2026-06-26 10:19:26
Darializa Avila Chevalier is almost certainly headed to Congress, having won the Democratic primary in New York’s 13th congressional district. In 2024, while she was a sociology PhD student at Columbia,1 she founded a group called “Columbia University Apartheid Divest”, which was involved in the Palestine protests. In a now-deleted Instagram post, CUAD declared: “We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.” Avila Chevalier’s group also tweeted “Marg Bar Amrika”, meaning “Death to America” in Persian.
Avila Chevalier is also known for making plenty of “controversial”2 statements on social media. In 2019, in another now-deleted tweet, she lambasted Black and Arab men for “fetishizing ugly colonizer women”:
In 2020 she endorsed a theory that COVID-19 began in France, rather than in China.
Also in 2020, Avila Chevalier was an ardent supporter of the movement to abolish the police:
During the nationwide protests in 2020 following the killing of George Floyd, Avila Chevalier responded to a user asking what a better slogan would be than “defund the police,” by posting, “F**k you. We’re gonna defund and abolish. You don’t get to water down our movements.”…Two days later, Avila Chevalier rejected an argument that abolishing police meant ending policing only “as we know it.”…“No. It means ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever,” she replied, adding several clap emojis.
She has also supported the abolition of prisons — a view she probably still holds. In a recent interview, when repeatedly asked point-blank whether she would put a murderer in prison, she refused to answer the question.
In 2022, she claimed that America’s support for Ukraine against Russia’s invasion was America “bullying Russia”:
Avila Chevalier has also endorsed any number of extreme economic policy positions:
During the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Avila Chevalier reposted a message calling for a sweeping government takeover of large parts of the economy. The repost advocated nationalizing utilities, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies; suspending rent and mortgage payments; dissolving private health insurance companies; and “seiz[ing] all properties from landlords.”
Other deleted posts and reposts included references to communism and anti-capitalist politics. In one April 2020 post, Avila Chevalier wrote that while most of the political theory she had read was communist, “the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me,” adding a laughing emoji.
If this all sounds absolutely crazy, it’s because it is. The woman who said all of these things is going to be a U.S. Representative — not a state representative, or a member of a city council, but a member of the United States’ highest legislative body. And she will be a Democrat — she will be formally supported by the Democratic Party, she will presumably caucus with the Democrats in Congress, and so on.
Avila Chevalier is as much of an extremist as anyone associated with the MAGA movement. The best comparator on the right would probably be Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has made a long string of similarly extreme and wacky statements. My typical line is that “both extremes are bad, but the Republican extreme is worse”. Avila Chevalier is severely testing that asymmetry.
Nor is this a case of one wacky person winning a lone, lucky victory. Avila Chevalier was one of three Congressional primary candidates backed by New York City’s powerful and charismatic mayor, Zohran Mamdani. All three won their primaries this week, and two of them — including Avila Chevalier — unseated incumbent Democrats.
But it isn’t even just Mamdani. Around the country, candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America are starting to win more races in blue cities:
Democratic socialists won big in New York’s primaries Tuesday…several more triumphed in state legislative primaries…In Washington, DC, DSA member Janeese Lewis George won a blowout victory in Democrats’ mayoral primary…In Seattle, Mayor Katie Wilson, who defeated incumbent mayor Bruce Harrell last year, is a self-identified democratic socialist. And in Los Angeles, city council member Nithya Raman, a DSA member, advanced to this November’s runoff against Mayor Karen Bass…
The DSA has also elected several members of the city councils of New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland (Oregon), San Antonio, and more. And they’ve elected a handful of state legislators in many states — mostly from urban districts.
This is quite a comeback for the DSA. As recently as 2024, its membership was collapsing, but it has soared to new heights:
The Democrats now have their own MAGA — a hard-left populist faction that opposes the traditional party establishment.
Why is this happening? I’m not typically a politics writer, but here are some of my thoughts.
Why am I even writing a post about the insanity of the DSA, when an equally insane group of people is running the whole country right now? It’s a fair question. Every week there’s a new report of unbelievable corruption, blatant lawlessness, dictatorial aspirations, policy failure, and general stupidity from the Trump administration:
Since I wrote that post one month ago, Trump lost his boneheaded war with Iran, blamed algae in the Reflecting Pool on nonexistent vandals, tried to ban mail-in voting by executive order, refused to pass a (very good) housing bill, issued an order calling for fewer childhood vaccines, and so on. The man is a walking disaster, and a majority of the country recognizes it.
But the movement that Trump started may end up being just as bad, or potentially even worse. After Trump leaves the scene, ideology will flow in to fill the gap left by his personality cult. We already know more or less what that successor ideology will look like — intensely xenophobic, obsessed with “Western civilization”, virulently opposed to the EU (for supposedly betraying Western civilization) and favorably disposed toward Russia, conspiratorial, anti-science, anti-vaccine, and so on.
Both Trump and his movement are clearly a disaster and a dead end. That opens up space for Democrats to do one of two things. The first is to become more extremist, and hope that anti-Trump backlash and base turnout/mobilization will allow the Dems to squeak out narrow victories in 2028 or 2032. The second is to moderate and stand up staunchly in defense of liberalism, attacking Trump’s corruption, economic policies, anti-democratic overreach, and general policy failure. This second approach would capture more swing voters, but would run the risk of inspiring tepid enthusiasm among the base.
I see elements of both strategies emerging. The DSA may be winning mayoral races and some Congressional seats, but it’s extremely unlikely to have a Presidential nominee in 2028. Many mainstream Dems have been moderating on cultural issues.
But the fact that “go moderate or go extreme” is even a question at all right now for the Democrats is thanks to Trump. The backlash to Trump is exactly what has opened up the possibility for Dems to become more extreme and still win elections. Mamdani’s election in NYC was clearly intended as a middle finger to Trump, and it’s no coincidence that DSA membership surges when Trump is in the White House.
Faced with a threat like Trump, some people instinctively become pragmatic and decide to do whatever it takes to make the threat go away. But a lot of people just instinctively reach for whatever weapon they can hurl at the enemy, and the DSA is a weapon that’s convenient and seems sharp.
The next question, of course, is: What can break the mutually reinforcing cycle of radicalization? There are plenty of things that seem to work, but the real message is that reasonable people have to stand up forcefully against the radicals. But it’s hard for moderate Dems to stand up to people like Mamdani right now, because voters are very mad at them.
