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Most of the way up the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, which rises to a height of more than eighteen thousand feet, in southwestern China’s Yunnan Province, there is a large alpine field called Yunshanping, or Spruce Meadow, where tourists gather to take photographs. Many of the visitors are couples about to get married. They wear traditional Western wedding clothing, the bride in white and the groom in black, and they are often accompanied by a team of several people. There are photographers and lighting assistants and makeup artists, with each set of professionals clustered around the couple. In October, 2024, when the British photographer Catherine Hyland first travelled to Spruce Meadow, she spent a day documenting the scene. “I found myself surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of brides and grooms,” she told me. “It was the first time I’d seen that many brides in one place.”

Hyland shoots with film cameras, in both medium and large formats, and her images of the meadow, often shot from a distance, are different from what Americans or Europeans would expect from mountain tourism. The subjects are clearly not dressed for rugged terrain. Each bride’s dress has been billowed out and arranged around her in a circle, and these white figures are scattered at irregular intervals throughout the green field. They could be flowers springing up after a rainstorm, or bits of cloud coming to earth. No trails or roads are visible inside the frame, adding to the mystery of how all these people in formal attire arrived at an elevation of ten thousand six hundred feet. Invariably, they have their backs to the stunning scenery. In one image, a veiled bride sits in front of a shopping bag, staring at her cellphone, oblivious to the majestic curtain of deep-green spruce arrayed behind her.

“They are very much not engaging with the landscape itself,” Hyland said. “The focus is on them, the whole time.” She continued, “The pictures look quite quirky and fun, but for them it was a quite serious, organized moment. I think they feel quite a bit of pressure to get the picture. They looked like they were doing a very serious activity.”

For years, Hyland has been interested in rural landscapes and their relationship to urbanization and climate change. “I’ve found that farming is very hard to shoot,” she said. “Quite often it can make a very boring picture. I’ve shot around the U.K. for years, and I think I have five pictures I like. Whereas, in Asia, there is this balance between nature and tourism. I’ve been to places in Thailand where there is farmland and they’ve built a giant Buddha, like a theme park. So they are making their money from the theme park, but they are still doing the farming. Those quirks, those contradictions, work quite well for me. You do see the conundrum. People will turn their noses up at tourism, but in fact it’s one of the solutions for a lot of these villages.”

In Yunnan, Hyland spent much of her time around Dali, a once-small mountain town that has cycled through various incarnations through the years. When I first travelled there, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, Dali was a sleepy refuge for young foreign backpackers, part of the banana-pancake network of friendly towns across East and Southeast Asia. Then, in the two-thousands, as urban Chinese households became more prosperous, Dali began to attract more domestic tourists. By the late twenty-tens, the town had become a major destination. Many of Hyland’s images portray the things that Chinese like seeing in the hinterlands of their own country: a well-groomed yak, a miniature tourist train, women in the full ethnic dress of the Bai minority.

In the past decade or so, Dali has acquired yet another identity, as a home for young people trying to escape the pressures of modern Chinese life. The term “tang ping”—“lying flat”—refers to youth who renounce the standard urban work pattern known as “996”: sitting at a desk from 9 A.M. to 9 P.M., six days a week. In practice, few young Chinese feel secure enough to drop out of their hyper-competitive society, but some have found new homes in Dali. When Hyland visited, she was interested in the contrast between these young urban transplants and older locals. “You have this kind of alienation between the two generations,” she said. “The younger ones are trying to get closer to nature, but in a way we might roll our eyes at. They’ll be in the Starbucks sitting right on the edge of the land, with the older generation still farming.”

When I lived in China twenty years ago, foreign journalists often documented the lives of individuals who were part of the country’s massive migration from farm to factory. A generation later, in a China that is much more prosperous but also less open, the future trajectory is hard to predict. Hyland feels sympathy for young people who experience a degree of confusion and disorientation. “I’m trying to take my pictures of the opposite of what you’ve written about, people moving to the cities,” she told me. “This is people leaving the cities, but they haven’t quite found their place. They’re quite lost. I don’t know if they will find their place, or if it’s a transition phase. Perhaps they will keep moving.”

Hyland’s images convey this sense of loneliness. In the photographs, people are rarely interacting with one another, and an empty playground and amusement park seem even emptier because of their bright colors. An old building with impressive wood columns and traditional painted eaves is fading under the Yunnan sun. These quiet scenes contrast with the curated world of well-attended brides and solipsistic selfies.

During Hyland’s last visit to Yunnan, in May, 2025, she travelled with her then three-year-old daughter, Sofia. Like any blond child in China, Sofia attracted more than her share of attention, and Hyland found that it changed her photographic interactions. “I would ask if I could take a picture of them, and then they would ask if they could take a picture of Sofia,” she said. “When you have children, it does make you think more empathetically. I don’t want to feel like I’m forcing people into uncomfortable positions.” She always allowed her subjects to choose their own poses.

Travelling once more to the highlands of Spruce Meadow, and seeing all the brides scattered like wandering clouds, Hyland and Sofia had different thoughts about marriage. “I have not actually got married yet,” Hyland said. “I have been with my partner since I was twenty. And I am engaged. I think I’m one of the women who is least interested in getting married, actually. The person who is most interested in me getting married is my daughter. She was outraged after she had seen everybody at the mountain getting married.” Hyland continued, “She thought it was the most beautiful sight she had ever seen. She is still going on, a year later, about how beautiful the brides were, and when am I going to get married, and get a white dress, and go up there to get photographed.”

“In war, truth is the first casualty.” It’s a line often attributed to Aeschylus, and it has never lost its relevance. Sometimes the culprit is the observer—the propagandizing correspondent, the mythologizing historian. Now, three weeks into a war of choice, the chief offender is the President of the United States.

On February 28th, at two-thirty in the morning, the White House press operation released a prerecorded video of Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago standing at a lectern in dim light. Wearing an oversized U.S.A. ball cap and no tie, the President announced that he had ordered American bombers to commence destroying targets throughout the Islamic Republic of Iran. Trump made a claim of preëmption. He was acting, he said, to “defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” (This was confusing. Hadn’t Trump declared last June that he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program? Hadn’t the Omani foreign minister, a mediator between the U.S. and Iran at negotiations in Geneva, just told “Face the Nation” that “a peace deal is within our reach”?) Trump went on to counsel the Iranian people to find refuge somehow—“It’s very dangerous outside, bombs will be dropping everywhere”—but then, at some unspecified moment, they should “take over” their government. “Let’s see how you respond.” And to his American listeners, he admitted, “We may have casualties. That often happens in war.”

For a narcissist obsessed with the projection of strength and grandeur, Trump gave a peculiarly gravity-free performance. The bill of his ball cap obscured his gaze. He raced and rambled through his text. And, rather than hustle back to the White House, he lingered at his country club. He had a fund-raising dinner to attend. It was left to the communications director, Steven Cheung, to provide clear instructions on how to react to the prospect of another American war in the Middle East. “NO PANICANS!” he wrote on X. “TRUST IN TRUMP!”

The President, together with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, could soon be heard lauding the precision with which they had “decapitated” the Iranian leadership and flattened military, police, and intelligence installations. And yet, as the late Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once blithely said, in the thick of America’s catastrophic misadventure in Iraq, “Stuff happens.” The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of the Iranian security hierarchy, would not survive the first day of bombing; neither would about a hundred and seventy-five innocents in the southern city of Minab, most of them children. When asked about a girls’ school there, which was struck by what was likely an American cruise missile, Trump blamed Iran. “They are very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions,” he said.

