Who are you with? With Harari or with Henrich?

Joseph Heath critiques in this article the account of human evolution presented by Yuval Noah Harari in “Sapiens” for being unscientific and outdated. He contrasts it with the much more solid and current theory, according to him, of Joseph Henrich (“The Secret of Our Success”), which completely reverses the explanatory order.

Heath identifies four unique capacities that differentiate humans:

• Superior intelligence (including abstract and mathematical reasoning).
• Complex and grammatical language.
• Ultrasocial cooperation (with non-kin).
• Cumulative culture (continuous transmission and improvement of knowledge and artifacts).

Any serious theory must explain how these traits evolved in a very short evolutionary time (Homo erectus appeared about 2 million years ago or so).

Harari’s sequence follows the classic order:

Intelligence → Language → Cooperation → Culture.

But Heath sees many problems with it:

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WHY did I win my wager against @ProfessorPape?

I have great respect for him and my respect for him has grown recently. But what did he get wrong?

He believed, correctly, that US security principals faced a strong incentive to do whatever it takes to prevail. He expected them to get sucked into higher and higher levels of escalation to get their way, in a process he calls The Escalation Trap.

I told you from the start that, while this was a good model of an important dynamic at play, it suffered from a grave problem: there was nothing is the model that could ever account for deescalation—it could only explain higher and higher commitments.

So his model was theoretically incomplete in a very important way, and it was not pretty to watch him impose his theoretical priors on a dynamic reality that refused to obey the model.

I tried to think harder about the incentive structures for the two sides. I did eventually formally model the interaction as a bargaining game under asymmetric information. But the underlying logic was already clear intuitively beforehand.

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Israel feels that in the last few days Trump has turned against it. They are worried the change is permanent. But Israeli sources are not claiming Trump is being unfair necessarily, they are describing a trap of Netanyahu’s own making:

1. Israelis read the rebuke as deliberate humiliation. A senior official close to Netanyahu told Channel 12 that Jerusalem was “stunned” by Trump’s criticism and called it “a resounding slap in the face.” The Times of Israel
2. Israelis accept they oversold the war and got caught. Former PM Ehud Barak, on Israel’s public broadcaster, said “Israel is paying the price of Netanyahu’s hubris and blindness, and the price of the manipulations that he tried to pull on Trump.”
3. Israelis believe Trump now sees Netanyahu as a possession. A critic quoted in Israeli media warned that Netanyahu “is turning us into a client state that takes orders about its national security.” Maariv columnist Ben Caspit put it more sharply: “Israeli policy is dictated by Trump’s social media posts.”
4. Israelis read the Netanyahu “won’t run again” remark as Trump reaching into their politics. After Trump floated that it was an open question whether the 76-year-old wants to continue his political career, Likud was forced to publicly confirm Netanyahu would run.
5. They see Lebanon signals as abandonment of a front they consider existential. Nadav Strauchler, a former Netanyahu adviser, conceded to the Times of Israel that the premier was counting on Trump’s support in the election, and how the war ends will affect the result more than anything. This lands hard given fourteen IDF soldiers killed by Hezbollah since the April ceasefire. The Times of IsraelThe Times of Israel
6. Israelis see Netanyahu boxed in with no answer. Yair Golan, the center-left party leader and former general, posted on X that Trump “signs an agreement that funnels billions to the Ayatollahs’ regime, leaves the nuclear infrastructure intact, preserves the ballistic threat as is, and throws a lifeline to the murderous regime in Tehran.”
7. Netanyahu’s camp is minimizing the rift, which is the tell. Strauchler argued the perception of a rift was overstated, yet a senior Israeli source briefed on the relationship conceded the leaked call was not helpful to Netanyahu ahead of an election he is polling to lose

Bottom line: the Israeli interpretation is not that Trump betrayed a loyal ally. It is that Israel overpromised a war, Trump caught on, and Netanyahu now has no leverage, no alternative patron, and no way to answer a public humiliation except to deny it is happening.

Trita Parsi has a rational, pro-American view of the Iran war, so naturally Bari Weiss tried to get him deported. Trita Parsi is an award-winning foreign policy expert and author specializing in U.S.–Iran relations and Middle East diplomacy. He is the 2010 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award and has written several acclaimed books, including Treacherous Alliance and Losing an Enemy, on U.S. foreign policy and Iran. He co-founded and serves as Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and teaches at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

Find Parsi here: https://tritaparsi.substack.com/

On 11 June 2026, I was on the “Deep Dive” with Lt. Col. (ret.) Danny Davis talking about Ukraine and Iran. Danny and I laid out the case that although neither the Iran war nor the Ukraine war is over, it is clear that Iran and Russia are going to be the winners and the US and its allies are going to suffer a pair of humiliating defeats. Save for the 1991 Gulf War, the US has been on a serious losing streak since at least the Vietnam war. Think Afghanistan and Iraq. There seems to be little doubt that the Iran and Ukraine wars are going to scramble the international landscape in significant ways, which is a subject for another day.

