Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
A conflict with Iran has quietly revealed something the United States has long preferred not to examine too closely. Since hostilities began in late February, two thirds of American Patriot missile interceptors have reportedly been depleted. The world's greatest military power, it turns out, may not be able to sustain a regional war beyond a few months before facing an armaments crisis. There is something worth sitting with in that.
Thucydides, writing across two and a half millennia, might not have been surprised. Scholars David Polansky and Daniel Schillinger remind us that the ancient historian was not a champion of might making right. He was instead a diagnostician of hubris, identifying a vice shared by all states, the tendency to mistake power for wisdom, and reach for what cannot be held.
And then there is Ani Liu, scientist, artist, mother, whose work asks what it means to live inside a body that others have always sought to govern. Her art does not argue so much as it opens, inviting us to feel the weight of control and the quiet persistence of the self beneath it.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