Now, as war has engulfed both the region and the global economy, Trump and his sycophantic advisers have taken to improvising on the fly, floating conflicting justifications for war and predictions about its duration. The Iranians were close to developing missiles that could reach the U.S. (They weren’t.) They were weeks away from building a nuclear weapon. (They weren’t.) Israel forced America’s hand. (Marco Rubio.) “No, I might have forced their hand.” (Trump.) It’s all about regime change. (Trump.) It’s not about regime change. (Trump, later.) When confronted with these contradictions and falsehoods, all the President’s men followed his lead: they blamed the media.

With increasing frequency, Trump berates reporters (particularly female reporters). He sues media outlets for sport. Resolve is in short supply. The owner of the Washington Post, the newspaper of Watergate, has done irreparable violence to his property merely to stay in Trump’s good graces.

But, while the President has little regard for the freedom of the press, he craves its ceaseless attention. His need has the quality of addiction. In Washington these days, there is hardly a reporter who does not have the President’s cellphone number. It is said that the best time to call is late at night while he is watching himself on TV and shitposting in his pajamas. He loves to muse aloud, then watch as those musings register in foreign capitals, and in the markets. Lately, he has been willing to say anything. The war will be over soon. Or maybe not. Whatever. Each pseudo-scoop is as ephemeral as a mayfly. But who can resist? When asked about the possibility of sending his infantry into Iran, he answers in the language of golf: “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground.” At other moments, he simply changes the subject to, say, his taste in interior decoration—“If you look behind me, see the nice gold curtains.” Are you not entertained?

His advisers, of course, know what to do. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has cracked down on actual reporting at the Pentagon and has filled his pressroom with “influencers” and propagandists, spoke in his usual tone of rage recently when he lambasted CNN’s coverage of the war as “fake news.” He would be pleased, he said, when the Trump-friendly Ellison family, which has already swallowed up CBS News, finally takes possession of CNN, too.

Brendan Carr, who runs the Federal Communications Commission for Trump, eagerly joined the fray by threatening to revoke the licenses of television networks that are, in his view, “running hoaxes and news distortions.” Trump pronounced himself “thrilled” with Carr’s outburst. On Truth Social, he accused “Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations” of airing “LIES.” Perhaps, he wrote, he will prosecute unruly journalists on “Charges for TREASON.”

Carr’s threats to pull network licenses have no legal weight; the more immediate danger is that media owners, who are all too aware of the economic pressures they face, will quietly cut back on critical coverage of the Trump Presidency in general, and the war in particular. They will fear landing outside the boundary of what is deemed patriotic. The historian Garry Wills, in an essay on Phillip Knightley’s 1975 book about wartime journalism, “The First Casualty,” wrote, “A liberal democracy submits to propaganda more readily than a totalitarian state. Self‐censorship is always more effective than bureaucratic censorship.”

The cruellest irony is that the President who addresses the Iranian people in the language of liberation, urging them to throw off the yoke of a regime that has brutalized them for decades, is the same man who threatens American journalists with treason charges and tries to strong-arm broadcasters into subservience. Having torn up a nuclear agreement in his first term and gone to war with no coherent goal in his second, Trump now directs his fire at the one thing he cannot afford to leave standing: the truth. What’s at stake is democracy’s oldest promise—that the people may call on their government to answer for what it does in their name. ♦

I told my mom everything, even when I gave my first blow job. She never shied away from uncomfortable topics; small talk was anathema to who she was. In the nineties, she and I were both in psychoanalysis while she was also in psychoanalytic training. We discussed our transferences, our dreams, our childhoods. When I showed up for an audition with no makeup and an unbleached mustache, that was success neurosis. When she asked Jack Nicholson for a puff of his cigar in a crammed elevator, it was penis envy. No onion went unpeeled. So it was strange not to tell her, last fall, that I’d been diagnosed with cancer.

For many years, I’ve been told that I have “dense” and “busy” breasts—not as a compliment but as a warning that they require extra monitoring. I had been seeing a breast surgeon every six months for checkups. The Friday before Labor Day, I went for what I thought would be a routine scan. Dr. K. usually chatted me up while she examined me, but this time she went silent. She told me that she didn’t like the way something looked on the ultrasound and wanted to perform a biopsy. After the procedure, she said that she would walk the sample over to Cedars-Sinai and hand-deliver it to Pathology. That’s when I knew.

The next morning, I woke up to a text from Dr. K., saying that she had a preliminary report. The tumor “appeared” to be small, but I would need an MRI after the holiday weekend to determine “the extent of disease.” On Tuesday, we would also learn my receptor status, which indicates how tough your strain of cancer is. “It’s like dogs,” she explained. “You have poodles on one end and, on the other, pit bulls.”

I called my two oldest friends, who sped to my house. I called my sister, in Philadelphia, and my husband, David, who had taken our two youngest children—Molly, who was fifteen, and Henry, who was ten—to a soccer tournament. My mom lived in a cottage twenty feet from our kitchen, but it didn’t cross my mind to go tell her because she was in the final stage of Parkinson’s disease. She still recognized me, and sometimes answered “yes” or “no” to my questions, but always reverted to an empty stare.

David made me swear I’d stay off the internet, but it was too late. I had already Googled “lobular breast cancer” and learned that, compared with the more common ductal kind, lobular is “tricky” and “insidious” because it grows in stringlike formations that can read as normal breast tissue. Even if you’re lucky enough to catch it on a scan, its size is often underestimated. And the kicker: “at ten years . . . half as likely to be alive.”

Everything took on a sickening poignancy: the boisterous din at our Saturday brunch place where, just a week before, my girlfriends and I had scrolled through the latest celebrity facelifts and griped about our jowls; the Santa Monica mountains coming back to life after the fires; Henry’s flag-football mouth guard on the kitchen table, imprinted with his teeth; the pissed-off scrawl on the Post-it Molly had left on her bedroom door (“Free first period DON’T WAKE ME UP!!!”); Frankie, our eldest, on the location-tracking app Life360, her face inside a tiny quote bubble floating over her freshman dorm, and her text a while later that nearly did me in: “Mama I need a drawstring bag for my laundry.”

We couldn’t tell the kids yet; there was nothing definitive to say. I braced myself to act plucky when Molly and Henry got home from their tournament, but in the end it didn’t matter. My sister called: our father was about to die. Our parents, long divorced, were both in hospice, on opposite coasts. Our mother’s had started in June, but our father’s was only a week in, so we hadn’t expected him to go first.

I flew to New York. I didn’t make it before my father took his last breath, but I got to see his body before it was taken from his apartment. My sister, who is a doctor and usually the stoic one, wept. I just stood there in a state of morbid fascination. I had never seen a dead body up close before, let alone someone so familiar to me. His hair was still the same—thick, mostly brown—and my sister and I thanked him for our own abundant heads. His signature club thumbs, which were the only fat, brutish things about him, were the same as ever. But his mouth was open and drooped peculiarly to one side, and his skin was sucked into his skeleton like a vacuum storage bag. I felt guilty for not crying, but at least I got a reprieve from guessing how much longer I had to live.

He’d been dead for two hours when the “removal team” arrived from the Greenwich Village Funeral Home: two men in black suits, who put me in mind of the Blues Brothers. They suggested that we step into the other room while they transferred our father out of his rented hospital bed. I wasn’t sure whether this was because there might be bodily leakage or because of how disturbing it would be to see the person who’d raised us—whose shoulders we’d ridden on—zipped into a body bag that looked like it came from the props department of “Law & Order.” We sat on the couch with our stepmother and made small talk—partly, I’m sure, so that we wouldn’t hear the Blues Brothers working away in the bedroom.

