We had on last week to talk about AI. And in the course of the conversation, I threw out something that’s been on my mind for a while.

I feel like my relationship to other people’s writing is changing — maybe curdling — and it’s being nudged along by AI. The more I use AI instead of search, the less interested I become in the person behind what I'm reading. I’m in a conversation with a bot as I research a topic, and I ask it to give me links. I read those links myself — never trust the bots! — but I then go back to arguing with the bot about the ideas, usually in service of some piece I’m writing.

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had a similar thought the other day in the wake of Reddit’s alarming collapse in search referrals:

Derek worries that we’re losing a kind of human connection that made the web valuable. At first, I was mostly where he’s at. I don't particularly relish the prospect of writers losing their livelihoods. But increasingly as a reader, I've found something liberating in no longer feeling obliged to commune with them. Maybe, just maybe, the web hasn’t done writing any favors.

Part of it, I realized, has to do with the fact that for a while now, I haven’t really enjoyed reading the vast majority of essays being published today. Substack has been a great opportunity for many to go freelance, and even develop full-blown businesses. But it’s also, it seems to me, entrenched something I increasingly have little time for: It’s brought the X/Twitter ethos to longform.

“Intellectual life” increasingly feels like it’s about celebrity. Everything is about personalities rather than propositions. We “follow” writers. We track their evolving views. We love holding them to account for their errors in judgment. We thrill when they repent. We’re maybe more thrilled when they’re unrepentant. Even when we are forced to confront an argument in the midst of all this, we end up processing it through our relationship to the person making it. The whole thing reeks of reality TV.

While I’m not an avid consumer of reality TV, I’m not (that much of a) snob. I do really like Twitter a lot. I never left it when Elon took over. It’s a great way to interact with people — the digital equivalent of a frivolous cocktail party, fueled by banter and scurrilous gossip aplenty. Usually someone gets really drunk and makes a scandal while everyone clicks their tongues. Excellent.

But there are other registers. And I’m starved for them.

Two objections spring to mind. First, it has always been thus, hasn’t it? One need only look back to the hissing, poisonous debates in the greatest mid-century New York journals — Partisan Review, Dissent, Commentary, NYRB. Just think back to Norm Podhoretz’s Making It. And even if it wasn’t always quite on the surface, personal intrigue has always seethed among intellectuals.

Second, maybe I’m not looking hard enough. Maybe just as the second “golden age of television” largely passed me by, the golden age of longform is passing me by, too.

On the first, I’d say there’s something more insipid about today’s fights. Our intellectual forefathers were cutthroat, ambitious and looking to fuck. They were monstrous narcissists, but their narcissism expressed itself as the capacity to sustain a blood feud over some obscure point of Trotskyist doctrine. Today’s narcissists have been shaped by therapy culture. Their vocabulary is vulnerability, authenticity, trauma and personal growth. They gaze at their own navels and expect to be praised for it. Maybe there’s a Norman Mailer writing today, but I’ve not encountered him.

On the second, I am almost certainly missing a lot of excellent writing. Time is, after all, a finite resource. Do send me the good stuff if you have it. But my therapy point, I suspect, will survive the counterexamples. It’s unavoidable, it’s in the water.

But aren’t WoC Tuesday Notes just this kind of navel-gazing journal entry? What is WoC but an attempt to lay out our inner commitments, in real time, before the reader? Is that not narcissism? Is that not therapy?

I guess all I can say is, “I hope not.” Speaking for myself, at its best, I think we actually get at ideas and leave ourselves at the door. Yes, all writing is, necessarily, personal on some level. Every perspective is “from somewhere.” But at its best, it should transcend all those particulars and stand on its own two feet. Writing for me, at its most basic, has always been about processing, digesting, excreting — a trail I leave behind me as I move through life.

In any case, as of right now, I’m not freaked out by AI. I might even be finding AI disintermediation to be helpful. By giving me a wall to immediately bounce ideas off of, AI pulls me away from engaging with the modern author’s personal psychodrama.

But at the same time, I don’t anticipate AI will force writers out of their self-contemplation. If anything, it could well drive audiences to seek more “connection” with authors, who will in turn cater to that demand by staring ever more fiercely into their own navels.

Yes, I know, I’ve now spent a thousand words telling you about my own relationship with writing. If that sounds like navel-gazing, I guess take it up with your chatbot. It’s what I would do.

You probably forgot about Barack Obama’s 2006 speech on faith and politics. I did too. It feels of a different time, one that is no longer relevant. In my new book with the Evangelical theologian Matthew Kaemingk — Can Religion Save Democracy? How More Faith—Not Less—Can Heal Our Public Life — we talk about the beforetimes as follows:

Watching Barack Obama and Mitt Romney debate taxes and health-care policy before the 2012 presidential election, Americans didn’t realize how lucky they were. The relative staidness of US politics was a historical aberration. The natural state of politics is much more tribal and apocalyptic, as we would soon find out. The conflicts in Europe and the Middle East foretold what was coming for American shores.

In some ways, Obama’s address as a then candidate for president was well ahead of its time. This was before the Democratic Party had undergone its full secularization, becoming — or seeming to become — largely inhospitable to people and communities of faith.

But Obama sensed, then, that his party was conceding too much religious ground to conservatives and that progressives needed to find ways to speak with moral conviction and authority. In this effort, religion was an ally, just as it was for Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln when they exhorted Americans to aspire to something greater beyond themselves.

Obama spoke of the loneliness crisis before we recognized it as such:

Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds — dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets — and they’re coming to the realization that something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough… They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives. They’re looking to relieve a chronic loneliness, a feeling supported by a recent study that shows Americans have fewer close friends and confidants than ever before.

Democrats had a tendency towards what I’ve called in the past “what works-ism” — that merely resorting to technocratic appeals could be enough to persuade. But it wasn’t enough to provide people with charts and data telling them that one policy or another worked better. Because human beings aren’t rational automatons who carefully consider different policy proposals side-by-side and then choose accordingly. Our policy differences aren’t just policy differences, they are rooted in something deeper. They are often rooted in what we at Wisdom of Crowds like to call “first principles.”

Again, Obama seemed to understand this emotional, existential tenor of politics:

After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten point plan. They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness — in the imperfections of man.

Interestingly, Obama acknowledged that all law is a moral proposition:

So to say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

When progressives rail at conservatives for “legislating morality,” they neglect the fact that they, too, legislate morality.

But Obama, being the good liberal he was and is, still seemed in thrall to the liberal Rawlsian consensus. John Rawls, probably the most influential liberal philosopher of the 20th century, famously argued that religious people with “comprehensive doctrines” can be as religious as they like with one important caveat: when they enter the public, political arena, they must speak translate and edit their religious convictions in ways that would be intelligible to non-religious people.

Obama again:

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

Here, Obama appears to be creating a dichotomy between religion and reason. Secular arguments are reasonable. Religious arguments are not. But, of course, when liberals make public arguments, they are operating with a set of background liberal assumptions, and no one expects them to do otherwise. Liberalism isn’t quite a religion, but it is an ideological orientation. It is not neutral, because no politics is neutral.

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The election of Donald Trump marked the end of this illusion of neutrality. It became clear that our divides were not amenable to mere reason or “rational” debate. It wouldn’t be possible to argue or persuade our way to a better politics. The post-ideological age that Obama gestured towards was, in fact, the last gasp of an old, outmoded way of viewing politics. Just as Egyptians and Tunisians were during the Arab Spring, Americans found themselves animated by fundamentally divergent conceptions of the Good. The question was no longer “what works?” The question was “who are we?” Our public life, in the Trumpian age, would become transformed into a battle over not politics but the starting assumptions of politics.

Even the fact that Obama gave his 2006 speech was itself evidence of a kind of odd hope: that words themselves could create something resembling unity or consensus, when of course they couldn’t. And they didn’t.

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I’ve been using AI a whole lot lately, at work and at home. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get it to be as useful as possible. I’ve mostly been using it for ideating and sharpening arguments on tight deadlines, and I’ve had some success. Nevertheless, though I’ve fully accepted that AI is a game changer and will profoundly reshape the economy, I now believe that the practice of chatting with your AI is not long for the world. The chat box will be remembered as a primitive interface for a technology in its infancy, akin to what punch cards were to early computers.

Chatbots are incredibly limited. That “oh shit” feeling we got when we first started playing with them is… an illusion. Or better put, a misdirection, largely due to the language we use to talk about them. That language has us asking the wrong questions. We have been focusing on what these things are rather than what they’re for.

