2025-11-28 22:00:00
The comedian Tim Robinson seems to love playing obsessive weirdos. His Emmy-winning sketch series I Think You Should Leave is packed with them: a dating-show contestant who can’t stop using a zip line; an office drone attempting to beat a nonsensical computer game; a rideshare driver who has taped-up window decals and wants—no, needs—people to call him “the driving crooner.” In the film Friendship, Robinson played a man so crushed after being rejected by a new friend group that he later holds the men who rebuffed him at gunpoint.
As a result, Robinson’s work can be intense and disturbing to watch. His characters are often beyond belligerent, and the cinematography can resemble horror films or true-crime dramas. Still, he’s cultivated a dedicated following, as evidenced by his apparent box-office pull and by the proliferation of Robinson-related memes over the years: Even those who haven’t seen a minute of his work have probably become familiar with his face via images of him, say, dressed as a hot dog or furiously pointing at the camera. His latest show, HBO’s The Chair Company, is the clearest distillation yet of what makes Robinson so compelling as a performer. The episodic series, which he co-created with his collaborator Zach Kanin, offers an intimate look at a certain type of socially challenged man: someone who believes himself to be macho, while also yearning to be accepted as a regular guy. In the process, Robinson taps into a persona audiences can laugh at—and maybe even recognize—but find sympathetic anyway.
Robinson plays the bespectacled everyman Ron, who unravels when his chair collapses moments after he delivers a rousing speech at work. Embarrassed over having his time in the spotlight thwarted by a piece of furniture, Ron seeks out the manufacturer. The quest leads him down rabbit holes that threaten to upend his otherwise average existence, while exposing parts of Ron’s psyche he perhaps never understood. He’s a more intimately observed version of the disgruntled-but-desperate man Robinson has often played in his sketch comedy—and that many comedians have embodied in recent years as well. Some of today’s most popular comics have built their personal brands on the kind of aggressive behavior Ron exhibits. But Robinson maintains a line between who he is and who he plays on-screen; in this way, he's more akin to the comedian Nathan Fielder, who similarly uses long-form fiction to explore the wannabe-alpha-male archetype. That helps him frame Ron’s journey as a story about more than just an average man’s fragile ego. His descent into conspiracism-driven madness illuminates both the ridiculousness and pain of trying to be liked.
[Read: The comic who’s his own worst enemy]
The pressure to keep up appearances amid the wackiness of daily life gets enhanced by the show’s offbeat dialogue, a tool Robinson has relied on throughout his career; some of his most popular sketches come peppered with technically incorrect English in grammatically loopy lines such as “Triples is best” and “For 50 seconds, I thought there was monsters on the world.” This type of bizarre wording is inherently quotable, but in The Chair Company, such Robinson-isms also help underline the strangeness of casual communication. In one of my favorite exchanges, Ron tells another man to “have a nice day.” That’s a perfectly routine sign-off, but the man, who had approached Ron by mistake, becomes despondent. “How?!” he replies. Ron doesn’t answer; engaging with such an abstract question would mean becoming the last thing he wants to be seen as: weird.
That desire to seem normal may be what makes Robinson’s characters irresistible. In his sketches, even the most oddball figures—a focus-group participant with terrible ideas, a man struggling to back out of a parking lot—are self-conscious about their unpopularity. Throughout The Chair Company, Ron’s need for approval yields something of an identity crisis. He’s hyperaware that his investigation into the titular furniture enterprise is unusual, yet he can’t deny that his double life as a suburban vigilante who’s actually uncovering the existence of a shadowy corporation makes him feel powerful. But his life gets a lot harder with his secret in tow. Fitting in, the show suggests, means fighting in an eternal battle against your own impulses. Ron’s efforts to juggle his dogged, sometimes cringeworthy pursuit for justice with his responsibilities to his family are admirable—maybe even inspiring. Not all of us would risk so much humiliation just to fix a faulty chair design.
Besides, Ron doesn’t seem to be entirely delusional. The show has planted plenty of clues that Ron has indeed stumbled upon a conspiracy of some sort; he’s just ill-equipped to fully understand what it is, or what it means. And if anything, he’s not alone in feeling like the odd man out. The series’s running gags involve other characters’ off-kilter fixations, such as an accomplice of Ron indulging in X-rated comfort watches, or Ron’s work rival insisting on throwing a party with an overly complicated theme. Everyone, it seems, is obsessed with something. Maybe that’s what makes us human.
