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A couple of years ago, when my mother was ninety-six, I drove her to the Registry of Motor Vehicles in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to get a photo I.D. She no longer had a valid driver’s license or passport, and it seemed prudent for her to have some sort of visual documentation aside from her Costco card to verify that she was who she said she was. Though she had recently moved from Virginia to the bluest of blue—“Don’t blame me, I voted for McGovern”—states, I told her that it was possible that sometime in the near future she might need a photo I.D. to vote. That got her attention. If democracy were a religion, the polling place would be her church. Even the hint that she might not be allowed to vote motivated her to dig through her files until she found her birth certificate. It was the original, issued in 1928.

We navigated the department’s website to schedule an appointment, which turned out to be on an insanely hot day in September. When we arrived, we picked our way across the packed and potholed parking lot—my mother uses a walker—until we stood at the bottom of a ramp outside the building that was pitched at an ungodly steep angle. It took my mother pushing the walker and me pulling it to get her to the door. (I mention all this only to demonstrate that it can be a struggle for many people just to get to their D.M.V.)

Not surprisingly, the office was crowded with an assortment of hot and cranky people. (I would put us in this category.) But my mother had an appointment, so I assumed that she wouldn’t have to wait too long. This, as you already know, was a naïve assumption. We took a number and waited and then waited some more. Eventually, my mother wanted to leave. I believe the words she used were “this is stupid.” I reminded her why we were there, and she pointed out that she voted by mail, which didn’t require an I.D. It was in the middle of this argument when her number was called.

At the counter, my mother handed over her rent bill to prove that she was a Massachusetts resident and then carefully unfolded her birth certificate—the paper was yellowed and fragile—and slid it proudly across to the clerk. “It’s the original,” she said, and, when the clerk did not respond, she added, “from 1928.” The clerk said that she had to talk to a supervisor. When she came back, she told us that the document was unacceptable. “It’s missing a file number,” she said. “What’s a file number?” I asked. I was not trying to be smart. Not to worry—clearly the clerk thought I was a dimwit. “It’s a number on the birth certificate, for filing,” she said. “Maybe nearly a hundred years ago New York City hospitals didn’t have file numbers,” I said. The clerk shrugged. “You can come back when you have a file number,” she said, and that was that.

In the years since, I have thought about that day each time Republicans in Congress have pushed forward the deceptively named Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. They did so in 2024, 2025, and most recently last month, when its newest iteration, the SAVE America Act, passed the House on nearly purely partisan lines, with only one Democrat—Henry Cuellar, of Texas—crossing the aisle. It now goes to the Senate, where Susan Collins, of Maine, has pledged to be the fiftieth Republican to support it. This means that if the Republicans can figure out a way to get around the sixty-vote threshold necessary to bring the bill to a vote—by, say, eliminating the filibuster—Vice-President J. D. Vance would vote to break the tie, President Donald Trump would sign it, and the SAVE America Act would become law. On Sunday, Trump threatened to veto all legislation coming across his desk until the SAVE America Act was passed, writing on Truth Social, “I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed, AND NOT THE WATERED DOWN VERSION—GO FOR THE GOLD: MUST SHOW VOTER I.D. & PROOF OF CITIZENSHIP: NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS EXCEPT FOR MILITARY—ILLNESS, DISABILITY.”

Threats aside, there may be other ways of pushing through the kinds of provisions in the SAVE America Act, such as bypassing Congress altogether. A year ago, President Trump issued an executive order, Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections, which required proof of citizenship to register to vote and decimated voting by mail. That order was struck down in a summary judgment last October, but a draft for a new order goes even further. That draft has been disseminated by a group of Trump supporters who continue to claim interference in the 2020 election, including Peter Ticktin, a Florida-based lawyer who has known Trump since high school. According to the Washington Post, they “expect their draft will figure into Trump’s promised executive order on the issue.”

The draft calls for Trump to take control of elections from the states immediately, superseding their constitutionally derived authority, by declaring a national emergency based on a claim that China interfered in the 2020 election. (The Post notes that an intelligence review found that China considered “efforts to influence the election but did not go through with them.”) “Under the Constitution, it’s the legislatures and states that really control how a state conducts its elections, and the president doesn’t have any power to do that. But here we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes,” Ticktin told the Post. “That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it.” The draft order would require all voters to re-register for the 2026 midterms, with proof of citizenship in hand.

On February 27th, Trump told a reporter for PBS that he had “never heard about” the draft. Yet, in a Truth Social post two weeks earlier, he wrote, “I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future. There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections whether approved by Congress or not!”

Disenfranchising voters who seem likely to vote for the other party has been a long-standing Republican project. Under Trump, that effort—including his call on Dan Bongino’s podcast for the Republicans to “nationalize the voting”—has focussed on another claim, that non-citizens are engaging in voter fraud. Susan Collins justified her support of the SAVE America Act by claiming that “there have been some incidents recently where people have called up town clerks and saying, ‘How do I get a friend of mine who’s from another country to vote here?’ And we’re not hearing a clear answer that only American citizens can vote in American elections.” But, as NPR recently reported, “Noncitizen voting occasionally happens but in minuscule numbers, and not in any coordinated way.”

