The Beauty of Pointlessness

Even if you know very little about The Big Lebowski, you probably know that The Dude loves bowling. The Dude and bowling go together. They just fit right in there together.

Now I’m no mind reader, but I suspect the Dude loves bowling for its own sake. Sure, he enjoys the camaraderie of Walter and Donny, and the bowling alley is a decent place to get a cold oat soda, but my hunch is that the Dude doesn't treat bowling instrumentally. He does not treat bowling as a means to some other end: he's not bowling to burn calories, network with business contacts, or improve his hand-eye coordination. The Dude gives zero fucks about optimization. I suspect he just bowls and enjoys the simple pleasure of trying to hit pins with a heavy ball. There is no larger purpose.

The rest of us, though? We've forgotten how to be like The Dude. It seems like so many of our daily activities are not done for their own sake, but for the promise of achieving something.

Take the so-called Huberman morning routine. His meticulously timed regimen demands morning sunlight, exercise, precisely timed caffeine, cold showers, and hydration. Huberman cloaks this routine in scientific legitimacy, throwing around terms like cortisol spikes and testosterone optimization, despite the evidence he cites being dubious at best. What's most troubling is how he's transformed morning routines from potentially enjoyable rituals into productivity optimization algorithms. None of these steps are recommended because they feel good or bring joy; they're prescribed based on the misplaced belief that they'll mathematically optimize your health and productivity like you're some kind of human spreadsheet.

Even meditation—a practice about being present—has been instrumentalized. Meditation apps don't promise the experience of quieting the mind; they promise productivity boosts, stress reduction, better focus. "Ten minutes a day to be 10% happier!" But what if meditation doesn't help with any of that? What if it's just sitting there noticing your thoughts? Isn’t that enough?

Things that were once pure pleasure have been transformed into health imperatives. Psychedelics shouldn't be taken because they can be fun AF, but because they can improve mental health. Rest isn't about blissful relaxation, but a means to recharge so we emerge more productive. When did we stop doing things just because?

This hit me recently when I came across a fascinating study about mice appearing to do things just for the fun of it. Scientists placed running wheels in natural settings to see if wild animals would use them voluntarily, without any rewards or incentives.

What they discovered was startling. Wild mice not only found and used the wheels but did so frequently and enthusiastically. Even when researchers removed all food from the experimental area, the mice still came to run on the wheels. It wasn't just mice either: the researchers recorded frogs, shrews, and even slugs voluntarily using the wheels. (And don’t ask me how a slug possibly uses a running wheel, but the authors provided receipts).

The conclusion was clear: these animals were running for the pure joy of running. No rewards, no external purpose, no optimization, no 30 minutes of cardio to burn 300 calories. Running on a wheel just because.

When's the last time you did something just because it was fun? No health benefit to justify the time spent. Just pure, purposeless fun.

I am far from the only one complaining about today's optimization culture. This obsession with turning every moment into a productivity hack has been critiqued by thinkers much sharper than me, who've recognized how we're increasingly trapped in a cycle of optimizing our lives rather than living them. (...)

The problem with optimization culture is that it imposes external goals on things that might be inherently pleasurable; optimization is always about the outcome, never the process. When we optimize our morning routines, we're not doing so because the routine itself is inherently pleasurable; we're doing it to maximize some future benefit—productivity, health markers, longevity. It transforms activities that could be enjoyable into mere instruments for achieving external goals.

by Michael Inzlicht, Speak Now Regret Later | Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. Golfing defined.]

Self Defense for Women (or anyone)

[ed. Public service announcement.]

Four Things: June 29, 2025

There are four political stories people should know about tonight.

First, President Donald Trump’s tariff war and weaker consumer spending translated to a contraction of 0.5% in the U.S. economy in the first quarter, even more of a drop than the 0.2% economists expected. The economy Trump inherited from President Joe Biden led the world in productivity.

Second, John Hudson and Warren P. Strobel of the Washington Post reported today that intercepted communications showed that senior Iranian officials said the U.S. attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities caused less damage than they had expected and that they wondered why the strikes were so restrained.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo also called out that at a press conference in the Netherlands last Wednesday, Trump said he had given Iran permission to bomb a U.S. air base in Qatar in retaliation for the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear weapons program sites. “They said, ‘We’re going to shoot them. Is one o’clock OK?’ I said it’s fine,” Trump said. “And everybody was emptied off the base so they couldn’t get hurt, except for the gunners.”

Marshall expressed astonishment that this admission has attracted very little attention. He suggested that, if it is true, it represents “the most shocking dereliction of duty one could imagine for the commander-in-chief,” and he wondered how Republicans would have reacted if a Democratic president had said he had let “a foreign adversary fire on an American military installation.”

Third, Jeff Stein of the Washington Post reported today that the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill makes the biggest cut ever to programs for low-income Americans. Those cuts have made many Republicans skittish about supporting the measure.

After Trump attacked him yesterday for not supporting the budget reconciliation bill, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) has announced he will not run for reelection next year, indicating his unwillingness to face a primary challenger backed by Trump. This puts the seat in play for a Democratic pickup.

In a statement, Tillis said: “In Washington over the last few years, it’s become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species.” He wrote: “I look forward to having the pure freedom to call the balls and strikes as I see fit and representing the great people of North Carolina to the best of my ability.”

Tonight, Tillis told the Senate: “What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there anymore, guys?... [T]he effect of this bill is to break a promise.”

Fourth, the Senate parliamentarian has told senators that several of the provisions added to the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill violate the rules for budget reconciliation bills. Those provisions include the ones added to the bill to win the support of Republican senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

Today, Trump pushed Republican senators to ignore the Senate parliamentarian, who judges whether proposed measures adhere to Senate rules. Trump posted on social media: “An unelected Senate Staffer (Parliamentarian), should not be allowed to hurt the Republicans Bill. Wants many fantastic things out. NO! DJT.”

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office today said the tax cuts in the budget reconciliation bill the Republican senators are trying to pass will increase the national debt by $3.3 trillion over the next ten years despite the $1.2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other programs over the same period. Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) called the measure “Robin Hood in reverse…stealing from the poor in order to give to the rich, this massive transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top…. This is socialism for the rich.”

Trump has demanded the measure’s passage by July 4, in part because the Department of Homeland Security has blown through its budget and needs the supplemental funding the bill will provide. That funding adds an astonishing $45 billion for migrant detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the current budget of $3.4 billion over the next five years, and $14.4 billion for transportation and removal on top of the current annual budget of $750 million.

