As Trump threatens that "a whole civilization will die tonight," remember that he didn't get here by himself

Edited by Sam Thielman

"A WHOLE CIVILIZATION will die tonight.” "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day or Bridge Day… Open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell – Just Watch! Praise be to Allah." 

Forgive me if this is the most emotional edition of FOREVER WARS in the nearly five years we've been publishing. But tonight we face the prospect of a madman in the White House ordering something that ranges between mass war crimes and the destruction of a civilization that can trace its roots back before the Bronze Age Collapse. Self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth was supposed to hold what passes for a press conference in the Pentagon this morning but last night abruptly cancelled it. After seeing Trump threaten the murder of "a whole civilization," I find myself taking seriously the prospect that tonight we could see the United States use nuclear weapons for the first time since 1945.

If it does, it will do so in a conflict pretextually predicated on stopping Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. 

I don't really know what to do with myself today as something this horrific approaches. "Fire and fury" taught us that Trump can back down after initiating a conflict whose escalatory spiral he can't control. I would like to look back on this edition as a hysterical overreaction. I would like this evening to look stupid, to look like an acute case of Trump Derangement Syndrome—or, if you prefer, American Empire Derangement Syndrome, for reasons I'll get into in a moment. Because it will mean the people and heritage of Iran will have survived. 

But if Trump does this—and it doesn't have to be a nuclear detonation to be unforgivable, it just has to be Power Plant Day or Bridge Day or any other Day of Destroyed Civilian Infrastructure Because Trump Lost A War And Cannot Escape The Trap He Set For Himself—this mass murder will not be his alone. There is an entire political, security and media apparatus that brought us to this point. 

The Bush administration, with the braying approval of influential neoconservative media figures like Bill Kristol who believes himself to bear no responsibility for Trump and now postures as his opponent, rejected the Iranian government's post-9/11 olive branches. Its decision instead to place Iraq on the "Axis of Evil" and surround it with U.S. ground forces prompted the rise of Iranian power region-wide. The effect of that included the agony felt by hundreds of U.S. troops in Iraq dead and thousands more wounded once the IRGC lent material support to the Shia insurgency. Such bloodshed understandably generated more elite political hostility against Iran rather than an appropriate reconsideration of what the United States was instead incentivizing Teheran to do. The few foreign-policy practitioners who argued that the Islamic Republic would be open to a recast relationship while a non-recast one would ultimately lead to war, like the former diplomat Flynt Leverett, were portrayed in conservative media as unserious people. Mainstream and liberal media offered little defense, fearful of seeming pro-Iranian. Sheldon Adelson, the late billionaire GOP megadonor, faced no censure when he casually suggested the U.S. should threaten to nuke Iran.  His widow has faced more censure for her role in trading Luka Doncic!  

Then Barack Obama did the best and most courageous thing his presidency accomplished and negotiated the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JPCOA), informally the Iran nuclear deal. Immediately the JCPOA met furious opposition from the right—a crucial moment in the rise of Marco Rubio—as well as opposition from Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer and tepid support, the sort intended to preserve hostility to Iran as a load-bearing plank of U.S. Mideast policy, from Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. That bipartisan opposition to a deal that would have verifiably ended the nuclear threat—a deal the United States desperately wishes was still on the table today—seeded the bed for Trump to violate the deal in 2018. Trump did that, and he deserves the historical blame for doing it. But he did not get there on his own. 

All this opposition to the most farsighted U.S. diplomatic effort of the 21st century was not about getting a fantastical "better deal," which is how resistance to the JPCOA was framed by warmongering charlatans like Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Such resistance was about cutting off any option that could deescalate U.S.-Iran hostilities and prevent the war he and his ilk longed for. 

You could also perhaps add to this the absolute refusal across the U.S. political spectrum to process the unexpected joint force against ISIS that united U.S. airpower with a ground force comprised of Iran-sponsored Iraqis, many of whom fought the U.S. occupation. That could have been a pathway to deescalation. Instead, Trump, backed by CIA Director Gina Haspel, whom the national-security potentates of the #Resistance took a break from criticizing Trump to support, assassinated Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad and then threatened to blow up Iran's cultural sites. 

To this list you can add the Biden administration, which bowed to this longstanding bellicose consensus, operated more in line with Trump than Obama on Iran, and didn't resurrect the Iran deal. Biden became a willing accomplice of Israel in the genocide of Gaza and accompanying Israeli escalations against the Iran coalition regionally, particularly the assassinations of the Resistance Axis that produced the first-ever direct exchanges of fires between Iran and Israel. I wrote in March 2024 that the U.S. had to negotiate with Iran or the region would burn. Instead, the pro-Israel and anti-Iran coalition in both parties got a sense that this could be the moment to finally destroy the Islamic Republic, and sure enough, the region is burning. 