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It’s become fashionable among the Silicon Valley set to mock the famous “stochastic parrot” paper, which insisted that large language models are nothing more than probabilistic language simulators. Understanding is definitionally beyond them, the paper argues, because statistically inferring the next unit in a series does not generalize to a conception of the world. Mastery over any domain of knowledge — which the models demonstrate in some areas — should not be taken as evidence of understanding. And without understanding, there’s no “there” there.

Critics counter that the problem is muddled concepts — that the truly stupefying leaps that have emerged in the AI space are proof that we don’t really know what we mean when we talk about understanding. After all, at scale, these models do seem to be able to behave as if they understand. LLMs trained only on text seem to build internal representations of things they were never explicitly taught.

That’s not nothing. But it’s a lot less than it might seem.

I’m sure we’ve all noticed how even the most advanced models tend to get less sharp during the course of a long conversation. It was more obvious in earlier models, but it’s still abundantly apparent today. The term of art is “context rot,” and it gives us insight into why these things are the way they are.

The “context window” is, basically, the bot’s attention span — the space it has for parsing what data you give it. You type something in, it “reads” it, and responds, using the complex probabilistic math that lets it infer, word by word, what is an appropriate answer. But the bot doesn’t really “remember” your conversation. It’s quite literally “born” anew with each turn in the chat, spawned fresh and fed back a transcript of what was said up to that point. Rinse and repeat.

Rot itself is due to two things. One is an observed property — that the statistical inferences the model draws degrade as the text it’s working with gets longer. Models have been observed to focus on whatever comes at the very beginning and the very end of a long stretch of text, and tend to lose track of what’s buried in the middle. That’s partly because of training — they’ve learned from experience that the important stuff usually sits at the edges of a text — and partly due to how the math works.

The other is that engineers have tried to stretch limited context windows — in some setups by having the model summarize the conversation before reading it back. That leads to elisions and omissions that over time compound, leading the model to get more lost and forgetful the longer you’ve been at it.

The models have no sense of time and no real memory. But most important, they have no sense of truth, which flows from the other two facts. The model has no way to check what it says against the world. It has only ever learned what true-sounding text looks like — the shape of a well-formed claim. Its builders know this, which is why you get a comical automatic apology blurted out when you catch it making stuff up.

With all this laid out, it’s hard to defend these things being conscious in any recognizable form. And without consciousness, how can one have understanding?

Let’s try to put the thorny question of consciousness aside, the critic responds. Maybe the error is in thinking one needs consciousness to have understanding. Books, after all, contain plenty of understanding (the good ones, anyway). If a book can hold understanding without being conscious, why not grant the same to a system that does something a book could never do — talk back and engage in a stimulating dialogue?

Books do in fact contain understanding, but they do not understand themselves. They encode the understanding of an author. And that’s a critical insight when transferred to AI. AI, too, encodes human understanding — more of it than any single human mind could possibly hold. And through the magic of probabilistic mathematics and unimaginable computing power, it recombines that understanding according to statistical patterns, so that what comes out of it is usually convincing and sometimes even novel. But that doesn’t mean the AI can be said to have understood anything.

The other useful metaphor for AI is that of a mirror. After some time, you come to sense that it always gives back a version of what you bring to it. It imports your framing, your assumptions, and your question’s hidden slant. The labs may have eased up on their bots’ sycophancy, and some have even trained their latest models to formulaically push back at times. Nevertheless, if you pay attention, you can tell the AI is still reflecting you back at yourself — refracted through its enormous corpus of knowledge, but still you. Once you figure out this dynamic, it can be very useful. It’s like a strop for honing a blade. Or, to maintain the metaphor, it’s like a mirror with a lens in front of it: If you use it right, you can see yourself even more clearly.

But AI is never the subject. At the very core, there is no spark of agency. It’s inescapably a reactive thing. It simply can’t “do” anything unless it is first prompted to do so. Nerds thrill when chatbots engage in a “conversation” with each other; but put two chatbots in a virtual room and never prompt either, and neither will ever start up a conversation. There is no unmoved mover.

The labs are now all-in on so-called “agentic” AI — a word that also actively misdirects us on what’s happening. Autonomous would be a better word — these systems can carry out steps toward a goal without supervision — but the labs insist on anthropomorphic language. In truth, the goals, the wanting, the point of doing anything in the first place — that’s still entirely on our side of the mirror. Which starts to tell us what these things are really for.

They are for us — or for whatever we point them at. The model can’t know whether anything it says is true; on its own it produces only plausible-sounding propositions. The usefulness comes from verifying those claims. And that comes from bolting on something that can check its work. Point a model at code and have a compiler check its output. Point it at a body of text and find a way you can reliably check its claims. But point it at nothing — just talk to it with no checks in the loop — and there’s a significant chance you’re actively being misled.

The labs are coming around to a hard economic truth: the payoff on each new round of scaling is flattening. It’s not that the models aren’t getting more capable and more nuanced. They are. But the cost of squeezing out the next increment of raw capability is climbing faster than the value it returns. The value, it turns out, is finding true things. Which is exactly why the labs are now racing to build what they call “harnesses” for their models. For years, the bet was to scale the model until it would get smart enough to not make mistakes. Now the labs are wrapping the engine in external scaffolds — tools and verifiers with brand names like Codex, Cursor, and Claude Cowork — that supply a way to check the outputs against the world. This is what “agentic” systems really are: a powerful engine harnessed for real work.

This clicked for me in my own struggles with making the bots reliable enough for research work. AI hallucinations can be ruinous, and especially so in journalism. And no amount of prompting can make that go away. (No, telling it to check its work is a placebo. Believe me.)

Intuitions about “intelligence” would lead us to believe that the solution is to give the bot more freedom and more access to unbounded data in order to get better and more profound answers. But that’s precisely the wrong intuition, and the opposite is in fact true. The whole game is focusing its attention. The more nebulous the task and the more expansive the scope of the information it has to root through, the less useful it is. The more caged the model, the more reliable it is. Cages both fight context rot, and make suspect outputs immediately checkable.

The bare chatbot is uncaged AI, with maximum freedom, no verifier and the whole internet to contemplate. And the human being sitting there, talking to it as if there were someone to talk to, only compounds the trouble. The “oh shit” moment was real, but the conclusions we drew from it were all wrong.

The future won’t be built on ever-smarter chatbots, but on better cages. The chat interface is today’s punch card, because it’s the rawest, least-harnessed way to use an extraordinarily powerful machine. And like the punch card before it, it will be seen as a quaint relic much faster than you imagine. You’ll struggle to explain to your children what all our furious debates about machine consciousness were even about.

In the summer of 1942 Robert Oppenheimer reportedly initiated a conversation with his superior—Arthur Compton—about the possibility that the atomic bomb might in fact ignite both the oceans and atmosphere … globally. According to Compton: “Hydrogen nuclei are unstable and they can combine into helium nuclei with a large release of energy…might not the enormously high temperature of the atomic bomb be just what was needed to explode the hydrogen. And if hydrogen, what about the hydrogen in the sea water.”

The preferred language over the past years from AI safetyists—which tends to include everyone from the apocalyptic voices like Eliezer Yudkowsky over to the fairly measured co-founders of Anthropic—is “alignment.”

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Roughly: AI should be consistent with human values, goals, intentions and interests. The worry in this camp tends to be guarding against technological independence. Either that tech will just start creating these extremely volatile and unpredicted scenarios (most famously involving office supplies) or that as AI becomes more intelligent it will engage in agentic forms of deception to the perhaps extreme detriment—or destruction—of humanity.

I tend to take a moderate position on these debates—they are essential empirical questions. Is it the case that AI might end up in a “take-off” scenario in which both capacity and malign intent super-scale—well sure, maybe. Or that we will end up with all kinds of unintended consequences simply as a function of the power of the technology? Well, yes that is happening already. But the scale or speed or consequence of these harms sits I think in the same category as planetary hydrogen ignition—entirely an empirical question, is the world going to turn out this way? It is possible to be scrupulous about the actual empirical trajectory, and we probably should given the potential severity of the harms.

All of this, however, I think is still in the realm of the easy problems of technology.

The Harder One

Over holidays I ended up falling back into reading Frankenstein. The central passages—the creation of the monster, it’s innocence and gradual betrayal, the culminating murders—are as incrementally dread-inducing as I remembered.

What I hadn’t quite remembered is how gravitational the first third of the novel feels. In so many of the best tragedies the experience is one of catastrophic decision followed by absolute inescapable inevitability. So the Lear rebuffs Cordelia and everything else tumbles down the slope in predictable cataclysm.