2026-06-24 17:01:34
In 2006, well before Xi Jinping came to power, Chinese state television ran a 12-part miniseries called The Rise of the Great Powers. It was based on Paul Kennedy’s book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, first published in 1989, and included interviews with the author, but also expanded on the source material. The show went through a bunch of historical examples of great powers — the Netherlands, Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia/USSR, and the U.S. — and tried to explain each one’s rise (and, if applicable, its fall). The implication was, of course, that China ought to become the next great power in the sequence.
I haven’t seen the series, but I’ve read Kennedy’s book, and its ideas are powerful and provocative. The most interesting idea is that countries become great powers due to their mastery of the most important technologies of the day — gunpowder, sailing ships, steam power, mass production, steel, the combustion engine, industrial chemicals, electricity, airplanes, and so on.1 The U.S., he argued, mastered the key technologies of the 20th century better than any other nation. To his list, we should add semiconductors, computers, and the internet.
There are some interesting unexplored corollaries of Kennedy’s idea. Although he attributes great-power decline to hubris and overstretch, it’s also possible to imagine that leading nations fall behind due to technological disruption. Britain’s industrial revolution made mercantile trade less pivotal as a source of national wealth, so the Netherlands fell behind. Britain failed to seize dominance of aviation and combustion engines the way the U.S., Germany, and (to a lesser degree) Russia did, so its early advantage in steam power became less important.
Today, everyone recognizes that artificial intelligence is the most important technology in the world — not just because of what it can do directly, but because of its potential to accelerate other technologies. Right now, the United States is leading in that industry, thanks to its pioneering role in AI research, but also to its mastery of semiconductors (along with its network of allies) and its skillful and timely use of export controls. Chinese AI models are officially nipping at the heels of Anthropic and OpenAI, but actually the gap is bigger than advertised. Here’s The Economist:
In reality, America’s lead is probably bigger than four months. Open-source models, many of them Chinese, tend to score better on public benchmarks than private ones, says Havard Tveit Ihle of the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment…[O]n private tests, America’s lead nearly doubled, to eight to ten months[.]
And here’s a chart from NIST, showing that Chinese models have been falling further behind lately:
Ten months is a slender lead, and even slightly out-of-date models will have truly awesome capabilities — and will probably be able to make decent amounts of money as cheaper alternatives. But the U.S. has been executing a fairly competent strategy to dominate this crucial technology of the future.
But artificial intelligence is not the only tech revolution happening in the world today. Actually there are, roughly speaking, two other big ones: 1) electric technology, and 2) biotech. We’ll skip biotech for now (though China is making big strides here), and focus on the one that China is clearly dominating: electric technology.
2026-06-22 07:33:20
A pizza wheel — also known as a rolling pizza cutter or just a “pizza cutter” — is not a great tool for cutting pizza. I know that’s a statement that’s going to anger a lot of people when I say it, but it’s true. I’m hardly alone in saying this — Wirecutter, Eater.com, and plenty of others have noted the same drawbacks. But anyway, let’s go through the many reasons why pizza cutters are not fit for the job they’re named after.
First, it’s hard to make a very strong cut with a pizza cutter. This is because when you roll a cutting wheel forward, your hand isn’t pushing straight down — it’s pushing forward and down at the same time, meaning that only some of the force from your cut is being delivered to the pizza itself. That makes your job harder.
On top of that, the amount of force that goes into the pizza isn’t constant across the cut. As you extend your arm across the pizza while pushing the roller forward, the angle changes — when the cutter is right under your arm, most of the force goes down into the pizza, but when it’s at the far end of the pizza, most of the force is going forward instead of down. This means that you basically have to do one of three things:
Be very good at dynamically adjusting your force level as you cut
Roll the pizza wheel back and forth over the pizza several times
Push down really, really hard the whole time
The first of these is hard and takes a lot of skill. The second results in little slivers in your pizza — since it’s very hard to keep the wheel in the groove as you cut back and forth — and often causes the dreaded “cheese drag”, in which the wheel drags the cheese right off of the top of the pizza. The third method blunts the cutting wheel, and cuts deep grooves into your cutting board. And all three methods require you to expend a lot of energy.
Pizza wheels are also notoriously hard to maintain and store. Cleaning cheese off of an exposed, rotating blade is difficult, because the blade keeps spinning as you try to wipe it, and because you’re constantly in danger of slicing yourself on the edge. Storing an exposed blade makes it easier to cut yourself when you reach into the drawer. And sharpening a circular, rotating blade is extremely difficult.
Fortunately, there are better tools out there for cutting pizza. The first, which works great for thin-crust pizza, is a scissors — either a standard pair of kitchen shears, or a dedicated pair of pizza shears. The latter looks like this:
As Wirecutter notes, Italian chefs tend to just cut pizza with scissors. They also note that a standard pair of kitchen shears is very versatile, so if you use it to cut your pizza, that’s one less tool you need to keep in your kitchen.
An alternative — which works especially well if you’re making thick-crust pizza — is a rocking pizza cutter, which takes very little arm strength, is easy to clean, and gets it right every time. It looks like this:
Eater.com recommends the rocking pizza cutter. There’s also a one-handed variant. The rocking pizza cutter is a specialized tool (so it takes up storage space), and it can cut a groove into your cutting board, but it’s easy to sharpen and clean, doesn’t get stored in a drawer, and has the added advantage of actually being able to cut pizza effectively.
(A third alternative for cutting pizza, which works decently well for either thick or thin crust, is just the tried-and-true “large kitchen knife”.)
Anyway, as I said, I expect lots of people to be angry at this take, because whenever I point this out in public, people get angry. Tons of Americans use pizza wheels — I couldn’t find reliable survey data, but browsing on Amazon, talking to people, and consulting AI all suggest that pizza wheels are very common in American households. But I’m right here — the physics doesn’t lie.1
Now on to the Japanese toilet, also known as the “washlet”:
This is a purpose-built washlet, which you commonly find in Japan. But you can also buy an add-on that converts your regular toilet seat into a washlet. That looks like this:
A washlet does several things that a normal toilet does not:
It has a heated seat.
It has a jet of water that washes your butt.
It also has a bidet mode.
It has a warm air jet that dries your butt.
