Приветствую, уважаемые читатели.
Меня очень порадовал и удивил ваш интерес к недавней статье об адамантанах и алмазоидах, которая собрала +52 и 21,7% дочтений. Поэтому я, продолжая заниматься следующей статьёй, предложу вашему вниманию интереснейший Guest Post под авторством уважаемой Владиславы Шраменко @Kotyara99о физико‑химических свойствах углеродных нанотрубок и о том, как их получать, правильно сжигая углеродный порошок. Статья богато иллюстрирована. Далее — от автора.
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Live updates from Anfield 12.30pm kick-off (BST)
The teams are out! Liverpool all in red, Forest wearing a third-choice shirt that looks awfully like a recent Manchester City number. You’ll Never Walk Alone rings out, as Liverpool principal owner John Henry and the new vice-chairman Amit Bhatia watch from the stand. We’ll be off in a minute … and that minute will see fans remember the legendary Kevin Keegan, the star of Bill Shankly’s second great team, who recently passed. The warmest applause from all four corners of the ground, a mosaic on the Kop that reads KEVIN 7, and a chant of One Kevin Keegan.
On the subject of Forest and big-money transfers … David Ornstein of the Athletic was on TNT Sports earlier, reporting the possibility of their buying 19-year-old midfield prospect Harrison Armstrong from Everton for £40m. Should that come to pass, it’ll probably result in the Hill Dickinson toppling into the Mersey, but only after the whole structure is launched a couple of miles into the air by the steam from Everton supporters’ lugs. Armstrong is extremely highly rated, but Forest have pockets full of cash after selling Elliot Anderson to Manchester City, so this one is worth keeping an eye on.
Continue reading...Australian-led trial finds low risk of side effects from common cholesterol-lowering medication for otherwise healthy older people
Taking a common cholesterol-lowering medication can reduce the risk of a heart attack or stroke for people aged over 70, with a low risk of serious side effects, a world-first clinical trial led by Australian researchers has found.
Statins are already commonly prescribed to people under the age of 75 who meet certain risk criteria, such as having diabetes and high cholesterol, to prevent them from having a major heart event such as a heart attack, stroke, or from requiring heart surgery.
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On Tuesday, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani was asked about an upcoming appearance by Mohan Bhagwat, a leader of a Hindu nationalist organization, at Madison Square Garden on Saturday.
“I don’t support the rally, but I don’t know if the city has any jurisdiction on canceling a private event,” he said at a press conference. “It has been incredibly troubling to see the rise of a movement that is predicated on an exclusionary vision of any country, frankly, and so it is one that I find myself in deep opposition to.”
His statement has led to a flurry of controversy and allegations that Mamdani is “Hinduphobic,” biased toward Muslims, and picking a fight with another religious and ethnic group. The mayor has continued to make headlines this year for his vocal criticism of Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, leading to tensions with Jewish leaders and communities in New York.
First the Jews. Then the Italians. Now Hindus.
— Adam Milstein (@AdamMilstein) August 26, 2026
Zohran Mamdani has found yet another New York community to target, opposing a Hindu celebration at Madison Square Garden because he objects to its politics. The mayor of America’s most diverse city seems determined to divide it one…
But Mamdani was far from the only critic of the event; other Hindu, Muslim, interfaith, and human rights activists protested the event and demanded it be canceled this week.
What’s actually going on here?
Bhagwat is the leader of the Indian organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (or RSS for short), a Hindu nationalist group affiliated with India’s ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Bhagwat is not a politician or an officeholder in India, but is frequently described as being one of the most influential men in that country, primarily because of his role in leading RSS, which describes itself as a “Hindu-centric civilisational, cultural movement.”
Yet plenty of activists, academics, experts, and critics contest that description of RSS, instead casting it as a right-wing Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization, accused of fueling intolerance, endorsing discrimination, or inciting violence against minorities in the subcontinent, particularly Muslims — essentially promoting an ideology that “amounts to ‘an Indian version of fascism,’” as one India scholar told my colleague Zack Beauchamp in 2023.
And one of the most vocal recent critics is Mamdani, who is himself Muslim and of Hindu descent on his mother’s side.
To better understand the RSS, Bhagwat, and the reasons for Mamdani’s criticism, I turned to Nishant Upadhyay, an associate professor in Asian American studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Upadhyay has done extensive research on the intersection of race and caste, as well as Hindu nationalism in both India and diaspora communities.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Could you explain to me what these groups behind Saturday’s event are?