2025-11-28 21:00:00
Because of time’s arrow, my daughter, who was once a toddler, is now a preteen. A new question thus arises: When should I let her get a smartphone? This problem isn’t new to me. I have two older kids, now in their 20s. Back in the day, I bought each of them an iPod Touch—essentially, a smartphone without the phone—when they were about her age, and then the full device at around the start of high school. But online life was different then. There was less pressure to be smartphone-connected all the time. Social media wasn’t yet as ubiquitous, or worrisome, as it is today. Now the stakes seem higher.
Today smartphones are as widespread as the concerns about their effects on young people’s brains. Psychologists have written best-selling books about how bad phones are for kids, and many schools have banned their use. Despite all this, no one can dispute the fact that phones and phone apps have entered every aspect of contemporary life. Even Jonathan Haidt, who aims to end the phone-based childhood, floats policies that would allow for a phone-based adolescence. The question is not whether your kid will ever get a smartphone, but rather how to manage its adoption in a way that will preserve the integrity of child, parent, school, and home life. And to that end, I believe I’ve found a good solution: Get your kid a watch.
That idea had not occurred to me until my daughter brought it up. She’d been FaceTiming with a friend who had just received an Apple Watch. Now my daughter wanted one, and it didn’t take long for me to acquiesce. After all, as a small device with fewer features, a smartwatch would have to do less damage than a standard smartphone. Maybe it would also do substantial good. The smartwatch might allow her to connect with friends and family, while keeping her away from social media.
[Read: You’re getting ‘screen time’ wrong]
I ordered her an Apple Watch that very day. In theory I’d been open to another sort of product—a smartwatch that is specifically designed for kids—but the competition barely registered. The market for children’s smartwatches has been flooded for years with garbage. Many products of this type are toys, and crappy ones at that: hunks of cheap plastic with poor displays and valueless software; Dick Tracy novelties for a generation that has never heard of the guy. The next tier up includes more functional devices with network connections, such as the Gizmo Watch. But that product, like many others in the category, caters to adult control. Technically, the Gizmo can be used to exchange text messages and calls, but only with a contact list that is managed by a parent. The device’s main function for a kid is passive: It allows her to be called or texted by her parents, and tracked by them via GPS. This is a house-arrest bracelet, not a smartwatch.
At the risk of devolving into “when I was a kid”–ism, when I was a kid, we learned how to use technologies through actual use. There were few phones or televisions or stereos for kids—instead, just phones, televisions, and stereos. The ownership, location, and operation of these devices was subject to the oversight of parents, who also gave their children direct and deliberate instruction on the devices’ proper use. I was taught how to dial a phone, but also what to say or not say on one, for example. And parents spent considerable thought on questions such as whether telephones should be in children’s rooms. Then, as now, their minds were on potential harms. What’s new today is the sense that nothing can be done to mitigate these harms aside from wholesale prohibition.
If I was going to do this, I wanted to get my daughter a fully operational smartwatch, and not some kiddie version that wouldn’t really help her learn how to navigate the computerized world. To some extent, I wanted her to confront the capabilities, confusions, and risks of online life, so she could learn how to manage them herself. I have owned and used smartwatches for some time, and I surmised that their many limitations compared with smartphones—and the uselessness of most of their apps—would make one a perfect candidate for this process.
We’re Apple users in my house, so the Apple Watch made sense, but similar options are available for Android, including Samsung’s Galaxy watches. The Apple Watch SE was the cheapest option, and as with any Apple Watch, you can set it up for a family member who does not own an iPhone. For that to work, you need to buy the more expensive cellular model, which permits your kid to call, text, and email from almost anywhere. It also lets you track their location. The latter function has a quirk: My kid also has an iPad, and Apple seems to treat that device, which stays home all the time, as her default location. At first I found this defect annoying, but soon I came to appreciate it. I almost never really need to know where she is, and the habitual pursuit of her geospatial data would feel like an invasion of the autonomy that the watch was meant, in part, to increase.
I’ve written in the past about the pleasures of installing a landline—a home phone that could be used by the family as a whole, rather than its individual members. For my daughter, the landline was a source of confidence that she could contact her mother or me, or a neighbor—or, God forbid, an emergency service—if she needed to. Our home phone played a similar role for me as well.
