Newsletter #505 — November 12, 2026

by Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess

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Highlighted Links

A few suggestions about links that we think are especially interesting.

• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  What Israel’s Election Is Really About, with Haviv Rettig Gur — Would a new prime minister change Israel’s approach to its enemies? Haviv Rettig Gur joins Aaron MacLean to explain where Israelis agree on security -- and why they remain divided even after the election over who should lead.
• Social / Economic Complexity
  Why Is Strategy So Difficult? — A summary of an important new book that offers a first rate explanation of how to plan strategically amid the astonishing complexity of the modern world.
• Violence
  Bernard-Henri Lévy: The Riots in France and the Return of a Dangerous Idea — Chaos on the streets of French cities has brought back the seductive notion that violence can set you free. It is a myth -- and a recipe for civil war, writes Bernard-Henri Lévy.
• Violence
  France Will Never Be Enough for the People Desecrating It — After starting with an explanation of why France is one of the most egalitarian countries in the world, this article challenges the notion that protesters are really just campaigning for fairness.
• Corruption
  How Corruption Got This Bad — This article explains why many of the most breathtaking acts of corruption on the part of the Trump administration are actually legal (and how things got so bad).
• Psychological Complexity
  Is ‘Attention’ the Essence of Intelligence? | Quanta Magazine — A mathematical mechanism enables AI models to process language at scale, undergirding the current AI revolution. This article addresses the role that attention plays in intelligence.
• US Politics
  Democrats Need McCain-Romney Republicans — From Rahm Emanuel, an argument that Democrats need to seek out and embrace moderate Republicans (and Democrats) -- people who are really focused on solving problems.
• Psychological Complexity
  The Cruelty of Compassion — A thought provoking, but also likely controversial, exploration of the limits of compassion.
• Climate / Environment / Health
  A Skeptic’s Guide to Environmental Alarmism — In 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb predicted that in the 1970s, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Fortunately, it didn't happen. This article asks important questions about what to worry about.
• Developing a Unifying Vision
  The Minimal Requirements for a Society Free From Fear — An unconventional and insightful observation that "Liberalism’s deepest grounding is the belief that cruelty is an absolute evil."
• Class Inequity
  The skilled trades undergird the essential economy. Let’s elevate them. — One way to overcome the problem of the economically left behind (and to relieve some of today's big economic bottlenecks) is by giving those in the skilled trades the prestige and compensation they deserve.
• Interstate War
  Donald Trump and the Nuclear Taboo — In light of the extraordinary (and in many ways unilateral) power that the President holds in areas related to national defense, an article that asks what Trump might do with nuclear weapons.
• Understanding The Issues That Divide Us
  The Generation Conflagration — News that the conflict between the young and the old has now emerged as a major flashpoint in numerous societies around the world.
• Effective Problem-Solving
  A golden age of science is coming — A hopeful story about the things that we might, with our new AI tools, be able to discover.

Colleague Activities

Highlighting things that our conflict and peacebuilding colleagues are doing that contribute to efforts to address the hyper-polarization problem.

