As the Middle East braces for another year of extreme heat, climate change is turning the soil to dust in the landscape that has long been known as the fertile crescent — and water has become a new source of conflict.
Alissa J. Rubin, who covers the Middle East, tells the story of Iraq’s water crisis and what it means for the world.
Guest: Alissa J. Rubin, a senior Middle East correspondent for The New York Times.
Background reading:
From 2023: A climate warning from the cradle of civilization.
Features reporter Ariana Bindman visits SF’s depressing new locale in this column
Sam Altman’s new human verification system, the Orb, was put to the test in downtown San Francisco on May 1, 2025. Ariana Bindman/SFGATE
It’s a cool Thursday morning in downtown San Francisco, and I’m walking up Powell Street through a once-familiar-looking Union Square.
As I stroll past the bones of retail giants, “For Lease” signs mark abandoned storefronts like lurid headstones. I see the empty Uniqlo, H&M and Forever21, along with a vacant Walgreens and the former Diesel outpost, which looms over Market Street like a pillaged kingdom. Overall, the neighborhood feels less like an economic epicenter and more like a consumerist graveyard.
But among these depressing corporate relics is an unusual and perhaps welcome sight: groups of stylish young people with mullets, micro-tattoos and designer clothes hobnobbing inside a new, sleek retail space on Geary Street. From a distance, it’s unclear what, exactly, it’s supposed to be, or what types of products it intends to sell.
Inside, EDM blasts from a coffee cart while baristas pour oat milk lattes and flat whites. In front of them is a wooden, cage-like structure lined with mysterious-looking white spheres. But this isn’t a modern art gallery opening or a new Mac store: hordes of tech enthusiasts and local news crews are here to celebrate the unveiling of Sam Altman’s new — and dystopian — “proof of human” technology, also known as the Orb.
Some Trump administration officials are stockpiling toilet paper and food before Trump’s tariffs cause prices to skyrocket
Donald Trump’s trade wars with China and other nations are widely expected to cause sharp economic pain, but some experts have warned consumers not to hoard supplies and goods before prices skyrocket, arguing that mass stockpiling could backfire spectacularly.
Well, many Americans aren’t listening to that advice, according to survey data this year, instead preparing for the possibility of store shelves being bare amid a Trump-inflicted recession. Funnily enough, this includes a number of government officials and staffers working directly for the man who launched these massive new trade wars, all on the grounds of bad tariff math and the flimsy premise that he would bring economic “liberation” to America and make the country “wealthy again.”
Two Trump administration officials and a Trump aide tell Rolling Stone that they have done some stockpiling of their own in recent weeks or months, and that they know others working in Republican politics — inside and outside of the administration — who are doing the same. One of the Trump officials says they have already run to Target to bulk-buy toilet paper, some types of food, and other household supplies.
I read this when it came out in 2011, while we were still thinking about Occupy and 2008. Here we are in 2025, and it is still relevant. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor.
A packet of hand-scrawled letters found in a stranger’s backpack tells of self-sufficient communities growing from the ruins of California’s housing collapse and the global recession. In unfinished Mojave Desert housing tracts and foreclosure ghost towns on the raw edges of the chaotic cities of the West, people have gathered to grow their own food, school their own children and learn how to live without the poisons of gossip, greed, television, mobile phones and the Internet. Encouraged by an enigmatic wanderer known only as “B,” the communities thrive as more families and workers are discarded by an indifferent system. But this quiet revolution and its simple rituals cannot stay unnoticed for long, because the teachings of “B” threaten an entire structure of power and wealth dependent upon people toiling their lives away to buy things they don’t need.