As soon as my dad’s corpse was out of sight, I was free to panic about my cancer again. In a few minutes, he would be carted away forever. My mind should’ve been flooded with memories, like the time he pulled the car over to make me and my sister listen to “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” followed by a disquisition on why Jim Croce was one of the great American lyricists, or the time he told me, at age eleven, that I should make my own living and never rely on a man for money.

I tried to stop thinking about myself. I flipped through my stepmother’s hospice pamphlet—“Gone from My Sight: The Dying Experience”—in which the end-of-life expert Barbara Karnes outlines the process of “transitioning” week by week, up to the final minutes. I made a mental checklist of which milestones my mom had left to hit. Karnes encourages you to think of your loved one in the throes of death the same way you’d think of a chick struggling to hatch. The last couple of pages listed the rest of her œuvre, including “I Am Standing Upon the Seashore: End of Life Coloring Book.” It annoyed me that the hospice-industrial complex offered such rinky-dink leaflets to the bereaved. My mom’s team had at least given me a heftier brochure featuring tasteful photographs of lilacs; this one was literally stapled together, with cartoonish drawings like the ones on airplane safety cards that show your aircraft making a pleasant water landing.

My dad was six feet two, and his apartment was tight quarters. The morgue techs each held one end of the body bag as they shuffled out of the bedroom, which opened onto a narrow hallway. Watching them try to pivot around the corner without sidescraping the walls was like watching Frankie parallel park—a nail-biter in two-inch increments. It seemed undignified to make my dad leave the building he’d lived in for thirty-five years in the service elevator, but I guess nobody wants to run into a dead body while they’re taking their dog out for a walk. I don’t remember thanking the men or the moment we closed the apartment door, but at some point it was final and incontestable that he was “gone from our sight,” and we were back in the living room with our stepmother, going over her plans. My sister had told her, in private, that I had just been diagnosed with breast cancer and that we were going to need to get back to L.A. right away. A little while later, we said our goodbyes.

When my sister and I left the building, the morgue techs were still parked in the yellow loading zone between Target and Tower Cleaners—our dad’s dry-cleaning place—and just closing the tailgate of the hearse. The sidewalk was bustling, but no one even bothered to rubberneck. This struck me as heartbreakingly lame and, therefore, as a moment of vital consequence. But we just kept walking, as if we were bank robbers fleeing the scene by acting like the people to whom it meant nothing.

My sister flew back to L.A. with me, and for the first time in twenty years David drove to the airport to pick me up. There was a new sense of romance between us—we stole glances, squeezed each other’s hands. All our petty marital grievances evaporated, even when he merged onto the 405 like a lead-footed moron. The rest of the weekend reminded me of the way we were after our first ultrasound, when I had just gotten pregnant with Frankie. The doctor couldn’t find the heartbeat and wasn’t sure if I had a blighted ovum, which is when there is a sac but no embryo inside it. For eleven days, we didn’t know whether to keep hoping or start grieving. “There’s nothing you can do but wait,” my sister said. “You’ll know when you know.” It was wild for me and David to be the only two people in the world on tenterhooks over this infinitesimal ball of cells I was carrying.

Peet as a baby with her older sister and her mother, 1972.Source photograph courtesy the author

While we waited for Tuesday and whatever news it would bring, my mom’s death watch plodded along next door. My sister and I toyed with the idea of telling her that our dad had died, but it was impossible to gauge how much she could comprehend. During the last few years of her decline, our talks had become shorter and shorter until I was only giving her positive, bite-size updates about my life. But there was no way to turn my father dying into a therapeutic fib.

All summer, we’d thought her death was imminent. We’d e-mailed her friends; her beloved younger brother had come from New Hampshire. I have pictures of the kids saying goodbye to her in June before they left for camp. She was still there when they got back. I told them “this is it” so many times that I felt like Lucy faking out Charlie Brown in the “Peanuts” football gag. My mom’s name was Penny, and she had long since put the kibosh on being called Grandma; to her nearest and dearest she was Pen, which is also Frankie’s middle name. Before she left for college, I said, “Frankie Pen, First of Her Name, this could be your last goodbye.” But my credibility was shot. “I’ll see Pen when I’m home over Thanksgiving,” Frankie said. And she was right.

My dad was even-keeled, and nothing if not practical. His death matched up with what the hospice manuals described. My mom had a more poetic temperament. She never let us buy premade Halloween costumes or birthday cards, and wouldn’t abide anything canned—in recipes or otherwise. When we went on family trips, pre-divorce, she and my dad would squabble over what type of hotel we should stay in. My mom thought any place with more than six rooms was a tourist trap. She wasn’t one to do things by the book. Why should her death be any different?

When she entered hospice, we stopped all twenty-three of her medications. She became emaciated and paralyzed. She could move her face and swallow, but nothing more. When we rolled her onto her side, it was like tipping over a wheelbarrow—her legs stuck straight out of her diaper like hardwood handles. She was plagued with all manner of rashes, sores, and ulcers. Her hands looked like the “lotus feet” of imperial Chinese women, whose toes were mashed in the wrong direction. Years before, she’d had deep-brain-stimulation surgery in an effort to stave off wheelchair confinement. Her skin was so thin and translucent that the batteries implanted above each breast—they looked like computer mice with tail cords—were freakishly prominent. The first thing she said when she woke up in the recovery room: “I’m going to need two bras.”

I never really got to know the bedridden, asocial version of my mom who was mesmerized by André Rieu’s stadium concerts. The person I knew had no interest in pomp, celebrity, or anything that smacked of Disney. At the première of “Simply Irresistible,” a Sarah Michelle Gellar vehicle from 1999 in which I had a supporting role, she fell asleep with her mouth wide open. My agent had to elbow her when I came onscreen.

My mom’s longtime aide, Jerome, became the person she was closest to. She was so smitten that she nicknamed him Jeromeo, and from then on that’s what we called him. He was never deterred by her blunted affect, or put off by the way she looked or smelled. I was always waiting for glimpses of who she was in the past, whereas he embraced the person she had become. Sometimes I caught sight of the old her. She would raise one eyebrow a skosh when I asked her if she wanted a glass of wine. The last time my sister’s husband came to see her, David whispered, “I’m your favorite son-in-law, right?,” and she let out an abrupt chortle.

The idea that she was still in there but couldn’t communicate gnawed at me. I thought of Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich and how badly he wanted his family to stop pretending that he was anything but doomed. I never told my mom that she was in hospice or used that word in her presence. Whenever the nurses came, I told her that they were wound-care specialists. I never asked her if she knew that she was dying, or if she was scared. I was like Ilyich’s wife, chirping about bullshit while he lay terror-stricken. I would drop by her cottage and try to perk her up with some dessert or a few sips of wine, but my visits were never more than flybys.

That Labor Day weekend, though, I found myself unable to visit her cottage at all. I didn’t have the space in my brain for both her disease and mine. I caught myself thinking of her as subhuman—too far gone to feel my absence, to feel anything at all. I was riddled with guilt, but I told myself it was just until Tuesday, when I would speak to Dr. K. It occurs to me, looking back, that I abandoned her because of the narcissism of small differences; friends always said that we were uncannily similar, in looks and temperament. I couldn’t bear to see her until I knew that I wasn’t going to die right along with her.

