Gli Stati Uniti hanno bombardato l’Iran durante i negoziati, e il Pentagono ha già pronti i piani per una nuova campagna dopo il 3 novembre. Intanto a scegliere i bersagli sono sempre più spesso sistemi di intelligenza artificiale sviluppati dai giganti della tecnologia: Palantir, Microsoft, Amazon, Google. E l’Italia? Il ministro Crosetto conferma 500 militari in Arabia Saudita, un nostro Eurofighter colpito a Ta’if e l’esercitazione nucleare Nato Steadfast Noon nei nostri cieli. “Non siamo in guerra”, dice. Ma allora che cos’è? Petrolio sopra i 100 dollari, gas alle stelle, Hormuz al minimo dei transiti. Ucraina: strage di civili a Kramatorsk e nuovo tavolo a Miami. Cisgiordania: i coloni aggrediscono i raccoglitori di olive. Gaza: due milioni di persone verso il quarto inverno senza riparo. Ne parliamo con: Tiziana Alterio: giornalista indipendente e scrittrice, già Rai e Mediaset, reporter in Africa, Asia, Sud America e Paesi arabi. Padroni nell’ombra (2025) · Putin. L’uomo di ghiaccio che sfida l’Occidente (2022) Gianmarco Pisa: operatore e formatore di pace dell’IPRI-CCP, con i Corpi Civili di Pace in Kosovo; ricercatore RESeT e IRES Campania, membro della Rete italiana Pace e Disarmo. Più eterno del bronzo (Multimage) · Paesaggi kosovari 1998-2018 Conduce Jeff Hoffman SOSTIENI CASA DEL SOLE TV Casa del Sole TV è un progetto di giornalismo indipendente, autofinanziato, senza editori né partiti. IBAN: IT63P0326822300052392596590 Intestato a: La Casa del Sole Edizioni Causale: Donazione Casa del Sole TV ABBONAMENTO YOUTUBE https://www.youtube.com/@CasadelSoleT… Analista Multipolare: €5/mese Inviato della Verità: €15/mese Architetto del Futuro: €25/mese I LIBRI DI MARGHERITA FURLAN «BRICS Scacco Matto», disponibile in italiano, inglese e russo SEGUI CASA DEL SOLE TV YouTube: @CasadelSoleTVChannel #Levante#CasaDelSoleTV#IntelligenzaArtificiale#AI#Iran#Israele#USA#Palantir#BigTech#Gaza#Cisgiordania#Ucraina#Crosetto#ArabiaSaudita#CrisiEnergetica#Hormuz#Geopolitica#Pace#InformazioneIndipendente#TizianaAlterio#GianmarcoPisa#Padroninellombra
Ukraine's "middle strikes" on Russian logistics haven't let up
Ukrainian drones hit Russian trucks 770 times in September
A shift to protected convoys hasn't reduced the truck losses
Ukraine's campaign of so-called "middle strikes" targeting Russian supply lines isn't generating the same headlines it did back in the spring, when the campaign was intensifying.
But that doesn't mean Ukrainian units aren't launching thousands of drones a month and blowing up a lot of Russian trucks. Indeed, the pace of Ukrainian strikes, concentrated along the main supply routes threading through occupied southern Ukraine into occupied Crimea, has leveled off without ever really decreasing since an early summer surge.
It's evident Ukraine's middle-strike campaign "didn't stop and wasn't slowed down," noted French mapper Clément Molin, one of the most important observers of the counterlogistics campaign.
For September, Molin tallied 770 confirmed drone strikes on Russian trucks in the logistical zone 10 km beyond the line of contact. That's up from 630 strikes in August, 656 in July, and 586 in June, the month the campaign really got underway. There were just 214 strikes in May and at most a few dozen in each of the previous three months.
Whether Ukrainian troops can take advantage of the Russians' weakening logistics anytime soon is less evident.
Since June, the Ukrainians have hit around 700 Russian trucks a month that analysts can confirm with video and photographic evidence. There are undoubtedly many more damaged and destroyed trucks that left no digital evidence.
In southern Ukraine mid-range drone strikes continue to relentlessly target Russian road logistics
In total, more than 3 000 trucks and vehicles have been hit on key roads since May 2026, while the R-280 road remains at the heart of the attacks.
There are thousands of Russian trucks on the road in Ukraine every day, so hitting 700 of them in a month won't immediately strangle Russian logistics. But that accumulating destruction does strain Russian logistics—and terrify the truck drivers who are in the drone crosshairs. "Russian drivers post videos on a daily basis, showing how dangerous a ride in southern Ukraine is getting," Molin wrote.
What's remarkable is that the counterlogistics campaign hasn't faltered even as the Russians have adapted. Early on, Russian trucks mostly traveled alone and without protection, making them fairly easy picking for a bevy of Ukrainian middle-strike drone types including the Hornet, the B-2, the RAM 2X, the Chaklun, and various high-endurance first-person-view quadcopters.
The drones ride along Ukraine's overlapping command and control systems, which include Starlink satellite terminals (some dangling from balloons) as well as mesh radio networks. Many of the drones have built-in AI for autonomously detecting and homing in on trucks in the final seconds of flight.
The moment the Hornet UAV struck a logistics vehicle in the occupied Kherson region. pic.twitter.com/Hc0DCcTnef
Reeling from the truck strikes, the Russians adapted this spring. Commanders began requiring all trucks to travel in convoys including mobile fire support groups, analysis group Tochnyi reported in May, citing Dmytro Putiata, a retired command post battle captain from the Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces 20th Brigade "K2."
Today the Russian convoys have a standard structure, according to Molin. "Convoys usually gather three to five trucks and two to three air-defense trucks." Combined with radio jamming gear that's increasingly common on both the supply trucks and the gun trucks, that's seemingly a lot of protection.
But the drones target the gun trucks, too, peeling back the protection in order to expose the supply trucks to follow-on attacks. In that way, the Ukrainians have sustained their attacks on the supply trucks despite the increase in mobile air defense activity along the most important supply routes.
Map: Euromaidan Press
And it's going to get worse for the Russians as fall wears into winter. "Supplying Crimea is turning into a nightmare and the arrival of winter and more difficult conditions will not help," Molin wrote.
There will be less foliage on the trees lining the roads, and thus less cover from Ukrainian surveillance. Moreover, Molin pointed out, "it will be more difficult to go off-road" and avoid the big paved roads that are the main drone kill zones.
Russian logistics are under pressure, and that pressure is only increasing. Ultimately, the Ukrainians aim to starve Russian forces in Crimea. Strikes on cargo ships plying the Black Sea prevent the Russians from simply shifting the logistics off the coast. Meanwhile, strikes on overland logistics "may lead to substantial softening of front-line positions," Tochnyi noted in May.
Softening those front-line positions to the point of melting away could facilitate what Tochnyi described as "eventual breakthrough operations" in occupied southern Ukraine.
It's not inconceivable. Ukraine's 3rd Army Corps recently proved, by way of its successful Operation Vivaldi, that local Ukrainian counteroffensives are possible.
But that doesn't mean they're easy. To win, the 3rd Army Corps had to carefully husband its forces and meticulously prepare the battlefield under conditions of strict secrecy before attacking. That same kind of preparation is underway along the supply lines into Crimea, but it's unclear whether local Ukrainian forces have enough combat power in reserve to shift from defense to offense and exploit Russia's deepening supply woes.
At least not yet.
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Ukraine retook 240 square km north of Lyman and nobody reported it for three months
China is planning to open the country’s space station to other countries, intended to transform the orbital facility into a global research platform. Yang Liwei, China’s first astronaut and deputy chief designer of the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA), discussed the plan during the now underway 77th International Astronautical Congress in Türkiye’s Mediterranean city of […]
Happy World Octopus Day! Every Oct 8, the world celebrates one of the more unusual creatures of the sea. Octopuses are well-known for their eight legs and ability to squirt ink when frightened. They’ve also been known to use tools, a sign of intelligence, and can shape-shift to mimic the colors and texture of their surroundings, an effective way to disappear from both predators and prey. Mongabay has reported on several octopus discoveries this year, including: Ancient octopus were apex predators Modern colossal squid are believed to be the largest invertebrates in the sea, but Mongabay’s Shanna Hanbury recently reported on an even larger ancient octopus species whose fossils were described by Japanese researchers in April 2026. The Japanese team found a fossilized jawbone from the now-extinct Nanaimoteuthis haggarti. Based on its jaw size, researchers suggest the octopus may have reached 6.6 to 18.6 meters (22 to 61 feet) in length. On the higher end, that’s around two-thirds the size of an adult blue whale, the largest animal to ever exist. “It suggests that it may have been among the largest invertebrates ever known,” study co-author Yasuhiro Iba, a paleontologist at Hokkaido University in Japan, told Mongabay by email. They were likely gigantic predators that roamed the late Cretaceous seas between 100 million to 72 million years ago. A rare look at baby octopuses From long dead octopus to newly born, Hanbury also reported on baby Argentine octopuses and a rare photo of them. Patagonian octopus eggs in Puerto Lobos Protected…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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Kimberly Guilfoyle was so close to getting it right.
The Trump hanger-on—former fiancée to Don Jr. and the current ambassador to Greece—was exchanging messages with a man named Eric Deters, according to a bombshell Wall Street Journal story last night. Deters, a right-wing podcast host, failed political candidate, and suspended lawyer in Kentucky, wanted help in clearing up some tax issues, and also wanted the Trump administration to extradite a doctor whose alleged fraud victims he was advising in a legal case. Guilfoyle, the messages indicate, wanted money—in one instance, a $100,000 wire—and she wanted it untraceable.
Guilfoyle was right to worry about secrecy. She was about to begin confirmation hearings for her ambassadorship, and understood the pay-to-play could hurt her. Yet neither she nor Deters could stop breaking the Stringer Bell rule by recording their skullduggery in writing.
“It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express,” Guilfoyle wrote. “Please.” And in another: “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today.” Yet even as she laid these instructions out, she kept haranguing Deters for indiscretion. “I really wish you would stop papering all these things. It’s really dangerous and not helpful to you or me while you could simply just call me on signal,” she wrote, referring to the encrypted messaging app. In one message, she wrote, “If you write an email or a text about, l’m gonna kill you cause I love you but you’re so out of control.” Unfortunately for Guilfoyle, her Signal messages were not as safe a space as she might have wished. (The Journal does not reveal how it viewed the messages. Guilfoyle’s lawyer broadly disputed their authenticity to the paper but offered no details.)
Somehow, this is not the only Trump scandal with Balkan ties in the news this week. The New York Times reported that James Blair and Chris LaCivita, who are ostensibly President Trump’s top political advisers, traveled—during an intense midterm campaign in which Republicans appear to be on the verge of serious setbacks—to advise a candidate in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s self-governing Serbian entity.
Both of these stories show the way that many people in Trump’s orbit view their positions not as public service but as a profit center. There’s a long and often depressing pattern of former officials capitalizing on government and political work, but Trump’s aides aren’t even willing to wait until they take their leave to start taking. Forget a team of rivals. Trump world is a team of mercenaries, in some cases literally.
Jared Kushner, who was a senior adviser in his first presidency and is married to his daughter Ivanka, continues to work as an envoy for Trump while pursuing business deals around the world. As Dexter Filkins wrote in The New Yorker in September, Kushner’s record as a diplomat is underwhelming, yet his financial gains have been enormous. “He represents a new kind of Washington figure, for whom public office serves as a means to extraordinary wealth,” Filkins wrote. Kushner and Ivanka Trump even have their own Balkan boondoggle, an attempt to develop an island in Albania that has run into legal and political difficulties.
Earlier this year, the Times reported that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick helped negotiate access to Kazakh tungsten reserves for an American mining company, and the federal government provided $1.6 billion in financing. Lutnick’s sons and Trump’s sons are both involved with companies that stand to profit from the deal (though representatives for them have said that they did not play a role in the deal). A Washington Post investigation this summer noted that Trump’s sons have invested heavily in defense-technology companies; the companies have scored “at least $3.2 billion in direct government business since the sons invested and an additional $3.1 billion in future contract options.” (Company representatives told the Post that they secured their business without assistance from Trump’s sons.)
Where do any of these people get the idea that this is appropriate or that they can get away with it? From the president himself, naturally. Trump has moved on from small-scale grifts such as charging the Secret Service exorbitant fees to stay in his hotels during his first term to far more ambitious and lucrative schemes such as crypto ventures; even conservative estimates put his gains during this term alone in the billions.
Though Trump doesn’t have ethical scruples, he does have a sense of right and wrong: It’s right for him to profiteer, but wrong for others to make too much money from his name. That’s where Blair, LaCivita, and Guilfoyle may run into trouble. Politico reports that Republicans’ “knives are now fully out” for the two consultants. Trump himself weighed in on Truth Social, saying he was unaware of their clients but adding that he “will, on reflection, ask them and, if there’s a conflict, I will terminate them, immediately!” Firing them just before the midterms seems risky, as it might just create more chaos for Republicans, but they could make for good scapegoats after the fact. Trump has not spoken publicly about the Guilfoyle story, although Vice President Vance said he didn’t “love that.” In a further embarrassment, the article emerged while Secretary of State Marco Rubio was visiting Athens.
Perhaps inevitably, Guilfoyle’s relationship with Deters ended acrimoniously. “I have paid you $300,000 over the years,” he wrote her in 2025, adding, in an amusingly self-negating flourish, “As of this memo, I have not received one favor. I am not naive or a sucker.” She was not happy, either. “What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing,” she told him at one point, per the Journal. Her warning may have been too late.