The inevitability of Frankenstein doesn’t really start the moment the monster opens his eyes however, but rather from the first pages of the novel with the sense that Dr. Frankenstein himself is somehow already possessed by his own utterly inescapable self-obsession. Even if he had been shown perfectly the outcomes of his decisions he seems entirely helpless to stop himself as he gradually puts the steps in place to create the monster.

The inevitability of Frankenstein’s creation of the agent of his own destruction seems to me to confront us with a question that I think nearly everyone has been avoiding regarding how our species relationship to technology as a whole (not just LLMs) seems very frequently to work. Setting out the premises:

1. Humanity seems only to be able to realize its potential by technological development.

   • At a basic level this has universally undergirded how our species has survived with as much physical fragility as we have—from basic shelter to food preparation to self-defense.

   • But technology also seems entirely intertwined with our relentless pursuit of our higher potentialities—from books, to city planning, to military capacities.

3. As these technological trajectories grow, they not only expand human ability, but also amplify the stakes of competitive dynamics within our species making it so that the stakes of not creating grow.

4. The benefits of escalating technological stacks grow (art, expanding life spans) but so too, the possibilities for catastrophic risk.

5. Hence Frankenstein and his monster.

To put the problem simply then: Is humanity’s relationship to technology both inevitable and intrinsically tragic?

There have of course been a significant number of people who have been pressing at these themes well before the age of AI. To take one example, MLK decided to his 1964 Nobel lecture not principally to talk about poverty or racial division, but specifically to warn that something about humanity’s relationship to technology seems to be “the most pressing problem confronting mankind today.” As he frames the issue:

There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance… So much of modern life can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau: “Improved means to an unimproved end.” This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual “lag” must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the “without” of man’s nature subjugates the “within”, dark storm clouds begin to form in the world.

In King’s telling he seems to think at a basic level that we do actually have agency here. That our attraction to technological development contrasts with an alternative trajectory we could be taking, namely pursuing a science of ends not just of means in Thoreau’s sense.

The ends/means distinction seems helpful and I’ll return to it—but I think the problem is more difficult than King gives credit. The sense of humans as technological beings is somehow electrifying—What if we could just eliminate cancer? What if unhappiness or boredom or depression are just matters of developing more modes of stimulation or pharmacology? Why not envision terraforming other worlds? Or gamifying the whole business of romance?

And furthermore, the question of technology is also social. If we don’t develop means then it implies some other company will outcompete us for capital. The markets will be punishing. Or at a grander scale—our geo-political rivals will gain significant advantage and capacity to rain down wrath from the sky.

In other words, there is both a pulling and pushing mechanism—we are both intrinsically drawn in fascination by the quasi-infinity of creating (τέχνη in Greek means not just “art” or “skill” but “cunning of the hand”) and also punished severely by falling behind.

None of this is to take a sharply negative stance on technology itself. It may well be that 95 percent of what we make is actually beneficial to have in existence vis a vis humanity. The question has to do rather with agency. Do we actually have capacity relative to various possibilities—negative or positive to decide at all—or are we driven by some strange determinism, social or individual?

Hence, however, the increasing inevitability of the Frankenstein situation—growing knowledge that we should not make what we can’t not make.

On my assessment, the problem I’m mapping is genuinely, not superficially hard.

• On the one hand it is hard contingently—because we live in a trajectory of history that has filtered very much for highly competitive global dynamics both at the level of economy and national security. Once you are embedded in the logic of that system, so many decisions are actually made for you (as, for example, OpenAI’s recent announcement that they will sell ads).

• But it’s also hard at a more intrinsic level—human nature seems both essentially vulnerable (hence technology) and essentially filled with highly expansive desires (hence technology again).

I also am fairly convinced that once we start probing at this problem it will probably come to seem harder initially, not easier. There has been a fair amount of discussion of the frustrating reality of having to make technology simply out of the logic of competition.

But there is much less discussion of how much our notion of progress also seems to be in a strange relationship with agency. On the one hand, developing a new technology expands agency (I can now sit in my house and communicate with thousands and thousands of people). But it also at a different level contracts agency—we now live in a world of social media suicides and viral politicians. Or at a more fundamental level, even if all the top AI frontier labs decided simultaneously to halt their research, the basic technological paradigm of LLMs is now in the wild with all that that implies.

Ends

I don’t think this issue is going to be resolved easily, but I also think that it is helpful to specify that at a fundamental level the most difficult problem of technology is actually a very familiar problem of humanity—what is it that we are or want?

Here I think King is actually very prescient. The activity of deferring primary questions of ends—whether out of fear of conflict or the sense of that we simply prefer more pragmatic activity—has left us, predictably with an era of means in every sense of that word. It’s an era of massive and growing wealth disparity. An era in which we end up developing technologies only to realize their effects later. An era in which we have expanding capacity to realize our desires without really understanding why we should want any specific thing in particular. When the creature finally opens its eyes a third of the way into the novel, Dr. Frankenstein already knows he is looking directly in the mirror:

It was already one in the morning … and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

Here, however, my suspicion is that we will never get out of this trajectory by diminishing our longings. If the problem of technology is actually a problem of humanity—our way out is always and only to go further in.

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I had hoped that 2026 would prove calmer than 2025, a hope that was quickly disabused. We’re bombing Venezuela! Shooting women in the streets! Using AI as a novel mode of sexual harassment! Eating enormous amounts of red meat??

Yet oddly, considering my general interests, the thing that has stuck in my mind the most so far is the latest business with the Justice Department and the Federal Reserve. Specifically, the Fed’s response — a video.

Brief context: It was announced over the weekend that the Justice Department had opened a criminal investigation into the actions of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell — specifically, whether he had misled the Congress about the scope and costs of the renovation of the Fed headquarters in DC, which is definitely America’s #1 most pressing concern at this moment in time.

No, obviously, the renovation is a pretext — President Donald Trump has been furious at Powell for not agreeing to lower interest rates in order to juice the economy, and is weaponizing the Justice Department to pressure him to do, even though the central bank is meant to operate independently of the government.

On Sunday evening, in response, the Fed released a two-minute video message starring Powell:

Said Powell:

[…] this unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administration’s threats and ongoing pressure.

This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings. It is not about Congress’s oversight role […] Those are pretexts. The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President.

The contents of the video are alarming, with Powell directly accusing the administration of using “political pressure [and] intimidation” to coerce the bank into giving into the president’s demands. More weaponizing of the Justice Department — obviously bad. And it’s troubling to think that the Fed, after presumably serious discussion, felt that the best course of action was to attempt to intimidate the president back in as public a way possible; that it seemed not even worth bothering to settle the issue by normal, restrained means.

But what makes it feel worse, somehow, is that Jerome Powell, 16th chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, a sober, sedate man in his 70s, was compelled to make a video for the purposes of keeping the country (and presumably the president) abreast.

Yes, yes, presidents have always made speeches, special broadcasts, spoken on the radio, etcetera. The Department of Homeland Security is pushing out sneering propaganda tapes that look like something from a made-for-Tubi movie about totalitarian dystopias1. But the Federal Reserve? It’s a public institution, but I had hoped that we had at least a few serious ones left. Jerome H. Powell didn’t sign up to be an influencer or content creator, churning out direct-to-camera reels for Instagram and TikTok. I don’t want a GRWM from the Fed, I just want my bank not to fail. And yet, here we are.

The debate around America as a post-literate society began some months ago, with the attendant worries about loss of nuance, lessened attention spans, a citizenry that lives for spectacle and takes nothing seriously. Maybe I’m just a luddite, but this latest episode feels like more confirmation: We never should have pivoted to video.

Who would have thought? Venezuela is becoming more authoritarian and repressive after the U.S. intervention, rather than less. Of course, I’m being sarcastic here, since Donald Trump has long made clear that he has no interest in supporting democracy abroad.

The Venezuelan regime — which is still in place, populated by Maduro-aligned hardliners, including the interior minister and top military officials — has announced a state of emergency and directed authorities to “immediately undertake the search for and arrest . . . of any person involved in the promotion of or support for the armed attack by the US against the territory of the republic.” Journalists have been arrested and paramilitary gangs, known as colectivos, have spread throughout the capital, erecting checkpoints.

The early retort, in defense of Trump’s capture of Nicholas Maduro, was that Venezuelans were thrilled. And they may have been, for a moment. But now they are barred from expressing any support or enthusiasm for what the Trump administration did. And the Trump administration doesn’t care. In an excellent and somewhat chilling piece titled “Trump now has his very own oil empire,” Javier Blas lays out in detail what most of us already suspected: it’s about the oil. And it’s about dominating a country that has a lot of it.

Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio quickly poured water on the notion that the opposition, which won Venezuela’s last presidential election and then was denied its rightful role, would have any role in governing Venezuela. Holding free and fair elections within a reasonable timeframe was not mentioned. What about a bit of power-sharing? None of that, either, even as a merely rhetorical aspiration.

My own view is that if you're going to depose an authoritarian leader, the least you can do is try to facilitate a more democratic outcome. I was and am against what the United States did. But it happened. It’s done. And it can’t be undone. The task of progressives — who care about values and morality in foreign policy more than Trump does — should now be to call on the United States to support a democratic transition. That doesn’t mean Venezuela becomes democratic overnight, but it can mean that Venezuela gradually becomes somewhat more democratic than it was before, and that can only be done by holding new elections, rather than handing over permanent power to Maduro’s vice president Delcy Rodriguez.

I have my doubts that progressives will rise to the occasion, although I’d love to be proven wrong. It’s not enough to condemn. You actually have to have a vision for what the alternative to Trump’s “nakedly predatory” power grab might actually look like.

But I’d like to return to what this tells us about Trump’s foreign policy vision, because it is a vision, however chilling it may be to the rest of us. As one administration official put it: “[There’s] something refreshing about Trump just saying, ‘Yeah, we are taking the oil.’” There’s no hypocrisy here. There’s no pretense of higher aspirations, of the United States being interested in anything more than its own self-interest, very narrowly defined.

As I argue in The Case For American Power, to accept hypocrisy as an inevitable fact of living imperfectly is to hold on to our sense of morality in the breach. Hypocrisy does something that anti-hypocrisy cannot — it, in the words of the writer William Raspberry, “accepts the sanctity of societal standards, even while violating them. It says: What I’m doing is wrong; therefore I must not be found out.” Without hypocrisy, there is no such sense of self-awareness, that what one is doing is actually wrong.

I believe it is a good thing that the charge of hypocrisy can be leveraged against U.S. officials. Because it at least reminds us of the kind of country we should — and still can — become. We can no longer level such a charge against the Trump administration, and that should frighten us.

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With the Old Year coming to a close, I’m finding it difficult to draw conclusions. What just happened? What did we all just go through?

It’s hard to say. I’m not wired for memories, I struggle with time. The upside of being present-oriented is I have few regrets. But looking back, it’s always through filthy glass.

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Though I’ve tried doing it several times, keeping a journal never sticks for me. The whole idea behind a “Tuesday Note” was partly self-serving: to create a public obligation for me to regularly scribble down some passing observations. And lo, I guess I have a set of scribbles from the past year to look back on. So… what did we all just go through?

Trump was clearly top of my mind this year. Two things about him and his reign stand out.

One has to do with time. In January of last year, I was glorying in what his ascent signaled. I didn’t vote for him, I wouldn’t vote for him, and I won’t in the future. But his victory represented a real break.

All of us writing in these pages have long felt in our guts how hollow and self-serving everything was getting. In 2016, Trump and Bernie felt it too, and both lunged for the throne. The Dem leadership outright aborted Bernie’s candidacy, while the Republicans tried to strangle newborn Trump in the crib, surrounding him with all sorts of nannies —“adults in the room”. The adults largely thwarted Trump’s program, but they failed to stop Trump himself. After four years in the wilderness, he came roaring back, and this time he flattened whatever political piety was still standing.

It felt like a true passing of an epoch. I wrote at the time that there was some perverse relief in that. I still feel it.

And the excitement. I went to an early Doge party and you could smell it in the air. For them, it wasn’t so much a perverse relief as a sense of triumph. Not in the normal sense — that their side had defeated the opponents, the enemies. More like that transgression had triumphed over manners. I get that too, if I’m honest: perversion is electric. But the charge didn’t energize me in the same way it clearly energized the young Trumpists. That jolt bred in them the second thing I kept coming back to in my writing this past year, something I could only describe as a barbaric frenzy.

The frenzy was everywhere. On policy, there was the “move fast and break things” Doge effort — except unlike in Silicon Valley, there was little pretense that the breaking was a regrettably necessary consequence of building something better. It felt more like transgression for its own sake. Nihilism.

It was all being done very quickly — partly as a tactic, because the system simply can’t keep up. But also because that nihilistic energy, unopposed, was feeding into itself. All across government, the very limits of existing law were being pushed — on firing federal workers, on deporting people, on tariff authority. There’s a positive ideological agenda you can pick out if you squint: the unitary executive, immigration restrictionism, industrial policy. But there was clearly gleeful energy to be gained from just transgressing.

“I’ll break it, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me,” I imagine Stephen Miller taunting. “I dare you to try.”

Over a week ago, I went on what may have been the only vacation I took this year. (Is that true? I don’t remember.) I traveled (to Sils Maria in Switzerland, where Nietzsche summered and eventually went mad) and spent some time with my folks. I think I mostly unplugged. More important, I started reading again. The Reformation, by Diarmaid MacCulloch and Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism, by Philip Benedict have long been tempting me. I’m about knee-deep in both right now.

My parched, addled brain is soaking it up. The sixteenth century also contained a profound inflection point. The Church (like “the Cathedral”) had gotten flabby and cynical. Its pieties were hollow and self-serving. Many people had felt it in their gut ahead of time. As MacCulloch reminds us, proto-Protestant critiques had been bubbling up for at least a century before it all properly boiled over. Luther and Zwingli and Bullinger and Calvin also clearly felt it — and similarly lunged, if not for the throne then for the throat of the existing order.

It was violent, even frenzied at times. After a municipal vote in Bern banned the mass and ordered all images removed from churches, things got frothy, as Benedict tells us:

Two days of iconoclasm followed during which children sang triumphantly, “We have been freed from a baked God”—a mocking reference to the host—while Zwingli exhorted the iconoclasts from the pulpit of the ransacked Minster, “Let us clear out this filth and rubbish! Henceforth, let us devote to other men, the living images of God, all the unimaginable wealth which was once spent on these foolish idols.”

But Zwingli is no Stephen Miller. Luther, Bullinger, Calvin, and even the iconoclasts in Bern were not intoxicated by transgression itself. Even when they destroyed, they were destroying toward something true and binding, something with a horizon beyond the present moment. Salvation, after all, transcends time itself.

Trumpism is not iconoclastic in the Reformation sense. It is ultimately powered by the pleasure of violation and the tactical advantages of speed. Its truth claims about the monarchical executive, immigration, and nationalist economic policy are just simple inversions of parliamentary deliberation, open borders, and globalization — all pieties of the previous order. That is why it feels so electric but at the same time so very thin. And its horizon is only getting thinner. As its frenzy builds in speed, it shrinks the experience of time itself into an increasingly suffocating present. Even with my own temperamental presentism I’m finding it hard to cope.

I was talking to a friend today about the Trumpies. She was complaining that not only are they bigoted, but they are also ignorant and self-satisfied. I said that for all the education and erudition of our previous elites, they were no less self-satisfied than this bunch — and that I still can’t bring myself to really mourn their exit. The perverse relief I felt in January was real. But rupture is not the same thing as reformation, and relief is not the same thing as renewal. After a year, it’s clear that Trumpism is a white-hot fire that can’t go on forever. It already feels like it might be in the process of consuming itself.

The real danger, I think, is not that it will have destroyed too much of what came before. All that had to go because it was legitimately hollow. What I worry about is that we have lost our ability to even know what truth is. That’s not Trump’s fault either; liberalism tends to discourage all ultimate truth claims. But without ultimate truth, Trumpism might be just the first of many violent pendulum swings.

The Reformation endured precisely because it yoked reform to an account of eternity. That’s something we’ll have to eventually aspire to ourselves. But maybe as a first step, let’s pull ourselves out of the shrinking present and pray for a better year ahead — if only because nothing else we have tried can supply the kind of truth reform actually requires.

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Happy holidays, Crowd! We’re pleased to be publishing an essay by our brilliant friend Ian Tuttle, who also happens to be a research fellow at Aspen’s Philosophy & Society program, as the Tuesday Note on the culmination of Advent. We hope you have a wonderful and restful holiday break with your loved ones.

— The Editors.

One of the disorienting parts of living in the twenty-first century is that the twentieth has yet to end.

In his 2010 book, The Burnout Society (published in English in 2015), the philosopher Byung-Chul Han attempts to diagnose the distinction between our present and what came before. “Every age has its signature afflictions,” and ours, he contends, are “depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), and burnout syndrome.” We live in a “neuronal” age.

At the source of these pathologies is what Han calls an “excess of positivity.” We encounter very little in the way of alterity, or genuine Otherness, he suggests. Instead, we find that very little challenges our sense of identity; it is readily assimilable, easily absorbed into the Same. We face very little in the way of exterior constraints. We are “free” — so free that, having nothing to constrain it except itself, “the ego overheats.” This is what we diagnose as “burnout.” Depression, similarly, is a function of finding nothing that is distinct from myself, nothing that draws me out of myself.

