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A month-long ceasefire has effectively collapsed, with the US and Iran exchanging fire for four consecutive days.

A Dubai agency says one gaming stream outperformed months of traditional advertising for a carmaker — and more brands are listening.

The host of the 2034 World Cup has blocked access to the Qatar-controlled network that holds regional media rights for this year’s tournament.

OpenAI and its revolutionary chatbot ChatGPT have single-handedly accelerated AI’s boom and threatened to upend much of how we work, create, learn, and communicate in the process. But when OpenAI was founded a decade ago, the company’s approach to artificial intelligence wasn’t taken seriously in Silicon Valley. Tech journalist Karen Hao has been covering OpenAI’s […]

A legislative amendment that would block U.S. security aid to Israel has split Democrats in Congress to such an extent that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has decided not to urge his party to oppose it. Instead, he told Democrats to vote their conscience, setting up an opportunity for lawmakers to go on the record about their views. Some are already doing so.“The Democratic Party as a whole needs to shift its policy on Israel and Palestine,” Representative Greg Casar, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told me. “I think that was clear during the last presidential election. I think it’s clear to me as a moral issue. And I think that [Wednesday’s] vote could be one step towards us beginning to shift our position as a party.”The amendment in question, brought by GOP Representative Thomas Massie, would cut $3.3 billion in security assistance that the U.S. has pledged to Israel between 2019 and 2028 and further stipulates that “none of the funds made available under this Act shall be obligated or expended for Israel.” Lawmakers are expected to vote Wednesday on the amendment, which Massie is hoping to attach to a $47 billion foreign affairs spending bill.On Tuesday, Jeffries wrote in a “Dear Colleagues” letter that he was planning to vote against the amendment but had decided not to whip the caucus into joining him, underscoring how divided the Democrats have become on the question of America’s relationship with Israel.In his letter, Jeffries wrote that he opposes the amendment because it is “overly broad,” prohibiting the use of funds for nonmilitary activities like U.S. embassy operations and humanitarian aid. He also expressed concern that Republicans will “weaponize” the amendment against Democrats—a potential reference to Republicans accusing Democrats of antisemitism for opposing aid to Israel.Even though Jeffries will vote against the amendment, his letter calls for a “change in direction,” signaling how much Democrats have changed their views toward aid for Israel. “Israel has an advanced economy and is capable of paying for its own sophisticated weapons,” he wrote. Future security agreements between the two countries, he wrote, should “strictly adhere to our human rights laws and values.”Representative Ocasio Cortez, who plans to vote “yes” on the amendment, told me that she thinks Jeffries’s decision not to whip “no” votes provides “flexibility” for Democrats to vote their conscience. Jeffries’s letter mirrors the advice given by J Street, the liberal Zionist advocacy organization. In a statement on Tuesday, J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami wrote that the amendment is “poorly drafted, overly broad and being used by Republican leadership to divide Democrats rather than advance a serious debate about US policy.” Despite that, Ben-Ami wrote, the organization supports whatever votes members choose to cast. Some Democrats will likely vote “present” to avoid a hard “yes” or “no” vote, a decision J Street says it supports.Casar weighed in on the amendment in his own letter, explaining why he plans to vote for the amendment and encouraging the caucus to do the same. “The Democratic Party needs a new approach to Israel and Palestine,” Casar wrote. “I hope you will join me in beginning that process by voting yes on this amendment.”Casar said that winning over Democrats who have previously supported aid to Israel will be critical to the amendment’s passage. “For us to achieve the goal of restricting military aid to the Israeli military, we have to have members that previously voted for aid, and I expect that you’ll see that if we have the vote,” he told me.Though elected Democrats are divided on the issue, the party faithful’s views are clearer. According to a New York Times/Siena poll from May, 74 percent of potential Democratic voters oppose “providing additional economic and military support to Israel.” Just 20 percent support it.Despite this, the Massie amendment is still expected to fail, as nearly all Republicans are expected to vote against it.

