‘Barcelona Or Die.’ For Senegalese Dreaming Of Europe, The Deadly Atlantic Route Is Not A Deterrent

BY MARK BANCHEREAU

THIAROYE-SUR-MER, SENEGAL (AP) — Salamba Ndiaye was 22 when she first tried to get to Spain, dreaming of a career as a real estate agent. Without her parents’ knowledge, she made it onto a small fishing boat known as a pirogue, but the Senegalese police intercepted the vessel before it could leave.

A year later Ndiaye tried again, successfully making it off the coast but this time a violent storm forced the boat to stop in Morocco, where Ndiaye and the other passengers were sent back to Senegal.

Despite her two failed attempts, the 28-year-old is determined to try again. “Right now, if they told me there was a boat going to Spain, I would leave this interview and get on it,” she said.

Ndiaye is one of thousands of young Senegalese who try to leave the West African country each year to head to Spain, fleeing poverty and the lack of job opportunities. Most head to the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago off the coast of West Africa, which is used as a stepping stone to continental Europe.

Since the beginning of the year, more than 22,300 people have landed on the Canary Islands, 126% more than the same period last year, according to statistics released by Spain’s Interior Ministry.

While most migrants leaving Senegal are young men, aid workers in the Canary Islands say they are increasingly seeing young women like Ndiaye risk their lives as well.

Earlier this year, the EU signed a 210 million euro deal with Mauritania to stop smugglers from launching boats for Spain. But the deal has had little effect on migrant arrivals for now.

The Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez will visit Mauritania, Senegal and Gambia this week to tackle irregular migration. The West African nations are the main launching pads for migrants traveling by boat.

The Atlantic route from West Africa to the Canary Islands is one of the deadliest in the world. While there is no accurate death toll because of the lack of information on departures from West Africa, the Spanish migrant rights group Walking Borders estimates the victims are in the thousands this year alone.

Migrant boats that get lost or run into problems often vanish in the Atlantic, with some drifting across the ocean for months until they are found in the Caribbean and Latin America carrying only human remains.

But the danger of the route is not a deterrent for those like Ndiaye, who are desperate to make a better living for themselves and their families in Europe. “Barsa wala Barsakh,” or “Barcelona or die” in Wolof, one of Senegal’s national languages, is a common motto of those who brave the deadly route.

“Even if we stay here, we are in danger,” said Cheikh Gueye, 46, a fisherman from Thiaroye-sur-Mer, the same village on the outskirts of Senegal’s capital that Ndiaye is from.

“If you are sick and you can’t pay for treatment, aren’t you in danger? So, we take our chances, either we get there, or we don’t,” he added.

Gueye also attempted to reach Europe though the Atlantic route but only made it to Morocco following bad weather, and was sent back to Senegal.

Like many inhabitants of Thiaroye-sur-Mer, he used to make a decent living as a fisherman before fish stocks started to deplete a decade ago due to overfishing.

“These big boats have changed things, before even kids could catch some fish here with a net,” Gueye said, pointing at the shallow water.

“Now we have to go more than 50 kilometers out before we find fish and even then we don’t find enough, just a little,” he adds.

Gueye and Ndiaye blame the fishing agreements between Senegal and the European Union and China, which allow foreign industrial trawlers to fish in Senegalese waters. The agreements impose limits on what they can haul in, but monitoring what the large boats from Europe, China and Russia harvest has proven difficult.

Ahead of the Spanish prime minister’s visit to Senegal on Wednesday, Ndiaye’s mother, Fatou Niang, 67, says the Senegalese and Spanish governments should focus on giving young people in the West African country job opportunities to deter them from migrating.

“These kids don’t know anything but the sea, and now the sea has nothing. If you do something for the youth, they won’t leave,” Niang says.

“But if not, well, we can’t make them stay. There’s no work here,” she said.

Associated Press writer Ndeye Sene Mbengue in Dakar, Senegal, contributed to this report.

Follow AP’s coverage of migration issues at https://apnews.com/hub/migration

How US Military Planning Has Shifted Away From Fighting Terrorism To Readying For Tensions And Conflict With China And Russia

BY ERIC RODENBACH

SENIOR LECTURER IN PUBLIC POLICY

HARVARD KENNEDY SCHOOL

President Joe Biden’s recent approval of a major shift in U.S. nuclear weapons strategy highlights the attention the country’s national security officials are paying to Chinese ambitions for influence in the world.

As changes emerge in the types of threats facing the U.S., the American military adjusts its strategic focus, budgets and planning. For instance, after 9/11, the U.S. military refocused away from its Cold War emphasis on preparing for combat against a powerful nation – the Soviet Union – and toward fighting small terrorist and insurgent groups instead.

Over the past decade, the Pentagon’s efforts have shifted back to preparing for what officials call “great power competition” among the U.S., Russia and China.

The most important strategic shift that’s evident in planning for great power competition is a focus on deterrence. In classic military strategy, deterrence focuses on making an adversary believe they can never achieve their goals by military force, because the response would be overwhelming and decisive. The National Defense Strategy released in October 2022 – the document that articulates the nation’s goals, objectives and resource allocation for the next two years – explicitly recognizes the potential risk of tensions and open conflict with Russia or China, and it calls for “integrated deterrence” to prevent it. That means combined efforts from the military, intelligence and diplomatic agencies across the U.S. government.

The National Military Strategy – the military’s section of the overarching National Defense Strategy – lays out how the U.S. armed forces will contribute to that effort. As a former assistant secretary of defense and Pentagon chief of staff, I see that the military is focusing on three main goals to achieve integrated deterrence and prevent a conflict with Russia or China.

New operational plans

For the military, integrated deterrence means the armed forces will depend both on where forces are located and what they can do once they’re in action to influence adversaries’ decisions about when, where, how – and whether – to use military force against the U.S. or its interests.

In the shift away from counterterrorism toward preparation for a great power conflict, the Defense Department has developed new ways to deal with the fact that Russia and China, unlike small terrorist groups, can fight in the air, on land and at sea anywhere around the world – and online and in space, too.

First among those methods is what the Pentagon calls “dynamic force employment,” in which U.S. military forces are deployed rapidly around the world, without predictable rotation schedules. This approach can reassure allies facing threats from Russia or China.

For example, the U.S. has, at times, deployed as many as 10,000 troops to Poland. The troops are not permanently stationed there, but a continuous presence of U.S. forces keeps Russia guessing about the size and capabilities of the force and demonstrates a commitment to support nervous NATO allies in Eastern Europe.

Second is a shift of personnel and capabilities to what is called “multi-domain operations,” in which units with different missions across air, land, sea, space and cyberspace plan and train together. That way, they can be prepared to work closely together in actual conflicts.

This level of collaboration allows the nation to respond to threats in a variety of ways. For instance, challenges to American naval power on the high seas do not have to be met directly with corresponding naval action, but instead could be answered with cyberattacks or from space.

This approach might make the Chinese People’s Liberation Army think twice about launching military operations against Taiwan. Not only would the Chinese potentially face a fierce direct conflict, but U.S. cyber and space operations could also disrupt or destroy Chinese military communications, hindering their attack.

Investments in modernization

Recent research has shown that China’s investments in its military personnel and capabilities – particularly in air, naval and nuclear forces – have grown exponentially over the past two decades, to a level estimated at near parity with the United States. This has prompted the U.S. to modernize its own military’s corresponding capabilities. For the 2024 budget, the Department of Defense allocated a whopping US$234.9 billion for programs to support integrated deterrence, which likely represents a 10% increase over previous spending plans.

