The MLK Gateway project marks the latest in recent developments that have helped reshape two of Anacostia’s busiest corridors by directing more city resources.
tagAfter decades of disinvestment, D.C.’s Anacostia welcomes new developmentsThe MLK Gateway project marks the latest in recent developments that have helped reshape two of Anacostia’s busiest corridors by directing more city resources. sharesave
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Scientists Are Rushing to Find America’s Secret WetlandsThis article was originally published by High Country News.On a warm day in August, Anthony Stewart hiked through a forest on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, making his way through a tangle of ferns and grasses. Wispy, lichen-coated branches hung overhead, providing shade as he set down his backpack and shovel, and he and his team prepared to dig.This was one of Stewart’s favorite study sites, he says. It’s relatively dry on the surface, but just underneath it, a layer of reddish soil, full of organic matter, gives way to gray-blue, claylike soil. These layers, formed over time as water flooded the area, are signs of a wetland. But like many forested wetlands in the Pacific Northwest, this area doesn’t appear on any state maps.In a study published in Nature Communications this past January, Stewart, a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, and his team reported the surprising abundance of unmapped, carbon-rich wetlands in the Pacific Northwest’s forests. The scientists studied the Hoh River watershed, which snakes westward across the Olympic Peninsula, documenting potential wetlands that, because of the thick forest canopy, were invisible to satellite imaging. Including them in estimates of the watershed’s carbon-storage capacity increased them by fivefold.Conserving forested wetlands not only protects valuable habitat; it could help stabilize the climate. But first, the wetlands must be put on the map—and that is no easy task.Wetland ecosystems are stunningly effective at soaking up carbon from the atmosphere. Despite covering only less than 10 percent of the world’s land surface, they contain roughly 20 to 30 percent of the carbon stored in the soil. And because the plant matter in the waterlogged soil decays slowly, their carbon tends to stay put.[Read: Nowhere is ready for this heat]Wetlands provide other benefits too: Some 40 percent of all animal and plant species rely on wetlands. The gnarled roots of wetland trees and plants purify water, and the wetland soils absorb it, providing flood protection to nearby areas.Since the 1920s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has surveyed the types and quality of soil throughout the nation. But until recently, these soil maps focused primarily on agricultural land, leaving out most forests and thus huge gaps in knowledge about the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. On top of that, “wetlands were not at all a focus in forested landscapes,” says David D’Amore, a soil scientist with the USDA Forest Service and a co-author of the study.To identify these hidden forested wetlands and estimate their carbon content, the researchers used the Wetland Intrinsic Potential (WIP) tool, a wetland-mapping tool that uses LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, an aerial remote-sensing technique that can resolve details underneath the tree canopy. The researchers then randomly selected 36 sampling sites across the entire Hoh River watershed, many of which were far from any sort of trail. Armed with shovels, hoses, and pumps, the researchers drove along bumpy backcountry roads and bushwhacked their way through thick woods. Once they arrived at their sampling locations, they used shovels to dig three-foot-deep holes in the ground. “It’s really intensive to get a carbon measurement,” Stewart says. “It’s not an easy path.”The team scooped the soil into gallon-size plastic bags and carried it back to the University of Washington. In the laboratory, Stewart ground the samples to a fine powder and heated them to 1,000 degrees Celsius (about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit). At that temperature, the carbon-containing substances in the soil were completely decomposed and transformed into carbon dioxide, allowing the scientists to measure its carbon content. Finally, the researchers combined the soil-carbon data with remote-sensing topography information to create a model of the amount of soil carbon that is stored across the watershed. “We just rediscovered these really carbon-rich forested wetland areas that weren’t being mapped by the currently available land data sets,” Stewart says.In the 2016 National Wetland Condition Assessment, a federal survey of the nation’s wetlands, Amanda Nahlik, an ecologist and biogeochemist in the Office of Research and Development at the Environmental Protection Agency, concluded that wetlands in the West held about 6 percent of the total carbon stored by wetlands in the Lower 48. “We recognized we were probably underestimating the amount of carbon stored in the West,” she says. Stewart’s study confirmed this hunch. “There is this landscape that’s uncharacterized that we need to start to target,” Stewart says.In general, wetlands aren’t faring well. Half of the wetlands in the Lower 48 have disappeared since the 1780s, and, over the past decade, the rate of wetland loss has doubled, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service’s most recent National Wetlands Inventory. Roughly half of the wetlands in the Mountain West are in poor condition. Though there are thought to be fewer wetlands in the arid West than on the East Coast, “that does not mean that those wetlands are less important,” says Megan Lang, the inventory’s chief scientist. “In fact, it might mean that those wetlands are more important, because there are fewer of them.”[Read: The oceans we knew are already gone]The two main drivers of wetland loss in the West, Lang says, are drought and cattle grazing. Climate change, which is expected to increase aridity in the West, could dry up huge portions of the region’s remaining wetlands by 2050. And when wetlands are destroyed, their carbon is often released into the atmosphere, further worsening global warming.Last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency changed the federal definition of a wetland under the Clean Water Act, disqualifying thousands of miles of ephemeral streams and millions of acres of wetlands—including those along the Hoh River—from protection under that law. Some federal and state initiatives are attempting to compensate: Late last month, President Joe Biden announced a goal to protect 8 million acres of wetlands over the next six years. And earlier this month, Colorado became the first state to pass legislation protecting the wetlands excluded by last year’s Supreme Court decision.Lang emphasizes that it’s crucial to map, measure, and conserve the wetlands we still have: “If we’re going to maintain resilience to climate change, if we are going to have clean water for the future, if we’re going to keep feeding our families, if we are going to be safe from flooding, we are going to need to do better in terms of wetland conservation.”
Scientists Are Rushing to Find America’s Secret WetlandsThis article was originally published by High Country News.On a warm day in August, Anthony Stewart hiked through a forest on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, making his way through a tangle of ferns and grasses. Wispy, lichen-coated branches hung overhead, providing shade as he set down his backpack and shovel, and he and his team prepared to dig.This was one of Stewart’s favorite study sites, he says. It’s relatively dry on the surface, but just underneath it, a layer of reddish soil, full of organic matter, gives way to gray-blue, claylike soil. These layers, formed over time as water flooded the area, are signs of a wetland. But like many forested wetlands in the Pacific Northwest, this area doesn’t appear on any state maps.In a study published in Nature Communications this past January, Stewart, a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, and his team reported the surprising abundance of unmapped, carbon-rich wetlands in the Pacific Northwest’s forests. The scientists studied the Hoh River watershed, which snakes westward across the Olympic Peninsula, documenting potential wetlands that, because of the thick forest canopy, were invisible to satellite imaging. Including them in estimates of the watershed’s carbon-storage capacity increased them by fivefold.Conserving forested wetlands not only protects valuable habitat; it could help stabilize the climate. But first, the wetlands must be put on the map—and that is no easy task.Wetland ecosystems are stunningly effective at soaking up carbon from the atmosphere. Despite covering only less than 10 percent of the world’s land surface, they contain roughly 20 to 30 percent of the carbon stored in the soil. And because the plant matter in the waterlogged soil decays slowly, their carbon tends to stay put.[Read: Nowhere is ready for this heat]Wetlands provide other benefits too: Some 40 percent of all animal and plant species rely on wetlands. The gnarled roots of wetland trees and plants purify water, and the wetland soils absorb it, providing flood protection to nearby areas.Since the 1920s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has surveyed the types and quality of soil throughout the nation. But until recently, these soil maps focused primarily on agricultural land, leaving out most forests and thus huge gaps in knowledge about the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. On top of that, “wetlands were not at all a focus in forested landscapes,” says David D’Amore, a soil scientist with the USDA Forest Service and a co-author of the study.To identify these hidden forested wetlands and estimate their carbon content, the researchers used the Wetland Intrinsic Potential (WIP) tool, a wetland-mapping tool that uses LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, an aerial remote-sensing technique that can resolve details underneath the tree canopy. The researchers then randomly selected 36 sampling sites across the entire Hoh River watershed, many of which were far from any sort of trail. Armed with shovels, hoses, and pumps, the researchers drove along bumpy backcountry roads and bushwhacked their way through thick woods. Once they arrived at their sampling locations, they used shovels to dig three-foot-deep holes in the ground. “It’s really intensive to get a carbon measurement,” Stewart says. “It’s not an easy path.”The team scooped the soil into gallon-size plastic bags and carried it back to the University of Washington. In the laboratory, Stewart ground the samples to a fine powder and heated them to 1,000 degrees Celsius (about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit). At that temperature, the carbon-containing substances in the soil were completely decomposed and transformed into carbon dioxide, allowing the scientists to measure its carbon content. Finally, the researchers combined the soil-carbon data with remote-sensing topography information to create a model of the amount of soil carbon that is stored across the watershed. “We just rediscovered these really carbon-rich forested wetland areas that weren’t being mapped by the currently available land data sets,” Stewart says.In the 2016 National Wetland Condition Assessment, a federal survey of the nation’s wetlands, Amanda Nahlik, an ecologist and biogeochemist in the Office of Research and Development at the Environmental Protection Agency, concluded that wetlands in the West held about 6 percent of the total carbon stored by wetlands in the Lower 48. “We recognized we were probably underestimating the amount of carbon stored in the West,” she says. Stewart’s study confirmed this hunch. “There is this landscape that’s uncharacterized that we need to start to target,” Stewart says.In general, wetlands aren’t faring well. Half of the wetlands in the Lower 48 have disappeared since the 1780s, and, over the past decade, the rate of wetland loss has doubled, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service’s most recent National Wetlands Inventory. Roughly half of the wetlands in the Mountain West are in poor condition. Though there are thought to be fewer wetlands in the arid West than on the East Coast, “that does not mean that those wetlands are less important,” says Megan Lang, the inventory’s chief scientist. “In fact, it might mean that those wetlands are more important, because there are fewer of them.”[Read: The oceans we knew are already gone]The two main drivers of wetland loss in the West, Lang says, are drought and cattle grazing. Climate change, which is expected to increase aridity in the West, could dry up huge portions of the region’s remaining wetlands by 2050. And when wetlands are destroyed, their carbon is often released into the atmosphere, further worsening global warming.Last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency changed the federal definition of a wetland under the Clean Water Act, disqualifying thousands of miles of ephemeral streams and millions of acres of wetlands—including those along the Hoh River—from protection under that law. Some federal and state initiatives are attempting to compensate: Late last month, President Joe Biden announced a goal to protect 8 million acres of wetlands over the next six years. And earlier this month, Colorado became the first state to pass legislation protecting the wetlands excluded by last year’s Supreme Court decision.Lang emphasizes that it’s crucial to map, measure, and conserve the wetlands we still have: “If we’re going to maintain resilience to climate change, if we are going to have clean water for the future, if we’re going to keep feeding our families, if we are going to be safe from flooding, we are going to need to do better in terms of wetland conservation.”
