My Journey to the Microwave Alternate Timeline

As we all know, the march of technological progress is best summarized by this meme from Linkedin:

Inventors constantly come up with exciting new inventions, each of them with the potential to change everything forever. But only a fraction of these ever establish themselves as a persistent part of civilization, and the rest vanish from collective consciousness. Before shutting down forever, though, the alternate branches of the tech tree leave some faint traces behind: over-optimistic sci-fi stories, outdated educational cartoons, and, sometimes, some obscure accessories that briefly made it to mass production before being quietly discontinued.

The classical example of an abandoned timeline is the Glorious Atomic Future, as described in the 1957 Disney cartoon Our Friend the Atom. A scientist with a suspiciously German accent explains all the wonderful things nuclear power will bring to our lives:

Sadly, the glorious atomic future somewhat failed to materialize, and, by the early 1960s, the project to rip a second Panama canal by detonating a necklace of nuclear bombs was canceled, because we are ruled by bureaucrats who hate fun and efficiency.

While the Our-Friend-the-Atom timeline remains out of reach from most hobbyists, not all alternate timelines are permanently closed to exploration. There are other timelines that you can explore from the comfort of your home, just by buying a few second-hand items off eBay.

I recently spent a few months in one of these abandoned timelines: the one where the microwave oven replaced the stove.

First, I had to get myself a copy of the world’s saddest book.

Microwave Cooking, for One

Marie T. Smith’s Microwave Cooking for One is an old forgotten book of microwave recipes from the 1980s. In the mid-2010s, it garnered the momentary attention of the Internet as “the world’s saddest cookbook”:

To the modern eye, it seems obvious that microwave cooking can only be about reheating ready-made frozen food. It’s about staring blankly at the buzzing white box, waiting for the four dreadful beeps that give you permission to eat. It’s about consuming lukewarm processed slop on a rickety formica table, with only the crackling of a flickering neon light piercing through the silence.

But this is completely misinterpreting Microwave Cooking for One’s vision. First – the book was published in 1985.

When MCfO was published, microwave cooking was still a new entrant to the world of household electronics. Market researchers were speculating about how the food and packaging industries would adapt their products to the new era and how deep the transformation would go. Many saw the microwave revolution as a material necessity: women were massively entering the workforce, and soon nobody would have much time to spend behind a stove. In 1985, the microwave future looked inevitable.

Second – Marie T. Smith is a microwave maximalist. She spent ten years putting every comestible object in the microwave to see what happens. Look at the items on the book cover – some are obviously impossible to prepare with a microwave, right? Well, that’s where you’re wrong. Marie T. Smith figured out a way to prepare absolutely everything. If you are a disciple of her philosophy, you shouldn’t even own a stove. Smith herself hasn’t owned one since the early 1970s. As she explains in the cookbook’s introduction, Smith believed the microwave would ultimately replace stove-top cooking, the same way stove-top cooking had replaced campfire-top cooking.

So, my goal is twofold: first, I want to know if there’s any merit to all of these forgotten microwaving techniques. Something that can make plasma out of grapes, set your house on fire and bring frozen hamsters back to life cannot be fundamentally bad. But also, I want to get a glimpse of what the world looks like in the uchronia where Marie T. Smith won and Big Teflon lost. Why did we drift apart from this timeline?

by Malmsbury, Telescopic Turnip |  Read more:

Images: Microwave Cooking For One/YouTube/uncredited

Power, Not Economic Theory, Created Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism didn’t win an intellectual argument — it won power. Vivek Chibber unpacks how employers and political elites in the 1970s and ’80s turned economic turmoil into an opportunity to reshape society on their terms.

Neoliberalism’s victory over Keynesianism wasn’t an intellectual revolution — it was a class offensive. To roll it back, the Left doesn’t need to win an argument so much as it needs to rebuild working-class institutions from the ground up. [...]

Melissa Naschek: Neoliberalism in general is a pretty hot topic right now among researchers, and one of the most common lenses is to focus on the role of ideas, theories, and thinkers in establishing neoliberalism.

The last time we talked about this topic, you dispelled a lot of common misconceptions about what it is and what it’s not. One of the questions that we’ve gotten a lot from listeners since then is, where does neoliberalism come from?

Vivek Chibber: Yeah, it’s very topical, but it’s also important for the Left, because getting to the crux of this helps us understand where and how important changes in economic regimes and models of accumulation come from. So it’s good for us to get into it in some more depth. [...]

* [ed. Historical discussion of Keynesism vs. Neoliberalism.]

Vivek Chibber: The mere fact that such ideas exist does not in any way give them influence. The question for us, for socialists and for the Left is, when do ideas gain influence?

It’s a profound methodological error, I think, when you ask the question, “Where did neoliberalism come from?” to look at the contemporary theorists or the contemporary advocates of neoliberalism and then, because they are influential today, trace the origins of their ideas back to where they first started and say, that is where the origins come from.

Melissa Naschek: How important was this debate in establishing or causing neoliberalism?

Vivek Chibber: Not even the least bit. It was largely irrelevant to it. In other words, even if this debate had never happened, even if Milton Friedman had not existed, even if Hayek had not existed, you would have still had a turn to neoliberalism, and that’s the key. This is what the Left needs to understand.

This does not in any way invalidate the intellectual project of tracing those ideas. It’s intellectually interesting. It’s an interesting fact that those ideas had been around for forty years, and they had no impact on policy. Some historians have done great work tracing these ideas back to their origin, but it’s quite another to say that it was the ideas themselves that in the 1970s and ’80s caused the turn to neoliberalism.

Now, it’s an easy mistake to make because when the change came, the change was justified with a highly technical economic apparatus, and people like Friedman were given the stage to say not just that these policies are desirable for political reasons, but that they make a lot of economic sense and that it’s rational to do it this way. That gives you the sense, then, that it’s these particular individuals and their intellectual influence on the politicians that makes the politicians make the changes.

But in fact, the order of causation is exactly the other way around. It’s the politicians who make the changes based on criteria that have nothing to do with the technical sophistication of the ideas or their scientific validity. They make the changes because of the political desirability of those changes, and then they seek out advice on a) justifying the changes so that the naked subservience to power is not visible or obvious — it makes it look like it was done for highfalutin’ reasons — And then b) of course, they do legitimately say, “OK, now that we’re committed to this, help us work it out.”

Melissa Naschek: Right, especially because as long as you’re still in capitalism, you’re going to be facing constant economic crises. Even if you’re instituting a new regime, you’re going to be constantly looking for new solutions.

Vivek Chibber: Yeah. And even short of crises, you’re going to look for ways of making the policies work smoothly. And you’re going to look for ways of coming up with the correct balance of instruments and policies within them. So you bring in Milton Friedman or you bring in somebody else.

Surface level, it looks like what’s driving the whole thing is these ideas. But I said to you that the ideas actually have no role to play in the turn itself. So that brings up the question, what does? Why did they do it then?

I just said a second ago that what drove it was political priorities, not intellectual feasibility. Well, what were the political priorities? Who were the politicians actually listening to? Ideas can matter, but they have to be made to matter.

There are only two key players when it comes to policy changes of this kind. The key players are the politicians, because they’re the ones who are pulling the levers. But then, it’s the key constituency that actually has influence over the politicians.

The least important part is intellectuals. You might say voters have some degree of influence, but really, in a money-driven system like the United States, it’s investors, it’s capitalists — it’s big capital. They’re the ones who are pushing for these changes.

That means that if you want to understand where neoliberalism comes from, or rather if you want to understand why it came about, the answer is, it came about because capitalists ceased to tolerate the welfare state.

Now, why did they tolerate the welfare state at all? Most people on the Left understand the welfare state was brought about through massive trade union mobilization and labor mobilizations and was kept in place as long as the trade union movement had some kind of presence within the Democratic Party, within the economy more generally, because those unions were powerful enough, employers had to figure out a way of living with them. Part of what they did to live with the trade unions was to agree to a certain measure of redistribution and a certain kind of welfare state. As long as that was the case, politicians kept the welfare state going.

This is why, in that era from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s, Keynesianism or the economics of state intervention of some kind was the hegemonic economic theory. The theory became hegemonic because it was given respectability by virtue of the fact that everybody in power was using it. Because it’s being used by people in power, it has great respectability.