This reality has not dampened Republicans’ zeal for ginning up the spectre of “illegal aliens,” as the President calls them, infiltrating and corrupting the democratic process. An even more restrictive bill, introduced by the Republican representative Bryan Steil, of Wisconsin, which is currently pending in the House, the Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act, would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and a government-issued I.D. to cast a ballot in person. Opponents of both bills say that requiring a government I.D. is burdensome on working people, people of color, students (because school I.D.s are not acceptable), and older Americans. If that claim seems overblown, consider the experience of my mother, a citizen who has voted in every election for the past seventy-five years. It’s hard to believe that her thwarted attempt was an anomaly. And what about someone who works a nine-to-five job and is unable to get to a D.M.V. or a county clerk’s office during working hours?

Then there’s the cost. Recently, my mother and I submitted a request to the New York City records department to get a copy of her birth certificate, hoping that it would come with a file number. It cost forty-five dollars. (The first link in my Google search was to a private company charging twice that.) In fact, even that document may not be sufficient. My mother is one of sixty-nine million American women who took their husband’s name when they got married. So, even if she returns to the Pittsfield Registry with an acceptable copy of her birth certificate and a rent bill, the names on them will not match. What then? The short answer is that she will be among the millions of Americans who will be summarily disenfranchised if a proof of citizenship is required to vote.

There are other provisions in both the SAVE and the MEGA acts that make it difficult for people to vote, or for their ballots to be counted, such as invalidating mailed ballots that arrive in the days after an election, even if they are postmarked on Election Day. And the MEGA bill puts an end to most voting by mail, something that Trump has been pursuing for years. Not surprisingly, states where everyone is allowed to vote by mail, such as Colorado and Washington, tend to have some of the highest voter-participation rates in the country. If the goal is to limit the franchise, that’s a good place to start.

President Trump, in his State of the Union address in February, urged the Republicans to figure out a way to pass the SAVE America Act as he railed against Democrats, saying, “They have cheated. And their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat. And we’re gonna stop it.” As usual, he offered no evidence, but his claims nevertheless have consequences. Of the many ways to suppress the vote, sowing doubt about the legitimacy of the electoral system may be the most insidious, because it undermines what should be our common faith in the integrity of democracy itself. ♦

The day Josh Wardle sold Wordle to the New York Times, in 2022, for more than a million dollars, should have been a moment of triumph. The game, which gives players six chances to guess a five-letter word, had unexpectedly become a global sensation, and Wardle had already begun to receive e-mails from puzzle designers seeking his input on their own ideas. “The underlying question was always, ‘How do I sell this to the New York Times?’ ” he told me. In their eyes, Wardle had achieved the ultimate success. Yet, as he fielded invitations from journalists, chat-show hosts, and podcast producers, Wardle felt only discombobulated, even borderline depressed.

The problem was not only the speed with which fame had upended his life but the fact that it had arrived uninvited. Wardle, who grew up on a farm in Wales, and who recently returned to the U.K. from Brooklyn, had built the game as a gift for his partner, Palak Shah: a bonding ritual they could share each evening. At the time, he didn’t consider himself a game designer, though play was deeply embedded in his professional life. While working as a product manager for Reddit, he had created a series of interactive projects for April Fools’ Day. One of them, from 2015, was the Button, a web page featuring a large button and a sixty-second countdown clock. Each time a visitor clicked the button, it reset the timer; if no one pressed it before the clock reached zero, the project would end. More than a million people participated before the countdown finally expired, three months later.

It was this sort of lightly mischievous design, combining play and social experiment, that led to Wordle. As the game slipped beyond Wardle’s living room, passing from friends to group chats to Twitter feeds around the world, many players started devotedly sharing their solve streaks—a dynamic not unlike the communal joy of the Button. For Wardle, though, the flood of attention felt overwhelming. “I’m not sure humans are built to handle going viral,” he said. He worried that others would copy and commercialize the game’s concept, whether he wanted them to or not; selling meant relinquishing control, along with responsibility for whatever followed. The day he sold the game was the last time he played it. He didn’t know what he would work on next, or how, exactly, he would pass his days.

Wardle found refuge in an unlikely place: the cryptic crossword, a kind of puzzle popular mostly in Britain, where it originated, in the nineteen-twenties. American, or “concise,” crosswords are typically exercises in trivia more so than wit. A conventional clue might read: “Got up.” If the solution line has four letters, two answers might fit—“rose” or “woke”—and only the crossing letters can settle the matter. The cryptic clue eliminates the ambiguity entirely. It might read: “Pairs of rowdy seagulls get up.” Here, “pairs of” is not a hint but an instruction: take pairs of letters from the following words—the “ro” of “rowdy,” the “se” of “seagulls”—and arrive at an answer, “rose,” that matches “get up.” The uncertainty collapses in a single, satisfying click. Chasing that click is the cryptic solver’s obsession.

