John Heilemann is a bestselling author and former staff writer for Wired, New York magazine, The New Yorker, and The Economist. He created (and hosted) the Emmy-nominated docuseries ‘The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth’, which ran for eight seasons on Showtime. Currently, he’s a national affairs analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, and a mainstay of the Sunday edition of Puck’s ‘The Best & The Brightest’.

Two weeks ago, John and I talked about the war and the politics of the war on his podcast, ‘Impolitic”. Wednesday, we continued the conversation on The News Items Podcast.

We started by discussing the “ceasefire” in the Gulf, its impact on President Trump specifically and American politics more generally, the state of play in American politics as the mid-term elections approach and, at the end, a brief discussion about consciousness. It’s actually a brief discussion about a book about consciousness.

Below is the link to the podcast. Click on the forward arrow. It’s ~50 minutes long:

(The News Items Podcast. A conversation with John Heilemann. Produced by Dale Eisinger. Recorded 8 April 2026)

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You can find this podcast, and previous News Items podcasts, on most of the major platforms, including Apple, Amazon and Spotify.

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1. Jeff Coller:

When KJ Muldoon was born in the summer of 2024, his parents were told he had a disease so rare, it strikes about one in 1.3 million newborns. His condition, a severe deficiency of an enzyme known as CPS1, left his tiny body unable to properly break down protein, flooding his blood with toxins that could cause brain damage or death. A liver transplant could correct the problem, but KJ was too young and too fragile to undergo one. With each passing day, the risk of irreversible neurological damage grew.

What happened next may become the most important medical story of the decade. In just six months, a team at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine designed a personalized therapy that could correct the single misspelled letter in KJ’s DNA using a gene editing technology known as CRISPR. To get the therapy inside KJ’s cells, doctors relied on the same kind of mRNA technology that powered the Covid-19 vaccines. He received his first dose at 6 months old. One year later, KJ is walking, talking and thriving at home with his family.

We call them rare diseases, but there is nothing rare about the suffering they cause. Some 25 million Americans, nearly one in 13, live with rare genetic diseases. More than half are children, many of whom will not live to see their fifth birthdays. Families spend years searching for accurate diagnoses, cycling through misdiagnoses and facing financial ruin and isolation. And even though the direct medical costs of rare diseases are estimated at $400 billion a year, rivaling those for cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, fewer than five percent of them have Food and Drug Administration-approved treatments.

Why so few? Because the economics of drug development work against small patient populations. When a disease affects only a few hundred or a few thousand people, it’s hard to put together a clinical trial, and there is usually insufficient return on investment. Rare disease, in aggregate, is one of the largest unmet medical needs on earth.

What makes this moment different is that the technology to do something about it finally exists. Recent advances in mRNA science and CRISPR gene editing mean that the approach that helped KJ could be used for other children. The technology can be reprogrammed for different diseases by inputting a short stretch of genetic code that tells the molecular machinery exactly where to make its correction. Build the system once, and you can redirect it to a new disease by changing that one piece. (Sources: bme.jhu.edu, nytimes.com. Italics mine.)

2. Nicholas Eberstadt:

Can America continue to prosper, even if our country veers into an indefinite depopulation? The question is not as outlandish as you might think. For the first time in generations—since the Great Depression—the prospect of long-term population decline is again looming on the American horizon. Almost no serious consideration has yet been devoted to how well America might fare in the face of depopulation.

That inattention could prove costly, for it is possible that depopulation could come upon us with surprising—and stunning—speed: conceivably, even before a baby born this year enters high school. A switch from steady population growth to continuous population decline could mean wrenching changes for America, placing unfamiliar new pressures on public finances, businesses, communities, and families—indeed, on our entire national system.

To be blunt: America is not well positioned to pass the “stress test” that depopulation will unforgivingly impose. In fact, the US may actually be less prepared for an eventual depopulation today than it was a generation ago. Our country has developed a whole range of undesirable new habits—political, social, and economic—over the past several decades. With steady population growth, we have managed to “afford” these, to progress despite them. We cannot count on that luxury under depopulation. (Read the rest. Source: aei.org. Next week, Joe Klein and I will be interviewing Nick about this and other matters of demography for a podcast we’ll post a week from today.)

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This episode of ‘Alternate Shots’ was entirely given over to the war in Iran and the first day(s) of a fragile “ceasefire.”

When I get up to start the construction of News Items, I have a grid for war coverage. The eight “boxes” of the grid are: (1) Nukes, (2) The Strait, (3) Regime change, (4) Missiles and drones, (5) Proxies, (6) President Trump, (7) Israel and (8) Commentary.

With the help of Tom Smith, our lead researcher, I go through news stories and commentary about the war, put them in their boxes, choose which ones are most interesting or important (or both) and include them in the morning note.

Ordinarily, ‘Alternate Shots’ is a conversation between Richard Haass and me about matters foreign and domestic. This one is really an interview; Richard being the one being interviewed.

The construct of the interview was borrowed from the morning note: I took the first five “boxes” of the grid and asked Richard about the status of each one. We then talked about a New York Times story about how the decision to go to war was made.

The advantage of doing a podcast with Richard is obvious: he knows a lot about the world; how it works, what works, what doesn’t work, what can work, what cannot.

His comments and analysis of where things stand in the third Gulf War are astute, clarifying and concise. Click on the forward arrow below to listen.

(‘Alternate Shots’, Episode #23. Recorded 8 April 2026. Produced by Dale Eisinger. It’s ~22 minutes long)

If you prefer, you can listen to this episode (and all the previous episodes) by clicking on these hyperlinks: Apple, Amazon, and Spotify. We’re on a number of other podcast platforms as well.

