The Dive, 6/1/26

Your monthly compilation of what's what on global politics, American society, and an assortment of odds and ends

Quote of the Month

"If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth... In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society—in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost's hired man, the fate of having 'nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.'"

- President John F. Kennedy, remarks at Amherst College, October 26, 1963

What I’m Reading:

1. How the “Madman Theory” undermines itself

Why you should read it: For Foreign Policy, international relations scholar Dan Drezner notes that the so-called "Madman Theory” of statecraft suffers from fatal internal logical contradictions that render it useless.

• ““When U.S. President Donald Trump was elected to his second term, many foreign-policy watchers asserted that he would be likely to employ the madman theory as a tool of coercive bargaining. A term originally coined by President Richard Nixon, proponents of the madman theory argue that a leader who behaves as if he might do something crazy has a better chance of deterring and coercing actors into making concessions that they otherwise would not make. In other words, countries might be willing to acquiesce more to a leader insane enough to use nuclear weapons than a leader too rational to try such a bluff… “Indeed, after examining Trump’s second term to date, it is difficult not to conclude that his madman gambits have largely failed. Worse, his efforts to play the madman might have conjured up the one thing guaranteed to blow the theory out of the water: an actual madman for an adversary.”

• “The problems with the madman theory are by now well known. Conceptually, acting crazy might increase the credibility of provocative threats, but it also reduces the credibility that the madman will follow through on any agreement to reduce tensions. Furthermore, saying out loud that one is acting like a madman automatically undercuts the strategy—and Trump likes to say things like this out loud… The pattern became easy to detect: Trump was willing to play the madman to the hilt when confronting smaller and weaker actors. At the same time, he was quick to suddenly revert to a more sane bargaining posture when confronting a more powerful actor. This was particularly true whenever markets responded negatively to his foreign and trade policies. It also explains his recent summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, which produced no substantive agreements and exposed Trump’s willingness to make concessions on Taiwan… The very fact that Trump developed such a predictable and weak bargaining reputation complicated his efforts to play the madman. Trump has faced difficulties parlaying the madman gambit into real concessions because of his failure to follow through on his more outrageous threats. Such a reputation makes the strategy harder to execute—because the crazy threats seem less credible.”

• Why it matters: “Iran’s responses have exposed other issues with Trump’s application of the madman theory as well. Negotiations with Tehran have been difficult for a number of reasons—but perhaps the biggest reason is that Iran’s leaders do not trust the Trump administration after twice being bombed in the middle of negotiations. Acting like a madman can make coercion more plausible, but it also raises the costs of conflict resolution.”

2. Why Trump can’t end his war with Iran

Why you should read it: Long-time Iran expert Karim Sadjadpour explains in The Atlantic that the Iran war will continue indefinitely because “a win-win scenario” for Trump and the Iranian regime “does not exist.”

• ““For nearly five decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been preparing for a war that Donald Trump expected would take days… The Islamic Republic is an obsessive-compulsive revolutionary state—a regime with a half-century fixation on resisting America, rather than advancing the welfare of its own people. Fighting America is not the regime’s policy; it’s the regime’s identity…To justify the immense costs of conflict to American taxpayers, Trump must demand far more from Tehran in any deal than he would have before the war began. Conversely, having lost hundreds of billions of dollars and its top leadership, Iran’s theocracy must demand far more—and concede far less—than it ever would have previously. Neither side can afford a deal that the other might accept. And in a zero-sum negotiation, Iran’s monomaniacal focus is a greater currency than American military power.“

• “The Islamic Republic has never been willing to trade its revolutionary principles for prosperity. As recently as May 26, Mojtaba Khamenei used the hajj—Islam’s most universal gathering—as an occasion to warn that the ‘terrorist’ U.S. military was no longer safe in the Middle East, and that the ‘cancerous tumor of Israel;’ would soon experience the ‘final days of their wretched existence…’ Over the past 47 years, Tehran has made major compromises only twice. The first was its 1988 decision to end the Iran-Iraq War—after eight years and an estimated 200,000 Iranian deaths—a concession that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini likened to drinking poison. The second was the 2015 nuclear deal with the Obama administration. In both cases, when faced with overwhelming economic and diplomatic pressure, a viable diplomatic exit, and no demands to change its revolutionary identity, Tehran showed itself capable of tactical compromise.”