[Read: America gave up on the best home technology there is]
The smartwatch offers something more. Most communication is not done in emergencies, but in ordinary life: I’m running late or Meet me at the other door or Dinner’s ready. The ability to exchange mundane information from afar—even from across the street at a friend’s house—is part of being a whole person in the world today. Ashley James, the mother of my daughter’s friend, told me that she’s been delighted by her daughter’s usage of the smartwatch: When her daughter sees an Apple News story that she thinks might interest James, for example, she sometimes sends it in a text. James also said that her kid now texts extended-family members, developing connections that might not have materialized otherwise. Just having the device, James told me, makes her daughter feel included in the world of technology “that kids want to be a part of so badly.”
In a way, it is strange to talk about a 10-year-old this way. When I was 10, a newspaper would have been sitting on the breakfast table, and I could have shown an article to my mother at any time. But then life became digitized, and now you need a device of some kind just to see the news. Like it or not, becoming a person in the 2020s means becoming a user of computers. It also means figuring out how to express yourself online.
I’d experienced my own revelation about my daughter once she started using the Apple Watch. Back when she had just her iPad, I’d concluded that she was terrible at texting. We have a family group chat, and she would either respond to messages with a single word, or not respond at all. But after she got her watch and learned to tap out texts across its tiny screen, her messages exploded into wry quips and fully formed ideas. She turned out to be a killer texter. I quickly surmised the prior problem: She mostly uses her iPad to watch streaming shows. All those texts were interrupting her! Imagine if your text messages kept popping up on your television. She was already old enough to express herself online in sophisticated ways, but until she got the smartwatch, she didn’t have the tools to do so.
I have since concluded that the smartwatch is an unalloyed good. James seems to agree. With these devices on our daughters’ wrists, our children feel a part of the world of portable, personal technology, even as the devices offer them just modest access to that world. They’re connected, but also free of the social-media posting and scrolling that is the real cause of anxiety about kids and phones.
I find it startling that Apple and other tech companies haven’t leaned even further into this obvious opportunity, to bill the watch as a sort of training tool for life online. (I did see an advertisement in one of my daughter’s magazines for a children’s-smartwatch brand called Cosmo—described, a little weirdly, as “the perfect first phone.”) What a shame that so much effort is devoted to providing parents with all manner of controls for their kids, but scarce support. The well-timed and thoughtful introduction of a smartwatch could help mitigate concerns about children’s smartphone use while also providing them with a scaffolding on which to learn basic digital-life skills.
For the moment, though, the smartwatch is too often lumped together with the smartphone, as if they were different causes of the same disease. On this logic, many schools ban both. But such prohibitionism is reliant on magical thinking: It assumes that kids of some arbitrary age can be suddenly trusted to use smartphones, so long as they’ve spent their prior years in full digital quarantine. That’s not how things work. Kids must be introduced into connected life, one step at a time.
2025-11-28 21:00:00
“Ozempic is about to be old news,” my colleague Yasmin Tayag wrote in 2023, just before an even more powerful obesity drug, tirzepatide, then best known as Mounjaro, was approved. Well, two years later, Mounjaro is becoming old news, too. A whole slew of next-generation obesity drugs are on the horizon, some already advanced enough in clinical trials to be looking as good as—if not better than—those already on the market. The novel medications continue to push the upward limits of weight loss, now to almost 25 percent of body weight on average, but they also differ in their modes of action. They target different cells and different parts of cells in the brain and body.
Obesity, after all, is not monolithic. “We don’t have a disease of obesity. We have a disease of obesities,” Angela Fitch, chief medical officer at Knownwell, a national obesity-care clinic, and a former president of the Obesity Medicine Association, told me. With the coming explosion of obesity drugs, doctors could soon match each patient’s condition to their optimal medication: A 25-year-old with fatty-liver disease may need a different drug than a 75-year-old with low muscle mass. About 100 million adults live with obesity in just the U.S., a market massive enough for multiple mediations to find a niche. “One size will not fit all, and one size will not be best for all,” Richard DiMarchi, a chemist at Indiana University who has worked on obesity drugs at both Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, told me.
The most obvious way obesity drugs are not one-size-fits-all is that those on the market do not actually work for all. Although patients on semaglutide, the drug in Ozempic and Wegovy, lost on average 10 percent of their body weight, a third lost less than 5 percent in one clinical trial. Some even gain weight taking the drug. And others suffer such terrible side effects, including constant nausea and vomiting, that they cannot take it at all.