Mohan Bhagwat is the president of this Hindu nationalist organization, RSS, which loosely translates to National Volunteer Corps. The group that’s organizing this event in the US is called American Hindus for Engagement and Dialogue. In choosing someone like Bhagwat, who has been the president of this organization since 2009, which is perhaps the largest paramilitary religious nationalist organization in the world, it’s very concerning and shocking.
American Hindus for Engagement and Dialogue say they’re all about fostering understanding, building bridges, strengthening communities, but the Hindu nationalist project in India is anything but that. In the diaspora, for them to say that we believe in diversity, we believe in building bridges, we believe in a vision of multiculturalism, it shows the contradiction between what Hindu nationalists are doing in India versus what they pretend to do in the diaspora.
Does RSS have a long history in India?
It was founded in 1925, when India was under British colonial rule, with the idea that India should only be for Hindus. And who is “Hindu” changes, but mostly the violence we see has been put on Muslim and Christian communities. And over the last hundred years, that violence just keeps escalating. Muslims are the primary target, but across the country, Christian communities have also become a big target.
The whole idea is that India should be for Hindus and religions that have originated in South Asia. So Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism — they can be part of the Hindu nation as long as they identify themselves as Hindu, because these religions have some similarities with Hinduism. But all of them actually came as anti-caste critiques of Hinduism. Practitioners of these religions assert a very separate identity than Hindu because of what their scriptures have been grounded in: a very anti-casteist and anti-patriarchal critique of what we understand as Hinduism now.
How does India’s current government fit into this?
RSS is the biggest umbrella organization of all Hindu nationalist organizations in India and the diaspora. And BJP, the ruling party in India, is seen as the political wing. So RSS does not necessarily participate in elections and government, but provides the spiritual, religious, and intellectual foundation for a political party like BJP that does come to power.
They have this really massive network of RSS followers across the country who are then mobilized for elections, who are mobilized to support BJP, who are mobilized to then commit violence against Muslims. Some people come from the RSS and become leaders in the BJP, though BJP also has other people who might not be directly affiliated with RSS, but it’s the main political organization.
For the last 12-ish years, Narendra Modi, who’s the prime minister of India, has been in power with the BJP, which has drastically changed the social, political, and economic landscape of the country. The Hindu nationalist agenda has become more and more frontline and mainstreamed and normalized. Religious minorities like Muslims and Christians face constant violence, everyday surveillance, everyday policing, from the minutiae to extreme violence on a regular basis across the country. If Hindu nationalists had their way, they would either take away citizenship rights from Muslim communities or render them nationless and kick them out of the country.
It’s also caste-oppressed communities, Indigenous communities, ethnic communities like Kashmiri and Manipuri communities. We have just seen drastic escalation and violence against everyone who’s not a Hindu and everyone who’s not a dominant caste, or caste-privileged Hindus across the country.
So this group’s leader is coming to the US — how do Indians in the American diaspora feel about all this? When Modi came to the US in 2019, he had massive crowds, and Donald Trump joined him. Do folks here feel the same way about someone like Bhagwat?
It’s complicated, and there isn’t just one view. For context: Modi was banned from coming into the US until about 2014, because he was accused of encouraging genocide against Muslims in the state of Gujarat in 2002, where over a thousand people were killed.
But since being elected prime minister, he’s visited the US multiple times and has often had huge gatherings in cities like New York and Houston. He won a third election two years ago, and his closeness with Trump…he’s projected often as a world leader. But there is, in the diaspora, along with human rights organizations in the US, active work against RSS and BJP for the last 20, 25 years. They are doing the consciousness-raising work of saying how this is a fascist ideology, anti-Muslim ideology and that we should not be in cahoots with them.
But what we’ve also seen is, especially in the last 15 years since Modi has come into power, that the Hindu right-wing diaspora has also become very active and mobilized. And so there used to be a more secular diaspora, which in some ways was the mainstream, that has been taken over by [the] Hindu right-wing diaspora now because of how they’re in alignment with both the Democrat and the Republican Party. They’re also working with Indian millionaires and billionaires in the US economy, and so they’ve started gaining this economic and political power in the US where they’re becoming more dominant.