Wardle had tried cryptic crosswords when he was younger, but found them to be impenetrable. “I didn’t know how to begin,” he told me. The rules could seem arcane, almost impossible to deduce. A clue containing the word “radio” could signal that “am” or “fm” belongs somewhere in the answer; “book” could imply “ot” or “nt” (Old and New Testament); “sailor” could require the letters “ab,” for “Able Bodied.” Anagrams were flagged by a bewildering range of indicators: “mixed,” “scrambled,” even “microwaved.” These codes often exhaust newcomers, who may feel as though they have arrived at the door of a private club, ignorant of its customs and wearing the wrong trousers. As P. G. Wodehouse wrote of the Times’s daily cryptic in 1945, “the humiliation of only being able to fill in about three words each day is too much for me.” Everyone needs a guide.

Wardle found his while listening to the podcast “Scriptnotes.” In one episode, the showrunner, Craig Mazin, of HBO’s “Chernobyl” and “The Last of Us,” enthused that “everybody should do cryptic crosswords,” and explained some of the form’s underlying logic. “It really stayed with me,” Wardle said. Conversance led to discernment. He became a devotee of the Toronto-based mathematics teacher and puzzle constructor Fraser Simpson, whose clues struck Wardle as contemporary and enviably taut, without the usual “fodder” used to make a clue legible. “Every word in the clue is either definition or wordplay; there are no connector words,” he said. “I was stunned when I saw that.”

Wardle wanted to make a game that could teach the rules of cryptics, just as Mazin had taught him. The idea was vague, germinal; the prospect of actually releasing a follow-up to Wordle felt “paralyzing,” he said, and for a time he worked as a consultant, helping others on game prototypes, which freed him creatively. Then he began to sense an appetite. Cryptics seemed to be experiencing a modest revival; the Australian YouTube channel Minute Cryptic, for example, had drawn tens of thousands of viewers to short videos that unpacked a single clue at a time. Wardle enlisted the support of Chris Dary and Matt Lee, two longtime collaborators from Reddit, and their new game, Parseword, is now available, with a title that came from Wardle’s partner, Shah.

Neither Dary nor Lee had been familiar with cryptics before development began, and Wardle believes this strengthened the game. They felt comfortable questioning conventions, pressing him on assumptions a veteran solver might take for granted. The result, Wardle hopes, is a way to introduce newcomers to the joys and agonies of the cryptic, whose curious but finally comforting logic had been, for him, a salve.

Others have tried this before. In 1968, the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim published an essay in New York explaining the rewards of the cryptic crossword. In his view, the form was superior to the American crossword, full of “cleverness, humor, even a pseudo-aphoristic grace.” Sondheim began publishing his own cryptics in the magazine, complete with rules, examples, and prizes (copies of “Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary,” then priced at around five dollars). The experiment didn’t take. After forty-two puzzles, Sondheim retired the column, and cryptics remained—with occasional exceptions, including at this magazine—largely a British preoccupation.

The central premise of Parseword’s approach is to treat the cryptic not as a riddle to be intuited but as an equation to be solved. On “Scriptnotes,” Mazin had suggested that most cryptic clues contain a conceptual dividing line: on one side is the definition, on the other the wordplay. This led Wardle to consider how each clue might be broken into components; once one fragment was resolved, it might be substituted back into the whole, reducing the remaining complexity.

In Parseword, this process is pleasingly tactile. You can click on a word and see potential synonyms, as well as whether the word is a potential indicator. The game teaches you that in the clue “Taxi reduced fee,” for example, “reduced” is an indicator word, instructing you to shorten another word. Remove the “i” from “taxi” and you find the solution, which is confirmed by the definition: “fee.” Having learned the principle, a thoughtful player should be able to solve the next example: “Funk reduced joy.” Rather than asking newcomers to memorize a rulebook, Parseword makes the algebra visible, guiding players through a sequence of discrete steps. The mystery remains, but the path to clarity is no longer obscure.

Neither Wardle nor his collaborators started out as puzzle constructors, but they knew that cryptic creators are often as distinctive as prose writers. A friend introduced them to Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon, revered constructors who, in the course of fifty years, produced cryptics for the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. “They were incredibly generous,” Wardle said. “They have this bank of clues, and they said we could use them.”

In recent years, crosswords have faced a gentle reckoning, as younger constructors push to update the form’s conventions, moving away from fusty references, obscure Latinisms, and other arcane rules by which, for example, the appearance of the word “school,” in a cryptic crossword, invariably signals that “Eton” lurks somewhere in the answer. Cox and Rathvon appear to avoid these habits, and Wardle and his collaborators have worked carefully to further soften the learning curve, beginning with an elegant tutorial designed to introduce essential techniques: deleting letters, joining them, spotting anagrams and homophones. Each daily clue is supported by a system of hints and prompts, which, in time, the player will learn to rely on less. The game still demands patience and study, however, almost guaranteeing that it will never approach the ubiquity of Wardle’s previous creation.