• Why it matters: ““Any government willing to immiserate its own population rather than compromise can look like a tough negotiator. Today, the U.S. naval blockade is costing Iran an estimated $450 million a day. With Iran’s inflation nearing 70 percent, its currency collapsing, and its dire shortages of feedstock and medicine, the regime’s defiance resembles the strategic victory of Monty Python’s Black Knight… The United States needs a deal, but the Islamic Republic needs the United States as an adversary. America seeks resolution. Iran is committed to revolution.”

3. The “Thucydides Trap” Trap

Why you should read it: University of Toronto international relations professor Seva Gunitsky writes on his Substack about the severe intellectual deficiencies of the so-called “Thucydides Trap” popularized by Harvard’s Graham Allison and embraced by Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.

• “Not since George W. [Bush] invoked democratic peace theory to justify invading Iraq has an obscure social science concept been put to such productive misuse. Xi deployed a piece of academic jargon to frame the entire bilateral relationship, and the US president walked right into it… The framing does three things that reinforce Xi’s view of global politics. It flatters China’s rise, places the burden of accommodation on the US and, best of all, accomplishes all this using the comfortable non-threatening language of American social science.”

• “The [Thucydides Trap] concept is stolen, methodologically broken, historically selective, Eurocentric, possibly backwards, and probably useless. Why does it persist?… But another reason for the concept’s persistence is that it does work. It performs diplomatic work and rhetorical work. And the diplomacy and rhetoric it serves is Chinese… First, it positions China as the rising power, the Athens to America’s Sparta. For domestic audiences, this is flattering and affirming. China is ascending and the old hegemon must reckon with its arrival. Never mind the debates around China’s slowing GDP growth, shrinking population, or troubled real estate sector… Second, it frames the US as the status quo power whose job is to accommodate the challenger. There is a policy demand hiding inside the historical analogy; once you accept the framing, the burden of adjustment implicitly falls on Washington… Third, it wraps a Chinese narrative in American academic language. Xi is not citing Mao or Sun Tzu but a Harvard man. The concept arrives pre-legitimized with the institutional imprimatur of the American establishment: birthed in the Belfer Center, endorsed by Henry Kissinger, reviewed in the New York Times. It sounds like neutral social science instead of an instrument of Chinese framing.”

• Why it matters: “When Xi invokes the ‘Thucydides Trap’ he is not making a neutral observation about IR theory but placing a bet that American elites will accept an unfavorable framing partly because it comes wrapped in their own prestige… I don’t think Allison is wrong that power transitions are dangerous, or that US-China competition carries risks of escalation. But the Trap as a concept has become something distinct from the scholarship it once strip-mined. It’s now a diplomatic weapon that an American academic built and the Chinese leadership has deployed. At this point the real trap might be the Trap itself.”

4. Why it’s really, really dumb to pull American troops out of Europe

Why you should read it: Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, former commander of U.S. Army troops in Europe, argues strongly against American military withdrawal from Europe in The Bulwark.

• “I spent years helping redesign America’s military posture in Europe, including serving as commander of U.S. Army Europe as the command completed the previous major restructuring of forces on the continent in 2011. My biggest concern about this latest decision is not the force reduction itself. Military posture decisions come and go; every administration has the right to review deployments. What concerns me is the apparent lack of strategic coherence surrounding this one—and a growing misunderstanding in Washington about what American forces in Europe are actually there to do… The Trump administration’s putative explanation only deepens the uncertainty. The force reduction discussion seems linked to to frustration with European opposition to President Trump’s Iran operation. Germany, among others, expressed concern or hesitation about supporting U.S. actions in the Middle East, President Trump became upset, and then suddenly troop reductions followed close behind. Managing alliances this way is extraordinarily dangerous. These actions aren’t part of thought-out process; they seem to be policy on a whim… The way Trump treats deployments as political rewards and punishments based on whether allied governments publicly support a particular American operation is strategically shortsighted. Worse, it misunderstands who actually benefits most from America’s military posture in Europe. The fact—and the strategy—is that the force structure in Europe today exists primarily for the strategic benefit of the United States."

• “Too many Americans still view U.S. forces in Europe through a Cold War lens. They imagine huge garrisons sitting idle on old bases, detached from modern security realities. Any caricature of American troops in Europe sitting around drinking beer and eating schnitzel while taxpayers foot the bill is profoundly wrong… Far from ‘occupation,’ our European stationing provides America with forward positioning, operational reach, and alliance access. It is critical for logistics infrastructure, intelligence integration, and our rapid response capability across multiple theaters. Europe is a launching platform for American global operations… Europe is not a strategic burden. It is one of America’s greatest strategic advantages. And that advantage is built not just on bases or equipment, but on relationships… American service members are constantly engaged with [European] partner nations. These might be during multinational exercises, logistics rehearsals, intelligence coordination, missile defense integration, aviation operations, cyber collaboration, medical planning, and joint leader development. Whatever the specifics, these interactions build familiarity, access, confidence, and trust with partners who may someday fight alongside American forces—or provide critical access during a crisis somewhere in the world. Once lost, trust in the United States cannot simply be re-won—or worse, demanded—at the last minute. And we certainly cannot deploy trust like we deploy forces.”