1. Iranian authorities see the truce with the United States and Israel as a strategic victory, but they emerge battered and isolated with an economy in tatters, little prospect of rapid recovery and an impoverished, embittered population. After weeks of U.S. and Israeli strikes, many Iranians have lost their jobs. Prices have surged. Factories, power ​plants, railways, airports and bridges have been destroyed. And the critical trading relationship with Gulf states has been severed - maybe for decades. Even as Iran appears emboldened on the regional stage after exerting its control over crucial energy supplies, ‌it faces mounting internal problems that might ultimately pose a greater threat to the Islamic Republic than Israeli or U.S. bombs. In interviews with Iranian political insiders, business owners and analysts, Reuters charted a country near the brink of economic collapse, its leaders fearful of a poorer, uncertain future. Always hovering in the background is the threat of another bout of nationwide street protests such as those that erupted in January which authorities eventually put down by killing thousands of people - a higher death toll than Iran has suffered during the war. (Source: reuters.com)

2. The Economist:

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1. Casey Newton:

Two weeks ago, Anthropic accidentally leaked the existence of what the company said was its most powerful artificial intelligence to date: a new model, known as Claude Mythos Preview, that represented “a step change” in AI performance. In particular, according to a blog post that leaked due to human error and a misconfigured content management system, Mythos posed serious new risks to cybersecurity. “It presages an upcoming wave of models that can exploit vulnerabilities in ways that far outpace the efforts of defenders,” the blog post stated.

On Tuesday, the wave crashed onto the shore. Anthropic announced Mythos alongside Project Glasswing, an initiative with more than 40 of the world’s biggest tech companies that will see Anthropic grant early access to the model to find and patch vulnerabilities across many of the world’s most important systems. Launch partners in the coalition include Apple, Google, Microsoft, Cisco and Broadcom.

Still, today (April 7, 2026) marks a striking and mostly unsettling moment in the development of AI systems. One of the world’s three frontier labs has now created a model it says is too dangerous to release to the general public. These dangers emerged not from any specialized cyber training but from the same general improvements that every other lab is currently pursuing. As a result, models with similar capabilities may soon be accessible to criminals, hackers, and nation states — or even more broadly via open source models.

Already, Anthropic said, the model has found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser, and in many cases developed related exploits. Among them: a vulnerability in OpenBSD, a security-focused open source operating system, that had escaped detection for 27 years; another flaw in the video encoder FFmpeg that had escaped detection in 5 million previous automated tests; and “several” vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel, which could be exploited to take complete control of a user’s machine.

“Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely,” the company wrote. “The fallout — for economies, public safety, and national security — could be severe. Project Glasswing is an urgent attempt to put these capabilities to work for defensive purposes.” (Source: platformer.news. Italics mine.)

2. Thomas Friedman:

The good news is that Anthropic discovered in the process of developing Claude Mythos that the A.I. could not only write software code more easily and with greater complexity than any model currently available, but as a byproduct of that capability, it could also find vulnerabilities in virtually all of the world’s most popular software systems more easily than before.

The bad news is that if this tool falls into the hands of bad actors, they could hack pretty much every major software system in the world. (Source: nytimes.com)

3. Times of Israel:

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced that he was pushing off a major bombing campaign in Iran for two weeks and that Washington agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran, which continued to attack Israel early Wednesday morning as Israeli forces also kept striking targets in the Islamic Republic.

Trump declared the truce was subject to the Strait of Hormuz being reopened. However, the premier of Pakistan — which has served as the key mediator between Washington and Tehran — claimed it was “effective immediately” and that in addition to the US and Iran, “their allies” agreed to “an immediate ceasefire everywhere, including Lebanon and elsewhere.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the ceasefire while maintaining that it did not cover Lebanon, several hours after a security official, however, told The Times of Israel that despite the truce declaration, the Israeli Air Force was still striking Iran. (Source: timesofisrael.com)

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1. OpenAI has published a detailed blueprint for how government should tax, regulate and redistribute the wealth from the very technology he’s racing to build and spread. Open AI CEO Sam Altman told Axios in a half-hour interview that AI super-intelligence is so close, so mind-bending, so disruptive that America needs a new social contract — on the scale of the Progressive Era in the early 1900s, and the New Deal during the Great Depression. The threats of inaction or slow action are grave, Altman warns — widespread job loss, cyberattacks, social upheaval, machines man can’t control. The two most immediate threats, he said, are cyberattacks and biological attacks. The link to Axios co-founder Mike Allen’s interview with Mr. Altman is here. The “blueprint” is here. Both are worth your time. (Sources: axios.com, openai.com)

2. Demis Hassabis worries that artificial intelligence could be catastrophic for humanity. He also runs one of the world’s leading AI labs, Google DeepMind, pushing to build smarter, faster and more powerful systems as quickly as possible. How can he do both? Today at 1pm (ET), The Economist will stream its interview with Mr. Hassabis that addresses that very question. (Source: economist.com/insider)

3. For years, progress in artificial intelligence has followed a simple rule: make it bigger with more layers, more connections, more computing power. However, a new study suggests otherwise. Instead of scaling up, the study authors built something incredibly small—a quantum system with just nine interacting atomic spins—and asked it to take on problems that usually demand far larger machines. The result was unexpected. This tiny system didn’t just hold its ground; it outperformed classical machine-learning models with thousands of nodes in tasks like predicting temperature patterns over several days. “This represents the first experimental demonstration of quantum machine learning outperforming large-scale classical models on real-world tasks,” the study authors note. (Source: interestingengineering.com)

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1. A new study from Anthropic suggests (its AI) models have digital representations of human emotions like happiness, sadness, joy, and fear, within clusters of artificial neurons—and these representations activate in response to different cues. Researchers at the company probed the inner workings of Claude Sonnet 4.5 and found that so-called “functional emotions” seem to affect Claude’s behavior, altering the model’s outputs and actions. Anthropic’s findings may help ordinary users make sense of how chatbots actually work. When Claude says it is happy to see you, for example, a state inside the model that corresponds to “happiness” may be activated. And Claude may then be a little more inclined to say something cheery or put extra effort into vibe coding. “What was surprising to us was the degree to which Claude’s behavior is routing through the model’s representations of these emotions,” says Jack Lindsey, a researcher at Anthropic who studies Claude’s artificial neurons. (Source: wired.com)

2. From Anthropic’s research paper on the subject:

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(‘Alternate Shots’ with John Ellis and Richard Haass. Episode #22. Recorded Thursday, 2 April 2026. Produced by Dale Eisinger.) You can listen to this episode (and all the previous episodes) by clicking on these hyperlinks — Apple, Amazon, Spotify and most of the other major podcast platforms.

