Dating Apps: Giving Men What They Want But Not What They Need

Dating apps were built on the bones of Grindr. I have been known to joke that everything wrong with dating apps is divine retribution for culturally appropriating them from the gays.

Gay men, specifically, that’s important - the overwhelming majority of people making apps are still men, and most of those are still straight men, and while I don’t exactly have insider knowledge on this, it couldn’t be clearer to me that some open-ish minded straight tech boy heard from one of his gay male friends about being able to summon sex partners to his bed from the immediate vicinity after filtering on a bunch of lewd photos and thought: “There isn’t a straight man alive who wouldn’t consider giving up his left hand to have this experience with women. I could make a billion dollars making straight Grindr.”

And thus Tinder was born. Blah blah blah lust and greed sullying the purity of romantic and sexual love; a direction I could go, but instead we’re going to talk about the ways that playing to male preferences in the short term can easily ruin their entire lives, even when it was men’s idea.

Dating apps aggressively reflect male preferences, sexuality neutral. They’re long on photos, short on text. They filter primarily on location, which has some usefulness, but is most useful if the question is “who’s geographically close enough to me that walking to my place for sex is a realistic option” .

Men love flipping through photos of people they’re attracted to - that alone drove much of the traffic to Facebook’s precursor, Hot or Not. This app is built to give men a sexual scrolling experience as soothingly magnetic as any social media site while providing enough mystery to feel less degenerate than porn (the better for large doses and intermittent rewards).

For women, it’s grim. Yes, they get matches much more often than men do (largely because these extremely male-centric UI decisions lure vastly more male users than women; what economist could have predicted this problem with a heterosexual dating app). They don’t enjoy using these apps, not nearly to the degree or as often as men do. For most women, sifting through men feels dehumanizing, and sorting on pictures feels painfully limited (the male equivalent might be having to swipe based on photos of a woman’s favorite outfit, laid out on her bed. Vaguely boring and frustrating to have to make important decisions with so little information about the things you care about).

This isn’t just because of blackpill stuff about how men aren’t hot to women - that topic has been covered to death, yes women find men physically hot but no it doesn’t always work in such a way that static photos capture, so men are impossibly screwed by efforts to appeal to women with photos alone. There’s also the fact that men suck at taking pictures, because the market for photos of people is overwhelmingly men as buyers and women as suppliers, with the demand being for sexually attractive photos of women. Looking at photos of men is like driving a Nissan truck: it couldn’t be clearer that it is not your specialty and significantly worse than other products that your entire factory line was designed for.

You might think that dating apps are bad for men because they lead to men experiencing significant rejection - even the way my post is framed up until this point sort of implies as much. That framework, like much about dating apps, gets the whole picture subtly, insidiously wrong in a way that leaves people who take them at face value much worse off. You know who takes things at face value most often? You’re not going to believe this,

No, the greatest deprivation created by dating apps is specifically denying women and men the opportunity for women to keep men around in a general capacity. (If this idea makes you freak out about the friend zone, I’m almost impressed with you because young people seem to do so little socializing that no one complains about the friend zone anymore. Pat yourself on the back for having friends if you’ve managed to develop a resentment complex around the friend zone).

Most women develop attraction to men via proximity and time. Force a woman to choose if she wants the option to sleep with a man the second she meets him, and she will default to no in almost every single case. For many men, this means that any men who enjoy the attention of women who are open to sleeping with them at first glance are the only men women authentically want. Respectfully, you’re thinking like a guy, and if you believe that men and women are extremely different, I’m going to need you to trust that women develop affection for men differently than men do for women, such that you’ll ruin your life trying to figure out why women don’t desire you in the exact same way that you desire them...

One of the worst things you can do if you date women is to push them into a choice of yes or no as early as possible. You are simply too much of a risk on too many axes to get something other than a no unless you look like Chris Hemsworth, and even that wouldn’t get you yeses from 100% of the women you might ask out (hot men can still be shitty in about a thousand ways, and women often aren’t willing to take risks even for hotness. Again. They are not men). You might think that your goal should be to look like Chris Hemsworth, or alternatively to despair that you don’t look like Chris Hemsworth and go sulkily into that good night, but that’s you thinking like a guy and assuming that how women feel has to match how you feel. Frankly, that’s what got you into this mess: by trusting tech men who told you that you could game heterosexual dating by giving you an interface that pinged all your dopamine sensors while curiously robbing you of a lot of opportunities to find and develop a fulfilling relationship. [...]

The major product provided by a dating app is the illusion of participating in dating at all - some time swiping through faces, and congratulations, you are “dating”, you Tried, you do not need to do anything scarier or riskier or less fun than this.

by Eurydice, Eurydice Lives |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via

Chain Reaction

Major disruptions to maritime chokepoints always send ripples through the entire global network. Like voltage through an electrical grid, maritime commerce will shift to the path of least resistance, with nations forced to redistribute security assets accordingly. The current conflict with Iran is testing this concept in real time — and US government planners need to be paying attention, both for short-term and long-term planning.

 

Maritime canals, straits, and capes are not independent waterways with unchanging risk profiles. They are, in fact, interconnected points in a system within the global maritime network on which international commerce relies. Disruption in one location redistributes traffic worldwide, altering shipping costs, delivery timelines, and global capacity.

In more extreme circumstances, this creates risk calculations that are very different from the steady state. This also creates dilemmas for governments regarding required force distributions to either maintain a specific chokepoint or protect national shipping interests.

Firms are already considering the impacts of conflict adjacent to the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s petroleum sails. A near-term return to the status quo may produce short-term uncertainty in shipping, with only marginal impacts on global commerce. However, the term “marginal” can still include billions of dollars, as shown by the March 2021 Ever Given grounding in the Suez. Conversely, a replay of the 1984-1988 Tanker Wars, or complete closure of the waterway, paints a very different picture.

In light of current events, leaders need to understand how the network has changed and be prepared to act accordingly. To define chokepoint risk, consider six factors: 

• Navigation (are there underwater obstructions or dangerous currents)
• Environmental (high waves or storms)
• Geopolitical (are adjacent nations stable and in control)
• Criminal (is there a high incidence of piracy)
• Density (is this a high traffic waterway)
• Economic activity (is this a regional or global economic corridor)

From a risk perspective, navigation and environmental risks are largely static and rarely affected by activity at other locations. Geopolitical and criminal (piracy) risks tend to drift toward adjacent chokepoints, while traffic density and economic activity quickly ripple throughout the entire system.

Looking closest to the closure, Bab al-Mandeb, located near Yemen, may expect an increase in lawlessness. Already poorly governed, regional frictions are sure to spread to Yemen, and those transiting the lower Red Sea should expect increased threats from both piracy and warring factions. There may be a decrease in traffic as vessels no longer need to move between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, but the Red Sea remains an important corridor for commercial and military traffic between Western nations and the Middle East. Consequently, while the current fight is through Hormuz, it is necessary to maintain maritime patrols in the vicinity of the Bab al-Mandeb and the Gulf of Aden. [...]

Where policy makers must firmly fix their gaze is the Turkish Straits. Ongoing conflict in the Black Sea Region (BSR) has already increased the risk between the Black and Aegean seas. Globally recognized as a wheat corridor between Ukrainian fields and the world, it is less appreciated that the BSR provides over 3 percent of global petroleum reserves, a figure likely to skyrocket in volume and value amid major market shifts. Expect to see a 5 percent increase in maritime traffic transiting through Istanbul.

Since the 1936 Montreux Convention, Turkey, whose military nearly doubles that of any European NATO ally, has deftly managed its control of the straits to stabilize geopolitical tensions in the region. But the heightened importance of the strait underscores the need for other interested parties to work together to support continued commerce. Bulgarian and Romanian forces, exempt from Montreux restrictions, must work with their Turkish NATO allies to monitor Black Sea activity, while the US 6th Fleet maintains vigilance in the Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean Seas.