• Why it matters: “Europe is a forward operating platform that gives the United States enormous military, diplomatic, and strategic advantages. During my years in Europe, we often described America’s relatively small forward presence as allowing us to ‘fight above our weight class.’ Reducing that posture without a clearly articulated strategy is not a demonstration of strength… You cannot casually remove pieces from a system like that without consequences. Especially not impulsively. Especially not without consultation. And especially not while allies scramble for explanations and Russia celebrates the outcome.”

5. Why the collapse of the Carter Doctrine will haunt America

Why you should read it: Energy historian Gregory Brew contends in the New York Times that the war in Iran marks the end of the Carter Doctrine and heralds a new era of insecurity for global oil markets.

• “In just two months [of war with Iran], the United States has transformed from a bulwark of the international energy system into its biggest source of insecurity. And while America may emerge relatively unscathed from the energy crisis it started by going to war with Iran, the long-term implications for its oil-based economy could be profoundly destabilizing… This [1970s-era] imperative to defend access to Middle East oil has been weakening, however. Since 2010, a boom in U.S. oil and gas production has reduced the nation’s dependence on imports. By 2020, Gulf oil met less than 10 percent of America’s oil consumption, creating an understandable belief in some circles in Washington that the United States no longer needed to remain embroiled in Middle East affairs. Donald Trump took this idea further, introducing in his first administration the more dubious notion that the United States was now ‘energy independent,’ and immune to oil shocks… Far from depending on the global oil market, the United States could now shape it in ways that served its geopolitical interests. It deployed sanctions aggressively against opponents — Russia, Iran and Venezuela — to limit their ability to sell oil. The United States has also threatened to place harsh tariffs on Canada, which is today the single largest source of its oil imports.”

• “The war against Iran has not proven as successful as the operation in Venezuela. And once the United States was apparently unwilling to keep protecting the passage of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, the global economy was thrown into turmoil… With so much oil of its own, America won’t face the same kinds of shortages and price spikes that affect other nations. But the idea that this country is immune is a mistaken one. The United States still imports roughly one-third of all the crude oil it consumes. The domestic price of oil products like gasoline is affected by changes in the global price, and the global market will be shaped for the rest of the year, if not longer, by the disruptive effects of this war… More significantly, the collapse of the Carter Doctrine undermines the security of the global oil economy. Even if the Strait of Hormuz reopens, markets will remain on edge, waiting to see if Iran closes it once more. Oil coming out of the Gulf will be viewed as more risky — and likely more expensive as a result. Countries will almost certainly rethink their energy security plans and shift their economies away from dependence on imports, including of oil and natural gas.“

• Why it matters: “But in the medium to long term, this crisis will create greater uncertainty over the stability of these energy sources. More countries will pursue alternatives, including clean energy technologies where China has a decisive edge. The United States could see its export market diminish as demand for oil and gas slows, threatening a trillion-dollar domestic industry and the thousands of jobs it provides… The American preoccupation with producing, consuming and controlling oil may ultimately prove a misplaced priority: a scramble to control the energy resources of the 20th century, as the rest of the world embraces the cleaner technologies that will power the 21st century. And while the relevance of the Carter Doctrine may have declined, the stability it represented will be sorely missed.”

6. Why America should consider reviving public factories

Why you should read it: Joel Dodge of the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator makes the case for a revival of government-owned factories in the Washington Monthly.

• “For years, the liberal response to concentrated corporate power has been to regulate it, sue it, or subsidize consumers trapped by it. All those tools have their place. But each approach has limits. Lawsuits take years. Regulation can be fought, weakened, or rolled back by lobbyists. Subsidies can be captured by the very firms whose pricing power made them necessary… Public factories are government-owned production facilities that provide or expand the supply of important goods. Some public factories are government-owned and government-operated (GOGO) facilities; others are owned by the government but operated by a private contractor (GOCO). Like other public options, public factories can provide an alternative to private firms that get away with selling subpar goods at inflated prices. Because they operate as nonprofit enterprises, public factories act as a ‘yardstick,’ as President Franklin D. Roosevelt put it, to both measure private performance and pressure private producers to improve their output and pricing.”