The first phase of Donald Trump’s war on Iran ended in defeat and humiliation. Iran emerged battered but stronger, with two new weapons: control of the Strait of Hormuz and a demonstrated drone and missile force that can cripple the economies of its Persian Gulf neighbors and wreak havoc on U.S. bases. Both are new instruments of power more usable than nuclear weapons.The two New Jersey property managers Trump sent to negotiate his surrender produced a poorly written memorandum of understanding, or MOU, that captured the new power relations—Iran got nearly everything it demanded, including a $300 billion reconstruction fund, while the United States got vague promises of talks on all the issues Trump had started the war to resolve. In particular, point five of the MOU, which seems dictated by Iran and accepted by the hapless Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, clearly gave Iran authority over all traffic through the strait: “Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge for 60 days only.”So why did Trump restart the war? As Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan write in their new book, Regime Change, “Unlike recent Presidents, Trump had shown he was entirely comfortable using extraordinary presidential powers on a whim.”Those extraordinary powers include the ability to launch waves of destructive attacks solely on his order. But these attacks, now numbering hundreds of sorties, are pointless. If it were possible to bomb Iran into submission, it would have worked the first time.Trump has been stewing over his loss. He accomplished none of the objectives he repeatedly promised, including:Overthrowing the Iranian regime. The government is likely stronger than before the war and certainly more hard-line.Obliterating Iran’s nuclear program. Trump and Israel failed last July to destroy the program and failed again this year. Though it is damaged, Iran retains significant quantities of enriched uranium and can rebuild its production facilities.Destroying Iran’s missile fleet. Iran retained 70 percent of its missile capabilities after the war, according to U.S. intelligence, and is rebuilding the rest. Its drone fleet is also intact and perhaps more capable than its missiles.Ending support for regional militias. A key goal for Israel, Iran’s network of regional militants is substantially weaker, but much of this happened before the war (Israel’s post–October 7 decapitation of Hezbollah, notably), and in any case, Iran shows no sign of ending its support for Hamas, Hezbollah, and others.Destroying Iran’s navy. Much of Iran’s surface fleet was destroyed, but hundreds of fast patrol boats remain capable of executing their main mission: interdicting shipping through the strait.Demonstrating U.S. power and resolve. The U.S. has lost credibility regionally and globally and weakened its alliances, the greatest source of U.S. global power. Persian Gulf states are reassessing the U.S. bases built on their territory since the 1991 Iraq War. Once seen as security assets, they now appear to be a security liability.As with his 2020 election loss, Trump now seeks to bend reality. He didn’t lose the war, he claims, he won it. He achieved all his objectives, he says. In an absurd social media post Monday, Trump claimed that the Strait of Hormuz is “OPEN, and will remain OPEN, with or without Iran.”He told Fox News, “We are going to keep the strait. We will probably run it. We’ll become the guardian of the strait. Maybe we’ll call it the ‘guardian angel’ of the strait.” He announced that he would charge a 20 percent fee on all cargo shipped (a claim he retracted on Tuesday).In so doing, Trump not only demonstrated the severe state of his delusions but undermined his own administration’s repeated assertions that, as Marco Rubio said, “No country is allowed to charge tolls or fees on an international waterway.” He is now also violating international law. Long before the Law of the Sea Treaty guaranteed free passage through international waters, the United States fought a war against those we called the Barbary Pirates (off “the shores of Tripoli”) to uphold the right of unhindered shipping. Trump’s boasts also helped legitimize Iran’s position on charging its own fees. Iran, which has been excellent at trolling Trump, immediately posted back. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi tweeted, “POTUS is absolutely right. Whoever provides secure and safe passage of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz should be compensated for this service.” He mocked Trump’s weird capitalization, saying that “Iran has always been the GUARDIAN of the Strait and will remain so FOREVER. 