The heightened importance of the waterway makes it an attractive target for malign actors, although Russia is less of a threat since much of the oil is theirs. Ankara is aware of these risks and should consider hosting regional exercises with NATO allies as a show of unified deterrence.

by Michael Kidd, Breaking Defense |  Read more:

Image: Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Indra Beaufort
[ed. See also: Golden Dome $1.5T Defense Budget Request (BD); and, How the National Security Strategy Gets Made (Statecraft).]

Fuck's Fucking Fucked

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” he wrote a little after 8 a.m. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah.”  ~ Donald Trump, 4/5/2026

Fuck had run its course. For the beloved curse word, the future did not bode well. Gross overuse of fuck had continued to degrade TV and film, music and prose. Rap, the musical genre in which fuck had become most unironically parodic was a fat, ripe, slow-moving target and was the first to be hit. Pop a cap in your bottom? No, not that dire. The minor profanities seemed fine. Even the nastier ones looked to be okay. Only the fucks were fading. What were fans saying? 

Soon to follow their fuck-dependent rap brethren, standup comics were next to feel these winds of change, the gentle breeze starting to gust. Most starkly and notably, the fuck that is delivered by the comic to get the customary post-punchline second laugh, a laugh as good as guaranteed, no longer seemed to be working.

You know the bit, we all do.

The comic delivers his punchline, which is, let’s say, “The guy has no clue.” As the audience laughs at the punchline, the comic walks the few steps to his stool for a sip of bottled water. Lifting the bottle to his lips as the laughter generated by the “no clue” punchline begins to wane, the comic aborts his sip and says, “No fucking clue.”

According to a longstanding formula, the repeating of the punchline here, reinforced by the strut that is fuck, should be an easy second laugh. Not anymore. Such was indicative of the diminishing power of fuck, an early warning sign, the not-funny-a-second-time-unless-supported-by-fuck punchline no longer getting those easy second laughs. The comic may hear more chortle than laugh, a laugh of manners, a laugh forced not earned, or, there may be no laugh at all. Among the comics, fears of fuck failing in its role as reinforcer is why deliveries of the second, fuck-dependent punchline would usually occur during the sip of water, for should you find yourself sipping in silence at least you have something to do.

This was the moment in entertainment when audiences were letting it be known that they weren’t finding the word funny or shocking or dramatic anymore. To the artist, the audience was saying, “We need more than your cursing. We don’t find it impactful. We’re not twelve years old. It’s kind of insulting.”

For comedians, the message was clear enough. They abandoned the formula that is the fuck-supported second laugh—but it didn’t stop there. Even the fuck-supported first laugh, the fuck-supported laugh in general, was losing traction, losing its cultural standing, the comics coming to fear that even to use fuck, let alone overuse it, had become cliché. The “fuck comics,” the comics who continued to use fuck, soon became less appealing to audiences and then unappealing, the least funny of the comics. There was no question by this time, with rappers and comedians blatantly beginning to tidy up their vocabularies, that the demise of fuck was upon us. The people were making it clear: they were not just tiring of the word, they were telling artists that they needed to do more than lean on the creative crutch that is fuck. For fuck, the writing was on the wall. Amongst themselves, the fucks were talking. 

“Now what the fuck are we supposed to do?”

“Fucked if I know.”

All fucks were nervous, all were concerned. The fucks knew that a cultural shift of this magnitude would result, more or less, in their immediate extinction. There was confusion and fear. Lots of questions. The union would be no help on this one. There were jobs, families. The future.

“Fuck. Fuuuuuck. Bro, this fucking sucks.”

“And like, zero fucking warning, bro.”

“And that German fuck. He didn’t fucking help. That German fucker fucking fucked us.”

“Not only him, fucking him and a whole fucking movement.”

The “German fuck” was Dr. Kalba Brenin, the German linguist and film critic. Dr. Brenin engaged the fuck catastrophe innocently enough. He had commented on his podcast that a limited series he had been watching and was intending to review used fuck so often that he stopped watching after two of eight episodes. A highly touted series about sexy young corporate lawyers dispatched to the world’s largest cities to ply their trade and defend and sustain capitalism, Dr. Brenin became frustrated by the “near constant” use of fuck that would commence in any scene that “required dramatic acting.” Rolling his eyes and ultimately laughing at fuck-choked so-called dramatic scene after fuck-choked so-called dramatic scene—the excessive fucks turning the drama into unintended comedy—instead of a review Dr. Brenin wrote his now infamous essay, A Welcome Overstayed, in which he called for fuck to be banned from all recorded entertainment—not for reasons of censorship of profanity—but “for the sake of preserving what human beings have for five millennia called art.”

In his essay, Dr. Brenin transcribes an exchange from the show.

“Becca should be told this case is now a fucking homicide.”

“Becca’s in the Andes, mountain climbing, off the grid, how the fuck am I supposed to get in touch with her?”

“Well she’s fucking president of this firm, you fucking better find a way.”

“Fuck you, Tristan.”

“Fuck you, too, Emma. And fuck Becca.”

Exeunt Tristan.

Dr. Brenin was relentless in his criticism.

“Fuck is anti-art. Fuck is an art killer. Writers, as of now, you must remove fuck from your lexicon. Distance yourself. Save yourself while there’s still time. It’s over.” [...]

For the linguists and pop culture scholars who attempted to explain the decline of fuck, the similarities to tattoos were often cited, that the way in which tattoos had lost their edge, their cred, their cool, should have been seen by fuck as a cautionary tale.

Tattoos had gone from ships-at-sea and prisons and cheap boarding rooms to spas and moms and pretty junior bank tellers with full sleeves. The tattoo was defanged. The tattoo had been corporatized, commercialized and, of special concern to men, feminized, as tattoos had become, near the final stages of the tattoo era and the rise of the tattoo removal era, more popular with women than men. Once the lone province of the hairy forearm, the tattoo had spread all over the body, a metastatic migration that could only result in homogenization. Fuck was on a similar trajectory. The word had become homogenous. It was as if once the film and television industries were finally permitted to say fuck, after years of censorship, fuck was all they wanted to say and now, after decades of relentless and unforgiving fuckery the people were tired, they had heard enough, they didn’t want to hear it anymore.

by Brutus Macdonald, Substack | Read more:
Image: George Carlin via: "the seven words you can't say on tv".

A Ride Through the Ages

via:

Isabelle Ferreira / Par La Nuit / Photography / 2025

via:

Two for One

Two Planes Destroyed by U.S. During Rescue Operation (WSJ)

Two U.S. Special Operations aircraft were blown up on the ground during the rescue mission of the second American aviator in Iran, a person familiar with the mission said.

MC-130Js are specially equipped planes that are used to carry out covert infiltrations and to remove troops from beyond enemy lines. The official didn't explain how the aircraft appeared to have gotten stuck during the course of the rescue operation, but said that it became necessary to destroy them.

Image: Ricardo Arduengo/Reuters

[ed. So much winning.]

You Work For the Bad Boss You Have, Not the Good Boss You Wish You Had

In every job, there is some gap between the advertisement and the reality. The outdoor job boasting “fresh air every day” consists of picking up trash. The service job “perfect for sunny personalities” consists of getting yelled at by angry customers. The day care job that offers “unlimited cuteness” consists of cleaning up poop. This is how it goes. We must all endure some amount of hastily concealed tribulations in order to pay the bills.

Likewise, we must persevere through bad bosses. We must learn to navigate pernicious supervisors, backstabbing managers, and incompetent executives as the price of gainful employment. Good bosses are a stroke of luck, rather than a baseline expectation. If we all limited ourselves to workplaces that were free of bad bosses, it would take ten years to find a job.