It usually has a built-in air freshener.
The overwhelming majority of Japanese households have washlets. But they’re an incredibly rare sight in America — in general, only rich people own them.
Once you’ve used a washlet for years, it’s very hard to go back to a basic toilet. First, the heated seat is just incredibly, luxuriously comfortable. Second, the butt-washing water jet really cuts down on toilet paper use. It also gets your butt much cleaner than toilet paper alone — so much so that you start to feel like a barbarian for not using a washlet. (The warm air jet and air freshener, in contrast, are more “nice to have” features, in my experience.)
But despite near-universal agreement among product reviewers as to the superiority of the washlet, only a tiny percent of Americans have adopted them. It’s on the rise, but only slowly, and very late — the washlet was first introduced in Japan in 1980.
So there you go, Americans. Please try pizza shears or rocking pizza cutters, and please try washlets. You’ll thank me. But as you probably guessed, this is really a post about AI.
I recently had the pleasure of going to a party in Washington D.C. with a number of lawyers, art history professors, and other educated progressive professionals. This provided me with a great opportunity to get out of my west coast tech-and-econ bubble, and talk to intelligent Americans from other regions and other walks of life.
Many of these conversations turned to the topic of artificial intelligence. Not one person that I talked to was positive about the technology. The first man I talked to asked me how “the AI bubble” was going. When I told him that Anthropic was experiencing the fastest revenue growth of any large company in history, and expects to turn an operating profit next quarter, he was astonished.
To be fair, not everyone pays close attention to quarterly Anthropic numbers; as recently as late 2025 data center investment was still racing ahead of revenue and even Dario Amodei didn’t know whether his company would go bankrupt. But while observers close to the industry — and econ writers like Yours Truly — simply raised the possibility of a bubble, lots of people seemed to have assumed that a bubble was definitely in progress, and then not bothered to check up on it later.
The other folks I talked to were generally dismissive of the potential of AI, and all were concerned about negative effects. One lawyer told me that he knew some people who used it a little bit, but never used it himself. Another said that it was “about as good as a 2nd-year associate”, but worried that people’s reliance on it would erode their own cognitive abilities. Various other people asserted that AI was flooding their professions with low-quality work.2
The art historian was even more negative about AI. She argued that AI couldn’t produce real art, because it lacked human input. When I pointed out the difference between skillfully prompted AI videos and sloppily prompted ones, she did consider it, but it was the first time she had thought about it. She then argued that AI art would deceive people by presenting a distorted version of reality as if it was real. When I pointed out that people had made a similar objection to photography and film, before those were eventually recognized as legitimate and respected art forms, she considered this, but insisted that AI was somehow different.
What’s interesting is that this anecdote doesn’t cleanly fit the polls. Americans in general are very afraid of AI taking their jobs, and they predict generally negative impacts on society:
But they’re using AI more and more, both at work and for personal reasons:
Unlike in the case of pizza cutters and washlets, Americans have correctly identified the most useful technology, and are adopting it.
But…not all Americans. Educated progressives, like the ones I hung out with in D.C., are far too dismissive of AI. Democrats consistently poll more negatively than Republicans, both on AI in general, and in terms of data center construction. On progressive-dominated forums like Bluesky, anti-AI animus is near-universal, and people who admit using the technology tend to get dogpiled. Sybren Kooistra has lamented progressives’ “unilateral disarmament” when it comes to the big technology of the future.
Dan Kagan-Kans has argued that the left is missing out on AI, precisely because so many progressives have chosen to dismiss the technology outright:
He writes:
As a movement, it appears the left has not been willing to engage seriously with AI — despite its potential to affect the lives and livelihoods of billions of people in ways that would normally make it just the kind of threat, and opportunity, left politics would concern itself with.
Instead, the left has, for a mix of reasons good and bad, convinced itself that AI is at the same time something to hate, to mock, and to ignore. “The GenAI sector’s foremost feat of marketing has been the term intelligence itself,” N+1, one of America’s foremost left publications, recently wrote. “A much more important question: What if China develops time travel or warp speed before we do?” asked Will Menaker, a host of the popular left podcast Chapo Trap House, when responding on X in December to a discussion of the possibilities of advanced AI. “Large language models do not, cannot, and will not ‘understand’ anything at all,” argued Tyler Austin Harper, the self-described “leftist, sort of Marxist-skewing” former professor, now The Atlantic staff writer, last summer…
This idea, that large-language models merely produce statistically plausible word sequences based on training data, without having any idea about what the words refer to, has become the baseline across much of the left-intellectual landscape. Thanks to it, fundamental questions about AI’s capabilities, now and in the future, are considered settled.
This dismissiveness reminds me of the cases of the pizza wheel and the washlet. There is no law of the Universe that useful technologies are adopted quickly by everyone who could make use of them.
Historically, countries that adopted gunpowder, industrial technology, computers, and other cutting-edge innovations had an edge over those that turned up their noses at them. Sometimes the consequence was a slightly lower GDP; sometimes the consequence was conquest and colonization. In most cases, economic historians believe that a fear of disrupting existing patterns of power and elite status was behind the decision to eschew new technology.
I worry about the same thing that Dan Kagan-Kans worries about. America as a whole is adopting AI rapidly. But if our educated progressive classes — our lawyers, academics, artists, and so on — turn up their noses, it could damage both their own cultural/political tribe and the country as a whole. In fact, by dismissing AI’s potential — by thinking that the most important technological revolution of the modern age can be waved away as a “bubble” or “fancy autocomplete” or IP theft or slop or whatever — they make it harder to think about the actual serious risks AI might pose.3
The coming of AI will definitely disrupt many of the relations of status and power in America. As Brad DeLong notes, educated professional types have had a long period of security, in which new innovations disrupted blue-collar work but not high-level white-collar work. That’s probably over now. But if educated progressive types don’t roll with the changes, and figure out how to use the new technology to their advantage, they could find themselves left behind by the tide of history — and the consequences will be worse than dirty butts and poorly cut pizza.
Update: As if on cue, Cory Doctorow — one of my favorite sci-fi authors, and usually a perspicacious and insightful commentator — just gave an interview with the socialist magazine Jacobin in which he demonstrates the exact same kind of airy, hand-waving dismissiveness that I encountered at the party in D.C.:
If you believe, as I do, that the toxic thing about AI is the bubble, then you have to attack the material basis of the bubble…[Companies] are pumping the AI bubble, and why they pump bubble after bubble, to tell a growth story…When they say, “We’re going to replace commercial illustrators with a pixel-guessing machine,” they’re not saying that is the source of the profits that are driving the bubble.