This is why, in the 1950s and ’60s, Milton Friedman was in the wilderness — same guy, same ideas, equally intellectually attractive, equally technically sophisticated, but he was in the wilderness.[...]

That little story tells you something. What it says is ideas that are going into the halls of power go through certain filters. And the filters are essentially the policy priorities that the politicians have already committed to. Now, what creates those priorities? It’s the balance of class power. Social forces are setting the agenda.

If the social forces, that is, say, trade unions and community organizations, have set the agenda for politicians such that they think the only rational thing to do is to institute a welfare state, then they will bring in economists who help them design a welfare state. That gives intellectual influence to those economists. Economists who are saying “Get rid of this whole thing” are cast out into the wilderness. That’s how it works. [...]

Melissa Naschek: How do theories that focus on this notion that ideas and thinkers caused neoliberalism suggest a certain set of solutions to neoliberalism?

Vivek Chibber: It’s a really good point and a very good question. It gets us back to the issue of, why should we care about this? What does it matter if you misunderstand the factors that go into a change in economic policies? What does it matter if you wrongly attribute influence to ideas, let’s say, over material interests? Well, it can lead you to propose wrong solutions.

This is a very good example of that. If you think that what’s behind dramatic shifts in policy is the influence of ideas per se, the brilliance of those ideas, then, if you think that neoliberalism is a catastrophe and we need to go back to social democracy, then your solution is going to be, “Let’s get some economists or political scientists who are really good theorists of social democracy and give them publicity — put them in newspapers, give them lots of op-eds, maybe try to get them a meeting in the White House or something like that.”

But if you think that what’s really driving these changes is the social balance of power — the power balance between capital and labor, between rich and poor — then you won’t pour your energies into getting the right people entrée into the halls of power. You’ll pour your energies into changing the class balance. That’s the difference between how people on what used to be called the Left approach these issues and the way in which mainstream theorists and thinkers approach these issues.

This kind of ideas-based analysis leads to a great man version of policy change, whereby you get the right person in the right place with the right ideas. And then, counterfactually, the reason we don’t have a desired change is that we haven’t managed to get the right people with the right ideas into the right places. That’s a great man theory of historical change.

But if you are a socialist on the Left, you know ideas get their salience because of the background conditions, the social context, and the power relations. They don’t get their influence because of simple brilliance, at least when it comes to politics. Science is a different matter. But in politics, they get their influence because some agency with social power gives them the platform.

Without that, I mean, if the power of ideas mattered and if the correctness mattered, we’d already have a social democratic government, and we would have had one for decades. Because not only are these ideas, we think in our arrogance, they appeal to everybody.

Zohran Mamdani’s ideas, Bernie Sanders’s ideas, are not radical the way the New York Times is constantly hammering that these are radical fringe ideas. They’re mainstream as can be. They are ideas that appeal to the majority.

Why do they not have entrée? Why do they not have political influence right now? It’s because the balance of class power is such that even though they appeal to the largest number of people, those people have no political organization. They have no way of effectuating their demands. And so, their demands as encapsulated in Sanders and Mamdani don’t have a lot of political influence.

So ideas can matter, but they have to be made to matter.

by Melissa Nacheck with Vivek Chibber, Jacobin | Read more:
Image:Dirck Halstead / Getty Images

I'm Just a Sound

One Sunday​ morning recently I listened, one after the other, to Monteverdi’s Selva morale e spirituale (1641) and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966), and it wasn’t in any way jarring. I have to say, though, that it was by Pet Sounds that I felt truly transported. Between July 1965 and April 1966, the 23-year-old Brian Wilson wrote, arranged, produced and sang on songs including ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)’, ‘Caroline, No’, ‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times’ and ‘God Only Knows’. All around three minutes long or a bit less, they can make you feel as if you are standing alone in a cathedral, bathed in sound. Wilson was able to make pop music that was uplifting without ever being sickly. Secular hymns baited with pop hooks; heavy themes made exquisitely light. ‘His progressions are always going up, then pausing before they go up again, like they’re going towards God,’ says a musician quoted in David Leaf’s liner notes to The Pet Sounds Sessions (1997).

From ‘In My Room’ (1963) to songs like ‘’Til I Die’ (1971) and ‘Sail on, Sailor’ (1973), the Beach Boys made music that for some of us has become a kind of gospel. This may seem a large and baffling claim if what you see in your mind’s eye when someone mentions them is an image of leathery old guys in Hawaiian shirts, or if all you know of their music is zippy hits like ‘Fun Fun Fun’, ‘Barbara Ann’ and ‘I Get Around’. Yet there is a logic here. Rock’n’roll was born from the uneasy tension between Saturday night and Sunday morning, church pew and dance floor, showing out and making things right with God. After those beginnings, pop and rock would go on to supply plenty of carnal jolt, but far fewer intimations of the sacred.

To an extent rivalled only by the Beatles, the Beach Boys have become the tales told about them, the ever expanding archive, the cornucopia of box sets, the shelves of books. It’s easy enough to see why. This is a tale stuffed with unlikely heroes and monstrous villains, which moves back and forth between glorious sunshine and the depths of despair. Many of the people in it – abusers, exploiters, bad magi – are not rounded or sympathetic figures; it sometimes seems as if everyone is trying to become the worst possible version of themselves. Here are Eugene Landy, Charles Manson, Phil Spector, Murry Wilson. Then there are the scarcely believable transformations of the boy-child Brian Wilson. How did he jump through the hula hoops of novelty pop to arrive, in the blink of an ‘I’, at a place where it seemed perfectly natural to come up with the idea of writing a pop music suite embodying the four elements?

Everything in this story is multiple and contradictory. No fact is secure, no testimony certain: all is apocrypha, surmise and legend. Over the years, the principals have offered wildly different readings of the same events, none more so than the prodigy at the heart of it all. In his brisk, canny, entertaining book Surf’s Up – a summa theologica of Beach Boy lore and legend – Peter Doggett sums it up: ‘As ever with Brian and the past ... the details altered sharply in each new telling.’ Sometimes during the course of the same interview. As if this or that reminiscence were simply one more of the musical ‘feels’ he said flowed through his head. There are even two starkly different Brian Wilson memoirs. [...]

Murry Wilson, the father of Brian and his two brothers, fellow Beach Boys Carl and Dennis, was not by all accounts an easy man to love. He was a businessman, but his dream life was dominated by the siren call of music. It nagged at him that his talent as a composer and songwriter wasn’t getting its due. Why weren’t his melodies heard everywhere? He was snappish, sniping, volatile, and doled out violent punishments to his three sons. The only time he wasn’t angry was when he could be soothed by the syrupy sounds of easy listening music. Off the back of his sons’ success he would eventually release his own LP, The Many Moods of Murry Wilson (1967) – the title is apt. The middle Wilson, Dennis, took the brunt of Murry’s physical abuse, but Brian, first born and most gifted, was the one in the dangerous position of being able to realise his father’s dreams. The ire of a disappointed god: anything you do will be either too good or not good enough. In this eggshell atmosphere, while the boys’ mother, Audree, rustled up huge amounts of anaesthetic food – hyperactive Dennis was the only one who didn’t pile on the pounds – Brian taught Carl and Dennis to sing in harmony; this, he later reflected, ‘brought peace to us’.

Brian studied Bach and Beethoven, and learned to trust in the healing balm of counterpoint. And like Beethoven, who also had two brothers and a violent, overbearing father, he was slowly going deaf. ‘Before he entered his teens,’ Doggett explains, ‘Brian’s parents noticed that he tended to talk out of one side of his mouth and would turn his head around to pick up sounds or voices that came from the opposite side of his head. Tests were carried out, and it was determined that he enjoyed less than 20 per cent hearing in his right ear.’ There seems never to have been an official diagnosis. All we know is that Brian didn’t seem to hear like anyone else. As with Beethoven, his partial deafness and the ringing in his ears didn’t hinder his work as a composer, but it did make live performance a living hell and caused him to withdraw slowly from the hubbub of social life. The crossroads moment took place high up in the air: in December 1964 Wilson was flying to Houston to start a tour when he had some kind of convulsive breakdown. Too much pressure, in both senses. Things that make your head go pop. He no longer wanted to be up on stage with all the feedback and screaming.

