Lev Davidovich

"I have one consistency, which is being against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The totalitarian is the enemy." Christopher Hitchens's last interview

By Andrew Masterson

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The decision to detain Mr. Pérez Molina is unprecedented in Guatemalan history and was a stunning conclusion to a day of swift change in the nation.

On Thursday night, President Donald Trump announced that the US had launched strikes against the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in retaliation for Assad's use of the chemical weapon sarin in an attack that killed dozens of civilians. "No child of God," Trump said in a statement, "should ever suffer such horror."

But the damage has already been done — and America, including President Trump himself, is already deeply culpable. Not because the US has shown undue hesitancy in dropping bombs on Syria before now, but because of its refusal to let Syrians help themselves by allowing more refugees to move to the United States. Expanding refugee resettlement would certainly work, would carry little in the way of short-term financial costs, and that would likely provide a powerful boost to the US economy and drastically increase the living standards of Syrians who were able to relocate. Instead, Trump has sought to slash the number of Syrians allowed to come to the US — while dropping bombs on Syria itself.

Letting Syrians come to the US would benefit them enormously, and quite possibly pay for itself

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

If we're actually serious about helping Syrian people — both people who've stayed and refugees — it's not enough to identify an intervention that seems like it could make things better and then declare that it's the only viable solution. You have to compare it with alternative plans, and see which produces the most good at the least cost. And it's very, very hard to argue that any military intervention that could avert further bloodshed in Syria — or even have prevented the bloodshed of the last four years — would have done more good, at lower cost, than this: simply issuing green cards to every Syrian who wants one — or even issuing them to just 1 million, or 500,000 — and providing airlifts to bring people here.

Let's take immigration to start. The potential benefits to Syrians are enormous. For one thing, we would avoid the huge humanitarian toll associated with existing refugee migration. Many fewer boats would capsize. Many fewer children would drown. Many fewer people would suffocate in the back of trucks.

The economic benefits are massive, as well. According to research from economists Michael Clemens, Claudio E. Montenegro, and Lant Pritchett, a worker born in Egypt but living in the United States makes 12 times as much as an identical worker still in Egypt. A worker born in Yemen makes more than 15 times as much as his counterpart who stayed behind. Even in Jordan, Syria's substantially richer neighbor, migrants make almost six times as much.

Finally, there's the basic fact that millions of Syrians want to leave Syria. They're willing to risk their lives to make it to a rich Western country.

President Donald Trump knows this. It's why he's made Syrian refugees a key issue in his first weeks in office. But instead of helping them by giving them what they want, he's made two separate attempts to prohibit them from coming to the US. In his first travel ban, signed during his first week in office, Trump singled out Syrian refugees for an indefinite ban from entering the US; in the second version of the ban, signed in March, Syrian refugees were included in an attempted 120-day pause on the entire US refugee program.

Either of these policies would have resulted in thousands of Syrians who otherwise would have been able to enter the United States no longer being allowed to do so. And while the first travel ban was abandoned and the second is tied up in court, the Trump administration's stated desire to slash the number of refugees allowed into the US during a given year — and its particular skepticism about refugees from Syria —strongly suggests that it's going to let fewer Syrians come to the US than its predecessor (who himself admitted many fewer Syrians than wanted to come).

What's the case against? President Trump claims that refugees in general and Syrians in particular are potential terrorists — but the odds that a Syrian refugee will commit a terrorist attack in the US are absurdly small, while the odds that the same person will suffer if not allowed to enter the US are extremely high.

It's true that flying people in and giving them basic resettlement support would cost money. Not a lot of money, but some. But over time, it would quite possibly pay for itself. It's uncontroversial among economists that immigration generates economic growth, and even the most immigration-skeptical economists concede that some of those gains go to native-born workers, not just migrants.

High-quality studies that use "natural experiments" — cases where there was a big, unexpected spike in immigration — suggest that the absolute effect of immigration on native workers is neutral or positive. It's much easier to isolate the effect on native workers in those cases than it is by trying to statistically weed out other potential causes of changes in wages. The Mariel boatlift, when Cuba unexpectedly sent 125,000 people to Florida, did not hurt employment or wages among native workers in Miami at all. A huge spike in Russian immigration to Israel in the early 1990s appeared to give existing workers a nearly 9 percent raise.

As economist Michael Clemens once told me, the effect of immigration on real wages for native workers is "definitely positive, without any doubt whatsoever." A recent evidence review by researcher David Roodman confirms this: While low-skilled immigration can make the existing low-skilled immigrant population worse off (though almost certainly not worse off than in their country of origin), Americans born here have very little to worry about, and a lot to gain.

We don't know if earlier intervention in Syria would've saved lives — and if so, how many

Sezayi Erken/AFP/Getty Images

Letting in Syrian refugees looks pretty promising. The benefits to Syrians are enormous. The cost to the US is small at worst and quite possibly negative. So how would a military strike compare?

It's doubtful the approach of only-missile-strikes taken by Trump so far will do much to prevent civilian casualties. But let's look at the military option that would have averted the most bloodshed so far — the options on the table back in 2011 and 2012, when the brutality of Assad's attacks on Syrians was just becoming a matter of international concern.

The most common proposal at the time, floated by former State Department Policy Planning Director Anne-Marie Slaughter, the Center on Foreign Relations' Steven A. Cook, and the Henry Jackson Society, among others, was to use Western air power to create and defend special "no-kill zones." These would be areas close to the Turkish, Lebanese, and Jordanian borders that would receive humanitarian aid and provide a base from which to train and arm opposition groups. Benghazi served a similar role in Libya; after being defended by NATO air power, it provided a base in which opposition groups could start building a government in exile and plan operations against the Gadhafi regime.

I genuinely don't know if that would've worked. But there's a lot of reason for doubt, and plenty of reason to think that creating such zones would be extremely costly.

For one thing, the political science literature on arms support to rebel groups suggests that, more often than not, they drag out conflicts rather than bringing them to a swifter end. George Washington University professor Marc Lynch notes that the particular characteristics of the Syria conflict — where the goals of the West and those of the rebels aren't identical, where the rebels are fractured, where the foreign countries intervening aren't all on the same side — made it a particularly unpromising conflict in which to take that approach.

Joel Robin / AFP

Lynch also points out that, in practice, supporting a "no-kill zone" would require much more than airstrikes. If it were unprotected and the Syrian military were allowed to attack within it, you'd have a repeat of the Srebrenica debacle, in which Serbian forces were able to massacre Bosnians within a UN-declared "safe area" because the UN troop deployment was insufficient to stop them. But defending such an area successfully would require a significant investment of troops.

"If Srebrenica is the worst-case, the experience of the relatively successful Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq after 1991 should prove equally sobering," Lynch writes. "An operation which was envisioned as a short term response to crisis, on the expectation of Saddam Hussein’s imminent fall, instead turned into a decade-long commitment. Maintaining that safe area required some 20,000 troops, near-constant air-raids, and an increasingly contentious international debate at the UN which consumed the Clinton Administration’s international diplomacy."

Mere airstrikes wouldn't have been enough to stop the killing, in other words. For one thing, many of the civilian casualties being endured at the time were occurring due to the Assad regime's assaults on contested cities. The US could not have bombed Assad's forces in those cities without running the risk of killing more civilians than it saved.

Ultimately, the choice was whether to commit tens of billions of dollars, and tens of thousands of US ground troops, to implement a strategy that might have toppled Assad and saved thousands of lives, but which also might have made the conflict even more brutal than it's been. The latter was probably more likely, in fact. The cost would have been considerable in any case, and the benefit very uncertain. Compared with the benefits of letting Syrian refugees into the US, which we know are great, and the costs, which we know are small, that's not a very attractive proposition.

The best humanitarian interventions don't involve the military

GiveDirectly.org

American elite enthusiasm for humanitarian airstrikes to protect civilians from civil war or genocide is peculiar. On the one hand, it's a welcome expression of empathy for the rights and welfare of people outside the United States. Strengthening cosmopolitan sentiment is a good thing indeed.

But it also enables a strange hypocrisy. The humanitarian interventionists who cheer our strike on Assad, and who urge further action to push him out of Syria entirely, aren't spending the rest of their time arguing that we should boost funding for the US's hugely effective anti-HIV/AIDS program. They're not pushing the US to greatly increase its foreign aid budget in general, perhaps to 1 percent of gross national income, like Sweden, from merely 0.2 percent.

They're not calling for reforms that make it easier for USAID and other aid agencies to spend on highly effective projects that reduce child and maternal mortality. They're not calling on the US to eliminate all quotas and tariffs on goods from poor countries, as well as farm subsidies that make it harder for poor farmers in sub-Saharan Africa to export their goods. They're certainly not calling for a massive expansion in levels of immigration to the US from Haiti, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the rest of the world's absolute poorest countries.

Perhaps they support all those policies, and if so, good for them. But if we're serious about changing US policy so as to help as many poor, vulnerable people as we can, military strikes wind up being a tiny part of the overall picture. The real struggles are less sexy. They don't let you posture like you're tough and hardheaded. And they require fighting against interest groups that wield real power in the US.

Basically no one in Washington likes the Assad regime, so it's extremely easy to saber-rattle and make grand pronouncements about the need to crush it. But plenty of people in Washington love farm subsidies. Plenty of people in Washington like restricting immigration, especially low-skilled immigration from poor countries. Plenty of people in Washington like the idea of cutting the foreign aid budget, or perhaps eliminating it altogether. Those fights are actually hard. And they actually matter.

And right now, in 2017, no one could seriously argue that sending US ground troops has a realistic chance of ending the war and leading to a peaceful, democratic Syria. It's too late. But it's not too late to help refugees. The boats are still sailing, and sinking. Children are still dying. People are still suffering. It's not too late for the US to heed the International Rescue Committee's call for us to resettle 65,000 refugees, not the paltry 1,434 we've resettled so far. It's not too late to do the International Rescue Committee one better and let in 200,000, 500,000, 1 million even. It's not too late to make Syrian refugees' lives dramatically better.

If the loudest Syria hawks on Capitol Hill — your John McCains and Lindsey Grahams — are serious about helping Syrian civilians, they'd be pushing for President Trump to stop trying to ban refugees and to commit to filling the 33,000 spots reserved for refugees from the Near East and South Asia this fiscal year. They'd be pushing him to increase that cap, or perhaps even lift it entirely. They'd be trying to make life better for Syrians in the most effective manner available. McCain and Graham have paid lip service to the plight of refugees, and Graham has suggested he might support legislation to let more enter. But they've spent far more of their time and energy urging intervention, and admonishing the Obama administration when it wasn't forthcoming.

Morality in foreign policy isn't about bombing bad guys. It's about helping people. And usually, the best way to do that won't involve bombings at all.

The greatest purveyors of radical Islam aren’t the Iranians, as a general says. The Saudis win that title hands down.

The Pew Research Center’s new study on American Catholics reads like an anti-credo. On issue after issue, Pew’s pollsters found that majorities of people who identify as religious, rather than cultural, Catholics dissent from church teaching. So why do they stay in a church that they think is erring? A lot of them assume that the church will inevitably come to their way of thinking.⁵⁸

Breaking down Pew’s numbers by regularity of Mass attendance shows that dissent is more common among people who go to church less often. Weekly Mass attendance is a natural place to divide Catholics by practice — skipping weekly Mass is a mortal sin, so Catholics who don’t attend as often are likely to view the church differently than those who show up every Sunday.

