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Bob Strong/ReutersNovelist Paul Auster has died at the age of 77 due to complications from lung cancer, his friend and fellow author Jacki Lyden confirmed.A New Jersey native who ultimately made Brooklyn his home, Auster wrote 34 books throughout his career, including the New York Trilogy, which began with City of Glass, the 1985 novel that wound up being Auster’s breakthrough (after it was first rejected by 17 publishers, according to The New York Times).Highly regarded as a leading figure in literary postmodernism, Auster was influenced by Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, and like Beckett, he lived for a time in Paris, where he translated French literature.Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Jerome Powell, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, on April 16, 2024. | Samuel Corum/Bloomberg via Getty Images The Federal Reserve will give an announcement on interest rates during its May meeting Wednesday. Even borrowing money is more expensive these days — and the Federal Reserve might decide to keep it that way for a while. All eyes are on the Fed’s May meeting today, where Fed chair Jerome Powell will make an announcement about interest rates. Though analysts do not expect the Fed to cut rates just yet, some had projected a cut might be coming soon. That now appears increasingly unlikely. Instead, his remarks are expected to shed light on how much longer the US economy will have to endure high interest rates, which are squeezing everyone from prospective home buyers to people who have racked up credit card debt. High interest rates have helped cool a too-hot economy, significantly bringing down inflation to 3.5 percent from its 9.1 percent peak in June 2022. But it’s still well above the Fed’s target rate of 2 percent, and inflation has increased slightly in the last few months, which means we might not see a rate cut anytime soon. “The ‘last mile’ ... to the Fed’s target range was expected to be more difficult than what came before it,” said Matt Colyar, an economist at Moody’s Analytics. “Even with that expectation, however, inflation data in the first three months of 2024 has been surprisingly high.” Why inflation has remained high A few factors are driving stubborn inflation. Housing costs have been the biggest contributor by far. Inflation in rent and homeowners’ cost of living in their own homes has moderated somewhat but by less than expected, Colyar said. Auto insurance and repair costs have also risen sharply even though car prices have fallen. And health care costs have also picked up. Nicole Narea/Vox But this isn’t necessarily a “strong indication that inflation will remain similarly high for the rest of 2024,” Preston Caldwell, chief US economist at Morningstar, said in a note to investors Friday. The US economy has so far staved off a recession, growing at a slower but still solid pace in the first quarter of 2024 in part because Americans are continuing to spend a lot. The job market also remains strong, with the US blowing past projections to add 303,000 jobs in March. That hasn’t given the Fed much urgency to cut rates anytime soon. “It’s not an economy in obvious need of the pick-me-up that a rate cut would deliver,” Colyar said. Strong consumer spending, though, isn’t expected to last as Americans deplete any savings they accrued in the pandemic and rack up more household debt. That will likely cause US economic growth to slow in the coming year, which “should be sufficient to cool off remaining excess inflation,” Caldwell told Vox. When will the Fed cut interest rates? After the Fed’s December meeting, financial analysts were expecting six interest rate cuts in 2024, beginning in June. But given that inflation has remained high and the economy is still going strong, that doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon. Caldwell said he’s now expecting three cuts this year starting in September. Other top economists at UBS, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America have also pushed back their projections for a rate cut. For example, Bank of America is projecting only a single rate cut in December. Some Fed officials also have not ruled out the possibility of another rate hike, which would be the first since last July. Fed Governor Michelle Bowman recently said she would support a rate hike “should progress on inflation stall or even reverse.” But Caldwell said that still seems a far-off possibility. “The mere fact that they’re delaying rate cuts already has a contractionary effect on the economy,” he said. Colyar said he will be watching Powell’s remarks to discern “how spooked they have been by the hotter-than-expected inflation data in the first quarter” and to what extent he attributes the stickiness of inflation to a few industries, rather than an indication of current overall cost pressures. What continued higher interest rates might mean for the economy Recent economic data has already dampened earlier enthusiasm in the stock market about an imminent interest rate cut. Powell’s remarks might have a similar depressive effect, depending on how pessimistic he is about the Fed winning its battle against inflation in the near term. “The first effect is psychological,” Colyar said. “Persistently high borrowing costs are painful and will eventually break something.” It’s already slowing down the real estate market significantly. Mortgage rates have surpassed 7 percent, and that’s keeping prospective home buyers and sellers on the bench. People who secured lower interest rates just a few years ago don’t want to sell and would have to secure a higher-rate mortgage for their new lodging, so there are fewer homes on the market, keeping prices higher than many buyers can afford. Americans’ total credit card debt also hit a record $1.13 trillion earlier this year, and repaying that in a high interest rate environment is bound to hurt their wallets. At the same time, the US economy has proved resilient even in a high interest rate environment. The Fed doesn’t need to step in just yet given steady job growth and economic growth, as well as strong consumer spending. “However, I would argue that the time to start loosening policy is before things are flashing red,” Colyar said. “Waiting too long because shelter prices are slow in moderating I think is an unnecessary risk.” This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