The recording studio made possible new ways of listening. Tiny increments of syllable and sound to juggle. Listen to tapes of Wilson working in the studio and you can hear just how precise and in control he is: this is the one place where he knows who he is and what he wants. Did he ever sound more sensual than when he delivered the lines ‘I can hear so much/in your sighs’ and ‘Listen, listen, listen ...’ from ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)’? ‘Music became his language of choice,’ Doggett writes, ‘with which he was far more articulate than he ever was with words.’ You could say things to girls you could never say in real life. You could conjure up swells, plateaux, shivers; the sound of the sun coming up over the sea. Like many a Romantic man, his way of feeling intimacy is via something cloudy, oceanic, mountain-top. The nearest faraway place.

One of​ the mythic promises of rock’n’roll was escape to a place where the action was and where you could maybe find others like yourself. But there would be no such getaway for the Beach Boys – no big city salvation, no yellow brick road. They would live and die in LA. The Beach Boys didn’t scour snow-strafed city streets looking for old blues 78s. They idolised the very ‘square’ barbershop quartet the Four Freshmen; Wilson wrote a song called ‘Be True to Your School’. They were not, in a word, cool. They didn’t leave home, didn’t mooch, didn’t stray: they were already in the teen fantasy promised land. In Hawthorne, south-west Los Angeles, everything was on their doorstep, including their future bandmates: livewire cousin Mike Love; high-school classmate Al Jardine; long-time neighbour David Marks.

The Beach Boys, like many of the new bands of that era, sprang out of a local scene with its own heroes, slang, fashion. In this bright diurnal paradise, four of their early singles were hymns to a local leisure pursuit/metaphysical quest: ‘Surfin’’, ‘Surfin’ Safari’, ‘Surfin’ USA’, ‘Surfer Girl’. But then there suddenly appeared the achingly introspective ‘In My Room’. Co-written with Gary Usher, it’s a swerve away from the world of the drive-in, the burger place, the drag strip into a wholly/holy inner world where the singer can ‘lie awake and pray’. It’s a vulnerable song about the desire to be invulnerable. ‘You’re not afraid when you’re in your room,’ Wilson once said. The recording studio was his other panic room. It was somewhere you could explore a spectrum of emotional tones, as heard in early songs like ‘Lonely Sea’ (1963), ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ (1964), ‘The Warmth of the Sun’ (1964) and, most of all for me, the near-perfect pop record ‘Guess I’m Dumb’ (1965), written, arranged and produced by Wilson, sung by a young Glen Campbell.

Wilson would soon become notorious for how much time he took to record things, but at this early stage everything was a blur. There were ten Beach Boys studio albums between 1962 and 1965. There were no maps, no precedents; their de facto manager and ‘appropriate adult’ at this point was their irascible, interfering father. Brian Wilson may have had his mood swings but he was, in his own way, quite sturdy. Something you begin to notice, leafing through all the Beach Boys books, is how strapping the teenage Brian looks in high-school snaps and how sporty too; this was no neurasthenic squirt. He also had a reputation for being a bit of a cut-up. A twelfth-grade report card reveals that he got an A in Physical Education, a B in Senior Problems (Personal Psychology) and only a C for Piano and Harmony.

Wilson was famously not a surfer: he may have held business meetings in his swimming pool and set up his piano in a sand pit, but he had to be dragged into the sea as if he was undergoing aversion therapy. The Beach Boys’ early hits were the sound of everything to do with surfing, absent the sensation of surfing itself. Surfers try to control unpredictable swells and curls, seeking moments of transcendence, measured in seconds or a few short minutes – just like the pop music Wilson was about to unleash on the world.

by Ian Pernman, London Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Secret History of Wakanda

The history of Wakanda is not, of course, an African history; it’s a history of Europe, and of Europe’s fantasies about Africa.

This hidden kingdom is first attested in Book V, Chapter VIII of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, on the ‘countries on the other side of Africa.’ As Pliny ventures further from the known world of the Mediterranean, and into the depths of Africa, the peoples he describes are drawn with a lighter and lighter brush. He can’t quite say what these people are, but only what they lack. Nightmares live here, in the hot voids of the world: [...]

But then, after this list of fantastic degenerations, we meet something different. Pliny describes a kind of African Utopia:

At the centre of the region of Æthiopia we may find the source of the Nile, guarded by a kingdom called Vicindaria, so called for its many conquests. The Vicindariæ are ruled by their philosophers; and if Pelagon of Rhodes is to be believed their libraries contain all that can be known in the useful crafts. Among their marvels are flying chariots, drawn by certain spinning serpents; fine silks that protect the body like armour; trees bearing glowing fruit with which they light their houses; and great towers made of brass and iron. Their cities are arranged in circles, like those of the Etruscans; at the centre of each stands a library which is also a temple to their God and his son. In all their affairs they are orderly and virtuous; solemn are their laws and just are their judges, and all men live in amity with one another. The Vicindariæ are the ancestors of the the Egyptians and the Numidians, and by some accounts, the fathers of all men. But Pelagon says that they have withdrawn from their troublesome children, have no intercourse with the peoples of the world, and no longer set off on voyages over the oceans or to the Moon; preferring to perfect their knowledge in seclusion, their kingdom can not be found by foreigners.

Where did this idea come from? And how did Pliny appear to describe helicopters, skyscrapers, and the electric lightbulb? Pelagon of Rhodes was a Greek geographer of the second century BC; frustratingly, one of our only surviving sources for his works is Pliny himself. Maybe the story stretches back further; maybe the Greeks had nursed this legend of a distant, magical kingdom for centuries. It’s been suggested that the army of Memmon in Arctinus Milesius’ lost Aethiopis might have some relation to the myth; so too might the Homeric gods’ repeated habit of flying off to visit Ethiopia. We will probably never know.

We do know that in Pliny’s time, Vicindaria was widely believed to be real. Sixteen years before the Natural History was published, the emperor Nero sent a praetorian expedition down the White Nile, to find its source and establish relations between Rome and Vicindaria, for future trade and possible conquest. Seneca, as Nero’s tutor, had commissioned the voyage, and he reports its findings in his Natural Questions:

There we found not towers of bronze or wondrous libraries, but only marshes, the limit of which even the natives did not know, and no one else could hope to know, so completely was the river entangled with vegetable growth, so impassable the waters by foot, or even by boat, since the muddy overgrown marsh would bear only a small boat containing one person.

Nero’s expedition may have reached present-day Uganda: the furthest Roman legions ever travelled into equatorial Africa. Europeans made no further efforts to contact the hidden kingdom of Vicindaria for another thousand years.

This is not to say that the story was forgotten. Pliny’s account was reproduced in the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville; among early medieval writers the most significant part of the narrative was the reference to ‘their God and his son.’ Centuries before Christ, these people were Christian. In 687 AD, the heresiarch Caelestius of Aquitaine was burned for insisting that Christ had been born twice, once to the Vicindariae and once to the rest of the world, but that the Vicindariae, being wise, had not killed him. Small communities of Caelestians survived in the Pyrenees for another two hundred years, claiming to follow a purer, African version of Christianity, in which redemption can be achieved without blood. (They rejected the name Caelestians, and preferred to call themselves the ‘Good Whites’ instead.)

by Sam Kriss, Numb at the Lodge |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

You'll Regret It

Human beings have manic episodes; when it happens to an entire nation we call it empire. The affliction is the same. You prance around town with your tits practically pouring out your top, demanding drinks from strangers, snatching cigarettes out their hands. Isn’t it funny how I can do absolutely anything I want? And everybody loves me? You know you have a special destiny in the world. It’s obvious; flowers turn their faces towards you whenever you walk past. You’re going to save the world by sniffing coke off a stranger’s frenulum. And other people don’t understand, they’re all such bummers, they take things so personally, when really it was just a joke. In fact the whole world is a joke, none of it’s really serious, this great primary-coloured playground built for your delight. Sometimes in the brief moments you’re alone you can hear laughter, not coming from anyone in particular, not laughing at anything you can name, just the manic chattering laughter of the entire universe, flooding the silence. Lately you’ve been getting in fights. You’ve been winning them all. You’ve been stumbling into casinos and putting it all on red, emptying out your bank account, taking unsecured loans, putting it all on red and winning every time. God loves you more than he loves other people, he loves you in a different way. Maybe in an erotic way. Maybe you’re interested. You’ve been buying precious stones, rubies and sapphires; you keep them in your pockets. Sometimes people tell you that one day you’re going to wake up in hospital again, or jail, again, or in a pool of your own blood and vomit, or maybe not at all. They’re wrong. That happens to other people. It will never, ever happen to you. 