If Trump does something in the neighborhood of what he is threatening, there will be many with blood on their hands who will rush to declare Trump an aberration, that they certainly never intended for this to happen, that they had a wiser, tougher, more effective approach. Such protestations will deserve nothing but contempt. Only by reckoning with the decades-long ease with which elite politics (as opposed to popular politics) has embraced unrelenting hostility toward Iran and punished the meagerest of efforts to end that hostility can we even begin to shatter this cycle of horror. It is already too late for between 2000 and 3500 Iranians. May it not be too late for the rest. 

I want to end with this, from A History of Iran by Michael Axworthy. Several years ago it occurred to me that since 1979 the United States has lost whatever sense of the long and rich civilizational history of Iran it possessed before the Islamic Revolution. I certainly consider myself ignorant of the bequests to human history made by one of the world's truly great civilizations:

The first such mention [of the Medes and the Persians] is in an Assyrian record of 836 BC – an account of an extended military campaign by the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III and several of his successors that was waged in the Zagros mountains and as far east as Mount Demavand… The accounts they left behind listed the Medes and Persians as tributaries… Within a century or so, however, the Medes and Persians were fighting back, attacking Assyrian territories.

But we can go farther back still, to the earlier inhabitants of the land. Much farther back. 

[B]y 5000 BC agricultural settlements were flourishing in and around the Zagros mountains – the area to the east of the great Sumerian civilization of Mesopotamia. Excavation of one of these settlements, at Hajji Firoz Tepe, has produced the remains of the world's oldest-known wine jar, complete with grape residue and traces of resin that were used as a flavoring and a preservative, indicating that the wine would have tasted something like Greek retsina. Before and during the period of the Iranian migrations, an empire – the empire of Elam – flourished in the area that later became the provinces of Khuzestan and Fars, based in the cities of Susa and Anshan…. Elamite influence spread beyond the area usually associated with its empire. An example of this is in Tepe Sialk, just south of modern Kashan, where a ziggurat – an ancient Mesoptamian temple– shows all the forms of an Elamite settlement. This ziggurat at Tepe Sialk has been dated to around 2900 BC.

This is what the United States of America, at the behest of by Trump but not by Trump's hands alone, is threatening. May none of it come to pass. 

HEY, IT’S SAM stopping by briefly to say that if you need some counterprogramming today I’ve published a piece I worked on for quite a while at the New York Times Book Review. It's about a child soldier for Mussolini who became a prisoner of war and grew up to be one of the greatest cartoonists to ever live. His name was Hugo Pratt. I focused on his early life, when he fell in love with Africa while his dad tried to defend the race for Mussolini.

In 1937, when Hugo was 10, Rolando moved the family to Ethiopia to take a job in the Italian office of labor production, which administered the regime’s forced labor camps. As Italy began to lose its hold on the country, Rolando joined the Italian Army on the front lines and forced Hugo, a gregarious boy who preferred to read comics and draw, to join the motley, polyglot Italian African Police (P.A.I.) in 1941.

A photo of father and son in Pratt’s memoir, “Avant Corto,” shows the jut-jawed Rolando in parade dress standing at attention behind Hugo and gazing heroically into the middle distance. Hugo, swimming in a gigantic P.A.I. uniform and a frankly hilarious pith helmet, stares mortified at the camera.

Hugo was only in Ethiopia as part of his family’s quest to acquire some of Mussolini’s promised glory, but instead he idolized the household servant, an older Ethiopian boy named Brahane who taught him Amharic. While his father read Mussolini’s magazine of racial purity, La Difesa Della Razza, Hugo and Brahane joked in a language Rolando refused to learn. After Italy fell to the Allies, Hugo polished his English while hanging out with Afrikaner pilots.

Gift link is here.

Sometimes the best music is the most embarrassing music. That's part of the magic of art: the mystical properties that can make a work simultaneously vulnerable and uncomfortable and alluring and groovy. A desire to jam and to hide my face in my hands—that is Dashboard Confessional to me.

Dashboard Confessional, the final boss of 2000s emo pop, was the brainchild of Florida boy Chris Carrabba, the jet-black-haired (and sideburned) original tattooed sensitive guy, with his Abercrombie chic of tiny shirts, tight jeans, and a silly armband. Brooding with a sleeve of tats, you know he might be trouble, but in that irresistibly wounded, emotionally expressive way. "Yes," your brain tells you, "I can fix him."

Dashboard formed in 1999 and put out their first album the following year, but their breakthrough came with their sophomore effort, The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most, which turned 25 last month. The year is 2001, and Carrabba and Dashboard Confessional have become an MTV staple. "Screaming Infidelities," a year-old song that had already appeared on their first album, is suddenly a big hit. The band has begun to ride the line between teeny-bop twee punk for the TRL set and the go-to punchline of every derisive joke about the cloying excesses of the fake genre that is emo, while simultaneously being a quality band with great, karaoke-ready pop songs. For my part, I am a 12-year-old boy, and they are the band I don't want anyone to know I am listening to ... even as I listen to them all the time.

