Robert Wright's Nonzero

Barbara bets that the Iran nuclear deal will be revived ... Hawkish Dems and Biden's slow start on Iran ... Does Iran pose an existential threat to Israel? ... Barbara: A comprehensive deal isn't happening anytime soon ... Iran’s strategic patience ... Do Iranian elections matter? ... Does the regime care about public opinion? ... Biden’s goals in the Middle East ...

Mickey teases a tantalizing reconciliation rumor ... Biden backs off campaign promise to raise refugee cap ... Bob worries that there’s a loophole in Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal ... Rising Russia-U.S. tensions ... Should we pledge to defend Taiwan? ... Mickey: Corporate political activism is an alarming anti-democratic trend ... Bob scolds the Washington Post ... Israel’s attack on Iran and on American diplomacy ... J.D. Vance’s senatorial ambitions ... Parrot Room preview: Bob’s genius point about Israel and identity politics, more Jeffrey Goldberg trash talk, how Dominion Voting Systems is helping Fox, Naomi Wolfe and Steve Bannon form an unholy alliance ...

Alex’s new book, Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home ... Kurt Wolff’s fugitive life as a literary subversive ... Alex’s father’s experience fighting for Germany in WWII ... The complementary war recollections of Alex’s and Bob’s fathers ... Helen and Kurt Wolff’s founding of, and exit from, Pantheon Books ... The expansive life and fitting death of Kurt Wolff ... A father’s flight from the past, a son’s revisitation ... Did the German bourgeoisie’s devotion to aesthetic experience blind them to their moral responsibilities? ... Endpapers as objet d’art ...

The softer side of infrastructure ... The pitfalls of overracializing policy ... Bob gets pedantic with the New York Times ... Bob: Even if George Floyd was overdosing, Derek Chauvin is accountable for his death ... Is there something to Matt Gaetz’s claim that he is the victim of extortion? ... Bring on the vaccine passports ... Mickey reconciles himself to reconciliation ... Parrot Room preview: Mickey cancels himself, new Tiger Woods driving data, and just how big of an asshole was Bob during Slate’s Slow Burn taping? ...

Jesse’s new book, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Solve Our Social Ills ... Does the Implicit Association Test actually measure bias? ... The flawed methodology underlying the superpredator theory ... Why the grit theory lacks staying power ... The replication crisis in experimental psychology ... Jesse clarifies his views on child gender dysphoria and transgender athletes ...

Iran’s move toward China ... Gaetzgate explained (or at least described) ... Puzzling over Biden’s infrastructure bill strategy ... The political risks of racial equity legislation ... Is the corporate pressure campaign against the Georgia voting law working? ... The George Floyd jury’s pressure chamber ... Parrot Room preview: Mickey takes the Deplorable Automotive Challenge, the strange death of Tony Hsieh, the challenges of post-Covid bathroom design, and is Mickey pampered? ...

How do we know Russia was behind the Solar Winds hack? ... The political nature of cyber attribution ... Tim: A digital Geneva Convention isn’t possible—at least not yet ... Why don’t great powers want a cyber war treaty? ... Tim: We should focus on building strong international norms ... The dangers of cyber war in an interconnected world ...

Biden’s slow but steady press conference performance ... Mickey gets ratio’d ... Bob attempts to convince Mickey to run for governor of California, immediately solicits a bribe ... Disappointing foreign policy decisions and the journalists that abet them ... Bob: “Blinken is totally out of control” ... The post-vaccination blues ... How intellectual property laws choke the global vaccine supply ... Parrot Room preview: Bob’s branding problem—and ours, near-death crises, JAMA deputy editor placed on leave, guaranteed income for Oakland POCs ...

Who you callin' bodhisattva? ... Outlining the Apocalypse Aversion Project ... How meditation can make us better global citizens ... Why we need “cognitive crampons” ... Transcend and include ... The varieties of meditative experience ... Achieving micro-enlightenment ... The benefits of confronting your dark side ... Building a cognitively empathetic grassroots movement ...

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Mickey breaks down the Clubhouse experience ... The Biden administration riles Russia, North Korea, and China in the space of a few days ... China’s surveillance state is creepy, but is it a threat to the U.S.? ... Mickey has some incredible PR advice for Biden ... Parrot Room NFTs: What could go wrong? ... How to use fearmongering to sell an infrastructure bill ... Mickey explains the asylum process ... A vaccine-related correction ... Parrot Room preview: Bob tells the bear hunting joke, Mickey flirts with cancellation, the Substack controversy ...