One good thing about Europe is we’ve all already been through it all. Here, every miserable dirt-poor republic had its century in the sun. Today, Splugovina is a dreary landlocked country of eight million people that produces sunflower seeds, insulated cables, and zinc-bearing ores, but for a brief period in the fifteenth century the glorious Splug Empire stretched clear across the continent. The crowned heads of Europe came to kneel and give tribute. After that, it’s true, there was the War of the Quintuple Alliance, and all the cities were razed, and maybe forty percent of the population starved in the fields, but there are still some very impressive ruins in the hills. That time is never coming back, though. All you can do now is put up a bunch of gaudy statues to the conquering heroes, make genocidal chants at football games. Remember, with a kind of lazy black bitterness, the days when the world was made of sugar and you were mad. [...]

I like American optimism. Not everyone does. A lot of people from long-vanished empires claim to find it unbearable; it reminds them of what they no longer have. But I like it. There’s something ridiculous about an American who tries to hate their own country, like a dog trying to walk on two legs. They don’t know what it means to wake up and curse the grey skies and poisoned soil of Splugovina, this place that closes around you like a tomb. They can rage against the slavery and genocide, but it’s still with that bright, feverish, all-American gleam in the eye. The only way an American can really encounter pessimism is by hiring a British person to perform it for them. That’s what I do, basically. It’s a living.

The problem, though, is the corollary to all this charming American exuberance, which is the repeated bouts of mass murder. It comes in cycles. A few years of screaming bloodlust until it all blows up in your face, and then you spend the next few years at home drinking wine out the bottle and wailing over the unfairness of the world, before finally straightening your back, giving one last sniff, and bravely stepping outside to once again club someone’s children to death. I used to think some kind of progress was possible here. I used to have something called the Iraq War Theory of Divorce in Hollywood Films. The theory says that if a film features a male lead character who gets divorced or separated from his main romantic interest, and it came out before 2005 or so, by the end he will have cajoled his ex back into bed and they’ll live happily ever after. Liar Liar, The Parent Trap, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. If it came out after 2005, by the end he will have learned to accept the situation, moved on, and found someone new. A total bloodbath in the Middle East, maybe a million people shot or blown up or tortured to death with power tools, so you can learn that hey, sometimes things don’t work out there way you want them to, and hey, sometimes that’s ok. But all these things are temporary. Don Quixote got a decade of sanity between volumes before the rabbit poison started glittering in his eyes and he was babbling about knight errantry again. America got less than half. Four years after the last American troops left Afghanistan under Taliban guard, war critic JD Vance was on the TV, saying that while he understood why people were put off by the last round of wars in the Middle East, ‘the difference is that back then we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives.’ The dumb presidents, the ones who blundered around getting America into quagmires, still always held back from directly attacking Iran. The smart president is Donald Trump. [...]

So far, the war is going very well. It’s called Operation Epic Fury. Operation Epic Badass Ninja Pirate. Organs of state keep issuing public statements that say things like ‘Kill without hesitation, avenge without mercy’ and ‘You say death to America, we say America will be your death.’ They’re having no problems killing anyone they want to kill. Iran might be a proud and ancient civilisation with a historical memory stretching back six thousand years, but right now it’s an easily broken toy in the hands of an empire that can barely remember the day before yesterday. But somehow, the power to kill anyone at will isn’t enough. Things are not going according to plan. As far as I can tell, the plan was this. As soon as Israel and America eliminated the Supreme Leader, the entire Islamic Republic would disintegrate like an alien invasion fleet once the mothership’s been hit. At this point the Iranian people would fill the streets, overthrow the mullahs, and immediately start signing up for an OnlyFans account. Obviously these are early days, but it doesn’t look like things are going to plan. Something very different is happening. Decapitating the Islamic Republic has not shut it down. Instead, individual IRGC units are all operating autonomously, using their own mobile and highly fluid command structures. Instead of a single enemy, there’s now a swarm. No central authority to negotiate with even if you wanted to. A headless zombie Iran, the wreckage of a six-thousand-year-old state spewing ballistic missiles in every direction. Missiles falling on Saudi oil refineries, Bahraini radar installations, on the matcha labubu sexual slavery camps of Dubai. You thought all those CGI skyscrapers meant you were abstracted from geography, but this is still the Middle East. Meanwhile the revolutionaries have not yet shown up in the streets of Tehran. Possibly because the people most likely to overthrow the regime already tried that in January, and the regime killed or imprisoned them all. It might not happen. The Islamic Republic is a bad government, possibly the worst government anywhere on the face of the earth, but it’s being attacked by children making plane noises. 

by Sam Kriss, Numb at the Lodge |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Birth of a Nation

From Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American: April 19, 2026

On the evening of April 18, 1775, the people who lived in the British colony of Massachusetts had gone to bed with the sun, as usual. By the evening of April 19, everything had changed. In the past twenty-four hours, soldiers from their own government had opened fire on them, killing their own people. And Massachusetts men had fired back.

It was hard to understand how things had gotten so bad. Only a dozen years before, at the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, Bostonians had looked forward to a happy future in the British empire. British authorities had spent time and money protecting the colonies, and colonists saw themselves as valued members of the empire. They expected to prosper as they moved to the rich lands on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains and their ships plied the oceans to expand the colonies’ trade with other countries.

But that euphoria faded fast. Almost as soon as the war was over, to prevent colonists from stirring up another expensive struggle with Indigenous Americans, King George III prohibited the colonists from crossing the Appalachian Mountains. Then, to pay for the war just past, the king’s ministers pushed through Parliament a number of revenue laws.

In 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, requiring the payment of a tax on all printed material—from newspapers and legal documents to playing cards. It would hit virtually everyone in the North American colonies. Knowing that local juries would acquit their fellow colonists who violated the revenue acts, Parliament took away the right to civil trials and declared that suspects would be tried before admiralty courts overseen by British military officers. Then Parliament required colonials to pay the expenses for the room and board of British troops who would be stationed in the colonies, a law known as the Quartering Act.

But what Parliament saw as a way to raise money to pay for an expensive war—one that had benefited the colonists, after all—colonial leaders saw as an abuse of power. The British government had regulated trade in the empire for more than a century. But now, for the first time, the British government had placed a direct tax on the colonists without their consent, a right the king had guaranteed to Englishmen in the Magna Carta of 1215. Then it had taken away the right to a trial by jury—also a historical right—and now it was forcing colonists to pay for a military to police them.

Far more than money was at stake. The fight over the Stamp Act tapped into a struggle over a profound question of human governance: Could the king be checked by the people?

This was a question the colonists were perhaps uniquely qualified to answer. While the North American colonies were governed officially by the British crown, the distance between England and the colonies meant that colonial assemblies often had to make rules on the ground. Those assemblies controlled the power of the purse, which gave them the upper hand over royal officials, who had to await orders from England that often took months to arrive. This chaotic system enabled the colonists to carve out a new approach to politics even while they were living in the British empire.

Colonists naturally began to grasp that the exercise of power was not the province of a divinely ordained leader, but something temporary that depended on local residents’ willingness to support the men who were exercising that power.

The Stamp Act threatened to overturn that longstanding system, replacing it with tyranny.

When news of the Stamp Act arrived in Boston, a group of dockhands, sailors, and workers took to the streets, calling themselves the Sons of Liberty. They warned colonists that their rights as Englishmen were under attack. Lawyer John Adams recognized that the Sons of Liberty were changing the political equation. He wrote that gatherings of the Sons of Liberty “tinge the Minds of the People, they impregnate them with the sentiments of Liberty. They render the People fond of their Leaders in the Cause, and averse and bitter against all opposers.”

