The Long Year

Marking Oct 7, America’s Homebodies

They say the days are long but the years are short. Not this year. It's been one endless year since the tragic attack of October 7; a year that has divided nations, split communities, fragmented college campuses, created schisms inside of warring countries, and even caused rifts across kitchen tables. An era defined by the determination to speak and post with certainty about things we know little or nothing about has rendered us fully dysfunctional when it comes to analyzing the world's most complex crisis. On October 7, a scab was ripped off the world's chronic trauma exposing, yet again, the festering wound that has infected the world's body politic. With my stomach in knots, I've been refreshing news feeds from the region every day for a year and some days I'm not even sure I agree with myself. So I'll mark this day with the simple answers. Does Israel have every right and responsibility to defend itself against Iran-backed terror groups hell-bent on its destruction? Yes. Have there been way too many citizens killed in the name of this defense? Yes. Is this all relentlessly sad and frustrating? Yes. Those views all seem innocuous enough. But don't kid yourself. In this conflict, those are fighting words. The NYT (Gift Article) on this year of living awfully. The War That Won’t End: How Oct. 7 Sparked a Year of Conflict. "Both sides appear to have decided that they will not go back to how things were before Oct. 7. Hamas’s leaders have said the prewar dynamic of endless Israeli occupation must be disrupted regardless of the human cost. Israel feels far more vulnerable after the deadliest day in its history and has decided it can no longer tolerate groups dedicated to its destruction on its borders. 'This war won’t end because nobody is willing to blink,' said Thomas R. Nides, the United States ambassador to Israel until shortly before the Oct. 7 attack. 'In the meantime, everyone is losing — hostages and their families, innocent Palestinians, Israelis displaced from northern Israel, Lebanese civilians. And it’s truly tragic.'"

+ "Months of US shuttle diplomacy involving Secretary of State Antony Blinken, CIA Director William Burns and other senior officials has yielded only limited progress in freeing hostages in Gaza. And a deal that would forge a ceasefire with Hamas seems more distant than ever. Often, it’s appeared that the US wanted an agreement far more than Netanyahu or Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who embedded Hamas forces in civilian areas, adding to the war’s carnage." How the October 7 attacks became a turning point for US politics.

+ "Nearly every day, Avital Dekel Chen sends a text message to her husband, Sagui. He was kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7 while she and their two young daughters hid in a safe room at their kibbutz in southern Israel. 'Please come back home. Please hang in there a little longer,' Dekel Chen wrote in one message. Dekel Chen, 34, finds emotional solace in the daily WhatsApp messages to her husband, though she knows he won’t see the texts unless he is freed." One year after Hamas attacks, hostage families are living in limbo but trying to find hope. From BBC: Stories of the people taken from Israel. And from Times of Israel: Pain, determination and survivor guilt at Nova massacre site, a year after atrocity.

+ "As an act of spy craft, it is without parallel, one of the most successful and inventive penetrations of an enemy by an intelligence service in recent history. But key details of the operation — including how it was planned and carried out, and the controversy it engendered within Israel’s security establishment and among allies — are only now coming to light." WaPo (Gift Article): Mossad’s pager operation: Inside Israel’s penetration of Hezbollah.

+ Meanwhile, with the impending Israeli response to Iran's missile attacks and the increasing threat of a wider war, the beat goes on. Here's the latest from CNN.

2

Failure to Launch

During the worst of the pandemic, some people realized that they liked being at home. A lot. But the trend of spending time at home that was supercharged during Covid has been building for years. (If you've got gigabit WiFi, why leave?) NYT (Gift Article): A Nation of Homebodies. "It turns out we aren’t just bowling alone — we’re bowling at home."

3

SuperPac of Wolves

"Their aim is to help tech leaders become as powerful in Washington, D.C., and in state legislatures as they are on Wall Street. It is likely that in the coming decades these efforts will affect everything from Presidential races to which party controls Congress and how antitrust and artificial intelligence are regulated. Now that the tech industry has quietly become one of the most powerful lobbying forces in American politics, it is wielding that power as previous corporate special interests have: to bully, cajole, and remake the nation as it sees fit." The always-excellent Charles Duhigg in The New Yorker on Silicon Valley, the New Lobbying Monster. The goal is not just to defeat candidates who are (often falsely) believed to present opposition. It's to scare the hell out of everyone else.

4

Radical Candor

If you follow the news and listen to certain podcasts, you might be pretty certain that the key to extreme longevity is right around the corner. But that corner might not be as close as it seems. According to a recent study, "unless the processes of biological aging can be markedly slowed, radical human life extension is implausible in this century." (What the hell good is it going to do for me next century?)

5

Extra, Extra

Milton: The cleanup and recovery associated with Helene is still ongoing, but Floridians are already preparing for Milton. And it's looking big. "Hurricane Milton’s strength is eye-popping. With sustained winds of 175 mph, it’s the strongest storm to occur anywhere on the planet this year." Here's the latest from CNN. Meanwhile, Mike Johnson won't commit to bringing House back before the election for more hurricane relief. (Trump has spent his time post Helene making up stories about the Biden administration not providing hurricane relief funding. Maybe Johnson wants to make the lie a reality. Anything for a campaign pitch.)

+ Waste Case: "Many Western media outlets depicted the site as a public health and environmental tragedy, rife with toxic chemicals that leach into the water and poison the air. While that’s undoubtedly true, it’s not the full story, according to a new collaborative photojournalism project." NPR: Stunning photos of a vast e-waste dumping ground — and those who make a living off it.

+ ER Emergency: "The Supreme Court on Monday turned away a Biden administration appeal in a dispute over emergency room abortion care in Texas, leaving in place a lower court victory for the Republican-led state." I mean it's Texas. And SCOTUS. (Vote.)

+ Asteroid Rage: Margaret Sullivan: Jack Smith's explosive brief should have landed like an asteroid. (It didn't.) (It didn't even land like Hillary's emails...)

+ Hurricane Donald: "As we’ve seen this week with the MAGA lies about everything from Haitian immigrants to FEMA’s hurricane recovery efforts: No lie will be too flagrant. No invention too incredible." Charlie Sykes: Why This Election Aftermath Will Be Even Worse (Maybe Much Worse). This is just one more reason why we need more Republicans like George W and Mitt Romney to endorse Harris and speak the hell up.

+ Small Victories: " The Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded Monday to Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of microRNA, a fundamental principle governing how gene activity is regulated."

+ Gestalt and Pepper: You’d expect such a beverage to be niche, an acquired taste one orders from a specialty shop, not found in millions of homes and major fast food chains. But what’s even weirder than Dr Pepper’s flavor is that we’re living through a Dr Pepper renaissance. This year, it tied Pepsi — the regular version, not diet — as the second bestselling soda in the US."

+ Setting a Son Screen: "LeBron and Bronny are the first father and son to play in any NBA game at the same time, let alone on the same team. The James family’s remarkable moment coincidentally happened on Bronny’s 20th birthday."

6

Bottom of the News

"Snoop has long been a lovable figure, so iconically mellow and suave, and with such a velvety voice. But he’s only recently become something bigger in popular culture, perhaps the closest thing we have to a national mascot." The Year of Snoop Dogg.

+ Nate Bargatze is back as George Washington in this classic SNL bit. So good.