The New Middle East | Robert Wright & Annelle Sheline
0:00 Teaser
1:06 Annelle’s Middle East bona fides
2:55 The state of play in Iran
8:14 A deepening fissure between Gulf Arab states
22:05 Explaining the Trump-Biden continuity on Middle East policy
26:45 Will the Middle East realign away from America?
34:46 Turkey and the moral hazard of US aid to Israel
40:00 Can Iran mend ties with the Gulf states?
47:40 Heading to Overtime
Two from today's (May 3, 2026) New York Times. First, China is on the rise and ready to move beyond America. Then we have the decline of the American empire.
China Rising
Jacob Dreyer, Trump Is Coming to a China That Has Moved On, NYTimes, May 3, 2023.
Deng Xiaoping, the former Chinese leader, once said: “If China wants to be rich and strong, it needs America.” But this isn’t the same country that once looked to a U.S. president’s visit as a moment of global validation. It is a country where the realization has dawned that it may have learned all it can from America and has begun to chart its own course.
This was bound to happen as China grew stronger and richer. But Mr. Trump has accelerated this shift. China’s people have watched with a mix of fascination and revulsion as the president — through his abortive tariff wars, the war with Iran and callow allegiance to financial markets — has completed America’s transformation from a model to emulate to a troublesome distraction to be managed. With sinking approval ratings and potential losses awaiting in the midterm elections, Mr. Trump will arrive in Beijing a more diminished figure in Chinese eyes than perhaps any visiting U.S. president. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
This matters, both for the visit itself and for the future of the relationship between the two countries. China’s leaders, aware of Mr. Trump’s weakness and perfidy, are unlikely to strike any meaningful bargains with him. His actions strengthen China’s Communist-ruled system at home by making it look superior by comparison.
Many Chinese people increasingly view the United States less as the lodestar it once was and more as a cautionary tale. Popular sentiment in China is of course state-managed, but it resonates because it mirrors what the Chinese see for themselves. I hear it in daily conversations: Chinese friends who return from America with tales of homelessness, dilapidation and political rancor, which contrast sharply with China’s clean and safe cities, gleaming infrastructure and political stability.
After a couple of paragraphs acknowledging that many Chinese “worry that China isn’t ready to fill [America’s] shoes” in the world and acknowledging that “China, after all, has its own problems,” Dreyer moves on:
Still, there is a clear sense about the need to move past America. Mr. Trump will be gone in two years, but Mr. Xi can rule for as long as he wants and has laid out ambitious plans that are likely to survive him. Those plans include a China that is at the center of new types of energy, the use of data and technologies like artificial intelligence for urban management, the delivery of public services, cheaper health care and better access to education. Chinese people also see that the world is increasingly open to adopting Chinese technology, products, investment and other solutions, maybe even its governance ideas.
There's more at the link.
Christopher Caldwell, America Is Officially an Empire in Decline, NYTimes, May 3, 2023.
The American-Israeli attack on Iran was more than a bad idea; it has turned into a watershed in the decline of the American empire. Some might prefer the word “hegemony” to describe the world order the United States leads, since its flag does not generally fly over the lands it protects or exploits. But the rules are the same: Imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends. And with the Iran war, President Trump has overextended the empire dangerously.
A Middle Eastern military misadventure is one of the last ways a casual observer would have expected Mr. Trump’s presidency to go wrong. The problems he alluded to in all three of his presidential campaigns had mostly resulted from our leaders’ governing beyond their means. At home, proponents of wokeness underestimated the costs and difficulties of micromanaging interactions between groups. Abroad, the mighty American armed forces proved to have no particular talent for democracy promotion, and there was the recent debacle in Iraq to prove it. Overextension was a danger that President Joe Biden contemptuously dismissed. “We’re the United States of America,” he used to say, “and there’s nothing we can’t do.”
Mr. Trump, people thought, would be different. For all the grandiosity of the expression “Make America great again,” Trump voters did not expect him to take on new problems. The greatness would be mostly atmospheric — braggadocio, not adventurism. The United States could become greater even if it withdrew to a less expansive sphere of influence. When he proclaimed an updated Monroe Doctrine, refocusing American attention on the Western Hemisphere, retrenchment was what most people thought they were getting. In last November’s National Security Strategy, he added, “The days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.”
And yet here we are, ankle-deep in a Middle Eastern quagmire, one that Trump himself laid the groundwork for when he withdrew from Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka JCPOA) in his first term. After two paragraphs in which Caldwell sketches out how Netanyahu suckered Trump into this quagmire, Caldwell has a paragraph in which he sketches out a parallel “with Britain a century ago: deindustrializing, overcommitted, complacent.” He concludes:
Mr. Trump was the perfect candidate for Americans who suspected something had gone wrong with their elites. His argument, basically, was that American-led globalism was so beneficial to politicians that once in power, they would defend it even against their voters, no matter what they said while campaigning. Events, alas, have proved him right.
Suckered again.
David French, Meet the New Leader of the Free World, NYTimes, Apr. 26, 2026.
A remarkable thing has happened on the world’s battlefields. Ukraine — a nation that was supposed to dissolve within days of a Russian invasion — has fought Russia to a stalemate, revolutionizing land warfare in the process. It has become an indispensable security partner in the western alliance, including in the war against Iran.
Now, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, is taking the next step, one that would have been unthinkable even as recently as 2024. By word and deed, he’s showing Europe and the world how the post-American free world can preserve its liberty and independence. This is what happens when, as Phillips Payson O’Brien wrote in a piece for The Atlantic, “Kyiv appears to have given up on the United States.”
If that is true — and it looks as though it is — it may be worse news for the United States than it is for Ukraine.
Events on the ground and in world capitals are moving so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. First, the strategic situation in the Ukraine war seems to have changed. Last week, Mick Ryan, a retired Australian major general and one of the most astute analysts of the war, wrote that Ukraine has largely stabilized the frontline in eastern Ukraine, deepened its coalition, isolated Russia diplomatically and developed an indigenous arms industry that makes it less dependent on external support.
It’s no longer accurate to think of Ukraine as a desperate underdog; it’s becoming an independent power. Even as it fights for its life against Russia, it’s reportedly reaching defense deals with the Gulf states and with the United States — and this time it’s Ukraine that’s providing military assistance.
In February 2025, Donald Trump mocked Zelensky in the Oval Office. “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now,” Trump said. In April 2026, Ukraine has enough cards left that it’s sharing them.
This might be difficult for many readers to grasp — given our nation’s longstanding military supremacy — but the largest and most battle-hardened land force in the western world may well be the Ukrainian Army. While the precise numbers are classified, the Atlantic Council estimated in 2025 that Ukraine had roughly a million men and women under arms, the vast majority of whom serve in the ground forces.
America’s total force is larger than Ukraine’s, but to put the size of Ukrainian land forces in perspective, the combined size of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps is around 620,000. It’s also worth noting that the U.S. forces have much less combat experience than Ukraine forces — especially when it comes to combat with a great power.