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From an American |  Read more:

Image: via

Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story

Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival

Summer 2025 kicked off with CNN declaring that the American music festival is on the decline, news that arrives on the heels of the March publication of Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival. Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock don't waste much time in their oral history dwelling upon the festival's latter-day incarnation as a destination event in Chicago's Grant Park, and why would they? Lollapalooza transformed from a traveling circus into a stable summer institution, reliably entertaining crowds who wouldn't know or care that it started as a trumped-up farewell tour for Jane's Addiction at the dawn of the 1990s.

The first Lollapalooza rambled across America in the summer of 1991, months before Nirvana released Nevermind, the album that's generally acknowledged as ground zero in the alternative rock revolution. Beaujour and Bienstock suggest that Lollapalooza softened the ground for Nevermind, and argue that the festival had a deeper cultural influence. They posit in their intro that "If Lollapalooza didn't single-handedly inaugurate what came to be known as 'alternative nation,' it went a long way toward codifying its ideals for generation of teens and twenty-somethings via a diverse mix of boundary-pushing musical acts, outsider fashion and art, political activism, and straight-up performative weirdness." It is undeniably true that the festival's heyday coincides precisely with the rise and fall of alternative rock within the mainstream, to the extent that it's difficult to determine whether it was a catalyst for change or merely a mirror.

Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival doesn't spend much time grappling with that question, preferring to depict business machinations, onstage antics, and offstage debauchery. Often, garden variety rock'n'roll decadence degenerated into drug dependency. Every year had at least one act crippled by hard drugs. Heroin was there at the start, when Perry Farrell conceived of the festival as a farewell for Jane's Addiction. It's there at the end, when Failure somehow stumbles through sets on the main and second stages during the 1997 installment despite their bassist Greg Edwards being in the throes of addiction. It's there everywhere in between, providing a refuge for creatures of the night being stuck playing afternoon sets in amphitheaters across America.

Years of consciously-curated festival lineups in the 21st Century have eroded the memory of just how odd it was to see either Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds or the Butthole Surfers in the blazing midday sun. Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story underscores how so much of the alternative rock was a nocturnal underground culture coming into the light. The survivors are the ones that could adapt to the new circumstances, such as Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails, who figured out how to feed off the energy of a massive audience. how to harness the excitement of a massive audience, becoming a symbiotic being that fed off each other's energy.

Of course, the circumstances on the ground changed after the first festival became an unexpected success. Lollapalooza's sequel arrived in 1992, after "Smells Like Teen Spirit" climbed into Billboard's Top Ten, a combination of events that ushered the alt-rock goldrush of the '90s. Those next three years of Lollapalooza are where the music biz figured out if it was possible to package and sell the underground, taking a chance on weirdos as they tried to find artists willing to play the game. Some bets didn't quite pan out but enough did for the chaos to chatter along until 1995, when Sonic Youth headlined a year that illustrated the commercial limits of the fringe.

Although the Sonic Youth year is the one that's commonly cited as the death knell for the festival, Chicago area promoter Andy Cirzan claims in the book, "The real drop-off, the crazy scary one, was '97. That's when the bottom fell out." By that point, Lollapalooza had credible competitors—Lilith Fair, the Warped Tour, HORDE—and, worse, they ran through all the potential headliners. The acts they could pull already knew the game: when Tool agreed to come back for another round, they asked to not close the festival, since they realized the crowds started to leave during the last act.

Tool was the defacto top-liner in a year where Orbital, the Prodigy and the Orb were the nominal future-minded headliners but the cast of characters that populate Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story illustrates how the festival always had one foot firmly planted in metal. The line between punk and metal could be blurry. A good portion of the '80s underground listened to the same heavy rock as metalheads—R.E.M. covered Aerosmith's "Mama Kin" in 1986, the same year Guns N Roses covered "Mama Kin"—and Jane's Addiction, Rage Against the Machine, and Soundgarden were all propelled by guitarists who specialized in some kind of six-string theatrics. All three acts keep popping up again and again through the oral history, acting as a chorus and returning to the bills that were also populated by bands who attempted to be louder than heaven.

Strip away the Sonic Youth year and maybe 1994—Smashing Pumpkins topped a bill that occasionally echoed the tastes of Nirvana, who were scheduled to headline until the last minute—and the Lollapalooza mainstage of the '90s was always dominated by aggro acts. During those first few years, the occasional hip-hop or woman artist gave an illusion of balance, but after the festival was rattled by the soft sales for Sonic Youth, they agreed to participate in Metallica's modern-rock makeover, conceding to a bill filled with loud guitar acts. By 1997, the fest cut loose the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion—who were signed and ready to go—because Korn refused to appear before the indie-rockers. Korn also got pissy when second stage headliners the Eels were elevated to the mainstage after Tricky left the tour without warning: the nu-metal kings made it clear there was no way they'd play before alt-rockers of any stripe.

Brad Tolinski argues in Lollapalooza that "With [Korn's] use of dissonant seven-string guitars, bagpipes, and funk-inspired bass lines there was very little to connect them to traditional metal. And Jonathan Davis's damaged-antihero lyrics were certainly closer to Perry Farrell's than say, Ozzy Osbourne's or James Hetfield's." Fair point but Korn also always read as a metal band in a way that, say, Soundgarden did not. Perhaps it was the dour imagery, perhaps it was the adolescent angst, perhaps it was their Jägermeister sponsorship, but Korn tapped into an ugly, primal energy: James "Munky" Shaffer remembers that "every three or four nights someone would set a fire out in the grass or the kids in front would start tearing out the seats," behavior that pointed toward the riots of Woodstock 99.

Korn played Woodstock 99, as did Metallica, a pair of Lollapalooza veterans who represented a strand of '90s culture that ran parallel to the alternative nation Perry Farrell intended to set into motion with the first Lollapalooza. What began as a cacophony of differing cultures reduced into a din of diffuse rage, a transition Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story that provides the book its unifying thread. Maybe this sour undercurrent is why the book doesn't provide much of a nostalgic kick or perhaps the structure of Lollapalooza itself didn't generate great gossip. Every year, a new round of misfits had their initial enthusiasm diminish as they realized they were stuck in the sticks, playing to the same number of diehards that could fill a club.

by Stephen Thomas Erlewine, So It Goes | Read more:
Image: Lollapalooza poster, uncredited

Bruce Lee, 1979
via:

via:

Notes From a Nursing Home

I sit in my room in this nursing home near Sydney, a box of four walls that holds all I now call my own. Two suitcases could carry it: a few clothes, some worn books, a scattering of trinkets. The thought strikes me as both stark and oddly freeing.

Not long ago my world was vast, a house with rooms I rarely entered, a garden that sprawled beyond need, two cars idling in the driveway, one barely driven.

Now it’s gone. The house, the cars, the cartons overflowing in the garage, all sold, given away or abandoned. A heart attack and dwindling funds brought me here two and a half years ago. Family ties, thin as they are, keep me from moving anywhere away from here.

