Robert Redford won a major acting award for a performance with almost no dialogue.

The entire movie contains only twenty words.

In an hour and forty-five minutes.

How is that even possible? And what does it reveal about the real language humans - and every other intelligent social animal - actually relied on for millions of years?

In the riveting 2013 movie All Is Lost, Robert Redford plays a captain alone on his sailboat trying to stay afloat after it’s been struck by another vessel. It was a physically demanding role for the seventy-seven-year-old, and his compelling work earned him the New York Film Critics Circle award for best actor.

So far that sounds pretty unremarkable. A devastatingly handsome, Academy Award-nominated veteran actor wins yet another award for acting. Yawn.

But that movie wasn’t like your typical movie. And Redford’s acting requirements weren’t quite, uhm, normal. Usually we imagine how difficult it is for actors to memorize all those lines. Well, in this case, Redford basically didn’t have any lines. In fact, the entire movie contained only twenty words. Total. In the entire hour and forty-five minutes. Yet he still won an acting award!

That is weird.

A movie without words is indeed a rare novelty. When such modern movies are made, many are modeled after old-fashioned silent films (ones where we can see, but not hear, the characters talking), are about a deaf character (who is usually signing), or feature animals for their leads. All Is Lost doesn’t fall into any of these categories.

As weird as this movie is, it’s great for inspiring some thought experiments about how real life is even more weird. While a movie without dialogue is very rare - and usually carries an extremely limited market appeal - up until relatively recently humans lived without dialogue altogether.

We don’t know exactly when we gained language skills. Estimates are in the ballpark of hundreds of thousands of years ago. Prior to that, while humans were basically identical to today, biologically, they spoke nary a peep. We were ready for language, but in lingo limbo.

Sit back and let that sink in. Imagine going even one whole day among your family and friends with no one speaking. (It would be wonderful, yes?!) Of course, that would mean no texting or writing of any kind either. You still have to prepare a lasagna, though. So you need your spouse to run to the store to grab ground beef and tomato sauce. You need to get your son to chop the onions (because he’s the one with cry-proof contact lenses) and find the pasta you accidentally left in the wrong place in the scary part of the basement. And you need to talk on the phone to your mom about grandma’s recipe, which is what makes the lasagna worth doing. Going even one day without language feels almost unimaginable. So, visualize a week of that. Imagine one month. A whole year. An entire life!

And it’s not just us humans who, before the advent of language, dealt with the deafening silence. Our prehuman ancestors and our hominid cousins were basically like us - similarly toiling through their lives… wordlessly.

The more you think about this, the more difficult it might be to imagine. Nearly the entire history of our human lineage is one long movie without dialogue. Borrrrring!!

Words are the newcomer. Emotional expression was our original language - an ancient, richly structured signaling system that let intelligent social creatures negotiate conflict, cooperate, reconcile, threaten, reassure, deceive, forgive, and bond long before anyone uttered a sentence.

Expressly Human develops a unified theory explaining why our expressions have the precise forms they do, how they evolved, and why they’re still the language we rely on most today, even if we rarely notice we’re speaking it.

(This was an adapted excerpt from Expressly Human.)

I’m in Cartagena, staying at the Hotel Charleston Santa Teresa, and I’m still astounded by how far ahead the Spanish already were in what is now Colombia while the future United States was still barely a glint in history’s eye.

The building that is now this hotel began as a Carmelite convent. Its founding act was signed in 1609. By then, Cartagena had already been a functioning Spanish city for 76 years—founded in 1533 as a major Caribbean port, with walls, churches, trade, and enough accumulated wealth to support a new religious house.

Meanwhile, in 1609, on the other side of the continent that would one day become the United States, the English had managed exactly one permanent settlement: Jamestown. It was two years old, staggering into the Starving Time, and about to lose most of its people to hunger, disease, and desperation. There were no other English towns. Plymouth was still eleven years away. The very idea of a lasting English colonial society remained mostly theoretical.

So while Cartagena was founding convents, the English experiment in North America was still trying not to die.

The gap is almost comic.

We had a nice little run in which politics seemed to be about something other than free markets versus socialism. Pandemics. Trans ideology. Censorship. Jihadism. The Woke Right. Jew-hatred. For a while, it almost seemed as though freedom had won the economic argument. Socialism had collapsed across much of the world, while appreciation grew for the staggering productive power of decentralized economies.