There's more at the link.
Daniel Byman and Seth G. Jones, Iran Resisted a Powerful Attacker. Taiwan Can Too. NYTimes, Apr. 19, 2026.
As the United States’ and Israel’s war with Iran grinds to an uncertain conclusion, observers have been quick to label it a win for China. The war has damaged American prestige around the world and angered countries and their populations whose economies face inflation and disrupted supply chains. But a closer look at Iran’s methods in resisting the United States reveals uncomfortable lessons for China as it weighs whether to follow through on its threats to take Taiwan.
Iran prevented the far more powerful United States from winning a war that, on paper, it should have walked away with. Iran weathered decapitation strikes and continued to counterattack, despite heavy bombing and inferior weapons. Iran’s ability to close the Strait of Hormuz is particularly instructive. Its navy had only dilapidated surface ships, a small number of diesel-powered submarines, and numerous small, fast-attack speedboats. Iran’s air force had no advanced attack aircraft and no true bombers.
What Iran did have, however, was a large stockpile of drones and missiles — including anti-ship cruise missiles — capable of striking vessels in the strait and hitting military and commercial targets across the Middle East. Iran also decentralized its command and control network and dispersed and concealed its weapons in multiple locations to make it difficult for the United States and Israel to find and destroy all of them.
Later:
Survival requires more than hardware. Iran weathered massive strikes against its political and military leaders by quickly replacing them and by decentralizing military command and control. It maximized deception and concealment, stored weapons in underground bunkers to increase survivability and relied on mobile systems that could be quickly rolled out, launched and rolled back into bunkers.
Taiwan needs to prepare similar moves to survive the potential disruption of its command networks and to be ready to fight in the face of decapitation strikes, space and counterspace attacks and offensive cyberoperations. Doing this will require plans for succession, decentralized command and control, deception and survivability.
There's more at the link.
Steven Erlanger, A Cease-Fire for Now in Iran, but a Blow to American Credibility, NYTimes, Apr. 9, 2026.
Historical analogies are never exact. But with the tenuous cease-fire deal in the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, some are asking whether this is a “Suez” moment for the United States, marking the waning of American power and credibility in the world.
The Suez crisis took place in October 1956, when Britain, France and Israel attacked Egypt to force open the Suez Canal. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, with an election days away, ordered them to stop. Prime Minister Anthony Eden of Britain resigned. President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt became a hero of anti-colonialism.
Suez became shorthand for the moment that Britain, exhausted from World War II, gave way as a global power to the United States.
There are differences from that time. The Suez Canal is man-made and wholly in Egyptian territory, unlike the international waterway of the Strait of Hormuz. There is no other global power capable of replacing America in the region, let alone ordering President Trump around.
But the two-week cease-fire leaves the Islamic Republic in place and still in command of the future of the Strait of Hormuz, with Iran’s nuclear stockpile and ballistic missile program unresolved. After Mr. Trump’s declaration of victory, however hollow, it is difficult to imagine a resumption of full-scale war. [...]
The impact of a diminished United States is strongest in Europe, which has relied on NATO and the American security guarantee implicit in membership, including the U.S. nuclear umbrella. But Europeans drew a distinction between faith in America and faith in Mr. Trump. The former remains because it is vital for European security.
Still, Mr. Trump’s policies are inevitably producing a response that will outlast him. The rest of the world is trying to organize itself and derisk from an America that treats its allies as enemies and its traditional enemies, like Russia and China, as friends. [...]
China, which gets so much of its oil through the Strait of Hormuz, pushed Iran to agree to the cease-fire, and it is expected to participate in keeping the strait open and guaranteeing safe passage for others.
Much depends on how the war ends, cautioned Mr. Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations.
If the cease-fire leads to a deal that imposes significant constraints on Iran’s nuclear program and its ability to cause trouble, he said, that would be much better in the longer run than a frozen conflict or one that “just burns on month after month,” with all the accompanying impact on the energy market and American allies.
There's more at the link.
Jeff Sommer, The Oil Shocks of the ’70s Changed the World. Will the Iran War Do the Same? NYTimes, Mar. 28, 2026.
In January 1974, my dad lent me his old gas-guzzling Ford LTD to haul my clothing and books to college in Ithaca, N.Y. A couple of weeks later, when I tried to drive back home to Long Island, I realized that I couldn’t buy enough gas for the 250-mile trip.
The 1973-74 Arab oil embargo was well underway. The price of oil had nearly quadrupled; there were lines at gas stations, and drivers were allowed to queue up only on alternate days. I had picked the wrong day for my trip. No gas for me. So much for freedom of the road.
That was the first of the world’s big oil shocks. By the time of the second one in 1978-79, set off by the Iranian revolution, I was a reporter in New Jersey and it seemed I was constantly interviewing angry motorists stuck in interminable lines. Gas shortages and soaring inflation were just other aspects of life in the United States.
The gas lines ended as the crises ebbed, but it took two recessions, engineered by the formidable Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker, to bring inflation under control.
What’s less well understood about that period is that the oil shocks reshaped the world’s financial markets. Money flowed around the globe in new ways — and cemented the status of the dollar as the world’s core currency.
We are experiencing what could end up as the third great oil shock.
Then we get more history and analysis, to end with this:
“Duration is the key question,” he told me. “If this goes on for a long time, it’s a big deal. If the war stopped right now, we might not need to talk about it next year.”
Not every conflict in the Middle East necessarily changes global finance in profound ways. The United States fought two Gulf wars — one that started in the early 1990s, the other a decade later. The first was short. The second one, the U.S.-led war with Iraq, stretched from 2003 to 2011, caused scores of thousands of deaths and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. The second war was a big one, but in retrospect, it preserved the status quo in energy markets more than it transformed them.
In every Gulf conflict since the Iranian revolution, U.S. strategists have worried that Iran might one day disrupt the global flow of energy by closing a geographical choke point, the Strait of Hormuz. For the first time, despite the pounding it has received from enormous U.S. and Israeli bombardments, Iran has demonstrated that it can close the strait. Roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas usually flows through it.
Whether this desperate achievement alters geopolitics substantially may not be known for years.
Ross Douthat interviews Amitav Acharya, NYTimes, Feb. 19, 2026.
Douthat's introduction:
Right now, 21st-century geopolitics seems like it’s defined by the struggle between America and China.
But the major power with the world’s fastest growing economy and largest population isn’t China. It’s India.
And right now, India has a unique role in global politics, doing deals with Europe one day and with Donald Trump the next, all while maintaining a strong partnership with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Its large and spreading diaspora gives it a unique cultural influence around the world, one that may only increase as other major powers grow old and people remain India’s most important export. My guest today is a prominent international relations scholar, Amitav Acharya, who’s written about what he calls a multiplex world order. A future where diverse powers compete to shape the world.
Between China and Pakistan:
Douthat: So let’s talk about, then, two concrete expressions of Indian power: The relationship with Pakistan, and the relationship with China.