Some of this money will go to developing and acquiring F-35 fighter jets and building Columbia-class, nuclear-powered submarines. When the U.S. and its allies in the Pacific region, such as Japan, South Korea and Australia, deploy these planes and submarines, they will remind potential adversaries of American military power – which is itself a deterrent against foreign aggression.

Over the past 10 years, China’s rapid expansion of its nuclear weapon supply has alarmed senior policymakers in the U.S. Although then-President Barack Obama pushed countries to envision a world free of nuclear weapons, he approved the most expensive and significant upgrade ever to the U.S. nuclear arsenal. In 2022, the Biden administration renewed a financial commitment to “field a modern, resilient nuclear triad” consisting of intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched missiles and long-range nuclear bombers.

Advancing technology

In 2019, the Space Force was established as a separate branch of the armed forces and tasked with defending American space-based assets and upholding international law. Because of the importance of satellite communications to military operations and civilian life – including internet connectivity – the Space Force works closely with Cyber Command, the military organization charged with defending the nation against cyberattacks, to prevent malicious hackers from disrupting systems vital to the world, such as the Global Positioning System, widely known as GPS.

Recent intelligence indicates that China plans to conduct destructive cyberattacks against U.S. domestic critical infrastructure, including the electric grid, during any conflict. To counter those plans, Cyber Command continues to enhance its abilities to defend U.S. systems and companies against cyberattacks, as well as to conduct attacks against systems in other countries.

The Pentagon is also seeking to counterbalance China’s rapidly expanding military forces by using artificial intelligence software in a program called the Replicator Initiative. The effort seeks to build thousands of low-cost, AI-directed autonomous aircraft and boats that can be used in combat to “counter the (Chinese military)’s mass with mass of our own,” in the words of Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks.

Integration with allies and partners

The U.S. military has also sought to strengthen alliances with other countries, especially over the past four years of the Biden administration.

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine led NATO to expand its membership as well as the numbers and capabilities of troops available to the organization. The U.S. has reinforced its commitment to NATO, increasing troop deployments in Eastern Europe and support for European defense initiatives by committing nearly $3 billion in funding for additional fighter aircraft, air-defense batteries and munitions.

In Asia, around the Indian Ocean and across the Pacific Ocean, a vast region that the government often calls “the Indo-Pacific,” the U.S. has strengthened alliances with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines by conducting numerous military exercises and increasing military assistance. Efforts like the annual Marine Aviation Support exercise are aimed at countering Chinese military and political influence.

The U.S. has also sought to strengthen its alliances with the U.K. and Australia, with a commitment to sell up to five conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarines to the Australian navy by 2030.

Collectively, the U.S. has combined all of these efforts into a coordinated approach seeking to avoid open conflict with China and Russia. But the work is not yet done: The global political and military landscape is ever-changing, and new security challenges are always emerging.

Grace Jones, a master’s student in public policy and research assistant at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, contributed research to this article.

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The Impossibility Of Children’s Television

BY MADELINE ULRICH

CHILDREN’S FICTION often belongs to children in name alone. After all, narratives of childhood are largely written by adults, usually to reinforce what Henry Jenkins has called “the myth of childhood innocence”—an ideal that envisions the child as somehow universal, apolitical, and sacred. “Too often,” Jenkins writes,

our culture imagines childhood as a utopian space, separate from adult cares and worries, free from sexuality, outside social divisions, closer to nature and the primitive world, more fluid in its identity and its access to the realms of imagination, beyond historical change, more just, pure, and innocent, and in the end, waiting to be corrupted or protected by adults.

Bound by the contradiction of being vulnerable to politics and at the same time magically beyond its purview, the figure of the child in popular culture does not reflect material realities. Instead, as Lee Edelman says in his 2004 book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, the image is of a “fantasmatic Child”: a repository of utopian hopes and dreams but also a battleground of deep-seated and incoherent cultural anxieties.

Two examples of popular media from this year, the viral Max/Investigation Discovery docuseries Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV and the A24 sci-fi/horror film I Saw the TV Glow, reveal the limits of the childhood innocence myth. They both also happen to draw attention to two major cultural forces so often blamed for corrupting the innocent child: television and queerness. Interestingly, both texts link these two forces together, albeit in distinct ways and to different ends. In Quiet on Set, viewers witness the toxic treatment of child actors working for the popular kids’ cable network Nickelodeon in the 1990s and early 2000s. The majority of the docuseries attributes the on-set abuses to a handful of “bad apples”—including two queer Nickelodeon employees—and each episode unpacks in detail the specific nature of their transgressions. By compiling and displaying evidence of Nickelodeon’s mishandling of child stars in the making of its shows, Quiet on Set proposes that television for children comes at a significant cost to children. As the title suggests, the making of kids’ TV must involve a “dark side”—one that includes but is not limited to the suppression, abuse, and manipulation of vulnerable young stars by adults who may care more about the business of “kids’ TV” than they do about actual kids.

I Saw the TV Glow, written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, also links queerness and television. Rather than present television as threatening in the “bogeyman” sense, the film suggests that TV is a disruptive force to the status quo; in the film, it threatens both the imaginary separateness of kids’ TV from other types of media and the myth that childhood is somehow devoid of or separate from queer and trans ways of life. The film centers on a different kind of youth-focused television that emerged in the same historical moment as Nickelodeon: the meteoric rise of the WB and UPN networks in the year 1995 and the “youth market” that became their demographic targets. The two main characters, teenagers Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), share an obsession with a coming-of-age, supernatural horror series called The Pink Opaque that airs on the “Young Adult Network,” a fictionalized WB/UPN counterpart. When both Owen and Maddy become hyper-identified with the two teen protagonists at center of the program (whose mission is to slay villains sent by the “big bad” Mr. Melancholy week after week), their existence as suburban teenagers—and their desire to eventually lead normal lives as adults—is thrown into doubt.

Described by the director as an allegory for the experience of coming out as trans, I Saw the TV Glow constructs an analogy between the fantasy worlds that television may provide us and the not-so-distant fantasy of creating a queer life outside of the norms often prescribed for children. The choice between what is queer and what is normative materializes when The Pink Opaque eventually impels one of the teens, Maddy, to reject the reality of suburban life in favor of a different universe, while Owen is left with the choice to remain in his current reality—despite knowing there might be a challenging but fulfilling alternative—or to follow Maddy to an unknown plane of existence.

Both Quiet on Set and I Saw the TV Glow explore anxieties around television, gender, sexuality, and queerness, but both also confront the impossibility of “kids’ TV.” Each text, in its respective style and subject matter, points to the potential hazards of seeing both kids’ media and children themselves as existing in a vacuum, apart from the realities of adulthood. Both texts also suggest the inevitable damage that results from adults’ investment in producing certain ideas of the child—harm that ranges from the literal and physical to the figural and symbolic—and in pushing on children ideas of the good life grounded in financial and commercial success, rather than other metrics of happiness and fulfillment. The medium of television at the center of Quiet on Set and I Saw the TV Glow becomes an interesting zone to challenge the tensions at the heart of what we consider “good” for kids, in part because television itself is so often assumed to be “bad” for them. Quiet on Set and I Saw the TV Glow suggest that it is not television itself that is inherently good or bad; instead, they illustrate how TV becomes imbued with specific values to different and sometimes disparate ends. If both I Saw the TV Glow and Quiet on Set show the figure of the child under threat, the former locates that threat not in television but in the surrounding culture. By contrast, Quiet on Set seems to hold out on the promise of television’s “good” (consumer) influence on children, if only it can be saved from a few “big bad” executives and crew members.

