Reasons to be Hopeful in Iran
Reasons to be Hopeful in Iran
President Trump used to quip that Iran “never won a war, but never lost a negotiation.” Perhaps this view explains his decision to forsake previous rounds of talks over Iran’s nuclear program and wage a full-scale assault on the country. But Trump’s gambit may have backfired: In this particular war, Iran remains undefeated, which puts the country in an even stronger position when the two sides start talking in Islamabad tomorrow.
Despite assumptions that this war has propped up the regime, the conflict may have also put Iran on a path toward reconciliation with the rest of the world. Should talks with America resolve the conflict and curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, the result could create better economic prospects and greater freedom for the Iranian people.
Following Tuesday’s cease-fire announcement, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council promptly claimed victory but also expressed some optimism for the talks. The council called for national unity and full support for diplomatic eff…
Claude Mythos Is Everyone’s Problem
For the past several weeks, Anthropic says it secretly possessed a tool potentially capable of commandeering most computer servers in the world. This is a bot that, if unleashed, might be able to hack into banks, exfiltrate state secrets, and fry crucial infrastructure. Already, according to the company, this AI model has identified thousands of major cybersecurity vulnerabilities—including exploits in every single major operating system and browser. This level of cyberattack is typically available only to elite, state-sponsored hacking cells in a very small number of countries including China, Russia, and the United States. Now it’s in the hands of a private company.
On Tuesday, the company officially announced the existence of the model, known as Claude Mythos Preview. For now, the bot will be available only to a consortium of many of the world’s biggest tech companies—including Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia. These partners can use Mythos Preview to scan and secure bugs and ex…
Scientists Are Finally Unlocking a Cancer Treatment’s Full Potential
By the time Fabian Müller met the patient at the center of his newest research paper, he was fairly certain that an experimental treatment was her last hope. The patient, a 47-year-old mother of two, had for years been battling three severe autoimmune diseases, all of which were triggering her body to attack components of her blood. Her doctors had made nine separate attempts to treat her conditions, but none of them had worked. By the start of 2025, she’d been confined to a hospital in Dresden, Germany, for more than two months, being dosed with multiple immunosuppressive drugs and receiving up to three daily transfusions of red blood cells, as her care team tried and failed to control a massive disease flare.
In desperation, the woman’s care team reached out to Müller, a hematologist-oncologist at the University Hospital of Erlangen, a roughly three-hour drive away by ambulance. In recent years, he and his colleagues have made a name for themselves pioneering experimental CAR-T cell …
Masterpieces of the New Deal
To forge a new social contract is one thing. To explain it to people is another. The bureaucrats of the New Deal understood that very well. They also knew that art and architecture could be powerful spreaders of political ideas. As it brought America out of the Depression, the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration built or funded courthouses, post offices, town halls, gyms, pools, auditoriums, and much more—tens of thousands of public buildings and facilities—and its arts programs employed as many as 10,000 artists to decorate them.
The Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, originally the Social Security Board Building, exemplifies New Deal art and architecture at their best. It’s the “Sistine Chapel of the New Deal,” in the words of the founder of the Living New Deal, an organization dedicated to documenting and preserving the history and culture of the period. In 1935, Roosevelt’s Social Security Act changed the covenant between the American people and the state. Social Security enshrined…
A Writer of ‘Hypnotic Repetition’
A love-it-or-leave-it feature of Nancy Lemann’s distinctive, dreamy style is that she often repeats herself. Images, events, and turns of phrase reoccur both within and across her five novels and even, to a lesser extent, in her nonfiction. The people in her books are always “falling apart”; their hearts are often “in a million pieces on the floor.” Her narrators—usually women from New Orleans—have a reverence for older traditions, including baseball, which represents “a chance to go forth with the heroes,” and for men in seersucker suits who have outdated affectations, like reading ancient Greek and eating oysters at lunch. Several of these women have soft spots for the same “blue-eyed boy with the crooked smile” (who has a drinking problem), and they tend to indulge in what could be called negative self-talk (they chide themselves for being “idiotic” or “lamebrained”).
In the introduction to a new reissue of Lemann’s 1985 cult-classic debut novel, Lives of the Saints, the British wri…
Add a comment: