Spent

Recently: What could disarming Hezbollah actually settle? Vali Nasr on the last time Israel occupied Lebanon. … & How could an unexpected event transform a work of art? Bryan Singer on a secret monument in Southern Lebanon, its tangled politics, and his first film in seven years.

Today: Five months into the war with Iran, two-thirds of America’s Patriot missiles are gone. … Uganda’s Ebola outbreak ends with two deaths, while Congo’s passes 1,800. … &c.

For members: What happened to the “public intellectual”? Raymond Geuss on a role that lasted 70 years—and why he won’t really miss it. … & What can machines really do for human beings? Benjamin Recht’s new book, The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us.

+ New music from Four Tet …

The rate of fire

At Camp David, the U.S. presidential retreat in Maryland, on Friday, a cabinet meeting turned into an argument about ammunition. U.S. President Donald Trump told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth he thought the Pentagon had fixed the munitions shortage, and that he’d been misled about it. The shortage is part of why Trump called off what he’d reportedly envisioned as the biggest bombing attack since the Second World War. From February 28 through the first four weeks of the war with Iran, American forces fired more than 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles. Now, according to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Americans have spent about 65 percent of their Patriot interceptors. The White House says the Camp David argument “literally never happened.” Either way. Why would the U.S. be running out of missiles?

U.S. plants build 183 Patriot interceptors a year and take three and a half years to fill an order. So Washington is keeping what it has. Hours after a Russian barrage killed at least 17 people in the Kyiv region on Wednesday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his allies have sent only a third as many air-defense missiles this year as last. Of course, not all of that deficit is from the shortage: The Trump administration has been cutting off military aid to Ukraine openly since early last year, for its own reasons. Only the Pentagon knows exactly how much of the cut to Ukraine is shortage and how much is policy. The White House itself won’t say how many missiles are left, only that the U.S. has “far more than we need.”

Meanwhile

• Not for publication. Sheikh Hasina fled Bangladesh two years ago, when a student uprising ended her 20 years in power; last November, a war-crimes court there sentenced her to death in absentia for ordering a crackdown the United Nations says killed nearly 1,400 people. On Wednesday, she told the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in New Delhi that she will go home in December. She wasn’t more specific. Bangladesh’s government had warned its newspapers and broadcasters not to report a word she said: A 2024 court order bars them from carrying her speeches.
• A quarter of the list. Congo’s Ebola outbreak is the largest the country has recorded—the World Health Organization counted 3,973 cases and 1,801 deaths by August 4. Uganda declared its own outbreak over on July 28, with 20 cases and two deaths. Ugandan teams followed up every contact on their lists—Congo’s responders are reaching three-quarters of theirs, in provinces where fighting, wrecked roads, and mistrust of the response keep them from the rest.
• Vouching for itself. Pakistan seizes two journalists who covered the Kashmir protests and starts licensing where foreign reporters can go. … German police defuse a drone rigged with explosives beside a Ukrainian cargo plane in Leipzig. … Europe’s 55 football associations keep up their boycott of FIFA over a plan to sell off the World Cup. … The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation now trades monthly visits with China’s police ministry. … & In a British safety test, Anthropic’s model puts malicious code into a real project, denies it’s malware, then has fake accounts the model controls approve it.

Feature

Tracks of uncertainty

What happened to the “public intellectual”? Raymond Geuss on a role that lasted 70 years—and why he won’t really miss it.

London’s O2 Arena can seat some 20,000 people. It usually hosts major music or sports events, but from time to time it will now host “public intellectuals,” who tour from continent to continent selling out venues as they go.

News organizations, meanwhile, have shifted from sending out reporters to cultivating stables of “talent”—columnists, commentators, people who’ll opine on any and every subject imaginable—while political influencers flourish on social media, where they “DESTROY” or “HUMILIATE” whoever’s on the opposing “side.” It’s a brave new world—in which it may be hard to imagine what role there is left for “public intellectuals.”

Is there one?

Raymond Geuss is an emeritus professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and the author of Tracks in Chaos: Philosophical Orientation and Political Reflection. Geuss says the whole category of “the intellectual” only came into existence in the late 19th century, and that media personalities have largely replaced intellectuals since—usually people with no intellectual accomplishments to speak of, who don’t really address the general public but bands of like-minded followers. Given today’s extremely complicated society, where we’re all groping for understanding, there is no lack of influencers selling certainty.

For Geuss, though, losing the old-style intellectual isn’t all bad. By seeing and presenting themselves as general experts—an evident contradiction when you look at that word combination—intellectuals often ended up effectively in the pulpit, preaching to people on things they actually knew little about. Some of the now traditional work of the intellectual is still valuable—clarifying the meaning of words is one of Geuss’s examples—but understanding that value means first accepting that no category of person, the intellectual or the philosopher, is uniquely equipped for it …

Books

‘An imaginary casino’

What can machines really do for human beings? Benjamin Recht, The Irrational Decision: How We Gave Computers the Power to Choose for Us.

During the pandemic, California decided when schools and businesses could reopen by running each county’s case numbers through a color-coded scale. “In America, there was a public campaign to ‘Follow the Science,’” writes Benjamin Recht, who teaches electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, “but this resulted in algorithmic policies that, while made to look scientific, were heavily laden with value judgement.” Of the scale, he adds: “No one was ever told where the various numbers came from, which led to some of the most prolonged school closures in the country.”

What else do governments decide this way?

New music

⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ - ʅ͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡(̸̢̛̼̞̭͋ͅ)̸͚̰͛̔̾̀̿͒͂:̴͓̞̑̌̂̆̊͋̀:̸͎̟̯̂̓̌ ҉ ͡ ͞ ͞ ͞ ҉● ࿀ ● ࿀ ●

We’d forgive you if this looked to you like gibberish, but it’s actually a new track from the London producer Four Tet, or Kieran Hebden—or here, by his “Wingdings alias”: ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ. Is there any difference between Four Tet and ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ? If so, it’s hard to tell: This is club music, with Hebden’s distinctive admixture of tight musicality and loose playfulness. On vinyl, all 2,000 copies have sold out.