In the opening moments of I Saw the TV Glow, the viewer first meets Owen—a quiet and shy seventh grader—when he stumbles upon the mysterious and brooding ninth grader Maddy hiding in the cafeteria reading an episode guide of The Pink Opaque. “It’s a kids’ show, right?” Owen hesitantly asks when he sees her book. Maddy launches into an annoyed yet cool defense of the show’s narrative merits and sophisticated horrors, claiming that while “technically it’s on the Young Adult Network […] it’s way too scary, and the mythology is way too complicated for most kids.” The film is less interested in answering Owen’s question (is it a kids’ show?) than it is in using such a question as a central refrain: does being a “kids’ show” inherently negate an object’s political, or in this case queer, potential? Or does such a label as “kids’ TV”—with its associations of innocence and simplicity—perpetuate distinctions (such as “real world” versus “kids’ stuff”) that never truly existed in the first place?

Numerous reviews of the film have noted the striking similarities between The Pink Opaque and the WB/UPN television hit Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003). As Elana Levine and Lisa Parks observe in a book-length anthology on Buffy, “netlets” such as the WB and UPN catered to millennial adolescents and teens in the 1990s and early 2000s to differentiate themselves from the four major broadcast networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox). Just as Nickelodeon revolutionized a formerly niche kids’ network in pursuit of the child consumer, the WB and UPN elevated the importance of young adult content with shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawson’s Creek (WB, 1998–2003), Smallville (WB/CW, 2001–11), Gilmore Girls (WB/CW, 2000–07), One Tree Hill (WB/CW, 2003–12), and Veronica Mars (UPN/CW, 2004–07). In the process, as Mary Celeste Kearney has argued, these shows could court a coveted youth market while selling an image of “youthfulness” and “cool” not just to those within the age demographic but also to those outside it. In other words, while seeming to be “about” and “for” adolescents, programs like Buffy and its fictional equivalent, The Pink Opaque, call into question the purity of labels like “teen” or “youth TV,” as well as the issues that may fall into their purview.

The first beat of the film’s narrative is a classic kid problem: Owen must find a way to successfully sneak over to Maddy’s house to catch an episode of The Pink Opaque. (His parents won’t let him stay up late enough to watch it.) As the episode begins, the film abruptly switches from wide-screen into TV’s classic 4:3 aspect ratio, along with a grainy, mid-1990s video feel, launching Owen, Maddy, and filmgoers into the odd and colorful world of The Pink Opaque. The teens are nearly hypnotized by the show, which features the deranged Ice Cream Man (a visual homage to Mr. Tastee from Nickelodeon’s The Adventures of Pete & Pete) as the episode’s villain. When the episode concludes, Owen asks, “Is the Ice Cream Man in every episode?” Maddy grows impatient with his lack of knowledge about the series’ rhythms and narrative structure. “No,” she says with a laugh, “That’s just a Monster of the Week! Mr. Melancholy is the Big Bad.” Maddy continues describing the characters with earnest excitement and intensity, elaborating on Mr. Melancholy:

MADDY: “He’s always messing with time and reality. He wants to rule the world, to trap Isabela and Tara in the Midnight Realm. So each week, he sends a new supernatural foe their way.”

OWEN: “Because they’re part of the Pink Opaque?”

MADDY: “No, because they are the Pink Opaque.”

Owen’s first experience of watching The Pink Opaque leaves him caught somewhere between exasperation at not quite “getting it” and excitement about the possibility of joining a new universe of characters and fellow fans. Owen’s emerging fandom quickly materializes as the film’s central allegory: joining a new world, whether with fictional characters in an imaginary realm or with queer community in real life, often requires leaving the old one, along with the ideologies we have internalized about what it means to live a “happy” or “fulfilled” life. When The Pink Opaque is canceled in 1998 after its fifth season, during Maddy’s final year of high school, Owen learns that his friend has vanished without a trace, apart from a burning TV left in the backyard of her family home. Only when the two are reunited 10 years later does Owen discover the reason for the abrupt disappearance: in an ode to the death of the main characters in The Pink Opaque’s series finale, Maddy too wanted to be buried alive, an act that would supposedly allow the show to continue forever. The unbelievable catch to Maddy’s plan, and the reason for her return, is that Owen, too, must bury himself alive in order for the show to go on. Owen is understandably disturbed and dumbfounded by Maddy’s story. “This is insane,” he stutters, as he tries to debunk Maddy’s theory that all along they, like the main characters, had been stuck in the Midnight Realm, and that his only way out is to do as she says. He begins recounting pleasant childhood memories: “I remember playing in the snow. Driving to baseball games with my dad. Cooking with my mom. […] This isn’t the Midnight Realm, Maddy. It’s just the suburbs.”

I Saw the TV Glow presents the loss of self that Maddy undergoes—even through something as seemingly innocuous as a kids’ show—as inherently alienating and violent. But even in connecting such loss to the experience of coming out as trans, as Schoenbrun does so convincingly, the film does not suggest that burying oneself alive—or the experience of coming to terms with one’s trans identity—is necessarily any more violent than the process of denying oneself the opportunity to live authentically. In the film, Owen experiences this denial of the self as death by a thousand cuts, both in the aftermath of Maddy’s disappearance and again when he rejects Maddy’s proposed plan, opting instead to continue on with “normal” life.

The film signposts the supposed pleasures of such a life through the progression of Owen’s adulthood: working at the movie theater and then at “the Fun Center,” and eventually buying his childhood home and having a family of his own. (Owen describes his life to the viewer, Pete & Pete–style, while looking directly into the camera as he picks up the brand-new LG flat-screen TV delivered to his porch.) Despite seeming to have made peace with his choices, he secretly ponders the what-if, divulging his insecurity in a voiceover narration:

I found myself wondering: What if she was right? What if she had been telling the truth? What if I really was someone else? Someone beautiful and powerful? Someone buried alive and suffocating to death? Very far away, on the other side of the television screen? But I know that’s not true. That’s just fantasy. Kids’ stuff.

“Kids’ stuff.” The phrase is a stand-in for a variety of affects, from describing what is simple, silly, and frivolous to anything deemed inherently innocuous and innocent. But the point of I Saw the TV Glow, as well as Quiet on Set, is that both this conception of “kids’ stuff” and the idea that it is somehow “over there” in kiddie land—in children’s TV, books, cartoons, comics, video games, and toys—but not “here,” in the real, “adult” world, is the actual fantasy. Rather than classifying the desire to find oneself as “kids’ stuff,” I Saw the TV Glow instead insists that it’s never too late (or too early) to take that desire seriously. As Maddy writes in chalk on the pavement outside of Owen’s house: “There is still time.”

In the last act of the film, Owen experiences a final, torturous cut, revealing the TV’s glow inside of himself. In opening himself up—literally—to the TV’s glowing light within, the film seems to propose that the true horror is not that media might make your kid queer or trans (if they weren’t already). Rather, as the viewer sees when Owen opens and closes himself back up, the danger is that, as adults, we might deny the truths that will certainly unsettle what we are told makes a happy life but that also make life worth living.

