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Today, the HISTORY Channel has officially launched Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise, a new eight-part podcast series examining one of the most consequential periods in American history. Available now on major podcast platforms, the project is hosted by bestselling author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell and features commentary from former President Barack Obama.

Produced in partnership with Higher Ground, Pushkin Industries, Audible, and The HISTORY Channel, the series revisits the years following the Civil War, when the United States confronted questions about citizenship, democracy, and what freedom would mean for millions of newly emancipated Black Americans.

While many history lessons end with the Confederacy’s defeat and the abolition of slavery, Reconstruction: The Unfinished Promise focuses on the turbulent years that followed. The series also examines why many of those efforts ultimately fell short and how the consequences remain visible today. Obama appears in conversations with Gladwell at both the beginning and conclusion of the series. Their discussions frame the broader themes explored throughout the project, including political power, civic participation, and the unfinished work of American democracy.

“The Reconstruction Era was a brief but pivotal and turbulent chapter in our nation’s history – one that is often overlooked, even though its consequences are still felt today,” said Obama. “In confronting this period honestly, I hope audiences can rediscover an essential part of our past and remember that even in moments of deep conflict and contradiction, persistence and perseverance remain powerful sources of hope.”

Several prominent historians, writers, and cultural commentators also contribute to the podcast. Among them are Jelani Cobb, Eric Foner, Kellie Carter Jackson, Kidada Williams, Manisha Sinha, David Blight, Kai Wright, Ashley C. Ford, and Wyatt Cenac. Their perspectives help illuminate the debates, conflicts, and possibilities that emerged during Reconstruction.

Drawing from letters, court documents, eyewitness accounts, diaries, and historical records, the series paints a detailed portrait of a country attempting to rebuild itself after slavery. Listeners are introduced to political leaders, formerly enslaved people, educators, organizers, and reformers whose efforts helped redefine the nation’s future, even as many of their gains faced fierce resistance.

The release arrives as part of HISTORY Honors 250, a broad initiative commemorating the upcoming 250th anniversary of the United States in 2026. Through original programming and special projects, the campaign seeks to revisit pivotal moments, influential figures, and lesser-known stories that have contributed to the country’s development.

For Higher Ground, the podcast adds to a growing slate of audio projects developed in partnership with Audible. Previous productions have included Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast, Your Mama’s Kitchen hosted by Michele Norris, The Wonder of Stevie hosted by Wesley Morris, and Fela Kuti: Fear No Man.

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President Barack Obama and Malcolm Gladwell (2026). Photo Credit: Higher Ground Productions | Photo: Eli Turner | Courtesy of A+E Global Media)

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Israel awoke to a frightening new reality on Thursday as it absorbed, with disbelief and largely in silence, the terms of President Trump’s preliminary agreement to end the war with Iran.

It accomplishes none of Israel’s war aims, analysts and officials said, and arguably leaves the country in worse shape on each of them.

Regime change? The government in Tehran is emerging from the war even more hard-line and emboldened, despite being decapitated at the outset of the conflict in late February. The deal’s requirement that American forces retreat from the “proximity” of Iran within 30 days means that Iran can boast that it has chased the U.S. military out of the region.

Ballistic missiles and proxy militias? The agreement does nothing to address Iran’s missile arsenal or its support of Israel’s enemies, like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

Worse still for Israel, by constraining its military in Lebanon — indeed, by requiring that Israel withdraw its forces from that country — the agreement seeks to handcuff Israel in a way that it was not before the war.

The hundreds of billions of dollars that Iran may receive in sanctions relief, unfrozen assets, or reconstruction aid could wind up funding more missiles in Iran and aiding Tehran’s militia allies around the Middle East.

And Iran’s nuclear program? The existential threat to Israel that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has tried to eliminate throughout his career, and which was Mr. Trump’s primary reason for joining the wars on Iran, was left for a later stage of U.S.-Iran negotiations.

“It’s a bad agreement in which the Americans are paying with cash, and got, at the maximum, a letter of intent,” Yaakov Amidror, a hawkish former national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, said in an interview.

David Horovitz, the editor of The Times of Israel, called it “a catastrophic capitulation,” in the headline of a fiery opinion column.

And Nir Dvori, an analyst for Israel’s Channel 12 News, likened the deal to a “diplomatic Oct. 7” — a cataclysmic disaster for which Israel was wholly unprepared.