Let’s say we’re living through a 15- to 20-year period where India’s influence and power are going to increase. What does success for India look like with its less powerful, but nuclear-armed rival Pakistan, and its more powerful neighbor, China?
Acharya: This depends on whom you ask. For foreign policy—
Douthat: I’m asking you.
Acharya: OK. My sense is that for India, if India can achieve the kind of growth and become the third-largest economy, not necessarily overtaking China, but maintaining political system openness and more diplomatic influence, I think that will be quite acceptable to India.
India is not a revisionist power. India is a status quo power. So I think that’s what success would mean. And domestically, at home, generate more employment. But you cannot have the third-largest economy without having a sustainable employment and industrial base.
With Pakistan, it’s terrorism. There is of course Kashmir and other issues, but it’s all linked, from the Indian perspective, to support for terrorism. And they see that. They see the West not really understanding India’s position. And then China’s support for Pakistan — China is the biggest, they say, ironclad relationship with Pakistan. They see that Pakistan will not be as adventurous or as assertive vis-à-vis India without Chinese help.
That’s what gets Indians angry about China. Otherwise, I don’t think there is any dimension that cannot be diplomatically addressed between India and China
Douthat: What changes the situation for the better for India? Is it just economic growth? Or is there a level of military power where India thinks that it could get Pakistan isolated and force China to be friendlier?
Acharya: I think nuclear weapons play a big role here. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. But China is also a much bigger nuclear power.
For a while, Indian foreign policy moved in the direction of ignoring Pakistan and engaging China. So it’s China they have to deal with. China is a true peer competitor rather than Pakistan.
Indian culture and the diaspora:
Douthat: The idea that Indian civilization is something that’s born in India and then spreads around the world is obviously relevant to an age when Indians have spread around the world. Modi has, I think, very explicitly talked about the Indian diaspora as a mode of Indian national influence.
But let’s talk about the diaspora. Let’s talk about America. You mentioned that in the United States, relations have been better than ever, up until very recently. Trump in particular spent a lot of time courting Indian American voters. He did an event with Modi in 2019 — “Howdy Modi” in Texas. It’s an amazing name.
But then, in the second Trump term, there’s been a swing. And it isn’t just a swing where Trump is imposing tariffs on Europe. It’s also a swing where there is this kind of anti-Indian backlash on the right.
Tell me where you think that comes from, but also just talk about how you think Americans see India — or see Indians, I think, is the better way to put it.
Acharya: By the way, don’t forget that Modi had one of the biggest rallies right next to Madison Square Garden.
Douthat: New York as well as Texas. All the centers — yeah.
Acharya: So I think, generally, Modi has used that as a foreign policy tool. It’s partly genuine, but it’s also partly a significant foreign policy asset.
So how about the American perception of India? First of all, Americans don’t know much about India. I’m sorry to say this. India doesn’t strike American imagination the way the Chinese do, and also, in some ways actually, the way the Soviet Union did, because it was a threat for a different reason.
There are many more universities with centers for China studies, Americans going to study in China, getting trained in the language — this goes back to the Cold War period. There’s nothing like that. As a professor, I can tell you that India studies is nothing comparable. American students and American academic institutions, and to some extent, think tanks too, are catching up now. But nothing like China.
As you know, the United States is not a country where there’s a lot of interest in foreign cultures. I can tell you that I have a son who just graduated from school and they studied China, Europe, Rome, Greece. Not much about India. So that’s part of the problem.
Americans don’t go to India as large numbers as tourists. So because of that, we have had this relative ignorance about India and neglect of India. We talk about democracy, but the U.S. and India, the largest democracies in the world — that’s rhetoric. It doesn’t really translate into endearment of India in the American public imagination.
Now you did mention the Indian diaspora, which is quite influential politically, although smaller than China, but more successful economically.
The Trump administration takes aim at the rules based international order.
Nikita's remarks on the nation-state as primary anchor for identity (c. 1:01:45):
One of the ways I pitched it to you is uh we can we can frame it ambitiously. We can say that uh the prevalent identity forming force in the world today is the nation state. Uh so much so it's almost hard to imagine to not have an identity attached to uh your country l ike somebody's not Russian, not American, not anything.
And that is my my understanding is a pretty new phenomenon
like there was a time when just a few centuries ago when people thought of their religion maybe village or even loyalty to a king but a king is like a person. He has a family and not this like expansive uh you know millions of people together as your people.
uh and uh some people say that that that uh force is in crisis.
The nation state itself is in crisis or at least a bunch of them are struggling with their own identity.
And then on individual level, I mean I particularly, you know, I I have a connection to my country and to my people, but I'm outside of that country as many Russians are. Uh and the relationship is not an easy one.
I'm contemplating like visiting and then I don't know whether I should because I read the news and there's another person who got like eight years for donating 500 bucks to a Ukrainian foundation. Um. Mhm.
And I think there are a lot of people in different that who are in different ways alienated from their um country or society or have a complicated relationship with it. And there it's not written anywhere that there has to be just one of those that you you should consider yourself a part of this tribe to the exclusion of every other tribe.And so my kind of pitch is like listen we are already uh some kind of network. We are connected. The people who uh listen to uh nonzero who read nonzero who exchange comments in the comment section have something in common. There's a sensibility worldview maybe even a sense of humor.
There are things uh that are not made very explicit that make uh that that that highlight some affinity between these people and they're all over the world. And uh and so why not see if we can build something more from that to to establish more of a relationship between these different members of the audience. And I say as I say like treat them less of an audience less as an audience and more as nodes in a network.
Timestamps for the whole conversation:
0:00 Bob welcomes Nikita back to the Nonzero team
6:17 WSJ's report on Trump's authoritarian drift
8:46 Three levers: streets, media, education system
12:58 Trump the businessman and Trump the politician
14:50 Why Putin was compelling in 1999, when Russia was a young democracy
22:37 Laws vs norms
29:05 Trump and lawfare: how independent is the US judiciary?
35:52 Partisanship among judges
38:28 Trump's view of the world as a game
42:44 Cynicism as a political brand
46:10 Nikita: Putin and Trump share a geopolitical worldview
49:46 The damage the US and Russia did to the international law
54:25 The evolution of Putin's understanding of geopolitics
59:22 Today's Overtime segment is open for everybody!
1:00:29 The crisis of the nation-state & NonZero's community building project
1:18:07 "Kremlin is not Russia": distinguishing between the nation and the state
1:19:35 Bob: We all need a tribe
1:24:32 What does it mean to be an American?
1:29:43 Nikita's Armenian propaganda: A legitimate reason to be proud of your nation
Annie Jacobsen on Nuclear War, Intelligence Operations, and Conspiracy Realities, Conversations with Tyler, August 6, 2025.
