Modern warfare is gradually removing pilots from combat in favor of drones and cost efficiency. But when the fighter pilot is gone, we no longer will have a shared figure who reflects the best version of ourselves.
A former Air Force pilot trainee traces the rise, and slow death, of the fighter-pilot myth. Head to link in bio to read.
Pictured: American fighter pilots of the United States Army Air Forces during World War II, 1940s. Photos by Reuben Saidman/Getty Images.
The New York Times defended Nicholas Kristof’s dubious prisoner abuse article by invoking his Pulitzer credentials. Except, in the 1930s, another Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the same paper helped cover for Stalin’s murderous regime.
It is well known that The New York Times’ Berlin bureau chief was busy slanting the news in Hitler’s favor, but this lesser-known cover-up also says a great deal about the moral and political blind spots of the press.
From the archives. Head to link in bio to read.
"Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar have instructed the initiation of a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times," announced the ministry Thursday morning, calling the article "one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press."
What began on the far-left fringes as “anti-Zionism” is increasingly becoming a shared political language across America’s ideological extremes.
But this isn’t the first time this has happened. In the USSR, Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda transformed Jews and Zionists into a global conspiracy blamed for social decay, war, and political dysfunction. That framework didn’t stay confined to the left; it crossed over into neo-Nazi movements, helping radicalize figures like Alexander Barkashov, one of post-Soviet Russia’s most prominent fascists.
There’s no denying the crossover between the right and left is now being mainstreamed in the United States. The question is: Does America recognize where this kind of conspiratorial politics has led before?
Head to link in bio to read.
The sourcing, timing, and evidentiary gaps behind the @nytimes opinion piece are now facing major scrutiny.
In a video posted on the Times’ opinion socials, the piece’s author, Nick Kristof, also claimed that what happened to Jewish women on Oct. 7 is now happening to Palestinians “day after day.”
As with attempts to appropriate Jewish suffering through the genocide libel, could the timing of the piece, published just before a major report on Hamas’ sexual violence, suggest an effort to reframe or morally invert the narrative surrounding Oct. 7?
Javier Milei didn't rise alone. A cast of outsiders, influencers, and true believers built the movement around him. And they're just getting started.
Five years ago he was a TV commentator dismissed as a local phenomenon. Today he sits on the world stage. The question is whether a movement built on rage against the old order can avoid becoming it.
Head to link in bio to read @sivakme on all the characters making up Milei's movement, and Mileism — the phenomeno born out of rage, inflation, and a society that had nothing left to lose.
At an elite summer program meant to teach free thinking and self-government, students were taught to “cede” their speaking time based on identity, friendships were treated as dangerous, and teenagers who challenged the group dynamic were voted out and removed from the program.
One student gave a presentation defending Hamas to snapping approval from staff. Another professor later described being put on trial by students for “harmful” behavior and insufficiently radical views.
@aniwilc revisits her summer at Cornell and how a once-celebrated experiment in intellectual freedom became an exercise in ideological conformity. Head to link in bio to read.
During the Obama-era Iran deal push, relatives of hostage-takers, IRGC figures, and regime insiders were granted visas and residency. Now ICE arrests are exposing just how deep it went, as many are facing deportation.
The revelations have sparked outrage among many Iranians online, furious at the spectacle of regime elites living lavishly in Los Angeles while ordinary Iranians suffered under the Islamic Republic.
Why were the children of Iranian regime elites ever being granted admission, visas, and acceptance letters into the United States? Head to link in bio to read.
Tablet's May issue is here 🪐
Starting off, Editor in Chief Alana Newhouse asks what looking out into space reveals about us, and what we may miss when we lose sight of larger dimensions.
Plus: Rina Raphael on near-death science, David Samuels remembers 1996, Martín Sivak on Mileism, Katherine Dee on the lost art of role playing, and more. Only in Tablet.
Head to link in bio to read & subscribe to get your issue.
What better way to mark Jewish American Heritage Month than by revisiting the Jewish underworld of the Lower East Side?
You know the story of the pushcart peddlers, crowded tenements, and Yiddish storefronts. But beneath it all was another world—gangsters, madams, racketeers, and street enforcers, some of whom claimed to protect their own even as they preyed on them.
Head to link in bio to explore Allan Levine’s series on the other, sometimes-gory history of New York City’s immigrant neighborhood and the not-so-nice Jews who inhabited it.
As American Jewish communities invest more in security than ever before, the result may not be strength, but a growing sense of fear and dependency, Liel Leibovitz argues in his latest column. Jews must stop being dependent on others for our safety.
Leibovitz isn’t arguing against protecting Jewish institutions, but against outsourcing that responsibility. When Jewish life becomes “well-fortified bunkers,” it risks teaching us to associate our identity “with anxiety, with insecurity,” rather than confidence, freedom and independence, the very promise Zionism was meant to fulfill.
We’re left asking: At what point does protection start to erode the very confidence it’s meant to preserve? How can we change our relationship to security? How can we protect *ourselves*?
Do you agree? Head to link in bio to read the full piece.