Mr. Netanyahu addressed the U.S.-Iran agreement only briefly on Thursday, saying “additional challenges lie ahead of us,” requiring “calmness, a firm stance on our security interests, and at the same time, maintaining the important connection with our American friends.”

The prime minister said Israel would stick to its ultimate goal: “Iran will not have nuclear weapons.”

He also vowed that Israel would restore security in the north, near its border with Lebanon. “That requires maintaining the security zone in southern Lebanon, and it requires that we not withdraw from it as long as Israel’s security needs demand it,” he said.

Otherwise, it was left to minor ministers and backbench lawmakers to try put the best possible face on the agreement.

Amichai Chikli, the diaspora affairs minister, speculated in a radio interview that Mr. Netanyahu would know how to say no to Mr. Trump about pulling out of Lebanon just as he knew how “to bring the United States into this war.”

But others more soberly grappled with the degree to which Mr. Netanyahu’s triumphalist rhetoric from early in the war had proved fantastical. He had repeatedly and confidently assured Israelis that the country and its alliance with the United States were “changing the face of the Middle East” to Israel’s advantage.

“We are remaking the region,” Chuck Freilich, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser, said on Thursday.

“Iran came out stronger, and I believe is now the regional hegemon,” he added. “They stood up to the U.S., the global superpower. They can have missiles, and there’s nothing in the agreement about the nuclear issue except we’ll talk about it. This is an Iranian victory over the U.S. and Israel.”

Even as they reeled from the terms of the agreement, Israelis across the political spectrum seemed also to be reckoning with Mr. Trump, the nature of his support for Israel, and the degree to which Mr. Netanyahu has tied Israel’s fortunes to the American leader’s good will.

On Wednesday at the Group of 7 summit in France, the president had again spoken of Mr. Netanyahu with disdain, suggesting he was excitable and prone to overreacting to Hezbollah’s attacks. He belittled him publicly as the “very small partner” in the relationship and said that Israel would have been annihilated if it had not been for him.

Mr. Trump suggested that Syria could do a better job than Israel of cracking down on Hezbollah in Lebanon without killing as many civilians. And he minimized the ballistic-missile threat from Iran — which forced millions of Israelis to run in and out of shelters throughout the war. He said it was only fair for Iran to have missiles because other countries in the region did as well.

The reactions in Israel evoked a bad divorce.

Hanoch Milwidsky, a lawmaker from Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party, posted a video on social media of himself removing a red MAGA hat and replacing it with a blue one with the Hebrew words for “total victory.”

Ben-Dror Yemini, a columnist at Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s largest newspaper, wrote that Mr. Netanyahu had led Israel into “the most severe collapse in its history.”

“Trump reneged on every promise, turned Iran into a power, strengthened Hezbollah, and as a final flourish, gave Israel a kick and humiliation,” he wrote.

Dahlia Scheindlin, an American-born Israeli pollster, said it was “slowly sinking in” for Israelis that Mr. Netanyahu had staked the entire U.S.-Israeli relationship on his personal bond with a president prone to “temper tantrums” over “simple slights.”

“I think he was hoping that he could employ the tools that he has always employed with American presidents,” she said. “You know, tread carefully and strategically, but push the boundaries, and try to run circles around them if you can,” she added.

“I think that with a bit of a back-and-forth dance, it was largely working for him with Trump,” she said. “But he hit his limit.”

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Jerusalem on Monday. Credit…Ronen Zvulun/Reuters

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You’re halfway through a challenging exam when you notice your focus starting to slip. The words on the page blur together, and you find your mind wandering to what you’re going to have for dinner that night. Does that sound familiar? This mental fatigue isn’t a character flaw—it’s a universal human experience that reveals something essential about how people’s minds function.

We are behavioral scientists who study how economic circumstances shape human cognition and behavior. In a recent study of more than 1,600 children, we found that the ability to sustain mental effort over time—or “cognitive endurance”—functions much like physical stamina. Almost universally, the longer people spend on a task, the worse they perform on it. But just as athletes can train to run longer distances, kids are able to strengthen their capacity for sustained thinking through simple but dedicated practice, allowing them to continue to perform at a higher level for longer stretches of time. In an era of social media and short-form content designed to minimize mental friction and demand minimal effort, the capacity for sustained thinking may be getting less practice than ever—making it more important to understand how it develops and how it can be strengthened.

