DL Open Thread Sunday Magazine: July 13, 2025
How Netanyahu Decided That Genocide Was How He’d Retain Power. Great long-form reporting, will no doubt win prizes, which will be well-deserved. A taste, set aside time to read the entire thing:
Six months into the war in the Gaza Strip, Benjamin Netanyahu was preparing to bring it to a halt. Negotiations were underway for an extended cease-fire with Hamas, and he was ready to agree to a compromise. He had dispatched an envoy to convey Israel’s new position to the Egyptian mediators. Now, at a meeting at the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv, he needed to get his cabinet onboard. He had kept the plan off the meeting’s written agenda. The idea was to reveal it suddenly, preventing resistant ministers from coordinating their response.
It was April 2024, long before Netanyahu mounted his political comeback. The proposal on the table would have paused the Gaza war for at least six weeks. It would have created a window for negotiations with Hamas over a permanent truce. More than 30 hostages captured by Hamas at the start of the war would have been released within weeks. Still more would have been freed if the truce was extended. And the devastation of Gaza, where roughly two million people were trying to survive daily attacks, would have come to a halt.
Ending the war would then have raised the chances of a landmark peace deal with Saudi Arabia, the Arab world’s most powerful country. For months, the Saudi leadership had secretly signaled its willingness to accelerate peace talks with Israel — as long as the war in Gaza stopped. The normalization of ties between the Saudi and Israeli governments, an achievement that had eluded every Israeli leader since the state’s founding in 1948, would have secured Israel’s status in the region as well as Netanyahu’s long-term legacy.
But for Netanyahu, a truce also came with personal risk. As prime minister, he led a fragile coalition that depended on the support of far-right ministers who wanted to occupy Gaza, not withdraw from it. They sought a long war that would ultimately enable Israel to re-establish Jewish settlements in Gaza. If a cease-fire came too soon, these ministers might decide to collapse the ruling coalition. That would prompt early elections that polls showed Netanyahu would lose. Out of office, Netanyahu was vulnerable. Since 2020, he had been standing trial for corruption; the charges, which he denied, mostly related to granting favors to businessmen in exchange for gifts and favorable media coverage. Shorn of power, Netanyahu would lose the ability to force out the attorney general who oversaw his prosecution — as indeed his government would later attempt to do.
As the cabinet discussed other matters, an aide hurried into the meeting room with a document summarizing Israel’s new negotiating position, quietly placing it in front of Netanyahu. He gave it one last read, ticking off various points with his pen. The route to a truce presented real danger, but he seemed ready to move ahead.
Then Bezalel Smotrich, his finance minister, interrupted the proceedings. As a young activist in 2005, Smotrich was detained for weeks — though never charged — on suspicion of plotting to blow up vehicles on a major highway in order to slow the dismantling of Israeli settlements in Gaza. Along with Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national-security minister, Smotrich was now one of the strongest advocates in the cabinet for re-establishing those settlements. He had recently called for most of Gaza’s Palestinian population to leave. Now, at the cabinet meeting, Smotrich declared that he had heard rumors of a plan for a deal. The details disturbed him. “I want you to know that if a surrender agreement like this is brought forward, you no longer have a government,” Smotrich said. “The government is finished.”
That’s merely the table-setter.
Time for a really bad segue–‘Speaking of table-setting, is cheese the stuff of nightmares?‘:
For centuries, folklore and popular wisdom have linked poor eating habits and indigestion to nightmares and restless sleep. In A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge at first dismisses the ghosts that torment him as mere dietary disturbances: “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato,” he says to one spectral visitor. “There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” Earlier, Benjamin Franklin lamented that “[I]ndolence, with full feeding, occasions nightmares and horrors inexpressible; we fall from precipices, are assaulted by wild beasts, murderers, and demons, and experience every variety of distress.” In the early 20th century, cartoonist Winsor McCay made his name with his “Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend” series, in which his protagonists suffer bizarre dreams and nightmares which they attributed to eating Welsh rarebit—a delicacy of spiced cheese on toast.
The most commonly cited medical condition linked to sleep quality was lactose intolerance—lending legitimacy to Scrooge’s “crumb of cheese” charge. Of the people who believed their diet was related to worse sleep overall, 30% were lactose intolerant.
“Nightmares are worse for lactose intolerant people who suffer severe gastrointestinal symptoms and whose sleep is disrupted,” said Nielsen in a statement that accompanied the release of the study. “This makes sense because we know that other bodily sensations can affect dreaming.” One 2024 meta-analysis, for example, found that all manner of sensory experiences—including sounds, smells, flashing lights, physical pressure, and pain—can be incorporated into dreams when people are sleeping and investigators provide the stimulus.
Cyborg Jellyfish Are Coming For The Oceanic Depths:
For years, science fiction has promised a future filled with robots that can swim, crawl and fly like animals. In one research lab at Caltech, what once felt like distant imagination is becoming reality.
At first glance, they look like any other moon jellyfish — soft-bodied, translucent and ghostlike, as their bell-shaped bodies pulse gently through the water. But look closer, and you’ll spot a tangle of wires, a flash of orange plastic, and a sudden intentional movement.
These are no ordinary jellies. These are cyborgs.
At the Dabiri Lab at Caltech, which focuses on the study of fluid dynamics and bio-inspired engineering, researchers are embedding microelectric controllers into jellyfish, creating “biohybrid” devices. The plan: Dispatch these remotely controlled jellyfish robots to collect environmental data at a fraction of the cost of conventional underwater robots — and potentially redefine how we monitor the ocean.
Artist Of The Week: Paul Cezanne. I love this kind of deep dive into what makes a great artist great. Especially enjoyed how there’s something deliberately ‘off’ in his still lifes:
Cousins have historically had a vital family role. For centuries, extended kin depended on one another—for example, to run a farm or a business, or, as Jiang told me, to relay information. But the typical family experience is changing. Some researchers say that American family trees are turning into beanstalks—tall and narrow. People are more likely to have multiple generations of relatives alive at the same time (because of longer life expectancy) but fewer “lateral” relationships, like cousins and siblings (because of a decreased fertility rate). Although the average number of lateral relatives varies across race and class groups in the U.S., the cousin decline is either imminent or already happening across all of them.
The classic cousin relationship, relative to that, is amazingly uncomplicated. Cousins tend to have more distance in age than siblings, even if they’re in the same generation. They also typically have more geographic space between them; less affluent families are more likely than wealthier ones to live in close proximity, but even so, sharing a house with a cousin isn’t the norm. Neither is giving the kind of material support, such as financial assistance, you’d be likelier to give to nuclear-family members, Megan N. Reed, an Emory University sociologist, told me. And there’s not much societal expectation for what the dynamic has to look like. Pop culture is full of sibling antics: bickering, pranking, sticking up for one another in school. Fewer models demonstrate how cousins are supposed to interact.
Kissin’ Cousins an endangered species. What would Elvis say?
The cyborg jellyfish sound like a lactose intolerant dream!
You’re proud that Bibi is a smart practitioner of genocide.
Why am I not surprised?
More that Bibi, unlike Trump, can spell genocide.
The article about cousins was a nice relief from all negativity going on. I was blessed to have had 26 first cousins. Our parents were dedicated to seeing that we all got to know each other. It was a positive experience.