The Vibes Are Only Minimally Maculate

Edited by Sam Thielman

SO THIS WEEK I drafted a nearly 7,000-word chapter of THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN that has the power to end my career in journalism. 

This is a difficult and often uncomfortable book to report and write. It's going to be a difficult and uncomfortable book to read. This chapter, Chapter 16, is not the most gruesome chapter of the book. The discomfort it will produce stems from the challenge it poses to the understanding of several people who have been the subject of much public discussion since 9/11. While the demonization of some of these people isn't exactly undeserved, it turns out there is much more to their stories, as there is to each and every one of us. Like I said: uncomfortable.

I might not be hireable or commissionable after this is published next year. We sure will find out. If that's it for me in this business, I will have no regrets. I beat the game already. And the purpose of accruing respectability over all these years was to cash it all out for work like REIGN and like this. I wish we had a pre-order link for you already! 

So I don't have any journalism of my own to share with you in today's edition. Instead, check out my brand-new appearance on Un-Diplomatic, my friend and comrade Van Jackson’s podcast. His path from Obama-era Pentagon policy wonk to one of the most trenchant critics of the "national security" consensus is inspiring to me. Van lets me cover a lot of ground, from Zohran Mamdani’s primary win to the unfinished Iran War and beyond. This is what it's like to talk to me in person, down to how thoroughly stumped I routinely am by the question, "How are you?"

Today I'll be doing a couple interviews, revising my 16th chapter of TT&DoMK, and so forth, so this is going to be a showcase for other people's writing that I've been into lately. 

FIRST, you want to read the most Sam Thielman paragraph of all time? This is from Sam's excellent, just-published review-essay of a graphic-novel Caravaggio biography by "Italian sex-comics genius" Milo Manara: 

In Caravaggio, Manara has an especially appropriate subject for his attentions: a horny scoundrel who painted some of the most transcendently beautiful images of Christian faith ever made. (He often tried to use them as bribes to stay out of prison.)

Read it at The New York Times. [I made it a gift link. This one is fun!—Sam]

SECOND is the report so real it got U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese sanctioned by the Trump administration. Albanese went after the corporations profiting from the Israel genocide, ethnic cleansing and settlement of Palestine. You can pick out a million quotes but these two paragraphs speak to core preoccupations of FOREVER WARS:

36. The Israeli military has developed AI systems like “Lavender”, “Gospel” and “Where’s Daddy?” to process data and generate lists of targets,[106] reshaping modern warfare and illustrating AI’s dual-use nature. Palantir Technology Inc., whose tech collaboration with Israel long predates October 2023, expanded its support to the Israeli military post-October 2023.[107] There are reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision-making.[108] In January 2024, Palantir announced a new strategic partnership with Israel and held a board meeting in Tel Aviv “in solidarity”;[109] in April 2025, Palantir’s CEO responded to accusations that Palantir had killed Palestinians in Gaza by saying, “mostly terrorists, that’s true”.[110] Both incidents are indicative of executive-level knowledge and purpose vis-à-vis Israel’s unlawful use of force, and failure to prevent such acts or withdraw involvement.[111]

37. Israel as “Start-up Nation”, incentivized by the post-9/11 global securitization boom, has received a significant boost through the genocide. It ranked first globally for the number of start-ups per capita, with a 143 per cent growth in military tech start-ups in 2024, and with tech comprising 64 per cent of Israeli exports throughout the genocide.[112]

 Read it at the United Nations. 

THIRD is one of the most important pieces of journalism of the Second Trump Administration. Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox have discovered a list of people the United States disappeared. 

In addition to the names of people who were on the list CBS News published, the GlobalX flight manifests contain the names of dozens of people who were supposedly on the flights but whose status and existence has not been acknowledged by the U.S. government or previously reported in the press. 

“We have this list of people that the U.S. government has not formally acknowledged in any real way and we pretty much have no idea if they are in CECOT or someplace else, or whether they received due process,” Michelle Brané, executive director of Together and Free, a group that has been working with families of deported people, told 404 Media. “I think this further demonstrates the callousness and lack of due process involved and is further evidence that the US government is disappearing people. These people were detained and no one knows where they are, and we don't know the circumstances […] For almost all of these people, there’s no records whatsoever. No court records, nothing.” 

This is journalism at its finest and most on-mission. Read it at 404 Media. 

FOURTH is Tini Howard, one of my favorite contemporary comics writers, on Argylle, a film I haven't seen and now kind of want to, just on the strength of Tini's evisceration: 

Argylle is industrialized, bloodless murder. The way the meat industry doesn’t want us to see blood and bones in our packages lest they turn our stomachs, this movie has done the same. Argylle is the factory-farmed meat of movies - the blood is mopped away before consumption. The pain is entirely removed. But while meat gets warm and attracts flies, this movie doesn’t have enough of an organic stink for that.

Read it at The Scorpio Room. 

FIFTH is a book I haven't read but am getting for my kids. It's my friend Molly Crabapple's biography of the Mughal Empress Nur Jahan, Tiger Slayer, written with Ruby Lal. The word genius gets thrown around too loosely—and to be honest, I support that, since we should recognize the genius in more places than in the cossetted, elite venues where it typically gets identified—but it fits Molly to a T. Her forthcoming book about the Bund is my most anticipated book of whatever year it comes out. 

OK, THAT'S ENOUGH for this week. I have to do an interview in literally five minutes. Sunday will see the fourth anniversary of this newsletter's launch. I'm so grateful for all of you who have, improbably, kept this depressing, bleak endeavor growing, especially when my next book is published and no one wants to work with me anymore. Then, on Wednesday, my final issue of IRON MAN is published, so you know I'll be processing a lot of feelings about that here—for subscribers only, however. Let's make sure that's you.