Could Environment Shape Concentration?

A few years ago, while we were analyzing standardized test results from around the world with our colleagues Christina Brown of the University of Chicago and Geeta Kingdon of University College London, we noticed a remarkably consistent pattern: students performed worse on questions that appeared later in exams, even after accounting for the difficulty of the questions.

This performance decline was much steeper among students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Children in poor countries showed three times the rate of performance decline compared with those in wealthy nations. This could be because disadvantaged children get fewer opportunities to train their focus. Cognitive skills generally improve with deliberate, focused and progressively more challenging training. And when looking at the activities the kids spent time on in school, we found that richer students were more likely to engage in independent, focused practice by doing activities such as working through problems on their own, reading silently, or concentrating on individual tasks. In contrast, students at disadvantaged schools were more likely to spend much of the day in passive activities such as listening to lectures, practicing rote memorization or copying from the board.

These patterns suggested that the school experience itself—particularly the amount of sustained mental effort the school day requires—could be molding students’ cognitive endurance.

Training the Mind Like a Muscle

To test whether cognitive endurance could be improved, we designed an experiment with 1,636 elementary school students in India. Students were randomly assigned to one of three groups during their study hall periods. Those in the control group continued with their usual routine—copying a few math problems from the board before spending most of the class time as they liked, resulting in minimal sustained mental effort.

In contrast, the other two “treatment” groups engaged in 20 minutes of continuous cognitive practice during these study hall periods. The members of one group solved math problems on tablets in a simple application that adapted to their ability level but didn’t have any gamified features to hold their attention. This gave these students focused practice in a specific subject area. But it was also possible that simply practicing concentration, regardless of the task, could increase mental endurance. To test that, the final group completed cognitively demanding games such as mazes and shape puzzles called tangrams that contained no academic content. These app-based games also adapted their difficulty based on performance, which kept them challenging for the students.

The results were striking. Both treatment groups showed significant improvements in their ability to maintain performance throughout tests, regardless of the type of training they had received. When students took listening comprehension, reasoning or math assessments, the performance of those who had received cognitive practice declined 22 percent more slowly than that of students in the control group. It didn’t matter whether the students had practiced with academic content or nonacademic games—the benefits were nearly identical for both groups. This suggests that the act of concentrating mattered more than what students were concentrating on.

The students who practiced concentrating also improved on standardized tests of sustained attention, including those that tested their reaction times or their ability to spot target symbols hidden in a grid. They also showed better focus in the classroom, according to ratings from their teachers—for example, they fidgeted less and followed through on multistep instructions. This seems to have translated to better grades across a wide range of subjects, too—students who received either form of cognitive practice earned grades that were about 0.09 standard deviations higher in Hindi, English, and math than those who didn’t. In comparison, this effect was roughly half to three-quarters as large as that of assigning a student to a class with seven fewer students per teacher. These were substantial improvements, considering the intervention required only 20 to 50 minutes per week over six months.

Beyond the Classroom

The implications of these findings extend beyond education. We also found evidence that disadvantaged groups, whose members are likely to have received less practice in sustaining focus, show more rapid declines in performance over time in other contexts. For example, we found that data entry workers made more errors as their shifts progressed and that less educated workers showed much steeper declines. Even voting behavior reflects these patterns: studies have found that, when a given proposition appears later in the ballot in California, voters are more likely to choose the default option. We showed that these declines are especially pronounced in lower-income neighborhoods.

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Kohei Hara/Getty Images

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The ads are often for startups you’ve never heard of, selling a service or software that’s somehow related to AI. And while the ad voice is direct, in that it’s written as if it’s speaking directly to you, the viewer, the copy is intentionally cryptic. “Own Your Inference.” “Put AI Agents to Work for People.” Sometimes it’s menacing. “Stop Hiring Humans.”

These kinds of ads seem to be everywhere lately, but that doesn’t mean that they make much sense. Now, comedians Harris Alterman and Dave Ross are emphasizing just how banal and meaningless the AI ad age is turning out to be by creating their own fake tech ads that skewer the medium simply by amping up its tropes: AI industry gobbledegook and design minimalism.

