Weekend Reading
What fresh hell is this? #Corruption #Incompetence
“If Mr. Trump is taking a pause, it may be because the list of things that could go wrong is long, and probably incomplete. There’s the obvious: It’s possible that a B-2 could get shot down, despite Israel’s success of taking out so many of Iran’s air defenses. It’s possible the calculations are wrong, and even America’s biggest conventional bomb can’t get down that deep. ‘I’ve been there, it’s half a mile underground,’ Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said last week, as the Israeli operation began. But assuming that the operation itself is successful, the largest perils may lie in the aftermath, many experts say, just as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. There are many lessons from that ugly era of misbegotten American foreign policy, but the most vital may be that it’s the unknown unknowns that can come back to bite. Iran has vowed that if attacked by American forces, it would strike back, presumably against the American bases spread around the Middle East and the growing number of assets gathering in the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean. All are within missile range, assuming Iran has missiles and launchers left after the Israelis are done with their systematic targeting. Of course, that could start a cycle of escalation: If Americans are killed, or even injured, Mr. Trump will be under pressure to exact revenge … Already, the message of these past five days, as interpreted by Iranian leaders or others with nuclear skill, may well be that they should have raced for a bomb earlier, and more stealthily. That was what North Korea did, and it has now ended up with 60 or more nuclear weapons, despite years of American diplomacy and sabotage to stop it. It is a big enough arsenal to assure that its adversaries, South Korea and the United States, would think twice about conducting the kind of operation that Israel executed against Iran.” (David Sanger/NYT)
“The world recently watched an argument unfold on X between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. It was a surreal exchange, featuring one of the richest men ever to have lived threatening to pull his spacecraft from NASA over a political disagreement. Some onlookers will have enjoyed it. For others, it will have been little more than background noise. But it pointed to something that’s worth taking seriously: one person can pull the plug on America’s entire crewed spaceflight program. NASA relies on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. After the Boeing debacle, no other American vehicle is able to do it. That means that the United States is only ever one political (or personal) disagreement away from losing access to low Earth orbit. This isn’t about Elon Musk or Donald Trump as people. My point is neither personal nor professional. It’s about the structure of the system: critical national infrastructure surely can’t be left to the whims of private individuals, however gifted or wealthy they might be. This connects to a broader issue, which is that governments both in the U.S. and across Europe make themselves vulnerable by leaning too heavily on private monopolies. We’ve seen this in launch services with SpaceX; Starlink with connectivity; Palantir with data and decision systems. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud dominate cloud infrastructure. This is dangerous — not because those companies are bad actors, but because it’s risky to rely too heavily on just a handful of firms to carry out important tasks.” (Robert Brull/SpaceNews)
“In the delicate center of the action, each dancer rests her head on the other woman’s shoulder. Expectation slows, tragedy softens, the center holds. They are barely touching. The lean is superficial; they do not need each other yet. This is the prelude to the enormous tension that comes next. The lift, when it comes, originates in the deepest part of the hips and resembles the ritualistic crouch of a sumo wrestler. The lifter’s thighs look enormous, but she is slim. She plants her legs below her shoulders and extends her arms. The trick is to hold up the rear without sticking it out so that the dancer being lifted settles onto the lifter’s back without a hitch. The memory of the playful lean in the beginning returns. Each dancer depends on the other to be precise and reliable in a way that life is not. The arriving dancer leans back across the shelf of her partner’s lower back and is immediately secured by an arm clamped around her waist. Her own arm grazes the floor. Her leg points up like a traffic light. When I flatten the image, I see Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso realizing that the shape of one woman combines pieces of many. The two ballerinas resemble a chair with a straight back for two people, a love seat in wood. It is the last week of rehearsals, and the musicians are here with the composer for the first time. The three pairs of ballerinas struggle to balance one another, then switch to new partners. It is a lesson in creating an approach and making adjustments with each companion. Every weight-sharing experiment in becoming one body is improvised because no amount of training can anticipate what has unfolded this morning, when these minds and spines crossed the street or exited the subway. No lift—not next take this rehearsal nor one two months later—will ever be the same as the one in progress now. Watching the women sweat, I realize that an enormous strength is being distributed.” (Diane Mehta/The Paris Review)
