in human drafts. But it feels artificial. That pileup of infinitives — to brainstorm, to summarize, to translate, to scaffold — reminds me of processed food: It goes down easy, but leaves a slick taste in the mouth… One giveaway is the clipped triad — ‘Faster. More conversational. Less detectable.’ — which is a hallmark of ChatGPT’s default voice. Another is its reliance on place-holder phrases, like ‘There’s a sense of …’ — it doesn’t know what human perception is, so it gestures vaguely toward it. At other times, the language sounds good but doesn’t make sense. What it produces is mimetic of thought, but not quite thought itself.”

• “Students often turn to A.I. only for research, outlining and proofreading. The problem is that the moment you use it, the boundary between tool and collaborator, even author, begins to blur. First, students might ask it to summarize a PDF they didn’t read. Then — tentatively — to help them outline, say, an essay on Nietzsche. The bot does this, and asks: ‘If you’d like, I can help you fill this in with specific passages, transitions, or even draft the opening paragraphs?’… The uncanny thing about these models isn’t just their speed but the way they imitate human interiority without embodying any of its values. That may be, from the humanist’s perspective, the most pernicious thing about A.I.: the way it simulates mastery and brings satisfaction to its user, who feels, at least fleetingly, as if she did the thing that the technology performed… My unease about ChatGPT’s impact on writing turns out to be not just a Luddite worry of poet-professors. Early research suggests reasons for concern. A recent M.I.T. Media Lab study monitored 54 participants writing essays, with and without A.I., in order to assess what it called ‘the cognitive cost of using an L.L.M. in the educational context of writing an essay.’ The authors used EEG testing to measure brain activity and understand ‘neural activations’ that took place while using L.L.M.s. The participants relying on ChatGPT to write demonstrated weaker brain connectivity, poorer memory recall of the essay they had just written, and less ownership over their writing, than the people who did not use L.L.M.s… Some critics of the study have questioned whether EEG can meaningfully measure engagement, but the conclusions echoed my own experience. When ChatGPT drafted or edited an email for me, I felt less connected to the outcome. Once, having asked A.I. to draft a complicated note based on bullet points I gave it, I sent an email that I realized, retrospectively, did not articulate what I myself felt. It was as if a ghost with silky syntax had colonized my brain, controlling my fingers as they typed. That was almost a relief when the task was a fraught work email — but it would be counterproductive, and depressing, for any creative project of my own… I’ve spent decades writing and editing; I know the feeling — of reward and hard-won clarity — that writing produces for me. But if you never build those muscles, will you grasp what’s missing when an L.L.M. delivers a chirpy but shallow reply? What happens to students who’ve never experienced the reward of pressing toward an elusive thought that yields itself in clear syntax?”

• Why it matters: “For now, many of us still approach A.I. as outsiders — nonnative users, shaped by analog habits, capable of seeing the difference between now and then. But the generation growing up with A.I. will learn to think and write in its shadow. For them, the chatbot won’t be a tool to discover — as Netscape was for me — but part of the operating system itself. And that shift, from novelty to norm, is the profound transformation we’re only beginning to grapple with… One of the real challenges here is the way that A.I. undermines the human value of attention, and the individuality that flows from that… When I write, the process is full of risk, error and painstaking self-correction. It arrives somewhere surprising only when I’ve stayed in uncertainty long enough to find out what I had initially failed to understand. This attention to the world is worth trying to preserve: The act of care that makes meaning — or insight — possible. To do so will require thought and work. We can’t just trust that everything will be fine. L.L.M.s are undoubtedly useful tools. They are getting better at mirroring us, every day, every week. The pressure on unique human expression will only continue to mount.”

9. How tech companies have created a loneliness doom loop

Why you should read it: In the New York Times, author Samantha Rose Hill submits that social media platforms and artificial intelligence programs offered by tech companies have conspired to leave us all lonelier than ever.

• “Tech companies have found a way to market digital goods to lonely people, promising relief through connection, but this kind of connection isn’t the solution; it’s the problem. Calling loneliness an epidemic transforms a feeling into a pathology to be cured, creating a loneliness economy. Reframing a universal human experience like loneliness as a medical diagnosis creates a market opportunity to manufacture, sell and buy treatment. The prescription given for loneliness is connection, and Big Tech has found a way to seize the vulnerability of lonely people eager to escape their predicament… Lonely people are particularly vulnerable to commercial exploitation because they will often go to extreme lengths to avoid being alone with themselves. When loneliness was declared ‘a national epidemic’ in 1983 in The Times, researchers were already worried that loneliness would become an industry. ‘Because lonely individuals feel pressed to search for others, they are likely to explore any possible remedy, whatever its genuine promise,’ Robert Weiss, then a professor at Harvard, told attendees at a 1982 conference on loneliness.”

• “The loneliness industry assumes that loneliness derives from a lack of sufficient connection to others. Early researchers often argued that loneliness was a reflection of an insecure attachment to the mother figure. Our first relationships become blueprints for our adult relationships, they believed. The terror of loneliness was likened to an infant crying out from the crib. With new A.I. companions, tech companies are essentially selling a risk-free relationship that recreates an idyll of childhood — except instead of an ever-present mother figure, customers receive a bot they can shape to their demands… Like Ovid’s Narcissus gazing into the water, users are being transfixed by their own reflections. A.I. companions don’t make loneliness go away; they just create a distraction, allowing the users to fixate on a reflected image of themselves. Eventually, that creates isolation from others. It’s a godlike seduction: to remake relationships in one’s own image. No risk, no mess, no friction. But also, no reality.”

Why it matters: “The danger is not that A.I. will replace human connection. The danger is that it will make us forget what actual connection requires while eroding our ability to think for ourselves by training us to depend on A.I. for the simplest of tasks and interactions. Treating loneliness as a disease is dangerous, because the goods being sold as cures keep us stuck in a loneliness loop… The promise of A.I. companionship will almost certainly bring corporations huge profits. It is easy to click and pay for something like intimacy in a moment of loneliness, for the comfort of hearing what you want. But when you turn the device off, you are still alone. You can’t cure being human, despite what Silicon Valley might want you to believe.”

Odds and Ends

Could T. rex actually swim? Kinda sorta…

How the discovery of an ancient Roman basilica derailed plans to build a London office building…

Why the Grand Canyon remains an overlooked source of fossils dating to the Cambrian Explosion of life on Earth…

How subtle differences between matter and anti-matter may explain why there’s a universe, according to researchers at CERN…

Why Trump’s budget cuts and transactional foreign policy may undermine the peaceful exploration of Antarctica…

What I’m Listening To and Watching

• Fantastic Four: First Steps sees Marvel’s first family battle the cosmic horror of the Silver Surfer and Galactus, devourer of worlds, in a retro-futuristic alternate reality separate from the main Marvel Cinematic Universe.

• Krypto the super-dog steals the show in Superman, a fun romp from director James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy) with David Corenswet as the Man of Steel.

• Jurassic World Rebirth, in which Scarlett Johansson leads a team stranded on yet another island filled with resurrected dinosaurs—including one too cute sleeping T. rex.

• Untamed, a noir-ish thriller set in Yosemite National Park featuring Eric Bana as a grizzled special agent and Lily Santiago as a park ranger assigned to assist the investigation into a murder in the park.

• The third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, following the starship Enterprise under the command of Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) in the years before Captain Kirk’s legendary five-year mission.

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"Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope, in the world? In our present differences, is either party without faith of being in the right? If the Almighty Ruler of nations, with his eternal truth and justice, be on your side of the North, or on yours of the South, that truth, and that justice, will surely prevail, by the judgment of this great tribunal of the American people... While the people retain their virtue and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government in the short space of four years."

- Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861

What I’m Reading:

1. How NATO’s Nordic and Baltic members have taken leadership over the alliance

Why you should read it: Retired Army general Mark Hertling details in The Bulwark the way eight NATO Nordic and Baltic members have taken a leadership role in the alliance since the accession of Finland and Sweden in 2023 and 2024.

• “When Sweden and Finland joined NATO in 2023 and 2024, respectively, their accession wasn’t just a procedural addition of new members. It changed the strategic orientation of the whole alliance. Their inclusion accelerated the formation of the Nordic-Baltic Eight (NB8)—Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, and Sweden—as NATO’s most cohesive and operationally capable regional bloc, a development that became unmistakable at the NATO summit concluded this week in the Hague… The Nordic-Baltic Eight have long shared geography, values, and an acute understanding of Russian behavior. With Sweden and Finland now under NATO’s formal umbrella, this regional grouping has emerged not as a quiet coalition, but as a leadership caucus—shaping policy, driving modernization, and reinforcing transatlantic resolve in ways far that go beyond what their population sizes or economies alone would indicate.”

• “None of this is occurring in a vacuum. These countries are responding to a very real and proximate threat. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was not a regional anomaly—it was a wake-up call. For the Nordic-Baltic Eight, it clarified something that should have been obvious to the rest of Europe: Hard power, political will, and alliance credibility still matter… But perhaps the most important shift isn’t tactical. It’s cultural. These nations are not just defenders of territory. They are advocates for the alliance’s values—resilience, transparency, and democratic civil-military relations. Their defense ministries are emphasizing public education, infrastructure hardening, and hybrid threat response. Their officers serve in NATO command structures and participate in complex joint exercises like BALTOPS and Arctic Challenge.”

• Why it matters: “Perhaps most importantly, what the NB8 bring to the alliance isn’t just military professionalism but populations that understand the threat posed by Putin’s Russia and are willing to do what it takes to deter or defeat it. In Finland, trust in the military is near 90 percent—which is remarkably high considering almost everyone serves. In Sweden, nearly the entire political spectrum supports the decision to abandon centuries of neutrality and join NATO. All eight nations are on track to meet or exceed the 2 percent GDP defense spending target, but more importantly, they are using those funds smartly—on personnel, logistics, modernization, and resilience. They’re not just checking boxes. They’re preparing for the future… The Nordic-Baltic Eight are doing just that. They’ve demonstrated that strong values, serious planning, and regional trust-building are not only compatible with NATO’s mission—they are essential to it. Sweden and Finland didn’t just join NATO. Along with their neighbors, they are helping it evolve—toward greater agility, credibility, and purpose.”

2. Why Europe doesn’t have a “China card” to play

Why you should read it: In Foreign Affairs, Council on Foreign Relations experts Heidi Creibo-Rediker and Liana Fix outline the ways a European attempt at detente with Beijing would hurt European interests.

• “The first hundred days of Donald Trump’s second presidency have turned out worse for Europeans than expected. In addition to Vice President JD Vance’s ideological crusade against European liberals, there are fears that the United States will abandon Ukraine and frustration and concern over Trump’s initiation of unprecedented tariffs on European countries. In the wake of these disruptions, it is not surprising that the gaze of some European politicians has wistfully turned toward China, which is perceived by some as a potential hedge against an unpredictable United States… But the harsh reality is that the game has not really changed: the EU still doesn’t have a China card to play. In fact, Trump’s disruptions are only magnifying China’s economic and security threats to Europe. To offset U.S. tariffs this year, China diverted its exports to alternative markets including Europe. This resulted in a record Chinese trade surplus with Europe in the first quarter of 2025. These low-cost Chinese exports are massively subsidized and undercut European producers who are already facing margin pressures and the imposition of U.S. tariffs. Many of the goods China redirected from the United States to the EU are now competing directly with Europe’s core manufacturing industries—the automotive sector, for instance, as well as electronics, industrial machinery and components, home appliances, and clean energy technologies. This flood of goods could damage the broader competitiveness of Europe’s manufacturing ecosystem, creating something like the ‘China shock’ that rocked the United States in the first decade of this century.”

• “Insulating itself from trade shocks, however, is only step one: Europe must also stop underestimating China’s support for Russia’s war against Ukraine, which in turn threatens European security. During the Biden administration, the United States condemned China’s support of the Russian industrial base, but Europe has been more cautious and has rarely threatened Beijing or followed through with serious consequences. Beijing has stopped short of delivering weapons directly to Russia, which President Joe Biden warned is a redline. But China’s supply of dual-use goods, such as semiconductor chips and weapons parts, has taken on such proportions that it has become the equivalent of providing lethal aid: Carnegie estimates that, in 2023, China was responsible for roughly 90 percent of the goods that Russia needs to sustain its war effort. An internal EU report this year estimates that China is responsible for approximately 80 percent of all circumventions of sanctions against Russia… Even if the United States is not on board with such sanctions, Europe has a lot of leverage of its own. The flip side of Europe’s trade dependence on China is China’s own reliance on Europe’s market to absorb its excess capacity. Since Trump’s tariff announcements against China and the diversion of U.S.-bound Chinese goods to Europe, Europe is now an even more important market for China’s exports; Europeans should use that leverage to ramp up the pressure on China. Instead of merely sanctioning Chinese companies that trade in goods that are of use to Russia’s military, the European Union should apply sanctions on Chinese banks that help Russia circumvent the EU’s sanctions regime. And if China truly wants to pursue a revival of an investment agreement with Europe, Brussels should condition any talks on China restricting the flow of dual-use goods to Russia’s military.”

• Why it matters: “Increased pressure on China will not, of course, result in Beijing abandoning Moscow. Nor will more free-trade agreements completely make up for the economic losses in a trade war with the United States and diminishing returns from trade with China. But regardless of how hostile the Trump administration (and Trump himself) is to the EU and how sweet the gestures are from Beijing, Europe must remember that China is not its friend. Europe cannot hedge against Trump’s disruptions by selling out its own economy and security.”

3. Why bombs can’t change Iran’s regime

Why you should read it: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace senior fellow Karim Sadjadpour writes in the New York Times that Israeli and American airstrikes won’t bring about the regime change Iran desperately needs to reclaim its place in the world.

• “Long before Israel’s invasion and Mr. Trump’s strikes, the Islamic republic resembled a zombie regime, ideologically dead but still repressive, much like the late-stage Soviet Union. Despite the country’s vast human capital and resources, Tehran’s theocrats preside over an economically isolated, socially repressive police state — elbow-deep in corruption and repression, yet ruling from the moral pedestal of an Islamist theocracy. The regime’s enduring slogans, ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel’ — never ‘long live Iran’ — have long made clear that its priority has always been opposing others, not uplifting its own people… Today, the regime most likely has the support of less than 20 percent of society, but up until now it has maintained a highly armed, organized repressive apparatus willing to kill en masse. By contrast, the regime’s far more numerous opponents are unarmed, unorganized and unwilling to die en masse. The state venerates martyrdom; the larger society aspires to separate mosque and state. This disparity has enabled the regime to brutally quash nationwide uprisings, including the Woman, Life, Freedom protests of 2022 and 2023.”

• “History shows that military entanglements can either entrench or unravel authoritarian regimes… If there’s a pattern, it’s this: Wars tend to strengthen revolutionary regimes in their early years, but military humiliations expose the brittleness of aging ones. Populations are more likely to rally behind existential wars than elective ones. Since its inception, the Islamic republic has waged a war of choice against Israel — not one of necessity… Revolutionary movements become viable when they attract a critical mass of people, but a critical mass of people will not join them until they believe it is viable. While a critical mass of Iranians today may believe the Islamic republic does not have a future, no opposition figure or movement has succeeded in channeling Iranians’ mass discontent toward a political alternative… Despite most Iranians’ desires to live under a tolerant, representative government that works for their prosperity, authoritarian transitions tend to be brutality contests, not popularity contests, often won by those with the greatest coercive powers. In Iran, it is military men, aspiring Iranian Putins and Sisis and not civilian reformers, who are the best positioned to seize control. According to one study, since World War II fewer than a quarter of authoritarian collapses have led to democracy — and those brought about by foreign intervention or violence have been even less likely to do so”

• Why it matters: “…But the most consequential battle for Iran’s future will be fought not between Iran and the outside world, but among Iranians themselves. That struggle is only beginning. Iran’s dynamic, modern population shows there is a light at the end of the tunnel. While outside forces may attempt to blast open the entrance, only Iranian leadership, unity and sacrifice can pave the way through it.”

4. Why ideology best explains Trump’s foreign policy

Why you should read it: Classics scholar Bret Devereaux argues in Foreign Policy that Trump’s foreign policy is the result of his administration’s ideological commitments more than anything else.

• “What may seem like a nonsensical constellation of foreign-policy positions presents a coherent list of desired friends and hated enemies when viewed through the lens of the ideological worldview that animates key decision-makers in the executive branch… So how does ideology look as a model for understanding the Trump administration? This requires first sketching the administration’s ideological worldview, with the necessary caveat that individual members likely differ in their attachment to any given component, and then testing that worldview against the foreign-policy agenda that we’ve seen thus far… Let’s look at its policy in Europe. While realists have attempted to frame U.S. efforts to back out of supporting Ukraine through a realist-restrainer lens, such an approach struggles to explain the whole of the administration’s strategy in the continent, like the unveiled contempt for allies or imposing tariffs on friendly European countries but not hostile states like Russia or Belarus.”

• “U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs are another area of sharp deviation from traditional Republican orthodoxy, which… realist assessments struggle to explain. However, the pursuit of economic autarky has been a core ideological goal for a range of personalist, authoritarian regimes on both the right and left. The pursuit of autarky as a means of excluding the influence of international economic systems imagined to be Jewish-controlled was a core ideological mission of the Third Reich, despite being bad economics, motivating much of Hitler’s aggression—including his disastrous invasion of the Soviet Union… Such efforts may serve a domestic purpose, and even though more autarkic economies are poorer and less productive, they are more under the control of their authoritarian leaders. At the same time, such policies arose out of ideological imperatives to include corrupting foreign influences, whether out of anti-capitalist or antisemitic ideology. Trump’s pursuit of tariffs seems equally ideological: ‘He just likes tariffs,’ he thinks ‘trade is bad,’ and he has surrounded himself with advisors who think the same.”

• Why it matters: “In short, many of the Trump administration’s otherwise inexplicable foreign-policy decisions are, in fact, perfectly explicable in the context of a foreign policy driven by a MAGA ideology that is personalist, authoritarian, anti-globalist, and white nationalist. Recognizing this is important, because an ideologically driven government may act in ways that, while not consistent with realist analysis, stated domestic policy objectives, or party traditions, are still predictable… Attempting to understand the Trump administration’s decisions purely through the lens of realpolitik, domestic policies, Republican party traditions, or power-politics infighting is bound to render quite a few decisions as confusing. But an analysis that key administration actors are, quite bluntly, racists and fascists will find that the Trump 2.0 foreign policy makes a distressing amount of sense.”

5. Why FPV drones kinda suck

Why you should read it: For War on the Rocks, former Armed Forces of Ukraine foreign volunteer Jakub Jajcay pushes back against claims that first-person video-controlled drones represent the future of warfare.

• “In 2024 and 2025, I served for six months as an international volunteer on a first-person view attack drone team in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. My team was deployed in the Donbas region, in one of the hottest sectors of the front. When I joined the team, I was excited to work with a cutting-edge tool. By the end of my deployment, I was a bit disillusioned. Let me tell you why… During my time in Ukraine, I collected statistics on the success of our drone operations. I found that 43 percent of our sorties resulted in a hit on the intended target in the sense that the drone was able to successfully fly all the way to the target, identify it correctly, hit it, and the drone’s explosive charge detonated as it was supposed to. This number does not include instances when our higher command requested a sortie but we had to decline because we knew that we could not strike the target for reasons such as weather, technical problems, or electronic interference. If this type of pre-aborted mission is included in the total, the success rate drops to between 20 and 30 percent. On the face of it, this success rate is bad, but that is not the whole story.”

• “I began to notice that the vast majority of our sorties were against targets that had already been struck successfully by a different weapons system, most commonly by a mortar or by a munition dropped by a reusable drone (in other words, not a first-person view drone). Put differently, the goal of the majority of our missions was to deliver the second tap in a double-tap strike against a target that had already been successfully prosecuted by a different weapons system… There are two reasons why these drones rarely successfully do what they were designed to do. The first has to do with how commanders choose to employ first-person view drones. Presumably, our commanders decided that they had first-person view drones as a capability, so they might as well use them, even if there were other weapons systems that could also do the job. There is a certain logic to this, and the commanders were not paying for the expended drones out of their own pockets. They were more focused on the immediate mission. While first-person view drones are cheap, they are usually not the cheapest option available to commanders… The second reason why these drones rarely do what they were designed to do is technical. They are finicky, unreliable, hard to use, and susceptible to electronic interference. Few first-person view drones have night-vision capability. Those that do are in short supply and cost twice as much as the base model. In Ukraine, in the winter, it’s dark for 14 hours a day. Wind, rain, snow, and fog all mean a drone cannot fly… But the greatest obstacle to the successful use of these drones by far is the unreliability of the radio link between the operator and the drone. One of the reasons why hitting a target at ground level with precision is difficult is that when first-person view drones get close to the ground, due to obstacles, they start to lose their radio connection to the operator, often located up to 10 kilometers away. In some cases, drones cannot attack a target if it is simply on the wrong side of a tall building or hill because the building or hill blocks the line of sight between the drone and the operator. Sometimes, the operator can work around the loss of signal close to the ground by climbing, pointing the drone at the target, and hoping inertia will take it to its target once they have lost control. When striking a small target like a doorway, a window, or the entrance to a basement, this degrades precision significantly.”

• Why it matters: “All that said, if a member of a NATO military were hypothetically to ask me whether NATO countries should acquire first-person view drone capabilities, based on my experience and given the current state of the technology, I would probably say no, whether they are radio-controlled or fiber-optic. The vast majority of first-person view drone missions can be completed more cheaply, effectively, or reliably by other assets. Furthermore, other authors have noted that drones still do not come close to matching the effects that can be achieved by massed artillery fires. Additionally, experts on artillery systems consistently note the greater reliability and range of artillery…. For sophisticated NATO militaries, instead of investing heavily in the development of first-person view drone capabilities, I would, first of all, recommend ensuring that troops in the field have well-trained organic mortar support with an ample supply of ammunition. Mortars, like artillery, can’t be stopped by bad weather, jamming, or crowded frequencies. Nor can they be impeded by the dark. A well-trained mortar crew can reliably put rounds on a target in less than five minutes… In practice, I don’t remember a single case when we struck a target that was beyond the range of mortars, and we certainly never struck a target that was beyond the range of artillery.”

6. Why nonviolence remains the best way to take on Trump

Why you should read it: In the New York Times, political scientist Omar Wasow and sociologist Robb Willer make the case that nonviolent resistance represents the best form of opposition to Trump.

• “History and research make clear that violence seen as unnecessary, whether from the state or protesters, typically reduces popular support for the political players who use it. The public’s rejection of violence they view as unjustified is consistent — so much so that it often elicits complex strategic games, with movements and the state maneuvering to portray the other as unnecessarily violent. Still, important exceptions exist, and understanding when and why nonviolence wins hearts and minds requires understanding the vast research on the topic… Rather than quell dissent, repression can mobilize opposition and erode the government’s legitimacy. Other scholarship suggests that when state officials use excessive force against peaceful protesters — such as when the police commissioner Bull Connor in 1963 blasted civil rights activists with fire hoses in Birmingham, Ala. — the images generated can be particularly effective for movements… These findings suggest that the more force the state uses on peaceful demonstrators, the more the state may inadvertently fuel precisely the kind of mass opposition it seeks to suppress.”

• “A range of research, including our own, shows that violent tactics used by protesters often backfire, too. Looking at thousands of events in the 1960s, one of us (Dr. Wasow) found that counties exposed to Black-led nonviolent protests shifted toward the Democratic Party. Analyses of newspaper coverage and public opinion showed that nonviolence was especially effective when the police and vigilantes responded violently. But when protesters turned violent, white voters were more likely to embrace ‘law and order’ Republicans, helping to swing the 1968 presidential election toward Richard Nixon. In surveys, among Democratic voters who switched from supporting Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to Richard Nixon in 1968, one of the best predictors of party defection was negative attitudes about civil unrest… Nonviolent movements were about twice as likely to succeed as violent ones, largely because a commitment to nonviolent action allowed them to recruit broader support and provoke defections from the opposition.”

• Why it matters: “In societies that have a reasonably free press, a persuadable bloc of citizens and free and fair elections, the historical, psychological and political evidence shows that movements are most effective when they remain nonviolent and build broad coalitions. And governments are most vulnerable when their use of force is perceived to be excessive or cruel.”

7. Why Trump’s politicization of the intelligence community should worry us all

Why you should read it: Retired CIA official Brian O’Neill describes for Just Security how the Trump administration is politicizing the intelligence community and its process—and why that’s dangerous for the country.

• “The reshaping of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) is happening with intent—even if it is not always with strategy—and increasingly out in the open. Since President Donald Trump’s return to office, senior intelligence personnel have been removed, clearances revoked, offices reorganized and analytic teams reassigned, and the infrastructure around finished intelligence has been pulled more tightly under the control of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)… At the center of these changes are Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Gabbard has adopted a more public-facing posture, pairing administrative overhaul with rhetorical framing. Ratcliffe’s approach has been less public, but no less consequential. Together, their early moves echo broader trends across the Cabinet: portraying national security agencies not only as instruments of statecraft, but also as bureaucracies in need of discipline. The message is one of alignment—with the president’s instincts, and with his narrative… What we have seen so far reflects a blend of two dynamics: actions that are performative—intended to signal loyalty—and others that are reflective, aimed at reinforcing the president’s claims and perceptions. Whether these moves are meant as institutional theater or tactical confirmation, the impact is the same: they begin to erode the objective tradecraft critical to offering warning to policymakers.”

• “The actions taken in the first months of the Trump administration raise a critical question: are we witnessing a series of reactive measures designed to enforce loyalty and message control or a coherent doctrinal shift in the practice of intelligence? That distinction matters not only for what it reveals about this administration’s view of intelligence, but for what it asks the IC to become. If the goal is not simply to dispute judgments but to recast the community’s function—to shift its role from informing decisions to reinforcing them—then what’s underway is more than restructuring. It’s an effort to redefine the intelligence mission itself… For Gabbard and Ratcliffe, this may not even register as doctrinal change. It is simply the fulfillment of their mandate: to make the IC comport with the president’s will. Whether they call it a doctrine or not is beside the point. The result is the same—an IC reshaped to please, not to warn. In doing so, they erode the very capabilities the system was built to protect.”

• Why it matters: “When senior analysts are sidelined, when assessments are filtered to support policy, when the institutions that coordinate long-range warning are pulled under political control—failures cease to be accidental. They become manufactured. In that system, the next intelligence failure will not be a surprise. It will be a choice… And that failure, when it comes, will not be shared. It will belong to the president who demanded to be told only what he wanted to hear.”

8. Why boys fall behind in school before they even start

Why you should read it: Claire Cain Miller shows in the New York Times how pressure for early performance hampers the academic performance of boys, who mature later than girls.

• “Girls have been outperforming boys in American schools for decades, from elementary school through college. But the gender gap in education starts even earlier: Boys enter kindergarten less prepared than girls, and this early deficit can compound and help explain some of the recent struggles of boys and young men… Kindergarten has become significantly more academic because of the effects of a national law passed in 2001, with children expected to spend more time sitting still and learning math and reading — and many boys do not enter with the skills to meet those expectations.”

• “Adding to that, childhood has changed in recent years in ways that could have set back boys further. The isolation of the pandemic delayed young children’s development, parents are increasingly stressed, and children are spending more time on screens. These factors affect all children, but they may have been particularly hard on boys, who scientists have shown are more vulnerable to hardship… Boys tend to mature later, said Lise Eliot, a professor of neuroscience at Rosalind Franklin University, especially when it comes to executive function — skills like paying attention, regulating emotions and inhibiting inappropriate behaviors… Executive function is crucial for learning and academic success, a variety of research has shown, and the gender gap in when children develop these skills explains much of the achievement gap in early elementary school…

• Why it matters: “A powerful way to help boys — and girls too — is to bring back more play into the early years of school, because it’s how young children learn best, researchers and teachers said. Movement, music, time outside, games with peers and activities like puzzles all help children build skills like self-regulation and executive function. Play-based preschool has been shown to shrink gender gaps.”

9. How the Pentagon fueled America’s UFO obsessions

Why you should read it: Wall Street Journal reporters Joel Schectman and Aruna Viswanatha reveal that a small Department of Defense office recently established to look into claims about UFOs found that, in reality, the Pentagon itself fostered these theories to throw people off the scent of classified programs.

• “A tiny Pentagon office had spent months investigating conspiracy theories about secret Washington UFO programs when it uncovered a shocking truth: At least one of those theories had been fueled by the Pentagon itself… But the [Air Force] colonel was on a mission—of disinformation. The photos were doctored, the now-retired officer confessed to the Pentagon investigators in 2023. The whole exercise was a ruse to protect what was really going on at Area 51: The Air Force was using the site to develop top-secret stealth fighters, viewed as a critical edge against the Soviet Union. Military leaders were worried that the programs might get exposed if locals somehow glimpsed a test flight of, say, the F-117 stealth fighter, an aircraft that truly did look out of this world. Better that they believe it came from Andromeda.”

• “This episode, reported now for the first time, was just one of a series of discoveries the Pentagon team made as it investigated decades of claims that Washington was hiding what it knew about extraterrestrial life. That effort culminated in a report… In fact, a Wall Street Journal investigation reveals, the report itself amounted to a coverup—but not in the way the UFO conspiracy industry would have people believe. The public disclosure left out the truth behind some of the foundational myths about UFOs: The Pentagon itself sometimes deliberately fanned the flames, in what amounted to the U.S. government targeting its own citizens with disinformation… At times, as with the deception around Area 51, military officers spread false documents to create a smokescreen for real secret-weapons programs. In other cases, officials allowed UFO myths to take root in the interest of national security—for instance, to prevent the Soviet Union from detecting vulnerabilities in the systems protecting nuclear installations. Stories tended to take on a life of their own, such as the three-decade journey of a purported piece of space metal that turned out to be nothing of the sort. And one long-running practice was more like a fraternity hazing ritual that spun wildly out of control… The Pentagon omitted key facts in the public version of the 2024 report that could have helped put some UFO rumors to rest, both to protect classified secrets and to avoid embarrassment, the Journal investigation found. The Air Force in particular pushed to omit some details it believed could jeopardize secret programs and damage careers.”

Why it matters: “These findings represent a stunning new twist in the story of America’s cultural obsession with UFOs. In the decades after a 1938 radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ ‘The War of the Worlds’ spread panic throughout the country, speculation about alien visitors remained largely the province of supermarket tabloids, Hollywood blockbusters and costumed conferences in Las Vegas… Concealing the truth from [military personnel] and deliberate efforts to target the public with disinformation unleashed within the halls of the Pentagon itself a dangerous force, which would become almost unstoppable as decades passed. The paranoid mythology the U.S. military helped spread now has a hold over a growing number of its own senior officials who count themselves as believers.”

Odds and Ends

After 62 years living in Ireland, U2 guitarist the Edge has finally become an Irish citizen…

Paleontologists discover a new distant relative of T. rex: Khankhuuluu mongoliensis…

Good news, everyone! Our Milky Way galaxy may not crash into Andromeda in five billion years after all…

How a Scottish meteorologist made the weather forecast that convinced Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to go ahead with the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944…

What I’m Listening To and Watching

• Two classic Dio albums: 1983’s Holy Diver and 1984’s The Last in Line.

• Walking With Dinosaurs, the new iteration of the classic BBC docuseries that follows dinosaurs like Triceratops, Albertosaurus, and Lusotitan as well as the paleontologists who dig them up.

• Ironheart, the Marvel streaming series that follows Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) as she dives into Chicago’s supernatural criminal underworld to make the money she ends to build her own Iron Man-style superhero armor.

• “Strange Brew,” the lead song from Cream’s seminal 1967 album Disraeli Gears.

• “Now it’s time,” the final track off Haim’s new album I quit, featuring an interpolation of U2’s “Numb.”

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"Yes. 
There's a reason for the way things are. 
But no. 
Not a very good one."

- Eric Jarosinski, Nein. A Manifesto, p. 103

What I’m Reading:

1. How progressive identity politics benefit the autocratic right

Why you should read it: Former Human Rights Watch chief Kenneth Roth argues in Foreign Policy that the progressive left’s embrace of identity politics “has made it easier for Trump to pursue his agenda of intolerance.”

• “The classic if reflexive response of human rights activists [to the rise of the far right] has been to stress that none of our rights are guaranteed unless all of our rights are secure… But autocratic politicians do not accept that syllogism. By portraying segments of society as threats to the community rather than members of it, autocrats seek to justify depriving them of their rights, assuming not only that mistreating these supposed outsiders will not affect the rights of people still deemed on the inside, but that this mistreatment is necessary to protect them. The autocratic response reflects the often-neglected premise of the liberal vision—that is, its dependence on a shared sense of community.”

• “Ironically, the identity politics that has come to define much of progressive thought these days has facilitated this autocratic sleight of hand by neglecting, or even undermining, the national community. Progressives have tended to promote the rights of interest groups, particularly people who are seen to have historically suffered discrimination and persecution… If progressive politics can be reduced to the promotion of a collection of disfavored interest groups, it is easier for the autocrat to carve out selected groups for demonization. Autocrats simply portray their priority interest groups as the ones that progressives are neglecting—typically, members of a country’s working-class ethnic majority—and claim that the demonized groups are the cause of the priority group’s malaise… An alternative approach would be for progressives to speak in terms of a national community; to stress the rights of all people who live in the nation. This would not mean ignoring the rights of the downtrodden, but it would require a different rhetoric that promotes their rights as members of a national community rather than as mere interest groups among others.”

• Why it matters: “To speak of a national community does not require nationalism. The aim is not to promote an aggressive pursuit of national interests against other nations. There is no need to invade Greenland. Rather, the point is to shift the public conversation away from identity politics. Progressives would speak less about a coalition of interest groups and more about a nation of rights bearers. In the United States, they would stress that the American dream should be available to everyone in the country, that no one should be left behind… Some people do indeed face historical discrimination, and a targeted response is required. But progressives cannot allow themselves to be reduced to the defenders of a series of special interests, however disadvantaged. The best antidote to the autocratic dodge is for progressives to recapture the defense of everyone in a nation—to embrace and defend a national community of rights bearers.”

2. Why China welcomes the American far right

Why you should read it: Also in Foreign Policy, Human Rights Watch China expert Maya Wang and New York University fellow Mason Wong explain why the American far right plays so well in China.

• “For years, political conditions in China have fostered a growing coalition of Chinese who have found meaning in the cultural and political worldview of the Western far right… The sentiments are related to Chinese nationalism, which has a racial and supremacist strain with a long history typically expressed in the idea that the modern Chinese nation is made up of a superior yellow race.’ But they are also distinct in that the framing of these ideas has only recently begun to resemble, converge, and cross-fertilize with far-right discourses in the West.”