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People walk through downtown Detroit, Michigan, on April 3, 2024. The city has experienced a historic turnaround on crime that is both part of a national trend and the result of a transformation in the city’s policing. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images Last year, Detroit saw its fewest homicides since 1966. Here’s how it did it — and how other cities can do the same. In 2021, Detroit was in trouble. The city, which already had one of the highest murder rates in the country, was experiencing a surge in gun violence coinciding with the Covid-19 pandemic. In the first five months of the year, homicides were up 27 percent, and nonfatal shootings were up 44 percent. James White, who was Detroit’s assistant police chief from 2012 to 2020, had only been retired from the department for a year when he got the call to return, this time as chief of police, in June 2021. When he came back, he said, “policing had completely changed.” “It was on the heels of the George Floyd murder, it was the pandemic — all those things kind of intersected,” White told Vox. It wasn’t just Detroit: Homicide spiked 30 percent across the US in 2020, the largest single-year increase since the FBI began tracking it. “We found ourselves [facing] a really big question, and rightly so, about the validity of policing and the model of policing that was happening around the country.” Three years into his time as chief, White and others in the community have much to celebrate. At the end of 2023, the city reported the fewest homicides since 1966, a decline of 18 percent over the previous year. Nonfatal shootings fell nearly 16 percent, and carjackings dropped by a third. By the end of 2023, the city’s homicide rate had returned to pre-pandemic levels. Detroit is on the leading edge of a national trend. Across US cities last year, homicides fell more than 12 percent, the largest single-year decline in violent crime since the FBI began keeping track. In Buffalo, they fell 46 percent from a year earlier — the fewest homicides since 2011. In Philadelphia, they dropped 21 percent. New York and Los Angeles also saw double-digit declines, according to preliminary data. What explains the precipitous rise — and sharp fall — in violent crime? Experts caution that several complex, intersecting factors drive crime trends, and no single explanation can easily answer the question. The best working theory is that multiple overlapping social crises — including pandemic-related disruptions that kept more people stuck at home and out of work, and the unrest across major cities after the murder of George Floyd — contributed to a breakdown of trust between the public and police, and created conditions ripe for violence in a country awash in too many guns. The decrease, meanwhile, may have much to do with society reopening and stabilizing, but it also probably has something to do with changes to the way some police, prosecutors, and civic leaders — in Detroit and elsewhere — have been operating after the major challenges of 2020. For Detroit, what worked was a coordinated effort across multiple agencies and community organizations that was targeted at reducing and preventing gun crime and mobilizing the judicial system after a pandemic-era shutdown seriously hampered the courts. That’s not to say Detroit, like other cities in the US, doesn’t face severe challenges when it comes to reducing violent crime. Though the city saw the fewest killings since 1966, it also had a much larger population back then, meaning 2023’s per capita homicide rate of around 41 people per 100,000 is much higher than the 1966 homicide rate of 15 people per 100,000. Still, White says, elected officials and community leaders in Detroit are encouraged by the fact that homicide fell back to the pre-pandemic baselines. “We’re not satisfied,” White says, but there’s satisfaction in “knowing our plans are working.” Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images US President Joe Biden shakes hands with Detroit Police Chief James White in February in Washington. Biden met with White to tout Detroit’s efforts to reduce crime, including using federal funds to transform policing and community interventions. It’s not just the chief of police saying that, either. “I think our people are hardwired to be skeptical of any news that comes from top to bottom, like, is this a political ploy? Is it real?” says Alia Harvey-Quinn, the founder of FORCE Detroit, a community violence intervention program that is active in northwest Detroit and is part of the effort to reduce gun violence. “We’re hearing people actually feel safer as of late, and that’s exciting.” Violent crime is continuing to fall across the US this year, but it’s still a major voter concern, driving politicians to pass laws aimed at reducing it further. Here’s how Detroit is reducing crime, and what other cities can learn from their success. Detroit changed the way police respond to some calls In 2020, in response to the murder of George Floyd, the city came up with plans for a Crisis Intervention Team, a partnership between mental and behavioral health specialists and police. The Detroit Wayne Integrated Health Network (DWIHN) staffs 911 call centers with mental health professionals and offers week-long training programs for police officers to learn about trauma-informed policing. The network also partners with police on a centralized mental health unit co-response team, where officers are paired with behavioral health specialists who can respond to people experiencing mental health crises. DWIHN’s Andrea Smith, who has answered 911 calls and worked with the crisis response team on in-person calls, says the goal is always “to bring a situation down instead of contributing to an escalation of the crisis,” and to help officers find other ways of responding to certain calls. The approach, modeled on methods first implemented by a team in Memphis, Tennessee, “contributes to a lower number of incidents of use of force,” says Smith. “It’s allowed us to have more of a focus on, ‘OK, this person might not have a behavior problem. It might be a behavioral health problem.’ … When you have the community that knows that the police are looking at alternatives to just pulling out their gun, that enhances or improves the relationship between the police and citizens.” For White, who in addition to being police chief is also a licensed mental health counselor, paying attention to the mental health needs of community members makes sense, but it was far from the only strategy. The city also unveiled a 12-point “summer surge” plan that increased police presence, curfew enforcement, and strategic traffic restrictions to secure downtown Detroit following the murder of a security guard last year. Police also cracked down on drag racing and stepped up their presence at community events where they had reason to believe there might be a risk of gun violence. The city council also approved a contract that gave officers a roughly $10,000 raise at the end of 2022 to help offset the recruiting problem other police departments are also facing across the country. White was careful to point out, though, that the work is far from over: “The challenge is to continue to drive down violent crime while providing policing excellence to our community and treating everyone fairly,” he says. Prosecutors made community outreach a key priority Courts across the country shut down because of Covid-19, delaying trials and preventing felony charges from moving through the adjudication process. To get the system moving again and to reduce the backlog of felony gun cases, district and circuit courts moved to get more hearings on the calendar. The US attorney for Eastern Michigan, Dawn Ison, also partnered with federal agencies to prosecute gun crimes and take illegal weapons off the street. Ison also led violence prevention and