Nuclear Power Has to WorkNuclear energy occupies a strange place in the American psyche—representing at once a dream of endless emissions-free power and a nightmare of catastrophic meltdowns and radioactive waste. The more prosaic downside is that new plants are extremely expensive: America’s most recent attempt to build a nuclear facility, in Georgia, was supposed to be completed in four years for $14 billion. Instead it took more than 10 years and had a final price tag of $35 billion—about 10 times the cost of a natural-gas plant with the same energy output.But the United States might not have the luxury of treating nuclear energy as a lost cause: The Department of Energy estimates that the country must triple its nuclear-power output by 2050 to be on track for its climate targets. For all the recent progress in wind and solar energy, renewables on their own almost certainly won’t be enough. Arguably, then, we have no choice but to figure out how to build nuclear plants affordably again.Half a century ago, nuclear energy seemed destined to become the power source of the future. The first commercial-reactor designs were approved in the 1950s, and by the late ’60s, America was pumping them out at a fraction of what they cost today. In 1970, the Atomic Energy Commission predicted that more than 1,000 reactors would be operating in the United States by the year 2000.In the popular history of atomic energy in America, the turning point was the infamous meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant in 1979. In the aftermath of the accident, environmentalists pressured regulators to impose additional safety requirements on new and existing plants. Nuclear-energy advocates argue that these regulations were mostly unnecessary. All they did, in this telling, was make plants so expensive and slow to build that utility companies turned back to coal and gas. Activists and regulators had overreacted and killed America’s best shot at carbon-free energy.This story contains some kernels of truth. The safety risk of nuclear energy is often wildly overblown. No one died at Three Mile Island, and later studies found that it didn’t have any adverse health effects on the local community. Even including the deadly meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear power has most likely caused only a few hundred deaths, putting its safety record on par with wind turbines and solar panels, which occasionally catch fire or cause workers to fall. (The immediate areas around the sites of the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters have, however, been rendered uninhabitable for decades because of the potential dangers of radiation.) Nuclear waste can be harmful if mishandled, but isn’t difficult to store safely. Air pollution from fossil fuels, meanwhile, is estimated to kill anywhere from 5 million to 9 million people every year.[Read: Nuclear is hot, for the moment]The claim that excessive regulation single-handedly ruined the American nuclear industry, however, doesn’t hold up. The cost of building new nuclear plants was already rising before Three Mile Island. Several nuclear-energy experts told me that a major driver of those cost increases was actually a lack of industry standards. According to Jessica Lovering, the executive director of Good Energy Collective and a co-author of a widely cited study on the cost of nuclear energy, throughout the ’60s and ’70s, utilities kept trying to build bigger, more ambitious reactors for every new project instead of just sticking with a single model. (Lovering used to be the head of nuclear policy at the Breakthrough Institute—a think tank that tends to warn against excessive regulation.) “It’s like if Boeing went through all the trouble to build one 737, then immediately threw out the design and started again from scratch,” she told me. “That’s a recipe for high costs.” The 94 nuclear reactors operating in the United States today are based on more than 50 different designs. In countries such as France and South Korea, by contrast, public utilities coalesced around a handful of reactor types and subsequently saw costs remain steady or fall.Lovering also noted that the overregulation story leaves out a crucial fact: Because of a slowing economy, electricity demand flatlined in the early 1980s, causing American utilities to stop building basically every electricity-generating resource, not just nuclear plants. By the time the U.S. finally did try to build them again, in 2013, the American nuclear industry had all but withered away. “In the 1970s, we had a whole ecosystem of unionized workers and contractors and developers and utilities who knew how to build this stuff,” Josh Freed, who leads the climate and energy program at Third Way, a center-left think tank, told me. “But when we stopped building, that ecosystem died off.” This became obvious during the disastrous Vogtle project, in Georgia—the one that ended up costing $35 billion. Expensive changes had to be made to the reactor design midway through construction. Parts arrived late. Workers made all kinds of rookie mistakes. In one case, an incorrect rebar installation triggered a seven-and-a-half-month regulatory delay. Experts estimate that by the time it was finished, the project was four to six times more expensive per unit of energy produced than plants built in the early ’70s.Given the impracticality of nuclear energy, some environmentalists argue that we should focus on wind and solar. These technologies can’t power the entire grid today, because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. With enough advances in battery-storage technology, however, they could in theory provide 24/7 power at a far lower price than building nuclear plants. “The nuclear industry has been promising cheap, clean energy for decades at this point,” David Schlissel, a director at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told me. “Why waste our money on false hopes when we could be putting it towards technologies that have a real chance of working?”He may be right about the technology. But just because it might one day be technically feasible to power the entire grid with renewables doesn’t mean it will ever be politically feasible. That’s because wind and solar require land—a lot of land. According to Princeton University’s “Net-Zero America” study, reaching net-zero emissions with renewables alone would involve placing solar panels on land equivalent to the area of Virginia and setting up wind farms spanning an area equivalent to Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma combined. The more land you need, the more you run into the meat grinder of American NIMBYism. Efforts to build renewables are already getting bogged down by local opposition, costly lawsuits, and permitting delays. These challenges will only intensify as the easiest sites come off the board.Transmission lines, which are needed to transport renewable energy from where it’s generated to where it’s used, may present an even bigger challenge. Some lines have taken nearly two decades just to receive their full suite of approvals. “There’s a chance we will suddenly get our act together and overcome the many, many constraints to deploying renewables,” Jesse Jenkins, who leads the Princeton Zero-Carbon Energy Systems Research and Optimization Lab, told me. “But I’m certainly not willing to bet the fate of the planet on that happening.”The case for nuclear, then, is less about technological possibilities than it is about political realities. Nuclear can generate the same amount of power while using 1/30th as much land as solar and about 1/200th as much as wind. Reactors can be built anywhere, not just in areas with lots of natural wind and sunshine, eliminating the need for huge transmission lines and making it easier to select sites without as much local opposition. And nuclear plants happen to generate the greatest number of high-paying jobs of any energy source, by far. (On average, they employ six times as many workers as an equivalent wind or solar project does and pay those workers 50 percent more.) That helps explain why four different towns in Wyoming recently fought over the right to host a nuclear project. Nuclear power is also the only energy source with overwhelming bipartisan support in Washington, which makes Congress more likely to address future bottlenecks and hurdles as they arise.[Brian Deese: The next front in the war against climate change]As for how to make the economics work, there are two schools of thought. One holds that if America forgot how to build nuclear because we stopped doing it, we just need to start back up. Pick a design, build lots of plants, and we’ll eventually get better. Other countries have done this with great success; South Korea, for instance, slashed the cost of constructing nuclear plants in half from 1971 to 2008. Here, the Vogtle project carries a silver lining: The second of the plant’s two reactors was about 30 percent cheaper to build than the first, because workers and project managers learned from their mistakes the first time around. “I consider Vogtle a success,” Mike Goff, acting assistant secretary for the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, told me. “We learned all kinds of hard lessons. Now we just need to apply them to future projects.”The second school of thought is that we’ve been building nuclear reactors the wrong way all along. This camp points out that over the past half century, basically every kind of major infrastructure project—highways, skyscrapers, subways—has gotten more expensive, whereas manufactured goods—TVs, solar panels, electric-vehicle batteries—have gotten cheaper. Lowering costs turns out to be much easier when a product is mass-produced on an assembly line than when it has to be built from scratch in the real world every single time. That’s why dozens of companies are now racing to build nuclear reactors that are, in a phrase I heard from multiple sources, “more like airplanes and less like airports.” Some are simply smaller versions of the reactors the U.S. used to build; others involve brand-new designs that are less likely to melt down and therefore don’t require nearly as much big, expensive equipment to operate safely. What unites them is a belief that the secret to making nuclear cheap is making it smaller, less complicated, and easier to mass-produce.Both paths remain unproven—so the Biden administration is placing bets on each of them. The president’s signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, included generous tax credits that could reduce the cost of a nuclear project by 30 to 50 percent, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law included $2.5 billion to fund the construction of two new reactors using original designs. The Department of Energy, meanwhile, is exploring different options for permanent nuclear-waste storage, investing in building a domestic supply chain for uranium, and helping companies navigate the process of getting reactor designs approved.There’s no guarantee that the U.S. will ever relearn the art of building nuclear energy efficiently. Betting on the future of atomic power requires a leap of faith. But America may have to take that leap, because the alternative is so much worse. “We just have to be successful,” Mike Goff told me. “Failure is not an option.”
Nuclear Power Has to WorkNuclear energy occupies a strange place in the American psyche—representing at once a dream of endless emissions-free power and a nightmare of catastrophic meltdowns and radioactive waste. The more prosaic downside is that new plants are extremely expensive: America’s most recent attempt to build a nuclear facility, in Georgia, was supposed to be completed in four years for $14 billion. Instead it took more than 10 years and had a final price tag of $35 billion—about 10 times the cost of a natural-gas plant with the same energy output.But the United States might not have the luxury of treating nuclear energy as a lost cause: The Department of Energy estimates that the country must triple its nuclear-power output by 2050 to be on track for its climate targets. For all the recent progress in wind and solar energy, renewables on their own almost certainly won’t be enough. Arguably, then, we have no choice but to figure out how to build nuclear plants affordably again.Half a century ago, nuclear energy seemed destined to become the power source of the future. The first commercial-reactor designs were approved in the 1950s, and by the late ’60s, America was pumping them out at a fraction of what they cost today. In 1970, the Atomic Energy Commission predicted that more than 1,000 reactors would be operating in the United States by the year 2000.In the popular history of atomic energy in America, the turning point was the infamous meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant in 1979. In the aftermath of the accident, environmentalists pressured regulators to impose additional safety requirements on new and existing plants. Nuclear-energy advocates argue that these regulations were mostly unnecessary. All they did, in this telling, was make plants so expensive and slow to build that utility companies turned back to coal and gas. Activists and regulators had overreacted and killed America’s best shot at carbon-free energy.This story contains some kernels of truth. The safety risk of nuclear energy is often wildly overblown. No one died at Three Mile Island, and later studies found that it didn’t have any adverse health effects on the local community. Even including the deadly meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear power has most likely caused only a few hundred deaths, putting its safety record on par with wind turbines and solar panels, which occasionally catch fire or cause workers to fall. (The immediate areas around the sites of the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters have, however, been rendered uninhabitable for decades because of the potential dangers of radiation.) Nuclear waste can be harmful if mishandled, but isn’t difficult to store safely. Air pollution from fossil fuels, meanwhile, is estimated to kill anywhere from 5 million to 9 million people every year.[Read: Nuclear is hot, for the moment]The claim that excessive regulation single-handedly ruined the American nuclear industry, however, doesn’t hold up. The cost of building new nuclear plants was already rising before Three Mile Island. Several nuclear-energy experts told me that a major driver of those cost increases was actually a lack of industry standards. According to Jessica Lovering, the executive director of Good Energy Collective and a co-author of a widely cited study on the cost of nuclear energy, throughout the ’60s and ’70s, utilities kept trying to build bigger, more ambitious reactors for every new project instead of just sticking with a single model. (Lovering used to be the head of nuclear policy at the Breakthrough Institute—a think tank that tends to warn against excessive regulation.) “It’s like if Boeing went through all the trouble to build one 737, then immediately threw out the design and started again from scratch,” she told me. “That’s a recipe for high costs.” The 94 nuclear reactors operating in the United States today are based on more than 50 different designs. In countries such as France and South Korea, by contrast, public utilities coalesced around a handful of reactor types and subsequently saw costs remain steady or fall.Lovering also noted that the overregulation story leaves out a crucial fact: Because of a slowing economy, electricity demand flatlined in the early 1980s, causing American utilities to stop building basically every electricity-generating resource, not just nuclear plants. By the time the U.S. finally did try to build them again, in 2013, the American nuclear industry had all but withered away. “In the 1970s, we had a whole ecosystem of unionized workers and contractors and developers and utilities who knew how to build this stuff,” Josh Freed, who leads the climate and energy program at Third Way, a center-left think tank, told me. “But when we stopped building, that ecosystem died off.” This became obvious during the disastrous Vogtle project, in Georgia—the one that ended up costing $35 billion. Expensive changes had to be made to the reactor design midway through construction. Parts arrived late. Workers made all kinds of rookie mistakes. In one case, an incorrect rebar installation triggered a seven-and-a-half-month regulatory delay. Experts estimate that by the time it was finished, the project was four to six times more expensive per unit of energy produced than plants built in the early ’70s.Given the impracticality of nuclear energy, some environmentalists argue that we should focus on wind and solar. These technologies can’t power the entire grid today, because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. With enough advances in battery-storage technology, however, they could in theory provide 24/7 power at a far lower price than building nuclear plants. “The nuclear industry has been promising cheap, clean energy for decades at this point,” David Schlissel, a director at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told me. “Why waste our money on false hopes when we could be putting it towards technologies that have a real chance of working?”He may be right about the technology. But just because it might one day be technically feasible to power the entire grid with renewables doesn’t mean it will ever be politically feasible. That’s because wind and solar require land—a lot of land. According to Princeton University’s “Net-Zero America” study, reaching net-zero emissions with renewables alone would involve placing solar panels on land equivalent to the area of Virginia and setting up wind farms spanning an area equivalent to Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma combined. The more land you need, the more you run into the meat grinder of American NIMBYism. Efforts to build renewables are already getting bogged down by local opposition, costly lawsuits, and permitting delays. These challenges will only intensify as the easiest sites come off the board.Transmission lines, which are needed to transport renewable energy from where it’s generated to where it’s used, may present an even bigger challenge. Some lines have taken nearly two decades just to receive their full suite of approvals. “There’s a chance we will suddenly get our act together and overcome the many, many constraints to deploying renewables,” Jesse Jenkins, who leads the Princeton Zero-Carbon Energy Systems Research and Optimization Lab, told me. “But I’m certainly not willing to bet the fate of the planet on that happening.”The case for nuclear, then, is less about technological possibilities than it is about political realities. Nuclear can generate the same amount of power while using 1/30th as much land as solar and about 1/200th as much as wind. Reactors can be built anywhere, not just in areas with lots of natural wind and sunshine, eliminating the need for huge transmission lines and making it easier to select sites without as much local opposition. And nuclear plants happen to generate the greatest number of high-paying jobs of any energy source, by far. (On average, they employ six times as many workers as an equivalent wind or solar project does and pay those workers 50 percent more.) That helps explain why four different towns in Wyoming recently fought over the right to host a nuclear project. Nuclear power is also the only energy source with overwhelming bipartisan support in Washington, which makes Congress more likely to address future bottlenecks and hurdles as they arise.[Brian Deese: The next front in the war against climate change]As for how to make the economics work, there are two schools of thought. One holds that if America forgot how to build nuclear because we stopped doing it, we just need to start back up. Pick a design, build lots of plants, and we’ll eventually get better. Other countries have done this with great success; South Korea, for instance, slashed the cost of constructing nuclear plants in half from 1971 to 2008. Here, the Vogtle project carries a silver lining: The second of the plant’s two reactors was about 30 percent cheaper to build than the first, because workers and project managers learned from their mistakes the first time around. “I consider Vogtle a success,” Mike Goff, acting assistant secretary for the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, told me. “We learned all kinds of hard lessons. Now we just need to apply them to future projects.”The second school of thought is that we’ve been building nuclear reactors the wrong way all along. This camp points out that over the past half century, basically every kind of major infrastructure project—highways, skyscrapers, subways—has gotten more expensive, whereas manufactured goods—TVs, solar panels, electric-vehicle batteries—have gotten cheaper. Lowering costs turns out to be much easier when a product is mass-produced on an assembly line than when it has to be built from scratch in the real world every single time. That’s why dozens of companies are now racing to build nuclear reactors that are, in a phrase I heard from multiple sources, “more like airplanes and less like airports.” Some are simply smaller versions of the reactors the U.S. used to build; others involve brand-new designs that are less likely to melt down and therefore don’t require nearly as much big, expensive equipment to operate safely. What unites them is a belief that the secret to making nuclear cheap is making it smaller, less complicated, and easier to mass-produce.Both paths remain unproven—so the Biden administration is placing bets on each of them. The president’s signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, included generous tax credits that could reduce the cost of a nuclear project by 30 to 50 percent, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law included $2.5 billion to fund the construction of two new reactors using original designs. The Department of Energy, meanwhile, is exploring different options for permanent nuclear-waste storage, investing in building a domestic supply chain for uranium, and helping companies navigate the process of getting reactor designs approved.There’s no guarantee that the U.S. will ever relearn the art of building nuclear energy efficiently. Betting on the future of atomic power requires a leap of faith. But America may have to take that leap, because the alternative is so much worse. “We just have to be successful,” Mike Goff told me. “Failure is not an option.”
The top things that piss off Americans may shock youA new survey asked Americans about all the things that have been grinding their gears in the past few months and saw one in two cite the cost of food and essentials as the most major annoyance.
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At Least Two Dead After Severe Weather Hits Texas and Oklahoma, Authorities SayAt least two people are dead after severe weather hit Texas and Oklahoma overnight, causing extensive damage and outages, authorities said.
Trump’s historic Bronx rally: Letters to the Editor — May 27, 2024The Issue: Former President Donald Trump’s historic 2024 presidential election rally in The Bronx. There must have been nearly 10,000 New Yorkers, if not more, present at former President Donald Trump’s rally in the Bronx last Thursday (“Boogie Don in Da Bx.,” May 24). They were shouting cheers of support for Trump’s pledge to repeat...
Trump’s historic Bronx rally: Letters to the Editor — May 27, 2024The Issue: Former President Donald Trump’s historic 2024 presidential election rally in The Bronx. There must have been nearly 10,000 New Yorkers, if not more, present at former President Donald Trump’s rally in the Bronx last Thursday (“Boogie Don in Da Bx.,” May 24). They were shouting cheers of support for Trump’s pledge to repeat...
Young pitchers star for UCLA softball's Women's College World series runKaitlyn Terry and Taylor Tinsley have played leading roles in helping UCLA win 13 consecutive games en route to a berth in the Women's College World Series.
Sick Cat Finds Forever Home After 3-Year-Old Girl Vows to Care for HerThe family were warned the cat was sick, but a toddler's love brought her back to good health.
Texas Woman Shares Reality of Driving in the UK—'What in the 1700s?'"I'll never forget driving on the left in a manual. I thought we'd die," the American expat told Newsweek.
20 years of Bennifer, explained HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA - FEBRUARY 13: Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez attend the Los Angeles Premiere Of Amazon MGM Studios "This Is Me...Now: A Love Story" at Dolby Theatre on February 13, 2024 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Lionel Hahn/WireImage) Just like the opening of Jennifer Lopez’s movie musical This Is Me… Now — where the multihyphenate’s unnamed character and the mysterious love of her life (played by and representing Ben Affleck) are thrown from a motorcycle in a crash that symbolically breaks her heart — the real Jennifer Lopez might be on the verge of a break up with the real Ben Affleck. According to tabloids, Lopez and Affleck are on the edge of divorce, living separately, and extremely unhappy with being married to each other. He allegedly wants to have a life away from the spotlight, and she can’t stop living in it. If this all sounds familiar, it’s because it’s all eerily similar to what happened 20 years ago when the couple, known as Bennifer, first broke up. After a magnetic first meeting on a movie set, the two began dating and quickly became one of the most sought-after celebrity couples. Gossip rags and paparazzi were there to capture their every breath. The couple eventually called it quits, blaming the outsize media attention for their demise. Based on what anonymous sources purported to be close to the couple have to say today, it feels like we’re once again back at the Bennifer precipice of 2004. Bennifer isn’t the first celebrity couple nor will they be the last, but they represent something rare in Hollywood: a real — and really dramatic — relationship. Something that wasn’t made for PR, but captures so, so much of it. They are two very famous people in love who have tried to live and love authentically in an industry where that’s extremely risky. Their relationship also reflects our fixation with realness and relatability: If they didn’t have either, we wouldn’t be so engrossed by them. Given the current media fervor, here’s a look at what the two represent — solo, together, split — that makes us so obsessed with them some 20 years later. The complete relationship timeline of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, a.k.a. Bennifer December 2001–November 2002: The birth of Bennifer Affleck and Lopez meet on the set of Gigli, which begins shooting in December 2001. Originally, Halle Berry had been offered Lopez’s role, but had to drop out due to scheduling conflict with 2003’s X-Men sequel X2. Lopez is married to backup dancer Chris Judd at the time, but files for divorce in summer 2002, ending their 10-month marriage. Lopez and Affleck officially begin dating shortly after. The media refers to the couple as “Bennifer,” a combination of their first names. Allegedly, director Kevin Smith coined the portmanteau while directing the two on the set of his movie Jersey Girl. Bennifer starts a trend of the media bestowing celebrity couples with mashed-up nicknames like Brangelina (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) and TomKat (Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes). On November 5, 2002, Lopez premieres her music video for “Jenny From the Block” on TRL. The video stars Affleck, and is about how Lopez and Affleck can’t find any privacy. They’re hounded by paparazzi at every turn. The video is also a flex because they are styled elegantly and doing glamorous things like hanging out on a yacht and lounging by the pool with a bottle of champagne. The gist: Everyone wants a piece of them because they’re the It couple. November 10, 2002: Bennifer’s engaged In an exclusive interview with ABC News’s Diane Sawyer, Lopez confirms that she and Affleck are engaged. At first, Lopez plays coy, telling Sawyer that the two were very “secure” in their relationship. According to ABC News, Lopez calls Affleck during a break in the interview, and they decide to go on the record about their engagement. Lopez tells Sawyer that Affleck’s proposal “was traditional, but also in a very spectacular way, as of course Ben would do it.” August 2003–January 2004: Bennifer bombs out Bennifer is now the most famous couple in Hollywood that isn’t married. Tabloids love them. Their wedding plans are in every magazine. Her engagement ring, a Harry Winston pink diamond the size of a meteorite, seems to have its own gravitational pull. The wedding is reportedly going to be a gigantic, multimillion-dollar Hollywood affair. The plan is to tie the knot in September, right after the August release of Gigli, the movie the two worked on together. People ostensibly want to see Gigli to witness the spark that created Bennifer, captured onscreen. Gigli, unfortunately, turns out to be an awful film, one of the worst movies that a group of humans has ever created. Critics ravage the often offensive idiocy of the script, its flat camera work, and its supernatural ability to bore. It flops at the box office, bringing in only $7 million worldwide. Every tabloid focuses on how Bennifer was handling Gigli’s absolute failure. Then in early August, Affleck visits Brandi’s Exotic Nightclub in Vancouver, Canada. Reportedly Lopez is upset, but through their spokespeople, the couple says everything is fine and that he had always planned to go to the strip club. Whispers of Lopez’s uneasiness sharpen into tabloids declaring that there is trouble in paradise, and Bennifer is rapidly deteriorating ahead of their storybook wedding. Days before the ceremony, post-Gigli and post-Brandi’s, the couple sends an announcement officially postponing their nuptials. “Due to the excessive media attention surrounding our wedding, we have decided to postpone the date,” Lopez and Affleck say in a joint statement. “We felt what should have been a joyful and sacred day could be spoiled for us, our families and our friends.” The couple officially calls it quits in January 2004. January 2004–April 2021: The solo days (kind of) Apart, the couple moves on. Lopez marries singer Marc Anthony in June 2004; the two have twins in 2008, but divorce in 2014. In 2019, she gets engaged to former Yankee Alex Rodriguez, breaking up in early 2021. As of early 2021, her career is on the up, as she stars in Hustlers and performs at the Super Bowl. Affleck marries actor Jennifer Garner (a Bennifer reboot, of sorts, with new casting) in June 2005, and they have three children. After his public struggles with alcoholism, their divorce is finalized in 2018. Affleck’s career over this period is a little more uneven, with high highs and low lows — Argo, which he directed, wins the Best Picture Oscar in 2012, but he also becomes the reluctant hero of inescapable, existential sadness. April 2021: Bennifer reunites In April 2021 — the same month that Lopez and Alex Rodriguez announce they’ve broken up — the pair reunite, reportedly after Affleck provides a glowing quote for an InStyle profile about Lopez. Lopez visits Affleck in Montana in early May, which is a big deal because that is allegedly one of Affleck’s most favorite places on Earth. According to unnamed sources, the reunion between the two is intense and the chemistry between Lopez and Affleck is, like the first time, indescribably strong. The public is rooting for the Bennifer reunion. Perhaps it’s the post-pandemic-lockdown earnestness or remorse over the general schadenfreude we seemed to feel at the end of Bennifer 1.0, but there’s a feeling that these two are good for each other. Her resurgent success is just what Sad Affleck needs. Post-A-Rod, Sad Affleck’s secluded life is just what Lopez needs. In a world that doesn’t make much sense, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez being together does. April 2022–February 2023: Bennifer engaged (again) and finally married Around a year after Bennifer reunite, the pair informs the public — via People — that they are engaged in April 2022. Lopez also teases the news in her personal newsletter OnTheJLo. A few months later, in July, the two marry in Las Vegas. The wedding is the complete opposite of the one the couple postponed and never had 18 years earlier. Instead of a full-blown, glitzy affair, the ceremony happened on a seemingly random Saturday in Sin City, taking the public by surprise. The small, unannounced, private nuptials seem to symbolically suggest that Affleck and Lopez realized the deleterious effects of media hoopla from 2004 — that they have grown up and are doing things on their own terms. The wedding adds to the idea that, this time, Bennifer are two people who have learned lessons about love and life and are determined to make it work. They seem more destined than ever. In August, the two have a second wedding ceremony in Georgia. “We moved in together, the kids moved in together, so it’s been like a really kind of emotional transition,” Lopez tells People about her 2022. “But at the same time … all your dreams coming true, it’s just been a phenomenal year.” February 2023–February 2024: The honeymoon phase The way Affleck makes Lopez happy and Lopez makes Affleck happy seems to be reflected in their public-facing personas. Affleck lands a Dunkin’ gig consisting of commercials that poke fun at his New England grump image (one includes Lopez). Sad Affleck would never make fun of himself like this. Only happy men have fun at their own expense. Meanwhile, Lopez not only launches and maintains a beauty line, but also begins work on an opus, seemingly ready to build upon the momentum from Hustlers and the Super Bowl. February 2024: This Is Them… Now The way Ben Affleck’s breath smells after drinking Dunkin’ coffee, the exact shade of his phoenix tattoo when it’s hit by the Los Angeles afternoon sun, the way his voice shifts up an octave when he talks about the funny thing Matt Damon just did — these are some of the intimate secrets that maybe only Jennifer Lopez will ever know. But if you ever wanted to know how loving Ben Affleck makes Jennifer Lopez feel, Lopez’s three-part This Is Me… Now multimedia experience exists to be consumed. In an album and a movie musical adaptation of the album (titled This Is Me… Now: A Love Story), Lopez figures her love affair with Affleck like a myth from the ancient world: She compares them to Alida and Taroo, lovers from a Puerto Rican legend separated by fate and feuding families. Her first breakup with Affleck is reflected in a physically catastrophic motorcycle crash that breaks Lopez’s “heart factory,” a steampunk-styled industrial foundry full of workers whose job it is to feed Lopez’s mechanical organ rose petals so that she can continue to love. With the help of a zodiac council (featuring Jane Fonda as Sagittarius), archetypal friends, a therapist played by Fat Joe, and a visit to the Bronx where Lopez meets her younger self and a hummingbird, her romantic cardiac complex is restored. With her heart machine full of rose petals, Lopez is ready to love Affleck when he enters her life again. Because she loves him now with a full understanding of herself, the motorcycle — the avatar of their love — does not crash. At the same time, Lopez releases the movie’s documentary accompaniment, The Greatest Love Story Never Told — all about the money she spent to tell us how in love she is with Ben Affleck. As Lopez explains, she had to spend roughly $20 million of her own money to make the film because studios and streamers were not interested in the allegorical retelling of her marriage. The doc, which some critics say is an example of Lopez’s blazing narcissism, makes a case that the only thing that Lopez loves more than Affleck is being able to tell the world about Affleck. Lopez doesn’t seem to care whether that is what the world wants from her. “It’s not like anyone is clamoring for the next J.Lo record,” Lopez tells the camera person in a moment of blistering self-awareness, before using the film’s other 85 minutes to spend a small fortune to not only give people that record, but an album and two films that no one is “clamoring” for. The most prescient and icy observation in the film, though, belongs to Affleck. It’s about his wife’s need for fame. He likens her constant performance — whether it’s acting, singing, dancing, playing the Super Bowl halftime show, or even making this documentary — to an addiction. “The thing you discover, like you do … with alcohol, is that there isn’t enough alcohol in all the liquor stores in the world to fill up that thing,” he says, astutely connecting Lopez’s need for celebrity to his own battle with drinking. “And I think in Jennifer’s case, I don’t think there’s enough followers or — or movies or records or any of that stuff — to still that part of you,” he adds. While promoting her films, Lopez talks about her reservations about having Affleck participate in the doc. He had told her that revealing so much of her personal life was not a choice he would make. She says that including him in the doc and showing his personal feelings — like that addiction comparison — was frightening but necessary. “I told him he was crazy, not me. But I know that I’m a crazy one. I get that part,” she tells a Los Angeles audience in February. “But I really feel like as an artist, you have to be vulnerable. You have to, even when you’re playing a role, have to get down to the real parts of yourself to share what it’s like to be human. And that is a scary thing to do.” Lopez’s multimedia art project turns out to be a bust. Even though the movie musical received surprisingly good reviews, it failed to have a lasting impact. The album is the lowest charting one of her career, and her accompanying arena tour suffered dismal ticket sales. As Variety reports, Lopez rebranded the concert as a greatest hits show in an effort to sell more seats. The timing of Lopez’s magnum opus flopping is strangely akin to the way Gigli took a nosedive when Affleck and Lopez were together in 2004. May 2024: Bennifer separation rumors begin (again) In the celebrity tabloid world, people are paid to watch certain famous people’s every move. According to a People magazine report this month, Bennifer has not been photographed together for 47 days. There are also reports that the two are currently living apart, and even though Lopez was recently photographed with a wedding ring on, the undertone was that she was doing it to hopefully quash the insistent rumors that they’re going through a rough patch. Through a variety of unnamed sources, the problem between the two is, once again, the ongoing attention from the media. A source told Entertainment Tonight that Affleck feels as though his wife is too engaged with being a celebrity. “Ben feels like Jen has a hard time feeling satisfied and that’s one of the issues they’re facing,” the anonymous source told ET. “Ben is one of the only people who feels comfortable enough to be honest and real with Jen. It’s part of why Jen loves him, but also why she’s upset with him.” That quote is extremely similar to what Affleck said in the documentary: that no amount of attention or praise is ever going to be enough for his wife. It’s also aligned with the ongoing narrative about Affleck and Lopez. He wants a quiet life away from the spotlight. She wants to be a star. Another anonymous source echoed that statement with People, telling the mag: “She likes to open her heart to her fans and to the world. He is more introspective and private. This has been difficult day-to-day.” The outlook for the two doesn’t look good. Page Six had a scathing quote from an insider, asserting that Affleck is just about done: “If there was a way to divorce on grounds of temporary insanity, he would. … He feels like the last two years were just a fever dream, and he’s come to his senses now and understands there is just no way this is going to work.” Neither Affleck nor Lopez have officially commented on the state of their relationship. Lopez was asked about divorce rumors though as she’s on a promotional tour for her sci-fi movie Atlas. She dismissed the question, saying it was inappropriate. Why we care so much about Bennifer Hollywood is an industry where we don’t see many people genuinely be themselves. Actors make a living and win awards on how convincing they are playing someone else. From auditions to promotional tours, they’re constantly selling themselves, luring people to buy into their public personas. And while it seems like we have more access to celebrities’ personal lives than ever — everyone is on Instagram at this point — it’s an illusion that masks how curated these people’s lives are and how carefully they’re presenting themselves to the public. The thing about Bennifer is that it genuinely feels like Affleck and Lopez do love each other in a very authentic way. After the first go-around, their agents, managers, and inner circles would have advised them against getting into a relationship because that’s not good business. Why would someone with a logical mind risk going through another round of bad press and harsh scrutiny? Why would someone spend $20 million of their own money making a movie about getting back together? Why would someone who hates the spotlight publicly get married to one of the most famous women in the world and star in her documentary about them? And to risk this all for it to possibly blow up in your face? Again? That has to be love, right? Despite the millions of dollars and awards and homes in Montana, this makes Bennifer strangely relatable. So many people were so invested in them getting back together because, despite the trappings, it feels like a love story that could happen to anyone: getting a second chance with your soulmate because you’ve both learned from your past mistakes. Their story is enough to make us wistful for a romance we’ve had or maybe even ones that we haven’t had yet. Tough times are relatable, too. While a fairytale reunion with the one that got away can be a story that resonates, so can the experience of getting back with an ex only to have it implode. Loving someone immensely is different from having a loving relationship with them. Perhaps we don’t always change and learn from our mistakes. Watching it play out with Affleck and Lopez just makes it all that much clearer. And we can’t stop watching because we need to see how — and if — it all ends.
