The founder of Chipotle wants to reinvent lunch with robots. Is that really a reinvention at all?

A new book explores the roots of our love for certain creatures—and our indifference toward many others.

Finding a matched donor has always been the major challenge. A drug has solved that problem.

In 2006, Oprah Winfrey couldn’t stop talking about The Secret. She devoted multiple episodes of her talk show to the franchise, which started as a kind of DVD seminar and later became a best-selling book. Its author, Rhonda Byrne, claimed to have stumbled upon an ancient principle, one that can teach anyone to manifest anything they want: money, health, better relationships. Winfrey retroactively credited its core philosophy for bringing her success, and her endorsement helped bring the book international fame: It has now sold more than 35 million copies. But in the era of endless scrolling, an author doesn’t necessarily need Winfrey’s stamp of approval. They just need TikTok.Keila Shaheen figured this out last year, when her self-published book The Shadow Work Journal began to dominate the app’s feeds. A slim volume, the book purports to help people unpack their “shadow” self—the repressed unconscious—through various activities. In video after video, TikTok users show themselves filling out its exercises and talk about the journal as if it has magical powers. They learn about Carl Jung’s model of the psyche. They circle terms related to their trauma. They heal their inner child! If you use a new coupon on TikTok Shop, the app’s new built-in store, you too can heal, for just a couple of bucks! they say. (Many of those posting earn a commission from each sale, but pay that no mind.)The journal has sold more than 600,000 copies on TikTok alone, and more than 1 million copies in total, a feat usually accomplished by the Prince Harrys and Colleen Hoovers of the world. Shaheen, a 25-year-old writer with a marketing background, is the new breakout star of the self-help genre. She even outsold Winfrey’s latest book.[Read: The 24-year-old who outsold Oprah this week]Her story began in an untraditional way: Here is a young author, plucked from obscurity by a powerful app’s algorithm during a conveniently timed e-commerce push and turned into a best-selling phenom. Yet her next chapter is following an expected arc. She has signed a multi-book deal with Simon & Schuster to bring an updated version of The Shadow Work Journal to new audiences. Specifically, she is working with the brand-new imprint Primero Sueño Press, which will launch her book as its “flagship,” Shaheen told me, in addition to releasing a new Spanish translation later this year. The self-help queen of TikTok is officially going mainstream.Shaheen’s arc, however unusual it seems, actually makes a lot of sense. We live in the age of therapy-speak; talking about one’s mental health isn’t as stigmatized as it once was. And yet a lot of people are still struggling. Teenagers—many of whom say they use the app “almost constantly”—are experiencing hopelessness and sadness at record highs. TikTok is known for authenticity, at least when compared with the picture-perfect posts on Instagram—it is supposed to be messier, more real. The kind of place where you’d talk about your struggles while in your sweatpants. The Shadow Work Journal isn’t the only such success on the platform. One of Shaheen’s other books, The Lucky Girl Journal—which teaches readers how to manifest their own good fortune, rather than leaving things up to chance—has sold more than 25,000 copies on the app’s store. Don’t Believe Everything You Think, a self-published volume by Joseph Nguyen, a mental-health content creator with little notoriety outside social media, has sold about 60,000 copies on TikTok, and is currently in the top 10 most sold books on Amazon.It’s boom times for self-help on social media. Kathleen Schmidt, who helped publicize The Secret and now runs a public-relations company (and writes the Substack newsletter Publishing Confidential), first heard about Nguyen’s book when her 16-year-old daughter asked for a copy. “I can see why it has caught on,” she told me. “It’s very simplistic, and it gives you big promises, like You’ll stop suffering, you’ll understand how to let go of anxiety, and all that.” A lot of self-help books, she explained, are too complicated or ask the reader to do too much; the more successful books tend to be accessible. If The Secret were published today, she argued, “it probably would have gone viral on TikTok and would have had somewhat of the same effect—but without Oprah.”[Read: TikTok is doing something very un-TikTok]With all of this in mind, I asked Shaheen why she’d made the decision to go a more traditional route. It was over Zoom, during a meet and greet set up by her publisher (and attended, as far as I could tell, by just me, one other writer, and some folks from her team). “I think I was just at a time and place where I couldn’t control what was going on,” she said, of all the attention last year, “and it was very overwhelming for me.” She realized that if she “wanted to continue helping people and grow the impact of this journal,” then she “would need help from a traditional publishing company.” She said she’d entertained offers from various publishers before settling on Primero Sueño Press, which will take over the production of her books. And anyway, her books will still be available for purchase on TikTok Shop.One publishing house she hadn’t heard from is 8th Note Press—which is owned by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance. It appears to have acquired three titles so far, and published its first book last month; a representative for TikTok told me that it has seen significant growth on TikTok Shop and success for a variety of books and book sellers, but did not comment on Shaheen’s decision to sign with a traditional publisher.Perhaps ByteDance has a little too much on its plate to prioritize courting authors. TikTok still faces the threat of a national ban in the United States. When defending itself in ads or before Congress, the app likes to tout how many small-business owners it supports—people like Shaheen. For some businesses, that’s definitely true. But with all the uncertainty about the platform’s future, a big, traditional publishing house can offer two things that never feel especially present on social media: stability and security. After all, Simon & Schuster has a pretty good track record. It publishes a little book called The Secret.

Over the course of World War II, countless challenges made basic transportation difficult, costly, and dangerous. The need for fast, efficient, and quiet ways of moving people from A to B—despite fuel shortages, damaged roads, and ongoing battles—led many soldiers and civilians to take advantage of bicycles as transport. Troops in some areas became more nimble, refugees used bikes to carry their family and belongings to safety, air-raid wardens could cover more ground on two wheels, and many civilians had no other options available. Gathered below are a handful of images of some of the many ways people put bicycles to use during the Second World War.

On a July weekend in Tijuana, in 1924, Caesar Cardini was in trouble. Prohibition was driving celebrities, rich people, and alcoholics across the border from San Diego, and Cardini’s highly popular Italian restaurant was swamped. Low on ingredients, or so the legend goes, he tossed together what he had on hand: romaine lettuce, Parmesan cheese, and croutons, dressed in a slurry of egg, oil, garlic, salt, Worcestershire sauce, and citrus juice. It was a perfect food.On a November evening in Brooklyn, in 2023, I was in trouble (hungry). I ordered a kale Caesar at a place I like. Instead, I got: a tangle of kale, pickled red onion, and “sweet and spicy almonds,” dressed in a thinnish, vaguely savory liquid and topped with a glob of crème fraîche roughly the size and vibe of a golf ball. It was a pretty weird food.We are living through an age of unchecked Caesar-salad fraud. Putative Caesars are dressed with yogurt or miso or tequila or lemongrass; they are served with zucchini, orange zest, pig ear, kimchi, poached duck egg, roasted fennel, fried chickpeas, buffalo-cauliflower fritters, tōgarashi-dusted rice crackers. They are missing anchovies, or croutons, or even lettuce. In October, the food magazine Delicious posted a list of “Caesar” recipes that included variations with bacon, maple syrup, and celery; asparagus, fava beans, smoked trout, and dill; and tandoori prawns, prosciutto, kale chips, and mung-bean sprouts. The so-called Caesar at Kitchen Mouse Cafe, in Los Angeles, includes “pickled carrot, radish & coriander seeds, garlicky croutons, crispy oyster mushrooms, lemon dressing.” Molly Baz is a chef, a cookbook author, and a bit of a Caesar obsessive—she owns a pair of sneakers with cae on one tongue and sal on the other—and she put it succinctly when she told me, “There’s been a lot of liberties taken, for better or for worse.”It’s all a little peculiar, at least in the sense that words are supposed to mean something. Imagine ordering a “hamburger” that contained a bun and some lettuce, with chicken, marinara sauce, and basil Mad-Libbed between. Or cacio e pepe with, say, carrots and Christmas ham. To be clear, modifying the Caesar isn’t fundamentally a bad thing, as long as the flavors resemble those of the original. Baz likes her Caesar with anchovies (traditional! controversial! correct!) but said she’s happy to swap in fish sauce, capers, or “other salty, briny things.” Jacob Sessoms, a restaurant chef in Asheville, North Carolina, told me he doesn’t mind an alternative green but draws the line at, say, pomegranate seeds. Jason Kaplan, the CEO of a restaurant-consulting firm in New York, doesn’t mind a miso Caesar. “Because of the saltiness and the complexity, because it’s a fermented soybean paste, you know?” he told me. “That doesn’t piss me off as much as somebody saying that ‘this is a Caesar salad,’ when clearly there’s nothing to say it’s even closely related.”The Caesar’s mission creep toward absurdity began long before the tequila and the fava beans. In fact, it has been going on for decades—first slowly, then quickly, swept along by and reflective of many of the biggest shifts in American dining. Michael Whiteman is a consultant whose firm helped open restaurants such as Windows on the World and the Rainbow Room, in New York. He remembers first seeing the Caesar start to meaningfully change about 40 years ago, when “hot things on cold things” became trendy among innovative California restaurants, and his friend James Beard returned from a trip out West raving about a Caesar topped with fried chicken livers. This was also, notably, the era of the power lunch, when restaurant chefs needed dishes that were hearty but still lunchtime-light, and quick to prepare. The chicken Caesar started appearing on menus, Whiteman told me, followed by the steak Caesar, and “it went downhill from there.”In the 1980s and ’90s, as advances in agriculture, shipping, and food culture increased Americans’ access to a variety of produce, chefs started swapping out the traditional romaine for whatever the leafy green of the moment was: little gem, arugula, frisée. At that point, the Caesar was still found mostly in Italian American and New American restaurants. But as “fusion” took hold and culinary nationalism abated, the Caesar became a staple of Mexican American and Asian American chain restaurants, zhuzhed up with tortilla strips or wontons for a mainstream dining public who wanted something different yet familiar.More recently, stunt food has come for the Caesar. “We’re living in a period of extreme eating, meaning extreme in terms of outlandish,” Whiteman told me, in which “innovation for its own sake” seems to be motivating chefs and restaurants up and down the price spectrum. Whiteman calls the resulting dishes “mutants.”