When Benjamin Franklin left Paris in 1785, after nearly nine years as the American emissary to France, King Louis XVI presented him with a parting gift. The token exuded the rococo extravagance of the ancien régime: a portrait of the monarch, surrounded by 408 diamonds, held in a gold case. It was frequently described as a snuffbox, a term that hardly captures its opulent nature; the item was likely far more valuable than anything Franklin owned.
When Hamas bulldozed its way across the Gaza fence on October 7, 2023, it hoped to eventually provoke the opprobrium that’s now flowing in Israel’s direction. Launching its carnival of murder, rape, and kidnapping, the group wagered that it could bait its enemy into moral blunders that would discredit it in the eyes of the world.
That vision is now unfolding as mass hunger engulfs the Gaza Strip, and images of starving children crumble American support for Israel.
Volodymyr Zelensky built a mythic reputation as a lonely bulwark against global tyranny. On Tuesday, the president of Ukraine signed that reputation away, enacting a law that gutted the independence of his country’s anti-corruption agencies just as they closed in on his closest political allies, reportedly including one of his longtime business partners and a former deputy prime minister.
Exhausted and demoralized, Columbia University agreed last night to pay the Trump administration $221 million in exchange for peace. By early next week, it will deposit the first of three installments into the U.S. Treasury, as part of a settlement that ends the government’s investigations into the school’s failure to protect Jewish students from discrimination.
It is the misfortune of Jews that they so often find themselves the subject of obsessive fixation. By his own description, Pankaj Mishra is a lifelong obsessive. As a boy in India in the 1970s, the writer grew up in a Hindu-nationalist family that revered Jews, despite not knowing any. In that spirit, Mishra placed a portrait of the Israeli general Moshe Dayan, the hero of the Suez Crisis, on his bedroom wall.
In the isolation of a Washington, D.C., office building, with a small team of acolytes, Elon Musk is dismantling the civil service and fulfilling an old dream. Deep within the folds of the Western brain resides a yearning for a savior: a master engineer who imposes reason and efficiency on the messiness of modern life, who can deploy his acumen to usher in a golden age of abundance and harmony. This is a fantasy of submission, where the genius takes charge.
Over the decades, the American right has deployed violent imagery to describe its highest ideological goal: drown government in a bathtub, starve the beast, slash and burn. In less than two weeks of organized chaos, the Trump administration has realized these fantasies, but by deploying tactics both more subtle and more sinister than the movement’s old guard ever imagined.
Rather than eliminating departments wholesale or depleting the budgets of agencies, it has relied on menacing gestures.
Let us now praise Donald Trump. It’s hard for me not to choke on that phrase. But it was his bluster—his demand that Hamas release its remaining hostages before his inauguration, or else “all hell will break out”—that effectively ushered in a cease-fire, the beginning of the end of the Gaza war.
Although honesty requires crediting Trump, his success was not the product of magical powers or an indictment of Biden-administration diplomacy.
Among the bizarrest phenomena in the world of sports is Ajax, the most accomplished club in the storied history of Dutch soccer. Its fans—blond-haired men with beer guts, boys with blue eyes—sing “Hava Nagila” as they cram into the trams taking them to the stadium on the fringes of Amsterdam. Ajax fans tattoo the Star of David onto their forearms.
In Elon Musk’s vision of human history, Donald Trump is the singularity. If Musk can propel Trump back to the White House, it will mark the moment that his own superintelligence merges with the most powerful apparatus on the planet, the American government—not to mention the business opportunity of the century.
Many other titans of Silicon Valley have tethered themselves to Trump. But Musk is the one poised to live out the ultimate techno-authoritarian fantasy.
In 2021, Israel bombed Gaza for 11 days in a campaign known as Operation Guardian of the Walls. At the end of the battle, Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas in Gaza, posed for a photograph in broad daylight. Surrounded by rubble, he sat in an armchair. On his face, he wore a defiant smile.
Sinwar—obsessed with operational security, paranoid about Israeli collaborators in his midst—possessed a genius for survival that inflicted death on his own people.
At this late stage in Bob Woodward’s career, it would be possible to publish an entertaining anthology of the negative reviews of his books. Although there’s an ongoing debate about the journalistic merits of Woodward’s reportorial mode, he has no doubt succeeded in bringing out the vitriolic best from the likes of Joan Didion, Christopher Hitchens, and Jack Shafer.
A few years back, I wrote to Woodward, hoping to get his help with an article I was reporting.
There was a thin hope that despite everything, he might actually return home. It was stoked by a series of images that unexpectedly emerged.
Not long after Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s abduction on October 7, CNN stumbled on video of terrorists loading the Berkeley-born, Jerusalem-raised 24-year-old into a pickup truck, the stump of one of his arms wrapped in a tourniquet because a grenade had blown off the rest. It was proof of life.
There was a thin hope that despite everything, he might actually return home. It was stoked by a series of images that unexpectedly emerged.