In I Saw the TV Glow, adults serve less as the film’s “Big Bad” than as a continuous reminder that harm to kids can take many guises. Like many kids’ and teen shows of the 1990s, in which parents are largely absent, most of the adults in I Saw the TV Glow—aside from Owen’s ailing mother—hinder their children through neglect, apathy, and subtle disdain. In one of the film’s early scenes, ninth-grade Owen asks his parents if he can stay up late to watch The Pink Opaque. “Isn’t that a show for girls?” his otherwise silent father dismissively remarks from the driver’s seat. Comments such as these, the film suggests, are all the more powerful in their subtlety.

In Quiet on Set, the harmful impact of adults on children’s lives and culture is made much more explicit. Indeed the “explicit” nature of this impact—on kid stars put into “comedic” situations that include pornographic references, or who are subjected to molestation and sexual abuse—is the docuseries’ main revelation and the primary source of its shock value. These revelations are presented as especially shocking given Nickelodeon’s reputation as a place where “kids rule” (doubly implying both kids’ self-governance and their superiority). As Sarah Banet-Weiser argues in her 2007 book Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship, far from imagining children as innocent or unsophisticated spectators, Nickelodeon differentiated itself in the late 20th-century cable marketplace by instead identifying its kid audience as “empowered citizen consumers”; it addressed its young demographic as technologically savvy, cool, and socially aware, yet irreverent towards “grown-up” virtues and tastes. The network’s “kids only” programming highlights children’s empowerment as a matter of choice and consumption. A lineup of kid-hosted late-night and variety shows spoofing Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show, televised award ceremonies like the Kids’ Choice Awards, and cartoons and sitcoms focused on issues facing children and teens gesture toward the genres and conventions of “grown-up” TV while suggesting a better attunement to kid viewers through a “by kids, for kids” trademark.

Indeed, the opening moments of Quiet on Set feature former child actors praising Nickelodeon and its shows for minimizing parents’ roles in the stories and on the set. Kids’ entertainment, viewers in the 1990s were told, was the first and foremost concern of the network. But the assembled evidence—taped and behind-the-scenes footage, alongside talking heads–style interviews with former Nickelodeon cast members, their parents, and crew members—suggests that working for Nickelodeon did not exactly align with this kids-first experience sold by the network. Instead, Quiet on Set showcases horrifying tales of mistreatment: child stars were subject to microaggressions due to their race or gender and made to perform abject physical stunts (getting drenched in the infamous Nickelodeon “slime,” for example, but also being forced to swallow insects and submerge themselves in tanks of live animals, part of an effort to imitate adult game shows like Fear Factor). “It was a house of horrors. House of horrors!” recalls the mom of child star Bryan Christopher Hearne. The docuseries suggests that Hearne was fired from the sketch comedy show All That (1994–2005) because his mother complained about the behavior she saw from adults on set. Then, in a jump scare–like fashion, the show cuts to the story of Jason Michael Handy, a Nickelodeon crew member and one of a handful of men accused of inappropriate behavior (in Handy’s case, child pornography and lewd acts). A later episode tells the story of Brian Peck, a Nickelodeon dialogue coach charged with the sexual abuse of a child star. (The docuseries makes a big deal out of revealing the identity of the survivor, actor Drake Bell.) The details of both cases are incredibly unsettling, and somewhat predictably, Nickelodeon brushed Handy’s case under the rug. Peck, meanwhile, continued to work on children’s shows for Disney after his conviction, though he was terminated when Disney discovered his history.

No one would deny that the acts of pedophilia that occurred on set at Nickelodeon are deeply upsetting. Yet a central question that goes unanswered throughout Quiet on Set is its goal in revisiting these traumas. Is it to problematically reinforce the stereotypical association between pedophilia and homosexuality, an association that comes up repeatedly in the tale of Brian Peck (who is gay)? Or to imply that the women on set, those in the writer’s room as well as the mothers of these child actors, are to blame for the harm that came to these children, just as much as or even more so than the TV executives at the helm when these abuses occurred?

What the series fails to question, in other words, is the very ideal of “children’s TV” itself—or rather, the impossibility of kids’ TV. As the feminist critic Jacqueline Rose once put it regarding the children’s novel Peter Pan:

Children’s fiction is impossible, not in the sense that it cannot be written (that would be nonsense), but in that it hangs on an impossibility, one which it rarely ventures to speak. This is the impossible relation between adult and child. Children’s fiction is clearly about that relation, but it has the remarkable characteristic of being about something which it hardly ever talks of. Children’s fiction sets up a world in which the adult comes first (author, maker, giver) and the child comes after (reader, product, receiver), but where neither of them enter the space in between. To say that the child is inside the book—children’s books are after all as often as not about children—is to fall straight into a trap. It is to confuse the adult’s intention to get at the child with the child it portrays. If children’s fiction builds an image of the child inside the book, it does so in order to secure the child who is outside the book, the one who does not come so easily within its grasp.

To put it differently, if children’s television is always already impossible—not in the sense that it doesn’t exist as an industrial category (Nickelodeon proved otherwise), but that it is indeed a misnomer. What gets lost when we insist on the label “children’s television,” rather than calling the form what it actually is—namely, “television written for kids by adults”? (Or is that too clunky for marketing campaigns?)

Unlike Quiet on Set, I Saw the TV Glow faces the impossibility of children’s television head-on by insisting that the contradictions of media designed for kids need not be resolved so much as explored, acknowledged, or even embraced. If both children’s television and childhood itself hinge upon the impossible relation between adult and child, as Rose proposes, it is worth wondering what is to be done about this impossibility. Quiet on Set serves as a cautionary tale about the desire to collapse the distinction between adult and child when it describes a kind of television that claims to address kids “as kids” but really intends to transform them into mini-adults. I Saw the TV Glow, on the other hand, imagines a kind of television that addresses young adults as such, while doing what Rose claims can never be done: it is in fact about that very relation between child and adult. Schoenbrun’s film does not suggest that this impossibility can be resolved but rather that acknowledging it is perhaps the best we can do for kids—including the ones inside all of us.

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The Biggest Diamond In Over A Century Is Found In Botswana — A Whopping 2,492 Carats

Botswana's President Mokgweetsi Masisi holds the 2,492-carat diamond that was unearthed at one of its mines and will be put on show Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024 i Gaborone. (AP Photo)

BY SELLO MOTSETA

GABORONE, BOTSWANA (AP) — The largest diamond found in more than a century has been unearthed at a mine in Botswana, and the country’s president showed off the fist-sized stone to the world at a viewing ceremony Thursday.

The Botswana government says the huge 2,492-carat diamond is the second-biggest ever discovered in a mine. It’s the biggest diamond found since 1905.

The as-yet-unnamed diamond was presented to the world at the office of Botswana President Mokgweetsi Masisi. It weighs approximately half a kilogram and Masisi was one of the first to get to hold it.

“It is overwhelming,” Masisi said. “I am lucky to have seen it in my time.” He gasped and said “wow” before calling senior government officials over to take a closer look.

Officials said it was too early to value the stone or decide how it would be sold. Another smaller diamond from the same mine in Botswana was sold for $63 million in 2016, a record for a rough gem.

“This is history in the making,” said Naseem Lahri, Botswana managing director for Lucara Diamond Corp., the Canadian mining company that found the diamond. “I am very proud. It is a product of Botswana.”

Lucara said in a statement Wednesday that it recovered the “exceptional” rough diamond from its Karowe Mine in central Botswana. Lucara said it was a “high-quality” stone and was found intact. It was located using X-ray technology designed to find large, high-value diamonds.

“We are ecstatic about the recovery of this extraordinary 2,492-carat diamond,” Lucara President and CEO William Lamb said in a statement.