[Read: How American cuisine became a melting pot]To some degree, the reason for all of this experimentation is obvious: Caesar salads—even bastardized ones—rock, and people want to buy them. “Isn’t it perhaps kind of the case that the Caesar salad might be close to the perfect dish?” Sessoms said. “It hits all of your dopamine receptors that are palate related, with umami, fat, and tons of salt.”The Caesar is a crowd-pleaser salad, a name-brand salad, a safe-bet salad. It’s also a format that allows for a sort of low-stakes novelty. That helps explain the rise of the fake Caesar too. Though demand for restaurants has generally bounced back since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, labor and ingredient costs are much higher than they were four years ago. Just like Caesar Cardini before them, chefs are looking for relatively cheap, relatively fast dishes, and creative ones are looking for classics they can riff on without alienating customers. “Would untrained American eaters be more likely to order a Caesar salad than any other salad? Yes,” Sessoms said. Sometimes, when he’s trying to find a use for specialty greens—celtuce, radicchio—he’ll douse them in Caesar dressing to get diners to order them.At the same time, Kaplan told me, it’s hard to overestimate how important the widespread adoption of the online menu has been over the past decade or so. Recognizable favorites sell. When diners can see what’s available before they make a reservation or leave the house, the menu is as much an advertisement as a utilitarian document. Appending the name “Caesar” to a salad is a shortcut to broad appeal.Last week, I called up Stewart Gary, the culinary director of Nitehawk Cinema, the Brooklyn dine-in movie theater where I ordered that almond-and-pickled-onion salad. He told me essentially the same thing: In his line of work, people have limited time with the menu, and Caesar is a useful signifier. “Look,” he said. “If we called it a kale salad with anchovy dressing, no one would order it.”[Read: In 1950, Americans had aspic. Now we have dalgona coffee.]Ancient philosophers were bedeviled by the question of whether the ship of Theseus retained its fundamental essence after each of its component parts was replaced one by one over the course of centuries. I’ve been thinking about salads for a few weeks now and feel pretty sure that a true Caesar requires, at minimum, garlic, acid, umami, cold leaves, hard cheese, and a crunchy, croutonlike product. Beyond that, you can get away with one or maybe two wacky additions before you start straining the limits of credibility. It’s about principle, not pedantry.Besides, the more you learn about Caesar salads, the more you come to realize that pedantry is useless. The original Caesar was reportedly made with lime juice instead of lemon. It was prepared tableside and intended to be eaten by hand, like a piece of toast, “arranged on each plate so that you could pick up a leaf by its short end and chew it down bit by bit, then pick up another,” as Julia Child and Jacques Pépin explained in their version of the recipe. It was meant to be dressed in stages, first with oil, then with acid, then with a coddled egg (to coat the lettuce leaves, so the cheese would stick to them), not with the emulsified, mayonnaise-adjacent dressing common today. Crucially, it didn’t have whole anchovies.As soon as the recipe began showing up in cookbooks, in the early 1940s, it started changing: Some recipes called for rubbing the bowl with garlic, or adding blue cheese or pear vinegar or mustard. In her headnotes for one of the earliest printed versions of the Caesar recipe, published in West Coast Cook Book, in 1952, Helen Evans Brown described the Caesar as “the most talked-of salad of a decade, perhaps of the century.” She then went on to note that “the salad is at its best when kept simple, but as it is invariably made at table, and sometimes by show-offs, it occasionally contains far too many ingredients.” The Caesar is forever, which means it’s forever being manipulated. For better and for worse.

On October 7, Hamas terrorists crossed the border into Israel and massacred more than 1,100 Israelis. The depths of Hamas’s sadism are almost too sickening to comprehend. Babies and children butchered. Parents murdered in front of their children. Families bound together and then burned alive. Others were tortured, and their bodies mutilated while both alive and dead.Even the harshest opponents of Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza acknowledge, albeit often half-heartedly, that Hamas acted with brutality on October 7 in killing innocents. But many of those same critics refuse to acknowledge the widespread sexual assaults against Israeli women that day.Since allegations of sexual violence first appeared in the fall, a contingent of anti-Israel activists have sought to disprove them. “Believe women” and “Silence is violence” have been rallying cries of progressive feminist organizations for decades. But the same empathy and support have not been shown for Israeli victims.Many prominent feminist and human-rights groups—including Amnesty International and the National Organization for Women—said little about the sexual-violence allegations. International organizations tasked with protecting women in wartime kept their powder dry. UN Women waited until December 1, nearly two months after the Hamas attack, to issue a perfunctory statement of condemnation.Israel’s critics have insisted that a lack of firsthand accounts from rape survivors or forensic evidence undercut Israel’s accusations—and have dismissed claims that systematic sexual violence occurred as “unsubstantiated.” Others have accused the Israeli government of “weaponizing” accusations of rape to justify Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza, as an open letter from dozens of feminist activists put it in February. The letter has since been signed by more than 1,000 others.News outlets that reported on the violence were fiercely attacked. For example, in late December, The New York Times published an investigation that thoroughly detailed the evidence of mass, systematic sexual violence. The story drew an immediate response from Hamas, in language echoing that used by Western activists. “We categorically deny such allegations,” Basem Naim, a Hamas leader, said in a statement, “and consider it as part of the Israeli attempt to demonize and dehumanize the Palestinian people and resistance, and to justify the Israeli army war crimes and crimes of genocide against the Palestinian people.”Stridently anti-Israel independent journalists and activists immediately tried to pick apart the Times story, which culminated in late February with the publication of a more-than-6,000-word exposé by the left-wing outlet The Intercept that accused the Times of flawed reporting. The left-wing magazine The Nation accused the Times of “the biggest failure of journalism” since the paper’s reporting in the run-up to the Iraq War; the leftist YES! magazine claimed, “There is no evidence mass rape occurred.” Considering the vitriolic attacks against Israel since October 7, none of this should come as a surprise. The bloodied and dismembered bodies of dead Israelis had barely been collected before accusations of genocide were being levied by anti-Israel activists. Six months later, such denouncements are routine.Across the United States and Western Europe, criticism of Israel’s actions quickly and predictably veered into rank anti-Semitism, with Jewish organizations, cultural institutions, artists, and individual Jews targeted by pro-Palestine activists because of Israel’s actions.[From the April 2024 issue: The Golden Age of American Jews is ending]But rape denialism falls into its own separate and bewildering category. Why have so many of Israel’s critics—and pro-Palestine activists—chosen to fight on this hill?Many insist, like the feminists who signed the open letter, that they are questioning claims used to justify a war they oppose. But there is also a disquieting sense that pro-Palestine activists believe they must defend Hamas. Accusations of systematic rape and sadistic sexual violence not only tarnish the terrorist group, but also undermine the notion that October 7 was legitimate “armed resistance” against Israeli occupation.Instead of believing women, these activists have chosen to take the word of a terrorist organization that is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians and that has constantly denied that any sexual assaults occurred on October 7.Six months into the war in Gaza, many pro-Palestine activists in the United States are so fully invested in the cause of Palestinian liberation, for which Hamas claims to be fighting—and so steeped in their hatred of Israel—that they are casting aside the progressive ideals that they regularly invoke when castigating Israel. In doing so, they are exposing themselves as hypocrites whose ideology is not forged in a set of universal values but rather is situational and dependent on ethnicity or skin color.Rape denialism also feeds the widely held belief among Israelis that non-Jews refuse to acknowledge the horrors of October 7—and that the world is hopelessly biased against them. At the same time, it excuses Hamas’s actions and perpetuates the notion that Palestinians have little agency or responsibility for the continuation of a 75-year-old conflict with no end in sight. It pushes both sides to retreat to their respective corners, unwilling to see the humanity in the other, and makes the long-term goal of peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians that much more difficult to achieve.Orit Sulitzeanu is the director of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel, an NGO that serves as a coordinating body for the country’s nine rape-crisis centers. As she tells every reporter who calls her, ARCCI does not work for or receive money from the Israeli government. In the days and weeks after October 7, ARCCI began getting “trickles of information” from doctors and therapists who were encountering survivors of sexual violence. “Everyone talks to us, and the community of therapists in Israel is small,” Sulitzeanu told me. The calls were intended not to alert ARCCI but rather to ask, “What do we do?”As Sulitzeanu told me, Israel has virtually no experience with rape during wartime: “No one could imagine what happened, actually happened.” Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, the former vice chair of the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and a law professor at Bar-Ilan University, told me that Israel was so unprepared for the onslaught of sexual-abuse cases on October 7 that during the intake process in Israeli hospitals, women who survived the Hamas massacre were not even asked if they had been sexually assaulted. Quickly, ARCCI began holding webinars to help therapists understand the special characteristics of sexual violence in wartime. And as time went on, Sulitzeanu and her staff noticed that the stories they were hearing were remarkably consistent. The group put together a report combining the information it was receiving (mainly from eyewitnesses and first responders) with media reporting in Israel and around the world. “Hamas’s attack on October 7th included brutal sexual assaults carried out systematically and deliberately against Israeli civilians,” it concluded. “Hamas terrorists employed sadistic practices aimed at intensifying the degree of humiliation and terror inherent in sexual violence.”The report’s section titles tell the story in even more vivid and disturbing detail: “Systematic Use of Brutal Violence to Commit Rape” “Multiple Abusers/Gang Rape” “Rape in the Presence of Family/Community Members” “Sexual Offenses of Males” “Execution During or After the Rape” “Binding and Tying” “Mutilation and Destruction of Genital Organs” “Insertion of Weapons in Intimate Areas” “Destruction and Mutilation of the Body” The next month, the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict reached similar conclusions, although without using the word systematic. After a two-and-a-half-week mission to Israel, the UN body concluded that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the 7 October attacks.”The UN report does not ascribe responsibility to Hamas and relies on careful, qualified, legalistic language. But Halperin-Kaddari believes the UN report should be applauded. It is, she says, the “most accurate and comprehensive” accounting of the sexual violence that took place that day—and she praised it, in particular, for verifying accounts when possible but also debunking allegations that were not true. Halperin-Kaddari noted that investigators “found the same pattern of violence and sexual assault combined with an extreme degree of cruelty and humiliation, and it occurred in several locations in a relatively short period of time.”This systematic nature of the abuse is obvious from both reports. For example, ARCCI recounts the eyewitness testimony of one survivor who said that the Nova music festival was an “apocalypse of bodies, girls without clothes.” In addition, it notes that “several survivors of the massacre provided eyewitness testimony of gang rape” as well as accounts from first responders of bodies unclothed and bleeding heavily from the pelvic area, and genital mutilation.