The ads, which they put up as banners in a New York City subway station (much like the controversial, real ads for the AI companion Friend last fall), ask asinine questions. “What if forks were spoons?,” “What if Texas was upside-down?,” and “What if the Rizzler was purple?” One fake ad is for a company with a human name, “Dennis.”

Another advertises a faux company that recently rebranded. “Zipline is now Froggle,” the ad says matter-of-factly. “The cloud-based online safety you know and love, now in the palm of your hand.” An ad for a brand called Fivetable confidently states, “We Put the Q in QR1777,” and Wireflow promises, “you pay us, we pay you.”

Alterman and Ross were especially inspired by a real ad for the product development software company Linear, which shows cursors pointing toward God’s outstretched hand, as in Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam,” and another for Dawn, an AI mental-health app, that says “Racing Thoughts Don’t Do Waiting Rooms.”

They call the lack of distinctiveness around AI advertising in its design, voice, and fonts “slop voice,” and note that while these ads sound like they’re speaking to you, they’re really talking to someone else: a high tech, SaaS-speaking in-group. And it’s ok if the copy alienates everyone else.

“People are confused by tech advertising,” they tell Fast Company in an email. “99% of the people reading these ads have no idea what they’re talking about. It feels like 20 people in tech, advertising to 20 other people in tech. Do you really need to put up ads? Can’t you guys just get in a group chat together?”

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[Photo: courtesy Harris Alderman and Dave Ross]

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Hmmmm … Sic Semper Tyrannis – Tarado

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President Trump on Wednesday issued a fiery defense of his deal with Iran, lashing out at critics who have said the agreement achieves even less than the one President Barack Obama negotiated, and threatening to bomb Iran again if it doesn’t adhere to the agreement.

Appearing at the Group of 7 summit of global leaders in Évian-les-Bains, France, Mr. Trump denied that the United States was, in effect, paying Iran to agree to the recently negotiated peace deal. And in an expletive-laden rant, he proclaimed that his deal was better than the one Mr. Obama signed with Tehran in 2015.

“And you know what the Iranians did? They laughed at Obama, and they said, ‘He’s a stupid son of a bitch,’” Mr. Trump said.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Obama said he would not be commenting on Wednesday, but referred to his remarks from an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America” over the weekend. In it, he said that he doubted that the new deal would be “significantly different or a significant improvement” from the one his administration negotiated. He said that it was a reminder that the United States cannot just “bully our way or bomb our way to solutions.”

Mr. Trump’s remarks came as a senior U.S. official disclosed what the official said was the full text of the deal. The official read it aloud on a conference call with reporters on Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the White House.

The deal would, among other things, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, outline a $300 billon plan for Iran’s reconstruction and at least temporarily lift restrictions on the country’s oil exports, according to the official. But it would push talks about Iran’s nuclear program — the central reason given for the U.S.-Israeli attacks that began in February — into a 60-day negotiation period.

Mr. Trump had denied reports that the deal included U.S. investment in the reconstruction fund or any immediate sanctions relief, two of the points that have drawn the most attention. But the $300 billion fund it outlines could provide Iran with much more money than the deal Mr. Obama negotiated.

The deal says the United States will work with regional partners to “develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least” $300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of Iran. The fund will go into effect once a final deal is reached within 60 days, the agreement states.

Mr. Trump left open the possibility that Persian Gulf states could provide the money for the fund. Mr. Trump has railed against Mr. Obama for providing $1.7 billion in cash to Iran after the 2015 nuclear agreement was signed.

But he said on Wednesday that the U.S. military had so badly damaged Iran during the war that the country needed help.

“Unlike Barack Hussein Obama, who sent Iran pallets of cash, any relief they receive under this deal, they’ll have to get based on merit — and it won’t be from us,” he said. “We don’t have to give them anything. But some people may want to invest.”

A diplomat said that work on the fund was already underway.

Commitments amounting to half of the $300 billion figure have already been made, including from companies in the United States, the Middle East, Asia, South America, and Africa, said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations.

The fund would be a conduit for private investment, not a reconstruction or reparations program, the diplomat said. Details about the funding pledges were initially reported by Reuters.

Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance have already electronically signed a framework agreement on the deal, along with the speaker of Iran’s Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who led that country’s negotiating team, a senior U.S. official said. American and Iranian leaders are expected to formally sign the agreement in Switzerland.