Annie Jacobsen has a favorite word for America’s nuclear doctrine: madness. It’s madness that any single person has six minutes to decide the fate of civilization, madness that we’ve built weapons capable of ending the world in 72 minutes, and madness that everything hangs by the thread of deterrence. But to Tyler, life is “a lot of different kinds of madness,” and the real question is simply getting the least harmful form available to us. It’s a conversation sparked by her latest book Nuclear War: A Scenario, which Tyler calls one of his favorites from last year—and which is compelling enough that Denis Villeneuve is turning it into a screenplay.
Tyler and Annie explore whether we should be more afraid of nuclear weapons or if fear itself raises the risks, who should advise presidents during the six-minute decision window, whether moving toward disarmament makes us safer or more vulnerable, what Thomas Schelling really meant about nuclear war and rational actors, the probability that America would retaliate after a nuclear attack, the chances of intercepting a single incoming ICBM, why missile defense systems can’t replicate Israel’s Iron Dome success, how Pakistan-India nuclear tensions could escalate, why she’s surprised domestic drone attacks haven’t happened yet, her reporting on JFK assassination mysteries and deathbed phone calls, her views on UFOs and the dark human experiments at Area 51, what motivates intelligence community operators, her encounters with Uri Geller and CIA psychic research, what she’s working on next, and more.
Iron Dome and ICBMs
JACOBSEN: Just a couple of technical points to drill down on. North Korea does have missiles that can reach the East Coast of the United States presently. That is the precise scenario I choose in my book because it was actually Richard Garwin who told me that was what he was most afraid of. He died last week at 97, the most knowledgeable person on the technical and the theoretical aspects of this, having looked at it since the ’50s and advised presidents since the ’50s.
Now you’re asking about, can our interceptor program shoot down that incoming single missile? That is a problem that the Missile Defense Agency faces. I write about it specifically. My answer would be no. There is technically a 50 percent chance of one interceptor missile on the US side being able to shoot down one incoming ICBM, but you have to remember those statistics are from a curated test.
COWEN: Sure.
JACOBSEN: It’s a test — just for listeners — which is like Vandenberg Air Force Base says, “Oh, we’re doing whispers to the powers that be.” They’re doing a test, and they know it’s coming, and less than 50 percent of the time, actually, it succeeds.
COWEN: You can’t have all your probabilities at one or zero. What’s your probability? I’d say 20 percent, but what’s your number?
JACOBSEN: You mean what is my mathematical equation for what — ?
COWEN: Yes, the betting odds. You’re indifferent on taking the bet or not. I’ll say 20 percent that we’d nail it.
JACOBSEN: To my eye, it’s either all or nothing. Again, I’m not a mathematician. I’m an author and a journalist, but it’s all or nothing. In the scenario I write, it’s nothing. We do not hit it with four missiles. I ran that by several former NORAD commanders, and they did not say, “Annie, not true.” Their odds are unfortunately, even with the [shoot-look-shoot] technology that we have on our interceptor systems, would not be capable of shooting down a warhead.
Let’s give listeners some specs just so that they can understand, so that you can visualize this, because that’s what helped me. The warhead coming in is traveling at about 14,000 miles an hour, 500 to 700 miles above the earth. The interceptor is trying to shoot it down, essentially, like a giant bowling ball at 20,000 miles an hour, 500 to 700 miles above the earth. The technology involved is exquisite, and it fails time and time again.
To me, the poetics of that are more important than to try and use a defense that we should have more interceptors, because that leads to, “Let’s just have as many interceptor missiles as the other guys have nuclear weapons.” Then you’re talking about bankrupting the United States.
COWEN: Israel has done a great job. They don’t stop literally everything, but it’s quite impressive. I know it’s a smaller country, but it can be done along some margins, right?
JACOBSEN: No, absolutely not. Wrong science. The Iron Dome you’re referring to shoots down short-range and some medium-range, including ballistic missiles. They come from either land-based systems, like the THAAD system, or they come from sea ships, the Aegis system, but they cannot shoot down ICBMs — intercontinental ballistic missiles — traveling, as I just mentioned, 500 miles above the earth’s surface.
That is an extraordinary distinction, and people incorrectly mix them, because it sounds great and it’s quite fantasy hopeful to think, “Wow, I can just build a system, an Iron Dome or a golden dome over the United States, over my head, and I will be free from nuclear attack.”
Now, because I have brought the golden dome up. I also must say, having interviewed Charles Townes, for example, who was the Nobel Laureate who invented the laser, and spoke to him a decade ago about whether or not an Iron Dome–type system could work. He said unequivocally no.
The intelligence community
COWEN: I think of the Pentagon as being one of the worst run and parts of the deep state as being relatively well run. That’s my personal impression. You differ from that?
JACOBSEN: Interesting. When you say deep state, you mean the intelligence community?
COWEN: Yes, especially the consultants who are attached and the way in which they really bring very high intelligence and analytic powers to bear on questions. It may not survive the passage of a memo to the presidency, but still, I think they’re quite on the ball.
JACOBSEN: We probably agree in that regard, that if discipline and system is important — again, I’m just using myself like a personal example, but what you really want to lead with is your own character and your own decision. I would probably agree with you, but the government is such a . . . I’m also fascinated that most people just think the government is one whole thing. As you and I both know from looking at this, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Nirupama Rao; Dhruva Jaishankar; Lisa Curtis; Ashley J. Tellis, What Kind of Great Power Will India Be?, Foreign Affairs, July 30, 2025.
The article consists of four pieces, one by each listed author, in response to an earlier aricle: Ashley J. Tellis, India’s Great-Power Delusions. I offer snippets from each piece.
Nirupama Rao, The Liminal Power:
Ashley Tellis’s recent essay, “India’s Great-Power Delusions” (July/August 2025), offers a searing critique of the country’s strategic posture. Tellis argues that India overestimates its influence on the world stage while lacking the economic heft, military capacity, and alliances to back its great-power ambitions. He warns that India’s attachment to strategic autonomy and multipolarity risks making the country irrelevant in an era of intensifying bipolarity, when the competition between China and the United States will shape geopolitics.
This thesis is well supported by observable gaps in India’s capabilities, but it flattens the rationale behind New Delhi’s foreign policy orientation. A more nuanced critique would require understanding India not as a delusional power but as a liminal one—a state standing on a geopolitical threshold, deliberately navigating ambiguity to preserve flexibility and autonomy in a global order that is not simply cleaving in two but fracturing in more complicated ways.
India’s foreign policy is best understood through the lens of liminality, the condition of existing between worlds rather than in a fixed role or within a bloc. India is not a classic great power, but neither is it merely a regional actor. It is a titan in chrysalis, whose $4.1 trillion economy, rapidly expanding defense capacity, and influence among many countries of the so-called global South signal not delusion, but a conscious avoidance of rigid alignments. Tellis sees India’s pursuit of multipolarity as a strategic liability. Instead, it is a form of adaptive realism, an intentional pivoting strategy necessitated by geography, history, and structural constraints in the international system.
I note that that's the role for Japan that Osamu Tezuka imagined in Nextworld, the last manga in his so-called SF Trilogy, see my essay Dr. Tezuka’s Ontology Laboratory and the Discovery of Japan.