[Graeme Wood: A record of pure, predatory sadism]The UN report draws a similar conclusion, finding “reasonable grounds to believe” that rape, gang rape, and the sexual abuse of female corpses occurred at the Nova festival.At Kibbutz Kfar Aza and Kibbutz Be’eri, the UN found evidence that female victims had been undressed, bound, and killed (though the mission team “was unable to establish whether sexual violence occurred in kibbutz Be’eri”). In its investigation at Kibbutz Re’em, the UN said there were “reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence occurred … including rape.” On Road 232, a key escape route from the music festival, the UN found “reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence occurred,” including “the rape of two women.” In addition, “along this road, several bodies were found with genital injuries, along with injuries to other body parts.”At an Israel Defense Forces base overrun by Hamas terrorists, there were, according to media stories cited in the ARCCI report, dead soldiers shot in the genitals and as many as 10 female soldiers with clear evidence of sexual assault. The UN report is more circumspect on this issue, saying that reports of genital mutilation are “inconclusive.” But Halperin-Kaddari told me that she saw documentation showing that victims had had weapons fired into their sexual organs.Both reports also agree that hostages released from Hamas’s captivity had been, in the words of the UN special representative, subjected to “sexual violence, including rape, sexualized torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” The UN report also concluded that violence may be “ongoing” against the approximately 100 hostages, including young women, still held in Gaza. In its response to the Times story, Hamas pointed to the treatment of Israeli hostages, whom they insisted were being well cared for: “If the Hamas resistance fighters held such ideas of sex violence, they would mistreat those who were in their captivity,” a Hamas representative wrote in a lengthy Telegram post at the time. Recently, however, The New York Times published a firsthand account of sexual assault and torture from an Israeli hostage released from Hamas captivity in November.For Shelly Tal Meron, a member of the Israeli Knesset for the opposition Yesh Atid party, the indifference of once-former feminist allies to the sexual violence on October 7 has been acutely painful. “I sent letters to UN Women, as well as #MeToo and human-rights organizations,” she told me. The response was “complete silence. I was astonished.”“Before the war,” she said, “I was a member of the Knesset’s women’s-rights movement. I would fight for gender equality and I would work with international organizations. Whenever [attacks on women] happened in other countries like Ukraine or Syria, I felt solidarity.” In the aftermath of October 7, she said, “I felt completely betrayed.”What is most galling about the pushback on allegations of mass rape is that it is precisely the lack of firsthand accounts and forensic evidence—as well as the initial fog of war—that has opened the door to rape denialists. As Dahlia Lithwick, the senior legal correspondent at Slate, told me, denialists are “capitalizing on the stigma and shame of sexual assault—and often frustrating lack of evidence in these situations.”That, according to the feminist author Jill Filipovic, is hardly an unusual circumstance. “Sexual violence in conflict is virtually never documented the way sexual violence might be documented on the cop shows you’ve seen,” Filipovic wrote on her Substack last December. “The Israeli recovery and medical teams treated the places where people were attacked on Oct. 7 as war zones and the aftermath of terror attacks, not as standard crime scenes in which a primary goal is to identify a perpetrator.”Complicating matters further is the particular emphasis in Jewish law on expeditious burial. Sulitzeanu told me that those at the army base who were preparing bodies for burial had “no capacity to keep the evidence from those killed.” The “first priority,” she said, “was to save living people. Second, to collect bodies. Third, identify them and prepare for burial.” Everything else, including proving that widespread rapes had taken place, was secondary.There is also the distressing reality that so few of Hamas’s rape victims survived. Some were dispatched with a bullet to the head after they’d been assaulted. The handful of survivors of rape during the attacks on October 7 have, so far, been unwilling to speak publicly. ARCCI has been so adamant in safeguarding them that Sulitzeanu refused to confirm that her association had spoken with them or that their stories were included in the group’s report. The survivors refused multiple requests to meet with the UN mission team, which the UN report chalked up in part to “the national and international media scrutiny of those who made their accounts public.”The latter fear is almost certainly a direct by-product of the response to the New York Times story—headlined “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” Buttressed by interviews with more than 150 “witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers, and rape counselors,” as well as “video footage, photographs,” and “GPS data from mobile phones,” the story features allegations of sexual violence, including eyewitness accounts. It was the most authoritative investigation by a major American news outlet and should have dealt a major blow to the efforts at denialism and deflection.But as soon as the Times article appeared, so, too, did the pushback. Much of it came from journalists with a long track record of animosity toward Israel, but it reached a crescendo in late February when The Intercept published its story.What is most striking about the exhaustive Intercept article is the apparent dearth of original reporting. There is little indication that the authors made any serious effort to contact Israeli government officials, the leaders of Israeli NGOs, or—with three exceptions—even the specific individuals who are named in their story and whose credibility they malign. Instead, The Intercept focuses its inquiry on a freelance Israeli journalist who helped report the story, Anat Schwartz, scrutinizing her social-media activity and parsing a Hebrew-language podcast interview to attack her credibility and, by extension, the credibility of the story as a whole.The Intercept also sought to chip away at the Times article by focusing on alleged inconsistencies—a process that is easier than it seems when it comes to reporting on sexual violence. After a terrorist attack that killed more than 1,100 Israelis over multiple locations, misinformation ran rampant. False stories, one infamously alleging that multiple babies had been beheaded and another claiming that babies had been strung up on a clothesline, proliferated. In cases of sexual violence, Halperin-Kadderi told me, “it’s not unusual for misinformation to spread,” and beyond trauma-related inaccuracies and memory failures, there could be a tendency “to exaggerate and amplify,” which she links to the high levels of trauma associated with sexual violence—both for survivors and for eyewitnesses. She also noted that exaggerated accounts of sexual violence can be “instrumentalized by leaders to portray their enemy in the darkest way possible.” Even Jeremy Scahill, one of the co-authors of the Intercept article, noted in an interview that inconsistencies in eyewitness accounts do “not necessarily mean that they didn’t witness something.”[Read: Hamas’s genocidal intentions were never a secret]But The Intercept, in its effort to undermine the credibility of witnesses to sexual violence on October 7, painted with a broad brush, creating an inaccurate picture. The flaws in its approach are perhaps best illustrated by the complicated case of Shari Mendes, an IDF reservist who served in the army unit responsible for preparing female bodies for burial and whose testimony Schwartz said helped convince her that there had been widespread sexual violence on October 7.In the weeks after the attack, Mendes worked 12-hour shifts cleaning and preparing bodies for burial. In an emotional and graphic speech delivered at the United Nations on December 4, Mendes related what she and her team saw: women shot so many times in the head, sometimes after death, that their faces were practically obliterated; multiple women with gunshots in their vagina and breasts; faces permanently cast in distress and anguish.In an interview in October, though, Mendes told the Daily Mail that “a baby was cut out of a pregnant woman and beheaded, and then the mother was beheaded.” That was not true. However, Mendes was neither the first person nor the only person to make this allegation. A video falsely claiming to show such an atrocity had made the rounds on social media in the days before the interview was published, and similar claims were promoted by a first responder.Ryan Grim, another co-author of the Intercept article, told me that such “demonstrable fabrications” had “thoroughly discredited” Mendes, and the article notes that “she has no medical or forensic credentials to legally determine rape” (a point that Mendes has publicly acknowledged). The Intercept story questions why the Times would “rely on Mendes’s testimony,” and in an interview last month, Scahill suggested that Mendes is among the Times’ “premiere witnesses.” But in fact, Mendes is quoted a single time in “Screams Without Words,” relaying her account of having seen four women “with signs of sexual violence, including some with ‘a lot of blood in their pelvic areas.’” Mendes’s claims are backed up by a second witness, an army captain working at the same facility, who added the horrifying detail that “she had seen several bodies with cuts in their vaginas and underwear soaked in blood.”The Intercept story fails to mention any of this, and it provides no indication that its reporters attempted to speak with Mendes. (I reached out to Mendes, who declined to comment.) Instead, it criticizes the Times for quoting “witnesses with track records of making unreliable claims and lacking forensic credentials.”The Intercept has applied useful scrutiny to some specific claims within the Times story. One of the accounts of apparent sexual assault relayed by the Times came from a paramedic in an Israeli commando unit who said he had discovered the bodies of two teenagers at Kibbutz Be’eri. A March 4 article in The Intercept concluded that two victims “specifically singled out by the New York Times … were not in fact victims of sexual assault,” and the Times has since updated its story to note that a video of the scene appears to contradict the paramedic’s account.But that skepticism is not limited to individual witnesses or accounts. The Intercept concedes that “individual acts of sexual assault may have occurred” but is quick to add that “rape is not uncommon in war.” It raises doubts about the extent to which Hamas members were responsible for attacks, noting that “there were also several hundred civilians who poured into Israel from Gaza that day.” (It is not usually the left that tries to blur the distinction between Palestinian terrorists and Palestinian civilians.) The central question, The Intercept contends, is whether the Times “presented solid evidence” to back the claim that, as the newspaper put it, “the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.” And it devotes more than 6,000 words to calling into doubt that it did.Yet The Intercept made no mention of independent efforts to answer this question. There is no reference to the ARCCI report—published a week before The Intercept’s story—which relied on 26 separate media reports from the Israeli press, The Guardian, the BBC, The Times of London, and other outlets, as well as confidential sources, eyewitnesses, and interviews with first responders. Neither does it mention a November 2023 report by Physicians for Human Rights, which concluded that “widespread sexual and gender-based crimes” had taken place on October 7. (Asked for comment, Grim dismissed these reports as “derivative of Western news reports and based on the same sources.”)The Times published a follow-up story on January 29, addressing many of the questions raised by critics of its article. Even in light of criticisms of the piece, the Times said in a recent statement that it continues to stand by its coverage “and the revelations of sexual violence and abuse following the attack by Hamas.”The UN mission team similarly concluded that the existence of a few false allegations did not undermine the other evidence of sexual violence in “at least three locations” on October 7. Nor did it limit its inquiry to searching for