• “But if the imagined superior white and yellow races are both threatened by nonwhite peoples and social liberalism, then they are also rivals. As political theorist Chenchen Zhang has pointed out, Chinese netizens consider their own political system to be superior, viewing the Chinese government’s ‘pragmatic, rational and non-moralizing approach to economic growth and social stability’ as a better alternative to Western liberalism… Western democracies have become corrupted by progressive values, which are not only unrealistic but also damaging to prosperity and social order. Chinese social media users have used a derogatory term to describe people promoting those values—baizuo, which literally translates to ‘white left…’ While Chinese government censors have occasionally shut down some of these accounts and removed their posts, many have been untouched or have been allowed to return and grow their followings… Far-right ideas flow through several conduits. In China, popular social media platforms frequented by young men, like the sports forum Hupu, have become hotbeds for manosphere ideas. Fringe WeChat groups filled with both Chinese and Chinese American users promote Islamophobia and conspiracy theories. And although right-wing Christianity—a key vector for the spread of social conservatism in the United States, Europe, and Russia—has little to no pull in China due to state control of religion, Western far-right intellectuals have tried to draw equivalences between Christian and Confucian traditionalism.”

• Why it matters: “The camaraderie between illiberal and far-right forces in Russia, China, and the United States might not last. In an era of heightened great-power competition, conflicting desires for domination may soon break this fragile coalition, even before it manages to vanquish its wide range of perceived enemies… Regardless, these emerging political alliances are worth taking seriously, especially as the nationalist and authoritarian trends that enable them show no signs of slowing down.”

3. What we can learn about industrial policy from the CHIPS program

Why you should read it: In Foreign Affairs, former Biden administration CHIPS program officials Nikita Lalwani and Sam Marullo detail what we can learn about making industrial policy from CHIPS .

• “The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act was the United States’ most ambitious foray into industrial policy in more than half a century. The bill included roughly $50 billion to revitalize the U.S. semiconductor industry, which had been hollowed out over decades as manufacturing migrated overseas. Industrial policy, long eschewed in policy circles, had come back in vogue as a way to strengthen supply chain resilience for industries critical to economic and national security. Moving the legislation through Congress required a multiyear process that involved lengthy negotiations and complex maneuvering. But passing the law was just the beginning. As soon as it was signed, the action moved from Congress to the Department of Commerce, which had to figure out, quickly and with little room for error, how to stand up a new office and infrastructure to deliver on its aims… It’s too early to pass a final judgment on how well it did: the semiconductor industry is fast-moving and cyclical, and many projects are just getting underway. But the program has made real progress. In two and a half years, it has unlocked more than $450 billion in private investments, helped support the construction of 17 new semiconductor fabrication plants (known as fabs), and made the United States the only country to secure manufacturing commitments from the world’s five leading chip manufacturers. When the CHIPS Act was passed, the United States produced none of the most advanced logic or memory chips, the hardware used in smartphones, laptops, and powerful AI systems; it is now projected to produce 20 percent of the world’s leading-edge logic chips by 2030 and ten percent of its dynamic random-access memory chips by 2035… Amid bipartisan consensus to expand industrial strategy beyond CHIPS, future programs would do well to learn from its example. Of course, there is no one way to do industrial policy, and the details will vary by sector and circumstance, but one constant is that large federal programs require the government to work quickly, efficiently, and well. That requires establishing nimble and dynamic teams with sophisticated expertise; building productive and transparent relationships with industry, other governments, and the general public; and figuring out how to overcome sources of delay—within government and outside it—that make it hard to build new things. Most important, industrial policy requires clarity of purpose: a concrete set of specific objectives to guide investments and against which to measure success.”

• “For industrial policy to work well, recruiting is essential. The government needs to draw sharp minds from finance, industry, and other federal agencies. For workers in the private sector, a federal job means much lower pay; it might also mean long commutes or relocation to Washington. During the early months of the CHIPS program, CHIPS relied on personal outreach from Raimondo and from office leadership. Their pitches were simple: get in on the ground floor of a once-in-a-generation experiment in industrial policy. When the ask was made directly, most people said yes… Equally important to staffing is developing an investment strategy—figuring out what, exactly, the United States is buying with its congressional funding. This strategy should be clear, provide concrete goals and metrics, and be accessible to the public so that Americans can judge whether the program is succeeding on its own terms and whether those terms are the right ones. Such a strategy, although hardly unique to industrial policy, is critical for a program’s operational and political success. Not every worthy project can receive funding. By specifying clear criteria by which applications for funding would be evaluated and by publishing a vision of success that set specific production objectives across the semiconductor industry, the CHIPS office could manage expectations for stakeholders both within and outside government.”

• Why it matters: “Doing industrial policy well is not easy. It requires scaling up production quickly and carving out a place in government that can act like a private-sector startup by staffing up, implementing new processes, and finding creative ways to avoid delays. The U.S. government, bogged down by rules and bureaucracy, is not the ideal home for a startup. But with the right playbook, it can become a more hospitable one. As CHIPS demonstrated, policymakers need to make government an attractive place to work for people from finance and industry, identify and mitigate sources of delay, and measure success against clear and definable metrics. At the same time, policymakers should push for structural reforms to make government work better. Under the best of circumstances, industrial policy is an uphill battle. Making smart early decisions can make the climb a little easier.”

4. Why Keynes opposed the free flow of capital around the world (and so can you!)

Why you should read it: Carnegie senior fellow Michael Pettis shows why British economist John Maynard Keynes opposed the free flow of capital around the world and why we should heed his advice.

• “In today’s global economy, the free movement of capital—with financial flows moving across borders without legal constraints—is often celebrated as a cornerstone of prosperity. Policymakers and economists alike argue that liberalized capital accounts allocate resources efficiently, deepen financial markets, and promote global integration. Yet many of the most influential economists of the 20th century—including, most notably, John Maynard Keynes—were deeply skeptical of these claims. In fact, he proposed that capital controls be a permanent feature of the international monetary system… Having lived through the interwar years—years marked by financial speculation, competitive currency devaluations, and the economic devastation of the Great Depression—Keynes understood the extent to which free capital mobility could distort a market economy. In his proposals for a postwar monetary system, he insisted on preserving national autonomy over monetary and fiscal policy, including the right to use capital controls when necessary. Unfettered capital flows, he argued, warped currency valuations, drove domestic credit creation, and distorted domestic interest rates. In this sense, free capital flows did not foster efficiency in a market economy; they constrained sovereignty and distorted efficiency.”

• “What makes free capital flows especially pernicious is their tendency to constrain democracy itself. When capital is mobile and policymakers are forced to adjust to external imbalances, democratic choices—the policies voters actually want—become subordinated to the wiles of financial markets. Elected governments are pressured to pursue fiscal austerity, encourage industrial offshoring, suppress wages, deregulate labor markets, stimulate household debt, or raise fiscal deficits—not because these policies promote sustainable growth, or benefit their workers and consumers, but because they must meet the demands of foreign investors… [Keynes] warned that when governments abandon control over capital movements, they lose the ability to implement the economic policies needed for full employment and sustainable growth. His view was not ideological, but pragmatic: domestic policy should be determined by national priorities, not by the demands of international finance.”

• Why it matters: “The solution is not to retreat from globalization, but to reshape it. Keynes’s vision for a managed global economy—embodied in the original Bretton Woods framework—offered precisely this balance. It allowed for trade and cross-border investment while preserving national autonomy over macroeconomic policy. Capital controls allowed each country to pursue its own economic development path without having to absorb the imbalances of its trade partners… The time has come to abandon the devotion to free capital flows as ideological necessity, and to reconsider and manage them, recognizing the conditions under which they benefit the global and U.S. economies as well as the conditions under which they don’t. We must build a global financial system that supports national development, reduces inequality, and promotes long-term stability.”

5. How new crypto-friendly laws threaten the U.S. financial system

Why you should read it: Professors Dan Davies and Henry Farrell contend in the New York Times that soon-to-be enacted laws that grant legitimacy to cryptocurrency do little other than threaten the stability of America’s financial system.

• “This has been a good week for America’s crypto interests. The Genius Act, which legitimates a kind of cryptocurrency called stablecoins, advanced in the Senate… Stablecoins, as their name suggests, are crypto assets guaranteed by other assets like the U.S. dollar. Mr. Trump and his sons created one called USD1 through their cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial. Digital currencies like stablecoins are bad enough when they could potentially be used for political self-dealing. The potential problems they pose to the mainstream financial system go deeper and are much more concerning…They are likely instead to undermine it, fostering scams and sanctions evasion, generating financial risk and perhaps even allowing another currency to supplant the dollar in global trade.”

• “Crypto interests want to break down the boundary between cryptocurrencies and regulated finance by integrating stablecoins into the regular U.S. financial system. That would allow them to go back and forth between the swashbuckling world of crypto, where cryptocurrencies swing wildly in value and you can gamble on the latest meme, and the rule-bound world of regulated finance, with assets and bank accounts protected by the Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation… If crypto becomes normalized, there is plenty of reason to worry that it will spread chaos. Democratic staff members on the Senate Banking Committee say that the Genius legislation would allow U.S. exchanges to trade stablecoins from offshore companies outside the full scope of U.S. regulation. Critics contend that Tether, the dominant stablecoin outside U.S. jurisdiction, has been used by criminals and sanctions evaders to circumvent financial controls. Platforms designed to obscure information about transactions — called mixer services — were implicated in a scheme by North Korean hackers to launder hundreds of millions of dollars.”

• Why it matters: “Perhaps the greatest concern about stablecoins is their potential to provoke risk to the entire financial system. Because they are neither fully inside nor fully outside the traditional financial system, they present unique, grave challenges for which there are no clear answers. For example, the Genius Act’s drafters propose regular reports on their implications for financial stability. Yet they have no clear response to a critical question: Does the United States stand behind dollar-based stablecoins or not?… Stablecoins were supposed to leverage dollars to stabilize the chaotic universe of crypto. Instead, they seem set to infect the dollar-dominated financial system with the unique combined chaos of crypto and Mr. Trump.”

6. Why artificial intelligence doesn’t live up to the hype when it comes to science

Why you should read it: On Tim Lee’s Understanding AI Substack, physicist Nick McGreivy recounts his ill-fated attempt to integrate AI into his PhD research program—and shows the limits of actually using AI in productive work.

• In 2018, as a second-year PhD student at Princeton studying plasma physics, I decided to switch my research focus to machine learning. I didn’t yet have a specific research project in mind, but I thought I could make a bigger impact by using AI to accelerate physics research… I eventually chose to study what AI pioneer Yann LeCun later described as a ‘pretty hot topic, indeed’: using AI to solve partial differential equations (PDEs). But as I tried to build on what I thought were impressive results, I found that AI methods performed much worse than advertised… At first, I tried applying a widely-cited AI method called PINN to some fairly simple PDEs, but found it to be unexpectedly brittle. Later, though dozens of papers had claimed that AI methods could solve PDEs faster than standard numerical methods—in some cases as much as a million times faster—I discovered that a large majority of these comparisons were unfair. When I compared these AI methods on equal footing to state-of-the-art numerical methods, whatever narrowly defined advantage AI had usually disappeared.”

• “Many others have identified similar issues. For example, in 2023 DeepMind claimed to have discovered 2.2 million crystal structures, representing ‘an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity.’ But when materials scientists analyzed these compounds, they found it was ‘mostly junk’ and ‘respectfully’ suggested that the paper ‘does not report any new materials…’ Princeton computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor have compiled a list of 648 papers across 30 fields that all make a methodological error called data leakage. In each case data leakage leads to overoptimistic results. They argue that AI-based science is facing a ‘reproducibility crisis…’ To be clear, AI can drive scientific breakthroughs. My concern is about their magnitude and frequency. Has AI really shown enough potential to justify such a massive shift in talent, training, time, and money away from existing research directions and towards a single paradigm?”

• Why it matters: “Ultimately, I don’t know whether AI will reverse the decades-long trend of declining scientific productivity and stagnating (or even decelerating) rates of scientific progress. I don’t think anyone does. But barring major (and in my opinion unlikely) breakthroughs in advanced AI, I expect AI to be much more a normal tool of incremental, uneven scientific progress than a revolutionary one… These issues seem to be bad enough that I encourage people to treat impressive results in AI-for-science the same way we treat surprising results in nutrition science: with instinctive skepticism.”

7. What Elon Musk and his DOGE bros get wrong about tech and government

Why you should read it: Public policy scholar Don Moynihan observes that a combination of arrogance, ignorance, and contempt for public service led Elon Musk and his DOGElings to destroy many government functions Americans and others around the world rely upon.

• “For anyone with a modicum of experience studying or working in government, nothing [former DOGE bro Sahil] Lavignia discovered is novel. Public servants care about public service! There is not really that much waste in government! There are too many meetings and decisionmaking is too slow! Indeed, sir! All true!… Lavignia was willing to acknowledge his prior beliefs were wrong. That is a hard thing for any human to do, and something I have not seen from any other DOGE official, certainly not Musk. The exception offers insight to the rule: DOGErs simply don’t understand the government they are destroying, and are unwilling to learn… This sounds obvious to say, but people handed extraordinary power that affects the lives of others should know what they are doing. If they don’t know important stuff, they should want to learn it before exercising consequential decisions. But DOGE has failed to meet even these banal standards.”

• “A trademark of DOGE was the toxic combination of arrogance and ignorance. Some DOGE members have real and impressive achievements, some do not. But all of those achievements are in the private sector. They know almost nothing about government except conspiracy theories from the internet, or negative interactions with the regulators who oversee their businesses. They did not understand where government spent its money, and that it was not full of waste… DOGE mostly believes that government is irredeemably broken, wasteful and fraudulent. If you believe that, it makes sense to downsize government as much as possible, and contract out what you cannot. It makes sense not to build cool products (DOGE killed Direct File) but to build AI that cuts the humans out of the process and automate as much as possible. The fact that DOGE claims about fraud have proven to be erroneous should be a huge red flag about how the assumptions that will be embedded into their AI builds will prove to be wrong in ways that could be catastrophic.”

• Why it matters: “The logic of DOGE’s approach is that they cannot be doing damage by destroying government, because nothing government does have value, and constraints like laws are merely blockers to ignore. And so, we have people who were elected by no-one exert extraordinary power over public services they barely understand, the consequences of which will play out long after they have left government… DOGE was able to have an impact not because it brought gifted technologists into government, but because of the broader Trumpian indifference to key aspects of governing, such as capacity, service quality or accountability. They have broken much, and built nothing of consequence.”

8. How a rejection of germ theory lies at the heart of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s quack medical convictions

Why you should read it: Ars Technica reporter Beth Mole digs into HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s written record and finds he denies germ theory—the foundation of modern medicine and public health.

• “While we may never have definitive answers on his cognitive situation, one thing is plain: Kennedy's thoughts and actions make a lot more sense when you realize he doesn't believe in a foundational scientific principle: germ theory… It's important to note here that our understanding of Kennedy's disbelief in germ theory isn't based on speculation or deduction; it's based on Kennedy's own words. He wrote an entire section on it in his 2021 book vilifying Fauci, titled The Real Anthony Fauci. The section is titled ‘Miasma vs. Germ Theory,’ in the chapter ‘The White Man's Burden.’”

• “In the chapter, Kennedy promotes the ‘miasma theory’ but gets the definition completely wrong… Kennedy contrasts his erroneous take on miasma theory with germ theory, which he derides as a tool of the pharmaceutical industry and pushy scientists to justify selling modern medicines. The abandonment of miasma theory, Kennedy bemoans, realigned health and medical institutions to ‘the pharmaceutical paradigm that emphasized targeting particular germs with specific drugs rather than fortifying the immune system through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition…’ In all, the chapter provides a clear explanation of why Kennedy relentlessly attacks evidence-based medicines; vilifies the pharmaceutical industry; suggests HIV doesn't cause AIDS and antidepressants are behind mass shootings; believes that vaccines are harmful, not protective; claims 5G wireless networks cause cancer; suggests chemicals in water are changing children's gender identities; and is quick to promote supplements to prevent and treat diseases, such as recently recommending vitamin A for measles and falsely claiming children who die from the viral infection are malnourished.”

• Why it matters: “The trouble is that now that Kennedy is the country's top health official, his warped ideas are contributing to the rise of a dystopian reality. Federal health agencies are spiraling into chaos, and critical public health services for Americans have been brutally slashed, dismantled, or knee-capped—from infectious disease responses, the lead poisoning team, and Meals on Wheels to maternal health programs and anti-smoking initiatives, just to name a few. The health of the nation is at stake; the struggle to understand what goes on in Kennedy's head is vital.”

9. Why the “abundance agenda” has become such a flashpoint for Democratic elites

Why you should read it: The Atlantic columnist Jonathan Chait delves into the reasons why the so-called “abundance agenda” has received such virulent pushback from those quarters on the progressive left ideologically committed to do-nothing proceduralism.

• “A civil war has broken out among the Democratic wonks. The casus belli is a new set of ideas known as the abundance agenda. Its supporters herald it as the key to prosperity for the American people and to enduring power for the liberal coalition. Its critics decry it as a scheme to infiltrate the Democratic Party by ‘corporate-aligned interests’; ‘a gambit by center-right think tank & its libertarian donors’; ‘an anti-government manifesto for the MAGA Right’; and the historical and moral equivalent of the ‘Rockefellers and Carnegies grinding workers into dust…’ The intensity of the argument suggests that the participants are debating not merely the mechanical details of policy, but the very nature and purpose of the Democratic Party. And in fact, if you look closely beneath the squabbling, that is exactly what they are fighting over… In recent years, the party’s internal divides have been defined almost entirely in relation to the issue positions taken by the groups [the constellation of activist organizations that control progressive politics and have significant influence over the Democratic Party]. The most progressive Democrats have been the ones who advocated the groups’ positions most forcefully; moderate Democrats have been defined more by their relative lack of enthusiasm for the groups’ agenda than by any causes of their own. The Democratic Party’s flavors have been ‘progressive’ and ‘progressive lite.’ The abundance agenda promises to supply moderate Democrats with a positive identity, rather than merely a negative one.”

• “But in the months and years that followed, an unsettling realization began to creep in. A massive law [the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill] had been enacted, yet Americans did not notice any difference, because indeed, very little had changed. Biden had anticipated, after quickly signing his infrastructure bill and then two more big laws pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into manufacturing and energy, that he would spend the rest of his presidency cutting ribbons at gleaming new bridges and plants. But only a fraction of the funds Biden had authorized were spent before he began his reelection campaign, and of those, hardly any yielded concrete results… This time, the failure inspired a little more introspection. Policy wonks, mostly liberal ones, began to ask why public tasks that used to be doable no longer were. How could a government that once constructed miracles of engineering—the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge—ahead of schedule and under budget now find itself incapable of executing routine functions? Why was Medicare available less than a year after the enabling legislation passed, when the Affordable Care Act’s individual-insurance exchange took nearly four years to come online (and had to survive a failed website)? And, more disturbing, why was everything slower, more expensive, and more dysfunctional in states and cities controlled by Democrats?… Finding answers to these questions began as a series of disparate inquiries into such neglected topics as restrictive zoning ordinances, federal and state permitting regulations, and the federal government’s administrative procedures. But many who pursued these separate lines of inquiry experienced similar epiphanies, as if a switch had suddenly been flipped in their heads. They concluded that the government has tied itself in knots, and that enormous amounts of prosperity could be unleashed by simply untying them.”

Why it matters: “You might think Democrats, in particular, would uniformly embrace plans to allow Democratic-run states and cities to expand, to build more zero-carbon energy, and to restore the bureaucratic confidence of the New Deal heyday. But this turns out to be a highly controversial proposition, because the limitations on building and the government were largely imposed by the left itself. What’s more, these limits remain a core part of the interest-group politics that has dominated the Democratic Party for more than half a century… The driving insight of the abundance agenda is that the organized citizen-activist groups descended from the Nader movement are not merely overly idealistic or ineffective, but often counterproductive. This is a diametric conflict: The progressive-activist network believes that local activists should have more legal power to block new housing and energy infrastructure. The abundance agenda is premised on taking that power away.”

Odds and Ends

Vanity Fair interviews actress Scarlett Johansson on her upcoming directorial debut— and why Avengers: Endgame deserved an Oscar nod…

How a copy of Magna Carta that was believed to be a fake turned out to actually be the real deal…

Why a Nobel laureate astrophysicist changed his mind about the implications of the research that won him the prize and laid the groundwork for modern cosmology…

How some California hummingbirds have evolved to take better advantage of access to backyard feeders…

Why penguin guano might help drive cloud formation over Antarctica…

What I’m Listening To and Watching

• Led by Florence Pugh’s super spy Yelena Belova, Marvel’s latest team of superheroic misfits assemble in Thunderbolts*.

• A divorced and down-on-his-luck hedge fund guru (Jon Hamm) addresses his financial woes and newfound existential angst by robbing his wealthy neighbors in Your Friends and Neighbors.

• The second season of Poker Face brings the return of Natasha Lyonne’s bullshit-detecting, Columbo-esque crime-solver Charlie Cale.

• Tucci in Italy, in which the actor Stanley Tucci takes viewers on a culinary and cultural journey across five Italian regions.

• John Summit’s remix of the classic late 1990s electronic track “Silence” by Delirium featuring vocals from Canadian chanteuse Sarah McLachlan.

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"Among today's adept practitioners, the lie has long since lost its honest function of misrepresenting reality. Nobody believes anybody, everyone is in the know. Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion."

- Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, 1.9

What I’m Reading:

1. How Trump is censoring the service academies

Why you should read it: Author and Daily Stoic proprietor Ryan Holiday writes in the New York Times about how the U.S. Naval Academy attempted to censor and then cancelled his talk on Stoic philosophy.

• “For the past four years, I have been delivering a series of lectures on the virtues of Stoicism to midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and I was supposed to continue this on April 14… Roughly an hour before my talk was to begin, I received a call: Would I refrain from any mention in my remarks of the recent removal of 381 supposedly controversial books from the Nimitz library on campus? My slides had been sent up the chain of command at the school, which was now, as it was explained to me, extremely worried about reprisals if my talk appeared to flout Executive Order 14151… When I declined, my lecture — as well as a planned speech before the Navy football team, with which my books on Stoicism are popular — was canceled.”

• “No one at the Naval Academy intimated any consequences for me, of course, but it felt extortionary all the same. I had to choose between my message or my continued welcome at an institution it has been one of the honors of my life to speak at… As I explained repeatedly to my hosts, I had no interest in embarrassing anyone or discussing politics directly. I understand the immense pressures they are under, especially the military employees, and I did not want to cause them trouble. I did, however, feel it was essential to make the point that the pursuit of wisdom is impossible without engaging with (and challenging) uncomfortable ideas… The current administration is by no means unique in its desire to suppress ideas it doesn’t like or thinks dangerous. As I intended to explain to the midshipmen, there was considerable political pressure in the 1950s over what books were carried in the libraries of federal installations. Asked if he would ban communist books from American embassies, Eisenhower resisted.”

• Why it matters: “The men and women at the Naval Academy will go on to lead combat missions, to command aircraft carriers, to pilot nuclear-armed submarines and run enormous organizations. We will soon entrust them with incredible responsibilities and power. But we fear they’ll be hoodwinked or brainwashed by certain books?… No one at any public institution should have to fear losing their job for pushing back on such an obvious overreach, let alone those tasked with defending our freedom. Yet here we are.”

2. Why military force doesn’t deliver victory

Why you should read it: In Foreign Affairs, strategy scholar Lawrence Freedman assembles evidence that the use of force does not deliver the results those who embark on wars assume it will.

• “The idea that surprise offensives could produce decisive victories began to be embedded in military thinking in the nineteenth century. But again and again, forces that undertake them have shown how difficult it is to bring a war to an early and satisfactory conclusion. European military leaders were confident that the war that began in the summer of 1914 could be ‘over by Christmas’—a phrase that is still invoked whenever generals sound too optimistic; instead, the fighting would last until November 1918, concluding with fast offensives but only after years of devastating trench warfare along almost static frontlines. In 1940, Germany overran much of western Europe in a matter of weeks by means of a blitzkrieg, bringing together armor and airpower. But it could not finish the job, and after initial rapid advances against the Soviet Union in 1941, it was drawn into a brutal war with enormous casualties on both sides that would only end nearly four years later with the total collapse of the Third Reich. Similarly, the decision by Japan’s military leadership to launch a surprise attack on the United States in December 1941 ended in the catastrophic defeat of the Japanese empire in August 1945. In both world wars, the key to victory was not so much military prowess as unbeatable stamina… Yet despite this long history of protracted conflict, military strategists continue to shape their thinking around short wars, in which all is supposed to be decided in the first days, or even hours, of combat. According to this model, strategies can still be devised that will leave the enemy surprised by the speed, direction, and ruthlessness of the initial attack. With the constant possibility that the United States could be drawn into a war with China over Taiwan, the viability of such strategies has become a pressing issue: Can China quickly seize the island, using lightning force, or will Taiwan, supported by the United States, be able to stop such an attack in its tracks?”

• “The advantages of short wars—immediate success at a tolerable cost—are so obvious that no case can be made for knowingly embarking on a long one. By contrast, even admitting the possibility that a war could become protracted may seem to betray doubts about the ability of one’s military to triumph over an adversary. If strategists have little or no confidence that a prospective war can be kept short, then arguably the only prudent policy is not to fight it at all. Still, for a country such as the United States, it might not be possible to rule out a conflict with another great power of similar strength, even if rapid victory is not assured. Although Western leaders have an understandable aversion to intervening in civil wars, it is also possible that the actions of a nonstate adversary could become so persistent and harmful that direct action to deal with the threat becomes imperative, regardless of how long that may take… So ingrained is the fixation with speed that generations of U.S. military commanders have learned to shudder at the mention of attritional warfare, embracing decisive maneuver as the route to quick victories. Long slogs of the sort now taking place in Ukraine—where both sides seek to degrade each other’s capabilities, and progress is measured by body counts, destroyed equipment, and depleted stocks of ammunition—are not only dispiriting to the belligerent countries but also hugely time-consuming and expensive. In Ukraine, both sides have already expended extraordinary resources, and neither is close to anything that resembles a victory. Not all wars are conducted at such a high intensity as the Russian-Ukrainian war, but even prolonged irregular warfare can take a heavy toll, resulting in a growing sense of futility in addition to mounting costs… In commentary on contemporary warfare, the distinction between ‘winning’ and ‘not losing’ is vital yet hard to grasp. The difference is not intuitive because of the assumption that there will always be a victor in war and because, at any time, one side can appear to be winning even if it has not actually won. The situation of ‘not losing’ is not quite captured by terms such as stalemate and deadlock since these imply little military movement. Both sides can be ‘not losing’ when neither can impose a victory on the other, even if one or both are on occasion able to improve their positions. This is why proposals to end protracted wars normally take the form of calls for a cease-fire. The problem with cease-fires, however, is that the parties to the conflict tend to regard them as no more than pauses in the fighting. They may have little effect on the underlying disputes and may simply offer both sides the opportunity to recover and reconstitute for the next round. The cease-fire that ended the Korean War in 1953 has lasted for over 70 years, but the conflict remains unresolved and both sides continue to prepare for a future war.”

• Why it matters: “What is clear is that amid rising tensions between the United States and a variety of antagonists, there is a critical misalignment in defense planning. In recognition of the tendency of wars to drag on, some strategists have begun to warn about the dangers of falling into the “short war” fallacy. By emphasizing short wars, strategists rely too much on initial battle plans that may not play out in practice—with bitter consequences… Wars start and end through political decisions. The political decision to initiate armed conflict is likely to assume a short war; the political decision to bring the fighting to an end will likely reflect the inescapable costs and consequences of a long war. For any military power, the prospect of drawn-out or unending hostilities and significant economic and political instability is a good reason to hesitate before embarking on a major war and to seek other means to achieve desired goals. But it also means that when wars cannot be avoided, their military and political objectives must be realistic and attainable and set in ways that can be achieved by the military resources available. One of the great allures of military power is that it promises to bring conflicts to a quick and decisive conclusion. In practice, it rarely does.”

3. How Nordic NATO allies have pooled their military resources amid a chronic threat from Russia and uncertainty from Trump

Why you should read it: Wall Street Journal reporter Sune Engle Rasmussen profiles the efforts of four Scandinavian NATO allies—Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden—to build their capacity for joint military action in the face of Russian threats and American inconstancy.

• “The Nordics have emerged as a model for Europe’s defense. They are leading efforts to reverse decades of military drawdowns to counter both Russian aggression and uncertain security guarantees from the Trump White House… Any Nordic country would struggle to militarily square up to Russia on its own. But combined, the Nordics have an economy about the size of Mexico’s, and nearly the same size as Russia’s. Following Sweden and Finland’s accession to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, they have pooled some of their forces.”

• “Sweden boasts an advanced defense industry that makes submarines, battle tanks and supersonic jet fighters. Norway possesses maritime surveillance and fighting capabilities in the Arctic. Finland has one of the largest standing armies and artillery forces per capita in Europe. And Denmark’s special forces have decades of experience deploying to some of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan and Iraq to fight American wars. (The fifth Nordic country, Iceland, has no standing army or defense industry)… Now, the shared Nordic view of Russia as a serious future threat has pulled those countries closer together than at any point in modern history. A recent Danish intelligence assessment said Russia could start a major war against one or more European NATO countries within three to five years, a view that chimes more with the Baltic nations than other Western capitals… The Nordics have combined their air forces, establishing a Joint Nordic Air Command in 2023. Last year they set out a vision for common defense through 2030 under the Nordic Defense Cooperation, or Nordefco.”

• Why it matters: “To be sure, the Nordics are compensating for decades of disarmament following the end of the Cold War. The need to rearm has only grown amid Europe’s fading trust in the U.S. as a reliable ally under President Trump… For now, a united Nordic bloc could serve as a model for other clusters of nations, such as around the Black Sea, said Matti Pesu, senior research fellow with the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. The model can also serve as an insurance policy for the future, if the trans-Atlantic alliance disintegrates under Trump, he said.”

4. How Trump is giving away the store to China

Why you should read it: Journalist Noah Schachtman writes in the New York Times how Trump’s empty bluster and self-harming policies play right into Beijing’s hands.

• “Provoking your enemies, alienating your friends and actively sabotaging your own defenses are no one’s idea of a sound national security plan. And yet this is the playbook that President Trump has apparently followed over the first 100 days of his second term. You can see it most clearly in the global fight he kicked off with China. He’s been scrapping for this showdown since before he entered politics, so you’d think that before taking on such a global powerhouse, he’d strengthen every alliance, game out every possible countermeasure and get his leadership team in peak condition. The mouthiest barroom brawler knows not to pick a fight and then turn his back, but that’s what the president is doing. He promised to ‘make America safe again,’ but instead of building up the nation’s defenses, he’s dismantling them at precisely the moment they are most needed.”

• “The president has a former weekend Fox News host at the Department of Defense, and a former aide has complained that there is ‘total chaos at the Pentagon.’ He’s got a Trump donor with no military experience as the secretary of the Navy and picked for director of National Intelligence someone with a tendency to repeat authoritarian talking points. The national security adviser uses a commercial messaging app to share sensitive information about U.S. airstrikes with people he can’t necessarily identify. This month the president sacked the military’s well-regarded cyberwar chief after a conspiracy theorist told him to, and his administration leaked word of plans to cut the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency by 40 percent. Next up appears to be an evisceration of the State Department, particularly the bureau that has challenged some of the worst abuses of hostile authoritarian states. And of course, Mr. Trump has done everything possible to infuriate NATO, America’s primary alliance of mutual military support… MAGA world insists that Mr. Trump’s moving-target approach to tariff negotiations is three-dimensional chess. His bullying approach to diplomacy may hurt some allies’ feelings, his supporters say, but it will bring some of America’s most lethal adversaries to the negotiating table. That might sound persuasive if Mr. Trump weren’t already signaling that he’s ready to back down to Mr. Xi in this trade fight.”

• Why it matters: “A showdown with China was one of the most consistent promises Mr. Trump made to the American people. His voters knew this was the war he wanted. But how many of them could have guessed that he’d wage it in China’s favor?”

5. How Trump’s tariffs will inflict maximum damage on the United States

Why you should read it: Peterson Institute of International Economics researcher Maurice Obstfeld details the severe damage Trump’s tariffs will do to the American economy.

• “President Donald Trump touted his bewildering array of ‘Liberation Day’ import tariffs as carefully calibrated to offset trade partners' tariff, nontariff, and currency barriers to US exports. However, details of the calculations released by the office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) show that in reality, the tariffs' effect will be to curtail US trade the most precisely where it provides America with the biggest benefits. The result will be a direct hit on US consumers and businesses… Trump's administration did not even try to calculate the true heights of trade barriers. For example, Korea was hit with a tariff of 26 percent, even though it has a free trade agreement with America and its tariff rate on US imports was only 0.79 percent in 2024. The tariff's entire justification was Korea's sizable bilateral surplus in goods with the United States, much of it due to Americans' taste for Hyundai and KIA vehicles.”

• “Trade barriers certainly can influence bilateral trade balances, but to think that every persistent bilateral balance is due to trade barriers misunderstands the basic reason why countries trade. Countries trade to specialize in the goods and services they are best at producing, which naturally means having possibly persistent surpluses with some trade partners and deficits with others. Trying to squash every bilateral balance to zero through brute-force tariffs is to levy taxes on international trade exactly where it provides the most benefits to Americans… But the tariffs rolled out on April 2 will not even accomplish the goal of balanced American trade. Behind Trump's tariff initiative is his stated desire to reduce the overall US trade deficit in goods, which was 4.2 percent of GDP in 2024. This deficit reflects that Americans spend more than they produce, obliging them to import the difference from abroad. Until the United States reduces its spending relative to its income—for, example, by narrowing the federal budget deficit—the US overall trade deficit will not go away. Since the overall trade deficit is the sum of US surpluses and deficits with all trade partners, the administration's attempt to eliminate all bilateral deficits is doomed to failure. At best, it will be able to shuffle them around, in a game of whack-a-mole where a smaller deficit with one country is matched by higher bilateral deficits with others. In the process, however, the efficiency gains from international trade are sharply curtailed.”

• Why it matters: “If the US economy falls into recession because of Trump's arbitrary tariffs and our trade partners' responses, its overall trade balance may improve as consumption and investment crater. Foreign economies will be hit hard too, and in the end, the net outcome for the US trade balance may depend on whether the recession is more severe at home or abroad. That would be a race to the bottom that no one wins.”