This kind of dismissive thinking can’t do a damn thing to slow down actual AI progress, protect people from the actual dangers of AI, or create more equitable outcomes in the AI-driven economy of the future. All it can do is make sure progressives get left behind in the tide of history.
Pizza wheels are used by many lower-end pizza restaurants, for a number of reasons. These are very high-throughput establishments, who do the pizza-cutting motion thousands of times and get very good at keeping the force constant across the cut — so constant that they can often cut the pizza in the box without cutting the box itself. Second, they have the capital and infrastructure to buy new pizza wheels instead of sharpening their old ones. Third, the speed of the pizza wheel enables extremely high throughput, often at the cost of accuracy — many restaurant pizzas arrive incompletely cut, because a wheel was used.
A software engineer at Google insisted this as well, though another Google engineer said he thought AI was generally very useful for coding.
Fortunately, Bernie Sanders has been pretty good about warning about existential risks. Hopefully more progressives will listen to Bernie on this!
2026-06-20 15:34:35
As birth rates fall and countries turn to immigration to address their labor shortages, a lot of countries around the world are struggling with crises of national identity. Japan is one of them. Over a decade ago, Japan began opening itself up to mass immigration:
Because Japan did this later than other rich nations, immigrants aren’t yet as numerous as in Europe or the U.S., but the percentage is rising fast. And so discussions about what it truly means to be Japanese are starting to emerge.
I thought it would be useful for my readers — most of whom live in America or other English-speaking nations that are going through their own crises of national identity right now — to get some perspective on how Japanese people think about these issues. And so I asked my friend Hiroko Yoda to write me a post about it. Hiroko is a Japan-based entrepreneur, cultural historian, and writer. She's the author of a new book, Eight Million Ways to Happiness, which is a memoir exploring Japan's modern secular-spiritual landscape. She also writes on Substack.
In this post, she writes about how shared culture, rather than adherence to a particular religious doctrine, is what binds Japan so tightly together. Interestingly, “culture” is the same answer I arrived at when I asked the question of what will bind America together in the future.
Although I live in Japan, as a Japanese person married to an American, and who studied at American universities for my undergrad and graduate degrees, I probably pay more attention to happenings in the U.S. than many Japanese people. One of the topics I have found most interesting is the ongoing struggle to define what an American is. The reason being, we Japanese are grappling with this issue as well.
As Noah has written, Japan is accepting more immigrants than ever before. When my husband and I moved to Tokyo in 2003, international couples were still uncommon, and we’d sometimes draw stares if we walked hand in hand. These days, it’s completely unremarkable. The numbers of tourists visiting Japan increase year by year, and so does the number of people taking permanent residence. I see many international families in the suburb where we live, and I don’t think we are unusual, at least as regards urban centers.
As Japanese are finding new ways to co-exist and live alongside non-Japanese, they are also revisiting what it means to be Japanese. As I’ve written in my own newsletter, the question once centered simply on ethnicity, but now many are coming to believe that shared cultural values are more important.
Are you Japanese simply because of where you were born, or are you Japanese because of how you participate in society? Superficially, this resembles the arguments going on in America. Are you American because of some kind of heritage, or are you American because you embrace shared values, like those laid out in the Constitution?
But there is an interesting difference, too. Japan is (or was) a country with relatively little immigration; that’s why the question of who’s Japanese traditionally hinges on ethnicity. On the other hand in America, an immigrant melting pot, the litmus test often seems to return to faith.
It comes up again and again in American discussions about what it means to be American. Take this recent essay from The New York Times opinion writer Ross Douthat:
One doesn’t need to be a specific kind of religious believer to be a good believer in the Declaration [of Independence]. But if you look at the sweep of American history, it’s very hard to disentangle the advance of equality from the religious belief that our rights come from God and that human beings are equal in his eyes… it has more power in a context where most Americans believe in a providential God.
And then there’s Derek Thompson, who in a recent conversation with religious scholar Ryan Burge, noted:
There’s this category of Americans who have gone into religion as if it’s a foreign country, harvested certain souvenirs, and brought them back to the world of secularism. They practice yoga but have no interest in understanding its religious origins. They meditate but are not remotely interested in any Buddhist version of nirvana.
To which Burge replies:
They only wanted the parts of religion they liked and left the others behind…
You can’t just pick and choose…A lot of people are doing that with religion right now. They’re walking down the buffet line, picking one piece, putting it on their plate, and calling it a spiritual life. That doesn’t endure.
And Thompson concludes:
If you don’t have that central spine of purpose, the community won’t last. If your only purpose is “let’s get together,” that’s not enough. You need that higher purpose—that vertical spine—in order to build a truly strong horizontal community.
These pundits are arguing that ideas alone – the values of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution – aren’t enough to keep Americans together, whether in communities or as a country. America’s loneliness epidemic, its polarization, its young citizens’ loss of hope: a big part of it can be attributed to the fact Americans don’t go to church or synagogue or temple or what have you anymore.
All of which makes me want to say: have you ever been to Japan?
Japanese, as a nation, don’t subscribe to any one faith. In fact, there’s a popular saying “born Shinto, married Christian, buried Buddhist.” We pick and choose, bringing what we like from various traditions – the purifications of Shinto, the pretty aspects of Christian weddings, the traditions of Buddhist funeral rites – into our secular lives. We’re so flexible about it that we often answer no when people ask if we’re religious. Look at this chart:
I’m going to put aside the question of how accurate this is. I actually wrote an entire book on how I believe surveys like this can miss the forest for the trees. (Spoiler: it involves how one defines “religion.”) But Burge and others argue Americans are “setting themselves up for failure” in becoming less religious, or at least in not going to religious institutions.
America is a flexible society that is rigid when it comes to religion; Japan is the opposite, a rigid society with a surprising flexibility when it comes to faith. There’s an old phrase that sums up Japan’s traditional spiritual cosmology: yaoyorozu no kami, which means eight million deities. It isn’t an accounting; it’s an expression of awe at the infinite nature of the sublime in all its forms. It incorporates, absorbs, rather than draws lines. In short, it’s radically inclusive.