	SHARE FAVORING CHANGE, BY MASS ATTENDANCE
CHANGE	LESS THAN WEEKLY	WEEKLY OR MORE
Married priests	71%	48%
Women priests	68	45
Birth control	83	65
Gay marriage	52	37
Communion after remarriage	70	50
Communion while cohabiting	71	46

Unsurprisingly, dissent is a lot more common among Catholics who are operating at a distance from the church, but substantial shares of weekly Mass-goers share those opinions. Although dissenters are often tarred as “Cafeteria Catholics” who pick and choose from among the church’s teachings, without much thought for the whole, the dissenting Catholics that Pew surveyed seemed fairly confident that the changes they support will wind up being viewed as orthodox and applicable to everyone.

On every controversy that Pew included in its survey, at least half of dissenting Catholics expected that their desired change would probably or definitely come to pass by 2050. Catholics who hoped that current teachings would remain unchanged were similarly confident that the church of the future would be the one they wanted. On all issues, fewer than 40 percent of Catholics holding to current orthodoxy thought a change was likely.

	SHARE WHO THINK CHANGE IS PROBABLY/DEFINITELY LIKELY, BY STANCE
CHANGE	FAVORS CHANGE	OPPOSES CHANGE
Married priests	58%	23%
Women priests	55	19
Birth control	67	34
Gay marriage	51	22
Communion after remarriage	66	34
Communion while cohabiting	67	37

Dissenters who attend Mass regularly turn out to be more optimistic than dissenters with irregular attendance that the church will wind up making the changes they want. Catholics who go to Mass regularly and want change were about 4 percentage points more likely, on average, to say their desired change would definitely happen, compared with Catholics with more irregular attendance records.

Faith that the changes they want are likely, or even definitely, going to happen may be part of what keeps these parishioners within the church. If they expect that their dissents will eventually be adopted by the Vatican, they may as well stick around while they wait for the change.

With both sides optimistic that they’ll prevail, someone is bound to wind up disappointed. But in the meantime, Catholics trust the church of the future, while sometimes ignoring the one that exists in the here and now.

CORRECTION (Sept. 5, 1:17 p.m.): Two previous versions of the second table in this article incorrectly listed the share of Catholics who agreed with current church teachings but expected them to change. The table and the text describing it have been corrected.

America is an exceptional country when it comes to guns. It's one of the few countries in which the right to bear arms is constitutionally protected. But America's relationship with guns is unique in another crucial way: Among developed nations, the US is far and away the most violent — in large part due to the easy access many Americans have to firearms. These charts and maps show what that violence looks like compared with the rest of the world, why it happens, and why it's such a tough problem to fix.

America's unique problem with gun violence

America's mass shooting epidemic

More guns, more violence

America's biggest gun problem is suicide

There are hundreds of police shootings every year in America

America's political fight over guns

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This is Mr. Franzen’s most fleet-footed, least self-conscious and most intimate novel yet.

As cities across the US build bike lanes, their decisions are often seen as a move to give space to bikes at the expense of cars. But data tells us this isn't always true: In New York City, for instance, bike lanes have actually shortened cars' travel times on several streets, while simultaneously encouraging people to bike and making it safer.

How can this be? Two words: road diets.

The video above — created by city planner Jeff Speck and artist Spencer Boomhower — nicely explains four types of road diets, a trend that has become increasingly popular in US cities over the past few decades.

These diets can take several forms, but the basic idea is that by removing traffic lanes, cities can free up space for bike lanes and reduce the frequency of crashes. Narrowing lanes from 12 feet to 10, meanwhile, makes drivers less likely to speed, and in doing so has also been shown to cut down on crashes that involve drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians.

All this sounds like it would cause tons of congestion and make it harder to drive. But in many cases, it can be done without actually increasing the time it takes a driver to travel a given distance — and can sometimes even decrease it.

One reason is that short bursts of speeding, interspersed with waits at traffic lights, don't actually shorten travel times all that much — they just make streets more dangerous. Another is that if a street carries fewer than 20,000 cars per day, it generally doesn't need a second lane to maintain a smooth flow of traffic. Many of the roads targeted for diets carry far fewer cars to begin with.

What's more, though they allot less space to cars, many road diets use that space much more efficiently. For instance, road diet No. 2 in the video above (the most common type) removes a driving lane in both directions, but introduces a dedicated left turn lane for cars going in either direction.

(Jeff Speck/Spencer Boomhower)

This allows cars to wait to turn left without holding up traffic behind them — and is one reason why road diets and bike lanes along Broadway and Eighth and Ninth Avenues in New York City shortened travel times while significantly reducing cyclist injuries.

When we present knowledge as more certain than it is, we discourage curiosity.

Henry Kissinger’s writings yield four main principles of foreign policy: To understand rivals and allies one must first understand their history; statesmen sometimes have to act before the facts are in; many foreign-policy decisions are choices between evils; and realism must go hand-in-hand with morality. In Kissinger’s view, to have a foreign policy based solely on morality is as dangerous as having one that denies morality

The Henry Kissinger reputation restoration project is in full swing. Volume 1 of an authorized biography delivers 1,000 pages of unconvincing claptrap

There is nothing unusual about doing this. The Senate has required changes in more than 200 submitted treaties before giving its consent.

Imagine you’re a conflicted lawmaker in the U.S. Congress. You’ve heard all the arguments about the Iran nuclear agreement, pro and con. A vote on the deal is coming up in September and you have to make a decision. But you are torn.

Most of your colleagues don’t share your angst. They have concluded that the risks of the nuclear accord far exceed its benefits. They will vote to disapprove.

Some take the opposing view. They accept President Barack Obama’s argument that the agreement will effectively block Iran from developing a nuclear weapon for a very long time at little risk to U.S. interests.

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Related Story

The President Defends His Iran Plan

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You are in a third group. You recognize the substantial achievements in the deal, such as Iran’s commitment to cut its stockpile of enriched uranium by 98 percent, gut the core of its plutonium reactor, and mothball thousands of centrifuges. But you have also heard experts identify a long list of gaps, risks, and complications. These range from the three and a half weeks that Iran can delay inspections of suspect sites, to the billions of dollars that Iran will reap from sanctions relief—some of which will surely end up in the hands of terrorists.

For his part, the president seems to believe that he negotiated a near-perfect deal. In his recent speech at American University, he described the pact as a “permanent” solution to the Iranian nuclear problem. It was a shift from when he told an NPR interviewer in April that once limitations on Iran’s centrifuges and enrichment activities expire in 15 years, Iran’s breakout time to a nuclear weapon would be “shrunk almost down to zero.” Both statements—achieving a “permanent” solution and Iran having near-zero breakout time—cannot be true.

The president has said a “better deal” is a fantasy. But you never took seriously the unknowable assertion that the Iran accord is “the best deal possible,” as though any negotiator emerging from talks would suggest that what he or she has received is anything but “the best deal possible.” And you cringe whenever advocates of the agreement hype its achievements as “unprecedented,” knowing this is not a synonym for “guaranteed effective.”

You may not believe in unicorns, as Secretary of State John Kerry said you must to accept the idea of a “better deal,” but you have been impressed by suggestions on how to strengthen the agreement. The United States could even implement many of these proposals without reopening negotiations with the Iranians and the P5+1 group of world powers. Here are several such options:

• Consequences: Repair a glaring gap in the agreement, which offers no clear, agreed-upon penalties for Iranian violations of the deal’s terms short of the last-resort punishment of a “snapback” of UN sanctions against Iran. This is akin to having a legal code with only one punishment—the death penalty—for every crime, from misdemeanors to felonies; the result is that virtually all crimes will go unpunished. The solution is to reach understandings now with America’s European partners, the core elements of which should be made public, on the appropriate penalties to be imposed for a broad spectrum of Iranian violations. These violations could range from delaying access for international inspectors to suspect sites, to attempting to smuggle prohibited items outside the special “procurement channel” that will be created for all nuclear-related goods, to undertaking illicit weapons-design programs. The Iran deal gives the UN Security Council wide berth to define such penalties at a later date, but the penalties have no value in deterring Iran from violating the accord unless they are clarified now.

• Deterrence: Reach understandings now with European and other international partners about penalties to be imposed on Iran should it transfer any windfall funds from sanctions relief to its regional allies and terrorist proxies rather than spend it on domestic economic needs. U.S. and Western intelligence agencies closely track the financial and military support that Iran provides its allies, and will be carefully following changes in Iran’s disbursement of such assistance. To be effective, these new multilateral sanctions should impose disproportionate penalties on Iran for every marginal dollar sent to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, etc. Since these sanctions are unrelated to the nuclear issue, they are not precluded by the terms of the Iran agreement.

“Snapback” sanctions are akin to having a legal code with only one punishment—the death penalty—for every crime; the result is that virtually all crimes will go unpunished.

• Pushback: Ramp up U.S. and allied efforts to counter Iran’s negative actions in the Middle East, including interdicting weapons supplies to Hezbollah, Assad, and the Houthis in Yemen; designating as terrorists more leaders of Iranian-backed Shiite militias in Iraq that are committing atrocities; expanding the training and arming of not only the Iraqi security forces but also the Kurdish peshmerga in the north and vetted Sunni forces in western Iraq; and working with Turkey to create a real safe haven in northern Syria where refugees can obtain humanitarian aid and vetted, non-extremist opposition fighters can be trained and equipped to fight against both ISIS and the Iran-backed Assad regime.

• Declaratory policy: Affirm as a matter of U.S. policy that the United States will use all means necessary to prevent Iran’s accumulation of the fissile material (highly enriched uranium) whose sole useful purpose is for a nuclear weapon. Such a statement, to be endorsed by a congressional resolution, would go beyond the “all options are on the table” formulation that, regrettably, has lost all credibility in the Middle East as a result of the president’s public rejection of the military option. Just as Iran will claim that all restrictions on enrichment disappear after the fifteenth year of the agreement, the United States should go on record now as saying that it will respond with military force should Iran exercise that alleged right in a way that could only lead to a nuclear weapon. It is not for the president 15 years from now to make this declaration; to be effective and enshrined as U.S. doctrine, it should come from the president who negotiated the original deal with Iran.

• Israeli deterrence: Ensure that Israel retains its own independent deterrent capability against Iran’s potential nuclear weapon by committing to providing technology to the Israelis that would secure this objective over time. A good place to start would be proposing to transfer to Israel the 30,000-pound, bunker-busting Massive Ordnance Penetrator—the only non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal that could do serious damage to Iran’s underground nuclear installations—and the requisite aircraft to carry this weapon. This alone would not substitute for U.S. efforts to build deterrence against Iran. But making sure Israel has its own assets would be a powerful complement.

You wish the president would embrace these sound, sensible suggestions. Inexplicably, he hasn’t. And nothing in the administration’s public posture suggests that he will change course before Congress votes.

So, what will you do?

Some of your colleagues have floated the idea of a “conditional yes” as an alternative to “approve” and “disapprove.” They, like you, recognize that the agreement has some significant advantages but are deeply troubled by its risks and costs. They want to attach strings to their “yes” vote, in the belief that this will bind the president and improve the deal.

But the legislation enabling Congress to review the Iran deal does not accommodate a “conditional yes.” Votes are to “approve” or “disapprove.” Legislators may negotiate with the White House over every comma and colon in a resolution of conditionality, and they may even secure one or two grudging concessions from the White House. But neither a resolution of Congress calling for these improvements nor ad-hoc understandings between the White House and individual legislators has the force of law or policy. According to the Iran-review legislation, the only thing that matters is a yea or nay on the agreement.

Is there really no “third way”?

The answer is yes, there is. Pursuing it requires understanding what the relevant congressional legislation is really about.

Advocates of the agreement have characterized a congressional vote of disapproval as the opening salvo of the next Middle East war. In reality, a “no” vote may have powerful symbolic value, but it has limited practical impact according to the law. It does not, for example, negate the administration’s vote at the UN Security Council in support of the deal, which sanctified the agreement in international law. Nor does it require the president to enforce U.S.sanctions against Iran with vigor. Its only real meaning is to restrict the president’s authority under the law to suspend nuclear-related sanctions on Iran.

