In today’s newsletter, an article by Rivka Galchen on new research about how the tiger got his stripes. But, first, the President’s disgraceful Gaza plans. Plus:
More than five hundred years ago, Machiavelli, the philosopher of political practice and modern republicanism, suggested, in “Discourses on Livy,” that “at times it is a very wise thing to simulate madness.” Richard Nixon, according to his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, apparently arrived at a similar conclusion, saying, “I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button’—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”
On Tuesday, President Trump appeared alongside the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in the East Room at the White House, and declared that the two million Palestinians in Gaza should be forced out of the Strip. The United States would “take over” Gaza and “own” it. The Palestinians, after having suffered tens of thousands of deaths and the destruction of countless homes, schools, mosques, hospitals, and other infrastructure, would, it appears, have nothing to say about any of this and would be sent . . . elsewhere. Egypt. Jordan. Whatever. It hardly seemed to matter to Trump that such a policy represents ethnic cleansing. Morality is of no interest when there is a real-estate deal to be made. Keep reading the story »
P.S. There is a less than two-per-cent chance—not nothing!—that a recently spotted asteroid will strike Earth in December of 2032. In T. Coraghessan Boyle’s propulsive and moving story “Chicxulub,” from 2004, the narrator is preoccupied with space rocks, and with the potential of a meteor strike. “Astrophysicists call such objects ‘civilization enders,’ and calculate the chances that a disaster of this magnitude will occur during any individual’s lifetime at roughly one in ten thousand,” he notes, “the same odds as dying in an auto accident in the next six months—or, more tellingly, living to be a hundred in the company of your spouse.” 💫
Hannah Jocelyn contributed to this edition.
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