What can Earth-sized exoplanets teach scientists about the formation and evolution of exoplanets throughout the cosmos? This is what a recently submitted study hopes to address as an international team of researchers announced the discovery of an Earth-sized exoplanet that exhibits temperatures and a density comparable to Earth. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of Earth-sized exoplanets and what this could mean for finding life beyond Earth.

A nexus of power.

Navin Chaddha, managing director of the 55-year-old Silicon Valley venture firm Mayfield, is betting big on AI’s ability to transform people-heavy industries like consulting, law, and accounting. The veteran investor, whose wins include Lyft, Poshmark, and HashiCorp, recently discussed at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC evening in Menlo Park why he believes “AI teammates” can create software-like margins […]

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Culture And Now We Present… Me! American superficiality is drawing on deep wells. The cover of my 1959 paperback edition of Erving Goffman’s classic Presentation of Self in Everyday Life sports a photo of what I believe to be Christine Jorgensen and two female impersonators. It’s impossible to know, of course, if the two other figures in the picture are merely transvestites or, like Jorgensen, underwent surgery to change their sex. You can be reasonably sure, in either case, that more recent editions of the book will not have any such covers.  And to be fair, in some regards, these days we’re all in drag. We’re encouraged to concoct an image of ourselves and how we want to “present” to the public. Each of us, especially as we advance in the world of work, must have a “personal brand.” These days branding “isn’t just for companies,” a “director of content strategy” at Northeastern University grad school tells us. Personal branding is now “an essential aspect of professional life.” MBA programs offer courses in how to develop your personal brand. The CEO of a consulting firm who suggests hiring a “personal branding professional” to help in this journey of self-discovery offers 5 C’s of personal branding. Another expert gives us 5 P’s. Yet another provides 5 A’s.  To develop your personal brand, you need to “figure out who you are,” which might take some effort. “Be introspective.” Ask yourself, “What motivates me?” Once you’ve answered such questions, you need to “believe in yourself,” or at least in this mental and social construct you have settled on. Only then can the rest of the world accept you for who you are, or at least for who you say you are.  What you choose to do with your life is, of course, wrapped up in who you have decided you are. And it’s only after you’ve settled on who you are and how you want others to see you that you can rise in the world of work. You must “follow your bliss,” as Joseph Campbell would say.   If all this begins to sound like the yoga instructor who says, “you be you,” this should come as no surprise. Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, published earlier this year by Harvard University Press, traces the connections between the “personal growth” and “self-help” ideologies, and what the author sees as their unholy alliance with American capitalism. Building on Goffman and others, author Erik Baker traces this “intellectual moonshine,” as Drew Calvert in Commonweal calls it, back to the New Thought movement of the Gilded Age. Then, in time, came Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, and Norman Vincent Peale, who performed one of Donald Trump’s weddings. It remains with us today, Calvert writes, in the form “of personal-growth seminars, advice podcasts, and the bright, encouraging schlock filling space in airport bookstores.” All of these help us “find ourselves.” A kind of Gnosticism seems to be operating here—this now deeply ingrained belief that we all have this real, yet hidden, “true self,” and the meaningful life is one of finding that “self” and embracing it. We have come to accept this as a matter of faith, and in a consumerist culture that prizes “choice” above almost everything else, we not only find this real self, we can also choose it—and the pronouns by which this real self is to be identified. It is no longer a matter of who we are but of who we “identify as.”  Or we can just fake it, gambling on where we think there is advantage to be gained. George W. Bush faked it, and not especially well. This child of wealth and position—grandson of a U.S. senator and son of a president—“had to decide to be a regular guy,” Thomas de Zengotita wrote in his 2005 book Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live In It. This was a “lifestyle option.” When W. played “his role as protector of the ‘Merican people,” he was performing, striking the postures of Texas manliness—the arms held out from his body, fist side forward, swinging as he strides, and all the rest. That was how he decided to distinguish himself from patrician Easterners back home, people among whom he failed so utterly to be otherwise distinguished, coasting through those intimidating schools, clowning…at the club.] Everybody does it, high and low, sons of Kennebunkport and the people who work on their cars. For those who actually have to get jobs, the self-help ideology that Baker describes constitutes “the rot festering at the core of” our economic system, requiring an unhealthy psychological investment in the work we do. And this ideology is no longer limited to our professional lives, if it ever was. Personal branding, for those with sufficient means, extends to all areas of our lives, including our gender. When, half a century ago, Rose and Milton Friedman told us we are Free to Choose, I’m not sure this was what they had in mind. The post And Now We Present… Me! appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs What Will Iran Do Next? There’s every reason to think Tehran will seek deescalation. Credit: NurPhoto/Getty Images The world now knows Trump’s initial play. But what of Iran’s next move? Here history suggests a course forward, which, if history is indeed our guide, says diplomacy is the endgame. What matters most to Iran is