6. How Republicans foisted their own subservience to Trump on the world

Why you should read it: Financial Times columnist Alan Beattie contends that Republicans have allowed their “localized pathology” of subservience to Trump to inflict damage on the world in the form of the president’s irrational trade war.

• “Well, at least we now know what Donald Trump will do with tariffs, until he is seized by another whim. Perhaps it was better when we didn’t. The ‘reciprocal’ tariffs announced on so-called liberation day were farcical, set by an arithmetic formula based on trade deficits in the apparent belief that current account imbalances can be fixed by trade policy… But this isn’t some general crisis of credibility in trade and globalisation. It’s largely a localised pathology, and particularly one of the Republican Party. The Democrats under Joe Biden accepted far too much of Trump’s first term tariff legacy, but at least with a vaguely coherent industrial policy rationale. The Republicans haven’t necessarily turned into a seething nest of protectionists, but their increasingly extreme bent ever since Richard Nixon took the party to the right in the 1960s has allowed a mindlessly destructive trade warrior to take over and they are too terrified to stop him.”

• “Accident, prejudice and unintended consequence play a bigger role in dysfunctional US tariff policy than the grand sweep of economic history might suggest… This current case is not just a tactical mistake: it’s what happens when an ideological extremist becomes president. If there are any grown-ups among Trump’s economic team, they are locked in a cupboard when decisions are taken. Among them is Kevin Hassett, an orthodox free-trade economist who advised George W Bush and Mitt Romney but who is unable or unwilling to stop the chaos. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent was supposed to be the voice of the financial markets: he’s evidently silent or ignored. The animating drive is from Trump himself, who since the 1980s has had a wrong-headed view of tariffs based on an analogy with a corporate profit-and-loss account, and the trade warrior Peter Navarro, who appears closest to the president’s ear.”

• Why it matters: “There can be no logic-washing of Donald Trump’s tariffs. This isn’t part of a carefully-designed industrial policy or a cunning strategy to induce compliance among trading partners or a choreographed appearance of chaos to scare other governments into obedience. It’s wildly destructive stupidity, and the generations of American, and particularly Republican politicians, who allowed things to slide to this point are collectively to blame.”

7. How Elon Musk relies on old, dumb ideas

Why you should read it: In the New York Times, historian Jill Lepore outlines how Elon Musk relies on old, conservative ideas that belie his reputation as a visionary futurist.

• “Mr. Musk has long presented himself to the world as a futurist. Yet, notwithstanding the gadgets — the rockets and the robots and the Department of Government Efficiency Musketeers, carrying backpacks crammed with laptops, dreaming of replacing federal employees with large language models — few figures in public life are more shackled to the past… Mr. Musk is attempting to go back to that fork and choose a different path. Much of what he has sought to dismantle, from antipoverty programs to national parks, have their origins in the New Deal. Mr. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration provided 8.5 million Americans with jobs; Mr. Musk has measured his achievement by the number of jobs he has eliminated… I was again struck by how little of what Mr. Musk proposes is new and by how many of his ideas about politics, governance and economics resemble those championed by his grandfather Joshua Haldeman, a cowboy, chiropractor, conspiracy theorist and amateur aviator known as the Flying Haldeman. Mr. Musk’s grandfather was also a flamboyant leader of the political movement known as technocracy.”

• “Under the technate, humans would no longer have names; they would have numbers. One technocrat went by 1x1809x56. (Mr. Musk has a son named X Æ A-12.) Mr. Haldeman, who had lost his Saskatchewan farm during the Depression, became the movement’s leader in Canada. He was technocrat No. 10450-1… Leading technocrats proposed replacing democratically elected officials and civil servants — indeed, all of government — with an army of scientists and engineers under what they called a technate. Some also wanted to annex Canada and Mexico. At technocracy’s height, one branch of the movement had more than a quarter of a million members… Technocrats argued that liberal democracy had failed. One Technocracy Incorporated pamphlet explained how the movement ‘does not subscribe to the basic tenet of the democratic ideal, namely that all men are created free and equal.’ In the modern world, only scientists and engineers have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of the economy. [Leading Technocrat Howard] Scott’s army of technocrats would eliminate most government services: ‘Even our postal system, our highways, our Coast Guard could be made much more efficient.’ Overlapping agencies could be shuttered, and ‘00 percent of the courts could be abolished…’ That Mr. Musk has come to hold so many of the same beliefs about social engineering and economic planning as his grandfather is a testament to his profound lack of political imagination, to the tenacity of technocracy and to the hubris of Silicon Valley.”

• Why it matters: “Mr. Musk’s possible departure from Washington will not diminish the influence of Muskism in the United States. His superannuated futurism is Silicon Valley’s reigning ideology… Muskism isn’t the beginning of the future. It’s the end of a story that started more than a century ago, in the conflict between capital and labor and between autocracy and democracy. The Gilded Age of robber barons and wage-labor strikes gave rise to the Bolshevik Revolution, Communism, the first Red Scare, World War I and Fascism. That battle of ideas produced the technocracy movement, and far more lastingly, it also produced the New Deal and modern American liberalism. Technocracy lost because technocracy is incompatible with freedom.”

8. How the rise of AI slop fueled the rise of the modern right

Why you should read it: Writer Ana Marie Cox posits in The New Republic that the rise of AI slop and social media fueled the rise of the modern political right and the return of Donald Trump to the White House.

• “…Hollywood’s failure to stay relevant has less to do with the political valence of its content than with the complete transformation of the media ecosystem. Woke was Hollywood’s most recent gambit to appeal to people; a right-wing turn may be its next. And yet conservative dominance of Hollywood may prove to be a much rosier future than the one we’re actually going to get: a future where pop culture is little more than a careless swirl of stock images, slapped together with no rationale beyond ginning up engagement—the wholesale replacement of storytelling with slop. To an extent, this future is already here, and it’s impossible to make sense of the extraordinary power held by right-wing podcasters in American politics or understand the meaning of Hollywood’s ‘unwokening’ without recognizing that slop—content shaped by data, optimized for clicks, intellectually bereft, and emotionally sterile—has been overwhelming Hollywood’s cultural impact and destroying its business model, not to mention countless careers along with it, for years…The foundation of the business had been cracking apart for years. In 2016, Hollywood saw some of its worst ticket sales this century. The industry had changed: Audiences were staying at home more, franchises were becoming a financial necessity, and mid-budget films were vanishing. ‘The tide has moved against movies,’ one analyst said. ‘They used to be the hub of what entertainment is, but that core has shifted to streaming and television.’ In 2018, the film industry seemed to rebound financially, but television was beginning to feel the pain. In 2019, the pace at which Americans were abandoning traditional pay-for television increased by more than 70 percent, and more Americans paid for streaming services than subscribed to traditional cable television… The Great Unwokening may align with Trump’s reelection, but it has as little to do with the aggregate opinions of the American people as did the Great Awokening. Rather, the degradation of Hollywood’s traditional movie- and show-making apparatus—the system’s inability to latch on to sustained audiences—has prompted the decision-makers to sloppily aim for what seems to be popular. (Then, Black Lives Matter; now, Jordan Peterson.)”

• “Politically, the real pop culture contest today isn’t between who has the best entertainment franchise—the Reaganesque frontier stoicism of Paramount’s Yellowstone or the perverse feminism of Showtime’sYellowjackets, say—it’s between who can effectively move their audience: Rogan or MrBeast? Liberals aren’t even competing on this front. I’m not sure they even know it’s there. Trump’s appearances on these podcasts helped him because they brought him into an environment. He was joining them... Since Trump’s reelection, liberal pundits have focused on the signifiers of support Hollywood has traditionally supplied: the label ribbons, the performative representation, and whether or not Disney includes content warnings on racial stereotypes present in its classic films. But the rise of the right-winger as trusted hangout interlocutor, and the way the connection he offers shapes how audiences move through the world, are different from the ‘different hat, same ball game’ signaling of past presidential cycles… As chilling as [Hollywood’s] obvious plays for favor to the right may be, we should be more chilled by what’s going on underneath them: the collapse of the broader communal experience of movies and TV. This is not a typical swing in messaging as the party in power shifts; it’s a culture falling in on a hollowed-out center.”

• Why it matters: “Mass culture was never perfect, never entirely progressive, much less revolutionary. It can numb as well as inspire us—but at least it provided a shared language… As America loses the superficial liberal flavor of pop culture, we’re losing culture’s transformative power entirely. Good storytelling challenges its audience; it encourages people to question their assumptions instead of accepting the status quo. The surprises matter because characters are changed by what they find; the mere novelty isn’t the point. We’re left with a future in which completely AI-generated families undertake increasingly surreal rituals designed to recall distantly remembered household traditions. This isn’t about ideology. The algorithm doesn’t care what you watch—just that you never stop watching. Just keep the screen on. Auto-play to infinity.”

9. Why America shouldn’t shortchange space science

Why you should read it: In the New York Times, the Planetary Society’s Casey Dreier protests the Trump White House’s desire to eviscerate NASA’s science budget—cutting funding for, among other things, robotic explorers by half in its proposed budget.

• “NASA’s science program manages a fleet of over 70 active missions stretching from the sun to interstellar space. Roughly 50 more are under intensive development. Despite this scale, the efforts account for about one-third of the agency’s annual budget — and a tiny 0.1 percent of total U.S. expenditures… If these cuts are enacted, the savings to taxpayers would be negligible, and the impact to science would be calamitous. Dozens upon dozens of productive science spacecrafts would have to be terminated for lack of funds, left to tumble aimlessly in space. Many projects currently under construction would be scrapped midstream, wasting billions already spent. NASA science institutions would be closed. Thousands of bright students across the country would be denied careers in science and engineering absent the fellowships and research funds to support them.”

• “Enacting these cuts would be a mistake — not only for the generational damage it would do to America’s scientific pre-eminence, but also for the symbolic curtailment of our ambitions. Space is among the most potent symbols in human society. It is big, unforgiving, alien and extremely hard to reach. Space agencies like NASA, then, are symbols unto themselves, an expression of a national self-identity projected into the heavens. Shattering NASA’s scientific capability would be an abandonment of our ideals: curiosity in the face of the unknown, relentless optimism and a practical determination to engage with the world as it is, not as we want it to be. Instead of looking up and out, we would become a country looking down and in, the national equivalent of a teenager hunched over an iPhone, oblivious to the world beyond.”

• Why it matters: “Curtailing the pursuit of space science is more than a question of budgets. It is a question of what kind of country we are and aspire to be. To retreat from the effort to know the cosmos in which we reside should not be the end of this American story.”

Odds and Ends

Visit the Heard and McDonald Islands, hit by President Trump’s tariffs despite being inhabited by zero humans and many, many penguins…

Why dinosaur tracks in Scotland show meat-eating theropods and plant-munching sauropods—predator and likely prey—drank from the same watering hole…

How the super-rich are hurting paleontological research by buying up T. rex fossils at an alarming pace…

Why Australia, of all places, has a the world’s largest feral camel population—and why nothing has worked to tame them…

How advances in 3D scanning technology have made it easier to preserve and visit hard-to-reach historical sites like the wreck of the Titanic…

What I’m Listening To and Watching

• Director Martin Scorsese’s enigmatic 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, starring Willem Dafoe as the title character and featuring an excellent cameo from David Bowie as well as a stellar score by Peter Gabriel.

• The second and final season of Andor, the Disney+ series that tells the origin story of the rebellion against the Galactic Empire in the Star Wars mythos.

• “California Blues,” a mellow paean to escaping Los Angeles from Duane Betts—the son of legendary Allman Brothers guitarist Dickey Betts—off his 2018 EP Sketches of American Music.

• “Everybody’s trying to figure me out,” a new and pensive single from the Haim sisters.

• A pair of recent covers of Harvey Danger’s apparently now-classic late 1990s track “Flagpole Sitta”: a dreamy rendition by AWOLNATION (featuring Elohim) and a more straightforward take by the All-American Rejects.

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“The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections... If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.”

- Justice Robert H. Jackson, West Virginia Board of Education vs. Barnette (1943)

What I’m Reading:

1. Why invading Canada is a bad idea

Why you should read it: The Atlantic columnist and strategy scholar Eliot Cohen details just why invading Canada is such a bad and dumb idea.

• “When I served as counselor of the State Department, I advised the secretary of state about America’s wars with Iraqi insurgents, the Taliban, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and al-Qaeda. I spent a good deal of time visiting battlefields in the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as shaping strategy in Washington. But when I left government service in 2009, I eagerly resumed work on a book that dealt with America’s most durable, and in many ways most effective and important, enemy: Canada… Unfortunately, we have tried this before, with dismal results. In 1775, before the United States had even formally declared independence from Great Britain, it launched an invasion of Canada, hoping to make it the 14th colony. The psychological-warfare geniuses in Congress ordered that the local farmers and villagers be distributed pamphlets—translated into French—declaring, ‘You have been conquered into liberty,’ an interesting way of putting it. Unfortunately, the Catholic farmers and villagers were largely illiterate, and their leaders, the gentry and parish priests who could read, were solidly on the side of the British against a bunch of invading Protestants… We tried again in 1812. Thomas Jefferson, the original Republican, described the acquisition of Canada as ‘a mere matter of marching.’ This was incorrect. The United States launched eight or nine invasions of Canada during the War of 1812, winning only one fruitless battle. The rest of the time, it got walloped. For example, General William Hull, like other American commanders a superannuated veteran of the Revolution, ended up surrendering Detroit with 2,500 troops to a much smaller British and Indian force. Court-martialed for cowardice and neglect of duty in 1814, he was sentenced to death but pardoned.”

• “Since the War of 1812, Americans have not tried any formal invasions of Canada, but there was tacit and sometimes overt support for the 1837–38 revolt of the Canadian patriotes, a confrontation over Oregon (a sober look at the size of the Royal Navy dissuaded us from trying anything), and the Fenian raids of 1866 and 1870. The Fenians were rather like the Proud Boys, only better organized and all Irish, and they also ended up fleeing back over the border… Canadians may have gone in for wokeness in recent years, it is true, but there is the matter of their bloody-minded DNA. It was not that long ago that they harvested baby seals—the ones with the big, sad, adorable brown eyes—with short iron clubs. They love hockey, a sport that would have pleased the emperors and blood-crazed plebeians and patricians of ancient Rome if they could only have figured out how to build an ice rink in the Colosseum… There is a martial spirit up north waiting to be reawakened. Members of the Trump administration may not have heard of Vimy Ridge, Dieppe, the crossing of the Sangro, Juno Beach, or the Battle of the Scheldt. Take it from a military historian: The Canadian soldiers were formidable, as were the sailors who escorted convoys across the North Atlantic and the airmen who flew in the Battle of Britain and the air war over Germany. Canada’s 44,000 dead represented a higher percentage of the population than America’s losses in the Second World War. Those who served were almost entirely volunteers.”

• Why it matters: “Bottom line: It is not a good idea to invade Canada. I recommend that in order to avoid the Trump administration becoming even more of a laughingstock, Secretary Hegseth find, read, and distribute to the White House a good account of the Battle of Chateau[gay]. It could help avoid embarrassment.”

2. Why NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander needs to be an American

Why you should read it: For The Bulwark, retired U.S. Army General Mark Hertling explains why NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander has got to be an American officer.

• “Since Gen. Dwight Eisenhower became the first supreme allied commander Europe in 1951, every top NATO commander has been an American. ‘SACEUR’ is likely the coolest name for the position, but it’s more than a title—the person who holds that job serves as the strategic glue binding the transatlantic alliance together, and that person becomes the symbol of leadership and commitment to the most successful security alliance in history. That’s why recent reports suggesting that President Trump is considering relinquishing the SACEUR role—as part of an initiative to transform U.S. combatant commands around the world—should alarm allies, military planners, and every American who values global stability and a strong relationship with our most important allies… The post is as much about strategic vision, international diplomacy, and sound operational management as about leading troops in combat. The person in that role must project both power and unity, equanimity and a bit of detached fairness toward countries large and small. That’s why the role has often been held by America’s most capable and talented officers, from Eisenhower to Matthew Ridgway to Wes Clark to the current occupant, Christopher Cavoli. Removing the U.S. general from this post would create a vacuum of leadership at the very center of NATO, and such a vacuum would immediately create confusion, friction, unnecessary competition, and risk in coalition operations.”

• “The tradition of American military leadership in NATO dates to World War II, when Eisenhower was appointed supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. The logic is relatively simple: French, British, Belgian, Canadian, Polish, and other allied forces would fight under an American commander because the Americans had brought an enormous military across an ocean to liberate the continent… Transferring the position to another country’s general as European nations are expanding their defenses against an emboldened Russia would be changing horses midstream; this change would not be a minor administrative reshuffle or a simple ‘change of command’ but a seismic shift in the architecture of collective defense. The SACEUR is dual-hatted as commander of U.S. European Command (EUCOM), one of the combatant commands that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is considering for transformation, downsizing, and integration with other commands. But being dual-hatted in this position allows SACEUR to integrate U.S. military power directly into NATO operations, ensuring the alliance can rapidly coordinate during a crisis… The fact that the man (and so far it has been all men) leading the most successful alliance in history wears the Stars and Stripes on his shoulder gives the United States extra clout in Europe. As valuable as our allies are, it seems inexplicable that any American would want to defer to a foreigner about the fate of the alliance—and the blood and treasure of Americans… Moreover, the geopolitical signals of such a decision would be catastrophic. Moscow would see it as an unmistakable sign of Western division and American retreat. When President Obama announced the ‘rebalance to Asia,’ I was in command in Europe, and I was immediately called by representatives from most of our NATO allies asking what it all meant for U.S. support. I also saw intelligence that noted Russia’s glee. Allies on NATO’s eastern flank—Poland, the Baltic states, Romania—felt especially vulnerable. Even more importantly, Beijing and Tehran would certainly take note: America no longer leads the world’s most successful military alliance.”

• Why it matters: “Make no mistake: Removing the U.S. general from the SACEUR post would be a soft exit from NATO leadership, even if Article 5 commitments remain on paper. It would undercut American influence at the very moment when a fragmented world demands unity among democracies. If the United States steps back, others will step in—but not necessarily in ways that serve American interests or global security. The SACEUR role is not a burden, it is a major strategic advantage in a strong multinational alliance. Leadership in this multinational coalition isn’t just about directing forces—it’s about projecting trust, capability, and the moral authority that binds coalitions together. Relinquishing that would be a self-inflicted wound and a gift to our adversaries. Now is certainly not the time for additional retreat. Now is the time to lead.”

3. How Trump is shooting America in the feet with a bazooka

Why you should read it: Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell observes that if President Trump wanted to cripple American power it’s hard to say what he would be doing differently.

• “More than anything else, President Donald Trump loves winning. Yet he has already positioned America to lose the 21st century, in three simple steps:

  1. Alienate your friends.

  2. Destroy your business environment.

  3. Slaughter your golden goose (i.e., science and research).

  “Trump most vividly demonstrated Step 1 with his Oval Office tantrum against a war-torn ally. But it also includes his gratuitous insults of our friends; abrupt termination of programs tackling global public health menaces (including some that the United States caused); and threats to punish our closest trading partners… All that soft power the United States accumulated over the past century is vaporizing. This means no friends to support us against our adversaries, whether rogue nations or terrorist groups. Ticking off our allies also means ticking off some of our best customers, who will turn to economic competitors. In some cases, these customers are outright boycotting U.S. products.”

• “Our country’s greatest global advantage, by far, is in science, research and technology. We have long been the global leader in R&D, which is why we have the most innovative companies, the most successful tech sector and the mightiest military. It is this knowledge sector — not some imagined renaissance in low-value goods manufacturing — that will determine who ‘wins’ the 21st century… Despite all this, Trump is gutting our scientific and research infrastructure.”

• Why it matters: “Trump and his allies might think they’re merely ‘owning’ the libs. In reality, he’s forfeiting what could have been the next great American century.”

4. Why Europe should create its own nuclear deterrent

Why you should read it: In Foreign Policy, Syracuse international relations professor Michael John Williams argues that questions about the reliability of America’s nuclear umbrella ought to prompt European nations to build their own shared deterrent.

• “Minus America, Europe finds itself unarmed in a dangerous, nuclear world. The arms control regimes developed during the Cold War have been abrogated by both the United States and Russia. China, never a signatory to the bilateral U.S.-Russia agreements of the Cold War, now seeks to expand and upgrade its own nuclear deterrent. Achieving a trilateral nuclear arms agreement would always have been tough, but without the Cold War agreements in place, the task is nigh impossible. To make matters worse, nuclear proliferation means that there are now nine nuclear powers… These are powerful incentives for the EU to develop a pan-European nuclear deterrent. Relying on Washington to provide extended nuclear deterrence for Brussels is an increasingly dubious proposition. And in this nuclear world, the actors with seats at the negotiating table to forge new nuclear arms control agreements will need to be nuclear powers themselves. If Europe wants to promote nuclear arms control, it paradoxically needs to go nuclear first.”

• “But the pursuit of a new nuclear capability by any one state in Europe is likely to trigger a security dilemma for the others—if Germany were to go nuclear, would this reassure Poland, or would it incentivize Warsaw to develop its own capability? Just as the United States used nuclear sharing to manage proliferation in early Cold War Europe, Brussels would do well to manage this situation proactively via a shared European nuclear project. Moreover, the development of a nuclear arsenal is extremely costly and difficult. Coordinating a pan-European deterrent would be more economical, focusing efforts against external threats rather than internal competition… The solution to these myriad challenges is a collective European finger on a collective European nuclear launch button. The best way to do this would be to dust off early Cold War plans for the [Multilateral Force]… a proposal to create a fleet of surface ships and submarines, crewed by European NATO allies, with the intent of giving those allies multilateral ownership and control in the nuclear defense of Western Europe.”

• Why it matters: “For 75 years, nuclear sharing in NATO has provided the United States an ability to manage proliferation and served as a strong tool of alliance management. But the only thing certain with the Trump administration is uncertainty, and Europe must plan accordingly. Although U.S. extended deterrence theoretically still covers NATO allies, European countries would be foolish not to develop a pan-European nuclear alternative… In a best-case scenario, a European nuclear deterrent will strengthen NATO, and in the worst-case scenario, if the United States abandons Europe, the continent will not be defenseless.”

5. How Trump is destroying America’s state capacity

Why you should read it: Niskanen Institute director David Dagan writes in Persuasion on how Trump’s demolition job on the federal government amounts to an anti-New Deal.

• “President Trump’s unilateral campaign to dismantle state capacity at home and shake the postwar liberal alliance abroad resembles the first 100 days of the New Deal in terms of its ambition and the backdrop of social upheaval. But the immediate causes and implementing strategy could hardly be more different. Trump’s campaign is based on a grotesquely distorted account of the problems we face, and his solution has not been to summon Congress to action but rather to sideline it… His approach to this ‘crisis’ has not been to ask Congress for extraordinary powers, but simply to take them: bullying and firing federal workers in defiance of the law, freezing appropriated funds, decapitating and shutting down agencies created by Congress. And the Republican-led Congress, far from objecting to these moves, has largely responded by applauding and approving the nominations of scandalously unqualified individuals to key posts in government. (The reduction of congressional Republicans to mere cheerleaders reflects a key difference between Trump and FDR: Roosevelt was elected with a sweeping mandate that reflected the real crisis the country was in, and his Democrats held overwhelming majorities in Congress. This made the lawful path to a constitutional restructuring much easier than it would be for today’s razor-thin, splintered GOP majority.)”

• “Of course, the fact that Trump managed to build a stunning political comeback and refashion the GOP in his image is indicative of the real problems facing America. The prosperity generated by the capitalist system that FDR saved in the New Deal has multiplied many times over, but the life satisfaction of average Americans has lagged. Rising premiums to education have benefited the third of Americans with college degrees and the regions where they congregate, leaving the rest of the country feeling abandoned. The blossoming of the internet age has upended recreation and social life as well as traditional working arrangements in industries ranging from retail to media to tax preparation… Donald Trump’s answer seems to be that liberal democracy is not up to the job. According to the logic of the Great Demolition, liberal democracy is largely a front for the machinations of a ‘woke elite’ that has brought us to this sorry state of affairs. It means the ‘censorship’ and sidelining of far-right critics that Vice President J.D. Vance recently bemoaned in Germany. As in the 1930s, Americans are drawn to whispers that only strongman rule can liberate the majority to speak its mind and enact its will.”

• Why it matters: “If it persists, the indiscriminate de-staffing and disempowering of the administrative state will amount to a reduction in both the gasoline and the engine oil available to America’s innovation economy. We will see less of the basic scientific research that leads to the new materials, drugs, and technologies that wealth is built on. We will see a decline in the capacity of American universities to attract top-flight talent, and, eventually, to offer undergraduates world-class education. We will see fewer of the inspections and routine monitoring that give the mass public the confidence to participate in the markets for food, medicine, air travel, the financial system, and other industries. We will eventually see lower innovation, higher prices, and less employment... The New Deal was a staggeringly ambitious effort to pull Americans back from the abyss. The superpower built on those achievements is now being systematically degraded with the same level of ambition. The effect may be to pull us back from frustrated prosperity to something far worse.”

6. Why DOGE amounts to nothing more than a repackaging of free market ideology

Why you should read it: In Fast Company, lawyer Jay Willis contends that Elon Musk’s DOGE represents little more than the latest incarnation of old-fashioned free market dogmatism.

• “At a press conference in the Oval Office earlier this month, Elon Musk—a billionaire who is not, at least formally, the President of the United States—was asked how the Department of Government Efficiency manages potential conflicts of interest to ensure ‘accountability and transparency.’ In response, Musk suggested that simply opening a browser tab would assuage the reporter’s concerns. ‘We post our actions to the DOGE handle on X, and to the DOGE website,’ he said. ‘So all of our actions are maximally transparent…’ The ‘Regulations’ tab [of the DOGE website], however, reveals the true nature of Musk’s project, which is not to deliver tax relief to working people, but to free wealthy corporations from pesky regulatory oversight. The page abandons dollars-and-cents metrics for something different: an ‘Unconstitutionality Index’ that divides the number of regulations enacted by federal agencies by the number of statutes passed by Congress each year. Users can scroll down to see how many regulations these agencies—’unelected bureaucrats,’ as DOGE calls them—have published, and even how many hundreds of thousands of words those regulations run.”

• “DOGE’s war on the very concept of regulation demonstrates just how little ‘innovation’ Musk and his henchteenagers are bringing to the putative task of streamlining the federal government’s workflow. Corporate interests, eager to shed even modest limitations on their ability to pay out executive bonuses and shareholder dividends, have spent decades arguing that regulations are unauthorized exercises of legislative power. At DOGE, Musk is simply repackaging these bog-standard, free-enterprise talking points with the trappings of Silicon Valley technobabble. In his position as this country’s de facto copresident, the more regulations he manages to scuttle, the more he and his cronies’ companies stand to profit.”

• Why it matters: “By enlisting Musk to go full Founder Mode on a dated federal bureaucracy, DOGE was pitched as the means of fulfilling every politician’s favorite promise: to run government more like a business. ‘We’re going to get the government off your back and out of your pocketbook,’ Musk told rallygoers in October to rapturous applause. But there is nothing new about the DOGE playbook, other than the involvement of a celebrity tech executive who is amused by memecoin backronyms. It is a decades-long ideological project to empower people like Musk to make themselves even wealthier at the expense of everyone else.”

7. Why DOGE’s plan to push AI across the government is “wildly dangerous”

Why you should read it: In Tech Policy Press, University of Michigan professor Ben Green outlines DOGE’s irresponsible and unworkable plans push AI into virtually every corner of the federal government.

• “Led by Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer now in charge of the General Services Administration’s technology team, the plan is to deploy AI widely across the federal government. The overall goal is to cut the agency’s budget by fifty percent. Shedd suggested using AI to analyze contracts for redundancies, root out fraud, and facilitate a reduction in the federal workforce by automating much of their work… To predict how Musk’s proposed transformation will go, we can look at prior examples of integrating AI into government decision-making and operations. There are already many instances of AI-driven governance gone wrong—particularly in cases where the goal is to root out fraud and cut budgets… In my home state of Michigan, the Unemployment Insurance Agency (UIA) adopted an algorithm (the Michigan Integrated Data Automated System, aka MiDAS) to streamline its operations. The UIA’s goals were to prevent unemployment fraud and to eliminate one-third of the existing staff by automating their work. MiDAS quickly boosted the cases of suspected welfare fraud by a factor of five, which led to a 23-fold increase in the UIA’s revenues… The only problem? Almost every accusation of fraud—93% of supposed fraud cases—was incorrect. Then, even once these errors became clear, it took years of litigation for the wrongly accused to receive the money they were owed. For many people, the fraud charge remained on their criminal record for years, barring them from jobs.”

• “What will happen if these plans for an AI revolution in government move forward? Already, we are seeing evidence that DOGE is repeating the same mistakes that have plagued other instances of government automation… DOGE will likely make many baseless judgments of waste and fraud based on AI results. This outcome will be partly due to Musk’s own wildly over-expansive definitions of waste and fraud. He has stated, without any evidence and contrary to other estimates, that ‘A trillion dollars can be saved just by addressing waste, fraud, and abuse.’ Given this viewpoint, DOGE’s AI developers will surely be more worried about avoiding false negatives (overlooking an instance of fraud) than false positives (incorrectly labeling a contract as wasteful or fraudulent), particularly in cases where they may have a conflict of interest… DOGE has already demonstrated a pattern of misinterpreting contracts, leading it to vastly overstate the savings it has generated. On February 19, DOGE posted a ‘wall of receipts,’ boasting $16.5 billion in savings from canceled contracts. Their calculations were riddled with mistakes. For instance, many ‘canceled’ contracts had ended years ago or were terminated under prior administrations... To make matters worse, DOGE is making these decisions in an opaque and unaccountable manner. It is unclear what role AI has played in the actions that DOGE has already taken. Moving forward, an AI’s classification of fraud could lead to contracts being canceled immediately without any notice or appeals process. When this action harms a person or organization, they may not be able to get a clear explanation of what happened aside from ‘the AI said so.’”

• Why it matters: “A central reason for these flawed AI tools is that engineers underestimate the complexity of government processes. In turn, engineers embed their superficial assumptions into software and overestimate their tools’ capabilities… The DOGE team is displaying this engineering hubris to an extreme degree. They are racing forward with little care for existing laws and protocols. Without spending the time to understand government operations, Shedd has asserted that AI can replace many federal workers… Of course, for Musk and his allies, these problems may be features rather than bugs. The AI will help them rapidly cut the federal budget and assert their dominance over the government. So what if many fraud accusations are incorrect and some essential government operations get waylaid?”

8. How human rights groups default to anti-Israel positions

Why you should read it: The Atlantic staff writer Michael Powell reports how prominent human rights groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Doctors Without Borders have refused to take into account Israeli perspectives and concerns about their conflict with the Palestinians, to the point of excommunicating their own Israeli chapters.

• “Amnesty’s goal was to serve as an advocate for victims and prisoners of conscience, and to stand apart from the polarized politics of the Cold War. The same ethos influenced the founders of Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders… More recently, though, human-rights leaders have grown accustomed to looking at the complicated stew of politics and culture in Israel and Palestine and blaming Israel foremost. As the cultural and political left has come to dominate the human-rights community, young staffers with passionate ideological commitments have helped rewrite the agendas of the best-known organizations. Critical theories of social justice, built on binaries that categorize Palestinians as oppressed and Israel as the oppressor, now dominate many conversations about the Jewish state, which a constellation of groups casts as uniquely illegitimate—a regressive, racist ethnic ‘Western’ state in an Arab sea.”

• “Human-rights groups fairly argue that disagreeing with Israel’s actions and policies is not anti-Semitic, but they have become more and more averse even to considering Israel’s side. ‘There’s clearly a leftist perspective that would like to do away with Israel,’ the longtime Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth told me. Roth led the group for decades before stepping down in 2022 and maintained that his former employer did not share this perspective. Some other former employees of the group disagreed. “The trend is to substitute ideology and personal belief for the principles of the human-rights movement,” Danielle Haas, who left her job as a senior editor at Human Rights Watch, told me… Major human-rights groups’ shift toward overt opposition to Israel has had the unusual effect of sidelining many of Israel’s own activists, who historically are among the sharpest critics of the Israeli government’s behavior in Gaza and the West Bank. These activists—along with many Jewish counterparts around the world—object to the reflexive condemnation of Israel and wrestle with questions they find vexing: How can the country protect itself from Hamas? What would a proportionate, defensible response to October 7 look like?”

• Why it matters: “After leaving Amnesty, Dan Balson has found himself adrift. He has begun, with reluctance and disappointment, to wonder about the assumptions of so many in the human-rights movement. ‘Within Amnesty, the phrase ‘Criticism of Israeli policy is not anti-Semitism’ has taken on a kind of mystical significance,’ he told me. ‘It is repeated frequently and forcefully, in private and in public. Amnesty’s leadership appears to believe that, if said with the proper zeal and elocution, the phrase will magically ward off deeper scrutiny…’ [Roy] Yellin, the left-wing Israeli activist who has collaborated with major international groups, is even more disillusioned. ‘They think if they just scream ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ maybe we will go back to Europe… Some days I feel like I’ve just been a useful idiot.’”

9. Why Trump’s should properly be considered anti-constitutional

Why you should read it: New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie calls attention to the fact that President Trump’s illegal actions aren’t just unconstitutional but anti-constitutional, actively hostile and antithetical to any notion of constitutional self-government.

• “Part of the conceptual basis of constitutionalism is a division between sovereignty and government. Sovereignty is the possession of supreme authority over the polity, and government is the instrument of that sovereignty. In an absolute monarchy or dictatorship, sovereignty belongs to the man or woman in charge, who commands the state in its entirety. In a constitutional system such as ours, sovereignty belongs to the people, who invest their authority in a set of rules and norms, a constitution, which binds and subordinates the government to their ultimate will… An anti-constitutional act is one that rejects the basic premises of constitutionalism. It rejects the premise that sovereignty lies with the people, that ours is a government of limited and enumerated powers and that the officers of that government are bound by law… The new president has, in just the first two months of his second term, performed a number of illegal and unconstitutional acts. But the defining attribute of his administration thus far is its anti-constitutional orientation. Both of its most aggressive and far-reaching efforts — the impoundment of billions of dollars in congressionally authorized spending and the attempt to realize the president’s promise of mass deportation — rest on fundamentally anti-constitutional assertions of executive authority.”

• “President Trump is clearly not restrained by the Constitution. He’s also not restrained by another important element of constitutionalism — an interest in and concern for the future… But this future sense is missing from the president and his political movement. Set against it, [legal scholar Jack] Jackson correctly observes, is a ‘radicalized politics of apocalyptic orientation’ that ‘happily sacrifices the prospect of a future for a present-tense ‘victory’ or redefines the sacrifice of the future as victory itself.”’”

