In 2019, a Russian foreign-policy hand told me that his country had intervened in Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad for reasons that were, he said, “pedagogical.” Putin had watched the Bush and Obama administrations insert themselves into Iraq, Libya, and Syria, leaving messes in each. Now he would teach America how to intervene right: swiftly, decisively, and without sermonizing about “democracy,” “human rights,” and suchlike twaddle.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died in June 1989, just months after issuing a fatwa ordering the murder of Salman Rushdie and all others involved in the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses. Fatwas cannot be rescinded posthumously, which is why ever since then, this fatwa has hung in the air like a putrid smell, inhaled deeply for inspiration by devout followers of Khomeini and his successors. On Friday, a man stabbed Rushdie in upstate New York.
The executive branch’s system of classification is among the weirdest aspects of the American government, and sometimes it seems as if those best equipped to understand it are people with a background in obscure religious practices—say, Roman Catholic sacramental theology—rather than journalists or lawyers.
The United States killed the leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in a drone strike this weekend in Kabul. I already kind of miss him. Zawahiri came from an older generation of jihadists—he was 71—and was in many ways the kind of terrorist one wants. For a decade or more he had no known good ideas. He told young upstarts to shelve their own good ideas, and never got around to them. He was a black hole of charisma.
Yesterday Vice President Kamala Harris briefly caused a significant portion of the social-media world to think that she was hopelessly liberal or simply out of her mind. At a recorded roundtable event in the Eisenhower Executive Office building, she introduced herself by saying, “I am Kamala Harris; my pronouns are she and her, and I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit.
A most predictable rocket attack hit Odesa today—announced shortly before it happened by an air-raid alert on my phone, but also a full day before, when Russia and Ukraine struck a tentative deal to let Ukraine ship grain from Odesa and two other ports. This morning, rockets landed at the port itself, which was soon in flames. Russia could not let a point of accord pass without spicing it up with discord. Let no agreement blossom into celebration.
A most predictable rocket attack hit Odesa today—announced shortly before it happened by an air-raid alert on my phone, but also a full day before, when Russia and Ukraine struck a tentative deal to let Ukraine ship grain from Odesa and two other ports. This morning, rockets landed at the port itself, which was soon in flames. Russia could not let a point of accord pass without spicing it up with discord. Let no agreement blossom into celebration.
“I know that there are many who disagree with my decision to travel to Saudi Arabia,” President Joe Biden wrote last week in an op-ed in The Washington Post. Among those disagreeing is the publisher of The Washington Post, who denounced Biden for “going … on bended knee” (surely he meant “meeting on bended knee,” unless Biden is flying to Jeddah from Tel Aviv on a magic carpet) to “shake the bloody hand” of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
My advice, if you are in an active-shooter situation, is the same no matter your age. Listen for the source of the shooting. Give yourself at most two seconds for this task. Those are not firecrackers. Then run as fast as you can in the other direction, and do not stop running until the only thing you hear is the sound of birds chirping, wind in the trees or grass, and the beating of your own heart.
The mass shooter in Uvalde, Texas, killed 19 children and two adults. That means at some point he probably paused to reload. The mind goes to dark places when it imagines the seconds spent fumbling for fresh ammo, amid the sounds of death, and the click of a new magazine as a murderer’s hand smacks its baseplate home into the mag-well.
The alleged teenage mass shooter in Buffalo, New York, wrote and posted a 180-page manifesto. I read the whole thing, and the only part that surprised me was the banality of his stated intention to eat “corn beef hash” for breakfast, followed by lunch at McDonald’s, before killing as many Black people as possible.
Thursday morning, after the publication of my profile of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) in the April issue of The Atlantic, Saudi Arabia’s propaganda machine cranked into operation. For the rest of the day, I watched it work: attempting to hide the uncomfortable parts (in my article I made numerous observations that would get a Saudi journalist imprisoned or worse), amplifying the parts the government liked, and straight-up lying about others.
In David Mamet’s film State and Main, a Hollywood big shot tries to shortchange a set hand by offering him an “associate producer” credit on a movie. A screenwriter overhears the exchange and asks, “What’s an ‘associate producer credit’?” The big shot answers: “It’s what you give your secretary instead of a raise.