A “no” vote on the Iran deal buys time for Obama to adopt remedial measures and then ask Congress to endorse his improved proposal.

Here’s the catch: By the terms of the nuclear agreement, the president only decides to suspend those sanctions after international inspectors certify that Iran has fulfilled its core requirements. In other words, congressional disapproval has no direct impact on the actions Iran must take under the agreement to shrink its enriched-uranium stockpile, mothball thousands of centrifuges, and deconstruct the core of its Arak plutonium reactor. Most experts believe that process will take six to nine months, or until the spring of 2016.

Why would Iran do all of these things if it can’t count on the United States to suspend sanctions in response? While it’s impossible to predict with certainty how Iranian leaders would react to congressional disapproval of the agreement, I’d argue chances are high that they would follow through on their commitments anyway, because the deal is simply that good for Iran. After Iran fulfills its early obligations, all United Nations and European Union nuclear-related sanctions come to an end. They aren’t just suspended like U.S. sanctions—they are terminated, presenting Iran with the potential for huge financial and political gain.

The “deal or war” thesis propounded by supporters of the agreement suggests that Iran, in the event of U.S. rejection of the deal, would prefer to bypass that financial and political windfall and instead put its nuclear program into high gear, risking an Israeli and American military response. But that volte-face makes little sense, now that Iran has painstakingly built a nuclear program that is on the verge of achieving the once-unthinkable legitimacy that comes with an international accord implicitly affirming Iran’s right to unrestricted enrichment in the future. In such a scenario, Iran would reap an additional benefit in continuing to implement the agreement: The United States, not Iran, would be isolated diplomatically.

The key point is that a “no” vote on the Iran deal has little practical impact until next year. Between now and then, such a vote buys time, adding up to nine months to the strategic clock. If, before the vote, Obama refuses to adopt a comprehensive set of remedial measures that improves the deal, then a resounding vote of disapproval gives the president additional time to take such action and then ask Congress to endorse his new-and-improved proposal.

Chastened by a stinging congressional defeat in September—one that would include a powerful rebuke by substantial members of his own party—the president might be more willing to correct the flaws in the deal than he is today. That would surely be a more responsible and statesmanlike approach than purposefully circumventing the will of Congress through executive action that effectively lifts sanctions—an alternative the president might consider if he is hell-bent on implementing the agreement.

Those who claim that a “no” vote would destroy the agreement argue that Europe would simply stop enforcing sanctions against Iran should Congress reject the deal. But this too doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny. In my view, the Europeans are more likely to wait six to nine months to see whether Iran fulfills its core requirements under the deal so that they can claim validation for their decision to terminate sanctions. If Congress were to approve Obama’s new-and-improved proposal before Iran complies with its requirements, the United States would still be on schedule to waive its sanctions at the same time that the European Union and United Nations terminate theirs.

So, if you are among the legislators who view the Iran agreement as flawed and are frustrated by the administration’s unwillingness to implement reasonable fixes, there is a way to urge the president to pursue the “better deal” that he keeps urging his detractors to formulate, but that he can’t seem to accept as a possibility. “No” doesn’t necessarily mean “no, never.” It can also mean “not now, not this way.” It may be the best way to get to “yes.”

Let’s call the Iran nuclear deal what it is: a partial U.S. surrender.

Sometimes, the best decision may be no decision at all.

For example, following an earnest debate at a recent board meeting of the Minnesota & Dakotas chapter of the Jewish Community Relations Council, members — by a narrow margin — decided that the organization should take no position on the proposed nuclear deal between the United States and Iran.

Eric Schwartz, a board member and dean of the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, led the argument that it would be best if the organization remained neutral on the deal. “Given the wide variety of views in the community on the [Iran] agreement, should an organization that represents an entire community take a position, or should it be a forum where people of all points of view can express their positions?” Schwartz asked. 

“No position” isn’t the sort of deal that gets huge media coverage, though. It appears to be an honest position, though, given that it reflects the fact that there is not a universal opinion among American Jews about whether the deal should go forward. Nationally, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, which is the umbrella group for JCRC chapters around the country, has not taken a position, either.

No organization speaks for all

In a recent op-ed piece in the Washington Post, Todd Gitlin, chairman of the Ph.D. communications program at Columbia University, and Steven Cohen, a research professor at Hebrew Union College, said that there has been a large “rift” between the so-called “U.S. Jewish leadership” and American Jews. 

Large organizations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the American Jewish Committee have strongly opposed the deal, leaving the impression among many Americans that most American Jews are opposed. But polling done by Cohen shows that a majority of Jews actually support the proposed deal.

Cohen and Gitlin said the reasons for the disconnect between Jewish organizations and individuals likely center around the fact that leaders of the Jewish organizations are both older and wealthier than the Jewish population as a whole, and thus tend to be more conservative.

But the rift should serve as a reminder that no organization speaks for all — or even a majority — of the people it claims to represent. No Jewish organization speaks for all Jews just as no Christian organization speaks for all Christians. 

And the rift should also serve as a reminder that, especially on complex issues such as this treaty deal, most of us are caught in a muddled middle. Even while those with strong — even strident — positions get the headlines. As do those with the money.

One example: Republican former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman is teaming with former Sen. Joseph Lieberman in creating the American Security Initiative to raise millions in order to purchase television ads to pressure politicians to oppose the agreement. (The ads are running in North Dakota, but not Minnesota. One ad features an Iraq war veteran with facial wounds saying that those who support the deal “will have blood on their hands.”) 

‘People I respect … feel differently’                

That’s the sort of rhetoric many are attempting to avoid.  

Michael Latz, rabbi at Shir Tikvah, a progressive reform congregation in Minneapolis, points to the position taken by the Union for Reform Judaism, which has a following of 1.5 million people. That organization said the focus of U.S. Jews and politicians in both the U.S. and Israel must “focus on the day after.”

Whether the deal is ultimately agreed to or rejected, the statement argues, “it is essential that this debate not be allowed to create a lasting rift between Israel and the U.S., between North American Jews and Israelis or among American Jews.” 

Latz noted that this is not the sort of position that has made a media dent, even in the oh-so-serious New York Times. But it shows that people are taking the issue seriously and understand that people of good will can have opposite views.

Latz is a liberal, and is among 340 rabbis who signed a letter supporting the deal. The signees, by the way, represented a denominational cross section of American Judaism. But on this issue Latz is no demagogue.

“People I love and deeply respect feel differently than I do on this issue,” he said. He understands the differences because the issue is not a black and white one in his mind either. He says he “reluctantly has come to supporting the treaty,” though he doesn’t believe it’s perfect, doesn’t trust Iran and is “deeply committed to Israel.’’ 

But the bottom line, in his mind, is that “it’s the best chance we have.’’ 

The conversation over the treaty is ongoing and heartfelt in the Twin Cities Jewish community, Latz said. He believes that there are more people who support the agreement than not.

The responsibility to be informed

Still, there is a broader question that crosses all demographic lines. How much should each of us be expected to understand about an international agreement such as this? As Latz says, “I can do a Bar Mitzvah, but what do I know about a centrifuge?’’

Schwartz, the JCRC board member, said that in a democracy we all have “a responsibility to have informed perspectives and opinions.” There are two ways to go about this, in his mind. We can each study issues carefully, listen to experts and make an assessment of our own. Or, we put our faith in political leaders we trust and give them “your proxy” vote on difficult issues. In either case, Schwartz said, it’s important to separate partisanship from policy.

When the debate about the JCRC taking a position on the treaty took place, the first vote was on a motion to oppose the treaty. That was defeated. Then the “neutral” position was supported. 

“I would hesitate to characterize positions of many of the members,” said Schwartz. “They all had their own reasons for voting as they did.’’

Each week following Show Me a Hero, David Sims, Brentin Mock, and Lenika Cruz discuss the controversial efforts to build low-income housing in Yonkers in the ’80s, as depicted in HBO’s six-part miniseries.

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Lenika Cruz: “How come the only people talking about this damn housing thing are white?” Pat, a Yonkers public-housing resident, ask her friend Norma, the nurse. “How come the only faces you see on television about this are white?” The two chat toward the end of Show Me a Hero’s fourth episode, after Norma’s home health aide bails on her after one day of working in the projects. The exchange reveals them to be of different minds: Norma, understandably wary of change, doesn’t know why Pat wants to march in East Yonkers near a new housing site in a neighborhood that doesn’t want her. Pat, gently chastising her, says she isn’t afraid and that their silence won’t make anything better.

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Related Story

Show Me a Hero: Welcome to Yonkers

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Pat and Norma’s chat stood out for me in a series that has prioritized political maneuverings over the scattered storylines of the public housing residents, and this week’s episodes cover a lot of ground in both arenas. We begin with Mayor Nick Wasicsko trying to wrangle enough council votes to get Yonkers to comply with Judge Sand’s order and avoid bankruptcy. By the end of part four, the city is in compliance; a jobless Wasicsko is puttering around his house trying to fix loose electrical wires; the sleazy new anti-housing mayor Henry Spallone is kicking off an early reelection campaign; and some newly installed prefab townhomes have been vandalized with the words “No Nigger” and “KKK.” And to think the anti-housing folks were worried about criminals and people with no sense of respect moving into their neighborhood.

It’s a fitting example of the ways this week’s episodes turned the show’s subtext into glaring text. The housing opponents’ euphemistic arguments about property values, and their claims that “this isn’t about race” are undercut again and again by barely contained racism. When Mary Dorman asks the anti-housing leader Jack O’Toole why they’re still marching (with effigies of Michael Sussman with a noose around his neck, no less) when the townhomes are already being built, he replies, “We’re letting them know they’re never gonna be welcome here.”

The episodes also reveal the brutal circularity of city politics and offer a clearer sense of scale and scope for the housing issue. Wasicsko becomes mayor in episode one after exploiting the public discontent on the housing issue to beat out the incumbent Martinelli. Similarly, Spallone smears Wasicsko to become mayor, but afterward he faces the same outcry once everyone realizes there’s no way to fight the housing order. At the start of part three, Wasicsko’s requests for support are being ignored by New York Gov. Mario Cuomo and Sen. Daniel Moynihan; later, they chime in to offer endorsements for his reelection campaign. And the most recent episodes offer a clearer picture of how how fringe the anti-housing group is in the context of Yonkers, and how Manhattan, the media, and the rest of New York actually seem to support Wasicsko’s efforts. (This kind of nuance was hard to grasp from all the scenes of council meetings drowned out by the screams of angry mobs.)

The nebulous notion of “home” is central to the show’s characters

Wasicsko finally grasps the importance of his single term as mayor—even if his ego plays a significant role. Being on the right side of history is lonely, he tells his girlfriend Nay, but he might be able to secure a congressional seat out of it (later, he’s lifted out of his post-defeat depression when he’s nominated for a JFK Profile in Courage Award.) But also, he realizes, looking up at the house he and his wife would later buy, he realizes, “People just want a home ... It’s the same for everybody.”

Indeed, the nebulous notion of “home” is central to the rest of the show’s characters, whose stories shuffled along this week. The indefatigable Carmen realizes that, for her, home is her children, and that nothing will keep her from being with them. Billie, a newly fleshed out character, moves out of her mother’s house with her new baby, whose father is in jail, and secures an apartment. Norma feels at home when she’s surrounded by her “own.” Then there’s Doreen, who becomes horrifically consumed by an addiction to crack cocaine, which she smokes in the same house as her young asthmatic son. Before she starts down that path though, she writes him a letter: “This isn’t home ... I know that I can't stay here without falling down, and I can't go home ... I’m waiting and I’m not sure what it is I'm waiting for.”