“But to understand the social mood as embodied by a group like Occupy, it may help to look at literature that captures its zeitgeist. One of the books that seems to have become a standard bearer for the Occupy movement is Ken Layne’s ‘Dignity.’ In a book that can only be described as a series of modern-day letters on the gospel of communal simplicity, you can see what kind of world some of the Occupiers might envision: communities occupying vacant suburban or exurban subdivisions, farming the land themselves, bartering with doctors and the like, and shunning modern technology.” — Minyanville.com
“… President Trump could soon have the tools to satisfy his many grievances by swiftly locating compromising information about his political opponents or anyone who simply annoys him. The administration has already declared that it plans to comb through tax records to find the addresses of immigrants it is investigating — a plan so morally and legally challenged, it prompted several top I.R.S. officials to quit in protest. Some federal workers have been told that DOGE is using artificial intelligence to sift through their communications to identify people who harbor anti-Musk or -Trump sentiment (and presumably punish or fire them).
What this amounts to is a stunningly fast reversal of our long history of siloing government data to prevent its misuse. In their first 100 days, Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump have knocked down the barriers that were intended to prevent them from creating dossiers on every U.S. resident. Now they seem to be building a defining feature of many authoritarian regimes: comprehensive files on everyone so they can punish those who protest.
“This is what we were always scared of,” said Kevin Bankston, a longtime civil liberties lawyer and a senior adviser on A.I. governance at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a policy and civil rights organization. “The infrastructure for turnkey totalitarianism is there for an administration willing to break the law.”
Over the past 100 days, DOGE teams have grabbed personal data about U.S. residents from dozens of federal databases and are reportedly merging it all into a master database at the Department of Homeland Security. This month House Democratic lawmakers reported that a whistle-blower had come forward to reveal that the master database will combine data from such federal agencies as the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Health and Human Services. The whistle-blower also alleged that DOGE workers are filling backpacks with multiple laptops, each one loaded with purloined agency data…”
And if you can’t get to the NYT article due to the paywall, here’s a PDF of the NYT article.
To understand the deepening divide between AI boosters and doomers, it’s necessary to unpack their common origins in a bundle of ideologies known as TESCREAL.
Liberals in the US make up about 15% of the prepping scene and their numbers are growing. Their fears differ from their better-known rightwing counterparts – as do their methods
One afternoon in February, hoping to survive the apocalypse or at least avoid finding myself among its earliest victims, I logged on to an online course entitled Ruggedize Your Life: The Basics.
Some of my classmates had activated their cameras. I scrolled through the little windows, noting the alarmed faces, downcast in cold laptop light. There were dozens of us on the call, including a geophysicist, an actor, a retired financial adviser and a civil engineer. We all looked worried, and rightly so. The issue formerly known as climate change was now a polycrisiscalled climate collapse. H1N1 was busily jumping from birds to cows to people. And with each passing day, as Donald Trump went about gleefully dismantling state capacity, the promise of a competent government response to the next hurricane, wildfire, flood, pandemic, drought, mudslide, heatwave, financial meltdown, hailstorm or other calamity receded further from view.
On Monday, police arrested Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old app developer, in connection with the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Online reaction to his apprehension reveals a new form of fandom.
Luigi Mangione, currently the internet’s main character, probably isn’t who you think he is. Main characters are like that. As soon as someone achieves main character status, they become the screen onto which the world’s opinions and preconceptions get projected. Mangione, who was arrested Monday in connection with the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, fits that bill.
Violence among humans seems to be worst when it is institutionalized (as in a standing army). Then it becomes the basis of the society’s economy. It becomes self-perpetuating and self-justifying. In addition to the death and destruction it causes, it re-enforces a masculinist character among the people. This is not the violence I am talking about, but rather the hit-and-run spontaneous violence of autonomous anarchist collectives. Not against the general populace, but against those in control. Anarchist violence still kills, but is quite a different thing from the massive, scientifically planned objective violence of institutions like the Pentagon. It is more like the violence of a cornered animal defending itself. Still, those who kill defile themselves, and they must be prepared to accept the consequences of that defilement. But at this stage in the crisis of international industrialism, I see no effective alternative to revolutionary violence. And revolutionary violence is effective — that’s why the U.S. government is so uptight about it.