I don’t resent it. I’ve seen the world, jungles, deserts, cities that glittered under foreign skies. That hunger is sated. This is a different journey, one of stillness, of finding meaning in what remains.

The nursing home is no idyll, no glossy promise of golden years. It’s a place of routine, of quiet necessity. Mornings begin with carers, gentle, hurried women who tidy my bed, adjust pillows, offer a smile before moving on. Tea and toast settle as I sit by the window. The air carries the clean sting of antiseptic, mingling with the chatter of birds outside. There’s peace in these moments, before the home stirs fully awake.

The staff do their work well, though they’re stretched thin. They check on us, ask after our aches, offer kind words that linger like a faint warmth. Activities fill the day, card games, a singalong. I join when I feel like it, which is less often than I might. The choice is mine, and that’s enough. The front doors creak as relatives arrive, their faces a mix of cheer and strain. Some hide tears, we all pretend not to see. We don’t speak of sadness here. It’s a silent agreement, a way to keep the days bearable.

The residents are a varied lot. Some are old, their bodies bent by years. Others are younger, broken by minds that betray them. A woman down the hall clutches a photograph, her son a rare visitor, his life too crowded for her. She speaks of him with no anger, only a flat resignation. A man, his eyes dim with addiction’s toll, mutters of a sister who never calls. I listen, nod, share a story of my own.

We understand each other here, bound by the shared weight of being left behind.

This place is a mirror, reflecting a truth we’d rather not face. Families, once close, find it easier to place their own in these clean, quiet rooms. It’s not cruelty, not always. Caring for the old, the broken, the lost-it, demands time, patience, a surrender most cannot afford. So they sign papers, appoint guardians and let the system take over. The nursing home becomes a vault, sealing away what disrupts the orderly march of life. Out of sight, out of mind. Yet I wonder if, in the quiet of their nights, those families feel the shadow of what they’ve set aside.

I walk the corridors, dim and smelling of antiseptic and something less tangible – forgotten promises, perhaps. Residents sit, staring at walls or televisions that drone with voices no one heeds. Many wrestle with dementia, their thoughts scattering like ash. Others bear scars of choices or chance, their lives eroded to this point. A few, changed by illness or time, became strangers to those who loved them. To care for such people is hard, unglamorous work. Easier to let them fade into these walls.

Yet there’s life here too. I find it in small things: a book that holds my attention, sunlight warming my room, a laugh shared over a memory. The community binds us. We talk of old days, of children grown distant, of the world beyond these walls. There’s comfort in that, a kind of strength. The local shops are my horizon now but I don’t mind. I’ve seen enough of the world to know its pleasures are fleeting.

Here I have my memories, these people, this quiet. The day stretches before me, simple and unhurried, the sun climbing higher, the air still fresh. There’s no need to rush, no call to chase what’s gone. This is my life now, pared to its bones, and it’s enough. 

by Andrew McKean, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Bec Lorrimer/The Guardian
[ed. See also: The Dull Men's Club (Guardian).]

G.O.P. Plans to Cripple Wind and Solar Power

China breaks more records with surge in solar and wind power (The Guardian)

China’s installations of wind and solar in May are enough to generate as much electricity as Poland, as the world’s second-biggest economy breaks further records with its rapid buildup of renewable energy infrastructure.

China installed 93 GW of solar capacity last month – almost 100 solar panels every second, according to an analysis by Lauri Myllyvirta, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute. Wind power installations reached 26 GW, the equivalent of about 5,300 turbines.

While estimates for the amount of power generated by solar panels and wind turbines vary depending on their location and weather conditions, Myllyvirta calculated that May’s installations alone could generate as much electricity as Poland, Sweden or the United Arab Emirates.

Between January and May, China added 198 GW of solar and 46 GW of wind, enough to generate as much electricity as Indonesia or Turkey.

“We knew China’s rush to install solar and wind was going to be wild but WOW,” Myllyvirta wrote on social media.

by Amy Hawkins, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Costfoto/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock

***

[ed. Meanwhile, in dumb ass nation: G.O.P. Bill Adds Surprise Tax That Could Cripple Wind and Solar Power.]

Senate Republicans have quietly inserted provisions in President Trump’s domestic policy bill that would not only end federal support for wind and solar energy but would impose an entirely new tax on future projects, a move that industry groups say could devastate the renewable power industry.

The tax provision, tucked inside the 940-page bill that the Senate made public just after midnight on Friday, stunned observers.

“This is how you kill an industry,” said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, a nonpartisan group of business leaders and investors. “And at a time when electricity prices and demand are soaring.”

The bill would rapidly phase out existing federal tax subsidies for wind and solar power by 2027. Doing so, many companies say, could derail hundreds of projects under development and could jeopardize billions of dollars in manufacturing facilities that had been planned around the country with the subsidies in mind. (...)

President Trump, who has mocked climate science, has instead promoted fossil fuels and demanded that Republicans in Congress unwind the law.

But the latest version of the Senate bill would go much further. It would impose a steep penalty on all new wind and solar farms that come online after 2027 — even if they didn’t receive federal subsidies — unless they follow complicated and potentially unworkable requirements to disentangle their supply chains from China. Since China dominates global supply chains, that measure could affect a large number of companies. (...)

Even some of those who lobbied to end federal support for clean energy said the Senate bill went too far.

“I strongly recommend fully desubsidizing solar and wind vs. placing a kind of new tax on them,” wrote Alex Epstein, an influential activist who has been urging Republican senators to eliminate renewable energy subsidies. “I just learned about the excise tax and it’s definitely not something I would support.”

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce also criticized the tax. “Overall, the Senate has produced a strong, pro-growth bill,” Neil Bradley, the group’s chief policy officer, posted on social media. “That said, taxing energy production is never good policy, whether oil & gas or, in this case, renewables.” He added: “It should be removed.”

Wind and solar projects are the fastest growing new source of electricity in the United States and account for nearly two-thirds of new electric capacity expected to come online this year. For utilities and tech companies, adding solar, wind and batteries has often been one of the easiest ways to help meet soaring electricity demand. Other technologies like new nuclear reactors can take much longer to build, and there is currently a multiyear backlog for new natural gas turbines.

The repeal of federal subsidies alone could cause wind and solar installations to plummet by as much as 72 percent over the next decade, according to the Rhodium Group, a research firm. The new tax could depress deployment even further by raising costs an additional 10 to 20 percent, the group estimated.

by Brad Plumer, NY Times/dnyuz |  Read more:

Image: Randi Baird for The New York Times

Federal Debt 101

The rise of the federal debt over the past two decades has prompted countless warnings that the United States is approaching a fiscal reckoning, a day when the government won’t be able to drink all it wants from the fountain of easy money.