reentry efforts for formerly incarcerated people. “The studies show enforcement alone has never been effective at moving the needle to reduce violent crime. We have to be transparent and bring legitimacy. We can’t do this work without the community,” Ison says. When developing One Detroit, her office’s program to reduce violence in the two city precincts with the highest rates of gun crime, Ison drew upon several evidence-based strategies outlined in the bookBleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence—and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets by Thomas Abt, founding director of the Violence Reduction Center at the University of Maryland. This included reaching out last summer to 200 individuals who, based on their previous interaction with the state’s legal system, were believed to be at highest risk of becoming a victim of, or perpetrating, gun violence. They were invited to a roundtable to hear from people who’d been incarcerated in an effort to deter them from violence. Ison’s office also focused on engagement with the city’s residents. In the summer, she goes into the precincts with high rates of gun crime and hands out fliers letting the public know that her office is looking to prosecute the small number of people driving most of the gun violence in the city. The office also puts on what they call “peacenics,” or summer block parties with DJs, bounce castles, and vendors from the city and local government who help people with basic services, like getting a driver’s license or having their record expunged for low-level offenses. “My vision is for it to be our non-enforcement engagement with the community,” Ison says. “We have to be talking to them, and not only there when we’re kicking in their doors or arresting somebody.” By the end of 2023, the city reported that homicides were down 17 percent in the precincts targeted by One Detroit, and carjackings were down 63 percent. Kirby Lee/Getty Images The Detroit skyline. Ison isn’t the only prosecutor focusing on violent crime reduction. At the direction of the Office of the Attorney General, each US attorney was asked to come up with their own district-specific violence reduction plan in response to the pandemic-related spike. But Thomas Abt says that the energy Ison brings to the effort is unusual. “The US attorney and Chief White are demonstrating an exciting new form of collaborative leadership,” Abt says. “They’re people who can celebrate the successes of others. I think that’s really positive and constructive.” Detroit invested in community violence interruption Detroit received $826 million through the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021, and in 2023, the city allocated a small slice of the money to a handful of community-based programs working to reduce gun violence in the neighborhoods that suffered from it the most. One of those programs is FORCE Detroit, which works on the west side of Detroit in a neighborhood that saw a significant reduction in gun violence last year. “Our goal is to create peace, so we’re dealing with people on multiple sides of conflict,” says Harvey-Quinn, the group’s founder. “They understand that our space is a neutral zone.” Since FORCE has begun its work, she says, the group has had at least 87 instances of intervention or deescalation. Those incidents range from getting someone to take down a threat made on social media before it escalates into violence to convening rival gang members and saying, “Let’s sit everyone down, and as long as people don’t want to go to prison, or die, there has to be a solution.” Mostly, it’s about connecting young people with credible messengers who have served time and lost friends to gun violence and are now trained by her organization in deescalation and crisis mitigation strategies. FORCE Detroit was touted by city leaders when the neighborhood they serve saw no homicides between November 2023 and January 2024. “We’re working with the people who shoot guns, and we’re encouraging them not to,” Harvey-Quinn says. “Statistically, less than 2 percent of our community is ever going to shoot a gun.” By designing programs focused on meeting that 2 percent in their own neighborhoods, she says, “you have a real opportunity to deeply impact them. It really matters whether or not they get the good, wraparound services. It really matters that they have mentors that care.” With polls showing that voters think of crime as a major concern this election year, political leaders are looking to show that they’re serious about reducing it. If they’re interested in what reduces crime, they should look at what worked in Detroit. It wasn’t the “tough on crime” approach that so many leaders are now pursuing as a too-late reaction to the crime surge of 2020 and 2021. Detroit succeeded by thinking creatively, working cooperatively, and asking the city’s residents to partner with them in the effort. City leaders demonstrated that they were willing to offer resources to help, even as they acknowledge there’s so much more work to be done. It’s a strategy designed for long-term improvement, not election-year grandstanding.

A Republican does not become speaker of the House for the job security. Each of the past four GOP speakers—John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, and Mike Johnson—faced the ever-present threat of defenestration at the hands of conservative hard-liners. The axe fell on McCarthy in October, and it has hovered above his successor, Johnson, from the moment he was sworn in.That is, until yesterday. In an unusual statement, the leaders of the Democratic opposition emerged from a party meeting to declare that they would rescue Johnson if the speaker’s main Republican enemy at the moment, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, forced a vote to oust him. Democrats chose not to help save McCarthy’s job last fall, and in standing with Johnson, they are rewarding him for bringing to the floor a foreign-aid package that includes $61 billion in funds for Ukraine and was opposed by a majority of his own members.[Read: A Democrat’s case for saving Mike Johnson]Democrats see an opportunity to do what they’ve wanted Republican speakers to do for years: sideline the far right. The GOP’s slim majority has proved to be ungovernable on a party-line basis; far-right conservatives have routinely blocked bills from receiving votes on the House floor, forcing Johnson to work with Democrats in what has become an informal coalition government. Democrats made clear that their pledge of support applied only to Greene’s attempt to remove Johnson, leaving themselves free to ditch him in the future. Come November, they’ll want to render him irrelevant by retaking the House majority. But by thwarting Greene’s motion to vacate, Democrats hope they can ensure that Johnson will keep turning to them for the next seven months of his term rather than seek votes from conservative hard-liners who will push legislation ever further to the right.