20% is of course too much. We will be fair.”Trump’s claim that the strait is open is an obvious lie. On Sunday, only 14 ships transited the strait, one-tenth the prewar volume. There is no way the U.S. Navy, even if it were to triple the number of ships deployed, could keep the strait open. One drone hitting one tanker can send insurance rates so high as to make transit prohibitively expensive.Before Trump’s new attacks over the past week, the strait was slowly getting back to prewar traffic. But it was all through Iranian waters, under Iranian authority.Iran directed all ships to transit through the Iranian side of the strait. Trump, as he does domestically, then tried to assert an authority he does not have. The U.S., working with Oman, sent ships through routes along the Omani side, promising to protect them. It could not. Iran, claiming this was a violation, struck the ships (which is also a violation of the MOU pledge not use force or threats of force). The U.S. struck back at Iran; Iran launched attacks on U.S. bases in Kuwait, Jordan, Oman, and other nations; the U.S. struck again, and a new cycle of war was launched.So, where will this go? With two volatile, fanatical, authoritarian regimes involved, it is difficult to predict. My best guess, in order of probability, is one of three scenarios:The fighting will peter out after a few weeks. There is no viable military strategy for Trump. There is no way to actually force open the strait and keep it safe. Omani and Pakistani mediators are working to bring the two sides back to the table. They could work out a compromise, likely largely along Iranian terms.We enter a new forever war. The current round of strikes ends, but there is no peace agreement. Traffic resumes but at low levels. Fighting flares up and dissipates in repeated cycles.Violent escalation. One side causes damage so severe that the other side responds with even greater violence. Iranian strikes on U.S. bases could kill scores of troops. U.S. strikes on Kharg Island could severely damage Iran’s main oil terminal. These or many other possibilities could trigger a larger war than either side desired.Democratic Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, rightly called out Trump’s new folly. “I wholeheartedly condemn the president’s suggestion that the United States is going to take over the Strait of Hormuz,” he wrote to his colleagues on Monday. “There is likely no scenario in which the U.S. could take total control of the Strait of Hormuz without significantly escalating the conflict. It is past time for [Republicans] to work with us to ensure the president finds a diplomatic solution to ending a war he never should have started.”We have to hope sufficient pressure builds to do just that.

In March, I reported on a tour conducted by the General Services Administration, the executive branch’s real estate arm, of the remarkable New Deal murals and sculptures in Washington’s Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which the Trump administration had designated for “accelerated disposition.” These artworks include, among other things, frescoes by Ben Shahn that the artist once called “the best work I’ve done,” as well as gorgeous murals by Philip Guston and Seymour Fogel—all paid for by your grandparents and mine. The architectural historian Gray Brechin, founder of the nonprofit Living New Deal, describes the Cohen as “a kind of Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.”As recently as last fall, the Trump administration was collecting bids to demolish the Cohen building and the art inside it, according to Mydelle Wright, a well-regarded former senior official who worked on preservation at the GSA. (The GSA responded with what Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, during the Watergate scandal, famously called a “non-denial denial.”) Since then, reason has emerged for cautious optimism that the Cohen can be saved, most recently new legislation introduced Monday by Democratic Representatives Dina Titus of Nevada and Lloyd Doggett of Texas.I attended the March Cohen tour with several members of Congress, including Doggett, who, like Titus, is a member of the bipartisan Congressional Arts Caucus. (The Democratic co-chair of the Congressional Arts Caucus, Representative Chellie Pingree, later offered an appropriations amendment to compel GSA to release publicly a study about refurbishing the Cohen that the Trump administration suppressed. The amendment failed in committee, but, in a hopeful sign, it picked up two Republican votes.) The Cohen tour was actually Doggett’s second, I was pleased to learn; he’s known about the Shahn murals inside the Cohen building for years. (The building is two blocks from the Capitol.) Doggett showed me some legislative language he had drafted requiring protection of all artworks in the Cohen building, and when I asked whether he supported flat-out barring the Cohen sale, Doggett said yes.The Protecting Resources and Ensuring Stewardship of Enduring Records of Visual Expression, or PRESERVE, bill doesn’t do that, alas. But it would require the GSA, “not later than 30 days” after it designates a federal property for disposal, to determine whether the property contains protected art; to notify the appropriate congressional committees within 30 days after that; and “not later than 90 days” before a scheduled demolition