- Trump’s ‘deal’ with Iran seems to have accomplished none of his objectives, and is worse than the Obama deal that Trump cancelled;
- Comments from Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, Media Matters;
- Which spills over in the contrast between Artemis II and Trump’s funding priorities;
- The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel on the best and worst of humanity this week: Artemis, and Trump;
- Former NASA research scientist Kate Marvel on the chaos of science funding;
- How MAGA men loathe tradwives;
- Another piece about how religions survive by influencing the youth early on;
- Radiohead’s “Daydreaming”
The general tenor today.
The Atlantic, Nancy A. Youssef, today: Trump Made a Deal That Gives Him Nothing He Wanted, subtitled “U.S. declarations of victory ring hollow.”
President Trump said he went to war to ensure that Iran never acquired a nuclear bomb. The war ended—for now, at least—with a demonstration that Tehran possesses an arguably more powerful weapon of deterrence against future attacks, one that is cheaper to use, gives Iran enormous sway over the global economy, can bring in revenue, and can’t be negotiated away: the Strait of Hormuz.
More than 12,000 U.S. missiles, bombs, and drones hit Iranian targets over the past five weeks, destroying the country’s navy and much of its military infrastructure. Several of Iran’s leaders and some 1,500 of its citizens were killed, including more than 170 who died in a strike on a girls’ school that was the apparent result of errant targeting. But 12 hours after Trump threatened to destroy Iranian civilization and weeks after demanding Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” the United States agreed to a two-week cease-fire last night while settlement talks play out. Among the president’s initial war goals—preventing Iran from having a nuclear weapon; eliminating its ballistic-missile capabilities; laying the ground for a popular overthrow of the regime; and eradicating Iranian proxies in the Persian Gulf—none have been met.
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And the deal that Obama made, and Trump cancelled because Obama, was far better than the current terms.
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Robert Reich, today: Trump’s Defeat in Iran, subtitled “It’s consistent with how other countries, organizations, and people have defeated him”
In addition to Iran, similar strategies have been used by China, Russia, Canada, Mexico, and Greenland. Inside the United States, the people of Minneapolis have used them, as have Harvard University, comedian Jimmy Kimmel, writer E. Jean Carroll, and the law firms Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey, and WilmerHale.
What’s the strategy that connects them all?All refused to cave to Trump, despite his superior military or economic power. Instead, they’ve engaged in a kind of jujitsu in which they use Trump’s power against him, while allowing Trump to save face by claiming he’s won.
With details on each of those mentioned.
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Paul Krugman, today: Ignorance and Ignominy, subtitled “Our Hormuz humiliation was not an accident”
So the world’s greatest military power went to war with a poor, medievalist theocracy. It was an incredibly uneven match. Here’s are the GDPs of Iran and the United States in 2024:
Yet Iran won. The Iranian regime has emerged far stronger than it was before, controlling the Strait of Hormuz and having demonstrated its ability to inflict damage on both its neighbors and the world economy. The U.S. has emerged far weaker, having demonstrated the limitations of its military technology, its strategic ineptitude and, when push comes to shove, its cowardice.
We’ve also destroyed our moral credibility: Trump may have TACOed at the last minute, but he threatened to commit gigantic war crimes — and for all practical purposes our political and civil institutions gave him permission to do so.
How did this happen? Naturally, the Iranian Minister of War credited divine intervention, declaring that “God deserves all the glory.” His nation, he said, fought with the “protection of divine providence. A massive effort with miraculous protection.”
Well, theocrats gonna theocrat.
But I lied. That wasn’t a quote from an Iranian official. That’s what Pete Hegseth, our self-proclaimed Secretary of War, said while claiming that one of the worst strategic defeats in American history was a great victory.
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Meanwhile.
Media Matters, today: How fractured right-wing media are spinning Trump’s Iran capitulation, subtitled “Right-wing media have been split over the war. As a ceasefire is agreed to, some figures claim Trump ‘negotiated the deal of his life,’ others argue he ‘chickened out again’ and warn the deal ‘could be an amazing victory for Iran.'”
With quotes from Trump, the Guardian, AP, Politico, The Bulwark, Sean Hannity, and many others. Long.
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Enough of that.
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The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel, 7 Apr 2026: An Incredibly Weird Time to Be Alive, subtitled “The world witnessed the best and worst of humanity in a single week.”
Seeing the Earth from space will change you so profoundly that there’s a term for it: the overview effect. The extreme minority who have had the privilege describe it similarly. You see something that you were never meant to see, namely the Earth just sitting there, with the entire universe surrounding it. Gazing upon the blue marble, surrounded by its oh-so-thin green layer of atmosphere, the auroras flickering on the fringes, is not merely awe-inspiring but something of a factory reset for one’s sense of self. Almost everyone tears up at the sight.
“You don’t see borders, you don’t see religious lines, you don’t see political boundaries. All you see is Earth, and you see that we are way more alike than we are different,” Christina Koch, one of the four astronauts on the Artemis II mission, told NASA recently. Jim Lovell, describing the view on Apollo 8 from the dark side of the moon back in the late 1960s, told Chicago magazine that he could put his thumb up to the window, and in that moment, “everything I ever knew was behind it. Billions of people. Oceans. Mountains. Deserts. And I began to wonder, where do I fit into what I see?”
Meanwhile, Trump.