The more immediate danger is that the fountain keeps flowing.

The fear of a future crisis is distracting attention from the problems that the government’s dependence on debt is already causing. We, the people, are spending a staggering amount of money each year to borrow money. The interest payments on the federal debt now exceed the government’s spending on the military. They are roughly equal to the annual cost of Medicare. The sum is more than the government spends on anything except Social Security.

President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” would deepen this profligacy, repeating the mistakes of the 2017 legislation on which it is based. Once again, Republicans are proposing to reduce taxation. Once again, they are proposing to force the government to borrow more to pay its bills. Once again, federal spending on interest payments would rise — and money spent on interest is money that can’t be spent on other things.

The government is on pace to pay more than $1 trillion to its lenders this year. The House version of Mr. Trump’s bill, already approved by that chamber, would increase interest payments on the debt by an average of $55 billion a year over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The increase alone is enough money to fully repair every bridge in the United States.

Editorial Board, NY Times via:

***

Total National Debt

What is the national debt?

The debt today stands at $36.2 trillion. The Treasury Department updates the national debt — to the penny — every day.

The debt was relatively stable into the 2000s, but it began to grow substantially after President George W. Bush’s 2001 tax cuts. That law was followed months later by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and then the U.S. went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those conflicts were largely deficit-financed, as were other domestic policy moves in the ensuing years. Stimulus programs to recover from the 2008 Great Recession drove up borrowing, and later Congress extended Bush’s tax cuts. Finally, Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and federal spending during the coronavirus pandemic under Trump and President Joe Biden led to sharp increases in federal spending, mostly paid for through borrowing. (...)

How does some debt create more debt?

As the national debt rises, the U.S. must pay more to maintain its borrowing. That happens in two ways.

First, gross interest costs increase. For example, 2 percent interest on $100 is $2. But 2 percent interest on $1,000 is $20.

But interest rates are not stagnant. As the U.S. takes on more debt, investors demand higher returns, forcing up interest rates. So that 2 percent rate the U.S. offered when it had less debt — say, in 2013 — jumps to the more than 4 percent rate the government has to offer to attract lenders now.

Washington Post via:

[ed. Aren't the Rich rich enough already? Wouldn't it be nice if Democrats fought for a massive middle class tax break as hard as Republicans do for the rich?]

Supersize Me: Amazon’s Biggest Data Center For AI

A year ago, a 1,200-acre stretch of farmland outside New Carlisle, Ind., was an empty cornfield. Now, seven Amazon data centers rise up from the rich soil, each larger than a football stadium.

Over the next several years, Amazon plans to build around 30 data centers at the site, packed with hundreds of thousands of specialized computer chips. With hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber connecting every chip and computer together, the entire complex will form one giant machine intended just for artificial intelligence.

The facility will consume 2.2 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power a million homes. Each year, it will use millions of gallons of water to keep the chips from overheating. And it was built with a single customer in mind: the A.I. start-up Anthropic, which aims to create an A.I. system that matches the human brain.

The complex — so large that it can be viewed completely only from high in the sky — is the first in a new generation of data centers being built by Amazon, and part of what the company calls Project Rainier, after the mountain that looms near its Seattle headquarters. Project Rainier will also include facilities in Mississippi and possibly other locations, like North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Project Rainier is Amazon’s entry into a race by the technology industry to build data centers so large they would have been considered absurd just a few years ago. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is building a two-gigawatt data center in Louisiana. OpenAI is erecting a 1.2-gigawatt facility in Texas and another, nearly as large, in the United Arab Emirates.

These data centers will dwarf most of today’s, which were built before OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot inspired the A.I. boom in 2022. The tech industry’s increasingly powerful A.I. technologies require massive networks of specialized computer chips — and hundreds of billions of dollars to build the data centers that house those chips. The result: behemoths that stretch the limits of the electrical grid and change the way the world thinks about computers. (...)

Just a few months after OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022, Amazon was in talks with electrical utilities to find a site for its A.I. ambitions. In Indiana, a subsidiary of American Electric Power, or AEP, suggested that Amazon tour tracts of farmland 15 miles west of South Bend that had been rezoned into an industrial center. By the end of May 2023, more than a dozen Amazon employees had visited the site.

By early 2024, Amazon owned the land, which was still made up of corn and soybean fields. Indiana’s legislature approved a 50-year sales tax break for the company, which could ultimately be worth around $4 billion, according to the Citizens Action Coalition, a consumer and environmental advocacy organization. Separate property and technology tax breaks granted by the county could save Amazon an additional $4 billion over the next 35 years.

The exact cost of developing the data center complex is not clear. In the tax deal, Amazon promised $11 billion to build 16 buildings, but now it plans to build almost twice that.

by Karen Weise and Cade Metz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Visuals by A.J. Mast

[ed. Crazy. Wouldn't more people enjoy a nice golf course instead?]

Love and Other Unrealizable Utopian Projects

Love and Other Unrealizable Utopian Projects (on Norman Rush's "Mating")

Image: William Kentridge, The Unstable Landing Point of Desire (2021)

[ed. Welcome to the Norman Rush fan club. Personally, 'Mortals' left a more lasting impression on me, but 'Mating' is nearly its equal.]

***

... I felt a recognition threading itself through me, whose form of words (more solemn than exhilarated) went approximately as follows: ‘Here is a writer I will have to read all of.”

I thought of that quote from Amis around page 15 of Norman Rush’s 1991 novel Mating. By page 50 I had ordered everything else Rush had ever written (Only three other books, luckily—for that certain sense of dutiful recognition to creep up upon you the oeuvre must be manageable). After I read the indelible final four words of Mating, a daring, almost unthinkable thought flashed immediately into my head: I think this might be the best book I’ve ever read. Realistically, that’s the afterglow speaking. Moby-Dick is probably better. But how appropriate that one of the last century’s great novels of love should so sweep me off my feet. I’m writing this in the afternoon, I finished Mating this morning, and I’ve been walking around all day with a sense of satisfaction so deep it feels it should be reserved for the tangible things in life like marriage and children and not for secular worship of the novel, which is clearly an absurd thing to dedicate much of your life to. But what can I say? The promise of occasional experiences like this is what keeps me in the game.

Henry Begler, via:

Bernie Sanders getting arrested at civil rights protests.

via:

[ed. Walking the talk.]