U.S. prosecutors charged Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, with conspiring to torture Americans and other prisoners in Venezuela to suppress opposition and maintain power. The new charge has been added to the federal case against the couple, who are scheduled for trial in June 2027.
At least 30 people were killed in a Russian strike on a bus in eastern Ukraine, a day after another Russian strike killed 22 people in an apartment building. The attacks come as Russia intensifies its use of drones, missiles, and guided bombs against Ukrainian targets.
Hurricane Isaias strengthened into the first hurricane of the Atlantic season as it approached the Gulf Coast, and landfall is expected as soon as tomorrow. It could reach Category 3 strength, prompting hurricane watches and mandatory evacuations in parts of Florida.
Whenever I receive a text, this is what happens. I pick up my phone. So far, so good. I experience whatever emotion the message elicits—the pleasant warmth of being reached out to, possibly the annoyance of being interrupted. Then, if conditions are right, if I’m not too busy or in the middle of talking with someone else, if my mind is at peace, if my anxiety is at no more than a low hum, if Mercury is not in retrograde, I will respond right then and there. If conditions are not right, it will be as though the text never existed at all.
Defying the trend toward footborne infantry assaults, the Ukrainian 3rd Army Corps deployed armored vehicles for Operation Vivaldi
The operation was a reminder that vehicles are still useful despite the ever-present danger from drones
But vehicles need a lot of support to give them a fighting chance
Armored vehicles aren't dead in Ukraine—they just need a lot of help. That's one of the biggest lessons from the Ukrainian 3rd Army Corps' Operation Vivaldi, its recent successful counteroffensive just north of the town of Lyman in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast.
Russia spent 18 months building its salient toward Sloviansk; Ukraine took much of it back in three. By 30 September, three of four planned phases in, the operation had returned 176 sq km to Ukrainian control, taken 250 Russian prisoners, and cost Russia more than 5,000 killed and wounded, Ukraine's presidential office said. It also foiled a Russian plan to break into the rear of the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk urban area, the office said.
Defying critics who insisted vehicles couldn't possibly survive in the drone-patrolled gray zone, the 3rd Army Corps repeatedly deployed mechanized forces as it counterattacked across a roughly 100 sq km salient the Russian 20th and 25th Combined Arms Armies had extended toward Sloviansk, one of the last two big free cities in Donetsk Oblast.
Maneuvering for months under a veil of secrecy, the 3rd Army Corps found and exploited gaps along the flanks of the 20th and 25th CAAs, ultimately breaking into the Russian armies' rears and forcing them to pull back across the Zherebets River in order to avoid encirclement.
Armored vehicles were key to the Ukrainian effort. They sped assault troops into battle, dropped them off under fire, and then supported them as they clashed with the Russians. "Maneuver warfare isn't going anywhere," stated Ryan O'Leary, a US Army veteran who once commanded volunteers in Ukraine.
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Ukraine is now sending its tanks into battle with drone escorts: they can drive into a Russian kill zone and come back alive
3rd Army Corps commanders knew they were taking a risk deploying armored vehicles in a Russian-controlled salient patrolled by first-person-view drones from Russia's elite Rubicon Center drone unit. But they clearly believed that, with adequate support, the vehicles could accomplish their missions—and survive.
They were right. A dramatic video shot by 3rd Army Corps troopers depicts the troopers disembarking from their armored trucks and rushing into the fight while small arms fire clatters all around them.
Given the intensity of the Russian fire, a mechanized assault "was the only real way to push positions in an effective manner to keep losses low as well as gain and hold momentum and aggression," O'Leary wrote. Walking into battle under the cover of trees might help the infantry avoid the attention of overhead drones, but it takes too long to sustain an aggressive assault, and it can be difficult to mass enough footborne infantry to overcome stiff enemy defenses.
"This is something that hasn't changed even with the advent of drone warfare coming of age," O'Leary added. "Suppression tactics and such have changed and now there is more than just indirect fires and counterassaults that you must be able to suppress and plan for."
But the concept of the infantry-carrying armored vehicle "isn't going anywhere," O'Leary stressed. "Especially when it takes a drone tens of minutes to get to target area, acquire target and hit the target. Right now, the front is extremely susceptible to maneuvering forces on assaults if it is planned right and executed properly."
The 3rd Army Corps' Operation Vivaldi is an excellent example of an operation that was planned right and executed properly—in ways that helped the corps' mechanized forces fight and survive.
New footage shows Ukrainian forces storming and clearing Russian positions during the "Vivaldi" counteroffensive in the Lyman direction. The assault was captured firsthand by Ukrainian soldiers using GoPro cameras. pic.twitter.com/qxyNHl0n3A
The corps explained that it deployed footborne scouts to find the best paths for follow-on vehicular assaults—and subsequent medical evacuations. Scouts "conducted recon of the front lines, ensured the breakthrough of equipment and led adjacent units along secret paths while evacuating the wounded," the 3rd Army Corps stated.
Ukraine liberates area above Lyman in Operation Vivaldi. Map: Euromaidan Press
Before the armored vehicles rolled into action along the pre-scouted paths, the 3rd Army Corps deployed robotic engineering vehicles to clear Russian mines. After that, the corps sent in old BTR-60 wheeled armored vehicles modified for remote control and packed with anti-tank mines. These "robotic kamikaze complexes ... were used to demolish the enemy's strongest fortifications," the corps said.
Only after the assault routes were scouted and cleared of mines and Russian strongpoints did the manned vehicles and their precious infantry cargo roll out. We don't know how many losses the 3rd Army Corps' mechanized infantry suffered on the attack, but we do know they ultimately prevailed—when the battered Russian 20th and 25th CAAs retreated.
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In Ukraine’s Vivaldi offensive, nobody rides in the BTR-60s. Bulgaria’s old troop carriers go into Russian bunkers packed with mines
"Recent Ukrainian operations demonstrate that maneuver is not dead," stressed Mick Ryan, a retired Australian army general. "Despite the difficulty in ground operations maneuver observed in eastern Ukraine over the past few years, offensive operations are still possible in modern war. But they need the intellectual effort to develop new techniques to make them viable and repeatable at scale."
In addition to the reconnaissance and robots-first engineering and suppression tactics the 3rd Army Corps employed, Ryan recommended commanders deploy more drone-grounding electronic warfare and use AI tools to help plan attacks.
But ages-old human elements are still essential, Ryan wrote. "Developing viable methods for offensive tactical and operational maneuver in the 21st century also demands the inclusion of older ideas about the employment of mass, logistic support and casualty evacuation [and the] maintenance of morale and leader's provision of purpose to their people."
Even when the assault route is clear, it's understandably terrifying to ride in an armored vehicle across drone-patrolled terrain. But a good leader can motivate their troops to try.
In Africa, high-quality seeds can produce improved crops with enhanced nutrition, pest-resistance, and drought tolerance. However, such seeds for maize, vegetables, and cereal crops can be indistinguishable from counterfeit, or “fake” seeds. That’s creating a massive potential for fraud in seed quality that can potentially deprive farmers of access to climate-resilient seeds while putting their harvests and incomes at risk. A group of researchers analyzed the efforts of 50 African countries to combat counterfeit seeds. They found a wide range of penalties for selling them across different governments, and concluded that a significant gap exists between government policy commitments and implementation, largely due to limited capacity. Study lead author Ed Mabaya, a professor of global development at Cornell University in the U.S., told Mongabay, “For most smallholder farmers in Africa, planting happens once a season, often timed to the first rains. A farmer who buys counterfeit seed usually finds out only after planting, when the seed fails to germinate or the crop grows poorly. By then it is usually too late to replant, so the loss is not a slightly smaller harvest but potentially the whole season’s food and income.” That can lead to food insecurity for the individual farmer and local markets more broadly. Counterfeiters can dye or repackage grain and sell it as branded, certified seed, Mabaya said. “The problem arises because certified seed looks exactly like ordinary grain but sells for a much higher price, in some cases several times more for hybrid maize. That price gap…This article was originally published on Mongabay
Chi scrive lo scenario sceglie il nemico. L’Europa si esercita alla fine del mondo; il resto del mondo si esercita a farne a meno. A Levante questa sera, giovedì 8 ottobre 2026, Jeff Hoffman dialoga con Margherita Furlan, giornalista e analista geopolitica, direttrice di Casa del Sole TV, e con Vincenzo Maddaloni, giornalista e scrittore, direttore del Centro studi Berlin89. A Bruxelles gli ambasciatori dei ventisette preparano a porte chiuse, senza telefoni, lo «scenario da incubo» di un attacco ibrido con molte vittime. Dal 13 ottobre i cieli del Tirreno ospitano Steadfast Noon, l’esercitazione nucleare annuale della NATO. Ad Accra il Ghana annuncia che chiederà di entrare nei BRICS. AFFRONTIAMO INSIEME «Risposta dolorosa», «Schengen militare», «10 milioni di droni»: la nuova lingua della Commissione europea Il protocollo d’emergenza di Bruxelles: difesa europea o competenza che i Trattati non danno? Steadfast Noon: Ghedi, Aviano, Amendola, Gioia del Colle, Trapani e la Sardegna sorvolata a bassa quota Un Parlamento informato da un avviso tecnico per i piloti: la sovranità comincia dall’informazione La Germania tra la paura di Lipsia, il rifiuto della guerra e il riarmo come politica industriale Chi incassa lo scenario: droni, cavi, satelliti e gli Azionisti dell’Apocalisse Se la paura è il prodotto, perché i titoli della difesa sono scesi? Il Ghana bussa ai BRICS passando da Nuova Delhi: multipolarità o diplomazia di facciata? Cosa guardare nelle prossime due settimane per capire se lo scenario resta uno scenario LIBRI DEGLI OSPITI Vincenzo Maddaloni, «Voglia di rivoluzione», Nexus Edizioni, 2024 Vincenzo Maddaloni con Modini, «L’atomica degli ayatollah», Nutrimenti, 2006 Margherita Furlan, «BRICS Scacco Matto», La Casa del Sole Edizioni, 2025 (italiano, inglese, russo) SOSTIENI CASA DEL SOLE TV Casa del Sole TV è un progetto di giornalismo indipendente, autofinanziato, senza editori né partiti. IBAN: IT63P0326822300052392596590 Intestato a: La Casa del Sole Edizioni Causale: Donazione Casa del Sole TV MEMBERSHIP YOUTUBE https://www.youtube.com/@CasadelSoleT… Analista Multipolare: €5/mese Inviato della Verità: €15/mese Architetto del Futuro: €25/mese I LIBRI DI MARGHERITA FURLAN «BRICS Scacco Matto», disponibile in italiano, inglese e russo SEGUI CASA DEL SOLE TV YouTube: @CasadelSoleTVChannel La guerra è il prodotto, il caos è la materia prima. #Levante#CasadelSoleTV#MargheritaFurlan#VincenzoMaddaloni#JeffHoffman#Geopolitica#Multipolarismo#GuerraIbrida#SteadfastNoon#NATO#BRICS#Ghana
They rarely make headlines, but they happen every single day. While difficult news reaches us non-stop, there are scientists, doctors, teachers, and volunteers working quietly to make the world a slightly better place. And when we pay attention to that work, we realize there is far more to be grateful for than we imagine.
We can thank science, which today protects against HIV with just two injections a year and reaches, for the first time, rich and poor countries simultaneously. We can thank technology, which restores voice and gestures to those who lost them, and artificial intelligence, which detects heart disease in just a few seconds. And we can be grateful, right here in Canada, for a simple measure that ensures thousands of children do not learn on an empty stomach.
None of this is a miracle. It is the result of years of effort, persistence, and cooperation among people who refused to give up. These are advancements that remind us that progress is possible and that humanity remains capable of the very best.
In the following pages, we have brought together a few of these stories. Not to forget what is still wrong, but to remember that, even in uncertain times, there is always a light shining.
Guiomar e Maria Célia (DR)
Kidney donated from mother to daughter reaches 111 years old, breaking a world record
A kidney donated from a mother to her daughter in Brazil in 1969 is still functioning and has reached a biological age of 111 years. It has now entered the history books as the oldest in the world.
Guiomar, who was 54 at the time, “had no hesitation whatsoever” in donating her kidney to her daughter, Maria Célia, who was suffering from kidney failure. At the time, the procedure was a novelty in Brazil—the first had taken place just five years earlier, and only about 50 were performed per year.
In the prime of her youth, Maria Célia underwent three hemodialysis sessions before the kidney transplant. But in 1969, they decided to move forward with the surgery, which took about five hours and carried several associated risks, as ultrasounds, CT scans, or MRIs were not available. “I never experienced rejection, I never had complications, I was never hospitalized,” the recipient told the Brazilian portal G1, adding that her mother also led a healthy life: “She never got sick, never had anything wrong. She died at age 97, without any complications.”
Speaking to the publication, nephrologist Dr. José Medina Pestana revealed that the situation is exceptional, given that transplanted organs last, on average, 20 to 30 years. The fact that they were mother and daughter, however, may have been the key to its success.
“I spent nine months inside my mother, and today she is here inside me. Alive. Much longer inside me. And she will stay,” Maria Célia highlights.
Currently, Brazil performs about 27,000 transplants per year, of which roughly 6,000 are kidney transplants. The surgeries are carried out under the Unified Health System (SUS), which provides anti-rejection medications free of charge. Estimates indicate that over 140,000 people have undergone kidney transplants in the country.