John Adams’s cousin Samuel Adams, who was deeply involved with the Sons of Liberty, recognized that building a coalition in defense of liberty within the British system required conversation and cooperation. As clerk of the Massachusetts legislature, he was responsible for corresponding with other colonial legislatures. Across the colonies, the Sons of Liberty began writing to like-minded friends, informing them about local events, asking after their circumstances, organizing.

They spurred people to action. By 1766 the Stamp Act was costing more to enforce than it was producing in revenue, and Parliament agreed to end it. But it explicitly claimed “full power and authority to make laws and statutes...to bind the colonies and people of America...in all cases whatsoever.” It imposed new revenue measures.

News of new taxes reached Boston in late 1767. The Massachusetts legislature promptly circulated a letter to the other colonies opposing taxation without representation and standing firm on the colonists’ right to equality in the British empire. The Sons of Liberty and their associates called for boycotts on taxed goods and broke into the warehouses of those they suspected weren’t complying, while women demonstrated their sympathy for the rights of colonists by producing their own cloth and drinking coffee rather than relying on tea.

British officials worried that colonists in Boston were on the edge of revolt, and they sent troops to restore order. But the troops’ presence did not calm the town. Instead, fights erupted between locals and the British regulars.

Finally, in March 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd of angry men and boys harassing them. They wounded six and killed five, including Crispus Attucks, a Black man who became the first to die in the attack. Son of Liberty Paul Revere turned the altercation into the “Boston Massacre.” His instantly famous engraving showed soldiers in red coats smiling as they shot at colonists, “Like fierce Barbarians grinning o’er their Prey; Approve the Carnage, and enjoy the Day.”

Parliament promptly removed the British troops to an island in Boston Harbor and got rid of all but one of the new taxes. They left the one on tea, keeping the issue of taxation without representation on the table. Then, in May 1773, Parliament gave the East India Tea Company a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies. By lowering the cost of tea in the colonies, it meant to persuade people to buy the taxed tea, thus establishing Parliament’s right to impose a tax on the colonies.

In Boston, local leaders posted a citizen guard on Griffin’s Wharf at the harbor to make sure tea could not be unloaded. On December 16, 1773, men dressed as Indigenous Americans boarded three merchant ships. They broke open 342 chests of tea and dumped the valuable leaves overboard.

Parliament closed the port of Boston, stripped the colony of its charter, flooded soldiers back into the town, and demanded payment for the tea. Colonists promptly organized the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and took control of the colony. The provincial congress met in Concord, where it stockpiled supplies and weapons, and called for towns to create “minute men” who could fight at a moment’s notice.

British officials were determined to end what they saw as a rebellion. In April they ordered military governor General Thomas Gage to arrest colonial leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who had left Boston to take shelter with one of Hancock’s relatives in the nearby town of Lexington. From there they could seize the military supplies at Concord. British officials hoped that seizing both the men and the munitions would end the crisis.

But about thirty of the Sons of Liberty had been watching the soldiers and gathering intelligence. When the soldiers set out on the night of April 18, two Sons of Liberty flashed two lanterns in the steeple of the Old North Church—the highest point in Boston—to signal to watchers that the soldiers were traveling across Boston Harbor to Charlestown. Armed with that knowledge, messengers could avoid the troops and raise the alarm along the roads to Lexington and Concord.

Paul Revere and William Dawes headed for Lexington. There, they warned Adams and Hancock and then set out for Concord. They picked up young doctor Samuel Prescott, who had been in Lexington courting, on their way. British soldiers stopped Revere and Dawes, but Prescott got away and made it to Concord. As they heard the news, families set off a system of “alarm and muster” developed months before for just such an occasion, ringing bells and banging drums to alert the next house that there was an emergency.

Just before dawn on that chilly, dark April morning, militiamen had heard the news and were converging on Lexington Green. When the soldiers marched onto the Lexington town green in the darkness just before dawn, they found several dozen minute men waiting for them. An officer ordered the men to leave, and they began to mill around, some of them leaving, others staying. And then, just as the sun was coming up, a gun went off. The soldiers opened fire. When the locals realized the soldiers were firing not just powder, but also lead musket balls, most ran. Eight locals were killed, and another dozen wounded.

The outnumbered militiamen fell back to tend their wounded, and about 300 Regulars marched on Concord to destroy the guns and powder there. But news of the arriving soldiers and the shooting on Lexington town green had spread through the colonists’ communication network, and militiamen from as far away as Worcester were either in Concord or on their way. By midmorning the Regulars were outnumbered and in battle with about 400 militiamen. They pulled back to the main body of British troops still in Lexington.

The Regulars headed back to Boston, but by then militiamen had converged on their route. The Regulars had been awake for almost two days with only a short rest, and they were tired. Militiamen fired at them not in organized lines, as soldiers were accustomed to, but in the style they had learned from Indigenous Americans, shooting from behind trees, houses, and the glacial boulders littered along the road. This way of war used the North American landscape to their advantage. They picked off British officers, dressed in distinct uniforms, first. By that evening, more than three hundred British soldiers and colonists lay dead or wounded.

Even before the British soldiers made it back down the Battle Road from Concord on April 19, militiamen—both white and Black, free and enslaved—from the Massachusetts countryside, furious that soldiers of their own government had shot at them and killed their neighbors, rushed to surround Boston, laying siege to the soldiers and British officials there.

By the next morning, more than 15,000 militiamen surrounded the town of Boston. The Revolutionary War had begun.

Just over a year later, the fight that had started over the question of whether the king could be checked by the people would give the colonists an entirely new, radical answer to that question. On July 4, 1776, they declared the people had the right to be treated equally before the law, and they had the right to govern themselves.

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

Image: The Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor by N. Currier, 1846 (Library of Congress)
[ed. My recollection of history classes in grade school was/is pretty spotty, so this granular account of the American Revolution - on the eve of our country's 250-year anniversary, is much appreciated. No Kings.]

Into the Wood Chipper

The destruction of USAID was just as dumb as it seemed

On February 5, 2025, after USAID’s name had been taken off the building, after most of its staff had seemingly been placed on leave (it was hard to be sure—HR couldn’t confirm because they were also largely locked out of the system), Nicholas Enrich was called in to justify the agency’s global health programming to the Trump administration’s newly-appointed USAID leadership.

According to Enrich, he spoke for about five minutes about USAID’s lifesaving health work: diagnosis and treating HIV and malaria, immunizing children, responding to emerging pandemics. His presentation was met by silence, which senior official Ken Jackson eventually broke. “Wow, there really is so much that USAID does that we never knew,” Jackson said.

Joel Borkert, USAID’s Trump-appointed acting chief of staff, agreed: “I had no idea you did all this. As a Republican, when I think of what USAID does in global health, I assumed it was just, you know, abortions.”

Adam Korzeniewski, the White House liaison to USAID, was similarly enlightened, and he had an idea. To help raise attention to the importance of programs to fight drug-resistant tuberculosis, “he suggested that [they] draft a simple, ‘Barney-style’ set of slides to help the political leadership grasp the dangers, referring to the purple dinosaur of children’s television.”

Korzeniewski acknowledged that most of the relevant officials weren’t “health people,” but he didn’t think that applied to him—he had recently read a book on smallpox. Enrich writes that Korzeniewski had another idea, too:

“One thing I thought of while you were talking,” he added, gesticulating wildly with his hands to conjure the image in his mind. “If you can make one of those maps like they have in Outbreak, where it shows the red growing over time as the disease spreads? You know, like the zombie apocalypse? That would be great, very effective.”

Much of Nicholas Enrich’s new book proceeds like this, describing a process so surreal that it verges on the comical until you remember that millions of lives were in the balance. Into the Wood Chipper: A Whisteblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID follows the 42-day spell that took Enrich from a relatively anonymous USAID worker to its highest-ranking health official to the author of a widely-reported memo detailing the deadly consequences of the destruction of USAID.

Into the Wood Chipper occupies the somewhat unique genre of civil service thriller, only to then verge into horror. More than anything, it was a 206-page reminder that what happened was so, so murderously dumb.

by Tim Hirschel-Burns, Together But Apart |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Everyone is misunderstanding what happened to USAID (TBA):]

***

The problem is that the development sector’s reckoning with the destruction of USAID has been largely unmoored from what actually happened. The post-mortems have tended to follow a similar recipe: a dash of lamentation and a spoonful of self-flagellation, topped with one cup of the author’s pre-existing policy preferences—all of which bear a tenuous relationship to what actually doomed USAID...