On Tuesday, David and I stayed glued to our phones, just as we had a few months earlier, during our evacuation from the Palisades Fire, when we obsessively checked apps that showed the containment line inching ever closer to our home. I sucked on little chips of Ativan all day, but my blood pressure was so jacked they didn’t even register. Then, at 4:42 P.M., Dr. K. texted: “All poodle features!”

I ran to the kitchen, where David, my sister, and the kids were hanging out, and said that the grownups had to work on our father’s obituary immediately. The three of us squeezed into our bedroom closet and huddled over my phone. I put Dr. K. on speaker, and she told us that I was hormone-receptor-positive and “HER2-negative.” One of my sister’s oldest friends, a renowned oncologist at Mass General, was standing by in Boston to interpret what all this meant about my treatability. My sister held up her phone to show me his text: “Woooo-hoooo!”

You’d think that I had just taken Ecstasy. I was happier than I’d been pre-diagnosis, when I was just a regular person who didn’t have cancer. But after about ten minutes I remembered that I still needed the MRI and regressed to baseline terror. Dr. K. said that the radiologist would check my lymph nodes, as well as “the left side for any surprise findings” and call with the results within a week. It was dawning on me that cancer diagnoses come in a slow drip.

I admire people who can sit with uncertainty in matters of life and death. I’m not one of them. I suck at mindfulness. I run scenarios, even for minor matters that are not exactly my business and hard to predict—like whether some entitled little lax bro is going to break my daughter’s heart. I know that worrying is a waste of time and that it has no bearing on probability, but I can’t help it. A therapist once gave me wise counsel during a bout of insomnia: thinking is not your friend.

The radiologist didn’t see evidence of lymph-node involvement, but she found a second mass in the same breast. We put my lumpectomy on hold, and she ordered an MRI-guided biopsy, which is when a tumor sample is extracted while you’re inside the big white imaging doughnut. I reported to the hospital in an Ativan haze and filled out the patient-intake forms to remind everybody, for the thousandth time, which breast my cancer was in, when I had received the diagnosis, whether my parents were alive or deceased, and which diseases they had succumbed to. When I entered the windowless operating theatre, I asked the tech what her name was. “Call me Tom,” she said. “I don’t want you to know my real name, because you’re not going to like what I’m about to do to you.” That’s when I realized that I was in the slaughter line without having been sufficiently pre-stunned. My bottle of Ativan was back in a hospital locker room, so I tried to calm myself by focussing on a fake skylight decorated with virtual leaves. If anything, it only reminded me that I was in a doomsday cancer bunker.

Tom helped me lie on my belly and lowered my traitorous breast into a horizontal, doll-size lunette. She injected the pain medication, which was so excruciating that there was no way white-knuckling it could have been worse. Then came an injection of dye, to make the suspicious mass stand out, and finally Tom slowly flattened my breast—while it was hanging in the air—with a barbaric waffle iron, whose latticed squares were numbered to locate the target site for the needle. Tom and my doctor called coördinates back and forth, as if playing a perverse game of Battleship, to confirm the quadrant of interest. Tom had to insure that my breast was pulled completely taut. If the flesh has any give (imagine a slightly deflated balloon), the hollow needle just rebounds. As I left, the doctor told me it was fifty-fifty whether or not there was more cancer.

Two days later, we found out that the second mass was benign, and that I would only need a lumpectomy and radiation, not a double mastectomy or chemo. David and I decided to tell the girls. My therapist said that I didn’t have to appear strong or unfazed or have definitive answers. She said that I’d be surprised by how much children can step up and that calling for all hands on deck can make them feel useful. Molly cried, and Frankie—FaceTiming from her college quad—clapped her hand over her mouth and kept it there until she was able to process the excellent portion of the news: that it appeared I was Stage I and wasn’t going to need chemo. Both of them were afraid that we were still withholding information or sugarcoating my prognosis. I wondered whether I’d become too accustomed to therapeutic fibbing. My daughters were on the cusp of adulthood. If we were going to remain close, to know each other deeply over the course of a lifetime, we would have to learn how to have difficult conversations.

Radiation wasn’t bad compared with Tom’s waffle iron—until the last stretch, when my nipple became charred and blistered, like an over-roasted marshmallow. It was November, and I had visited my mom only a handful of times since that infamous Labor Day weekend. But now my sore nipple brought up the memory of how, during a vacation in Greece when I was eleven, I’d made the mistake of sunbathing topless and burned both nipples. My mom stayed up with me all night in the hotel, passing me cotton pads doused in witch hazel and cold water. I realized how intensely I missed her. She wasn’t the same person she was in 1983, but, unlike my dad, she was still here, twenty steps from my kitchen. I thought of how often, during my childhood, we would be the last two people awake, whispering into the night. Usually, it was because dark scenarios were playing out in my head. As long as she was there and I confessed them to her, I could make it through.

The last time this happened was almost twenty years ago, when I had just brought Frankie home from the hospital. I hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours. My breasts were engorged, but Frankie wasn’t latching, and my anxious brain was already off to the races, wondering whether I was fit to be a mother. I was crying on the guest bed, and my mom lay down next to me. She reminded me about D. W. Winnicott’s “good enough” mother, whose attunement isn’t, and shouldn’t be, constant. She stroked my hair in the dark. I could feel a faint Parkinson’s tremor, the first harbinger of a storm that was still a ways off but set to make landfall.

When I walked back to my mom’s cottage, Jeromeo smiled at me as if no time had passed. He said that she’d still been enjoying a few bites of fruit from time to time but that she’d started “pocketing”—when Parkinson’s patients hold food in their cheeks because they’ve lost the ability to chew and swallow. I knew better than to ask him how much longer she had. Jerome gave her a bird bath, and I tried to blow-dry her hair, but she was so slumped over that it kept falling into her face. I cleaned her teeth with a warm washcloth, and we gave her a Tramadol so that Jerome could unfurl her hands just enough for me to cut her nails. I massaged scented oil into her skin and put on “Duck Soup,” one of her old favorites, as a break from André Rieu.

Peet with her father on her wedding day, 2008.Source photograph by Christian Oth

In mid-January, two weeks after my first clear scan, our hospice nurse suggested that I call the mortuary. She told me that my mom was going to die in a matter of days and that most people find it too painful to make arrangements in the immediate aftermath. She gave me a scrap of paper with a phone number, and I went to my bedroom, closed the door, and called it. After hearing seventy-five thousand menu items and a drippy piano solo, I reached a sales rep who explained the tiered options for transporting, refrigerating, and disposing of my mom’s body. I knew that dying was expensive, but this guy was trying to sell me on the idea that there’s a skybox version of being turned to ash. I fell for it: I chose the premium plan instead of the basic one, and the “simplicity scattering urn” over the temporary plastic option. He asked whether my mom had a pacemaker because, if so, that would have to be removed at an additional cost. I told him that she had two batteries inside her chest and two electrodes in her brain. “Any type of batteries can blow up from the extreme heat in the retort and damage it,” he said. Apparently, no one had told him in sensitivity training not to refer to the client’s loved one “blowing up” in the furnace. The most devastating news was that the crematorium was in Anaheim, home of the original Disneyland. My mom was going to think she’d landed in Hell.

At the very end, she became agitated. She had caught a cold and needed to get the mucus out of her chest, but was too weak to cough. My sister showed me how to perform percussion, and we took turns patting her with cupped hands. Jerome tried using a suction tube, but when he pulled it out of her throat all we got was an undissolved Ativan stuck to it like a barnacle. She wouldn’t stop moaning, and we tried to give her liquid morphine, but she kept biting down on the syringe, so I finally pulled her lip down and inserted the dropper through a gap where she was missing a tooth. Even though Jerome promised me that the biting was just a reflex, it seemed like her last line of defense and made me think she didn’t want to go. This idea was unbearable, but watching her gasp for air was worse.