(DR)
A twice-a-year injection against HIV
For decades, major innovations in the fight against HIV took years to reach poorer countries. With lenacapavir, the story is unfolding differently. This injectable medication, which protects against the virus in nearly 100% of cases, needs to be administered only twice a year. It is a massive advantage over daily pills, which many people struggle to adhere to.
For the first time, an innovation in HIV prevention has arrived almost simultaneously in rich and low-income countries. The initial doses arrived in Eswatini and Zambia in November 2025 and began being administered in December. According to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, 49,000 people had been protected by the end of June. By mid-August, that number was close to 100,000 across nine African countries. By the end of 2026, the drug is expected to be available in 24 countries.
The good news doesn’t end there. Cheaper generic versions are expected to hit the market at the end of this year, which will expand access further in 2027. Researchers estimate that lenacapavir could prevent nearly a third of new infections in parts of eastern and southern Africa and accelerate control of the epidemic by up to 14 years.
(DR)
Restoring voice and gestures to those who lost them
Imagine losing the ability to speak and move, but continuing to think with complete clarity. This is the reality for many people who have suffered a severe stroke or live with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). For them, new hope has now arrived from the University of California, San Francisco.
A team led by bioengineer Samantha Brosler and neurosurgeon Edward Chang has developed a brain implant that allows paralyzed individuals to speak and gesture through a digital avatar using only their thoughts. The device, about the size of a cell phone, contains 253 electrodes and is placed over the region of the brain that controls movements. It reads brain signals and simultaneously translates them into words and gestures such as waving or clapping.
The system was tested on two patients. The patient paralyzed after a stroke achieved 100% accuracy in test conversations. The patient with ALS achieved 85% accuracy in gestures and 75% in speech. For now, the participants trained on ten simple phrases, such as “hello” and “nice to meet you,” and ten gestures, across a hundred combinations.
“Gestures play an important role in communication,” explains Samantha Brosler. The same word can carry different meanings depending on the gesture that accompanies it. The study was published on September 14 in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
(DR)
Artificial intelligence detects heart conditions in seconds
The electrocardiogram is one of the simplest and cheapest medical exams: it takes just a few seconds and is available in almost every health center. Until now, it served primarily as an initial screening tool. Thanks to artificial intelligence, it may soon reveal far more.
Researchers at Imperial College London, led by physician Arunashis Sau, have developed a software program that analyzes an electrocardiogram in under two seconds and identifies signs of heart disease that doctors cannot see with the naked eye. The system learned from millions of tests in Brazil and the United States and was then tested on 67,000 patients. It correctly identified 81% of heart failure cases and 90% of heart valve diseases.
Today, many patients wait months for an echocardiogram—the test that confirms these conditions. With this tool, it will be possible to quickly identify who needs it most urgently. The goal is not to replace cardiologists, but to help them reach those in need much faster.
“A 10-second electrocardiogram, which was once a low-precision screening tool, could soon become one of the most informative tests in medicine,” said Professor Fu Siong Ng, one of the study’s leads. The results were presented at the European Society of Cardiology congress. Before reaching hospitals, the tool still requires approval from health authorities.
(DR)
No child should learn on an empty stomach
It’s hard to pay attention in math class when you’re hungry. Recognizing this, Canada took a major step forward: the National School Food Program became law on March 26, 2026, making it permanent and protecting it from future political shifts.
This school year, more than 10,000 schools are offering food programs to students—representing about 80% of the country’s public schools. The program will reach an additional 400,000 children annually. Approaches vary by region: free breakfasts, “pay-what-you-can” lunches, grab-and-go snacks, school gardens, and community meals featuring traditional foods.
Federal funding to provinces and territories doubled to $140 million per year. Starting in 2029–30, the government guarantees $216.6 million annually to maintain the program. Families are feeling the difference too. According to the government, a family with two school-aged children can save around $800 a year on groceries.
“When children have access to healthy food at school, they can learn, grow, and reach their full potential,” stated Parliamentary Secretary Anna Gainey. In a time when the cost of living weighs heavily on so many families’ budgets, this is a measure well worth giving thanks for.
(DR)
US approves new Parkinson’s drug that acts differently in the brain
Hope for patients: a new drug for Parkinson’s disease has just been approved in the United States. The FDA, the country’s drug regulatory agency, authorized the use of tavapadon for adults living with the disease. The medication, which will be sold under the brand name Juvmo, is manufactured by AbbVie and is expected to hit American pharmacies this October.
The novelty lies in how the drug acts within the brain. Tavapadon is the first approved agonist that selectively targets D1 and D5 dopamine receptors, whereas similar medications currently in use mainly target D2 and D3 receptors.
The pill is taken once daily and can be used on its own or alongside levodopa, one of the primary medications for Parkinson’s.
Improvement in movement
The new medication is not proven to cure or stop the progression of Parkinson’s. The benefit demonstrated so far is the management of motor symptoms.
Another data point caught the researchers’ attention. After 85 weeks of follow-up, 93% of participants using tavapadon alongside levodopa did not need to increase their levodopa dosage.
Among patients in the early stages of the disease who were not yet taking levodopa, 94% remained off levodopa during that same period.
Matthew (DR)
McDonald’s employee covers meal for customer who forgot wallet and receives surprise for his generosity
Look at what generosity can do! A young McDonald’s employee paid out of his own pocket for a meal for a customer he didn’t know, who had forgotten his wallet and couldn’t complete the payment using his phone. The gesture touched the customer so deeply that he reached out to a television station to share the young man’s act so he could be recognized. And that kindness came back to the young man in the form of gifts!
Matthew works at a McDonald’s location in Rexburg, Idaho, in the United States, and had no idea that paying for that burger and a milkshake would cause such a stir. The incident happened in July and was recently published by the portal Sunny Skyz.
The crew from the Feel Good Friday show, which regularly surprises community members who perform good deeds, sought out young Matthew and handed him several gift cards and presents in recognition of his attitude.
Daniel Romano (DR)
Pizzeria owner sees elderly woman eating from trash and starts chain of kindness against hunger
A pizzeria owner was heartbroken to see an elderly woman eating pizza out of the trash. Daniel Romano, owner of D’Romano’s Pizza, brought the woman inside, threw away what she had found, and served her a fresh, hot slice. The woman began to cry upon receiving the food.
Daniel told her: “Don’t cry, eat!” After that encounter, he made the decision to offer pizza to anyone in a similar situation who came to his shop. “I don’t want anyone eating from the trash,” said the shopkeeper from the Bronx, New York, in the United States.
The story, shared on social media in July, gained millions of views and gained traction again in late August when Fox 5 New York showed that the gesture had expanded beyond the pizzeria, sparking a massive chain of kindness.
Still deeply impacted by the hungry elderly woman’s story, Daniel grabbed a marker and wrote a note on the shop’s window: “To the people eating out of my trash: I have more love for you than you realize,” the message begins.
In the rest of the note, he asks that anyone in that situation step inside and simply say they are hungry, promising to offer a slice of pizza and fresh water free of charge. No explanations needed—just ask.
“I think there’s too much hate, too much anger, too much negativity. Why not put a smile on someone’s face?” said the business owner.
Daniel recalls that his mother, Carmella Romano, used to repeat an old Italian saying: “A desperate person always makes a better decision on a full stomach than an empty one,” he shared. And he never forgot it.
Chain of kindness reached other states
Daniel’s initiative inspired many people and set off a chain of goodwill. Today, strangers call from various states to pay in advance for new slices for people in need who arrive hungry. “I have people from Texas, Arkansas, Alaska, everywhere calling me,” Daniel said, laughing at the volume of calls he started receiving.
This is an edition of Video Village, David Sims’s newsletter that unearths cinematic gems and brings readers into his movie obsession. Sign up for it here.
Welcome to Video Village, a new space for The Atlantic’s film-loving readers. For this, my first edition, my editors challenged me to lay out my perspective on my own taste, so I’ve worked up a list of movies that I think define this strange decade thus far. These are all personal favorites, yes, but this is not precisely a “best of” list; think more an atmospheric overview of how Hollywood looks and operates today, which will be a recurring theme of this newsletter.
Let’s get two of the most obvious picks out of the way: Greta Gerwig’s Barbieand Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, whose release on the same day in July 2023—and during a strike that kneecapped Hollywood—resulted in a multibillion-dollar cultural phenomenon. The industry has spent the following years trying its darndest to recapture that success—and to undo the coronavirus pandemic’s unprecedented effects on moviegoing as a whole. Those movies aside, here’s a look at 10 other great films that illustrate the spirit of the 2020s.
Da 5 Bloods(2020, directed by Spike Lee): The decade kicked off with what still has been its oddest year, defined by COVID lockdowns, theaters going out of business, and the dominance of streaming services at a moment when the only way to experience good movies (for most people) was at home. A lot of the wonderful films released that year feel like a blur; maybe the best example of a memory-holed masterpiece is Lee’s Vietnam epic, Da 5 Bloods, which I’d love to someday see on a giant screen with booming sound. It boldly ties the failures of America’s intervention in that war to the country’s struggles since, with Delroy Lindo’s troubled vet turned MAGA patriot the chief emblem of its chaotic viewpoint. Hopefully, this ambitious movie, whose production was similarly fascinating, will be rediscovered in the years ahead—ideally on a bigger screen than a television set.
The Worst Person in the World(2021, directed by Joachim Trier): The ultimate work of self-reflexive Millennial-core, the Norwegian director Trier’s sharp dramedy came just as some moviegoers were returning to theaters after lockdowns had frozen them in time and anxiety. It follows Julie (played by Renate Reinsve), a witty 30-year-old who simply does not know what to do with her life. The film charts her every stutter-step career decision and corresponding romantic entanglements with bittersweet aplomb. All of Trier’s movies are worth checking out (the most recent being Sentimental Value, a hit at this year’s Oscars). But this one remains my personal favorite.
Drive My Car (2021, directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi): One of the best examples of William Goldman’s notorious industry adage—“Nobody knows anything”—is this three-hour, soft-spoken Japanese drama. The story of a depressed theater director’s effort to stage a multilingual production of Uncle Vanya became a surprise sensation, launching Hamaguchi to art-house fame and snagging four major Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. It’s a beautiful work of deceptive tranquility, where aloof conversations belie dark emotional storms beneath; it’s also the greatest adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s writing ever put to film. Hamaguchi has since proved to be one of the decade’s most fascinating auteurs, and his work is appointment viewing. (Next up is All of a Sudden, out this November.)
Tár(2022, directed by Todd Field): I finally became convinced that the theater experience wasn’t going anywhere while watching the titular protagonist of Tár, Lydia (Cate Blanchett), confront a child who had bullied her daughter on the playground—I felt the entire viewing audience ripple with delight. Here we all were, observing this egotistical conductor whose life was spiraling to pieces, and struggling to resist the urge to cheer for such obviously aberrant behavior. Field’s film is a fantastic portrayal of ego, power, and the kind of rapid professional disintegration that’s become more common in the celebrity sphere of late; it’s a totally unique take on a common spectacle.
Nope(2022, directed by Jordan Peele): Peele announced himself as a film director with the subversive smash that was Get Out and could have led his career in any direction from there. I love that he’s instead doubled down on original horror storytelling. Nope is his most recent movie (a new project is supposedly in the works but remains a mystery), and it’s his best and most ambitious: a sly tale of how the entertainment world can chew people up and spit them out. It also features a flying monster that can literally do that.
RRR (2022, directed by S. S. Rajamouli): This epic from India’s Telugu-language industry (known as “Tollywood”) blasted into multiplexes out of nowhere, just as the Hollywood blockbuster began truly spooling up again. RRR showed Americans how grandiose, CGI-assisted action filmmaking can still feel fun and original; the movie is a sprawling, 1920s-set musical epic of revolt and revenge designed to inspire viewers to stand and applaud throughout. The crowd-pleaser par excellence broke records around the world and even won an Oscar for Best Original Song. Rajamouli’s much-anticipated next film, Varanasi,is due for release in 2027.
Asteroid City (2023, directed by Wes Anderson): Few raves I’ve written in my time at The Atlantic have been more polarizing than my championing of Anderson’s sci-fi comedy; multiple people who had grown wary of the writer-director’s output have angrily confronted me about my review. Plenty of readers, however, agree with me wholeheartedly that it’s the director’s best film in close to a decade. Whatever other viewers make of it (and all of Anderson’s recent work, which is hermetic and tightly designed even by his standards), I think Asteroid City is one of the most profound attempts to wrestle with the odd sense of community and tragedy that emerged when most of us were unable to leave our home. It’s a very modern portrait of quarantine—albeit set in the 1950s—that doesn’t pull its punches on the darkness that its broad ensemble is struggling with.
Red Rooms (2024, directed by Pascal Plante): Looking back at 2020s cinema, we’ll find that a defining trend was contending with the spiraling madness of online life. Red Rooms is maybe the best horror movie ever made about being on your computer too much: The Canadian thriller is a freaky tale of a true crime–obsessed woman (Juliette Gariépy) fixated on a murder case that’s sparked a media circus. It’s a profoundly disturbing watch, even though it holds back on graphic visuals (like many a great horror movie, it leaves the worst to your imagination). Red Rooms was a sneaky festival hit before it trickled into cinemas, and it’s guaranteed to become a long-running cult classic.
