The Closing Argument
A verdict on the week — plus the week's top stories.
Welcome to the first edition of The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.
The Verdict
When I began to draft this newsletter, I assumed the top story of the week would be the Pentagon’s unprecedented attack on an American tech company and the basic principle of free enterprise. Unfortunately, we find ourselves in interesting times, so Anthropic finds itself competing for attention with the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s (now former) supreme leader.
If you take the long view of American politics — and by this I mean remembering history before 2016 — a Republican president bombing Iran is overdetermined. That’s the polite way of saying anyone who genuinely believed that President Donald Trump represented a break with the right’s hawkish foreign policy was either a mark or a shameless liar.
At least the neoconservatives purported to care about spreading democracy and human rights. Other nations — including my country of origin, Eritrea — often choked with rage at the hypocrisy, but I think we’re all learning to miss hypocritical virtue signaling now.
Trump and the New Right’s “America First” ideology is not anti-interventionism or a reluctance to use hard power and hurt civilians. No, “America First” is exactly what it sounds like: Not putting any weight on the interests and needs of the rest of the world when making decisions.
Now, for this week’s top stories.
Top stories this week
As we grow, I want to make sure you see everything we’re doing without flooding your inbox with dozens of emails. But for the real libs, you can get every post as it drops by opting into The Mag here.
🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟
Indiana passes sweeping housing deregulation bill (HB 1001)
Duke Energy files for early nuclear site permit in North Carolina
Massachusetts finalizes clean energy permitting reform regulations
Bipartisan governors push Congress for energy infrastructure permitting overhaul
Worth watching...
On this week’s podcast, I talked with psychologist Paul Eastwick about my reflexive disgust for evolutionary psychology.
The Science of Attraction with Paul Eastwick
Are men naturally promiscuous and drawn to younger women? Are women obsessed with tall, older, rich men? Dating discourse is littered with pop evolutionary psychology that makes broad claims about how men and women are under a thin veneer of scientific credibility. But how much of it is backed by real science?
Kelsey Piper went on NPR's Consider This to unpack how worried you should actually be about AI taking your job.
Lakshya Jain joined The New Republic’s Greg Sargent to break down why Trump's approval numbers are worse than they look.
What’s News with The Argument
My writing career began with a Vox fellowship that no longer exists. Many of my favorite writers can trace their own journalistic debuts to fellowships at The Atlantic, The American Prospect, and elsewhere, many of which have also ceased existing or shrunk in recent years.
So, when I decided to found The Argument, I was eager to found a fellowship program that could serve as a pipeline for early career writers. More than just a place to learn to write, this fellowship is providing direct instruction in how to engage with scientific research as a nonexpert and gain exposure to the most important debates of the day.
To get introduced to our new fellows, see below:
The Argument recommends
Here’s what our staff is watching, reading, and listening to this week:
Books:
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
The Gadfly by E.L. Voynich
Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays by Michael Oakeshott
Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 by David M. Kennedy
Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan
TV/Movies:
Music:
My Hero, Foo Fighters
Teenage Dirtbag, Wheatus
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Send us a picture of you with your merch and we might just feature it in this weekly roundup.
Ngl saw the title and thought the magazine was ending
"Not putting any weight on the interests and needs of the rest of the world when making decisions." Well I think Israel might beg to differ: they called the shots here. This administration definitely cares about their interests and needs, arguably more than American interests and needs.