• “…there is a long history of policymakers creating public factories. After the Revolutionary War, President George Washington and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton fretted that private arms manufacturers were overcharging the new government for low-quality weapons. They convinced Congress to create armories—public factories for military arms—to secure dependable, affordable supplies. The Springfield armory in particular would go on to develop pioneering advanced manufacturing techniques like interchangeable parts and assembly-line style mass production that helped seed the Second Industrial Revolution. During the Civil War, public factories in the North produced everything from arms to uniforms to drugs like morphine, partly to avoid unscrupulous contractors bilking the government for a wartime windfall. During the Progressive Era, the Navy ran factories producing smokeless powder for artillery and firearms, and armor plates for its then-new steel ships to secure better deals and higher-quality goods than those offered by the private sector… Public factories could be useful today. Like the price-gouging by military contractors from earlier American history, there is no shortage of industries fleecing the public sector. Pharmaceutical industry concentration and anti-competitive practices, such as patent abuses, have led to high prescription drug prices charged to government healthcare programs, not to mention private insurers and underinsured Americans paying out of pocket. When President Joe Biden’s administration offered incentives for environmentally friendly electric heat pumps, the private equity industry drove increased consolidation across the heat pump supply chain to raise prices and capture more government subsidies. Private equity has also snapped up manufacturers of fire trucks and ambulances, forcing municipalities to pay higher prices or reduce emergency response services.”

• Why it matters: “Like the public factories of old, the reality—or even just the threat—of the public sector entering an industry could weaken the strategic and economic value of monopoly or roll-up tactics. Once the public factory bazooka is used a few times, it might have an even greater deterrent effect, discouraging corporations from engaging in that kind of anti-competitive conduct in the first place.”

7. How anti-trust fanatics took control of the Democratic policy debate

Why you should read it: The Atlantic writer Jonathan Chait details how a band of monomaniacal anti-trust activists captured the Democratic Party’s domestic policy agenda and made every problem look like a nail in search of an anti-trust hammer.

• “[Activist Barry C.] Lynn is the intellectual godfather of what is now known as the neo-Brandeisian movement, which identifies corporate consolidation as the singular, villainous force behind everything that has gone wrong in the United States… The movement that he leads has reshaped progressive thought on economics, antitrust enforcement, and political strategy. Lynn and his acolytes run a handful of nonprofit organizations, including the Open Markets Institute, where he serves as executive director. But they also influence liberal magazines, Democratic elected officials, and other key nodes of discourse on the left. Members of his movement held important positions in Joe Biden’s administration, and his followers are waging a vigorous—even vicious—campaign to ensure that they regain their power in the next Democratic administration… Lynn has won so much that the Democratic Party may soon be tired of his winning. The effects of his revolution on the party and its ability to govern are far greater than many intellectuals, politicians, and staffers seem to grasp. To attribute all problems to a single cause is to reject every solution but one. It is also to dismiss anyone who thinks differently—that is, anyone who thinks about the world like nearly any Democrat did until very recently—as a corrupt enemy who must be expunged.”

• “At first they mostly published in the Washington Monthly, a liberal magazine once devoted to the journalist Charles Peters’s idiosyncratic vision of government reform but more recently converted to Lynn’s. In recent years, they have expanded into horizontal integration. The American Prospect (which [Lynn acolyte David] Dayen now edits), The Nation, The Intercept, The New Republic, and Democracy (the latter two of which share the same editor, Michael Tomasky), as well as Harper’s, where Lynn still publishes his big-think essays, tout the neo-Brandeisian line often, and criticize it with vanishing infrequency… That committed enemies of monopolization have built a sort of cartel might seem ironic, but perhaps the neo-Brandeisians have a keener appreciation than most of the power of cornering a market… Lynn’s theory promised to resolve all [the Democratic Party’s post-2016] dilemmas. It explained how their party had lost working-class voters and supplied a simple message that would win them back. Cultural liberals could avoid the painful necessity of jettisoning some of the party’s unpopular stances to win back alienated voters. By redirecting all the political questions that had bedeviled the party into a simple argument about the perfidy of big corporations, neo-Brandeisian theory offered a road map to restoring the lost prosperity of the New Deal era and rebuilding a connection to the voters who had abandoned them in despair… With Biden’s presidency, the neo-Brandeisian movement crossed over from insurgency to establishment. Its adherents wielded the power of the federal government. And unlike many other issue areas, which require legislation, their vision could be implemented through executive action… The dominant issue in public opinion since Biden’s election has been the post-pandemic inflation spike. Democrats have sought to turn this issue to their advantage by promising to foster ‘affordability.’ But neo-Brandeisian dogma is not designed to bring down prices. It actually maintains that economic policy is too concerned with keeping costs down. Lynn has decried the Democratic Party’s ‘fixation on lowering prices,’ and lauds small businesses and farms that are less able to generate economies of scale than giant corporations are, and therefore have to charge more for their products. After the Biden administration recognized that inflation was eating away at public approval, the antitrust regulators tried to uncover price-fixing schemes in industries like gas stations, shipping, and groceries, with little success… The neo-Brandeisians maintain that they have the solution to nearly every ill in modern life, yet somehow, despite administering strong medicine, no improvements were discernable to the public within four years, much less rewarded by voters.”