And they’re able to do these things at a much larger scale now and counter the critiques of nationalism in the diaspora. There is power in the Hindu diaspora, and now, in some ways, the right-wing diaspora. That ideology works very well with Trump’s ideology and actually also works with Democrats in many ways because Modi has also allowed more and more American corporate interests to come into the Indian economy.
But that’s not to say that the majority of the Indian diaspora is Hindu and the dominant caste; there are many who are non-dominant-caste and many who are not Hindus, and many who are Hindus and dominant-caste and critical of Hindu nationalism because we see the violence that is happening under the name of our religion in many ways.
And that’s where the conversation heats up, because Zohran Mamdani’s family also comes from a much more secular, pluralist, anti-Hindutva [the RSS/BJP ideology that defines Indian identity through Hindu identity] ideology. And a place like New York has many amazing diasporic groups who are working every day to fight against fascism in India and the US.
Every time this erupts in the mainstream, we see this conflict between the much more conservative Hindu right-wing voices versus the much more liberal, secular, pluralist Indian diaspora.
So let’s talk about Mamdani’s critique. What’s the context we need to know that explains why he would speak up?
He is such a curious figure to have someone in the public realm like that. So he is Muslim, but his mother is Hindu, and his mother is from India. His mother has been a very renowned progressive filmmaker who’s made films about different forms of structural violence in India for a long time. So he is Muslim, but also someone from a progressive Hindu background. He can see the violence in the Indian state in ways that are not accessible to many others.
I would not say it’s just because he’s Muslim. I think because he’s Muslim and has a progressive anti-violence kind of approach that for him then these are very important issues. That kind of outlook is not targeting Hindus, he’s specifically talking about the violences of Hindu nationalism. It’s not a blanket statement against all Hindus, that they are like that. And he’s also Hindu, comes from a Hindu-heritage family as well.
How does this compare to his comments and criticisms of Netanyahu? Some on the American right have cast him as having it out against Jewish people, or Israel, and now he’s moving on to Hindus.
It’s very similar, in the sense that criticizing an ideology or a nation’s policies is not the same thing as saying all people are responsible. The conversation that criticizing Netanyahu or Israel is not antisemitic is a similar conversation: it’s actually not a critique of Hinduism or Judaism, it’s a critique of hyper-nationalist politics that can come out of Zionism and Hindu nationalism and what the Indian state and the Israeli state does.
His critique and my critique and many of us in the US, our critiques are saying, no, actually let’s look at what Hindu nationalism and Zionism does. And that’s where I think Mamdani comes from.
Anything Mamdani says and does or his wife says and does becomes news anyway, but these are much more grounded in politics that his and his family have been grounded in for a long time, to fight against violence and fascism and stand up for minoritized communities here and globally.
He does have a track record of speaking up about Hindu nationalism. I believe he has called Modi a “war criminal.”
Yes, he’s been doing this even before he became mayor or before he came into US politics. If you see his track record when he was a younger organizer, he has always been consistent on standing up for Palestinians, standing up for Muslims, standing up against all forms of fascism here and globally.
He’s very openly spoken about what is happening to Muslims in India in the last 10-plus years. Quite recently, he has spoken up about an Indian Muslim PhD scholar, Umar Khalid, who was critical of BJP and was arrested and has been detained in Delhi for six years. So Mamdani has shown solidarity to many Muslim folks in India who get unjustly incarcerated or face violence.
So it’s not surprising that Mamdani would weigh in now. But is it significant?
I’m wondering now with your question, if Mamdani hadn’t said anything, would this have been an issue? Or if Mohan Bhagwat had gone somewhere else in the US, if the mayor would have not said anything, or if it would have sparked any interest.
I want to emphasize that this is beyond players like Zohran Mamdani and Mohan Bhagwat, and more about the mainstreaming of Hindu nationalist ideology in the US. It is really scary and we need to be very attentive to it even when they use the language of pluralism and dialogue and building bridges.
Even Indian Americans who are Muslims and Kashmiris and Dalit and Manipuri and others get attacked on a very regular basis. So many academics in the US academy and grassroots-level organizers, who are mostly women and who are mostly Muslim or mostly Dalit, are publicly hounded. They get threats, threats against their children in their inboxes, in their phone calls, on their social media feeds. And this has been going on for the last 10 years and more. And so it is when we give power to people like Mohan Bhagwat that these violences escalate more.