Indeed, the contrast between Wordle and Parseword is stark. Wordle’s power rests in its elegant restraint. “Even people for whom English is their second language are able to play,” Wardle said. Cryptics occupy the opposite end of the word-game spectrum, and Parseword admits to its difficulty in a blunt subtitle: “A tricky wordplay game.” For Wardle, too, this project feels vastly different. “Releasing Parseword is happening more on my own terms, instead of happening to me,” he said. His ambition is modest and, for now, apparently noncommercial. He hopes, simply, to “reduce the problem space for new solvers,” a phrase that sounds as though it could be parsed for indicator, connector, and definition. ♦

Birthday shopping can be stressful, but if you’re looking for the perfect gift for my niece Maya, here’s a selection of thoughtful, one-of-a-kind ideas that she’ll just love, as curated by me, her aunt who briefly interacted with her on our way out of a family thing when she was, like, fourteen.

Raisins
I saw Maya eating raisins once, years ago, after which she said, “Mmm, pass me a few more.” Obviously, she frickin’ adores raisins and wants no fewer than two five-kilogram boxes every month.

A (Some?) Labubu (Labubi?)
Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out what these are. I say it’s a new kind of Tamagotchi, but my husband says it’s a type of jam. What I do know is that young people like them, and that Maya is twenty-one, unless she’s thirty-five now. Let me text her mom and get back to you.

Crate of Paco Rabanne Ultraviolet Eau de Parfum Samplers
By total coincidence, I just so happen to already own this from that time I went full-on nuts in the Orlando airport duty-free shop, in 2004, and now it’s taking up attic space that my husband needs for his protein powders. Anyway, it totally screams “Maya,” because she’s within driving distance, last I heard, so I probably won’t have to pay for shipping.

T-shirt That Says “I Love Elephants” for No Discernible Reason
I bought this for my daughter because it was seventy per cent off at Marshalls, even though she claimed that she didn’t want it because, and I quote, “Mom, I’ve literally never said a word about elephants in my life.” She and Maya are around the same age, I think, so, logically, it will fit Maya.

Annual Subscription to Nightingale Raisin Farm
Maya will for sure love this, because you get unlimited raisins every month until a lawyer sends them your notarized death certificate. Bonus: she’ll never have to worry about cancelling, because their customer-service number goes straight to a dim-sum kitchen in Guangdong.

“Fuck You, You Fuckin’ Fuck” T-shirt
A bit cheeky? Yes. But Maya lives in New York, and I have it on good authority that everyone down there absolutely cannot get enough of these.

Novelty Personalized License Plate That Says “Mary”
It’s the closest that I could find to “Maya” at the Orlando duty-free shop.

Notepad of Random Ideas I Had for Maya to Implement at Her Job (Which I Don’t Understand)
Maya works in H.R. at Verizon, and I have some pretty profitable ideas about how their phones should have a built-in spoon, in case you’re ever out and need a spoon.

An Air France Mug
They were giving them out at my husband’s job.

Etsy Floral Sham-and-Throw Set
Last time I saw Maya, I said, “Hey, how’s school?” And she said, “Good.” And I said, “Enjoying your classes?” And she said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Bio and algebra, right?” And she said, “Art and geography.” So, yeah, this feels right on the money.

“The Queer Eye Guide: How to Love Yourself the Fab Five Way”
My cousin’s neighbor’s sister-in-law’s hairdresser saw Maya at his CrossFit gym last year. The girls at my bridge club and I chatted about it, and we’re pretty sure we know where this leads.

TurboBlade Anti-Aging Mattifying Beard Oil
Crap, I accidentally copy-pasted from my open GQ “Gifts He’ll Love” tab.

Lifetime V.I.P. Pass to Raisin World Theme Park
Yes, at four hundred ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, it’s pricey, but Readers Digest raves, “This park boasts the biggest slide made of raisins that you’re not allowed to get on for safety reasons in the Southwest.” ♦

The special election in Georgia’s Fourteenth District to replace Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is expected to go to a runoff on April 7th. There are no Party primaries for most special elections in the state, so both Democrats and Republicans will be on the same ballot—a so-called jungle primary—making it unlikely for a candidate to receive a majority of the votes. Greene, a Republican, resigned from her seat on January 5th, after President Donald Trump attacked her for supporting efforts to compel the Department of Justice to release its investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein. She has declined to endorse a candidate in the race.

On the Republican side, Trump has endorsed Clay Fuller, the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit district attorney and a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard, dubbing him an “America First Patriot.” Fuller’s main Republican challenger is Colton Moore, a former member of the Georgia General Assembly who was banned from the state-Senate floor after calling the late speaker of the Georgia House David Ralston “one of the most corrupt Georgia leaders we’ll ever see in our lifetimes,” during a memorial for Ralston at the state House. Despite the ban, Moore later attempted to attend Governor Brian Kemp’s State of the State address and was subsequently arrested. He has been endorsed by the former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz and Kyle Rittenhouse, the man who, as a seventeen year old, shot three people, killing two, at a racial-justice protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020.