Dhruva Jaishankar, The Nimble Power:
Tellis argues that India’s grand strategy misreads the international environment, that New Delhi is misguided in striving for multipolarity, and that it is short-sighted in its aversion to an alliance with the United States and its preference for strategic autonomy. These assertions mischaracterize India’s objectives and priorities and neglect to mention efforts by successive Indian governments that more accurately reflect India’s approach to international affairs. More surprisingly, Tellis sidesteps the fact that it is the United States that is today reluctant to engage in alliance-like commitments, not just with India but with most of its long-standing treaty allies. Washington is reconsidering the terms of its security guarantees in Europe, troop levels in South Korea, defense contributions to Japan, and the transfer of submarine technologies to Australia. Unlike many other partners in Asia or the Middle East, India does not seek aid, bases, or troops from the United States. Indeed, as U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby wrote last September, “India is an ally in the old sense—to be regarded as an independent and autonomous partner. We need more of that kind of [ally], rather than dependencies.”
In many respects, Tellis is harking back to a world that no longer exists. The era of the United States overseeing a unipolar order is over. To be sure, the United States remains the world’s preeminent power, with its share of the global economy remaining steady at around 26 percent from 1991 to today. But Washington is now keen on resetting the terms of globalization and renegotiating its commitments in Europe and Asia. China, which now accounts for 17 percent of the global economy, has become a near peer competitor to the United States, and the two countries’ competition is playing out in virtually every domain. Despite noteworthy defense production increases in Europe, most advanced industrial economies are struggling with aging and declining populations, discord over immigration, strains to welfare systems, slowing innovation, and military dependence on the United States. Apart from the United States, the six other members of the G-7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom) have seen their share of the global economy contract from 42 percent to 18 percent since 1991. Russia’s robust military operations in Ukraine and war-propelled economy belie the country’s frailties and a growing dependence on China. The world is witnessing a more contested Indo-Pacific, a more violent Middle East with several capable regional powers, and a multitude of countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America coming into their own.
Lisa Curtis, The Quad Power:
As Tellis makes clear, India’s long-held strategy of promoting a multipolar world order has become counterproductive for New Delhi. The concept of a multipolar order is seductive to Indian policymakers, who think India would have more influence if global power were dispersed. Such calculations may have made sense 25 years ago, when India, with its rapid economic growth, seemed poised to challenge China’s influence in Asia. In the last two decades, however, China has widened the power gap with India considerably, in economic as well as military terms. That deficit means that India’s vision of a multipolar order, in which power is evenly distributed among a handful of countries, is no longer realistic. Worse, seeking such an order now plays directly into China’s hands. China and Russia both push for a multipolar world to overturn international norms and institutions that have largely kept the peace in the Indo-Pacific for the last 50 years. Far from aiding India’s rise, multipolarity would only confirm Chinese hegemony in Asia and make India more vulnerable to Chinese aggression.
A shrewder policy would have India reaffirm the importance of the U.S.-led rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific region. Despite the growing economic gap between India and China, New Delhi can still play an important role in shaping geopolitical trends and acting as a counterweight to Beijing. The principal way India can both fend off China and ensure stability in its neighborhood is through the existing Indo-Pacific partnership known as the Quad.
Finally, Tellis replies to each:
It should be consoling to New Delhi that a special relationship with Washington does not require an alliance centered on collective defense. Curtis emphasizes that a sturdy commitment to the Quad is itself a worthwhile first step. Yet India continues to object to what it calls the “securitization” of this coalition even though the United States and its partners are struggling to balance China militarily. It may well be that a long-term solution lies in constructing “a collective defense pact in Asia,” as Ely Ratner has argued recently in these pages. After all, if military balancing fails, little else that the Quad and others do matters very much.
But until such an Asian mutual assistance system can be institutionalized, India can work seriously with the United States to implement a strategy focused on cooperative defense aimed at checking Chinese aggression, dealing with crises, and preventing wars. Unfortunately, today, for all the transformations in the bilateral relationship during the last few decades, India is still reluctant to embark on such a course, leaving itself highly vulnerable to China.
"Nollywood - Nigeria's Mirror" takes us to Lagos, the third largest film industry in the world. Scholars Jonathan Haynes and Onookome Okome serve as guides as we negotiate the intricacies and eccentricities of Nollyood's past and digital future. Nollywood films dramatize key tensions in contemporary Nigerian life, such as the relationship between tradition and cosmopolitanism. Distributed through pirate DVD networks across Africa, the Caribbean and the Diaspora at large, Nollywood films are a global phenomenon - and we'll find out why. We'll also be joined by Christopher Kirkley of the Sahel Sounds blog, who transports us to northern Nigeria and into the electronic sound world of Hausa film music.
An earlier post about Nollywood: Nollywood Millionaire.
On Friday, July 4, I had a post in which I asserted, without argument, my believe that our institutions are probably fatally compromised. There’s no way we can back to the way things once were. The next day, July 5, I had a post where I presented a conversation I had with Claude about how an explanation about that belief might go. In that post I gave a quick precis of how I have experienced the socio-political sphere from my childhood up through and into this millennium. Claude and I gave a special place to the collapse of the USSR in 1989. On the one hand that was a major event in world affairs. On a personal level, moreover, it forced me to revise my priors, to put it informally in Bayesian terms. I grew up during the Cold War and had come to think that it was an all-but permanent feature of the world order. When the USSR collapsed I had to revise my sense of the world on the deepest and broadest level. Perhaps significant change WAS possible.
Additionally, Claude pointed out that, early in my life, I had experienced major institutions at maximum effectiveness (e.g. the founding of NASA as a response to Sputnik, a steel strike that affected the entire nation for half a year) and then, later in life, experienced weak and ineffective institutions. Most people have not lived long enough to have experienced that. And that leads to the topic of today’s dialog with Claude 4.0.
With the election of Donald Trump, and the actions he’s taken in the first half of the year, we are in a state of political crisis, a chaos that the administration has spread to the rest of the world as well. How is this going to play out in America? The answer to that question depends, in part, on what people think about socio-political possibilities: What is possible? What is unlikely to ever happen? Surely people’s experience of that will depend, in part, on their own life experience. What roll has the collapse of the USSR played in that experience?
That obviously depends on a person’s age. Someone born in, say, 1975, has probably not had enough life experience in the Cold War for that, and the subsequent collapse of the USSR, to register deeply in their experience. They will have learned about the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR in history classes in school and from reading. Because of their relative, youth, however, the collapse itself would not have caused them to rethink their sense of the national and international political arena. It’s merely history.
With that in mind, I asked Claude to “think” about the effects of that event. Not surprisingly it reported that we don’t have much data on the question, but offered some remarks and speculation. I then asked it to suggest research we might conduct into the repercussions of that collapse.
As before, my prompts are highlighted in blue, while Claude’s response are clear.