inconsistencies, paying attention only to those claims it had some reason to doubt. Instead, the investigators took pains to carefully review the scenes, to talk to eyewitnesses and first responders, and to assess the evidence in its totality before presenting the conclusion that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred.”Semafor’s Max Tani recently reported that The Intercept “is running out of cash,” and that Grim and Scahill had suggested that its board resign and turn operations over to them and the remaining staff. But the publication’s skeptical coverage of the war has apparently been a bright spot for its financial health. “The Intercept’s unapologetically hostile view of Israel’s post-Oct. 7 military operation in Gaza has galvanized its readers and supporters,” Tani wrote, “who have responded by helping the publication set internal records for small-dollar donations.”Grim refused to say whether he believes that Israeli women were raped on October 7 and, if so, whether any of these assaults were committed by Hamas members. (His two co-authors did not respond to any questions.) Instead, he said he had “addressed these questions repeatedly” and pointed to an interview in which he had said that “the idea that there would be no sexual assault is not taken seriously by pretty much anybody who understands war and violence.” Considering the overwhelming evidence that sexual assault took place, despite the inherent challenges in collecting such evidence in wartime, it’s difficult to fathom why so many on the anti-Israel left continue to deny that it occurred or cast doubt on its significance.The most obvious explanation is that by questioning what happened on October 7, activists hope to undercut the rationale for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Showing that systematic sexual abuse didn’t happen would, they believe, demonstrate that Israel is engaged in a mass public deception to justify killing Palestinians.But some experts I spoke with see other factors at play.The charge that Jews have exaggerated and weaponized their suffering has long been the basis for Holocaust denialism, said Amy Elman, a professor of political science and Jewish studies at Kalamazoo College who has written extensively on anti-Semitism and women’s rights. Now that same claim is being used by anti-Semites to portray efforts at justice for October 7 as “part of a larger nefarious scheme to harm Palestinians.” “Rape denialism is absolutely consistent with Holocaust denialism,” Elman said, and “this rape denialism is another form of anti-Semitism.”One of the more troubling aspects of the left’s response to October 7 has been to cast the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians in simplistic terms: Palestinians are the oppressed, dark-skinned minority population; Israelis are the white oppressors. Never mind that Israel is a diverse, multiethnic society. (Most American Jews trace their origins to immigrants from Europe, but the majority of Israeli Jews descend from those who came, most often as refugees, from the Middle East and North Africa.) This reductionist binary has also made it easier to explain the conflict to a younger generation unfamiliar with Arab-Israeli history but well versed in the American civil-rights movement.Natalia Melman Petrzela, a historian at the New School, says that this black-and-white framing has led to a distorted view of what happened on October 7—one that is informed by a reductive view of modern feminism. “There is a very powerful and understandable resistance on the left,” she told me, “to centering ‘white feminism’ or white womanhood in understanding the experiences of women and the purpose of feminism, domestically and internationally.” By this logic, white feminism is inherently “problematic”—and because many on the left see Israelis as white, she says, they “see any defense of Israeli women as some sort of capitulation to ‘white feminism.’”Moreover, claims of sexual assault against white women have historically been used to justify racial violence, which has, according to Elman and Petrzela, led some pro-Palestine activists to compare Hamas to Emmett Till, who was accused of whistling at a white woman in the Jim Crow South before his brutal murder. It’s “unhinged,” Petrzela said, “but in some ways totally predictable.”Jonathan Freedland, a columnist for The Guardian, suggested to me that left-wing rape denialism is, in effect, a refusal to believe that Hamas could stoop so low as to engage in sexual violence. On the surface, this sounds bizarre. Hamas massacred more than 1,100 Israelis, the majority of whom were civilians, and has a long history of massacring Jewish civilians, including children. How could any crime be considered worse than murder? But Freedland says that there are leftists who are prepared to countenance “armed resistance” but cannot do the same for sexual violence. “You can see why it would be essential for them to say that Hamas was ‘only’ guilty of killing and not guilty of rape.”Freedland noted that Hamas itself has consistently denied that its fighters committed sexual crimes, perhaps in an effort to retain its standing among devout Muslims. “Hamas would be nervous of being seen not as warriors for Palestine but as a bunch of rapists who bring shame on Islam,” he said. Indeed, as Sulitzeanu pointed out to me, some Israeli Arabs who have stood in solidarity with the victims of October 7 have also refused to accept that their Palestinian brethren could commit such heinous, un-Islamic crimes.Frankly, none of these efforts to whitewash the carnage of October 7 makes much sense. You can acknowledge Hamas’s barbarism while still condemning Israel’s military response or criticizing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Indeed, many have done precisely that, including the Biden administration and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. You can raise questions about specific rape allegations—as the UN report did—while still accepting the overall weight of the evidence.[Read: Netanyahu is Israel’s worst prime minister ever]Instead, many on the left seem determined to justify what happened on October 7 as a legitimate act of Palestinian resistance. “The images from October 7 of paragliders evading Israeli air defenses were for many of us exhilarating,” one American professor recently wrote. But acknowledging Hamas’s atrocities doesn’t invalidate Palestinian demands for self-determination. You can still embrace Palestinian nationalism and, unlike Hamas, advocate for a two-state solution while also acknowledging that Hamas’s actions on October 7—including the systematic rape of Israeli women and girls—are simply not defensible. Leftists who genuinely support Palestinian statehood do that cause, and themselves, no favor by denying the overwhelming evidence of sexual violence.The rape denialists might think they are winning a near-term public-relations battle against Israel, but denying Palestinians agency, and accusing Israel of fabricating allegations of mass rape, does far more harm than good.Above all, it denies reality, perpetuates misinformation, and feeds the empathy gap that separates the two sides. When Israelis and Palestinians look beyond the walls—both real and metaphorical—that separate them, few see fully formed individuals with legitimate grievances and fears that are worthy of their sympathy. Instead, they glimpse caricatures.As pro-Palestinian activists rightly demand that Israel come to grips with how its policies breed humiliation and desperation among Palestinians, so too must supporters of the Palestinian cause face the reality that rejectionism and terrorism have contributed to Israeli fears that peaceful coexistence is not possible.When such activists surrender their ideals and dismiss the evidence that sexual violence took place on October 7, they feed the already overwhelming belief among Israelis and Diaspora Jews that those who advocate for the Palestinians and witheringly criticize Israel’s actions are simply not interested in their humanity.Any solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict must start by recognizing not just the lived reality of Jews and Palestinians, but the abundant feelings of trauma and fear that have made reconciliation so difficult to achieve. Rape denialism pushes Israelis and Palestinians further apart. It isn’t just wrong; it doesn’t just diminish the trauma experienced by Israeli women on October 7—it makes the pursuit of peace and genuine reconciliation impossible.

“The entire world knows exactly why the U.S. is trying to ban TikTok,” James Li declared on March 16 to his nearly 100,000 followers on the social-media platform. His video then cut to a subtitled clip of a Taiwanese speaker purportedly discussing how “TikTok inadvertently offended the Jewish people” by hosting pro-Palestinian content. “The power of the Jewish people in America is definitely more scary than Trump,” the speaker goes on. “They have created the options: either ban or sell to the Americans. In reality, it’s neither—it’s selling to a Jewish investment group.”Li, who calls himself an “indie journalist” and subsequently posted another video blaming Israel for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, got more than 160,000 views for his TikTok theory—and the video was one of the poorer-performing entries making similar claims on the platform.What prompted this outburst? On March 13, Congress advanced a bill that would give TikTok’s Chinese parent company six months to sell it or be banned from American app stores. The legislation passed 352–65, with overwhelming bipartisan support, and the rational observer will have no trouble understanding why.The United States has a long history of preventing foreign adversaries from controlling important communications infrastructure. Washington spent more than a decade, under Democratic and Republican presidents, leading a successful international campaign to block the Chinese telecom giant Huawei from Western markets. Donald Trump attempted to force a TikTok sale back in 2020. The reasons are straightforward: The app has access to the data of some 150 million American users—nearly half the population—but it is owned and controlled by the Chinese company ByteDance. Like all companies in the country, ByteDance is effectively under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party, which regularly punishes and even disappears business leaders who displease it. A former ByteDance executive has said that the CCP had “supreme access” to the company’s data, and used the info to track protesters in Hong Kong, for example.[Read: Beijing is ruining TikTok]Recent polls show robust public support for TikTok’s ban or sale, and for years, Gallup has found that Americans see China as the country’s greatest enemy. In short, Congress has strong electoral and political incentives to act against TikTok. But spend some time on the platform itself, and you’ll discover a very different culprit behind all this: Jews.“We were all thinking it: Israel is trying to buy TikTok,” the influencer Ian Carroll told his 1.5 million followers last month. The evidence: Steven Mnuchin, the former Trump Treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs executive, has sought investors to purchase the app. “He’s not Israel, right?” continued Carroll. “Well, let’s peel this onion back one layer at a time, starting with just the fact that he’s Jewish.”Carroll’s TikTok bio says “do your own research,” and he certainly had research to share. “The censorship is not about China on TikTok,” he explained. Rather, “as a TikTok creator who gets censored all the frickin’ time, I can tell you that the things you get censored about are the CIA and Israel.” Carroll did not address why Israel would go through so much trouble to acquire TikTok if it already controlled the platform, or why the Semitic censors somehow missed his video and its more than 1 million views, not to mention the several similarly viral follow-ups he posted.In truth, far from suppressing such content, TikTok’s algorithm happily promotes it. I purposely viewed the videos for this piece while logged out of the platform, and it nonetheless began suggesting to me more material along these lines through its sidebar recommendations.Characteristic of anti-Semitic online discourse, these videos and others like them interchangeably reference individual American Jews, American Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, American pro-Israel lobbying groups like AIPAC, and the state of Israel, as though they are all part of one single-minded international conspiracy to take down TikTok. When a commenter asked Carroll to “look into universal studios pulling their music from TikTok,” a reference to the Universal Music conglomerate’s dispute with TikTok over royalties, Carroll replied, “Universal CEO is a Jewish man.”