• Why it matters: “When the president claims sovereign power to ignore Congress or deport foreign nationals without due process — when he treats the law as a suggestion, rejects any limits on his authority and makes the government his personal fief — he is both degrading the constitutional order and abdicating his responsibility to future generations of Americans. He is rejecting the obligation we have, as citizens, to carry on the effort to ‘form a more perfect union’ and ensure that ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’ He is selling our birthright so that he might enjoy a bit more power for the time he has left in office, indifferent to what it might mean for Americans yet to be born.”

Odds and Ends

How the James Webb Space Telescope found auroras on Neptune…

Paleontologists describe the recently-unearthed new species of dinosaur Duonychus tsogtbaatari as a “giant, feathered mix of a sloth and giraffe…”

How a trio of amateur mid-nineteenth century British linguists decoded the cuneiform writing of ancient Mesopotamia…

On the myriad receptions of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby over the century since its publication…

How Kurdish immigrants established themselves in Moorhead, Minnesota…

What I’m Listening To and Watching

• Daredevil: Born Again, the revival of the Marvel television series featuring blind lawyer Matt Murdock and his superheroic, crime-fighting alter ego Daredevil (played by Charlie Cox) facing off against crime lord-cum-mayor of New York Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio).

• The Leopard, a lavish Italian-language Netflix adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel about an aristocratic patriarch and his family confronting political and social change in 1860s Sicily.

• Mickey 17, Oscar-winning director Bong Joon Ho’s black comedy science-fiction film starring Robert Pattinson as the title character, an “expendable” who does the dirty work for a space colonization mission and is repeatedly cloned back to life when he dies.

• “Redemption Song,” a posthumously released Johnny Cash cover of a track from Sheryl Crow’s 1996 self-titled album.

• “Better Days,” the second song off of Graham Nash’s 1971 solo debut album Songs for Beginners.

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"The attempt to turn back the wheel of history will be futile. We Social Democrats know that one cannot undo the facts of power politics with mere legal protests. We see the power-political fact of your present rule. But the people’s sense of justice is also a political power, and we shall not cease to appeal to this sense of justice... In this historic hour, we German Social Democrats solemnly pledge ourselves to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom and socialism. No Enabling Act gives you the power to destroy ideas that are eternal and indestructible."

- Otto Wels, parliamentary leader of the German Social Democratic Party, March 23, 1933

What I’m Reading:

1. How Trump is a weak strongman

Why you should read it: Historian Timothy Snyder explains on his Substack why Donald Trump is a weak strongman and what that means for America and the world.

• “Americans have a certain idea of freedom. We are fine just the way we are and the only problem are the barriers in the outside world. In this mental world, Musk’s hollowing out of the government can seem justified. Trump’s betrayal of friends and destruction of alliances can seem convenient. We will be great again by being all alone, with no one to trouble us… Trump is a strongman in the sense that he makes others weak. He is strong in a relative sense; as Musk destroys institutions, what remains is Trump’s presence. But other sorts of power meaning vanish, as Musk takes apart the departments of the American government that deal with money, weapons, and intelligence. And then the United States has no actual tools to deal with the rest of the world… The strongman is weak because no one beyond the United States has anything to want (or fear) from the self-immolation. And weak because Trump submits to foreign aggression, putting waning American power behind Russia.”

• “The weak strongman undermines the rules, but cannot replace them with anything else. He creates the image of power by his rhetorical imperialism: America will control Greenland, Panama, Mexico, Canada, Gaza, etc. From there, it is hard to say that others are wrong when they invade other countries. The weak strongman is left endorsing other people’s invasions, as with Russia and Ukraine. He lacks the power to resist them. And he lacks the power to coerce them. And, ironically, he lacks the power to carry out wars himself. He lacks the patience, and he lacks the instruments… Trump plays a strongman on television, and he is a talented performer. But the strength consists solely of the submissiveness of his audience. His performance arouses a dream of passivity: Trump will fix it, Trump will get rid of our problems, and then we will be free. And of course that kind of Nosferatu charisma is a kind of strength, but not one that can be brought to bear to solve any problems, and not one that matters in the world at large. Or rather: it matters only negatively. As soon as Trump meets someone with a better dictator act, like Putin, he submits. But he can only enable Putin. He can’t really even imitate him… It’s an obvious point, but it has to be made clearly: no one in Moscow thinks that Trump is strong. He is doing exactly what Russia would want: he is repeating Russian talking points, he is acting essentially as a Russian diplomat, and he is destroying the instruments of American power, from institutions through reputation. No American president can shift an international power position without policy instruments. And these depend on functioning institutions and competent civil servants. In theory, the United States could indeed change the power position by decisively helping Ukraine and decisively weakening Russia. But that theory only becomes practice through policy. And it is not hard to see that Musk-Trump cannot make policy.”

• Why it matters: “A weak strongman brings only losses without gains. And so the descent begins. Destroying norms and institutions at home only makes Trump (or rather Musk) strong in the sense of making everyone else weak. In our growing weakness, we might be all tempted by the idea that our strong man at least makes us a titan among nations... But the opposite is true. The world cannot be dismissed by the weak strongman. As a strongman, he destroys the norms, laws, and alliances that held back war. As a weakling, he invites it.”

2. Why China’s trade surpluses are bad, part II

Why you should read it: Council on Foreign Relations international trade expert Brad Setser details the ways China under Xi Jinping is making the world pay for its own domestic economic policy mistakes.

• “But [Donald Trump] is not the only danger the world economy faces and may not even be the biggest. That may be President Xi Jinping of China, whose more strategic and calibrated industrial and economic policies are fundamentally distorting and harming global trade… Over the past six years, China’s imports of such [manufactured] goods increased by an average of only $15 billion a year, essentially no change at all when inflation is taken into account. Its manufactured exports, on the other hand, have grown more than 10 times as fast, by over $150 billion a year… China now dominates global manufacturing, and its trade surplus dwarfs the biggest run by Germany and Japan during their eras of postwar export supremacy. Countries around the world get cheap Chinese products, but they can’t sell nearly as many of their own to China. Their export sectors are hurting — see Germany — and not hiring.”

• “The roots of the problem go back to the global financial crisis of 2008. The crisis caused Chinese exports to fall. The government could have offset this by strengthening the ability of Chinese consumers to buy the country’s products through policies that support household incomes and by reducing the hefty taxes on low-wage workers and domestic consumption that finance China’s state… Chinese leaders opted instead to funnel the country’s huge household savings into an immense investment boom. New bridges, roads and, above all, apartments were built, and all of that construction and related economic activity allowed China to rely a bit less on exports for growth. But this created a real estate bubble, and when Mr. Xi responded by cracking down on the housing sector in 2020, he triggered a deep property slump that has persisted… In other words, Mr. Xi is making China’s trade partners and competitors pay for the government’s misplaced bet on real estate and its longer-term failure to strengthen the spending of Chinese households.”

• Why it matters: “All told, Chinese export volume is growing three times as fast as global trade. This means China’s success is directly coming at the expense of manufacturers in other countries, which increasingly cannot compete and face pressure to abandon sectors that China targets. With China’s real estate market still in the doldrums, the pattern shows no signs of changing. This points to a world economy in which China has no need for the industrial inputs of other countries while leaving those countries dependent on Chinese-made goods — and vulnerable to Beijing’s political and economic pressure.”

3. Why Trump is a very pro-China president

Why you should read it: Politico diplomatic correspondent Nahal Toosi contends that, his anti-China rhetoric notwithstanding, Donald Trump has proven to be a president quite amenable to Beijing’s interests.

• “…Trump has started his second term looking like the U.S. president Beijing has long wanted… In less than three weeks, using everything from threats of war against allies to freezing foreign aid, Trump has arguably done more to weaken America’s standing in the world than in his entire first term. He has given China’s communist regime a chance to strengthen itself just as it was facing economic headwinds.”

• “Since taking office on Jan. 20, Trump has frozen U.S. foreign aid in numerous countries while taking steps to shrink the U.S. Agency for International Development, endangering humanitarian and economic aid for millions in places where the Chinese government has sought to increase its influence. He has weakened his shot at convincing allies to move away from China by taking steps to impose tariffs on Mexico and Canada, two of America’s friends, neighbors and top trading partners. He has allowed tech mogul Elon Musk to take steps to gut the U.S. federal workforce, a move that tosses out an enormous amount of expertise in fields such as fighting Chinese propaganda. He has mocked the rule of law and Congress in a way that reinforces Beijing’s top-down leadership structure. And he has threatened to invade other countries, including U.S. partners — rhetoric that could embolden China to further menace Taiwan… At the same time, he has sought to safeguard the Chinese-owned company TikTok, invited Chinese leader Xi Jinping to his inauguration (Xi declined) and made it a point to seek out a call with him.”

• Why it matters: “But the lesson other countries are learning is not necessarily to obey America, multiple foreign diplomats told me. Instead, foreign officials say they are now more likely to take that call from the Chinese foreign minister, get tea with the Russian ambassador, or show up to meet with the Turkish commercial attache.”

4. Why people sanewash Trump

Why you should read it: On his Substack, Tufts political scientist Dan Drezner ponders the question of why so many people seem so eager to sanewash Trump’s most bizarre and deranged mental gestures.

• “There three distinct tribes that are currently rationalizing this particular batshit insane idea. First, there are Trump’s sycophants and media enablers of those sycophants. These are the anonymous White House insiders and White House reporters who rely on these insiders as sources… This sort of sanewashing is the most amusing, because it is basically a variation of someone saying, ‘crazy… or crazy like a fox?!’ It requires the person doing the sanewashing to constantly invoke business cliches like ‘outside the box’ to convince their interlocutors that world politics can be solved using the same business principles that forced Trump to declare bankruptcy multiple times. It rests crucially on the logic of ‘surely things can’t get much worse, why not try this?’ when the truth is that bad situations can always get worse.”

• “The second category of sanewashers are Trump’s contrarian pundits and colleagues. These folks almost always start their political conversations with ‘I didn’t vote for Trump, but…’ and then proceed to defend his strategic acumen for the next hour… Even dumb statements from Trump can be reframed as ‘he’s just asking questions.’ For the pundit, this has the added bonus of enraging and attracting sophisticated eyeballs by bravely declaring that Donald Trump is either right about something that everyone else thinks is rubbish, or asking the uncomfortable question that everyone else is too afraid to raise... My point, however, is that sanewashing is vital to sustain the premise that Trump is a secret political genius.”

• Why it matters: “The final group of Trump sanewashers are policy advocates weaponizing Trump’s words to advance their own agenda… This is the sanewashing that matters the most, because it leads to real-world consequences. Trump subordinates will be incentivized to implement policies they wanted to implement anyway by using Trump’s words as an intellectual pretext. Indeed, this move is a win-win: the subordinate can praise the Great Leader while executing their own policy agenda at the same time.”

5. How Trump and Musk are assaulting the foundations of American power and prosperity

Why you should read it: In MIT Technology Review, contributor Karen Hao delves into the ways the Trump-Musk attack on America’s scientific research and technological development agencies will cripple American power and prosperity.

• “Ever since World War II, the US has been the global leader in science and technology—and benefited immensely from it. Research fuels American innovation and the economy in turn. Scientists around the world want to study in the US and collaborate with American scientists to produce more of that research. These international collaborations play a critical role in American soft power and diplomacy. The products Americans can buy, the drugs they have access to, the diseases they’re at risk of catching—are all directly related to the strength of American research and its connections to the world’s scientists… That scientific leadership is now being dismantled, according to more than 10 federal workers who spoke to MIT Technology Review, as the Trump administration—spearheaded by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—slashes personnel, programs, and agencies. Meanwhile, the president himself has gone after relationships with US allies.”

• “The US currently has the most top-quality research institutes in the world. This includes world-class universities like MIT (which publishes MIT Technology Review) and the University of California, Berkeley; national labs like Oak Ridge and Los Alamos; and federal research facilities run by agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Defense. Much of this network was developed by the federal government after World War II to bolster the US position as a global superpower… The return on these investments is difficult to measure. It can often take years or decades for this kind of basic science research to have tangible effects on the lives of Americans and people globally, and on the US’s place in the world. But history is littered with examples of the transformative effect that this funding produces over time. The internet and GPS were first developed through research backed by the Department of Defense, as was the quantum dot technology behind high-resolution QLED television screens. Well before they were useful or commercially relevant, the development of neural networks that underpin nearly all modern AI systems was substantially supported by the National Science Foundation. The decades-long drug discovery process that led to Ozempic was incubated by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Institutes of Health. Microchips. Self-driving cars. MRIs. The flu shot. The list goes on and on… Beyond fueling innovation, a well-supported science and technology ecosystem bolsters US national security and global influence. When people want to study at American universities, attend international conferences hosted on American soil, or move to the US to work or to found their own companies, the US stays the center of global innovation activity. This ensures that the country continues to get access to the best people and ideas, and gives it an outsize role in setting global scientific practices and priorities. US research norms, including academic freedom and a robust peer review system, become global research norms that lift the overall quality of science. International agencies like the World Health Organization take significant cues from American guidance.”

• Why it matters: “…dismantling the behind-the-scenes scientific research programs that backstop American life could lead to long-lasting, perhaps irreparable damage to everything from the quality of health care to the public’s access to next-generation consumer technologies. The US took nearly a century to craft its rich scientific ecosystem; if the unraveling that has taken place over the past month continues, Americans will feel the effects for decades to come.”

6. Why DOGE’s incompetence is a feature, not a bug

Why you should read it: Wired reporter Brian Barrett observes that the stunning incompetence displayed by Elon Musk and his clique of young cybercriminals running DOGE is a feature of their efforts, not a bug.

• “This is just the truly dumb stuff, the peek behind the veil of DOGE, the confirmation that all of this destruction is, in fact, as specious and arbitrary as it seems. When in doubt, tear it all down, see what breaks, assume you can repair it—maybe with AI? It’s the federal government; how hard can it be?… This is incompetence born of self-confidence. It’s a familiar Silicon Valley mindset, the reason startups are forever reinventing a bus, or a bodega, or mail. It’s the implacable certainty that if you’re smart at one thing you must be smart at all of the things.”

• “It doesn’t work like that. Michael Jordan is the best basketball player of all time; when he turned to baseball in 1994, Jordan hit .202 in 127 games for the AA Birmingham Barons. (For anyone unfamiliar with baseball stats, this is very bad. Embarrassing, honestly.) Elon Musk is the undisputed champion of making money for Elon Musk. As effectively the CEO of the United States of America? Very bad. Embarrassing, honestly… It takes a certain swashbuckling arrogance to propel a startup to glory. But as we’ve repeatedly said, the United States is not a startup. The federal government exists to do all of the things that are definitionally not profitable, that serve the public good rather than protect investor profits. (The vast majority of startups also fail, something the United States cannot afford to do.)”

• Why it matters: “There are two possible explanations for this mess. One is that Musk and DOGE have no interest in the government, or efficiency, but do care deeply about the data they can reap from various agencies and revel in privatization for its own sake. The other is that a bunch of purportedly talented coders have indeed responded to a higher civic calling but are out here batting .202.”

7. Why DOGE will backfire

Why you should read it: University of Michigan public policy professor Don Moynihan argues in The Atlantic that DOGE will fail due to its contempt for public service and public servants.

• “President Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk justify dismantling the civil service as cost cutting… For all of Trump’s and Musk’s talk of efficiency, their policies will likely slow down the government. The state needs capacity to perform core tasks, such as collecting revenue, taking care of veterans, tracking weather, and ensuring that travel, medicine, food, and workplaces are safe. But Trump seems intent on pushing more employees to leave and making the civil service more political and an even less inviting job option. He bullies federal employees, labeling them as ‘crooked’ and likening their removal to ‘getting rid of all the cancer.’ A smaller, terrified, and politicized public workforce will not be an effective one.”

• “To start, let’s dispense with the notion that the government is too big. It is not. As a share of the workforce, federal employment has declined in the past several decades. Civilian employees represent about 1.5 percent of the population and account for less than 7 percent of total government spending… If the federal government should, then, rightly be focused on hiring, it is quite obviously doing the opposite, but the manner in which the Trump administration and DOGE are forcing workers out will only compound the error. Ten thousand USAID employees, for example, were recently placed on administrative leave. Employees on leave must still be paid, so little money will be saved in the short run. And if they’re rehired, the agencies will have to incur the costs that resulted from the disruption in their work. The USAID inspector general’s office has said that the agency has almost entirely lost its ability to track $8.2 billion in unspent aid. (The inspector general was fired the day after his office made that announcement.) Projects such as drug trials and medical treatments have been abandoned.”

• Why it matters: “We rely on public employees every day, usually not noticing how they make our lives better. The costs of dismantling agencies, dramatically politicizing state capacity, and demeaning the idea of public service will still be counted long after Trump has departed the scene.”

8. Why DOGE amounts to an artificial intelligence coup

Why you should read it: For Tech Policy Press, Eryk Salvaggio writes that DOGE’s wire-stripping of the federal government amounts to a coup against democracy on behalf of the purveyors and propagandists of artificial intelligence.

• “Artificial intelligence (AI) is a technology for manufacturing excuses. While lacking clear definitions or tools for assessment, AI has nonetheless seized the imagination of politicians and managers across government, academia, and industry. But what AI is best at producing is justifications. If you want a labor force, a regulatory bureaucracy, or accountability to disappear, you simply say, ‘AI can do it.’ Then, the conversation shifts from explaining why these things should or should not go away to questions about how AI would work in their place… The Trump administration frames generative AI as a remedy to ‘government waste.’ However, what it seeks to automate is not paperwork but democratic decision-making. Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are banking on a popular but false delusion that word prediction technologies make meaningful inferences about the world. They are using it to sidestep Congressional oversight of the budget, which is, Constitutionally, the allotment of resources to government programs through representative politics… In contrast to Musk and his acolytes' ongoing claims of ‘existential risk,’ which envision AI taking over the world through brute force, an AI coup rises from collective decisions about how much power we hand to machines. It is political offloading, shifting the messy work of winning political debates to the false authority of machine analytics. It's a way of displacing the collective decision-making at the core of representative politics.”

• “Amidst the chaos in Washington, Silicon Valley firms will continue to build their case that they are the answer. We can expect another industry announcement of a radical new capability for AI in the near future. OpenAI may once again claim to reach PhD-level intelligence (as in September 2024 and again in January 2025), or DOGE may launch a new chatbot trained on government data… To serve its purpose, any generative AI deployed here wouldn't have to be good at making decisions or even showcase any new capacities at all. It merely has to be considered a plausible competitor to human decision-making long enough to dislodge the existing human decision-makers in civil service, workers who embody the institution's values and mission. Once replaced, the human knowledge that produces the institution will be lost… By shifting government decisions to AI systems they must know are unsuitable, these tech elites avoid a political debate they would probably lose. Instead, they create a nationwide IT crisis that they alone can fix.”

• Why it matters: “The AI coup emerged not just from the union of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. It is born of practices and beliefs now standard among Silicon Valley ideologues that are obscure to most Americans. However, the tech industry's weakness is that it has never understood the emotional and social complexity of actual human beings… The AI coup depends on a frame of government efficiency. This creates a trap for Democratic representatives, where arguing to keep government services–and government employees–will be spun as supporting government waste. But this is also an opportunity. AI achieves ‘efficiency’ by eradicating services… Do not fall for the trap. Democratic participation and representative politics in government are not ‘waste.’ Nor should arguments focus on the technical limits of particular systems, as the tech elites are constantly revising expectations upward through endless promises of exponential improvements. The argument must be that no computerized system should replace the voice of voters. Do not ask if the machine can be trusted. Ask who controls them.”

9. How Trump resembles Mao Zedong

Why you should read it: Long-time China scholar Orville Schell makes the case that Trump resembles no other figure more closely than Mao Zedong, whose talent and penchant for nihilistic disruption produced the calamity of the Cultural Revolution.

• “…there is a precedent for Trump’s political blitzkrieg: Mao Zedong. While Mao, who launched China’s violent Cultural Revolution, and Trump share little in the way of geography, ideology, or hairstyle, they can both be described as agents of insurrection… Mao’s abiding belief in the power of resistance led him to celebrate conflict. ‘Without destruction, there can be no construction’ (不破不立), he proclaimed. Another vaunted slogan of the time declared: ‘World in great disorder: excellent situation!’ (天下大乱形势大好). This impulse to disrupt or ‘overturn’ (翻身) China’s class structure proved massively destructive. But Mao justified the resulting violence and upheaval as essential elements of ‘making revolution’ (搞革命) and building a ‘New China.’”

• “The Trump administration has an equally voracious appetite for disruption and chaos. Palantir CEO Alex Karp, whose co-founder Peter Thiel is also a Trump acolyte, recently described the new president’s overhaul of the United States government as a ‘revolution’ in which ‘some people will get their heads cut off.’ And this revolution’s executioner-in-chief would appear to be the world’s richest person, Elon Musk… Musk is more than a little reminiscent of Kuai Dafu, who was deputized by Mao himself to lead Tsinghua University’s Red Guard movement. Kuai not only brought chaos to his campus, but led 5,000 fellow Red Guards into Tiananmen Square shouting slogans against Liu and Deng, before attempting to lay siege to the nearby leadership compound, Zhongnanhai – much as Trump’s own version of the Red Guards did at the US Capitol in 2021.”

• Why it matters: “Trump may lack Mao’s skills as a writer and theorist, but he possesses the same animal instinct to confound opponents and maintain authority by being unpredictable to the point of madness. Mao, who would have welcomed the catastrophe now unfolding in America, must be looking down from his Marxist-Leninist heaven with a smile, as the East wind may finally be prevailing over the West wind – a dream for which he had long hoped.”

Odds and Ends

How Musk’s cuts to the National Science Foundation have already disrupted the U.S. Antarctic Program…

The first new royal tomb to be discovered in Egypt since Howard Carter found King Tut over a century ago…

Fifteen songs from the legendary and deeply idiosyncratic 1960s and 1970s rock and funk musician Sly Stone…

On a strange rash of “dinosaur” sitings in the Congo…

How a recently-unearthed woodhenge in Denmark may be connected to Stonehenge and similar monuments in England…

What I’m Listening To and Watching

• Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) takes up the red-white-and-blue vibranium shield as the title character in the entertaining and enjoyable superhero thriller Captain America: Brave New World.

• Paradise, an excellent post-apocalyptic thriller involving a Secret Service agent (Sterling K. Brown) unraveling the mystery surrounding the murder of the president (James Marsden) and the possible role of a tech oligarch (Julianne Nicholson) in a cover-up.

• The second season of School Spirits, a supernatural murder-mystery series which finds high-school student Maddie (Peyton List) trapped in limbo (and the grounds of her high school) as she seeks answers to her own demise.

• The essentials of legendary mid-century jazz musician John Coltrane, at least according to the good algorithms over at Apple Music.

• “The Song is Over,” a deep cut from the Who’s seminal 1971 album Who’s Next.

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Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again.  - W.H. Auden, "September 1, 1939"

What I’m Reading:

1. Why China’s trade surpluses are bad

Why you should read it: On his Substack, former New York Times columnist Paul Krugman explains why China’s trillion-dollar trade surplus is bad for the rest of the world.

• “Should China be celebrating its achievement? No — this surplus is a sign of weakness, not strength, a symptom of China’s apparent inability to grapple with its fundamental economic problems… Giant Chinese trade surpluses create problems in other countries too — although not the problems crude mercantilists like Donald Trump imagine. And China’s attempt to export its problems (for that’s what this amounts to) will meet a protectionist backlash; in fact, this would have happened even if Trump weren’t about to take office.”

• “…the Chinese economy is having big problems adjusting to the prospect of slower economic growth; extremely high rates of investment are no longer sustainable in the face of diminishing returns, yet the government remains unwilling to do the obvious, and promote higher consumer spending… Without question, China’s big trade surplus is helping to keep its economy afloat — for now. But the weak yuan policy is almost certain to backfire, big time, because the rest of the world won’t accept those surpluses for very long.”

• Why it matters: “As a practical matter, however, regional job loss in the face of import surges generates a powerful political backlash. So the rest of the world just isn’t going to accept China’s attempt to export its way out of policy failure. Trump would probably slap high tariffs on China no matter what, but that giant trade surplus means that Europe, the UK, and probably everyone else will do the same… Tariffs on China are unavoidable unless China makes major policy changes, but the tariffs should be smart and reflect real policy concerns, not a visceral belief that trade deficits mean you’re losing. Also, even given what I’ve said, 60 percent tariffs are wildly excessive. And since China’s trade surplus is a global concern, we should be acting in concert with our allies, not alienating Europe, Canada and Mexico with tariffs on everyone. Among other things, let’s not forget that Trump basically wimped out on China last time after the Chinese retaliated against U.S. farm exports; that would be much less likely to happen if America was working with its allies, not against them.”

2. What America needs to do to round out its China policy

Why you should read it: Former Biden administration China advisers Elizabeth Economy and Melanie Hart argue in Foreign Affairs that the United States needs more trade deals with friends and allies around the world to compete fully with Beijing.

• “Washington, however, is still competing with one hand tied behind its back, and progress, although significant, is moving too slowly. It will take a full suite of economic incentives, public-private partnerships, and investment and trade deals to reduce the United States’ and its partners’ reliance on China. U.S. partners, concerned about Chinese influence themselves, are eager to work with Washington… Many countries and multinationals recognize that they are too reliant on China and are seeking other options. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the risk of overdependence on any single supplier, even a benevolent one. And Beijing has shown that it is not benevolent. Countries now worry about Chinese economic coercion reducing their exports and investments, Chinese overcapacity harming their domestic industries, and potential Chinese military action against Taiwan disrupting critical supply chains.”

• “Efforts to de-risk the U.S. economy and the economies of U.S. allies and partners through supply chain diversification and targeted infrastructure investment have made real, measurable gains. Supply chains are moving. New projects are coming online. But progress is slow, labor-intensive, and expensive. If the goal is to secure U.S. and global supply chains and reduce China’s leverage over the United States and its partners, then Washington cannot holster the biggest weapon in its arsenal: trade… If the global market is set up in ways that make Chinese goods more attractive than others, subsidies and other direct incentives are rowing upstream. They can incentivize companies to build new mines and fabrication plants, but those companies still need to find buyers for their products. Doing so is difficult when Chinese alternatives are always cheaper—and Beijing can drop prices even lower if it chooses. As the Chinese government continues to subsidize both domestic manufacturing and overseas investment and sign new trade deals that further reduce the cost of trade with China relative to trade with the United States or its partners, Beijing will persistently undermine the progress Washington has made.”

• Why it matters: “If the global market is set up in ways that make Chinese goods more attractive than others, subsidies and other direct incentives are rowing upstream. They can incentivize companies to build new mines and fabrication plants, but those companies still need to find buyers for their products. Doing so is difficult when Chinese alternatives are always cheaper—and Beijing can drop prices even lower if it chooses. As the Chinese government continues to subsidize both domestic manufacturing and overseas investment and sign new trade deals that further reduce the cost of trade with China relative to trade with the United States or its partners, Beijing will persistently undermine the progress Washington has made.”

3. Why Trump’s talk of seizing Greenland echoes the run up to the Iraq war

Why you should read it: Talking Points Memo proprietor Josh Marshall details the ways in which Trump’s threats against Greenland resemble the discourse that preceded the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

• “I’m starting to get a strong Iraq War vibe about Greenland… I don’t mean that I expect a catastrophic and ruinous U.S. invasion to take place. I’m referring to something different… but let’s just say: still not great. One of my strongest memories of those dark times 20-plus years ago was a peculiar dynamic that took hold in Washington after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The desire to invade Iraq was already a big thing in elite conservative circles in the late Clinton years. That was the origin of the ‘Iraq Liberation Act’ of 1998. After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration quickly made clear it wanted to overthrow the Iraqi regime either as retaliation for the attacks or as some sort of preemptive action to forestall future attacks… From the first weeks after the 9/11 attacks, there was a kind of competitive bidding largely though not exclusively in right-wing DC circles proposing arguments for the invasion. There was the democracy argument, the WMD argument, the Saddam-bin Laden alliance argument among a lot of others. These almost entrepreneurial proposals moved between the think tanks and the administration with a range of policy entrepreneurs and agitators bubbling in the mix. For anyone there at the time and watching all this closely it was impossible not to ask, what’s the real story here? What’s actually motivating this? I discussed this at the time not only here at TPM but in a number of articles in The Washington Monthly. One of my abiding memories of those months is being at a party in DC and having a pro-Iraq War journalist walk me through these different arguments for the war. At a certain point in the conversation I said, Okay, I get the logic in each of those cases. But these aren’t really arguments. They’re rationales. Which is the actual reason why the people leading this charge want to do this? It can’t be a bunch of logically unrelated rationales.”

• “What I eventually decided was that there actually was no reason. Or to put it more specifically, the idea of invading Iraq and overthrowing its government had become a sort of idée fixe in 2002 in Washington, DC. Once it became clear that people at the highest levels of the administration really, really wanted to do this there was a kind of unannounced contest to come up with a reason why it was a great idea. It’s started to feel like that again today. Donald Trump is a bit obsessed with possessing Greenland. And that’s creating a kind of gravitational pull to come up with reasons to justify the idea… Needless to say, all of these ideas are fairly weird. What seldom gets discussed in what we must now call ‘Greenland discourse’ is that the U.S. already has a military base in Greenland with about 100 soldiers permanently stationed there. To the extent that Greenland becomes an even more strategically placed piece of land in a warmed Earth future (which is quite possible, even likely) there’s every reason to think we can come to some agreement with either Denmark (the current national government) or Greenland itself (if it becomes independent) to secure everyone’s defense interests. The Greenlanders probably don’t want to be invaded by China or Russia any more than we’d want that to happen. And similar to the situation with the Panama Canal, it’s all kind of moot.”

• Why it matters: “This is all a long way of saying that these Greenland ideas are solutions in search of a problem. But you can see how Trump’s obsession is creating that same gravitational pull, creating a hot house climate where upstart national revivalists are coming up with new reasons to conquer or buy Greenland, explaining the mix of economic, strategic or spiritual awesomeness doing so would bring in its wake… But it is worth keeping an eye on the Trumper freak show that is busy spinning up these ideas. Remember, this didn’t go great last time.”

4. How DOGE turns over the government to Elon Musk and other would-be oligarchs

Why you should read it: Substacker Don Moynihan outlines the ways the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) represents a hostile takeover of the U.S. government by techno-oligarchs like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen.

• “The shape of the [oligarchic] America that Biden describes is revealed in a variety of ways. Trump has assembled a Cabinet of the very rich. The three richest men in the world sat in the front row of his inauguration. He has authorized the very richest man to reorganize American government… Here is a factual description of DOGE: it is a group run by right-wing billionaires who oppose government regulation of their businesses, and benefit from government contracts. It avoids accountability standards that we expect of other groups who seek to influence government. It is not run by people who have a deep knowledge of the function of government, or have much patience with the procedural requirements that flow from laws… DOGE will bypass normal policymaking processes or rebuttals by experts. Years of carefully developed policy compromises will be portrayed as corrupt and broken. Andreessen proposed that ‘of course you want efficiency, and of course you want cost cutting wherever you can get it, and of course you want to eliminate fraud and abuse and all these things.’ Evoking norms like ‘efficiency’ or cutting ‘fraud and abuse’ serves to abstract real cuts to real programs that people depend upon. But with a sophisticated enough messaging operation, maybe you can change the policy before enough people realize what has been taken from them.”

• “Because you cannot separate DOGE from Musk, it comes with the power that he brings to the table. This includes extraordinary media power: Musk owns what is (still) the most influential social media platform in the world. How might he use this power? Andreessen provided one clue, which is that DOGE will become a propaganda machine, doing for government programs what LibsOfTikTok has done for school teachers: amplifying negative messaging to undermine public support… Andreessen's argument is that if people really understood government programs like Social Security — the way that some very online tech billionaires who don't understand government do — they would not support them. And the billionaires will use their social media make the public misunderstand these programs the way they do.”

• Why it matters: “To be clear, America in 2024 is not 1990s Russia. And so, the use of oligarchy as a description has its limits. But in the weeks and months ahead, we should be willing to apply a critical lens to DOGE and its work, rather than taking its claims at face value. Unwilling to follow the rules, it needs to earn trust through its actions. And ‘oligarchy’ seems like a reasonable if extreme alternative to the lens of ‘good government commission….’ I don’t know what the answer will be, but we should be ready to ask: Does DOGE work for the American government, or does the American government work for its sponsors?”

5. How Germany’s economic model broke—and why there’s no good ideas on how to fix it

Why you should read it: Wall Street Journal reporters Tom Fairless and Bertrand Benoit describe how Germany’s export-fueled economic model ran into deep trouble—and why few German politicians have proposed real alternatives.

• “Slowing economic growth in China and growing competition from companies there have undercut German industry as a whole. Combined with exploding energy costs and the threat of new trade tariffs, the forecast is grim…Gross domestic product has roughly flatlined since 2019, before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic—the longest period of stagnation since the end of World War II. Most economists expect it will stagnate again this year… Germany’s industrial output has fallen by 15% since 2018, and the total number of people employed in the manufacturing sector is down 3%. Manufacturers in Germany’s metal and electrical industry, weighed down by costs, could lay off as many as 300,000 workers over the next five years, said Stefan Wolf, president of a lobby group for the sector. ‘Deindustrialization is in full swing,’ said Wolf, adding that over €300 billion in investment capital has flowed out of Germany since 2021.”

• “The country, with 83 million inhabitants, grew into the world’s third largest economy by making and exporting the engineering products—cars, robots, trains, factory machinery—others wanted to buy. Now, the world is turning its back on made-in-Germany, and Germany has no plan B… Trade in goods is more critical to Germany’s economy than oil is to Texas or tech to California—an overdependence that is the result of decades of government policy that supported export manufacturing while creating hurdles to investment in new sectors such as IT or in the country’s infrastructure. Exports support roughly one in four German jobs. More than two-thirds of cars produced in Germany are exported. Since the mid-1990s, exports’ share of Germany’s GDP doubled, reaching 43% of GDP, four times the share in the U.S. and twice as high as China.”

• Why it matters: “Most politicians are focusing on how to tweak and improve the current export-reliant, manufacturing-heavy economic model. New ideas to encourage investment and consumption, boost trade inside Europe or open up to fast-growing tech or services sectors are virtually absent… Decades of government underinvestment have left Germany with a depleted transportation infrastructure, including trains that no longer run on time and a military that is a shadow of what it was during the Cold War. In May, the business-affiliated IW economic institute and the trade union-owned IMK think tank estimated Germany would need €600 billion in spending over the next 10 years to offset its investment gap, modernize the country’s education system, fix its transport networks, upgrade its power grid and digitize its public administration.”