The morphine was taking forever to kick in, and she was looking at the ceiling and whimpering, so I climbed onto her rented hospital bed to get in her line of vision. We locked eyes and she quieted down, and then she and I continued to stare at each other for what felt like several minutes. I thought of my teen improv class, which she had found for me when we moved back to New York from London. In improv, even if the given circumstances defy logic, you and your scene partner have to stick to them. I wasn’t sure whether my mom knew that she was looking at me or whether I was just a constellation of interesting, disembodied shapes. I said “howdy doodle”—that’s how she often greeted me. But then I realized that she was communing without words, and I followed suit. Time was running out, and, besides, I had already told her everything. ♦

In the show notes handed to audience members at Marc Jacobs’s Fall/Winter 2026 presentation, at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in early February, the designer included a section titled Credits and Receipts. The list included entries like “Yves Saint Laurent Couture 1965,” “Prada Spring/Summer 1996,” and “Stüssy.” It also named a number of Jacobs’s own past collections, like the 2003 offering from his now defunct diffusion line, Marc by Marc Jacobs, and “Perry Ellis Spring/Summer 1993,” the final collection Jacobs designed for that house before he left it and launched his own line.

As Mark Twain once wrote (in a letter to no less than a young Helen Keller), “substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.” This certainly holds true in the world of fashion: it’s the rare designer, I’d venture, who eschews a mood board when making a collection. It’s rather more singular for a designer to point out, to his audience, the exact cluster of sources that have informed his work; and yet it makes a lot of sense that Jacobs is precisely that kind of a designer. Since launching his career, in the mid-nineteen-eighties—first at Perry Ellis and then under his namesake label (which, between 1997 and 2013, he juggled alongside his role as the creative director of Louis Vuitton, in Paris)—Jacobs has been a genius of the cultural collage, picking and choosing from a world of both high and low references to make new objects of desire for mass consumption.

It’s this devotion to culling and remixing to fit the moment that the new documentary “Marc by Sofia” takes as its implicit subject. Sofia is the film director Sofia Coppola, who’s been one of Jacobs’s close friends since the two met, in the early nineties, toward the end of his time at Perry Ellis. In the years since, both have become prominent in their respective fields, Jacobs as one of the most important American designers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and Coppola as a director of several influential films, among them “Lost in Translation” (2003), “Marie Antoinette” (2006), and “The Bling Ring” (2013).

Like Jacobs, Coppola is highly invested in fashion, an interest that is manifest in her work. Whether it’s the montage of candy-colored Manolo Blahnik heels in “Marie Antoniette,” or the pastel Juicy Couture sweatsuits worn by the young and shallow Los Angeles criminals of “The Bling Ring,” Coppola’s focus on pretty surfaces is both pointed and omnipresent. Still, while these surfaces are clearly meant to reflect deeper emotional and cultural truths, Coppola’s mining of them is done glancingly, airily. Probed but never dismantled, they are at least as important to her as what lies beneath them, if not more so. She seems, in this sense, like the perfect person to lead us into Jacobs’s world.

Much like the great fashion documentary “Unzipped” (1995), which follows the designer Isaac Mizrahi during the preparations for, and staging of, his Fall/Winter 1994 show, “Marc by Sofia” begins twelve weeks before the Marc Jacobs Fall/Winter 2024 show, at the Armory, and ends the morning after that presentation. But, while “Unzipped” is a tight and funny movie that sticks close to the prep-and-staging time line, “Marc by Sofia” uses this time line as a pretext to offer a retrospective portrait of Jacobs himself. The word “portrait,” though, might be misleading for viewers expecting a film that penetrates Jacobs’s persona and his history. The designer, who is now sixty-two, has experienced a fair amount of tumult during his life and career. (He reportedly became estranged from most of his nuclear family at a young age, and he has struggled in the past with substance abuse and with well-publicized business challenges.) The film addresses none of this. Instead, and perhaps fittingly, Coppola takes a page from Jacobs’s own book, and strings together a gauzy assortment of references and influences—presented through clips, photographs, and interviews—that have made up Jacobs’s artistic blueprint over the years.

There’s, of course, grunge, whose seditious spirit the designer famously used as inspiration for his final Perry Ellis collection, sending models down the runway in high-end versions of slip dresses, stocking caps, and plaid shirts; there’s Bob Fosse, whose larger-than-life vision of on-the-brink feminine glamour in movies like “Cabaret” and “Sweet Charity” has served as a longstanding model for Jacobs’s womenswear; then there’s Liz Taylor and her white diamonds, and Cindy Sherman and her “Untitled Film Stills” photo series, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the clashing, hysterical palette of “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant” (1972), and the Supremes and their slinky, spangly gowns, and the “teen-age hippie vibes” of Jacobs’s young babysitter and her friends in early-seventies N.Y.C., and his grandmother and the proper-lady outfits that she wore on shopping trips to Bendel and Bergdorf and Bonwit Teller, and Vivienne Westwood’s punk spirit, and Yves Saint Laurent’s Scandal collection, with its decadent take on trim nineteen-forties dressing, thirty years on.

All of this is a bit haphazard, and none of it is very deep or revealing. But, for a Gen X-er like myself who grew up looking to Jacobs and his designs to “always hit it on the head,” as Vogue’s Grace Coddington tells Coppola (I distinctly recall leafing through Vogue as a young teen and marvelling at grunge—wow, my culture!—making it to Fashion Week), the documentary nonetheless feels quite meaningful. There’s also something a little elegiac about it. Jacobs is a cultural titan who found his voice in the late twentieth century, and his influences are mostly culled from that era, too. Beginning his career as a young man during the tail end of the American century, he was a master of the on-the-pulse cultural quote. But now he, like so many of us, is older, and we’re well into the new century, which, for better or worse, is no longer America’s. In Coppola’s footage of Jacobs’s 2024 show, models dressed in stiff, oversized separates, blown-up bouffant hairdos, and exaggerated mod makeup, like cutouts or caricatures of ladies who lunch, teeter through the cavernous Armory to the melancholy sounds of a Philip Glass piano piece. It’s all very beautiful, but it also feels a bit like a funeral.

And yet there’s still something passionate, still very much alive, about Jacobs. It’s thrilling to observe his intense aesthetic precision as the person responsible for controlling every aspect of his brand’s output and presentation, down to the most minute details. (“It needs to be, like, dead Barbie,” he instructs the nail artist Jin Soon Choi about the “too bright” pink varnish she’s devised for the show, before telling the makeup artist Diane Kendal that the models’ lower lashes “are still not so clumpy, they’re very, like, straight-liney.”) At one point in the documentary, Jacobs talks about the “Big Spender” number in Fosse’s “Sweet Charity,” in which a row of bespangled, heavily made-up hostesses—“broken dolls,” in the designer’s words—beckon a prospective bar customer in an angular, highly stylized dance of seduction. “I’ve looked at this so many times,” he tells Coppola. “But I didn’t realize, when you broke it down, how smart every little gesture was. The precision of every little gesture created a feeling of discomfort or titillation. . . . He was a really incredible man. Really a genius.” It takes one to know one. ♦

For much of the superbly chilling historical drama “Two Prosecutors,” we are inside a Soviet prison in the city of Bryansk, in 1937, during Stalin’s widespread purge of his political enemies in the Communist Party. We know we are inside because the Ukrainian writer-director Sergei Loznitsa has brought us there, step by agonizing step, with none of the shortcuts that might have tempted a less disciplined observer. In the opening moments, Loznitsa, working with the Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu, plants the camera before the prison gates, which open with a loud creak, allowing a fresh batch of emaciated arrivals to shuffle into a work yard. An old man, bearded and solemn, is assigned a special task, and the camera watches patiently as he is led up a stairwell, down a corridor, and into a cell with a furnace, where he’s ordered to burn the contents of a large sack. “Don’t think you can hide even a scrap,” a guard warns, for the bag contains evidence: letters written by Party members inside the prison, all protesting their innocence of crimes they’ve been charged with and testifying to experiences of abuse and torture under detainment.