Модели и харнессы стали более совершенными, что позволяет организациям трансформировать не только то, как они производят код, но и весь жизненный цикл разработки ПО. В данной статье — перевод рекоммендаций Anthropic по организации SDLC, если вы используете сервисы Claude.
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— Я киник, господин, потому что у меня дырявый плащ, стоик, ибо терпеливо сношу несчастья, перипатетик, так как не имею лектики и хожу пешком от виноторговца к виноторговцу и по дороге учу тех, которые обещают заплатить за кувшин.
Генрик Сенкевич, “Камо Грядеши”
Как известно нам из Ютуба, в Римской Империи были такие специальные коучи — философы-стоики, которые накачивали римлян мужеством, мудростью и должным. И в наше время стоицизм снова популярен — ютуб полнится роликами с колоннадами, античными статуями и цезарями, на фоне которых мелькают пацанские цитаты из Эпиктета, Сенеки и Марка Аврелия.
Действительно, стоицизм был очень популярен в древнем мире и из него можно подчерпнуть немало мудрости. Неспроста, как писал Гилберт Марри, «почти все преемники Александра […] исповедовали себя стоиками».
Да, многие из нас хотели бы, чтобы нас содержал сенатор, поражённый нашей мудростью, как это было с Эпиктетом. Или быть настолько богатым, чтобы самому содержать сенаторов, как Сенека. Или просто ограничиться должностью императора, как Марк Аврелий. Стоицизм очень популярен в интернете, особенно среди тех, кто не признаёт религию, но понимает, что жизнь надо как-то обосновать.
К сожалению, есть небольшая проблема, которая не даёт нам стать полноценными стоиками. Хотя, конечно, поднабраться удачных мыслей у них можно и так.
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На официальном сайте Deno (раздел Built for the real world) красуется любопытная табличка. Согласно их замерам, Deno уходит в отрыв от Node.js по HTTP аж в 1.65 раза:
Независимые тесты (denosaurs/bench, pkgpulse 2026, jsmanifest 2026) показывают похожую картину: Deno стабильно быстрее на HTTP-нагрузке. Я решил копнуть глубже и понять, где Deno получает преимущество по сравнению с Node.js.
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Монолит документооборота, менеджмент говорит: «пора пилить на микросервисы». Мы нарезали шесть сервисов, сверху повесили API Gateway, Load Balancer и Circuit Breaker и какое-то время искренне считали, что теперь у нас взрослая распределённая система.
По факту мы собрали распределённый монолит. Те же зависимости, что и в монолите, только теперь по сети — с таймаутами, ретраями и без общей транзакции. Оно работало, спорить не буду. Просто каждая вторая проблема в итоге упиралась в одно и то же: границы сервисов мы провели не там, где надо.
Это не туториал «как правильно резать монолит на DDD-bounded-context за 10 шагов» — таких на Хабре хватает. Это разбор конкретных мест, где границы у нас поехали, в порядке от «это все знают, но всё равно наступают» до «поняли только в проде под нагрузкой». Если вы сейчас режете свой монолит — читайте как чеклист. Если уже прошли — сверьте, сколько совпало.
Дисклеймер: проект под NDA. Названия сервисов, домен и детали обобщены и изменены, часть цифр округлена. Сами грабли и порядок, в котором мы на них наступали, — настоящие.
Читать далееAroma wafts over courts from nearby Corona Park
Katie Boulter: ‘You smell it a lot. I’m not a huge fan’
Britain’s US Open hopefuls thought they had put the grass behind them when Wimbledon finished, but the smell of it is all around Flushing Meadows and they are not happy about it.
Marijuana is legal for adults in New York and while smoking is not allowed on site, the aroma of weed wafts over some outside courts from the nearby Corona Park.
Continue reading...In a 1931 exhibition, Jackie Mitchell silenced the greats back-to-back. It sparked still-ongoing debates over legitimacy and opportunities for women in baseball
The Sultan of Swat sounded exasperated. “I don’t know what things are coming to,” Babe Ruth sighed during spring training in 1931.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen if they begin to let women in baseball,” he elaborated to reporters. “Of course, they will never make good. Why? Because they are too delicate. It would kill them to play ball everyday.”