Once the agreement is formally signed, the United States will issue waivers allowing Iran to export its crude oil. Critics have said that relief for the Iranian oil industry rewards Tehran merely for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, the critical oil shipping route that was open before Iran effectively closed it at the start of the war.

In an effort to resolve the fate of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, which could be used to build at least 10 bombs, experts say, the deal requires Iran to weaken it by “down-blending” it — or effectively diluting it — on site, under the supervision of international atomic inspectors. It does not require Iran to give up that material and ship it out of the country.

The agreement says the United States will also lift sanctions on Iran “in an agreed-upon schedule as part of the final deal” that the two sides would negotiate within 60 days. Relief from crushing economic sanctions may be the ultimate lever that can persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear program. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal brokered by Mr. Obama traded sanctions relief for strict caps on Tehran’s nuclear activity.

The new deal calls on Iran to allow commercial ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz safely and “with no charge for 60 days only.” After that, it indicates, Iran and Oman will work out a deal to administer ship traffic in the strait in consultation with other Gulf nations. Mr. Trump has said the passageway must be “permanently toll-free.” But Iran has said it plans to charge “fees” in exchange for unspecified “services” it provides there.

The deal also seeks to end the war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon, by committing the United States, Iran, and their allies to immediately stopping military operations on “all fronts, including in Lebanon.” Neither Israel nor Hezbollah have signed on to the deal, and both have indicated that they will not be bound by it.

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President Trump and other U.S. officials at a news conference amid the Group of 7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, France, on Wednesday. Credit…Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

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Chinese scientists have discovered the largest whale “graveyard” ever found. It contains nearly 500 whale skeletons, all collected by chance, and spreads across 750 miles of seafloor and five million years of evolutionary history.

“They’ve really captured something novel,” says Nick Pyenson, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the new research. The discovery is detailed in a study published today in Nature. “It’s a cool study; it’s really neat to see,” Pyenson says.

The discovery is centered on the Diamantina Fracture Zone, which travels west from the southwesternmost tip of Australia into the Indian Ocean along a rift valley that formed some 50 million years ago, when the Down Under continent split from Antarctica.

In early 2023, Chinese scientists used a crewed submersible vehicle to scout along the fracture and spotted what they quickly realized was a whale fossil at some 23,000 feet (7,000 meters) below the surface. Over the course of some 30 additional dives, the researchers discovered an incredible array of whale remains, as well as traces of the animals’ activity at most of the sites they explored.

Five of the whale skeletons they found were recent enough to be hosting the type of dynamic ecosystem that scientists associate with “whale falls.” Such systems support a shifting cast of scavengers and then microbes specialized to these fleeting feasts. (Because scientists only discovered whale falls less than 50 years ago, Pyenson says that researchers don’t have an accurate estimate for how long these pop-up ecosystems can last.)

In the Diamantina zone, all five of the whale falls the scientists found were in the later stages of being consumed, with the bones fully exposed and host to teeming microbial communities. The researchers also observed animals ranging from bone-eating worms to squat lobsters, from spoon worms to jellyfish—and the scientists suspect that some of these creatures may represent undescribed species.

These tantalizing observations only scratch the surface of this discovery. Perhaps more interesting still are the hundreds of barren whale remains that the researchers saw during their dives. In these cases, the whale bones managed to fossilize before scavengers and microbes could demolish the massive carcasses. And because sediment accumulates so slowly at these depths, the fossils have remained exposed for thousands or even millions of years.

The researchers were able to use their submersible to collect 33 samples of the fossils, which were dated to between 5.26 million and 120,000 years old—a stunning range, Pyenson says. For him, the site is the marine equivalent of the famous La Brea Tar Pits in downtown Los Angeles, a site that has gathered and preserved carcasses over a range of geological time.

The “paper reminded me of a trailer for the first in a series of epic movies,” wrote Stephen Godfrey, a paleontologist at the Calvert Marine Museum, who was not involved in the finding, in a piece accompanying the paper that was also published in Nature. “I hope that there will be many more of these blockbusters to come.”

“It shouldn’t be surprising that we find this kind of site,” Pyenson says. “What they’re documenting here is probably not unique.” He believes it might be possible to find similarly massive numbers of whale remains along common migration “superhighways”—at least those routes that have remained more or less stable over millions of years.

“That’s what’s really cool,” Pyenson says. “It really underscores the value of protecting and better understanding these deep-sea environments.”