Eddington(2025, directed by Ari Aster): This internet-horror story runs right at the bizarre experience of the pandemic lockdowns. Aster’s Eddington was profoundly divisive on release and was quickly dismissed by some critics for its sheer unpleasantness. It’s worth a watch (or, if you hated it the first time, a revisit); Aster’s got a keen eye for the type of online brain poisoning that has grown and spread across the world over the past six years, and he has a darkly humorous perspective on the way identity politics have been misappropriated by bad actors. I had barely heard of data centers when I saw Eddington last summer; now they are often at the top of political discourse. What else did Aster see coming?
Backrooms(2026, directed by Kane Parsons): I’m hardly proclaiming Backrooms the movie of the year; 2026 isn’t even over yet. But its release definitely seems to have pushed Hollywood to recognize a new frontier in filmmaking. The horror film, a bewildering adaptation of a series of YouTube videos, was directed by a 20-year-old who taught himself visual-effects technology during high school.Set in a world of eerie liminal spaces, Backrooms feels somehow beamed in from another universe while also being a slick creep-fest that could draw in young viewers on “vibes” alone. The unsettling promise of its scares just feels so unlike anything I’ve seen in theaters lately—I loved it.
An Essay I Enjoyed
Robert Falconer / Prime
Carrie, With Kid Gloves By Emma Stefansky
The climax of Carrie, Stephen King’s debut horror novel, is so famous that even people who haven’t read it or seen any of the numerous adaptations know the basics. The eponymous Carrie White, driven to the edge of sanity after years of abuse from her classmates and hyper-religious mother, gets drenched in a bucket of pig’s blood at her prom. She then uses her latent telekinetic powers to destroy her high school and her hometown.It’s an extreme reaction to an extreme situation, the climax of a revenge story in which vengeance is just another tragic act of violence.The line between villain and victim blurs.
October tends to mark the start of a real glutof releases: Many major premieres happen in quick succession at big fall festivals (in Telluride, Venice, Toronto, and New York), and then they come to regular theatergoers—and bring the awards race into focus. One of this year’s contenders, in theaters this week, is Fjord. Directed by the Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu, it won him the Palme d’Or at this summer’s Cannes Film Festival—an award that has become a bit of a springboard to more mainstream success, as it did for the recent Best Picture winners Anora and Parasite. But I’m of two minds on whether Fjord will follow in their footsteps. Like all of Mungiu’s movies, it is challenging in its remoteness, asking the audience to hold some uncomfortable truths and make their own decisions about them.
The film follows a Romanian family that has immigrated to a remote Norwegian village. The parents, played by Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, are both stern and religious, placing them well outside of the country’s secular cultural norms. The couple is soon accused of abuse, and the government takes their children away while an investigation proceeds—a situation that erupts into something of an international incident. The reality of what’s happening is plain to grasp: This parenting style is at best alienating, and the seemingly tolerant society surrounding the family doesn’t quite know how to deal with it. Fjord is grim, and at 146 minutes, it’s a demanding watch—one that may be too disaffecting to break through. But it’s also an undeniably engrossing experience; no character feels truly sympathetic, and best intentions crumble in the face of internet outrage and ill-functioning bureaucracy.
What Else I’m Watching
I rewatched Paweł Pawlikowski’s film Cold War in preparation for the upcoming release of Fatherland, which will complete a loose trilogy about postwar Europe; it’s short, sometimes sexy, and sweetly tragic (and streaming on Prime Video).
I’m also catching up on the filmography of another great director, Lee Chang-dong, whose Possible Love is out at the end of the month (and in November on Netflix). I watched his debut, Green Fish, which is a lovely and poetic little crime saga from 1997. (It’s available to rent on Prime Video and Apple TV, and streaming on Kanopy, though I watched it on a disc published by Vinegar Syndrome.)
Finally, I caught up with last year’s documentary Pompei: Below the Clouds, from Gianfranco Rosi. It’s a gorgeous and fragmented portrayal of life in modern Naples in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, and it’s streaming on Mubi.
Africa’s monitored wildlife populations have declined an average of 80% since 1970, according to a new global assessment. The report also points to pockets of recovery where conservation efforts have been maintained over decades. The report on the decline in the average size of monitored populations was released Oct. 8 in the Living Planet Report 2026. It tracked monitored populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians between 1970 and 2022. Africa’s 80% decline compares with a global average of 73%; Latin America and the Caribbean recorded the largest regional decline, at 95%. The findings come as governments prepare to assess progress on the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, whose 23 targets include commitments to halt human-induced extinctions and support the recovery of threatened species by 2030. The framework also calls for conserving at least 30% of the world’s land, inland waters and seas by 2030. The Living Planet Index, managed by the Zoological Society of London in partnership with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), draws on 35,803 population trends from 5,790 vertebrate species worldwide. The index measure changes in the average size of monitored populations, it does not mean that Africa lost 80% of its wild animals or wildlife species, a press release obtained by Mongabay cautions. Habitat destruction and degradation are the most frequently reported pressures on the wildlife populations tracked globally, the report finds. Overexploitation, climate change, pollution, disease and invasive species are among the other threats identified. In the Congo Basin, for example, those pressures…This article was originally published on Mongabay
We wake up to news of wars, fall asleep to reports of crises, and in between, we scroll through a screen that rarely gives us a reason to smile. In this scenario, talking about gratitude might seem like a luxury, or even naive. But is it really?
For psychotherapist Angela Masuzzo, the answer is clear: looking for reasons to hope is not naive; it is necessary. “Without hope, we often cannot move forward,” she states. In this conversation ahead of Thanksgiving, the psychotherapist helps us understand what happens within us when we choose to give thanks and why that choice is far from being just a pleasant feeling.
The specialist explains that our brains have a natural tendency to give more weight to what goes wrong than to what goes well. This is the so-called negativity bias, which social media and constant news consumption make even more intense. To counter this effect, she proposes something she calls “self-preservation”: knowing one’s own limits and knowing when to disconnect, without ceasing to care about the world.
Throughout the interview, Angela Masuzzo also distinguishes healthy optimism from so-called “toxic positivity”—the kind that forces us to say everything is fine when, inside, we are exhausted, anxious, or sad. For the psychotherapist, being optimistic requires courage: the courage to be honest about how we feel and, even so, to believe that there are viable paths forward.
Her simplest advice is also the hardest to follow nowadays: pause. Pause to see, hear, and notice the small things—like a conversation, a gesture of affection, or a shared meal—that we so often take for granted.
As the daughter of immigrants who left for Brazil after World War II, Angela Masuzzo knows firsthand the value of fresh starts. Because of this, she looks with special fondness upon the experience of immigrant communities, such as the Portuguese in Canada, who have learned to value every achievement because they know all too well the price paid for it.
This is a conversation that reminds us that, even on the hardest days, there is still so much to be thankful for.
Milénio Stadium:From a psychological standpoint, what happens within us when we practice gratitude? Is it merely a pleasant feeling, or does it have tangible effects on our well-being and mental health?
Angela Masuzzo: Gratitude is something that we should all cultivate in our daily lives. Practicing gratitude is often simply shifting the focus away from what we think we lack and learning to value and appreciate what we have in the present, as well as what we have already experienced in the past.
Being grateful is being able to look at life from a more positive perspective, recognizing the good things even when we are going through difficult times. Maintaining this focus can contribute to a more balanced mental health and help us live in a more optimistic, humble, and conscious way.
Gratitude also helps us accept that we won’t always have everything we desire at the exact moment we want it. Sometimes, what didn’t happen, what we don’t yet have, or even something we lost might be part of a larger process that we cannot yet comprehend.
Cultivating gratitude does not mean ignoring life’s hardships, pain, or challenges. It means learning to recognize that, even in the midst of them, there are still reasons to give thanks. It is a simple practice, but one that can transform the way we see ourselves, the people around us, and our own lives.
MS:Wars, economic crises, polarization, non-stop bad news… With so much negativity around us, is it naive to look for reasons to hope? What can help us find reasons to keep the light of hope in humanity burning?
AM: It is by no means naive to look for reasons to hope. Without hope, we often cannot move forward.
There is a lot happening in the world today. For people who are more sensitive to all these news items and events, practicing “self-preservation” can be very important.
And what does that mean? It doesn’t mean becoming indifferent individuals who don’t care about the world or what is happening. It means having the ability to assess our own limits and recognize how much we can absorb emotionally before that information begins to affect us negatively.
Limiting our constant exposure to news—whether on television, social media, artificial intelligence, or any other media outlet—can help relieve that emotional overload. We don’t need to be plugged in all the time to everything that is happening to remain conscious and engaged with the world.
Sometimes, preserving our emotional health means knowing when to stop. It means stepping away for a few hours or a few days and directing our attention toward the positive things that also exist around us.
Caring for ourselves in this way is neither selfishness nor a lack of awareness. It is a way to protect our ability to continue feeling empathy, to keep the light of hope burning, and to believe that, despite so many difficulties, there are still many good things happening in the world.
MS:We seem to have a natural tendency to focus more on what goes wrong than on what goes well. Why does this happen? And in what ways do social media and constant news consumption fuel this pessimistic view of the world?
AM: Yes, that tendency is real, and the reason why it happens is a good question. It is due to the so-called negativity bias. What does that mean? Simply that our brain has a natural inclination to give more importance to negative things than to positive ones. Our attention ends up being more directed toward a potential danger, a threat, a loss, or a conflict.
Social media and constant news consumption cause this effect to become even more intense. We are surrounded by news about the world, our country, and people that isn’t always positive, and that can reinforce a more pessimistic view of the world and even of humanity.
Often, it is human beings themselves who are involved in conflicts, wars, violence, crises, and other problems that end up being precisely the news we hear, read, and consume daily. When we are repeatedly exposed to this type of content, we can begin to get the impression that everything is worse than it actually is.
Therefore, it is important to remember that what receives the most attention in the news does not always represent reality as a whole. There are also many good things happening, people helping other people, and positive changes, but those don’t always receive the same spotlight.
MS:Can a more positive outlook truly help us live better? What is the distinction between healthy optimism and “toxic positivity,” which forces us to pretend that everything is fine?
AM: Yes, but that is a conscious and intentional decision we have to make to protect ourselves, including protecting our physical and mental health.
Practicing healthy optimism requires courage: the courage to be truthful and honest with ourselves and with what we are experiencing. When we enter the cycle of “pretending” that everything is fine, we often don’t get to experience optimism in a light and genuine way. On the contrary, we can end up in a constant state of alert, in that well-known “fight or flight response.” We are always trying to run, avoid, or protect ourselves from what we feel might hit us.
Being present and practicing honesty in a careful manner is not easy in today’s world. Many people aren’t truly interested in a real answer. The question “How are you doing?” is often already accompanied by an almost automatic response: “I’m good, thanks.” And it stops there.
But how many people are screaming inside, hidden behind that “everything’s fine”? How many are merely functioning, smiling, fulfilling their obligations, while inside they are exhausted, anxious, sad, or overwhelmed?
Perhaps that is precisely where courage comes in: the courage to be a little more honest. That doesn’t mean exposing everything to everyone, nor living life only talking about hardships. It means acknowledging what we are truly feeling, respecting our own boundaries, and allowing space for both pain and hope to exist.
Healthy optimism isn’t pretending that nothing is wrong. It is looking at reality as it is, recognizing what is difficult, and yet choosing to believe that there are possibilities, resources, people, and paths that can help us move forward. Perhaps, with a bit more honesty and less need to pretend, we can live in a lighter and more authentic way.
MS:What small daily habits or gestures can help us cultivate gratitude and a more positive mindset, both within ourselves and our families? And what advice would you give to someone going through a difficult time who feels they have nothing to be grateful for?
AM: There are people who have immense difficulty seeing the small positive things around them, and sometimes even quite significant ones.
Gratitude is a state of mind. When it doesn’t arise naturally, we can cultivate it at different moments in our lives. It is about developing the awareness that, no matter the size of the problem, difficulty, or obstacle we are facing, there is almost always an important lesson in that process. And that lesson, in itself, already deserves gratitude.
Human beings, in a way, have grown accustomed to never being completely satisfied. We are always looking for something more, something bigger, something better. And that “something more” can often be related precisely to the difficulty of recognizing and valuing what we already have in our lives.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t want to grow, change, achieve, or seek better things. The problem begins when we are so focused on what we don’t yet have that we stop seeing what is already present. And, often, important things pass right before our eyes without us realizing it.
My first suggestion would be: pause. Simply pause. Stop and begin to see, feel, hear, and pay attention. Pay attention to words, gestures, people, events, and small moments that pass us by unnoticed because we are always searching for “something” bigger, better, or different.
Sometimes, it’s a conversation. A gesture of affection. Someone remembering us. A text message. A moment of peace on a hard day. A meal. The opportunity to be with someone we love. Even small things that, because they are always present, we end up taking for granted.
And perhaps that is precisely where gratitude lives: not just in grand achievements, but in the ability to notice what is already happening while we are living it.
Because what happens when we don’t do that? We go on autopilot. We wake up, work, solve problems, handle our responsibilities, chase the next goal, think about what is missing, what we still want to achieve… and the day ends.
Then another day begins, and another. And, without realizing it, we can become people who simply exist, but aren’t truly living.
Cultivating gratitude is also cultivating presence. It is being able to step out, if only for a few moments, from this constant search for what is missing and look at what already exists. Because, often, the life we are waiting to live in the future is already happening right now. We just need to be able to notice it.
