One of the oddest reality glitches between everyday life and what we experience in established media is that in everyday life, if you respond to wild, disorienting turns of events with braying certainty, no one can stand you. While in the media, if you do the same thing, it’s normal. In fact, it’s rewarded. Why is that? It’s because in the media, people are incentivized to sell something unreal—and something you’d recognize as unreal in an instant if the relationship weren’t mediated by a screen: total explanation, total resolution, total defeat of any ideas that complicate what you’re saying. But we all know, ultimately: Understanding the world in a way that actually helps us navigate it, and be effective in it, is a very different proposition.
—John Jamesen Gould
This week, at The Signal:
Developments
U.S.-Ukraine relations enter a moment of bizarre chaos; Hezbollah shows signs of life in Lebanon; the political right makes huge gains in Germany’s elections; and the decline of Christianity in America may have slowed. + Birth rates are up in South Korea; they’re down in Japan; and scientists in the U.K. get clear on a 1,945-year-old cause of death.
Connections
What is Beijing up to in the South China Sea?
Exchanges
How can the U.K. respond to the U.S. strategy shift in Europe? What now for the “liberal international rules-based order”? + What’s behind the purge at the Pentagon?
Features
What’s driving the terrible conflict in Congo? The 2025 Oscar-nominee Johan Grimonprez on a history of violence and the costs of global competition over critical minerals. + Why are bond yields going up so much around the world? Rebecca Patterson on economic growth, expectations of inflation, and unsustainable government spending.
Books
What did the 1985 Schengen Accords, joining 29 European states without internal borders, do to the Content? A look at Isaac Stanley-Becker’s new book, Europe Without Borders: A History.
Music
From Saya Gray, DJ Lycox, Ibibio Sound Machine, Masma Dream World, and Praetorian.
Weather report
Kujalleq, Greenland …
Developments
The world in brief, February 21-27
Chaos between the U.S. and Ukraine
It’s been a week of disruption and turmoil between the United States and Ukraine. After weeks of cooling relations, with the U.S. signaling warming relations with Russia, along with a strategic retreat from Europe and the war, President Trump said on Wednesday that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would be visiting the White House on Friday to sign a long-sought minerals deal that would closely tie the two countries together for years to come. Trump hailed the prospect as “a very big agreement.”