Continue reading...A family day in a Florida back yard was the setting for a summertime memory it would be impossible to recreate
Trace Meek is abundantly proud of his Florida back yard. For the last 10 years, he and his wife, Lauren, have worked diligently on it. “It’s our happy place,” he says. “We live in Belleair Bluffs, and I’ve watched my son and daughter grow up playing in the dirt under our giant oak trees, swinging on the tree swing, riding their bikes and scooters on the circular path, and swimming in our pool. It’s big, with a really deep end and three water fountains that shoot over the top. We like to have a last jump into the pool before bed and, best of all, there are no iPads or TVs.”
The family had friends visiting for 4 July celebrations when Meek took this photo on his phone. There were six adults, six children and two dogs present. Harvey, a braque français, is pictured here on Lauren’s lap.
Continue reading...Fighters in legal limbo after accepting ‘total peace’ plan of Petro government just days before hardliner Abelardo De la Espriella took over
In mid-June, 99 guerrilla fighters were flown by helicopter to a small settlement in a rural area of southern Colombia where they lined up and, one by one, handed their weapons to government officials: rifles, pistols, machine guns and grenade launchers.
They also stripped off their heavy tactical vests, field packs and camouflage uniforms, which were each piled into a bonfire to mark the beginning of a new life away from an armed conflict that has claimed nearly half a million lives in the last six decades.
Continue reading...Fighters in legal limbo after accepting ‘total peace’ plan of Petro government just days before hardliner Abelardo De la Espriella took over
In mid-June, 99 guerrilla fighters were flown by helicopter to a small settlement in a rural area of southern Colombia where they lined up and, one by one, handed their weapons to government officials: rifles, pistols, machine guns and grenade launchers.
They also stripped off their heavy tactical vests, field packs and camouflage uniforms, which were each piled into a bonfire to mark the beginning of a new life away from an armed conflict that has claimed nearly half a million lives in the last six decades.
Continue reading...
Six months into the war between the United States and Iran, President Donald Trump has turned to economic warfare to force the country into submission and threatened an “Economic D-Day” against Iran. This new American strategy was spelled out by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent earlier this week: a campaign of U.S. sanctions against countries and financial institutions that do business with Iran or help it evade sanctions.
The proposed new sanctions go beyond oil exports to target digital assets, gold, and the aviation sectors that help finance the Iranian economy. Bessent described it as a campaign to “collapse every last option for Iran.” Making all this work depends on whether the U.S. can convince Iran’s most important trade partners to cut out the Islamic Republic. China, which buys around 80% of Iran’s seaborne crude oil, has already pushed back, warning that it will “take all necessary measures” to protect its interests should it be targeted by U.S. sanctions. Beijing's response casts doubt on whether Washington’s new gambit can deliver results.
If the aim, as stated, is to deal an economic blow to Iran, the fact is that the country is already under severe strain. A U.S. naval blockade has constrained oil exports, the primary source of revenue for Iran. Ordinary Iranians are facing greater economic pressure as their purchasing power is eroding: food inflation reached 128% year-on-year in July and families are cutting back on meat and other items. The dollar value of the minimum wage has fallen from about $105 to $86 since late March as the rial has weakened significantly. On Monday, Iranian currency fell to a record low of 2.02 million rials to the dollar.
So what is the goal of Bessent’s announcement? Simply put, acknowledging the reality—even if the administration won’t state it in these terms—of avoiding a further, major military campaign as the conflict drags on. For their part, Iran’s leaders have dismissed the threat of intensified economic warfare, insisting the new punitive economic measures would fail. “It is the same movie they keep playing over and over again,” remarked Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi.
Does this mean nothing will change with the American announcement? Put another way, are we likely to see a continuation of the current state of neither war nor peace, with Iran prolonging things until it can secure a favorable deal to end the conflict? Tehran, it is true, has powerful reasons to avoid another major military escalation. A new round of fighting could deepen the damage to Iran’s energy, transport and industrial infrastructure—much of it still under repair from earlier hostilities— and would also complicate reconstruction by further straining state finances, disrupting imports and exposing an already weakened economy to another cycle of destruction.
Yet American economic saber-rattling could alter this calculus. After all, on Aug. 10, Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei appointed Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi, a hardliner with significant experience in intelligence and operational positions, as the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), instructing him to strengthen capabilities for “powerful offensive operations against the enemy.” That language was echoed on Aug. 22 by Mohsen Rezaei, who was recently appointed secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, the top national security body of Iran. In an interview Rezaei spoke of Tehran going to introduce “changes in the conduct of the war” and bring “new capabilities” into play. He also warned that Iran had so far targeted only U.S. military bases but could begin striking American economic interests if Washington intensified its economic campaign.