There’s so much more to cover (a testament to the show’s incredibly dense storytelling). There’s Wasicsko’s increasingly frequent graveside chats with his father. There’s Oscar Newman’s behind-the-scenes fight for low-unit, single-family housing. And there’s the largely unsubtle portrayal of single moms and absent fathers, which I feel walks the line of making the projects residents seem like tragic victims. That’s why I wanted to open our chat this week with a quote from Norma’s friend, Pat—an older character who’s actively challenging her circumstances without being patronizing to those who aren’t.

David and Brentin, how did you guys feel about this week, and what are your hopes as we head into the last two episodes of the series?

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Brentin Mock: For me, the key moment comes during episode three, when all eyes are on councilman Nick Longo during a last-second, backroom negotiation before the council votes on whether to accept the new city plan for low-income housing. Longo is the swing vote—or at least he’s the swingyest of the opposing votes—and the mayor is counting on him to join the other three council members who have agreed to accept the housing order. Longo is told that if the council continues to resist, the city risks not only millions of dollars in fines and lost city services, but also that 630 city employees would have to be laid off.

Before this point, Longo was dead against the housing, and was willing to take the fines and even jail time for contempt of court. But the layoffs are what change his heart: “We’re about to economically murder 630 families here.” These are families that he’s backyard-barbecued with, and attended their weddings and baby christenings, “not as their councilmen, but as their friends.”

This same sympathy is not extended to the hundreds of the black and Latino families already facing economic murder, concentrated in public-housing poverty camps. Their lives don’t matter to Longo and his frothing constituents. And it’s not just about economics, or different “lifestyles” as the anti-low-income housing activist Mary Dorman tells a reporter. No one will yet admit that it’s about racism. When the young widowed mother (her child’s father dies of a police chase-induced asthma attack) Doreen winds up temporarily in a shelter in upstate New York, she shares concerns with a neighbor that she heard “there’s KKK up here.” The KKK is right there in east Yonkers, in the white neighborhood where the controversial set of low-income houses are being built. We know this because, as Lenika pointed out, someone has spray-painted “KKK” and “nigger” on the houses before they’ve even been finished.  

What I like about these middle two episodes is that they confront us with the question once posed by Outkast rapper Andre 3000 in the song “Y’all Scared”: “Have you ever thought of the meaning of the word ‘trap’?” The black and Latino families are trapped in substandard housing where drug-dealing and violence have filled the void created when its industrial-centered economy collapsed—the Otis Elevator factory and Alexander Smith Carpet Mills closed years ago. The families don’t choose to live in these housing projects, they just have no other choice. Their meager wages won’t allow them to become homeowners, and few neighborhoods want these families in their presence anyway.

These episodes ponder the question posed by Andre 3000 in “Y’all Scared”: “Have you ever thought of the meaning of the word ‘trap’?”

Contrast that with the scenes of Mayor Nick Wasicsko gracing the wide front porch of an enormous house he tells his girlfriend he plans to buy some day. It sits on a hill overlooking the city, and from this perch Wasicsko outlines his vision—his cityview and his worldview—which includes being able to point out his City Hall office to their future children. Apparently out of the couple’s price range, his girlfriend asks him if he’s crazy for considering buying it, to which he cavalierly responds, maybe. After sober reflection, Wasicsko reasons “I’m just a councilman. I haven’t done anything to deserve a home like that.”

And yet he ends up buying the house, anyway, because he had the option to do so, and no one fought him in city council or in the streets to prevent him from doing so. These are options that the black and Latino families of the story simply did not have. No council members are attending their weddings and christenings. In fact, Doreen had to pull out a letter from her doctor explaining that her bronchially challenged baby needed to live in a well-ventilated area to survive in order to get a city worker to finally listen to her request to move them to better surroundings after initially ignoring her. There are no queens in this trap.

Wasicsko finally wins the council’s approval to comply with the court’s housing order, although it costs him his mayoral seat. But his life goes on. He not only gets the house of his dreams, he also gets married. It shows that while there are political consequences for white people in power taking these kinds of stands, they hardly affect their real lives when the political battles are over. Meanwhile, the lives of the people who are the subject of these political fights continue to degrade. The racism at the heart of it is never resolved.

Which is why I have to come back to the point I made in our last roundtable, that it matters that the audience understands the history of what this is all about. The federal judge hasn’t ordered low-income housing built in the white-by-choice neighborhoods simply because it’s the right thing to do. He ordered it because it’s demanded by claws like the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act, the latter of which had to see Martin Luther King murdered before Congress would finally pass it. And the people who fought for these laws did so because they believed there was real social harm in continuing to live in segregation. This experiment in integration demanded by the Fair Housing Act—and it is a social experiment, whether we like that language or not—isn’t carried out purely because of the idea that black people’s lives will improve by living in closer proximity to whites. If anything, it’s equally, if not more, out of the idea that white people’s lives will improve by learning how to live with black people.

When white people choose to sequester themselves away from people who don’t look like them, as they did in this Yonkers story, then … well, we saw the spray-painted writing on the new housing walls. I think that said it all.

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David Sims: Indeed that does say it all, and it makes for a remarkable cap to these two episodes, which begin with Mary Dorman (Catherine Keener) assuring a black reporter that her protest efforts weren’t motivated by racism, but merely economic worries—that property owners in the neighborhoods zoned for new housing were worried their own houses’ values would fall. What’s so good about Keener’s performance in these two episodes is that you can really tell she believes her argument that she’s not a prejudiced person, which is the kind of delusion at work throughout many of these protests and Council meetings. Longo’s later pronouncement, which Brentin mentioned, that he had to approve the housing to help his friends and neighbors, is couched in the same kind of language, talking around the issue of fear of having black neighbors. There’s empathy in both arguments—but only for Yonkers’s white population.

Over the course of these two episodes, that delusion fades, even for people like Mary, who seems to have an inkling now that Jack O’Toole and other protest leaders are motivated purely by hatred, and that her own stance is rooted in the same ignorance, even if it lacks the same outward fury. By the end of episode four, as you both noted, the writing is literally on the wall.

It was fascinating to see Wasicsko speak of a so-called “silent majority” during his re-election campaign, using the same kind of language Richard Nixon used to refer to the supposedly vast community of quiet Americans who didn’t take part in anti-war protests or belong to any counter-cultural movements. Nixon’s electoral strategies were heavily rooted in fear, and in pitting communities against some unknown “other,” and it’s the same strategy that Wasicsko employed in his first campaign, promising to appeal the housing decision and coasting to office on a wave of dissent. Only two years later, he’s become painfully aware of the necessity that Yonkers obey the court’s orders, but it’s only when presented with polling numbers that he realizes the majority of his party agrees with him, something he couldn’t make out in the thicket of protests for every Council vote.

Once again, the protest movement has been co-opted for political gain, but this time by an even more ruthlessly cynical man.

That “silent majority” almost returns Wasicsko to office against all odds, until his rival Hank Spallone realizes what’s happening and defects to the Republican Party to secure victory. It’s at his victory speech that the real coup de grace is delivered—Spallone promises his furious white constituency that he’ll fight the housing decision all the way to the Supreme Court, and definitely won’t comply with it (unless, he quietly adds, there’s no other option at that point). Only Mary catches it, but it’s a beautifully bitter moment of irony—once again, the protest movement has been co-opted for political gain, but this time it was by an even more ruthlessly cynical man.

The same irony permeates the investigation of Wasicsko’s post-mayoral life, as he gets married, buys a house, and does a thousand other normal things most Yonkers residents had the privilege of doing, not realizing that decades of segregation and insidious policy-making have robbed their neighbors of the same rights. On the one hand, his JFK Profile in Courage Award feels well-deserved, since Wasicsko’s efforts helped save the city of Yonkers and begin its slow process of desegregation, perhaps at the cost of his political career. Still, more than anything, here was a pragmatist: A man who knew he had to do the right thing, because every other option was a worse one. As Brentin noted, it’s the work of the courts, and the people who passed the Civil Rights and Fair Housing Acts, that compelled all of this action. Wasicsko was merely a messenger, though he did his duty far better than Yonkers’ other messengers.

Late in episode four, city planner Oscar Newman (Peter Riegert), tasked with implementing the construction of affordable housing in a way that will avoid the mistakes of previous projects, explains his “defensible space theory.” He argues that public housing should not have too much shared space, like big open stairwells or hallways, because no resident can claim ownership over it, allowing the space to be conquered by homeless people, or gangs, or drug dealers. It was a revolution in city design, but it also feels like a metaphor for what’s happening in Yonkers. People like Mary are jealously guarding their own territories and ignoring larger goods, refusing to see how harmful the ghettoization of Yonkers’s African Americans have been to the city’s interests at large. Wasicsko’s silent majority may well exist, but they are nowhere to be seen at council meetings, and so progress has to come at a desperately slow pace. In that time, the many tragedies we’re seeing among the various residents of Yonkers’s public housing are unfolding.

Tom Friedman vs. Bill Flack. One is a noted columnist, the other an irrigation specialist. One is world-famous, the other a nobody. Yet Flack is better at forecasting the future

Here in the MMM family household, we live a lifestyle that could be considered unrecognizably oddball, or classically familiar depending on who you ask. Although the fairly well-appointed house in an expensive area probably does a good job at reassuring certain neighbors that we fit in, our lives are pretty different.

We spend most of our time within a 2-mile circle with home at the center. The car is just starting in on its third tank of gas for the year, and I’m expecting this one to make it through December. We often go months without visiting any store besides the grocery, and the half million dollar house contains no TV set, clothes dryer, powered lawnmower, ties or suit jackets of any sort, and no items of clothing (other than great hiking shoes) worth more than about $50.

None of this is by necessity or due to lack of money, it’s just how we’ve ended up after ten years of  freedom from conventional work, while trying to optimize our lives for happiness rather than maximum consumption. But the end result is still pretty powerful, as I can’t seem to blow more than about $25,000 per year no matter how luxurious we feel our lives are.

The further along we go, the more I realize this is a great way to live, and probably not just for us. Because a life like this comes with other changes aside from the superficial spending-related ones described above. It seems that we are sliding right into the comfortable groove of much older human civilizations, the ones in which all of our instincts are more at home: something you could call the tribe.

The Modern Urban Tribe

I’ve noticed that our life is following a pattern that echoes back to a far distant era. We wake up when our bodies feel they have had enough sleep and the house is brightening with the sky. I walk outside to inspect the sunrise with bare feet and strong coffee, and a relaxed breakfast for all of us is never compromised. Only after this routine, sometimes with music or other times with a chapter of reading from a book, do we start to think about other things like meetings or appointments or heading out for some good old-fashioned hard work.

Our house backs onto a park, which is at the center of a human-friendly community where people actually walk places. Because of this, people tend to just show up throughout the day. Little MM might run out to join some friends after seeing them out throwing toy airplanes in the park, who later join him to make mud rivers in the back yard or come inside for a round of Starcraft II. Kids wander in pairs or groups from one household to another without an armored SUV escort, or even shirts or shoes. We all climb trees and play in the creek. Adult friends might stop in as part of an afternoon walk, which ends up leading to beers and the joint cooking of a feast, which in turn attracts other adults and children, possibly even leading to unexpected tent sleepovers in the back yard.

In such a community, leisure and work tend to blur together. I might recruit a friend to help build a fence, who ends up needing my help to replace a furnace. A third friend might stop by to learn about the installation process, but mention a house he saw for sale down the street which leads to a short-term real estate investment partnership. Everybody could use some help at times, and everyone has some help to offer at other times. As a result, kids and salads, tools and books and loaned vehicles, money and heirloom tomatoes and homebrews tend to circulate freely through the crowd, enriching us all with each transaction.

