Flagship

Trump’s travails

An alleged Iranian hack of the Donald Trump campaign came amid growing signs of tension within the former president’s effort to return to the White House. The extent of the digital intrusion thus far remains unclear, but reportedly includes a “research dossier” on Trump’s now-running mate JD Vance. The revelation came as new polls showed his Democratic challenger Kamala Harris was ahead in three swing states and was more trusted by voters to steward the economy. Republican strategists, meanwhile, worry that Trump’s vocal criticism of the GOP governor of Georgia and his call for mass deportation of migrants living in the US illegally could harm his campaign in a battleground state and among much-needed Latino voters respectively.

Iran strike on Israel expected

Israeli intelligence reportedly expects a much-anticipated Iranian attack within days, a move that comes amid growing doubts over a potential ceasefire in Gaza. The strike by Tehran, in retribution for the killings of senior commanders of the Hamas and Hezbollah militant groups, exemplifies what The Economist described as “Iran’s frightening new playbook for war,” in which the country has a “new appetite for risk-taking” and is more willing to countenance direct conflict with Israel. In a sign of the rising tensions, the US increased its naval deployments to the Middle East. Within Gaza, meanwhile, prospects for a deal — seen as close just last week — were upended by an Israeli school strike that left dozens dead and sparked global outrage.

Kyiv ready to defend captured ground

Ukrainian troops are digging trenches in Russian territory, suggesting that Kyiv plans a prolonged defense of newly captured land. Six days into the unexpected incursion, Ukraine holds land 20 miles over the Russian border, and Forbes reported that industrial excavators have been seen on both sides of the front line. Russian President Vladimir Putin has promised retaliation for the attack, but counterintuitively the largest territorial gain by either side since 2022 could shorten the war, a military analyst argued in Foreign Policy: Kyiv has hinted that one goal is gaining “leverage in negotiations,” offering a trade of captured ground for captured ground and both sides retreating to their recognized borders.

New scrutiny over Adani

A US hedge fund piled pressure on Indian regulators, alleging a top official had financial ties to Asia’s richest man. Hindenburg Research’s claims of links between India’s stock-market watchdog and the brother of Gautam Adani came after the firm last year accused Adani’s conglomerate of fraud. The Indian regulator denied the accusations, and Adani’s company described the claims as “malicious, mischievous, and manipulative.” Though the dispute is specific, Adani’s connections to Prime Minister Narendra Modi mean “politicians on either side of the aisle are unlikely to get into the technical complexities,” Bloomberg columnist Andy Mukherjee wrote. Modi could look past Adani-linked controversies when his grip on Parliament was unquestioned, but losing his majority in recent elections has “eroded that advantage.”

China looks to accelerate transition

Chinese authorities unveiled plans to accelerate the country’s energy transition, including efforts to change its taxation, consumption, and energy regulations to bolster cleaner sectors of the economy. The latest announcement, which was quickly followed by China’s central bank saying it would extend a program of cheap lending for emissions-reduction projects, underlined the speed at which China — the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitter — is deploying clean power and the extent to which it has made itself a central node of the global green transition: China already dominates the global solar-panel and battery markets, and is fast making inroads into the production of wind turbines, including in markets with entrenched incumbents such as Europe.

Haiti progress at risk

A deployment of Kenyan police to Haiti has pushed powerful drug gangs back from the country’s capital, but violence persists elsewhere in the island nation. Although the US-backed police deployment has alleviated conditions in some areas of Port-au-Prince — including allowing the reopening of Haiti’s international airport — most of the country’s economy remains paralyzed by violence. Meanwhile Kenya is dealing with its own domestic instability, raising the risk that the police may be recalled. Experts called on Western countries to increase funding for Haiti, and “dig much more deeply than they have.”

Chess club refuge for DRC children

A chess club in a refugee camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo has become a refuge from war for dozens of children. The club is “a therapeutic escape from the stress and horrors these children have endured,” helping them find calm amid one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, its founder told the Associated Press. More than five million people have been displaced by years of conflict in the east of the country, which experts say has been stoked by neighboring Rwanda. Despite the worsening conditions in camps — where many remain exposed to hunger and violence — a UN aid drive secured just 41% of the funds it sought.

Au revoir Paris, hello LA for Olympics

Tom Cruise abseiled into the Olympic stadium as Paris symbolically handed the Games over to Los Angeles. After months of doubt, Parisians threw themselves into the Games: The French “capital let itself be overtaken by the Olympic spirit,” Le Monde reported, “a success hailed by all.” The Paris Mayor handed the Olympic flag to her LA counterpart, and “the show went jarringly Hollywood,” The Los Angeles Times’ TV critic said, with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Snoop Dogg performing and Cruise adding three extra rings to the Os in the Hollywood sign to make the Olympic symbol. It will be a big time for international sport in the US, which will also partly play host to the 2026 men’s soccer World Cup.