“A foreign government is influencing the 2024 election,” the leftist podcaster and former Bernie Sanders Press Secretary Briahna Joy Gray declared on X in March. “I’m not talking about China, but Israel. In a leaked recording, ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt admitted that Israel had a ‘TikTok problem.’ Suddenly, a divided Congress agrees on one thing: A social media ban.” Greenblatt is an American Jew, the ADL is an American organization, the bill isn’t a ban, and the push for a forced sale predated the Gaza war, but other than that, Gray was on the money.[Yair Rosenberg: Why Facebook and Twitter won’t ban antisemitism]“Banning TikTok became a crucial emergency because what they saw was a bunch of young individuals, essentially people that are going to be the future leaders of America, who were not pro-Israel,” the far-right commentator Candace Owens claimed in March on her popular show at The Daily Wire. She then issued an implied threat: “If TikTok is in fact banned, there is no question that Israel will be blamed, AIPAC will be blamed, the ADL will be blamed, Jews are going to be blamed … You can see that sentiment building.” (Owens left The Daily Wire a week later following a string of anti-Semitic incidents, which included claims that Jews were doing “horrific things” and “controlling people with blackmail,” as well as her favoriting a social-media post that accused a rabbi of being “drunk on Christian blood.”)At this point, it’s not uncommon to find videos about the TikTok legislation that do not even mention Jews or Israel—like this one with 1.5 million views—yet are flooded with hundreds of comments, garnering tens of thousands of likes, accusing “Zionists,” “Jews,” or AIPAC of being behind it, despite years of national-security reporting on concerns over the platform’s Chinese owners. That alleged Jewish malefactors are being assailed on TikTok even when they are not invoked explicitly in a video illustrates how widely the meme has spread.Like many conspiracy theories, the notion that Jews are out to ban TikTok contains a grain of truth. Jewish and pro-Israel groups have raised concerns about TikTok’s failure to moderate anti-Semitic content for years, including when it pertains to Israel, but they have never called for the app to be shut down. After the TikTok sale legislation was proposed, the Jewish Federations of North America said it “appropriately balances free speech and individual rights with regulatory action” while asserting that “our community understands that social media is a major driver of the rise in antisemitism, and that TikTok is the worst offender by far.” (Presumably, the organization arrived at this conclusion by spending 10 minutes on the app.) Researchers have found that pro-Palestinian content dwarfs pro-Israel content on TikTok, likely reflecting the platform’s young and international demographic.But no conspiracy theories or appeals to recent geopolitical developments are necessary to understand why U.S. politicians wouldn’t want one of the most-trafficked social-media networks in America to be run by Communist China via a black-box algorithm. Just this past December, researchers at Rutgers found that anti-China posts on topics like the Hong Kong protests or the regime’s brutal repression of Uyghur Muslims were dramatically underrepresented on TikTok compared with Instagram.TikTok’s response to allegations that it could function as a foreign influence operation have not exactly allayed concerns. Shortly after the Rutgers study was published, the app restricted access to the tool used by academics to track its content. Last month, it sent multiple alerts to its American users falsely warning that Congress was about to ban TikTok and urging them to contact their representatives. In fact, the bill seeks to force a sale to new ownership, much as congressional scrutiny over data privacy led the dating app Grindr to be sold to non-Chinese owners in 2020.Simply put, none of what is happening to the social-media platform is new. Neither is the tendency to blame Jews for the world’s problems—but that doesn’t make the impulse any less dangerous. Many understand anti-Semitism as a personal prejudice that singles out Jewish people for their difference, much like other minorities experience racism. But anti-Semitism also manifests as a conspiracy theory about how the world works, alleging that sinister string-pulling Jews are the source of social, political, and economic problems—and this is the sort of anti-Semitism that tends to get people killed.[Yair Rosenberg: Why so many people still don’t understand anti-semitism]Consider recent American history: In 2018, a far-right gunman who blamed Jews for mass immigration murdered 11 people in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. In 2019, assailants tied to the Black Hebrew Israelite movement attacked a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, killing three; one of the shooters had written on social media about Jews controlling the government. In 2022, an Islamic extremist took an entire congregation hostage in Colleyville, Texas, and demanded that a rabbi get a convict released from a nearby prison. These perpetrators—white supremacist, Black extremist, radical Islamist—had essentially nothing in common other than their belief that a Jewish cabal governed world affairs and was the cause of their problems.The reality is the reverse: Jews constitute just 2 percent of the American population, and although they exercise influence like any other minority, they frequently disagree among themselves and do not dictate the destiny of the majority. Politicians voting against TikTok are pursuing their conception of the national interest, not being suborned to serve some nebulous Jewish interest. Remove the Jews from the equation, and the situation will be the same.Conspiracy theorists typically claim to be combatting concealed power structures. But as in this case, their delusions make them unable to perceive the way power actually works. Thus, conspiratorial anti-Semitism hobbles its adherents, preventing them from rationally organizing to advance their own causes by distracting them with fantastical Jewish plots.“Anti-Semitism isn’t just bigotry toward the Jewish community,” the Black civil-rights activist Eric Ward once told me. “It is actually utilizing bigotry toward the Jewish community in order to deconstruct democratic practices, and it does so by framing democracy as a conspiracy rather than a tool of empowerment or a functional tool of governance.”Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories won’t safeguard TikTok from the bill that’s currently moving through the U.S. legislature. But the more people buy into them, the more they will imperil not only American Jews but American democracy as well.

Don’t stab me. Don’t stab yourself. Don’t draw a circle on your arm. They want the tangent to be the length of the radius. So first draw a circle on the page. Good. Now draw a line between the point of the pencil and the point of the stabbing thing.I’m not going to talk to you about that right now, because we’re doing math. So that you can be STEM and put me in a luxury nursing home when I’m old. Besides, what I liked about your father wasn’t—I can’t reduce it to one thing. May I ask why you’re interested?By “how to talk to girls,” you mean how to flirt with girls? What can I say, I’m a mind reader. I’m happy that you talk to me about what’s going on with you. When I was your age, I was very preoccupied with boys and what it would take to make them … But you’re not going to learn geometry if we … I was going to say “get off on a tangent,” but when I was 15, I would have been like, What kind of walleyed moron would even entertain the idea of making that joke? So never mind.Okay, Steven, let’s start over. What can we observe about this pair of circles? No, the points in the center are called foci; pull your mind out of the gutter. God, why do you even want to know about that? How about this: I’ll tell you what I liked about your father if after that we finish this problem set with zero digressions. Are you sure you want to hear your mother reminisce about courtship? Will you promise that your soul won’t be permanently disfigured? Is there a particular girl you have your eye on, may I ask? Sorry, of course not. Put down the compass. Because I can’t think when you’re poking your hand with that thing. Thank you.What I liked about your father was that he helped me find my contact lens. Correct, a commune. It was on 15th, which is considered South Slope now but wasn’t considered any part of Park Slope then. Because there weren’t enough assholes yet. Our building was a decrepit brownstone full of unhandy people. In the winter, there were always a few of us in the kitchen, moaning about the cold, drinking beer, without any warm clothing on. You know, T- shirts, pajama bottoms, cutoffs. The radiators didn’t produce much heat, but they did produce this homey clanking, which dangled the possibility of heat in the near future. Yes, like a crack house, I suppose, except, as far as I know, no one was smoking crack. We preferred Adderall. It was mostly grad students. In a crack house, there would have been a stronger sense of shared values and a common mission.Well, you know, your father has those broad shoulders. I’ve heard him brag about them to you by telling you how pleased he is that you’ve inherited them. Back then, he usually had crumbs on his clothing from walking around with a scone or a sandwich in his hand. He was studying for the bar, and the only way he could concentrate was to go to the park for short bursts of exercise. So he often smelled like sweat and grass. He would come home from the park with dirt under his fingernails from doing push-ups. It made his hands look homeless. Oh, yes, right, it made his hands look unhoused. He was friendly, always asking everyone how school was going, trying to start a touch-football game. He was so good at not bringing up that he’d gone to Harvard that Harvard was like this very faint hum he emitted. Yes, but a nice fridge.One hot night in summer, we were having one of our counterproductive house meetings in the living room. A guy said that we should all sign a contract governing the division of resources. Resources meaning pasta, beans, tortillas, beer, cookies, and cigarettes. Your father looked alarmed by the proposal. He liked everything to be congenial and unregimented as far as communism went, because he was a big eater. Big eaters favor a certain informality in affairs of state. He started talking over the guy, saying that what made the bourgeoisie the bourgeoisie was its fondness for contracts.Sure, maybe he was right about that; I guess bourgeois people like contracts. I know how much you value the things he says, and I think that’s nice. Are you clear on what bourgeois means? Actually, I would say that the kids at Saint Ann’s are rich. Is your crush a Saint Ann’s girl? Just asking. Sorry. Rich is different from bourgeois. Bourgeois is a French word for a person from a town in the countryside. It’s used to mean people who have a little bit of money and so they’re cautious and conventional. We moved into this apartment so that you could go to PS 39 and be in District 15; that’s bourgeois. You and I and your father are all bourgeois. I spent my adolescence dreaming of being bourgeois. Oh, I have no comment as to whether she’s bourgeois or not; it’s not my place to comment on your stepmother’s … If you want to know if your stepmother is bourgeois, ask her.Anyway. I was sitting on the couch at this house meeting, and I found the argument between your father and the contract guy so irritating that I put my face in my hands and rubbed my eyes to blot out what was happening. I could almost hear a “boing” when my contact lens sprang out of my eye onto my hand. Then it fell off my hand onto the rug. I wore monthlies back then, and I had forgotten to order new ones, so I didn’t have any spares. I shouted, “Oh, fuck, my contact lens,” thus adjourning the meeting. Everyone looked grateful.Your father dropped to his knees. He searched the carpet on all fours. I yelled at everyone to be careful not to step on the contact lens. I made them all back out of the room, except for your father. Your father had his beard down in the rug and his butt in the air. It was a good look for him. I think he felt bad about talking over the contract guy, and he was trying to redeem himself. It’s worth noting