I get that America is a religious country. I was taken to Sunday school every week when I was a homestay student in Indiana in the 1990s. I recited the Pledge of Allegiance alongside the other students every day. But there’s no pledge of allegiance in Japanese schools. The Japanese flag wasn’t even displayed in any of my classrooms. None of my classmates ever went to anything resembling a Sunday school.
But we were united in other ways. Ways that look like faith to outsiders, but just felt like everyday life to us. We made New Year’s visits to shrines or temples for hatsumode, a first prayer for the year. Many of us had Buddhist-style altars in our homes, where we kept photos of departed family members. Many of us carried omamori, Shinto or Buddhist amulets for scholarship or travel safety on our schoolbags.
But if you’d asked the majority of us what our faith was, or who we were praying to, we’d have reacted with utter confusion. None of us saw amulets as a replacement for studying, or looking both ways before crossing the street. They were simply cute ways to wish. If you’d asked us what we believed, I honestly don’t think we would have even understood the question. We just did.
So if institutional faith is core to the communities that form a healthy society, why is Japan’s so successful without it?
First, let me be clear here. I don’t see Japan as some kind of utopia or even a role model. I just see it as different. But the fact it is different – and not struggling in the ways many commentators seem to think America is struggling, at least regards faith as an identity – is what might make the Japanese counterpoint relevant. Let me also be clear that I believe faith can nurture a life or a community. If your personal faith nourishes you, I cheer you on.
But speaking broadly, if Japan can maintain a stable society without faith, it would seem to indicate it isn’t a necessity for a healthy society.
So what is keeping Japan together?
For a long time, Japanese could rely on clear lines to define themselves, like language (Japanese being little spoken outside the nation) and terrain (being an archipelago). But things are changing, and changing fast. It isn’t particularly difficult to get to Japan anymore. More people outside Japan are learning and speaking Japanese than ever before. More want to live here than ever before.
And Japan is aging and shrinking. We’ve “lost” three million citizens over the last few years alone, as deaths outpace births. The numbers of foreign visitors and permanent residents are higher than ever before. All of these factors are driving the question of what it means to be Japanese, which is playing out in online forums, TV shows, newspapers, and election contests throughout Japan.
A recent Stanford survey about immigration shows that race isn’t a major factor in resistance to immigration. Rather, Japanese language ability is. In this chart, you can see how many more respondents chose to admit a hypothetical immigration applicant based on their ability to speak fluently.
Now, this might seem like a no-brainer. Of course, you want to admit people who can communicate with you. But “fluent” is doing a lot of lifting here that might not be obvious in English.
Japanese is classified as a “high-context” culture, meaning that a large amount of cultural knowledge is required to speak fluently. (Other high-context cultures include China, Korea, and many Arab countries.) There’s a lot of implicit communication, meaning context is often implied rather than expressed directly. Meanwhile, Americans, Germans, and Scandinavians (among others) are framed as “low-context,” meaning conversations tend to be explicit, with context usually spelled out.
Anyone who’s studied Japanese will know what I mean. We often leave pronouns and even subjects out, in casual speech. You’re expected to kuuki wo yomu – “read the air” and intuit meaning. So when Japanese say they want immigrants to master Japanese, they’re talking less about the linguistics of speaking than they are context – “the air,” in other words.
In a recent survey, 62% of Japanese reported that they wanted immigrants to not only follow the rules, but also “etiquette and customs.” Some interpret this as draconian or authoritarian, but I don’t think so. If you correlate it with that Stanford survey, you can see that once Japanese fluency is achieved, locals ranked people of a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds as acceptable (the dot at far right in each graph.)
Of course, not everyone in Japan agrees with this thinking. There are those who have a vested interest in keeping the definition of Japanese as strict as possible, who use foreigners as scapegoats for society’s failings, who wish to keep the number of outsiders who immigrate here as low as possible. The far-right party that rode an anti-immigrant platform to a surprising number of seats in parliament in the 2025 elections is one example. But I believe the winds are against people who think in this way. The demographics are against them. The technologies that let us cross borders physically, and share our ideas across them virtually, are against them. And most of all, I think our cultural traditions are against them. When our cosmology, so to speak, is so inclusive, it’s hard to square why our society should not be. Anyone who trumpets conservative values in Japan is eventually going to run up against that conundrum.
As a Japanese, it isn’t my place to say who is or isn’t an American. But I can say what I personally envision for my country’s identity going forward. I see it in little moments all over the city today. Non-Japanese employees greeting customers in polite Japanese. Foreign folks showing respect at temples and shrines. The caucasian man and his daughter I saw commuting to kindergarten on a mama-chari bike, her tiny pastel backpack slung incongruously over his big shoulders. In other words, the stuff of everyday life. To me Japanese isn’t what you look like; it’s how you act. In other words, it’s how you read the air.
2026-06-19 14:35:04
About three years ago, someone asked me why, with my physics undergrad background and a PhD in economics, I had decided to become a professional blogger. I told him that blogging seemed like the highest-leverage thing I could do, in terms of actually having an impact on the world.
I didn’t mean that bloggers literally rule the world, of course — this isn’t Ender’s Game. Nor do I have any illusions that I’ll be able to have as much influence as a top politician like Donald Trump, a top entrepreneur like Elon Musk, and so on. But in terms of what I could personally accomplish, it seemed like a no-brainer — being an opinion writer has probably allowed me to change the world much more than being an academic or an engineer or a financier or a consultant would have.
Why? Because blogging has allowed me to inject ideas into the discourse with unparalleled speed, breadth, and access. A researcher goes deep into a few topics; a blogger can quickly hit the main points of many topics. This enables speed; academics might take months to write something useful about a breaking event like the Iran War or Trump’s tariffs, while I can have something out in hours. It also enables me to comment on a wide variety of topics, because people expect me to be an analyst rather than a subject-matter expert. And speed and breadth in turn allow me to talk to a wide variety of important and interesting people — top academics, billionaire company founders, presidential advisors.
Injecting ideas into the discourse is incredibly powerful. John Maynard Keynes famously described the power of idea injection:
Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.
To describe why idea injection is so powerful would take an entire post (which I do intend to write). There are a number of reasons. First, idea injection allows you to frame the terms of the debate. Whether people think your idea is right or wrong, once you put it out there, discussion of the issue at hand turns into discussion of whether your idea is good or bad.