All of this looks and sounds too grim for words, but stick with it, for there is a purpose—and, crucially, an urgent dramatic pulse—to Loznitsa’s deliberation. His filmmaking has an immense physical weight; he wants to convey not only the dreary look of prison, all dim lighting and bare gray walls, but also a crushing sense of immobility, as if the camera, like an inmate, could move only when granted permission. Sometime later, a neatly dressed, sombre-faced young prosecutor named Kornev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) will arrive at the prison on important business, and he, too, is escorted by the camera every step of the way. Doors and gates are slowly unlocked, guards stare impassively from the sidelines, and, eventually, he meets with a politely useless duty assistant, to whom he makes his request known. Kornev has come into possession of a letter from one of the prisoners, I. S. Stepniak, requesting a visit from the prosecutor’s office, so that he can share some “vital information.”

Stepniak’s note, we learn, was written in blood—a detail that likely awakened the letter burner’s sympathy and compelled him, in a courageous (and possibly final) act of defiance, to smuggle the missive out. Kornev’s visit to the prison is another bit of bravery, born of a newcomer’s naïve belief in the system; he was, we learn, appointed a prosecutor only three months earlier. (“Do you know where your predecessor is now?” someone asks, ominously.) In pursuing an audience with Stepniak, Kornev is taking on not only the prison authorities but also Stalin’s secret police, the N.K.V.D. For the next several hours—the film, though extraordinarily rigorous, is not bound by the strictures of real time—Kornev’s persistence will be met with deflections, delays, and excuses. Such a visit requires official permission, he’s told; the prisoner is ill and contagious. “Don’t forget about the risk of infection,” the prison governor says, and there’s more menace than concern in his warning; he’s referring to an ideological contaminant, not a physical one.

By the time Kornev is finally ushered into the cell of Stepniak (a mesmerizing Aleksandr Filippenko), there’s no sense of triumph or even anticipation about what he will discover. Stepniak’s account is terrifying, though not terribly surprising: he is one of many Old Bolsheviks who have been strategically targeted by Stalin’s regime, and his “vital information” is written, in part, in the wounds and scars covering his battered body. Stepniak was also once a lawman himself—he’s the other prosecutor of the film’s title—and Kornev, who regards him as something of a mentor, is determined to live up to their shared ideals. Loznitsa neither sentimentalizes nor mocks this impulse; for him, the human will to resist, to cling fast to integrity and courage in the face of a mounting totalitarian horror, is something as real, as undeniable, and therefore worth acknowledging, as the horror itself.

Loznitsa, who has lived in Berlin since 2001, has been making films for more than two decades, most of them nonfiction. These include “The Invasion” (2024), a portrait of everyday Ukrainian life during wartime, though he has previously revisited the Stalin era in archival documentaries, such as “The Trial” (2019) and “State Funeral” (2021). The director’s easy traverse between past and present, and between fiction and nonfiction, has accumulated its own meaning over time: fascism persists now as it did then, and its horrors are inexhaustible in any medium. So it is with “Two Prosecutors,” which is Loznitsa’s first fictional narrative in some time, though it is informed by real-life experience. The story is drawn from a novella by the Soviet physicist Georgy Demidov, who spent fourteen years in the Gulag as a political prisoner; he wrote it in 1969, but it wasn’t published until 2009, long after his death.

Not having read Demidov’s story, I can’t assess Loznitsa’s adaptation on the basis of narrative fidelity, although there is one purely cinematic coup—a structural doubling—that undoubtedly belongs to him and the astoundingly versatile Filippenko. That doubling underscores the film’s title and its structure, which is ingeniously bifurcated: the movie runs just under two hours, and the second hour, which follows Kornev as he seeks to report his findings to the prosecutor general’s office in Moscow, holds up a brilliantly warped mirror to the first. The Moscow offices are, of course, nicer than the Bryansk prison cells, with wood panelling in lieu of ashen concrete, but even here Kornev is subject to the same evasions and veiled threats, the same pointless waiting games, the same hush of conspiracy that, he realizes too late, has already eyed him as its next target. Loznitsa’s methods are grim and exacting, but the effect is never monotonous; there are shivers of Hitchcockian suspense, plus a whispery cackle of satire that veers toward the Kafkaesque. Whether Kornev is navigating the bowels of a prison or a labyrinth of bureaucratic absurdity, the rooms and anterooms he must pass through are like successive circles of Hell. Once he reaches the core, his sense of entrapment, and ours, is total.

Like “Two Prosecutors,” “Palestine ’36,” the fourth feature from the Palestinian director and screenwriter Annemarie Jacir, unfolds at a politically and existentially precarious moment in the nineteen-thirties. The similarities end there. Jacir’s film, which was short-listed (but not nominated) for the Oscar for Best International Feature, has no use for art-film solemnity. Conceived as a robust classical entertainment, it is blunt and sprawling where Loznitsa’s picture is precise and concentrated, and it pointedly frames resistance as a collective rather than a solo enterprise. The title sets the scene: the story begins in British-controlled Palestine, in 1936, and then tracks, on multiple narrative fronts, the three-year Arab revolt against the mounting injustices of mandatory rule. Chief among these is a British partition plan, well under way, to establish an Israeli state in Palestine; Jewish refugees, fleeing persecution in Europe, are already arriving en masse and building settlements in the countryside. As tension erupts between Jewish settlers and Palestinian rebels, the British police and Army enforce an indiscriminate crackdown on Arab villagers, confiscating their land, enforcing curfews, limiting travel, and beating and arresting any who resist. The Nakba of 1948 is still about a decade away, but its catastrophic legacy has already begun.

In one scene, Arthur Wauchope (a suitably plummy Jeremy Irons), the British High Commissioner for Palestine, is confronted at his office in Jerusalem by a group of female Palestinian protesters, and he offers up a condescending explanation of why so many must be punished for the sins of a few: “As you know better than anyone, the Arab holds the community in higher value than the individual.” Jacir is measured enough to grant this assumption a modicum of truth: when rebels on horseback stop and board a locomotive, what ensues is less a great train robbery than a great train fund-raiser, in which the Arab passengers part happily with their possessions (“For the revolution,” a woman declares, surrendering her jewelry). Elsewhere, though, as events gather pace—the Arabs stage a months-long general strike, the British launch an investigation into the roots of the Arab-Jewish conflict—the film productively undermines the notion of an easy, monolithic Palestinian solidarity. Its strength lies in the creation of characters who, although sometimes forced to function stiffly as rhetorical mouthpieces, seem genuinely conflicted and caught off guard by the brutal interventions of history.