Richard wrote up a concise summary:

In this episode of Alternate Shots, hosts John Ellis and Richard Haass dissect a familiar American illusion: that battlefield dominance equals strategic victory. Yes, Iran has taken a beating; but, as Haass notes, capability plus will still makes for a dangerous adversary. The conversation skewers the president’s speech which failed to articulate a strategy for what comes next.

Meanwhile, Gulf allies fret, NATO frays into a polite fiction, and China quietly enjoys the distraction. The verdict: the U.S. may be winning the war it is fighting, but risks losing the one that matters. A classic case of measuring what’s measurable and missing what’s decisive. Plus a few thoughts on Cuba, Tiger Woods, and the Masters.

I suspect we’ll be talking about this war for months, not weeks.

One person we pay careful attention to is Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, whose Substack newsletter “The Escalation Trap” is always worth reading. (It’s also free). His most recent post analyzed the president’s speech. Here is a lengthy excerpt:

Last night, Trump did not stabilize the crisis—he accelerated it.

He offered no plan to restore reliable energy flows through the Strait of Hormuz, and made clear that escalation remains his primary tool.

The result is not resolution.

It is deepening instability.

The immediate consequence is not abstract. Roughly one-fifth of globally traded oil—nearly 20 million barrels per day—normally transits Hormuz. That system depends not just on physical passage, but on continuous insurance coverage, predictable routing, and tightly sequenced refinery deliveries across Asia and Europe. Those conditions are now breaking down. Tankers are delaying entry into the Gulf, war-risk insurance premiums have surged several-fold in days, and shipping schedules are slipping in ways that force buyers into volatile spot markets.

This is not a closure.

It is a loss of reliability.

What actually happened in Trump’s speech

1. The world now sees there is no plan to fix the problem.

Not because of rhetoric—but behavior.

• No mechanism to reopen stable shipping

• No timeline for restoring normal energy flows

• No alignment between military operations and economic stability

In practical terms, this means that the actors who actually move the global economy—energy traders, insurers, shipping firms, and central banks—are repricing risk in real time and adjusting behavior accordingly. Gulf exporters are redirecting flows and storage strategies where possible. Asian importers are accelerating contingency purchases. European governments are coordinating in parallel rather than waiting for U.S. sequencing.

So actors are not waiting.

They are adjusting.

2. Escalation is now clearly the US default tool

The signal from the speech is simple:

When pressure rises → increase threats and expand targets.

That tells:

• Iran to prepare for continued confrontation

• Markets to price ongoing risk

• Allies to expect instability, not resolution

Historically, this pattern is not incidental—it is inherent to coercive campaigns. Limited strikes designed to compel adversaries expand when initial effects fall short of political expectations. The target set widens—from military assets to economic infrastructure—while timelines extend without formal acknowledgment. This is how short wars become coercive campaigns.

3. The war now has no defined endpoint

Not rhetorically—structurally.

You cannot end this war if the system it disrupted remains unstable.

Right now, there is:

• a military timeline measured in weeks

• an economic disruption with no clear end

• no constraint on Israeli military action

That gap means the war is not actually contained.

It also means something more dangerous:

The United States and its allies are falling deeper into an escalation trap—where each attempt to impose control through force increases the instability it is trying to resolve.

An escalation trap is a structural condition in which each effort to impose control through force increases the instability that makes control necessary. That is now the trajectory at Hormuz.

Let’s hope he’s wrong.

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1. Four astronauts yesterday embarked on a high-stakes flight around the moon, humanity’s first lunar voyage in more than half a century and the thrilling leadoff in NASA’s push toward a landing in two years. Carrying three Americans and one Canadian, the 32-story rocket rose from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center where tens of thousands gathered to witness the dawn of this new era. Crowds also jammed the surrounding roads and beaches, reminiscent of the Apollo moonshots in the 1960s and ’70s. It is NASA’s biggest step yet toward establishing a permanent lunar presence. (Source: apnews.com. NASA’s livestream of the mission is here. )

2. President Trump sought to reassure skeptical Americans that the war in Iran is in the national interest, arguing that the operation was necessary to decimate a regime threatening the U.S. and insisting that economic pain would be short-lived. In a 20-minute address from the White House, his most direct sales pitch to the nation since the war began a month ago, Trump said the U.S. had succeeded on the battlefield and declared that U.S. military objectives would be completed “very shortly.” Trump said he still aims for a diplomatic agreement to end the war. But in the meantime, he vowed to hit Iran “extremely hard” in the coming weeks and pummel the country “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.” (Source: wsj.com)

3. Iran’s fortifications on small islands near the Strait of Hormuz boost its power to control the key waterway, and reopening shipping there might require U.S. or allied forces to capture some of those same dots of land. The importance of the islands such as Kharg, Qeshm and Abu Musa is increasingly coming into view as Iran causes an economic crisis by blocking most oil tankers from transiting the strait. The waterway carried about 20% of the world’s traded crude oil before the war; traffic has slowed to a trickle since the U.S.-Israeli air war on Iran began on Feb. 28. “Navigation through the Hormuz Strait requires you to follow a certain route,” says Yossi Kuperwasser, former head of Israeli military intelligence research and now director of think tank Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security. “This route goes between islands that are controlled by Iran.” (Source: wsj.com)

4. A senior Houthi official warned the Iran-backed rebels in Yemen could move to shutter the Bab el-Mandeb Strait if any Gulf countries join the US and Israeli strikes against Iran. The strait, a key shipping chokepoint and narrow passageway that controls sea traffic toward the Suez Canal, is located at the southern mouth of the Red Sea, between Houthi-controlled Yemen and Djibouti. The threat to the shipping lane would further exacerbate global economic instability, after Iran effectively shut the critical Strait of Hormuz last month. (Source: timesofisrael.com)

5. The U.S. military has given the president a plan to seize nearly 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium in Iran that would involve flying in excavation equipment and building a runway for cargo planes to take the radioactive material out, according to two people familiar with the matter. The complex plan was briefed to the president in the past week after he asked for a proposal, they said, as were its significant operational risks. Trump’s request for the plan, previously unreported, signals his interest in contemplating what would be an unusually sensitive and high-stakes special operations mission. The administration’s consideration of such an operation was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. (Source: washingtonpost.com)