"In high school, he lost his first election, finishing last of three candidates for the student body presidency with a campaign that focused on aiding Korean War orphans. Despite the loss, he became active in his school's fundraising activities for Korean orphans, including organizing a charity basketball game". ~ Wikipedia

Enjoying a Nazi Pop

[ed. Is it surprising that in 2025 this wouldn't be surprising?]

via:

Even Educated Fleas Do It

Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes by Stephen Sondheim

(with help from Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop Music – A History by Bob Stanley)

People looking to disparage modern literature will often complain that it has changed from an art to a craft. Gone are the days, they say, when writers considered themselves attuned to some outside force, mere channels for the muse, the antennae of the race. Now our novelists and poets consider themselves dutiful little craftsmen, attending Iowa or Columbia or NYU to learn from masters of the trade and going into the world to hammer out finely wrought but uninspired work, losing the wild vitality that animated the romantics and modernists.

Though this is a vast oversimplification, a half-truth at best, a half-truth is still a some-truth. So it is curious to consider that as literature underwent this shift, popular music was transforming in the opposite direction. While modern pop music is the product of many artisans, these days it’s hard to shake off appraising it with a Romantic sensibility; as the uncontaminated expression of one artistic soul. And this is true on all levels, from bedroom producers and coffeehouse strummers to Taylor Swift, whose records involve dozens of producers, co-writers, and musicians, but who is read by her fans on a diaristic, personal level, as though she were Sylvia Plath.

But there was a time, from around the invention of the Gramophone to the late 1950s, when popular music was understood as crafted, by people like Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, and Cole Porter, who would, figuratively if not literally, clock in to an office, roll up their sleeves, and get to work producing songs, most of which were written for musical theatre but which quickly passed into culture via other recordings, often before the shows even closed. This meant that for the first fifty years of pop’s existence, songs were divorced from singers, they were uniquely free-floating and open to interpretation. Hear “Creep” and you think Radiohead, hear “Yesterday” and you think The Beatles, hear “All the Things You Are” and you think – who? Maybe Frank Sinatra, maybe Ella Fitzgerald, maybe John Coltrane, but almost certainly not the forgotten 1939 musical Very Warm for May.

Which brings me to Finishing the Hat, the annotated lyrics, partial autobiography, and opinionated consideration of his predecessors by Stephen Sondheim, the most important theatrical composer and lyricist of the twentieth century’s second half. Like Keith Johnstone’s Impro, which I’ve also written about in these pages, Finishing the Hat is a book seemingly concerning a narrow and oft-maligned branch of theatrical practice that will actually be useful, even revelatory, to anyone involved in any creative pursuit at all. Sondheim says it himself in the indispensable introduction:

The explication of any craft, when articulated by an experienced practitioner, can be not only intriguing but also valuable, no matter what particularity the reader may be attracted to. For example, I don't cook, nor do I want to, but I read cooking columns with intense and explicit interest. The technical details echo those which challenge a songwriter: timing, balance, form, surface versus substance, and all the rest of it. They resonate for me even though I have no desire to braise, parboil or sauté. Similarly, I hope, the specific techniques of lyric-writing will enlighten the cook who reads these pages. Choices, decisions and mistakes in every attempt to make something that wasn't there before are essentially the same, and exploring one set of them, I like to believe, may cast light on another.

It would have been easy to dash off a preface to this book, let the editors arrange the lyrics as they saw fit, and call it a day, but Sondheim, ever the perfectionist, cannot abide the thought. Each set of lyrics is given a long introduction describing the genesis of the production they were written for and then intensely annotated, with ruthless honesty in pointing out what he considers his mistakes, failures, and sloppiness. And interspersed throughout are short essays commentating on his predecessors, the men and women who created the form and canon of American song.

So what is the task of the lyricist, according to Sondheim? It is not the same as the task of the poet, who depends on density and evocation rather than clarity and catchiness (he scorns lyrics by poets like W.H. Auden and Langston Hughes who ventured into theatre, saying they “convey the aura of a royal visit”). Mostly, it’s to get out of your own way. The lyricist must serve both the music and the performer by being easy to sing, comprehensible, and not too overwrought, all while managing to convey the emotional tenor of the song. Despite his work’s reputation for being musically complex and somewhat chilly, on the page Sondheim’s lyrics read as quite simple and straightforward, without a word out of place. And contrary to what the Romantic might assume, he is adamant that attention to craft and detail helps to highlight the emotion of the song rather than smother it, as he writes in his extended defense of the importance of true rhyme (as opposed to near rhyme or slant rhyme).

In fact, pop listeners are suspicious of perfect rhymes, associating neatness with a stifling traditionalism and sloppy rhyming with emotional directness and the defiance of restrictions. [...]The notion that good rhymes and the expression of emotion are contradictory qualities, that neatness equals lifelessness is, to borrow a disapproving phrase from my old counterpoint text, "the refuge of the destitute." Claiming that true rhyme is the enemy of substance is the sustaining excuse of lyricists who are unable to rhyme well with any consistency.

"If the craft gets in the way of the feelings, then I'll take the feelings any day." The point which [the unnamed pop star he is criticizing] overlooks is that the craft is supposed to serve the feeling. A good lyric should not only have something to say but a way of saying it as clearly and forcefully as possible—and that involves rhyming cleanly. A perfect rhyme can make a mediocre line bright and a good one brilliant. A near rhyme only dampens the impact.

Then there’s trying to be too clever, and showing off – a common sin. Here’s the rapture of a critic praising the work of Jerome Kern and his partners Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse (yes, that P.G. Wodehouse), as cited in Bob Stanley’s book Let’s Do It.

Nobody knows what on earth they’ve been bitten by
All I can say is I mean to get lit an’ buy
Orchestra seats for the next one that’s written by
Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern

Not to dig up this long-dead man’s tossed-off verse just to bury it, but recite it and you can see that, despite the superficial cleverness of the rhyme, the third line causes the tongue to trip over itself, the glide from “orchestra” to “seats” is difficult, not to mention the dreadful “next one that’s”. Now compare Cole Porter in the bridge of “Anything Goes,” using the same technique of rhyming the penultimate word while repeating the final one:

The world has gone mad today
And good's bad today,
And black's white today,
And day's night today,
When most guys today
That women prize today
Are just silly gigolos

Mad/bad, white/night, guys/prize – these are as elementary and obvious as it gets, but the recitation could not be sprightlier or easier on the tongue, and this, combined with the music, gives Porter his reputation for effortless wit and elegance rather than labored cleverness.

An aside: I should say that – and you won’t believe this but I swear it’s true – I actually have fairly little interest in musical theatre. I haven’t seen most of the shows described in Finishing the Hat and what affection I might have for the form is generally compromised by its cringier qualities. Truth be told, while I’m happy to listen to Chet Baker or Ella Fitzgerald or even croaky old Bob Dylan singing this stuff, my aesthetic sensibilities generally can’t make the leap to the originals, with their sickly-sweet orchestration and affected Broadway Voice. And as for modern examples of the form like Wicked or Hamilton, forget about it. But you’d have to be crazy not to recognize the unbelievable talent that coalesced around composing popular and theatrical song in the first half of the century. It’s like the peak of classic Hollywood, the Elizabethan stage, or the golden era of Looney Tunes – a marriage of artistic sensibilities and urgent commercial needs that kept a coterie of talented craftsmen churning out masterpieces at an accelerated rate.