or sale, to create a preservation committee of experts, including at least one member of the GSA’s own Fine Arts Program (drastically reduced by DOGE but, thankfully, not eliminated). The preservation committee must then submit a plan, to be posted online, to preserve the artwork “to the maximum extent possible, including through a preservation covenant in an outlease agreement and sale terms, or moving covered artwork to another facility or museum.” No sale or demolition may take place until the GSA administrator “certifies to the appropriate congressional committees” that the GSA is implementing a preservation plan and that “the covered artwork … will remain publicly accessible under any future owners or tenants of the property.”In the bill, art that must be protected is defined as any that within the past five years was managed by the GSA, including any New Deal art. Representative Titus told me by email that the bill would protect “all of the 26,000 pieces of art in GSA’s Fine Arts Collection.” The press release announcing the bill name-checks the Cohen building as being under “immediate threat.” It also points out that in the case of the Cohen building, “the frescoes are embedded in the walls,” so “they cannot simply be taken out of the building or transported to another location.” Legal protections for New Deal art in federal buildings exist already, in case law and in regulations. But President Donald Trump has little regard for the former and he’s waging war on the latter. The Cohen building has since 2007 been listed in the National Register of Historic Places, which requires extensive preservation-minded review prior to disposal. This is called the “Section 106 process” (named for that section of the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act). The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, or ACHP, administers Section 106, and soon after entering office Trump removed three members after two others resigned, depriving ACHP of a quorum for about a year. When it reopened for business this past February, ACHP immediately launched a comprehensive review of Section 106 with the avowed purpose of “streamlining” its preservation requirements. So putting preservation requirements in statutory language would seem an excellent idea.In addition, Representative Titus told me, her bill would introduce an enforcement mechanism currently lacking in Section 106 review:My bill would create a process whereby the General Services Administration would have to certify that it is following a preservation plan established by experts before moving forward with a building disposal. This will ensure that publicly commissioned art is taken care of during the disposal process under this administration, and all future administrations for that matter. It also requires GSA to certify that the artwork will continue to be publicly available after the disposal in question.The Cohen building’s sale was mandated by Congress in an amendment that Representative Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, inserted into a water resources bill in January 2025. It’s pretty unusual for Congress to tell GSA which buildings to sell, and in this case neither Ernst nor her staff had any clue that the building contained important art. Titus’s bill disappointed me by not repealing the Ernst amendment. I asked Titus why not. “That provision was in an appropriations bill,” she replied, “which is a separate fight.” But since Ernst’s amendment wasn’t an appropriation, I’m not sure why that should matter. Also, Titus said, “I do not oppose the sale of the building outright.” I do oppose the sale, so I guess we differ in that regard. I take some comfort that certain infrastructure realities are on my side. As I reported last month, Rich Butterworth, senior analyst and adviser with the GSA’s Office of Real Property Utilization and Disposal, and a career civil servant, pointed out on June 25 that because the Cohen shares heating and electrical equipment with a sister building across C St. (the Mary E. Switzer Memorial Federal Building)—a property that GSA does not intend to sell—it follows that unloading the Cohen would cost the federal government a lot of money to reroute a bunch of underground cables and ducts and whatnot. “While a lot of people would like to see this building disposed of,” said Butterworth, “and given its underutilization rate, we understand why, our thought is, unless we can solve that problem, that might be a building that’s better reinvested in and get back to a utilization rate that would make sense and justify the level of investment.” Amen.At any rate, repealing the Ernst amendment wouldn’t bar the GSA from selling the Cohen building. It would merely leave the question up to the GSA, which is how it usually works. So the Ernst amendment really needs to be repealed.But that’s a battle for another day.  Titus’s bill represents a significant step toward saving the Cohen, and it’s endorsed by the nonprofit Living New Deal and Social Security Works, the two major groups fighting to preserve the building and its art. So onward and upward.Cohen Building Archive:June 26, 2026: “The ‘Sistine Chapel of the New Deal’ May Be Saved!”June 15, 2026: “Is Trump Selling Himself Back His D.C. Hotel?”March 27, 2026: “The Fight to Save D.C.’s Sistine Chapel From Trump”December 10, 2025: “Can the ‘Sistine Chapel of the New Deal’ Be Saved From Trump?”October 3, 2025: “There Was a Plan to Save These New Deal Masterpieces. Then Trump Won”September 30, 2025: “The New Deal Masterpieces Threatened by Trump’s Downsizing”