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Charles Duhigg explains why trying to eliminate a bad habit is neurologically futile, and what to do instead.

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Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of The Power of Habit, which spent over three years on bestseller lists and has been translated into 40 languages,[…]

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Hmmmm … Sic Semper Tyrannis – TARADO!

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Iran’s military leaders have greeted the cease-fire agreement with President Trump as a triumph, crowing that “through the imposition of their divine and iron will,” they had “humiliated American and Zionist enemies.”

Mostly, they’re right.

Mostly, because it’s worth remembering that the current regime in Iran is far less formidable than it was before the Hamas assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Back then, Iran had potent allies and proxies in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen. Its nuclear program was intact and steadily accumulating ever larger quantities of highly enriched uranium. It had a powerful military-industrial base, a weak but functional economy, and a government that — for all its repressiveness — was internationally recognized as legitimate.

Today, much of that is either gone or diminished. Iran is no longer within sprinting distance of a bomb. Its ally in Syria was deposed. Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis have lost much of their fighting strength. The Iranian rial is the world’s most worthless currency. The leadership rules an unhappy population that — outside of die-hard loyalists — would almost certainly overthrow it if given the chance. Its latest ballistic missile salvo against Israel failed to land a serious single blow. Its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz strained, but did not strangle, the world’s energy markets.

Those are real achievements against an evil, ambitious regime. Yet the outcome of war rarely rests on a tally of relative strength. War is a contest of wills. And in that contest, the hard men of Tehran appear to have scored a decisive victory over the vain man of Washington.

I write this as someone who supported the war from the outset and hoped to see Trump carry it through to a decisive result: if not regime change, then at least a deal in which Iran would be forced to relinquish all of its enrichment capabilities and access to the Strait was unfettered. Those goals were well within the president’s reach, particularly if he had continued to attack Iran’s military-industrial infrastructure until it agreed to terms, rather than conducting most of the negotiations after the fighting had mostly stopped.

But Trump got spooked after the regime didn’t instantly crumble, and energy prices shot up. He then effectively abandoned the war he had started after less than six weeks of sustained combat — combat in which the United States lost fewer service members than in the 1983 invasion of Grenada. He compounded the error with an almost comical succession of military threats and last-minute climb-downs, each of them signaling indecision and weakness to Iranian adversaries practiced in the study of weakness.

Tehran took the measure of Trump’s courage. What it found was a bone spur.

All this may seem odd for a president who once loudly complained that the United States hadn’t “fought to win” a war since 1945, who demanded “unconditional surrender” from Tehran and who had repeatedly lambasted his predecessor for the humiliating exit from Afghanistan. Then again, it’s not odd for a president whose very essence is betrayal of everyone and everything, his own words not least.

Though the details of the deal remain murky — a telling indicator of its likely shoddiness, since the administration would surely trumpet the terms of a strong agreement — it’s already clear that Trump has betrayed his promise to the Iranian people, after they were massacred in January to quell antigovernment protests, that “help is on its way.” As in Venezuela, to say nothing of China and Russia, this administration’s message to oppressed people everywhere is that their rights come last.

Trump is also on his way to betraying Israel, our principal ally in this fight, by pushing Jerusalem to stand down in its effort to stop Hezbollah’s attacks on its north, in that way handing Tehran the victory of creating a diplomatic linkage between Lebanon and Hormuz. If Iran is now allowed to extract some kind of service fee for permitting ships to transit the Strait, Trump will have also betrayed our allies in the Persian Gulf by giving Iran financial and strategic leverage to which it has no right, and which it didn’t previously have.

The worst betrayal, however, is of Americans who supported the war — not only neocons like me but also most of Trump’s MAGA base — because we believed that Iran, which has waged a 47-year war against us, posed an increasingly intolerable threat to our security and vital interests.

This cease-fire neither ends nor eases that threat; it hardens and magnifies it. It removes the one point of U.S. leverage over Iran — the naval blockade of its ports — before there’s any negotiation over its nuclear program, which the Iranians will almost surely drag out until Trump is out of office. It reminds the world of the adage that while it can be dangerous to be America’s enemy, it is fatal to be its friend. And it gives Iran’s leaders something even more vital: The confidence that, whatever Trump may threaten, they can withstand the most any American president or Israeli prime minister can throw at them.