that the rug was foul. That house was full of cobwebs and mouseholes. Even holes that were supposed to be there, like vents in the stove, were de facto mouseholes. The mice would show up at our house meetings to discuss the division of resources. There wasn’t a functional vacuum cleaner or the political will to budget for one. I was one of the culprits, in terms of making the place disgusting.I was committed to eating vegetable lo mein straight from the container with chopsticks, on the couch, while watching French New Wave DVDs to educate myself. It was all part of a self-imposed training regimen. I wanted to eat with chopsticks and ape the gallic shrug. Because I’d grown up in Peru, Massachusetts, where either of those things was a crime punishable by death. I contributed a lot to the vermin problem, dropping noodles on the floor.Oh, quite bad. Every morning, in my bedroom, when I woke up and got dressed, I used to shake the cockroaches out of my shoes; we had the tiny ones. They’re called German cockroaches. I used to hold my sneakers upside down and shake them like maracas while I sang “La Cucaracha” to myself. Usually, one or two of the little guys would fall out.Sometimes they’d land on my bare feet. And then I’d go wash some more of them out of the bristles of my toothbrush. Don’t call your mother a crack whore. I mean it, really. You’re going to go around saying “unhoused” instead of “homeless” but also say “Mom, you’re a crack whore”? Besides, there was no sex work or any unseemly kind of drug use. Just filth. I was young and provincial. I wanted to cultivate good taste and a refined manner. I wanted to speak like an educated person, with an educated person’s references. It would have been nice to clean the floor, but I didn’t have time for superficialities. Kind of joking, kind of not joking.I don’t think I thought, Wow, what a chivalrous guy. I think I was aware that your father wanted to find my contact lens to prove that he was a good person. That rug had more fauna than the floor of a rainforest, and I couldn’t see very well, so I thought, Knock yourself out; I’m going to go chill. I went to my room and put on a nightgown and got into bed. In retrospect, I was playing a part in the drama, helping something happen. Why did I need to go to bed so early? Why did I need to put on my nightgown instead of my pajamas? Why did I take a book off the shelf that I hadn’t been reading, a book of poems by Frank O’Hara, and sit in bed reading it? Frank O’Hara is a cool poet. He was gay, and there are jokes in the poems. Nobody thinks Frank O’Hara is bad. I knew what I was doing. On some level, I mean. Soon, there was a knock at the door, and I answered with the book in my hand. And there, poised on your father’s trembling finger: a tiny piece of plastic, contoured to fit my eye. Was it the restoration of my sight he offered me, or was it blindness? Yes, exactly, that was irony. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me that you like to talk to me and that you recognize irony. I don’t think I can take credit. You’re just a sweet and intelligent boy. Does the girl you have a crush on like irony? I wish I could be more helpful.Other than that he found the contact lens, I liked that he didn’t try to hang out in my room when he brought it to me. I put my finger on his finger to accept the lens, and I held it to the light. It was covered in crimson fibers from the rug. I said, “What a beautiful gift you have brought me.” We named the things that were probably on it: blood, feces, goat cheese, Swiss Miss, semen. He bowed. He asked how I liked the O’Hara, and we talked about poetry, with the lens still on my finger, and then we said good night. Not hooking up even when hooking up is in the air, that’s the idea. What you want is for the girl, or whoever, maybe it won’t always be a girl, the other person, to think to themselves afterward, I wonder why he didn’t try to cross the threshold of my room. I wonder why he didn’t try to kiss me. And, gradually, for their thoughts to drift to: Wait, did I want him to kiss me? You need to give desire room to grow. People desire things they don’t have. It’s like how you’re burning with desire to grow up and go to L.A. to direct films. Don’t get me wrong; I’m so glad that’s what you want rather than, I don’t know, to live in this apartment all your life and watch TikTok and smoke weed. But you’ve never been to Los Angeles, you’ve never directed a film, and so those things are still perfect to you. You see what I’m driving at?I wouldn’t say that you’re chubby. And if you weren’t a little shy, if you were one of those kids who started dating at 12, and you were always out with your legions of friends, maybe you and I wouldn’t be so close like this, and we wouldn’t have watched so many films together, and you wouldn’t be so interesting. Maybe you wouldn’t be so well-behaved.I cannot in good conscience advise you to careen through life infuriating everyone around you as a strategy for getting a girlfriend, and yet I must admit that I was often infuriated by your dad. There was this one party where he insulted the paintings on the wall: “These are quite figurative, aren’t they?” The host had put on a Bob Dylan record, and your father condemned the entire phase of Dylan to which the album belonged. The real problem was that our host was this woman who kept looking around him, at more important people, while he was trying to talk to her. There must be a German compound word for that: looking-around-the-person-you-are-talking-to-for-a-more-important-person. He doesn’t like it when people are uncharmed by him.Sure, of course, he is charming. Yeah, he’s charmed his way into a number of jobs at this point, sure. Yes, his job does pay pretty well. It pays about the same as the one in Boston. I can believe that people in Chicago like him, sure. I don’t know if that’s the word I’d use for him, but who cares. “Brilliant” is just a very generous thing to say. I’m glad that you feel that way; really, I am.He was good at talking, sure. I think that I was drawn to, and worried by, something in him that was lost. He left that house not long after we started dating. We pretended it was because it was awkward to be a couple there, with so little privacy, but I think he could tell that people wanted him gone. He told one woman she was peeling ginger wrong and took the peeler out of her hand to show her how to do it. He mocked a guy for being bad at touch football. When I scolded him, he said, “I was raised in a bullshit-filled environment, so honesty is important to me.” I always got him to apologize to the offended party. It made me feel powerful. Because he needed guidance. He would put his head in my lap and say, “When will I be able to stop making people hate me?”Yeah, we had dinner a few times. Once in Queens, out in Fresh Meadows. The idea was to try Afghan food, but I think the real reason was that it was romantic to get in his hand-me- down, old-person car, with Jersey plates, and drive to a strip mall, and feel like we were in America. The funny thing about dating him was he always wanted to picnic in the Vale of Cashmere. That was his move. But he genuinely liked it there. You don’t know what that is? You grew up here. I guess that’s because I don’t go there, and your father doesn’t live here anymore. It’s in the middle of Prospect Park, but people don’t notice it, so it’s quiet and empty. It’s secluded. A gay-cruising spot, I think. Hills all around, a pond in the middle. The pond has a ruin around it. It was a balustrade, a stone railing from the 19th century. Now it’s just newels. Newels are the big posts, and balusters are the little posts between the big posts.The one time we did picnic in the Vale of Cashmere, we talked about why we liked children, which was a way of flirting. But also sincere: We did like children. When two grown-ups who are out on a date talk about kids, what they’re doing, beneath the surface, is imagining a future in which they have sex and raise kids. I know, gross, let’s not linger on that aspect of the … It was late summer by then, maybe September, with green scum on the water. There was this island in the center of the pond that was overgrown with weeds. The weeds were so big, they leaned out over the water and touched the scum with their leaves. Everything was very green.Your father said, “A child is like this.” He made a sweeping gesture to show he was talking about the Vale of Cashmere. He said that a child’s mind was this place that nobody had polluted. It was wild. For him, the innocence of children was this precious thing; it was a form of nature that had to be preserved. I was amused. By his sentimental attachment to the Vale of Cashmere, and by his belief in the purity of children.I didn’t buy the Rousseau–cum–Pink Floyd shit: Teacher, leave those kids alone. I said that children are joyful because they’re discovering the world for the first time, acquiring a worldview, which is joyful. You can’t separate the joy from the learning; they’re the same thing. It might have had something to do with the difference in our backgrounds. He was into noble savagery and felt that his own savagery had been compromised too soon. At the shore club. Being taught to carry himself like a politician at age 5. The firm handshake, the fake indifference to luxury. The veneer of modesty. The veneer of hardiness. The acquiring of character by meandering around the ocean in little boats. He didn’t want his child’s innate human goodness to be corrupted by the wrong kind of knowledge. And for me, my whole life, it was: Give me all the knowledge you have. Get me the information I need to ditch this shitty little town. When I was a child, my mind was not the Vale of Cashmere. It was this terrified, grasping animal. I wasn’t innocent. I was starving for data.We came to the commune for different reasons, your dad and I. He was slumming it with the punks between the end of law school and the start of his career. For me, that place was Downton Abbey. Everybody there had gone to a good school. Everybody there had a subject they could talk about for hours if you gave them a little box of wine. That was what made it unspeakably glamorous. I’ve always wanted to give you the knowledge that nobody gave me.But there was one thing your father and I agreed on: The most sacred thing you could do with yourself, more sacred even than being an artist or an intellectual, as much as we valued those things, was to be a good-enough parent to a child. My stepfather would call me “Hot Lips” as I ate my mashed potatoes, and my mother would smile as if it were a term of endearment. If you’ve ever wondered why I’ve never imposed a stepfather on you … When your father was at boarding school, when he was 13, 14, still a chunky kid; before he had his growth spurt, which might happen to you, by the way, he used to call home crying, begging to come home, because these older boys would grab his ass as he walked by. His father told him, “If you stop eating so much and get some exercise, you can play football, and then they’ll respect you.”I said, “I will never speak to a child that way, so help me God.”Your father said, “I will never speak to a child that way, so help me God.” He raised his hand in the air, to make it a vow. And I raised my hand in the air. When people are falling in love, there’s not one moment when it happens. It’s gradual. But that was an inflection point: talking in the Vale of Cashmere about how to talk to you before you existed. We did move fast. We got married a year later. You were born the summer after that.This conversation has wandered pretty far afield. We were supposed to be doing geometry, and then I was supposed to tell you how I fell in love with your father, to help you learn how to make your crush fall in love with you, and now we’re getting pretty close to your birth. This is a bad thing that’s happening right now. It’s called speaking to your kid as if they’re your friend. It’s what single parents do without even knowing they’re doing it. But now I realize that I’m doing it, so there’s no excuse. Basta. Geometry, now. I’m really mad at myself that I haven’t gotten through at least one of these proofs with you yet. We’re going to start doing your math immediately, because I’m so annoyed at myself.Yes, he was a good father. I’ll give you an example. When you were 3 years old, we bought the apartment in Greenpoint. It had no walls then. We’d barely been able to scrape together the down payment, and we assumed that I could draw up the plans for the renovation myself and save us the expense of hiring someone to draw them. But when I submitted the plans to the co-op board, they argued that I couldn’t