MS:For many immigrants, such as the Portuguese in Canada, life was built on sacrifices and fresh starts. Do you think this experience teaches people to appreciate the small things more and hold on to hope?
AM: Most certainly. I am the daughter of immigrants who went to Brazil after World War II, and I witnessed firsthand how they valued everything they achieved. I saw up close the sacrifices that were made, the effort to restart life in an unfamiliar place, far from what they knew, often out of necessity rather than mere choice.
There is something very profound in that experience. Starting over requires far more than willingness. It requires courage, perseverance, and the ability to believe that there is something better on the other side.
Everyone who prepares to immigrate needs, in some way, to cling to something stronger than themselves to keep going. It could be family, faith, a dream, an opportunity, the hope of providing a different life for their children, or simply the need to survive and build a new beginning.
Hope goes hand in hand with that perseverance and courage. Without hope, it becomes very difficult to envision a different future. And, in the end, that is precisely what every immigrant seeks: a different future.
Not necessarily a perfect future, but a future with more possibilities, more security, more dignity, or more opportunities than those left behind.
And perhaps that is why many immigrant families learn to value small victories so deeply. Because they know the price paid for them. They know that many things that seem simple or guaranteed to some were the result of immense effort, sacrifice, and courage.
Hope, in this sense, is not just waiting for something to get better. It is continuing to walk even without having all the guarantees, believing that today’s effort can make room for a different reality tomorrow.
More than 800 gigabytes of Artemis II lunar science data – some of it previously unreleased – was released today, posted to NASA’s Planetary Data System. Most of the images from the mission were previously made public – although this Oct. 7 release is the official data archive with high resolution imagery and robust metadata. […]
LEVANTE | 7 ottobre, tre anni dopo: Netanyahu sapeva? Avvertimenti ignorati, Europa complice del silenzio e la legge sull’antisemitismo. Tre anni dal 7 ottobre 2023. Secondo inchieste di Haaretz, New York Times e Wall Street Journal, Netanyahu avrebbe ricevuto avvertimenti dagli Emirati e dall’Egitto prima dell’attacco. Perché nessuno ha agito? E perché Israele rifiuta ancora una commissione d’inchiesta indipendente? Bruxelles sanziona tre coloni e quattro organizzazioni, ma risparmia Ben Gvir e Smotrich. Contro il governo di Tel Aviv, nessun passo concreto. Ipocrisia o impotenza? Il ddl antisemitismo adotta la definizione IHRA: tutela necessaria o strumento per silenziare la critica a Israele? Ripartiamo dalle parole di Moni Ovadia, ospite lunedì su Casa del Sole TV. E poi: l’Accordo della Mecca tra Arabia Saudita, Turchia e Pakistan, la strategia di Erdogan, il fronte Houthi, la guerra dell’intelligenza artificiale e il declino della civiltà occidentale. Intanto in Italia inflazione al 4,2%, energia +22% e carburanti sopra i 2 euro. I libri degli ospiti: Federico De Renzi: Dialoghi sulle minoranze. Un viaggio attraverso le minoranze del mondo, Fabrizio Noli, Federico De Renzi- editore: Qulture Edizioni – anno edizione: 2014 L’India dei turchi. Una storia dimenticata del subcontinente indiano- Federico De Renzi, Simone Costanzo – editore: Il Cerchio 2025 Michele Putrino, Manuale di resistenza al potere – Uno Editori, 2019 Liberi dalla paura. Gli insegnamenti di un’antica dottrina per liberarsi dal controllo del sistema Uno Editori, 2021 Roberto Quaglia, Guerra e pace e zombi, 2025 Roberto Quaglia, Il fondamentalismo hollywoodista, 2020 Roberto Quaglia, Il mito dell’11 settembre e l’opzione dottor Stranamore, 2006 I LIBRI DI MARGHERITA FURLAN BRICS Scacco Matto (disponibile in italiano, inglese, russo) Un podcast d Margherita furlan, una produzione Casa del Sole TV Iscriviti, attiva la e sostieni l’informazione indipendente! #Levante#CasaDelSoleTV#AccordoDellaMecca#ArabiaSaudita#Turchia#Erdogan#Pakistan#Iran#Yemen#Houthi#MedioOriente#AsiaOccidentale#Russia#Propaganda#GuerraCognitiva#IntelligenzaArtificiale#DeclinoOccidente#Inflazione#CaroCarburanti#Geopolitica#Multipolarismo
Hello, good morning, how are you? Another month… and what really matters is that we keep moving forward in good health, stumbling here and there, but following our path without harming anything or anyone. And, let’s face it, that isn’t bad at all.
We are celebrating Thanksgiving weekend, but shouldn’t we be thankful every day?
Not only for the food we put on our tables for our families day after day, but have you ever stopped to think that this very food is indeed a blessing, and that sometimes those who produce it and get it to us from its source might not even have enough to eat?
And don’t you think that those who provide us with work, which secures that food for us, should also be in our thoughts when we reflect on what we should be grateful for? We are—and I say we are because I am a sinner just like all mortals—we are, as I was saying, “ungrateful.” We complain about trivial things. For example, I find myself looking at my husband when he prepares a wonderful breakfast for me, which he does whenever he can, and then sets out the wrong cutlery—oh dear, I just can’t convince him that we have smaller forks and knives; it is what it is. But then I think to myself: well, there are also those who have no forks, no cutlery at all, nor any food, and so that fleeting moment of “ingratitude” washes away with the ocean wave that had brought it in.
I am grateful for my health, despite a few hurdles. I am grateful for my daughters, for my husband, and for 4 or 5 true FRIENDS, already including Ross, who never fails me in anything.
I am grateful to belong to two countries that, for now, still live in peace, for the roof that protects me and my loved ones, and for everything I have, whether much or little. I am grateful that I don’t care for ostentation or vanity, for being humble and knowing how to appreciate those who lend a hand when we falter or lend us an umbrella on a rainy day. I am also grateful for being humble—something that, along with gratitude, is slowly being lost these days.
I wish you all a Thanksgiving weekend filled with peace, abundance, love, and good health. Do not forget, however, a neighbor or family member who might not have anything to put on the table. Remember, Kindness begets Kindness.
It is what it is, and it’s always worth what it’s worth.
In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the sudden recall of 12 B-1 bombers from their base in the south of England to the mainland of the United States. He asks what prompted the move and why the Trump administration refuses to learn vital military lessons from Ukraine.
Then, David is joined by Reihan Salam, the president of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, to discuss why American cities cost so much and often deliver so little. They explore how some urban governments waste public money, how cities could provide better services to residents, and why the rise of populism is doing little to solve Americans’ actual problems.
Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of Every War Must End by Fred Charles Iklé.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Reihan Salam: Well, David, I actually don’t believe that it is Donald Trump who is the only political figure who will have been discredited by this moment. When you’re looking at the Democratic coalition right now, I see a lot of anger and frustration with how people see their leadership class as well. So I think that this is going to be this big generational turnover that could go very badly.
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David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Reihan Salam, president of the Manhattan Institute, and we’ll discuss how American cities can deliver better government to their residents at more reasonable costs than they now do. This week’s book will be a masterpiece of strategic thinking: Every War Must End by Fred Charles Iklé. But before either the dialogue or the book discussion, some opening thoughts on a news story you may have seen this past weekend: the sudden recall of 12 B-1 bombers from their base in the south of England to the mainland of the United States.
As so often with Trump-administration military stories, there may be less, or there may be more, to this story than meets the eye. The Trump administration is staffed by people who look for any opportunity and any excuse to recall military assets from allies, and especially from European allies, back to the American mainland. This recall may be something that people in the Trump administration wanted to do anyway, for their own reason. And we’ll find out more about that in the days ahead.
But the first reports may also be true—that there was some sudden threat to these bombers that necessitated their removal from England back to the American mainland. What might that threat be? Either a terrorist attack in Britain, or else possibly a drone-and-missile attack like those that have been experienced by American forces in the Persian Gulf. We don’t know.
But what we do know is that through the Persian Gulf, the Iranians have had great success, much greater success than as first reported, pushing back American forces from their perimeters. The American naval base in Bahrain was badly damaged by Iranian drones and missiles.
As we have seen in Ukraine, suddenly individuals far from the battle scene controlling these small, comparatively inexpensive new technologies can inflict tremendous damage anywhere on the enemy’s territory. The Ukrainians have done it to Russia, and the Russians have done it to the Ukrainians.
We may be living through a revolution in military technology as dramatic as when the advent of gunpowder made obsolete the knight on horseback and the castle made of stone. The United States is poorly adapted to this revolution, and especially poorly adapted under the Trump administration. There are deep reasons why the United States is poorly adapted to this revolution. The United States has made an enormous investment in very costly, very sophisticated platforms: bombers, fighters, aircraft carriers, tanks, equipment. Machinery that moves aboveground, on the land, on the ocean, in the air. And it is reluctant to accept that this enormous investment may now be obsolete, and obsolete in ways that empower weaker adversaries who master the new technology of drone warfare first.
The United States is also poorly adapted because of the way America finances and approves its military technology. The congressional system—the iron triangle of lobbyists and administrations and Congress—tends to regard weapons as not just tools of war, but also as tools of economic development back at home, and oftentimes as income-support strategies for retired members of the military. And so the United States invests very deeply in systems that are driven by domestic needs and not by the needs of the battlefield.
In the Trump era, these difficulties are augmented by two special problems. The first is the nation that is the pioneer and leader in drone warfare is Ukraine. And the United States under President Trump is terribly reluctant, brutally reluctant, to learn lessons of war from Ukraine. President Trump, Vice President Vance, and others around them decided early that the Ukrainians were losers, that they were doomed, that they were dependents, they were welfare recipients, they were moochers, they deserved nothing, and they had nothing to offer. Now it turns out they may be the leading military innovator of the modern era, and suddenly it’s very embarrassing to turn around and say, maybe these guys, of whom the Trump administration has so little good to say, maybe they have something to offer that America needs. So the reluctance to learn lessons from Ukraine—and the eagerness to fire the generals and admirals most ready to learn the lessons from Ukraine—that has handicapped the United States.
There’s another handicap in the drone-warfare era, and that is ideological. Secretary Hegseth is a man with a vision of the military as a tool for waging culture war, not real battlefield warfare. He has inveighed against troops who wear beards, against troops who are overweight, against troops who don’t have enough testosterone. He wants to promote troops that look a certain way, that can do certain physical exercises. It is said in a new Rolling Stoneprofile of just-retired Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll that Hegseth’s vision is of an army that is ready for Instagram, not ready for war. And as he systematically goes through the army, firing those generals who want to learn the lessons of the new, Hegseth has left the United States vulnerable to the lessons of the new.
My wife’s grandfather was the founder of the Canadian [Royal Army] Armoured Corps. He’s contested through his life with the old and outdated proponents of cavalry warfare. And he lamented: There’s something about senior military command that has the effect of transforming brain into bone. Something like that seems to be going on in the higher reaches of the Trump Defense Department. And it’s happened at a time when we desperately need all the brains we can get.
As I said, there may be less or more to this story of B-1 bombers being recalled than first reported, but it is a portent of something ominous in the changing world of national security. Something ominous that this administration and this Department of War, so called, is uniquely unready to meet.
And now my dialogue with Reihan Salam.
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Frum: Reihan Salam grew up in Brooklyn, the son of immigrants, and went through New York City’s public schools. He started out doing research for David Brooks at The New York Times, worked as a producer at NBC News, and became an editor at The Atlantic and National Review. In 2008, he and Ross Douthat co-authored Grand New Party:an argument that the GOP, the Republican Party, should do more to appeal to working-class voters. In 2018, he published Melting Pot or Civil War?, arguing for an immigration system built on skills. In 2019, he became the fifth president of the Manhattan Institute, carrying a warning to all conservatives that a conservatism that does not speak to cities will be marginalized.
Canadian listeners: Be aware that Reihan also possesses an expert knowledge of Canadian politics.
Reihan is an old and dear friend, and it’s a pleasure to welcome him to The David Frum Show. Reihan, welcome.
Reihan Salam: Thank you for having me, David. It’s a pleasure to be with you.
Frum: Well, let’s focus on your day job of city government. Back in the Reagan ’80s, there was a bumper sticker, a good-natured conservative joke: Thank God we don’t get all the government we pay for. I don’t know that New Yorkers or San Franciscans or Angelinos—they pay for a lot of government, a lot. And I think most of the inhabitants of these overwhelmingly Democrat blue cities would like to see more reward for the money they pay. This has been the work of the Manhattan Institute.
It looks like in 2026 the country is going to veer to the left; maybe quite far to the left. State government, local government in these places is already pretty far to the left. Without telling anyone on the left not to be on the left—they wouldn’t listen—but how do people in New York, in Los Angeles, in San Francisco, in similar cities, get more of the government they’re already paying for?
Salam: Well, fundamentally, when I think about a dense, large city, I do believe that it is reasonable to expect that you’re going to have a larger government. Density creates enormous opportunities; it creates enormous productivity. But it also creates demons of density as well, when you’re thinking about the need for more stringent policing, when you’re thinking about the other questions of urban management, public health. When you’re thinking about drainage, when you’re thinking about environmental pollutants. Any number of questions. So my starting point is that it is reasonable to expect that you’re going to have a more energetic government in these places. You need a more energetic government to fully unlock that potential of urban life.