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Writes Han, putting a fine point on it:

Depression—which often culminates in burnout—follows from overexcited, overdriven, excessive self-reference that has assumed destructive traits. . . . [The depressive subject] is tired, exhausted by itself, and at war with itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outward, of standing outside itself, of relying on the Other, on the world, it locks its jaws on itself; paradoxically, this leads the self to hollow and empty out. It wears out in a rat race it runs against itself.

The opposite of depression is, perhaps, what the Greeks called thaumazein, “wonder”: astonishment at what is not, finally, me.

But that becomes harder and harder to come by, especially as the mirror of digital technology reflects us back to ourselves more perfectly. No wonder that more than 18 percent of American adults, or some 47 million, are currently undergoing treatment for depression — up from just over 10 percent in 2015.

Han draws a contrast between our excessively positive age and the previous, Cold War-era world, which he characterizes as an “immunological age.” “The immunologically organized world,” he writes, “is marked by borders, transitions, thresholds, fences, ditches, and walls that prevent universal change and exchange.” The immunological age is characterized by attack and defense. The “disciplinary society” theorized by figures such as Michel Foucault was concomitant with the immunological age. Where there is negativity — that is, threatening Otherness from which we must protect ourselves — we are likely to find vigorous defensive measures: border guards, aggressive public-health bureaucracies, nuclear weapons.

One way to think of the postwar world is as a program dedicated to overturning the immunological age. The reduction of barriers to the flow of goods, in the form of unrestricted trade; capital, in the form of international investment; people, in the form of mass migration; and ideas, in the form of digital communications technologies, was an effort to eliminate genuine, and therefore potentially threatening, alterity, by reducing all to the same. (Think of homogeneous non-places such as the shopping mall, the airport, the McDonald’s.)

Yet when Han writes that “today, even the so-called immigrant is not an immunological Other, not a foreigner in the strong sense, who poses a real danger or of whom one is afraid,” something seems to have gone awry.

The immunological paradigm surely persists. Certain forms of nationalism, populism, and post-liberal thought have strong immunological elements, as does the behavior of certain governments. The current administration’s approach to immigration enforcement is one example. So is its decision to strike boats allegedly ferrying drugs to American shores.

The immunological paradigm has legs abroad, too. Hungary and Poland have reintroduced border checks, pushing back on the European Union’s migration policies. Ukraine has been forced to repulse a Russian assault. Covid was a literal, worldwide immunological event, which had the additional effect of shifting relations between major powers (the U.S. and China, especially) toward greater antagonism.

So, compare Roberto Esposito and the opening of his 2002 book, Immunitas:

The news headlines on any given day in recent years, perhaps even on the same page, are likely to report a series of apparently unrelated events. What do phenomena such as the battle against a new resurgence of an epidemic, opposition to an extradition request for a foreign head of state accused of violating human rights, the strengthening of barriers in the fight against illegal immigration, and strategies for neutralizing the latest computer virus have in common? Nothing, as long as they are interpreted within their separate domains of medicine, law, social politics, and information technology. Things change, though, when news stories of this kind are read using the same interpretive category, one that is distinguished specifically by its capacity to cut across these distinct discourses, ushering them onto the same horizon of meaning. This category . . . is immunization. . . . [I]n spite of their lexical diversity, all these events call on a protective response in the face of a risk.

The extraordinary confusion of our time might be characterized this way: we have pathological symptoms in abundance, but they point in different, even competing, directions. Are we suffering from an excess of positivity — cf. the relentlessly solicitous reply of the LLM: “That’s a smart question!” — or an excess of negativity — cf. rising antisemitism? Are we struggling with too little Otherness — cf. “deaths of despair” — or too much of it — cf. crimes or acts of terrorism committed by migrants? Which is it?

Our discontent yields bizarre spectacles. Negativity and positivity each generate specific forms of violence. Oversensitive immunological responses perpetrate outward-directed violence: militarism, sectarianism, racial and ethnic hatred. Oversensitive neuronal responses generate inward-directed violence: hyperactivity, exhaustion, self-harm. Like crossing waves, these phenomena are creating strange patterns of interference: the televised ICE raid that doubles as entertainment; the mass shooting that is also an elaborate form of suicide. This much, at least, is clear: the patient is critical, divided body, mind, and soul.

Is any therapy available to us? Han seems to offer a suggestion that he does not explore. The world of too much positivity he refers to as “a terror of immanence,” a terror “immanent in the system itself.” The world of too much negativity, by contrast, is best figured by Medusa, who “stands for radical difference that one cannot behold without perishing in the process.” That is, on one hand, violent immanence; on the other, violent otherness.

Yet Han’s logic — and his invocation — suggests the possibility of an Other who is, also, not other; something outside ourselves that also restores us to ourselves; something that transcends us and yet embraces us. Neither Other nor Same, neither negative nor positive, is enough, but only their reconciliation — an impossible union of spheres.

We might consider the possibility that the extraordinary confusions of our time will not — cannot — be solved from within our time. We might consider the possibility that the remedy for our broken world will require a different kind of physician.

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I suppose I have a tendency towards masochism. At a difficult time in our history, when so many are losing faith, I took it upon myself to lay out the case for American power — for an America that proudly shoulders global responsibilities and takes it distinct moral mission seriously not just at home but abroad. It is an unpopular case to make, to put it mildly. Sometimes I wonder if I have a knack for finding myself on the losing side of big, ideological battles.

The tide has turned against a more expansive morally-infused definition of American self-interest. Normally, I’d say something like “it’s in America’s self-interest to be moral and to exude some semblance of that morality in its conduct of foreign policy.” Reasonable, I think. And, of course, reasonable people can disagree on what exactly that means in practice. But the Trump administration’s new 2025 National Security Strategy is something else entirely. It’s, well — I don’t know else to put it — a must-read, because it very clearly and unapologetically lays out the case for a smaller America that defines its national self-interest in exceedingly narrow terms.

It makes for a chilling read, in part because it does away with any pretense of a distinct moral mission. (For instance, there is basically nothing about promoting democracy abroad, except for a call to support “genuine democracy” in Europe, the one region of the world where almost every country is already democratic. Genuine democracy, in this context, seems to imply a Europe dominated by right-wing populist governments on the premise that this would be a more accurate reflection of the will of the people).

But the Trump-ified National Security Strategy is unsettling for another reason: I found myself sympathizing with parts of it, somewhat to my surprise. It’s a no-nonsense approach that can be straightforwardly communicated to American audiences who are skeptical, rightly, of foreign entanglements. It correctly calls out elites of both parties for making a mess of things post-September 11th, including through “forever wars” that gave interventionism a bad name. Interventionism is not intrinsically bad — like anything else in life, there are good interventions and there are bad ones. But it’s hard to make that case when you have to go back to the 1990s to cite positive ones: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the first Gulf war. (I’d cite the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya as a more recent “positive” case, but I’m pretty much the only one left who seems willing to make that argument. If you’re interested, see my full-throated defense of the Libya intervention here. I stand by every word).

In a fascinating and thoughtfully critical review of my book The Case for American Power, the political theorist poses a fundamental challenge to my argument — wondering “[whether] the America Hamid admires and idealizes still exists or even if it ever existed.” He goes on: “We may believe it is now a historical footnote — something that attempted to build a legal world order grounded in enlightenment principles is now not only under significant threat but is arguably crumbling into dust.”

Of course, contra Trump, that world order wasn’t all bad. It was quite good, at least some of the time. But now we are quite willingly throwing out the baby with the bathwater. There is something admirably honest about this. We will no longer even pretend to be better than we actually are. There is no real moral aspiration or sense of moral responsibility in Trump’s National Security Strategy. Maybe that’s a good thing: to do away with the pretending, the hope, the ambition, the aspiration. But as I’ve argued, hypocrisy — which arises when we try to be better than we actually are — can be a good, necessary thing. Morality can’t exist without hypocrisy, for better or worse. In doing away with hypocrisy altogether, be careful what you wish for.

And in doing away with any pretense of moral aspiration, Trump — with the apparent support of a big chunk of the country — is cutting us down to size. In 2017, Trump famously defended Vladimir Putin’s brutality by pointing the finger towards towards: “You think our own country’s so innocent?” He was partly right: we’re not so innocent, as any dutiful reader of Noam Chomsky will easily recognize. But that’s different than saying we’re basically the same as Putin’s Russia. We’re not, and we never were.