The weight would make it the largest diamond found in 119 years and the second-largest ever dug out of a mine after the Cullinan Diamond that was discovered in South Africa in 1905. The famous Cullinan was 3,106 carats and was cut into gems, some of which form part of the British Crown Jewels.

A bigger, less pure black diamond was discovered in Brazil in the late 1800s, but it was found above ground and was believed to have been part of a meteorite.

Botswana, a country of 2.6 million people in southern Africa, is the second-biggest producer of natural diamonds behind Russia and has unearthed all of the world’s biggest stones in recent years. The Karowe Mine has produced four other diamonds over 1,000 carats in the last decade.

Before this discovery, the Sewelo diamond, which was found at the Karowe Mine in 2019, was recognized as the second-biggest mined diamond in the world at 1,758 carats. It was bought by French fashion house Louis Vuitton for an undisclosed amount.

The 1,111-carat Lesedi La Rona diamond, also from Botswana’s Karowe Mine, was bought by a British jeweler for $53 million in 2017. Another diamond from Karowe, The Constellation, was sold for the record $63 million.

Diamonds are formed when carbon atoms are squeezed together under high pressure deep underground. Scientists say most diamonds are at least a billion years old and some of them more than 3 billion years old.

AP Africa news: https://apnews.com/hub/africa

What Links Aging And Disease? A Growing Body Of Research Says It’s A Faulty Metabolism

BY MELANIE R. MCREYNOLDS

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF BIOCHEMISTRY

PENN STATE

Aging is a biological process that no one can avoid. Ideally, growing old should be a time to relax and enjoy the fruits of your labor. Aging also has a darker side, however, often linked to disease.

Every second, your cells perform billions of biochemical reactions that fuel essential functions for life, forming a highly interconnected metabolic network. This network enables cells to grow, proliferate and repair themselves, and its disruption can drive the aging process.

But does aging cause metabolic decline, or does metabolic disruption accelerate aging? Or both?

To address this chicken-or-egg question, you first need to understand how metabolic processes break down during aging and disease. I am a scientist and researcher, and my lab focuses on exploring the complex relationship between metabolism, stress and aging. Ultimately, we hope this work will provide strategies to promote healthier aging and more vibrant lives.

Link between metabolism and aging

Aging is the most significant risk factor for many of society’s most common diseases, including diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative disorders. A key factor behind the onset of these health issues is the disruption of cellular and metabolic homeostasis, or balance. Disrupting homeostasis destabilizes the body’s internal environment, leading to imbalances that can trigger a cascade of health issues, including metabolic disorders, chronic diseases and impaired cellular functions that contribute to aging and other serious conditions.

Disrupted metabolism is linked to many hallmarks of aging cells, such as telomere shortening, which is damage to the protective ends of chromosomes, and genomic instability, the tendency to form genetic mutations.

A dysfunctional metabolism is also linked to poorly functioning mitochondria; cellular senescence, or when cells stop dividing; imbalances in gut microbes; and cells’ reduced ability to detect and respond to different nutrients.

Neurological disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, are prime examples of age-related conditions with a strong link between dysregulated metabolism and functional decline. For example, my research team previously discovered that in aging mice, the ability of bone marrow cells to produce, store and use energy is suppressed due to increased activity from a protein that modulates inflammation. This energy-deficient state leads to an increase in inflammation that’s worsened by these aging cells’ reliance on glucose as their main fuel source.

Experimentally inhibiting this protein in the bone marrow cells of aging mice, however, revitalizes the cells’ ability to produce energy, reduces inflammation and improves plasticity of an area of the brain involved in memory. This finding suggests that some cognitive aging could be reversed by reprogramming the glucose metabolism of bone marrow cells to restore immune functions.

Repurposing drugs to treat Alzheimer’s

In our newly published research, my team and I discovered a new connection between disrupted glucose metabolism and neurodegenerative disease. This led us to identify a drug originally designed for cancer that could potentially be used to treat Alzheimer’s.

We focused on an enzyme called IDO1 that plays a critical role in the first step of breaking down amino acid tryptophan. This pathway produces a key compound called kynurenine, which fuels additional energy pathways and inflammatory responses. However, excessive kynurenine can have detrimental effects, including increasing the risk of developing Alzheimer’s.

We found that inhibiting IDO1 can recover memory and brain function in a range of preclinical models, including in cell cultures and mice. To understand why, we looked at the metabolism of brain cells. The brain is one of the most glucose-dependent tissues in the body. An inability to properly use glucose to fuel critical brain processes can lead to metabolic and cognitive decline.

High levels of IDO1 reduce glucose metabolism by producing excess kynurenine. So IDO1 inhibitors – originally designed to treat cancers such as melanoma, leukemia and breast cancer – could be repurposed to reduce kynurenine and improve brain function.

Using a range of lab models, including mice and cells from Alzheimer’s patients, we also found that IDO1 inhibitors can restore glucose metabolism in brain cells. Furthermore, we were able to restore glucose metabolism in mice with both amyloid and tau accumulation – abnormal proteins involved in many neurodegenerative disorders – by blocking IDO1. We believe repurposing these inhibitors could be beneficial across various neurodegenerative disorders.

Promoting healthier cognitive aging

The effects of neurological disorders and metabolic decline weigh heavily on individuals, families and the economy.

While many scientists have focused on targeting the downstream effects of these diseases, such as managing symptoms and slowing progression, treating these diseases earlier can improve cognition with aging. Our findings suggest that targeting metabolism has the potential to not only slow neurological decline but also to reverse the progression of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and dementia.

Discovering new insights at the intersection of stress, metabolism and aging can pave the way for healthier aging. More research can improve our understanding of how metabolism affects stress responses and cellular balance throughout life.

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Italian Teenager Carlo Acutis’ Upcoming Canonization Reflects The Vatican’s Desire To Appeal To A New Generation Of Catholics

Carlos Acutis (Britannica)

BY MICHAEL A. DI GIOVINE

PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY,

WESTCHESTER UNIVERSITY OF

PENNSYLVANIA

The Italian teenager Carlo Acutis, who died in 2006 of a rare form of leukemia at age 15, will soon become the Catholic Church’s first “millennial saint.”

Acutis was a computer programmer who created virtual exhibitions and databases on Eucharistic miracles – when the bread and wine are believed to change into the physical body and blood of Jesus – and the reported sightings of the Virgin Mary. Although the specific date has not been announced, the Vatican indicated that his canonization will occur in 2025 when the church celebrates its jubilee, or holy year that occurs every quarter century.

Canonization is the official term for declaring a person a saint. It requires the verification of a faithful life through an often lengthy research process. This includes confirming two miracles. Acutis’ first miracle was attributed to a Brazilian child who could not eat solid food because of a pancreatic disorder, but was inexplicably healed in 2013 after praying to the teenager. The second involved a Costa Rican student who, after suffering a head injury, awoke from her coma after her mother prayed at Acutis’ shrine in 2022.

Described by the bishop of Assisi as an “ordinary” teenager with extraordinary faith, Acutis’ upcoming canonization reflects the Vatican’s interest in making a more modern church that appeals to a new generation of faithful.

This is a trend that began at the turn of the millennium with another charismatic saint, Padre Pio of Pietrelcina – one of the world’s most prayed-to saints – whose devotion I’ve studied for over a decade.

Born in Pietrelcina, Italy, in 1887 and originally named Francesco Forgione, the Capuchin Franciscan priest was hailed by the Vatican as a “saint for the millennium” when he was canonized in 2002. Pio was arguably the first saint of the 21st century to speak to the culture of the time.