But we will never truly win.

Free markets are astoundingly complex — exactly the kind of decentralized, emergent system the human mind is terrible at understanding. Every ordinary intuition tells us that if we want a society in which people get the things they need, someone must design it. Someone must organize production, allocate resources, set priorities and make sure the whole thing works.

Government.

And on its face, that sounds perfectly reasonable. The truth — that the design emerges without a designer, that order arises without central direction, and that no one even needs to understand the whole system for it to work — sounds almost ridiculous. Surely there must be someone in charge.

So people fall into a kind of conspiracy theory. Not the usual right-wing variety, populated by evil plotters with absurd powers, but its benevolent mirror image: wise clerics who can organize the world for the common good.

Human groups do not merely fail to understand free markets. They often do not want to understand them. They want somewhere to channel their good intentions. They want visible moral authorship. They want to be able to say that their compassion, their movement and their policies produced the good.

But in a free market, no one gets to claim responsibility for the miracles. No committee created the abundance. No movement delivered it. No clerisy forged prosperity across the land. It emerged from millions of people pursuing their own plans, trading, adapting and correcting one another without central command.

That is economically miraculous — and politically intolerable to anyone who wants to rule.

So no, the defenders of freedom — free speech, free markets and the rest — have not won. We never will. Every generation must fight the argument again, because every generation is born with the same instincts: distrust the spontaneous, trust the planner, and hand power to the people promising to do good.

Mamdani has slingshotted us straight back into the old socialism-versus-free-markets battle. It is a slap in the face. Good. Let it wake us up.

The argument is not over. It will never be over.

So get locked and loaded. Sharpen the case. Learn the history. Explain the miracle. Expose the clerisy.

There is another generation waiting to be taught what freedom is — and what happens when people surrender it.

The common assumption is that, once Muslims are free to vote, they naturally elect Islamists. But that is not what we generally see. In Muslim-majority countries with genuinely competitive elections, governments usually remain nationalist, pluralist, or relatively secular, even when Islamic parties participate. Indonesia and Senegal are examples.

Across a Muslim world of roughly 2 billion people, only a handful of regimes openly justify their rule in hardline Islamist terms: Afghanistan under the Taliban, Iran, and, if we include it, Hamas-ruled Gaza. And these are brutal dictatorships—the farthest thing from democratic expressions of Muslim public opinion. Islamists maintain power by crushing elections, opposition, dissent, and individual freedom: not because Muslim populations freely choose them, but in spite of what those populations want.

And yet NYC leftists just voted for Mamdani. Apparently even Westerners, when given the vote, can choose an Islamist.

Not biologically. Socially.

You had one reputation, one career, one community, one public identity. If you wanted to reinvent yourself, you usually had to burn the old one down.

Then social media quietly changed one of the deepest constraints on human creativity.

It gave ordinary people multiple parallel lives.

No, not in the psychological sense. In the evolutionary sense.

One person can now simultaneously be a scientist, a filmmaker, a local journalist, a startup founder, a political commentator, and an expert on medieval maps—each with its own audience, reputation, collaborators, and opportunities. Most of these parallel lives fail. A few flourish.

I suspect this ability to run multiple public experiments at once may prove to be one of social media’s most important—and least appreciated—contributions.

People who don’t spend much time online often see social media as little more than narcissism at scale: billions of people posting photos, opinions, and videos in the hope that strangers might pay attention.

They’re not entirely wrong. But they’re also missing something.

With billions of people now participating across X, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Substack, podcasts, Discord servers, and countless niche communities, something genuinely new has emerged. Most commentary focuses on the obvious candidates: unprecedented interconnectedness, information moving at lightning speed, global collaborations, algorithmic feeds, and the creator economy.

But after spending years immersed in this world, I came to think that one of social media’s most important innovations has received remarkably little attention.

It lets us conduct multiple lives in public.

The title of this essay calls them “multiple personalities,” but that’s really just a metaphor. What I mean is that a single person can now cultivate several distinct public identities, each living in its own community.

One person might simultaneously run a science channel on YouTube, a startup newsletter on Substack, a local news account on Instagram, a political account on X, and an anonymous account devoted to an obscure hobby. Each develops its own audience, reputation, collaborators, and opportunities. Some quietly disappear. Others unexpectedly flourish.

