AI holds tantalising promise for the emerging world
A warming planet threatens the world’s favourite drug
The government has yet another plan for a nuclear renaissance
Pleasure cruises, golf and tracing the family tree are not that fulfilling
How to thrive in the power élite—while declaring it your enemy
By Evan Osnos
As a young man in the nineteen-eighties, Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson set out to claim his stake in the establishment. His access to money and influence started at home. His stepmother, Patricia, was an heir to the Swanson frozen-food fortune. His father, Dick, was a California TV anchor who became a Washington fixture after a stint in the Reagan Administration. For fortunate clans like the Carlsons, it was “A Wonderful Time,” to borrow the title of a volume of contemporaneous portraits of “the life of America’s elite,” which included “the Cabots sailing off Boston’s North Shore, and Barry Goldwater on the range in Arizona.”
There are few Hollywood families in which one famous director has spawned another. Coppola says, “It’s not easy for anyone in this business, even though it looks easy for me.”
By Rachel Syme
When Eleanor Coppola went into labor with her third child, on May 14, 1971, at a hospital in Manhattan, her husband, the director Francis Ford Coppola, was on location in Harlem, shooting a scene for “The Godfather.” Hearing the news, he grabbed a camcorder from the set and raced over to capture the moment. “When they say, ‘It’s a girl,’ my dad gasps and nearly drops the camera,” Sofia Coppola told me recently, of her birth video. “My mom is there, just trying to focus.” The footage—which has been screened by the family multiple times over the years, and as part of a feminist art installation designed by Eleanor—was the first of many instances in which Sofia would be seen through her father’s lens. When she was just a few months old, Francis cast her in her first official film role, as the infant in the dénouement of “The Godfather,” in which Michael Corleone, the ascendant boss of the Corleone crime family, anoints the head of his newborn nephew as his associates murder rival gangsters one by one.
On the ruinous history of Religious Zionism
In August 1975, I stood outside the Knesset, in Jerusalem, witnessing a fevered demonstration against Henry Kissinger, then the American secretary of state. Thousands of young men in knitted kippahs chanted and danced in circles, their arms wrapped around one another, their voices echoing off the stone building. They were mainly West Bank settlers, I was informed, part of a fledgling movement called Gush Emunim—in effect, the Young Guard of the National Religious Party (NRP).
The trials of trucking school
“If you have to change friends, that’s what you gotta do,” our instructor, Johnny, told the twelve of us sitting in a makeshift classroom in a strip mall outside Austin. “They’re gonna be so jealous, because you’re gonna be bringing home so much money. Encourage them to get their CDL, too.”
A CDL is a commercial driver’s license, and if you pay attention, you’ll find variations on the phrase cdl drivers wanted everywhere: across interstate billboards, in small-town newspapers, on diner bulletin boards, on TV, and, most often, on the backs of semitrucks. Each of us had come to the Changing Lanes CDL School to answer that call.
Amid war with Hamas, a hostage crisis, the devastation of Gaza, and Israel’s splintering identity, the Prime Minister seems unable to distinguish between his own interests and his country’s.
To be vigilant—to live without illusions about the ever-present threat of annihilation—was a primary value at No. 4 Haportzim Street, once the Jerusalem address of the Netanyahu family. This wariness had ancient roots. In the Passover Haggadah, the passage beginning “Vehi Sheamda” reminds everyone at the Seder table that in each generation an enemy “rises up to destroy” the Jewish people. “But the Holy One, Blessed be He, delivers us from their hands,” the Haggadah continues. Benzion Netanyahu, the family patriarch and a historian of the Spanish Inquisition, was a secular man. For deliverance, he looked not to faith but to the renunciation of naïveté and the strength of arms. This creed became his middle son’s inheritance, the core of his self-conception as the uniquely unillusioned defender of the State of Israel.
An ambitious law set forth a more humane way to address addiction. Then came the backlash.