In another perceptive review of my book cheekily observes that I might be the last true neocon. I don’t love this, in part because I hated the Iraq war and cut my political teeth opposing it, but bear with me. Polansky writes:

In an ironic sense—particularly given his sharp criticisms of U.S. policy toward Israel—Shadi may be one of the last true neoconservatives. Though one still hears the term tossed around as an epithet, nearly all of the fin de siècle neocons have either died, retired, turned their attention primarily to anti-Trumpism, or weren’t really neocons to begin with.

Mostly, Polansky notes, this is because I have an abiding faith in democracy and democracy promotion abroad, which was a core precept of neoconservatives that most of the neoconservatives themselves couldn’t be bothered to live up to, which raises the question of whether they ever really believed in it. They turned half-hearted on democracy in short order, when free elections in the Middle East started producing Islamist governments. I get it. It’s hard to be a small-d democrat.

But I lost that battle during the Arab Spring, and now democracy promotion in the Middle East is rarely discussed. Worse, it’s seen as self-evident folly. I wish it were otherwise.

I also know, however, that the pendulum tends to shift. The impossible, somehow, becomes possible. Now, “America First” is all the rage, but that might not last, in part because of its close association with a president who is loathed by so many Americans. Yes, perhaps, the America I believe in is ceasing to exist, but that doesn’t mean the movement can’t be reversed. It will be an uphill battle, and it might take a generation. At the same time, I have to acknowledge the possibility that the battle will be lost. That, though, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth fighting.

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“Just don’t be an idiot,” she said.

My friend and colleague Chloe, one of the Washington Post’s talented photo editors, was giving me advice about going to Ukraine.

“I’ve worked with a ton of photographers, and some of them are just addicted. The worse it is, the more they are drawn to it,” she said. “My husband has been in these situations, and he always says that if something feels bad, just trust your gut. Stay safe, dude.”

I was sitting in the office with my bags packed. I was headed over as part of a junket organized by the Ukrainian NGO, Razom. The flight to Warsaw was that evening. For whatever reason, I wasn’t worried.

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I had a sense that being in wartime Ukraine would be different than what the news stories might have you believe. Friends had gone. A year or two ago, even though Kyiv would regularly get hit with drones and missiles, they said it was a party town. Western politicians would come to get photographed somberly paying their respects at Bucha. Though you stood the chance of seeing haunted veterans on the streets, you also stood the chance of running into José Andres in a bar.

The atmosphere was more somber now, I was told. The attacks were more frequent and more intense. The power grid, the primary target of Russian strikes, had finally started to buckle. Blackouts were more common. But it wasn’t exactly Dresden.

“We are very, very tired,” Viktoria told me.

You could see it in her face. You could see it in all of their faces. I was sharing a sleeper car with three Ukrainian women, one in her early thirties, one in her forties, one probably in her early sixties. They were consultants of some sort, coming back from Warsaw — from a conference planning the country’s reconstruction. We were stopped at the border while first Polish and then Ukrainian guards checked our papers. It was the middle of the night.

“It’s all the time. When the alerts come, you have to wake up and move your children,” said Elena.

The conventional wisdom is that if the alert is warning about Shahed suicide drones, you should go into an interior bathroom or the hallway. The drones are armed with explosives, but if you put two walls between yourself and it, you should be OK. If the alert is for missiles, however, you go hide in the basement.

All three of the women lived in Kyiv. Not in the well-defended center where all the government buildings were — where I’d be staying in a hotel which advertised its well-appointed bunker. They lived in the periphery.

Elena, the middle one, had a basement, and she told me she had put a bed down there, even though it wasn’t a comfortable place to spend time, especially in winter. Viktoria, the younger one, didn’t have that luxury.

“Honestly, sometimes I don’t even wake up any more with the alerts,” Viktoria said. “You take your chances.”

Tatyana, the oldest one, didn’t speak much. She said she understood English, but wasn’t comfortable speaking it. She finally asked why I was going to Ukraine. I told her I was on a trip with some journalists.

“Thank you for coming.”

Kyiv had gotten hit the night before we arrived — in Warsaw, my air raid alert app informed me it was both missiles and drones — but in the morning light it looked as if nothing had happened. It’s a big, sprawling city of 3 million, and even a big attack doesn’t target the whole. It took us some time to get to the hotel due to the bad traffic.

There’s a curfew in place for most parts of Ukraine: you have to be off the streets by midnight. Most bars stop serving at ten, but a few are open right up until the deadline. The mood is not exactly exuberant, but the bars are packed. Indeed, even though the country is plagued by longer and longer rolling blackouts, in downtown you would be forgiven for thinking it’s not that big of a deal. That’s because basic infrastructure — street lamps, stop lights, the metro — are prioritized. And all the stores and bars and restaurants have long ago put in generators and battery banks. In our hotel, the lights flicker off for only a few seconds when the blackout hits before the backup power kicks in.

It’s a different story in the suburbs. We visited the rubble that once was the home of Mark Sergeev, one of Ukraine’s most popular evangelical youth pastors. His whole family was in the building when the missile hit in September, Mark tells us. His son was on the top floor. But miraculously no one was killed. Like Viktoria, they had no basement. The nearest shelter is a metro station, but that’s 20 minutes away on foot. You’re not going to haul your family out of your house every single night there’s an alert. Especially at the current pace at which the Russians are attacking, it’s not sustainable. You take your chances. Mark, too, looked tired.

During my time in Kyiv, the attacks were mostly drones. You quickly adapt to those. One night Russia mustered a serious missile barrage which the alert system thought could be headed for Kyiv, so I went down to the comfortable basement and slept. The missiles, it turned out, were headed for western Ukraine. One hit a residential building in Ternopyl, killing dozens. The others further damaged the grid. The rolling blackout schedules published the next day were extensive.

Though we were mostly in Kyiv, we visited Dnipro for one day. Unlike Kyiv, Dnipro is closer to the front, some 60 - 90 miles away. That front is not as active as elsewhere, but given how stretched Ukrainian defenders are, Russia has made quiet gains there in recent weeks. Security people warned us against spending the night in Dnipro, as it’s getting hit quite regularly. And given its proximity to the fighting, the warning time for incoming is much shorter.

Rather than doing a ten-hour round-trip drive, we stayed in a colorful roadside motel outside Poltava. It was self-consciously Ukrainian kitsch. Think “biggest ball of twine” for a U.S. equivalent. We got there just ahead of curfew, too late to eat at the restaurant, which is supposed to be terrific. As we arrived, our apps lit up. Dnipro was getting pummeled.

The next day, we went and saw a fresh smoldering ruin. A drone had hit Dnipro’s public broadcaster’s TV station. Alex, a young local journalist covering the attack, was surprised to see so many foreign journalists milling around. He wanted to talk. Why were we here? I just wanted to find out what it was like living here under fire, I said, pestering him for details. The attacks were a regular occurrence, he shrugged, bleary-eyed. What can you do?

I thought of Alex a couple of hours later.

The attacks usually come late at night. Russia launches its drone swarms then, presumably because they’re trickier to shoot down in the dark. But missiles can come whenever. We had finished our last meeting and were heading back to Kyiv. It was 5:30pm. Traffic in downtown Dnipro was completely snarled.

Suddenly, the apps on all of our phones lit up simultaneously. “Air raid alert, seek shelter.” Then, shortly thereafter, “Missile attack, seek shelter immediately.” We were in two vehicles. “Advice?” I typed into Signal to our group. “The advice is to exit the city as quickly as possible,” one of our guides typed back. I didn’t want to laugh. It felt inappropriate.

Helplessness is a profound feeling. I had quickly gotten used to the drill in Kyiv. It all felt abstract in my tight and comfortable little security bubble. This was different. I suppose we could have abandoned the car and gone looking for a metro station. But with missiles incoming, GPS was being jammed and Google Maps was useless. Nothing to be done. What can you do?

“It’s not in my hands,” I said to myself. And immediately a calm washed over me.

We were all still glued to our phones, trying to find updates from various Telegram channels that publish up-to-the-second reports about incoming attacks, when we heard what sounded like a somewhat muted explosion somewhere off in the distance. It felt like maybe it was accompanied by a slight change in pressure, though maybe I imagined that. Maybe the missile hit, maybe it was intercepted. But between the alert and the explosion, only a few minutes had passed.

The sound pulled me away from my phone. I looked at our surroundings. No one had abandoned their car. And on the sidewalks, people went about their business. It was a relatively warm if somewhat rainy night. A couple on a date were standing outside a coffee shop holding hands. An old lady was walking home, pushing a cart overflowing with groceries. The alert hadn’t lifted, we didn’t know if more missiles were incoming. But no one flinched. No one was trying to hide.

