Dexter Filkins

The ranks of the American armed forces are depleted. Is the problem the military or the country?

From the daily newsletter: Dexter Filkins on the potential next Attorney General. Plus: the right’s new rallying cry; a gorgeous Mumbai rhapsody; and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s elegiac farce.

In the span of a week—with the death of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, and Iran’s ballistic-missile strike on Israel—the entire Middle East is changed.

Hezbollah has been in conflict with Israel since the group was founded, in the nineteen-eighties, but in the past year the fighting has grown dangerously intense. On October 7th, Hamas militants surged across Israel’s southwestern border and killed more than eleven hundred people. The next day, Hezbollah fired into Israel from the north, launching a volley of rockets that provoked a retaliatory strike. Since then, the shelling and bombing by each side have intensified, stoking fears of an all-ou…

Tehran had ordered the attack in response to Israel’s dramatic assassination of Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior commander in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, earlier this month, in Damascus. The barrage may have caused little damage, but it was unprecedented: after years of clandestine struggle, it was Iran’s first direct attack on Israeli territory, and any projectiles that evaded air defenses could have caused tremendous casualties. The Iranians evidently hoped to str…

By the time of Gaetz’s visit, on December 21st, Trump’s allies had already set in motion a deceptively simple mechanism to overturn his defeat: in seven states where he had narrowly lost, they attempted to replace the delegates to the Electoral College with loyalists to Trump. The plan, which came to be known as the “fake elector” scheme, was unsuccessful, and led to the indictment of several dozen people. Gaetz was more interested in exploiting technicalities. He joined a group of Republican ha…

“This is Chinese naval warship one-seven-one,’’ he said, in English. “Your helicopter is continuously approaching my unit. We remind your helicopter to keep a safe distance—ten nautical miles.” Commander Charles Cooper, the Rafael Peralta’s captain, responded with a prepared statement: “We are in full compliance with international law, with due regard for other vessels.” The Haikou’s commander acknowledged the message, but his ship stayed close, along with a second Chinese warship. When the Rafa…

A group of eccentric endangered birds serves as a bellwether of the climate crisis.

America’s broken immigration system has spawned a national fight, but Congress lacks the political will to fix it.

Taraneh Alidoosti is the latest prominent figure to be arrested, as the regime faces the most serious challenge to its rule since it took power in 1979.