When I first noticed this, I found it vaguely unsettling. “Figure out who you are and stick with it,” was my instinctive reaction.

Over time, however, I found myself changing my mind.

The reason is that this isn’t really a story about social media at all. It’s another example of a much deeper principle.

One of the recurring themes across biology, science, markets, and culture is that progress comes from variation followed by selection. Evolution produces countless mutations and natural selection preserves the few that work. Markets generate thousands of startups, knowing that almost all will fail. Scientific communities pursue many competing hypotheses, expecting most to be wrong.

The same algorithm keeps reappearing.

Progress depends upon running many experiments.

For most of history, each person effectively got one public experiment. You pursued one profession, developed one reputation, and belonged to a relatively small number of communities. If you wanted to try something radically different, the costs were often prohibitive. You risked the reputation you had already spent years building.

Social media changed the economics of that gamble.

Instead of placing one enormous bet on a single public identity, we can place several smaller bets. Each identity explores a different intellectual ecosystem. Each finds a different audience. Each competes under different selection pressures.

Of course there are limits. Spread yourself across twenty identities and each receives too little attention to thrive. But a handful of well-maintained identities can substantially increase the probability that one of them finds fertile ground.

The important change is that one person can now run several creative experiments at once.

A scientist can also become a writer. A fitness coach can try making films. An entrepreneur can build a local news channel. Someone fascinated by medieval maps or octopus behavior can discover thousands of people who share the obsession. None of these experiments requires abandoning the others.

Most won’t amount to much.

That’s exactly what we’d expect. Evolution works because most mutations fail. Markets work because most startups fail. Science advances because most ideas fail. Exploration is inherently wasteful—and that’s what makes it so productive.

Seen this way, social media is much more than a communication technology. It lowers the cost of creative experimentation.

People become willing to try things they otherwise would never have attempted because failure no longer means sacrificing everything they’ve already built. If one experiment fizzles, the others continue.

The result is a society running vastly more experiments than ever before.

More ideas are tested. More communities form around unlikely interests. More collaborations emerge. Every so often, one of those experiments changes a person’s life.

Perhaps one day we’ll look back and conclude that this—not the influencers, not the memes, not the endless scrolling—was social media’s greatest contribution.

It allowed millions of ordinary people to explore several possible versions of themselves instead of just one.

And whenever evolution gets to run more experiments, remarkable things tend to happen.

Large language models give us something notebooks never could: a notebook that talks back.

When you sit down to write a careful prompt — spelling out your half-formed theory, your stuck project, or your tangled dilemma — you’re performing the same cognitive labor as journaling.

The difference is that now, instead of a blank page, you get a response that reflects your ideas back to you, often cleaner, better organized, and slightly reframed. In many cases the real advance in understanding happens during the prompting itself, long before the model replies.

Most people think color blindness is about mixing up reds and greens.

They have no idea it’s actually making them health-blind.

We tend to imagine color vision evolved to help us identify objects: ripe fruit, colorful flowers, traffic lights.

But that’s probably not what it’s mainly for.

In 2006, my colleagues and I discovered that primate red-green color vision appears specially tuned to detect oxygenation changes in blood beneath the skin. Human skin is a living display, continuously broadcasting information about health, emotion, fatigue, stress, attraction, embarrassment, illness, and countless other physiological states.

In other words, color vision isn’t mainly about seeing colors.

It’s about seeing people.

That realization completely changes how we should think about color deficiency.

It’s not merely a quirky inconvenience in distinguishing certain hues. It’s a reduced ability to perceive some of the very information color vision evolved to detect.

Color-deficient individuals have long reported difficulty seeing veins, pallor, cyanosis, jaundice, bruising, erythema, inflammation, and other medically important skin signals. Even John Dalton, the scientist after whom color blindness is named, famously remarked that he could scarcely distinguish mud from blood.

This matters in medicine, of course. Clinicians rely on skin color every day, often without realizing it. But the implications go far beyond hospitals and clinics.

Every day, all of us unconsciously read subtle color changes in the faces of the people around us. We notice when someone is embarrassed. Angry. Flushed. Sick. Exhausted. Stressed. Much of that information is carried by blood beneath the skin.