Mostly, this is to be expected—an inducement to aspire to a promotion, or to start a union, rather than a catastrophe. But there are some jobs where a bad boss is a bigger deal. There are some jobs where a bad boss can very quickly get you into a genuine moral crisis. If you have a job like that, shrugging off what the bad boss is doing can become not an act of resilience, but one of gross negligence.

The military is one job of this type. There is more moral urgency attached to the military’s conduct of its affairs than to, you know, a restaurant’s conduct of its affairs, due to the fact that the military kills people. There are higher stakes to poor management decisions. If you are a line cook and your boss tells you to cook a dish improperly and you acquiesce for the sake of keeping your job, you can be forgiven. If you are a member of the military and your boss tells you to kill innocent people or bomb their homes or snatch their freedom and you acquiesce for the sake of keeping your job, forgiveness is not so certain. You become not a beleaguered employee, but a true villain. The space that the world is able to afford you as a matter of sympathy for your workplace annoyances shrinks down to almost nothing once guns are involved.

People join the military for all sorts of reasons: For economic opportunity, for adventure, for patriotism, for sheer lack of options. Most soldiers, it is safe to say, believe they are doing something good. Even those who are not ultra-patriots probably believe—and are told, by ads and by supervisors and by TV and by politicians and by the public—that their jobs are, on balance, honorable ones. They do something difficult, and they believe they do something necessary, and they take a certain amount of pride in that, as anyone would.

The school in Iran where we blew up kids.

But the military is a gun in the hand of the Commander in Chief and we have a Commander in Chief who is dumb, narcissistic, unpredictable, and dangerous. The bad boss problem, for soldiers, is everything. It is the difference between being honorable and being the violent foot soldier of a thug. Which situation is closer to reality now, do you think? Being a soldier is not inherently righteous. That is a fairy tale they tell teenagers in order to get them to join the military. The righteousness of an army is wholly dependent on the righteousness of the cause that the army fights for. (Teenagers learn this, too, about other armies in other nations. We are careful never to tell them to apply the principle to the United States itself.) [...]

Here in America, when we are talking about American soldiers, we typically say they are honorable public servants and dismiss any blame for the havoc they wreak. Whereas if we are speaking about other soldiers in other nations, we expect and call for them to be killed by our own soldiers because they are carrying out equivalent duties. I hope I do not have to point out the ethical schizophrenia of this approach.

My purpose is not to demonize members of the military. On the contrary. People who joined an organization with noble intentions, who were told that they were serving the purest interests of their country, are now in the position of being foot soldiers for a gangster-style president who is quite possibly the single biggest threat to peace on earth. It is important that we speak honestly about the fact that these soldiers are in the perilous position of risking their lives in order to carry out villainous goals. That would be a tragedy not only for the victims of American imperial overreach, but also for the American soldiers themselves, who will be cursed to live their lives with the knowledge of what they have done. You may have joined the organization imagining what good it could do with a good boss. But that is not the world you have actually entered. In this world, the world that exists, you are an armed member of a deadly organization run by a bad boss. He has done and will continue to do bad things. And who will have to carry out the bloody acts inherent in those bad things? You will. It’s a bad deal. While you may have come to find yourself in this position through a series of well-intentioned actions, the fact is that the only ethical thing to do is to do your utmost to remove yourself from a job that might ask you to kill, unethically, on behalf of a bastard.

The military is not the only sort of job in this same position today. Many well-intentioned people who went to work in, say, the State Department, or the CDC, or other branches of government may now be faced with a similar moral dilemma.

by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work |  Read more:

Images: Getty

[ed. Should be fun telling the grandkids what they did in their career. See also: Digging up the Dead (LRB):]

***

More than a million people have been displaced by Israel’s invasion and bombardment of Lebanon, many fleeing with nothing more than the clothes on their back, camping in the hills or sheltering in schools or municipal buildings. The desire to turn Lebanon into another Gaza, articulated by Israeli spokesmen, is being fulfilled with attacks on journalists, the use of undercover operatives and the bombing of displaced families huddled in makeshift shelters. Familiar too was the timing of the attacks during Ramadan, frequently at iftar when people were about to break their fast.

The attack on the small town of Nabi Chit in the eastern Bekaa Valley on 6 March shows the value placed on human lives by the regime in Israel and its backers in the United States. According to the Israeli government, the invasion was a rescue operation to retrieve the remains of an Israeli airman who disappeared forty years ago. Residents of Nabi Chit and the Lebanese army chief told the BBC that Israeli special forces entered the town ‘disguised in Lebanese military fatigues and used ambulances with signs of Hizbullah’s Islamic Health Organisation’. They headed to the corner of the graveyard, dug it up but found nothing there. The town fought back, causing the Israeli soldiers to withdraw. To cover their retreat, Israel carried out more than forty airstrikes in five hours, killing 41 people. [...]

According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, 58 of Gaza’s 62 graveyards have been damaged or destroyed:

the Israeli army carried out a focused operation at al-Batsh Cemetery, east of Gaza City, in January 2026. The cemetery was converted into a military barracks, and more than 700 bodies were exhumed under the pretext of searching for the body of an Israeli detainee. The army later withdrew after extensive bulldozing that radically altered the cemetery’s landscape, preventing families from locating their relatives’ graves.

This was not an isolated event:

in many cases, the Israeli army deliberately exhumed graves and converted cemeteries into military barracks under the pretext of searching for the bodies of Israeli detainees. These actions were carried out without documented, verifiable procedures, independent oversight, or a clear chain of custody and handover process. Israeli forces removed hundreds of bodies from their burial sites, mixed remains, failed to return them to their original locations, and provided no identifying or biological data to enable verification or documentation, making the recovery and identification of remains extremely difficult. [...]

The scope of this policy has been expanded in recent years and upheld by the Israeli Supreme Court. Amira Haas reported in Haaretz last month that Israel was holding the bodies of 776 Palestinians. There are 256 buried in nameless, numbered graves while the rest are held at military morgues. Nearly half were killed since October 2023 and 88 died in Israeli detention. These bodies are sometimes used as bargaining chips in negotiations, although in more recent exchanges many of the bodies have been unrecognisable when returned. There is at least one case of the wrong (long awaited) body being returned to the family.

The grieving are not allowed to grieve, the reunited to celebrate. The repeated disruption of Palestinian funerals and prisoner releases has been bolstered by military orders that proscribe and punish expressions of Palestinian emotion. In February 2025, during a prisoner exchange, the psychotherapist Gwyn Daniels quoted Edward Said, who

chose the word ‘inert’ not descriptively but to conjure up the Zionist fantasy about the ideal Palestinian body. Perhaps for the coloniser, this ideal body should be lifeless or ‘disappeared’. But given the stubborn persistence of Palestinians to remain living on their land, they should preferably cause as little disturbance to the colonisers as possible. Along with no displays of cultural identity, there must be no passion, no pride, no joy, no sorrow, no anger – indeed, no demonstrable emotions that might trouble their oppressors.

Go Ahead and Use AI. It Will Only Help Me Dominate You.

Recently there has been a lot of commentary of the following type:

BAD WRITER [touchily]: “Actually, I do use AI to help me write.”

Okay. That checks out. Carry on.

Want to use AI as a Valuable Part of Your Writing Process? Want to use it to “generate pushback on my column thesis” and be “more comprehensible” and “craft unique angles” and offer “positive and negative feedback” and “scale the quantity” of your “output?”

Knock yourself out.

You have my blessing.

Hey buddy— go for it!

Some in the “real writer” community find this sort of rampant outsourcing of the writing process to AI to be distressing. Not me. Would I do it myself? No. I have self-respect. But I want to tell you, my friends, that you have my full support for all of it. Want to throw your dashed-off notes into ChatGPT and have it spit a draft back at you and then edit that and call it your own? Want to toss a few hastily written headlines at Claude and have it generate the outline of your piece? Want to dump your entire career archives into a chatbot and then order it to replicate your own voice so you don’t have to?