The problem, as you suggest, is that also that wealth that you create in these dynamic, productive cities also becomes a target for extraction. And though you might have the starting point as, Hey, we need to have a capable government to solve problems X, Y, and Z,another thing that can often happen, depending on the political dynamic in the city and whether or not you have meaningful competition and what have you—and we can get more into that—but basically, you have this dynamic where in many cases that wealth is being extracted by interest groups that become really potent and entrenched.
So think about it this way. New York City employs 300,000 city employees. That is in some ways an undercount, because you have a lot of other people who are employed indirectly, who are subsidized by city and state government in various other ways. That is already a very potent political constituency unto itself. People who have a vested interest not only in a city government that is large, but also a city government that is offering very favorable terms of employment to its various employees.
What do I mean by favorable term of employment? Well, let’s say you don’t necessarily want a very high degree of accountability. Let’s say you want very strong tenure rules. Let’s say you want the job to be a more attractive or appealing job according to various metrics, so that the job actually becomes more attractive than the equivalent job in the private sector. So you may well get featherbedding over time. You may well employ more people than you need to, strictly speaking. Or, you know, though, technically, we have civil service hiring and notionally we’re hiring people on a meritocratic basis, but it could be that that’s not quite how it happens. That you’re growing the city-employment rolls because you’re, again, trying to achieve some larger political objective.
In New York City—and I think this applies to many other cities as well—you could think of this as the friction not between Republicans and Democrats, but call it Tammany Hall and reform. Tammany Hall being the politics of patronage, the politics of using public dollars, not necessarily solely to achieve a public purpose, but using public dollars to entrench and grow a given political coalition. And then, the party of reform—that again could come with a Democratic label or a Republican label or whichever label—that comes in to say, Okay, we’re going to take away the punch bowl. You know, We are going to be the ones who are going to refocus city government on what matters, on delivering efficiency. And I think that that is this oscillation of power that has been part of the American urban story. But it’s not unique to dynamics within the city. It also is shaped by dynamics outside of it, and larger cultural and political forces.
Frum: I was in New York this past weekend. At one point in the weekend I was crawling along westward, inch by inch, on a Midtown street and observing: The reason the street was moving so slowly is because it was a three-lane street. One lane was being used for driving, and two lanes were being used for cheap parking. Who made that decision that the city should give two-thirds of the street away as a subsidized parking lot to the people using the street? So that’s a giveaway to somebody, or more or less randomly chosen people, but it’s still a giveaway. And I think everyone who drives along the street must have had the same question that I’ve done. And yet obviously it’s impossible to do anything about it, because there it is: Two-thirds of the street is used for subsidized parking.
Salam: Well, we also know from the great scholar of parking, Donald Shoup, that actually quite a bit of that traffic consists of people who are looking for a parking spot. So, in a way, there’s many levels to this perversity.
But, part of it is a point, it’s an observation that kind of answers itself. So when you become used to the entitlement, the expectation that you’re going to have free parking, moving from one equilibrium—which is a very painful and damaging one, that causes all kinds of waste, all kinds of economic damage—to a new one that may well be much more efficient, but you’re not necessarily going to be thinking, Think about all this time that I’ve saved. I feel so blessed, I feel so fortunate. What you’re going to think about is that: I once had an entitlement to free parking on the street, and now I don’t. Including if you’re not someone who drives especially often. You just could think in the back of your head, Aha, I once had this entitlement.
And in New York City, and in many other cities besides, you also have these bespoke arrangements. You have what you might think of as these hereditary rights that you gain over time. So if you’re looking at many public employees in New York City, in many cases, they will use placards to identify themselves as public employees. And one reason they do that is to ensure that they will not receive tickets. Because the idea is that if you work in parking enforcement, if you are someone who is looking to a fellow public employee, you will treat them differently than you treat other people. Now, that hereditary privilege alone is something that actually has enormous effects on the flow of traffic.
But it’s just one of many ways in which, when you’re thinking about any city, you’re not just thinking about a place that is run through cool rationality. You know, how are we thinking about the technocratic management of this urban landscape? You are thinking about traditions; you are thinking about this deference; you are thinking about this exercise of power in a lot of other ways that don’t actually rise to the level of being covered by the newspaper or even being understood in some data-rich kind of way. These are just the ways that things work that degrade the quality of life, but that people tolerate until they don’t.
Frum: As blue cities and blue jurisdictions swing further to the left after November of 2026, which is what looks likely to happen, they are insisting that the solution is to capture more revenue, and especially to capture it from the very richest people. And so their projects—you see them in Washington state and other places—to impose an extra-heavy level of surtaxes on the very richest people in the jurisdiction, thinking that that’s the way out. That seems an ideological commitment. And it seems like a strange commitment for subnational governments to have, because it’s a country in which it’s very easy to move. It’s a world in which people have less and less reason that they have to be in any particular place. But it seems to be a move that urban governments are determined to make in 2026.
Salam: I am a great believer in the potential of our great cities, and so I do believe that they are very attractive. They have many advantages, particularly when you’re thinking about an aging society. It is not difficult to imagine a world in which younger people in an aging society want to cluster with other younger people. So those are advantages, and I think a lot of people are taking those advantages and saying, Gosh, we can tax much more, we can allow the quality of services to degrade further. And that’s going to be fine; there will still be the stickiness of economic activity. I believe that’s a mistake, even though I do believe in that power of urban concentration, urban agglomeration, urban productivity. Because, as you suggest, I think that there are other forces on the other end. There are other cities that are emerging that are themselves competitive.
But the larger point I would make is this, David. We have been living through a period of fiscal expansion and fiscal incontinence. You know that our deficits are above 6 percent of GDP right now. This is at a time when unemployment is 4.2 percent, quite low by historical standards. And yet, even then, we have this enormous deficit. And that deficit trickles into state and local governments. It trickles in, because you have your city budget funded by city taxes, but then you have your portion of the city budget funded by transfers from state governments. And then you have the proportion of the city and state governments funded by federal dollars as well. And this is really, really important to understand. Now you know as well as anyone, David, that a huge driver of employment in any American city, big or small, is what we affectionately refer to as “eds and meds.” The education system and the health system. These are two systems that are very heavily subsidized. The health system in particular is very heavily subsidized by federal dollars and, might I add, borrowed federal dollars.
New York City might be a somewhat extreme case, but it’s not unique. But in New York City, 52 percent of residents are on either Medicaid or something called the Essential Plan, which is a Medicaid-like publicly subsidized health system. Now we can debate whether or not that’s strictly necessary. I would argue that it’s not. That in fact, if we had a narrower safety net, we would have more effective safety-net programs, and you’d have a lot of other folks who would find private health insurance, let’s say, and then you would have a somewhat lower burden, tax burden, and yada yada. Let’s come back to that for a moment. But fundamentally, you’re looking at a city that is a very dynamic city with a very dynamic private economy.
But if you’re actually looking at employment, if you’re actually looking at the biggest, fastest-growing private-sector job in New York City, but also in many other cities besides, it is home health aids. Now that is a private-sector job in a sense, that you are not literally a public employment, but it is also a publicly subsidized job. And it’s a job in which you, David Frum, or I, Reihan Salam, if I were on a subsidized program and I have a subsidized home health aid, I’m not paying with my own dollars. And so in some cases, you might not actually have someone who is offering a service with value commensurate to what the public sector is paying for that service. That is something you are seeing more and more in American political economy, and particularly in our cities.
Frum: Okay. Now I invite you to imagine a meeting that you are taking with one of the more leftish crop of new urban officials, local officials, in the country after of November of ’26. And the meeting begins with the person you’re talking to saying: Reihan Salam, you are a self-identified conservative. Conservatives are very out of style. A lot of the problems that that our city faces are driven by the Trump administration: its many forms of interference in our lives that were unasked for. Why should anybody listen to you? What can you possibly have to say that’s of value to me as I cope with my problems and my constituents?
Salam: Well, I believe that fundamentally, whatever the partisan label, there are some underlying structural forces that are going to come to bite relatively soon. If you look at the urban-policy revolution that unfolded in the late ’80s, 1990s, 2000s, the big insight was not some grand ideological insight. It was this—it was that when you’re looking at a lot of major cities that had for many decades been begging the federal government for money—Give us more money to solve this problem. My old colleague Fred Siegel called this the riot ideology. If you do not give us money, there are going to be riots. You know, we’re not going to be able to control it; it’s going to be really bad. And therefore, you just kept going and rattled the tin cup, begging for more money from the federal government. The problem is when you have a federal government that starts to tighten its belt by necessity, then suddenly you’re going to have a more discerning federal government that’s going to be thinking about: Where exactly am I going to be applying these subsidy dollars? And it’s not necessarily going to be in a place that is not really politically contested.
During the migrant crisis that unfolded during the Biden presidency, Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, was begging the Democratic president, Joe Biden, to rescue New York City by infusing more federal dollars into the city. And the Biden administration said no. The Biden administration said, You have a right to shelter. You have a ton of other policies that actually have exacerbated this crisis in your city. And by the way, we’re not really concerned about losing the five boroughs of New York City as voters in our upcoming presidential election, so we’re not going to be all that concerned about you. And that’s in a case where they were quite happy, as President Trump is, to run an enormous federal deficit.
So basically what happened is you had an alternative to tin-cup politics. You had a group of mayors who said, We have to solve some of these problems ourselves. So you don’t have to listen to me. All you have to do is look at your bottom line. All you have to do is look at the fact that you’re going to start experiencing, if you haven’t already, very stringent budget constraints, and voters to whom you’ve been making a lot of promises that are going to be very hard to fulfill given this new fiscal landscape.
Frum: Can we talk about schools for a moment? I mean, you in your own life owe so much to the schools as ways to identify and promote talent. And so much of your rise to your eminence was achieved because of the talent scouting that occurred in the New York public-school system. New York and other cities seem to be less interested in doing that. In fact, they seem to want to break a lot of the mechanisms for finding talent and helping talent forward. Why does that happen? Is there anything that can be done to change the cities? Or maybe the cities aren’t even wrong. Maybe the talent-scouting mechanism is too exclusionary and unfair.
Salam: There’s so many things going on that are making our cities today really different than they were 30 years ago. So, narrowly on the education point, you know this as well as I do, David, in many big, urban public-school systems, it increasingly feels as though the system is being run for the benefit of the system’s employees than for its notional beneficiary students. That’s not because anyone is sinister. It’s because you’re seeing declining enrollment. That’s kind of one thing that is going on across jurisdictions. But also, you have the system that employs an enormous number of people who are themselves people who might feel economically fragile. These are people where some of them absolutely could find more remunerative employment outside of these public systems, but some of them are people who might not be able to find more remunerative employment outside of these systems. What we’ve been doing in the United States as a whole since the 1970s is, we’ve been increasing the amount of staff in our school systems. That is: We’re hiring more teachers, but we’re hiring more paraprofessionals as well. So if you’re looking at the staffing ratios, how many students do you have relative to the number of adult employees of the school system? You’ve seen a really dramatic change over this time.
And so if you’re looking to people who are employed in public education, they will often say that, well: Look, education is part of our mission. But we also are providing meals. We are providing counseling. We have students in some cases who are homeless, who are suffering from various other maladies. And so we are essentially social-service bureaucracies in miniature that are serving this troubled population.
Now, you know, we can get into that specifically, whether or not that’s a sound argument. But also think about a middle-class parent who, as you were suggesting before, has options. They don’t necessarily have to enroll their children in that school system. They can move elsewhere and what have you. That system that is leading with the idea that, well, Look, education schmeducation. Yes, this or that might be true—but how dare you not appreciate this incredibly profound social mission that we have? And by the way, gosh, you’re right, maybe we’re not doing as well as we might on the educational front, but that’s because of segregation and inequality and various other problems of cosmic injustice that we, of course, in our small little school system, can’t possibly solve on our own. So it becomes this incredible buck-passing to help cement the political coalition that allows for these failures to unfold.
And again, there are some great people in these systems. There are some excellent schools within these systems. But the underlying logic is one that leads you to more excuse-making and away from accountability.
Frum: Tell me what is wrong with the argument I’m about to present. A historic idea in the New York system—long ago, a generation ago and more—was, students in the school system are going to be disproportionately poor. Some of them are going to be very talented people who might not have on their own, from their own family resources, the opportunities that their talent could use, could benefit from, and could benefit all of us. So we’re going to do talent-sifting. We’re going to look for those talented 30 percent, and we’re going to promote them and fast-track them and help them to get to college and to discover things in themselves that the people in their lives, who they grow up with, may not recognize for them. That’s been a view in the past. It’s increasingly challenged. And we’ve all been reading with fascination the recent eruption between a famous New York Times writer and her daughter. The New York Times writer said to the daughter, You’re going to go to the same school as everybody else. And the daughter said, You have the ability to get me into a better school. Why won’t you help me? And the mother said, It’s a point of principle. What is wrong with what the mother is saying? And what is potentially right about the old way of doing it, or vice versa?
Salam: Well, I believe the mother in that case was right to say that: My daughter has been failed by these schools, and there is something broken. Where she goes wrong is with her view as to what the right structural solution would be.
So this is my answer to any number of dilemmas facing American cities, and it’s this: When you are an American city that has people who want to solve problems for you at very low fiscal cost to you, you should let them do it. What do we mean by that? So, one thing we hear again and again—you hear this in Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, San Francisco, of course, any number of cities—we have an acute housing crisis. And that’s true. We have an acute housing crisis in many American communities. But what you also have is a crisis that could present its own solution.