Shawn Harris, who previously ran for this seat in the 2024 election, is the most prominent Democrat on the ballot. Harris is a cattleman and a retired brigadier general who served in Afghanistan. He has been endorsed by the Floyd County Democratic Party, and by national figures such as Pete Buttigieg.

Since the United States and Israel launched their war against Iran, on February 28th, President Trump has offered a number of explanations for his decision—from wanting to overthrow the Iranian regime to trying to prevent the country from acquiring nuclear weapons. But the U.S.-Israel bombardment of Iran has led to civilian deaths estimated to be well over a thousand; a strike that hit a girls’ school in Minab killed more than a hundred and seventy-five people alone. (Trump has said that Iran struck the school, but initial evidence suggests that the U.S. was behind this attack.) In recent days, Israel has struck multiple Iranian oil facilities, which has led to an unknown number of civilian deaths and potentially dangerous clouds of smoke across Tehran. The ferocity of the war, along with recent efforts at the Pentagon, led by the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, to undercut safeguards meant to limit civilian casualties, has raised questions about whether the United States and Israel are even attempting to minimize the war’s cost on Iranian civilians.

I recently spoke by phone with Oona Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School and the director of its Center for Global Legal Challenges. She is also the president-elect of the American Society of International Law. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what has most concerned her about the ways in which the U.S. and Israel are waging this war, how the Trump Administration has dismantled the architecture meant to protect civilians during war, and whether the international system is headed for a new kind of lawlessness.

At this point, what do you think we can and can’t say about potential violations of international law in the war in Iran?

There are two bodies of law that are at issue. There’s the body of law that governs whether states can use force. And, here, there’s no doubt that the United States and Israel are in violation of international law, which provides that it’s only lawful to use military force against another state if it’s been authorized by the Security Council of the United Nations, or if a state is acting in its self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. And that has to be self-defense against an armed attack or an imminent attack. And I think the consensus is that there isn’t enough evidence to support the self-defense claim. And the fact that this has not been authorized by the Security Council means it is in violation of international law.

Then there’s a second body of law, which is the body of law that goes to how the war is conducted. That is: Who can be targeted, what can be targeted, what are the rules that govern the use of force once you’re engaged in an armed conflict?

There have been other wars fought with shaky legal reasoning or claims of self-defense that turned out to be ridiculous, but what’s notable is that, in this case, the United States has barely bothered to make any sort of case that there was an imminent threat from Iran.

I would agree with that. What’s striking here is that, while the argument is so extraordinarily bad that it’s almost not worth spending time on, it’s surprising to me that the rest of the world has been fairly silent in response.

The United States and Israel are two countries that have waged a lot of aggressive wars. They are countries that have violated international law in the past and committed war crimes. There are war crimes that have been covered up by both governments. All of that being said, we really haven’t had a situation in the United States where the President quite clearly believes that America should be able to commit war crimes. Does this make you think, even if we should have always been skeptical of how the U.S. conducts war, that we should go into our analysis of this war with a different standard?

What is so troubling here, among many things, is the almost celebration of the violation of the rules and the way in which there’s clearly a message coming from the top that the rules that are meant to protect civilians and protect the troops on both sides from unjustified use of military force are not worth paying attention to. And, in fact, as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth put it, the “stupid rules of engagement” are rules that the United States has, while imperfectly observing, at other times worked hard to abide by. I worked in the Pentagon for a year and had a chance to work side by side with uniformed military lawyers, and they took these rules extremely seriously. And I think what’s really striking about this moment is we have a Secretary of Defense and a President who clearly don’t see the rules in that way.

So, in terms of what we’ve seen since the war started, what specifically worries you the most?

There are many things. We’ve seen many strikes now that on the face of it seem to suggest that there is not enough care being taken with the choice of targets. Everybody has been talking about the horrific strike on the girls’ school that led to the deaths of more than a hundred and seventy-five people. It was struck more than once, therefore killing some of the people who went to try to rescue those who were hurt in the first strike. I’m troubled by the fact that President Trump seems to be denying that the United States was responsible for that strike, despite the fact that the U.S. government has already released information that suggested that it was.

And I’m troubled by the fact that this is the predictable result of a desire to dismantle some of the internal protections that have been put in place within the Department of Defense. There had been a multiyear effort to build up internal structures with lots of personnel who were devoted to this question of how to adequately protect civilians in times of armed conflict. There was a Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan that was developed by the Department of Defense. There was a whole office dedicated to this. That has all been dismantled and therefore it doesn’t come as a huge surprise that these mistakes happen, even though I believe that the school was not intentionally targeted. I have to believe that it was a mistake, but it’s a predictable mistake.

I think that a lot of people draw a moral distinction between targeting civilians and civilians dying as collateral damage in the course of a war. And I agree that that can be a useful moral distinction. But, if you’re dealing with people who quite clearly do not care about civilian lives, and have tried to remove procedures that would protect civilians, it’s much harder for me to come up with any big moral distinction.