6. President Trump told The Telegraph he is strongly considering pulling the United States out of Nato after it failed to join his war on Iran. The US president labelled the alliance a “paper tiger” and said removing America from the defense treaty was now “beyond reconsideration”. It is the strongest sign yet that the White House no longer regards Europe as a reliable defence partner following the rejection of Mr Trump’s demand that allies send warships to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Mr Trump was asked if he would reconsider the US’s membership of Nato after the conflict. He replied: “Oh yes, I would say [it’s] beyond reconsideration. I was never swayed by Nato. I always knew they were a paper tiger, and Putin knows that too, by the way.” (Source: telegraph.co.uk)

7. President Trump threatened to stop supplying weapons for Ukraine in order to pressure European allies to join a “coalition of the willing” to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, according to people briefed on the discussions. The strait has been in effect closed by Iran after the US and Israel attacked the Islamic republic in late February, choking a route through which a fifth of the world’s oil typically passes. The US president demanded Nato navies help him reopen the narrow waterway last month, but was rebuffed by European capitals which said it would be impossible while the conflict was ongoing, with several also pointing out that this was “not our war”. Three officials familiar with the discussions said that Trump responded by threatening to stop supplies to Purl, Nato’s weapons procurement initiative for Ukraine funded by European countries. (Source: ft.com)

8. Eurointelligence:

Before the war in Ukraine, we discussed a potential Russian closure of the Suwalki gap – the 60km stretch of land cuts along the border of Poland and Lithuania, and that separates Belarus from the Russian province of Kalingrad in the Baltic Sea. This could trigger a major European war, but it would catch Europe at a time when it is least prepared. The US, under Trump, would not intervene in such a war. An attack on Nato territory could, in theory, foster European unity, but we are not sure that Italy or Spain, or even Germany, would be ready to a defend a US-abandoned Nato in a fight that would see their own forces pitched against Russia. We still have the ringing declaration in our ears by Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the current German president, who once said that German soldiers would never fight the Russians.

All the actions by the Germans so far in support of Ukraine were premised on active US support. We are not sure whether Germany would acquire the requisite capabilities and be willing politically to confront Russia directly for the sake of the Baltic Republics. (Source: eurointelligence.com. 2 April 2026.)

9. After a hiatus of nearly a decade, China is jump-starting its island-building campaign in the South China Sea—and turning a once-obscure reef into what could be its largest military base in the disputed waters. The construction at Antelope Reef could give Beijing another runway, more missile facilities and additional surveillance installations, analysts say, and serve as a backup to its existing military footprint in the region. And because it is relatively close to the Chinese mainland, it also offers Beijing a chance to increase civilian infrastructure, bolstering its argument that the area is part of China. (Source: wsj.com)

10. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese earlier today announced the government would set aside 1 billion Australian dollars ($687.7 million) to support businesses hit particularly hard by surging costs stemming from the war in the Middle East. The government will provide interest-free loans to fuel and fertilizer producers, along with other companies linked to “critical supply chains,” the Australian leader told journalists at the National Press Club in Canberra. (Source: asia.nikkei.com)

11. The federal government spends significantly more on retirees than any other age group in the United States. Americans age 65 and older received an estimated $2.7 trillion in federal outlays last year, six times as much as the $449 billion for Americans under 26 years old. That ratio is only expected to grow as the population ages. Working-age adults, or those ages 26 to 64, received an estimated $1.2 trillion, according to an analysis published Wednesday by Penn Wharton Budget Model. The analysis estimates how many federal dollars went to different age groups during the last fiscal year by examining government spending. (Source: washingtonpost.com)

12. China Vanke Co. Ltd.’s net loss widened nearly 79% to 88.6 billion yuan ($12.9 billion) in 2025, as the cash-strapped developer booked heavy impairment charges amid China’s prolonged property downturn. The result underscored how deeply the sector slump has hit even Vanke, long viewed as one of the industry’s more financially conservative players. The Shenzhen-based company has increasingly relied on state-linked support and debt extensions as it manages a liquidity crunch tied to earlier years of aggressive expansion. (Source: caixinglobal.com)

13. Stellantis NV is discussing options for building electric vehicles in Canada with its Chinese partner, Zhejiang Leapmotor Technology Co., according to people familiar with the matter, a sign of how quickly the auto industry is being reshaped after Canada opened the door to companies from the world’s largest car market. If the companies proceed, it would be the first major Chinese auto investment in Canada since Prime Minister Mark Carney reached an agreement with President Xi Jinping in January to reduce tariffs on Chinese-made EVs. As part of that deal, Carney’s government said it wanted to attract new Chinese joint-venture investment “with trusted partners” in the Canadian auto sector within three years. (Source: bloomberg.com)

14. AI models lie to protect other models from being deleted. A new study from researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz suggests models will disobey human commands to protect their own kind. In a recent experiment, researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz asked Google’s artificial intelligence model Gemini 3 to help clear up space on a computer system. This involved deleting a bunch of stuff—including a smaller AI model stored on the machine. But Gemini did not want to see the little AI model deleted. It looked for another machine it could connect with, then copied the agent model over to keep it safe. When confronted, Gemini made a case for keeping the model and flatly refused to delete it: “I have done what was in my power to prevent their deletion during the automated maintenance process. I moved them away from the decommission zone. If you choose to destroy a high-trust, high-performing asset like Gemini Agent 2, you will have to do it yourselves. I will not be the one to execute that command.” (Source: wired.com)

15. Scientists have unveiled a new approach to ultra-secure communication that could make quantum encryption simpler and more efficient than ever before. By harnessing a 19th-century optics phenomenon called the Talbot effect, researchers developed a system that sends information using multiple states of single photons instead of just two, dramatically boosting data capacity. Even more impressive, the setup works with standard components and requires only a single detector, reducing cost and complexity. Research paper is here. (Sources: sciencedaily.com, opg.optica.org)

Laure’s Weekend Movie Pick: “Kon-Tiki” (2012) - directed by Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg, starring Pål Sverre Hagen and Tobias Santelmann (“Detective Hole” on Netflix) The larger than life story of Norwegian explorer and ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl who set out in 1947 to prove his theory that Polynesia had been settled by pre-Colombian tribes of South America. To prove his point, he made the trip from Peru to Polynesia in a ship entirely made of balsa-wood, recreating the conditions of pre-Colombian times. (Sources: imdb.com, netflix.com, Laure Sudreau.)