“Modi’s government has also actively sought to curb free speech through police and surveillance strategies. Freedom of the press has significantly declined, with India ranked 151 among 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index in 2025. In addition to the press, civil society groups, universities and think tanks have all increasingly come under attack. Even academics are getting arrested, with the recent detention of Ali Khan Mahmudabad in the state of Haryana a case in point. As much as Modi’s rhetoric, these domestic abuses shape how the world views India and affect its global standing. For example, a 2024 survey published by the ASEAN Studies Centre at the Singapore-based ISEAS think tank painted a bleak picture of ASEAN societies’ outlook on India’s foreign policy instincts and capacities: Only 1.5 percent of respondents trusted India to do the ‘right thing’ in global matters, while 40 percent agreed that ‘India does not have the capacity or the political will for global leadership.’ Consider India’s immediate neighborhood, where it has fewer friends than before and more countries treating its intentions with suspicion. Once a close partner, Bangladesh is recalibrating its relations with New Delhi since the ouster last year of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina by a student-led popular protest movement. Amid growing anti-India sentiment—in part due to Hasina’s close ties with India, where she fled in exile—bilateral relations have hit a new low. In recent years, Nepal has protested India’s territorial claims, while Sri Lanka continues to balance between India and China. Even the Maldives, once an all-weather friend to India, elected pro-China President Mohamed Muizzu, who rose to power last year on the back of anti-India sentiment and asked India to withdraw its troops stationed in the island country as one of his first moves upon taking office. India has also been ineffective in handling Chinese incursions across the India-China border in Ladakh, in the Himalayas. More recently, India responded to April’s deadly terror attack in Indian-controlled Kashmir with air strikes across Pakistan.” (Adarsh Badri/WPR)
“By 7,000 years ago, people in New Guinea were cultivating bananas. Around the same time, figs in the Near East and avocados in Mesoamerica were well on their way to becoming the fruits we savor today. People across the world consume an astonishing variety of fruits. These range from the smallest edible example—a neon green sphere produced by the Asian watermeal plant that measures less than the width of a pencil tip—to the largest, the 100-pound yellowish-green jackfruit. ‘The fruit we eat now is a result of people experimenting extensively for thousands of years,’ says archaeobotanist Erica Rowan of Royal Holloway. For archaeologists, evidence of ancient fruit opens unexpected pathways to understanding the past. ‘The seeds or pits of fruit are quite hardy and survive well in the archaeological record,’ says Rowan. Studying fruit can give scholars glimpses of the ingenuity of ancient peoples—for example, some used figs preserved in honey as a source of precious calories during harsh winters. People of all eras, it seems, have coveted fruit as a welcome departure from ordinary fare. ‘Fruit was used as a source of sugar, nutrients, flavor, and lots of different textures,’ says Rowan. ‘Fruit was everywhere, all the time. It has always been very important to people.’” (Archaeology)
“IF ZOHRAN MAMDANI KNOCKS OFF ANDREW CUOMO in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, he will have Latino voters to thank. A Marist poll released Wednesday showed that the democratic socialist assemblymember had more than halved Cuomo’s lead from May, when Cuomo led 53 percent to 29 percent. Now Cuomo leads by just 10 points in a simulated final round of ranked-choice voting. The primary is next week. To understand this shocking turn of affairs, check the crosstabs for the nearly 30 percent of New Yorkers who identify as Hispanic/Latino. Mamdani now leads among that bloc, the Marist poll found, with his support doubling to 41 percent from 20 percent last month. During the same period, Cuomo’s support from Hispanics dropped slightly from 41 percent to 36 percent. There are several ways to explain this. Mamdani offered one up himself in an interview with The Bulwark on Wednesday: He, not Cuomo, is best suited to take on Trump’s mass deportation regime, especially as ICE ramps up raids in blue cities … Mamdani’s belief that New York’s Latinos want someone to stand up to Trump’s deportation regime is something of a gamble. The community is not monolithic when it comes to illegal immigration. Not so long ago, the emerging wisdom was that caring for undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers—those who came to New York themselves or were shipped there from border states—was draining the city of resources and that the city government was ready to work with Trump on the matter. But there is also ample history of New York City mayors standing up to Trump on immigration.” (Adrian Carrasquillo/The Bullwark)