Do you, a grown man, a successful professional writer who has received a book deal paying you real US currency, want to use AI for the purpose of “making sure the book matches [your own] writing style”[???]? Guess what, brother: I support you. I affirm you. I am right here offering you a classic thumbs-up gesture of affirmation.

“Whoa, a writer who I have never regarded as particularly inventive is using AI? I am surprised and disappointed.” There’s a sentence I would never utter. Instead, I would accept the news of your AI use with total equanimity, nodding almost imperceptibly to indicate that this is not something worth raising my eyebrows over.

No, I will not be joining in the chorus of condemnation. On the contrary. If you are a professional writer, I want you to use AI. Because this industry is competitive. I’ll take any advantage I can get. And if you want to make your writing suck, that’s all the better for me. One less person outshining me.

The tepid, conformist nature of your AI-assisted prose will only make my unexpected bons mots stand out more sharply. While you lean on a technological crutch of grammatical mediocrity to drag your essays over the finish line, I’ll be metaphorically zipping past you on my “magic carpet” of words emerging directly from my own declining and unpredictable brain. Over time, the intellectual box into which AI has seduced your creative process will suffocate you, leaving your bereft readers little choice but to drift into my subscription base.

You’ll be all, “Politics in America is divided—but it doesn’t have to be. Let’s discuss how to bridge the partisan divide.” Your sense of joy at the possibilities of the English language will have been so eroded that you won’t even understand why that sucks shit. Meanwhile I’ll be dropping some wild similes you could never even imagine. “Politics is like a sea slug.” What?? How?? Readers will flock to me to find out. Too bad your AI editor struck that line from your piece as “indecipherable.”

You and your friend “Claude” wouldn’t last two seconds in my cipher.

Maybe you read the studies about how AI use causes “cognitive surrender” that slowly destroys your ability to think critically about the linguistic cud that the machine is serving you. Or about how it causes “cognitive foreclosure” that prevents you from ever developing the skills to critique AI output even if you wanted to. Maybe these studies give you pause, when you think about introducing these inscrutable tools of mental paralysis into your own creative process.

Don’t worry about it!

Life is hard enough already. You’re busy. You have lots of things to do—laundry, making lunch, and more. The last thing you need is a bunch of jealous (Brooklyn hipster) writers lecturing you about how this magical productivity booster is somehow “bad” for you. Those are probably the same haters who told you to stop doing so much crystal meth. Some people can’t stand to see you succeed!

I just checked a calendar—it’s 2026. AI is here to stay and you might as well beat the rush by using it more and more, right? Right. In the name of efficiency, it just makes sense for you to turn over ever greater portions of your thought process to this seductive helper, never stopping to ask yourself what it is costing you. You are a nice person and your job (writing) deserves to be easy. There, there. Allow yourself to sink into the warm opiate of cerebral ease. This is better. Yes. This is much better.

By all means—proceed.

And then, when you have settled into this comfortable pattern, sit back and watch me unsheath my massive, work-hardened intellect, built to staggering strength through a daily regimen of thinking about stuff. I think you’ll find that your panicked efforts to resist my onslaught will prove unsuccessful, hampered as you are by atrophied muscles of the mind. Ask your AI companion for some final words of comfort. The hour of your doom draws near.

I will crush you with ease.

by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. Haha...yep. : ) See also: Who Goes AI? (with respect to Dorothy Thompson's 'Who Goes Nazi', gracefully acknowledged by the author).]

The Big T-Shirt Payoff

The College Student—and His Cat Meme—Who Hunted the World’s Biggest Cyberweapon

Sitting in his dorm room at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Benjamin Brundage was closing in on a mystery that had even seasoned internet investigators baffled. A cat meme helped him crack the case.

A growing network of hacked devices was launching the biggest cyberattacks ever seen on the internet. It had become the most powerful cyberweapon ever assembled, large enough to knock a state or even a small country offline. Investigators didn’t know exactly who had built it—or how.

 

Brundage had been following the attacks, too—and, in between classes, was conducting his own investigation. In September, the college senior started messaging online with an anonymous user who seemed to have insider knowledge.

As they chatted on Discord, a platform favored by videogamers, Brundage was eager to get more information, but he didn’t want to come off as too serious and shut down the conversation. So every now and then he’d send a funny GIF to lighten the mood. Brundage was fluent in the memes, jokes and technical jargon popular with young gamers and hackers who are extremely online.

“It was a bit of just asking over and over again and then like being a bit unserious,” said Brundage.

At one point, he asked for some technical details. He followed up with the cat meme: a six-second clip that showed a hand adjusting a necktie on a fluffy gray cat.

Brundage didn’t expect it to work, but he got the information. “It took me by surprise,” he said.

Eventually the leaker hinted there was a new vulnerability on the internet. Brundage, who is 22, would learn it threatened tens of millions of consumers and as much as a quarter of the world’s corporations. As he unraveled the mystery, he impressed veteran researchers with his findings—including federal law enforcement, which took action against the network two weeks ago.

Chad Seaman, a researcher at Akamai, joked at one point that the internet could go down if Brundage spent too much time on his exams.

Early warning

Three times a year, several hundred of the techies who keep North America’s internet running gather to talk shop. Last June they met at a conference in Denver hosted by the North American Network Operators’ Group.

One major topic was a fast-growing and often legally dubious business known as residential proxy networks. Dozens of companies around the world run such networks, which are made up of consumer devices like phones, computers and video players.

These “res proxy” companies rent out access to internet connections on the devices to customers who want to look like they’re surfing the internet from a genuine home address.

That kind of access is useful for people who want privacy or for companies that want to masquerade as regular people to test out internet features for particular regions or scrape the web for data (say, a shopping price-comparison site). AI companies use the networks to get around blocks on automated traffic so they can gather large amounts of data to train their models.

Then there are the customers who want to hide their identity while engaging in ticket scalping, bank fraud, bomb threats, stalking, child exploitation, hacking or espionage.

Some device owners willingly sign up to be on these networks so they can make a few dollars a month, but most have no idea they’re connected to one.

At the Denver conference, Craig Labovitz was alarmed. The Nokia executive had been tracking the data flows of the internet’s infrastructure for years, and he knew the network’s data centers, chokepoints and design better than most.

Starting in January 2025, Nokia’s sensors had picked up a series of increasingly powerful cyberattacks coming from devices that hadn’t previously been considered dangerous. Called distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks, these were massive floods of junk internet data designed to knock websites offline by overwhelming the data pipes that connected them. These attacks are sometimes launched by extortionists or even business rivals seeking to sabotage computer networks.

Nokia saw hundreds of thousands of devices joining in these attacks. One unprecedented attack later in the year on internet service provider Cloudflare was “comparable to the combined populations of the UK, Germany, and Spain all simultaneously typing a website address and then hitting ‘enter’ at the same second,” Cloudflare said.

The network, which would become known as Kimwolf, seemed to be using residential proxy connections to launch its attacks, giving it the potential to do massive damage.

“The basic message was, ‘Be afraid,’” Labovitz remembers.

by Robert McMillan, Wall Street Journal |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Here's how to protect yourself.]

Josef Stoitzner (Austrian, 1884–1951), “After the Rain”, 1925

via:

Duane Michals, Madame Schrödinger and her cat, 1998

via:

Ship of Fools Lost in the Fog of War

Inside Trump's Search for a Way Out of the Iran War

Donald Trump was in the Oval Office during the third week of the Iran war when a group of his most trusted advisers came to deliver some unwelcome news.

His longtime pollster, Tony Fabrizio, had conducted surveys that indicated the war Trump launched was growing increasingly unpopular. Gas prices had surged past $4 per gallon, stock markets had tumbled to multi-year lows, and millions of Americans were preparing to take to the streets in protest. Thirteen American service members had been confirmed killed. Some of Trump’s key public supporters were criticizing a conflict with no clear end in sight. It fell on White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and a small group of aides to tell the President that the longer the war dragged on, the more it would threaten his public support and Republicans’ prospects in November’s midterm elections.