The first character we meet is Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya, in a soulful-eyed screen début), a farmer’s son from the village of Al Basma, who, longing to slip the bonds of rural life, begins working in Jerusalem as a driver for a wealthy newspaper owner, Amir (Dhafer L’Abidine). But rising tensions and encroachments keep pulling Yusuf back to Al Basma; at one point, he is called upon to represent the interests of impoverished Palestinian farmers, who are at risk of losing their livelihoods—not just to Jewish settlers but to the wealthy Palestinian landowners who are happy to sell off their fields for higher profits. “Is Zionism really so bad for us? For business?” one of them asks, and his question will hang over the picture like a miserable portent. Amir, who has set his sights on political office, proves similarly amenable to the British agenda—to the chagrin of his activist wife, Khuloud (Yasmine Al Massri), who has been writing about the village conflicts in Amir’s newspaper. (In a nod to the sexism of the era, Khuloud has to employ a male pseudonym to be taken seriously.)

Jacir has approached questions of Palestinian identity in all of her previous features; “Salt of This Sea” (2010) and “Wajib” (2018) were both set in the present day; “When I Saw You” (2014) takes place at a Jordanian refugee camp in 1967. Venturing deeper into the past, “Palestine ’36” is an ambitious work. Jacir’s skillful evocations of pre-Nakba Palestine, particularly her images of a bustling, thriving Jerusalem, have the quality of a sun-drenched paradise lost. (The film was shot in several Palestinian locations after the attacks of October 7, 2023.) These scenes are supplemented by occasional archival clips from the period, which offer us a rare glimpse of Jewish refugees up close. They are otherwise undifferentiated and undramatized, in what feels like a strategic corrective on Jacir’s part—a refusal to grant them a narrative primacy that Palestinians have long been denied.

Even so, there’s a mercy in the omission. “Palestine ’36” is anti-colonialist to the core, and Jacir reserves her most damning critique for the High Commissioner and his colleagues. The film’s most odious villain is Orde Wingate (Robert Aramayo), a British Army captain and Christian Zionist who leads the brutal crackdowns on Palestinian villages. On the opposite side is the High Commissioner’s thoughtful, compassionate secretary, Thomas Hopkins (Billy Howle), who is sympathetic to the Palestinians’ plight and tries to advise them at every step, to little avail. Hopkins is, perhaps, the closest thing this story has to a Kornev—a principled outsider who ultimately overestimates the value of his own empathy and knowledge. Exasperated by the fruitlessness of his labors, Hopkins finally declares, “I quit Palestine!” Jacir is not, I think, unsympathetic to such a response, but she also doesn’t grant it the final word. “Palestine ’36” ends on an evocative image of peaceful protest—a long and ongoing march toward justice that extends from its era into ours. ♦

Soon after the United States and Israel attacked Iran, Hezbollah—a paramilitary group and a political party that wields tremendous power in Lebanon, and is an Iranian proxy—struck back, firing missiles at Israel. Israel retaliated with strikes and a “limited” ground invasion of southern Lebanon. Even though the Iranian front of the war has received significantly more attention in the global press, the reality on the ground in Lebanon is staggering: the Israeli attacks have already killed more than a thousand people, and displaced upward of a million, in a country of some five million. The displacement orders affected more than fourteen per cent of the country. And many Lebanese are concerned that Israel intends to eventually redraw the border between the two countries.

To better understand this part of the widening Middle East conflict, I recently spoke by phone with Maha Yahya, the director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Middle East Center, who lives in Lebanon and was in Beirut when we talked. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the roots of Lebanon’s long political crisis, how Israel’s war in Gaza changed Lebanese society, and what Israel really hopes to achieve with its bombing campaign in Lebanon.

Can you describe the political situation in Lebanon leading up to the October 7th attacks? Because the period after that is when Israel has been especially aggressive in Lebanon, at least in recent years.

God, it feels like a lifetime ago, honestly. I think the situation prior to October 7th was pretty much status quo, both internally, within the country, but also in the country’s relationship with Israel. The last war between Israel and Lebanon was in 2006. The cessation of hostilities, or ceasefire, that was put in place at the end of that conflict was holding. There was very little interaction along the border. In 2022, an agreement was struck between Lebanon and Israel to finalize the delineation of our maritime borders. And, as for the land borders, some of the disputed points had been resolved.

Internally, in Lebanon, there was a power struggle between the various political parties. Hezbollah still had quite a bit of political power. They were the central political power, in many ways. And then you had the Lebanese government forces on the other side, who were basically the heads of various militias during the Lebanese civil war who had simply moved from the street into government at the end of hostilities, in 1989. There had been growing resentment of that political class within Lebanon, especially after a series of protest movements in 2019, when the country seemed to be facing economic collapse. And the protests were about how grossly the country was being mismanaged, but also that a majority of Lebanese people, across all sectarian groups, were fed up.

So that movement against Lebanon’s political status quo had quite a bit of momentum, but it was derailed. One of the reasons why it was derailed was something that took a lot of us by surprise but shouldn’t have, which was how fast Hezbollah came to the fore to defend the system. It derailed the protest movement within weeks. I remember those protests as such a moment of hope. People were energized like I’ve never seen before.

Did Hezbollah dislike the protest movement because the fractured nature of Lebanese politics gave them a way of wielding de-facto power?

It was that—the extent to which they were invested in the system as is. The division of power between six political leaders from different sectarian backgrounds gave them outsized political power. Of course, the arms also gave them power within that system. So, on the one hand, part of Hezbollah’s discourse is a commitment to anti-corruption, et cetera. None of this has ever happened, and at the same time they were very invested in making sure that the demonstrations quickly diminished. And then COVID came, and then the catastrophic Beirut port explosion that derailed the process as well.

So how would you describe the period from October 7th until early March of this year? What changed?

In the immediate aftermath of October 7th, Hezbollah made the decision to support Gaza by waging a low-intensity conflict on Israel’s northern borders. That opened the door for Israel. And I think this is where Hezbollah completely misread the situation. I don’t think many of us, frankly, understood the extent to which that created a shock within the system in Israel and within a society that already was veering to the right. So we saw an escalation. Israel was hitting deeper into Lebanon. And there were assassinations. And the response from Hezbollah was, We will respond at the time of our own choosing. They thought that, by maintaining a measured response to what Israel was doing, they could stave off a broader attack. But that did not work. And we saw that it did not work in September, 2024, when Hassan Nasrallah was assassinated, and there were these pager attacks on Hezbollah officials. This was interesting logistically, but it was also a terror operation. When you have pagers going off in public markets, in supermarkets, in pediatric offices, with children holding these pagers, the danger to civilians is quite significant.

You also have other countries, led by the United States, pressuring the central government of Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah. Did that not happen because of a lack of will on the part of the central government, or because it did not have the power to do so?

In terms of the relationship between Hezbollah and the central government, it was a very, very tenuous one, particularly after Nasrallah made the decision to join the fray and attack Israel, and then immediately afterward we had the war, which was followed by a cessation of hostilities, during which Hezbollah asked the speaker of parliament and the central government to basically negotiate with Israel on their behalf. And we ended up with a cessation of hostilities that was not to Hezbollah’s advantage. And, by then, Hezbollah really had been significantly weakened.

What we do know is that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (I.R.G.C.), by then, had gone from being macromanagers to something else. They had been involved at the macro level in managing Hezbollah. There was an I.R.G.C. member on the seven-member Shura Council of Hezbollah. After Nasrallah was killed, and the war had started, I.R.G.C. members were on the ground and helping lead the battles, if you like. And over the past year, they’ve been helping reformulate and reorganize the military arm of Hezbollah.

So, Hezbollah’s weakening by Israel led to more direct Iranian control?