There’s a word for this: debacle. Not because the war, for all its costs or errors of execution, was a mistake. It’s because this pretense of a peace is an act of geopolitical self-harm that will haunt our standing in the world for years to come.

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Photo illustration by Tam Stockton for The New York Times

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When Emma Scales decided she wanted to be a scientist, it seemed logical—simple, even. She’d grown up in coastal New Jersey, attended a high school that emphasized marine biology, and learned about the connections among sea creatures large and small. She felt a calling to better understand and protect a world she loved.

Now a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, Scales is studying symbiosis, specifically the way bacteria can grow inside fungi and create a mutual-use arrangement. It’s what she calls a “Russian nesting doll” system. But these days, little seems simple or logical. Scales’s research is aimed largely at protecting food crops, and at Cornell, she’s recently watched laboratories shut down because of federal funding cuts, including labs running practical programs meant to help strengthen U.S. agriculture. Since 2025, the Trump administration has cut more than 7,800 grants, removed 25,000 scientists and related personnel from their jobs, and, as of January 2026, proposed budget cuts equaling about $32 billion. Cornell has recovered its funding, but doing so came with its own heavy costs, and warning signs are still flashing.

Scales is one of thousands of early-career researchers in the U.S. trying to make sense of how the current tumult in American science will shape their professional paths. Between lost funding and stalled programs, the young scientists of today are facing uncertainty in the job market and the possibility of having to leave the U.S. or, in some cases, leave science completely.

But Scales has decided to fight back, joining with other graduate students trying to protect universities. “They are scrubbing science of the influence of some of its most brilliant scientists. Work that has taken decades to build is being wiped out,” she says. When the research community gets a chance to rebuild, she wonders, how long will it take to regain what’s been lost?

Julia Menzel, an American early-career science historian currently at the University of Toronto, has similar questions. “There has got to be some way to dull the negative impact this has on people trying to start their careers in science,” she insists. “If we lose a generation of scientists, we are going to see very negative consequences.”

Menzel’s research, which she began while completing a Ph.D. in the history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tells us that the country has faced these kinds of challenges before. Administrations hostile to evidence have previously worked to dismantle the U.S. scientific enterprise. And history is cyclical—many science historians point to similarities between the eras of Donald Trump and Richard Nixon and the ways these presidents sowed distrust of science among Americans to push their agendas. For example, in an echo of today, Nixon imposed widespread cuts to research funding while redirecting money to his chosen science projects. In subsequent administrations, science regained both money and status, in part because of strategic advocacy by scientists. Will such a pattern repeat this time around?

David Kaiser, a physicist and historian of science at M.I.T. who mentored Menzel, believes that the past tells us to hold on, that we don’t yet know the end of the story. But the solution may come from young scientists like Scales who take on the task of rebuilding science as a profession. They may need to use a new blueprint. They may need to invent their future. But first, they need to survive the present. “There’s now a deeply felt uncertainty about science,” Kaiser says with a sharp edge of worry. “There are so many students, so gifted and earnest, who go into research because they want to help the world. And they are marching toward a future that looks nothing like what I had hoped for them.”

The U.S. has long been committed to supporting R&D. In 2023, the country’s investment in research was about 3.45 percent of its gross domestic product, making it the fifth-highest worldwide. The National Science Foundation says the total amount spent on science in 2024 was $993 billion. Of that, almost 19 percent came from the federal government. Nearly 76 percent came from industry. In 2024, federal research dollars went mostly to federal agencies and certain public-private research partnerships (43 percent), then universities (31 percent) and businesses (19 percent).

The return on investment for science is equally enormous. The National Institutes of Health alone provide more than $69 billion toward the U.S. GDP through research, and a medical-research advocacy group reports that every NIH dollar spent on research returns $2.57 in new economic activity. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has found returns of up to 300 percent from government research and development since the days after World War II.

Science itself is not partisan, and research is supposed to inform policymaking. Yet science funding in the U.S. has long been a political pinball.

President Barack Obama promised that “the days of science taking a back seat to ideology” were over in 2009, saying he hoped to double federal research spending during a time when federal spending was in a minor upswing. But a Congress dominated by the Tea Party thwarted him. In the end, according to an analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, congressionally approved funding by federal agencies instead dropped a full 10 percent, when adjusted for inflation.