 

For Trump, the stark warning was unsettling. The President has begun many recent mornings watching video clips compiled by military officials of battlefield successes, according to a senior Administration official. He has told advisers that being the commander in chief to eliminate the nuclear threat posed by Iran could be one of his signature achievements. But Wiles, according to two White House sources, was concerned aides were giving the President a rose-colored view of how the war was being perceived domestically, telling Trump what he wanted to hear instead of what he needed to hear. She had urged colleagues, the officials say, to be “more forthright with the boss” about the political and economic risks.

The meeting reflected a reality the White House can no longer ignore: time is running out before the President, his party, and the American public pay an even steeper price. Trump had promised to revive the economy and keep the U.S. out of foreign conflicts. Now he has started a war he had not gotten a mandate to wage, and the economic pain may only be beginning. A month into the largest oil shock in modern history, global growth forecasts are being slashed, shortages are emerging across Europe and Asia, and energy traders warn the world has yet to feel the full severity of the disruption. A prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that is the primary exit route for oil and gas from the Persian Gulf, could tip the global economy into recession.

The President was left frustrated by the predicament, at odds with some of his own officials, and fuming at the negative impressions of the war. The mounting political and economic toll has left him looking for an off-ramp, according to two advisers and two members of Congress who have spoken to him during the last week. Trump told them he wants to wind down the campaign, wary of a protracted conflict that could hobble Republicans heading into the midterms. At the same time, he wants the operation to be a decisive success. Allies say he is searching for a way to declare victory, halt the fighting, and hope that economic conditions stabilize before the political damage hardens. “There’s a narrow window,” says a senior Administration official, who like others interviewed for this account of Trump at war was granted anonymity to provide candid observations about the President’s thinking. [...]

The Pentagon disputes the account. "The U.S. military is the most advanced, comprehensive, and battle-tested planning organization in the world. Long before Operation Epic Fury launched, we had already anticipated, war-gamed, and fully prepared for every possible Iranian response, from the weakest possible reaction to the most extreme escalation,” Hegseth’s chief spokesman Sean Parnell tells TIME. “Nothing Iran does surprises us. We are ready, we are dominant, and we are winning."

By the Pentagon’s accounting, Operation Epic Fury has been an unambiguous military success, leaving 90% of Iran’s missile capacity degraded or destroyed, roughly 70% of its launchers neutralized, more than 150 naval vessels disabled or destroyed, and Iranian Supreme Ali Khamanei killed, along with many of his top lieutenants. Yet it seems increasingly unlikely Trump will achieve the broader objectives he trumpeted—permanently blocking Tehran’s path to a nuclear weapon, dismantling its ballistic missile program, and replacing the Islamic Republican’s theocratic hardliners with a friendlier regime—on the compressed timeline the White House has embraced. [...]

As preparations for the war began, the Administration believed it had a winning formula. The U.S. would deliver an opening strike so overwhelming Tehran’s only viable response would be limited retaliation—enough to satisfy domestic audiences without inviting more attacks. It was a theory rooted in precedent. When Trump ordered the killing of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani during his first term, Iran’s response was a missile strike on a U.S. base that caused no casualties and was telegraphed in advance. After Operation Midnight Hammer, the June 2025 air campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities, the retaliation was similarly tempered.

Trump has long favored what aides call “one-and-done” operations. He has launched them in Yemen, Syria, and Somalia. In January, he pulled off the audacious capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, spiriting the autocrat out of the country to face trial in the U.S., and creating room for the ascension of a more compliant partner, acting president Delcy Rodriguez. He then moved to facilitate U.S. access to Venezuela’s oil reserves, among the largest in the world. Aides say Trump saw Venezuela as a demonstration that a swift, surgical intervention could topple a hostile regime, install a cooperative replacement, and secure American interests without drawing the nation into an open-ended confrontation.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a champion of military aggression against Iran, had a different idea of how things might go. Over the last six months, Netanyahu repeatedly told Trump that the past successes against Iran should serve as a prelude for a more sustained, final campaign, an Israeli official tells TIME. On Feb. 11, Netanyahu came to Washington for a private meeting with the President that stretched for hours. “We’ve come this far, Donald,” Netanyahu told Trump, according to a source present. “We have to finish what we started.” Iran was playing for time, Netanyahu told Trump, and would race toward a bomb in secret. “After they got hit the last time, they thought they had nothing to lose,” says another Israeli official, arguing that Tehran would see the development of nuclear weapons as the only way to prevent such an onslaught from happening again.

The plan of attack was set in motion nearly a month before it was executed, according to two senior U.S. officials. It took weeks of meticulous coordination, much of it conducted in close consultation with Israeli counterparts. When the New York Times published details of the planning of the operation on Feb. 17, Trump exploded at aides, unleashing a string of profanities, according to a senior Administration official. The President then told reporters he would decide on strikes within “10, 15 days,” although he knew the U.S. was planning to attack much sooner. “He was intentionally engaged in public misdirection to protect the mission,” a White House official says.

Trump became wary enough of leaks that some of his own aides were the target of subterfuge. On Feb. 27, he traveled to Mar-a-Lago. Aides assembled in a makeshift Situation Room. Trump bristled at the number of people present. “He thought the group was too big,” one official recalls; it included people Trump didn’t recognize or didn’t feel he knew well enough. At one point, the President snapped that the operation was off. He said he would keep deliberating. This was another head fake: Trump had already made up his mind to attack that very night. Once the room cleared, he called back a smaller, trusted circle—those he wanted beside him as the first bombs fell.

That evening, Trump had dinner on the patio of Mar-a-Lago with a group that included deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Witkoff, and White House counsel David Warrington. Not present was Vice President J.D. Vance, who was in the Situation Room back in Washington. A Trump official says that was a reflection of standard continuity-of-government protocol, which calls for the President and Vice President to be kept apart during sensitive national security operations when both are not at the White House. Of the President’s inner circle, Vance had pushed hardest against the operation, according to two sources familiar with the deliberations. “J.D. really doesn’t like this,” Trump told the group gathered under the Palm Beach stars. “But when the decision is made, it’s a decision, right?”

A White House source says that Vance, in the lead-up to the offensive, laid out what he saw as both the benefits and the risks, adding that “once the President makes the decision, the Vice President stands by him 110%.” (A Vance aide declined to comment.)

Operation Epic Fury began with a sweeping round of strikes that killed Iran’s supreme leader. Tehran’s response was expansive: volleys of missiles and drones targeting U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria, barrages against Israeli cities, harassment of commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf, and coordinated attacks by proxy militias across the region. Hegseth was among those taken aback, says the person familiar with his thinking: “He was expecting the Iranians to fight back in some form. When they started attacking virtually the entire region, it sort of hit him like, ‘Whoa, we’re really in this now.’”

by Eric Cortellessa, Time | Read more:
Image: Missiles launched by Iran over Beersheba in southern Israel, on March 29. Mostafa Alkharouf—Anadolu/Getty Images

[ed. See also: Trump Needs Smarter Sycophants (NYT):]

***

Kristi Noem is gone. Pam Bondi is out. If there’s going to be a fall guy for our ill-starred regime-change operation in Iran, it’s likely to be Pete Hegseth, whose prewar overconfidence is being highlighted in hostile leaks from inside the administration, emphasizing how he was “caught off guard” (never a good look!) by the scale and boldness of the Iranian response.

The former secretary of homeland security, the jettisoned attorney general and the embattled secretary of defense have often seemed like President Trump’s ideal cabinet officials: selected for televisual looks and energy, lacking any political constituency apart from Trump himself, serving without qualm as pure conduits of his will. So their struggles offer a lesson for Republicans contemplating service in this administration’s 33 (but who’s counting?) remaining months: What Trump appears to want and what he actually wants are not exactly the same thing.