• Why it matters: “A noxious side effect of populism is its habit of dismissing all critics as corrupt shills, a style of politics that has flowed into the party along with the neo-Brandeisians… A cynic would see this campaign—to trash the reputations of liberals who merely disagree with their policies—as a ploy to discredit the neo-Brandesians’ factional enemies and retain the movement’s hold on power. And judging by its growing prominence, and the ease with which Lynn and his allies have shrugged off a politically disastrous four years in power, it has succeeded… He really does think that he and his allies have discovered not a, but the, profound truth about America and the world. That monopolies function as a kind of Hegelian force that explains the movement and meaning of history… Their fervent belief in this plan requires, almost incidentally, tearing apart the Democratic Party in order to save it. The trouble is that their theories don’t embody perfect truth, so the tearing might happen, but the saving part will never arrive.”

8. Why “speaking truth to power” isn’t as good an idea as it sounds

Why you should read it: On his Substack, academic philosopher Dan Williams submits that “speaking truth to power” has done more harm than good as a guiding principle for public intellectuals, journalists, and ordinary citizens.

• “One of the most influential ideas among ‘intellectual elites’ in the broadest sense—academics, public intellectuals, writers, pundits, journalists, artists, and so on—is that their job is to ‘speak truth to power’. Even when they don’t use this specific phrase, it captures how many intellectuals understand their ethos and social responsibility: to unmask and confront entrenched interests, official narratives, and dominant institutions… It’s easy to understand the ethos’s appeal. The world contains oppression, exploitation, and extreme power inequalities, many of which are unjust and harmful. Societies can’t rely on the powerful to check themselves. They will spread, fund, and amplify self-serving propaganda. So, intellectuals surely have a responsibility to push back against such falsehoods—to expose deception, unmask mystifying ideologies, and reveal what is really going on… To hold power accountable, societies need access to trusted truths about what is happening. At least in modern liberal-democratic societies, these truths are often highly complex and counterintuitive. Determining what they are is challenging. The ethos of speaking truth to power encourages intellectuals to think that such truths have been established before inquiry has even begun. It replaces a difficult epistemic task—finding out what is true, where power lies, and how truth and power interact in specific cases—with the simpler, more self-flattering goal of summoning intellectual courage… Specifically, I will argue that an ethos of speaking truth to power has three problems: it prejudges what inquiry is supposed to discover; it licenses motivated reasoning under a heroic self-image; and it exempts intellectual elites from the suspicion they direct at others. For these reasons, it also threatens public trust in the institutions that democratic societies depend on to make sense of society and hold power accountable.”

• “Today, Western intellectual elites live in liberal democracies characterised by universal rights, formal equality, the rule of law, pluralism, constitutional limits on state power, and significant political and economic freedoms. We also live in an era of unprecedented material prosperity, in large part a consequence of how economic freedom and competition are channelled into productivity and innovation through free markets, and political freedom and competition are channelled into social welfare, insurance, and public goods through democracy… In liberal societies, ideological elites wield substantial independent power and are often far more influenced by their own norms, fashions, and status games than by top-down political authority or economic influences… In fact, in a clear trend that has accelerated since at least the 1960s and the birth of a powerful “counter-culture” prestige economy, much of the intelligentsia and art world defines itself in explicit opposition to established political and economic power centres. Hence the widespread appeal and embrace of an ethos of speaking truth to power. And today, of course, the media environment in liberal societies is characterised by strong demand on both the left and right for populist denunciations and condemnations of establishment institutions. Critiquing the powerful can function as a lucrative source of cultural esteem and financial rewards.”