“We want to turn the page,” Representative Pete Aguilar of California, the third-ranking House Democrat, told reporters. He explained that Democrats were not issuing a vote of confidence in Johnson—an archconservative who played a leading role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election—so much as they were trying to head off the chaos that Greene was threatening to foist upon the House. “She is a legislative arsonist, and she is holding the gas tank,” Aguilar said. “We don’t need to be a part of that.” Democrats won’t have to affirmatively vote for Johnson in order to save him; they plan to vote alongside most Republicans to table a motion to vacate the speaker’s chair should Greene bring one to the floor, as she has promised to do.McCarthy’s ouster by a group led by Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida paralyzed the House for weeks as Republicans considered and promptly rejected a series of would-be speakers, until they coalesced around Johnson, a fourth-term lawmaker little known outside the Capitol and his Louisiana district. Democrats were then in no mood to bail out McCarthy, who had turned to them for help keeping the government open but only weeks earlier had tried to hold on to his job by green-lighting an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.Now the circumstances are different. The impeachment case has fizzled, and Democrats saw in Johnson’s move on Ukraine—despite months of delay—an act of much greater political courage than McCarthy’s last-minute decision to avert a government shutdown. They also respect him more than they do his predecessor. “I empathize with him in a way I could not with Kevin McCarthy, who was just this classic suit calculating his next advancement as a politician,” Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a first-term Democrat from Washington State, told me recently, explaining why she planned to help Johnson.[Elaina Plott Calabro: The accidental speaker]Greene took the Democrats’ move to save Johnson as a validation of her argument against him—that he kowtows to the establishment rather than fighting for “America First” policies at any cost. “Mike Johnson is officially the Democrat Speaker of the House,” she wrote on X in response to the Democrats’ announcement.After the Ukraine aid passed, Greene had hoped that a public backlash by conservative constituents against Johnson would lead to a groundswell of Republicans turning on him. That did not materialize. Only two other GOP lawmakers have said they would back her. Nor has former President Donald Trump lent support to her effort. Though Trump has been tepid in his praise of Johnson, he’s sympathized with the speaker for leading such a slim majority.Greene first introduced her motion to vacate more than a month ago and insisted yesterday that she would still demand a vote on it. If she does, no one will be surprised when it fails, but that will demonstrate something America hasn’t seen in a while: what a Republican-controlled House looks like when its hard-liners have finally been defanged.

On April 21, a week after Iran’s first-ever direct attack on Israel, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei met with his military commanders to gloat. The assault had failed to cause much damage in Israel, but Khamenei claimed victory and tried to give it a patriotic color.“What matters most,” he said, “is the emergence of the will of the Iranian nation and Iran’s military forces in an important international arena.”Such national chest-thumping is to be expected from any head of state. But something stood out about the Iranian attacks that made this nationalist reading suspect. Technically speaking, the strikes had been carried out not by Iran’s military but by a militia, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization whose name doesn’t even include Iran: the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The IRGC’s Aerospace Force, one of its six divisions, was what fired 300 drones and missiles at Israel.This is not some bureaucratic “fun fact.” Rather, it illustrates a fundamental truth about Iran: the duality of its institutions, many of which are explicitly defined to be autonomous of both the nation and the state. That duality, in turn, leads to much head-scratching and confusion about Iran. Is the Islamic Republic a rational and potentially pragmatic actor, like most other nation-states, or is it an ideologically motivated actor, bent on pursuing mayhem in support of its goals?The charged nature of Washington debate about Iran often leads partisans to give simple, binary answers to this question. But those who follow Iran more closely realize that the dilemma has produced a tough, protracted battle within the regime itself. In 2006, a journalist asked Henry Kissinger about the future of Iranian-American relations. The doyen of American strategy responded, “Iran has to take a decision whether it wants to be a nation or a cause. If a nation, it must realize that its national interest doesn’t conflict with ours. If the Iranian concern is security and development of their country, this is compatible with American interests.”[Read: Ordinary Iranians don’t want war with Israel]Khamenei, the man who holds ultimate power in today’s Iran, has himself been inconsistent on this point. He is after all not just Iran’s commander in chief but also a revolutionary in chief who heads the Axis of Resistance, an international coalition of anti-West and anti-Israel militias.Not all Iranians are happy to lend their nation-state to such a coalition. Thus a continuous battle rages, in Iran’s society and its establishment, not only over what Iran’s foreign policy should be, but over the more fundamental question of whom it should serve. Should it be the vehicle for the pursuit of Iran’s national interests—or of an Islamist revolutionary agenda that knows no borders?The IRGC is an instrument of the latter conception. That Iran is nowhere in its title is no accident: The IRGC was formed in 1979 from a variety of Islamist militias, precisely because the revolutionaries who had just overthrown the monarchy didn’t trust traditional institutions, such as Iran’s powerful military, and wanted to serve goals beyond Iran’s borders. The IRGC’s founders saw themselves as loyal first and foremost to the revolution’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who couldn’t have been more explicit about rejecting Iranian nationalism in favor of a transnational revolutionary Islamism.Doing so meant reorienting Iran’s foreign policy entirely. Under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran had maintained ties with Israel as well as its Arab neighbors, even proposing to mediate between them. The monarchy had christened Iran’s position a “national independent policy” and positioned Iran as Western-leaning but nonaligned, touting the country’s long and proud tradition as a founding member of both the League of Nations and the United Nations.Khomeini wanted both to do away with this tradition and to burnish his credentials as an international revolutionary leader. He began by fully embracing the anti-Israeli cause, declaring the last Friday of the month of Ramadan to be Quds (Jerusalem) Day, an occasion for global rallies in opposition to the Jewish state. In a televised message on Quds Day 1980, Khomeini stated forcefully: “Nationally minded