The first Trump administration immediately sought to deepen those cuts. This move, too, was stymied by congressional resistance. The budget of the NIH—the largest supporter of research at U.S. universities—went from about $30 billion in 2015 to more than $48 billion in 2025, in part because of President Joe Biden’s call for greater investment in research. Biden, in fact, campaigned on a promise to respect scientific advice; Trump responded by mocking Biden for listening to scientists.

The second Trump administration has further targeted science funding. It has frozen grants and other money across the spectrum of research. The proposed budget for fiscal year 2027 asks to reduce the amount earmarked for nearly every federal science agency, including a 55 percent cut to the NSF. And although Congress has voted to restore much of the funding and federal judges have tried to intervene, the administration has used internal agency decisions and presidential memos to slash budgets as often as possible—and, on occasion, simply held back money authorized by Congress. “I don’t think anyone was prepared for the aggressiveness and suddenness of the cuts,” says University of Maryland, College Park, historian of science Melinda Baldwin. “I can’t really think of a similar moment in the past where funding has been cut off that fast.”But government hasn’t always been the primary funder of science. In the 19th century, research was largely practical, seen as the purview of independent businesspeople. Take Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin, which revolutionized the mechanical aspects of farming in the early 1800s, or Alexander Graham Bell’s commercial development of the telephone later that century. Both men had benefactors supporting their efforts.

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Pepe Serra

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Key Takeaways

• Big Think has launched its first-ever online store, a collaboration with the infographic poster company Pop Chart.
• Our first poster with Pop Chart is “A Visual History of the Universe,” which features stunning illustrations of the universe from its earliest moments to the present.
• Check out Big Think’s store on Pop Chart to find the poster — as well as T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, notebooks, and, soon, our quarterly print magazines. 

Every few months, I round up useless or unused objects in my house, walk to the alley, and plop them into the dumpster without a second thought. I am no collector or hoarder. I only really value a few physical possessions: my three guitars, my books and magazines, and a small collection of posters and art (my favorite being a painting of a stork whose eyes stare right through you, made by my late grandpa).

That last category is something I could use much more of: beautiful things to look at. One piece that’ll soon hang on the wall of my office comes from my colleague, Ben Gibson, a design director at Big Think.

He recently created a poster called “A Visual History of the Universe,” made with help from Dr. Ethan Siegel, an astrophysicist and author of the Big Think column Starts With A Bang. It’s a poster that strikes a rare balance between being aesthetically stunning while also teaching you something useful — in this case, scientists’ best explanation for how everything around you came to be.

Ben’s been striking that balance since he was a kid.

“I had always loved looking at things like maps, charts, and cutaway illustrations, and spent a lot of hours (too many!) trying to draw them myself,” he said.

In 2010, he cofounded the infographics poster company Pop Chart with Patrick Mulligan after the two met while working at Penguin Books.

“Patrick also loved this stuff, and we started finding ways to incorporate these things into the books we were working on at Penguin — but we realized we needed a bigger canvas.”

The first poster the two produced was a chart of rapper names, diagrammed according to semantics. They’ve since sold hundreds of thousands of infographic posters and other products, becoming a design shop for advertising, events, publishing, and custom merchandise, with clients like HBO, Nike, Wieden + Kennedy, The New York Times, and the MoMA Design Store.

Pop Chart’s posters cover everything from literature’s most famous opening lines (as analyzed through the Reed-Kellogg system) to a visual breakdown of the Beatles’ discography by instruments featured on each song to a taxonomical diagram of every species of bird in North America — a bestseller that Ben said took about four months of “pretty painstaking research, illustration, and design to complete.”

The New York Times has dubbed Pop Chart “the poster mavens.” Fast Company described their posters as “catnip for uber-geeks.” Popular Science called them the “master of the infographic poster.”

Now, Big Think is calling them a partner. On Pop Chart, we recently launched Big Think’s first-ever store, where you can find our “A Visual History of the Universe” poster, along with Big Think T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, notebooks, and much more.

We’ll be designing and releasing many more posters over the coming months. It’s a natural partnership: Like Big Think, Pop Chart is always “uncovering deeper, surprising, and fascinating layers” about the world, Ben said. Big Think does that with articles and videos. Pop Chart turns those ideas into something worth hanging on your wall.

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Ideas worth displaying.

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