20 years of Bennifer, explained HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA - FEBRUARY 13: Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez attend the Los Angeles Premiere Of Amazon MGM Studios "This Is Me...Now: A Love Story" at Dolby Theatre on February 13, 2024 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Lionel Hahn/WireImage) Just like the opening of Jennifer Lopez’s movie musical This Is Me… Now — where the multihyphenate’s unnamed character and the mysterious love of her life (played by and representing Ben Affleck) are thrown from a motorcycle in a crash that symbolically breaks her heart — the real Jennifer Lopez might be on the verge of a break up with the real Ben Affleck. According to tabloids, Lopez and Affleck are on the edge of divorce, living separately, and extremely unhappy with being married to each other. He allegedly wants to have a life away from the spotlight, and she can’t stop living in it. If this all sounds familiar, it’s because it’s all eerily similar to what happened 20 years ago when the couple, known as Bennifer, first broke up. After a magnetic first meeting on a movie set, the two began dating and quickly became one of the most sought-after celebrity couples. Gossip rags and paparazzi were there to capture their every breath. The couple eventually called it quits, blaming the outsize media attention for their demise. Based on what anonymous sources purported to be close to the couple have to say today, it feels like we’re once again back at the Bennifer precipice of 2004. Bennifer isn’t the first celebrity couple nor will they be the last, but they represent something rare in Hollywood: a real — and really dramatic — relationship. Something that wasn’t made for PR, but captures so, so much of it. They are two very famous people in love who have tried to live and love authentically in an industry where that’s extremely risky. Their relationship also reflects our fixation with realness and relatability: If they didn’t have either, we wouldn’t be so engrossed by them. Given the current media fervor, here’s a look at what the two represent — solo, together, split — that makes us so obsessed with them some 20 years later. The complete relationship timeline of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, a.k.a. Bennifer December 2001–November 2002: The birth of Bennifer Affleck and Lopez meet on the set of Gigli, which begins shooting in December 2001. Originally, Halle Berry had been offered Lopez’s role, but had to drop out due to scheduling conflict with 2003’s X-Men sequel X2. Lopez is married to backup dancer Chris Judd at the time, but files for divorce in summer 2002, ending their 10-month marriage. Lopez and Affleck officially begin dating shortly after. The media refers to the couple as “Bennifer,” a combination of their first names. Allegedly, director Kevin Smith coined the portmanteau while directing the two on the set of his movie Jersey Girl. Bennifer starts a trend of the media bestowing celebrity couples with mashed-up nicknames like Brangelina (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) and TomKat (Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes). On November 5, 2002, Lopez premieres her music video for “Jenny From the Block” on TRL. The video stars Affleck, and is about how Lopez and Affleck can’t find any privacy. They’re hounded by paparazzi at every turn. The video is also a flex because they are styled elegantly and doing glamorous things like hanging out on a yacht and lounging by the pool with a bottle of champagne. The gist: Everyone wants a piece of them because they’re the It couple. November 10, 2002: Bennifer’s engaged In an exclusive interview with ABC News’s Diane Sawyer, Lopez confirms that she and Affleck are engaged. At first, Lopez plays coy, telling Sawyer that the two were very “secure” in their relationship. According to ABC News, Lopez calls Affleck during a break in the interview, and they decide to go on the record about their engagement. Lopez tells Sawyer that Affleck’s proposal “was traditional, but also in a very spectacular way, as of course Ben would do it.” August 2003–January 2004: Bennifer bombs out Bennifer is now the most famous couple in Hollywood that isn’t married. Tabloids love them. Their wedding plans are in every magazine. Her engagement ring, a Harry Winston pink diamond the size of a meteorite, seems to have its own gravitational pull. The wedding is reportedly going to be a gigantic, multimillion-dollar Hollywood affair. The plan is to tie the knot in September, right after the August release of Gigli, the movie the two worked on together. People ostensibly want to see Gigli to witness the spark that created Bennifer, captured onscreen. Gigli, unfortunately, turns out to be an awful film, one of the worst movies that a group of humans has ever created. Critics ravage the often offensive idiocy of the script, its flat camera work, and its supernatural ability to bore. It flops at the box office, bringing in only $7 million worldwide. Every tabloid focuses on how Bennifer was handling Gigli’s absolute failure. Then in early August, Affleck visits Brandi’s Exotic Nightclub in Vancouver, Canada. Reportedly Lopez is upset, but through their spokespeople, the couple says everything is fine and that he had always planned to go to the strip club. Whispers of Lopez’s uneasiness sharpen into tabloids declaring that there is trouble in paradise, and Bennifer is rapidly deteriorating ahead of their storybook wedding. Days before the ceremony, post-Gigli and post-Brandi’s, the couple sends an announcement officially postponing their nuptials. “Due to the excessive media attention surrounding our wedding, we have decided to postpone the date,” Lopez and Affleck say in a joint statement. “We felt what should have been a joyful and sacred day could be spoiled for us, our families and our friends.” The couple officially calls it quits in January 2004. January 2004–April 2021: The solo days (kind of) Apart, the couple moves on. Lopez marries singer Marc Anthony in June 2004; the two have twins in 2008, but divorce in 2014. In 2019, she gets engaged to former Yankee Alex Rodriguez, breaking up in early 2021. As of early 2021, her career is on the up, as she stars in Hustlers and performs at the Super Bowl. Affleck marries actor Jennifer Garner (a Bennifer reboot, of sorts, with new casting) in June 2005, and they have three children. After his public struggles with alcoholism, their divorce is finalized in 2018. Affleck’s career over this period is a little more uneven, with high highs and low lows — Argo, which he directed, wins the Best Picture Oscar in 2012, but he also becomes the reluctant hero of inescapable, existential sadness. April 2021: Bennifer reunites In April 2021 — the same month that Lopez and Alex Rodriguez announce they’ve broken up — the pair reunite, reportedly after Affleck provides a glowing quote for an InStyle profile about Lopez. Lopez visits Affleck in Montana in early May, which is a big deal because that is allegedly one of Affleck’s most favorite places on Earth. According to unnamed sources, the reunion between the two is intense and the chemistry between Lopez and Affleck is, like the first time, indescribably strong. The public is rooting for the Bennifer reunion. Perhaps it’s the post-pandemic-lockdown earnestness or remorse over the general schadenfreude we seemed to feel at the end of Bennifer 1.0, but there’s a feeling that these two are good for each other. Her resurgent success is just what Sad Affleck needs. Post-A-Rod, Sad Affleck’s secluded life is just what Lopez needs. In a world that doesn’t make much sense, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez being together does. April 2022–February 2023: Bennifer engaged (again) and finally married Around a year after Bennifer reunite, the pair informs the public — via People — that they are engaged in April 2022. Lopez also teases the news in her personal newsletter OnTheJLo. A few months later, in July, the two marry in Las Vegas. The wedding is the complete opposite of the one the couple postponed and never had 18 years earlier. Instead of a full-blown, glitzy affair, the ceremony happened on a seemingly random Saturday in Sin City, taking the public by surprise. The small, unannounced, private nuptials seem to symbolically suggest that Affleck and Lopez realized the deleterious effects of media hoopla from 2004 — that they have grown up and are doing things on their own terms. The wedding adds to the idea that, this time, Bennifer are two people who have learned lessons about love and life and are determined to make it work. They seem more destined than ever. In August, the two have a second wedding ceremony in Georgia. “We moved in together, the kids moved in together, so it’s been like a really kind of emotional transition,” Lopez tells People about her 2022. “But at the same time … all your dreams coming true, it’s just been a phenomenal year.” February 2023–February 2024: The honeymoon phase The way Affleck makes Lopez happy and Lopez makes Affleck happy seems to be reflected in their public-facing personas. Affleck lands a Dunkin’ gig consisting of commercials that poke fun at his New England grump image (one includes Lopez). Sad Affleck would never make fun of himself like this. Only happy men have fun at their own expense. Meanwhile, Lopez not only launches and maintains a beauty line, but also begins work on an opus, seemingly ready to build upon the momentum from Hustlers and the Super Bowl. February 2024: This Is Them… Now The way Ben Affleck’s breath smells after drinking Dunkin’ coffee, the exact shade of his phoenix tattoo when it’s hit by the Los Angeles afternoon sun, the way his voice shifts up an octave when he talks about the funny thing Matt Damon just did — these are some of the intimate secrets that maybe only Jennifer Lopez will ever know. But if you ever wanted to know how loving Ben Affleck makes Jennifer Lopez feel, Lopez’s three-part This Is Me… Now multimedia experience exists to be consumed. In an album and a movie musical adaptation of the album (titled This Is Me… Now: A Love Story), Lopez figures her love affair with Affleck like a myth from the ancient world: She compares them to Alida and Taroo, lovers from a Puerto Rican legend separated by fate and feuding families. Her first breakup with Affleck is reflected in a physically catastrophic motorcycle crash that breaks Lopez’s “heart factory,” a steampunk-styled industrial foundry full of workers whose job it is to feed Lopez’s mechanical organ rose petals so that she can continue to love. With the help of a zodiac council (featuring Jane Fonda as Sagittarius), archetypal friends, a therapist played by Fat Joe, and a visit to the Bronx where Lopez meets her younger self and a hummingbird, her romantic cardiac complex is restored. With her heart machine full of rose petals, Lopez is ready to love Affleck when he enters her life again. Because she loves him now with a full understanding of herself, the motorcycle — the avatar of their love — does not crash. At the same time, Lopez releases the movie’s documentary accompaniment, The Greatest Love Story Never Told — all about the money she spent to tell us how in love she is with Ben Affleck. As Lopez explains, she had to spend roughly $20 million of her own money to make the film because studios and streamers were not interested in the allegorical retelling of her marriage. The doc, which some critics say is an example of Lopez’s blazing narcissism, makes a case that the only thing that Lopez loves more than Affleck is being able to tell the world about Affleck. Lopez doesn’t seem to care whether that is what the world wants from her. “It’s not like anyone is clamoring for the next J.Lo record,” Lopez tells the camera person in a moment of blistering self-awareness, before using the film’s other 85 minutes to spend a small fortune to not only give people that record, but an album and two films that no one is “clamoring” for. The most prescient and icy observation in the film, though, belongs to Affleck. It’s about his wife’s need for fame. He likens her constant performance — whether it’s acting, singing, dancing, playing the Super Bowl halftime show, or even making this documentary — to an addiction. “The thing you discover, like you do … with alcohol, is that there isn’t enough alcohol in all the liquor stores in the world to fill up that thing,” he says, astutely connecting Lopez’s need for celebrity to his own battle with drinking. “And I think in Jennifer’s case, I don’t think there’s enough followers or — or movies or records or any of that stuff — to still that part of you,” he adds. While promoting her films, Lopez talks about her reservations about having Affleck participate in the doc. He had told her that revealing so much of her personal life was not a choice he would make. She says that including him in the doc and showing his personal feelings — like that addiction comparison — was frightening but necessary. “I told him he was crazy, not me. But I know that I’m a crazy one. I get that part,” she tells a Los Angeles audience in February. “But I really feel like as an artist, you have to be vulnerable. You have to, even when you’re playing a role, have to get down to the real parts of yourself to share what it’s like to be human. And that is a scary thing to do.” Lopez’s multimedia art project turns out to be a bust. Even though the movie musical received surprisingly good reviews, it failed to have a lasting impact. The album is the lowest charting one of her career, and her accompanying arena tour suffered dismal ticket sales. As Variety reports, Lopez rebranded the concert as a greatest hits show in an effort to sell more seats. The timing of Lopez’s magnum opus flopping is strangely akin to the way Gigli took a nosedive when Affleck and Lopez were together in 2004. May 2024: Bennifer separation rumors begin (again) In the celebrity tabloid world, people are paid to watch certain famous people’s every move. According to a People magazine report this month, Bennifer has not been photographed together for 47 days. There are also reports that the two are currently living apart, and even though Lopez was recently photographed with a wedding ring on, the undertone was that she was doing it to hopefully quash the insistent rumors that they’re going through a rough patch. Through a variety of unnamed sources, the problem between the two is, once again, the ongoing attention from the media. A source told Entertainment Tonight that Affleck feels as though his wife is too engaged with being a celebrity. “Ben feels like Jen has a hard time feeling satisfied and that’s one of the issues they’re facing,” the anonymous source told ET. “Ben is one of the only people who feels comfortable enough to be honest and real with Jen. It’s part of why Jen loves him, but also why she’s upset with him.” That quote is extremely similar to what Affleck said in the documentary: that no amount of attention or praise is ever going to be enough for his wife. It’s also aligned with the ongoing narrative about Affleck and Lopez. He wants a quiet life away from the spotlight. She wants to be a star. Another anonymous source echoed that statement with People, telling the mag: “She likes to open her heart to her fans and to the world. He is more introspective and private. This has been difficult day-to-day.” The outlook for the two doesn’t look good. Page Six had a scathing quote from an insider, asserting that Affleck is just about done: “If there was a way to divorce on grounds of temporary insanity, he would. … He feels like the last two years were just a fever dream, and he’s come to his senses now and understands there is just no way this is going to work.” Neither Affleck nor Lopez have officially commented on the state of their relationship. Lopez was asked about divorce rumors though as she’s on a promotional tour for her sci-fi movie Atlas. She dismissed the question, saying it was inappropriate. Why we care so much about Bennifer Hollywood is an industry where we don’t see many people genuinely be themselves. Actors make a living and win awards on how convincing they are playing someone else. From auditions to promotional tours, they’re constantly selling themselves, luring people to buy into their public personas. And while it seems like we have more access to celebrities’ personal lives than ever — everyone is on Instagram at this point — it’s an illusion that masks how curated these people’s lives are and how carefully they’re presenting themselves to the public. The thing about Bennifer is that it genuinely feels like Affleck and Lopez do love each other in a very authentic way. After the first go-around, their agents, managers, and inner circles would have advised them against getting into a relationship because that’s not good business. Why would someone with a logical mind risk going through another round of bad press and harsh scrutiny? Why would someone spend $20 million of their own money making a movie about getting back together? Why would someone who hates the spotlight publicly get married to one of the most famous women in the world and star in her documentary about them? And to risk this all for it to possibly blow up in your face? Again? That has to be love, right? Despite the millions of dollars and awards and homes in Montana, this makes Bennifer strangely relatable. So many people were so invested in them getting back together because, despite the trappings, it feels like a love story that could happen to anyone: getting a second chance with your soulmate because you’ve both learned from your past mistakes. Their story is enough to make us wistful for a romance we’ve had or maybe even ones that we haven’t had yet. Tough times are relatable, too. While a fairytale reunion with the one that got away can be a story that resonates, so can the experience of getting back with an ex only to have it implode. Loving someone immensely is different from having a loving relationship with them. Perhaps we don’t always change and learn from our mistakes. Watching it play out with Affleck and Lopez just makes it all that much clearer. And we can’t stop watching because we need to see how — and if — it all ends.
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What If Iran Already Has the Bomb?There’s rarely a dull moment in Iranian affairs. The past few months alone have seen clashes with Israel and Pakistan, and a helicopter crash that killed Iran’s president and foreign minister. But spectacular as these events are, the most important changes often happen gradually, by imperceptible degrees.One such change took a while to register but is now obvious to all: In a sharp departure from a years-long policy, Iran’s leading officials are now openly threatening to build and test a nuclear bomb.Earlier this month, Kamal Kharazi, a former foreign minister, said that Tehran had the capacity to build a bomb and that, if it faced existential threats, it could “change its nuclear doctrine.”“When Israel threatens other countries, they can’t sit silent,” he said in an interview with Al-Jazeera Arabic on May 9.To emphasize that this wasn’t a gaffe, he reiterated the position a few days later when he addressed an Iranian Arab conference in Tehran.Kharazi isn’t just any old diplomat. He heads a foreign-policy advisory body that reports directly to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who also appointed Kharazi to the regime’s Expediency Council. He would not have spoken without Khamenei’s blessing.[Read: Is Iran a country or a cause?]For Iranian officials to openly acknowledge the possibility that Iran could pursue a nuclear weapon is a momentous change and marks the collapse of a previous taboo. Western intelligence agencies unveiled Iran’s clandestine nuclear program in 2002. For many years after that, Tehran’s leaders emphatically insisted that this was a civilian effort with no military dimensions. Khamenei was even claimed to have issued a fatwa (an Islamic ruling) banning the possession and use of nuclear weapons, although, as the journalist Khosro Isfahani recently argued, whether such a ruling has ever existed is not actually clear.The fatwa was always a bit of a red herring anyway. Under the tenets of Shiite Islam, ayatollahs can revoke most rulings at will. “We can’t build a bomb because we have a fatwa” was thus never a convincing argument, even from a purely religious perspective.But the repeated invocation of the fatwa by Iranian officials did make boasting about a possible bomb taboo. This proscription held throughout the long years of Iran’s nuclear negotiations with the United States and five other powerful countries, which resulted in the landmark nuclear deal in 2015. Even after President Donald Trump quit that deal in 2018, and Iran reinvigorated its program, the Islamic Republic made no such threats for a while.Over the past couple years, however, Iranian officials have begun making sporadic comments insinuating a nuclear threat. In 2021, then–Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi told Western states that if they push Iran to become “a cornered cat,” they should expect it to behave like one: “If they push us to such directions, it’s not our fault,” he said, referencing the country’s nuclear intentions.The innuendo has been stripped away in recent weeks as numerous officials have made more direct threats similar to Kharazi’s. The list of those who have publicly bragged that Iran could build nukes now includes the head of the military unit in charge of safeguarding Iran’s nuclear installments, a leading nuclear physicist known to have played a key role in the program, and a former head of the nuclear agency.The more extreme version of the boast is that Iran already has nuclear weapons and just hasn’t tested them. A former member of Parliament’s foreign-policy committee made this claim on May 10.Last month, when Israel’s attacks on an Iranian consular building in Damascus led to an exchange of fire between the two countries, Iranian pro-regime commentators made statements that would have been unthinkable in the past. If the United Nations didn’t act against Israel, Iran should “leave all nuclear negotiations and reveal that beautiful Iranian boy,” a pro-regime analyst said, in an obvious reference to Little Boy, the type of atomic bomb the U.S. used on Hiroshima in 1945.“The Western intelligence entities were mistaken to think Iran won’t move toward a bomb under any conditions,” Mehdi Kharatian, the head of an Iranian think tank, said recently. Regime outlets now speak of Khamenei’s well-known “strategic patience” doctrine as having given way to “active deterrence,” allegedly evidenced by last month’s attacks on Israel, but with a seemingly deliberate echo of the language of nuclear deterrence.Experts will inevitably debate whether all of this is a bluff or an actual change in military doctrine. Understanding the Islamic Republic has always been as much an art as a science, and key to the endeavor is distinguishing between the regime’s bark and its bite. But whatever the true intentions of the regime’s bigwigs, the rhetorical shift matters on its own.For more than 20 years, Western intelligence agencies have believed that Iran shut down its nuclear program in 2003 and made no subsequent decision to build a nuclear bomb. In 2018, Israel was able to infiltrate Iran’s nuclear archives and examine much of their content. No finding seems to have emerged from this endeavor to significantly contradict the previous assessment of decision making in Tehran. The trouble, however, is that civil nuclear efforts can be “double purposed”—meaning that even without any specific work on weaponization, Iran’s nuclear advances have brought it dangerously close to producing a bomb.Under the 2015 deal, Iran had agreed to enrich uranium up to only 3.67 percent for a period of 15 years, thus keeping it far from the high-grades necessary for possible military use, and to cut its stockpile of already-enriched uranium by 98 percent. When the U.S. withdrew from the deal in 2018, Iran started gradually scaling up its program. Today, according to the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), it has more than 5,000 kilograms of enriched uranium, including more than 120 kilograms that are 60 percent pure, many times more than what’s necessary for most civil purposes and a very short step away from the necessary military grade. Not only is Iran the only nonnuclear weapons state in the world to have enriched uranium to such levels, but it already has enough material for at least three bombs.When he visited Iran last month, Rafael Grossi, the director general of the IAEA, said that the country was merely weeks, not months, away from bomb-making capacity. He also said that his agency didn’t have a full picture of the country’s program, meaning that it could be even more advanced. The assessment has been substantiated in a 112-page report that Grossi has prepared ahead of IAEA’s board of governors meeting next month in Vienna. If Iran is not able to satisfy the body that it is still abiding by its obligations to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, including granting adequate access to IAEA inspectors, it could face censure or be referred to the UN Security Council.Are we in a moment of acute crisis then?I’ve spent much of my adult life covering the Iranian nuclear issue, and I’ve seen many such moments come and go. There is often more to the situation than meets the eye. For months now, for example, Iran and the U.S. have been holding secret talks in Muscat, with the nuclear issue at their center. Perhaps something in this subtext also explains the bizarre condolences the U.S. offered for the passing of President Ebrahim Raisi, despite his well-known involvement in crimes against humanity.As the Washington-based analyst Karim Sadjadpour recently argued, Khamenei is 85 years old and unlikely to change his longtime strategy. Sadjadpour suggests that as long as Khamenei is alive, Tehran won’t attempt to build a bomb, but will continue to pursue the “Japan option,” which entails standing on the nuclear threshold without crossing it. Maybe the recent decision to break the rhetorical taboo is an attempt to formally declare Iran’s Japan posture: Tehran could hope that making its threshold status more explicit can deter a U.S. or Israeli attack.[Phillips Payson O’Brien: The growing incentive to go nuclear]Observers of the region will be forgiven if they find this explanation, though plausible, hardly reassuring, given Tehran’s disruptive ideology and vows to destroy Israel. Khamenei doubled down on those threats during Raisi’s funeral, when he met with the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and promised that the world would see a “disappearance of Israel” and its replacement with “Palestine, from the river to the sea.”And as terrible as Khamenei is, he often avoids direct confrontations. When he finally dies, Iran will see big changes; power will pass to others, likely including some within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. A rocky period will follow, with unforeseeable consequences. Whether in Riyadh, Tel Aviv, Abu Dhabi, or Washington, no one wants to see a volatile Tehran have access to nukes.In other words, the United States and others should still want to do all they can to scale back Iran’s nuclear program. The realist theoretician Kenneth Waltz famously mused that a nuclear Iran would actually help stabilize the region. But as even Waltz’s ideological successors admit, this is a gamble best not taken.