Such a life is not just the quaint habit of a few lucky rich people in a friendly, safe neighborhood. It is the foundation of human civilization itself. We are meant to live in medium-sized groups, to walk between each other’s dwellings, and to collaborate and play freely with an abundance of unscheduled free time. When you start with these basic building blocks of a community, you automatically press your happiness buttons and suddenly start living a much happier, healthier life.

Lessons in Tribalism from my Summer Vacation

This summer, I had an unusually action-packed trip as I made my way through the cities of Hamilton, Toronto, Ottawa and surrounding spots in Canada to visit friends and family. With our own lifestyle so bright in my mind, it was fascinating to see how other people live.

Many people we know in Ottawa live in isolated suburbs, scattered 30 miles from their other friends and from work. Some chose their location because they wanted to live on a large plot of land, and others because they wanted a big house that still fit within the limits of their mortgage payment budget. But few if any made the choice based on living within walking distance of friends, family, food and work.

They have adapted to this situation by living more planned lives. A long email discussion of schedules precedes any gathering of friends, and they need to work around traffic and weather and repairs and gas prices. Brand new cars have gone from shiny to dull to rusty to junkyard while my used car has yet to lose the stiff blackness of its nearly new seat fabric. Getting together is still fun, but it tends to happen less often and end earlier in the night. I couldn’t help but notice the amount of happiness this physical distance seems to subtract from the equation.

Later I ended up in San Francisco, peeking in on the lives of some new friends as an outsider. As I joined the neighborhood parties and looked at the way this much smaller, bike-scaled city functions, I noticed that the social life of these friends was much more similar to my own despite the much larger population of the city. Spontaneous gatherings and sharing of household amenities was the norm. Patios or parks would fill with neighbors and driveways would fill with bikes. The fact that people lived within walking or biking distance of friends seemed to make all the difference.

The final lesson came when I headed to Victoria, BC for three days. This is an island city of 80,000 people which happens to feature the highest rate of bicycle commuting in Canada. Meeting a friend at a the airport, we immediately went to one neighbor’s house to borrow a bike for the duration of my visit and ditched the motor vehicle. Then we rode to a barbecue gathering for local business owners. The next day featured a longer ride through the city and out to the surrounding lakes and mountains, then I took a bus downtown to join a meetup of Mustachians in a public park. Afterwards we walked out for a late night dinner, and then I enjoyed an hour-long solo midnight walk back through the city to my temporary home.

I found an amazing similarity to my own city of Longmont, Colorado. More seemingly random people knew and cared about each other, spontaneous gatherings and excursions to the mountains were commonplace, and the general consensus was that this was a wonderful and happy place to live. Prosperity and good health seemed to be in abundant supply in these more tribe-oriented places.

So How Can this Make us All Richer?

I believe the close and local community is a big part of what we’ve been losing with modern life. The dual-full-time-income-plus-kids household, ivy-league preschool syndrome, car commuting and suburban sprawl in our city designs have all made it a little harder to live a local lifestyle. But it absolutely does not have to be that way.

There’s a Greek island called Ikaria that pops up regularly in health news because its people enjoy some of the longest, healthiest lives on Earth. At least once a month, somebody emails me a link to one of a few major stories about it, because they notice the parallels to the lifestyle you and I are working towards right here. Plenty of sleep. Some outdoor hard work every day. A high degree of socialization. And of course, olive oil and wine as desired. Ikaria is the Original Island of the Mustachians. Even without much money, these people are wealthier than most of us in rich cities.

Slowly but surely, the US is waking up from its suburban slumber and starting to change the way cities are designed, with groups like Strong Towns pushing and city planners trained in New Urbanism pulling as they gradually start displacing the people who were raised with nothing but cars. But without even waiting for these changes, we can start adding some Ikaria to our own lives.

Great Friends are Hiding Among your Neighbors

You just need to start meeting your neighbors. Not just one or two of them, but all of them. Not everybody will be cool or fun or have much in common with you, but some of them actually will. When I move to a new house, I actually write down the addresses of the 10 nearest houses and then set a goal of filling in a name and summary of the details for each household. Then I keep branching out and making eye contact and meeting people from other nearby blocks, because it is a genuinely happy thing to know people who live so close to you.  Why focus your energy on traveling to meet friends who live several cities away, while ignoring those right next door who you haven’t even met yet?

Joining local groups can facilitate this, whether it’s through a school, business group, church, or bike, sport or volunteer club. Even getting a part-time job at an in-style downtown venue works well. The key to keeping it tribal is simply to keep it local – you need to mingle with people you actually live with. To create an area with a “high social collision rate” as a doctor friend of mine puts it.

Even after 10 years in my own city, I still run into a new person every week who I’d actually like to spend time with, who lives within a five minute walk. As the network grows, so does my happiness. And miraculously, the number of things I can think of to spend money on continues to drop, because a more satisfying life automatically cuts down your desire to doll it up with more toys.

The answer to a better life may be walking past you right now.

Further Reading: 

This year a busy urban neighborhood in South Korea tried banning cars for an entire month. It ended up blowing everyone’s minds for the better: http://www.fastcoexist.com/3045836/heres-what-happened-when-a-neighborhood-decided-to-ban-cars-for-a-month

Do any Longmontians want to try this here? The first city in the US to accomplish this feat will start a chain reaction that changes everything.

 

 

Iraq is burning, and the zealots of the Islamic State are rampaging across the Middle East, beheading their captives and erasing borders. Is this Hillary Clinton’s fault?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The teaser for Mr. Iñárritu’s film starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the explorer Hugh Glass.

On Wednesday at American University, Barack Obama made the case for the Iran nuclear agreement, and against its critics, in a long and detailed speech. The official transcript is here; the C-Span video is here. Later that afternoon, the president met in the Roosevelt Room of the White House with nine journalists to talk for another 90 minutes about the thinking behind the plan, and its likely political and strategic effects.

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg was one of the people at that session, and he plans to write about some aspects of the discussion. Slate’s Fred Kaplan was another, and his report is here. I was there as well and will try to convey some of the texture and highlights.

Procedural note: The session was on the record, so reporters could quote everything the president said. We were allowed to take notes in real time, including typing them out on computers, but we were not allowed to use audio recorders. Direct quotes here have been checked against an internal transcript the White House made.

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Related Story

Why the Iran Deal’s Critics Will Probably Lose

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Nothing in the substance of Obama’s remarks would come as a surprise to people who heard his speech earlier that day or any of his comments in the weeks since the Iran deal was struck—most notably, his answers at the very long press conference he held last month. Obama made a point of this constancy. Half a dozen times, he began answers with, “As I said in the speech...” When one reporter observed that the American University address “reads like a lot of your other speeches,” Obama cut in to say jauntily, “I’m pretty consistent!,” which got a laugh.

But although the arguments are familiar, it is still different to hear them in a conversational rather than formal-oratorical setting. Here are some of the aspects that struck me.

* * *

Intellectual and Strategic Confidence

This is one micron away from the trait that Obama-detractors consider his arrogance and aloofness, so I’ll try to be precise about the way it manifested itself.

On the arguments for and against the deal, Obama rattled them off as he did in his speech and at his all-Iran July 15 press conference: You think this deal is flawed? Give me a better alternative. You think its inspection provisions are weak? Look at the facts and you’ll see that they’re more intrusive and verifiable than any other ever signed. You think because Iran’s government is extremist and anti-Semitic we shouldn’t negotiate with it? It’s because Iran has been an adversary that we need to negotiate limits, just as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan did with the evil and threatening Soviet Union. You think that rejecting this deal will somehow lead to a “better” deal? Well, let’s follow the logic and see why you’re wrong.

It’s the follow the logic theme I want to stress. Obama is clearly so familiar with these arguments that he was able to present them rapid-fire and as if each were a discrete paragraph in a legal brief. (At other times he spoke with great, pause-filled deliberation, marking his way through the sentence word by word.) And most paragraphs in that brief seemed to end, their arguments don’t hold up or, follow the logic or, it doesn’t make sense or, I don’t think you’ll find the weakness in my logic. You’ll see something similar if you read through his AU speech.

The real-world context for Obama’s certainty on these points is his knowledge that in the rest of the world, this agreement is not controversial at all.

There is practically no other big strategic point on which the U.S., Russia, and China all agree—but they held together on this deal. (“I was surprised that Russia was able to compartmentalize the Iran issue, in light of the severe tensions that we have over Ukraine,” Obama said.) The French, Germans, and British stayed together too, even though they don’t always see eye-to-eye with America on nuclear issues. High-stakes measures don’t often get through the UN Security Council on a 15-0 vote; this deal did.

The context for Obama’s certainty is his knowledge that in the rest of the world, this agreement is not controversial at all.

Some hardliners in Iran don’t like the agreement, as Obama frequently points out, and it has ramifications for many countries in the Middle East. But in Washington, only two blocs are actively urging the U.S. Congress to reject it. One is of course the U.S. Republican Party. The other is the Netanyahu administration in Israel plus a range of Israelis from many political parties—though some military and intelligence officials in Israel have dissented from Benjamin Netanyahu’s condemnation of the deal.

Obama has taken heat for pointing out in his speech that “every nation in the world that has commented publicly, with the exception of the Israeli government, has expressed support.” But that’s the plain truth. As delivered, this line of his speech was very noticeably stressed in the way I show:

I recognize that Prime Minister Netanyahu disagrees—disagrees strongly. I do not doubt his sincerity. But I believe he is wrong. … And as president of the United States, it would be an abrogation of my constitutional duty to act against my best judgment simply because it causes temporary friction with a dear friend and ally.

To bring this back to the theme of confidence: In this conversation, as in the speech, Obama gave Netanyahu and other Israeli critics credit for being sincere but misinformed. As for the GOP? Misinformed at best. “The fact that there is a robust debate in Congress is good,” he said in our session. “The fact that the debate sometimes seems unanchored to facts is not so good. ... [We need] to return to some semblance of bipartisanship and soberness when we approach these problems.” (I finished this post while watching the Fox News GOP debate, which gave “semblance of bipartisanship and soberness” new meaning.)

Obama’s intellectual confidence showed through in his certainty that if people looked at the facts and logic, they would come down on his side. His strategic confidence came through in his asserting that as a matter of U.S. national interest, “this to me is not a close call—and I say that based on having made a lot of tough calls.” Most foreign-policy judgments, he said, ended up being “judgments based on percentages,” and most of them “had hair,” the in-house term for complications. Not this one, in his view:

“When I see a situation like this one, where we can achieve an objective with a unified world behind us, and we preserve our hedge against it not working out, I think it would be foolish—even tragic—for us to pass up on that opportunity.”

If you agree with the way Obama follows these facts to these conclusions, as I do, you’re impressed by his determination to fight this out on the facts (rather than saying, 2009 fashion, “We’ll listen to good ideas from all sides”). If you disagree, I can see how his Q.E.D./brainiac certainty could grate.

* * *

Awareness of the Intellectual and Strategic Unknown

Obama missed no chance to push right back if there was a question or a premise he disagreed with.

For instance: After he’d given a discourse about the risks of accidental war with a nuclear-armed Iran, one reporter asked him, “Do you have a head count on the Hill?” Obama immediately shot back, “Come on! We’re having a big geopolitical conversation!” It was with a laugh, but he moved right on to the next questioner. When another questioner began by asking for Plan B if he lost the congressional vote, Obama said (essentially): I’m going to stop you right there and give you a chance to ask a question that I will answer. I’m not going to answer this one because, “I make it a point not to anticipate failure.”

There’s a contrast between Obama’s certitude on the facts and logic of the deal, and his agnosticism about the major social and strategic shifts that might ensue.

But Obama did engage one string of questions whose premise he challenged. The questions involved whether he was naively placing too much faith in the idea that Iran’s reconnection with the world would liberalize its society and undermine its extremist leaders.