In New York City, asking rents are so high for the tiny number of units that are available that there are people crazy enough that they will come along and say, I will build private rental housing, if you let me do it and if you allow me to charge what the market will bear. You might think they’re mad. I might think they’re mad, because there’s so many other barriers that you have to overcome, so many political obstacles. But if you let them do it, they would do that.
In a similar vein, there are people who run school systems in New York City, in the five boroughs of New York City, but also in many other urban jurisdictions besides, who will say: Hey, I’m running a charter network. Give me a fraction. And by the way, they’d rather have more money, but they’ll say, Hey, give me 80 percent of what you’re giving to your public district schools for my public charter school, where I don’t have the same collective-bargaining rules and I have greater flexibility. And I can educate those students much more effectively. There are people who will solve that problem for you if you just let them solve it for you. So, to my friends on the left, what I would say is that, you have bigger fish to fry. You know, maybe you want to address the Middle East. You know, you want to address kind of various other problems. Why don’t you allow these other people to educate young people?And do it competitively and at reasonable cost. Why don’t you let these other people address this acute housing crisis, and you can focus, you know, much like the Queen of England, and now the King of England, is able to serve as defender of the faith and do other things, the magic and mysticism of kind of any any form of government. Why don’t you focus on those things and then allow these other people to solve the problem?
Frum: I’m smiling at your joke. The new mayor of New York should focus on solving the problems of the Middle East and let volunteers deliver schools and build housing for him.
Salam: Because they will do it. They will come along and do it if you actually just create a system.
Frum: And because, well, he’s got a lot to say about the Middle East, of course, and everyone there wants to hear from him.
Salam: And that seems to be, you know, kind of a burning passion for him and for many other people. And again, I might disagree with where he lands in the Middle East, but we’ll leave that aside.
Frum: But he’s probably pretty harmlessly occupied talking about it.
Salam: He might actually do less damage if he simply said, I’m going to actually serve as an ambassador for—I’m going to serve as a mascot for this or that political cause. But why don’t you create the systems that allow other actors, including in some cases public actors, to do good work.
Frum: Well, you mentioned housing, and that was where I wanted to go next.
You and I come from a tradition where we believe if you let private builders build tens of thousands of new units per year, even if all of those units are aimed at the top of the market, simply the presence of those tens of thousands a year of new units all aimed at the top of the market is going to push down prices all the way through the market. But that seems to be, at least in the city of New York, a discarded, rejected idea. And they say that if you build lots of units at the top of market, they will only serve the top of the market, and everything else will remain unchanged by the arrival of all of these new units. Can you speak up on behalf of what we used to think of as the basic economics of housing, against the new idea that no matter how many units you build at the top, it won’t change anything else for anybody else?
Salam: It’s very simple. If you—right now, the way that we are approaching housing in many of our cities is, you’re saying that the desire to build private rental housing is suspect. It is something that is very questionable. We will allow you to do it if you do 15 other things to prove to us that you’re not actually doing something sinister or dubious or questionable or whatever else. So one thing we’ll say is that we’ll allow you to build private rental housing if you set aside some number of those new units to represent permanently affordable housing stock. That is to say—if you set it aside so that people with incomes below a certain threshold can afford these units, and then if you’ll do that on a kind of ongoing basis, then we’ll allow you to build some other private housing.
But the funny thing there is that what you’re effectively doing is that these people who want to build more housing supply, you’re taxing them. You’re saying that: We’re actually going to limit the number of new market-rate units you can build, so that you can set aside this number of units that are mandatory below-market, affordable. So actually, you make it even harder to solve the bigger problem, which is that demand is outstripping supply.
Then you could say, Well, we’ll allow you to build it, but you need to offer very high wages to the people building it. Because actually somehow this work, relative to all forms of work otherwise, needs to be put in some separate bucket. And we don’t trust those workers to be able to come to some arrangement with you, because you exert power—any number of, there are all of these other side deals that are imposed so that you actually see to it that the amount of new housing is a trickle.
Now, actually, how it really works, when it works, is this: You allow a bunch of speculators to build, and indeed to overbuild, so that actually they eventually come to a point where they lose their shirts. And they, as investors, lose their shirts. It’s not the city government that loses its shirt through a subsidy; it’s the investors build and build and build until you’ve satiated the demand. And then, okay, lo and behold, we built a little bit too much. That’s what happened in Austin, Texas. Austin, Texas, built an enormous amount of housing, rents went down, and then developers stopped building new housing, because then they’re waiting for that amount of new supply to be absorbed by the marketplace. So I’m not of the view that if you allow private developers to build a lot of new housing, they’re going to build so much that New York City is going to become as inexpensive to rent an apartment as in Dubuque. That’s not going to happen.
But you will mitigate this acute problem we have right now, number one. And number two, you’ll have a bigger tax base. You will actually have a more prosperous, thriving city, which is a good thing unto itself. And I think that there are some folks on the left who recognize that you need to build more, but I call this immaculate-conception progressivism. They say that, well, you can build more—provided you do it in exactly the right way, in exquisitely moral ways. By my exquisite moral standards. I’m not going to let you do it in some laissez-faire fashion, where the idea is that you build it to the point where you lose your shirt. I’m going to do it with you as a partner. Side by side, we will do this together, and I will essentially dictate to you exactly what it ought to look like.
And I understand that there’s some subtleties here. There’s some complexities; there’s a question of getting from here to there. I get all of that. But I think that, fundamentally, if there are people who are willing, through their animal spirits, to address the problem, let them do it.
Frum: How much new housing does New York need, in your opinion? How many units per year would put the city on the path to escaping from the crisis of affordability it’s in?
Salam: I would say something like 50,000-plus new units a year, so that we would get something like half a million over the course of a decade. If you were to do that, then I believe housing would be much more abundant and more affordable than it is today. There are many other things that I would do too, David, but I think that that would go a long way.
Frum: And how many is New York building now? Do you happen to remember?
Salam: It’s more like in the kind of in the twenty thousands. You know, kind of maybe the high twenty thousands. But that is a little bit of an artifact of the fact that we just had a big rezoning, and also there are some units that are being built because of a tax credit that is about to expire. So people were rushing to kind of collect that tax credit. So those numbers I would expect to go down somewhat. But we’ll see.
I think that our current mayor recognizes that this is an acute challenge, and he does want to build more. He, however, is not always mindful of the various other regulations that he’s imposing that make this a less attractive place to invest. So we’ll see. But we’re not anywhere near where we need to be.
Frum: Now, urban politics, as you said, is inherently very complicated. People are close together; there are a lot of interests; there are lots of points of view. But one of the things that used to guide good decision-making was a few basic rules. And say, you know, I’m not going to master every complex detail. I just know if you build more housing, the prices go down. If you arrest more criminals, the streets are safer. If you sweep the streets, you’ll have less disease.
And those basic notions, which are not a hundred percent true, but good enough—we seem to have a harder and harder time holding on to them. And maybe that’s because of something that I talk about a lot, and I know you think about a lot, which is the implosion of conservatism as a workable philosophy. It used to be the conservatives’ jobs to say: Build more housing; the price will go down. And as conservatives give up their ancient views and chase after new ideas—new and often quite sinister ideas—who’s speaking for these old truths? Build more housing; put the criminals in jail; sweep the streets; have schools locate kids with less economic opportunity and more talent and find a way forward for them. Who’s to speak for that?
Salam: Well, first I’ll note that there have always been many conservatives who are small-C conservative, in the sense they want to protect their neighborhood, they want to protect its character. So some of that resistance to new building has always come from people who are small-C conservatives, who do not want the composition of their neighborhood to change and what have you.
But the larger point is well taken. And you wrote an essay many years ago, David, that left a very deep impression on me. About how what you and I call conservatism reflected arguably an historical moment. When you think about the progressivism of the early 20th century, this was a moment; this was a sensibility that was a response to the challenge of urbanization, an enormous immigrant influx, and a pattern of industrialism that demanded new forms of state capacity. And then you had a progressive movement that was actually a part of both major political parties. In a similar vein, you’ve observed, there was what you could call a supply-side movement, a conservative movement, that actually did shape both major parties as well. And now that movement appears to be in abeyance. And what you have now instead is new forms of populist politics. You have a left-wing flavor of it; you have a right-wing flavor of it. And instead, the partisans of what you might call pluralism or classical liberalism or something that resembles the conservatism of that earlier era—they still exist. These ideas are still there; these ideas are still very compelling and relevant. But you could argue that they represent a minority faction in both of the major-party coalitions.
And so what I would argue, David, is that I think that you need political innovation as well. You have a ton of new challenges right now that are markedly different from the challenges of even 15 years ago, when you and I were having that conversation about what had happened to the conservatism of that era of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. And I think that those challenges demand new forms of left and right politics. And I think that’s a big part of what we focus on at Manhattan Institute.
Frum: Well, let me ask you, since you’re kind enough to allude to my work. I’m basically at the end of my career, but you’re in the middle and peak of your career. You are going to have to ride your way through whatever’s happening next in American politics, which probably is a kind of collapse and discrediting of the ideas associated with President Trump. How do you find your personal way forward through this new landscape, in which it’s 2029, it’s 2030, the Trump era is left behind? Maybe the Republican Party is chased off under Vice President Vance toward evermore protectionism, evermore chauvinism, evermore xenophobia. How do you—and you have always stood for the opposite of those things—how do you find your way forward as a thinker and as an institution, in a landscape where so much will have changed?
Salam: Well, David, I actually don’t believe that it is Donald Trump who is the only political figure who will have been discredited by this moment. When you’re looking at the Democratic coalition right now, I see a lot of anger and frustration with how people see their leadership class as well. So I think that this is going to be this big generational turnover that could go very badly. It could also go pretty well. When you’re thinking about the fact that we’ve had, I believe, it’s three American presidents who are all born in 1946, who presided over a period that many see as discredited. If you think about neo-socialism, this new movement, why is the term that had been so anathematized in American political life, why has it reemerged? One reason is because of that larger discrediting. And I think that in the case of Trump and Trumpism, what was fascinating about Donald Trump—and I’m talking about him in the past tense, but when he first emerged in 2015-2016—is that he served as a new coordinating device. There were many people on the right who felt as though they were burdened by backward compatibility. Ronald Reagan was still the figure that people could rally around. George W. Bush was a figure that many people felt they couldn’t rally around. And Donald Trump said some things, not entirely true, about how he had always opposed the Iraq War. It was a stupid war. And so he allowed himself to emerge as a new coordinating device.
However, I think that that Trump era right now, in 2024, that campaign, I think, showed the outlines of what could be a new coalition. The problem is that the Trump presidency and how it’s unfolded did not represent the cementing of that coalition, that multiethnic coalition, a coalition that was—call it a back-to-basics coalition.
If in 2025 you had a right-of-center presidency that said, We’re going to focus on inflation; we’re going to focus on getting the basics right; we are going to focus on having state capacity when it comes to managing immigrant inflows, managing law and order, this kind of thing. And we’re otherwise going to let the private economy roar—I think we’d be in a very different place right now.
But President Trump, like many of his opponents, he’s someone who is very fixed on past rivalries. He is someone who is very fixed—you know, he has deep self-interest, he’s very self-motivated. That’s certainly true. And I think that basically you are going to have a very different politics in a few years’ time. It’s very unpredictable, what it’s going to look like. But I do think that some of these core ideas you were talking about, these kind of core pragmatic ideas you’re talking about, I think that they’re going to have a place in the other side. And I think that that’s something that everyone is going to have to be thinking about. It’s a reckoning that it’s not going to apply just to the right, but also to the left.
Frum: Well, if we are turning the page, what writing will you put on that page? I mean, you’ve written two books about the way forward for conservatism at an interval of a decade. If you were to return to this at another 10-year interval, what would you say? What would you advise?
Salam: Well, I’m fortunate in running a nonpartisan organization. We pride ourselves on our independence. We certainly have a point of view, but a lot of what I’m thinking about is identifying talent. Thinking about people who have a thoughtful, smart perspective on where things are heading and advancing a certain vision of American life.
My view is that we have a multiethnic society. That’s just a reality that will be true one way or another, regardless of who’s in power. And how will we go about making that multiethnic society a success? And how will we ensure that that multiethnic society is in tune with core American values, and with core virtues that I see as good and valuable? When I came to identify with the political right, a lot of it was out of an appreciation for what Margaret Thatcher called the vigorous virtues: the virtues of independence, self-reliance, loyalty. These are just things that matter. They’re not the only virtues, but they’re virtues that matter, and they’re virtues that a system—a kind of government, a society, a culture—can either cultivate and celebrate or diminish and demean. And I just really believe that in our multiethnic society, there is a potential majority that embraces those ideals, that embraces the best aspects of our American, of our Western inheritance. And that’s what I’m really focused on. Just the idea of ensuring that these values survive into the future.
So some of that is looking at policy issues through this lens. You know, trying to find what are novel issues that we ought to be paying more attention to that we haven’t. If you believe, as I do, that building new housing is a good and valuable thing to do, and that will address some of these acute challenges, how do you make that argument? And also, how do you structure the bargain to make it work? So it’s not to bang my head against the wall and say that all is lost, all is doomed. It is to recognize: What do we have? What is the population that we have? What is the electorate that we have? What are the challenges we’re facing? And how can we make the best of it, and how can we draw people into our way of thinking? That is what I’m really passionate about and want to do more of.