* * * * *
Previously we’d identified the collapse of the USSR as an inflection point in the course of recent history. At the time I identified is as an important event in my understanding of history. I’d grown up during the Cold War and, in effect, thought of the conflict between the democratic nations and the communist nations as an all-but permanent feature of the world. I expected that conflict to continue as long as I lived. Thus, when the USSR collapse I realized that, “hey,” maybe things can actually change. A colleague of mine who was born in 1967, 20 years after me, said he experienced that collapse the same way. I was in my early 40s when the collapse happened; he was in his early 20s.
This raises a general question: Across the whole population, what effect the collapse of the USSR had on people’s attitudes toward politics and the future? On the one had we have people who are old enough to have lived during the Cold War and hence to have experienced collapse of the USSR. OTOH we have those too young to have experienced the Cold War and the subsequent collapse of the USSR. Do the attitudes of these two groups differ in a systematic way that can be attributed to their lived experience of the Cold War? Do we have any relevant survey data? Any other evidence?
This is a fascinating question that touches on how major historical events shape generational political consciousness. Let me search for relevant research on this.Your observation about the USSR collapse as a pivotal moment for understanding the possibility of systemic change is profound, and you're right to wonder about its generational impact on political attitudes. While I didn't find extensive survey data specifically measuring this phenomenon, the available evidence suggests significant generational differences shaped by lived experience of the Cold War.
The research does reveal clear patterns:
Cold War Generation (born ~1930-1975): Americans from the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, and Generation X, believe it is best for the United States to take an active role in world affairs and show higher support for global engagement. They experienced the full arc of the Cold War and its dramatic conclusion.
Post-Cold War Generation (born after ~1980): Americans from the Millennial Generation and Generation Z are far less convinced of the merits of active global engagement and are more selective about how the U.S. should engage internationally. Unlike their elders, young Americans don't buy into US exceptionalism and are divided on whether the United States should play an active role or stay out of world affairs.
Your insight about experiencing the USSR collapse as proof that "things can actually change" appears to have had lasting effects:
Fukuyama's Optimism as Cultural Zeitgeist: The immediate post-Cold War period was characterized by unprecedented optimism about systemic change. Fukuyama's "End of History" thesis captured this mood, arguing that liberal democracy had triumphed and would inevitably spread globally. This wasn't just academic theory - it reflected a broader cultural belief that fundamental transformation was possible.
Evidence of Generational Political Efficacy: While direct survey data is limited, we can see the effects in:
This generational difference may be crucial for understanding our current institutional crisis. Those who experienced the USSR collapse know viscerally that:
Meanwhile, younger generations who grew up during American institutional dominance may paradoxically be both:
First I run through my personal history from about the age of ten up into the current century. That tells a lot about why I feel this way but it is not itself an explanation. It doesn’t justify that feeling.
Most of this post takes the form of a conversation I had with Claude about this subject. As the subject is deep and complex, that conversation doesn’t itself provide an explanation. But it does indicate how I think an explanation should be constructed. About two thirds of the way through I made a long prompt in which I run through my personal history. Claude’s response to that was a bit surprising to me, and quite interesting.
I was born at the end of 1947. During the mid-1950s Walt Disney had several episodes about man in space on his TV program. They had me enthralled, as did Forbidden Planet, which I saw when it came out in 1956. Then Russia launched Sputnik in 1957. That’s when my personal life, with fantasies of space exploration, intersected with world history. I followed the space program for years, also building model kits of space craft and making a painting or two.
A ten-year-old is not going to have a very sophisticated grasp of world affairs. But it doesn’t take long for a ten-year-old to become 13 and then 14. I’m very aware of the Cold War. I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, just barely, and the assassination of President Kennedy. I remember the Civil Rights movement, mostly from TV, the news, and discussions in school civics classes.
And then we have the Vietnam War, which played a major role in my life during my teens and early 20s. I protested the war and served as a conscientious objector. I was a fellow-traveler in the counter-culture, turning on and tuning in (I played in a rock band from 69-71), but I never really dropped. Still, I was sufficiently alienated from mainstream America that I was indifferent to the moon landing in 1969. I remember the OPEC oil embargo and its aftermath, which trigged the demise of the steel industry in the USA. And so forth. I was deeply disappointed when Ronald Reagan was elected President.
Let’s more or less say that the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-90 was a major inflection point. I’d grown up during the Cold War so I’d believed that conflict between the United States and the USSR was written into the nature of the world. That event proved me wrong, though I didn’t believe in Fukuyama’s end of history (and, yes, I did know that he was talking about history in a very special and specific way), nor that international conflict was at an end.
Not long after that we have the first Iraq war, which went by quickly. Then 9/11 and the second Iraq war leading into the “war on terror” and the war in Afghanistan. The USA had now repeated the Vietnam debacle twice. Did we not learn?
We have the rise of inequality, the consequent Occupy movement – I visited Zuccotti park in Lower Manhattan – and a nation where the working class no longer has their interests effectively represented in the federal government. Linking back to my youth, I remember when labor unions were strong and a steelworker’s strike shut things down for half a year. Now, unions are struggling to survive. All of this feels like institutional collapse.
* * * * *
My Prompts are set in bold and highlighted in light blue.
Claude's replies are plainface and unadorned.
I believe there is a relatively recently academic literature on the collapse of civilizations. Would you give me a quick review of it. What are the major hypotheses and debates?
The academic literature on civilizational collapse has flourished over the past few decades, producing several influential theories and ongoing debates. Here's an overview of the major approaches:
Jared Diamond's Environmental Determinism (Collapse, 2005) Diamond argues that civilizations collapse primarily due to environmental degradation, often following a five-factor framework: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, trade disruption, and society's responses to problems. His case studies include Easter Island, Maya civilization, and Norse Greenland.
Joseph Tainter's Complexity Theory (The Collapse of Complex Societies, 1988) Tainter proposes that societies become increasingly complex to solve problems, but eventually hit diminishing returns where the cost of complexity exceeds its benefits. Collapse represents a rational response - simplification when complexity becomes too expensive to maintain.
Peter Turchin's Structural-Demographic Theory Turchin uses mathematical models to identify cyclical patterns, focusing on "elite overproduction" - when societies produce more elites than can be supported, leading to internal conflict and institutional breakdown.
1. Environmental/Resource Depletion: Overexploitation of natural resources leads to ecological collapse (Diamond, Wright's "progress traps")
2. Complexity Overload: Administrative and social complexity becomes too costly to maintain (Tainter)
3. Social Fragmentation: Loss of social cohesion, trust, and shared institutions (Putnam, Fukuyama)
4. Elite Dynamics: Conflict between competing elites when resources become scarce (Turchin, Goldstone)
5. External Shocks: Climate change, pandemics, invasions, or economic disruption overwhelming adaptive capacity
6. Institutional Failure: Decay of governance structures and inability to respond effectively to challenges
Monocausal vs. Multicausal Explanations: Critics argue that single-factor theories (like Diamond's environmental focus) oversimplify complex historical processes. Most recent work emphasizes multiple interacting factors.