regime survival, and some form of diplomacy is the only path. Look back at the previous time the United States “bombed Iran,” the assassination on January 3, 2020 of Qasem Soleimani, the powerful Iranian major general and the head of the Quds Force, in a U.S. drone strike near Baghdad International Airport in Iraq. Soleimani was an almost mythical figure in Iran; when I visited there prior to his death, I saw his face painted on massive wall murals next to the religious leaders of the country. Soleimani was in charge of Iran’s overseas militia and terrorist operations, and directed the Shia resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq. He quite literally had American blood on his hands and, through his charisma and tactical skills, played a critical role in Iran’s regional reach. The U.S. killing him so overtly—like a mafia hit, everyone was intended to know who did it—was expected to set off a massive and global retaliation by Iran. President Trump, then in his first term, was accused of starting World War III (#WWIII was trending on Twitter) and kicking off a new cycle of violence against American forces in the region. Sleeper cells would be activated and a new front in the Iraq War was said to be imminent. Sound familiar? Instead, despite the rhetoric—Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei vowed “harsh revenge”—Iran’s response was tepid. A few days after the assassination, Iran launched “Operation Martyr Soleimani,” sending all of 16 missiles against U.S. bases in Iraq, including at Al-Asad airbase and Erbil. No Americans were killed. Sound familiar? Then-Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted that Iran had finished fighting and would not actively pursue further escalation. For his part, Trump launched no military counter-attack, although he spoke of further economic sanctions, and gestured at future agreements. Everyone called it quits. Because Iran is a semi-developed nation, unlike other locales for American adventures overseas, it can be effectively destroyed from the air, as the Israelis and U.S. have demonstrated. It suffers from a massive technological disadvantage in any conflict with the U.S., which will retaliate against any aggression. Trump’s America will take a punch to throw back two. Further, America is no longer dependent on Persian Gulf oil. There are threats by Tehran to close the Straits of Hormuz, but Iran needs the oil to flow more than the U.S. does. (By Washington’s current calculus, who cares about Europe’s and China’s needs?) Thanks to sanctions, Iran is almost totally dependent on oil exports, Tehran’s biggest source of external income. The oil industry’s massive infrastructure can be bombed, and most of it has so far been untouched by Israel and America. Iran’s military operates in large part out of fixed sites. It has a weak navy, and its bases are vulnerable to bombing and mining. The Iranian military is ranked globally below Indonesia. Iran knows it will never find itself in a fair fight, especially stripped as it is now of its nascent nuclear threat. That has changed everything. The Iranian government is a tense coalition of elected civilians, unelected military officials, and theocrats. The population under them is of two minds; it is happy to chant Death to America, but equally open to the idea of finding a way out from under sanctions that would open them to the world. Iran 2025 understands its limits. Despite more saber rattling—Iran’s Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh warned recently “all U.S. bases are within our reach and we will boldly target them”—Iran has endured many provocations without significant escalation: U.S. troops landing in-country in a failed hostage rescue in 1980, U.S. support for Iraq in the Iraq–Iran war, the U.S. killing some 300 innocents in a civilian aircraft in 1988, U.S. invading and occupying Iran’s eastern border during the Iraq War and its western approaches in the Afghan War. In 2003, in response to Iranian diplomatic overtures following the War on Terror’s initial American military successes, George W. Bush declared the country part of an “Axis of Evil.” In 2007, U.S. forces raided an Iranian diplomatic office in Iraq and arrested several staffers. The U.S. has maintained crippling sanctions for decades, helped execute the 2010 Stuxnet cyberattack that destroyed many Iranian nuclear centrifuges, and another 2019 cyberattack—not to mention whatever the Israelis have done covertly. Nothing led to a wider war. Soleimani died in this context. And look what it has not done so far in response to Israel dismantling its nuclear program piece by piece: no dirty bomb on Tel Aviv, no terror acts against Israel or the U.S. anywhere in the world, no known major cyber attacks, no activation of the Houthis to attack shipping in the Gulf, no proxy attacks against vulnerable American enclaves in Iraq. The lobbing of missiles into Israeli cities and Qatar is by no means inconsequential, but it is within the accepted (and expected) boundaries of tit-for-tat. No one could have expected Iran to do nothing and history would not support that. Limited retaliation is an expected part of the calculus of the Israeli and America strikes; the New York Times even reported that Iran “coordinated the attacks on the American air base in Qatar with Qatari officials and gave advanced notice that attacks were coming to minimize casualties.” What will happen next is probably up to Trump (and Israel). But what will happen after that is in Tehran’s hands. Their goal is regime survival first of all, some sort of modus vivendi with Israel and the West in second place. The decades-long strategy to match Israel as a regional nuclear power has failed. What was bombed once by Israel and the U.S. can be bombed again. History suggests Iran will absorb the next blow, and seek a diplomatic solution to assure its own survival. Washington seems to agree; “We’re not at war with Iran,” Vice President J.D. Vance said. “We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program.” This is a watershed moment in the modern history of the Middle East. The post What Will Iran Do Next? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Class and taste personified.