Trump’s bluster, no matter how serious, has always been impossible to parse. (He’s famous for chickening out, backpedaling, or pretending like he never said what he said.) Yet one way to view our current age is as a series of existential reminders, be they nuclear proliferation, climate change, or pandemics. In Silicon Valley over the past half decade, civilizational extinction at the hands of hypothetical technological advances has moved from the realm of pure science fiction to a marketing tactic to an immediate concern for a subset of true believers. Humans may not want to die, but as a species we seem eager to invent and tout new ways to threaten our existence.
Concluding,
There is something disorienting, horrible, and somehow fitting in the timing of all of this. That one man with the means to do it would threaten destruction of a part of our planet at the same moment its beauty and fragility are on full display. We are, in this tense moment, living with our own overview effect. Four are watching from afar. But the rest of us are watching too—left to reckon with our own place on the pale blue dot, reminded of all the ways we might die, and all the reasons for which to live.
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Trump made a bland congratulatory call to the Artemis II crew, which they had to listen to, and two days later slashed the NASA budget by a quarter, as noted yesterday. He needs more money to bomb people he doesn’t like back to the Stone Ages.
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Thus.
NY Times, guest essay by Kate Marvel (who “was, until recently, a research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies”), today: NASA Flew by the Moon, but Behind the Scenes, Its Science Is a Chaotic Mess [gift link]
Artemis II’s journey around the moon, scheduled to conclude on Friday, has delivered stunning new images of our home world taken from space.
Those pictures remind us that Earth has changed immensely since the last time astronauts went near the moon in 1972. So has NASA. Budget cuts, chaos and political interference now threaten the very science that motivates and enables space exploration. President Trump’s 2027 budget request calls for a nearly 50 percent cut to NASA’s science division. We may still be able to shoot for the moon, but we’re losing the ability to understand our own world.
She describes the gradual escalation of cuts, of positions and funding.
Researchers studying the sun, the stars and other planets and moons also faced disruption and cuts. The library at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center was shut down, as were dozens of labs, supposedly a “consolidation.” The career scientific leaders we knew and trusted were struggling to guide us through the turbulence. Their bosses seemed more interested in making sure no one had pronouns in their email signatures than protecting science.
And then the NASA administrator’s disparaging of concerns about the climate, because politics.
Reasonable people can disagree on what should be done to limit the effects of climate change. But rather than debate policy, the administration has chosen to attack science itself. It has effectively canceled the National Climate Assessment, fired researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and left NASA scientists in limbo. Now, it plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a crown jewel of weather and climate science.
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Even as the evidence mounts that the climate is growing increasingly unstable, NASA’s study of Earth still offers plenty of wonder: satellites that see the ocean in glorious color, pieced-together records of past climates, high-resolution models that show smoke and pollution swirling through the atmosphere. I’m awed, dizzy and grateful to exist amid such otherworldly beauty. It’s impossible not to want to know more.
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Further afield.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, today: Why MAGA men actually loathe tradwives, subtitled “A new study shows submissive women aren’t cherished but are held in contempt”
Plenty of citations to studies and surveys. This isn’t a surprise, given the far right’s tribalistic, hierarchical attitudes, in which men are better than women, whites are better than any other color, Christians are better than any other religious group, and so on. At the same time, many other religions treat women even more harshly.
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Get ’em while they’re young. As the Catholic Church has famously advised.
(AI Overview explains:
“Get them while they’re young” refers to the strategy of influencing or educating children early, as they are impressionable and lack experience, making them more receptive to forming lasting habits, beliefs, or brand loyalties. It is used in marketing, education, religious training, and parenting to shape attitudes that persist into adulthood.
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Right Wing Watch, Peter Montgomery, 7 Apr 2026: ‘The Youth Are Ours’: Joel Webbon Hails ‘New Christian Right’ Influence in Gen Z
Joel Webbon, a Christian nationalist who believes women should not have the right to vote and Jewish people should not be able to hold public office in the U.S., devoted an episode of his “New Christian Right” podcast to reveling in recent media coverage he has received, treating it as evidence of the ascendancy of his antisemitic, anti-feminist, and anti-equality brand of Christian nationalism among right-wing youth and young adults.
One of Webbon’s co-hosts read from a recent New York Times articlethat quoted Webbon writing “the youth are ours” after attending the recent Conservative Political Action Conference. That article quotes an administration official estimating that 75 percent of young Republican staffers are groypers, the name given to followers of the antisemitic and racist “America First” online personality Nick Fuentes.
Not a new story. This is how religions survive. If religion was not taught until students were, say, 30 years old, they would never take. Lesson: beware whatever you were taught as a child. Your parents meant best for you, but consider perhaps that they were just perpetuating a culture, and that there’s a truth that they’ve never known but which you can figure out. (Like, that your culture isn’t center of reality.)
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The last Radiohead album, A Moon Shaped Pool, came out a full 10 years ago! (Though Thom Yorke has done side groups, and solo albums, and Jonny Greenwood has been busy composing movie soundtracks, several Oscar-nominated) But I’ve always had trouble connecting to it. I’m listening to it again this week, over and over. Here’s perhaps the most interesting song. And the video is interesting because it shows lead singer Thom Yorke, as always looking rather scruffy, wandering adjectively from place to place…
The entire weird ambience of this song is the essence of Radiohead.