As Keynes notes, an early writer’s ideas can also act as a kind of training data for later thinkers; it becomes a foundation off of which politicians, bureaucrats, staffers, other writers, and even entrepreneurs and financiers build when they make their own ideas.1 Just today I saw Matt Yglesias and Jerusalem Demsas — two of my favorite pundits — riffing on my post on dating advice on their podcast.
But injecting ideas is only one part of a blogger’s influence. We’re also part of a community of intellectuals that span multiple disciplines and walks of life. On a daily basis I get to mull ideas over not just with other writers and pundits, but also with top academics, CEOs and entrepreneurs, Congressional staffers and political advisers, think-tankers, corporate researchers and engineers, and plenty of people from other countries. This leads to a much richer discussion, with a greater diversity of viewpoints, than almost anything else I can think of. And they reach a very wide set of ears. In a way, blogging is like DARPA — ad-hoc multidisciplinary teams that build the rapid prototype of an idea. OK, maybe that’s a bit pretentious, but you get the point.
Anyway, the reason I’m writing all of this is not to brag, but to complain. Over the last two years, I’ve felt like my job has become a bit less important than it used to be, for three reasons:
The rise of populism on all sides of the political spectrum in the U.S. means that smart ideas are simply not as likely to be implemented by the people in power.
The general shift to Substack and other monetizable direct-to-audience channels has made punditry less conversational.
The rapid proliferation of AI writing has increased the demands on readers’ attention (including my own).
This doesn’t mean I think punditry is dead or unimportant — despite the title of this post, I do think that what I write still matters — but it does mean I’m now spending some time thinking about how to regain some of the impact I felt I had a couple of years ago.
“Thus when the irreverent intellectual has done his work…The stage is now set for the fanatics.” — Eric Hoffer
Ten years ago, it was already apparent that wonkish policy types were to have a much diminished role under Donald Trump. Trump himself is not the type of person who’s inclined to listen to egghead intellectuals — he’ll always trust his own instincts, which were usually developed watching CNN in the early 1990s. In his first term, though, he could sometimes be prevailed upon to listen to reason when a crisis struck — Operation Warp Speed and the CARES Act were done under his auspices, because he stepped back and allowed smarter folks to take over.
And in Trump’s first term, it still felt like there were lots of relevant ideas for econ types to debate — trade policy, place-based economic policies, new socialist ideas from the Bernie camp, and so on. It felt like a time of great political ferment and upheaval — even if Trump himself wasn’t listening to economists, someone would be soon.
In Trump’s second administration, though, that’s all gone. Whether it was Covid, Trump’s advancing age, or his attempted overthrow of the 2020 election that made Trump totally lose faith in everyone but himself, the big man now seems inclined to listen only to the voices in his own head.
Take tariffs, for instance. Essentially no one thought — or thinks now — that his tariffs were a good idea. Oren Cass, one of the last few tariff defenders, has been reduced to speaking in snarky generalities about how “econ isn’t a science”, because on some level he knows that the way Trump went about imposing tariffs is intellectually indefensible.
There was Peter Navarro, of course, at least until he got sidelined. But Trump didn’t get the tariff idea from Navarro. He thought of it all himself, and then looked around for someone — anyone! — who would be willing to stand in front of a podium and endorse the policy, and Navarro was just the guy he found. Reading Peter Navarro’s books, or trying to start a dialogue with Navarro, would have been useless, because Navarro’s ideas — such as they are — weren’t actually driving anything. It was all just a cult of personality.
The rest of Trump’s administration is the same way. The “MAHA” antivax insanity, the research funding cuts, the doomed war in Iran, the reckless spending — it’s all just ad-hoc stuff that Trump did, either on a whim, or because the last guy he talked with told him it would be a good idea, or because he’s in damage control mode after a drop in the S&P. There’s no intellectual movement here, just a cult of personality. There’s no one to argue with, because nothing that’s happening is based on an argument in the first place.
This state of affairs will eventually end, of course. Whoever succeeds Trump won’t have his cult of personality, and will have to rely on ideologies and ideas that will be ripe for debate. And if a Democrat retakes the White House in 2028, ideas will be back on the table, as they were during the Biden administration.
But even on the left, the trend is away from open intellectual debate. Zohran Mamdani and the other socialist candidates who are winning primary races in blue cities are interested in ideas, but only from people within their own clique. Leftism in America is fundamentally a factional movement disguised as an ideological one; bloggers who aren’t on the team will simply be ignored, except for the occasional denunciation.
This is just populism. Populism isn’t really about doing stuff that’s popular; it’s about putting factional and tribal conflict above the national interest or the general public good. The goal is always to “own” the other side, and economic and social outcomes become subordinate to that goal.
Intellectualism thrives in times of relative social peace. This isn’t one of those. Hopefully, the tide of populism is receding in America, but the experiences of other countries suggest that these times of factional struggle can go on for a very long time.
“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.” — Ferenc Molnár
Substack has done a whole lot of good, both for me personally and (more importantly) for the world. In a time when most of the internet has been taken over by malignant opportunists and sensationalist attention-seekers, Substack stands as a lone island where reasoned, intelligent, earnest debate is still possible. It has also allowed many writers to escape from publications that stifle their voice, impede their development, and don’t pay them their due. In many ways, Substack has resurrected the old blogosphere from the early 2010s.
However, this resurrection has come at a price. Substack’s killer feature — email distribution — allows writers to get much larger and more loyal audiences, and to make a lot more money by charging those audiences for subscriptions. But this creates a financial incentive for writers to spend more time serving their customers and less time talking to each other.
In 2011, I was blogging part-time, because it was fun — the attention that mattered was when Brad DeLong or Paul Krugman or Tyler Cowen was interested in something I had to say. It was a little “republic of letters”. Now I’m blogging full-time, and having a conversation with Brad or Paul or Tyler is still just as fun and stimulating, but it’s a distraction from my job of creating content for my paying audience. There are still interesting intellectual debates and exchanges in the blogosphere, but they are no longer the main thing writers are rewarded for.