When Trump took office and DOGE went into USAID, even they didn’t plan on destroying it. But two weeks later, USAID was functionally dead. In the end, the administration terminated 83% of USAID projects, shuttered USAID as an independent agency, and kept on just 300 of USAID’s over 10,000 staff in the State Department.

Ship of Fools

Behind Trump’s Public Bravado on the War, He Grapples With His Own Fears

Trump campaigned on ending foreign wars but wagered that he could solve, with American air and naval power, a national security problem that had bedeviled seven previous presidents. Now, a cease-fire is in doubt, a critical trade route has been closed for weeks and Iran’s regime has been replaced with radical new leaders, all threatening to lengthen an operation that Trump has repeatedly said would only last six weeks—a deadline already missed since the war began Feb. 28.

White House officials said they believe a breakthrough in negotiations with Iran could be reached in coming days, and they are eyeing more talks in Pakistan.

The president’s impulsive style has never before been tested during a sustained military conflict. Unlike the successful operation in Venezuela, which buoyed his confidence, Trump is confronting a more intractable foe in Iran, which is so far unwilling to bend to his demands.

 
“We are witnessing astonishing military successes that do not add up to victory and that is squarely on the president and how he’s chosen to do his job—lack of attention to detail and lack of planning,” said Kori Schake, a senior fellow at the right-leaning think tank American Enterprise Institute who served on former President George W. Bush’s National Security Council.

Soon after Trump’s holiday post, aides fielded calls from Republican senators and Christian leaders. They asked, why would he say “Praise be to Allah” on Easter morning? Why would he use the F-word? Trump swears profusely in private but usually calibrates it in public and on social media.

 

When one adviser later asked him about it, he said he came up with the Allah idea himself. He said he wanted to seem as unstable and insulting as possible, believing it could bring the Iranians to the table, senior administration officials said. It was a language, he said, the Iranians would understand. But he was also concerned about the fallout. “How’s it playing?” he asked advisers. (Iran’s parliamentary speaker called the threat reckless.)

 
On the Tuesday after Easter, he issued the most dramatic ultimatum of his presidency, saying that unless Iran struck a deal in 12 hours, a whole civilization would die.

 
Again, the post was improvisational, and not part of a national security plan, the administration officials said.

People around the U.S. and the world were gripped with fear and confusion about what the president intended to do. Behind the scenes, top aides saw the move as a way to spur negotiations in a war the president was desperately ready to end. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told others privately it was language that might actually bring the Iranians to negotiate.

 
What Trump really wanted, advisers said, was to scare the Iranians, and to end the conflict. Less than ninety minutes before his deadline, Trump announced a precarious two-week cease-fire.

 
“President Trump campaigned proudly on his promise to deny the Iranian regime the ability to develop a nuclear weapon, which is what this noble operation accomplishes,” said Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary. She said the president had “remained a steady leader our country needs.”

 
Trump is keeping close score on the war, measuring how many Iranian targets have been destroyed as a key metric of success, officials said.

‘Blood and sand’

Trump’s decision to venture into the war surprised many who knew him best. “Blood and sand,” he told advisers in his first term to describe the region, explaining why he wasn’t interested in getting drawn into any Middle East conflict.

After a persuasive February briefing from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Situation Room, and repeated conversations with a group of outside allies that included Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), he said he trusted the military to pull it off. Look, he said to advisers, at how quickly they had “won” in Venezuela, where the U.S. had, in a matter of hours, captured its president and ended with his more compliant deputy in his place.

 

In Iran, the war started with the execution of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top Iranian officials. Trump was shown clips every morning of stunning explosions across the Iranian terrain. Advisers said Trump remarked to them how impressive the military was, seeming in awe of the scale of bombs.

 
But Trump had done little to sell the American public on the war, and soon grew frustrated that his administration wasn’t getting the same kind of external praise. Leavitt attributed his frustration to what she deemed unfair news coverage of the administration. His team showed him poll results for the November midterm elections that showed him the war was dragging down Republican candidates.

 
Still, Trump himself wasn’t up for re-election—and he thought a win over Iran would give him a chance to reshape the global order in a way he couldn’t in his first term, two top officials said. Trump said early in the military operation that if we get this right, we are saving the world, according to a person who heard his comments.

 
With the strait’s closure choking off some 20% of the global oil supply, energy CEOs soon grew nervous. In mid-March, Energy Secretary Chris Wright appeared at a board meeting of the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s primary lobbying group, and said the war would be over in weeks, according to people at the meeting. The energy leaders have at times worried that war would drive up prices far more than the White House seemed to appreciate if Trump continued an escalation that matched his rhetoric, people familiar with the matter said.

Trump vacillated, people close to him said, between considering economic worries in calls with advisers including Wright and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and insisting that he was going to keep the war going. He told advisers that they needed to watch the markets, and his words often moved them.

 
But Trump quickly began ruminating on how the military action could turn into a catastrophe. [...]

The strait has been a particular source of frustration. Before the U.S. went to war, Trump told his team that Iran’s government would likely capitulate before closing the strait, and that even if Tehran tried, the U.S. military could handle it, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Some of the president’s advisers were caught off guard that tanker traffic would grind to a halt so quickly after the bombing began, according to a person in contact with the White House.

Trump has since marveled at the ease with which the strait was closed. A guy with a drone can shut it down, Trump has said to people, expressing belated irritation that the key waterway was so vulnerable. He has publicly oscillated between demanding support from allies to help open it and insisting that the U.S. doesn’t need or want military assistance.

In late March—about a week before the Iranians shot down the plane—Trump had ordered his negotiating team to find a way to start talks, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

By early April, the price of gas was up by more than $1 a gallon, and industry leaders worried that the market still hadn’t properly priced the risk that the war was posing to the oil supply. The president, through his force of personality, was doing a good job talking down the price of oil, but reality would soon set in, said one person familiar with the industry.

 
But they’ve been told Trump is willing to take the political hit for higher prices for a short period of time, the person said.

The president’s competing impulses, playing out in early-morning missives, concerned his aides who were growing worried the war was becoming a political albatross. [...]

  

Trump’s top aides have taken turns telling the president that he should limit the impromptu interviews because they were only convincing the public he had contradictory messages. At times, Trump would joke with Leavitt that he had talked to a reporter and made big news, but she would have to wait and see what it was, White House officials said. For a bit, he agreed to curb them—then soon returned.

Some advisers encouraged him to do a speech to the nation. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles thought it would reassure the country that Trump had a plan. Trump wasn’t initially interested. What would he say? He couldn’t declare victory. He didn’t know where it was going. He was eventually persuaded to make the address on April 1, and aides along with outside advisers filled the room hoping to encourage him.

 
The U.S. had succeeded on the battlefield and the U.S. military objectives would be completed “very shortly,” he told skeptical Americans. The speech, which didn’t clarify how the U.S. would exit the war, didn’t increase public support.

 
Minute-by-minute rescue

The repeated crises prompted by the war have led to scrambles inside the administration.
For 24 hours over Easter weekend, Trump’s team dialed into the Situation Room: Vice President JD Vance from Camp David, Wiles from her home in Florida. They received almost minute-by-minute progress reports, of the military entering Iran, the rescue planes getting stuck in the sand, the efforts to distract the Iranians. They called the last airman by a code name.

 
Trump wasn’t included in the meeting but received updates by phone.

After Trump’s subsequent threat to destroy Iranian civilization, White House officials talked to Pakistani counterparts about mediating a cease-fire. Trump was too mad at the Europeans for any of them to serve the role, administration officials said.

 
As the world waited on the president’s 8 p.m. deadline, Trump flitted between topics, aides said. He talked to officials about endorsements in an Indiana state race. His team prepped for the midterms. He listened to officials talk about cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence policy.

 
He also asked Wiles and Steve Witkoff, the U.S.’s chief negotiator with Iran, where things stood. Push them to a deal, he told Witkoff repeatedly.

 
White House concerns about security threats have been heightened, aides said.