The funny thing about Sondheim is that, for all his genius, he represents the final closing of the door on the era that I love. Let me try to explain why.

by Henry Begler, A Good Hard Stare |  Read more:

Image: Reginald Marsh, Twenty Cent Movie; Sondheim and Bernstein rehearsing for West Side Story

John Philip Falter (US 1910 - 1982), Sunday Picnic, Troy, Kansas. Oil on canvas (80.6 x 61 cm). Used as a cover for the Satuday Evening Post

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Bob Dylan and Blind Willie McTell

Most Dylanologists disagree about which is the single greatest song in Bob Dylan’s catalog, but few would deny “Blind Willie McTell” a place high in the running. It may come as a surprise — or, to those with a certain idea of Dylan and his fan base, the exact opposite of a surprise — to learn that that song is an outtake, recorded but never quite completed in the studio and available for years only in bootleg form. “Blind Willie McTell” was a product of the sessions for what would become Infidels. Released in 1983, that album was received as something of a return to form after the Christian-themed trilogy of Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love that Dylan put out after being born again.

The sources of that perfection are many, as explained by Noah Lefevre in the new, nearly 50-minute long Polyphonic video below on this “unreleased masterpiece,” whose origin and afterlife underscore how thoroughly Dylan inhabits the musical traditions from which he draws. 

Like most major Dylan songs, “Blind Willie McTell” exists in several versions, but the one most listeners know (officially released in 1991, eight years after its recording) features Mark Knopfler on twelve-string guitar and Dylan himself on piano. Melodically based on the jazz standard “St. James Infirmary Blues” and named after a real, prolific musician from Georgia, its sparse music and lyrics manage to evoke a panoramic view encompassing the blues, the Bible, the ways of the old South, and indeed, the very history of American music and slavery. Though Dylan himself considered the song unfinished, he came around to see its value after hearing The Band work it into their show, and has by now performed it live himself more than 200 times — none, in adherence to the protean character of blues, folk, and jazz, quite the same as the last.  ---  [ed. Lyrics here.]

via: Open Culture: Why Bob Dylan’s Unreleased “Blind Willie McTell” Is Now Considered a Masterpiece

Signs the Frog Has Been Boiled

A large pot sits in plain sight. There’s a frog in it.

Every day, Leader announces his plans to boil the frog. His campaign slogan was “BOIL THAT FROG.”

He has already made at least one run on the stove.

A man stirs the pot with a large stick. “It’s a metaphor,” he says.

The frog is sweating.

The frog is informed that this is due to a natural variation in temperature.

“He’s clearly boiling the frog,” say the other frogs.

All books about frogs have vanished from the library.

You ask the man with the stick about the purpose of the pot. “It’s a melting pot,” he says. “What are you melting?” you say. The man keeps stirring.

You ask about the frog. The man says something about the price of eggs.

A panel on TV debates the ethics of boiling the frog. The panel is composed of twelve herons and no frogs.

The Amphibian Conservation Organization is stripped of government grants. All funding is redirected to the new Department of Frog-Boiling.

The frog treads water. He’s reassured that the water is unfluoridated.

Leader tells other frogs not to worry. Healthy, hard-working frogs are fine. They can climb out of the pot whenever they want.

The US Secretary of Health says that boiling water is actually good for frogs. It keeps them from turning gay.

You ask about the frog. You’re reassured that it’s a nonnative species. (...)

All frogs are encouraged to call their representatives every day to request not to be boiled. They’re told their calls are very important.

You ask to turn off the stove. You’re told, “We can revisit this in four years.”

A panel on TV debates whether the frog is being boiled or merely poached. The herons lick their lips.

You walk by a pond. Every lily pad is empty.

The frog roils and flails in the pot, striking against the walls. Bump. Bump. Bump. The frog is accused of rabble-rousing.

The National Guard is deployed to subdue the frog.

You try to turn off the stove. Twenty masked men in body armor hit you with rubber bullets and tear gas.

The air smells like soup. A timer dings.

The room feels like a sauna. Your ankles are wet. When you open your mouth, out comes a croak.

by Amanda Lehr, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: via

Not Made in the USA

The Trump phone was announced last week with a claim that the device would be made entirely in America, and people were rightly skeptical. Trump Mobile's $500 T1 Phone "is a sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance and proudly designed and built in the United States for customers who expect the best from their mobile carrier," the Trump Organization said in a press release.

But with electronics supply chain experts casting doubt on the feasibility of designing and building an American-made phone in a short span of time, Trump Mobile's website doesn't currently promise an American-made phone. The website says the T1 is "designed with American values in mind," that it is "brought to life right here in the USA," and that there are "American hands behind every device."

The Trump Mobile website previously said, "Our MADE IN THE USA 'T1 Phone' is available for pre-order now." The phone was initially supposed to be available in August, but the date was changed to September, and now the website simply says it will be available "later this year." (...)

Some experts have said the Trump phone appears to be a re-skinned version of the REVVL 7 Pro 5G, made by Chinese company Wingtech. The REVVL 7 Pro 5G is sold by T-Mobile for $250, half the price of the Trump phone.

by Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Getty Images/Joe Readle

[ed. Lol. The bullshit/scamming machine continues firing on all cylinders. A+ for creativity. See also: this.]

Why Did the Novel-Reading Man Disappear?

For the first meeting of his book club for men, Yahdon Israel, a 35-year-old senior editor at Simon & Schuster, asked the participants to bring a favorite work of fiction. Not everyone completed the assignment.

One man brought “Watchmen,” a graphic novel. Valid, technically.

Another scoured his home bookshelf and realized he did not own a single novel or short story collection. So he showed up to the meeting with a nonfiction book about emotional intelligence. (Mr. Israel posted a photo of the seven millenial-ish men in the group, each holding his selection, to his Instagram account.)

Mr. Israel, who has hosted another book club for nearly a decade, started this group last December in an effort to inspire heterosexual men to read more fiction. He solicited members over social media. For the second meeting, he assigned a story collection by Jamel Brinkley, “A Lucky Man,” which examines contemporary masculinity. For two hours, the men discussed the book, and the theme. (...)

“I’m doing this because I need it,” he said in an interview.