If you’re color deficient, some of those signals are simply harder to see.

Most color vision technologies are designed to help people distinguish colors.

That’s useful.

But it raises a deeper question:

What is color vision actually for?

Vino Optics is the only color vision technology built around the scientific discovery that human color vision appears specialized for perceiving oxygenation-related signals beneath the skin.

Our optical filters aren’t designed merely to make colors look different. They’re designed to enhance access to information that is already present in natural skin coloration.

Not just helping people see more colors.

Helping people see more of what color vision evolved to see.

Most people think color blindness means missing colors.

The deeper problem is missing some of the information those colors evolved to convey.

And that information is written all over the people around us.

One of the strangest discoveries I ever made is that our forward-facing eyes are probably a relic of an ancient form of X-ray vision.

Not literally X-rays, of course.

But something almost as weird.

We’re taught that animals have forward-facing eyes because they’re predators.

Sounds plausible. Except almost all birds are predators. Most fish are predators. Countless hunters throughout nature have eyes on the sides of their heads.

And the mammals with the most forward-facing eyes aren’t lions or wolves.

They’re primates.

So I started wondering whether we’d been asking the wrong question.

Imagine you’re moving through a dense forest. Leaves and branches are constantly blocking your view. With side-facing eyes, if a leaf blocks something, it’s usually blocked for both eyes.

But with eyes closer together and aimed forward, each eye gets a slightly different view. A leaf that blocks an object in one eye may not block it in the other.

Your brain can combine those views and partially “see through” the clutter.

A kind of natural X-ray vision.

The really surprising prediction was that this benefit should grow the larger an animal becomes. As your eyes get farther apart relative to the diameter of leaves and twigs, the two eyes see increasingly different paths through the vegetation.

More opportunities to see around obstacles.

And that’s exactly the pattern I found.

Out in open habitats, animals tend to have side-facing eyes.

Inside forests, eyes become more forward-facing. And among forest dwellers, the larger species tend to have the most forward-facing eyes of all.

Not because they’re predators.

Because they’re trying to see through a visual jungle.

Ironically, if many of us were redesigned for modern life, we’d probably be better off with somewhat more side-facing eyes. We no longer spend our days navigating dense forests. Wider visual coverage would often be more useful.

But our eyes still carry the signature of the world that built us.

They aren’t primarily hunting eyes.

They’re forest eyes.

When people imagine traveling to the stars, they imagine better ships.

Bigger engines. Faster engines. Better shields. Better sensors.

The assumption is so natural that we rarely question it. Space is almost completely empty, so surely the challenge is simply building a vehicle capable of crossing that emptiness.

But what if that’s exactly backwards?

My colleague Dr. Tim Barber has emphasized a simple observation that turns our intuition on its head. Space is indeed extraordinarily empty. Yet as speeds rise, that emptiness becomes increasingly dangerous.

At everyday speeds, a dust grain is a dust grain. At a significant fraction of the speed of light, a dust grain is a bullet. At still higher speeds, a tiny grain can carry the energy of an explosive. The problem is not that space contains a lot of stuff. It is that the rare bits of stuff it does contain become catastrophically dangerous.

The usual response is to imagine better sensors. But Tim’s analysis suggests that sensing itself may become the dominant obstacle. To avoid collisions, a ship must illuminate an ever-larger volume of space farther and farther ahead, while also detecting increasingly tiny objects with enough warning to react. The power required for this grows extraordinarily rapidly. Depending on the assumptions, the sensing burden scales faster than the fifth power of velocity.

That scaling is brutal. Double the speed and the perception challenge grows by more than a factor of thirty. Increase speed by a factor of ten and the sensing challenge grows by more than one hundred thousand times.

The implication is startling. Even if propulsion were somehow solved, perception might not be. In fact, realistic estimates suggest that a self-contained ship attempting to detect and avoid all dangerous particles may encounter practical speed limits around 0.0003c if it is genuinely expected to survive the journey and arrive intact.

Whether that particular number ultimately proves correct is less important than the broader lesson. The obstacle may not be moving fast enough. The obstacle may be seeing far enough.

This suggests a surprising possibility.

Perhaps interstellar travel is not primarily a ship problem at all. Perhaps it is an infrastructure problem.