Padre Pio: Living saint of the 20th century

A poor friar, Pio was believed to have had the stigmata, or bleeding wounds of Jesus’ crucifixion. Considered a living saint, he reportedly had mystical visions of Jesus and could know beforehand what people came to confess.

In his lifetime, Pio used devotees’ donations to set up a research hospital at the shrine in San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy, to couple medical healing with spiritual healing.

When he died in 1968, the Italian air force dropped flowers on his funeral procession attended by an estimated 100,000 people, and his 2002 canonization ceremony had a record 300,000 attendees. His extraordinary veneration in 2008-2009 drew upward of 9 million pilgrims to the town of San Giovanni Rotondo. That year, he was exhumed and exhibited before being moved into a new ultramodern basilica designed by globally recognized architect Renzo Piano and adorned with work from leading contemporary artists.

In 2016, Pope Francis brought his body to Rome to be the centerpiece for his special Jubilee Year of Mercy. Tens of thousands watched his procession through the city of Rome to the Vatican.

Pio’s “rock star” popularity was – and continues to be – fueled by global media that includes over five multilingual magazines, a publishing house, a radio station, a satellite TV station and a website, which together net the shrine over US$150 million per year.

Such modern media was rare for the turn-of-the-millennium, but were considered necessary for circulating photos and videos of his stigmata, something people had to see to believe.

Acutis: An everyday saint

Yet as Pio’s devotees get older, the church seems to be turning to Acutis to appeal to a new, more worldly demographic.

Like Pio, Acutis enjoys widespread appeal among a new generation in search of contemporary models of holiness, according to journalist Rhina Guidos, who interviewed Latin American teens in 2023. The appeal of Acutis lies in being an ordinary person who models everyday faith – whom Pope Francis calls a “saint next door.”

What sets Acutis apart from other saints is that “none of these individuals thus far have used cell phones, played PlayStation videogames, or searched for information on Google,” writes the Rev. Will Conquer in his biography, “A Millennial in Paradise.” Indeed, the media is already lauding Acutis as “God’s influencer” and the “patron saint of the Internet.”

In January 2024, Pope Francis urged young people to use their modern, everyday interests for the church as Acutis did: “Since he was very good at getting around on the internet, he used it in the service of the Gospel, spreading love for prayer, the witness of faith and charity toward others.”

His story is also marketed through media the new generation uses, especially TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. His biographies take the form of comics or young adult novels. Biographies with titles such as “A Saint in Sneakers” and “God’s Computer Genius” mix stories of his holiness with discussions of his love of Nutella and struggle with weight, his interest in soccer, hiking and searching for information on Google, and his passion for Pokémon and Halo video games.

His online exhibitions also have gotten an old-school makeover: A physical version has been created and is exhibited in parishes throughout Europe and the U.S. – a way to bridge younger and older generations. Located in Pennsylvania, the Malvern Retreat House, one of the oldest and largest spiritual centers in the U.S., boasts a permanent exhibition of Acutis’ Eucharistic miracles in its Blessed Carlo Acutis Shrine and Center for Eucharistic Encounter.
A modern pilgrimage

On his deathbed, Acutis asked to be buried in Assisi, Italy – the birthplace of St. Francis, the founder of the Franciscan religious order and the patron saint of Italy, since he was attracted to his teachings.

Acutis was first buried in a cemetery in Assisi, but once his canonization process opened in 2019, his body was exhumed and dressed in jeans and sneakers; it was placed in a modern, see-through sarcophagus in the small church of the Sanctuary of the Spoliation in a little-visited area of the town.

That next year, 2020, over 117,000 pilgrims visited despite COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, according to the Diocese of Assisi. It continues to be popular; when I visited in June 2024, long lines of people, especially children, from as far away as the United States and Sri Lanka were lining up for a chance to pray at his tomb.

Indeed, the town of Assisi has enjoyed a makeover of sorts, thanks to Acutis. A modern chapel holding Acutis’ heart was created in Assisi’s cathedral, San Ruffino. He is given equal billing as St. Francis in guided tours. Even souvenir stands incorporate a modern look, as ubiquitous images of St. Francis now share space with key chains, photos and pictures of Acutis in jeans, Adidas and a backpack.

Acutis is continuing the trend started by the Catholic Church with Padre Pio’s sainthood to modernize devotion. As a perpetual “teenager in heaven,” laid to rest in Nikes, jeans and a warmup jacket, a tech-savvy and socially conscious generation of young Catholics may very well see themselves in him.

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US Is Unlikely To Stop Giving Military Aid To Israel − Because It Benefits From It

BY DOV WAXMAN

ROSALINDE AND ARTHUR GILBERT

FOUNDATION PROFESSOR OF ISRAEL

STUDIES, UCLA

The Democratic National Convention has been packed with prominent speakers and musical interludes that all focus on unity and moving forward into a more hopeful future.

But this cheerfulness is shadowed by a split within the Democratic Party related to Israel’s war in Gaza. There have been calls by some delegates for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris to support a halt in U.S. military aid to Israel.

While the pro-Palestinian protests surrounding the convention have been much smaller than some expected, Chicago police arrested at least 72 pro-Palestinian protesters on Aug. 20, 2024.

These activists are calling for a U.S. arms embargo on Israel, which the Democratic Party’s new national platform does not include.

The Conversation U.S.’s politics editor Amy Lieberman spoke with Dov Waxman, a scholar of Israel studies, to better understand what is behind the U.S.’s relationship with Israel and the strategic reasons why an arms embargo is, at best, a remote possibility.

Do you think that Kamala Harris is likely to agree with the calls for an arms embargo on Israel?

I do not think she will agree with those calling for an arms embargo on Israel.

For one thing, as vice president and before that as a senator, Kamala Harris has consistently supported providing U.S. military aid to Israel. This position is typical of most Democratic Party members, as well as most Republicans.

Opponents of U.S. military aid to Israel often argue that this help is solely a function of domestic politics and reflects the power of the pro-Israel lobby, particularly AIPAC. I think that this view is myopic and exaggerates the power of the pro-Israel lobby. It ignores the fact that the U.S. has its own economic and strategic reasons for supplying that military aid. It is a U.S. national interest, not simply a favor for Israel, and that’s why there is broad, bipartisan support for continuing this military aid.

Although an arms embargo is unrealistic, there are other things short of an arms embargo, like conditioning or restricting military aid, which are more realistic – and there is a growing debate among Democratic lawmakers over that.

What are some of the ways that U.S. aid to Israel helps the U.S. domestically?

When the U.S. gives military aid to Israel, the Israeli government is not putting that money in its pocket. The vast majority of the money that the U.S. allocates to Israel each year must be spent on American weapons. That is true, in general, for American military aid to other countries, such as Ukraine.

Those American weapons that Israel purchases are produced in factories across the U.S. So, many American lawmakers have an interest in sustaining that aid because that money ends up flowing into their own states and providing local jobs.

What has U.S. aid to Israel historically been like, before the Gaza war?

Historically, Israel has received more U.S. foreign aid than any other country. In total, the U.S. has provided Israel with over US$300 billion, with this amount adjusted for inflation.

Initially, for the first decade after Israel’s establishment in 1948, the U.S. provided Israel with only economic aid, but, starting in the 1960s during the Kennedy administration, it began providing military aid as well. The U.S. now gives only military aid to Israel.

After Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel demonstrated its ability to decisively defeat Soviet allies in the region, the U.S. significantly increased its military aid to Israel. This was a turning point in many ways for the U.S.-Israel relationship, because since then the U.S. has seen Israel as a valuable ally.

Another major increase in U.S. military aid to Israel occurred under the Nixon administration in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is worth noting because Nixon was not a great friend of Jewish people. But he increased U.S. aid to Israel because of its strategic interest to the U.S.

Since then, U.S. military aid has continued to steadily increase over the years, and in the past year it has risen following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza.

I think the primary reason for this continuous military assistance to Israel, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, is that it serves U.S. national interests.

How does U.S. aid to Israel serve America’s national interests?

A militarily strong Israel helps the U.S. counter their common enemies.

During the Cold War, Israel helped contain the spread of Soviet influence in the Middle East. For example, after Israel defeated Egypt in the 1967 and 1973 wars, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat defected from a Soviet alliance to ally with the U.S., ushering in a long period of American hegemony in the region.

After the Soviet threat receded after the Cold War, Israel’s strategic value to the U.S. diminished. But it rose again following the 9/11 terrorist attacks because of Israel’s long experience in counterterrorism and its vaunted intelligence-gathering capabilities.

More recently, over the past decade or so, Israel has worked with the U.S. to counter the expansion of Iranian influence in the region and to slow down Iran’s nuclear program. Although the two allies have disagreed over tactics – particularly over the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran – they both regard Iran’s growing power in the region as the greatest threat to regional stability, and they both want to stop Iran from having nuclear weapons. For the U.S., a militarily strong Israel is seen as necessary to prevent Iranian expansionism.

Israel not only has the most powerful military in the region, it is also the only long-standing democracy there – albeit a seriously flawed one, in my view. So, from the U.S.’s perspective, Israel can help the U.S. achieve its strategic goals in the region without the American military actually having to put boots on the ground and do so itself. Israel is also perceived as a more reliable and less problematic ally than the U.S.’s other major allies in the region, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Ultimately, although Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and its war in Gaza have alienated and angered many Democrats, particularly progressives, most Democratic policymakers, including Harris, still believe that supporting Israel is in the interests of the U.S. And providing Israel with military aid is still seen as the best way for the United States to do that.

The real question is whether the U.S. should exercise greater oversight or control over how American weaponry can be used.

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I Walked Down The Aisle With The Man Who Panned My Book On Goodreads

BY LAURA HANKIN

Sooner or later, we all come across our critics. Maybe it happens via a stinging romantic rejection, or a meeting about our “disappointing performance” in the job we worked so hard to get. In my case, I came face-to-face—literally—with my biggest critic while walking down the aisle with him. He was the best man at my friend’s wedding; I was the maid of honor. And he’d given my debut novel a one-star review on Goodreads.

For the uninitiated, Goodreads is a (now notorious) website—one which the New York Times Opinion Section declared an “online hellscape”—where more than 150 million users publicly track and rate the books they’ve read. Authors who decide to look up their own books’ reviews do so at their own peril: You might find a five-star review confirming that the story you poured your heart into is, as you secretly suspected, the next Great American Novel. Alternatively, you could encounter a casually devastating review that will haunt you forever.

With my first book, I blithely took the plunge. Most of my readers were friends and family anyway, so I spent far too much time gorging myself on their Goodreads praise. As a rabid people-pleaser who hated the idea of anyone disliking me, it was intoxicating to believe that maybe, just maybe, I’d done the impossible and created a piece of art that was universally loved.

Until a one-star rating popped up. My stomach dropped. I reminded myself that it was bound to happen sooner or later. Then I immediately clicked on the account to see who had decided to tell the internet that my life’s work was trash. I knew that name, didn’t I? Yes, he was a friend of my close friend’s fiancé. And not just any friend, either. He was going to be the best man at their upcoming wedding. And his maid of honor counterpart? That would be me.

I was indignant—and worried. Maybe the book was bad, and my friends had been sugarcoating their responses. But I was also confused. Did this man not realize how uncomfortable this would make the wedding? As the big day approached, I spent a lot of time questioning how best to handle the situation. Should I reach out to him to clear the air? Ignore him completely? Demand that he tell me exactly why he hated the book so that I could tell him why he was wrong?

At first, I tried rising above. Perhaps he’d be so taken by my friendliness and charm that he’d rethink his opinion of the book, even go back and change his one-star to a five-star! As we lined up for the ceremony, I locked my face into a smile, making semi-awkward small talk. I figured he knew that I knew about the rating, but neither of us mentioned it. We simply made our way down the aisle, arm-in-arm, to watch the beautiful ceremony.

But by the time the reception rolled around, politeness didn’t feel adequate. So I got petty. Both of us were due to deliver toasts to the crowded ballroom, and mine would be better! This man might have hated my book, but I’d make it impossible for him to hate my speech. I tried to remind myself that the toast was about celebrating my friend and her husband, not about making their best man regret his life’s choices. Still, I couldn’t help feeling a surge of triumph when, at the end of my speech, the crowd rang with laughter and applause.

Finally, I got drunk. (This seemed, at the time, an appropriate response to Goodreads slander.) As the wedding guests grooved to a dance floor standard, with the encouragement of a couple other bridesmaids, I shimmied up to the best man and slurred-shouted, “So, what would you rate my toast?” (I thought this was very clever.) I don’t think he heard me clearly amidst the guests’ Whitney Houston scream-singing, because he turned to me, confused. “What?” he yelled back. I wasn’t brave enough to repeat myself, so I danced away, Homer Simpson-ing back into the crowd.

We saw each other one final time, at the end of the night. He gave me a friendly wave and told me to reach out if I was ever passing through his city, as if totally unbothered by the feud between us. Or perhaps I’d invented the feud altogether.

Ultimately, my friend got the backstory from him: He’d bought the book as a show of support, and it hadn’t been his thing. He liked to keep track of his reading for himself, so he’d marked it with a one-star review without thinking about the fact that the review would appear publicly. As soon as he realized, he took it upon himself to delete the rating.

Even if he hadn’t, readers have a right to rate books however they wish. It’s part of the bargain that an author makes in exchange for getting their book published. Authors get to control so much when we’re in the writing process. We make up entire worlds where the characters do exactly what we want. We edit and futz with sentences until they shine. Then, if we’re lucky, we release our story into the real world, and suddenly it doesn’t belong to us anymore. It’s not for us anymore. And therefore we can’t expect to—nor should we desire to—control audience’s responses.

If I was going to keep writing, something that brought me so much joy and fulfillment, I had to forgive that best man. But more importantly, I had to forgive myself. I didn’t write a perfect book, and then, when someone forced me to face that fact, I overreacted by getting petty and annoyed. That was okay. That was human.

Acknowledging my own inadequacies ultimately allowed me to be more empathetic toward my characters, my readers, and myself. So my first novel hadn’t blown every single reader away. That meant there was room for me to grow. I would never write a perfect book, but I could use this man’s criticism to write a better one, pushing myself to dig deeper when I tried again—even while knowing that, still, some people wouldn’t love it.

Now, I’m grateful for that one-star rating. It was an early, impossible-to-ignore lesson that it’s not my job as an author to make every one of my readers happy, nor is it my job to monitor and police their responses—however natural the urge to defend myself might be. If there’s a person out there who’s managed to please everyone they’ve ever known—including their haters!—I’d like to meet them. To shake their hand, sure, and maybe study them for science. But also to tell them: If you’re willing to be hated a little, you might grow to love yourself more.