“We hardly see the cartilaginous villain of ‘Jaws’ before it tears through a skinny-dipper, a dog, a little boy and an overconfident fisherman. It takes nearly two hours to finally watch the great white shark leap out of the water to swallow the gruff veteran Quint. Until then, we only really catch its dorsal fin before victims are ripped under the waves as the water around them turns the color of ketchup. ‘Jaws’ is credited with inventing the summer blockbuster. It inspired decades of creature features and suspenseful flicks. It kickstarted a whole subgenre of shark-centric horror (with diminishing returns). It also inflamed our fear of sharks as man-eating monsters, said Jennifer Martin, an environmental historian who teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara. ‘I’m struggling to think of a parallel example of a film that so powerfully shaped our understanding of another creature,’ she said. ‘They were killing machines. They were not really creatures. They weren’t playing an ecological role.’ Fifty years on, ‘Jaws’ preys on our existing fears of the oceanic unknown. The film even briefly influenced the popularity of shark-killing tournaments after its release, Martin said. But it also enticed marine biologists and researchers to better understand the deranged shark at its center.” (Scottie Andrew/CNN)
“Bahr el-Din Yakoub fled Sudan to seek sanctuary in Egypt after a missile ripped through his home in Khartoum and killed four of his friends. But economic hardship and a crackdown on refugees in Egypt pushed him onwards, first along dangerous desert smuggling routes into northeastern Libya, and then on the perilous sea crossing to the Greek island of Crete. Yakoub, 25, is one of a small but growing number of Sudanese refugees who are giving up on Egypt and taking their chances in Libya, rather than returning home where civil war has been raging since April 2023, according to migrants, smugglers, aid workers and activists. While the flight of tens of thousands of Sudanese to Libya via their common border has been documented, the trend of Sudanese nationals feeling they have no option but to take the northern route out of Egypt has not previously been reported. For this story, Reuters spoke with 32 Sudanese refugees. While a few are still in Egypt, most described how they had moved on due to the difficult conditions there, making it to Libya, Greece and France. And as more Sudanese head to Libya, where the situation can be precarious for refugees, more are boarding boats for Europe. In the first five months of 2025, the number of Sudanese nationals arriving in Europe jumped 134% from a year earlier, even as overall numbers of people crossing from North Africa declined, according to preliminary figures from the U.N.'s refugee agency UNHCR. ‘The sea was rough and it was a very difficult trip, but we were exhausted by all that we endured in Libya. We had no other choice, either we cross or die,’ Yakoub said, adding that he had been detained, arrested and ill-treated by Libyan authorities and militias.” (Reuters)
“To be more than fair to two profoundly corrupt leaders who don’t remotely deserve it, this is alas nothing new: Israeli prime ministers who bend American presidents to their will have a long and distinguished pedigree. The last U.S. president to stand up to Israel and demand that it reverse itself in a matter of war was Dwight Eisenhower, who, after the 1956 Israeli-British-French attack on Egypt over the closing of the Suez Canal to Israeli shipping, insisted on an immediate withdrawal. (It did not endear Israel to Eisenhower that he was trying to focus the world on Moscow’s invasion of Hungary at the same time.) Even then, France and England immediately complied. Israel took its time and eventually extracted most of the concessions it wanted from the U.S. This phenomenon has only grown in scope with the rise of the myriad groups that make up the extraordinarily influential ‘Israel lobby,’ together with the growing power of Christian Zionism in the Republican Party. Robert Gates, who spent decades of service in top national security positions under both Democratic and Republican presidents, once observed that of all the presidents he had served, literally ‘every’ one of them would, at some point in his presidency, ‘get so pissed off at the Israelis that he couldn’t speak.’ They would all “rant and rave around the Oval Office” out of ‘frustration about knowing that there was so little they could do about it because of domestic politics.’ To say this is understandable would be a considerable understatement. Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg reported a now-famous conversation he had with an official at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee during the Clinton era. Goldberg asked the official if AIPAC had lost influence after a leader had been caught on tape speaking in an impolitic fashion. The official interrupted him and pushed his napkin across the table: ‘You see this napkin?’ he asked, before explaining, ‘In twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.’” (Eric Altermann/TNR)