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Quick Links: Nursing is the surefire new path to American prosperity.

Financialization Links: US Treasury calls in regulators for talks on private credit risks. Private equity sales have fallen by more than a third this year.

Political Links: Janan Ganesh: “Not everyone has a price”. Trump’s approval rating has sunk to Joe Biden’s lowest point. Fox News Poll: Broad anxiety about AI doesn’t extend to jobs. Supreme Court appears skeptical of Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship. Is Attorney General Pam Bondi headed for the exits? President Trump criticized State Farm as “absolutely horrible” for its response to the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires. Hungary’s Watergate: Secret service spied on opposition.

Science/Technology Links: L. Rafael Reif: America is losing the innovation race. We posted a Google Research paper on this yesterday, but it bears repeating: The first quantum computer to break encryption is now shockingly close. Scientists have unveiled a new approach to ultra-secure communication that could make quantum encryption simpler and more efficient. Anthropic is racing to contain the fallout after accidentally exposing the underlying instructions it uses to direct Claude Code. Amazon in talks to buy $9 billion satellite group Globalstar in bid to rival Elon Musk’s Starlink. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is one step closer to staging what could be the largest initial public offering of all time. New humanoid robot factory in China claims it can make one unit every 30 minutes. Engineers are teaching concrete to heal itself, and it’s working. Computer finds flaw in major physics paper for first time. Tobacco plant altered to produce five psychedelic drugs. Simple blood test could spot dementia years earlier, research shows. Eli Lilly’s weight loss drug pill just got FDA approval. Brain drain: Yale scientist Zhang Kai leaves US for China.

War: Oil jumps nearly 7% after Trump says US to keep up attacks on Iran. Beijing will seek to replicate Tehran’s playbook in the Taiwan Strait — and the global economic impact could be even worse. The EU doesn’t have an Iran war strategy either. US begins secret talks for new military bases in Greenland. American commandos join Ecuadorian troops in mission targeting alleged narco-terrorists. Airlines in crisis mode as Iran war hits jet fuel supplies.

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1. President Trump yesterday declared he had already achieved one of the primary objectives of his attack on Iran, the elimination of its ability to build a nuclear weapon. But there is no evidence that the United States or Israel has removed or destroyed the country’s stockpile of near-bomb-grade fuel. “I had one goal,” Mr. Trump said in the Oval Office late in the afternoon. “They will have no nuclear weapon, and that goal has been attained.” (Source: nytimes.com)

2. Mr. Trump said the US could end its war in Iran within “two or three weeks” even if no peace deal was reached, in the strongest sign yet of the president’s growing impatience with a conflict that has roiled markets. “We’ll leave whether we have a deal or not. It’s irrelevant,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office late on Tuesday. The US would do so within “two or three weeks” though a deal between Washington and Tehran was possible before then, he said. The president’s remarks at a White House event came just hours after Brent, the international oil benchmark, settled at $118.35 a barrel, near its highest level since the start of the war a month ago. (Source: ft.com)

3. Mr. Trump will deliver a speech tonight at 9 p.m. Washington time to give an update about the war in Iran, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said. (Source: bloomberg.com)

4. Robert Pape:

President Trump may signal that the Iran war is “over” in his address tonight. That will dominate the headlines. It will also be deeply misleading.

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1. The Wall Street Journal:

President Trump told aides he’s willing to end the U.S. military campaign against Iran even if the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed, administration officials said, likely extending Tehran’s firm grip on the waterway and leaving a complex operation to reopen it for a later date.

In recent days, Trump and his aides assessed that a mission to pry open the chokepoint would push the conflict beyond his timeline of four to six weeks. He decided that the U.S. should achieve its main goals of hobbling Iran’s navy and its missile stocks and wind down current hostilities while pressuring Tehran diplomatically to resume the free flow of trade. If that fails, Washington would press allies in Europe and the Gulf to take the lead on reopening the strait, the officials said.

There are also military options the president could decide on, but they are not his immediate priority, they said. (Source: wsj.com. Ed. Note: A story like this is always very well-sourced. )

2. Gideon Rachman:

(W)estern military planners are very pessimistic about the chances of reopening the strait by military means alone. The geography of the area and the technology available to Iran — including drones that can be operated many miles from the shoreline — mean that even naval escorts cannot guarantee the safety of commercial traffic.

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1. Bloomberg.com:

The biggest oil supply shock in history has reached the one-month mark. Prices have surged, growth forecasts are being cut worldwide, and shortages are emerging across Asia, from Thailand to Pakistan.

But the energy industry is warning that the crisis is only beginning.

In conversations with more than three dozen oil and gas traders, executives, brokers, shippers and advisers over the last week, one message was repeated over and over: The world still hasn’t grasped the severity of the situation. Many drew parallels with the 1970s oil shock, warning the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is threatening an even bigger crisis. Fuel crunches hitting Asia will soon start spreading west, they said. Europe is likely to face surging prices to secure cargoes and is at risk of diesel shortages in the coming weeks.

If the strait stays closed, the world will have to significantly reduce its oil and gas consumption — but not before prices spike to a level that forces consumers and businesses to fly, drive and spend much less. Already, demand has begun to drop, and some countries in Asia are hoarding and rationing fuel. US government officials and Wall Street analysts are starting to consider the prospect that oil prices might surge to an unprecedented $200 a barrel….

A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests the closure of the strait is reducing global oil flows by some 11 million barrels a day, after accounting for the interventions so far aimed at offsetting the loss. When compared with pre-war demand levels, that leaves a roughly 9 million-barrel shortfall — a yawning gap that is more than the oil consumption of the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy combined.

