In a new piece, I examine why, in the past several weeks, the U.S. military has bombed seven boats off the coast of Venezuela—killing some thirty-two people—on the ground that they were carrying drugs. “We are headed straight to the point of the matter,” Karl Ove Knausgaard observes of Dostoyevsky’s work, “and there is no time.” The author of “The Brothers Karamazov” insisted on exploring an essential question: What are we living for? Pressure from the Trump Administration to maintain calm is too great and, in Israel at least, favorable public opinion of the hostage-release-and-ceasefire deal has been such that there is little incentive for Benjamin Netanyahu to order a resumption of a full-out war anytime soon.
Author: Jonathan Blitzer
Published at: 2025-10-21 22:30:00
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