If Iran is pondering a possible escalation in the military conflict, the Trump Administration appears to be betting that time may yield what bombs have so far failed to. The naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz remains in place, secondary sanctions are being tightened, and pressure is being increased on countries and financial networks that have allowed Tehran to circumvent previous restrictions. On Aug. 19, the United Arab Emirates, which has been a traditional financial gateway for Iran, suspended financial and commercial transactions with the country, a decision that is bound to hurt the Iranian economy.
Iran has declared the Strait of Hormuz closed, but oil has continued to move through the waterway, which is 29 nautical miles wide at its narrowest point. The U.S. military has established a protected route along the southern side of the strait, close to the shore of Oman. The Gulf states have experimented with ship-to-ship transfers and other means of moving crude around Iranian restrictions. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have been working intensively to reduce their dependence on the strait, building pipelines and investing in storage facilities to transport their oil by other routes.
Precise estimates of oil passing through the strait are not available, but the volume seems to be somewhere between a quarter and half of the prewar flow of 20 million barrels a day. Oil prices remain elevated, hovering around $90 a barrel, but they are still far below the levels Tehran might have expected from an effective and sustained closure. Tehran had hoped that continued disruption in Hormuz would eventually make the economic costs of the confrontation intolerable for Washington and force Trump back toward compromise. Instead, the U.S. increasingly appears to believe that it can keep enough oil moving while allowing the blockade and sanctions to steadily increase the pressure on Iran.
For Iran, that creates a very different calculation. The longer the current situation continues, the greater the strain on an economy already struggling with shortages, inflation and restrictions on trade. Iranian officials are increasingly speaking of the domestic consequences. First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref has spoken of the danger of economic discontent turning into social instability; the speaker of Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, has warned that measures such as raising gasoline prices could provide an opening for renewed unrest. President Masoud Pezeshkian has acknowledged that the blockade has restricted the country’s ability to import essential goods, including fuel.
Thus, Tehran is finding it increasingly harder to sustain the condition of “no war, no peace.”
A renewed war would impose enormous costs on Iran, but its leaders might ask a different question: will those costs be greater after months of economic pressure, declining revenues and continued military containment? If the answer is yes, then waiting ceases to be a strategy of restraint and begins to look like gradual erosion of power and strength. And they could consider escalation as a means of breaking the deadlock before Iran’s position deteriorates further.
Economic pressure is not the only reason Iran may be more willing to take risks. Tehran’s own understanding of deterrence has also changed over the course of the war. For years, Iranian leaders portrayed military action as retaliatory: Iran would absorb an attack, then impose costs on the aggressor. The experience of the past two years has increasingly called that logic into question. From Tehran’s perspective, repeated attempts to contain escalation did not prevent Israel and the United States from expanding their attacks.
The strategic reassessment is now visible in Iran’s military leadership and practice. After appointing Vahidi as the commander of the IRGC, Khamenei instructed him to pursue “maximum deterrence” while preparing the force for “powerful offensive operations.” The wording is significant. Offensive action is increasingly being conceived as a path to restoring deterrence. Iran has already offered a glimpse of what this could mean in practice. On Jul. 28, the IRGC launched ballistic missiles at a U.S. military base in Jordan, at a time when Trump had paused American strikes to give diplomacy more time.
In a departure from the past, the strike was not a response to an American attack. U.S. Central Command described it as an attempted surprise attack, and Washington subsequently resumed its strikes against Iran. The sequence suggested that Tehran was becoming more willing to initiate military action when it believed doing so could alter the strategic equation, rather than waiting to retaliate. Iranian leaders may also feel they have more room to act than Washington or Israel expected. Despite the enormous damage inflicted on Iran’s military-industrial infrastructure, recent satellite imagery and Israeli assessments indicate that Tehran has been restoring missile bases, production facilities, ports and other military infrastructure at a surprisingly rapid pace.
Iran has not recovered from the war, and its leaders have not become indifferent to the risks of another military confrontation. Yet capability and willingness do interact. The more Tehran believes it can regenerate the military tools damaged during the war, the less compelling a strategy of absorbing economic pressure becomes. The emerging emphasis on proactive military action and sense of military regeneration could establish a lower threshold for Iranian military escalation than Washington assumes.
