After the Trump administration inadvertently texted its war plans to this magazine’s editor in chief last month, people all over the world—including spies, fighter pilots, and foreign leaders—had to wonder if their secrets were safe with the United States government.
But the humiliating gaffes of Signalgate are only one measure of the Donald Trump team’s recklessness.
Illustrations by Matt Rota
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
On a sunny morning in October 2023, a 90-year-old woman in a blue blazer walked slowly toward the main courthouse in Shizuoka, a city on the Japanese coast about a two-hour drive south of Tokyo.
As word spread on Saturday that Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, had been killed in his underground Beirut bunker by an Israeli air strike, people began quietly reckoning with the possibility that Lebanon’s political architecture might be about to shift for the first time in more than three decades. And that, in turn, raised the prospect that locked doors might soon open across the Middle East.
It felt like a science-fiction film, one Lebanese friend told me. At almost exactly the same moment—3:30 p.m. today—pagers exploded all over Lebanon, leaving hideous gashes and wounds on the heads, hands, and hips of their owners.
The significance of the attack quickly became clear: The pagers were being used by members of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant movement that has been fighting an undeclared war with Israel since October.
The ugly right-wing riots that broke out across the United Kingdom over the past week have put Prime Minister Keir Starmer in a difficult position: He and his new Labour government must address the widespread concern about immigration that helped drive the unrest—not because of what the rioters have done and said, but in spite of it.
The lawlessness on display in recent days doesn’t change the fact that the British government has been mishandling immigration for years.
“After Mahsa, everything is hanging by a hair.”Those words, spray-painted in red on a Tehran wall last week, sum up the atmosphere of rage and defiance that has consumed Iran since the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who died in police custody in mid-September after being arrested for failing to properly veil her hair.Rallies have turned progressively more violent.
In the spring of 1989, a 21-year-old Iraqi university student named Ali came home and made a shocking discovery: On the living-room table of his family’s home was a copy of The Satanic Verses. A friend of Ali’s father had smuggled Salman Rushdie’s controversial book from London, removing its distinctive blue cover and hiding it in his luggage. This was like finding a bomb.