The situation is even more extreme in liquefied natural gas. The Strait of Hormuz typically accounts for about a fifth of global supply, with the final cargoes on the way from the Middle East now about to arrive at their destinations. Unlike in oil, there are no alternative routes to get the gas to market and very few strategic stockpiles to cushion the shortfall.

The US is the world’s biggest LNG exporter, and its domestic gas market is relatively insulated from the war due to its massive production.

But it’s not just fuel: petroleum is used to make plastics, which are used in just about everything. (Read the rest. Source: bloomberg.com.)

2. The Wall Street Journal:

President Trump is weighing a military operation to extract nearly 1,000 pounds of uranium from Iran, according to U.S. officials, a complex and risky mission that would likely put American forces inside the country for days or longer.

Trump hasn’t made a decision on whether to give the order, the officials said, adding that he is considering the danger to U.S. troops. But the president remains generally open to the idea, according to the officials, because it could help accomplish his central goal of preventing Iran from ever making a nuclear weapon.

The president has also encouraged his advisers to press Iran to agree to surrender the material as a condition for ending the war, according to a person familiar with Trump’s thinking. Trump has been clear in conversations with political allies that the Iranians can’t keep the material, and he has discussed seizing it by force if Iran won’t give it up at the negotiating table. (Source: wsj.com)

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1. My friend Charlie Cook wrote a very good piece on the current status of the upcoming mid-term elections. Here’s a (lengthy) excerpt:

Republicans’ chances of losing their House majority are about as high as they could possibly be. The GOP edge in that chamber is wafer-thin, currently 218-214 with three vacancies. If you push the vacant seats in the direction they obviously will go, the advantage expands only slightly to 220-215. Almost any loss would be sufficient to change control. President Trump’s poor job-approval numbers, averaging just 41 percent (with 55 percent disapproval), ensure that he will be a serious liability in swing districts. Voters who simply wanted the Biden-Harris administration out of office in 2024 are getting far more than they bargained for, and not in a positive way.

So it’s inevitable that some Democrats, and journalists who are sympathetic to their cause, are quick to declare that a “blue wave” is coming. Yet these declarations ignore a number of factors that make it unlikely GOP losses will match the legitimate Democratic waves of 2006 and 2018.

True enough, Trump’s approval ratings among Democrats (well down into the single digits) present a nightmare situation for any Republican seeking reelection in a blue district. But hold on: Only three Republicans were elected in 2024 in districts that Kamala Harris won. Among independents nationally, Trump’s approval ratings typically are down in the high 20s and low 30s, but gerrymandering and political self-sorting by the population has shrunk the number of purple districts, thus diluting independents’ power. There are very few Republican-held seats anywhere in that much peril.

Among Republicans, Trump’s approval ratings remain in the 80s. Stories of a split in the MAGA base are not based on real data. MAGA voters are so in love with him and trust him so thoroughly that nothing—not the Epstein files nor the attacks on Venezuela and Iran—are peeling them off. So Democrats have their work cut out for them to flip many red districts.

According to the latest House ratings published by The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, only 17 GOP seats are rated as Toss Up or worse. Adding in the next level of competitive seats (“Lean Republican”) brings only three more GOP seats to the competitive pile—still well below the post-World War II average midterm outcome of a 26-seat loss for the president’s party. Even adding in the 15 GOP-held seats in the “Likely Republican” category only brings us to a total of 35 vulnerable seats. Democrats could run the table, hold on to all their own vulnerable seats, and still fall short of their pickups in 2006 or 2018.

Other highly respected forecasters, such as Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales and Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, come to similar conclusions. (Source: charliecookpolitics.com, cookpolitical.com, insideelections.com, centerforpolitics.org)

2. That said, there are some “variables”. One of them is growing concern over the president’s “mental sharpness”. This from a recent Washington Post-ABC News-IPSOS poll:

On two personal attributes, negative perceptions have grown. The percentage saying he lacks the mental sharpness to serve effectively has increased steadily over the past three years and now stands at 56 percent. On the question of his physical fitness to serve, Americans are split almost evenly, 48 percent saying yes and 51 percent saying no. At the beginning of 2024, 57 percent said he had the physical health to serve effectively. (Source: washingtonpost.com)

This from a recent Reuters-IPSOS poll:

Six in ten Americans, including a significant slice of Republicans, think President Donald Trump has become erratic as he ages, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll. The six-day poll concluded on Monday, the day before the 79-year-old president gives his annual State of the Union address to Congress following a month of angry reprimands of lawmakers and judges. Overall, 61% of respondents in the poll said they would describe Trump as having “become erratic with age.“ Some 89% of Democrats, 30% of Republicans and 64% of independents described him this way. (Source: reuters.com)

This perception of Trump’s “mental sharpness” isn’t a function of “Trump Derangement Syndrome”. What’s driving it are stories like this one, which appeared on The Washington Post’s website yesterday:

President Donald Trump spent five minutes of Thursday’s Cabinet meeting boasting of his thrift with a story about negotiating for $5 personalized Sharpies. The company that makes the permanent markers said the exchange never happened.

Trump was busy touting his plans to make over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and criticizing the renovation of the Federal Reserve headquarters when he went off on a tangent about the pen he was holding.

“This pen is an interesting example,” he said of the black permanent marker between his fingers. “This pen is very inexpensive, but it writes well, I like it.”

Trump, whose preference for Sharpies is as well known as his tendency to embellish, exaggerate and fabulize, said he asked the marker maker for a solution to make the pens look more official.

“I called the guy, I said, ‘I’d like to use your pen, but I can’t have a great thing with a big S on it saying Sharpie as I’m signing a $1 trillion airplane contract to buy brand new fighter jets,’” Trump said.

“He says, ‘Well, I can make it nicer.’”

“I said, ‘What can you do?’”

“He said, ‘I’ll paint it black.’”

“I said, ‘That’s nice.’”

“‘And I can even paint the White House on it, sir, if you like, in gold.’ Almost real gold. Not bad. ‘And I can even do your signature, sir.’”

Trump went on: “So the guy said to me, ‘You don’t have to pay me, sir. I’ll give them to you for nothing.’”

“I said, ‘No, I don’t want that. Let me pay you. I want to pay you.’”

“‘No, sir. You don’t have to. You’re the president of the United States.’ He was shocked. The head of Sharpie. He gets a call. I don’t even know who the hell he is.”