What If Iran Already Has the Bomb?There’s rarely a dull moment in Iranian affairs. The past few months alone have seen clashes with Israel and Pakistan, and a helicopter crash that killed Iran’s president and foreign minister. But spectacular as these events are, the most important changes often happen gradually, by imperceptible degrees.One such change took a while to register but is now obvious to all: In a sharp departure from a years-long policy, Iran’s leading officials are now openly threatening to build and test a nuclear bomb.Earlier this month, Kamal Kharazi, a former foreign minister, said that Tehran had the capacity to build a bomb and that, if it faced existential threats, it could “change its nuclear doctrine.”“When Israel threatens other countries, they can’t sit silent,” he said in an interview with Al-Jazeera Arabic on May 9.To emphasize that this wasn’t a gaffe, he reiterated the position a few days later when he addressed an Iranian Arab conference in Tehran.Kharazi isn’t just any old diplomat. He heads a foreign-policy advisory body that reports directly to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who also appointed Kharazi to the regime’s Expediency Council. He would not have spoken without Khamenei’s blessing.[Read: Is Iran a country or a cause?]For Iranian officials to openly acknowledge the possibility that Iran could pursue a nuclear weapon is a momentous change and marks the collapse of a previous taboo. Western intelligence agencies unveiled Iran’s clandestine nuclear program in 2002. For many years after that, Tehran’s leaders emphatically insisted that this was a civilian effort with no military dimensions. Khamenei was even claimed to have issued a fatwa (an Islamic ruling) banning the possession and use of nuclear weapons, although, as the journalist Khosro Isfahani recently argued, whether such a ruling has ever existed is not actually clear.The fatwa was always a bit of a red herring anyway. Under the tenets of Shiite Islam, ayatollahs can revoke most rulings at will. “We can’t build a bomb because we have a fatwa” was thus never a convincing argument, even from a purely religious perspective.But the repeated invocation of the fatwa by Iranian officials did make boasting about a possible bomb taboo. This proscription held throughout the long years of Iran’s nuclear negotiations with the United States and five other powerful countries, which resulted in the landmark nuclear deal in 2015. Even after President Donald Trump quit that deal in 2018, and Iran reinvigorated its program, the Islamic Republic made no such threats for a while.Over the past couple years, however, Iranian officials have begun making sporadic comments insinuating a nuclear threat. In 2021, then–Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi told Western states that if they push Iran to become “a cornered cat,” they should expect it to behave like one: “If they push us to such directions, it’s not our fault,” he said, referencing the country’s nuclear intentions.The innuendo has been stripped away in recent weeks as numerous officials have made more direct threats similar to Kharazi’s. The list of those who have publicly bragged that Iran could build nukes now includes the head of the military unit in charge of safeguarding Iran’s nuclear installments, a leading nuclear physicist known to have played a key role in the program, and a former head of the nuclear agency.The more extreme version of the boast is that Iran already has nuclear weapons and just hasn’t tested them. A former member of Parliament’s foreign-policy committee made this claim on May 10.Last month, when Israel’s attacks on an Iranian consular building in Damascus led to an exchange of fire between the two countries, Iranian pro-regime commentators made statements that would have been unthinkable in the past. If the United Nations didn’t act against Israel, Iran should “leave all nuclear negotiations and reveal that beautiful Iranian boy,” a pro-regime analyst said, in an obvious reference to Little Boy, the type of atomic bomb the U.S. used on Hiroshima in 1945.“The Western intelligence entities were mistaken to think Iran won’t move toward a bomb under any conditions,” Mehdi Kharatian, the head of an Iranian think tank, said recently. Regime outlets now speak of Khamenei’s well-known “strategic patience” doctrine as having given way to “active deterrence,” allegedly evidenced by last month’s attacks on Israel, but with a seemingly deliberate echo of the language of nuclear deterrence.Experts will inevitably debate whether all of this is a bluff or an actual change in military doctrine. Understanding the Islamic Republic has always been as much an art as a science, and key to the endeavor is distinguishing between the regime’s bark and its bite. But whatever the true intentions of the regime’s bigwigs, the rhetorical shift matters on its own.For more than 20 years, Western intelligence agencies have believed that Iran shut down its nuclear program in 2003 and made no subsequent decision to build a nuclear bomb. In 2018, Israel was able to infiltrate Iran’s nuclear archives and examine much of their content. No finding seems to have emerged from this endeavor to significantly contradict the previous assessment of decision making in Tehran. The trouble, however, is that civil nuclear efforts can be “double purposed”—meaning that even without any specific work on weaponization, Iran’s nuclear advances have brought it dangerously close to producing a bomb.Under the 2015 deal, Iran had agreed to enrich uranium up to only 3.67 percent for a period of 15 years, thus keeping it far from the high-grades necessary for possible military use, and to cut its stockpile of already-enriched uranium by 98 percent. When the U.S. withdrew from the deal in 2018, Iran started gradually scaling up its program. Today, according to the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), it has more than 5,000 kilograms of enriched uranium, including more than 120 kilograms that are 60 percent pure, many times more than what’s necessary for most civil purposes and a very short step away from the necessary military grade. Not only is Iran the only nonnuclear weapons state in the world to have enriched uranium to such levels, but it already has enough material for at least three bombs.When he visited Iran last month, Rafael Grossi, the director general of the IAEA, said that the country was merely weeks, not months, away from bomb-making capacity. He also said that his agency didn’t have a full picture of the country’s program, meaning that it could be even more advanced. The assessment has been substantiated in a 112-page report that Grossi has prepared ahead of IAEA’s board of governors meeting next month in Vienna. If Iran is not able to satisfy the body that it is still abiding by its obligations to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, including granting adequate access to IAEA inspectors, it could face censure or be referred to the UN Security Council.Are we in a moment of acute crisis then?I’ve spent much of my adult life covering the Iranian nuclear issue, and I’ve seen many such moments come and go. There is often more to the situation than meets the eye. For months now, for example, Iran and the U.S. have been holding secret talks in Muscat, with the nuclear issue at their center. Perhaps something in this subtext also explains the bizarre condolences the U.S. offered for the passing of President Ebrahim Raisi, despite his well-known involvement in crimes against humanity.As the Washington-based analyst Karim Sadjadpour recently argued, Khamenei is 85 years old and unlikely to change his longtime strategy. Sadjadpour suggests that as long as Khamenei is alive, Tehran won’t attempt to build a bomb, but will continue to pursue the “Japan option,” which entails standing on the nuclear threshold without crossing it. Maybe the recent decision to break the rhetorical taboo is an attempt to formally declare Iran’s Japan posture: Tehran could hope that making its threshold status more explicit can deter a U.S. or Israeli attack.[Phillips Payson O’Brien: The growing incentive to go nuclear]Observers of the region will be forgiven if they find this explanation, though plausible, hardly reassuring, given Tehran’s disruptive ideology and vows to destroy Israel. Khamenei doubled down on those threats during Raisi’s funeral, when he met with the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and promised that the world would see a “disappearance of Israel” and its replacement with “Palestine, from the river to the sea.”And as terrible as Khamenei is, he often avoids direct confrontations. When he finally dies, Iran will see big changes; power will pass to others, likely including some within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. A rocky period will follow, with unforeseeable consequences. Whether in Riyadh, Tel Aviv, Abu Dhabi, or Washington, no one wants to see a volatile Tehran have access to nukes.In other words, the United States and others should still want to do all they can to scale back Iran’s nuclear program. The realist theoretician Kenneth Waltz famously mused that a nuclear Iran would actually help stabilize the region. But as even Waltz’s ideological successors admit, this is a gamble best not taken.
A Throwback Show That Stays RelevantThis is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Malcolm Ferguson, an assistant editor who has written about the case for Kwanzaa, and why he wishes his family would take up the holiday again.One of Malcolm’s favorite art pieces is Pool Parlor, by Jacob Lawrence, an exceptional example of the artist’s “dynamic cubism.” Lately, he and his friends have been discussing the merits of Challengers, and he recently started his first watch of Sex and the City. The Carrie-and-Big situation remains as confounding as ever, but he’s enjoyed learning about “the deep inner lives of white, 30-something women”—a perspective he admits knowing “very little about.”First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: Inside the decision to kill Iran’s Qassem Soleimani Mad Max’s George Miller is taking on the apocalypse (again). The big AI risk not enough people are seeing The Culture Survey: Malcolm FergusonA painting that I cherish: Pool Parlor, by Jacob Lawrence. Like most people, I was more familiar with Lawrence’s famous Migration Series, a much more raw, somber collection depicting mass African American flight from the South to the North. But Pool Parlor takes the same grim artistic elements—the dark shading, the rigidity, the aggressive and overstated angles of Lawrence’s “dynamic cubism”—and converts them into an easy, effortless work. I’ll probably hang this painting on my wall someday soon.The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I can’t bring myself to say that I’m fully enjoying this show, but Sex and the City currently has a surprisingly firm hold on me. As with The Sopranos, I initially felt that I’d already consumed much of the series passively, via memes and pop-culture references. But from the very beginning, it was obvious why Sex and the City has maintained such relevance, especially among Gen Zers such as myself. It’s like if a soap opera was actually cool and well produced. I’m currently at the start of Season 5, and I’ve noticed that the ensemble cast develops well; I appreciate that the focus slowly shifts away from Carrie as the seasons progress. (Speaking of, Big and Carrie are about as insufferable together as a main pairing could be. Why are they still friends?)Samantha’s and Charlotte’s converse storylines—Samantha giving in to love, Charlotte (temporarily) reclaiming her singlehood—are much more compelling to me right now. And the wardrobe is unreal: great fits all around. But more than anything, the show is an interesting study of the pre-smartphone romantic landscape, the pre-smartphone version of New York City, and the deep inner lives of white, 30-something women—a perspective I know very little about. [Related: And Just Like That addresses its Che Diaz problem.]My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: Although Reddit still has its fair share of dark and scary corners, I find that the sports Subreddits are a quick, accurate, and entertaining way to check the temperature of the most painfully obsessive and devout fans. The NBA Playoffs are happening right now, and a team’s Subreddit will have a live “game thread” for each game, where fans can gather and comment in real time. When a team I’m rooting against starts to collapse, I go straight to the Subreddit game thread to hate-watch fans’ lamentations from afar. It’s truly fun to witness internet communities of spoiled Lakers, Suns, and Heat fans go through the five stages of grief, especially when my team is too horrendous to even stress over. (Go Wizards.) I’ll be doing the same for the NFL when the Ravens start playing.The culture product my friends are talking about most right now: My friends shifted seamlessly from the Drake-and-Kendrick-beef discussion (Kendrick won) to the Challengers discussion. Everyone wants two boyfriends now … I thought that movie was about tennis! [Related: A sexy tennis thriller—yes, really]The last debate I had about culture: I wouldn’t call it a debate, but my roommate and I have been discussing how collective memory functions among historically persecuted groups, and it came up again at her Seder meal. She’s Jewish, and I’m African American, so there are plenty of catastrophic events and experiences between us to be memorialized and remembered each year. But what is the line between remembrance and self-victimization or self-othering? Does centering a history of pain and loss obscure the achievements? And what will we tell the generations that come after us, who are even further distanced from that suffering?I might be thinking about this forever. But right now, to me, the pain will always be important to remember and teach. We wouldn’t be here—I wouldn’t be here—without the scars of others. They inform us and our gains whether we like it or not. And although those scars fade, they never really disappear; they can often be reopened. To decenter them just doesn’t feel right.The last museum or gallery show that I loved: I visited the National Museum of Anthropology, in Mexico City, last month. It was startlingly beautiful inside and out, and there was a real emphasis on the traces of precolonial Mesoamerica in modern Mexico via art, food, and fashion. I was also struck by the concept of the Tlaltecuhtli, or “Earth Monster.” Some early Mesoamericans believed that the Earth was neither round nor flat, but a gargantuan turtle or alligator whose back they were riding on. I think that’s a very interesting way to perceive Earth, as this sentient, moving creature that we’re just clinging on to. (Honorable mention goes to the Simone Leigh sculpture exhibit, which I saw when it was at the Hirshhorn Museum, in Washington, D.C.)My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is a blockbuster that feels like everything a kid’s superhero movie is supposed to be: well paced and wonderfully animated, with some real meat to it plot-wise. The dynamic of choosing versus creating your own fate plays out over a diverse gaggle of Spider-people from many dimensions, and the cliff-hanger ending actually surprised me. [Related: A spidey sense we haven’t seen before]A thought-provoking art film is Nashville, directed by Robert Altman, the guy who also did M*A*S*H. This movie is hard to describe. It’s dense, sharp, grim yet funny, and incredibly American. It features about an hour’s worth of live folk, gospel, and country music, and 24 “main” characters, some of whom are gathered for the political fundraising of the presidential candidate for the Replacement Party. His character is unseen but heard, as his political messaging—and the film’s thesis—blares loudly throughout the city: All of us are deeply involved with politics whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not.A musical artist who means a lot to me: Roy Ayers, perhaps the most important figure in modern Black music. His work is a convergence of all my favorite genres. From his early, groovy stuff such as Stoned Soul Picnic and Vibrations to his ubiquity in early hip-hop sampling and his generation-linking feature on Tyler, the Creator’s 2015 track “Find Your Wings,” Ayers has made his mark on seemingly every stage and sound of Black music since the 1960s. I’m not sure where my taste would be without him.The Week Ahead Eric, a psychological-thriller miniseries starring Benedict Cumberbatch as a devastated father and puppeteer who searches for his missing 9-year-old son (premieres Thursday on Netflix) Young Woman and the Sea, a film based on the true story of the first woman to swim across the English Channel (in theaters Friday) Housemates, a novel by Emma Copley Eisenberg about two artistic housemates who go on a road trip of self-discovery (out Tuesday) Essay Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Sources: Fred Mullane / ISI Photos / Getty; Tullio Puglia / Getty; Matteo Ciambelli / Getty; Dan Istitene / Getty. The Unbearable Greatness of DjokovicBy Scott Stossel What is perhaps most intimidating about Djokovic is the steeliness of his nerve. The ice water in his veins gets chillier as the stakes get higher: The more important the point, the more likely he is to win it. The ATP keeps track of what it calls “pressure stats,” which measure performance on the highest-value, highest-stakes points (break points, tiebreakers, etc). Djokovic, unsurprisingly, has the highest ranking on the pressure-stats list among current players. But he also ranks highest all time by that metric, ahead of Pete Sampras, Nadal, and Federer. Before he lost a tiebreaker to Carlos Alcaraz in the Wimbledon championship last summer, Djokovic had won a staggering 15 straight tiebreakers in major tournaments. When everything is on the line, he rarely falters. Read the full article.More in Culture What’s really epic about Furiosa Tennis explains everything. The Brooklyn sequel asks the most American of questions about immigration. Hollywood’s most pessimistic blockbuster franchise The new sound of sexual frustration A powerful indictment of the art world Catch Up on The Atlantic Trump’s money problems are becoming a crisis for the entire country. The British prime minister bowed to the inevitable. New 9/11 evidence points to deep Saudi complicity. Photo Album A bear-safety demonstration at Yellowstone National Park (Jennifer Emerling) The photographer Jennifer Emerling had been to 22 national parks by the time she was 12 years old. Since then, she hasn’t stopped returning to photograph them. Here are some images from her many pilgrimages to the natural scenes of American beauty.Explore all of our newsletters.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
A Throwback Show That Stays RelevantThis is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Malcolm Ferguson, an assistant editor who has written about the case for Kwanzaa, and why he wishes his family would take up the holiday again.One of Malcolm’s favorite art pieces is Pool Parlor, by Jacob Lawrence, an exceptional example of the artist’s “dynamic cubism.” Lately, he and his friends have been discussing the merits of Challengers, and he recently started his first watch of Sex and the City. The Carrie-and-Big situation remains as confounding as ever, but he’s enjoyed learning about “the deep inner lives of white, 30-something women”—a perspective he admits knowing “very little about.”First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: Inside the decision to kill Iran’s Qassem Soleimani Mad Max’s George Miller is taking on the apocalypse (again). The big AI risk not enough people are seeing The Culture Survey: Malcolm FergusonA painting that I cherish: Pool Parlor, by Jacob Lawrence. Like most people, I was more familiar with Lawrence’s famous Migration Series, a much more raw, somber collection depicting mass African American flight from the South to the North. But Pool Parlor takes the same grim artistic elements—the dark shading, the rigidity, the aggressive and overstated angles of Lawrence’s “dynamic cubism”—and converts them into an easy, effortless work. I’ll probably hang this painting on my wall someday soon.The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I can’t bring myself to say that I’m fully enjoying this show, but Sex and the City currently has a surprisingly firm hold on me. As with The Sopranos, I initially felt that I’d already consumed much of the series passively, via memes and pop-culture references. But from the very beginning, it was obvious why Sex and the City has maintained such relevance, especially among Gen Zers such as myself. It’s like if a soap opera was actually cool and well produced. I’m currently at the start of Season 5, and I’ve noticed that the ensemble cast develops well; I appreciate that the focus slowly shifts away from Carrie as the seasons progress. (Speaking of, Big and Carrie are about as insufferable together as a main pairing could be. Why are they still friends?)Samantha’s and Charlotte’s converse storylines—Samantha giving in to love, Charlotte (temporarily) reclaiming her singlehood—are much more compelling to me right now. And the wardrobe is unreal: great fits all around. But more than anything, the show is an interesting study of the pre-smartphone romantic landscape, the pre-smartphone version of New York City, and the deep inner lives of white, 30-something women—a perspective I know very little about. [Related: And Just Like That addresses its Che Diaz problem.]My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: Although Reddit still has its fair share of dark and scary corners, I find that the sports Subreddits are a quick, accurate, and entertaining way to check the temperature of the most painfully obsessive and devout fans. The NBA Playoffs are happening right now, and a team’s Subreddit will have a live “game thread” for each game, where fans can gather and comment in real time. When a team I’m rooting against starts to collapse, I go straight to the Subreddit game thread to hate-watch fans’ lamentations from afar. It’s truly fun to witness internet communities of spoiled Lakers, Suns, and Heat fans go through the five stages of grief, especially when my team is too horrendous to even stress over. (Go Wizards.) I’ll be doing the same for the NFL when the Ravens start playing.The culture product my friends are talking about most right now: My friends shifted seamlessly from the Drake-and-Kendrick-beef discussion (Kendrick won) to the Challengers discussion. Everyone wants two boyfriends now … I thought that movie was about tennis! [Related: A sexy tennis thriller—yes, really]The last debate I had about culture: I wouldn’t call it a debate, but my roommate and I have been discussing how collective memory functions among historically persecuted groups, and it came up again at her Seder meal. She’s Jewish, and I’m African American, so there are plenty of catastrophic events and experiences between us to be memorialized and remembered each year. But what is the line between remembrance and self-victimization or self-othering? Does centering a history of pain and loss obscure the achievements? And what will we tell the generations that come after us, who are even further distanced from that suffering?I might be thinking about this forever. But right now, to me, the pain will always be important to remember and teach. We wouldn’t be here—I wouldn’t be here—without the scars of others. They inform us and our gains whether we like it or not. And although those scars fade, they never really disappear; they can often be reopened. To decenter them just doesn’t feel right.The last museum or gallery show that I loved: I visited the National Museum of Anthropology, in Mexico City, last month. It was startlingly beautiful inside and out, and there was a real emphasis on the traces of precolonial Mesoamerica in modern Mexico via art, food, and fashion. I was also struck by the concept of the Tlaltecuhtli, or “Earth Monster.” Some early Mesoamericans believed that the Earth was neither round nor flat, but a gargantuan turtle or alligator whose back they were riding on. I think that’s a very interesting way to perceive Earth, as this sentient, moving creature that we’re just clinging on to. (Honorable mention goes to the Simone Leigh sculpture exhibit, which I saw when it was at the Hirshhorn Museum, in Washington, D.C.)My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is a blockbuster that feels like everything a kid’s superhero movie is supposed to be: well paced and wonderfully animated, with some real meat to it plot-wise. The dynamic of choosing versus creating your own fate plays out over a diverse gaggle of Spider-people from many dimensions, and the cliff-hanger ending actually surprised me. [Related: A spidey sense we haven’t seen before]A thought-provoking art film is Nashville, directed by Robert Altman, the guy who also did M*A*S*H. This movie is hard to describe. It’s dense, sharp, grim yet funny, and incredibly American. It features about an hour’s worth of live folk, gospel, and country music, and 24 “main” characters, some of whom are gathered for the political fundraising of the presidential candidate for the Replacement Party. His character is unseen but heard, as his political messaging—and the film’s thesis—blares loudly throughout the city: All of us are deeply involved with politics whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not.A musical artist who means a lot to me: Roy Ayers, perhaps the most important figure in modern Black music. His work is a convergence of all my favorite genres. From his early, groovy stuff such as Stoned Soul Picnic and Vibrations to his ubiquity in early hip-hop sampling and his generation-linking feature on Tyler, the Creator’s 2015 track “Find Your Wings,” Ayers has made his mark on seemingly every stage and sound of Black music since the 1960s. I’m not sure where my taste would be without him.The Week Ahead Eric, a psychological-thriller miniseries starring Benedict Cumberbatch as a devastated father and puppeteer who searches for his missing 9-year-old son (premieres Thursday on Netflix) Young Woman and the Sea, a film based on the true story of the first woman to swim across the English Channel (in theaters Friday) Housemates, a novel by Emma Copley Eisenberg about two artistic housemates who go on a road trip of self-discovery (out Tuesday) Essay Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Sources: Fred Mullane / ISI Photos / Getty; Tullio Puglia / Getty; Matteo Ciambelli / Getty; Dan Istitene / Getty. The Unbearable Greatness of DjokovicBy Scott Stossel What is perhaps most intimidating about Djokovic is the steeliness of his nerve. The ice water in his veins gets chillier as the stakes get higher: The more important the point, the more likely he is to win it. The ATP keeps track of what it calls “pressure stats,” which measure performance on the highest-value, highest-stakes points (break points, tiebreakers, etc). Djokovic, unsurprisingly, has the highest ranking on the pressure-stats list among current players. But he also ranks highest all time by that metric, ahead of Pete Sampras, Nadal, and Federer. Before he lost a tiebreaker to Carlos Alcaraz in the Wimbledon championship last summer, Djokovic had won a staggering 15 straight tiebreakers in major tournaments. When everything is on the line, he rarely falters. Read the full article.More in Culture What’s really epic about Furiosa Tennis explains everything. The Brooklyn sequel asks the most American of questions about immigration. Hollywood’s most pessimistic blockbuster franchise The new sound of sexual frustration A powerful indictment of the art world Catch Up on The Atlantic Trump’s money problems are becoming a crisis for the entire country. The British prime minister bowed to the inevitable. New 9/11 evidence points to deep Saudi complicity. Photo Album A bear-safety demonstration at Yellowstone National Park (Jennifer Emerling) The photographer Jennifer Emerling had been to 22 national parks by the time she was 12 years old. Since then, she hasn’t stopped returning to photograph them. Here are some images from her many pilgrimages to the natural scenes of American beauty.Explore all of our newsletters.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
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