Maybe it’s worth explaining this idea of collateral damage, or this question of whether you’re intentionally killing civilians versus unintentionally but knowingly killing civilians. So, under international law, intentionally targeting civilians is clearly unlawful and a war crime, but it is not unlawful to intentionally target a military objective when you know that there may be civilians or civilian objects that will be harmed, as long as the harm to the civilians and civilian objects is not anticipated to be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage that’s anticipated, and that’s sometimes called collateral damage.

And there is a really interesting moral question as to whether the two are really all that different, because, in one case, you’re intentionally killing civilians. In other cases, you are intentionally, in a sense, killing civilians—you know that they’re going to die, you’re taking a strike that you know is going to kill them—but you’re not aiming at them. But it’s cold comfort to the people who are killed in that strike. And there have been a lot of those cases where totally innocent civilians just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. For them and their families, it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference that there was a military objective.

But I think the law does draw a distinction, and I think rightly so, because, if we’re intentionally targeting civilians, we’re giving up on the idea of actually trying to advance any of the war aims. The idea of this balancing, that’s built into the law, is that it’s impossible in times of war to completely insulate civilians from the damage that might be done. And so, if we’re targeting a high-enough-value military objective, occasionally it’s going to be necessary to kill civilians in order to do that. One of the things that comes in here, though, is, like, What is the proportionality calculus? And I think this may be what Hegseth is referring to when he says “stupid rules of engagement.”

But I do think there is a moral distinction. I think the law is right to draw a moral distinction.

Right, but forget the law for a second. Many of the people carrying out this war, including the leaders, do not care about civilian casualties and, in fact, are trying to remove the architecture that is meant to protect civilians from dying—at that point, it’s very tough for me to draw a particularly big moral distinction.

Yes, I think that’s right. And I actually think that this gets to something really important, which has been relatively unnoticed in the last year, which is the dismantling of this architecture that has been put in place. Nobody was really paying attention to it because it seems very bureaucratic and uninteresting and unimportant, but then, when war happens, this is the predictable result, right?

And the question then is: Can that be prosecuted as a war crime? And the short answer is probably not, even though I think that it is morally reprehensible. But I think, in cases where you’re making the same mistake over and over again, and predictably making the same mistake over and over again—that is a case where actually the law does require that you take feasible precautions to avoid and minimize incidental loss of civilian life.

What else have you been paying attention to?

Well, the strikes on the water-desalination plants on both sides. We don’t know exactly who’s responsible for these, but apparently there’s an Iranian desalination plant that was destroyed. And then there was also a desalination plant in Bahrain that the Iranians may have struck.

What could be the possible justification for something like that?

I don’t think there is a lawful justification for it. It is not uncommon to want to target objects that are indispensable to survival, because striking them makes the lives of civilians really miserable, but it is clearly unlawful to do so. I haven’t seen any evidence that suggests that the desalination plant in Iran had any military use whatsoever, and, as a civilian object, it should be protected, but it’s also considered an object indispensable to survival, and in that respect is especially protected because it’s necessary to providing basic needs of human beings in a place where there’s already inadequate water.

There have been reports of attacks on medical facilities, which are deeply worrisome, if true. There have been attacks on parts of the oil infrastructure, which is reportedly causing terrible health conditions in Tehran and potentially making life dangerous for people who are living there. It’s important also to mention that Iran’s attacks are also clearly in violation of international humanitarian law. They’ve just been striking out pretty much everything, and many of these strikes have been on things like apartment buildings.

This is against other Gulf states.What about striking things like oil infrastructure? Because, obviously, you could imagine that oil infrastructure could be used by both civilians and the military. I suppose that the most important thing would be to be aware of those medium-term consequences, like people in Tehran being able to breathe, along with whatever initial explosion there is from bombing oil infrastructure.

Yeah. So it is not uncommon to go after oil infrastructure. The United States has done it in its counter-terrorism campaign. Oil infrastructure is often referred to as a dual-use object, and while that’s not a formal legal term, it’s often a term used to refer to objects that have both civilian and military uses. And it’s not uncommon to target these dual-use objects, but it can be quite damaging to civilians and civilian life. It doesn’t appear, at least from initial reports, that this was used solely for military purposes, but that these are sort of general oil resources that are available to the civilian and to the military population. And this can have impacts on the environment, which we’re hearing about, such as acid rain, and the various health effects that people are suffering immediately in the area, but also it has what are sometimes referred to as reverberating effects. That is, it’s not just the harm that’s done by the strike itself, the civilians who are working at the plant and might be killed, but the aftereffects as well. It’s all the things that follow from it that can be extremely damaging to civilian life.