Ozempic functions by mimicking a single hormone called GLP-1; the drug’s mode of action is relatively simple but limited. To improve upon Ozempic, drugmakers have started targeting GLP-1 in combination with other hormones linked to hunger and satiety. The second drug currently on the market, the tirzepatide found in Mounjaro and Zepbound, resembles GLP-1 in addition to another hormone called GIP, hitting receptors for both in the brain. The GIP component may serve a double function, promoting additional satiety while suppressing some of the nausea caused by GLP-1. However tirzepatide truly works—and experts caution that no one knows—it prompts, on average, about 20 percent weight loss. It’s only the first of the “GLP-1 plus” drugs to market.
Other GLP-1-plus drugs in development include GLP-1 plus amylin, GLP-1 plus glucagon, and GLP-1 plus anti-GIP, which surprisingly could work as well as Mounjaro’s combination of GLP-1 plus GIP. (“If you aren’t confused,” Randy Seeley, an obesity researcher at the University of Michigan, told me, “you aren’t paying attention.”) In fact, all of these combinations seem to work—at least based on preliminary data from clinical trials—even as a precise understanding of the science lags. Some of the hormone mimics, such as for amylin, might also work alone. And others could be remixed into combinations of more than two. The drug retatrutide, which is in trials, is a triple hitter that targets GLP-1 plus glucagon plus GIP receptors, all at once. In an early Phase 2 trial, patients lost on average 24 percent of their weight, the highest of any obesity drug so far. The best responders lost upwards of 40 percent.
Even more intriguing than the top-line weight-loss numbers are metabolic changes unique to particular drugs. Glucagon, for example, ramps up liver metabolism; drugs based on this hormone could help break down fat accumulated in the livers of patients who also have fatty-liver disease. (The FDA is expediting review of one such drug, survodutide, for liver-disease patients.) Meanwhile, GLP-1-based drugs appear to protect against cardiovascular disease, even independent of weight loss. Patients prone to heart disease might fare best on medication that includes a GLP-1 component. When it comes to obesity, Seeley said, “your flavor of metabolic disease will be different than the next person’s.” Obesity drugs of the future may finally reflect that diversity, too.
An extensive menu of obesity drugs that work via distinct biological mechanisms means that patients will have more options to try. If they aren’t losing weight on drug A, they can move on to drug B or C. Experts don’t yet understand why the drugs work differently in different people, but hormone receptors in our brains likely vary in subtle yet important ways. The new drugs not only hit distinct combinations of hormone receptors; they also each tickle those receptors in a unique way.
In the near future, doctors and patients will probably have to trial-and-error their way to what works best. Further down the line, experts tell me, they hope to have a test, such as a blood test, that can forecast how patients will fare. Doctors could tell patients that they’ve got five different drugs at the ready, “and if I do this one test on you, I do this one test on you, I can predict which one of these drugs is the best for you,” Jonathan Campbell, an obesity researcher at Duke University, told me.
Maximum weight loss might not always be the goal for everyone though. The 40 percent that some people lose on retatrutide would be far too much for a patient barely over the BMI cutoff for obesity. Patients who don’t need to optimize weight loss may choose to prioritize convenience instead, which drugmakers are also happy to oblige. Most obesity drugs on the market are formulated as weekly injections. But Eli Lilly is developing a daily pill called orforglipron, and Amgen is testing a monthly injection called MariTide. And some patients, especially those who are elderly with already low muscle mass, might need extra help preserving their strength. The powerful appetite suppression that induces fat loss can induce muscle loss too. A number of drugmakers are now trialing obesity drugs in combination with various muscle-preserving drugs.
A mere decade ago, obesity drugs powerful enough for people to routinely drop double-digit percentages of their body weight were unheard-of. Today, there are two, and they feel ubiquitous. In yet another 10 years, this toolbox of just two obesity drugs will likely appear tiny and outdated. The next phase of the obesity-drug revolution is coming, with more drugs to choose from.
2025-11-28 20:00:00
Every Thanksgiving when I was growing up, my family held a Wacky Tacky Talent Show so needlessly competitive that at least one kid inevitably cried. And on the same special tablecloth we used every year, we would list with a felt-tip marker what we were most grateful for: I’d write my dog and American Girl doll; my mother would write me and my sisters; my college-aged cousin would write her boyfriend du jour (there were many crossed-out names on the fabric). Then I would sit down with a pile of buttered mashed potatoes and wait for midnight, when the real holiday would begin, the one that made my mini shopaholic’s heart beam: Black Friday.