In early 2021, during the depths of the pandemic, a slim, provocatively titled book became a surprising hit. How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Swedish scholar Andreas Malm made the case for a more radical form of environmental activism that, he argued, matched the severity of the crisis we face. If rising temperatures and biodiversity loss pose an existential threat to the planet, why aren’t more people putting their bodies on the line?Though the book was not a how-to manual—there is in fact nothing in it about blowing up pipelines—the message was clear. The contemporary environmental movement, despite some notable successes, such as stopping the Keystone XL pipeline and building a formidable divestment campaign (modeled on the anti-apartheid struggles of the 1980s), had not come anywhere near to achieving its goal of curbing climate change or holding those most responsible, i.e., fossil fuel companies and the banks that fund them, accountable. Malm’s logic was relatively straightforward; if these tactics have failed and the window to make a difference really is closing, it’s time to try something new. The book was widely reviewed (the Financial Times named it one of the best books of the year, and Malm was interviewed on the New Yorker radio hour), and, if nothing else, Malm punctured the polite discourse surrounding the acceptable limits of political action. A film that took the book’s title literally—it follows the story of a group of activists who blow up a pipeline in West Texas—was released two years later. But though it often went unmentioned, Malm was drawing on a much longer tradition, one that has periodically attempted to redefine the trajectory of environmental politics. In 1998, an essay similar in spirit to Malm’s appeared in the Earth First! Journal. Titled “Beyond Civil Disobedience,” it opened with a thought experiment, in which the author—writing under the pseudonym “Snap Dragon”—asked readers how they’d respond to an intruder breaking into their home to kill their family. The options were: Make a banner and call the media, call a lawyer and file for a restraining order, or chain yourself to the front door. (And the answer was that none was sufficient.)    The piece was written by Chelsea Gerlach, the youngest member of the Earth Liberation Front, or ELF, a highly secretive group of eco-saboteurs who engaged in a series of spectacular acts of property destruction between 1996 and 2001. Relying mostly on primitive incendiary devices, the activists set fire to government buildings on Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land, released wild horses from captivity, toppled transmission towers, and, in their most audacious and consequential act, incinerated the Two Elk ski lodge at Vail resort, which was planning to expand into the White River National Forest—including 700 acres of old-growth forest. The Vail arson—which was carried out in October 1998 by two of the group’s members, including Gerlach, and caused $12 million in damage—put the ELF on the map. But, as Matthew Wolfe points out in Fires in the Night: The Earth Liberation Front, the FBI, and a Secret History of Eco-Sabotage, not always in the way they had hoped. The Vail attack was widely condemned on nightly newscasts and across the nation’s op-ed pages (The Wall Street Journal called it a hate crime). But the group also drew the ire of much of the environmental community, with the Environmental Defense Fund castigating the action as “an outrage” and Earth First! co-founder Dave Foreman describing the activists as “nitwits”; Foreman even implied that they may have been working on behalf of industry.  Among law enforcement officials, however, the Two Elk fire had the effect of raising the ELF’s profile. As Wolfe notes, the group, “once unheard of, was suddenly on the lips of every special agent in the Bureau.”  