6. How Trump’s budget cuts will cripple American science

Why you should read it: Jake Steckler of TechPolicy.Press shows how federal budget cuts proposed by the Trump administration will eviscerate America’s capacity for research and innovation.

• “This is how many major innovations originated—from someone motivated to solve a problem, driven not by profit but by discovery, and often funded by the government. Yet, today, many of Silicon Valley’s most influential leaders helped re-insert Donald Trump into the White House, whose administration is hostile to federal agency funding and likely to govern in ways anathema to technological progress. Dismantling the federal agencies that lead and support the nation’s scientific research will have devastating effects on the type of innovation that saves lives and improves our standard of living… The MAGA coalition has already revealed itself to be a credible threat to vital government-funded projects. Last month, President Trump and Elon Musk’s recent demands for a leaner budget led Congress to remove funding for child cancer research in the most recent funding bill. Now, a Trump executive order caused the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) operations to abruptly halt, putting frontier biomedical research at risk. An OMB memo further ordered agencies to pause the disbursement of funds for clean energy projects associated with the Inflation Reduction Act.”

• “Many of our truly groundbreaking inventions since the Industrial Revolution are the fruits of research motivated by an intractable problem and fueled by government agencies. Not just the internet, which carries our information across the globe, but the jet engines that power us to physically do the same, and the GPS that steers us the right way. NASA-funded research gave us the baby formula that nourishes our infants, and the NIH and National Science Foundation have enabled many of our most profound medical breakthroughs, from vaccines to MRI machines. Even the duct tape that literally holds things together was borne out of a project greenlighted by FDR during World War II… Trump’s first administration proposed major cuts to the NIH, NSF, NASA, DOE, and the EPA. His proposals largely failed, thanks to Congress wielding the power of the purse. But with a more politically experienced Trump inner circle and a Republican-controlled Congress—not to mention Elon Musk, who is calling for $2 trillion in federal spending cuts as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—the odds of Trump having his way are higher this time around. The irony of Musk’s austerity crusade is the early survival of Musk’s Tesla hinged on government grants and subsidies. SpaceX, another Musk venture, has earned over $20B in government contracts since 2008.”

• Why it matters: “A policy approach that encourages innovation is one that prioritizes funding for basic research, actively attracts the world’s best talent to the United States, and places a premium on education. Preventing catastrophic impacts to the agencies that have long enabled the critical R&D on which America relies will only require a few Republican congress members to vote against the Trump coalition’s proposals. But critics fear that Congressional loyalty to Trump is stronger than ever before… If Congress toes the line on anti-R&D policies, American innovation will falter at a time when it’s desperately needed.”

7. Why the TikTok ban is good, actually

Why you should read it: On his Substack, Center for New Liberalism honcho takes TikTok apologists to task for ignoring the social media platform’s very real threats to American national security.

• “The TikTok ban is coming, and TikTok’s user base is doing a speed run of the five stages of grief… [TikTok creator] Soupy’s rant about the TikTok ban has been shared widely across the web, and it’s emblematic of TikTok in general. There’s no specific argument other than vaguely conspiratorial vibes. There’s a wild misunderstanding of what terms like ‘free speech’ and ‘fascism’ mean. There’s no facts or data or hard evidence presented. The video is laced with the pseudo-intellectualism of a college freshman who just got high for the first time. Soupy doesn’t actually understand what’s happening, but social media incentivizes her to be righteously angry about it. And because we’re all addicted to being outraged the video went viral.”

• “The actual argument for banning TikTok has always been about national security. China under Xi Jinping’s rule is a totalitarian nightmare state. It is still actively genociding minority populations, it crushes dissent and human rights, and it’s America’s geopolitical enemy. It would be absolutely insane to allow the CCP to control one of the most important information channels in our country… Some people conflate this as just being about ‘data’, but that’s wrong. Data privacy is a concern, but the larger concern is about control of the algorithm and control of what hundreds of millions of people see. During the Cold War, we wouldn’t have dreamed of letting the USSR control NBC, directing whatever propaganda they wanted into American households. Why would we let the CCP control one of the largest social media sites today? It’s shocking how few people address this, even those arguing directly against the ban. You’re more likely to see a direct acknowledgement that it happens. ‘I know China is influencing me or spying on me, but that’s better than Mark Zuckerberg!…’ It really isn’t in question that TikTok is beholden to the CCP and that they’re already using their power to influence public opinion.”

• Why it matters: “Arguably one of the most dangerous uses of social media by both foreign and domestic actors has been to convince an entire generational cohort that the US government is literally Satan while other governments have only friendly intentions. This knee-jerk anti-Americanism is spread by the alt-right, by the far left, and by the foreign governments that benefit from extremist political discourse in America. It’s why such a sizable pro-Russia contingent exists online when Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine is a fairly uncomplicated good vs evil situation. It’s why people can say with a straight face that Mark Zuckerberg is equal to or worse than a genocidal dictatorship. It’s why so many Zoomers assume the US government is at all times deliberately trying to ruin their lives, while China is just a cute lil guy who wants to be friends. If Xi Jinping invaded Hawaii next week there would undoubtedly be a contingent of young people who would embrace Xi Jinping Thought and say that the US deserved it… All that’s left is the cope. Both ByteDance and their users have proven in the last few weeks exactly why it’s so dangerous to give a totalitarian state control of your information channels. People will spend the next week flipping out, but absent a last-minute deal where someone buys TikTok the ban is happening. I don’t love strengthening two already gigantic social media behemoths. But it’s preferable to having the CCP own TikTok.”

8. How the campaign against “neoliberalism” failed

Why you should read it: The Atlantic columnist Jonathan Chait observes that the left’s “post-neoliberal” program failed politically by failing to win over the working-class voters its proponents said it would.

• “On the substance, Biden’s economic agenda has registered some meaningful successes. The hot labor market raised wages; union organizers at a handful of companies, such as Starbucks and Amazon, have made breakthroughs; and the administration’s public investments in chip production and green energy have built up strategic domestic industries. As a political strategy, however, post-neoliberalism has clearly failed. Biden’s popularity dropped to catastrophic levels in his first year and never recovered, leaving his successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, unable to escape his gravitational pull. If rejecting neoliberalism for four years did nothing to pull working-class voters away from Trump, perhaps Trumpism was never a revolt against neoliberalism in the first place.”

• “Some Democrats have responded to the disaster of 2024 by insisting that the way forward for the party is to keep doing what Biden did, but louder and more insistently. In fact, Trump’s reelection ought to call into question the whole foundation upon which the strategy was constructed… In November, working-class voters of all races, the very constituency that Biden’s anti-neoliberal turn was supposed to court, deserted the party. Perhaps hoping for Roosevelt-size majorities was a bit ambitious, but Biden’s sweeping, historic changes ought to have had at least some positive directional impact for the party. Unless, that is, the post-neoliberal theory of politics was wrong all along… The pro-Trump swings were small [in places that received Biden investments], ranging from 0.1 percent to 3.5 percent—well below the national average. One could spin this as evidence that Biden’s domestic build-out had brought some marginal benefits—fractional gains concentrated in areas that were chosen as the staging grounds for gigantic national expenditures. But we are talking about small local shifts, obtained via many billions of dollars of federal investment. That is not a scalable national strategy.”

• Why it matters: “Public policy, of course, is not just about winning elections; it’s about improving people’s lives. Some of the policies Biden implemented are worth preserving on the merits. The blue-collar workers of Lordstown may well be in a better position than they were four years ago. But the electorate’s diffidence in the face of these measures is bracing. The notion that there is a populist economic formula to reversing the rightward drift of the working class has been tried, and, as clearly as these things can be proved by real-world experimentation, it has failed. It turns out there’s more to popularity than populism.”

9. The pseudo-intellectual origins of our Silicon Valley techno-oligarchy

Why you should read it: A blast from the past—Corey Pein’s 2014 piece in The Baffler that profiles the neoreactionary mentality exemplified by PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel and logorrheic blogger Curtis “Mencius Moldbug” Yarvin that had already seized the imaginations of many in Silicon Valley.

• “Welcome to the latest political fashion among the California Confederacy: total corporate despotism. It is a potent and bitter ideological mash that could have only been concocted at tech culture’s funky smoothie bar—a little Steve Jobs here, a little Ayn Rand there, and some Ray Kurzweil for color… Moldbuggism, for now, remains mostly an Internet phenomenon. Which is not to say it is ‘merely’ an Internet phenomenon. This is, after all, a technological age. Last November, [Curtis] Yarvin [aka ‘Mencius Moldbug’] claimed that his blog had received 500,000 views. It is not quantity of his audience that matters so much as the nature of it, however. And the neoreactionaries do seem to be influencing the drift of Silicon Valley libertarianism, which is no small force today. This is why I have concluded, sadly, that Yarvin needs answering.”

• “If the Koch brothers have proved anything, it’s that no matter how crazy your ideas are, if you put serious money behind those ideas, you can seize key positions of authority and power and eventually bring large numbers of people around to your way of thinking. Moreover, the radicalism may intensify with each generation. Yesterday’s Republicans and Independents are today’s Libertarians. Today’s Libertarians may be tomorrow’s neoreactionaries, whose views flatter the prejudices of the new Silicon Valley elite… California libertarian software developers inhabit a small and shallow world. It should be no surprise then, that, although [PayPal cofounder Peter] Thiel has never publicly endorsed Yarvin’s side project specifically, or the neoreactionary program in general, there is definitely a whiff of something Moldbuggy in Thiel’s own writing. For instance, Thiel echoed Moldbug in an infamous 2009 essay for the Cato Institute in which he explained that he had moved beyond libertarianism. ‘I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,’ Thiel wrote.”

• Why it matters: “Might a dictatorial approach, in Thiel’s opinion, also work better for society at large? He doesn’t say so in his Stanford lecture (although he does cast tech CEOs as the heirs to mythical ‘god-kings’ such as Romulus). But Thiel knows where to draw the line in mixed company. Ordinary people get so ‘uncomfortable’ when powerful billionaires start talking about the obsolescence of participatory government and ‘the unthinking demos,’ as he put it in his Cato essay. Stupid proles! They don’t deserve our brilliance!… It is clear that Thiel sees corporations as the governments of the future and capitalists such as himself as the kings, and it is also clear that this is a shockingly common view in Thiel’s cohort.”

Odds and Ends

How Italian scientists discovered the perfect cacio e pepe recipe…

Archaeologists in England have unearthed a remarkably well-preserved sword from the fifth or sixth century, one with a silver-and-gold hilt inscribed with runic script…

How sunken shipwrecks tell the story of World War II’s Aleutian Islands campaign…

NASA announces that samples of the asteroid Bennu returned by the OSIRIS-REx probe contain the requisite building blocks for life as we know it…

How one Danish fossil hunter found a regurgitalite—66 million year old fossilized shark vomit—and what it can tell us about the late Cretaceous food chain…

What I’m Listening To and Watching

• Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, an entertaining mash-up of The Goonies and Pirates of the Caribbean set in the Star Wars universe and featuring Jude Law as a ruthless, Force-wielding pirate captain.

• Cunk on Life, in which landmark documentary presenter Philomena Cunk (deadpan comedian Diane Morgan) explores the meaning of life.

• All Blues, guitar hero Peter Frampton’s 2019 album of blues covers—perfect listening for a road trip.

• “Backwater Blues,” the penultimate track from blues guitar legend B.B. King’s last studio album, 2008’s One Kind Favor.

• “The Cross,” a smoldering track from Prince’s classic 1987 album Sign O’ The Times that’s one of his most spiritual songs.

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"This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.

"We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some—perhaps many—may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

"This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe."

- Jimmy Carter, "Voyager Spacecraft Statement by the President," July 29, 1977

What I’m Reading:

1. Why Trump will make America a lonely, predatory power

Why you should read it: In The Atlantic, columnist David Frum argues that the second Trump presidency will see America turn away from its historic post-World War II as a defender of freedom and an open world to a predatory power that operates like a gangster more than anything else.

• “From the Marshall Plan of the 1940s to the Trans-Pacific Partnership of the 2010s, Americans sought to achieve security and prosperity for themselves by sharing security and prosperity with like-minded others. The United States became the center of a network of international cooperation—not only on trade and defense, but on environmental concerns, law enforcement, financial regulation, food and drug safety, and countless other issues… Donald Trump is the first U.S. president since 1945 to reject the worldview formed by the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the Cold War… Trump regularly disparages U.S. allies, and threatens to abandon them. ‘We’re being taken advantage of by every country all over the world, including our allies—and in many cases, our allies are worse than our so-called enemies,’ he said at a rally this November. But unlike the ‘America First’ movement before World War II, Trump’s ‘America First’ vision is not exactly isolationist. Trump’s version of ‘America First’ is predatory.”

• “Open trade and defensive alliances were already bumping into domestic resistance even before Trump first declared himself a candidate for the presidency… But Trump uniquely accelerated America’s retreat from world markets, and will continue to do so. His first-term revision of the North American Free Trade Agreement preserved existing access to U.S. markets for Canada and Mexico in return for raising higher barriers around all three North American economies. He has nominated Jamieson Greer, who he said ‘played a key role during my First Term in imposing Tariffs on China and others,’ as U.S. trade representative. The tariffs Trump desires, the protection money he seeks, and his undisguised affinity for Putin and other global predators will weaken America’s standing with traditional allies and new partners. How will the United States entice Asian and Pacific partners to support U.S. security policy against China if they are themselves treated as threats and rivals by the makers of U.S. trade policy?”

• Why it matters: “Every president puts a face on the abstraction that is the American nation, and gives words to the American creed. Few spoke more eloquently than Ronald Reagan, who famously compared the United States to a ‘shining city on a hill…’ Under Trump, America will act more proudly, yet have less to be proud of. Its leaders will pocket corrupt emoluments; the nation will cower behind tariff walls, demanding tribute instead of earning partnership. Some of its citizens will delude themselves that the country has become great again, while in reality it will have become more isolated and less secure.”

2. What Trump doesn’t get about tariffs

Why you should read it: Financial Times columnist Alan Beattie details what president-elect Trump doesn’t understand about trade and tariffs.

• “For Trump, import taxes are the philosopher’s stone that turns base metal into gold. They coerce trading partners into toeing US lines, close deficits (bilateral and overall) by keeping out cheap dumped imports, raise revenue, create jobs, revive manufacturing and generally make America great again, all in one go… Even before taking office Trump has threatened them twice: against Mexico and Canada if they don’t sort out immigration and the fentanyl trade, and against the Brics middle-income countries for their (almost non-existent) campaign for a currency to replace the US dollar.”

• “But in reality, even leaving aside that tariffs only affect goods rather than services, the US is a smaller player than its self-image seems to suggest. If Trump really does favour tariffs over other measures like export controls on technology and financial sanctions he will find them a clumsy and often ineffective way of asserting American power… Quite simply, the US just isn’t that big in global trade any more. With a diverse production profile, it has always been quite a self-sufficient economy, and the rise of the Asian consumer pushed the US share of worldwide goods imports down to just 15.9 per cent last year, less than Europe (taking the EU and UK together) and only 3 percentage points above China… With the exception of a few economies highly integrated with the US such as Mexico and Canada, most of those likely to face US tariff coercion could replace it as a final market with pain but without catastrophe. Evenett calculates that even if the US market were completely closed to a particular trading partner, by 2030 more than 100 of them, including Australia, China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, India and Germany, would have recovered their lost exports elsewhere.”

• Why it matters: “The world trade system showed extraordinary flexibility and resilience after Trump imposed tariffs on Chinese goods during his first term. Quite apart from the loopholes negotiated by US companies such as Apple, production and distribution networks proved good at slinking around blocks on exports… Tariffs may have an intuitive appeal, but the evidence suggests they are a weaker superpower than Trump supposes.”

3. Why isolationism begets international belligerence

Why you should read it: For Liberal Currents, Matthew Downhour makes the case that anti-trade political coalitions at home almost always pursue to belligerent foreign policies abroad.

• “In the United States and elsewhere, internal coalitions that denigrate foreign trade have often been the most bellicose. Their coalitions have the least to lose from war, and swearing off free trade makes seizing resources through force seem more attractive. This unfortunately means that the incoming ‘America First’ coalition is likely to put the United States in greater, not less, risk of conflict… Inward-looking [domestic] coalitions economically desire to build up an autarkic economy that in turn favors local, static elites. This is especially attractive to those that have gained their status and wealth through local dominance of internationally non-competitive economic sectors. Because a modern economy requires a variety of resources, however, this disavowal of free trade means ‘inward-looking’ coalitions are perhaps misnamed, as they in fact seek opportunities to gain natural resources and perhaps even markets outside the borders of the metropole, primarily through imperialism or settler colonialism.”

• “The ideal of self-contained autarky does not mean, as one might suppose, a less interventionist view on the world. Instead, eroding the norms of free trade obligates an advanced economy to have direct access to whatever resources it might need, or else a way to ensure the countries it buys from are perpetually in friendly hands. America’s own history can be something of a guide here—the same presidents (McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and Taft) who presided over the high tariffs of the Gilded Age also committed the United States to annexing Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, and creating a virtual empire out of most of Latin America. Coalitions that are generally inward-looking are not above having their eyes wander avariciously to foreign soil. Far from facilitating a peaceful transition to ‘America first"‘ isolationism, a United States traveling this path is likely to be less averse to bellicosity and more willing to risk war, having weakened any internal commercial or civil society coalition that might push back against it.”

• Why it matters: “For decades, experts have seen the US as a "status quo" power—while it may have intervened in other countries’ specific affairs, it was dedicated to overall preservation of the world order it had helped create during and after the Cold War. This order emphasized peace between great powers and international institutions dedicated to maintaining increasing economic links between states to give all of them a stake in trade and a growing global economy. However, these were policies pursued largely by an internationalist coalition, one branch or another of which held sway in Washington during both Republican and Democratic presidencies. The years of this internationalist coalition dominating American politics—and thus embracing trade and peace at least with major economies—may be coming to an end. This could mean entering a new era where the economic forces that had resisted military adventurism and brinkmanship are much weaker and the political-economy forces that encourage it have taken the lead.”

4. How Obama and Merkel screwed up

Why you should read it: Reviewing former German chancellor Angela Merkel’s new memoir and her American book tour with former president Barack Obama, Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman provides a scathing retrospective on the records of both leaders.

• “From 2008 to 2016, Merkel and Obama were the two most powerful politicians in the western world. They got on well — which is not surprising, since they were similar characters. They were both outsiders: the first female chancellor of Germany and the first Black president of the US… Both Merkel and Obama are self-assured, highly educated, intellectual and cautious by temperament. These are qualities that endeared them to cautious, educated liberals. (I plead guilty.) But, in retrospect, their careful rationalism made them ill-equipped to deal with ruthless strongman leaders like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.”

• “…it is increasingly clear that decisions taken by the two leaders — or often the decisions not taken by them — had a damaging, if delayed, impact on global stability. We are now witnessing major wars in Europe and the Middle East and sharply rising tensions in east Asia. Some of today’s problems date to mistakes made in a crucial period from 2012 to 2016… Merkel did not like or trust Putin. But she did appease him. The mistakes made by the former chancellor — particularly after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and attack on the Donbas in 2014 — were picked apart in many reviews of her book… Rather than pushing back against the mistakes made by the German chancellor, Obama compounded them. In his second term, he made three critical foreign policy blunders. Collectively, they sent out a message of weakness that contributed to the mess we are in today.”

• Why it matters: “Merkel has a PhD in quantum chemistry. Obama was a law professor. Their training told them to weigh the evidence and to avoid rash decisions. Unfortunately, international politics is less like a law school seminar or a laboratory than a playground in a tough area. Playground bullies tend to get nastier and more aggressive, until somebody finally stands up to them.”

5. Why America is looking to rebuild its commercial shipbuilding industry

Why you should read it: Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Michales profiles efforts in Congress and in the outgoing Biden administration to rebuild America’s moribund commercial shipbuilding industry.

• “Not long ago, America led the world in sea freight. At the end of World War II, the U.S. commercial marine fleet accounted for about half of the world’s cargo-shipping capacity. An American entrepreneur in the 1950s pioneered the shipping container, which revolutionized international commerce… U.S. commercial ships today account for less than 1% of the world fleet. U.S. ports are racked by strikes and battles over the type of automation that has supercharged expansion of container terminals across the globe. The Navy struggles to find commercial vessels to support its far-flung operations.”

• “Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro has advocated a focus on ‘maritime statecraft,’ stressing commercial shipping’s importance to the Navy in tasks including refueling ships and carrying vital military supplies… And he has championed expanding the U.S. Merchant Marine, a corps of commercial sailors who can assist the Navy in wartime and whose ranks have plunged over recent decades. Government and industry officials estimate the U.S. now has fewer than 10,000 merchant mariners, compared with roughly 50,000 in 1960… That start, Navy and industry officials hope, is a piece of legislation recently introduced by Sens. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.) and Todd Young (R., Ind.) and two House members, the Shipbuilding and Harbor Infrastructure for Prosperity and Security for America Act. If passed, it would be the first major piece of maritime legislation since 1936.”

• Why it matters: “China’s rise as a military rival to the U.S. prompted a push to modernize and expand the Navy… Commercial shipping’s importance to national security gained renewed attention during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the U.S. and allies faced shortages of necessities as basic as surgical masks. Alarm grew in Western capitals about China’s domination of the sea-freight business, ports and obscure specialties such as tracking cargo data… At [World War II’s] end, the U.S. had roughly 4,500 commercial cargo ships and 75,000 merchant mariners. Those numbers shrank as ships grew in size and efficiency while international competition increased. Decisions by the Reagan administration in the 1980s to end subsidies for shipping and shipbuilding, in part to focus shipyards on a Navy expansion, accelerated the domestic industry’s decline.”

6. Why cryptocurrency remains a scam with no real use… besides crime

Why you should read it: Former New York Times columnist Paul Krugman reiterates that there’s no real use for cryptocurrency other than facilitating criminal schemes.

• “But the real reason banks don’t want to be financially connected to crypto is that they believe, with good reason, that to the extent that cryptocurrencies are used for anything besides speculation, much of that activity is criminal — and they don’t want to be accused of acting as accessories… One of the (many) odd things about cryptocurrency is that it has somehow managed to maintain an image as something futuristic when it’s actually ancient in tech years: Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, which still accounts for more than half of the total crypto market cap, is 15 years old. Over this entire period, monetary economists and banking veterans have asked, what’s this for? What legitimate use cases are there for cryptocurrency that can’t be served more easily without the blockchain rigamarole?”

• “I’ve been in many meetings where this question has been raised, and have never heard a coherent answer. In fact, crypto has made essentially no inroads on conventional money’s role as a means of payment — which is why crypto guys are so angry about being debanked: you can’t do business without an account at one of those banks Bitcoin was supposed to replace. Even the crypto industry’s own employees won’t accept payment in crypto, which is why the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, where they deposited funds for payroll, was an existential crisis demanding, yes, a government bailout… One answer you sometimes hear, especially from financial executives who want to say something positive about crypto, is that Bitcoin in particular may be turning into the digital equivalent of gold. After all, gold doesn’t really function as money — try buying a car with gold bars — and its industrial and dental uses, while real, don’t remotely justify its value. It’s just an asset that people consider valuable because others consider it valuable, and it has maintained that status even though gold coins went out of use as a means of payment generations ago.”

• Why it matters: “But there’s a third possible explanation of crypto’s rise. Maybe asking ‘what are the legitimate use cases for this stuff’ is the wrong question. What about the illegitimate uses, ranging from tax evasion to blackmail to money laundering? Maybe crypto isn’t digital gold, but digital Benjamins — the $100 bills that play a huge role in illegal activity around the world… Presumably not everyone in crypto is participating, even unknowingly, in criminal activity. But the use of crypto for money laundering appears to be rising rapidly. And if I were running a bank, I’d be reluctant to host a bank account belonging to someone who might be involved in unsavory activities.”

7. How a second Trump presidency forced the center-left to come to its senses

Why you should read it: The Atlantic columnist Jonathan Chait contends that re-elevation of Donald Trump to the presidency has brought the American left’s decade-long romance with illiberal identity politics to an end.

• “A decade ago, cultural norms in elite American institutions took a sharply illiberal turn. Professors would get disciplined, journalists fired, ordinary people harassed by social-media mobs, over some decontextualized phrase or weaponized misunderstanding… The illiberal norms that took hold a decade ago have gone by many terms, including political correctness, callout culture, cancel culture, and wokeness—each of which has been co-opted by the right as an all-purpose epithet for liberalism, forcing left-of-center critics of the trend to search for a new, uncontaminated phrase. The norms combined an almost infinitely expansive definition of what constituted racism or sexism—any accusation of bigotry was considered almost definitionally correct—with a hyperbolic understanding of the harm created by encountering offensive ideas or terms… The censorious elements of the new culture could be hard to acknowledge at a time when many of the same energies were being directed at deserving targets—most notably, police mistreatment of Black Americans (#handsupdontshoot) and sexual harassment and assault of women in the workplace (#MeToo). Partly for that reason, or out of a general discomfort with criticizing their allies, some progressives insisted either that nothing new was afoot in the culture and that reactionaries were manufacturing a moral panic out of thin air, or alternatively that there was something new, but it merely involved overdue accountability (or ‘consequence culture’) for racist and sexist behavior… These tactics ignored the possibility that any charge of racism might be erroneous, or that it might be possible to overreact to its scale, and had no limiting principle.”

• “The mania peaked in 2020. By this point, Twitter’s influence had reached a level where large swaths of reporting in major newspapers were simply accounts of what Twitter was talking about. When the coronavirus pandemic struck, social media almost totally eclipsed real life—especially for liberals, who were much likelier than conservatives to stick with social distancing…The aftermath of the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel further chipped away at the foundations of left-wing illiberalism by showing how easily its premises could be co-opted by the other side. Many Jews who had previously supported the left’s approach to racial issues began to apprehend that their allies considered them oppressors, rather than the oppressed. Meanwhile, the response from supporters of Israel turned the cancel-culture debate on its head. In the face of anti-Israel protests, congressional Republicans hauled several university presidents into hearings, where they were berated and urged to adopt sweeping policies not only against anti-Semitic conduct, but against any speech that made Jewish students feel threatened. Suddenly, the rhetoric of safety and harm that had been used by the left was being deployed against it, and principled free-speech defenders were sticking up for the right of protesters to chant ‘Death to Israel.’ This put even more strain on the already unraveling consensus that allegations of racial discrimination must be treated with total deference… In the end, progressive illiberalism may have died because the arguments against it simply won out. Although a handful of post-liberal thinkers on the left made an earnest case against the value of free-speech norms, deflections were much more common. It was just the antics of college undergraduates. When it began happening regularly in workplaces, the real problem was at-will employment. And, above all, why focus on problems with the left when Republicans are worse? None of these evasions supplied any concrete defense for sustaining dramatic, widely unpopular culture change. Eventually, reason prevailed.”

• Why it matters: “Once political correctness had expanded to the point where it could affect candidates for office at a national scale, it would inevitably begin to self-destruct. A small group of committed activists can dominate a larger organization by intimidating a majority of its members into silence, but that tactic doesn’t work when people can vote by secret ballot… What will come after the era of political correctness within the left is, hopefully, a serious effort to engage with political reality. While the illiberal left is in retreat, the illiberal right is about to attain the height of its powers—and, alarmingly, some of the institutions that once gave in too easily to left-wing mobs are now racing to appease the MAGA movement. A new era of open discourse in progressive America cannot begin soon enough.”

8. How Democrats got the politics of immigration wrong

Why you should read it: Also in The Atlantic, Rogé Karma writes about how left-wing activists pushed Democrats to take positions on immigration that had little to no actual support among actual Latino voters.

• “For more than a decade, Democrats have struck an implicit electoral bargain: Even if liberal immigration stances alienated some working-class white voters, those policies were essential to holding together the party’s multiracial coalition. That bargain now appears to have been based on a false understanding of the motivations of Latino voters… Part of the story is the rise of progressive immigration-advocacy nonprofits within the Democratic coalition. These groups convinced party leaders that shifting to the left on immigration would win Latino support. Their influence can be seen in the focus of Hillary Clinton’s campaign on immigration and diversity in 2016, the party’s near-universal embrace of border decriminalization in 2020, and the Biden administration’s hesitance to crack down on the border until late in his presidency.”

• “The notion that Latinos are single-issue immigration voters became something like conventional wisdom thanks to the 2012 presidential election. Barack Obama had won more than two-thirds of the Latino vote four years prior, only to see his approval ratings plummet with these voters over the first few years of his presidency. Then, in the summer of 2012, he signed the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals executive order promising legal protections for Dreamers—undocumented immigrants who had been brought to the country as children. This, the story goes, galvanized Latino voters just as Obama’s opponent, Mitt Romney, was busy alienating them with calls for ‘self-deportation.’ Obama went on to win more than 70 percent of the Latino vote that fall, and this was widely attributed to DACA… This perception provided an opening for immigration-advocacy organizations. Following the 2012 election, [polling firm] Latino Decisions continued to churn out polls on their behalf showing that—contrary to a large body of public-opinion research—immigration was actually the top issue for Latino voters, and that Latinos had far more liberal views on immigration policy than the rest of the electorate… But Democrats had spent the better part of a decade listening to those [immigration activist] groups—and to Barreto’s polling done on their behalf. With just over 100 days to campaign, the vice president couldn’t distance herself from the policies of the administration she had helped run. In one post-election survey, Blueprint, a Democrat-aligned firm, found that the second most important reason that voters (including Latinos) offered for not voting for Harris was ‘too many immigrants illegally crossed the border under the Biden-Harris administration.’ (The top issue, by a single-point margin, was inflation.) Another Blueprint survey found that 77 percent of swing voters who chose Trump believed that Harris would decriminalize border-crossing—perhaps because she had endorsed that position during the 2020 campaign. ‘Both the Biden and Harris campaigns eventually realized that they had been sold a bag of goods by these immigration groups,’ [political strategist Mike] Madrid tells me. ‘But it was too late. You can’t reverse years of bad policy and messaging in a few months.’”

• Why it matters: “The Democratic Party’s embrace of these groups was based on a mistake that in hindsight appears simple: conflating the views of the highly educated, progressive Latinos who run and staff these organizations, and who care passionately about immigration-policy reform, with the views of Latino voters, who overwhelmingly do not. Avoiding that mistake might very well have made the difference in 2016 and 2024. It could therefore rank among the costliest blunders the Democratic Party has ever made… The job of politicians and parties is to understand what their constituents want, and to say no when those desires don’t match up with activists’ demands. Over the past decade, Democratic leaders appear to have lost the ability to distinguish between the two categories. They seem to have assumed that the best way to represent Latino voters would be to defer to the groups who purported to speak for those voters. The problem is that the highly educated progressives who run and staff those groups, many of whom are themselves Latino, nonetheless have a very different set of beliefs and preferences than the average Latino voter.”

9. Behold the Jimmy Carter renaissance!

Why you should read it: Talking Points Memo reporter Kate Riga explores how Jimmy Carter’s presidency, once considered a failure, has been reassessed much more positively over the past decade or so.

• “For years, the conventional wisdom has held: Carter was a bad president, but an exemplary ex-president… in the last decade, a churn of work — biographies, documentaries, books — has been produced aimed at reevaluating the Carter presidency… Some found Carter to be prescient, almost prophetic, in his concern about climate change and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some found him to be ahead of his time in his diversification of the federal judiciary and preservation of wide swaths of Alaskan wilderness. Some found him to be distinctly unsung, with little attention given to his brokering of peace with the Camp David Accords and emphasis on global human rights… A serious, intelligent, faithful, deeply honest man who spurned political expediency and burned through hundreds of pages of memos a day, he preached self-restraint, stewardship and commonality to an electorate that cast him off four years later for the glib excesses of Ronald Reagan.”

• “It’s impossible to talk about Carter’s current appeal without mentioning Trump… Where Trump lied, by one count, over 30,000 times by the end of his presidency, Carter was honest to the point of self-inflicted political pain. Trump commissioned ludicrously glowing health reports and took a still-mysterious trip to the hospital; Carter disclosed when he had hemorrhoids.Trump was a scandal magnet, and faced a bevy of lawsuits stemming from his business deals, alleged sexual assaults and attempts to overthrow the 2020 election. One of the headlines from the Carter administration involves a placidly rowing Carter running afoul of an aggressive swamp rabbit. Trump refused to reveal his taxes; Carter started the practice of presidents releasing entire tax returns, and put his assets in a trust… Removed from but intrinsically connected to Trump is the sentiment that permeates swaths of the country and allowed him to rise: intensive individualism, disdain for compassion as weakness, a grievance manifested in an us vs. them mentality. Again, Carter is a foil to the Trump ethos.”

• Why it matters: “Jimmy Carter revivalists argue that his legislative accomplishments reveal a prolific presidency, and his failures the foresight of a president worried about problems that would continue to haunt the country decades later… His piecemeal approach [to energy and environmental policy], cloaked in distinctly unsexy bills like the 1978 Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act, planted the seeds for a changing national energy system in the face of climate change. Carter had started underlining passages in scientific journals about what is now the most existential crisis of our time as early as 1971… Some of the reevaluation may also stem from more logistical realities. The Carter Presidential Library has declassified many more documents now, and Carter agreed to sit for interviews with his two most recent biographers, something he was generally opposed to in the years prior… There are many factors contributing to the Jimmy Carter renaissance, and they all work in concert to burnish the legacy of a man once dismissed as a one-term failure.”

Odds and Ends

Who’s a good boy? Humans began giving dogs treats 12,000 years ago, according to new evidence uncovered by archaeologists…

How a timber framer from Grand Marais, Minnesota helped rebuild Notre Dame cathedral in Paris…

The farcical story of when Australia went to war with emus—and lost…

How members of the British Antarctic Survey spent their Christmas…

Why dinosaur poop can help paleontologists explain just how the terrible lizards came to dominate the planet…

What I’m Listening To and Watching

• Black Doves, a spy thriller starring Keira Knightley (the Pirates of the Caribbean series, among others) as a mole married to a senior British politician and Ben Whishaw (Q from the recent James Bond films and the voice of Paddington bear) as a troubled hit man.

• The fifth season of Miss Scarlet, the PBS series about a female private detective (Kate Phillips of Peaky Blinders fame in the title role) plying her trade in late Victorian London.

• Yacht Rock: A DOCKumentary, an entry in Bill Simmons’ Music Box series for HBO, explores a genre of extremely smooth music featuring the likes of Steely Dan, Kenny Loggins, and Michael McDonald that went largely unrecognized until an obscure comedic web video series coined it in the mid-2000s.