This was long before you could do all your shopping on your phone, for sales that lasted all November. A few years, my cousin Michelle made matching T-shirts for the family members brave enough to join us: BLACK FRIDAY 2010 one said on the front, with IT’S GOING TO BE EPIC on the back. Like many families, we strategized for months—we’d hit Walmart for the TV doorbuster, Old Navy next for the BOGO puffer vests, Target for the discounted home decor, Bath and Body Works for the sickeningly sweet three-wick candles. But first, we’d all pile into the car and gossip about our grandfather’s dating life, about school and our friends, about whose parents were crazier.
The single day of massive discounts could, of course, get ugly. Starting in the middle of the night, consumers sprinted to as many stores as possible to gather as many Christmas gifts as their Honda Odysseys could hold. Teenagers working at big-box stores had to miss Thanksgiving dinner entirely to set up before the shoppers descended. A friend who worked at Target told me that his manager always delivered a motivational speech before the doors opened. He’d climb up onto a conveyor belt and address the workers, as if they were “going into battle or the big game.” Then the shoppers flooded in. One year, my friend had to break up two fights—one between two women over a blanket that was on sale, and the other between a cashier and customer over a pricing dispute. He finished the shift hiding out in an empty produce aisle.
Bill Pawlowski, who’s now a production sound mixer for TV and film in Brooklyn, reported to a Toys “R” Us near Buffalo at 7 p.m. every Thanksgiving for years. One Black Friday around 2010, a coupon in the local newspaper promised customers a colossal discount on a three-foot-tall princess-castle play set. Most people missed the fine print, which clarified that the deal was valid for one hour only. Red-faced customers screamed at Pawlowski and his young colleagues that they were frauds and that it wasn’t fair. But even as a teenager, he felt sorry for them. It was the holidays, money was tight, and they just wanted to get their kid that princess castle.
[Megan Garber: The fading spectacle of Black Friday]
The transition to online shopping over the past few years, combined with a much longer stretch of discounts, eliminated this particular form of frenzy. Deals that once kicked off only at 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day are now available all day, all week, or even all month. James A. Roberts, a marketing professor at Baylor University and the author of Shiny Objects: Why We Spend Money We Don’t Have in Search of Happiness We Can’t Buy, calls it “Black November.” Roberts told me he sees the shift as “both good and bad.” On the one hand, consumers can take their time planning their purchases. On the other hand, shopping is now something that people do alone, on their phones, from Halloween to Christmas.
It’s not actually clear that the changes have taken any pressure off deal hunting, either. Targeted ads reveal a new bargain every few seconds. It’s 3 a.m. on November 15, and the ads are rolling in. Is this special-edition Dyson Airwrap the cheapest it’s going to get? Will there be a bigger discount on Black Friday itself? Websites are announcing “LOW STOCK! ONLY A FEW LEFT!” Is that a bluff? Panic buying has never been easier.
More choices online and more time to buy means that shoppers are spending more than they ever did during in-person Black Friday. Last year, worldwide Black Friday spending hit a new record—$74.4 billion over 24 hours, according to Salesforce. That’s a 5 percent increase from 2023. Roberts attributes the rise to mobile-phone transactions. “We spend more because there is less pain in paying” if you don’t even have to pull out a credit card, he told me.
This Black November, Roberts predicted, may be the biggest yet, because so many Americans are concerned about tariffs and inflation. “Money’s more real to them” right now, he said, and they’re more cost conscious. The irony is that people who are driven to take advantage of a deal may end up spending more than ever.
[Caroline Mimbs Nyce: When Black Friday is your Super Bowl]
Many of these shoppers may resort to buy-now-pay-later programs, which are predominantly used online and become particularly appealing during the holidays, when people find themselves spending more than normal.
Sure, we won’t see these people physically fighting in the aisles of Best Buy over the last flatscreen. But is this better? I don’t think so. There was at least some glory to be found in digging the last scarf out of the H&M clearance bin on the Black Fridays of yore. We were limited by what our arms could carry and by the stopwatch of a single day. And we did it together.
My cousin Michelle and I live far apart now. We won’t see each other for Thanksgiving this year, and it’s been a while since we caught up anytime other than a big family gathering or over some sporadic text exchanges. I don’t know where she bought her sweater or how discounted it was. I couldn’t tell you what she’s getting her kids for Christmas. And when did they get so big anyway? I miss our Black Fridays—the intimacy of those late nights, opening up to each other over a pretzel at the food court, and then driving home exhausted from doorbusting and deal hunting.