By E. Tammy Kim
In the early months of the pandemic, joggers on the Bear Creek Greenway, in southern Oregon, began to notice tents cropping up by the path. The Greenway, which connects towns and parks along a tributary of the Rogue River, was beloved for its wetlands and for stands of oaks that attracted migrating birds. Now, as jobs disappeared and services for the poor shut down, it was increasingly a last-ditch place to live. Tents accumulated in messy clusters, where people sometimes smoked fentanyl, and “the Greenway” became a byword for homelessness and drug use. On a popular local Facebook page, one typical comment read, “Though I feel sorry for some of the people in that situation, most of them are just pigs.” In Medford, the largest city along the trail, police demolished encampments and ticketed people for sleeping rough.
But it should keep its markets open to cheap, clean vehicles
The war against the Houthis is part of an escalating struggle for the seas
Germany is unable and unwilling to lead Europe
In the past few years, chronic absenteeism has nearly doubled. The fight to get students back in classrooms has only just begun.
Absenteeism underlies much of what has beset young people, including falling school achievement, deteriorating mental health, and elevated youth violence.
From opposite directions, the revolutionary intellectual and the creator of James Bond saw violence as essential—psychologically and strategically—to solving the crisis of colonialism.
More than fifty years later, Zohra Drif could still picture the Milk Bar in Algiers on September 30, 1956. It was white and shining, she recalled, awash in laughter, young voices, “summer colors, the smell of pastries, and even the distant twittering of birds.” Drif, a well-coiffed law student in a stylish lavender dress, ordered a peach-Melba ice cream and wedged her beach bag against the counter. She paid, tipped, and left without her bag. The bomb inside it exploded soon afterward.
In failing to look past Joe Biden, Democrats have shown cowardice and complacency
To be safe, Israel needs new leadership
Israeli officials see Hizbullah as an unacceptable threat
He began as more of a tutor than a talent. But in his final decade he lent a keen eye-in-the-sky view to the Paris streets, rendering miracles of kinetic characterization.
By Adam Gopnik
It’s one of the stranger anomalies of French intellectual life that Impressionist painting—by far the most influential of French cultural enterprises—has received so little attention from the most ambitious French critics and philosophers. One can page through André Gide’s journal entries, a lot of them on art, or through Albert Camus’s, and find very little on Claude Monet or Edgar Degas (and much more on the Symbolists, a group that was far easier for a literary man to “get”). Marcel Proust cared passionately for painting, and his hero-painter Elstir has touches of Monet, but in order to make him interesting Proust had to model him on the more histrionic James McNeill Whistler, with samplings from a forgotten American painter added in.
Following Hamas’s October 7th attack and Israel’s invasion, Mosab Abu Toha fled his home with his wife and three children. Then I.D.F. soldiers took him into custody.
REASON MAGAZINE (December 21, 2023) – The latest issue features ‘The Conformity Gauntlet’ – How Universities use DEI Statements to Enforce Groupthink; The Post-Neoliberalism Moment; We Absolutely Do Not Need an FDA for AI, and more…
DEI statements are political litmus tests, write Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott.
Anyone advocating neoliberal policies is now persona non grata in Washington, D.C.
If our best and brightest technologists and theorists are struggling to see the way forward for AI, what makes anyone think politicians are going to get there first?
Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping threaten global trade
For the world to prosper, ships must reach their ports. They are most vulnerable when passing through narrow passages, such as the Strait of Malacca or the Panama Canal. So a recent surge of attacks on vessels in the Red Sea, the only southern conduit into the Suez Canal, poses a grave threat to global trade. The Houthis, militants in Yemen backed by Iran, have fired over 100 drones and missiles at ships linked to more than 35 countries, ostensibly in support of the Palestinians. Their campaign is an affront to the principle of freedom of navigation, which is already at risk from the Black Sea to the South China Sea. America and its allies must deal firmly with it—without escalating the conflict in the Middle East.
Mistaken recession calls were just part of it
Spare a thought for economists. Last Christmas they were an unusually pessimistic lot: the growth they expected in America over the next calendar year was the fourth-lowest in 55 years of fourth-quarter surveys. Many expected recession; The Economist added to the prognostications of doom and gloom. This year economists must swap figgy pudding for humble pie, because America has probably grown by an above-trend 3%—about the same as in boomy 2005. Adding to the impression of befuddlement, most analysts were caught out on December 13th by a doveish turn by the Federal Reserve, which sent them scrambling to rewrite their outlooks for the new year.
Intellicurious 