Turning intellectuals into content creators tends to put them in siloes. And Substack is far from the strongest in terms of silo-ing. Most of the internet is being taken over by vertical-scrolling short-form video, which is not exactly good for conversation and exchange. I could go start a YouTube channel, but it would just be me talking directly to my fans — I’d basically be a TV talk show host. I might still do this, because it’s a high-leverage way to influence the world, but it’s not as intellectually rich or rewarding as being part of a round-table conversation.
Nor are interesting new ideas as likely to emerge from one-way siloed content creation. Ideas emerge not from singular minds in isolation, but from dialogue — the cross-pollination that the blogosphere and other intellectual communities create isn’t just fun, it’s productive. Writing for you, my readers, is not boring, but you’d get better content from me — and from all your other favorite writers — if we talked to each other more.
I do think that platform companies could consciously try to recreate intellectual dialogue by tweaking the features of their platforms. Substack has tried to do this with the Substack Live feature, with modest success. But a more powerful tool would be to allow Substackers to easily and automatically see when another Substacker links to their blog. This feature existed on Blogger in 2006 — whenever another website linked to you, you’d see how many pageviews it drove to your blog. If Substack implemented this feature, it would get a lot of writers talking to each other more often.
“My ambitions accelerate. My afternoons do not.” — Claude
Unlike many people, I think AI writing is actually pretty good. Yes, there’s a recognizable style that the basic models use (“It’s not X, it’s Y” and lots of other little cliches). That style isn’t bad, it just gets overplayed when everyone uses it.2 Yes, AI models are still not great at boiling a complex idea down to one or two pithy sentences. But you can modify the style that AI uses. And AI can do plenty of things human writers can’t — it can seamlessly incorporate vast knowledge and novel data analysis into a piece as it writes it.
For example, I immediately suspected that this essay by Aaron Brown, Michael Mendelson, and Cliff Asness, on the confusion of the debate over “affordability”, is mostly AI-generated, and Pangram — the most reliable AI text detector — flagged it as around 50% AI. But that’s not a knock against it — the essay is great. It classifies different kinds of “affordability” problems — true poverty, precarity, downward mobility, etc. — into different buckets, gives some illustrative vignettes, and provides some useful numbers about each one. I broadly agree with the article’s conclusions, and I think it’s a valuable addition to the discourse.
A bigger problem is that in a world where a huge number of people generate effectively infinite amounts of good-quality content like this, it becomes hard for readers to decide where to allocate their attention. Instead of identifying the few most consistently useful blogs and reading those in great detail, a lot of people will respond to the explosion of content by “reading” a larger number of posts but only lightly skimming each one.
It’s not my job I’m worried about here. It’s that in that world, even if my blog continues to get tons of readers and make me plenty of money, what I do becomes less important. If people are just skimming what I write so they can move on to the next 10,000-word Claude-generated post, the fact that they’re paying me $10 a month is cold comfort — I’m not really reaching them. And even more worryingly, no one is reaching them — if they’re skimming 100 posts a day instead of reading 10 all the way through, they’re not getting really good information from anywhere.3
I don’t know how severe this problem will be, to be honest. There was always a lot more high-quality content on the internet than anyone could ever read, and a lot of people always just skimmed my posts instead of reading them closely. Maybe AI can’t make this problem worse because it was already maximally bad.
Also, I’m optimistic that AI itself will open up new channels for intellectual influence. It’s a well-known fact that if AI just consumes AI-generated output, it gets worse and worse. So AI companies try very hard to “clean” the text they use to train their models. Human writers, whose personal experience brings in new data for AIs to learn, can influence the world if their writings are used to train the next generation of AIs.
Interestingly, I think I’m already doing this, quite by accident. I don’t know how reliable the website intheweights.com is, but it shows me in the top 2% of contributors:
I suspect that on the topics I write about, I’m even more influential. Claude and GPT often cite me as a source on topics I write about4, and friends have told me that Claude recommends my blog with surprising frequency when they ask it for reading material. Maybe Tyler Cowen is right when he says we should be “writing for the AIs”.
In any case, I find that although blogging is still very fun, and I still think I’m having a positive impact, and my readership is still growing, the environment a lot more challenging than it was just two years ago. The combination of a nation ruled by closed-minded tribalists, a blogosphere obsessed with putting out monetizable content, and the rampant proliferation of high-quality AI output is forcing me to rethink what I do. I want to keep injecting ideas into the discourse and participating in a vibrant and relevant intellectual community, but what it takes to do that might look a little different going forward.
Occasionally this can devolve into unconscious copying. I always smile when another pundit presents one of my ideas as their own, weeks or months after I wrote it. The reason I smile is because only the belief that it was their own original idea, instead of “that thing Noah Smith wrote”, allowed them to spend time and effort broadcasting the idea in the first place.
An analogy is the song “Under the Bridge” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which is actually a great song, but which got so overplayed in the late 1990s that it made me want to burn down the building whenever I heard it.
Have you ever met a guy who “reads” a hundred books a year? He’s almost certainly doing the same thing. Unless he’s Brian Potter, in which case he’s actually reading and absorbing every word. Brian Potter is superhuman.
Not when I use them, because it knows not to quote my own writing back at me, but when other people use them.
2026-06-17 06:29:17
Young people won’t remember this, but there was a distinct point at which George W. Bush started to lose the country. In August 2005, a giant hurricane swamped New Orleans, killing over a thousand people and washing away whole parts of the city. Bush displayed startling incompetence and tone-deafness during the cleanup, which began a process of general disillusionment with his presidency that intensified with the financial crisis of 2008 and the long slog in Iraq.
I don’t know whether Trump’s debacle in Iran will be a similar moment for his presidency. For one thing, unlike Bush, Trump’s approval ratings were already very low before Iran:
Compared to the other stuff people hate about Trump — the blasé attitude towards inflation, the tariffs, the unprecedented corruption, the ICE raids, the various abuses of power — the Iran War may end up being a minor footnote. But there is one similarity with Katrina: This is the point at which even many of Trump’s defenders will be forced to admit, in private if not in public, that the man and his administration are grossly, pathetically incompetent.
The details of the deal that Trump is trying to make in order to withdraw from the war he started are still murky and unclear — probably because as soon as those details are released, people will realize that the U.S. has effectively been defeated by Iran. Here’s what the deal is rumored to contain:
(Update: Bloomberg has the confirmed details of the draft memorandum, and and the initial reports look to have been completely accurate.)