And there’s an ongoing debate among international lawyers as to whether reverberating effects should be part of the calculus when you’re assessing whether a strike is an excessive strike, and therefore one that should be avoided. The International Committee of the Red Cross says, yes, these reverberating effects should be taken into account. I think they’re right about that, because that’s a way of actually assessing the harm that’s in fact being done to civilians. It’s not just that initial strike but now the fact that you’ve got these horrific fires, that people can’t breathe and the environment is being poisoned, and that people are not going to have access to oil for all the things that they’re going to need for civilian life. Those things ought to be taken into account, but that’s contested, and neither the U.S. nor Israel has accepted that view. And so they don’t take into account those reverberating effects. And so they are more willing to take strikes that have these long-tail effects.

I am curious how you are thinking through these issues broadly right now, because to some degree these questions seem a little bit almost beside the point, because we essentially have this unstable guy carrying out a war for some unknown reason that no one can figure out, and it almost feels like this whole set of rules that we have from the middle of the twentieth century is absurd to talk about.

I agree that the original sin is the war itself, and that, without the launching of this unlawful war, we wouldn’t be talking about any of the rest of it. On the other hand, I do think the rules that govern the conduct of war are extraordinarily important because they are what protect civilians in the context of these kinds of armed conflicts. Obviously, the first, best solution is to not have the war in the first place, and I’m the first to argue that these wars should never happen, and that we shouldn’t be waging illegal and misguided wars in the first place, but it’s also the case that these rules really do matter.

I recognize that Trump and Hegseth don’t care about these rules. Having worked at the Department of Defense, I very much doubt that that is a view that is widely shared within the Pentagon. I think that people who are in the armed services believe that these rules really do matter. And they understand they matter because they protect not just civilians but American forces as well. And these are rules that govern what happens if any member of the armed forces is captured, that govern what can happen to them. It protects their own sense of humanity.

I believe that there is a culture war happening within the Pentagon, because I doubt that the people who have been there and the people who have been serving share that view and that disregard for the rules. Certainly, there are some, but the vast majority believe that we should be fighting by these rules. Over time, that culture will erode and it’ll get worse and worse. And maybe the erosion has already been taking place, but I don’t know that you can destroy a culture in a year. That said, you can destroy structures in a year.

And a country, it turns out.

It sometimes feels that way, that’s for sure. ♦

In his treatise on Islamic governance, Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, raged at the idea of political leadership passing down through family lines. Monarchy and hereditary succession were “sinister” and “evil” and “invalid,” he wrote. They “have no place in Islam.” The revolution that he led, in 1979, centered on ending dynastic rule in Iran, specifically of the U.S.-backed Pahlavi family. The Islamic Republic has, nevertheless, just created a new dynasty.

Early on Monday morning, amid the pounding of U.S. and Israeli bombs, Tehran defiantly announced, on state-controlled television, that the Assembly of Experts had selected Mojtaba Khamenei—the son of the previous Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—to succeed his father, who was killed in an air strike on the first day of the war. Mojtaba, as he is commonly referred to, is a fifty-six-year-old cleric who was his father’s closest adviser. He wears frameless glasses, a salt-and-pepper beard manicured to proper clerical length, and a black turban, signifying his descent from the Prophet Muhammad. During his father’s thirty-seven-year reign, he kept a low profile and was rarely photographed or quoted. He married well; his wife was the daughter of a former speaker of parliament. She was killed, along with other family members, in the same strike as the former Supreme Leader.

Mojtaba had never held a government title or elected position until, on Monday, he became, for those who still believe in the principles of the Revolution, God’s representative on earth. Among Iran experts, he was not considered an important scholar or thinker, although he was educated in the élite seminaries of Qom, the center of theological learning, and taught religious classes. But Mojtaba, who will now assume the role of commander-in-chief, has long cultivated a base of support in the military, notably among the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as his father had, too, to solidify his own prominence, four decades ago. Alan Eyre, a former senior Iran watcher at the State Department, who is now at the Middle East Institute, in Washington, told me, “Before the tsunami of analysis drowns us all, let’s flag the most important fact about this appointment: he is ‘Putin light’ in clerical garb, and his appointment marks the end of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the beginning of Iran as an I.R.G.C.-dominated police-military-security state.”

The selection—by eighty-eight aging scholars and jurists, who are popularly elected every eight years—was a defiant rejoinder to President Donald Trump, who recently demanded the right of refusal over Iran’s next Supreme Leader. Just hours before the announcement, Trump told ABC News, “If he doesn’t get approval from us, he’s not going to last long.” The President had previously dismissed Mojtaba as a “lightweight.” Late last week, he had said, “We want someone that will bring harmony and peace to Iran.” Instead, the Middle East is reeling from the war that Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started, with countries across the region getting sucked into the conflagration. Thousands have been killed, air travel has been grounded, and oil-and-gas exports have been blocked from transiting through the Strait of Hormuz.

Mojtaba’s appointment “is a final act of resistance by the late Khamenei from his grave,” Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “It also sends a strong message to Trump that his bombings and threats are not delivering the regime change he seemingly wants.” Before the war, in December and January, nationwide protests had pushed the Islamic Republic toward a political cliff. The regime ruthlessly cracked down on those protests, killing thousands and detaining tens of thousands who were shouting “Death to the dictator.”