Yes, they became a lot more hands-on with Hezbollah’s military operations. But then there were elections. And, in early 2025, we had a new President, and then there was the selection of a new Prime Minister and the new government. And this was a turning point. You had the election of a former Army chief as President, and then a Prime Minister, Nawaf Salam, who is not from the traditional political élite. His family is well known. It’s a traditional political family, but he himself worked outside Lebanon as the president of the International Court of Justice, and comes from a legal background, and doesn’t have any business dealings with any of the political parties here.

In terms of Hezbollah, there was international pressure, but there was also domestic pressure. People assume that the demand for the state to mobilize and to take full authority over arms in the country from Hezbollah is simply an international request. It’s not. That desire has been building up within Lebanon among very different population groups, including the other political parties. Hezbollah, for the longest time, was strong-arming other parties, and they are accused of assassinating a former Prime Minister. And there was one other thing: on December 8, 2024, Bashar al-Assad’s regime fell, and control of Syria changed hands. That also undermined Hezbollah significantly because the route via Syria for Iran to send weapons was no longer there or had become a lot more difficult to use. Iran had to pull out of Syria, having invested billions of dollars there.

So pressure against Hezbollah was growing internally and externally, and the government did things that were not well enough appreciated. There is a very delicate balance within Lebanon. You’ve got eighteen officially recognized sectarian communities, and most of the political parties represent these communities directly. But there was a seismic shift in the mind-set and in the approach of the Lebanese government toward Hezbollah. It was very clear in the decision of the cabinet to declare a state monopoly over arms on August 5, 2025.

And then, in September, the Army chief made a plan to clear out all Hezbollah arms from south of the Litani River. That was phase one, and it was verified internationally. The Army had operational control south of the Litani. Further proof is that, if you look at the location of the rockets that are going to Israel now, most of them, very few are coming from south of the Litani.

The criticism was that the Army was not moving fast enough. They should have been a lot more aggressive. There were requests from Israel. And the government’s response was, Look, Lebanon is doing what it can. You need to show that diplomacy works. You’re occupying five points in Lebanon. Why don’t you withdraw from one? Why don’t you declare a unilateral cessation of hostilities for a period of twenty days?

Because let’s not forget that, since the ceasefire in November, 2024, until just before this war started, the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon was unilateral. Israel was continuing its bombing campaigns targeting members of Hezbollah, but many Lebanese civilians’ lives were also lost in the process. And that’s part of the logic that Hezbollah is using today, saying, Look, we didn’t respond to Israel’s attacks for a year and a half. And now we’re in a position where we knew that they were preparing to attack us, so we preëmpted it.

But I still think the Hezbollah decision to launch rockets after the Iran war started was foolish, and it dragged the country into a genuine abyss.

Hezbollah started firing rockets after the attack on Iran began, and it seems Israel was probably planning to use this as a pretext to start this massive campaign in Lebanon. What have you been able to tell from Israel’s choice of targets so far about what they may be trying to accomplish here?

I think, frankly, if Israel were interested in weakening Hezbollah further, they would have engaged diplomatically with the government. There were plenty of offers before all of this started. This could have been avoided because the Lebanese government had made a commitment that, should any rockets be fired by Hezbollah, the Army would apprehend and stop it. But Israel started responding immediately. So this was prepared. Israel was intending to come in. We’d been hearing about this for ages, that they were preparing for a ground invasion. There’s an element of targeted punishment of the Shia community, because it’s mostly their areas that are being hit by Israel for having supported or elected Hezbollah. But I can tell you that, when the war started, there was significant anger at Hezbollah for dragging us into this, but now some are rallying back around them, partly because of the brutality of the bombardment.

Many people are not happy with Hezbollah, but they feel that now is not the time to criticize.

Do you have faith that the Lebanese government would’ve acted against Hezbollah if Israel hadn’t attacked so quickly?

I think the Army would’ve gone after those who fired at Israel. Definitely. The political will to prevent Hezbollah from attacking Israel is there. The next steps are a lot more challenging. Disarming and decommissioning Hezbollah requires a very strong army to be able to go in and find weapons depots and arrest people. To do that in a country where the sectarian balance is very delicate, you need to have at least one part of the Shia community politically supporting you. And what is very interesting for me is, when the government, after Hezbollah opened this front, held an emergency meeting, the Council of Ministers made the decision to consider Hezbollah’s military activities illegal and therefore prosecutable by law, to stop the visa-free arrangements between Lebanon and Iran, and to expel any I.R.G.C. members that are found in the country. That’s a seismic shift in the mentality. These are things we never thought we would see happen in a country like Lebanon, because going after Hezbollah, an armed group that represents at least part of the Shia community, could trigger civil strife. But three of the five Shia ministers did not protest this decision. The President has also offered direct talks with Israel.

The Israelis have said no, correct?

Yeah, I don’t think Iran or Israel wants to stop the war in Lebanon.

So, just to go back, then, to my question from before, what is it that you think Israel’s trying to accomplish here? And can you tell anything about their aims from the targets they’ve chosen to hit?

I think they’re trying to do a number of things. One, as I said, is a collective punishment for the Shia community. And we see this in many of the areas that are being targeted, because some of them include blanket-bombing the southern suburbs of Beirut. These are residential buildings. It’s not like the entire southern suburbs is one big arms depot. So many of these areas that are being targeted are really about broader collective punishment.

The second thing they’re trying to do is spread a sense of fear and paranoia, which they’re succeeding at in Lebanon. By directly targeting individuals, especially when they’re in apartment buildings and in hotels, you place a bull’s-eye on every member of the Shia community. People are scared to take them in. There’s a lot of concern about having displaced people around you. It’s really an environment of paranoia and fear that we saw glimpses of in 2024. The Lebanese, as you know, I mean, they’re very hospitable when there’s a problem—they all jump in. When I think back to 2006, N.G.O.s opened their doors. Everyone was trying to help. This time, it’s a lot more muted.

And then the third thing is, now it looks like Israel is looking to occupy a very large part of south Lebanon. It’s not just to the Litani. We have to wait and see where this is going to end. Will they ultimately withdraw back to the border, or are they trying to renegotiate everything again? Because you had the minister of energy in Israel two days ago say, We should reconsider the maritime borders as well, the ones that were agreed to. Are they trying to maintain what they call a buffer zone, and I call occupied Lebanese territory, where you already have thirty-seven villages that have been completely vaporized, and therefore no one would be able to go back? So it’s just not clear to me where the Israeli government wants to go with this. They must want to negotiate from a position of strength, but they already have that. They have complete control over our skies.

But this mass expulsion of people will create tensions within Lebanon. Already, there are many tensions on the ground, and it’s going to create even greater tensions down the road. And this is why, again, the Army’s being very careful in trying to demobilize or decommission certain areas, because you can trigger these tensions at any moment.

No problem if you don’t feel like answering this question, but what has life been like for you recently?

Look, it’s been exhausting. It’s emotionally . . . It’s very difficult, partly because you’re seeing your country being ripped apart, and there’s a sense of helplessness. I’m in a domain where we’re supposed to be looking for creative solutions and off-ramps and thinking of all of this, but it’s very difficult to see an off-ramp in this environment, where we’re just on an escalatory path on the way to nowhere. This country is literally trapped. You have Israel on one side, Iran on the other. So, for me, it’s been very, very difficult to see all of this play out, and then you have to do stuff while you are being professional, unemotional. It’s very hard. And there’s the personal side also, where, I mean, my father’s buried in an area that I no longer can go to. So there’s a sense of . . . I get emotional about this because I’m having a hard time processing this. ♦