The seeming desire of the president is for loyalty, sycophancy and TV-ready swagger. He wants to turn on Fox News and see his top officials performing like reality-show characters in the drama of his administration. He wants to sit in a cabinet meeting and listen to a litany of his accomplishments. He wants the decisions made in the West Wing or at Mar-a-Lago to be simply rubber-stamped in his departmental fiefs.

He wants all that, but at the same time he also wants victory rather than defeat, and he definitely doesn’t want embarrassment. His metrics for success are unusual by normal presidential standards: He has a high tolerance for unpopularity, to put it mildly, and a remarkable shamelessness around corruption. But there is a point at which, even inside his cocoon, Trump senses that things aren’t going well for him. And then sycophancy doesn’t work, and it doesn’t matter if you were acting on his orders; you will be punished for that unsuccessful service just as surely as if you’d tried to thwart his aims...  when Hegseth reportedly told the president “let’s do it” in the run-up to the war, he was merely being an enthusiastic yes man for a bellicose boss. But there’s no reward for being a loyalist if Trump’s grand plans don’t actually work out: In that case, you own the failure, not him.

The Bourgeoisie Has Switched Sides

The Brooklynization of the Bourgeoisie

It is impossible to understand the recent politics of the Western world without considering a giant sociological transformation—one that, inevitable though it may seem in retrospect, nearly nobody predicted: The bourgeoisie has switched sides.

For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the proletariat was the political stronghold of the left. The bourgeoisie was the stronghold of the right. Indeed, the assumption that affluent professionals would tend to be conservative is reflected in the most famous political treatises and pieces of art that the period produced.

Karl Marx called on the workers, not on the lawyers or freelance illustrators, of the world to unite. The origins of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, of Britain’s Labour Party, and even of the modern-day Democratic Party in the United States lie with factory workers and trade unionists. In Jacques Brel’s song “Les Bourgeois,” three young men mock the conservative pieties of their elders by mooning the notaries of a small French town; when, by song’s end, the protagonists, themselves now middle-aged notaries, respond in anger to being mooned in turn, the obvious implication is that they too have turned into conservatives.

But of late, these realities have started to shift, with huge impacts on contemporary politics. It is astonishing, for example, that according to The Economist, the socio-economic profile of the coalition assembled by Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2024, most closely resembles the socio-economic profile of the coalition assembled by Bob Dole, the Republican presidential candidate, in 1996. (Unsurprisingly, both lost.)

This transformation is even visible in the realm of popular culture. Take, as an example, the most famous American cartoon of the last decades. When The Simpsons first aired, Homer Simpson was likely a Democrat, his pious neighbor Ned Flanders definitely a Republican. But over the three decades that the show has been on air, the nature of America’s partisan divide has shifted so much that any politically astute viewer would now assume these characters to have rather different loyalties. Flanders may be sufficiently alienated by the coarseness of the populist right to vote for the Democrats; Homer would undoubtedly support Donald Trump.

This transformation has been called by a variety of names. Thomas Piketty has described it as the rise of the Brahmin left. David Brooks has written about the rise of the Bobo. Matthew Yglesias has lamented the rise of The Groups. I propose to call it the Brooklynization of the Bourgeoisie: New York’s wealthy used to live on the Upper East Side, to pride themselves on their old family ties, to value markers of high culture like the opera, and to vote conservative; today, they live in Brooklyn, believe that they have earned their place in the upper echelons of society thanks to succeeding in a meritocratic competition, are more likely to care about rock bands or microbrews, and think of themselves as progressive.

That same transformation also helps to explain the Paradox of Infinite Voices and Narrow Minds. The population of the United States, and of many other Western democracies, is now deeply stratified by educational achievement. The affluent and highly credentialed are mostly on the political left. The working class is increasingly drifting to the political right. And that has deeply transformed the composition, the values, and even the actions of the professional class.

Plumbers are right wing but lawyers are left wing. Cab drivers are right wing but university professors are left wing. Police officers are right wing but civil servants are left wing. And though many professions claim to be apolitical, the plumbers and cab drivers and police officers increasingly suspect that the lawyers and professors and civil servants are letting their political values influence their work. The decline in respect for “experts” is in part owed to the blatant lies spread on social media; but it also has its roots in the real ways in which the consensus within these professions has increasingly come to adhere to a narrowly progressive—and often lamentably erroneous—set of assumptions about the world.

The Brooklynization of the Bourgeoisie also has another side effect. Lawyers, university professors, and civil servants have outsized influence on the rules, norms, and decisions that structure a lot of day-to-day life. And that leaves many less-affluent and less-educated citizens feeling that the democracy they were promised is a sham. “We are the majority,” they complain, “but no one listens to us.”

The resulting state of affairs leaves both sides equally unhappy. Many citizens feel ignored, besieged, and detested by a professional class which believes that it is entitled to rule, and finds the views of many of their compatriots intolerably bigoted. That is of great political significance because, even in highly affluent countries, there are more tradespeople, cab drivers, and police officers than there are lawyers, university professors, and civil servants. Meanwhile, members of the professional class feel bewildered at the lack of respect for their expertise, and fearful that the barbarians at the political gates will soon come for their heads.

What one side perceives as flagrantly unjust domination by the well-credentialed, the other interprets as the perils of revanchist demagoguery.

How Not to MAGA

Populists are able to win power in good part because they promise their voters that they will do what they can to close this representation gap. Legislators, they say, will finally start listening to the views of the people. Professions that have been captured by ideologues enforcing a narrow orthodoxy will be forced to become more representative. Institutions which once had disdain for ordinary people will finally feel their wrath.

There are real reasons why these promises have proven so enticing. Anybody who completely dismisses the fact that this anger is based in real failings of the professional elite is refusing to grapple seriously with this political moment. And yet, the record of populists in India and Turkey, in Hungary and Venezuela suggests that these promises are rarely fulfilled—and the first year of Donald Trump’s second administration in the United States only serves to reinforce that suspicion.

by Yascha Mounk, Persuasion | Read more:
Image: Getty

***

Lind’s response, which I am sharing with you today, makes a strong point: that we should, really, be distinguishing between two different segments of the middle class. The first segment includes lawyers, doctors, academics, and others who have advanced to their positions by accruing formal meritocratic credentials; the German term for it is the Bildungsbürgertum (roughly: the bourgeoisie of the educated). The second segment includes business owners and prosperous artisans who have advanced to their positions by competing more directly in the free market; the German term for it is the Besitzbürgertum (roughly: the bourgeoisie of the owners). Without preempting Michael’s fire, I will just note that the way in which I used the term “bourgeoisie” in last week’s essay was primarily meant to refer to the first group, since that—perhaps to the detriment of our collective conceptual clarity—is how that term now tends to be used in the United States.

The Two Bourgeoisies

Yascha Mounk’s essay “The Bourgeoisie Has Switched Sides” is as insightful as his phrase “the Brooklynization of the bourgeoisie” is memorable. His analysis could be elaborated by acknowledging that there is more than one bourgeoisie in the contemporary West.

In Germany, there has long been a distinction between the “educated middle class,” or Bildungsbürgertum, which includes lawyers, doctors, academics, clerics, and civil servants, on the one hand, and the “propertied” middle class, or Besitzbürgertum, which includes business owners and independent bankers (large and small), and prosperous, self-employed artisans, on the other.

This social division, if not the terminology, is familiar in the United States. The politics of “expert progressivism” has been based in America’s educated bourgeoisie, who since the 1900s have favored variants of would-be enlightened technocratic government as an alternative to the dreaded extremes of mob rule and plutocracy. Meanwhile, for a century, American businessmen and the politicians and pundits they have funded have denounced “meddling bureaucrats” and “long-haired professors” in pseudo-populist campaigns to delegitimize rival non-capitalist elites.