The filmmaker and polymath Melvin Van Peebles died last week at the age of 89 at his home in New York. He is best known as the auteur behind the first hit blaxploitation film, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), but he was an artist of great breadth and versatility: sculptor; poet; painter; composer and, with Gil Scott-Heron, progenitor of rap and hip-hop; playwright; gifted novelist. I would continue, but I have run out of semicolons.
Earlier this week Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times writer in charge of the 1619 Project, was denied a tenured professorship at the University of North Carolina’s journalism school. The faculty recommended her for a job, and a committee headed by a UNC trustee expressed doubts about her suitability. Other trustees reportedly said they would not approve her for tenure.
I am one of the nearly 7 million Americans with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine percolating through my tissue at this very moment. It feels good. The sensation of rising immunity to COVID-19 would almost certainly still feel good if I were a woman between the ages of 18 and 48, like all six of the vaccine recipients who later suffered from blood clots. The clots, which might or might not be related to the vaccine, can kill you; one of the six patients died.
Gérard DuBois
This article was published online on April 5, 2021.In October 2012, in the second year of the Syrian civil war, a 44-year-old freelance journalist named Theo Padnos crossed from Turkey into Syria with two young men he thought were his friends. Padnos made friends easily and indiscriminately: In 2006, he was in Yemen researching a book about foreign converts on the path of jihad, and he showed me around when I arrived in the country.
Yesterday afternoon, Condé Nast, the publisher of Teen Vogue, announced that Alexi McCammond, a 27-year-old former reporter for Axios, would not be taking over as editor of the magazine after all. She had been done in by her own social-media posts, little time bombs she’d unwittingly armed when she tweeted them at age 17. Those posts groaned about her “stupid asian T.A.” and mocked Asians’ “swollen eyes.” She apologized for the tweets in 2019.
In 2019, a romance blossomed between an eligible European royal and a Black commoner whom traditionalists considered unsuitable for a royal marriage. The lovebirds were not Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, who had already been married for a year. They were Princess Märtha Louise of Norway and her boyfriend, a Californian named Durek Verrett. Like Prince Harry, Princess Märtha Louise is a spare heir with a brother in training for the throne.
Today the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released its report on the murder of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi. If the report were the denouement of a dinner-theater murder mystery, most of the audience would be so confident of the conclusion that they would already be walking out to the parking lot. The crown prince ordered it. In the consulate. With the bone saw.
The name “Sleepy Joe” was meant to be pejorative rather than prophetic. But today President-elect Joe Biden’s team leaked the names of three likely appointees, and they are the equivalent of a warm cup of Ovaltine with a melatonin chaser. According to reports, Antony Blinken, Barack Obama’s deputy secretary of state, will be nominated for secretary of state.
Trolls are a Scandinavian invention, straight from the frigid sagas of Norse mythology, but Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a Norwegian parliamentarian, swears that he is not one. Observers of his antics this week could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. On Wednesday, he announced that he had nominated Donald J. Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. “Can you name a person who has done more for peace than President Trump?” Tybring-Gjedde asked me, insisting that the question was a serious one.
This morning, Donald Trump announced the normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Israel is also committing to not annexing the West Bank. The agreement will shock those who thought the portion of the Jared Kushner portfolio devoted to peace in the Middle East consisted of a single briefing folder filled with printouts of Wikipedia articles.
Politics is usually about compromise, so we should savor those rare policy decisions for which every consideration—justice, morality, practicality—is neatly aligned. The Trump administration has a chance this week to reverse itself and get one such decision right. There are indications that it will.The underlying facts offer little to savor. The Islamic State kidnapped and murdered four Americans in 2014 and 2015.
Updated at 9:45 p.m. ET on June 8, 2020.Virginia Governor Ralph Northam announced his intention to remove his state’s most prominent statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, which has presided regally over Richmond since 1890.* On the subject of whether to topple a statue of Lee, my opinion is predictable. I grew up partly in the American South, but in a mixed-race Canadian-immigrant family to whom racist white southerners knew better than to proselytize.