• US Politics
  Both Parties Have Forgotten How to Lose: It’s Time for Guardrails — On November 3, 2026, one side in the U.S. will lose. It's time we remember how to allow that to happen gracefully and fairly.
• Psychological Complexity
  Gallup and The Rippel Foundation: Thriving Together in America — Explore how Americans rate their well-being today, their outlook for the future, what their communities are doing to improve things, and why they see reason to be hopeful.
• Social / Economic Complexity
  A Clear-Eyed Look at the National Debt — Without panic, partisanship, or jargon, a plain look at how the national debt grew and how the federal budget came to run on autopilot.
• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Matt Shinners - What Are We Building? — A Beacon Project Podcast with Mat Shinners, former chief of staff for Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign and co-founder of the Forward Party, on the challenges of creating a new type of politics.
• Saving Democracy
  Can Democracy Funders Go from Blocking to Building? — A proposal for three major changes that philanthropists could make to help renew US democracy. 
• Social / Economic Complexity
  The Curse of Linearity in a Networked World (and the Gift of the Meandering Path) - Network Weaver — Discover why traditional linear planning falls short in social change networks, and learn how embracing flexibility, distributed responsibility, and trust can help organizations thrive in complexity.
• Leadership
  5 Traits That Make a Politician Good at Their Job (According to Science) - Builders — What are the traits of a good politician? Science points to five, from curiosity to a clean record. Here's what research says to look for before you vote.
• Developing a Unifying Vision
  This Country 'Tis of Thee: A Call for Americans to Unite Beyond Division — A new, rousing song, that exhorts all Americans to do their part to "keep Lady Liberty" free. Spoiler -- it is wonderful! Have a watch/listen! The links is toward the bottom of the article about the song.
• Saving Democracy
  Change the Incentives, Change the Politics — Derate the Hate Episode 335 with Matt Koesters, founder of Fortify Democracy. He argues that, in order to keep the same bad outcomes from repeating, we need to change the structures and incentives for voting.
• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Frustration Rises, Commitment Endures: How Americans View the State of Democracy in 2026 — A report on the results of a survey revealing that Americans remain committed to democracy as an ideal, even as their confidence in its performance continues to erode.
• Developing a Unifying Vision
  More Involved Americans Feel Greater Belonging and Agency — Those who are more involved in their community are more likely to feel they are capable of shaping the future of their community and the country.
• Developing a Unifying Vision
  The Practice of Potentialism for Civic Thriving — Potentialism is a political philosophy based on the idea that everyone has a gift, and a right and a responsibility to develop and share that gift.
• Peacebuilding
  Everyone Wants Peace. That’s the Problem. — What (or who) are you willing to sacrifice to achieve peace?

News and Opinion

From around the web, more insight into the nature of our conflict problems, limits of business-as-usual thinking, and things people are doing to try to make things better. (Formerly, Beyond Intractability in Context.)

• Psychological Complexity
  Our culture is way too eager to embrace deception — A welcome argument for rebuilding the ethic of probity and integrity.
• Artificial Intelligence
  Colleges need to teach last-mile knowledge — A thought-provoking essay that argues that colleges could help their students succeed in the world of AI by climbing down from the ladder of abstraction and better teaching expertise and facts.
• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  No Blacks, No Jews, No Dogs — As we work so hard to banish racism and other forms of injustice from the modern world, a call for remembering what humanity has done to the Jews and adding their plight to the list of evils we won't allow to be repeated.
• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Two Visions of Postwar Liberalism —  Food for thought, as we struggle to articulate a vision for a liberal democracy that can earn the public's strong support.
• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  The Flydubai attacker’s motive was even darker than we thought — News that the goal of the Fly Dubai hijacker was to crash into the busy Ben Gurion airport and create casualties comparable to 9/11 while also severing Israel's principal air connection with the outside world.
• Progressive Left / Socialism
  Radical Professors Have Poisoned the Electorate — From the Wall Street Journal, a controversial critique of the ways in which social justice faculty have transformed the political views of their students and the larger society is worth understanding.
• Psychological Complexity
  ‘Success Addicts’ Choose Being Special Over Being Happy — For a highly individualistic nation of strivers, hard questions about where our pursuit of success is taking us.
• Freedom of Speech 
  In Defense of Free Speech and the Mission of the University — An argument that allowing free speech rights to continue to erode on campus would result in the further entrenchment of current orthodoxies.
• Artificial Intelligence
  The Blog Post That Set the AI World on Fire — For those who are trying to keep up with the rapidly evolving debate over the future of AI, an article explaining one of the most important and influential new ideas.
• Climate / Environment / Health
  The surprisingly hopeful quest to fix concrete — Hopeful news that we are in the process of finding ways of limiting one of the largest, but also least recognized sources of CO2 emissions -- concrete. Plus, hope that the AI era may help us find other big innovations.
• Race / Anti-Racism
  White Guilt Is Here — A controversial, but thought provoking and surprisingly well reasoned critique of efforts to address the very real problem of racism in the US and other Western democracies.
• Family / Gender / LBGTQ+
  Gender identity and its discontents — Rogers Brubaker talks about his new book that traces the "career" of the notion of "gender identity" from its obscure mid-20th century beginning, to its current contemporary contestation.
• Authoritarianism
  The Authoritarian Future Is Already Here — A report from Uganda on the ways in which its military leader is showing the world how to use the latest social control technologies (and cement their hold over the larger society).
• Israel, Hamas, Iran, and Related Wars
  Fighting Israel to the Last Palestinian — For those concerned about the plight of the Palestinians, an essay that argues that they are little more than pawns being sacrificed by Iran as part of its effort to destroy Israel.

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About the MBI Newsletters

Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

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