Very Bad Men and My Not So Terrible Disease

We've all waged war. Are the spoils worth it?

It has been a genuinely disorienting month, one of those stretches where “WTF” stops being a reaction and starts feeling like a baseline.

We are being maneuvered toward war, nudged and framed into it, with Netanyahu playing his familiar game of escalation and inevitability. Trump, operating in his own gravitational field, has managed to rattle global markets while simultaneously raising the temperature on conflict, casually invoking war crimes and even picking rhetorical fights with the Vatican. JD Vance, ever the ideological contortionist, turns up abroad lending legitimacy to strongmen dressed as reformers. And Putin continues, methodically and without pause, to grind down both Ukrainians and his own people.

What’s most unsettling is not just that all of this is happening. It’s that it’s happening in plain sight, in real time, and still feels insufficiently confronted.

Meanwhile, at home, the erosion is just as stark. Public health policy is incoherent at best, destructive at worst. Th…