Bill Pawlowski definitely doesn’t miss his days at Toys “R” Us, but he’s still nostalgic for the camaraderie he found among the workers there, a few of whom remain his close friends. They are, he said, “the closest I have to friends I served in war with.”
2025-11-28 03:36:16
Volodymyr Zelensky, in the next phase of talks to end the war in Ukraine, intends to draw a red line at the most contentious issue on the table: the Russian demand for Ukraine’s sovereign territory. As long as he remains the nation’s president, Zelensky will not agree to give up land in exchange for peace, Ukraine’s chief negotiator, Andriy Yermak, told me today in an exclusive interview.
“Not a single sane person today would sign a document to give up territory,” said Yermak, who has served as Zelensky’s chief of staff, lead negotiator, and closest aide throughout the full-scale war with Russia.
“As long as Zelensky is president, no one should count on us giving up territory. He will not sign away territory,” he told me by telephone from Kyiv. “The constitution prohibits this. Nobody can do that unless they want to go against the Ukrainian constitution and the Ukrainian people.”
On the question of land, Ukraine is prepared to discuss only where the line should be drawn to demarcate what the warring sides control. “All we can realistically talk about right now is really to define the line of contact,” Yermak said. “And that’s what we need to do.”
The Ukrainian position for the next round of talks, which Yermak laid out for the first time, will sharply constrain the space available for negotiators to reach a peace deal. Russia has shown no willingness to back away from its demand for Ukrainian territory, including parts of the country that Russian forces do not control. Even though negotiators have made progress toward an agreement in recent days, they remain far apart on the crucial question of territory, where the Russian and Ukrainian positions appear difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile.
Russia first seized parts of Ukraine in 2014, when it annexed Crimea in a swift and nearly bloodless land grab. In September 2022, during the first year of the full-scale invasion, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that four additional regions of southern and eastern Ukraine—Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, comprising about 15 percent of the country’s territory—would “forever” be a part of Russia. The Kremlin then staged a referendum to approve the annexation of these regions and to define them as Russian territory under the Russian constitution, making it politically difficult for Putin to reverse his territorial claims.
The problem for Putin is that Ukraine still controls large parts of Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. The Russian military has been fighting for nearly four years to seize all of those regions by force, with the most intense battles centered around Donetsk, part of Ukraine’s industrial heartland. Ukrainian forces have dug in to defend the areas of Donetsk they still control, building fortifications and fielding weapons that have managed to hold back the invaders. Putin has tried to gain control of that territory through negotiations, offering to stop the Russian onslaught if Ukraine gives it up without a fight.
[Read: Why Trump Pushed for Peace—Again]
Yermak called me today during a holiday lull following an intense week of negotiations. Envoys from the United States and Ukraine gathered in Geneva on Sunday to rework an American peace proposal that was heavily weighted in Russia’s favor. The plan included a demand for Ukraine to cede territory in Donetsk, where the Russian military has made slow and plodding advances in recent months at an enormous cost in casualties.
At the conclusion of the talks in Geneva, where Secretary of State Marco Rubio represented the U.S. alongside President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, the negotiators stripped out the most onerous Russian demands on Ukraine.
They continued to work on the deal on Tuesday in Abu Dhabi, resulting in a proposal that “does not contradict our interests and takes into account our red lines,” Yermak said. Only a few questions were set aside in the negotiations for the presidents of Ukraine and the U.S. to decide, he added, including all points related to Ukrainian territory.
Zelensky’s team requested a meeting with Trump this weekend to discuss the proposal. But the president decided to first send Witkoff to Moscow to discuss the revised terms of the peace agreement with the Kremlin. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov signaled at a press conference on Tuesday that Moscow would stick firmly to its core demands, which have long included its territorial claim on Donetsk and other regions of eastern and southern Ukraine.
Trump discussed the Kremlin’s conditions for peace in August during his summit in Alaska with Putin. The Russian and American leaders had planned in October to meet again in Budapest in hopes of advancing the peace process. But Trump scrapped those plans after Lavrov staked out an inflexible position during a preparatory call with Rubio, who then advised the White House not to proceed with another presidential summit.