people are of no use to us. We want Muslim people. Islam opposes nationality.”As Islamist revolutionaries took over Iran and built their Islamic Republic, some envisaged erasing Iran’s national identity altogether. A faction close to Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi dreamed of fusing Iran and Libya into a new revolutionary state. A cleric took a group of goons to vandalize the tomb of Ferdowsi, Iran’s cherished medieval national poet, near Mashhad. Many regime leaders were openly contemptuous of pre-Islamic Iranian traditions, even the single most important one: the Iranian new year, or Nowruz. In 1981, Khomeini explicitly asked Iranians not to put much emphasis on “their so-called Nowruz.”But Khomeini’s radicalism soon collided with reality. Few people anywhere would willingly give up their national identity; Iranians are famously patriotic, and for them, the demand was a nonstarter. Nowruz would stay, as would Ferdowsi’s tomb. But the battle over whether revolutionary Iran would behave as a nation or as an Islamist cause never ceased.When Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980, masses of Iranians mobilized to defend their country, in what was clearly a patriotic effort. Former pilots of the Shah’s imperial armies were released from prison to fly sorties. From his exile, the recently overthrown crown prince offered to come back to join the armed forces (he was denied). Iran’s war dead included many non-Muslims—Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Baha’is. And yet, Khomeini conceived of the war not as one of national defense but as a “holy war” to spread the revolution.Iran liberated all of its territory from Iraqi forces in 1982, but Khomeini declared that the war had to go on “until all sedition has been eliminated from the world.” He sent Iranian forces into Iraq, where they kept pushing for six more futile years, until at last he accepted a UN-mandated cease-fire in 1988. That same year, Iran reestablished diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia. By the time Khomeini died, in 1989, the country appeared to be setting a more moderate course, even shedding its internationalist revolutionary pretensions.Shadi Hamid: The reason Iran turned out to be so repressiveWhether it would really do so would be up to Khomeini’s successor. Khamenei was a hard-line revolutionary activist, known for translating into Persian the works of Sayyid Qutb, the notorious ideologue of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. But he owed his ascent to the leadership in part to the new president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose pragmatism many thought would rub off on Khamenei as well. Rafsanjani came to represent something of an Iranian Deng Xiaoping, more interested in technocracy than in ideological purity.The alliance turned out to be one of convenience, and from the 1990s to 2010s, Iran became the scene of a ferocious struggle among three broad factions: conservatives led by Khamenei, reformists (led by Mohammad Khatami, who would succeed Rafsanjani as president in 1997) who wanted to democratize, and centrists (led by Rafsanjani) who wished to maintain the closed political system but make the country’s foreign policy less ideological and more practical. As Khamenei sought to strengthen his faction against the other two, he realized that the IRGC was his best cudgel. He used it to repress and exclude from power both the reformists and the centrists. Khamenei extended the state’s largesse to his allies in the militia as it pursued its most ambitious project: that of building up an Axis of Resistance in the region, including groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iraq’s Shiite militias.With the help of these proxies, the IRGC conducted a campaign of terror against its ideological enemies, Israel above all. It helped bomb Israel’s embassy in 1992 and, two years later, a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. The latter action killed 85 people, making it the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentine history. Starting in 2003, wars and crises in the Middle East allowed the Axis to spread and strengthen—and, as it did so, to capture Iran’s regional foreign policy.Khamenei understood that the rise of the IRGC’s regional power risked dangerously isolating Tehran and putting it on a collision course with Washington. And so he attempted to balance out the IRGC’s radicalism by giving some ground to the pragmatism of the centrists who favored ties with the West. Hassan Rouhani, a Rafsanjani acolyte, was elected president in 2013 with a popular mandate to conduct direct negotiations with the West over Iran’s nuclear program. He and his U.S.-educated foreign minister, Javad Zarif, had the support of both reformists and centrists. They bitterly opposed the IRGC, and the militia in turn opposed their talks with the United States.The Rouhani government finally inked a deal with the United States and five other powerful countries in 2015, only for it to be thrown out three years later by President Donald Trump. The anti-IRGC coalition was severely weakened, and Khamenei swung heavily in the other direction—which better fit with his own politics in any case.The long-lasting battle over Iran’s foreign policy has now been largely settled in favor of the octogenarian supreme leader and his allies. Since 2020, only pro-Khamenei conservatives have been permitted to run for office in major elections. The IRGC openly operates Iranian embassies in most of the Middle East, and ideological commitments, rather than national interest, drive Iranian foreign policy. This turn is most evident in Iran’s shameful support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which only makes sense as an expression of Khamenei’s anti-Western zeal. In fact, Khamenei’s men have broken with the country’s traditional nonalignment by repeatedly favoring ties with China, Russia, and North Korea. The facade of Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tehran is still emblazoned with the revolutionary slogan “Neither Western nor Eastern”—but pro-Khamenei foreign-policy hands now speak of a “Look East” policy to justify their new orientation.Khamenei never made the transition from Islamist activist to Iranian statesman. Having hijacked the Iranian nation for a cause, he hitched its fortunes to those of militias that wreak havoc in every country where they operate. With the IRGC's attacks on Israel, he has now put the country on the path to a war most Iranians neither want nor can afford. Having just turned 85 years old, Khamenei has lost the respect of most Iranians and even many establishment figures. Iran is worse today in every single way than it was 20 years ago: socially repressed, politically closed, diplomatically isolated, and economically destroyed.Many Iranians are now simply waiting for the leader to die. His cause-centered foreign policy has brought only disaster. Those who want Iran to once more act like a nation are politically marginalized, but in a post-Khamenei Iran, they will fight for a country that pursues its national interests, including peace with its neighbors and the world.