Gradualism vs. Sudden Collapse: Whether collapse is typically a slow decline or rapid breakdown. Recent work suggests both patterns exist, often depending on system resilience and feedback loops.
Predictability: Whether collapses follow predictable patterns that can be modeled (Turchin's approach) or are fundamentally unpredictable due to complex system dynamics.
Definition of "Collapse": Ongoing debate about what constitutes collapse versus transformation, adaptation, or reorganization.
The field faces several challenges:
The literature increasingly emphasizes that collapse and resilience exist on a spectrum, and that understanding both failure and successful adaptation is crucial for addressing contemporary challenges like climate change, technological disruption, and social polarization.
I have a recent post where I stated, without argument, that our current set of institutions, political and otherwise, is so badly broken that we need to come up with new ones. This article is one example of the sort of thing I have in mind: Brendan Buck, Is This Really How We’re Legislating Now? NYTimes, July 4, 2025:
Speaker Mike Johnson once again defied skeptics and found a majority in a high-stakes vote, with the House passing the president’s big policy bill on Thursday along party lines. He and John Thune, the Senate leader, ably made whatever deals and promises were necessary to get the bill through their chambers, and Republicans are celebrating it as a major victory. But the wobbly passage of the fiscal package says more about the frivolity of the game Congress now plays than it does about how well G.O.P. congressional leaders played it.
Few seem happy with the actual product. Republicans and Democrats alike have found plenty to criticize about the substance of the bill: the cost, the cuts, the gimmicks. Just as concerning, though, is the way it came together — and what that says about America’s once admired legislative body.
The process was marred by dynamics that have increasingly undermined Congress’s status as a dominant and deliberative institution: The bill lacked a clear and inspired purpose; it supplanted the expertise of congressional committees for the whims of holdouts and the president; and it relied on the make-or-break reconciliation mechanism that limits the ability to write sound policy.
Congress is no longer in the business of thoughtful legislating. Its role has been reduced to putting political points on the board for the president.
There has been a series of changes in how leadership and legislating in Washington work.
Committees and expertise:
Congress, particularly the House, is a body built around committees, which have jurisdiction over various areas of policy. This is where expertise is supposed to be housed. Historically, members of these committees have jealously defended their policy terrain, and they have been given deference to do their jobs.
However, this critical architecture has been collapsing in recent years. In this instance, Mr. Johnson allowed rank-and-file members to end-run the committees of jurisdiction. After the committee process, the bill was workshopped through a series of hasty negotiations with holdout members such as with the changes to the state and local tax deductions. Medicaid policy, affecting tens of millions of Americans, appears to have been made on the fly. Editors’ Picks Should I Be Worried About Arsenic in Rice? What Makes Someone Cool? A New Study Offers Clues. Can the ‘Princess Treatment’ Go Too Far?
In the Senate, the bill didn’t even go through a full, open committee process, and policy was still being written last weekend as senators began voting to proceed.
With committees relegated, there was no ownership of the product — and certainly little pride in it. [...]
Bad process can lead to bad policy and bad politics.
I don’t mean the all-night voting in the Senate or both chambers passing legislation before official scorekeepers had even provided final cost estimates. Those are just unfortunate realities of legislative politics. There’s another process story that has been building for decades across both parties, as Congress increasingly relies on large legislative vehicles like this. Many of the issues with this package can be traced to the decision to put everything in one big bill. With little interest in policymaking through regular order, or bipartisan compromise, the majority is left to place all its eggs in the basket of the budget reconciliation process.
The wonky rules of the reconciliation process give the majority a narrow crack at avoiding the Senate filibuster — but the process also significantly limits how policy can be written. Generally speaking, everything must be drafted to address matters of spending or revenue. The 1974 Budget Act that created this process was intended to help Congress balance the budget. It’s now being used for issues like artificial intelligence standards and immigration policy.
This is a poor mechanism for addressing the nuances of complex policy. It also functionally means that the biggest policy changes both parties are making are increasingly partisan ones.
That's only one example.
* * * * *
And then there's this article over at 3 Quarks Daily: Bill Murray, Managers and Clowns, July 4, 2025. I won't attempt to excerpt the whole thing, but the first part is about NATO, and then comes America under Trump:
For a long time the United States held on to one huge advantage: since World War II it presented a template for how the world’s most successful prevailing models of both politics and economics could work in tandem. Now eighty years on, American Democracy just delivers volatility and gridlock, and American Capitalism has come to represent rent-seeking inequality.
•••••
Institutions once held weight and countries addressed each other through them. Now no country has a particular reason to aspire to former goals like transparency; the US doesn’t itself. So countries follow their own self interest and the world fumbles about.
What is NATO but a series of nerve-wracking meetings managed to assuage the erratic Americans? What is the G7 but a string of photo-ops with resort backdrops? What is Davos but grating opulence?
Nobody has confidence in any of it.
There's more at that link.
Tanisha M. Fazal, Is War in Decline? Annu. Rev. Political Sci. 2025. 28:57–73, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-041923-115351
Abstract: The claim that war is in decline has gained considerable traction among analysts and policy makers. This review surveys the empirical data as well as the theoretical arguments for a decline of war. It concludes that, while great power wars have declined since 1945, war in general is not necessarily in decline. Critiques of the claim that war is in decline range from the statistical to the anthropological. While war is not necessarily in decline, though, it has changed. Specifically, a major driver of the putative decline of war—international norms, laws, and institutions—has done more to change how war is discussed and presented than whether it is prosecuted. Stronger the- ories of change are needed in international relations to understand whether these somewhat superficial changes could deepen in ways that produce a true decline in war.
The penultimate paragraph:
The twinning of institutionalized attempts to regulate and limit warfare with observed changes—although not necessarily an overall decline—in war suggests an alternative pathway for change in the international system. Change does not require technological or material power shifts, but it does not always follow the path intended by social actors such as norm entrepreneurs. Norms, for example, can produce important effects even if they take hold to a limited extent. Insofar as actors feel pressure to comply with norms, they may try to create the appearance of compliance while still committing violations; they may, in other words, try to comply with the letter of the law while violating its spirit. The debate over the decline of war provides multiple examples of this phenomenon. War is still war even if it is not formally declared, it does not entail seizing large swathes of territory, and the civilians who get caught in the crossfire are true non- combatants. But the fact that how wars are fought has changed—even if only in an apparently superficial manner—may itself be a harbinger of other, future shifts. A less teleological and more capacious version of the spiral metaphor sometimes used to describe the institutionalization of norms may be apt here (Risse & Sikkink 1999; Risse et al. 1999, 2013). New norms put pressure on others, but displacement of one norm does not necessarily mean the wholesale establishment of another. New norms may realign incentives, but there are some very deep incentives that cannot be easily overturned. Nonetheless, talking about war as if it is a bad (rather than glorious) thing may, in the longer term, make it so.
So, I got up did this and that and then, as I often do, went looking in the NYTimes for something to excerpt for New Savanna. I saw a bunch of stuff. So I decided to post a bunch of quick hits on a variety of items. The idea is to indicate the scope of things by “sampling the space.”