Obama disagreed with the premise because, he said, the deal made no assumptions about what might happen in Iran. E.g., “There is nothing in this deal that is dependent on a transformation of the character of the Iranian regime. … This is a hard-headed, clear-eyed, calculated decision … to seize our best opportunity to lock down the possibility of Iran getting a nuclear weapon.”

That’s consistent with the case he’s been making all along. I was more interested in what he said next, when asked directly about what he expected to occur in Iran. The question was: Let’s not talk about assumptions built into the deal. Please tell us what you, President Obama, think will happen in Iran if the deal goes through. He answered,

I just don’t know.

When Nixon went to China, Mao was still in power. He had no idea how that was going to play out. He didn’t know that Deng Xiaoping suddenly comes in … and the next thing you know you’ve got this state capitalism on the march. You couldn’t anticipate that.

When the first arms-control treaties were entered into with the Soviet Union, nobody was anticipating that at some point the entire system—well, maybe George Kennan was anticipating it—but at some point, the system rots to the point where the Berlin Wall comes down. You have a more immediate objective, which is let’s make sure that we’re not triggering nuclear war...

I was the first president to visit Burma—after 40 years of as repressive a regime as there is. And we still don’t know yet how that experiment plays itself out. But what we do know is suddenly there’s this opening, this space. … We’ve created a possibility for change.

He went on to say that he was more confident about predicting changes in Cuba, because “that’s a small country which has almost a unique relationship to us.” As for Iran?

Iran is the latest expression of a deep, ancient, powerful culture that’s different than ours. And we don’t know how it’s going to play itself out. But as I said before, it’s not necessary for us to be optimistic in order for us to assess the value of this deal. If you believe that Tehran will not change, and the latest version of the current supreme leader is in charge 10, 15 years from now … you’d still want this deal. In fact, you want this deal even more.

The fantasy, the naiveté, the optimism, is to think that we reject this deal and somehow it all solves itself with a couple of missile strikes—that is not sound foreign policy.

My point: It can be as revealing to hear people talk about what they don’t or can’t know as what they do. In our evolving understanding of Obama, I mean to highlight the contrast between his certitude on facts-and-logic of the deal, and his agnosticism about these major social and strategic shifts that might ensue.

* * *

Or Else, War

Many critics of the deal, and some supporters and others in the press, are furious about what they feel is Obama’s scare-tactic false choice: If you don’t vote for this deal, you’re voting for war. Here was the Israeli Embassy’s reaction:

Eli Lake, of Bloomberg, lamented Obama’s stooping to the “politics of fear.”

This sensitivity to fear-mongering is selective at best, considering the apocalyptic tone of many arguments against the deal. I mention it because in the conversation on Wednesday, Obama was asked about it directly. His answer, which was even longer than I will relay here (but similar to what he has said in his speeches), was simply to move through the chain of logic link by link:

First, the U.S. Congress rejects the deal. The secretary of state has negotiated it; the president has endorsed it; the UN has approved it; so have all other involved governments. But the U.S. will not take part. What then?

Next, “at a minimum, what we’ve done is we’ve put Iran in the driver’s seat. And Iran could make various decisions here, none of which are good for us, and all of which are good for them.” Logically, what would those options be?

“They could decide to pull out of the comprehensive deal or the interim deal, put the entire blame on the United States, and proceed with their R&D, their research, the installation of more advanced centrifuges, claiming the entire time that these are all still peaceful. They would have been willing to defer on the installation of some of those centrifuges in exchange for sanctions relief, but since the U.S. Congress refused to be reasonable, they’re going to go ahead—in which case, the scenario that everybody talks about happening 15 years from now happens six, nine, 12 months from now.”

“Alternatively, they could say, ‘We’re going to go ahead and abide by the deal despite what the U.S. Congress says,’ and put our partners—Russia, China, as well as the Europeans—on notice that they’re ready to do business...”

“It’s hard to conceive of Russia and China not taking full advantage of that—not only because of commercial purposes, but because of the enormous propaganda boom that it provides them at a time when the entire story they’re telling around the world is that U.S. hegemony is over, that we need an entirely new set of global institutions that are more reflective of the balance of power.”

Would the Russians and Chinese, as Netanyahu has claimed, simply forget about the current deal and join in a GOP-dictated request for tougher sanctions? “Inconceivable,” Obama said. The way he actually put it was:

And if we now had Congress reject an initiative that a U.S. president and a U.S. secretary of state had led and that now has virtually universal approval, then it is inconceivable that President Xi or President Putin or, for that matter, a number of our European partners would then say, ‘We’ll just do what Tom Cotton has to say with respect to our geopolitical interests.’

There’s a lot more to the chain of logic, but at its end, according to the president, is an Iran much closer to nuclear-weapon capacity than it would be under the deal, and a United States with no leverage other than the military to deal with it. And what comes with that final link?

So in almost every scenario, our ability to monitor what’s happening in Iran, our ability to ensure that they are not breaking out, our ability to inspect their facilities, our ability to force them to abide by the deal has gone out the window.

And as I said in the speech, everybody around this table knows that within six months or nine months—I don’t know how long it would take—of Iran having pulled out of this deal, or cheated on this deal, or interpreted the deal in a way that was deemed contrary to the spirit, if not the letter, of the deal, that some of the same voices who were opposed to the deal would insist that the only way to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon is to take strikes. And it will be framed as limited military strikes, and it will be suggested that Iran will not respond. But we will have entered into a war.

That doesn’t mean that Iran suddenly attacks us directly. It does mean that I’ve got a whole bunch of U.S. troops on the ground trying to help Baghdad fight ISIL, and they’re now looking over their shoulders with a host of Shia militia. It does mean that Hezbollah potentially makes use of some of those rockets into Israel, which then precipitates us having to take action. It does mean that the Strait of Hormuz suddenly becomes a live theater in which one member of the IRGC, or Quds Force, or [Iranian Quds Force commander] Mr. Soleimani directs a suicide speedboat crashing into one of our naval ships, in which case I think it’s fair to say that the commander in chief of the United States will be called upon to respond.

So when he says it’s the deal, or war, this is the case he is making. “I do not say that a military option is inevitable just to be provocative, just to win the argument. Those are the dictates of cold, hard logic.”

Agree with him or not, to classify this as “fear-mongering,” on a topic where presidential candidates are talking about “leading to the door of the oven” and a “declaration of war on Israel,” is to stretch that term beyond meaning. (And a new term altogether would be useful for the irrepressible Dick Cheney, who most recently said that the deal would make “the actual use of nuclear weapons more likely.”)

* * *

The Mindset

In addition to “the deal or war,” the part of the AU speech most calculated to infuriate opponents was Obama’s emphasis on “the mindset.” By this he meant a general over-reliance on military responses—“we shortchange our influence and our ability to shape events when that’s the only tool we think we have in the toolbox”—and the specific, disastrous resort to a military response in invading Iraq.

Obama is fully aware that bringing up Iraq is a “divider, not a unifier” move. The Munich agreement, nearly 80 years in the past, is rolled out whenever anyone wants to criticize a modern-day treaty. The Iraq misjudgments, so much more recent and involving so many still-active figures from both parties, are trickier to bring up. Obama made clear that he wanted to highlight rather than obscure the connection between the thinking that led the United States into Iraq and the arguments that oppose this deal. He said:

I also think that there is a particular mindset that was on display in the run-up to the Iraq War that continues to this day. Some of the folks who were involved in that decision either don’t remember what they said or are entirely unapologetic about the results, but that views the Middle East as a place where force and intimidation will deliver on the security interests that we have, and that it is not possible for us to at least test the possibility of diplomacy.

And I’ll leave it to you guys to do the political analysis of why those views are most prominent now in the Republican Party. I’ll leave it at that.

Obama wouldn’t be talking this way if he thought he could bring any of those Republicans to his side of the argument. He doesn’t. “The degree of polarization that currently exists in Washington is such where I think it’s fair to say if I presented a cure for cancer”—he was saying this jokingly, and it drew a laugh—“getting legislation passed to move that forward would be a nail-biter.”

* * *

The Art of the Possible

One reporter asked Obama whether he was upset that the deal would, at best, squeak by in Congress. The Republican majorities in the House and Senate will almost certainly pass a measure condemning it; Obama will certainly veto that; and the deal’s survival will depend on denying opponents the two-thirds majority they would need in both the House and the Senate to override his veto.

Is that an inglorious way to prevail? He said no. “My main concern is simply to be able to implement the deal, and then make sure that, globally, we put in place the structure to make it stick.” And a little later,  “I’m less concerned about the point spread. I’m more concerned about getting it done.”

His final words before he shook our hands and left were, “Nothing is easy in this town”—he has been in Washington long enough to say this town. “But it’s all worthwhile.”

Astronomers have dreamed about finding alien life for centuries. It's just always been considered a far-fetched possibility — the stuff of science fiction. That's why it's so surprising that in recent years, many scientists have started taking the search for life on other planets much, much more seriously.

That's partly due to new astronomical discoveries. A generation ago, we didn't even have evidence that there were any planets orbiting other stars. But in the past few decades, scientists have found thousands of distant "exoplanets," including several that seem like they might have the right conditions for life. At the same time, scientists have discovered several moons right in our own solar system that appear to have liquid oceans underneath their icy surfaces and perhaps other ingredients necessary for life.

It's all extremely promising. So astronomers have decided to double down on the search for extraterrestrials. They've moved beyond the traditional methods, which involved simply hoping that intelligent aliens might contact us via radio signals, à la the SETI Institute. Instead, they're now planning missions to nearby ocean worlds and finding new ways to peer at distant planets.

Some astronomers— including NASA's chief scientist — even believe we could find alien life within our lifetimes. "With new telescopes coming online within the next five or 10 years, we'll really have a chance to figure out whether we're alone in the universe," Lisa Kaltenegger, the director of Cornell's new Carl Sagan Institute, told me last year. "For the first time in human history, we might have the capability to do this."

Granted, if life does exist on any of these planets or moons — either in our solar system or outside it — it's far more likely to be in the form of simple, single-celled organisms rather than little green men. These microscopic aliens would be extremely hard to definitively detect, especially if they're orbiting other stars. But it would be a monumental discovery, a sign at last that we're not alone.

Here's a step-by-step guide to how we'll actually go looking for alien life.

Step 1: Survey our solar system's ocean worlds

A rendering of the Europa Clipper. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

It'd be a lot easier to find definitive evidence of extraterrestrial life within our own solar system than it would be to explore other stars. So the first step is to identify and explore all the ocean worlds orbiting our sun.

Ocean worlds are planets or moons that are icy on the surface but harbor a warmer liquid ocean underneath. They're promising for a simple reason: temperature. Most of the other planets in our solar system (i.e., those besides Earth) seem to be either too hot or too cold for life to survive, too close or too far from the sun. But a planet with an ocean might be able to get around this constraint — because there are lots of possible ways an ocean on a distant icy world could have the right temperature for life to occur.

For instance, scientists have recently found evidence of water oceans on at least three moons: Jupiter's Europa and Ganymede and Saturn's Enceladus. (Saturn's moon Titan also has an ocean of liquid methane.) Even though these moons are frigid on the surface, their insides appear to be warmed by various mechanisms.

Europa gets squeezed continually back and forth by Jupiter's immense gravity. "That results in friction, which generates heat, which is part of what we think helps maintain that liquid water ocean beneath the icy shell," NASA scientist Kevin Hand told me in May. These oceans could theoretically be home to life — and there might be similar oceans on other icy moons and space objects.

(NASA/JPL-Caltech)

So far, we don't know a ton about these oceans. Most of the evidence for them is indirect, like the geysers of water vapor we've spotted erupting from Enceladus. To know more, we have to send initial probes to them. Which is what we're doing.