Andrew Korybko

Iran is poised to gradually return to the US-led Western order within certain limits exactly as Iran’s moderate faction has long wanted, its hardline faction has successfully preserved the armed forces and their missile stockpile, while Israel achieved none of its goals in its most epic defeat ever.

Iran and the US plan to sign a Zarif-inspired memorandum of understanding (MoU) on ending the Third Gulf War this Friday in Switzerland. The exact details aren’t yet known, and Fortune reported that there were at least three competing texts, but all of them “include similar elements around reopening the vital Strait of Hormuz waterway, giving Iran sanctions relief and opening the door to longer-term negotiations around its nuclear program.” That’s already enough to arrive at several very important conclusions.

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“Kar nisi uspel doseči z orožjem, težko dosežeš s pogajanji”

So what is in “The Deal with Islamic Republic of Iran”?

If you’re confused, it’s normal: the US and Iran already publicly disagree on what they agreed to, and it’s not even a “deal”: just a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that sets the terms for negotiating the actual deal within the next 60 days.

We do, however, know a few things:

1) Israel is actively trying to undermine the deal – for instance by striking Beirut yesterday Sunday.

Israeli media say that the deal is causing “profound concern among Israeli officials,” that “Israel, despite having started the war alongside the US, was not involved in the negotiations,” and that “the deal do[es] not achieve the goals of the war that were set out by the US and Israel” (https://timesofisrael.com/us-iran-reach-deal-to-end-war-reportedly-including-lebanon-conflict-trump-hormuz-to-open/).

That last part is clear: the very existence of this MOU proves the objectives of the war were not met, as they certainly didn’t include the US negotiating an exit with an undefeated Iran while Israel is freaking out about it on the sidelines.

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Jakob Marcel Del Piero

Evropa se danes sooča s paradoksom svoje gospodarske prihodnosti. Po eni strani države članice Evropske unije potrebujejo največji investicijski val po drugi svetovni vojni – od zelenega prehoda in energetske neodvisnosti do digitalizacije, tehnološke konkurenčnosti ter krepitve obrambnih zmogljivosti. Na drugi strani pa pa jih pri tem omejujejo fiskalna pravila, katerih primarni cilj je omejevanje javnega dolga in zagotavljanje stabilnosti javnih financ.

Toda kaj se zgodi, če pravila, ustvarjena za zaščito prihodnosti, začnejo omejevati investicije, brez katerih prihodnosti sploh ne bo mogoče zgraditi?

To vprašanje predstavlja eno osrednjih ekonomskih dilem Evropske unije. Fiskalna disciplina je nedvomno temelj zaupanja v javne finance in stabilnost skupne valute. Vendar pa lahko pretirano osredotočanje na kratkoročne fiskalne cilje povzroči dolgoročne ekonomske stroške, če države zaradi omejitev zmanjšujejo ravno tiste investicije, ki povečujejo produktivnost, inovacijsko sposobnost in konkurenčnost gospodarstev.

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Mnogi pišejo debele knjige o planetarnih mejah, nekatere so dolge celo po 2000 strani. Toda prav ti isti avtorji – v svoji ideološki slepoti? – spregledajo preprosto dejstvo, ki je temelj razvoja na svetu skozi zgodovino človeške vrste. Zmota o končnosti planeta temelji na napačni predpostavki, da je gospodarska rast omejena s končno količino materialnih virov na Zemlji. Čeprav je količina atomov na planetu res omejena, gospodarska rast ne izhaja iz povečevanja količine snovi, temveč iz izbojšane učinkovitosti njihove uporabe – torej iz človeškega znanja, inovacij in vedno boljšega načina organizacije ter uporabe obstoječih virov. Nova vrednost ne nastaja iz dodatne mase, ampak iz idej – isti kilogram silicija je lahko brezvredna mivka ali pa visokotehnološki mikročip. Zgodovina gospodarskega razvoja kaže, da so človeška ustvarjalnost, tehnološki napredek, substitucija redkih virov in večja učinkovitost vedno znova premaknili navidezne meje rasti. Pravo bogastvo človeštva zato ni zaloga omejenih naravnih virov, temveč neomejena sposobnost ustvarjanja novega znanja o tem, kako te vire uporabiti za ustvarjanje večje blaginje.

A critique I often get, whenever I defend economic growth, runs like this: “The truth is that the pie is fixed. The Earth is a closed system. You cannot sustain exponential growth on a finite planet.” It is delivered with the confidence of a physical law — as if invoking the conservation of mass settles the matter and only an economist too compromised to see it could disagree. It is the founding intuition of degrowth, of much of the environmental movement, and of the Club of Rome before them. It is also wrong, and wrong in an instructive way, because the error is not in the physics. It is in the economics smuggled inside the physics.

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