The first time I photographed Gerald Ford, he was a day away from being nominated as vice president, after Spiro Agnew had resigned in disgrace. The portrait I made ran on the cover of Time, a first for both of us. Ford was my assignment, then he became my friend. As president, he appointed me, at age 27, as his chief White House photographer, granting me total access. The more I got to know him, the more I admired his humanity and empathy. I remained close to him and his wife, Betty, until the end of their lives. And I was honored to serve as a trustee on the board of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation for more than 20 years.On April 9, however, I resigned from that position. It was over a matter that might seem trivial on the surface, but that I believe constituted another step in America’s retreat from democracy—the failure of an institution bearing the name of one of our most honorable presidents to stand in the way of authoritarianism.Each year, the foundation awards its Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service, recognizing an individual who embodies Ford’s high ideals: integrity, honesty, candor, strength of character, determination in the face of adversity, among other attributes. Past winners have included John Paul Stevens, George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Colin Powell, and Bob and Elizabeth Dole. This year, in my capacity as a trustee, I pushed hard for former Representative Liz Cheney to receive the recognition.After the January 6 insurrection, Cheney famously helped lead the push to impeach President Donald Trump. “The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” she wrote in a statement a few days after the riot. “There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.” Four months later, she was stripped of her House leadership position by an ungrateful and angry Republican caucus. A month and a half later, she joined the House select committee investigating January 6; she soon was named co-chair. The next year, Trump got his revenge: Cheney was defeated in her Wyoming primary by a rival he had backed.Despite this—and numerous death threats—Cheney has been unwavering in standing against Trump and the risk his 2024 candidacy represents.[Mark Leibovich: Liz Cheney, the Republican from the state of reality]Cheney is a friend of mine; I have known her since she was 8 years old and have photographed and spent time with her and her family for decades. But I wasn’t alone in my thinking: Many of my fellow trustees also believed she clearly deserved the recognition. Ford himself would have been delighted by the selection. He first met Cheney when she was a little girl, and her father, future Vice President Dick Cheney, was Ford’s chief of staff. (Cheney herself is a trustee of the foundation in good standing, but several other trustees have received the award in the past.) President Gerald Ford and an 8-year-old Liz Cheney in February 1975.(David Hume Kennerly / Center for Creative Photography / The University of Arizona) Yet when the foundation’s executive committee received Cheney’s nomination, its members denied her the award. Instead, they offered it first to a former president, who did not accept, and then to another well-known person, who also declined. When the door briefly reopened for more nominations, I made another passionate pitch for Cheney. The committee passed on her again, ultimately deciding to give the award to former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, whose last job as a public servant ended more than a decade ago.To me, the decision was inexplicable; Cheney obviously had been more deserving. Sensing that the foundation’s executive committee no longer shared my principles, I resigned from the board, as I wrote in a letter to my fellow trustees.Shortly after that letter was published by Politico, the foundation’s executive director, Gleaves Whitney, issued a public statement explaining the committee’s decision and confirming what I had heard from fellow trustees: “At the time the award was being discussed, it was publicly reported that Liz was under active consideration for a presidential run. Exercising its fiduciary responsibility, the executive committee concluded that giving the Ford medal to Liz in the 2024 election cycle might be construed as a political statement and thus expose the Foundation to the legal risk of losing its nonprofit status with the Internal Revenue Service.”Giving the award to Cheney, Whitney said, would not be “prudent.” Translation: The foundation was afraid. In another statement, Whitney said that Cheney could be considered for the award in the future. That was not only totally embarrassing, but too late.I believe the foundation did what it did because of the same pressures hollowing out many Republican institutions and weakening many conservative leaders across America—the fear of retaliation from the forces of Trumpism, forces that deeply loathe Cheney and the values she represents. Fear that president No. 45 might become No. 47. Fear that wealthy donors might be on Trump’s team overtly or covertly and might withhold money from the foundation. Fear of phantom circumstances.[Read the January/February 2024 issue: If Trump wins]I see Whitney’s legalistic tap dance as a cop-out. Cheney has not announced that she is running; she hasn’t been a candidate for any elective office since she lost her primary two years ago. What’s more, in 2004, the foundation gave its annual recognition to then–Vice President Cheney while he was an active candidate for a second term. In a recent letter to trustees, Whitney wrote, correctly, “We face a very different political environment today than in 2004.” He added that, in 2006, the IRS had cracked down on nonprofits supporting political candidates. But again, Cheney is not a political candidate. Two years ago, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation wasn’t afraid to pay her tribute with its Profile in Courage Award (granted jointly to her, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and three others).Mitch Daniels might seem like a safe choice for the recognition, a moderate in the mold of Ford. But he has shown none of the valor that Cheney has in confronting Trump. Despite acknowledging that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Daniels has made only tepid comments about the threat Trump presents to democracy. In 2022, for example, The Bulwark’s Mona Charen asked Daniels about a recent warning from President Biden that American democracy was in danger of being subverted by election-denying “MAGA Republicans.” Daniels said he had spent 10 years “ducking” such questions. He allowed that he would “make no objection” to Biden’s statement, but continued: “I think there are anti-democratic tendencies across our political spectrum, or at least at both ends of it.” This was classic both-sides-ism. To me, Daniels in that moment exemplified the kind of passive Republican who is laying brick on the Trump highway to an autocracy.My resignation is about more than giving one valiant person an award. America is where it is today because of all the people and organizations that have committed small acts of cowardice like that of the Ford presidential foundation’s executive committee. I wanted to draw attention to those in the political center and on the right who know better, who have real power and influence, who rail against Trump behind closed doors, yet who appear in public with their lips zipped. They might think of themselves as patriots, but in fact they are allowing our country to be driven toward tyranny. Every now and then, you should listen to your heart and not the lawyers.Ultimately, the foundation has tarnished the image of its namesake. I was in the East Room of the White House 50 years ago on that hot day of August 9, 1974, when President Ford declared, “Our long national nightmare is over.” It was a great moment for America, and a bold statement from the new president, acknowledging that Richard Nixon’s actions had threatened the Constitution. Ford could not have envisioned the threat to democracy that America now faces. But he would have been encouraged by a bright light named Liz Cheney—someone who is fighting hard, sometimes alone, for the Constitution that Ford defended just as courageously.