be trusted to be the architect of my own renovation because I was incentivized to say that the work wouldn’t interfere with the plumbing or electrical lines. They rejected the plans, but we still had to move in; the lease was up on our old place, and there was nowhere else to go. One evening, when our stuff was still in boxes, I lay on the couch in despair and watched your father play with you. I realized that the two of you were actually enjoying this open-plan hellscape. He took up the Swiffer and showed you how to throw a javelin. He put on music, and you made him stand you on the kitchen island so that you could gaze into his eyes as you danced with him. You needed to be face-level with your father to dance. I was terrified you were going to fall off and crack your skull.When you got a little older, what you liked the most was when he talked to you about the law. You would memorize the things he said and repeat them to me, for my benefit: In a public park, there’s no such thing as a trespass; a public defender is a lawyer the government hires to protect people from itself; a pickpocket steals with stealth, but a mugger steals with main force or imminent threat thereof. You would recite and say, “When I grow up, I’m going to be an intellectual-property lawyer.”Very perceptive. He needed to feel that adoration coming at him all the time. I’m glad he’s told you about the affairs he had back then. It was a menschy thing, for him to talk to you about it. It’s so much better that he be the one to tell you, and it’s good you understand what happened with our marriage. Sure, but I only started after he’d been doing it for six months. He told you that, right? Good.I think it all started because of his poetry. Did he tell you about the poetry? He had this manuscript, 20 pages long. He didn’t show it to anyone else, just to me. He wanted to know what I thought. I said, “Thank you, dear, I’m so happy that you’d share this with me.” The next morning, he went to work, and I dropped you off at preschool. I went home, and I went into my study, which by that time existed. I settled into my chair, and I began to read. It would have been better if I’d hated the poems. I didn’t feel strongly enough about them to feel hate. They were a distillation of the part of him that he called honest and authentic. What I mean is that they were lyric takedowns of friends. That’s unfair of me, actually. Some awe of nature was mixed in. I said nothing about them at all. My strategy was to pretend that he’d never shown me anything and hope he’d get the message. Probably I should’ve faked raptures. Would it have killed me to writhe on the floor, just a little? But I knew that if I told him they were good, he would have rushed out and shown them to his friends and been humiliated. I was trying to protect him. Weeks went by, and then months. And then a woman called me. A painter, someone we both knew. I wasn’t all that surprised, really. I asked her if he’d shown her the poems. “What poems?” she said. I was ruined for him, you know?You’re right, that is harsh. What I mean is, my sense was that he was filled with horrific shame whenever he saw me, because I’d read his poems and thought they were bad. So he ran off to sleep with people who didn’t fill him with horrific shame. Yes, an escape. That’s why he’ll never be creative for a living: He has no stomach for rejection. Sorry, Steven, I didn’t mean to make myself cry.Can we stop for a moment and talk about this conversation? It’s hard, sometimes, knowing what’s okay to say to you when I’m on my own. There’s nobody around for me to consult when things take off in a strange direction. It’s hard to keep my bearings when I’m the only adult. Well, I’m glad you like it. I’m glad we’re close like this, that we talk. I just worry that some of it isn’t good for you. You might not be so shy around kids your age if I wasn’t always here for you to talk to. Like, you have friends, but you might have a best friend if I weren’t your best friend.Wait, are you asking that just to put off math even longer? Because there’s obviously no way I can ignore that question and force you to do geometry before I answer it. Yes, your father cares about seeing you. Of course he does. Why would you ever think otherwise?Stop jabbing your hand with that thing. Because I say so. How are we supposed to make any progress when you do that? Put it down. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Why would you think your father doesn’t—That’s wrong. It means nothing that he moved to Boston. It means nothing that he moved to Chicago. It says nothing about how he feels about you. You think he’s happy that he moved away, and then farther away? That’s really what you believe? You think he’s content, being far away from you?Tell me something. What did your father tell you about taking the job in Boston, and then the job in Chicago? Did he offer an explanation? Have you asked?“Wandering in his blood.” That’s an exact quotation? I see. “A natural nomad.” What did he tell you about why he quit the Boston job two years ago? Even though he didn’t have another job lined up? The work didn’t excite him anymore. Huh. And your conclusion is that he doesn’t care how often you see each other. I see. Can’t you tell that he’s happy and excited when he sees you? Every time we do a handover in person, he lights up when you get out of my car. That time we met him in Kerhonkson, he sauntered out of his Airbnb hut and yammered at you while you were still walking up the driveway about what hike you were going to go on and what he was going to cook you for dinner. Huh. You think that’s just his state all the time? Mr. Happy Guy, loving life in the Windy City, far away from you? Really?I’m so sorry. Okay, come here. It’s okay. It’s okay. Come here. Okay, you don’t have to let me hug you. Listen to me.In the early days, right after the divorce, when you were 6, 7, your father still worked for Fried, here in New York. Yes, with the big fish tank in the lobby, you remember. The beverage cart! What a memory you have. One Friday evening, when I dropped you off at his place in Vinegar Hill, he asked me to meet him for a drink the next day. He’d found a babysitter for you, so the two of us could talk in private.We sat at the marble bar at this restaurant near his apartment, and he ordered a Stolichnaya on the rocks with a wedge of lime—I remember the stoic voice he used when he ordered it. He rattled the ice in his glass and sang “La Cucaracha,” which was his way of saying, “Remember the old days, ex-wife, everything we’ve been through?” He told me he’d been forced to tender his resignation. He’d yelled at men in meetings; he’d flirted with a woman who didn’t want to be flirted with; he’d slept with another woman and hurt her feelings. It was his way of being a wild man, living according to his nature, being real; that was what had brought him down. He said, “Please, please, don’t tell Steven what happened.” He begged me to let him come up with a reason that would keep you from worrying that he was incapable of supporting you and that we were going to run out of money. And there he was, the Harvard boy with dirty fingernails, this divorced, balding lawyer, weeping with shame in a bar.No, we wouldn’t be here if it were just my income from the architecture practice. We’d be far from District 15, my boy. Way out in the Catskills. That’s my guess. I’ll bet there’s a Peru, New York. Maybe there.Not because I felt sorry for him, though I did feel sorry for him. Because I thought he was right. You were a small child. The truth would have scared you. It would have been irresponsible to let you know that your father had lost control and lost his job and didn’t know what his next one was going to be, and he’d have to go wherever he could find employment. Because his reputation was shot in New York. We knew it might make you think he didn’t care how far away he—I’m sorry. He said, “I know it might give Stevie the wrong impression, but it’s the only way.” I thought you might figure it out around the age you are now, on your own. Maybe a little older. It wasn’t my place to expose him, like I’m doing now. It wasn’t ego or pride that made him keep it from you. He wanted you to feel safe.I thought you’d probably figure it out when you were ready because what we told you didn’t hold water. Somebody yearns for adventure and excitement, so they move to Boston? On purpose? You wonder why he has a spring in his step when you show up at O’Hare? Because you’re the best thing in his life. By far. I mean, I would hope that he loves your stepmother. But you’re the thing he lives for, and he gets you five days a month.After seven years up there, he called me and told me it had happened again. Our money is all tangled together, you know. He has to tell me, contractually, when there’s a change in his income. Things had been fine for a long time, and then the paralegals and the receptionists all got together and requested a meeting with the executive committee and took turns saying how scared of him they were. It was the same thing. He’d spent an afternoon making a playlist—I know, I know—and then when an intern made a joke about it, a queer intern, he got angry and said something that he himself found literally unrepeatable. I asked him, “What did you say? Just whisper it over the phone; it won’t kill you.” He couldn’t do it. Thank God he had some old law-school buddies in Chicago.We still talk sometimes, you know. He keeps a journal in his desk now, at his therapist’s behest. Every afternoon, he writes down all of his impulses, so that he can see how destructive they are. I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine. Probably impulses like: Quote Robert E. Lee at strategy meeting. Or: Ask co-worker bragging about trans child, “Was the trans thing the kid’s idea or yours?” He calls it The Book of Things I Must Not Do.You haven’t been duped. Not at all. Yes, we let you believe something that was untrue.But you can admire him even more now. Not joking. I mean, who is more worthy of your admiration? The associate at a small midwestern firm with a notebook full of unacceptable desires, trying to make sure he doesn’t hurt anyone, trying to make sure he can continue to pay child support? Or the natural nomad, with wandering in his blood, rolling dice, looking for work that excites him? For me, the answer is obvious. What’s that face? Why does that make you angry? I don’t think that was a cruel thing for me to say. You’re just used to thinking of him as a demigod.Are you okay? How are you feeling? Will you tell me? Stop poking your hand with that thing. Because I’ve told you it bothers me. It’s not a smart thing to do. That’s my compass, and I’m worried you’re going to—I’m serious. It’s driving me insane. You’re going to break the skin. You’re doing it too hard. Not joking.Give it to me. You’re bigger than I am now, so I need you to give it to me. You’re going to drive me nuts if you keep doing that. You’re doing it too hard. Why won’t you talk to me?Steven. You’re going to hurt yourself. Talk to me, please.I’m going to change the settings on your phone if you keep doing that to your hand. Do you hear me? I’m going to lock up the Xbox. You’re acting like a child. A person who does this is a person who is spoiled.I might not succeed in taking it from you, but if you don’t stop, I’m going to try. Are you really going to fight me off?Okay. Thank you. Come here. Let’s have a look. I’m sorry I said those things to you. I was upset. I’m going to get the hydrogen peroxide and a Band-Aid. You’re going to be fine.Hold still. Then we’re both sad. Yeah? It’s normal to want to go back to how you used to be. I miss my old self too.For example, I miss when we had flying roaches in the commune in August. I had a technique I developed: I sprayed them with Windex when they were airborne. Your father called it anti-aircraft fire. He used to watch me, shouting encouragement. Like “Direct hit, London.” The Windex gummed up their wings and brought them down. It was all we used Windex for.You’d hear this tiny thud when the big ones hit the linoleum. It really did look like a bomber catching flak, going into a death spiral, and crashing. Then I’d advance, blasting it with the Windex, until it was almost paralyzed, kicking its legs in slow motion. Your father got some paper towels and finished the job. Sometimes it was a struggle; they’d hide behind a shelf or whatever. None of them eluded us for long. I thought your father and I would always be a team. Ignorance is bliss. When you’re a grown-up, the past is this incredible party, and you can’t get there. Yeah, like L.A. But I’d rather be here, talking to you. Okay: geometry.