We resist this idea because space appears empty. Why would one need infrastructure in emptiness? Yet every transportation revolution in human history has eventually discovered the same lesson. The faster we move, the more intelligence migrates from the vehicle into the environment.

A person walking through wilderness carries all of the navigation burden. A horse does as well. Roads remove part of that burden. Railroads remove even more. A train succeeds because someone already surveyed the route, graded the terrain, laid the tracks, and maintained the corridor. The train itself becomes simpler because the environment has become smarter.

The standard science-fiction picture imagines starships as glorified horses: completely self-contained vehicles roaming freely through empty space. But perhaps the future looks more like railroads.

Imagine that before any human ship departs, countless robotic pathfinders are sent ahead. Most fail. Some succeed. Over time they establish the first interstellar railroad: a sparse but continuous chain of sensors, communication nodes, power sources, and hazard-clearing stations stretching between the stars.

Each station watches only a tiny region of space. Each knows the trajectory of approaching ships and can predict which objects may become dangerous. Most of the corridor is empty most of the time. But when a potentially hazardous object is identified, a station can act long before the ship arrives, nudging it slightly off course or otherwise ensuring it will not occupy the wrong place at the wrong time.

The remarkable thing is that very little mass actually needs to be moved. The total mass of dust occupying a narrow corridor several light-years long is surprisingly small. The challenge is not clearing vast quantities of material. The challenge is knowing where the dangerous particles are and having infrastructure already in place to deal with them.

The ship itself no longer needs godlike perception. The route provides the perception. The route has the eye.

At first glance, building such infrastructure sounds impossibly expensive. And it is. Sending sensors, power systems, communication nodes, and maintenance devices across interstellar distances would require an enormous investment of energy and time.

But that observation may be less devastating than it first appears.

Imagine asking in the early nineteenth century what it would cost to build a complete railroad from coast to coast. The answer would have been so staggering that it might have discouraged anyone from trying. Yet that is not how railroads were built.

First came trails. Then improved trails. Then dirt roads. Then local rail lines. Then connected rail networks. Each increment lowered the cost of the next increment.

Infrastructure is often self-amplifying.

Roads help build more roads. Railroads help build more railroads. Ports help build more ports. The very existence of infrastructure makes additional infrastructure cheaper to construct and maintain.

An interstellar railroad could evolve the same way. The first generation might consist of little more than navigation beacons. Later generations add sensors, power storage, maintenance drones, hazard-clearing systems, and traffic management. What begins as a fragile thread gradually becomes a robust transportation corridor.

The deepest irony is that the emptiness of space may be exactly what misleads us.

We look at the vast darkness between the stars and imagine a featureless void. But at sufficiently high speed, that seeming emptiness becomes a minefield. The danger does not come from there being a lot of material. It comes from there being just enough.

A civilization that wishes to travel slowly may need only ships.

A civilization that wishes to travel very fast may need tracks.

The first great breakthrough in interstellar travel may therefore not be a better engine. It may be the interstellar equivalent of a railroad tie.

For more than a century, science fiction has imagined that the road to the stars begins when we build a sufficiently advanced spacecraft. History suggests a different possibility. Again and again, transportation revolutions have depended less on vehicles than on infrastructure.

Perhaps the first civilization to routinely cross interstellar distances will not be the one that builds the fastest ship.

Perhaps it will be the one that lays the first tracks.

It’s worth pausing to examine what this theory actually requires.

No serious person disputes that Jewish communities, like every long-lived people, absorbed some outsiders over time. A local marries in. A convert joins. A family becomes Jewish generations ago and stays Jewish. Over centuries, this creates some genetic admixture. That’s normal.

Modern genetic studies confirm exactly this: Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Italian, Greek Romaniote, and other Jewish groups show varying degrees of mixture with surrounding populations. Expected. Uncontroversial.

But the anti-Semitic claim is far stronger. It insists European Jews were largely unrelated to ancient Israelites - that masses of Europeans converted en masse and essentially replaced the original population.

Think about how absurd that is.

For nearly two thousand years, being Jewish in Europe was one of the least appealing identities imaginable. Expulsions from England (1290), repeated expulsions from France, Spain (1492). Ghettos, quotas, forced conversions, pogroms, blood libels, and endless conspiracy theories about secret power and disloyalty.

