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Vice President Vance is having a busy month. He may facilitate negotiations with Iran in Pakistan this weekend—part of the White House’s attempt to maintain the fragile cease-fire in the Middle East. But he’s also got his eye on domestic issues as the administration’s “fraud czar.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
From the window of Orion, home looks like a pale-blue marble slipping under the dark felt of the universe. The four people aboard the spacecraft, now earthbound after finishing their lunar flyby, have traveled farther from our planet than any person has ever ventured, and have seen more of the moon’s far side than any person has ever beheld.

President Trump used to quip that Iran “never won a war, but never lost a negotiation.” Perhaps this view explains his decision to forsake previous rounds of talks over Iran’s nuclear program and wage a full-scale assault on the country. But Trump’s gambit may have backfired: In this particular war, Iran remains undefeated, which puts the country in an even stronger position when the two sides start talking in Islamabad tomorrow.

For the past several weeks, Anthropic says it secretly possessed a tool potentially capable of commandeering most computer servers in the world. This is a bot that, if unleashed, might be able to hack into banks, exfiltrate state secrets, and fry crucial infrastructure. Already, according to the company, this AI model has identified thousands of major cybersecurity vulnerabilities—including exploits in every single major operating system and browser.

By the time Fabian Müller met the patient at the center of his newest research paper, he was fairly certain that an experimental treatment was her last hope. The patient, a 47-year-old mother of two, had for years been battling three severe autoimmune diseases, all of which were triggering her body to attack components of her blood. Her doctors had made nine separate attempts to treat her conditions, but none of them had worked.

Service in wartime has long been a reliable path for Americans denied full citizenship to secure their rights. Black troops’ contributions to the Union cause during the Civil War helped convince Abraham Lincoln of the righteousness of extending suffrage to Black men. Women’s work on the home front during World War I persuaded a reluctant Woodrow Wilson to urge passage of the Nineteenth Amendment as a “war measure.

The most important thing to understand about the “madman theory” of foreign policy is that it was designed by losers for losers.
The world first heard of the madman theory from a 1978 memoir by President Richard Nixon’s former chief of staff H. R. Haldeman. According to Haldeman, Nixon said: “I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war.

The tendrils of Christina Koch’s flyaway hair swirled about in the gravityless cockpit of the Orion spacecraft, seeming to represent all of the untetheredness of the Artemis II mission. As her mane eddied, like its own separate creature, throughout the record 252,756-mile journey to the radio-silent black side of the moon, it brought a sense of irrepressible aliveness to that dead stone up there.
Until this past week, a certain ho-humness had set in about human space flight.