Investigating Iran's Nuclear Program
On a new PBS Frontline episode.
A. PBS Frontline has been under attack from the second Trump administration. There is now a trust; an expanded range of philanthropic foundation sponsors; and individual donors. Frontline’s latest episode investigates Iran’s nuclear program. It combines on the ground HUMINT from September 2025; SOCINT analysis of recently attacked sites; and OSINT collaboration with Bellingcat. There are lots of lessons in this episode from how to handle Iranian government officials during interviews to how to run a cross-border and collaborative research team under conditions of uncertainty. This is firmly where geopolitical risk oriented research is going.
B. Jacob Savage’s Compact Magazine article The Lost Generation has gone viral in the past four days in the United States. It analyses how and why white millennial men have not succeeded relatively in academia; in publishing; in Hollywood scriptwriting; and in nationally competitive grants. Much of it is a critique of Diversity Equity Inclusion (DEI) policies that resonates with the second Trump administration’s rollback of this initiative and with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. I have read and will provide a longer critique of the article. My own experience with DEI as a white Gen X male who has worked in all three main areas of academia on research grants (and earlier in publishing and having studied the scriptwriting market during my BA) is that DEI is often dealt with in terms of dimensionality reduction. Intersectional identity is more than just gender: my own would include “lived experience” of mental health issues; being autistic / neurodiverse and getting a late-in-life diagnosis; and experiences of social class; poverty; homelessness; family violence; and career volatility. Much of what the article actually deals with are the causal mechanisms about upward career trajectories in four industries that are winner-takes-all markets. This intersects with income inequality and social stratification: the top three winners on a medal dais get outsized gains; no-one remembers who got fourth or fifth place. The very influential economics paper on this is Edward Lazear & Sherwin Rosen’s “Rank-Order Tournaments as Optimum Labor Contracts” from the Journal of Political Economy 89(5) (October 1981), 841-864.
C. MIT has launched its MIT Learn portal for lifelong learning opportunities.
D. Willem Dafoe talks about acting at the Locarno Film Festival.
E. A late-in-life Jiddu Krishnamurti: “Don’t join anything.”
Also see the Lucasfilm documentary Jiddu Krishnamurti: The Reluctant Messiah.
F. The Beatles have released a short film on Free As A Bird.
Also a 1964 concert in Australia.
G. REM’s MTV Unplugged performance from 2001.
H. Goldman Sachs provides its 2026 outlook for the United States.
I. An audio reading of Charles Bukowski’s novel Ham On Rye (1982) which is part of his fictional protagonist Henry Chinaski.