And yet the theory asks us to believe that huge numbers of Europeans looked at this persecuted, restricted, and frequently massacred minority and said: “Sign me up.”

Even stranger: Judaism has never been a missionary faith. Unlike Christianity or Islam, it did not seek converts. Conversion was always possible but rarely encouraged. The process demands serious study, adoption of Jewish law and practice, vetting by a rabbinical court, and - for men - circumcision. Rabbis traditionally discourage prospective converts to test sincerity. It is not casual.

So the theory requires us to believe that, for centuries, Europeans in large numbers:

~ Voluntarily joined a despised, stigmatized group;

~ Adopted a non-proselytizing religion that wasn’t recruiting them;

~ Underwent a demanding, lifestyle-altering conversion process;

~ Did so in numbers massive enough to replace the existing Jewish population and erase its ancestry.

This becomes more ridiculous the longer you dwell on it.

Of course Jewish communities absorbed some outsiders. Every enduring people has. But the idea that millions of unrelated Europeans flooded in and transformed Jews into an entirely different people is one of the most implausible - and unintentionally comical - anti-Semitic fantasies ever invented.

The far simpler, evidence-backed explanation is the obvious one: Jews remained Jews. They mixed modestly with host populations, as all long-lived groups do. But they preserved historical and genetic continuity with earlier Jewish communities, who themselves maintained continuity with the people of ancient Judea.

Why does a thing require force to get moving?

Most people don’t even hear that as a question. Of course it does.

But that’s only because we’ve spent our entire lives pushing things around and developing intuitions about heavy objects.

The deeper you look, the stranger inertia becomes.

Inertial mass is the property that determines how much force is required to accelerate an object. Bigger mass, more “oomph” needed to change its motion.

At first glance, this seems utterly unmysterious. Of course heavy things resist being shoved — that’s one of our strongest everyday intuitions. We push furniture, throw balls, pedal bikes, and learn from infancy that motion demands effort.

Inertia can feel almost tautological: things resist acceleration because they have inertial mass, and inertial mass is defined as what resists acceleration.

But that familiarity hides the real mystery.

Modern physics dissolves the intuitive picture of “solid matter.” Thanks to mass-energy equivalence, inertia isn’t fundamentally about matter at all. It’s about energy.

In fact, even the inertia of ordinary matter is mostly not due to the masses of the particles making it up. The quarks inside a proton account for only a small fraction of the proton’s mass. Most of the proton’s inertia comes from the kinetic energy of the quarks and the energy stored in the gluon fields binding them together.

In other words, most of the inertia of the matter around you comes not from “stuff,” but from energy.

A weightless mirrored box filled with bouncing light has more inertial mass than the identical empty box.

A hot brick has slightly more inertial mass than the same brick when cold.

A compressed spring has slightly more inertial mass than the relaxed one.

No new matter added. Only energy.

What resists acceleration is not “stuff,” but total energy content — whether kinetic, thermal, potential, electromagnetic, or field energy. The universe treats all forms with remarkable indifference: if it adds to the system’s energy, it adds to its inertia.

And here the mystery returns, sharper:

Why should energy resist acceleration?

Why is a box full of trapped light harder to push than an empty one?

Why does heating an object make it (ever so slightly) more resistant to motion?

Why does the energy stored in gluon fields contribute to inertia in exactly the same way as the mass of an elementary particle?

Our equations describe how inertia works with extraordinary precision. But why localized energy couples to motion this way — why the universe extracts a tax on changing the state of energy — has no widely accepted deeper explanation.

Inertia remains one of the most familiar facts in nature … and one of the least understood.

The people of Israel didn’t suddenly appear in 1948. They were a nation and a people long before the modern concept of the nation-state even existed. Long before there was a Republic of France, a United Kingdom, or a United States, there was the people of Israel.

In fact, the Jewish people served as an inspiration even to America’s founders.

America’s early political culture was soaked in the Hebrew Bible. The Founders regularly compared the American colonies’ struggle against Britain to the Israelites’ escape from Egypt. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson even proposed a national seal depicting Moses and the crossing of the Red Sea. The idea of a free people governed by laws rather than kings resonated deeply with the republican ideals that helped shape the United States.

And the connection runs far deeper than America.