On a freezing day in December 2021, I arrived in Madison, Wisconsin, to visit Simon Gilroy’s lab. In one room of the lab sat a flat of young tobacco and Arabidopsis plants, each imbued with fluorescent proteins derived from jellyfish.Researchers led me into a small microscope room. One of them turned off the lights, and another handed me a pair of tweezers that had been dipped in a solution of glutamate—one of the most important neurotransmitters in our brains and, research has recently found, one that boosts plants’ signals too. “Be sure to cross the midrib,” Jessica Cisneros Fernandez, then a molecular biologist on Gilroy’s team, told me. She pointed to the thick vein running down the middle of a tiny leaf. This vein is the plant’s information superhighway. Injure the vein, and the pulse will move all over the plant in a wave. I pinched hard.On a screen attached to the microscope, I watched the plant light up, its veins blazing like a neon sign. As the green glow moved from the wound site outward in a fluorescent ripple, I was reminded of the branching pattern of human nerves. The plant was becoming aware, in its own way, of my touch.But what exactly does it mean for a plant to be aware ? Consciousness was once seen as belonging solely to humans and a short list of nonhuman animals that clearly act with intention. Yet seemingly everywhere researchers look, they are finding that there is more to the inner lives of animals than we ever thought possible. Scientists now talk regularly about animal cognition; they study the behaviors of individual animals, and occasionally ascribe personalities to them.Some scientists now posit that plants should likewise be considered intelligent. Plants have been found to show sensitivity to sound, store information to be accessed later, and communicate among their kind—and even, in a sense, with particular animals. We determine intelligence in ourselves and certain other species through inference—by observing how an organism behaves, not by looking for a psychological sign. If plants can do things that we consider indications of intelligence in animals, this camp of botanists argues, then why shouldn’t we use the language of intelligence to describe them too?[From the July/August 2021 issue: A better way to look at trees]It’s a daring question, currently being debated in labs and academic journals. Not so long ago, treading even lightly in this domain could upend a scientist’s career. And plenty of botanists still think that applying concepts such as consciousness to plants does a disservice to their essential plantness. Yet even many of these scientists are awed by what we are learning about plants’ capabilities.A single book nearly snuffed out the field of plant-behavior research for good. The Secret Life of Plants, published in 1973, was as popular as it was irresponsible; though it included real science, it also featured wildly unscientific projection. One chapter suggested that plants could feel and hear—and that they preferred Beethoven to rock and roll. Another suggested that a plant could respond to malevolent thoughts.Many scientists tried to reproduce the most tantalizing “research” presented in The Secret Life of Plants, to no avail. According to several researchers I spoke with, this caused the twin gatekeepers of science-funding boards and peer-review boards to become skittish about plant-behavior studies. Proposals with so much as a whiff of inquiry into the subject were turned down. Pioneers in the field changed course or left the sciences altogether.A decade after the book’s publication, a paper by David Rhoades, a zoologist and chemist at the University of Washington, reopened questions of plant communication. Rhoades had watched a nearby forest be decimated by an invasion of caterpillars. But then something suddenly changed; the caterpillars began to die. Why? The answer, Rhoades discovered, was that the trees were communicating with one another. Trees that the caterpillars hadn’t yet reached were ready: They’d changed the composition of their leaves, turning them into weapons that would poison, and eventually kill, the caterpillars.Scientists were beginning to understand that trees communicate through their roots, but this was different. The trees, too far apart to be connected by a root system, were signaling to one another through the air. Plants are tremendous at chemical synthesis, Rhoades knew. And certain plant chemicals drift through the air. Everyone already understood that ripening fruit produces airborne ethylene, for example, which prompts nearby fruit to ripen too. It wasn’t unreasonable to imagine that plant chemicals containing other information—say, that the forest was under attack—might also drift through the air.[Read: A glowing petunia could radicalize your view of plants]Still, the idea that a plant would defend itself in this way was heretical to the whole premise of how scientists thought plants worked. Plants were not supposed to be that active, or have such dramatic and strategic reactions. Rhoades presented his hypothesis at conferences, but mainstream scientific journals were reluctant to take the risk of publishing something so outlandish. The discovery ended up buried in an obscure volume, and Rhoades was ridiculed by peers in journals and at conferences.But Rhoades’s communication experiments, and others that came immediately after, helped establish new lines of inquiry. We now know that plants’ chemical signals are decipherable not just by other plants but in some cases by insects. Still, four decades on, the idea that plants might communicate intentionally with one another remains a controversial concept in botany.One key problem is that there is no agreed-upon definition of communication, not even in animals. Does a signal need to be sent purposefully? Does it need to provoke a response in the receiver? Much as consciousness and intelligence have no settled definition, communication slip-slides between the realms of philosophy and science, finding secure footing in neither. Intention poses the hardest of problems, because it cannot be directly determined.