Ask Questions Later

Caricature: Dan Perry and GPT-5.6 Sol Trump has developed a strange way of treating America’s friends. The Divider-in-Chief threatens and humiliates them and toys with their territorial integrity, while lavishing affection on rival strongmen and ideological fellow travelers who have figured out that the quickest route to favor is through his galaxy-sized ego.

We are in the middle of a global AI freakout, whose manifestation today is markets tumbling on declining tech stocks. Each day seems to bring new evidence of mounting societal anxiety around the most consequential technological advance in decades. Amid all this upheaval, one of the more curious developments is that AI’s most visible political enemy is strikingly prosaic: a windowless warehouse filled with computers.

For most of its enormous running time, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is startlingly faithful to its source. The Trojan Horse is there, and so is Helen of Troy, now attached to Menelaus. Odysseus encounters the Cyclops, the cannibalistic Laestrygonians, the witch Circe, Sirens, the Scylla and Charybdis, and of course Calypso. Penelope waits in Ithaca as scumbag suitors circle.

Gloria Steinem’s death took me back to 1982, when she visited my then-hometown of King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. I was in my late teens, and therefore rather distracted, but do I remember being aware that she was promoting the Equal Rights Amendment. In America this meant legally codifying equality for women — and it seemed to me, back then, that this should not be so difficult.

Trump believes he is demonstrating American power. Mark Carney is drawing a very different lesson: that it has become dangerous to depend too heavily on America. That is what makes the collapse of US-Canada trade negotiations much more consequential than another Trumpy tariff drama. Carney’s response is not simply to retaliate against Trump’s tariffs, although Canada will do that.

On today’s episode of Critical Conditions, Claire and I discussed the latest thing that is too weird to be believed: Trump, last heard from preferring Russia (despotic, mass-murdering invader) to Ukraine (plucky democratic defender), now seems to prefer North Korea, the world’s sole hereditary nuclear wacko-dictatorship, to the democratic US ally in the south of the peninsula.

Strangely and misleadingly placid (Dan Perry photo) Most people think of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy as inseparable wartime allies. Images of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini together are among the defining photographs of the Second World War.

A terrible mutation afflicts American politics. What began as fury over Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war has evolved, in significant parts of the progressive left, into a pathological hostility toward Israel that has become a driver of political identity and debate. The genocide accusation is increasingly treated not as a contested claim but as settled truth; opposition to Zionism as evidence of virtue; and even Hamas and “armed resistance” can be romanticized or excused.

Something has gone badly wrong with American capitalism. A system that produced extraordinary prosperity and innovation is also yielding concentrations of wealth so extreme that they’re difficult to defend, fueling a political backlash against capitalism itself. It is capitalism’s defenders who should understand that action is needed.

On today’s episode of Critical Conditions, Claire and I talked to Tom Kent, author of the new book The Propaganda Manual of the Ukraine War, about a dimension of the conflict that may prove almost as important as what happens on the battlefield: the struggle to persuade people about the essence of what’s happening.