• An episode of Dan Snow’s History Hit podcast on the Cod Wars between Iceland and the UK from the 1950s to the 1970s that’s much more interesting than it has any right to be.

• Two songs titled “New Year's Day” by U2 and Taylor Swift.

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"Through me you go into the city of weeping;
Through me you go into eternal pain;
Through me you go among the lost people.

Justice is what moved my exalted Maker;
I was the invention of the power of God,
Of his wisdom, and of his primal love.

Before me there was nothing that was created
Except eternal things; I am eternal:
No room for hope, when you enter this place."

- Dante, Inferno, III.1-9

What I’m Reading:

1. What does it mean to call Trump a fascist

Why you should read it: In the New Yorker, historian Timothy Snyder dissects what it means when we correctly call Trump a fascist.

• “Trump’s skills and talents go unrecognized when we see him as a conventional candidate—a person who seeks to explain policies that might improve lives, or who works to create the appearance of empathy. Yet this is our shortcoming more than his. Trump has always been a presence, not an absence: the presence of fascism… When the Soviets called their enemies “fascists,” they turned the word into a meaningless insult. Putinist Russia has preserved the habit: a ‘fascist’ is anyone who opposes the wishes of a Russian dictator. So Ukrainians defending their country from Russian invaders are ‘fascists.’ This is a trick that Trump has copied. He, like Vladimir Putin, refers to his enemies as ‘fascists,’ with no ideological significance at all… Putin and Trump are both, in fact, fascists. And their use of the word, though meant to confuse, reminds us of one of fascism’s essential characteristics. A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meanings. He does not serve the language; the language serves him… That is quite a fascist achievement. Faced with the complexity of history, liberals struggle with the overwhelming volume of questions to be asked, answers to be offered. Like communism, fascism is an answer to all questions, but a different kind of answer. Communism assures us that we can, thanks to science, find an underlying direction in all events, toward a better future. This is (or was) seductive. Fascism reduces the imbroglio of sensation to what the Leader says… A fascist just has to be a storyteller. Because words do not attach to meanings, the stories don’t need to be consistent. They don’t need to accord with external reality. A fascist storyteller just has to find a pulse and hold it. This can proceed through rehearsal, as with Hitler, or by way of trial and error, as with Trump.”

• “Trump’s presence has always been a co-creation: his and ours. From the moment when he first came down the Trump Tower escalator in 2015, he was treated as a source of spectacle. Because he was good for television, he was accepted as a legitimate candidate. In the print media, he grew through the doctrine of both-sides-ism: no matter how awful his deeds, his opponent had to be presented as equally bad. This empowered him to be both wicked and normal. During every campaign’s final months, polling had a similar effect. By displacing policy differences and reducing politics to two faces or two colors, polls reinforce the notion that Trump belonged where he was, and that politics was just a matter of us or them… What amplifies Trump’s presence more than any other medium is the Internet. He is a natural with its quirky rhythms. And its algorithms make the rest of us open to exactly his sort of talky fascism. On social media, we are drawn away from people of complexity and toward blunt stereotypes. We ourselves are categorized, and are then fed content that brings out, in Václav Havel’s term, our’“most probable states.’ The Internet does not just spread specific conspiracy theories; it primes our minds for them.”

• Why it matters: “Fascism is now in the algorithms, the neural pathways, the social interactions. How did we fail to see all this? Part of it was our belief that history is over, that the great rivals to liberalism were dead or exhausted. Part of it was American exceptionalism: ‘it can’t happen here’ and so on. But most of it was simple self-absorption: we wanted to see Trump in terms of his absences, so that our way of seeing the world would go unchallenged. So we failed to see his fascist presence. And, because we ignored the fascism, we were unable to make the easy predictions of what he would do next. Or, worse, we learned to thrill at our own mistakes, because he always did something more outrageous than we expected… Again and again, our major institutions, from the media to the judiciary, have amplified Trump’s presence; again and again, we have failed to name the consequences. Fascism can be defeated, but not when we are on its side.”

2. Why Trump voters got exactly what they wanted

Why you should read it: The Atlantic columnist Tom Nichols writes in a post-election columns that Trump voters got a president who they believe will hurt their others but, somehow, not them.

• “…in the end, a majority of American voters chose Trump because they wanted what he was selling: a nonstop reality show of rage and resentment. Some Democrats, still gripped by the lure of wonkery, continue to scratch their heads over which policy proposals might have unlocked more votes, but that was always a mug’s game. Trump voters never cared about policies, and he rarely gave them any. (Choosing to be eaten by a shark rather than electrocuted might be a personal preference, but it’s not a policy.) His rallies involved long rants about the way he’s been treated, like a giant therapy session or a huge family gathering around a bellowing, impaired grandpa.”

• “Back in 2021, I wrote a book about the rise of ‘illiberal populism,’ the self-destructive tendency in some nations that leads people to participate in democratic institutions such as voting while being hostile to democracy itself, casting ballots primarily to punish other people and to curtail everyone’s rights—even their own. These movements are sometimes led by fantastically wealthy faux populists who hoodwink gullible voters by promising to solve a litany of problems that always seem to involve money, immigrants, and minorities. The appeals from these charlatans resonate most not among the very poor, but among a bored, relatively well-off middle class, usually those who are deeply uncomfortable with racial and demographic changes in their own countries… Americans who wish to stop Trump in this assault on the American constitutional order, then, should get it out of their heads that this election could have been won if only a better candidate had made a better pitch to a few thousand people in Pennsylvania. Biden, too old and tired to mount a proper campaign, likely would have lost worse than Harris; more to the point, there was nothing even a more invigorated Biden or a less, you know, female alternative could have offered. Racial grievances, dissatisfaction with life’s travails (including substance addiction and lack of education), and resentment toward the villainous elites in faraway cities cannot be placated by housing policy or interest-rate cuts.”

• Why it matters: “No candidate can reason about facts and policies with voters who have no real interest in such things. They like the promises of social revenge that flow from Trump, the tough-guy rhetoric, the simplistic ‘I will fix it’ solutions. And he’s interesting to them, because he supports and encourages their conspiracist beliefs… Those voters expect that Trump will hurt others and not them. They will likely be unpleasantly surprised, much as they were in Trump’s first term. (He was, after all, voted out of office for a reason.) For the moment, some number of them have memory-holed that experience and are pretending that his vicious attacks on other Americans are just so much hot air… In this election, he has triggered the unfocused ire and unfounded grievances of millions of voters. Soon we will learn whether he can still trigger their decency—if there is any to be found.”

3. How right-wing influencers and social media created an alternate universe for Trump voters

Why you should read it: Unsuccessful Congressional candidate John Avlon details his observations about the election in a piece for The Bulwark, highlighting the way a polluted information environment makes it difficult to convince voters of reality.

• “Running for a seat in New York’s first district, I found that what I learned by listening to voters did not track with the subjects that preoccupy most horse-race political coverage. Instead, people out on Eastern Long Island were focused on issues like the price of food and affordability (from inflation to housing and insurance costs)… President Biden was hobbled by legitimate perceptions of reduced vigor while Democrats were denied credit for the bipartisan legislation they passed during his presidency. At stops at diners while on the campaign trail, I noticed that Biden’s age was a punch-line offered up by kids while their parents offered a pox-on-both-houses assessment of the two parties, often mentioning things like defund-the-police. There was pervasive anger at Albany for bail-reform laws, despite the fact that violent crime has fallen under Biden.”

• “Talking with those voters, I was often reminded of one of my favorite quotes from the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: ‘Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.’ The results of this election show that collective reasoning around common facts in hopes of finding common ground is an increasingly rare quality… I was struck by the prevalence of misinformation but also the relentlessness of the right-wing media ecosystem. There was willful amnesia over Trump’s botched COVID response, dismissal of election denialism and the January 6th attack, a demonization of Ukraine aid, and outright hostility to facts about America’s economic recovery and the re-shoring of essential manufacturing under Biden… The network of influencers and social media accounts, compounded by what remains of right-wing talk radio and cable news, would drive a message that was repeated loudly by true believers in ways that reached the ears of less politically-active voters. This prevalence overwhelmed the influence of less partisan legacy media, which proved susceptible to getting pulled toward a fake fairness out of concern over seeming biased.”

• Why it matters: “Hardcore Trump supporters often come to political debates armed with a catechism of alternative facts. There is remarkable message discipline that comes from repetition—arguing, for instance, about the alleged failures of the bipartisan border security bill Trump killed, rather than acknowledging what conservative Oklahoma Senator James Langford said about the bill’s virtues and substance. There is a pervasive impulse to defend whatever Trump does, even when it requires reversing previous positions or common sense standards. This loyalty-over-logic impulse revealed itself in a televised debate when my opponent—a sitting congressman—couldn’t even bring himself to criticize Donald Trump for praising Adolf Hitler.”

4. Why Trump will lose a trade war

Why you should read it: New York Times columnist Paul Krugman explains why President-elect Trump “may be the worst possible person to guide U.S. policy through the turmoil that’s probably ahead” in the global economy.

• “The good news: I don’t think Donald Trump will cause a global trade war… The reason I say that is I believe that a trade war would be coming even if Trump had lost the election, largely because China is refusing to act like a responsible economic superpower… So what do you do if [like China] you have lots of capacity but your consumers can’t or won’t buy what you make? You try to export the problem, keeping the economy humming by running huge trade surpluses… China appears to be exporting close to $1 trillion more than it imports, and the trend is upward.”

• “Hence the coming trade war. The rest of the world won’t passively accept Chinese surpluses on that scale. The ‘China shock’ of the 2000s taught us that whatever the (real) virtues of free trade, a huge import surge does unacceptable damage to workers and communities in its path. Furthermore, China is an autocracy that doesn’t share democratic values. Allowing it to dominate strategically crucial industries is an unacceptable risk… So the trade war is coming; in some ways it has already started.”

• Why it matters: “During his first term, Trump eventually stopped raising tariffs after signing what he called a “historic trade deal” in which China agreed to buy $200 billion in American goods. How much of that total did China actually buy? None... [S]erious trade conflict is coming as China tries to export its policy failures. But America just elected perhaps the worst possible leader to manage that conflict.”

5. Why Biden administration economic policy isn’t to blame for pandemic-era inflation

Why you should read it: Former Obama administration budget czar Peter Orzag makes the case in the Washington Post that “the nearly unprecedented supply-side shock” caused by the COVID-19 pandemic bears primary responsibility for the bout of inflation suffered by the United States—not President Biden’s $2 trillion American Rescue Plan.

• “Inflation turned out to be a defining issue of the 2024 election, but the common story about its cause—covid-era stimulus—is more wrong than right. We should not learn a mistaken lesson… This story [that the ARP caused inflation] is intuitively appealing, and it is no surprise it became a popular narrative with the media. The weight of the evidence, however, suggests that the package had only a modest impact on the path of inflation.”

• “Along with Robin Brooks of Brookings and William Murdock of Lazard, I have parsed a variety of economic data through the arc of the pandemic, including a commonly used measure of demand, supply indicators such as delivery times… The results show that supply-chain variables directly accounted for 79 percent of the rise in underlying inflation in 2021. These effects then continued into 2022, with ongoing supply issues directly explaining 60 percent of the rise in inflation that year. The rest was more than accounted for by spillovers from the 2021 supply-driven inflation. All of which leaves only a modest role for demand-driven effects like the covid relief package… At the start of the pandemic, Americans shifted their spending from services (like travel, eating out and going to the movies) to goods (like computer hardware and exercise equipment) — just as a snarled supply chain caused those goods to be in short supply. This caused prices to spike… In this multistage process of inflation’s arc, the American Rescue Plan played a minimal role. The stages would have occurred regardless of whether the plan was $2 trillion, $1 trillion or $500 billion. It simply takes a long time for economies to adjust to massive shocks like the pandemic.”

• Why it matters: “There will be future health and economic crises. Misunderstanding the underlying causes of recent inflation risks hampering effective policymaking when the next crisis happens. Leaders might be hesitant to provide significant fiscal relief out of fear of stoking inflation. Though each situation is different, it would be a mistake to reach that conclusion from this covid episode.”

6. Why Democrats need to start saying “no” to activist groups

Why you should read it: Former Democratic staffer Adam Jentleson contends that the party needs to start saying “no” much more often to activists and advocacy groups who purport to speak for certain constituencies but in reality represent no one but themselves.

• “Supermajority thinking is urgently needed at this moment. We have been conditioned to think of our era of polarization as a stable arrangement of rough parity between the parties that will last indefinitely, but history teaches us that such periods usually give way to electoral realignments. Last week, Mr. Trump showed us what a conservative realignment can look like. Unless Democrats want to be consigned to minority status and be locked out of the Senate for the foreseeable future, they need to counter by building a supermajority of their own… Democrats cannot do this as long as they remain crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power. Whereas Mr. Trump has crafted an image as a different kind of Republican by routinely making claims that break with the party line on issues ranging from protecting Social Security and Medicare to mandating insurance coverage of in vitro fertilization, Democrats remain stuck trying to please all of their interest groups while watching voters of all races desert them over the very stances that these groups impose on the party.”

• “Achieving a supermajority means declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win. Collectively, these groups impose the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal and fatally wounding them in the places they need to win not just to take back the White House, but to have a prayer in the Senate… At their best, these groups can be productive partners in building power and legislating. But many have grown too big, adopted overly expansive mandates and become disastrously cavalier about the basic realities of American politics in ways that end up undermining their own goals… The groups also pollute the talent pipeline by training young people in magical thinking, teaching them to apply movement tactics to every issue instead of inculcating them with the disciplined practice of smart politics. This is primarily the fault of the leaders, not the youth, since many bosses claim to live in fear of being ‘canceled’ by their young staff members. Yet having managed dozens of junior staffers in progressive institutions for more than a decade, I know it is possible to listen to and learn from their concerns and create a supportive work environment while also setting clear boundaries and expectations.”

• Why it matters: “Ruthlessly prioritizing winning will make the groups mad, and that’s OK — in fact, it will be good for them. Groups have become too accustomed to enjoying access without holding themselves accountable; the question “is this tactic more likely to trigger backlash than to advance our goals?” is the single most important one, yet it seems to be rarely asked by many of the groups’ leaders or funders. Meanwhile, many of today’s lawmakers and leaders have come up at a time when alienating the groups is seen as anathema, but they should start seeing it as both right and necessary — a long overdue resetting of the relationship that will be healthy for all involved… Those who would rather lose elections so that they can feel better about themselves leave the real suffering to the people they claim to fight for. No one wins when we lose. It is time to start winning again.”

7. Why Democrats should moderate on trans issues, not surrender

Why you should read it: The Atlantic columnist Jonathan Chait notes that, contrary to the overwrought claims of trans activists and social media types, Democratic moderation on transgender issues does not entail “throwing trans people under the bus.”

• “Now some of the very people who pushed Democrats into adopting these politically toxic positions have shifted to a new line: Abandoning any element of the trans-rights agenda would be morally unthinkable… Refusing to accommodate the electorate is a legitimate choice when politicians believe they are defending a principle so foundational that defeat is preferable to compromise. But in this case, the no-compromise stance is premised on a fundamental misunderstanding of the options on the table. Democrats do not, in fact, face a choice between championing trans rights and abandoning them. They can and should continue to defend trans people against major moral, legal, and cultural threats. All they need to do to reduce their political exposure is repudiate the movement’s marginal and intellectually shaky demands.”

• “Democrats mainly ran into trouble because they either supported or refused to condemn a few highly unpopular positions: allowing athletes who transitioned from male to female to participate in high-level female sports, where they often enjoy clear physical advantages; allowing adolescent and preadolescent children to medically transition without adequate diagnosis; and providing state-funded sex-change surgery for prisoners and detainees. The first two issues poll horribly… I think there’s a strong case to be made for the Democrats adjusting the first two of these stances on substantive grounds. But even if you disagree with that, as many activists do, there remains an almost unassailable political case for reversing course. Why not stick to what I’d argue are the clearest, most important cases where trans rights must be protected, while letting go of a handful of hard-to-defend edge cases that are hurting Democrats at the polls—yielding policy outcomes that work to the detriment of trans people themselves? The answer is that much of the trans-rights activist community and its most vocal allies have come to believe that the entire package of trans-rights positions is a single, take-it-or-leave-it bloc. That mistaken conviction underlies the insistence that compromise is impossible, and that the only alternative to unquestioning support is complete surrender.”

• Why it matters: “In place of careful reasoning, advocates of the maximal [trans] position frequently resort to sweeping moralistic rhetoric. Innumerable columns after this month’s elections have chastised moderates for ‘throwing trans people under the bus…’ But there is plenty of reasonable room for Democrats to retreat—on female-sports participation, youth gender medicine, and state-sponsored surgery for prisoners and detainees. You may wish to add or subtract discrete items on my list. I can’t claim to have compiled a morally or politically unassailable accounting of which compromises Democratic politicians should make. What is unassailable is the principle that compromise without complete surrender is, in fact, possible.”

8. How blunderbuss tariffs hurt manufacturing jobs and export industries

Why you should read it: Trade economist Fariha Kamal digs into the data at the Briefing Book Substack and finds that broad-based tariffs on imports only harm exports and do nothing (at best) for manufacturing employment.

• “A new ‘Washington Consensus’ has emerged where higher tariffs feature prominently in U.S. international economic policy. A key objective of the tariff increases is to protect and promote U.S. manufacturing employment. However, the balance of the evidence to date points to few benefits and net costs to U.S. manufacturing activity. A central reason is that U.S. production is integrated into global supply chains and it is challenging to reorient long-established supply links. An examination of newly released public-use statistics reveals the high concentration of trade and jobs at firms that both export and import goods (exporter-importer firms) and thus tariffs on imports can end up hurting export performance and associated employment. Future U.S. trade policy actions should narrowly target stated domestic goals to minimize unintended hits to American competitiveness.”

• “Contrary to broadcasted objectives of boosting U.S. manufacturing activity, evidence shows that the dramatic rise in U.S. import tariffs between 2018 and 2019 lowered exports and employment in the U.S. manufacturing sector. While tariffs on foreign goods provide protection to import-competing industries, they can have a net negative impact on output and employment because U.S. manufacturers rely on foreign inputs in their goods production processes. In fact, half of all U.S. imports are industrial supplies and capital goods that are used as intermediate inputs by manufacturers. Tariffs are taxes that make these inputs more expensive; and in the absence of suitable alternatives and inability to pass on higher costs to consumers, especially in the short-term, higher tariffs place downward pressure on output and employment (all else equal). The Federal Reserve’s October 2019 Beige Book, for example, documents that ‘[b]oth retailers and manufacturers noted rising input costs, often for items subject to new tariffs, but retailers had relatively more success passing through these cost increases to their customers…’ This is borne out in evidence from co-authored work examining the impacts of the 2018-2019 import tariffs on U.S. exports. Three facts underscore the links between exports and tariff-impacted imports: (i) 57% of all imports facing tariffs were intermediate goods; (ii) exporters exposed to import tariffs accounted for 84% of total exports; and (iii) the average importer in the manufacturing sector paid implied duties of about $1,600 per worker (equivalent to about 1.5% of the average wage bill) and employed 65% of manufacturing workers. By 2019, the negative effect of import tariffs on exports is equivalent to what would happen with a direct ad valorem tariff on U.S. exports of 2%. The analysis further indicates that export growth reductions would have been a third smaller if the new import tariffs were not levied on goods likely to be part of the average firm's supply chain.”

• Why it matters: “Getting the basic facts right on the structure of U.S. industry is fundamental to assessing the impacts of tariffs. An examination of the contribution of U.S. goods trading firms to exports, imports, and employment, using the latest publicly available information, reveals that exporter-importer firms play an outsized role in U.S. goods exports and manufacturing job growth… Given exporter-importer firms’ outsized contribution to exports and as a major source of employment and job creation not only in the goods-producing sector but also across a wide range of industries in the service-providing sector, the continuation of existing tariffs and further broad-based increases are likely net hindrances to long-term U.S. competitiveness.”

9. How America can return to its central values after Trump

Why you should read it: In The Bulwark, retired Army general Mark Hertling takes lessons from his own experience helping the U.S. Army recall its own core values at the height of the Iraq war and shows how they can help America return to its own principles when Trump finally leaves the scene.

• “There are times in all our live when we lose our way. Unexpected challenges, fear of the unknown future, absence of role models, a gradual drift away from what we believe, continuous compromises to what we know is right, losing sight of what truly matters—it’s not hard for individuals, businesses, organizations, and even nations to stray from their stated values… For the Army, the values are derived from longstanding traditions, principles of military service on behalf of a democratic nation, ethical standards derived from the Geneva Conventions and the Laws of Land Warfare, and the American approach to military service. Throughout my military career, I was also taught our country’s values determine our national interests, and those interests should drive our strategies and how we act on the international stage… Our national values… flow mostly from our nation’s founding documents, inspiring speeches, and the worthy ideals that have shaped our history… The values found in the Declaration of Independence are equality (‘all men are created equal’), inalienable rights (‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness’), popular sovereignty (‘Governments are instituted among Men and derive their just powers from the consent of the governed’), and freedom from tyranny (the right of the people to ‘alter or abolish’ abusive governments). Our Constitution lists six key national values: unity, justice, domestic tranquility, the common defense, the general welfare, and the protection of liberty… These are the values that inspired every future generation of American political thought, from Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan, and up to the present day.”

• “Some people view America as an accident of history—a more or less random selection of people, serendipitously assigned to a land, like every other people in any other land around the world. But even a cursory reading of the country’s founding documents and great speeches makes clear that America is a political organization with a reliance on our values. The speeches by great men and women through our history also provide us with the values we ought to hold dear. There are hundreds of such reminders, but Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, Kennedy, King, and Reagan provide a few examples… Like the Army values we instill in new soldiers, American values have both intrinsic and instrumental worth. Peace, freedom, and respect for the rights of everyone all stem from the acknowledgement of the universal value of human life. But our inherent values are also necessary tools to allow a large, diverse, energetic population to live as one in a bountiful nation. Americans have always been divided by wealth, education, region, religion, even language, in addition to race and ethnicity and place of birth. But application of our shared values are tools for peace and productivity.”

• Why it matters: “These American values have served us well for hundreds of years, just as the Army values served the Army for centuries before they were codified in doctrine. Our problem is not that our values are outdated or obsolete; it is that we haven’t done a sufficient job teaching them to the next generation. If the lessons I learned in the Army are any guide, even a little more time spent explaining what it means to be an American based on our national values would return civic rewards manyfold.”

Odds and Ends

An historian of ancient Rome reviews Gladiator II…

How new discoveries of Neolithic stone circles in England support theories of a “sacred arc” that includes Stonehenge…

The 80s are back, at least for orcas in the Pacific Northwest who have resumed wearing dead salmon hats after a 37-year break…

Why ice giant planets Uranus and Neptune may be concealing vast oceans that help explain their weird magnetic fields…

Fourteen songs from the late, legendary producer Quincy Jones…

What I’m Listening To

• The Who’s 1978 Shepperton Studios performance of “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” from their seminal 1971 album Who’s Next.

• “1999,” the opening track from Prince’s breakthrough 1982 album of the same title.

• Vince Guaraldi’s “Thanksgiving Theme” from A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.

What I’m Streaming

• Silo, a post-apocalyptic Apple TV+ drama starring Rebecca Ferguson (the Mission: Impossible and Dune movie franchises), returns for its second season on the streaming service.

• Say Nothing, a streaming adaptation of journalist Patrick Radden Keefe’s excellent book on the brutality and cruelty of Northern Ireland’s Troubles.

• Endurance, a National Geographic documentary feature about polar explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated 1914 expedition to Antarctica and the 2022 search for the wreck of his ship, the Endurance, in the frigid waters of the Southern Ocean.

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"I never forget that I live in a house owned by all the American people and that I have been given their trust...

"I always try to remember that reconciling differences cannot satisfy everyone completely. Because I do not expect too much, I am not disappointed. But I know that I must never give up—that I must never let the greater interest of all the people down, merely because that might be for the moment the easiest personal way out.

"I believe we have been right in the course we have charted. To abandon our purpose of building a greater, a more stable and a more tolerant America, would be to miss the tide and perhaps to miss the port. I propose to sail ahead. I feel sure that your hopes and your help are with me. For to reach a port, we must sail—sail, not tie at anchor—sail, not drift."

- Franklin Delano Roosevelt, April 14, 1938

What I’m Reading:

1. Why Putin’s nuclear threats shouldn’t be taken too seriously

Why you should read it: British strategy scholar Lawrence Freedman argues in the New York Times that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s chronic if vague nuclear threats should not be taken as seriously as many policymakers seem to do at present.

• “[Putin’]s problem is that he is unable to describe situations, however belligerent his rhetoric, in which using nuclear weapons would make sense… Why is that? None of the actions above [supplying tanks, fighter jets, and rockets to Ukraine] warranted such drastic escalation. Any kind of nuclear use would raise what is still supposed to be a limited ‘special military operation,’ in Ukraine, to a new, exceptionally dangerous level. Striking NATO countries or other countries with nuclear weapons would risk retaliation in kind against Russia (a point that is not likely to be lost on the populations of Moscow and St. Petersburg). Confining use to so-called tactical nuclear weapons, which have smaller warheads and are designed for battlefield use, against Ukraine’s frontline forces could prompt a direct NATO intervention, if only with conventional forces… Any nuclear use would lead to international outrage, some of which Mr. Putin might feel able to ignore, but less so if it came from otherwise friendly states such as India and China. He could try to limit that outrage by using just enough weapons to show he was prepared to cross the threshold — and could go further. But that could be embarrassing if the weapons turned out to be duds — many have not been tested for some time — or the delivery vehicles were shot down by Ukrainian air defenses.”

• “If Mr. Putin really believes, as he claims, that Ukraine can operate precise Western weapons systems only with Western support, then that has already happened: Western precision-guided weapons have already been used against Russian targets on Ukrainian territory, including in the Crimean peninsula. If the problem is hitting targets inside Russia, then Ukraine has been doing that for some time with its homemade systems — and with increasing effectiveness. Ukraine even mounted a conventional invasion of Russia in August, in Kursk, from where it has yet to be ejected… There is very little about the current debate that is new. That is not to dismiss Mr. Putin’s threats as pure hot air and bluff but to recognize that nuclear use, while undoubtedly the most dangerous option, is not the most likely. It is not that he is averse to escalation; he has already escalated — from the full-scale invasion to ordering the annexation of sovereign territory, attacking energy infrastructure and bombarding civilian areas. He has sought to punish the West through energy crunches, campaigns of sabotage and subversion, and by stirring up trouble around the world. President Biden has still not agreed to Ukrainian requests to use Western missiles against targets inside Russia. This is partly because U.S. intelligence believes it would be a poor use of scarce resources, but also because of concerns about these other, nonnuclear forms of escalation.”

• Why it matters: “Nor does this mean that there are no circumstances in which Mr. Putin might consider using nuclear weapons. The scenario he has mentioned most is one in which NATO forces are fighting alongside Ukrainian forces, a situation that could quickly put Russian forces on the back foot. That is a scenario in which we can imagine a desperate Mr. Putin being prepared to embark on a wider war. He finds himself caught in the classic paradox of the nuclear age. He does not consider himself irrational, but to make his threats credible, he has to rely on his adversaries’ thinking that he might be a bit crazy.”

2. Reports of globalization’s demise have been greatly exaggerated

Why you should read it: In a policy paper for the Aspen Institute, Council on Foreign Relations international economics expert Brad Setser observes that incessant talk of “deglobalization” obscures the reality that globalization persists—albeit in the unbalanced and unhealthy forms of tax avoidance, unregulated financial flows, and China’s monumental trade surpluses.

• “The now-standard tale of deglobalization certainly contains a kernel of truth. Policies meant to accelerate economic integration across borders no longer command a clear political majority… But as a description of the current global economy, this paper argues that that narrative is incomplete at best and in many ways simply inaccurate. As significant as the political forces pushing for a less integrated world are, there are also strong forces pushing for further integration—even when further integration isn’t necessarily healthy… persistence of globalization may mask ongoing distortions in global trade, which impede the efficient direct flow of Chinese-assembled consumer goods—and Chinese components for US production—into the US market… more generally, we should make no across-the-board assumption that higher levels of globalization necessarily reflect more perfect markets and/or the elimination of arbitrary restrictions on cross-border flows. Rather, certain forms of integration stem from distorted incentives, and thus a fall in measured integration can be a sign of a healthier and more balanced global economy.”

• “Any discussion of globalization ultimately leads to China… The recent surge in China’s exports and in its trade surplus stems primarily from China’s sharp domestic slowdown and its still-unresolved property market crisis. China’s internal demand growth has faltered, and it has instead relied again on exports and global demand to support its growth. This form of globalization is unhealthy to be sure, as it stems from unresolved imbalances inside China’s economy, but it is nonetheless globalization… China’s immense strength in global manufacturing has many sources, not least the fact that countries that import commodities generally do need to export other goods to cover their import bill. China also provides extensive government support to favored sectors in both the old and the new economies. Those subsidies have tilted the playing field to China’s advantage in several specific cases… A final point: the global economy cannot truly fracture along geopolitical lines into a ‘democratic’ bloc (led by the United States) and an autocratic bloc (led economically by China) so long as the autocratic world collectively runs an enormous surplus that only balances with a large deficit across the democratic bloc. This persistent imbalance, of course, also implies a net flow of capital from the autocracies to the democracies, even if that flow is now well-disguised… The negative externalities from China’s low level of consumption have been recognized for the last twenty years but still haven’t given rise to significant policy shifts. The negative global spillovers from China’s unresolved internal imbalances are once again increasing. A China that needs to export to make up for internal demand shortfalls will intrinsically create sectoral-supply dependencies even in the absence of sector-specific government intervention at a time when concerns about over-reliance on Chinese supply are real. Creativity is needed, including increased coordination across the G7. European policymakers share American concerns about Chinese sectoral overcapacity but haven’t been as forceful in linking overcapacity to oversaving.”

• Why it matters: “China’s weakness is creating pressure globally for further but ultimately unhealthy globalization. The auto industry is a powerful example. China has gone from being a modest net importer of autos to being the world’s largest vehicle exporter—with a substantial lead over Germany and Japan—in just three years. Unbalanced interdependence with an economy as large as China’s will inherently create new forms of supply chain dependence; it also risks undermining investment in leading-edge sectors that are hoped-for sources of future growth and productivity. Common policy approaches among allies are the best response to these pressures, even if they are difficult to introduce in practice. Reform of the US corporate tax code is of course also not easy, but it offers a clear strategy to address concerns that the actual economic outcomes from the era of unfettered globalization generated outsized gains for the few while leaving many behind.”

3. Why Beijing wants another Trump presidency

Why you should read it: In the New York Times, former National Security Council official Rush Doshi makes the case that China’s ruling Communist Party would welcome a second Trump presidency that they believe would accelerate America’s decline.

• “Beijing seeks to displace the United States from its global leadership position and is a formidable challenger. It is America’s first geopolitical rival to surpass 70 percent of U.S. G.D.P., exceed American industrial capacity and pull ahead in multiple technology sectors, such as electric vehicles, hypersonic weapons and nuclear energy technology. Absent corrective action, the United States risks falling behind China technologically, growing dependent on it economically and perhaps even suffering defeat by China’s military in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea. How the next U.S. president navigates the remaining years of this decisive decade will have far-reaching consequences for America and the rest of the world… [Chinese leaders] saw [Trump’s] term as an accelerant of what they believe to be American decline, and not without reason. Mr. Trump focused on U.S. commodity exports instead of long-term manufacturing strength. He alienated allies and partners, mishandled the pandemic response and repeatedly showed disregard for democratic norms. On China policy, he routinely put personal gain over America’s interests and undermined important steps his staff members took to compete with Beijing. As a result, Mr. Trump was widely mocked by Chinese citizens, who nicknamed him ‘Chuan Jianguo’ (‘Build-the-Nation Trump’ — the ‘nation’ being China). His administration led President Xi Jinping of China to declare that the world was undergoing ‘great changes unseen in a century’ as America fell from pre-eminence… As president, he squandered any leverage he gained from raising tariffs on China by accepting a bad trade deal that he hoped would help his re-election prospects. The deal allowed Beijing to keep its unfair practices and sell Americans manufactured goods if China promised to buy American commodities. More bad deals like that in a second term could cost millions of U.S. jobs, displace America in high-tech industry and accelerate decline by turning the United States into a commodity supplier dependent on Chinese manufactured goods.”

• “Mr. Trump’s ideas on Taiwan are a blueprint for calamity. For decades, Washington has deterred China from invading Taiwan with a bipartisan policy of strategic ambiguity about whether the United States would defend the island. Mr. Trump threatens to weaken that deterrence. He said recently that Taiwan should pay the United States to defend the island, which is democratically ruled, while cavalierly casting doubt on America’s ability to do just that…Telegraphing a lack of U.S. resolve could one day embolden China to seize the island, which could spark a conflict that devastates the global economy. And Beijing has already taken notice: It is increasingly well known in Western diplomatic and scholarly circles that Chinese officials and think tank experts are quietly asking whether Mr. Trump might acquiesce to Chinese military action against Taiwan if he is re-elected.”

• Why it matters: “China is America’s most formidable geopolitical rival in a century, and thanks to Mr. Trump’s term in office, leaders in Beijing are acutely aware of what he is about and how to manipulate him. They believe China is rising and America is declining. Electing Mr. Trump next month risks proving them right.”

4. How America’s economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic beat the rest of the world

Why you should read it: Brookings Institution economics experts Robin Brooks and Ben Harris detail the ways America’s economy outperformed its peers and competitors in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic—thanks in no small part due to decisions made to avoid permanent economic damage through fiscal stimulus.