When China helped negotiate a peace deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia in 2023, it hailed the breakthrough as a victory for Chinese diplomacy and a sign that America’s chief geopolitical rival had emerged as a major power broker in the Middle East.
But as President Trump openly ponders deploying American forces to join Israel in attacking Iran, the limits of China’s clout in the region are coming into focus.
China has much to lose from a runaway conflict. Half of the country’s oil imports move in tankers through the Strait of Hormuz on Iran’s southern coast. And Beijing has long counted on Tehran, its closest partner in the region, to push back against American influence.
When Scott Gagnon was fired from his government job earlier this year, he and his laid-off colleagues kept in touch to vent, comfort each other and share job opportunities. It quickly turned into an informal but crucial support group.
And they happened to be uniquely qualified for the task, having worked at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a relatively small agency within the Department of Health and Human Services.
“It was very familiar territory for us to rally around each other, knowing that we’re all going through this trauma, being separated from jobs that we all loved very much,” Mr. Gagnon, 49, the agency’s former New England director, said in an interview.
Their ad hoc network, which meets virtually every couple of weeks, mirrors the way hundreds of laid-off federal employees are dealing with the stress and pain of abruptly losing their livelihoods as part of President Trump and Elon Musk’s slash-and-cut-some-more approach to reshaping the federal work force and government programs.
To reach the top of Cerro Pachón, a mountain at the edge of the Atacama Desert in Chile, astronomers take a drive of two hours up a winding, bumpy road. The lush greenery at the mountain’s base slowly gives way to the browns and yellows of the desert. Eventually, telescopes rise in the distance, the sun glinting off their metal domes.
The newest eye on the cosmos is the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which houses the largest digital camera ever built. For the next 10 years, the telescope will take advantage of its station under Chilean skies, some of the darkest on Earth, to conduct an astronomical survey more ambitious than any scientific instrument that came before it.
From that survey, astronomers hope to learn about the birth of our Milky Way galaxy, the mysterious matter comprising much of the cosmos, and how the universe evolved into its current arrangement. Perhaps they will even uncover clues about its fate.
They will also use the telescope to home in on millions of transient objects, “faint things that go bang, explode or move in the night,” said Tony Tyson, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Davis. That includes gorging black holes and collisions of dense, dead stars.
Hayao Miyazaki and his colleagues at Studio Ghibli craft pictures that are so delicately drawn and convincingly textured that it seems as if we should be able to step right into them. Think of the bustling bathhouse of “Spirited Away” or the bucolic Japanese countryside of “My Neighbor Totoro.”
But as viewers, we are never able to actually enter these worlds of tender emotions, whimsical characters and, perhaps above all, vivid locations that set the imagination ablaze. Movies are made from flat 2-D images; they remain tantalizingly out of reach. [...]
Enter video games, which allow players to explore immersive 3-D environments and satisfy many fantasies: the sword-wielding savior, the slayer of fantastical beasts, the fleet-footed time traveler.
The influence of Studio Ghibli — which turned 40 this week — can be seen throughout the industry, notably in recent additions to the Legend of Zelda franchise. Breath of the Wild (2017) and Tears of the Kingdom (2023) each offer pastoral experiences tinged with menace, similar to many Ghibli pictures; their cel-shaded graphics also evoke the studio’s exquisite painterly style. In Tears of the Kingdom, Zelda’s devoted knight Link moves between floating land masses that evoke those in “Castle in the Sky.”
Ashland, Ohio, is a small rural city where Akron Children’s Hospital has one of its 46 pediatric clinics. Last winter, I met Kristin Seveigny, the clinic’s mental-health therapist, in her office there. The hospital hired her two years earlier, at a time when the pandemic had exacerbated a nationwide crisis in adolescent mental health. [...] Among adolescents, one in five reports having unmet health care needs.
The situation in Ashland mirrors those trends. The practice conducts 6,000 wellness checkups a year, each lasting 15 to 40 minutes. [...] “In this area, a lot of counseling offices are not taking any patients, or there’s a six-month wait.”
That lack of availability was a big reason that Seveigny and Cunningham agreed to try out an unusual tool: a smartphone chatbot, designed to teach coping skills to adolescents during their wait for an appointment with a therapist. Patients needed a referral to download the app, called Woebot, on their phone. Once they did, it would periodically ask how they were feeling; patients could also start a conversation with it anytime. [...]
Unlike ChatGPT and other popular chatbot models, Woebot was not “generative A.I.,” that is, capable of generating unique responses by consulting the internet; all its messages were preapproved by psychologists to deliver, primarily, a type of treatment known as cognitive behavioral therapy, in which patients learn to identify and reframe negative thoughts. Seveigny and Cunningham couldn’t see what their patients wrote to Woebot, but the data — for instance, the time of day when users logged in and for how long — was stripped of identifying details by a third party and sent to the app’s parent company, Woebot Health, for analysis. [...]
Later:
“Right now, there’s clearly an A.I. arms race to make bigger, smarter A.I. models,” says John Torous, director of the digital-psychiatry division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “Safety will have to unfortunately catch up.”
This is especially concerning when it comes to therapy chatbots geared toward children, who are among those with the greatest need and — as digital natives — among those for whom app-based therapy is most likely to resonate. One solution has been to hire people to supervise multiple A.I.-led conversations at a time.
Authorities in western India are taking steps to improve labor conditions for sugar cane cutters after a court ruling and an investigation by The New York Times and The Fuller Project highlighted serious abuses of workers.
Journalists revealed last year that women in the Indian state of Maharashtra were pushed to get unnecessary hysterectomies as a way to keep them working in sweltering sugar fields, unencumbered by menstruation or gynecological ailments. The sugar cane-cutting system also has used child labor, pushes young girls into marriage and locks families into debt bondage.
The sugar industry is overwhelmingly controlled by the state’s political leadership. And major Western brands like Coca-Cola and Pepsico have profited from the system. Government officials, regulators and companies have for years done little or nothing to address these abuses. Politicians say that changing the labor system would cut into sugar profits and make it impossible for factories to compete.
The sound of horns and percussion permeated Harlem, causing neighbors to poke their heads out of windows to listen to the colorful sounds of jazz.
It was Thursday night — Juneteenth — and the sun was shining after a brief downpour. The Big Band Jubilee, an annual live music celebration, had been delayed for a bit by the weather. But now it was in full swing, and musicians and dancers had taken to the streets.
Ava Johnson, 62, rocked to the rhythm of the music next to her sister, Peggy Salano, and a sea of people. Before the event, Mrs. Johnson had stood in the rain under a covering for an hour, anticipating a night of jazz in a historic Manhattan neighborhood.
“This is where it all started,” Mrs. Johnson said. “This is where our ancestors Dizzy, Louis, Ella and all of them, I’m sure, walked through this neighborhood and played their music. So it’s like coming back home to be here and to celebrate our history on this day.”