• Why it matters: “The existence of ideological power raises awkward questions for those who wield it under the banner of speaking truth to power. If the ethos’s animating insight is that the powerful often embrace self-serving, self-aggrandising narratives, shouldn’t we also turn such suspicion towards intellectual elites themselves? Mightn’t the ethos itself function as a kind of legitimising myth, a way of dressing up activity often rooted in grubby motives—self-aggrandisement, status competition, demonising rivals, and so on—in suspiciously noble clothing?… Of course, one might respond that this kind of view is too cynical, and that the mere fact that intellectual elites might have impure motives doesn’t show that their claims are wrong. And I agree. We shouldn’t pre-judge that the powerful’s claims are self-serving propaganda before inquiry has even begun—before we’ve undertaken the hard work of figuring out what is actually true.”

9. What the pope’s encyclical on AI really means

Why you should read it: In the New York Times, retired Vatican correspondent David Gibson observes that Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, aims to shift the Catholic Church away from “pelvic theology,” or an obsession with sexual morality above all else.

• “Pope Leo XIV’s first landmark teaching document, to be published on Monday, is expected to explore a theme he has emphasized since beginning his papacy a year ago: social disruption in the digital age, in particular the dangers that A.I. poses for human flourishing… Dedicating his first encyclical to social justice would show how much Leo, like his predecessor Pope Francis, is trying to shift Catholicism away from the near fixation on ‘pelvic theology,” or sexual morality, that has come to define Catholicism, especially in Leo’s home country, the United States. The concern is that decades of focusing on ‘sins below the waist,’ as Pope Francis memorably put it, has fueled the church’s culture war agenda and driven many people away from the central teachings of the Gospels. It has also left workers and the marginalized with a weakened moral voice against the predations of powerful financial interests.”

• “Leo, of course, defends teachings like the church’s stance against abortion, but he embeds it in a wider context, such as when he defended the decision of the Archdiocese of Chicago to give Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, an abortion-rights Catholic, an award for his long work on behalf of immigrants. Conservative Catholics were incensed, but Leo told reporters that it’s important to look at the entirety of a person’s views… Leo was not forging some new doctrine. On the contrary, he was articulating an older tradition of placing justice above personal chastity… Leo’s similar approach does not mean that he is about to loosen the church’s sexual mores. During the news conference on his flight from Africa, he prefaced his response about gay blessings by saying that ‘the unity or division of the church should not revolve around sexual matters.’ He wants to welcome everyone, and has made a point of meeting with gay Catholics, for example. But he does not want to alienate those who may disagree. Leo wants a sexual devolution, if you will… Leo, on the other hand, is not beating a tactical retreat from any issue but instead is expanding the scope of the church’s teachings, much as Francis did with his encyclical on the environment, ‘Laudato sí.’ Like climate change, A.I. is a scientific topic. But the Catholic approach is theological and social.”

• Why it matters: “A.I. can do remarkable things, but it can also sow disinformation and division. Leo stresses wisdom and relationships. His holistic view of mankind is reflected in the very title of this new encyclical. Our shared humanity, the pope is saying, is a sacred reality, and that carries a social responsibility.”

Odds and Ends

• The Artemis II crew answers questions from children and the makers of the New York Times podcast The Daily about their journey around the Moon…

• Five noteworthy ancient Roman ruins that will probably never be excavated because they lay beneath modern cities…

• A new contender for the longest dinosaur ever has emerged from Thailand: Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis…

• Beluga whales have joined the exclusive club of animals that can recognize themselves in mirrors…

• Jack Kirby, the legendary comic book artist who helped create the likes of Captain America, Iron Man, and the X-Men, now has a street named after him in his native New York City

What I’m Listening To and Watching

• Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, a murder-mystery starring Tatiana Maslany as a beleaguered, single soccer mom who finds her self caught in a web of sex, blackmail, and murder.

• The Mandalorian and Grogu, the cinematic debut of the titular Star Wars characters after three seasons on Disney+.

• “Fields of Gold,” an enchanting, delicate track from Sting’s 1993 album Ten Summoner’s Tales.

• “First Light,” the song accompanying the new James Bond video game of the same name by Lana Del Rey.

• Neuroscientist Anil Dash gives a TED Talk on why artificial intelligence models can’t be considered conscious in any real or meaningful way.

Image of the Month

Natty, a service dog in training with the Washington Nationals, naps at Nationals Park in Washington, DC. Credit: Washington Nationals