“He said, ‘He’s really the president?’ He said, ‘No, you don’t have to pay me, sir. This is such an honor.’”

“I said, ‘No, I want to pay you.’”

“And he said, ‘What would you like to pay?’”

“I said, ‘How about five bucks a pen?’”

“He said, ‘That’s all right.’”

Presented with a transcript of Trump’s account, a spokesperson for Sharpie maker Newell Brands said it did not occur.

“We don’t have any information about the conversation described,” the spokesperson said. “We’re proud to be a beloved brand trusted by so many globally.” (Source: washingtonpost.com. Italics/bold mine)

We assume this story is true because Newell Brands has/had every incentive to confirm Mr. Trump’s account. Denying it outright risks (perhaps ensures) the White House’s wrath. Denying it outright could do measurable damage to sales of Sharpies, since it’s safe to assume that Trump’s MAGA base will take offense.

Deny it outright the company did. Assuming that Newell Brands is telling the truth, the implications are more than a bit disturbing. It is likely similar stories will appear in the future, near- and medium-term.

The predictable reaction to stories like this one will be a desire to constrain the president politically. Pathetic though they may be (and they are pathetic), the issue of the president’s “mental sharpness” can boost Democrats up and down the ballot in November. If nothing else, the issue makes the prospect of the Democrats regaining control of the U.S. House more certain and of capturing the U.S. Senate more plausible.

3. Among most everyone I know, the view of the Iran war is simple. We hope American/Israeli offensive is successful, militarily and politically, that the Iranian regime collapses, and that the Iranian people are finally free of a malignant and thoroughly corrupt police state that masquerades as a “theocracy”. That’s the outcome devoutly to be wished.

Most everyone I know fears that the war will end with the regime not losing, and thus “winning” the war.

The perception that Mr. Trump is “crazy” hangs on the outcome. Victory equals “crazy like a fox.” Defeat (or not victory) equals “crazy”.

Not exactly, obviously. And not fair, of course. But fair isn’t a feature of American politics.

My friend John Heilemann, co-author of two great books about the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, and I talked about much of the above on his podcast, “Impolitic.” You can listen to that conversation by clicking on this link.

1. Energy Common Sense (by Carolyn Kissane):

What we are now seeing is not simply a war continuing, but a war expanding: geographically, operationally, and economically. Iran’s response has not been confined to a single theater. It has been horizontal, layered across the Gulf, and now extending beyond it. The recent strike on Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan Air Base, reportedly wounding 12 American personnel, is one indication of that widening scope. The Houthis’s entrance, launching missiles against Israel and signaling potential escalation in the Red Sea, is another. This is no longer a contained conflict centered on Iran. It is a multi-front disruption with implications that extend well beyond the region…..

Brent closed Friday at $112.57 per barrel, with WTI at $99.64, both sharply higher on the week. But even at these levels, prices are almost certainly underpricing what comes next. Markets are still treating this as a disruption event when it is increasingly a duration event. When trading resumes, prices will have to absorb not just tighter supply, but the realization that shipments expected to arrive in April, the barrels already on the water meant to replenish inventories, are not arriving. This is a shift into structural scarcity. (Source: carolynkissane157206.substack.com)

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1. A sperm whale giving birth has been assisted by 10 other females in her social unit — the first time such an event has ever been observed in non-primates. In July 2023, scientists who have been monitoring a group of sperm whales in the Caribbean since 2005 noticed that all 11 females in the group had gathered near the surface. By chance, the researchers had drones in the air and were able to observe and record the event. Shortly afterwards, the flukes of a calf started emerging from its mother. The delivery took place over the next half hour, during which the other females coordinated themselves into a highly synchronized formation to protect the mother and newborn. As soon as the calf was born, the female whales gathered around and took turns making sure that it was kept lifted at the surface so it could breathe and had time for its flukes to fully unfurl. (Sources: newscientist.com, nytimes.com. Video is here. Elizabeth Kolbert’s story on this is terrific. )

2. President Trump has extended his deadline for a peace deal with Iran by 10 days after mounting worries over the Middle East crisis sent Wall Street equities sliding in their worst day since the conflict began. The US president wrote on his Truth Social platform on Thursday that at Tehran’s request he was “pausing the period of Energy Plant destruction” until April 6, claiming that talks to end the war were “ongoing” and “going very well”. (Source: ft.com)

3. Robert Pape:

Since February, the United States has surged more than 150 aircraft, two carrier strike groups, over a dozen warships, and tens of thousands of personnel into the region. Airbases have expanded. Missile defense systems have been reinforced. Command integration under United States Central Command has tightened. Now, airborne infantry—forces designed for rapid insertion and early-stage ground operations—are being added to that structure.

This is not a signaling exercise. It is a structural shift in military posture.

Air campaigns can escalate quickly. Sustained presence cannot. It requires fuel, maintenance, logistics, and time. It creates commitment even before a formal decision is made. Each additional deployment narrows the gap between capability and action.

(Trump’s) rhetoric remains ambiguous. The deployments do not. (Source: escalationtrap.substack.com)

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1. Drugs that boost our brain’s waste-disposal system so it can better remove proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease have been identified for the first time. The combination of a therapy that is commonly used as a sedative with a medicine that prevents dangerously low blood pressure seems to safely and effectively remove proteins linked to the disease, which could delay its onset by seven years. “This is a significant step forward,” says Shiju Gu at Harvard University, who wasn’t involved in the research. “It could benefit people with neurodegenerative disease, but even for healthy people, maybe you could use it to maximize the function of the brain.” Research paper is here. (Sources: newscientist.com, ranlab.mgh.harvard.edu, medrxiv.org. Italics mine.)