The peace talks resumed in earnest only this month, just as a massive corruption scandal weakened Zelensky’s standing among the people of Ukraine and his allies in the West. A 15-month investigation, unveiled on November 10 by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, accused several senior government officials and one of Zelensky’s former business partners of extorting and laundering about $100 million in bribes.
Investigators have not directly implicated Zelensky or Yermak in the case. But calls for Yermak’s resignation have intensified amid the scandal. “Zelensky needs to clean house,” a senior European diplomat told me earlier this month. “And he should start with Yermak.”
In our interview, Yermak responded at length for the first time to the investigation and the resulting calls for him to step aside. “The pressure is enormous,” he told me. “The case is fairly loud, and there needs to be an objective and independent investigation without political influence.”
By appointing him to lead Ukraine’s negotiating team despite the scandal, Zelensky made clear to the people of Ukraine that Yermak continues to enjoy his trust, he said. The people of Ukraine “see that I have been beside the president all these years during all the most difficult, tragic, and dangerous moments,” Yermak said. “He trusted me with these negotiations that will decide the fate of our country. And if people support the president, that should answer all their questions.”
2025-11-27 23:00:52
Before an Afghan refugee, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, yesterday shot and seriously injured two National Guard members who had been deployed by President Donald Trump to Washington, D.C., military commanders had warned that their deployment represented an easy “target of opportunity” for grievance-based violence. The troops, deployed in an effort to reduce crime, are untrained in law enforcement; their days are spent cleaning up trash and walking the streets in uniform. Commanders, in a memo that was included in litigation challenging the high-visibility mission in D.C., argued that this could put them in danger. The Justice Department countered that the risk was merely “speculative.” It wasn’t. There are costs to performatively deploying members of the military—one of which is the risk of endangering them.
Lakanwal’s exact motives are still unknown; he worked for the CIA during the Afghan War. He is now in custody but apparently refusing to speak. Trump offered a predictable response to the shooting: pausing immigration for anyone from Afghanistan, a move that conveniently ignored how Lakanwal had gotten to the United States. He came as part of Operation Allies Welcome, admitted for his assistance to U.S. troops, and was reportedly granted asylum status after vetting by the Trump administration earlier this year.
Trump yesterday also ordered additional troops to D.C., on the theory that more troops are always better than fewer ones, even though a federal judge had ruled just last week that the entire deployment would have to be halted because it was probably illegal.
More troops is not the answer. The National Guard has been deployed as part of the White House’s political attacks on cities run by Democrats, and the Guard members are vulnerable because politics is not a military mission. The military spends a lot of time thinking about “readiness”: the need for troops to be trained and prepared for what may be asked of them, and for them to be protected while doing it. The problem of mission readiness does not get solved by deploying more soldiers. It gets solved by having a clear mission.
Even if the deployments to D.C. were legal, they lack a clear mandate and metrics of success, and have vague rules of engagement and ill-defined operating procedures. And morale is low among part-time volunteer soldiers, who have had to leave home to patrol the streets of an American city that Trump doesn’t like.
Trump’s use of the military began as a so-called public-safety emergency, though crime was already down in D.C. before the deployment. The D.C. National Guard falls under the command of the federal government—unlike a state’s National Guard—so the district was an easy choice for Trump’s first target. Governors from red states gladly volunteered their troops for the mission, although the Pentagon was struggling to find one. It began to publish information regarding the troops’ trash-cleanup and landscaping successes, calling the initiative Task Force Beautification. Uniformed troops patrolled streets in “high visibility” efforts, fully decked out, though any visitor to D.C. could see they were just waiting around.
The military is fully aware of the lack of support for this deployment both among the public it serves and among those performing the mission. The National Guard has been sending out news releases describing its progress, with updates such as: “cleared 906 bags of trash, spread 744 cubic yards of mulch, removed five truckloads of plant waste, cleared 3.2 miles of roadway and painted 270 feet of fencing.” Sounds nice, but that says nothing about why this is a job for the National Guard.
Ironically, deploying more National Guardsmen to increase the force protection for National Guardsmen is a very Afghanistan-style military error. The sunk-cost fallacy describes a phenomenon whereby individuals irrationally decide to continue investing in a flawed decision as a way to try to justify the original bad decision. We sent more and more troops to Afghanistan because we had already lost troops there, instead of pausing to reassess the war itself.
We are not at war now. But Trump’s use of the National Guard suggests that he thinks we are not at peace either. The National Guard is stranded somewhere on this battlefield of partisan politics. They are not ready for this arena, and we should never have asked them to be.