The first step toward coexistence for Israelis and Palestinians—and toward the resolution of the conflict between them—must be the abandonment of the zero-sum mentality that has suffused thinking about the conflict for far too long. And it’s not just the Israelis and Palestinians who have fallen victim to such thinking. In Western and Arab capitals, elites have chosen to view the issue through ethnic, religious, colonialist, and geopolitical frameworks that are simplistic, woefully misguided, and incompatible with their oft-stated commitment to universal values.There is nothing unpatriotic or disloyal about understanding another people’s history and its foundational narratives. This is simply sound strategy, undergirded by normal human empathy. Each dead-end eruption of violence has put paid to the notion of a military solution; reconciliation is the only path forward. The parties should not be asked to reach a consensus on the historical record of the past 140 years in the region. But they can, and should, learn to understand each other well enough to build a shared future around a promise of mutual recognition, equal rights, security, and prosperity.The simple fact is that two peoples, in roughly equal numbers and with distinct national identities, reside in the territory that lies between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Israel exercises various degrees of hegemony over that territory, which includes Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. The people who reside there, however, have been sorted by Israel into four primary categories. There are Israeli Jews (including West Bank settlers), who enjoy exclusive first-class citizenship in the Israeli state, as most recently enshrined in Israel’s 2018 nation-state law. There are Palestinian citizens of Israel, who have political rights but suffer discrimination within the state. There are Palestinians in the West Bank, who live as noncitizens under foreign-military occupation, or who contend with Israeli-settler encroachment and violence. And there are Palestinians in Gaza, who live as noncitizens under a military blockade and are currently suffering through Israel’s brutal military campaign.[Arash Azizi: The one-state delusion]This four-layered arrangement is inherently unjust, unstable, and unsustainable. In the postcolonial world, ethnic domination is simply not going to fly. Sooner or later, a formula for coexistence undergirded by legal, political, and social equality must be found.The latest explosion in the tortured history of this land began on October 7, with Hamas’s brutal attack in southern Israel that killed more than 1,100 Israelis. Since then, 33,000 Gazans have been killed, according to Hamas’s Health Ministry. Some 1.9 million Gazans have been displaced, and most of the Strip has been destroyed. The onset of disease, famine, and chaos will only exacerbate the human devastation in the months to come. The emotional and political impact—in the region and globally—is likely to be generational. Once the difficult triage work of bringing the violence to a halt, ensuring the return of all hostages, and restoring some level of stability to Gaza is complete, the world community must prioritize a genuine political resolution to this most vexing and intractable of conflicts.Promises of a “total victory”—whether Israeli fantasies of enforcing military submission or expulsion, or Palestinian visions of an international restoration of pre–Balfour Declaration Palestine—undermine progress toward peace. Such chimerical ideologies would damn the populations of the region to many more years of violence and cruelty. The purveyors of these atavistic yearnings, no matter how sincerely they feel them, must be marginalized. People of goodwill, who genuinely believe in a peaceful future and who can prioritize their reverence for universal values over tribalism, will be the ones who bring about peace. For far too long, ideological extremism, political cowardice, cynical exploitation, and war profiteering have been ceded an effective veto power over finding a pragmatic resolution to the conflict, while the blood of the Palestinian and Israeli peoples continues to flow.[Read: My message of peace to Israelis]The question of Israel and Palestine needs to be reframed and recalibrated. Relitigating years of violence and atrocities may make for good television or social-media spats, but it does nothing to promote peace. There is no need for either side to submit to the other’s narrative or to admit their own singular culpability.Rather, the paramount focus must be on a shared future built on equality, the rule of law, justice, compromise, and the rejection of ethnic or sectarian supremacy. The elevation of these principles from sloganeering to practice will be the basis of any just and lasting resolution. Those who embrace them need to engage in the effort to bring about peace—and those who do not can watch their influence ebb as history passes them by.

This 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.Donald Trump is among the most famous and most polarizing people alive. The task of selecting 12 impartial jurors who can render a fair verdict in the criminal trial of a former president is a first for America’s court system.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic: Welcome to pricing hell. Gaza is dividing Democrats. David Frum: Why Biden should not debate Trump A Reasonable Middle GroundYesterday, jury selection began in Donald Trump’s first criminal trial, and today, six jurors were selected. The New York trial, centered on accusations that Trump falsified business records to conceal a hush-money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels, may be the only of Trump’s various legal cases to wrap up before the November election. Many Americans are set on their hopes for the trial’s outcome before it begins, which makes finding impartial jurors a real challenge. Ninety-six potential jurors were called into the courtroom yesterday—an usually large number—and more than half of them quickly raised their hand to say they couldn’t be impartial and thus needed to be dismissed. Some prospective jurors who had indicated yesterday that they could be impartial changed their mind today.The task of the judge is not necessarily to select people who have no feelings about Trump—that’s near-impossible. Rather, the point is to select people who can be impartial (about both Trump and other potential witnesses), listen to evidence, and follow the law and the rules given by the court, Sharon Fairley, a professor from practice at the University of Chicago Law School, told me. The jurors selected so far, whose names haven’t been released, reportedly include a young corporate lawyer, a man originally from Ireland who works in sales, and a young Black woman who said that some of her friends have strong opinions about the former president but that she is not a political person.Criminal convictions, Fairley reminded me, require a unanimous decision from the jury. So Trump’s lawyers are likely hoping for even a single holdout—a person who is independent in their thinking and perhaps not a stickler for following rules. The government’s lawyers, for their part, are likely looking for people who are intelligent and discerning, who believe in the rule of law, and who are able to see through the “smoke and mirrors” that the Trump defense may introduce to the courtroom, Fairley said. Lawyers from either side can dismiss 10 potential jurors for any reason (so far, Trump’s lawyers have done this with six potential jurors, the prosecution with four). Beyond that, Fairley explained, the judge has discretion in selecting people who he feels could credibly set aside personal feelings to render a fair judgment.Trump has held tight to his narrative that this trial is a politically motivated “witch hunt,” a tactic that will only add to the court’s unique challenges here. Usually, the prosecution is more likely to generate publicity about criminal trials than the defense, Valerie Hans, a law professor at Cornell University, told me in an email—most defendants do not “have the public microphone of Donald Trump.” Already, Hans noted, one prosecutor, Joshua Steinglass, has been trying to draw a distinction for prospective jurors between what they have seen about the trial in the news and the actual evidence that they will go on to see.Part of the court’s challenge is weeding out people who are actually able to be impartial versus those who say they are because they want to get on the jury for their own reasons, James J. Sample, a law professor at Hofstra University, told me in an email. Ideological jurors could come from either side, Sample noted: “Yes, Manhattan is mostly blue. But might there be one true believer who wants to cement themselves as a MAGA hero? Absolutely.”How each prospective juror voted will be of interest to lawyers on either side, but it likely won’t be the deciding factor in who gets placed on the jury—and lawyers aren’t allowed to ask that question directly. Justice Juan M. Merchan’s 42 questions for would-be jurors, including ones about whether they are part of advocacy groups or have attended campaign events for Trump (or anti-Trump groups), “suggest an attempt to find a reasonable middle ground here—not ruling out anyone who has some views on Trump or disqualifying them based on their vote in 2020 or 2016, but also making sure they’re not rah-rah activists either for or against,” my colleague David Graham told me.There’s also a simple irony at the core of this whole process: The type of person best suited to be a thoughtful and credible juror in this case will almost by definition know something about Donald Trump. “A hypothetical juror who had never heard of Mr. Trump at all,” Sample acknowledged, “would be such an uninformed citizen as to be of suspect legitimacy from the jump.”The trial is expected to last about six weeks (though it could take longer). After the rest of the jury is chosen, the trial proceedings will kick off in earnest, with former Trump-world figures including Michael Cohen and possibly even Stormy Daniels herself expected to testify. But in the meantime, the public and the defendant (who seemed to nod off on the first day) will need to sit through more of the same. As David told me, “Monday’s start to the trial was both huge in historic terms and mostly very boring in substance.”Related: Trump’s alternate-reality criminal trial The cases against Trump: a guide Today’s News The U.S. Supreme Court justices considered whether the Justice Department can charge January 6 defendants with violating an obstruction statute—a decision that could affect the election-interference case against Donald Trump. Israel’s military chief said yesterday that Iran’s recent strike “will be met with a response” but did not specify a timeline or the scale of a retaliatory attack. A federal appeals court ruled that a West Virginia law, which bans transgender girls and women from playing on certain sports teams, violates the Title IX rights of a teen athlete. Evening Read Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty. What Happens When You’ve Been on Ozempic for 20 Years?By Gary Taubes Of all the wonder drugs in the history of medicine, insulin may be the closest parallel, in both function and purpose, to this century’s miracle of a metabolic drug: the GLP-1 agonist. Sold under now-familiar brand names including Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro, these new medications for diabetes and obesity have been hailed as a generational breakthrough that may one day stand with insulin therapy among “the greatest advances in the annals of chronic disease,” as The New Yorker put it in December. But if that analogy is apt—and the correspondences are many—then a more complicated legacy for GLP-1 drugs could be in the works. Insulin, for its part, may have changed the world of medicine, but it also brought along a raft of profound, unintended consequences … With the sudden rise of GLP-1 drugs in this decade, I worry that a similar set of transformations could occur. Read the full article.More From The Atlantic How the Biden administration messed up FAFSA Salman Rushdie strikes back. The myth of the mobile millionaire Trump’s presidential-immunity theory is a threat to the chain of command. Culture Break Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Courtesy of the author; FPG / Getty; Tom Kelley / Getty. Care for a loved one. With the right amount of self-awareness, you can learn parenting lessons from raising a dog, Kate Cray writes.Watch. Recent prestige TV shows have featured difficult men: heroes who are resolutely alienated, driven to acts of violence they don’t want to inflict and can’t enjoy, Sophie Gilbert writes.Play our daily crossword.Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.Enjoy listening to our journalism? Find quick stories and deep dives here.Explore all of our newsletters here.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.