In recent weeks, for example, Trump and his team have noticed an increase in security. On a cloudless night in April at Mar-a-Lago, every umbrella was up on the patio in an unusual arrangement, guests said. Club members were told that there was an effort to limit drone visibility, a Mar-a-Lago member said.

 
Rubio told others about standing outside his home at the military compound where he lives and watching a suspicious drone, administration officials said. Secret Service protection teams have expanded to carry weapons White House officials had never seen before.

 
Despite the high pressure moments, Trump has also told advisers he wants to talk about other topics and see the media focus on other issues. When guests showed up for a meeting of Kennedy Center officials in March, the president pulled some of them aside to talk about the ballroom he is constructing on White House grounds. Out came drawings showing a large hole in the ground—he was amazed at all that could be built underneath. Advisers said he has multiple meetings a week on the topic and views himself as the general contractor.

Also on his mind: raising money for the midterms. Hours after the war began on the last Saturday in February, he was at a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago. When some staff questioned if they should cancel it, Trump said he would have to eat dinner regardless.

 
At another gathering, one night after threatening to end Iranian civilization, Trump stood in the White House with donors and top staff for a reception ahead of America’s 250th celebration this summer. He mused about giving himself the nation’s highest military honor, the Medal of Honor, designed to honor bravery, courage and sacrifice, according to people who were at the reception.

 
He then told a story about why he said he deserved it: In his first term as he flew into Iraq for a surprise holiday visit to the troops, his jet descended in the dark toward an unlit runway. In dramatic fashion, he counted down the feet to the plane landing, and recalled how scary it was. The pilots kept reassuring him, he said, and they landed safely.
He couldn’t get the medal, he said, because White House counsel David Warrington, who was standing nearby at the event, wouldn’t allow it.

 
Leavitt, the White House spokeswoman, said he was joking.

by Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey, Wall Street Journal |  Read more:
Images: Matt Rourke/AP; Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA/Shutterstock

[ed. When you've lost the Wall Street Journal... If they (staffers) are keeping him at arms length and somewhat removed from any form of pragmatic decision-making, then that would partly explain why so many of his posts are uninformed and contradictory.]

Right and Left

No great American novel has ever emerged from the nation’s capital, Christopher Hitchens once observed. London had Dickens—Paris, Zola and Flaubert. And Washington, D.C.? A city cut out for genre fiction: dutiful historical reconstruction, or else cheap political thrillers, sold at airports with raised gold lettering. Evidently, the town’s bureaucratic processes and brutalist office architecture just cannot deliver an exhilarating prose style. Nor can the self-serious men and women, with their big egos and small ambitions, attract literary sympathies.

If literature is no place to turn, perhaps there exists some great work of art? It was 2025, and I had to escape a May Day protest on the Mall (grown men in FUCK TRUMP wifebeaters, a crimson Handmaid’s Tale girl zapped back from a fascist-lite era). So far 2025 had been no 1963, 1982 or even 2017. CSPAN-watching geriatrics waving cardboard signs on bridges felt at times like the only symbolic act fending off the wacko, dark-web authoritarianism radiating from Pennsylvania Avenue. When May Day turned to more “mayday, mayday!,” rather than going to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to drown myself, I ended up in front of a painting in the American Wing of the nearby National Gallery.

Right and Left (1909) by Winslow Homer might be altogether disqualified from Great Washington Painting. For one, the work is not set on the banks of the Potomac but off the shore of Prouts Neck, Maine. Surely the craggy presidential faces in the Portrait Gallery or Gordon Parks’s solemn American Gothic (1942) would make for more obvious contenders. But the painting’s perfect, suggestive title, paired with the melancholic mood of the hunting scene, relaxed all critical judgment that afternoon, as I reached for something, anything, to explain a strange city in strange times.

Over gray waters, a pair of goldeneye ducks are tossed mid-flight like clown juggling pins. Distant waves carry the sportsman who has just fired on them. As if rendered by a Persian miniaturist, the diminutive scale of the shooter makes clear human motives are entirely incidental to the painting. The real drama, and damage, is in the foreground—the freakish, jack-o’-lantern yellow eye of the bird on the left, the terrible head-first plummet on the right. Both birds’ bodies are a cohesion of awkward, unnatural angles. The animals are alive and dead. The waves crest and fall. There is nothing romantic about the state of suspension: the setting sun, low and feeble, is a single orange stroke Homer has made over the indefinite horizon, like a pencil scratch on a doorframe marking the growth of a child.

In late January of last year, a quiet panic began rippling through the capital when the little figure skaters’ plane went down in the Potomac. This was around the time the government was purging tens of thousands of jobs that do things like keep planes in the sky. Countless entries follow in the region’s diary of a bad year. Authorities abducted a local Maryland man from an IKEA parking lot, to then erroneously deport him to a Salvadoran mega-prison. Gold-chained tech barons snapped up mansions in Massachusetts Avenue Heights as the welcome mat was laid out in the White House. A gunman mowed down embassy sweethearts in the streets; seventy-ton M1 Abrams tanks squeaked through a militarized birthday carnival. The clangor of dissent played out on pots and pans as the National Guard rolled into town. M4 semiautomatic rifles circled two-year-olds’ birthday parties in Capitol Hill’s Lincoln Park. Meanwhile, immigration authorities began quietly patrolling the District alongside the police, making more than triple the number of arrests in a month than in the first half of the year. Come fall, the president spent the longest government shutdown in U.S. history gussying up the White House, with such understated measures as razing a wing. The year rounded out with two shot National Guard members and a hydra-headed call for five hundred more on the ground: Christmases lost protecting deserted streets in camo and Santa hats.

In a city being pulverized and remade seemingly daily, where even as recent of history as the Black Lives Matter plaza is jackhammered to oblivion, the sense of dread and unknown can bully one into a state of mental submission, or else frantic, desperate attempts to make sense of the nonsense—“rational delirium,” I underline in a hip novel I can’t finish. One of these disposable origami thoughts comes to me in the museum. It is futile surely as any other attempt to say something intelligent about such deeply stupid times. But there it is: like Homer’s bewildering birds, the targets in Washington have also been two. They have also been twinned. In this city, maybe no one has been thumped harder than undocumented workers from Central and South America, on the one hand, and federal public servants, on the other. Their red-alert existential terror—though quite incomparable in kind—might even be held within a single frame. Both perform types of labor deeply distasteful, or perhaps incomprehensible, to the administration: manual labor and public-serving work.

What I mean to say is, hardworking bricklayers and line cooks are being criminalized as hardened gangsters. Dedicated civil servants, meanwhile, are roasted as do-nothings, forced to correspond with HR black holes and polygraph machines. D.C. flags may have sold out across the city in protest of the paramilitary takeover, but Trump’s nostalgia for tough-on-crime 1970s New York increasingly feels like the sideshow. The real story of this past year, the story that will have the longer historical afterlife, is a quieter one. It is one of draining the intrinsic value from labor yoked to repetitive, inglorious and truly vital tasks: the maintenance of the civic home, on the one hand, and the literal home, on the other. (If you want to call these real, productive forms of labor feminized versus a masculine world of bullshit finance capital or big tech, I, for one, won’t object.)

In this bleak picture of 2025 Washington, both civil servants and undocumented workers were said to be living off ill-gotten gains. Both were targeted at the places of their work. Both, like the pair of mid-flight sea birds, found themselves in kinds of godless existential suspense. And both, I would argue in a more grandiose mood, if I could summon it, were subject to an elitist attack on the American work ethic. A work ethic that arrived in the rugged hills of New England with… the Puritans!

Leaving the museum, I retraced the perimeter of the protest on the National Mall, where it turned out I might have misunderstood the Calvinist commitments of the Handmaid girl whose outdated display had driven me away. Now sitting cross-legged, ringed by the roots of an American elm and the rim of her red dress, eyes closed, bodice pooling around her waist: She was topless? Stamp-sized leaves overlaid her nipples and inked across her chest in lipstick were the words “Non Violent Vibes.” (Two words, not one.)

The Puritans had their maypoles of Merry Mount and were, in reality, a band of certified neurotics (Max Weber’s description was always too somber). But even at this lefty protest, the Protestant work ethic—its seriousness, self-discipline, prudishness—appeared to be in somewhat dramatic retreat.