The growth of giant corporations run by managers rather than founders, and the bureaucratization of higher education and philanthropy in the United States and Europe, has greatly expanded the offices that can be filled by professionals educated and credentialed as members of the Bildungsbürgertum. These meritocratic managers can easily circulate among the bureaucracies of business, banking, government, and the nonprofit sector, and they tend to share common values instilled in them by prestigious universities.

Today’s propertied bourgeoisie is made up both of small business owners and of entrepreneurs who found companies that grow to immense size. Big and small owner-operators alike tend to share the view that their firm is their personal property. They feel attacked and insulted by government regulators, tax authorities, and workers who try to organize unions or simply demand higher wages.

Right-wing populists on both sides of the Atlantic claim to represent “the people” against “the elites,” when in fact they merely represent the propertied bourgeoisie in its century-long battle against the managerial-professional overclass. A model for today’s anti-intellectual, anti-tax, anti-state demagogic populism can be found in postwar poujadism—the revolt of small proprietors in France in the 1950s led by Pierre Poujade. While demagogic populists like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage can win over working-class voters upset with immigration or alienated by cultural progressivism, their core constituents and donors are the petty bourgeoisie as well as super-rich tycoons who answer only to themselves, like oil men and tech-company founders, as opposed to the CEOs and other temporary, professional managers of bureaucratic corporations and megabanks with many stakeholders.

If I am right, the pattern that Mounk has described so well can be described as a clash of the two bourgeoisies. On one side, technocratic professionals in large organizations of all kinds appeal to science and reason as they define them. On the other side, small capitalists and big entrepreneurs hire demagogic politicians to represent them while posing as anti-system populists. Except in the run-up to elections when they need working-class voters, both of the two bourgeoisies tend to ignore working-class majorities in the West.

by Michael Lind

Kim VanDerHoek (American, born 1971), “The Made Maps of the Sky”, 2020

via:

Airports Are Too Safe: The Case Against Checkpoint Screening

If you take a plane in New York City, you must first perform a series of rituals. You set aside any liquids you possess, then you remove your shoes. You place your laptop and sometimes your phone into a plastic bin. You take off your belt and sometimes your shoes and place them into a plastic bin as well. You enter a machine that sees through your clothes. Only then may you board your plane.

If you take the subway in New York City, you swipe a card at a faregate and walk onto the train.

Put another way, airports have ‘checkpoint screening’: systematic inspection of every passenger and their belongings before boarding. Subways and rail stations do not.

Once we start thinking about this asymmetry, the stranger it seems. LaGuardia Airport hosted 32.8 million passengers in 2025, which averages roughly to 90,000 per day. Meanwhile, Penn Station processes more than 600,000 riders per day. Despite the fact that Penn Station has more than six times the number of passengers, no one verifies their identity, checks their bags, asks what liquids they are carrying, nor inspects their belts and footwear.

It’s not as if terrorist attacks on railways are unheard of. Madrid’s commuter trains were bombed in 2004, the London Underground in 2005, and Mumbai’s suburban railway in 2006, causing hundreds of deaths. And yet none of these now feature checkpoint screening. Indeed, the absence of checkpoints is regarded as a merit of rail and a demerit of air; there is no debate over just how many hours before one’s trip one should arrive at a rail station. Meanwhile, the USA’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employs over 56,000 people and spends more than $11 billion per year ensuring that no one boards an airplane with an unexamined shampoo bottle.

The asymmetry is so familiar that it barely registers as a choice. It feels like a law of nature: air travellers are screened but rail travellers are not. But it is a choice we’ve made, and the fact of that choice permits only two conclusions: either rail security is unconscionably negligent, or aviation security is irrationally excessive.

Our behaviour reveals which we actually believe.

A History of Violence

In the early days of commercial aviation there was no security at all. For a taste, watch Bullitt (1968) or Airport (1970), where it’s taken for granted that one can carry guns and bombs through terminals, onto the tarmac, or into aircraft without any mechanism for authorities to stop it, or even notice.

Those portrayals fall squarely within the so-called Golden Age of Hijacking, which began in 1961 when Antulio Ortiz, a passenger on a flight from Miami to Key West, threatened the pilot with a gun and demanded to be flown to Cuba. His was the first of 159 hijackings over the next ten years. After a 1972 incident where hijackers threatened to crash a plane into a nuclear reactor, in January 1973 the Federal Aviation Administration finally mandated that every passenger and their carry-on bag be inspected for weapons. Metal detectors appeared at airports that year.

The 1973 system had a clear purpose: prevent hijackers from bringing weapons aboard. Metal detectors caught guns and knives and, in principle, explosives carried by passengers, while X-ray machines did the same for carry-on luggage. This physical system to deal with hijacking complemented the social system, which was to cooperate. Acting on the theory that hijackers wanted hostages, not corpses, the doctrine for crew and passengers alike was to comply rather than resist. Going along with demands bought time for negotiation, which generally ended with surrender, or with the hijackers escaping the plane and being apprehended elsewhere without loss of life to those aboard the airplane.

This system, of metal detectors, X-ray machines, and cooperative passengers, persisted largely unchanged for nearly three decades. It was imperfect, but it addressed a real problem, and it worked reasonably well.

This was the model that the 9/11 attackers exploited. They carried box cutters on board the plane, which were seen as tools rather than weapons and as such were permitted. Once aboard, they relied on passengers and crew behaving passively. Lack of resistance meant they were able to carry out their attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Notably, Flight 93 did not carry out such an attack, because the passengers did resist. Having learned, via Airphone, that other captured flights were being deliberately crashed, the passengers on that plane understood their only chance of survival was to fight back. They attempted to overpower their captors, who destroyed the plane rather than lose control of it.

That shift on Flight 93, from compliance to resistance, has turned out to be a permanent psychological change. Richard Reid, the ‘shoe’ bomber, was subdued by passengers and crew in 2001. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the ‘underwear’ bomber, was subdued by passengers and crew in 2009. In both cases, everyone else on the plane understood that the right move was to restrain the hijacker rather than submit to his demands. This means that one of the two vulnerabilities the 9/11 attackers used is now closed.

The other is closed as well. By April 2003, all commercial aircraft were required to feature hardened cockpit doors. The flight deck is now mechanically isolated from the main cabin, and will remain that way irrespective of what might happen there. To commandeer the aircraft, as the 9/11 terrorists did, now requires breaching that barrier. At a cost of $12,000 to $17,000 per door, plus annual extra fuel costs of $3,000, these doors make it more-or-less impossible for the cockpit to be captured, meaning that, in the future, any attacker’s bad acts will be confined to the cabin.

This means that the specific attack vector that made 9/11 catastrophic, using aircraft as guided missiles against ground targets, is now defended against by layers that don’t depend on checkpoint performance. Cockpit doors provide physical protection. Passengers provide active resistance. The weaponization-of-aircraft scenario requires defeating both. [ed. along with the presence of air marshals].

Despite these changes, checkpoint screening has become ever more elaborate in the post-9/11 era. After Reid’s failed shoe bombing in 2001, passengers were required to remove their shoes for X-ray inspection. After a foiled liquid-explosives plot in 2006, liquids were restricted to containers of 100 millilitres or less. After Abdulmutallab’s failed underwear bombing in 2009, full-body scanners were deployed. Each measure was a reaction to a specific plot. Each remains in place decades later, despite none of these measures having ever demonstrably prevented a subsequent attack.

Indeed the evidence that checkpoint screening catches any threat is weak. In 2015, the Department of Homeland Security red-teamed its own screening and found that screeners failed to detect threat items in 67 of 70 tests: a failure rate of 95%. We’re told things are better now, but I’m not aware of any subsequent published test, so there’s no public evidence to support the claim.