The first mission will likely be NASA's Europa Clipper, tentatively scheduled to launch sometime in the mid-2020s. Current plans call for it to enter Jupiter's orbit, then fly by Europa an estimated 45 times over the course of three or so years, gathering data on composition and temperature of the ocean, plumes, and icy surface. (There aren't any planned missions to Enceladus or Ganymede yet.)

Step 2: Explore nearby ocean worlds with follow-up probes

Saturn's moon Enceladus. (NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

The Europa Clipper probably might not be able to determine for sure whether there's life there. That's because it'd be too expensive to give the probe every possible tool for exploration, such as a lander with the capacity to drill through the ice and collect water. After all, we're still not certain what life would look like on such a world and don't know exactly what we'd measure to test for it.

Instead, the initial probe will focus on understanding the size, composition, and temperature of Europa's ocean and creating high-resolution maps of its surface, so that a future mission might land and directly study the moon's ice and water. The Clipper might also sample plumes shooting out of Europa's surface, to look for indirect evidence of hydrothermal activity in the ocean, which could be fuel for life.

Then the follow-up probes could conceivably search for life, although there's still much debate about what they'd look like. Some scientists have proposed submarines that could explore Europa's oceans after drilling through the ice. Similar missions, in theory, could someday be executed on Enceladus and Ganymede.

These missions could collect all sorts of data on activity within the oceans, perhaps providing stronger evidence for conditions that could be right for life. And if the oceans do have hydrothermal vents, then a submarine mission could even more fruitful. On Earth, these vents emit heated water and dissolved chemicals, which feed chemosynthetic bacteria, which in turn feed diverse groups of animals. It's a long shot, but similar ecosystems could have evolved on Europa and on other moons' sea floors.

Of course, the technology needed to carry out these sorts of missions is still years away. These follow-up probes would also be far more expensive than NASA's Clipper, in part because the extra equipment for a lander requires more fuel to launch into space. And that will undoubtedly prove a tough sell, given NASA's dwindling budget for planetary exploration.

Step 3: Bring ocean samples back to Earth

An artist's impression of Europa's subsurface ocean. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

If these ocean worlds did contain any life, they'd most likely harbor exotic microscopic organisms (rather than more complex ecosystems). If that's the case, we'd probably want hard proof that life actually existed — and it'd be extremely hard to provide that remotely. That would entail bringing a water sample back to Earth.

This would be yet another monumental engineering challenge. To date, we've only managed to return rock samples from the moon and dust from a comet and an asteroid relatively nearby Earth. Bringing back a sample from Europa or another icy moon would require some sort of spacecraft that's light enough to launch with our rockets, but big enough (and able to carry enough fuel) to escape its destination's gravity when it's time to return home. At the moment, that technology doesn't exist.

There would also be another problem to worry about: how to avoid contaminating Earth with any life forms that we might bring back. This risk seems small — if there were alien life forms, they probably wouldn't have evolved to survive on Earth — but the potential damage could be devastating, as no Earth organisms have evolved any sort of resistance to the threats these aliens might pose. Consequently, scientists have come up with a series of recommendations to prevent this sort of threat, mostly involving thorough quarantine of returning spacecraft and samples.

These technical challenges mean that finding (and verifying) life in our own solar system probably wouldn't occur for decades, at the earliest. So in the meantime, we'll also want to look much farther away: to planets in other solar systems. Paradoxically, that search might end up yielding results even sooner, though they wouldn't be as definitive.

Step 4: Find planets in other solar systems

An illustration of Kepler-452b, the most Earth-like exoplanet discovered so far. (NASA)

The first step toward doing so is finding a planet alien life might reside on. We've already found thousands of exoplanets (and counting), mostly using NASA's Kepler space telescope and something called the transit method.

Here's how the method works. Imagine staring at a star far away. If there is a planet orbiting that star, it might occasionally pass between us and the star, briefly blocking it from view. Scientists can't actually see the planets doing this blocking, but they can indirectly detect their presence.

"We measure the brightness of a star, and when a planet passes in front of it, it blocks out some of the starlight for a period of a few hours," Thomas Barclay, an exoplanet researcher, told me in April. If scientists observe a star dimming by a consistent amount on a predictable schedule, they can infer the size of an exoplanet that's orbiting around it.

(Sean Raymond)

There are a few other methods for detecting exoplanets, but the transit method is the most straightforward, and it has led to the most discoveries to date.

Step 5: Narrow down the list to planets suitable for life

Now that we've found exoplanets, we need to whittle down the list to the most promising ones.

Scientists are still working on this step. Most of the thousands of planets in other solar systems that we've found are too big, too gaseous, or too hot to be capable of supporting life as we know it. (Unfortunately, these planets are also easier to detect.) So for now, they're crossing these off the list.

Based on what we know about life on Earth, we'd expect life to be more likely to evolve on a rocky planet that orbits within its star's habitable zone — an area where there's enough warmth for liquid water, but not too much heat. (It's possible that a planet even farther off than this could evolve life, perhaps due to a heat-trapping layer of ice like Europa, but it'd be extremely difficult — maybe impossible — to detect signs of life in an icy world in another star system.)

(NASA)

The good news is that there are definitely some exoplanets out there that meet these criteria. Scientists have already spotted about a dozen planets that are relatively close in size to Earth and which may lie in their stars' habitable zones. In July, for instance, astronomers discovered Kepler-452b, which is just 60 percent bigger than our planet and considered Earth's closest twin yet.

The catch is that our current telescopes aren't optimized to analyze these planets and look for signs of life. (Ironically, the Kepler telescope scientists currently use is too powerful — it was built to observe distant portions of the Milky Way, not to look for planets relatively close by.) So scientists are building more suitable telescopes. NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), set to launch in 2017, will be the first space telescope specifically designed to analyze exoplanets.

An illustration of TESS. (NASA)

Step 6: Scrutinize the atmospheres of the most promising exoplanets

Most exoplanets are probably too far off for us to ever visit — even with uncrewed probes. So the best way to learn more about them is by analyzing the light spectra that pass through their atmospheres. That lets us know what gases are present — and, if we're lucky, may give us clues as to whether there's life, as well.

So far, scientists have been able to directly analyze the spectrum of light passing through the atmospheres of a dozen or so exoplanets. However, these have all been large, gaseous planets with thicker atmospheres. Again, we want to analyze rocky planets in the habitable zone of stars.

(NASA)

This, too, will require better telescopes — and those are on the way. The James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2018, will help analyze the atmospheres of smaller, Earth-like planets that have been spotted by NASA's TESS. Meanwhile, the European Extremely Large Telescope, a ground-based telescope to be built in Chile in 2024, may also be used for this purpose.

Step 7: Search for signs of life in these atmospheres

An illustration of the exoplanet Gliese 832c, one of the closest potentially habitable exoplanets. (Radialvelocity)

The reason we'd want to analyze atmospheres is to look for biosignatures — gases that could be signs of alien life. "We can't go to these planets," Kaltenegger told me. "So we're trying to figure out what a planet that has life might look like from far away, in ways that would be detectable by our telescopes."

At the moment, we only know of one planet with life — Earth — so scientists are using that as a model to determine what gases might support life. Kaltenegger and colleagues, for instance, have used our knowledge of Earth's history to generate what they call an alien ID chart — a series of snapshots of Earth's atmospheric composition over the last few billion years, as it's evolved due to the presence of life.

Meanwhile, other researchers are modeling how various life forms might alter the atmospheres of planets with geologic compositions that differ from Earth's. As far as we know, there are some gases (like oxygen and methane) that are abundantly produced by life but can also be produced by geologic processes. On the other hand, there are some rare gases (like dimethyl sulfide) that are produced only by life forms — as far as we know — but in much smaller quantities.

In either case, though, any potential biosignatures we find will be somewhat uncertain. It'd be impossible to say that the makeup of an atmosphere hundreds of light-years away is definitive evidence of life, even if it were chock-full of dimethyl sulfide. We might find strong suggestions of life, but when looking at planets so far away — rather than oceans in our own solar system — it'll be hard to know for sure.

Last year, President Obama asked for $500 million to arm and train the Syrian rebels. This year alone, the effort is supposed to train 3,000 soldiers to fight ISIS.

But so far, it's only yielded about 60 fighters. Of those 60, over half have been killed, wounded, or captured in the past week alone by Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda's Syrian branch. American officials, according to the New York Times, "did not anticipate an assault from the Nusra Front."

This defeat underscores a painful truth: Obama's Syrian rebel plan has, so far, been a complete disaster. Worse, it has been a disaster that was foreseeable. The last week's events were the direct result of fundamental contradictions in America's Syria policy, contradictions that were obvious from the start. The administration has trapped itself in a bad policy — and it's not quite clear how to get out.

"I blame everybody for this," says Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "I don't know anybody above [the rank of colonel] who didn't think this was a terrible idea."

The basic conflict in America's Syria policy

Free Syrian Army rebels training. (Baraa al-Halabi/AFP/Getty Images)

The program is meant to train and equip rebels who will fight ISIS in Syria. But the problem is that, broadly speaking, America has three goals in Syria, and they don't line up:

1. Support local fighters in Syria who can push ISIS out of its territory in the country's north and east
2. Avoid getting drawn into a direct conflict with Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad that could escalate into a major, Iraq-style war
3. Prevent other extremist groups in Syria, such as al-Qaeda, from getting stronger

These three objectives are fundamentally irreconcilable. In order to retake ISIS territory, the United States needs allies on the ground, which means Syrian rebels (Kurdish forces aren't enough on their own). But those rebels typically see Assad as a bigger priority than ISIS. If the US were to simply train them, equip them, and let them go their own way, they'd likely use their American support to focus on fighting Assad.

Assad would see that, quite clearly, as an open American campaign against him. So far, his anti-aircraft defenses have yet to fire on American planes flying over Syria to bomb ISIS. That could easily change if US-backed rebels began waging war on Assad. Even if it didn't, toppling Assad by force isn't the US goal — fighting ISIS is.

At the same time, al-Qaeda and other hard-line Islamist rebels in Syria make the whole problem harder. Because Jabhat al-Nusra is currently one of the strongest groups in the rebel movement, anything that helps the rebels is likely to help al-Qaeda, which the US wants to avoid. Moreover, fighters in the civil war often shift sides, so any training and arms the US gives to one rebel group could easily end up benefiting al-Qaeda or a similar hard-line Islamist group.

And any non-extremist rebels the US did train would have few allies on the battlefield: Assad and ISIS, the two most powerful groups in Syria, would both see those rebels as an enemy. So would other extremists such as al-Qaeda, given that the US is bombing those groups as well. So whatever US-backed force walked onto the Syrian battlefield would find itself the enemy of virtually every group there, hopelessly outgunned. And that is indeed what has happened.

There is simply no feasible way for the US to use Syrian rebels to defeat ISIS while also dodging conflict with Assad and avoiding strengthening al-Qaeda. This fundamental, irresolvable tension doomed the program to failure from the start.

This was a "do something" knee-jerk reaction to ISIS

Kerry holds up a copy of the Wall Street Journal during testimony about ISIS. (Erkan Avci/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

The train-and-equip program was rushed out in response to ISIS's shocking victories last year. It was thus implemented without any real mind to solving the fundamental tension in America's Syria policy.

It's important to remember how panicked everyone got about ISIS for several weeks in the summer of last year. After the group swept northern Iraq in June, taking Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, the Obama administration came under tremendous pressure to develop a plan to defeat the group. That reached a crescendo when ISIS beheaded two American journalists on camera at the summer's end.

"It was the general response triggered by the beheading videos last summer," according to Zenko. "Once the videos happen, it triggers the impulse to do something, with greater US airstrikes and providing US support on the ground."