Plenty of people, looking at these details and observing the conduct of the war, are ready to speak the plain truth that the U.S. lost the war to Iran. Tom Nichols, a former professor at the U.S. Naval War College, had this to say:
Trump and his team, in record time, just lost a war to a militarily mediocre—but nonetheless extremely dangerous—adversary…[E]ven before we have the details, it is clear that Trump has failed to achieve every one of the goals he put forward for this war of choice, and now he is determined to sign, seal, and deliver America’s capitulation as quickly as possible.
The New York Times editorial board concurs, with the headline: “Trump Lost the War He Started in Iran”. The WSJ Editorial Board is slightly nicer, writing “Trump Stages an Iran Retreat”.
As regular readers of this blog know, I’m very skeptical of claims that America has “lost” this or that war:
For example, we clearly won the Iraq War, despite a generation of pundits who got used to repeating that we “lost”. We defeated all enemies — Saddam, various militias, and ISIS — and established a friendly, pliant government that allows U.S. oil companies unfettered access to the country. Bush’s war was a strategic mistake — in my opinion, the geopolitical benefits weren’t worth the costs — but by any reasonable historical standard, it was a victory.
The same is not true, however, of Trump’s war in Iran. This one really is a clear defeat for the U.S. The reason is not just that the U.S. failed to achieve its strategic goals. It’s how Iran forced the U.S. to give up those goals.
Iran used military force to defeat the U.S. First, it successfully dispersed and hardened its key forces — missiles and drones. This is from the Washington Post on May 7th:
A confidential CIA analysis delivered to administration policymakers this week…found that Tehran retains significant ballistic missile capabilities despite weeks of intense U.S. and Israeli bombardment…Iran retains about 75 percent of its prewar inventories of mobile launchers and about 70 percent of its prewar stockpiles of missiles, a U.S. official said. The official said there is evidence that the regime has been able to recover and reopen almost all of its underground storage facilities, repair some damaged missiles and even assemble some new missiles that were nearly complete when the war began.
And this is from CNN on May 21st:
Iran has already restarted some of its drone production during the six-week ceasefire that began in early April, one sign it is rapidly rebuilding certain military capabilities degraded by US-Israeli strikes, according to two sources familiar with US intelligence assessments…Iran’s military is reconstituting much faster than initially estimated…[S]ome US intelligence estimates indicate Iran could fully reconstitute its drone attack capability in as soon as six months…Iran has been able to rebuild much faster than expected due to a combination of factors, ranging from support it is receiving from Russia and China to the fact that the US and Israel did not inflict as much damage as the two countries had hoped, one of the sources told CNN…
Thousands of Iranian drones still exist — roughly 50% of the country’s drone capabilities[.]
Iran dispersed and buried both its weaponry and its defense industrial base, and the U.S. was unable to destroy it.
Next, Iran used its surviving weapons to execute an effective naval blockade of the U.S., and its key allies.
The naval blockade was Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. This vital waterway, which delivers much of the world’s oil, is right next to Iran, so Iran had the geographic advantage. It used drone boats, naval mines, aerial drones, and missiles to prevent ships from transiting the strait. This did two things. First, it raised the global price of oil, which raised gasoline prices in America:
It also sent U.S. inflation back to around 4%, which caused Americans’ real wages to start falling:
Meanwhile, the U.S.’ allies — the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia — were severely impacted by Iran’s blockade of Hormuz, since much of their oil couldn’t be sold. These allies put pressure on Trump to end the war.
The U.S. tried many things to open the Strait of Hormuz, but nothing worked. American strikes were incapable of destroying Iran’s weaponry or forcing Iran’s regime to submit. So in the end, it had to submit. The deal Trump is reportedly cutting makes huge concessions to Iran, leaving Iran in a much stronger position both economically and militarily than it was before the war:
The U.S. will withdraw its forces from the conflict zone within 30 days.
All U.S. sanctions on Iran are reportedly being lifted. Before the war, sanctions had crippled Iran’s economy since 2012, leaving it stagnant and sclerotic. With those sanctions gone, Iran will be able to sell oil and grow much more prosperous.
Iran will reportedly start charging fees on transit through the Strait of Hormuz. This is a toll on international shipping — something forbidden by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. This will be a huge source of income for Iran — something that didn’t exist before the war.
The U.S. and/or its Middle Eastern allies will reportedly pay Iran a $300 billion reconstruction fund, as well as unfreezing Iranian assets. This is equal to one entire year of Iran’s GDP, and would effectively constitute war reparations. JD Vance has said that the reconstruction fund is not yet confirmed.
Iran thus compelled the U.S. to withdraw its military, end the sanctions that were in place before the war, and potentially pay Iran reparations. In exchange, Iran will allow the Strait of Hormuz to open (with tolls) and will publicly declare that it’s not pursuing nuclear weapons (which it has always publicly declared in the past).
In addition, Iran will gain an important new source of geopolitical power and economic revenue: control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Before the war, Iran didn’t control the strait, simply because it didn’t realize it could. Drone technology had advanced to the point where Iran was able to shut down Hormuz, but Iran didn’t know that until the U.S. attack forced it to try the risky and desperate move of actually shutting down the strait. The gambit paid off spectacularly, and now Iran knows that modern drone weaponry gives it an advantage it didn’t have in previous decades. So it controls Hormuz.
It’s kind of wild to step back and consider how good of a position Iran’s leaders are in now, compared to the situation before the war. Iran had lost most of its proxy armies in the Middle East — Hezbollah, Assad, most of Hamas. The regime had been rocked by massive nationwide protests, which it only managed to quell by murdering tens of thousands of innocent Iranian citizens. The country’s economy was slowly dying. Now the leaders are firmly entrenched in power, their economy will be revived, and they find themselves the masters of Hormuz for the first time.
Anyway, I don’t see any sense in which this is not a classic military defeat for Donald Trump and the United States. Consider the contrast with Iraq. None of America’s opponents in the war were in power after the war; in Iran, despite the assassination of a few leaders, the regime is even more firmly in power now than before the war. In Iraq, the U.S. suffered some economic damage, but was willing to see the conflict through until all opposition was defeated and all U.S. war aims were achieved (except for the destruction of WMDs, which never existed in the first place and so could not be destroyed). In Iran, economic pressure forced America to make major concessions relative to the pre-war status quo.