If Iran considers the current balance as unsustainable, its escalation would have to differ from what it has already tried. Tehran is already attacking commercial shipping, contesting passage through Hormuz and relying on the Houthis to keep pressure on maritime traffic in the Red Sea. Intensifying those actions may raise costs, but it is unlikely to change Washington’s calculation of moving significant volumes of oil through the southern part of the strait.
Iran could resume attacks on U.S. bases, radar systems, and other facilities that support maritime surveillance and command-and-control systems that help protect and coordinate shipping through the Strait. More dangerous still, it could attempt to strike U.S. naval vessels directly. Iran is believed to possess anti-ship missiles that, at least on paper, can threaten American warships operating in and around the Persian Gulf. The harder problem is locating and tracking moving targets with sufficient precision, why is why better intelligence, including potentially from partners such as Russia or China, could become an important variable.
So far, Tehran has generally had strong reasons to avoid inflicting large numbers of American casualties, which could trigger a much larger U.S. campaign against Iran’s military and civilian infrastructure. But that restraint depends on Iranian leaders continuing to believe that avoiding such a confrontation leaves them better off. If they conclude instead that prolonged blockade and economic pressure are steadily worsening their position, the threshold for taking that risk could fall. Tehran has already warned that major U.S. attacks on Iranian energy or civilian infrastructure would be met with strikes against comparable infrastructure across the region, potentially widening the confrontation well beyond Hormuz.
This is also why diplomacy remains the least costly way out for both sides. Washington may believe that time and economic pressure are improving its bargaining position; Tehran may increasingly believe that the same process is closing its window for action. That is a particularly dangerous combination.
The memorandum of understanding reached earlier in the conflict is imperfect and each side accuses the other of violating it, but it still provides an existing framework for sequencing de-escalation, maritime arrangements, sanctions relief, and further negotiations. Reviving it would require concessions from both Washington and Tehran. The alternative is to allow each side’s strategy to reinforce the other’s worst assumptions until escalation begins to look less like a choice than an inevitability.
Some relationships need to end.
Years ago, I treated a woman whose husband was deliberately trying to drive her toward suicide while attempting to extract money from her family. What struck me was not only the cruelty of his behavior, but his complete lack of empathy or remorse for the harm he was causing. Leaving him was necessary, and the woman is now happily remarried.
Most troubled relationships look nothing like that. They involve disappointment, resentment, misunderstanding, conflicting needs, old wounds, and people who have never learned how to reconcile after hurting one another. In more than 20 years of clinical practice, that extreme case remains the only time I directly recommended divorce.
Mental-health professionals have become remarkably good at helping clients identify unhealthy relationships. We have a sophisticated vocabulary for boundaries, trauma, toxicity, narcissism, gaslighting, and emotional safety. But I worry that we are far less effective at helping people navigate difficult but meaningful connections.
There is an irony here. Psychotherapy itself is predicated upon the healing power of human connection, yet therapists can be surprisingly quick to undervalue relationships outside the therapy room. Furthermore, relationships themselves teach basic psychological capacities such as regulating emotions, tolerating disappointment, and negotiating differences—skills which therapy is supposed to cultivate.
Too often, we mistake relational distress for relational dysfunction. Wall Street Journal columnist Elizabeth Bernstein recently highlighted this eloquently. She reported on therapists who encouraged adult children to go “no contact” with their parents, often after surprisingly little effort to mend ruptures. In a survey of roughly 7,000 estranged parents, one-third believed their adult child’s therapist had influenced or even recommended the decision to cut ties. That should give us pause.
The issue extends well beyond parents and children. Similar patterns appear in marriages and among siblings, friendships, and other close bonds. Therapists have become too quick to support ending difficult relationships instead of helping people develop the skills to repair them.
In reality, walking away from another person often solves one problem while creating others. Increasingly, my practice sees clients who have ended relationships that took a lifetime to build. The immediate conflict may be gone, but so is the connection. Many become lonelier and less equipped to navigate conflict, disappointment, and repair elsewhere.
Tragically, many who end contact with loved ones also become more distressed in the long run, since close relationships are a foundation of mental health. Maintaining social connection is a form of “fitness” that requires ongoing cultivation. Even when strained or difficult, human bonds provide belonging, support, identity, and resilience. That may matter more now than ever, as many meaningful in-person social interactions are dwindling in the face of digital alternatives.