Although the ELF celebrated property destruction, the group made a point of never targeting people—they were going after the corporations, government agencies, and research institutions they believed were responsible for wreaking havoc on the planet. But it was a distinction that made little difference to authorities in the United States, particularly after the attacks of September 11, when “ecoterrorism” was declared one of the top threats to national security, second only to Al Qaeda. (Alaska Congressman Don Young even speculated, in an interview with the Anchorage Daily News on September 12, that the attacks had been carried out by ecoterrorists.)Eventually, after a nearly decade-long FBI investigation and, crucially, the participation of one of the cell’s founding members who turned on his fellow comrades, all but one of the ELF activists were hunted down and charged with a variety of crimes, which were compounded by domestic terrorism enhancements. Most eventually agreed to cooperate with the federal government in exchange for the possibility of a more lenient sentence. (Julia Overaker, who took part in the very first act of arson at a ranger station in Oregon, has never been captured.) It is a harrowing story, particularly the fateful denouement, long after the ELF members had moved on from their radical pasts to embrace more conventional forms of political engagement. At the time of their arrests, one of the former Elves, as they referred to themselves, was working as a caregiver for disabled adults. Another was doing legal aid work for victims of domestic violence. A third was applying to medical school. Part of the deal they had made with one another was that they’d never talk about what they’d done. By the time Jacob Ferguson—a recovering heroin addict with a young son to support—showed up unannounced to reminisce with his friends, wearing a wire concealed beneath his baseball cap, nearly all his fellow activists had renounced the tactics they used in their younger days. This may explain why some ultimately broke their own rule not to discuss the past; but they also trusted Ferguson, who many felt was least likely to become a snitch. As Wolfe writes, “Having spent years living a double life as a member of the ELF, Ferguson was now living another, one in which he systematically betrayed many of those closest to him.”  Wolfe’s riveting account of the ELF’s rise and fall—based on over a hundred interviews, footage from a documentary project that was never finished, Freedom of Information Act records, and the forensic recreation of the events in question—is not a morality tale. He’s not really interested in passing judgment, and he draws sympathetic but not uncritical portraits of the activists and the law enforcement agents who pursued them. At times, the ELF comes off as a band of reckless crusaders destroying historical archives maintained by the Forest Service and severely damaging a research lab at the University of Washington that focused largely on environmental restoration. But with hindsight, and an understanding of our current political and ecological predicament, it is difficult not to conclude, as Wolfe does, that the ELF members were not only “uncomfortably prescient about our collective inability” to deal with one of the world’s most pressing problems but also, in some ways, voices crying in the wilderness (or as Wolfe puts it, “little people doing things in the dark”).Wolfe entertains the argument that all forms of property destruction are unacceptable because they undermine the rule of law central to a functioning democracy (or as David Marchese put it in his New York Times interview with Malm, “How do you rationalize advocacy for violence within what are supposed to be the ideals of our system?”). But then Wolfe turns the question around and asks, “What happens to faith in the law when the law permits cataclysm, when a system begets its own, slow destruction?”The ELF emerged out of the ferment of radical eco-politics and animal rights activism of the 1980s and 1990s, much of which was aired, and argued over, in the pages of Earth First! Journal. Earth First! was formed in 1980 and adopted the irreverent, monkey-wrenching ethos of its patron saint, Edward Abbey (Abbey’s bestselling novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, was published in 1975). In some ways, it laid the groundwork for the ELF’s more combative approach to environmental politics. Earth First! was not unwilling to engage in sabotage: tree spiking, pouring sand in the gears of machines tearing up forests, and occupying land that it felt should be protected were its preferred methods (and it is worth noting it also became a target of the FBI). But for Gerlach and other members of the ELF—many of whom got their start working for more mainstream organizations—even Earth First! came to be seen as too timid and too concerned with lobbying for change through the formal political process. As knowledge and understanding of the ecological crisis deepened, so did the sense that the activist community—particularly big green groups like the Sierra Club and Environmental Defense Fund—was not prepared to lead the way. The stakes were now too high.So, in October 1996, Ferguson and Overaker, who were on-and-off romantic partners, burned a Forest Service ranger station in Oregon. And spray-painted a message on a nearby utility shed claiming ELF credit for the action. This was the cell’s opening salvo, and even they were surprised that they’d pulled it off. They slowly recruited other like-minded members who were not only down with the cause but willing to essentially lead double lives.   