The Jews are not merely one people among many in Western history. They sit near the very foundation of the West itself. Christianity emerged directly from Judaism. Jesus was a Jew. His disciples were Jews. The earliest Christians were Jews. The Hebrew Bible became the Old Testament. For nearly two thousand years, the stories of Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, and Jerusalem have been among the central stories of Western civilization.

The moral vocabulary of the West — law, justice, covenant, human dignity, and moral accountability — owes an enormous debt to traditions that originated among the Jewish people and were carried throughout Christendom.

Which is why the modern obsession with portraying the Jews as foreign interlopers in the West is so strange. The Jews are not outsiders to Western civilization. They are one of the peoples from whom it emerged.

One of the biggest misunderstandings about attraction is the belief that men’s attraction to women is mostly about thinness.

It’s not.

Thinness matters. But thinness often arrives bundled together with a whole collection of other traits people find attractive: toned muscles, firm skin, energy, vitality, health, and the general appearance of youth.

The mistake is assuming thinness is doing all the work.

A 23-year-old woman who is thin is generally considered attractive by most men. But she doesn’t merely look thin. She also looks youthful. She doesn’t need to spend hours in the gym to appear toned, vibrant, and energetic because youth itself provides many of those qualities for free.

Not so for a young man. Men quickly learn that being merely thin isn’t enough. Women tend to find athletic men more attractive, so men are pushed toward exercise from an early age.

Fast forward twenty years.

Many women are surprised when the attention they once received begins to fade. They may still be thin, but some of the markers of youth are no longer there. Arms begin to soften, cellulite appears, skin loses some of its glow, and overall vitality diminishes.

But it was never just about being thin.

It was about looking youthful.

At 23, a woman is toned and radiant largely because she is young. Youth itself does much of the work.

Meanwhile, because men were taught that attractiveness requires effort, many continue exercising for decades. By their forties, they are often not merely thin, but muscular, energetic, and retaining many of the visual cues associated with youth.

Why are men disproportionately attracted to younger women?

Yes, evolution plays a role. Reproductive potential matters. But we’re not attracted to age itself. We’re attracted to the visual and behavioral cues that correlate with youth.

The irony is that modern culture strongly encourages men to maintain those cues through exercise and fitness.

But it often encourages women to believe that staying thin is enough.

Then, years later, we complain that society treats aging differently in men and women, without acknowledging that men and women have been receiving very different messages about maintaining youthfulness all along.

Perhaps some of the asymmetry isn’t that men age better than women.

Perhaps it’s that men were trained to work at it, while women were taught that they wouldn’t need to.

Egypt is for Egyptians. Iran for Iranians. Turkey for Turks. China for the Chinese. The Netherlands for the Dutch. Russia for Russians.

Nobody calls these “Egyptism,” “Iranism,” “Turkism,” or “Dutchism.” They’re just peoples with homelands.

But when it comes to the Jewish people having a homeland in Judea, suddenly it gets a special name — Zionism — and then people spend decades loading that word up with all sorts of baggage having little to do with the basic idea itself.

So drop the term.

There is no Zionism, just as there is no Egyptism or Turkism.

There is simply the Jewish homeland.

Israel — Judea — is the homeland of the Jewish people. It has been continuously their homeland for over 3,000 years. That’s where Jews originated. That’s where Jewish civilization emerged. That’s where the Hebrew language, Jewish culture, Jewish religion, and Jewish identity took shape.

Empires came and went. Conquerors came and went. Jews were dispersed, persecuted, expelled, and murdered. But the connection never broke, and neither did the continuous Jewish presence in the land.

And like virtually every nation on Earth, Israel is not inhabited by only one people. Roughly 20% of its citizens are Arab Muslims, along with Christians, Druze, Bedouins, and others.

The strange thing isn’t that the Jewish people have a homeland.

The strange thing is that people insist on giving that one fact a special name, and then acting as if the name itself proves there’s something sinister about it.

I’ve found myself surprisingly flat-footed trying to make sense of Trump’s behavior regarding the Islamic Republic.

Not because I think he’s playing some secret 5D chess game. And not because I think he’s crazy, evil, selfish, TACO, only cares about oil, doesn’t care about Iranians, or any of the other cartoon explanations people reach for. Those explanations all feel too easy.

The funny thing about the “5D chess” meme is that it gives chess masters way too much credit.