I supposed. Who the hell knew what was going on anymore. I was pregnant and needed to go home and lie down. [...]

●

Around Washington, the flat, SSRI-pilled Zoomers wear shirts that read like floating signifiers or non sequiturs. A girl brandishes SOLD OUT across her sweatshirt in Capitol Hill. (She sold out? Her shirt is sold out?) MAIN CHARACTER traipses toward the zoo in Northwest. (Surely the pandas are the protagonists?) LET’S GO FOR A WALK crosses Penn Quarter, alone, as if the invitation has gone declined. I haven’t seen a slogan fit for the moment of deep unease in a city in which 20 percent of the workforce is federal, tens of thousands have left or been fired since February, and where the unemployment rate has been leading the nation for months. Why not say what we mean? CANNED, FURLOUGHED or PROBATIONARY. DAMNED. SAVED.

In every other respect, the people of this city speak in a direct manner, so rarely a note of the ironical or bohemian. Washington can feel like inhabiting a LinkedIn hologram: transactional, oppressively chipper, neutered. At the tasteful, wood-paneled bistro, a young woman in athleisure sits alone reading Gung Ho! Increase Productivity, Profits, and Your Own Prosperity over a shrimp salad and pale coffee. (The endearing maître d’ who used to inhale drags of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. behind the counter seems to have evacuated his post.) Steel yourself: the first question out of a new acquaintance’s month really might be “What d’you do?”...

Laments are often operatic, duly so, but from people whose professional life and manner are the definition of restraint. A physician running miraculous clinical trials described to me a Looney Tunes world this past winter: a futile Road Runner-Coyote chase sequence, until the latest cuts made by the DOGE kid stuffed in the utility closet inevitably get reversed. Another fed worker is witnessing his unit transform into a “tabloid operation,” he says, “a craven institution stewarding the demise of the nation.” He continues: “What do you do stuck in a job with career-preservationists in charge who bend 93 different ways a day?”...

An elder nanny sidles up at the library to tell me about more ICE sightings. Arrests of nannies at Turtle Park, now Macomb. “They called the parents to come get the child,” she says of yet another raid I cannot confirm. When I ask her where she is hearing these reports—that I think they really might in fact be false—she just points to her phone, to the WhatsApp-group rumor mills, like it is an investigative report published by the Washington Post. It doesn’t matter that she is a citizen, she says. “They don’t care who you are, what your status is. And they go right to us,” she says, pointing to her skin and pursing her lips. Other nannies in the area are forgoing Venmo or check payments. Cash only. “Soviet practices=best practices in this climate!” a Russian-American mom texts me.

No one can even pretend anymore that Americans will take over all these jobs, particularly in the realm of construction or farming, giving the lie to an “American-made” future. An artist acquaintance has been photographing housing construction sites to imagine what it would look like for the power tools and saws to go silent in an industry where undocumented workers constitute more than 20 percent of the workforce. In a film she is making, she interviews a worker who says in Portuguese: “That guy that makes the hole, that breaks things, gets on the roof, lays down brick—they [Americans] don’t want to do that.” He adds, lightly: “So that is why they have us.” I hear of another young woman’s Bolsonarista father in São Paulo finally turning on the Bolsonaro of the North: “Who will do the work?”

The tariffs on trade suppose we want our goods “American-made,” returning the old glory back to the American working-class and blue-collar jobs. But by treating undocumented laborers in the appalling manner we are, it sends the message, rather loudly, that the work done by these individuals does not confer one ounce of dignity or worth. In fact, it disqualifies one from living even a quiet life on the margins. Who wants to be the understudy to the guy who worked so hard he was rewarded with being disappeared to a country he doesn’t even come from?

Another South American living near Rock Creek Park tells me he woke up recently in the middle of the night to the cry of a rabbit shrieking, pursued by a fox, an owl, some kind of predator. It was the most chilling sound he had ever heard. “I feel like that,” he says, “like a chased animal.”

by Noelle Bodick, The Point |  Read more:

Image: Winslow Homer, Right and Left

April 7, 2026

At 5:06 this morning, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen,

but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”

Trump has painted himself into a corner in his impulsive war against Iran. His job approval is dismal and Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil travels, is sending the cost of oil soaring, squeezing the global economy. Always in his life he has had someone to fix his mistakes—his father, Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, the “adults in the room” in his first administration who distracted him from catastrophic errors, and so on—but no one was willing to bail him out of the global disaster of his war on Iran.

So he threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” an open threat to push his current embrace of war crimes all the way to genocide. No one knew if he was gearing up for a ground invasion of Iran in a war that has never received congressional authorization, or a massive bombing campaign, or even the use of nuclear weapons.

Or if he was making yet another empty threat.

Within the announcement were signs that perhaps it was bluster designed to let him claim victory and walk away. Despite his claim, there has been no “regime change” in Iran: the regime is very much still in place, although it has changed leadership in the wake of the bombing deaths of previous leaders. The new leaders appear to be more radical than their predecessors.

There was also the unmistakable echo of television advertising in his announcement. Either “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” or “maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”

At 6:32 this evening, we learned that the horrifying announcement of the morning was, indeed, cover for Trump to declare victory and get out of the crisis he has caused in the Middle East.

Trump posted: “Based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, of Pakistan, and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran, and subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks. This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE! The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all Military objectives, and are very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East.

“We received a 10 point proposal from Iran,” Trump continued, “and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate. Almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran, but a two week period will allow the Agreement to be finalized and consummated. On behalf of the United States of America, as President, and also representing the Countries of the Middle East, it is an Honor to have this Longterm problem close to resolution. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Michael Rios of CNN reported that Iran’s media is claiming it has achieved a great victory, forcing the U.S. to agree in principle to its 10-point plan, which includes the end of sanctions against Iran, the removal of all U.S. combat forces from bases in the region, and Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz. If these terms are correct, they leave the United States significantly worse off than it was before the war and leave Iran significantly stronger.

Trump called Rios’s story a fraud, and immediately sought to reassert his strength. He posted, “Authorities are looking to determine whether or not a crime was committed on the issuance of the Fake CNN World Statement,” and said that “CNN is being ordered to immediately withdraw this Statement with full apologies for their, as usual, terrible ‘reporting.’”

Political commentator Ben Rhodes summed up the situation: “In the best case scenario, Trump struck a deal to reopen a Strait that was open before the pointless war he started, with [Iran] demonstrating its control over the Strait and potentially extracting fees plus sanctions relief. Thousands of innocents—including hundreds of children—dead in Lebanon and Iran for no reason. U.S. troops killed and wounded. U.S. embassies and bases in the Middle East badly damaged. U.S. standing in the world obliterated. U.S. munitions badly depleted. Hundreds of billions spent. Prices up everywhere. More global economic fallout to come. Putin strengthened and enriched. Just a catastrophic situation even in the best of circumstances. A profoundly shameful episode in American history no matter what happens next.”

And then, a minute after midnight, Trump posted:

“A big day for World Peace! Iran wants it to happen, they’ve had enough! Likewise, so has everyone else! The United States of America will be helping with the traffic buildup in the Strait of Hormuz. There will be lots of positive action! Big money will be made. Iran can start the reconstruction process. We’ll be loading up with supplies of all kinds, and just ‘hangin’ around’ in order to make sure that everything goes well. I feel confident that it will. Just like we are experiencing in the U.S., this could be the Golden Age of the Middle East!!! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice wrote: “Trump went from making insane genocidal threats this morning to hyping the ‘golden age’ of Iran hours later, and he received no concessions in between. He’s an absolute basket case who needs to be removed from power before he follows through on one of his mass murder fantasies.”

The American people spent the whole day wondering if their mad king would destroy the world, only to find out he was terrorizing them in order to protect his ego after starting a disastrous war. Throughout the day, Democratic members of Congress have called for Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to recall the Senate and for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to recall the House of Representatives from break to end the war in Iran and start the process of removing Trump from office.

Trump’s threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” was not just a reference to Iran. If he had destroyed Iran in our names, unhampered by the Republican Congress members who have vowed to defend the U.S. Constitution, it would also have been an epitaph for the United States of America.

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