[From the March 2019 issue: A journey into the animal mind]The likely impossibility of establishing intentionality in plants, though, is no deterrent to Simon Gilroy’s sense of wonder at their liveliness. In the ’80s, Gilroy, who is British, studied at Edinburgh University under Anthony Trewavas, a renowned plant physiologist. Since then, Trewavas has begun using provocative language to talk about plants, aligning himself with a group of botanists and biologists who call themselves plant neurobiologists, and publishing papers and a book laying out scientific arguments in favor of plant intelligence and consciousness. Gilroy himself is more circumspect, unwilling to talk about either of those things, but he still works with Trewavas. Recently, the two have been developing a theory of agency for plants.Gilroy is quick to remind me that he is talking strictly about biological agency, not implying intention in a thoughts-and-feelings sense. But there’s no question that plants are engaged in the active pursuit of their own goals and, in the process, shape the very environment they find themselves rooted in. That, for him, is proof of plants’ agency. Still, the proof is found through inferring the meaning behind plants’ actions rather than understanding their mechanics.“When you get down to the machinery that allows those calculations to occur, we don’t have the luxury of going, Ah, it’s neurons in the brain,” Gilroy told me. His work is beginning to allow us to watch the information processing happen, “but at the moment, we don’t know how it works.”That is the essential question of plant intelligence: How does something without a brain coordinate a response to stimuli? How does information about the world get translated into action that benefits the plant? How can the plant sense its world without a centralized place to parse that information?A few years back, Gilroy and his colleague Masatsugu Toyota thought they’d have a go at those questions, which led them to the experiment I participated in at the lab. Their work has shown that those glowing-green signals move much faster than would be expected from simple diffusion. They move at the speed of some electrical signals, which they may be. Or, as new research suggests, they may be surprisingly fast chemical signals.Given what we know about the dynamics of sensing in creatures that have a brain, the lack of one should mean that any information generated from sensing ought to ripple meaninglessly through the plant body without producing more than a highly localized response. But it doesn’t. A tobacco plant touched in one place will experience that stimulus throughout its whole body.The system overall works a bit like an animal nervous system, and might even employ similar molecular players. Gilroy, for his part, does not want to call it a nervous system, but others have written that he and Toyota have found “nervous system–like signaling” in plants. The issue has even leaked out of plant science: Researchers from other disciplines are weighing in. Rodolfo Llinás, a neuroscientist at NYU, and Sergio Miguel Tomé, a colleague at the University of Salamanca, in Spain, have argued that it makes no sense to define a nervous system as something only animals can have rather than defining it as a physiological system that could be present in other organisms, if in a different form.Convergent evolution, they argue, wherein organisms separately evolve similar systems to deal with similar challenges, happens all the time; a classic example is wings. Flight evolved separately in birds, bats, and insects, but to comparable effect. Eyes are another example; the eye lens has evolved separately several times.The nervous system can reasonably be imagined as another case of convergent evolution, Llinás and Miguel Tomé say. If a variety of nervous systems exist in nature, then what plants have is clearly one. Why not call it a nervous system already?“What do you mean, the flower remembers?” I ask.It’s 2019, and I’m walking through the Berlin Botanic Garden with Tilo Henning, a plant researcher. Henning shakes his head and laughs. He doesn’t know. No one does. But yes, he says, he and his colleague Maximilian Weigend, the director of a botanical garden in Bonn, have observed the ability of Nasa poissoniana—a plant in the flowering Loasaceae family that grows in the Peruvian Andes—to store and recall information.The pair noticed that the multicolor starburst-shaped flowers were raising their stamen, or fertilizing organs, shortly before a pollinator arrived, as if they could predict the future. The researchers set up an experiment and found that the plant in fact seemed to be learning from experience. These flowers, Henning and Weigend found, could “remember” the time intervals between bee visits, and anticipate the time their next pollinator was likely to arrive. If the interval between bee visits changed, the plant might actually adjust the timing of its stamen display to line up with the new schedule.In a 2019 paper, Henning and Weigend call Nasa poissoniana’s behavior “intelligent,” the word still appearing in quotation marks. I want to know what Henning really thinks. Are plants intelligent? Does he see the flower’s apparent ability to remember as a hallmark of consciousness? Or does he think of the plant as an unconscious robot with a preprogrammed suite of responses?Henning shakes off my question the first two times I ask it. But the third time, he stops walking and turns to answer. The dissenting papers, he says, are all focused on the lack of brains—no brains, they claim, means no intelligence.“Plants don’t have these structures, obviously,” Henning says. “But look at what they do. I mean, they take information from the outside world. They process. They make decisions. And they perform. They take everything into account, and they transform it into a reaction. And this, to me, is the basic definition of intelligence. That’s not just automatism. There might be some automatic things, like going toward light. But this is not the case here. It’s not automatic.”Where Nasa poissoniana’s “memories” could possibly be stored is still a mystery. “Maybe we are just not able to see these structures,” Henning tells me. “Maybe they are so spread all over the body of the plant that there isn’t a single structure. Maybe that’s their trick. Maybe it’s the whole organism.”It’s humbling to remember that plants are a kingdom of life entirely their own, the product of riotous evolutionary innovation that took a turn away from our branch of life when we were both barely motile, single-celled creatures floating in the prehistoric ocean. We couldn’t be more biologically different. And yet plants’ patterns and rhythms have resonances with ours—just look at the information moving through Gilroy’s glowing specimens.Mysteries abide, of course. We are far from understanding the extent of “memory” in plants. We have a few clues and fewer answers, and so many more experiments still to try.This article was adapted from Zoë Schlanger’s new book, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. It appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The Mysteries of Plant ‘Intelligence.’”