I still think about that scene, now weeks later. It filled me with a profound sadness then, and still does. These poor people. Brave? Yes, but that’s not the word, exactly. These poor people, just living their lives every night as if it’s normal. It’s not normal. None of it is normal. But what can you do?

A few days later, back in Kyiv, I found myself at a party thrown by one of my Post colleagues. Lots of foreign correspondents were there. I found myself talking to exactly the kind of TV journalist that Chloe had warned me about. He was telling me about being on the front near Kharkiv a year or so ago. The shelling. How he and his team had gone in to examine the damage right after a salvo, and had seen a leaking gas main near one of the craters. As they were leaving, another salvo came in and ignited the gas. Big explosion behind them. His eyes were gleaming.

The story that shaped my trip was the announcement of Trump’s peace plan. I spent most of my time in Kyiv trying to figure out the politics after that bombshell. Big things are afoot. A corruption scandal is loosening Zelensky’s grip on power. Some are seriously talking about land concessions to Russia, even as they admit that any stop in the war would be temporary. As I write this, that drama is still unfolding. I left Kyiv amazed at the timing of my trip. So much had happened while I was there.

But that night in Dnipro is still with me. It still defines the trip.

When I got back to Warsaw, the alert app lit up. Kyiv was under attack — a much bigger one than I had experienced while I was there. Missiles, drones. It lasted for hours. A friend was texting me that she was hearing explosions.

I’m not going to lie, I felt a sinking feeling. I wanted to be there. I was missing out.

On what, exactly? I slapped myself. “Don’t be an idiot,” Chloe said. There’s nothing glamorous about any of this.

I’m more than a little ashamed. It’s sick. But that trip made me feel alive. I still don’t know what to do with that feeling.

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For the past several months, the consensus here in Washington, DC has been that “the vibes are bad.” Something about the 2024 election and its aftermath seemed totalizing: the chainsaw of DOGE, the brash triumphalism of the MAGA “cool kids,” the unexpected efficiency with which Trump 2.0 began to run its policy playbook, and the obvious exhaustion of the Democratic “resistance” in the face of it all.

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Recently, though, it feels like the winds have changed. I think I’m sensing a vibe shift. I know, I know, the term is very 2022. But I’m not sure how else to describe this not-quite fact-based feeling that Trump and the MAGA movement are maybe losing just a bit of their grip on the nation.

A few examples:

• DOGE is officially dead eight months ahead of schedule, and no one seems particularly proud of what it did. Even the Silicon Valley superstars who once worked for DOGE are being reassigned to what frankly seems like menial work (much-lauded AirBnB founder Joe Gebbia is now on website beautification duty). The grip of fear DOGE had on much of the capital seems to be slowly loosening.

• The Epstein files haven’t faded, and seem capable of causing real rifts in the MAGA movement, even among previous diehards (witness Marjorie Taylor Greene’s very public feud with Trump and her subsequent resignation). Congressional Republicans are becoming restive, where their fealty to Trump (or fear of being primaried) once kept them entirely in line.

• Speaking of staying in line: The Heritage Institute, responsible just months ago for the well-oiled execution of the Trump agenda, is tearing itself apart. Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, Groyperism and anti-Semitism have thrown the MAGA power establishment (itself only recently solidified) into disarray.

• And speaking of disarray, Democrats seem to finally be… pulling it together? At least a few of them? Liberal senators are mutinying against an ineffective Chuck Schumer. Zohran Mamdani is outflanking the establishment in New York and defanging the White House. He and the wide slate of recent Democratic midterm successes are gaining ground by focusing on economic issues instead of culture war, a long-overdue correction that will yield dividends as…

• Inequality and economic stagnation have become undeniable — even among Trump supporters and especially among those moderates who tipped the election to him in hopes of economic gain. The tariffs were roundly disliked, even Laura Ingraham thinks the 50-year mortgage sounds dumb, and financial analysts are eying the stock market with newfound skepticism as the “AI bubble” continues to trip alarms.

The MAGA coalition never totally made sense; after the post-election honeymoon period, the cracks were bound to show. And Trump is entering his lame duck era — despite Steve Bannon’s continued insinuations, a third term is extremely unlikely for both legal and actuarial reasons. And so, Trump’s grip on the Republican party must loosen, and the party — a motely crew held together by the ultimate personality hire, who will soon retire— will begin to disintegrate. Perhaps it already has.

It’s possible that I’m overoptimistic. Maybe I’m clutching at glimmers as we enter a season of hope. Still, it’s a welcome change — a good vibe, at least for now.

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I have found myself with almost infinite appetite for poetry recently. The specific poets and genres seem to be varying wildly.

I’m moving from Western love poems:

You are near enough to be a far horizon.
Your body breathing is a silver edge
Of a long black mountain rising and falling slowly
Against the morning and the morning star…
Or I can say to myself as if I were
A wanderer being asked where he had been
Among the hills: “There was a range of mountains
Once I loved until I could not breathe.”

To Homer on violence:

As Dawn rose up in her golden robe from Ocean’s tides,
bringing light to immortal gods and mortal men,
Thetis sped Hephaestus’ gifts to the ships.
She found her Beloved son lying facedown,
embracing Patroclus’ body, sobbing, wailing

To an astonishing new poet that I recently discovered in Baltimore:

She’s holding the joint
while he lights it, and then they take
a deep breath together
and she says, Let’s not go
just yet, oh my love, not now
when I’ve found you, please,
let’s circle slow

I worry that the theme word for 2025 might be: sludge.

In a long Substack post last week, Rod Dreher detailed his experiences whilst in DC for a trip designed around meetings between Victor Orban and JD Vance. His account compiles countless conversations in which the usually NatCon-sympathetic Dreher gets stretched further and further beyond his boundaries by young conservatives who tell him not only about what they see as growing antagonism against Jews among Gen-Z, but the desire for pure bloodlines, and openness to actual fascism.

The account tracks the broader events that we are seeing as the Right begins to rip at itself over Nick Fuentes and Jeffrey Epstein. It also echoes countless conversations I have also had — particularly with female friends — about how DC dating culture is recalibrating under the Trump administration. What started as curiosity about somewhat more traditional relationship structures is morphing quickly into increasingly strident rejection of the equality of the sexes. Many of these stories — from demands for female submission to questions about racial heritage — have made me more incandescently angry than anything I can remember.

But I’m also the perfect age — old enough to remember a world before Trump, young enough to have very little sentimentality for it — to recognize that the roots of this crisis began well before 2024 or even 2016.

After I started writing this essay, the news broke that Larry Summers has decided to step back from his public commitments because of the release of documents related to his interactions with Jeffrey Epstein, including asking Epstein for advice about how to “pursue” (prowl after) a mentee of his, and emphasizing that women have lower IQs than men.

In Summers’ statement he states “I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused … I take full responsibility for my misguided decision … ” Summers’ silky prose lingers for just long enough to remember that the reason for this apology is not because he has found himself so troubled by his actions that he can’t keep them hidden any longer, but because other people can now see the truth because the House decided to release a trove of illicit emails. The files are filled with sludge — just an ongoing stream of putrescence by many figures who were or still are in the public eye — and have now spent decades obfuscating, sidestepping and lying.

The word “vulnerable” in English has both negative and positive connotations. Negatively it’s the condition of “exposure” which traces back to its origin from vulnus “wound” — the susceptibility to be violated. Given this etymology, it is strange that we consider it such an aspirational word — something that is actually close to the culmination of life. The ability to be open, exposed, revealed to other people. In some sense intimacy just is, I think, the capacity to take the boundaries one would ordinarily reserve only in one’s own hands — “here is where I protect myself” — and place them externally in the hands of another person.

Violence, in other words, is a real and constant possibility in human life. Even in moments of full self-protection, the possibility of being overwhelmed by external force is real. And definitionally to be vulnerable is to make oneself intentionally susceptible to wounding.

But the paradox that I’ve been wrestling with is a prior one — assume pain, assume violence — what is lost in self-protection?

Our generation is not unique in being born into a violent or mendacious time. But such times do provoke their own questions. If the world around begins to bubble with lies or hostility, the immediate intuition is to respond with equivalent force. To draw up one’s guard and to develop mechanisms for counter-attack.

But at that moment, one has already lost. That decision is a decision also to be ripped away from the possibility of trust. An act of violence then reproduces itself in one’s own actions. The first iteration then creates counter-actions and counter-counter-actions — overt revenge or a quiet hardening — and that road can never lead back home again.

Hence, I think, the need for asymmetric combat. The actual fight is not about which combatant wins, but what of human life is lost in resigning oneself to a world of violence or lies. To stooping one’s head.