So, this transition will not be the kind of change that the majority of Iranians had hoped for, or expected, especially after U.S. military intervention. John Limbert, a former diplomat who was held, for fourteen months, at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran during the hostage crisis in the Revolution’s early days, told me, “The same clique that’s been in charge since 1979 is neither going to leave nor pay any attention to the demands of eighty-five per cent of Iranians who are asking for a government that treats them decently and doesn’t lead the country into bloody disaster.” If the younger Khamenei does survive, he could have veto power over Iran’s political, military, economic, and social policy for decades to come. The message to other Iranians, and to the world, Limbert added, is “However much you hate us, we’re not going anywhere without a fight. We enjoy our power too much to give it up.”

The elder Khamenei had warned the past six Iranian governments to be wary of the United States, which the theocracy’s faithful dubbed the Great Satan. In 2015, as Iran was negotiating a nuclear deal with the Obama Administration, he told his diplomats “not to be fooled by their smiles, not to trust their promises because, when they have achieved their objectives, they will laugh at you.” In 2018, he may have felt vindicated, after Trump abruptly abandoned the nuclear deal and instead imposed sweeping economic sanctions. His son might feel the same way—and follow the same strategy, based on suspicion and enmity, in both domestic and foreign policy. Geranmayeh told me that loyalists will likely “expect Mojtaba to endorse a path of resistance, potentially with more defiance to restore deterrence against the U.S. and Israel.” More urgently, he will have to prove himself capable of saving the Islamic Republic, while “facing the lowest legitimacy from the ground up, and confronting a war against two nuclear powers. And he must do this while trying to stay alive.”

Shortly after Mojtaba was formally designated, Ali Larijani, the current head of the Supreme National Security Council, and a former speaker of parliament, called on Iranian factions to put aside past disagreements and unite under the new leadership. He also, however, put the country’s ninety-two million people on notice that Mojtaba will govern “with firmness” amid the war. Political and military leaders quickly pledged allegiance. The Revolutionary Guards heralded “a new dawn and a new phase for the revolution and the Islamic Republic’s rule.” On Monday, the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, congratulated the new Supreme Leader. “I would like to reaffirm our unwavering support for Tehran and solidarity with our Iranian friends,” he said. Iran provided thousands of Shahed kamikaze drones in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

In an analysis for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Patrick Clawson and Farzin Nadimi predicted that Mojtaba, “driven by raw, vengeful feelings,” may try to carry out purges that strengthen the theocracy’s “ideology of existential confrontation with America and Israel” and the I.R.G.C.’s central role in governance and the economy. The tentacles of the I.R.G.C. reach deep into politics and the economy, especially telecommunications and construction. Mojtaba reportedly served with the I.R.G.C. in the final phase of Iran’s grisly eight-year war with Iraq, in the nineteen-eighties, which claimed more than a million casualties. Many veterans of that war, including Larijani and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the influential speaker of parliament, have already risen to senior government positions.

Limbert said, “The Islamic Republic has now proved that it varies little from the kind of dynasties that had ruled old Persia for more than two millennia.” The uncertainties spawned by the war has led Tehran, at least for now, to revert to a pattern of the past. Limbert told me that the revolutionaries “had originally rejected the entire principle of dynastic rule. Now the son succeeds the father, and they repeat what Iranian kings have done for millennia.”

The new war in Iran, now in its second week, has shown no signs of letting up. On Sunday, the U.S. announced its seventh fatality, a service member on a military base in Saudi Arabia. (The first six died at a port in Kuwait.) In a reflection of the increasing threat to U.S. interests across the Middle East, the State Department ordered American diplomats at the Embassy in Riyadh to leave the kingdom; two drones fell on the Embassy last week. NATO forces in Turkey intercepted a ballistic missile from Iran, the second in a week. Allison Hart, a spokeswoman for the U.S. alliance of thirty-two Western nations, said, “NATO stands firm in its readiness to defend all Allies against any threat.” A drone was also intercepted near Iraq’s international airport in Erbil, where U.S. forces are based. Iranian drones and missiles are also targeting other U.S. allies in the oil-rich Gulf.

The war between Israel and Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, also escalated in Lebanon, where U.S. envoys had already been evacuated. More than ten per cent of the people living in Lebanon have fled the fighting. The Lebanese government condemned the war, but amid the chaos and destruction its parliament announced a two-year delay in national elections. Meanwhile, over the weekend, Israel struck dozens of fuel depots in Tehran, setting off massive fires. Images and video from the capital looked apocalyptic, with black clouds consuming the horizon, and oil droplets raining down. The price of oil surged to more than a hundred dollars a barrel, sparking fears of a global economic crisis. Trump dismissed the price spike as a “little glitch.”

Last week, Trump was asked what the worst-case scenario would be, as Iran sorted through the candidates to be the Supreme Leader. “I guess the worst case would be we do this and somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person,” he said, in the Oval Office. “Right, that could happen. We don’t want that to happen.” So far, the war has not had the political impact that Trump expected. ♦