I learned this lesson the hard way about 15 years ago.
A woman came in because she was deeply concerned about her husband, who had obsessive-compulsive disorder. We eventually got him into treatment. He worked hard, completed difficult exposure therapy exercises, and improved considerably. By the standards I had been trained to use, the treatment was successful. But their marriage was not. His wife remained deeply unhappy, and their connection deteriorated. Eventually he lost most of his hard-fought progress, and she fell into clinical depression. Looking back, I can see the mistake clearly: we treated the patient and his symptoms, but not the relationship itself.
This reflects something larger about how mental-health care is generally structured. Our system is overwhelmingly individualistic. Diagnostics assign disorders to individuals, and insurance reimbursement follows an identified patient and his or her diagnosis. Even family psychotherapy is typically covered only when it is being used to treat an individual’s mental health. That model may make sense in other areas of medicine, such as orthopedics where a fracture occurs within one body. Mental health is fundamentally different. A great deal of flourishing and suffering happens between people, not just within them, because human beings are relational beings.
A second structural problem is that mental healthcare increasingly pathologizes ordinary negative emotions. That can backfire. Excessive focus on distress tends to amplify it. As an anxiety specialist, I know this pattern well. Avoidance may bring immediate relief, but over time it reinforces fear and reduces our capacity to tolerate discomfort.
Effective treatment does the opposite: it helps people face distress so they become more capable to withstand adversity, not less. Applied to relationships, this becomes especially critical because even the healthiest connections generate some strain. Loving spouses disappoint us, supportive parents fail us, close friends misunderstand us, and even terrific children create enormous stress. If stress itself is taken as evidence that a relationship is unhealthy, the normal difficulties of human interaction begin to look pathological.
Therefore, therapy should do more than help people identify what’s wrong with their relationships. It should build our capacity to sustain connection and repair ruptures: to tolerate disappointment, take responsibility for our own contribution to tensions, set limits without reflexively severing ties, and accept what another person may never be able to give us.
These skills matter beyond any single relationship. Learning how to reconnect with a spouse can make us better caregivers. Learning how to accept a parent’s limitations can change how we relate to our friends, work colleagues, and children. Working through difficult interactions can both preserve meaningful connections and strengthen our ability to navigate other ones.
Mel Robbins captured this idea in accessible language through her book, The Let Them Theory. Her core insight is simple: stop trying to control other people. Let them disappoint you, disagree with you, and make choices you don’t like. Then decide how you want to respond.
That message matters because a great deal of interpersonal conflict comes from trying to force others to change. We want parents to be more emotionally available, spouses to react differently, siblings to finally understand us, and adult children to make choices we approve of. Sometimes change is possible and can be requested directly upon the foundation of a loving connection. But sometimes the wiser move is to stop demanding that another person change as a condition of staying in contact with them.
Unfortunately, some of my academic and clinical colleagues have dismissed this approach. I think they are missing something critical. Leaving is sometimes necessary, but far more often the harder and healthier work is learning how to stay connected to imperfect people without surrendering ourselves, or trying to control them.
Human beings need relationships. Relationships require skills. Therapy should help us build them.
The federal government recruits top experts to volunteer to advise on pressing research issues of the day. Since President Trump took office, hundreds of these experts have been dismissed.
(Image credit: Lucy Lu for NPR)
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Our very own Luke McLaughlin is getting into the soggy swing of things:
“Sticking with 90s Dad Rock rain-related tunes…”
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Poor weather temporarily hampered aerial rescue operations in Nepal on Saturday as the search for thousands of missing people in areas devastated by catastrophic flash floods along the border with China continued.
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Есть готовый сайт, написанный на Laravel + Vue. Руководство попросило сделать его мультиязычным. Зная, что для Laravel “есть все”, я сходу без чтения документации назвал кратчайший срок. Но когда зашел на страничку Vue I18n то понял, что ошибся. Мультиязычность Vue происходит на клиенте, файлы переводов по формату отличаются от файлов Blade. Другими словами, если брать все «из коробки», то переводы придется дублировать и держать в разных местах, js приложение раздуется от подключения плагина I18n и к тому же на клиента придется загружать словари переводов... очевидно же, что надо делать переводы на сервере, то есть все хорошо, но без Vue I18n.
ТЗ формулировалось так:
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