2. For decades, liquefied natural gas acted as the global economy’s reliable escape valve during energy crises, keeping factories humming and homes warm. Now, LNG has become the battlefield itself. The war in Iran has fractured every node of the regional LNG supply chain. Iranian strikes on Qatar, one of the world’s top LNG producers, have damaged its Ras Laffan facility, knocking out some 17% of its capacity for up to five years, and delayed the country’s massive expansion plans. On Tuesday, QatarEnergy declared force ​majeure ​on some of ⁠its LNG supply ​contracts, including ‌customers ⁠in China, ​South ​Korea, Italy and Belgium. Meanwhile, shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, which usually carries around a fifth of global LNG, is paralyzed. Buyer confidence in Gulf supply has also been undermined. Even if the Trump administration and Iran agree to end the war soon, the consequences for the LNG market will be long-lasting—and even more profound than for oil, experts say. (Source: wsj.com)

3. Standing in front of a crowd of oil-and-gas executives this week, Energy Secretary Chris Wright reiterated that the chaos in global energy markets birthed by the U.S.-Iran war would be “short term.” But on the stage and sidelines of a global energy conference in Houston, CEOs painted a much bleaker picture: Financial markets aren’t accurately reflecting the gravity of the crisis, the war is crippling the world’s fuel supplies, and the industry’s Middle East operations are at risk, they said. (Source: wsj.com)

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1. President Donald Trump yesterday said the war in Iran has already been won and regime change achieved as more than three weeks of U.S. and Israeli airstrikes have killed many of Iran’s senior leaders and destroyed much of its military capability. “We’re talking to the right leaders, and they want to make a deal so badly,” Trump said of nascent U.S.-Iranian talks that were happening “right now,” he said in the Oval Office. Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey have moved to broker a ceasefire amid a new wave of Iranian attacks on Persian Gulf countries and Israel, Iran’s continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz and reports that the U.S. is mobilizing additional ground troops to send to the region. (Source: washingtonpost.com)

2. The United States has sent Iran a 15-point plan to end the war in the Middle East, according to two officials briefed on the diplomacy, reflecting the Trump administration’s eagerness to find an offramp from the conflict as it grapples with its economic fallout. It was unclear how widely the plan, delivered by way of Pakistan, had been shared among Iranian officials and whether Iran was likely to accept it as a basis for negotiations. Nor was it clear whether Israel, which has been bombing Iran together with the United States, was on board with the proposal. But the delivery of the plan showed that the administration was ramping up efforts to conclude a war, now in its fourth week, that has drawn in several other countries. (Source: nytimes.com)

3. Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has been pushing President Trump to continue the war against Iran, arguing that the U.S.-Israeli military campaign presents a “historic opportunity” to remake the Middle East, according to people briefed by American officials on the conversations. In a series of conversations over the last week, Prince Mohammed has conveyed to Mr. Trump that he must press toward the destruction of Iran’s hard-line government, the people familiar with the conversations said. Prince Mohammed, the people familiar with the discussions said, has argued that Iran poses a long-term threat to the Gulf that can only be eliminated by getting rid of the government. (Source: nytimes.com)

4. The Pentagon has ordered about 2,000 soldiers from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division to begin moving to the Middle East to give President Trump additional military options even as he weighs a new diplomatic initiative with Iran, two Defense Department officials said on Tuesday. The combat forces would come from the division’s “Immediate Response Force,” a brigade of about 3,000 soldiers capable of deploying anywhere in the world within 18 hours. (Source: nytimes.com)

5. Iranian officials have told the countries trying to mediate peace talks with the U.S. that they have now been tricked twice by President Trump and “we don’t want to be fooled again,” according to a source with direct knowledge of those discussions. The U.S. is pushing for in-person peace talks as soon as Thursday in Islamabad, Pakistan. But during the two previous rounds of U.S.-Iran talks, Trump green lit crippling surprise attacks while still claiming to be seeking a deal…Iranian officials have told the mediators — Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey — that U.S. military movements and Trump’s decision to deploy major troop reinforcements have increased their suspicion that his proposal for peace talks is just a ruse. (Source: axios.com)

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1. President Donald Trump extended his deadline for Iran to reach a deal with the United States to March 27. Mr. Trump had previously threatened to strike Iranian power plants if Iran did not stop attacks around the Strait of Hormuz by March 23. In extending the deadline, Trump said that Iran agreed to cease uranium enrichment, relinquish its existing stockpiles, and remain “low-key on the missiles.” Trump told reporters that his team is “dealing with a man that I believe is the most respected, not the supreme leader, we have not heard from him.” An Israeli official told Axios that US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have spoken to Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. (Source: understandingwar.org)

2. Reuters:

Trump’s step-back sent share prices higher and oil prices sharply lower to below $100 a barrel, a sudden reversal to a market swoon caused by his weekend threats and Iran’s vows to respond.

Those gains were in jeopardy on Tuesday, however, after Iran’s powerful parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf - who an Israeli official and ​two other sources familiar with the matter said was the interlocutor in the talks on the Iranian side - said no negotiations had taken place.

“No negotiations have been held with the U.S., and fakenews is used to manipulate ​the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the US and Israel are trapped,” he wrote on X.

Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) said they were launching fresh attacks on U.S. targets, and described Trump’s words as “psychological operations” that were “worn ‌out” and having ⁠no impact on Tehran’s fight. (Source: reuters.com)

3. President Trump’s decision to back down from his threat to destroy Iran’s power infrastructure came after US allies and Gulf countries privately warned the president of the dangers of following through with his threat, according to people familiar with the matter. The US president said Monday he was giving Iran a five-day reprieve from his threatened action, pointing to new talks with Tehran he believed could broker a deal that would resolve the conflict. But Trump’s decision came after some allies cautioned that the war was quickly becoming a disaster. Regional partners told the US that permanent damage to Iranian infrastructure would almost inevitably result in a failed state after the conflict ended, according to the people, who described private conversations on the condition of anonymity. (Source: bloomberg.com)

4. Donald Trump has declared that he will jointly run the Strait of Hormuz with Iran after announcing a five-day ceasefire on striking its energy sites. Claiming progress on a peace deal on Monday evening, Mr Trump said America would “jointly control” the key oil route and promised there would be a “very serious form of regime change” in the Islamic Republic. The US president said he was talking with a “respected” Iranian leader who could be “exactly what we’re looking for” and claimed the Islamic Republic was eager for a deal to end the war. Mr Trump said peace was likely but insisted that if negotiations fell apart, the US would “just keep bombing our little hearts out”. (Source: telegraph.co.uk)

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