The administration concluded, reasonably, that ISIS couldn't be driven out of its territory without a bigger push from Syrian rebels. The CIA had a program to train friendly Syrian rebels, but it had largely failed. "The CIA just doesn't have the reach, and doesn't do this for a living like the Pentagon does," Zenko says.

The administration, seeing the CIA plan was failing, began to develop a separate Pentagon-led program to train Syrian rebels. After Mosul fell, the administration beefed up the Pentagon program from a proposed budget of $200 million to $500 million. But with all of that money, the Pentagon had not solved the problems inherent in the strategy.

"This train-and-equip program was probably doomed from the beginning," Jason Lyall, an expert on insurgencies at Yale, wrote in an email.

The problems were manifold — but they all stemmed from the basic contradiction in America's Syria policy. In order to avoid risking conflict with Assad, it declared that any US-trained force would only target ISIS. That limited the potential recruits severely. Then it imposed strict vetting requirements designed to make sure that US-trained fighters had no ties to extremist groups, which is a problem because the fluid nature of alliances on the Syrian battlefield means a lot of fighters have some kind of link to extremists. There were just very few people left who qualified.

"Despite significant effort, [these] two constraints have really hobbled its effort," Austin Long, a professor at Columbia University, says of the program to arm Syrian rebels. "You've got a double whammy for the program. You've put constraints on action that are going to turn off some. ... And the pool that remains, it's hard to get them into the program."

When the US began bombing al-Qaeda in Syria in September, it also dealt the final blow to its own program of arming friendly rebels. The strikes made sense: Not only is al-Qaeda an American enemy, but they were necessary to help ensure that al-Qaeda could not too easily benefit from ISIS's decline.

But this also meant that any US-trained rebels would immediately become targets for al-Qaeda fighters, who would see them as an enemy. The al-Qaeda group in Syria probably feared, quite reasonably, that any American-trained rebels would eventually turn on them as part of America's war on extremism in Syria. So better to take them out first.

That is precisely what happened almost immediately after the first US-trained rebels entered the battlefield. In late July and early August, Jabhat al-Nusra attacked Division 30, the unit of US-trained Syrians. The al-Qaeda franchise killed, wounded, or captured more than half of Division 30, including one of its leaders. Maybe if there were more fighters, they could have resisted more effectively. But there weren't, because the program was limited by America's other objectives in Syria.

Most damningly, the US was taken by surprise when al-Nusra attacked its proxy rebels. The Obama administration reportedly thought Nusra would welcome the fighters as allies against ISIS. The fact that they got this so wrong suggests they were a little blind to the problems with their policy.

There's no way out

Syrian rebels survey destroyed buildings. (Zein al-Rifai/AFP/Getty Images)

Obama's Syria policy isn't all bad. The airstrikes in the country have helped weaken ISIS regionally; in both Iraq and Syria, ISIS has suffered serious setbacks. The group is on the road to defeat, in the long run, though that could take years, and in the meantime the US's failed rebel-training policy is going to make that road longer and more painful.

This policy was, in many ways, meant to be a middle ground between even worse options. The administration clearly thought the status quo policy — airstrikes, supplemented with very occasional special forces raids — wasn't enough. At the same time, it has foresworn a major ground intervention.

Those are indeed two deeply unattractive options, and so the pressure to do something led them to find another option. Because the administration has been rather risk-averse on Syria, it picked a relatively low-risk strategy, but it is a strategy that is so obviously flawed that it's remarkable they bothered to go ahead with it at all.

The same could be said of the recent plan, worked out between the US and Turkey, to carve out an "ISIS-free" zone in northern Syria as a safe haven for friendly rebels.

Without addressing the fundamental problems in America's Syria policy, it's hard to see how this middle approach could succeed. So far, the strategy has been if anything counterproductive: Instead of helping persuade Syrian rebels to work with the United States, it's sending them the message that being an American ally can get you killed.

The risks of conflict with Assad or bolstering extremists may simply outweigh the benefits from having a real Syrian proxy force. If that's the case, the administration should just be honest and shutter the train-and-equip program. Because one thing is clear: Sending out small numbers of allies to die at al-Qaeda's hands isn't a winning strategy.

Adam Thirlwell

Roberto Bolaño wrote that Alan Pauls was “one of the best living Latin American writers”—curious readers unacquainted with Pauls’s work might begin with his new novel A History of Money, a desolate, delighted history of our impermanent valuations.

James Salter

The Wright Brothers
by David McCullough

The Wrights’ first aircraft, really a large kite, was made of bamboo and paper and had two wings, one over the other, with struts and crisscross wires connecting them. A system of control cords enabled its flight to be directed from the ground. Although they ended with a crash, the tests were successful, the brothers felt, and the following summer they built a full-sized glider with an eighteen-foot wingspan meant to be flown as a kite and, if that went well, to carry a man.

When health emergencies like the Ebola epidemic strike, there's one group the world looks to for help: the UN's World Health Organization. But never has this disturbing truth been clearer: The organization isn't funded or empowered to actually respond in a crisis.

This year the Ebola virus outfoxed the organization so badly that the WHO boss, Dr. Margaret Chan, convened an independent panel of experts to review what went wrong and chart a pathway to reform. Today, the panel released its final report, which reads like a dire assessment of a broken organization in need of immediate repair.

"The panel considers that WHO does not currently possess the capacity or organizational culture to deliver a full emergency public health response," the panelists write.

"The panel firmly believes that this is a defining moment not only for WHO and the global health emergency response but also for the governance of the entire global health system."

The experts, led by former Oxfam head Dame Barbara Stocking, provided 21 recommendations for immediate action. Considering that the world hasn't yet seen the last of Ebola and that there are other disease crises on the horizon, acting on the panel's insights is a very important step. They include:

1) Fixing the International Health Regulations

These are a set of laws that govern how member states react to disease outbreaks. Established in 2005 in the wake of SARS crisis, they were designed to make reporting outbreaks more transparent and build countries' capacities for disease surveillance.

Countries were supposed to improve their own disease surveillance and reporting systems, and richer countries are under a legal obligation to help poorer ones do so. The rules also mandate that countries avoid punishing each other for disease outbreaks within their borders through economic sanctions and travel bans.

But many countries never built up their disease surveillance systems and also quickly enacted travel bans during the Ebola epidemic. "The panel considers this situation, in which the global community does not take seriously its obligations under the international health regulations (2005) — a legally binding document — to be untenable," the panelists write.

So the experts asked for special attention to figuring out how to build up countries' ability to carry out the regulations, including creating incentives for declaring and sharing data on disease outbreaks.

2) Increasing countries' mandatory payments to the WHO

The WHO hasn't seen a budget increase since the 1990s. Largely  because of these funding cuts and freezes, the panel determined that the WHO doesn't have the capacity or organizational culture to respond to health crises. It suggested fixing this immediately:

Funding for emergency response and for technical support to the International Health Regulations (2005) is lacking. Currently, less than 25% of WHO’s Programme budget comes from assessed contributions [what countries must pay in for membership] (and the remainder from voluntary funds). There are no core funds for emergency response. The longstanding policy of zero nominal growth policy for assessed contributions has dangerously eroded the purchasing power of WHO’s resources, further diminishing the Organization’s emergency capacity.

To address the problem, the panel recommends a 5 percent increase in mandatory payments from countries to the WHO.

3) Embed the WHO within the wider health and humanitarian system

The Ebola crisis made it clear that the WHO is not properly coordinating its efforts with other humanitarian agencies, even within the UN:

The Panel considers that during the Ebola crisis, the engagement of the wider humanitarian system came very late in the response. The Panel was surprised that many donors, governments, the United Nations and international nongovernmental organizations understood only either the health emergency or the humanitarian system. In part this was due to lack of understanding across the two systems, caused by different approaches to risk assessment.

So the panel suggests that the WHO figure out how to coordinate its own emergency responses with the rest of the UN and the broader humanitarian system, and also that WHO staff and partners better understand the humanitarian system and its key players.

Mullah Muhammad Omar’s survival record would be the envy of any alley cat. Despite living a life of danger, usually in hiding and fighting two of the world’s greatest empires, he has repeatedly slipped out of sticky situations with his life.

Now it’s possible that Omar’s luck has run out: New reports say the top Taliban leader is dead. There’s been no official confirmation from either the Afghan government or the Taliban, but for what is apparently the first time, there are multiple high-level sources within both groups confirming that Omar is dead to The Wall Street Journal and BBC. There’s no information on how or when he may have died, and Voice of America has also reported a denial from Taliban sources.

For the time being, though, it may be wise to withhold judgment. Omar, who lost an eye fighting against the Soviets in the 1980s, has been the subject of death rumors repeatedly over the years. Here’s a quick rundown:

• On several occasions during the first months of the war in Afghanistan in 2001, American forces apparently came very close to killing Omar, according to Steve Coll. In one case, they struck his home and killed his son, but the mullah escaped harm.
• In October 2008, bloggers leaped on a BBC report that Omar had been killed in a drone strike in northwest Pakistan. The only problem: It was a different, much lower-level Taliban official sharing the same name.
• In May 2011, reports surfaced Omar was dead. The primary source of the rumors seemed to be the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s main intelligence agency, according to the Los Angeles Times. But Pakistani intelligence said it had no such information, and Western diplomats in Kabul were skeptical. The Taliban “vehemently” denied the report. (My colleague Uri Friedman carefully traced the path of the rumor at the time.)
• In June 2011, Canada’s National Post reported Taliban commanders were doubtful Omar was alive. The Taliban’s central leadership again denied the rumor.
• Then, the following month, there were more reports Omar was dead, this time starting with text messages believed to have been sent by high-ranking Taliban spokesmen. Reached by Reuters, the Taliban denied that Omar was dead and denied they even sent the texts, calling them the work of hackers, possibly American. (The U.S. didn’t comment.)
• In November 2014, Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security was once again cited as the source for a claim Omar was dead. A month later, a New York Times report noted Omar's invisibility had caused frustration among Taliban leaders, but the story didn’t suggest he was dead, and in fact reported Afghan intelligence thought he was alive.
• In April 2015, the Taliban published a strange biography of Omar. The short leaflet was interpreted by Taliban-watchers as an attempt to show Omar was still alive and in charge.

That brings us to the present day and the present claim.

There are two things many of these past reports share. One, as The New York Times’ Carlotta Gall notes, is they begin with Afghan intelligence, which suggests it may not be the most reliable source. The second is a political valence—that is, they have come at times when Omar's death, or lack of authority, might be  relevant to the balance of power in the region. Take the 2011 reports: Those came in the months immediately following Osama bin Laden’s death—at a time of high tension between the U.S. and Pakistan, which was upset about the American strike carried out on its soil without clearance or prior notice. Afghan and American officials have repeatedly accused Pakistan of sheltering Omar in Quetta, which Pakistan denies.

The April 2015 biography came as ISIS was attracting the lion’s share of attention among jihadist groups, and helped to remind the world the Taliban was still around.

And as for the latest reports? Just two weeks ago, the BBC reported Omar supported peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government. He issued the statement in writing, with no audio or video, making it hard to verify. But not all parts of the Taliban support pursuing negotiations. A splinter group called Fidai Mahaz claimed this month Omar was actually dead—which would mean his statement couldn’t be authentic. That would undermine the negotiations. (Fidai Mahaz actually said that Omar had been dead for two years.)

Omar’s practical absence may be a source of frustration for Taliban fighters and commanders, but the group has also fiercely denied every report that he is dead. Now, as intelligence agencies and reporters scramble to nail down the latest claim, the question to ponder is whether it really matters if Mullah Omar is dead.

Today’s thinkers lack glamour, malice, looks, and a penchant for mandarin invective. Will intellectual combat ever regain the entertainment value of the Buckley-Vidal jousts?