Not long after Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s abduction on October 7, CNN stumbled on video of terrorists loading the Berkeley-born, Jerusalem-raised 24-year-old into a pickup truck, the stump of one of his arms wrapped in a tourniquet because a grenade had blown off the rest. It was proof of life.
For nearly the entirety of the past decade, a question has stalked, and sometimes consumed, American politics: Why do Donald Trump and his acolytes heap such reverent praise on Vladimir Putin? The question is born of disbelief.
With his trip to Israel tomorrow, Joe Biden will become the second American president to travel abroad to an active war zone that is not controlled by his own military. The first was also Joe Biden. When he ventured to Kyiv last February, he arrived during a lull in the fighting. This time, he’s flying into an escalating conflict.
During the era of American dominance in women’s soccer, success was largely a product of athleticism, fitness, and bursts of individual skill. The triumph of Spain, which won the World Cup today, represents an evolutionary leap forward, a higher level of refinement and technique. Aitana Bonmati, Spain’s midfield brain and the player of the tournament, dominated games with subtle flicks and visionary through balls; teammates rotated around her intricately.
Fatalism can be a fan’s best friend. When the United States’ women’s team began this World Cup, I wanted the best to transpire, but my mind kept warning me that the team was destined for the worst. It was painfully evident that the squad wasn’t well-coached and that injuries to crucial players left it unable to surmount bad tactics. From the opening game, I watched the rest of the tournament in search of another nation that I could adopt as my own if the U.S. flamed out.
The U.S. Women’s National Team suffers by comparison to its old glories. At the previous World Cup, in 2019, it channeled the best of the American character: magnetic self-confidence that verged on arrogance, individualism that flamboyantly flouted archaic norms. In the press, players jawboned about the president of the United States as they waged war against their own employer in the name of equal pay.
In the early days of the pandemic, it became harder for us to see one another. The human face, the ultimate marker of individuality, what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called “the first disclosure,” was suddenly sheathed in fabric. Strangers encountered on the street were even stranger—and the masks that covered their visage became a screen on which to project anxious thoughts.
The rage that Russia inspires is especially painful, because it is also an expression of helplessness.
Sigmund Freud had a rule. However irresistible the temptation to burrow into the inner life of kings, prime ministers, and tycoons, he wouldn’t analyze famous contemporaries from afar. It just wasn’t right to rummage around in the mind of a subject who didn’t consent to the practice. But in the end, he found one leader so fascinating and so maddening that his ethical qualms apparently melted away.
For the past two years, Washington has been under the unified control of the Democratic Party. It has also been under the control of a narrow demographic: longtime recipients of Social Security. The ruling troika of Nancy Pelosi (age 82), Chuck Schumer (72), and Joe Biden (80) has participated in politics for about a combined 140 years. The last time one of them had a job that wasn’t based on Pennsylvania Avenue was 1987.
Hopefully this isn’t horribly apparent, but this piece was a slog to write. It required overcoming my professional disposition, resisting my cognitive wiring, and drying out from a certain website that I used to fiendishly inhale.For a long moment in global politics, the planet seemed to be hurtling toward authoritarianism. It was terrifying, but I found myself strangely suited for apocalyptic times.
The literary critic Edward Said coined the phrase late style to describe the final works of a composer or writer—when the decay of the body can’t help but inform artistry, when creativity is infused with the bumps, bruises, and wisdom of a life almost fully lived. In soccer years, 35 makes the Argentine forward Lionel Messi a veritable geriatric. And this World Cup was his final opus, his version of Beethoven’s last string quartets or Monet’s lily ponds.
Updated at 1:15 p.m. ET on December 10, 2022.This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.Twenty years ago, when I first called the soccer writer Grant Wahl, he was an exotic species. In those days, most writing about American games existed in niche magazines with low production values and even lower circulations.
This is an edition of The Great Game, a newsletter about the 2022 World Cup—and how soccer explains the world. Sign up here.One of Gregg Berhalter’s charms is that he can’t be bothered. Unshaven, attired in the uniform of Team Schlub, he loped along the sideline as if it were still the height of the pandemic and he was enjoying his newfound freedom from showering.
When soccer first appeared in Iranian villages in the 1920s, clerics began their long attempt to stifle the revolution that the game represents. They hated the sport—an import from Great Britain and championed by the shah, it was a symbol of modernity that featured men running around in heretical shorts. Clerics attended local matches for the sake of pelting players with stones.
The worst American soccer chant goes, “I … I believe … I believe that we will win.” It betrays the anxieties of those who bellow it; far from arrogantly assuming victory, it seems to argue that the success of the United States men’s soccer team is a matter of prayerful thinking. Beating England is not a dream, if you will it.But the chant, for many years, was also an honest assessment of the quality of the U.S. Men’s National Team.
The worst American soccer chant goes, “I … I believe … I believe that we will win.” It betrays the anxieties of those who bellow it; far from arrogantly assuming victory, it seems to argue that the success of the United States men’s soccer team is a matter of prayerful thinking. Beating England is not a dream, if you will it.But the chant, for many years, was also an honest assessment of the quality of the U.S. Men’s National Team.