To the extent that ELF was a political project, it did not give much thought to long-term goals or building power. Its focus was action. But going underground and committing crimes that are likely to turn most people off—arson, it should be noted, is a felony—is not an easy way to launch a movement. To the extent that the ELF was a political project, it did not give much thought to long-term goals or building power. Its focus was action. William Rodgers, known as Avalon, was in many ways the group’s intellectual leader and liked to say, paraphrasing a Chinese proverb, “Talk doesn’t cook rice.” So what did it all add up to? Wolfe doesn’t devote much time to pondering the ELF’s legacy, but its members’ eventual disillusionment with their own tactics—and failure to achieve lasting change—seems to speak for itself. This sense of defeat, and worsening ecological crisis, was only compounded by the bitter recriminations, paranoia, and distrust that gripped Eugene’s anarchist community after it was revealed that Ferguson had embedded with the FBI. Rodgers—who several years before had been accused of groping a 14-year-old girl at an Earth First! gathering, creating further divisions within the activist scene—would take his own life in prison. Ferguson, shunned by his peers—one anarchist zine essentially put a bounty on his head—tried to return to some semblance of a normal life. He got a job as a mechanic. But, deeply depressed and alienated from the community that had once kept him afloat, he soon fell off the wagon and started using heroin again (he eventually served a four-year sentence for selling drugs). It is hard not to conclude that by the time the last ELF member was apprehended in 2018, the group had left little more than destruction in its wake.  Wolfe’s intimate portrait of the ELF focuses on the roughly five-year period in which the group was most active, as well as the FBI investigation that followed. But in the book’s final pages, he touches on the battle at Standing Rock in 2016 and 2017, in which thousands of “water protectors” descended on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota to protest construction of an oil pipeline, and the prosecution of two activists who tried to sabotage it using welding torches and rags soaked in gasoline. Scanning the political horizon since Trump’s ascendance—which has dovetailed with a brutal crackdown on legal protest and an attempt to equate anti-fascism with domestic terrorism—Wolfe rightly notes that environmentalism has suffered “the worst losses in its history.”There’s a curious omission, though, in his gloss of more recent environmental campaigns. Just a few years after the ELF members were sentenced in 2007, a group of climate activists gathered in Washington, D.C., to bring attention to the Keystone XL pipeline, an infrastructure project that would have significantly increased the amount of oil transported from the tar sands of western Canada to the Gulf Coast. A revolving cast of volunteers from across the country spent two weeks getting arrested in front of the White House in what was later described as the largest act of civil disobedience in the movement’s history, contradicting, in some ways, Wolfe’s assertion that in the wake of 9/11 and the ELF convictions, “The public … had turned hard against illegal forms of protest.” Opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline was in many ways the sort of mass movement that ELF members dreamed of sparking—one that inspired thousands of ordinary people to risk arrest to defend the planet.It was also just the beginning. Along the proposed pipeline route, activists and landowners came together to protest the pipeline. In rural East Texas, an elaborate tree sit was erected on private land that TransCanada, the company behind the project, was attempting to seize through eminent domain. An unlikely coalition of ranchers, Tea Party Republicans, radical environmentalists including former Earth First! members, and somewhat reluctant green groups was forged. In 2015, Obama canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, handing the movement a major win. (He also fast-tracked the southern portion of the pipeline, from Oklahoma to the Gulf Coast, a decision that tends to get scrubbed from the narrative.) This was in many ways the sort of mass movement that ELF members dreamed of sparking—one that inspired thousands of ordinary people to risk arrest to defend the planet. (And it did not end there. Many Keystone XL organizers went on to play a part at Standing Rock, and some would go on to work for Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign.) Looking back at the history of the ELF today, it can be easy to forget that only a decade ago, the political landscape seemed far more expansive. Sometimes it’s worth remembering—even in the face of seemingly insurmountable ecological and political crises—that victories, even if only temporary, are still possible. 

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