So do lots of men — at least according to a robust debate unfolding in opinion pages and news articles, on social media platforms and inside the publishing world. By turns a maligned or suspicious figure in decades past — in the case of the “Infinite Jest” lover, for instance — or a fetishized one — consider the enormously popular “Hot Dudes Reading” Instagram — the figure of the literary male reader is now disappearing, some say, and his disappearance is a matter of grave concern.

These articles, which focus explicitly or implicitly on straight men, connect the fact that these men are reading fewer novels to a variety of social maladies, up to and including deleterious effects on American democracy itself. If more men were reading like Mr. Israel, the thinking goes, the country would be a healthier place: more sensitive, more self-aware, less destructive. As more American men fill their hours with the crude talk shows of the “manosphere,” online gambling and addictive multiplayer games, the humble novel — consumed alone, requiring thought and patience — can look like a panacea.

It’s a lot of pressure to put on the reading man, who for many people remains a fittingly prosaic sight, unworthy of deeper thought or further comment. Perhaps he is passing the time on a commute, or taking a break from the stresses of the day. Little does he know, he’s been drafted into a new front in the culture war over the future of men.

On a recent afternoon in June, Jack Kyono, an assistant manager at McNally Jackson, the stalwart New York book chain, walked the floor of the store’s SoHo location. Mr. Kyono was quick to point out that not all men read in the same way. International tourists are buying different books from older American men, who are buying different books from young professionals. But he broadly agreed with the idea that when it came to reading fiction, straight men were followers, not leaders. They might read Sally Rooney or Ocean Vuong, he said, but only after an audience of straight women and queer people had made them cultural touchstones.

Earlier on the phone, he told me he had noticed a gender divide among the stacks: When groups of women wandered into the store, they frequently browsed together, pointing out books they had read and making suggestions for their friends — an act that booksellers call “the handsell.”

Meanwhile, when men came into the bookstore with other men, they typically split up and dispersed to far corners of the store.

“It’s solo browsing time,” he said. (...)

Eventually, Mr. Kyono took me to the front to look at an attractive “customer favorites” display. Here, pastel and vivid colors dominated the covers of books by romance and “romantasy” stalwarts like Carley Fortune and Sarah J. Maas, the author of the popular “A Court of Thorns and Roses” series.

Beyond the bookstore, much of the architecture of book discovery is informally targeted at women. Celebrity book clubs are mostly led by female celebrities and increasingly court women of all ages, from those who are fans of Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon to those who are more interested in the tastes of Dua Lipa and Kaia Gerber. (Former President Barack Obama, the obvious straight male exception, releases a single list of his favorite books every year.) #BookTok, the vast community on TikTok that has become a best-seller machine, is largely populated by women recommending books by other women, like Colleen Hoover’s “It Ends With Us.”

There are counterexamples that prove the rule. C.J. Box, the author of a long-running series about a Wyoming game warden who solves murders, has expanded his audience to include younger men by appearing on a series of podcasts about hunting, fishing and other outdoors subjects.

But literary novelists — the kind who populate prestigious lists and publish the “big” books of the year — have not seemed to crack the code with straight guys, at least on social media. (...)

These arguments hark back to a midcentury culture of fiction writing dominated by men writing about masculine subjects and the male experience. But it was not always thus. In the 19th century, the most popular novels were written by women for a female audience. Their output was considered “paltry entertainment,” according to Dan Sinykin, a professor of English at Emory University and the author of “Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature.”

Many of these titles were so-called sentimental novels, whose virtuous heroines illustrated proper moral conduct. In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne described American novelists to his publisher as “a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash.”

A century later, the story had changed, and publishing had become a boys club with cultural cachet, according to Mr. Sinykin. Literary form was prized above social instruction.

Starting in the 1980s, a new generation of women came to dominate the publishing industry. The “feminization” of the industry, as Mr. Sinykin called it, resulted in a business that “assumes its primary audience is white women between 30 and 65” and publishes books to suit their tastes. (...)

Book culture is not a monolith. According to BookScan, some 782.7 million books were sold in 2024, and the rapid growth of the self-published book market means that there is fiction to suit almost every taste. In this context, what Mr. Sinykin called the “worst version” of the critique of contemporary fiction — that liberal politics have destroyed the space for male readers — seems like a huge oversimplification. And many people who care about the future of the male fiction reader are keen to avoid it.

Mr. Israel deliberately did not include the words “man” or “men” in the name of his book club. He called it “The Fiction Revival,” to underline the idea that there was a kind of reading experience for men that needed to be resuscitated.

Max Lawton, a translator who frequently works on long European novels, scoffed at the “corny idea of the male reader” who is interested only in stereotypically masculine subjects and austere prose.

“Being a reader is not a two-party system — you can read whatever you want,” he said.

Even Mr. Castro, the novelist, rejected the idea of a countermovement in the name of masculine identity. “Resentment, performing or embodying a self-consciously ‘masculine’ identity at the expense of literary value, is cringe,” he wrote in an email. “‘Identity’ is not a literary value.”

One real challenge at hand is a frenzied attention economy competing for everyone’s time, not just men’s. To present the sorry state of the male reader as having solely to do with the gendered quality of contemporary fiction misses a screen-based culture that presents nearly unlimited forms of entertainment.

“Our competition isn’t other publishers,” said Sean Manning, the publisher of Simon & Schuster. “It’s social media, gaming, streaming. All these other things that are vying for people’s time, attention and financial resources.”

Asked whether the publishing industry needed straight men to read more fiction as a purely economic matter, Mr. Manning focused instead on the social benefits of reading.

“It’s a problem if anyone isn’t taking advantage of an incredible artistic medium,” he said. “It’s hurtful not to be well-rounded.”

by Joseph Bernstein, NY Times |  Read more:

Image:Porsalin Hindsman-Israel
[ed. I read, on average, probably a couple novels a month - always fiction. There's too much non-fiction on the internet as is. I wouldn't have thought this was anything special re: men vs. women, or any kind of trend, because so many reviews by both are on Amazon, Goodreads, in literary journals, etc.; and, of course, there doesn't seem to be any shortage of male writers. But maybe that's an unreliable sample, and overall numbers actually are this bleak. I know in real life (actually, my whole life) I can't think of or recall more than a handful of guys who I'd call avid fiction readers or at least occasional dabblers (my son being one of them). And that was mostly back in college. Pretty sad, since an active imagination (vs. passive screen consumption) is surely one of life's most delightful of human pleasures. One thing I'd definitely agree with: all those pastels and wild book colors scattered across bookstore display tables are definitely a turnoff and should immediately be suspect.]

Reconciliation Explained

Ordinarily, a bill would need 60 votes in the Senate to bypass its filibuster rule. But Republicans are advancing the “Big, Beautiful Bill” under a complicated process called reconciliation.