Actual grandmasters don’t play that way. They don’t sit down with some elaborate plan where move 4 is setting up move 17, which is setting up move 38, which eventually wins the game. That would fail almost immediately because the opponent gets a vote. The board changes. Unexpected opportunities appear. Unexpected threats appear.

What great players bring instead is a collection of intuitions. Control the center. Improve piece activity. Preserve initiative. Keep the king safe. Create threats that force responses. Avoid unnecessary weaknesses. Maintain flexibility. And they don’t have a single objective, either. They’d like their king safe, their queen active, their pawns healthy, their opponent constrained, and their tactical opportunities increasing. None of those is “the plan.” They’re simply things you’d generally like moving in the right direction.

Poker is the same way. Business is the same way. Science is the same way. And foreign policy is vastly more complicated than any of them because now there are not one or two opponents, but dozens. Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Europe, Russia, China, domestic voters, military institutions, energy markets, political allies, political opponents. Each move is simultaneously observed by multiple audiences, and each signal may be intended for several recipients at once. It’s remarkably easy for outsiders to misidentify who the signal is actually for. A raise in one poker game may look irrational until you realize it was directed at a different player sitting at a different table.

That’s part of why I’m reluctant to embrace either the “5D chess” interpretation or the “Trump suddenly forgot everything he knows” interpretation.

Trump has repeatedly distinguished between the Iranian people and the regime. He has repeatedly spoken about the impossibility of trusting the regime. His administration restored “maximum pressure” on Iran, explicitly aimed at denying Iran a nuclear weapon, countering its regional influence, and neutralizing its terrorist network.

And that’s what makes some of the recent signaling difficult for me to parse.

Does anyone seriously think Trump believes someone like Ghalibaf has had a genuine change of heart? That he suddenly sees IRGC leadership as trustworthy? That these people are going to transform Iran into a normal nation, dismantle their proxy networks, stop exporting instability, and open the door to political freedom?

Likewise, Trump surely understands Hezbollah, Israel, deterrence, and the reality that Israel cannot indefinitely absorb attacks and simply grin and bear them. He surely understands that perceptions of weakness matter. In fact, few modern politicians have spent more time thinking about reputation, leverage, threats, humiliation, bargaining position, and the public projection of strength.

So when I hear statements that seem inconsistent with those realities, I don’t immediately conclude that Trump suddenly forgot everything he knows. Nor do I conclude that every move is secretly part of some brilliant hidden design.

The more plausible hypothesis is that he’s what he’s always appeared to be: a messy pragmatic strategist. Not a master planner. Just a strategist trying to move a bunch of variables in favorable directions at the same time. Maybe those include preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon, avoiding a major American war, keeping oil markets reasonably stable, continuing the integration of Arab states into a regional order that increasingly includes Israel, maintaining pressure on the regime, preserving American leverage, keeping military options available, avoiding irreversible commitments, and reducing the chances of a wider regional escalation.

The problem is that no single move advances all of those objectives simultaneously. Sometimes they reinforce one another; sometimes they conflict. Sometimes a signal that looks weak to one audience is intended for another. Sometimes what sounds conciliatory is really about preserving future options. Sometimes what appears aimed at Tehran is actually aimed at Riyadh, Beijing, Brussels, Jerusalem, or domestic voters. And from the outside we often don’t even know which poker table a particular raise was intended for.

Trump may be wrong. He may fail. He has failed before. But the most plausible interpretation isn’t that every move is part of some master plan, nor that every move is random. It’s that he’s navigating an insanely complicated landscape with a bundle of instincts, priorities, threats, opportunities, reputational considerations, and constraints, and trying to keep more of them moving in the right direction than the wrong direction.

That’s a lot less exciting than 5D chess.

But it’s also a lot closer to how actual strategy works.

Wrinkles? Pin it down.

Sagging? Pull it tighter.

Texture? Sand it smooth.

Discoloration? Repaint it.

But skin isn’t upholstery. It’s a living organ.

This Science Moment may completely change how you think about aging, beauty, exercise, and what actually creates youthful skin.

Do LLMs think?

https://youtube.com/shorts/tTQvS4HhH2I?feature=share

Are LLMs conscious?

https://youtube.com/shorts/Z_Qbfh2m6Ps?feature=share