• “The COVID-19 pandemic-era recession was unlike any other in U.S. history. Beginning in February 2020, the recession quickly reached depths not experienced in roughly a century before abating just as fast—lasting just two months according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. A combination of unprecedented fiscal support, rapid deployment of vaccines, and structural economic resilience all helped jumpstart the swift and enduring U.S. recovery, with the economic expansion now entering its fourth year… The prior recovery was marred by economic scarring that emerged from insufficient fiscal support for households and businesses. Following the Great Recession, consumption was very slow to return to its precrisis level, causing a large output gap to emerge, which held down inflation but also limited demand for labor. With employment depressed, millions of discouraged workers exited the labor force and many more would struggle to return to prerecession earnings levels. As a result, consumption and residential investment remained depressed and the output gap between potential and actual GDP persisted… In the wake of the pandemic, many of the United States’ competitors repeated its mistake in the prior recovery. As the global economy remained disrupted by COVID-19 in 2021 and beyond, many foreign governments opted for premature fiscal consolidation in which the policy response was too muted and insufficient to help return their respective economies to prerecession form. By contrast, policymakers in the U.S. opted for more generous countercyclical support—including massive relief bills passed under both Democratic and Republican administrations that would provide assistance past even the omicron and delta waves of COVID-19. As a result, there is now no meaningful slack in the U.S., unlike in Europe where activity is once again falling behind its prepandemic trend. Perhaps most important, U.S. labor force participation has risen to record highs across major population groups, especially among prime-age women. Elevated inflation in 2021 and 2022 abated quickly and in recent years was driven more by supply constraints in the housing market than by fundamental imbalances in supply and demand. The steady fall in non-shelter year-over-year inflation, which now stands at just 1.1%, underscores that supply disruptions—not overheating—were by far the main driver of high inflation right after the pandemic. All told, the post-COVID recovery reaffirms the difficult choices made by policymakers and ultimately vindicates U.S. policy choices.”

• “Investment in the U.S. has been a notable point of optimism relative to other G10 economies. Buoyed by the investment incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act (and to a lesser extent) the CHIPS and Science Act, coupled with broader optimism over the U.S. economy, the U.S. experienced a relative boom in investment compared to its competitors… Today, U.S. investment is 14% above its pre-COVID level, while investment in the eurozone has fallen by 7% over the same period… The absolute rise in investment in the U.S. is especially notable when controlling for the business cycle. As noted in analysis by the U.S. Treasury Department, change in investment typically falls (as a share of GDP) in the period following a peak in the business cycle—typically falling by about 1 percentage point between six and 12 quarters from the peak. However, in the current recovery, aggregate investment has remained roughly constant—leading to an additional $430 billion in investment relative to historical norms.”

• Why it matters: “In broad terms, policymakers faced two options during the pandemic with respect to fiscal stimulus. One route was to invoke aggressive fiscal stimulus to avoid persistent economic scarring and sluggish growth but accept elevated inflation in the face of highly atypical supply chain pressures. The second option was to offer more muted fiscal support, and to allow for the emergence of output gaps and slow growth in consumption, which might help offset extra inflation. The U.S. chose the former, while most of the rest of the G10 opted for the latter. As a result, the U.S. has seen substantially more economic growth and more investment, but with slightly higher price levels in the initial years of the recovery.”

5. Why the woes of Boeing and Intel constitute a “national emergency”

Why you should read it: Wall Street Journal columnist Greg Ip surveys the woes facing aerospace giant Boeing and chipmaking behemoth Intel as they struggle to cope with self-inflicted setbacks that threaten their existence

• “Today, both [Intel and Boeing] are on the ropes. Intel has suspended its dividend, slashed jobs and capital spending, and is a takeover target. Boeing has been hobbled by investigations into crashes and a midair mishap, production delays and a strike. A breakup or bankruptcy are no longer unthinkable… Intel and Boeing were once the gold standard in manufacturing groundbreaking products to demanding specifications with consistently high quality. Not any longer.” 

• “The loss of either company would have industrywide repercussions. Each supports a multilayered ecosystem of designers, workers, managers and suppliers. Once that ecosystem moves offshore, it is almost impossible to bring back… So, much as national leaders would like to ignore these companies’ woes, they can’t. National security dictates the U.S. maintain some know-how in making aircraft and semiconductors.”

• Why it matters: “Both political parties have bought into the idea that manufacturing is special and thus deserving of public support. That raises the question: which manufacturing, and what kind of support?”

6. How Bidenomics has already started to reshape the American economy

Why you should read it: New Yorker columnist Nicholas Lemann details how President Biden’s substantial investments in infrastructure and industrial policy have begun to change the American economy for the better—even if no one’s noticed.

• “There is as close to a unifying theory as one can find in a sweeping set of government policies. Almost all the discussion of ‘Bidenomics’—by focussing on short-term fluctuations of national metrics such as growth, the inflation rate, and unemployment, with the aim of determining the health of the economy—misses the point. Real Bidenomics upends a set of economic assumptions that have prevailed in both parties for most of the past half century. Biden is the first President in decades to treat government as the designer and ongoing referee of markets, rather than as the corrector of markets’ dislocations and excesses after the fact. He doesn’t speak of free trade and globalization as economic ideals. His approach to combatting climate change involves no carbon taxes or credits—another major departure, not just from his predecessors but also from the policies of many other countries. His Administration has been far more aggressive than previous ones in taking antitrust actions against big companies… Bidenomics has overturned a number of unwritten rules that you previously had to follow if you wanted to be taken seriously as a policymaker: economic regulation is usually a bad idea; governments should balance their budgets, except during recessions and depressions; subsidizing specific industries never works; unions are a mixed blessing, because they don’t always promote economic efficiency; government should not try to help specific regions of the country or sectors of the economy.”

• “The irony of Bidenomics is the vast gulf between its scale—measured in money and in the number of projects that it has set in motion—and its political impact, which is essentially zero, even though a major part of its rationale is political. It has become a standard talking point of the engineers of Bidenomics that it will take at least five years, maybe ten, possibly even longer, for the public to understand its effects. ‘That’s the way it was with the New Deal,’ Steve Ricchetti, one of Biden’s closest and longest-serving aides, said. ‘It wasn’t just three or four years of new programs. It was leveraged for twenty or thirty years into the future.’ But the short-term politics worked out a lot better for Franklin Roosevelt; he carried all but two states in his first reëlection campaign. There is little evidence that the Democrats will be similarly rewarded in 2024. Only late in the race, when she was spending much of her time in the Midwest, did Kamala Harris begin speaking regularly about Biden’s major economic initiatives. It’s unclear how committed to them she will be if she becomes President. Trump has promised to repeal many of them. Still, President Biden can rest assured that many signs are being put up. They just don’t say ‘Joe Did It.’ They say ‘Investing in America.’”

• Why it matters: “Where we are now, near the conclusion of the 2024 campaign, is profoundly strange. People love to complain that politics organizes itself around perception, not reality. Here’s the reality: one party, the G.O.P., ditched its establishment, embraced a form of economic nationalism and populism, and surprised everybody by winning a Presidential election. This wasn’t just a freak event; versions of the same thing happened around the world. In the United States, the Trump Administration, once it was in power, mostly pursued not what it ran on but an old-fashioned Republican program of tax cuts and deregulation. Meanwhile, the Democrats began competing for the voters Trump had attracted, and, after this helped lead to a victory in 2020, they enacted an ambitious program aimed at the economic lives of working- and middle-class Americans. And still, outside a limited cadre of activists and policymakers, none of this is the dominant narrative of American politics. Another complaint that people make about politicians is that they are all talk, no action. With Biden, on these issues, it has been almost the opposite: lots of action, very little talk. As Harris’s campaign wore on, she began speaking more about economic issues, especially during her visits to Midwestern states, but her language has been quite different from that of other Biden officials. If Biden’s actual economic policies were the main topic of the campaign, perhaps the outcome of the election would determine their future. Their absence from the election makes their fate more of a mystery.”

7. What the restart of Three Mile Island says about the future of nuclear power

Why you should read it: The Breakthrough Institute’s Ted Nordhaus and Alex Trembath contend that the recently announced restart of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant symbolizes dramatic shifts in the domestic energy market over the past several years.

• “By the time that Exelon Energy prematurely shuttered [Three Mile Island’s] Unit 1 in 2019, the nuclear sector in the United States had reached a nadir. Not only had the United States stopped building new reactors but it had begun to close existing plants as well. The power sector was awash in cheap natural gas, electricity demand was not growing quickly, and neither liberalized electricity markets nor policy-makers valued nuclear’s attributes as a firm and reliable source of low carbon electricity. Nuclear energy’s problems were further exacerbated by environmental groups campaigning to shut down plants like Indian Point in New York, Diablo Canyon in California, and Three Mile Island despite their professed concern about climate change… Natural gas is still cheap. But electricity prices have soared across much of the country. Electricity demand is once again growing robustly, as AI driven data center growth is already outstripping the generation capacity that grid planners anticipated just a few years ago. Local resistance to wind, solar, and transmission, along with the hesitance of grid planners to allow more variable generation resources onto electricity systems without sufficient firm resources to back them up, has slowed growth of wind generation over the last few years, though solar is still growing apace. And a welcome shift of approach from tech and other firms at the leading edge of corporate commitments to clean energy, from simply procuring enough renewable energy credits in bulk to claim that they are offsetting their carbon dioxide emissions to matching their demand on an hour to hour basis with clean electricity generation, has tilted the corporate procurement landscape toward nuclear energy.”

• “For a long time, many climate and renewable energy advocates dismissed concerns about how electricity systems would deal with very high penetrations of variable renewable energy without natural gas, arguing that it wasn’t an immediate issue. Fossil fuels still accounted for most generation, and policy-makers and grid managers could cross that bridge once most fossil fuel generation had been eliminated from the system. But booming electricity demand and the unique requirements of the new AI data centers for enormous amounts of always-on clean electricity have brought that question to the fore…Were it possible to meet that demand by simply penning a deal for some new solar and wind generation and energy storage, Microsoft [the company that made the deal to restart Three Mile Island] surely would have done so. But the basic economics of the massive data centers that AI requires and the variable nature of renewable energy generation are a terrible match. Data centers may be energy hogs compared to many other electricity customers. But energy, even very expensive energy, is a relatively small part of the cost of AI data centers. They require huge capital outlays for the massive computing power they need. The firms that build and operate these centers need to utilize them all the time to make money. Demand-side management of their electricity use is not an option.”

• Why it matters: “It’s been clear for a while now, from those very same models that look at how low carbon electrical systems might work, that if you can get somewhere between 25 and 50% of your electricity in a decarbonized electricity system from nuclear, particularly next generation nuclear with significantly greater ability to ramp its output up and down, both the cost and complexity of the system are far lower. You don’t need to massively overbuild wind and solar. You don’t need a vast capacity of batteries to store energy for days or even weeks. Your high-voltage transmission requirements are much lower, since nuclear can be sited in smaller geographies closer to load. And you don’t need a big natural gas infrastructure that mostly sits idle… But it does require building significant new nuclear capacity. When Biden Administration officials say that the US needs 200GW of new nuclear by 2050 to meet its climate goals, they are talking about roughly doubling nuclear energy’s share of US electricity generation, from 20% to 40%. Wind and solar energy, under this scenario for a decarbonized US power sector, still produce the majority of electricity. But that still requires building another 200 large reactors over the next three decades or somewhere in the neighborhood of 500-3500 small reactors...  You can operate the system with a lot more wind, solar, batteries, and natural gas. Or you can operate it with a lot more wind, solar, batteries, and nuclear. Choose the former and what you will likely end up with is costly electricity that can’t be fully decarbonized. Choosing the latter offers many advantages, climate and land use chief among them, but also more robust grid reliability and resilience.”

8. Why one expert on historical fascism changed his mind about Trump

Why you should read it: New York Times Magazine contributor Elizabeth Zerofsky profiles Robert O. Paxton, a leading scholar of fascism, and why January 6 made him decide that Trump is, in fact, a fascist.

• “After Trump took office, a torrent of articles, papers and books either embraced the fascism analogy as useful and necessary, or criticized it as misleading and unhelpful. The polemic was so unrelenting, especially on social media, that it came to be known among historians as the Fascism Debate. Paxton had, by this point, been retired for more than a decade from Columbia University, where he was a professor of history for more than 30 years… Jan. 6 proved to be a turning point. For an American historian of 20th-century Europe, it was hard not to see in the insurrection echoes of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, who marched on Rome in 1922 and took over the capital, or of the violent riot at the French Parliament in 1934 by veterans and far-right groups who sought to disrupt the swearing in of a new left-wing government. But the analogies were less important than what Paxton regarded as a transformation of Trumpism itself. ‘The turn to violence was so explicit and so overt and so intentional, that you had to change what you said about it,’ Paxton told me. ‘It just seemed to me that a new language was necessary, because a new thing was happening.’”

• “This summer I asked Paxton if, nearly four years later, he stood by his pronouncement. Cautious but forthright, he told me that he doesn’t believe using the word is politically helpful in any way, but he confirmed the diagnosis. ‘It’s bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms,’ Paxton said. ‘It’s the real thing. It really is…’ He told me that what he saw on Jan. 6 has continued to affect him; it has been hard ‘to accept the other side as fellow citizens with legitimate grievances.’ That is not to say, he clarified, that there aren’t legitimate grievances to be had, but that the politics of addressing them has changed. He believes that Trumpism has become something that is ‘not Trump’s doing, in a curious way,’ Paxton said. ‘I mean it is, because of his rallies. But he hasn’t sent organizers out to create these things; they just germinated, as far as I can tell.’”

• Why it matters: “Paxton has not weighed in on the issue since the Newsweek column, spending much of his time immersed in his life’s second passion, bird-watching. At his home in the Hudson Valley, I read back to him one of his earlier definitions of fascism, which he described as a ‘mass, anti-liberal, anti-communist movement, radical in its willingness to employ force . . . distinct not only from enemies on the left but also from rivals on the right.’ I asked him if he thought it described Trumpism. ‘It does,’ he said. Nonetheless, he remains committed to his yes-no paradigm of accuracy and usefulness… ‘I think it’s going to be very dicey,” he said. “If Trump wins, it’s going to be awful. If he loses, it’s going to be awful too.‘“

9. How Trump debases America

Why you should read it: Bulwark columnist Mona Charen shows how Donald Trump has made America a meaner, more tawdry place during his decade in politics and public life.

• “Natural disasters are moments of unity. They remind us of our frailty in the face of nature. They are matters of life and death. We don’t ask, before sending aid, whether you live in a red state or a blue state… But not now. In the hours after Helene devastated the South, Republican nominee Donald Trump circulated rumors to the effect that the Biden–Harris administration and the ‘Democrat governor of North Carolina’ were ‘going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.’ As it happens, Asheville, one of the most devastated parts of North Carolina, is quite blue, but whatever. Trump’s lips were moving, therefore he was lying. This is what he does: sow suspicion, engender resentment and hatred.”

• “When there are no actual causes for fear and loathing, he and Igor JD Vance freely invent things to strike fear in the hearts of their followers. Crime has been declining for three straight years after a spike during the pandemic (when Trump was president). But in the Trump-invented pseudo-reality, crime is ‘so out of control . . . you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot. You get mugged. You get raped, you get whatever it may be…’ This is the brutish, false incitement that Trump never tires of injecting into American life. And though it has become commonplace, it is not yet the dominant culture. Trump’s false stories about Haitian immigrants in Ohio threw Springfield into chaos. Bomb threats closed schools and universities. The owner of McGregor Metal has had to draw his shades at night, buy a gun, and vary his family’s movements due to death threats following his defense of his Haitian employees.”

• Why it matters: “Some people inclined to vote for Trump reason that he was president before and things seemed to be okay. The economy was good (until COVID). There were no new wars. But there were new wars—between Americans. Trump’s relentless lies and incitement have transformed this county into a less rational and less generous nation. That alone should be reason enough to vote for his opponent. One election is not going to repair the damage to our national character. But another term of Trump could be enough to tip the scales for a long time to come.”

Odds and Ends

How astronauts could turn asteroids and other space rocks into food on future missions…

How a motley crew of pro-Ukraine shitposters managed to raise millions of dollars to support Ukrainian troops on the frontlines…

How GM overtook Ford on electric vehicles—and now looks set to become the first established automaker to break even on them…

How X-rays could help deflect asteroids, at least according to one study at Sandia National Laboratories…

NASA generates an economic return three times the size of its own budget…

What I’m Listening To

• “Misery,” by grunge-era band Soul Asylum’s 1995 record Let Your Dim Light Shine.

• “Howl,” an energetic spooky season-themed track from Florence + the Machine’s 2009 album Lungs.

• DJ Tiësto’s turn-of-the-millennium remix of Delerium’s “Silence,” featuring Sarah McLachlan on vocals.

What I’m Streaming

• The fifth and final season Star Trek: Lower Decks, the hilarious animated misadventures of lower-ranking officers aboard one of Starfleet’s least important starships—and a love letter to the 1990s era shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation.

• Seinfeld, the quintessential 1990s show about nothing has been in heavy rotation. Favorite episodes include “The Junior Mint,” “The Hamptons,” “The Chicken Roaster,” “The Yada Yada,” and “The Summer of George.”

• Extremely loosely based on life of Italy’s first female lawyer, the murder mystery/period piece series The Law According to Lidia Poët sees the title character (played by the beguiling Matilda De Angelis) investigate murders and solve mysteries in late nineteenth century Turin.

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"It won't make any difference: they won't stop even if you explode with rage."

- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8.4

What I’m Reading:

1. How defense “experts” got the war in Ukraine wrong

Why you should read it: Cribbing from their recently published report on the subject, historians Eliot Cohen and Phillips P. O’Brien detail in The Atlantic how a coterie of Russia-focused defense experts all got their analyses of the war so wrong.

• “One might think that an intelligence failure can be benign: The good guys do far better than expected, the bad guys far worse. In fact, erring on the side of pessimism can be as big a problem as being too bullish. The period just before and after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, is a good example of this. At the West’s most influential research organizations, prominent analysts—many of them political scientists who follow Russian military affairs—confidently predicted that Russia would defeat its smaller neighbor within weeks. American military leaders believed this consensus, to the point that the Joint Chiefs of Staff chair reportedly told members of Congress that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours of a Russian attack. Although those analysts’ gloomy assessments turned out to be wrong, they’ve nevertheless made the United States and its allies overly cautious in assisting Ukraine in its self-defense… To the extent that analysts discussed Ukraine in any detail, its citizens were depicted as the demoralized and atomized victims of a corrupt government. The country’s substantial Russophone population was portrayed as largely indifferent to rule from Moscow or Kyiv. Ukraine’s equipment was no match for advanced Russian systems. They had experienced only static warfare in the Donbas and would have no chance against a Russian blitzkrieg. Volodymyr Zelensky was portrayed as an ineffective president. He was a comedy performer, not a wartime leader; his government, intelligence services, and armed forces had been penetrated by Russian spies and saboteurs. Ukrainians might not even put up much of a guerrilla resistance. On top of it all came consistent policy advocacy: assertions that Ukraine was not worth arming or that well-intentioned efforts to do so would merely increase suffering.”

• “The same expert analytic community that erred early in the war continues to dominate much of the public and governmental discourse. Many of them persist in downplaying Ukrainian chances and counseling against giving the Ukrainians weapons that they have repeatedly shown themselves able to use with great effect. Some of them still warn of Russian escalation, up to and including the use of nuclear weapons, even as one Russian red line after another has faded to pink and vanished… The standard analysis of Russia and Ukraine paid almost no attention to the documented corruption of the Russian military, the rote nature of its exercises, and the failure of attempts to professionalize it. Far from having an abundance of well-trained personnel akin to American and British soldiers, Russian forces consisted for the most part of conscripts who had been bribed or coerced into signing up for a second year of duty in the same old abusive system. Many commentators wrongly compared Vladimir Putin’s forces to their Western counterparts, yielding predictions that Russia would employ ‘shock and awe’ against the Ukrainians—as if its air force had experience and organization similar to that of the United States. But the Russian military was not a somewhat smaller and less effective version of America’s. It was a brutal, deeply flawed, and altogether inferior armed force… This point is crucial: Many Western analysts had been trained as Russia specialists. Implicitly, perhaps subconsciously, they viewed Ukraine the way Russian imperialists did: as adjunct to Russia. In many cases ignorant of Ukrainian history, and even dismissive of its claims to national identity and political cohesion, authors of nearly a quarter of the reports we read did not even attempt to describe Ukraine as anything more than a target set for Russia. Many had never visited Ukraine, or spoken with Westerners—including members of allied training missions who had served there—who might have had different and better-informed views.”

• Why it matters: “What is troubling is that analytic failures can happen again in any setting where small groups of experts in a particular country exercise outsize influence. Let’s hope analysts of the People’s Liberation Army will take a different approach if tensions with China continue to escalate… The correctives for recent intelligence failures do not include, obviously, chucking expertise altogether. But our report shows why, especially in moments of crisis, governments and the public need to hear from a wide variety of experts, demand relentless commonsense questioning, and, above all, create incentives for open, sharply expressed disagreement on fundamental issues. Expertise is not a form of occult knowledge, and those of us who consume expert opinion should always do so with a strong dose of skepticism. The analytic failure in Ukraine makes a strong case for something so often lacking in military analysis and the academic world more generally: intellectual humility.”

2. Why America should focus on Europe before Asia

Why you should read it: In Foreign Policy, former assistant secretary of state A. Wess Mitchell and politics professor Jakub Grygiel argue that the United States needs to focus on Europe first and foremost—not Asia, as conventional strategic wisdom has it.

• “The United States’ ability to cope with the pressures of great-power competition hinges on securing Europe and preserving the trans-Atlantic alliance. While it is true that there are serious and pressing national security problems in Asia and the Middle East, these can only be dealt with effectively once the Atlantic foundation of Washington’s global strength is secure. To conduct a future pivot to Asia, the United States needs a fulcrum in Europe—not vice versa… First, Europe is indispensable to the United States in balance-of-power terms. China may be the United States’ top overseas trade partner when it comes to goods, but when services and investment are taken into the equation, the most important economic partner by far is the European Union. The United States invests four times more in Europe than it does in Asia; Europeans invest 10 times more in the United States than in China and India combined. The United States has 30 allies in Europe compared to six in the Indo-Pacific. The collective GDP of European NATO allies is $20 trillion; that of allied Asia is $9 trillion. The combined annual defense spending of U.S. allies in Europe was $383 billion in 2023, while that of U.S. allies in Asia was $140 billion. European allies make up two of the five permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council and a larger share of the membership of the world’s most important organizations than any other region.”

• “What these numbers show is that, precisely because of China’s growing strength, the United States cannot afford to forfeit Europe, either politically or economically. In a hypothetical scenario, if the United States lost its allies in Asia but kept Europe in its corner, it would retain the capacity to compete with China. But the reverse is not true. If the United States ever lost Europe—for instance, if China succeeded in neutralizing it or a Russian victory in Ukraine caused key allies to seek accommodation—U.S. allies in Asia could not replace the role of Europe… Whatever its flaws, modern Europe is the greatest accomplishment of U.S. foreign policy. From 1917 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it took Americans two world wars, 14 presidents, and 38 congresses to get Europe—the source of the biggest threats to U.S. security in the 20th century—to where it is today: a continent of free-market democracies modeled, to a large extent, on the United States. Despite what its detractors say, the trans-Atlantic West represents the strongest force for progress in modern history, and it is worth preserving.”

• Why it matters: “The point in all of this is not that the United States should want to ‘lose’ Asia or the Middle East. Americans have critical strategic and economic interests in all three regions. Rather, it is that Europe is the United States’ indispensable base in global geopolitics. As any architect planning a foundation, investor choosing a core holding, or politician tending to the base knows: Get that right, and other positive things can be added over time. Get it wrong, and you could very well lose the whole… The United States will be best positioned to deal with China, the greatest threat in U.S. history, with Europe, the greatest alliance in U.S. history, stable and on its side. The adage of U.S. strategists in the 20th century—Europe first, Asia second—remains true in the 21st.”

3. Why Germany isn’t as important as people believe

Why you should read it: Also in Foreign Policy, American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Dalibor Rohac contends that the United States should shift its thinking about Europe away from its current and long-standing focus on Germany and toward stronger relationships with Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and the Baltics.

• “Here’s a thought. Instead of the constant hand-wringing and trying to shame Germans into playing a geopolitical role commensurate to their size and centrality in the European Union, perhaps their allies should just leave them be. Berlin does not want to turn the Bundeswehr into a formidable fighting force, project hard power, or use its defense industrial base to arm Ukraine and other Eastern European nations. And perhaps that is OK… [It] is time to drastically reduce the centrality of Germany in the U.S. conversation about the trans-Atlantic partnership—on both sides of the aisle.”

• “Neither lionizing nor constantly bashing Germany strengthens the trans-Atlantic partnership. Never mind the obvious naivete of a worldview in which multilateralism and trade have supposedly turned hard power obsolete. More importantly, unlike during the Cold War when Germany was a front-line state and its military had some heft, NATO is no longer about Germany. Germany’s territory is not being contested, and the country is surrounded by thoroughly benign neighbors in all directions. Should one be surprised that German voters do not support massive increases in defense spending?… The centrality of Germany in U.S. thinking about NATO is an unhelpful remnant of the Cold War era. Today, however, NATO is about protecting the countries of its eastern flank—from Finland in the north, through the Baltics and Poland, to Romania in the south. On balance, the presence of Western European countries, including Germany, in the alliance is helpful, but it does not affect the fundamental strategic rationale for the alliance’s existence.”

• Why it matters: “True, given Germany’s current economic size, nothing ever happens in the EU without Germany. Yet, time and time again, not much happens with Germany either. Just as Berlin has resisted calls for a substantial military buildup, it has also thrown water repeatedly on efforts to turn the EU into a properly federalized institution with real fiscal and geopolitical heft. Especially given the state of German politics today, the prospect of a genuine German leadership on the European and global stage is akin to waiting for Godot in the eponymous play… To be sure, we should be hoping for a more strategically minded German leadership than the assortment of box-ticking accountants who occupy most, though not all, positions of influence in Berlin. But, as things stand, the United States shouldn’t just grant Germany its current privileged position to shape the trans-Atlantic relationship, nor should it go on an anti-European crusade simply to punish German fecklessness.”

4. No, Reagan didn’t win the Cold War

Why you should read it: Journalist Max Boot, author of a new biography of President Ronald Reagan, pushes back against notions prevalent among American conservatives that Reagan single-handedly “won the Cold War.”

• “One of the biggest such myths is that Reagan had a plan to bring down the ‘evil empire’ and that it was his pressure that led to U.S. victory in the Cold War. In reality, the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union were primarily the work of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—two consequences of his radically reformist policies (the former intended, the latter unintended). Reagan deserves tremendous credit for understanding that Gorbachev was a different kind of communist leader, someone he could do business with and thereby negotiate a peaceful end to a 40-year conflict. But Reagan did not bring about Gorbachev’s reforms, much less force the collapse of the Soviet Union. To imagine otherwise is to create dangerous and unrealistic expectations for what U.S. policy toward China can achieve today.”

• “Indeed, accounts that focus only on Reagan’s get-tough approach to the Soviet Union during his first term miss a big part of the picture. Reagan’s approach toward the Soviet Union was neither consistently tough nor consistently conciliatory. Instead, his foreign policy was an often baffling combination of hawkish and dovish approaches based on his own conflicting instincts and the clashing advice he received from hard-line aides such as Clark, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and CIA Director William Casey and more pragmatic advisers such as Shultz and national security advisers Robert McFarlane, Frank Carlucci, and Colin Powell… There was nothing inevitable about the Soviet collapse, and it was not the product of Reagan’s efforts to spend more on the military and to curb Soviet expansionism abroad. It was the unanticipated and unintended consequence of the increasingly radical reforms implemented by Gorbachev, namely glasnost and perestroika, over the objections of more conservative comrades who finally tried to overthrow him in 1991. The Soviet Union broke up not because it was economically bankrupt but because Gorbachev recognized that it was morally bankrupt and he refused to hold it together by force. If any other member of the Politburo had taken power in 1985, the Soviet Union might still exist and the Berlin Wall might still stand, just as the demilitarized zone still divides North Korea from South Korea. Although he did not induce Gorbachev’s reforms, Reagan deserves credit for working with the Soviet leader at a time when most conservatives warned that the president was being hoodwinked by a wily communist.”

• Why it matters: “There is little evidence that pressure on the Soviet Union in Reagan’s first term made the Soviets more willing to negotiate, but there is a good deal of evidence that his pivot toward cooperation with Gorbachev in his second term allowed the new Soviet leader to transform his country and end the Cold War. Yet many conservatives conflate Reagan’s second-term success with his first-term failures, applying the wrong policy lessons to relations with communist China today… The United States should continue to contain and deter Chinese aggression, limit the export of sensitive technology, and support human rights in China while still engaging in dialogue with Chinese leaders to lessen the risk of war. This was the prudent approach to the Soviet Union that U.S. presidents of both parties adopted during the Cold War. But Washington should not imagine that it can transform China. Only the Chinese people can do that. Today’s confrontation with China can only end if Chinese leader Xi Jinping is succeeded by a true reformer in the Gorbachev mold. Unless that long-shot scenario comes to pass, pursuing a one-sided caricature of Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union is likely to make the world a more dangerous place.”

5. The case for public nuclear power

Why you should read it: In the pages of The Nation, journalist Fred Stafford makes the case for a big public nuclear power build-out led by the Tennessee Valley Authority.

• “Thanks to its potential for decarbonization, nuclear energy is more prominent in national policy than it’s been in decades. The Biden administration has thrown the weight of the government behind the technology: subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, regulatory reforms in the ADVANCE Act, and extensive engagement with the industry in the Department of Energy. For the first time in the United States, a closed nuclear plant, in Michigan, is being restarted. ‘To reach our goal of net-zero by 2050,’ Jennifer Granholm, Biden’s secretary of energy, recently stated, ‘we have to at least triple our current nuclear capacity in this country.’ But after staggering cost overruns and delays at the most recent nuclear megaproject now complete in Georgia—more than double its $14 billion estimate and seven years late—no companies are ready to build the next one.”

• “Because of all the nuclear power, the TVA ranks as providing the second-lowest share of fossil-fueled electricity among the 10 largest ‘balancing areas’ of the grid—the regions with distinct rules and incentives for electrical resources, each controlled by a single grid operator—behind only the main one serving California. That’s despite the TVA’s gas plants. Environmental groups blast out a different data point about the TVA, though: It’s dead last among the same 10 by share of wind and solar electricity… The Tennessee Valley is looking at massive new electricity demand thanks to a surge in manufacturing in the South and, according to a recent university study, an expected 22 percent growth in the region’s population by 2050. To meet that growth at the same time as it retires the rest of its coal plants, the TVA is turning to a suite of resources, including gas plants, solar farms, energy storage facilities, and, once again, nuclear power. And this time the nuclear program serves national interests beyond regional ones: kicking the tires of American industrial capacity to build big things.”

• Why it matters: “In 2022, the TVA announced its decision to launch a new nuclear program… If the project succeeds, the TVA could one day rely on SMRs instead of gas plants for flexible, on-demand power to complement increasing renewables. Both [TVA chief nuclear officer Tim] Rausch and IBEW [union] see that as a good thing. Offering so much utility to the grid while emitting no carbon into the atmosphere and no pollutants into local communities is what justifies the substantial cost of building the first SMRs. The TVA’s standardized design for BWRX-300 deployment could become a template that is shared with other utilities: particularly smaller public ones across the United States or even those in developing nations that need clean, 24/7 power for industrialization.”

6. Why America can’t build ships

Why you should read it: For his Construction Physics Substack, Brian Potter goes over the woes of the American commercial shipbuilding and finds that American shipbuilding was never quite the powerhouse we.

• “Commercial shipbuilding in the U.S. is virtually nonexistent: in 2022, the U.S. had just five large oceangoing commercial ships on order, compared to China’s 1,794 and South Korea’s 734. The U.S. Navy estimates that China’s shipbuilding capacity is 232 times our own. It costs twice as much to four times as much to build a ship in the U.S. as it does elsewhere. The commercial shipbuilders that do exist only survive thanks to protectionist laws like the Jones Act, which serve to prop up an industry which is uncompetitive internationally. As a result, the U.S. annually imports over 4 trillion dollars worth of goods, 40% of which are delivered by ship (more than by any other mode of transportation), but those ships are overwhelmingly built elsewhere… U.S. shipbuilders have struggled to compete in the commercial market since roughly the Civil War. Outside of a few narrow windows, the U.S. has never been a major force in international shipping. The situation we face today, with U.S. ships costing at least twice as much to build as ships built elsewhere, is not a recent development; it’s been the norm for at least the past 100 years.”

• “To try and support the merchant marine and reignite shipbuilding employment during the depths of the depression, in 1936 Congress passed another Merchant Marine Act, which amongst its provisions included an extremely generous subsidy for American shipbuilders. These shipbuilders could receive a Construction Differential Subsidy (CDS) that covered the difference between American and foreign costs, up to 50% of the cost of the ship; in other words, it assumed that U.S. ships were roughly twice as expensive as ships built elsewhere… But the U.S. again failed to transform its enormous [World War II] shipbuilding effort into a successful commercial shipbuilding industry. The huge fleet of cargo ships was quickly sold off to foreign countries and private shipowners. Within three years, Britain, France, Germany and Denmark had completely or nearly completely replaced their wartime cargo ship losses with U.S.-built ships, and the American-owned fraction of global shipping tonnage had fallen to 48%. While the U.S. could have used the opportunity to jumpstart its commercial shipbuilding industry, it chose not to. Even at peak Liberty Ship production the U.S. had not been able to produce ships as efficiently as Britain in terms of labor hours, and after the war both American steel and American labor were far more expensive than in Britain. The U.S. dismantled or mothballed its emergency shipyards, and shipbuilders mostly abandoned the large-block style construction, returning to pre-war methods. Protected by its generous subsidies and often blocked by union rules, American builders had little incentive to try and overcome its labor and material disadvantages with novel, efficient techniques, and U.S.-built ships remained far more expensive than ships built elsewhere. By 1950, the U.S. was once again a marginal producer of commercial cargo ships.”

• Why it matters: “What’s behind the US’s long history of being unable to compete commercially? In looking at the history of US shipbuilding, two major trends stand out. The first is the high cost of inputs, particularly labor and steel. Shipbuilding is labor intensive, and we see a repeated pattern of it moving to countries with low-cost labor: from Britain to Japan, then to Korea, then to China... The U.S., on the other hand, never appears to have been strongly motivated to make its shipbuilding industry an international success. Historically it has been isolationist, trading much more with itself than it has with other countries. Shipbuilding policies have long been much more focused on sheltering the industry from competition rather than driving to make it successful. Shipbuilding unions have often resisted dramatic changes in shipping and shipbuilding technology. Best practice transfer efforts often appear half-hearted. A Japanese shipbuilding executive noted that if ships were behind schedule, American yards were inclined to throw more labor at the problem, where Japanese yards would ask for the reason behind the delays and resolve the fundamental issues. A recurring theme in The Abandoned Ocean, a history of U.S. maritime policy, is that the U.S. has never been able to marshall the political will to remake its industry along more competitive lines.”

7. Why Europe is taking a page from America’s economic playbook

Why you should read it: Wall Street Journal columnist Jon Sindreu looks at the report on European competitiveness authored by former European Central Bank head Mario Draghi and finds it’s a lot closer to America’s recent economic policies than the European Union’s own.