If successful, the process means that a bill can pass with 51 votes, or 50 if it’s supported by the vice president’s tiebreaking vote.

Reconciliation starts when the Senate and House adopt a resolution that says how much they want to spend on the federal budget or change taxes.

Then, the Senate directs its various committees to come up with ways to make spending fit within that resolution, reconciling what the federal government is doing with what Congress planned.

Each Senate committee drafts a proposal for the federal departments that it oversees.

That’s where the Senate process stands right now.

Next, each committee’s work is examined to see whether it follows the Byrd Rule, which sets six tests to see whether an item can be done in reconciliation.

If a particular item fails one of those tests, it gets stripped out. Colloquially, in the Senate, this is known as going through the “Byrd bath.”

When that’s done, what follows is a “vote-a-rama,” where the Senate votes on each committee’s language and senators have a chance to offer amendments.

Because of limits on the time allowed for debate, the votes often proceed quickly.

Once the Senate is done with its work, its version of the budget must be combined and compromised with a different version that has gone through a similar process in the House.

Once the House and Senate have agreed on the same version of the budget, it goes to the president for his signature.

by James Brooks, Alaska Beacon |  Read more:

Image: YouTube via

[ed. The most concise explanation I've read yet. At least its been helpful in killing off this travesty (for now): Republican plan to sell over 3,200 square miles of federal land is found to violate Senate rules. See also: Alaska’s public lands belong to all of us — don’t sell them off (ADN).

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Anthony Blinken: Trump’s Iran Strike Was a Mistake. I Hope It Succeeds.

Former secretary of state.

The strike on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities by the United States was unwise and unnecessary. Now that it’s done, I very much hope it succeeded.

That’s the paradox for many former officials like me who worked on the Iran nuclear problem during previous administrations. We shared a determination that Iran never be allowed to produce or possess a nuclear weapon. Iran without a nuclear weapon is bad enough: a leading state sponsor of terrorism; a destructive and destabilizing force via its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, Yemen and Iraq; an existential threat to Israel. An Iran with a nuclear weapon would feel emboldened to act with even greater impunity in each of those arenas.

So why was the strike a mistake?

First, it never should have come to this. In 2015, the Obama administration, together with Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and the European Union, reached agreement with Tehran on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A. The nuclear deal effectively put Iran’s program to make fissile material, the fuel for a nuclear weapon, in a lockbox, with stringent procedures for monitoring Iran’s nuclear program. The deal pushed “breakout” — the amount of time it would take Iran to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a single nuclear weapon — to at least one year. If Iran reneged on the agreement or refused to extend it when certain provisions expired after 15 years, we would know it and have plenty of time to respond, including, if necessary, militarily.

In 2018, President Trump tore up the agreement and replaced it with … nothing. In response, Iran accelerated its enrichment, quite likely reducing its breakout time to a matter of days or weeks. Mr. Trump, in essence, is now trying to put out a fire on which he poured gasoline.

Second, fissile material is a necessary but insufficient element for a bomb. You also need an explosive weapon. As of now — and there are conflicting messages coming from within the Trump administration — our intelligence agencies believe Iran has not yet made a decision to weaponize. If and when it does, it would take Tehran 18 to 24 months to produce an explosive device, according to some estimates. In other words, there was still time for diplomacy to work, and the situation wasn’t nearly the emergency that Mr. Trump portrayed it to be.

Third, experts I’ve spoken to had real doubts about the ability of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or M.O.P. — the 30,000-pound bombs unique to America’s arsenal that were dropped on Iran’s nuclear sites — to fully incapacitate the Fordo site and other deeply buried or fortified components of Iran’s nuclear program. Initial reports suggest that while Iran’s nuclear infrastructure was severely damaged, it was not destroyed.

Fourth, in war-gaming the military option during my time in the Biden administration, we were also concerned that Iran had or would spread its stockpile of uranium already enriched to just short of weapons grade to various secure sites and preserve enough centrifuges to further enrich that stockpile in short order. In that scenario, the Iranian regime could hide its near weapons-grade material, green light weaponization and sprint toward a bomb. Thus, Mr. Trump’s strike has risked precipitating what we want to prevent. In this, it may prove a repeat of Israel’s strike against Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981 — after the strike, Saddam Hussein accelerated an underground program.

Finally, while there is no doubt the American strike set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Iran could rebuild quickly, in locations and at depths virtually immune to airstrikes, while pursuing weaponization at the same time. So while their program has been significantly disrupted, and buying time is a good thing, it underscores that sticking with the J.C.P.O.A. was the better option. It bought us at least 15 years instead of just a few. And it avoided the risk of Iranian retaliation — such as Monday’s missile attacks directed at our forces in the region — as well as the potential for further escalation, including threatening global oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, conducting terrorist operations on American soil or carrying out sophisticated cyberattacks.

And, perhaps paradoxically, Mr. Trump’s actions were possible only because of the work of the Obama and Biden administrations.

The Obama administration accelerated development of the M.O.P. and had contingency plans for the type of operation that Mr. Trump authorized. Mr. Biden instructed his team to rehearse, test and refine those plans. We also conducted, in 2023, the largest-ever joint exercise with Israel — something of a dry run for this latest action.

As important, Mr. Biden supported Israel’s successful efforts to grievously weaken Iran and its proxies. Our deployments, deterrence and active defense of Israel when Iran directly attacked it for the first time allowed Israel to degrade Iran’s proxies and its air defenses without a wider war. In so doing, we set the table for Mr. Trump to negotiate the new nuclear deal he pledged years ago to work toward — or to strike. I wish that he had played out the diplomatic hand we left him. Now that the military die has been cast, I can only hope that we inflicted maximum damage — damage that gives the president the leverage he needs to finally deliver the deal he has so far failed to achieve.

by Anthony J. Blinken, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Kevin Mohatt/Reuters

[ed. If you're going to have opinions, best to have all relevant context and details. See also: Intel Report on Iran Upends Victory Lap Trump Was Hoping for at NATO (NYT):]

***

"As President Trump landed in the Netherlands on Tuesday for the annual meeting of NATO allies, he was desperate to hold together the fragile cease-fire between Israel and Iran, cursing and cajoling to make sure that history would remember him for bombing Iran’s nuclear sites over the weekend and brokering a peace deal days later.

But just hours after he landed, the leak of a new U.S. intelligence report cast doubt on his repeated claim that the American strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear programs. Mr. Trump started using the word “obliterated” before he received his first battle damage report, and since then, he has closely monitored which members of his administration have used the same language.

The report’s finding, while preliminary, was particularly damaging because it emerged from inside the Pentagon, which had carried out the strikes, and it concluded that the military action had only set Iran’s nuclear program back by a number of months."