And it turns out that this man gave me so much more than a one-star review. He also gave me the idea for my latest novel, One-Star Romance, a romantic comedy about a maid of honor, the best man who gives her book a one-star review, and what happens when they’re forced back together each time their married best friends celebrate another life milestone. I took risks in the writing of this one, letting my characters make mistakes, trying to honestly capture that disorienting period in your twenties and thirties when, suddenly, everyone starts moving at different speeds and it’s easy to feel like you can’t keep up—that you’re doing something wrong. I knew the feeling well.

In real life, unlike in my book, the best man and I did not fall in love. Instead, I married someone who’s only ever rated my novels five stars. Occasionally, my husband goes on my Goodreads page and tells me snippets of nice things that people are saying. And sure, for One-Star Romance, I might have written down, “Someone apparently called it a masterpiece!!” on my Notes app, and maybe I look at that Note whenever I get anxious about publication. Because it turns out that, while risk-taking might get easier, it never gets easy.

Still, I’m so proud of this book. It’s better than my writing before; I’m better than I was before. I like to think that even my old best-man nemesis might begrudgingly rate this book more than one star. But since I no longer check my own Goodreads, I’ll never know.

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America’s Iran Policy Is A Failure − Piecemeal Deterrence And Sanctions Can Go Only So Far

BY ARIE PERLIGER

DIRECTOR OF SECURITY STUDIES AND 

PROFESSOR OF CRIMINOLOGY AND 

JUSTICE STUDIES, UMASS LOWELL

The escalating conflict between Israel and Iran in recent months is frequently explained as another extension of Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza. After all, Hamas enjoys a close relationship with Iran, and both share the goal of eliminating the Jewish state.

But there’s more to it than that.

As a scholar of security studies who has researched conflicts in the Middle East for over 20 years, I would argue that a decade of U.S. foreign policy in the region has failed to contain Iran’s ambitions and has instead substantially contributed to the current escalation.

As is clear from recent events along Israel’s northern border, Washington’s ability to project power and manage American interests in the Mideast has eroded so dramatically since 2010 that Iran has only limited concerns about the consequences of its proxies attacking U.S. forces and directly attacking U.S. allies such as Israel.

Iranian victories

The government of Iran, a Shia Muslim nation in a Sunni Muslim region, expands its regional influence by funding and militarily supporting violent proxy organizations in neighboring countries. Those groups, in turn, attack and destabilize those nations.

Over the past decade, this canny strategy has turned Iran arguably into the Mideast’s most influential superpower.

Until the early 2010s, Iran’s only real foothold in the region was Hezbollah, the Shia political and military group it fostered in Lebanon in the early 1980s. Today, Iran’s alliances include the Houthi rebels in Yemen and a loyal network of Shia militias in Iraq. In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad has allowed Iran’s elite fighting force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, to build a massive military presence.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel, triggering the Gaza war, these groups have directly attacked Israel, American military bases and U.S. civilian assets in the region over 170 times. The political and military sovereignty of Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq has so eroded that some American officials consider them Iran’s puppet regimes.

Over the same period, Iran’s military nuclear program has reached its most advanced stage. In July 2024, six years after the Trump administration backed out of the international nuclear deal meant to slow the development of Iranian weapons, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that Iran was weeks from being able to equip its vast and growing arsenal of ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads.

Misconceptions, containment and oversimplified diplomacy

Despite Iran’s many recent military and political advances over the past decade, the American government has consistently underestimated its ambitions of regional dominance. Simultaneously, in my assessment, it has overvalued the effectiveness of long-standing U.S. “soft power” policies toward Iran: containment and de-escalation.

To avoid escalating conflict in the Mideast, Washington prioritizes actions that will avoid, at almost any cost, any military confrontation with Iran. Instead, to contain Iran’s expanding regional influence, the U.S. has banned arms sales and technology to Iran, imposed stringent economic sanctions, frozen Iranian financial assets and diplomatically isolated its government.

Yet, Iran’s influence continues to expand. In my assessment, this indicates that containment and de-escalation cannot deter a regime whose core policies are driven by fundamentalist ideology. Iran’s leaders invoke religious convictions to justify their commitment to violent struggle, regional superiority and the destruction of Israel.

“Allah willing, there will be no such thing as a Zionist regime in 25 years,” said Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in 2015, calling the fight to annihilate Israel a matter of “jihadi morale.”

I consider diplomacy, negotiation and legal and economic punishments preferable solutions for most global conflicts. Yet modern history shows that these measures cannot force policy change on nondemocratic, fundamentalist regimes that flout the rules of global international relations – think Nazi Germany, North Korea and the Afghan Taliban regime.

How not to deal with proxies

My scholarship on terrorist groups suggests that the U.S. has erred in its handling of Iran’s proxies, too. Rather than addressing them together as part of a hostile network, the U.S. treats each proxy as an isolated actor operating in a specific place and seeks to contain or de-escalate that particular threat.

In Yemen, for example, the U.S. did not stop the Iran-backed Houthi rebels from seizing territory and essentially supplanting the government. The Biden administration even pressured U.S. ally Saudi Arabia in 2021 to stop militarily boosting the country’s legitimate leaders in their bloody fight to retain power. After the Gaza war began, the Houthis, doing Iran’s bidding, began lobbing dozens of missiles at Western-flagged ships in the Red Sea.

Only in early 2024 did the U.S. confront the Houthis, making retaliatory military strikes on Houthi bases in Yemen.

In Iraq, the U.S. was long willing to overlook that Iran was backing the Iraqi Shia militias battling the Islamic State group, as long as these forces continued to participate in the war on the Islamic State. Ignoring the long-term consequences of their growing strength has come at a cost: In the past year, those Iraqi militias have attacked numerous American military bases in the region.

And in Syria, despite Iran’s rising influence in the aftermath of the Syrian civil war, the U.S. has gradually reduced its support for anti-Assad rebels and pro-democracy Kurdish forces.

Collapse of American deterrence

All these failed foreign policies have culminated in the collapse of American deterrence in the Middle East. Simply put, the U.S. no longer projects enough power there to stop Iranian hostilities.

In April 2024, after Israel killed high-ranking officials in Iran’s embassy complex in Syria, Iran launched one of the largest missile attacks in history, lobbing over 300 missiles at Israel – its first-ever direct attack on Israel. Yet it has suffered marginal consequences, mainly economic sanctions and diplomatic outcry.

The U.S., which rallied Israel’s allies across the Mideast to shoot down most of the Iranian missiles, again preferred to block a meaningful response. The Biden administration declared the fact that few missiles hit Israel to be a “win” and insisted that the U.S. would not join Israel in any retaliation against Iran.

America’s deep aversion to escalation was further exposed after the targeted killings of top Hezbollah and Hamas leaders. In late July 2024, Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut, Lebanon, and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in a bombing at a government guesthouse in Iran. Iran blamed Israel for Haniyeh’s killing; The New York Times reported that assessment was “also reached by several U.S. officials who requested anonymity.”

Iran immediately vowed to retaliate.

For months, the U.S. had pressured Israel to adopt more precision-based military operations to avoid further civilian casualties in the Gaza war, which had killed nearly 40,000 people in its first six months. Yet when Israel apparently finally did that, eliminating specific terrorists responsible for killing Israelis and Americans, American policymakers fretted that such cross-border attacks could lead to regional escalation.

If the U.S. seeks to achieve long-term peace in the Middle East, it must first acknowledge the failures of the past decade. The evidence backs my conclusion that Iran is an enemy that cannot simply be deterred, contained or de-escalated.

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