So if the 9/11-style vulnerability has been addressed by hardened cockpit doors and changed passenger psychology, what is the marginal security value of the vast post-9/11 checkpoint expansion? The 1973 system screened for guns and knives; perhaps that still serves a purpose. But the layers added since—shoe scanning, liquid restrictions, body scanners—what are they for? [...]

We maintain a regime whose costs are staggering (over $11 billion annually in direct federal spending in the USA, plus equivalent per-capita amounts in other nations, plus hundreds of millions of passenger-hours in queues globally) and whose marginal benefits are undemonstrated.

Let me pause to acknowledge a counter-argument: perhaps aviation checkpoint screening deters terrorists, who shift their attacks to softer targets like rail. The Madrid, London, and Mumbai bombings might be evidence of successful deterrence, with subsequent displacement. But if checkpoint screening merely displaces attacks from aviation to rail, the net security benefit is zero; we’ve spent billions and wasted millions of hours to move the threat from one set of passengers to another… implicitly, a set of passengers we think less deserving of our protection.

And the fundamental point remains: whether those rail attacks were sui generis or displaced from harder targets, they killed hundreds, yet we didn’t impose checkpoints. We revealed our preference.

The Security Ratchet

If that revealed preference is for the rail model of security, why doesn’t aviation security move in that direction?

The reason for the air vs. rail distinction is a separate asymmetry among political incentives. An official who maintains excessive security incurs no blame for doing things the way they have always been done. Passengers may grumble, but passengers always grumble. Conversely, an official who loosens security would incur heavy blame in the event of an attack, regardless of whether the loosened measures would have prevented it.

Put another way, any official who changes the system must first incur costs of time, attention, and effort. If things go well, they receive no benefit in return, because no one notices; but if things go poorly, the disbenefit they receive would be massive.

This incentive structure produces a ratchet. Security measures accumulate, but almost never recede. After the shoe-bomb plot, we started removing shoes. After the liquid explosives plot, we restricted liquids. After the underwear-bomb plot, we deployed full-body scanners. Each measure responds to a specific plot, but none is ever removed, at least not without a technological excuse. The only significant rollback in two decades came in July 2025, when the TSA eliminated the shoe-removal requirement… but only because new scanning technology could inspect footwear while still on people’s feet, not because anyone concluded the requirement was unnecessary.

There’s a strong tell that the system understands that checkpoint screening is theatre, namely TSA PreCheck.

by Andrew Miller, Changing Lanes |  Read more:

Image: Alist, Denver Airport Security Lines, 2008, Flickr, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
[ed. Finally, a voice of reason, no doubt shared by millions. I'd also add another reason for the asymmetry we see between air and rail travel: just the psychological aversion to falling (in a damaged aircraft) vs. smashing into something or being blown up. Nobody every said humans are totally rational.]

Nopack Snowpack

'On a Whole Other Level’ - Rapid snow melt-off in American west stuns scientists.

Snow surveys taking place across the American west this week are offering a grim prognosis, after a historically warm winter and searing March temperatures left the critical snowpack at record-low levels across the region.

Experts warned that even as the heat begins to subside, the stunning pace of melt-off over the past month has left key basins in uncharted territory for the dry seasons ahead. Though there’s still potential for more snow in the forecast, experts said it will probably be too little too late.

“This year is on a whole other level,” said Dr Russ Schumacher, a Colorado State University climatologist, speaking about the intense heat that began rapidly melting the already sparse snowpack in March. “Seeing this year so far below any of the other years we have data for is very concerning.”

Acting as a water savings account of sorts, snowpacks are essential to water supply. Measurements taken across the west during the week of 1 April are viewed as important indicators of the peak amounts of water that might melt into reservoirs, rivers and streams and across thirsty landscapes through the summer.

During a critical survey in California’s Sierra Nevada on Wednesday, grass and mud could be seen through the thin white patchwork as state officials attempted to measure the meager snowpack.

“Normally we’d be standing right here,” Andy Reising, manager of California department of water resource’s snow surveys and water supply forecasting unit said, gesturing at chin height. The 5ft-tall tool typically thrust deep into the high berms on 1 April poked into the brown earth next to him. “There is actually no measurable snow.”

With zero depth and zero water content, this year’s annual April snow survey conducted at Phillips Station, was the second worst on record, beaten only by 2015 when officials “walked across a dry field”, Reising said.

It’s not just the amount of snow left on mountaintops that’s concerning experts, but the amount of moisture still frozen within them. “Snow water equivalent” (SWE), a measurement of what could melt off to supply natural and manmade systems, is exceptionally low.

California’s Sierra Nevada had just 4.9in of SWE, or 18% of average on Wednesday, according to the state’s department of water resources.

In the Colorado River headwaters, an important basin that supplies more than 40 million people across several states, along with 5.5m acres of agriculture, 30 tribal nations, and parts of Mexico, had just over 4in of SWE on Monday, or 24% of average. That’s less than half what was previously considered the record low.

Schumacher said the incoming storm could slow the early melting but won’t be enough to pull the basins back from the brink. Snow water equivalent measurements going into April were at levels typically seen in May or June, after months of melt-off, according to Schumacher.

The issue is extremely widespread. Data from a branch of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which logs averages based on levels between 1991 and 2020, shows states across the south-west and intermountain west with eye-popping lows. The Great Basin had only 16% of average on Monday and the lower Colorado region, which includes most of Arizona and parts of Nevada, was at 10%. The Rio Grande, which covers parts of New Mexico, Texas and Colorado, was at 8%.

“This year has the potential of being way worse than any of the years we have analogues for in the past,” Schumacher said.

‘Nothing short of shocking’

Even with near-normal precipitation across most of the west, every major river basin across the region was grappling with snow drought when March began, according to federal analysts. Roughly 91% of stations reported below-median snow water equivalent, according to the last federal snow drought update compiled on 8 March. Water managers and climate experts had been hopeful for a March miracle – a strong cold storm that could set the region on the right track. Instead, a blistering heatwave unlike any recorded for this time of year baked the region and spurred a rapid melt-off.

“March is often a big month for snowstorms,” Schumacher said. “Instead of getting snow we would normally expect we got this unprecedented, way-off-the-scale warmth.”

More than 1,500 monthly high temperature records were broken in March and hundreds more tied. The event was “likely among the most statistically anomalous extreme heat events ever observed in the American south-west”, climate scientist Daniel Swain said in an analysis posted this week.

“Beyond the conspicuous ‘weirdness’ of it all,” Swain added, “the most consequential impact of our record-shattering March heat will likely be the decimation of the water year 2025-26 snowpack across nearly all of the American west.” [...]

In the Colorado River Basin, the situation could be even more dire. The two largest reservoirs on the Colorado River are Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which together account for about 90% of storage, are 25% and 33% full accordingly, as of 29 March, and there is little to fill them.

Already officials are in the process of relocating a floating marina on Lake Powell in anticipation of the quickly receding water levels, as experts warn the vital reservoir could drop to the lowest levels recorded since it was filled in the 1960s. If they fall far enough, the system would cease to function altogether. So-called “deadpool” – when water isn’t high enough to pass through the dams, generate hydroelectric power, and be distributed downriver – would be catastrophic.

The Colorado River has been overdrawn for more than a century but rising temperatures and lower precipitation are putting more pressure on the system that depended on by cities, farms, industries and wildlife across the west. The extreme conditions have added more urgency and greater tensions to fraught negotiations over who will bear the brunt of badly needed cuts. Seven states that have blown past two key deadlines are still locked in a stalemate over how the river’s essential resources will be managed through a hotter and drier future.

by Gabrielle Canon, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Guardian Design/Nasa Worldview

[ed. See also: Western US states fail to negotiate crucial Colorado River deal: ‘Mother nature isn’t going to bail us out’ (Guardian).]