• “The bloc’s politics were shaken last week after Mario Draghi, the former European Central Bank president credited with saving the eurozone in 2012, published his long-awaited report on how to stop an economic stagnation that has been worsened by the competition posed by Chinese exports and the end of cheap Russian energy… The crucial point of the report is that ‘the EU should aim to move closer to the U.S. example in terms of productivity growth and innovation,’ highlighting that no listed European company valued at more than 100 billion euros, equivalent to $111 billion, has been created in the past 50 years. In America, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon.com, Alphabet and Meta Platforms all surpass $1 trillion.

• “What does moving closer to the U.S. mean, though? Draghi emphasized the importance of the technology sector, saying it is responsible for almost all of the U.S. productivity outperformance over the past 20 years… This ‘vertical’ emphasis on a single sector is a big departure from the post-1980s status quo, which has exhorted free markets, entrepreneurship and ‘horizontal’ policies meant to boost the entire European economy such as educating the labor force and building up infrastructure… The takeaway is that firms will only make big productivity-enhancing investments if they operate in growth sectors where it makes sense. This is why Europe has a gap in nonconstruction investment rates relative to the U.S.: Its top-three research spenders in recent times have consistently been petrol-car companies. In the U.S., by contrast, big R&D spenders were in automobiles and pharmaceuticals in the 2000s, then in software and hardware in the 2010s and more recently in digital applications.”

• Why it matters: “But the EU has failed to react to the same extent [as the United States], paralyzed by fractured governance, Germany’s corporatist interests in China and Russia and an acute case of believing its own free-market propaganda… Draghi’s image as the ultimate technocrat gives him a shot at changing this, while avoiding a destructively protectionist turn. To do so, the 400-page document proposes a trade policy based on ‘a case-by-case analysis’ of what will enhance productivity growth, and an industrial strategy based on picking sectors, rather than specific winners… The so-called Washington consensus of the late 20th century preached free trade and laissez-faire economic management. Today, being Team USA means targeted protectionism and aggressive subsidies for high-tech sectors.”

8. How the sale of U.S. Steel became a lose-lose proposition

Why you should read it: The Atlantic’s James Surowiecki attacks the industrial policy stupidity of blocking Japanese firm Nippon Steel’s attempt to buy out U.S. Steel, noting that many of the mooted objections have already been addressed.

• “Purely on the merits, blocking the deal makes little sense. After U.S. Steel put itself up for auction last year, Nippon’s bid proved substantially higher than the next highest, from the American steelmaker Cleveland-Cliffs (several other domestic and foreign buyers were said to be in the running). And in contrast to U.S. Steel’s own record of doing little to upgrade its older plants and facilities, Nippon has promised to spend billions to modernize the American firm’s aging blast-furnace plants in Pennsylvania and at Gary, Indiana… Nippon has gone to considerable lengths to address [United Steelworkers leader David] McCall’s concerns, promising that it will honor all of U.S. Steel’s contractual commitments to its workers, and committing to a $2.7 billion investment in those blast-furnace plants. But McCall has, if anything, become more intransigent, with the union declaring, ‘We can’t trust in what USS and Nippon are telling us.’”

• “Even so, the Committee on Foreign Investment—created by Gerald Ford in 1975 to provide analysis of inward investment, and later given formal authority by Congress—is supposed to evaluate deals not with an eye toward politics, but purely according to their implications for national security… The committee has tried to manufacture a national-security rationale for killing the deal. But its argument that a Nippon acquisition would make America less safe is implausible at best. The U.S. defense industry’s demand for steel is small; only about 3 percent of domestic production is purchased by the Pentagon. As for Nippon’s foreign ownership, Japan is no hostile power but one of America’s closest and most loyal allies. Rolling metal is not making microchips, and U.S. Steel is no technological pioneer—if anything, it’s become something of an industry also-ran. The deal will not move American steel production abroad; more likely, it would lead to more manufacturing at home. In a letter that the committee sent to Nippon and U.S. Steel, officials expressed concern that Nippon might try to import steel from India, where it has plants. But if the Japanese company could competitively ship steel from India to the U.S., Nippon would hardly be spending almost $15 billion to make steel in the U.S. and avoid tariffs.”

• Why it matters: “The upshot of all this interference from politically motivated interests is that U.S. Steel could be left without a buyer at all. The hope for any deal is always that every side can call it a win. Blocking Nippon’s acquisition on a bogus national-security pretext might well ensure that everybody loses.”

9. How Russia gets high on its own supply of disinformation

Why you should read it: Disinformation expert Thomas Rid analyzes a cache of document leaked from one of Russia’s top disinformation clearinghouses in Foreign Affairs and finds that Moscow often deceives itself at the same time it seeks to deceive others.

• “Tech companies and research labs had carefully traced, documented, and often removed some of Doppelganger’s online footprints, and even exposed the private Moscow firm mostly responsible for the campaigns: the Social Design Agency. But the disinformation campaigns persisted, and on September 4, in a move to counter them, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it had seized 32 Internet domains behind the Doppelganger campaign—and published an unprecedented 277-page FBI affidavit that included 190 pages of internal SDA documents likely sourced by American spies. Then, 12 days later, the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that, in late August, it had received from an anonymous source, large amounts of authentic internal SDA documents… The information revealed not only tactical insights but deeper ones—insights that observers had not expected and that, to date, have not yet been properly understood by intelligence analysts and investigative reporters. A close analysis of the leaked files suggests that although Russia is using new technological methods to disseminate disinformation, many of the country’s core methods and goals remain familiar from the Cold War. They show how the SDA’s efforts to trick Western audiences may well have deceived the company’s own leadership—and the Russian government—about the effectiveness of the Doppelganger campaigns. And perhaps most important, the documents reveal that the biggest boost the Doppelganger campaigners got was from the West’s own anxious coverage of the project. That revelation, in turn, demonstrates that those who wish to fight disinformation—whether it originates from Russia or elsewhere—need to start thinking very differently about how to counter campaigns.”

• “A close read of these leaked documents, as well as of the FBI’s September affidavit, reveals, first, how central forgery is to Russia’s disinformation strategy. Fabrication and misrepresentation—forging documents, counterfeiting letters, making up sources, creating false identities, inventing front organizations, and deceiving audiences—were, for a century, a prominent part of the Soviet Union’s political warfare. The Doppelganger documents reveal the degree to which Russian political actors still rely on tools from Soviet so-called active measures, albeit abetted by new technologies and given new names… The documents also reveal that the SDA not only deceived its targets but also deceived itself. Historians of active measures have catalogued how the Soviet Union took advantage of existing frictions, conflicts, and contradictions in the societies they targeted, and the SDA sought to do the same with Doppelganger. The newly disclosed documents illustrate that the SDA begins its influence efforts by surveying the landscape of organic friction points and real frustrations within its target societies. But such a method incorporates a wicked risk for disinformation operators. Because their goal is to accelerate trends that are already advancing, there is no definitive way for them to know just how much their own interventions contributed to driving these trends… The SDA’s executives, writers, and artists may not have believed its own internal propaganda, of course. Disinformation operators’ main target audience has always been their funders and their own governments. Thus is the bureaucratic logic of large-scale, long-term disinformation efforts: they tend to eventually persuade even the organizers that aspects of their falsehoods are true, and thus they become a form of institutionalized conspiracy theory.”

• Why it matters: “The recent document disclosures—and particularly the information about how the SDA gauged its own impact—hold potent lessons for how to counter disinformation. Democracies must vigorously counter foreign influence operations, because leaks and fakes can, indeed, deepen divisions and weaken open societies. And the documents do reveal that efforts by social media companies to identify and remove disinformation work. Meta’s vigilant internal intelligence teams and relentless takedowns blunted the project’s overall reach: after Meta kept shutting down Doppelganger-associated accounts on Facebook and Instagram, the SDA appears to have dialed down its efforts to sow disinformation on Meta’s platforms, although some abuse continues… The newly disclosed documents show that reporting on run-of-the-mill influence operations with negligible or no effect—or even exaggerating that effect—simply helps disinformation agents generate more convincing marketing material. Instead, governments, companies, and investigative organizations and media outlets that wish to counter disinformation must focus more sharply on efforts that translate into tangible consequences for the perpetrators: taking down infrastructure and accounts from social media platforms and barring their reentry as well as exposing disinformation entrepreneurs personally, sanctioning them, and indicting them. If the SDA documents were not leaked to the press by Western intelligence agencies, they should have been.”

Odds and Ends

Americans have a favorable opinion of ancient Rome, with 49 percent of the public saying in a recent survey that the Roman Empire had a positive impact on the world…

A timeline of the deterioration of the Titanic wreck from its discovery in 1985 to the digital recreation of the site in 2023…

Prehistoric Earth was much hotter than previously assumed, one recent scientific study argues, with high levels of carbon dioxide shouldering most of the blame…

Was King Charles II too horny to rule? The BBC investigates…

A preview of NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, scheduled to launch to the Jovian moon next month…

What I’m Listening To

• A live rendition of Cream’s “White Room” by Sheryl Crow, featuring a scorching Eric Clapton guitar solo, from Crow’s fall 1999 concert in Central Park.

• “You Wreck Me,” a cover of a Tom Petty number by the War on Drugs for the Bad Monkey soundtrack.

• “Bad/40/Where the Streets Have No Name,” a live medley of U2 classics from the band’s recently released Electrical Storm EP.

What I’m Streaming

• The podcasting, crime-solving odd throuple of Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez returns for a fourth season of Only Murders in the Building, this time investigating the murder of Martin’s long-time stunt double Sazz (Jane Lynch) while navigating Hollywood’s attempt to bring their true crime podcast to the silver screen.

• Agatha All Along, the sequel to 2021’s WandaVision that finds Marvel Comics witch Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) seeking to regain her arcane and mystical powers after being stripped of them by the Scarlet Witch—all while dodging the vengeance of fellow witch Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza).

• Twisters, this summer’s highly entertaining quasi-sequel to the 1996 weather thriller, starring Glen Powell as a rogue storm-chaser and Daisy Edgar-Jones as his straight-laced scientific counterpart.

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"Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns.

What is that to him that reaps not harvest of his youthful joys,
Tho' the deep heart of existence beat for ever like a boy's?

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the shore,
And the individual withers, and the world is more and more.

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,
Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest."

- Alfed, Lord Tennyson, "Locksley Hall"

What I’m Reading:

1. What Ukraine’s Kursk offensive can tell us about strategy

Why you should read it: Former Australian army general Mick Ryan writes for Engelsberg Ideas that Ukraine’s surprise offensive into Russia’s Kursk region demonstrates the timid strategic thinking of America and its allies.

• “The Ukrainian attack into Kursk in Russia, now into its third week, was a tactical and operational surprise for the Russians… The Ukrainians have also surprised their supporters in the West. This was in large part because Ukraine deliberately withheld details of the Kursk attack to preserve operational security, maximise its chances of achieving surprise and shock against the Russians, guard against the inflated expectations of the failed 2023 counteroffensive and avoid second guessing by talkative, risk-adverse bureaucrats in the West.”

• “The status quo of the war before the offensive was not sustainable for Ukraine. It is incurring unacceptable humanitarian and strategic costs. Appreciating that NATO strategy for supporting Ukraine is unlikely to shift beyond its ‘defend Ukraine’ approach; that no significant shift in US policy is likely before next year; and that Putin retains his aspiration to exterminate its sovereignty and culture, Ukraine knew that it was the only actor that could change the status quo in the war. The surprise attack into Kursk, with its political, strategic and military objectives, is the result… Another factor that partially explains Ukraine’s strategic and battlefield surprise is that Western politicians and bureaucrats, having assumed a posture of ‘strategic slumber’ since the end of the Cold War, can no longer imagine such battlefield and strategic audacity. From the perspective of western politics, it is very risky behaviour, and certainly would not poll well. None of the challenges faced by the West in the past 30 years, even the wars spawned by 9/11, have required the mobilisation of people, industry and new ideas – or the taking of massive strategic risks.”

• Why it matters: “The strategic timidity that has produced a lack of imagination in the the West’s national security community has brewed over decades; it was on display in Afghanistan. Very few countries involved were willing to commit significant resources to the campaign. Almost all had significant caveats on the employment of their forces… The West’s strategic timidity prevents it from imagining, let alone conducting, the kind of audacious, high risk and high reward actions that Ukraine is taking in Kursk. The Kursk offensive, which is yet to draw Russian forces from its advance in the Donbas, may well fail to achieve some of its objectives. If so, it won’t be because the Ukrainians didn’t try. Western politicians and bureaucrats have much to learn from the strategic audacity shown by Ukraine in recent weeks. Let us hope they have the character, humility, and risk-tolerance to do so.”

2. Why China is starting a new trade war

Why you should read it: Wall Street Journal reporters Lingling Wei and Jason Douglas observe that China is “cranking up its massive export engine again” and pushing its surplus production on the world—sparking a trade war in the process.

• “Beijing’s solution to a weak Chinese economy—putting the country’s factory sector on steroids—is squeezing businesses around the world and raising the specter of a new global trade war… Behind it all is a bold but risky calculation by Beijing that investing more in manufacturing can restore the country’s economic vitality and build up its industrial resilience without triggering so much international pushback that it threatens China’s future… Chinese leader Xi Jinping ordered officials to double down on the country’s state-led manufacturing model, with billions of dollars in fresh subsidies and credit. He used a slogan to make sure officials got the message: ‘Establish the new before breaking the old’” or xian li hou po in Chinese.”

• “China has added capacity to produce some 40 million vehicles a year, even though it sells only around 22 million at home. It’s on track to make around 750 gigawatts of solar cells this year, despite only needing 220 gigawatts domestically in 2023. And it is expected to account for 80% of the world’s new supply this year in basic chemicals such as ethylene and propylene, used to make garbage bags, toys and cosmetics—even though prices in China have been falling for 19 months, a sign of oversupply… Overall Chinese export volumes, stripping out the effect of exchange-rate movements, are up 10% since the end of 2021, versus 1.5% for world exports in total. China’s steel exports jumped 36% last year from a year earlier… By doubling down on manufacturing when it already produces close to a third of global factory output, China is effectively asking the rest of the world not to expand its share of production, but to reduce it, said Michael Pettis, a professor of finance at Peking University who has written extensively on imbalances in global trade.”

• Why it matters: “The U.S. is in some ways one of the least-affected countries, because it has high tariffs on many Chinese goods that help shield U.S. workers. But Washington’s goal of expanding U.S. manufacturing can’t be achieved if overproduction in China continues, and some industries—especially renewable energy—are feeling pressure… The risk for Xi is that unlike the first “China Shock” in the early 2000s, when cheap Chinese manufacturing wiped out an estimated two million jobs in the U.S. but also benefited Western consumers, the latest push could trigger so many protectionist measures that China winds up with few sizable markets to sell to.”

3. How Joe Biden spurred an American manufacturing renaissance

Why you should read it: Financial Times reporters Amanda Chu and Alexandra Wright outline how President Biden’s industrial policies have breathed new life into America’s manufacturing industries.

• “The Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips and Science Act together offer more than $400bn in tax credits, grants, and loans to revitalise the country’s industrial heartlands and rival Beijing… The two laws have catalysed manufacturing investment, spurring a fierce contest between states to attract corporations eager to build factories and take advantage of the often uncapped federal support. US Census data shows that spending on construction for manufacturing sits at record highs, and the FT estimates that large-scale manufacturing commitments surpassed $225bn in the first year.”

• “But as the two-year anniversary arrives for the legislation, many of these factories face roadblocks linked to deteriorating market conditions, overproduction in China, and a lack of policy certainty in a high stakes election year… A tough macroeconomic backdrop of high interest rates and inflation, combined with the collapse in global pricing for these particular technologies, has clouded investor interest to back manufacturing projects, even with the longer term certainty and incentives offered by the two laws. The IRA offers a 10-year window for tax credits, and the Chips Act awards generous funds to selected applicants as well as a tax credit for projects that break ground before 2027… Approximately 47 per cent of the large-scale manufacturing projects announced in the first year of the IRA and Chips Act are on track or operational, the FT found… Delays also do not necessarily translate to major setbacks to production. The chipmaker Micron pushed back construction on its $20bn semiconductor fabrication plant in New York due to environmental permitting challenges related to an endangered bat species, but the company has moved up its target date for production by three years. Ryan McMahon, chief executive of Onondaga County, where Micron is located, calls the project ‘a huge comeback story for a rustbelt community.’”

• Why it matters: “Uncertainty over the IRA’s future at a political level has also stalled progress on projects. While the vast majority of the IRA’s manufacturing dollars have flowed to Republican-controlled districts and states, the IRA received no Republican support in Congress and former president Donald Trump has vowed on the campaign trail to ‘terminate’ it… The delays themselves add a layer of political risk. The slower arrival of manufacturing jobs will make it harder for the Democratic presumptive nominee and Vice-President Kamala Harris to sell her administration’s economic agenda to voters in the November election, where support from rustbelt states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin will be decisive in securing a victory.”

4. Why predictions of AI doom resemble the movies more than reality

Why you should read it: At his Substack on artificial intelligence issues, writer Tim Lee notes that the prophets of inevitable AI doom cannot come up with scenarios that don’t resemble dumbed-down cinematic depictions of intellectual breakthroughs like the cracking of German codes during World War II.

• “Stories about the existential risk from AI exhibit some of the same cognitive biases you see in Hollywood movies. Doomers expect an AI system to achieve artificial general intelligence, start improving its own design, and quickly transform itself into a superintelligence. Then they fear it could take over the world and kill all human beings… The problem is that many doomer scenarios feel oversimplified in a movie-like way. Movies tend to involve fewer characters and simpler plotlines than real historical events. The fate of the world sometimes hinges on a handful of crucial decisions by a movie’s main character. This is rarely true in the real world.”

• “In stories of AI doom, the Hollywood-style turning point is the moment when an AI system achieves ‘artificial general intelligence’ and begins a ‘fast takeoff’ toward superintelligence… In reality, the process of recursive self-improvement has already started: companies like Meta make heavy use of [large language models] to help them build the next iteration of LLMs… So when it comes to filtering and augmenting training data, AI systems are already doing a lot of the work to build their successors. I expect this to become increasingly true over time. But it will be many years—if ever—before companies stop hiring human beings to oversee the process… I don’t think there will be any clear-cut moment when AIs “take over” this job from human programmers. And even if this did happen, it wouldn’t necessarily lead to a sudden increase in productivity because AIs will already be doing most of the work prior to that point.”

• Why it matters: “…people envision a future where AI systems serve as scientists, and assume that such a system would need to be highly agentic to do its job. But it seems more likely that we’ll have a science chatbot that helps a human scientist design experiments and analyze the results. It might generate code that instructs robots in automated labs to actually carry out the experiments… [I]t’s not too much to expect a superhuman AI system to explain its recommendations in terms ordinary human beings can understand. This will be particularly important because many high-stakes decisions have both moral and practical dimensions. There are often tradeoffs between performance, cost, safety, and other factors. Human beings are going to want to make those tradeoffs themselves, not go along with whatever a neural network happens to prefer.”

5. How autocrats use hostage-taking as a weapon

Why you should read it: Wall Street Journal reporter Yaroslav Trofimov details the ways in which autocratic regimes like Putin’s Russia and Iran use hostage-taking as a tool of foreign policy.

• “Hostage-taking by nation-states—something practiced more often by terrorists and insurgents in the past—has become more and more frequent in recent years. The phenomenon poses a new challenge to Western democracies… The playing field is skewed. Countries with rule of law and independent judiciaries cannot just order tit-for-tat reprisals, grabbing similar hostages in return. They’re also constrained in what they can do to ban travel of their own citizens to adversary nations. Currently, hundreds of citizens of the U.S. and allied democracies are estimated to be held by authoritarian regimes for political reasons, with Russia alone grabbing several Americans in recent months.”

• “Iran—whose revolutionary regime started off with the capture of American diplomats in 1979, and then sponsored the kidnappings of Westerners in Lebanon—has led the way in making hostage-taking a feature of modern international statecraft… China and Russia have also increasingly resorted to seizing Western academics, tourists and journalists, including Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich. So have a slew of smaller countries, including adversaries such as North Korea and Venezuela and ostensible U.S. allies such as Turkey—which in 2017 unsuccessfully tried to trade a detained American pastor, Andrew Brunson, for Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, who resides in Pennsylvania. Brunson was released the following year, after the Trump administration sanctioned senior Turkish officials and raised tariffs on Turkish exports… The U.S. and other Western nations have tried to mitigate the risk by warning their citizens not to travel to countries where the probability of wrongful detention is high. The State Department has issued such ‘D’ warnings against trips to eight countries: Iran, Russia, China, Eritrea, Venezuela, North Korea, Nicaragua and Myanmar. Yet—unlike during the height of the Cold War, where American passports were marked as not valid for travel to much of the Communist bloc—there are no legal restrictions for such trips, except to North Korea.”

• Why it matters: “Only deeper cooperation among democracies, including a joint response to inflict real pain, can deter autocratic regimes from taking more and more Western hostages, said Carla Ferstman, a professor at Essex Law School in the U.K., who has worked on several cases of hostages held by authoritarian governments. ‘This is a new kind of warfare…Iran, or Russia, or whoever else is doing it is going to win unless Western governments collectively put a bar against this practice,’ she said. ‘But now each government thinks they are smarter, that if they make their own little deal they will do better. They don’t.’”

6. Why denial of anti-Israel protestors’ motives is unsustainable

Why you should read it: New York columnist Jonathan Chait contends that it’s become impossible to sane-wash the views of virulently anti-Israel protestors by attributing to them noble motives or concern for Palestinian suffering.

• “[Students Allied for Freedom and Equality], like other branches of [Students for Justice in Palestine], takes an eliminationist posture toward Israel. It has employed violent rhetoric preceding Israel’s operation in Gaza. A SAFE rally in January 2023 featured calls of “intifada revolution,” smashing the “Zionist entity,” claims that Israelis ‘water their invasive species with Palestinian blood,” and so on. SAFE celebrated the October 7 attacks. In March, its president wrote on social media, ‘Until my last breath, I will utter death to every single individual who supports the Zionist state. Death and more. Death and worse.’ The group sent masked protesters to the home of a Jewish regent in the middle of the night and vandalized his law office…. Would progressives have taken a cooler view of the demonstrators had they possessed a clearer view of their objectives? Some might. But others would not. Progressives tend to take a romantic view of left-wing protest. Protesters occupy a special category of political actor, freed of any responsibility or agency and judged only as a counterweight against the worst excesses of whatever they oppose. They represent an idealistic impulse and revulsion at the status quo, and since the status quo is unjust, their behavior, by definition, cannot be. All that matters is that their actions are directionally correct.”

• “Inevitably, the activism and pedagogy inspired by [left-wing] settler-colonialist theory has frequently slipped over into outright antisemitism. A Stanford lecturer told Jewish students to identify themselves, then ordered them to stand in a corner of the classroom, because ‘this is what Israel does to Palestinians.’ At Columbia, one professor allegedly asked a student with a Jewish name before an exam to explain their views on Israeli’s actions in Gaza, while another complained that the mainstream media ‘is owned by Jews.’ At CUNY, the activist group Not in Our Name instructed its members and followers to undermine a Hillel survey on campus antisemitism, including by answering a question about encountering prejudice against Jews in the negative even if they had experienced it… These sorts of incidents may not represent the typical experience of Jewish students, but they are a predictable result of the climate of opinion fostered by the leading pro-Palestinian activist groups. Their rejection of coexistence between Palestinians and Jews in the Middle East has extended to their vision of domestic politics in the U.S. The protesters’ central goal has been to turn Zionism — which they define, de minimus, as the belief that Israel has a right to exist in any form — into an unacceptable opinion. Their demand that universities boycott Israel is designed to advance this strategy by lending official support to their view that Israel is a unique source of evil in the world… What Democrats and progressives need to decide is whether to treat these groups as noble idealists broadly on the right side of history or as the fanatic adherents of an illiberal and unjust program. In the Middle East, that program calls for endless war until the Jews have been expurgated from a soil on which they unnaturally reside. In the West, it means imposing social norms that make most Jews feel alien and unwelcome.”

• Why it matters: “For years, Jews in progressive spaces have long agonized over demands they face to denounce Israel or Zionism as the entry price for their participation. Divestment is a lever intended to spread that cultural norm more broadly through universities and other cultural institutions. The protest method of seizing campus common space and declaring it off limits to ‘Zionists’ is a model for their strategic goal. That persistent demand, more than the sporadic outbursts of overt antisemitic harassment, is the chilling threat that makes Jews fear for their future in the U.S…. The movement could not be any more clear on this point. Its members will not stop harassing and intimidating Jewish people. Nor will they adopt any standard of behavior. When they say they believe they are part of the Palestinian liberation movement, and that the movement is entitled to use any means necessary, that is exactly what they mean.”

7. How Nate Silver lost the plot

Why you should read it: For The Point, Leif Weatherby and Ben Recht review data journalism guru Nate Silver’s new book and find its central conceit of betting reveals “Silver’s true passion: gambling.”

• “A revealing look into a hyper-quantified worldview where numbers inform all decisions, it takes us from poker to sports betting to capitalist swashbuckling to battling superintelligent robots. Silver’s thesis is that gambling represents a comprehensive approach to life: a way to decide what to do in literally any situation. If you go by the process. If you make everything into numbers. If you bet the odds. Then you are righteous—even if you lose it all… Yet despite the apparent triumph of his numbers-based techniques, things turned sour for Silver in 2016. He first insisted that Donald Trump would not win the Republican nomination, and then, chastened by his folly, ended up giving him a 29 percent chance of winning the general election. When the results were in, Silver adamantly claimed he was more right than everyone else, pointing to the fact that the Huffington Post, for instance, put Trump’s odds of winning at about 2 percent. But why does it matter if other forecasters were more bullish on Hillary Clinton’s chances? For Silver, this speaks to the way he has often been misunderstood. In [his book] On the Edge, he asserts that his forecasts were never supposed to make the readers of the New York Times feel less anxious; his job, rather, was ‘to handicap the race’ for those who wanted to bet on it. A good election forecast is one where if you’d bet on it, you’d make money… Silver’s logic is thus that if your forecasts are better, you’ll make more money betting. Notice, though, that this defense has nothing to do with accuracy in raw terms—he didn’t predict Trump would actually win—and certainly nothing to do with voting or representative democracy itself. It’s about how you might be able to profit off of democratic elections.”

• “Here’s something we learned while reading this book: no amount of empirical evidence is enough to convince Silver that this might be, well, bad. Silver acknowledges that slots are unfair, but concludes that the problem is with the addicts. He manages to find a few ‘Riverian’ slot players who are gaming the bad odds while hiding their expertise from the casinos. Everyone else is doing it wrong. What he can’t seem to see is that the casino owners—whose operations have in recent years become ever more data-driven—are the ultimate Riverians, and that they are not taking any risks at all. Indeed, it’s precisely the opposite: slots guarantee profit to the casino by impoverishing people who play them… On the Edge is a celebration of the community that uses their phones to gamble on everything: to place sports bets, to bet on risky stock options, to bet on cryptocurrencies, to bet on elections… Is this a world that we want to live in? Silver provides lip service to the counterarguments, but his approach excludes them. The methods that Silver introduces in the book largely lead to personal immiseration and addiction. Several recent studies have found that online gambling activity by teenagers is increasing, and that their calls to helplines are up; about 2.5 million adults in the U.S. have a gambling addiction, a number that’s been on the rise since the legalization of sports betting in 2018. A set of multibillion-dollar industries, from casinos to crypto exchanges to AI, complete the feedback loop, facilitating a gamified Bayesianism and parasitically feeding off society.”

• Why it matters: “This is the mindset behind the world that Silver played a large role in establishing: one of ubiquitous prediction where everything is bettable. Silver insists that viewing all decisions through this lens of gambling is the underappreciated characteristic of Very Successful People. It is true that, as Silver suggests, quantifying everything, and then betting on the outcome, has become a pervasive and powerful technique, at work in fields from finance to culture to sports to politics. But what Silver willfully ignores is that the successful players in this world aren’t the bettors. They are the bookies and casino owners—the house that never loses.”

8. Why the gay rights movement has outlived its usefulness

Why you should read it: Writer James Kirchick posits in The Atlantic that the gay rights movement’s move into transgender issues has been driven by a need to sustain itself after it had achieved resounding victories on its central causes like gay marriage.

• “Founded in 1985 as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, the nonprofit originally had the mission of promoting more empathetic media coverage of people with AIDS. Over the years, its remit expanded to countering negative portrayals of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in advertising and entertainment. Today, the proliferation of LGBTQ characters on our screens, largely sympathetic coverage in mainstream media, and the ubiquity of same-sex couples in advertisements and commercials all suggest that GLAAD achieved its mission. The group should have long ago taken the win and dissolved—just as the organization Freedom to Marry announced it would do shortly after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in the summer of 2015... The trouble at GLAAD, however, is more than just a story of individual or organizational corruption. It’s also a story about how—in the years since LGBTQ people earned the right to serve openly in the U.S. military, get married, and not be discriminated against in housing and employment—an entire movement has gone tragically adrift.”

• “As gay people have become more fully integrated into the mainstream of American life, prominent activist groups have excelled at perpetuating themselves. The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s leading LGBTQ advocacy organization, issues a highly publicized Corporate Equality Index and, like GLAAD, accepts donations from the businesses it scrutinizes. It and other groups constantly gin up publicity on the faulty premise that life in the United States keeps getting worse for LGBTQ people… Flailing about for relevance since the legalization of same-sex marriage, many gay-rights groups pivoted to a related but fundamentally different cause: transgender rights. Rather than emulate the movement’s past approach—seeking allies across the political spectrum and accepting compromise as a precondition for legal and social progress—they have taken hard-line left-wing positions. LGBTQ groups repeat the mantra ‘the science is settled’ on the extremely complex and fraught subject of youth gender medicine and insist that anyone who questions the provision of puberty blockers to gender-dysphoric children is transphobic. They continue to spread this message even as many European countries have backed away from such treatments after concluding that the evidence supporting them is weak. The reflexive promotion of major medical interventions for minors should be a red flag for gay men and lesbians, considering the research indicating that many gender-distressed and gender-nonconforming children grow up to be gay.”

• Why it matters: “Accepting victory, however, can be difficult for people who devote their lives to a cause, and not only for emotional reasons. The impulse among activists, once successful, to keep raising money necessitates that they find things to spend it on… The [gay] community has genuine needs—which do not include helping nonprofit executives enrich themselves and hobnob with celebrities. If there’s a silver lining to the ethical collapse of GLAAD, it’s to shine a bright light on the massive waste of resources spent on organizations that have no reason for being and, in some cases, cause more harm than good.”

9. Why Trump’s Arlington Cemetery desecration is even worse than you think

Why you should read it: The Atlantic columnist Michael Powell explains just why former president Trump’s use of Arlington National Cemetery as a campaign prop is even more disgusting than it appears at first glance.

• “For Trump, defiling what is sacred in our civic culture borders on a pastime. Peacefully transferring power to the next president, treating political adversaries with at least rudimentary grace, honoring those soldiers wounded and disfigured in service of our country—Trump long ago walked roughshod over all these norms. Before he tried to overturn a national election, he mocked his opponents in the crudest terms and demeaned dead soldiers as ‘suckers…’ Few spaces in the United States join the sacred and the secular to more moving effect than Arlington National Cemetery, 624 acres set on a bluff overlooking the Potomac River and our nation’s capital. More than 400,000 veterans and their dependents have been laid to rest here, among them nearly 400 Medal of Honor recipients. Rows of matching white tombstones stretch to the end of sight.”

• “But the former president outdid himself this week, when he attended a wreath-laying ceremony honoring 13 American soldiers killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul during the final havoc-marked hours of the American withdrawal. Trump laid three wreaths and put hand over heart; that is a time-honored privilege of presidents. Trump, as is his wont, went further. He walked to a burial site in Section 60 and posed with the family of a fallen soldier, grinning broadly and giving a thumbs-up for his campaign photographer and videographer… This was not a judgment call, or a minor violation of obscure bureaucratic boilerplate. In the regulations governing visitors and behavior at Arlington National Cemetery, many paragraphs lay out what behavior is acceptable and what is not. These read not as suggestions but as commandments. Memorial services are intended to honor the fallen, the regulations note, with a rough eloquence: ‘Partisan activities are inappropriate in Arlington National Cemetery, due to its role as a shrine to all the honored dead of the Armed Forces of the United States and out of respect for the men and women buried there and for their families.’”

• Why it matters: “It had the quality of middle-school graffiti, suggesting that Trump viewed the controversy as yet another chance to mock his critics before moving on to the next outrage. For grieving families with loved ones buried in Section 60, moving on is not so easy… This week, all [Gold Star mother Karen Meredith] could do was call out a crude and self-regarding 78-year-old man for failing, in that most sacred of American places, to comport himself with even the roughest facsimile of dignity.”

Odds and Ends

After a glitch-plagued test flight, Boeing’s Starliner crew vehicle will return to Earth on September 6—without its two-astronaut crew, both of whom will stay on the International Space Station until early next year…

How a quartet of sea lions are helping Australian researchers map the ocean floor off the country’s southern coast…

Why Jerusalem’s fortunes wax and wane with the holy city’s ties to the imperial powers of the day…

Archaeologists reveal that Stonehenge’s central Altar Stone came all the way from the far north of Scotland, over 400 miles away from the megalithic monument’s home in England…

Another volcanic eruption in Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula—the sixth since last December alone…

What I’m Listening To

• Slash’s version of Steppenwolf’s “The Pusher,” featuring Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes on vocals, from the guitar icon’s new covers album Orgy of the Damned.

• “Shine,” a tune from 1990s rockers Collective Soul from the band’s 1993 debut album Hints, Allegations, and Things Left Unsaid.

• “Fire,” a funk track by Ohio Players off the 1975 album of the same name.

What I’m Streaming

• The Killer, director John Woo’s remake of his 1989 action classic, starring Nathalie Emmanuel (Game of Thrones) as the title character and Omar Sy (Lupin). Woo’s trademark moves are all here: doves taking flight before action scenes, manic shoot-outs in hospitals, and plenty of heroic bloodshed.

• Bad Monkey, a dark comedy detective series produced by Bill Lawrence (Scrubs, Ted Lasso) featuring Vince Vaughn as a suspended Florida Keys cop-turned-food inspector working a convoluted case involving a detached arm and, of course, a monkey.

• Veteran actor Ed Harris (The Right Stuff, Apollo 13) narrates the six-part documentary series Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War, which explores what happened before and after the infamous gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona.

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