Fault lines
Recently: Why does North Korea keep threatening South Korea and its allies without ever going to war? Michael Breen on theater and reality in one of the most enigmatic places on Earth.
Today: Afghanistan’s deadliest quake in years. Indonesia’s worst violence in decades. China’s record attendance for its diplomatic summit in Tianjin. A U.S. federal judge’s dramatic holiday-weekend ruling. & Our third interstellar visitor since 2017 is among us.
+ John Jamesen Gould with an update on The Signal. & New music from Nite-Funk ...
Natural disaster, isolated response
A 6.0 magnitude earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan late Sunday, killing at least 812 people and injuring more than 2,800 in the country’s deadliest seismic event in years. The shallow quake destroyed entire villages in Kunar and Nangarhar provinces, with the Taliban government conducting rescue operations using helicopters and military personnel. The disaster exposes how vulnerable international isolation can leave populations when catastrophe strikes: Taliban officials report no foreign government assistance offers, despite ongoing humanitarian needs and Pakistan’s recent expulsion of 1.2 million Afghan refugees.
Indonesia’s stress test
Deadly anti-government protests across Indonesia forced President Prabowo Subianto to cancel his trip to China and announce cuts to lawmakers’ benefits after violence killed at least five people. The unrest, triggered by monthly housing allowances of 50 million rupiah (10 times Jakarta’s minimum wage) for lawmakers, escalated after police killed a motorcycle taxi driver during demonstrations. Prabowo’s concessions—cutting the allowances and canceling his China trip—suggest a leader who miscalculated how far he could push legislative perks while his signature program providing free school meals has managed to sicken more than 1,000 students since January.
Geopolitical realignments
Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted more than 20 leaders at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Tianjin, with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in attendance, alongside leaders from Iran, Pakistan, and across Southeast Asia. Xi notably called for AI cooperation, while cautioning against “Cold War mentality”—understanding he was speaking to an audience whose relationships with Washington have deteriorated under U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff policies. The summit’s record attendance—including Modi’s first China visit since 2018—will be encouraging for Beijing in its bet that American economic pressure can help drive a number of significant world powers toward China-led trade and security frameworks.
Last-minute judicial intervention
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan blocked the Trump administration from deporting nearly 600 Guatemalan children on Sunday after lawyers discovered planes were being loaded with minors in the pre-dawn hours over a holiday weekend. The administration claimed Guatemala had requested the children’s return for family reunification, but attorneys argued some parents had never requested repatriation and that federal law requires immigration hearings for unaccompanied minors. The dramatic standoff, with children already aboard planes when the judge’s order came, shows the American administration testing whether semantic distinctions—“repatriation” versus “deportation”—allow it to bypass congressional protections requiring immigration hearings for unaccompanied minors.
Planetary convergence
Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury aligned in a rare predawn formation on September 1, giving stargazers a real celestial spectacle while astronomers continue tracking interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, discovered in July. Unlike comets that originate within our solar system, this one formed around another star—only the third such interstellar object detected after asteroid ʻOumuamua (2017) and comet Borisov (2019). 3I/ATLAS will make its closest approach to the Sun in late October, at a distance of 130 million miles, offering astronomers a limited window to study material from another star system before solar glare obscures it.
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Most of us have noticed at one time or another, if we aren’t noticing it all the time, the way contemporary news coverage feels designed to compel us to check it constantly—even while the experience seems to make it harder to track what’s actually going on as it unfolds in the world over months or years, or longer.
At The Signal, we certainly notice this. And think about it a lot. Every once in a while, that will lead us to make some adjustments in what we do—as I’m glad to say we’re doing this month.
Starting this week, we’re expanding from three to five emails—not because more things have suddenly started happening in the world, but because we think we can be more helpful this way. You’ll get our usual curation and elucidation of developments we see as significant, plus excerpts from members’ content—whether new features, our cultural-intelligence briefing, our weekly member’s despatch, or otherwise—discoveries in new music, and yes, attention to the weather. Don’t let anyone tell you the weather doesn’t matter.
The core idea, of course, hasn’t changed: We’re still here for the questions we’re all actually living with, still filtering for importance rather than hype, still working to be your loyal guide to a changing world. We’re just doing it with a little greater frequency, in slightly smaller doses, and stretching our range.
Meanwhile, we’ve been testing some new functionality courtesy of our friends at the remarkable publishing platform Ghost, and we love it. Possibly a little too much: In the event you happen to be among the lucky few to have received a literally and figuratively funky music recommendation from us earlier today, we hope you enjoy it; and there’s a lot more where that came from; but, no, we’re not planning on sending you daily music notes (at least until you you insist on it).
In all events, I think of what we’re doing here as moving from being something like a weekly magazine to being something with more of a conversational rhythm—the same substance, less concentrated, more woven into the texture of your week.
Membership means access to a suite of benefits, including: all new articles, our complete archive, our cultural-intelligence briefing, and the member’s despatch—our weekly current-affairs roundup for those who want to keep up with what’s happening in the world and need to spend their time carefully.
It also means playing crucial role in backing a distinctive, independent new enterprise in current-affairs journalism.
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