Frum: Well, let’s finish by talking about this challenge of the multiethnic society. You and I have been talking about this for a long time, about how we make immigration a source of renewal and strength for American society and not a source of trouble. How do you think the United States of 2026 and future is doing on building itself as a multiethnic society? And what advice would you have? How would you recommend that it do better than it is doing now?
Salam: One of the biggest challenges we face is a challenge that we can’t avoid, we can’t work our way around. It’s the fact that birth rates are shrinking, the population is aging markedly—and, by the way, healthy lifespan is increasing as well. I mean, there are many things to look forward to, things that are good and positive. But they will have very unpredictable effects on our political culture. If you are in your 50s for 30 years—which sounds ridiculous, but I think that that could be something we’re looking at when you’re looking at the pace of biomedical innovation. What effect does that have on people in their teens and 20s? When you’re looking at how our information environment is changing at a time when you have increasingly intelligent machines. These are very deep questions about what it means to work and be a purposeful individual.
It could be that we could have challenges of affluence that are even greater and graver than the challenges of affluence we already face. So we’re going through these incredible ructions at the same time that we’re going through these multiple, reverberating identity crises.
When I think about the manias of our politics right now, I think often of the 1920s and 1930s. When you had the popular front, when you had a group of people who were themselves second-generation Americans—who are both included in a sense, but very alienated in another sense. I look at the fact that the populations right now that feel very alienated and out of sorts are not just minorities; it’s also majorities. I see this incredible psychic breakdown that’s happening in our society that goes above and beyond discrete policy questions.
And so, part of me thinks: Stick to your knitting; focus on the basics. How do we make public systems work? How do we address questions of integrity and corruption and competence? That’s something we can wrap our arms around.
But then I do think that these spiritual questions, which are not my bailiwick as someone who is in the business of policy research. But I do think that those questions matter an enormous amount, and they stem from an abdication of responsibility. You have a generation of people who are taking over as leaders of different institutions, who don’t think of themselves as the establishment. They think of themselves as fighting an establishment, but that establishment is hollow.
And actually, what we need is to have a group of people from different ethnic backgrounds, different kind of educational backgrounds and what have you, who take responsibility. Who say that rather than complain about the ways in which they’ve been victimized or aggrieved—and you see this very much on the right as well as on the left—how do you instead have a group of people who say that I am going to take responsibility? And therefore inspire other people by virtue of having taken that responsibility? That’s something I think about a lot, David. And part of that is about an ethic, a cultural ethic of inhabiting that role of adult. But instead, what’s incredibly attractive to everyone is to imagine themselves as victims of this or that catastrophe, as people who are damaged and therefore can’t take responsibility.
Frum: Well, give some affirmative advice to how to achieve this end you care about.
One of the things I think we’ve seen in the 2020s is that the ethnic groups of America are voting less differently one from another, while the sexes of America vote more differently one from another. And that’s true within ethnic groups and across ethnic groups. There seems to be, part of the alienation is an alienation between young men and young women. Which expresses itself in family formation, among other things.
Meanwhile, you’re getting these strange kinds of cross-cultural coalitions, which can be kind of reactionary sometimes. How do we make it better? What is your advice? This is something you think about a lot. Give us just something we can hold on to as a solution, as something to carry forward into the new era you’re talking [about].
Salam: In everyone’s life—as an individual, as a citizen, as a neighbor—to think about, in a more purposeful way, about what it is that you can do. Because I think that there’s a tendency to think about these problems—and I certainly am guilty of this myself—in purely abstract, broad terms. But when I see the people I admire the most, I see people who are raised in families where there wasn’t a ton of religious observance and who are becoming more observant themselves. Or people who are finding institutions in their own lives that they can breathe life into in a more deliberate way.
You know, we were talking about political parties in our major cities that are just moribund, when you have these incredible political monocultures. Well, you can complain about the problem, or you can get actually involved in a local political party that is moribund. And it can actually be very distasteful, because what you’ll find is that there are not necessarily a lot of other people who are very thoughtful. Or maybe that’s what you’ll find. But actually doing that patient work.
One thing that I find very striking is that—and again, I don’t run a political organization—but when I talk to people in politics, one thing that is very powerful for them is when you actually talk to or interact with people outside of your own narrow world, and you’re trying to persuade them. And you recognize they don’t agree with you on everything, but you want to bring them along in your direction. That is a very powerful civic habit that we’ve lost.
So I think that you and I are both very fortunate to live among neighbors, to have many friends who don’t agree with us on a great many things. And I think that’s a really valuable discipline, and that’s something that all of us can find in small ways. How do you have different kinds of conversation? How do you engage with people where you’re trying to solve a problem together with them as opposed to retreating? I think that that’s something that we can all do more of.
Frum: Reihan Salam, thank you so much for joining me today.
Salam: Thank you very much, David.
Frum: Bye-bye.
[Music]
Frum: Thanks so much to Reihan Salam for joining me today on The David Frum Show.
This week’s book is a classic of American strategic thinking: Every War Must End by Fred Charles Iklé. Originally published in 1971, the book gained great fame when Colin Powell urged it on all of his officers during the planning for the Gulf War of 1990 and ’91. But it remains burningly relevant today as the United States contemplates an exit from the war with Iran.
The author, Fred Iklé, was born in 1924 in Switzerland. He emigrated to the United States after World War II and became one of the leading thinkers in the new area of nuclear strategy and nuclear deterrence. He directed the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under Presidents Nixon and Ford, and he was promoted to undersecretary of defense by Ronald Reagan.
I got to know him toward the end of his life, and he was as incisive and original at the end as he was all the way through.
Let me start my discussion of his book, Every War Must End, by quoting the opening paragraph:
“Fighting a war can cost more in blood and money than any other undertaking in which nations engage. And to wage war, governments develop more detailed plans, establish a more rigid organization, and institute tighter discipline than for any other national effort. Yet, despite all this elaborate and intense dedication, the grand design is often woefully incomplete. Usually, in fact, it is not grand enough. Most of the exertion is devoted to the means, perfecting the military instruments and deciding on their use in battles and campaigns. And far too little is left for relating these means to their ends.”
As we discussed at the opening of the program, this advice applies so pointedly to the troubles in which the United States finds itself today.
Military planning focuses on the work that soldiers do; it focuses on developing plans to actually wage the war.
How fighting will shape the political outcome, however, falls between the work of soldiers and the work of civilians. And because it’s in that in-between zone, it can often be neglected until it becomes too late, until the choices have narrowed.
That’s where the United States is today in Iran. What exactly are we trying to achieve? That was a question that was not asked hard enough back in February when the war began. And now the options don’t look so good as the United States tries to find a way out.
Leaders enter wars expecting battlefield success to produce its own reward. Win on the battlefield, and you’ll get something good without having to think very much about what it is you want. And they also don’t think very hard about if they don’t achieve total victory—Japanese surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri, Lee surrendering a sword to Grant—if they don’t get total victory, how do they arrive at terms that the defeated but not hopeless enemy will accept?
Through the war, both sides overrate their own prospects and assume the enemy is near breaking when the enemy may not be near breaking. And sunk costs—the money that has been spent, the lives that have been lost—make compromise feel like a betrayal of earlier sacrifices.
In the discussions of how to end the war, the advocates of peace risk charges of defeatism. And the hawks, too, often promise too easily that just one more big push can deliver the results that everybody wants.
In Iran, as in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan before that, the United States has had terrible trouble defining an achievable end state that is worth the effort of the military undertaking in the first place.
So here we are, in the throes of this war, trying to make sense of what has been done. Why was it done, where is it going, what are we trying to do? And Fred Iklé in 1971 predicted it all. If you don’t think at the beginning about how the war will end, you’re unlikely to have a successful arrival at that destination point. That’s the question to start with. What are you trying to do? How likely is it that you can do it? And if you don’t achieve total victory, what is the means you’re going to use to ensure that the defeated but not hopeless enemy complies with the victors’, but not total victors’, requirements? That’s where the United States is today. It’s a book that repays rereading. I’ve been thinking about it a lot in these past days. Thank you for thinking about it with me.
See you next week on The David Frum Show. Remember, as always, if you’re minded to support the work of this program, the best way to do it is by subscribing to The Atlantic. And please share the work of this program on whatever social-media platform you use. Thanks for watching or listening. See you next week. Bye-bye.
Hear from the Artemis II crew about impact flashes — bursts of light caused by pieces of space debris hitting the ground — that they saw while they were on the other side of the Moon, during a planned loss of comms. Here’s what it was like at two key points in the story: when […]
The Social Network was powered by alienation. David Fincher’s incredible 2010 film, written by Aaron Sorkin, tells the story of an internet age. It does this through the fraught relationship between two frustrated college students, hungry for popularity and connection, one of whom just happens to be Mark Zuckerberg. It’s a haunted movie that did an outstanding job predicting the nightmares that awaited us in our lives online. Now comes a sequel of sorts: The Social Reckoning, written and directed by Sorkin, which amounts to a long and drawn-out “Told ya so!”
What’s powering The Social Reckoning is outrage—and that outrage is certainly justified. Set from 2019 to 2021, it dramatizes a series of Wall Street Journal articles that exposed the company’s willful ignorance, and oftentimes algorithmic encouragement, of Facebook’s damages to society. Sorkin diligently lays out the reporting by Jeff Horwitz (played by Jeremy Allen White), the investigative journalist who collaborated with the product manager turned whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) to reveal the company’s misdeeds; there’s no disputing the public good of their work. But Sorkin’s enterprise has very little excitement to it and instead feels like a perfunctory coda to a point he made more poetically many years ago.
Part of the problem, undoubtedly, lies with the director. After spending decades among Hollywood’s most reliable and colorful screenwriters, Sorkin made the leap to filmmaking in 2017 with the solid biographical thriller Molly’s Game. He’s made three movies since, each a rendition of real-life events told with his distinctively bouncy, elliptical, rat-a-tat dialogue. His visuals, however, have never matched the liveliness of his writing. The Social Reckoning is disappointingly flat and gray, set in anodyne hotel rooms and glassy offices, and unbearably static. In The Social Network, Fincher made the Harvard campus that Zuckerberg skulked around feel both dreamy and hostile; Sorkin has no such impression of the Silicon Valley walled city that the Facebook co-founder ended up in.
One of the biggest diminishments between the two films, though, is the lack of any emotional turmoil at The Social Reckoning’s center. The prior entry depicts the inception of Facebook and, just as important, the love-hate friendship Zuckerberg had with his co-founder Eduardo Saverin—two socially stunted buddies who become rivals after the silly college website they created takes off. Reckoning offers nothing so tumultuous or compelling; the only interpersonal tension stems from how Horwitz (whom White plays as deadpan, a bit old-fashioned, and consummately professional) tries to make Haugen feel comfortable about leaking internal documents. Although the nervous Haugen sometimes teases the reporter for his lack of tech know-how, their banter never even rises to a sizzle.
The other unavoidable comparison point between the original movie and the sequel is Zuckerberg himself. Eisenberg’s nervy performance in The Social Network made him an Oscar-nominated star, and it’s clear from how the part is written here that Sorkin expected him to return (indeed, he’s said as much). Eisenberg has been replaced by Jeremy Strong, who’s appeared in two other Sorkin projects, and the Succession actor tackles the role with his usual aplomb; he does a fine imitation of Zuckerberg’s stiff and pitchy voice. But though Eisenberg’s rendition of the 20-something CEO buzzes with youthful insecurity, Strong’s Zuckerberg, here in his late 30s, is almost zombified. The character is always seen sitting or stiffly standing, and has no light behind his eyes. That the head of one of the biggest tech companies in the world has become somewhat ghoulish and surrounded by yes-men is easy to believe yet hardly shocking; when Zuckerberg appears on-screen, the audience is meant to boo and hiss until he exits.
It is simply not enough for The Social Reckoning to present the facts that Facebook misled its users and encouraged many of their worst impulses. Those revelations are patiently explained by Haugen and Horwitz over and over again, as they emphasize to each other how the website’s algorithms pushed outrageous material that nudged its users toward hate groups to keep them scrolling. But the viewer can already learn about these developments by reading the existing source material.
That Sorkin relies on his favorite screenwriting tropes, which have grown creakier and creakier, doesn’t help—and they feel especially tired as he tackles subjects this topical. Attempts at witty repartee about such subjects as the musical Show Boat and Frank Capra movies fall flat coming out of White’s and Madison’s mouths. The narrative also hops backwards and forwards in time, encompassing the coronavirus pandemic and the January 6 insurrection, which just feels choppy and unfocused; Sorkin’s hammer-blow point about Facebook encouraging humanity’s worst impulses in regard to both crises can be seen coming from a mile off. The Social Reckoning isn’t wrong about the troubled world Facebook has helped make. The film just can’t talk about it in a remotely interesting way.
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Gli Stati Uniti hanno bombardato l’Iran durante i negoziati, e il Pentagono ha già pronti i piani per una nuova campagna dopo il 3 novembre. Intanto a scegliere i bersagli sono sempre più spesso sistemi di intelligenza artificiale sviluppati dai giganti della tecnologia: Palantir, Microsoft, Amazon, Google. E l’Italia? Il ministro Crosetto conferma 500 militari in Arabia Saudita, un nostro Eurofighter colpito a Ta’if e l’esercitazione nucleare Nato Steadfast Noon nei nostri cieli. “Non siamo in guerra”, dice. Ma allora che cos’è? 