WW1 soldier identified after 106 years

A US soldier who died in World War I will be buried in Seattle this month. The bodies of two soldiers were found during construction work in Aisne-Marne, northern France, in 2004. One was easily identified, but the other was considered impossible. In 2018, though, a forensic archaeologist, Jay Silverstein, reopened the case, using DNA evidence, dental records, and military documents of the battle of Aisne-Marne, in which the soldiers died. Silverstein wrote in The Conversation that he was able to find family members to confirm with genetic testing that the soldier was Private First Class Charles McAllister, who can now “finally be laid to rest with military honours in his hometown,” in the presence of his 91-year-old great-nephew.

Henry James’ artful circumlocutions

A new collection of Henry James’ prefaces to his own work reveals what the great novelist thought about his fiction. They also, wrote Colin Burrow in the London Review of Books, highlight James’ struggles later in his life to say what he meant: He “wanted every sentence to be artful,” said Burrow, forgetting that “some sentences just need to say what they need to say.” Still, the prefaces take readers “inside the operations of the creative mind.” Late-career James was chiefly interested in how consciousness works, and his circumlocutions and “unnaturally emphasised adverbs” hint at the uncertainty in that enterprise: It is a “fusion of style and content” intended to reveal a “multiplex vision of human reality.”

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Talking bull

The bullroarer is a simple device — a length of cord or string with a flat piece of bone or wood on the end. The user spins it around in a circle, and it makes a roaring noise. But what is interesting about it is that it is used in rituals in more than 100 apparently separate cultures, from aboriginal Australians to ancient Greece, and usually with the same cultural significance: It is often considered the voice of God or some mythical first ancestor; it is often used in male coming-of-age ceremonies to symbolize death and rebirth; and it is often said to have been invented by women, but stolen from them by men.

It could have been independently invented, dozens of times — but it could also have been invented once, writes Andrew Cutler in Vectors of Mind. Anthropologists argued the two cases for decades, but the “diffusionist” position that they spread from a common ancestor became unpopular, when some construed it as suggesting some cultures were more creative than others, and it has since been neglected. But given the ritual similarities in its use between wildly disparate cultures — from Bantus to Navajos, Sami to Basque — “the simplest explanation for this set of facts,” says Cutler, “is the bullroarer was invented once, long ago, and spread.”

Life and death

In 2006, Clayton Schwartz, a 30-year-old philosophy student, was in a motorbike accident, and paralyzed from the chest down. A year and a half later, he died by suicide. In the time in between, he wrote a book, Two Arms and a Head, which acted as a combined memoir, suicide note, and manifesto. On Astral Codex Ten, an anonymous writer reviewed that book. The review itself is hard to read — Flagship can only imagine the book itself is even harder. In the book, Schwartz addresses the obstacles that lie between him and ending his life, which he considered a shadow of what it was, on his own terms.

The obvious one was that when he wrote it, physician-assisted suicide was illegal almost everywhere in the US. But there are “smaller, more insidious roadblocks,” the anonymous reviewer writes. “The book is a scathing indictment of how our society enables the lifelong disabled at the expense of the newly disabled and terminally ill.” A major part of it is “toxic positivity” — a social ecosystem that “reinforces the idea that disabled people should be upbeat and optimistic about their life prospects.” Any hint that he wanted to die “would have gotten him locked up in the psych ward,” so “he has to write his book in secret, he has to lay his thoughts out for the world in secret, and he has to die in secret.”

Home advantage

Host countries tend to do well at the Olympics. France had is having a good Games this time around; Japan overperformed last time out; Great Britain raked in the medals in 2012. It’s not always true, but in general, you can see a decent bump in the medal haul for a country when it has the Olympics on its soil. The data-savvy blogger Dynomight has a go at determining why: Is it the refs and judges being biased? Is it the boost of the crowds?

Honestly, it’s probably the money, says Dynomight. You can usually see an increase in the Games before a country hosts, and sometimes afterward, implying that it’s not home-biased judges or crowd fervor. And while most countries don’t disclose their Olympic funding, the UK does, and when the money started flowing after an embarrassing performance in 1996 and especially ahead of the UK hosting in 2012, the medals started to flow too. “Medal counts are not a measure of a country’s worth,” says Dynomight. “Mostly, they measure (a) population, (b) economic development, and (c) how much money you’re willing to set on fire to make numbers go up on a magic billboard.”

Nice Guys, a 1979 experimental jazz album by the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The 1960s and 1970s had seen great, and controversial, changes in jazz, as musicians bucked existing trends and sometimes alienated listeners and peers by doing so. But a disparate group of artists still felt “locked up in a system,” and created the Ensemble. Nice Guys is the “apex” of their work, Pitchfork said, “an album that’s both staunchly uncompromising and about as inviting as avant-garde music gets.” Listen to Nice Guys on Spotify.

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