We're a little over 6 years(!) since the first documented american case of covid. There is no way to convey how many changes to our world trickled out of that one event. A significant one, for many of us, is the way covid changed how we work. The nonprofit where I worked had a single zoom license only a few months before the pandemic hit. Soon, all our meetings were taking place online. I stopped going into the office altogether. It began to feel needless, the hours people spent commuting, when we could do great work at our own kitchen tables. This was work that at one time could only take place in an office. Now it’s possible to do it from anywhere with an internet connection.

But it didn't take long before businesses began their return to office policies. After months of doing it all in a nice shirt and sweatpants, the orders came to drive or transit back in. Not everyone could return to work, though. Some people bought or rented homes far outside cities they didn't imagine ever commuting to. The working world has long excluded people with disabilities or mobility issues. Some people weren't lucky enough to live near transit good enough to get them to their office jobs. If we all started meeting in person again, we'd be leaving some of our new colleagues behind.

I work from home because I want to. In fact, I left a job in part because they insisted I return to the office. At the same time, I like working in an office. I like the energy of people working in space together. We each build personal connections, even capital, when we meet with our coworkers in person. But there are reasons why people don’t go to the office. Knowing all this, I can hold two truths.

1. There is something valuable about in-person work that makes it worth doing.
2. Not everyone can work in person, and we shouldn't punish them for that fact.

I'll assume the push to return workers to offices is more than bailing out people who over-invested in real estate. Here are my ideas to make remote meetings as fulfilling as working in person.

create a level working field

In meetings, it's often one poor sap who has to keep an eye on the online folks. This means that everyone who connects to the video chat has to look at Phil's nostrils while he makes a point. Instead...

• Ask everyone who attends in person to log in to the meeting with their own computers. In-person attendees should join with video on but audio muted. Leave a computer unmuted in the center of the room or place microphones at both ends. This will limit audio feedback and ensure everyone is well-heard.
• Monitoring the chat is everyone's responsibility. If someone online raises their hand, anyone in the room should feel responsible to call attention to it.
• When collecting input from the room, leave space for people online. Ask folks for their thoughts at the beginning and ending of every feedback period.
• Assign 1-2 people per meeting to be the avatar for the person/people online. These folks will pair up with one online user or have them join a small-group meeting. Rotate this role every 20-30 minutes like you would a language interpreter. This ensures nobody feels like we're keeping them from fully participating all day.

unstructured time

I argue that the time spent between meetings is at least as valuable as the time spent in meetings. This is how we build connections with each other that don't revolve around business.

• Open the virtual room 5-10 minutes before the start of the meeting. Leave recording or transcript features off until the meeting officially starts.
• Getting right to business at the start of a meeting rarely happens in person. Build time for friendly interactions into your online meetings, too.

encourage online/offline participation

People online often feel neglected or even ignored during hybrid meetings. This can cause online participants to disengage or contribute less than people in the room.

• Invest in a video/projection system so that everyone in the room can see the people online.
• Reimagine your in-person movement activities. One example: instead of easel paper, project an empty presentation slide onto a wall. In-person participants can add sticky notes to the wall. Online folks can add colored rectangles to the same wall.

acknowledge lag

Limitations of technology can also create a divide between in-person and online folks. We need to acknowledge and account for it.

• Give everyone time to compose their thoughts before speaking. Schedule a moment of silent reflection or journaling after you ask each question. Paste your questions into the chat while you ask them.
• If we use a slide deck, share that with online participants. This allows them to see people in the room without having the whole screen taken up by what we share.

I facilitated a retreat several months ago that we designed to be only in-person. We had one person dialing in from out of town. A heavy rainstorm hit the morning of our session. The one virtual attendee we had planned turned into two, then four, then eight. We soon had as many people online as we did in person. We missed out on the contributions that our online folks could have shared. They felt cut out from the interactive pieces of our agenda. There was little I could do that day that I hadn't already tried. But I left the retreat confident that it could have gone better.

Virtual meetings are no longer optional. They're not a nice-to-have for people who can't meet in person. We have to accept that we may never meet some of our coworkers without a screen between us. They are just as vital to our future success; we exclude them at our own risk.

For every action, there must be an equal and opposite reaction. Sir Isaac Newton said this, presumably after a long day of scrolling whatever the social media platform of the time was. To wit, the moment I finished reading an excellent essay by Marisa Kabas about refusing to accept an AI-poisoned future of journalism, I encountered the following headline: “Esquire AI-Generated A Fake Interview With Live-Action One Piece Actor Mackenyu Because He Was Busy.” Either I’m losing my mind, or the world is. 

This isn’t one of those cases where a publication quietly leaned on AI and only copped to it after getting called out. Esquire Singapore fully admitted what it was doing when it published the story and used it as a supposed selling point! From the piece:

We were stoked to have some face time with the Japanese-American actor, but his schedule prevented it. So, we opted for e-mail correspondence. A list of queries was sent his way, and we waited. The silence continued until it was quickly replaced by a ticking clock as deadlines loomed.

We had the photospread, but nothing directly uttered by the 29-year-old. With a driving need for a feature, we had to be inventive. Harnessing our creative license, we pulled his verbatim from previous interviews and fed them through an AI programme to formulate new responses.

Are these the words we expect from Mackenyu? Or are they just replies from an echo chamber of celebrity-hood that we want to believe is from him?

Clearly the latter, you fools! You hacks! You credulous dipshits! 

This groundbreaking new approach to lying produced riveting exchanges like:

ESQ: Any advice on how to deal with pressure and expectations?

(AI) M: I separate pressure from weight. Pressure is external; like people's expectations. That I can't control, but the weight of family legacy… the goal isn’t to match my father. It's to make him proud, and maybe inspire someone else to do the same. Pressure can crush you, but weight can ground you.

And:

ESQ: What has fatherhood taught you?

(AI) M: That you can't rehearse it. (laughs) Everything else in my life I can prepare. Fatherhood has no script. No second take. You're just there, and you figure it out in real time. It's humbling in a way nothing else is.

You were talking to a chatbot! It did not laugh! Shut the fuck up! Also, as Kotaku notes, the chatbot certainly never knew Mackenyu’s father, deceased action star Sonny Chiba, and I cannot think of a single person in their right mind who would ask a predictive text generator a question so probing and personal about the feelings of a human being who’s very much still alive. That is deranged behavior! To be clear, I believe, on no uncertain terms, that the person who wrote this is deranged!

I cannot believe I even have to say this, but if you’re trying to publish an interview feature, and you’re unable to procure the interview in question, then you scrap the story. There is no “driving need” for a piece that supersedes that. The world was not crying out for this essential dollop of PR fluff. You can find interviews with Mackenyu, specifically, on numerous websites and, of course, YouTube. If anything, all Esquire has demonstrated here is that this kind of journalism matters so little that it can be farmed out to a robot homunculus and still pass muster.

It is bonkers to me that anyone thought this was a good idea—let alone that multiple people (if we include editors) presumably did. They should all hang their heads in shame forever, quit their jobs immediately, and give them to a few of the thousands of vastly more deserving reporters who, in a twist of fate that borders on maniacal, are currently out of work. These people would be better served casting away their old lives and embarking on a journey to find the actual One Piece, a treasure I’m well aware is fictional. Despite that rather substantial stumbling block, they would still find more success in that arena than in this one. 

This is what happens when AI rots journalists’ brains beyond the point that they can’t discern the difference between a good idea and a terrible one—to the point that they can only conceive of angles that involve AI.

That in mind, a salient section from Kabas’ piece:

If you want to work with machines, get a job that requires it. There are a whole lot more of those than there are writing jobs, so free up space for people who actually want to do the work. You’re not doing the world a favor by gifting it your human/AI hybrid. Journalism will not miss you if you leave. No one is making you be a journalist; it’s not one of those jobs parents force you to choose, like a doctor or a lawyer. Journalism, while romanticized in popular culture, is generally unglamorous and poorly paid, with progressively worse job opportunities (no thanks to AI.) I’m careful not to refer to it as a calling because that seems to excuse sacrificing mental health in service of craft, but I do believe that it’s a job that can’t be forced. It’s obvious to readers when your heart isn’t in it.

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AftermathLuke Plunkett

Everyone is trying to get to the bar. The name of the bar? The bar is called Erewhon.

This past January, I spent a long weekend in Los Angeles. I was excited to catch up with my friends and their dogs, to swap Mediterranean oak forest for chaparral and the faintly hallucinatory deep-winter warmth endemic to that biome, and to microdose the L.A. experience of encountering celebrities in mundane contexts. But mostly I wanted to go to Erewhon.

Erewhon is a chain of grocery stores with locations throughout the greater L.A. area. The chain gets its name (an anagram of "nowhere") from a satirical 1872 Samuel Butler novel about a "utopian" society that locks up the ill, forcing people to tend to their health and wellness under threat of imprisonment. Erewhon is known primarily for selling smoothies and a suite of ridiculous wellness products, all for outrageous amounts of money, though the items on offer at the store only go so far in explaining the broader Erewhon phenomenon and the chain's nimbus of mystical prestige. Most grocery stores, particularly in L.A., sell overpriced smoothies and serums, but only Erewhon attracts the paparazzi, carries itself like a luxury brand, and symbolizes something deeper about health and consumerism. So what distinguishes Erewhon?