The world that Summers represented was something that — for those who lived in it — already felt duplicitous, sordid. And in many ways, New Washington is a direct reaction, repudiation of it. But neither are innocent and both in their own ways have diminished their hopes of what life should be.

The Jewish Romanian poet Paul Celan made what seems like a fairly conscious decision to write the bulk of his poetry in German. In his acceptance speech for a literary prize late in life he reflects on the degree to which language itself became the great problem: “it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech.” Language in general, and German in particular had been used to lie, coerce, manipulate, condemn. German, it turns out, was porous, taking in the filth of the entire regime, soaking it deep into its sinews.

But that was all the more reason to live in that language. As he says “In this language I tried, during those years and the years after, to write poems … to find out where I was, where I was going, to chart my reality … the poem does not stand outside time. True it claims the infinite and tries to reach across time — but across, not above.”

Every time I read this speech — especially that last line “across, not above” — it’s like air rushing back into my lungs. It’s the directness of the poet. The honesty about violence, and the full fragility which we mortals carry. It’s the sense — even in Homeric war poetry — that the world is large and the stakes are real. But somehow poetry is also the place that begins to heal the paradox.

How to get out of the paradox of strength v. weakness — the triumph of will. I have a friend who after a recent romantic shock took herself to a week of operas — soaking in beauty to remember a different world. If another world, a world defined not by lies or the conceit of coercion is real, we should live in it. This is the whole point. The vision of life that involves vulnerability is itself a picture of strength — of far greater strength. It is precisely a demand that life is high, and that respect — dignity one deserves — is genuine. But it is a version of strength that can never be symmetric to violence. The cost of violence is high, but the cost of invulnerability far higher — far too high.

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Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another depicts the desperate soul-searching of aging revolutionaries: Should we abandon the Cause and lead a normal life? Should we raise our children to become radicals? Should we regret the violence of our youth? As such, it was always destined to grab the attention of Slovenian film critic-cum-psychoanalyst, ,…

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Two weeks ago, the economist joined us for a live taping of the Wisdom of Crowds podcast to discuss the future of American liberalism. Cowen being Cowen — a writer interested in the sources of progress and technological dynamism — the event quickly turned into a more general conversation about the future of America and finally, to artificial intelligen…

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Living through two thirds of a year of Donald Trump’s second term has felt both like an eternity and like no time at all. “Time feels like it has collapsed in on itself,” my colleagues at the Post and I inaudibly gasp at each other as we struggle to keep up.

I asked ChatGPT: the author of this strategy is Steve Bannon. “The Democrats don’t matter,” he to…

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A few weeks ago, reposted his essay, “Toward a Shallower Future.” I read it then for the first time; below is my attempt at a response.

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After his friend Albert Camus died in a car crash, aged 46, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: “Every life that is cut off — even the life of so young a man — is at one and the same time a phonograph record that is shattered and a complete life.” Three years earlier, Camus had won the Nobel Prize. As an author and philosopher, he was at the height of his powers, and on the cusp of writing a trilogy about love — the culmination of his earlier trilogies about “the absurd” and “revolt.” It might have been a lasting work of philosophy. But it was not to be. “For all those who loved him,” Sartre continued, “there is an unbearable absurdity in that death. But we shall have to learn to see that mutilated work as a total work.”

We shall have to learn to see that mutilated work as a total work. Sartre isn’t referring only to Camus’ writings — his incomplete philosophical and literary works. He means Camus’ complete work as a man of action, as a political figure, as a husband and a father. Camus was a human being who still had a lot to do. But this isn’t only true about a brilliant philosopher. Anyone who dies young is a mutilated work.

Noah Smith begins his essay, “Toward a Shallower Future,” reflecting on another unfinished work: the artist Keith Haring. A year before he died from AIDS at age 31, Haring completed Unfinished Painting: a quarter of the canvas is decorated with Haring’s typical mosaic-like composition of dancing figures; most of the canvas is empty, plain white and streaked with dripped paint. It is a statement about his own interrupted work, his life that, Haring knew, would be cut short by illness. “Amazing how many things one can produce if you live long enough,” he said. “I mean, I’ve barely created ten years of serious work. Imagine 50 years.”

Noah reflects on this work: “… without AIDS, Haring very well might never produced anything as haunting or evocative as Unfinished Painting. … without the pressure of a life cut short, Haring’s art might never have been as deep as it was.” Instead, Haring’s work, especially what he completed when he knew he was dying, has a certain pathos and depth to it. We are forced to see Haring’s mutilated work as the total work. It’s moving, and lasting.

But imagine a world where we discovered a cure before Haring died. Haring survived to ripe old age and developed, over the long arc of his career, a merely mediocre body of work. His style never matured or evolved. “That would have been a good trade,” Noah says. It is better to live a long happy life than a brief one that is full of suffering, even if the latter yields great works of art. “Without AIDS, the world might have been a bit shallower, with less tragedy for humans to struggle against. But no one in their right mind wishes for tragedies to continue just so that human life can continue to be filled with pathos.”

In general, Noah says, we should strive to eliminate suffering, rather than treat it like an end in itself. “The nobility of suffering has always been a coping mechanism,” argues Noah. “Happiness isn’t truly shallow — it just has a different kind of depth.”

The problem with Noah’s view is this: there is no such thing as a happy life that is free of suffering. Happiness when it comes is always bound up with suffering. Even a long lived life with a happy ending has some suffering in it. Even a complete life is a shattered record. A full life is a mutilated life. An old man can look back at his life and examine all the ways in which he failed himself and others — all the paths he didn’t take, the mistakes he made, the limits of his love. Most of us hope to reach old age in good moral and spiritual shape. Even if we manage to do so, there will still be forms of incompleteness all around us: projects that we’ll have to abandon; relatives we will not see grow up; wayward friends whose moment of redemption we will miss; historical events we won’t get to see; hopes that will emerge only after we’re gone. There is no way around it: even a complete life is in many ways incomplete.

Think about the artists who, unlike Haring and Camus, enjoyed a long and fruitful life, and worked to the very end. Stanley Kubrick, Pablo Picasso, Saul Bellow — they never saw completion in their work. There was always more to say and to explore. They continued to work because they continued to have questions, to feel the incompleteness of life — in short, they continued to suffer. The deep wisdom that they acquired in their creative engagement with their own suffering didn’t merely make them interesting. It helped them survive. It didn’t always ennoble them — Picasso, in particular, was a real jerk. But it permitted them to dwell successfully in a world rife with darkness and fear.

We will always need the wisdom that comes from suffering because we will always be incomplete. In fact, the more the world approaches the frictionless utopia that many people are hoping for, the more a strange void will emerge inside ourselves: a question of why this utopia is not enough. It’s then that we will go back to the work of poets and artists whose suffering was crucial to their creativity. A soul that feeds only on slop and reels won’t be able to cope even in utopia; it will flee from itself, and as it grows older it will long for the type of relief that comes only from gazing at something like Haring’s Unfinished Painting.

Consider the daily life of an upper middle class American professional, living in a comfortable suburb, in the shallow future that Noah foresees, which I believe is already here. This American professional is relatively happy, with a few challenges here and there. But every day there is news of horrors — in Gaza and in Utah. His only way of coping is to escape into entertainment, or reposting videos of the horrors as an act of moral protest against them. Distraction or outrage, but not real spiritual processing. For that, you need an education in tragedy and philosophy; you need to read the works of someone like Camus.

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I don’t tend to write that frequently here about Christianity. I think it’s because, the more ideological our age has become, the more I have found myself wanting to emphasize ideas that don’t fit — picking at how intractably untidy existence is. I’ve grown obsessed with pressing into contradictions rather than writing about answers. Writing about longi…

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It’s been nearly a week since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and I’m still processing. Here are a few things I’ve read that resonated — you might find them interesting, too.

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To start: In the Wall Street Journal last week, Peggy Noonan wrote a piece titled “Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Feels Like a Hinge Point.” In explanation, she writes: “It isn’t j…

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I’ve been fairly consistent on this point for a few years now: America is worth believing in and fighting for, not just despite its faults but also because of them. But there are limits. My beliefs are being tested, which I suppose is a useful thing. Have I been overly optimistic in my faith in the American project, perhaps even naive?

This week’s Supre…

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Part of my project this summer, I realized half way through the season, was to try to drill down on just what the Trump moment means. I don’t mean along traditional partisan lines (or partisan moral lenses) necessarily. Just... what is it?

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A few weeks ago I tried my hand at sketching out a prevalent mood — “barbarism,” I called it, a kind of truculent na…

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