Who would have thought that toque-wearing hosers Bob and Doug McKenzie would be the Pythian oracles of our age? Once upon a time, not that long ago, the North belonged to those who lived there with nobody else paying much attention. Who wants to fight over ice and polar bears, eh?

Well, to be fair, Canada and Denmark used to fight over a rock every year called Hans Island (also known as Tartupaluk). An uninhabited rock somewhere between Greenland and Ellesmere Island. For decades, their navies would trade territorial claims by…leaving flags and whisky (sometimes schnapps) for each other. They finally settled the Whisky War in 2022 by splitting the rock down the middle. Then, we’d call it quirky news. Now, it seems pretty quaint.

I used to try and interest the BBC in the coming battle for Arctic sovereignty…my editors would laugh a lot, telling me how unlikely it was that it would EVER matter. And…here we are.

When I recommend visiting Churchill, Manitoba right now, it’s not just because of the polar bears. It’s because what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz, in Ukraine, in NATO corridors in Brussels points directly north.

Everyone wants the Arctic now: its routes, minerals, leverage, and strategic ground. But wanting the North is not the same as being able to operate there. This is a story about ambition colliding with geography, infrastructure, and the people who already know what outsiders are only beginning to see.

Canada, Russia, the United States, even China says it’s aiming to be a global polar power by 2030. In pursuit of that goal, they’ve taken to calling themselves the near-Arctic (which is a bit like me calling myself the near-Beyoncé.)

And please don’t think I’m neglecting Greenland. Although I’m sure they wouldn’t mind less attention.

A few months ago, I interviewed Greenlandic photographer/filmmaker/Arctic sports athlete Dida Heilmann. She told me a story from 2004, when she was flying back home from Los Angeles via Frankfurt. As the little map on her seat-back screen showed they were over Greenland, she turned to the American man beside her, and said that was her home. She wished, she told him, that she had a parachute so she could just jump out right there and be there. He was shocked (and rude): “No, you’re lying. Nobody lives there.”

Geography Wins

Everyone hasn’t just decided they want snow. They want alternatives. New paths to get goods and energy around the world. But it’s tough when your paths are icy, narrow, shallow and prone to changing every season. That’s why one of the most interesting, lesser-known tech races involves icebreakers.

South Korea isn’t just the undisputed champion of Pop Groups, their shipyards, which built most of the ice-class tankers already hauling Russian gas, lead the world at this kind of construction. With sanctions on Russia freezing that partnership, they’re pushing ahead and building anyway, knowing that allies will come.

Russia has the only fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers on Earth. Nuclear power means they can stay at sea far longer without refuelling, which matters enormously in a region where ports and fuel are scarce. In December all eight went to sea at once for the first time. A show of force.

It is building its next ship, the enormous Rossiya. They say it could cut through more than four metres of ice. That would potentially be enough to create channels wide enough for large commercial ships. But before you pop the bubbly, it has also been delayed. Not even Putin can just order his shipyards or the Arctic to co-operate.

Canada, the United States, and Finland are not standing idly by. They know they can’t build fast enough on their own. So they’ve created the ICE Pact to pool their expertise and do it together. But shifting…icy (sorry, I couldn’t help myself) relations at the top could slow that plan down.

The prize is hard to reach, but it’s not an ice mirage.

In September 2025, a Chinese container ship called the Istanbul Bridge made the first scheduled cargo run across the top of Russia to Europe, reaching the UK in about twenty days. (They’d advertised it would take 18.) The Suez route takes closer to forty, and the Arctic path is roughly a third shorter.

Still, don’t expect the Suez Canal with polar bears.

Last year, the Suez Canal, even with traffic still hammered by the Red Sea crisis, handled 12,758 ships and roughly 464 million tonnes.

The Arctic route moved about 0.7 per cent as much cargo as Suez did.

The usable transit season lasted roughly four and a half months. Most of the cargo was Russian oil, gas, and bulk commodities.

Some of the world’s largest container companies (MSC and Hapag-Lloyd among them) still refuse to use the route because of its environmental, navigational, insurance, and reputational risks.

The passages are hampered by the very things that make them interesting: they are remote, extreme, and unforgiving.

Ask a Navigator: Geography is undefeated. Besides, the shipping lane is really a bonus, not the prize.

What Lies Beneath

What’s really got everyone cutting through the ice is what lies underneath it. The minerals are the story. Rare earths for the magnets in many EV motors and wind turbines. Copper, zinc, nickel, the whole periodic table of the energy transition, sitting in ground that used to be worthless because nobody could reach it.

The technologies we are building our future around require lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt, copper, rare earth elements, and other materials that cannot be conjured by a sufficiently inspirational TED Talk.

They have to come out of the ground.

China dominates the processing and the magnet-making, and when Beijing puts restrictions on, as it has, industries worth trillions of dollars outside the country feel the pinch.

Ever wonder why we care so much about Greenland? Cynics might suggest it’s because they have massive Rare Earth deposits, an international airport and an existing deep-sea port.

Canada has a potentially enormous opportunity.

At present, it produces an average of only about 2 per cent of the global supply of six priority critical minerals. If identified Canadian projects actually reach production, that share could rise to roughly 14 per cent by 2040.

“Actually reach production” is doing a lot of heavy lifting, though.

If you don’t have a road, a railway, power, workers, houses for the workers, and local agreement…it’s not an investment, it’s an interesting rock.

Canada is trying to change that. Ottawa has announced a $1 billion Arctic Infrastructure Fund, additional military investments, and an initial $50 million for planning and preconstruction of the proposed Grays Bay deepwater port and 230-kilometre all-season road in Nunavut. (Ever seen Ice Road Truckers? An all-season road is a beautiful thing.)

The Western provinces and northern territories have also formed a joint critical-minerals strategy.

The press has duly trundled along on field trips and we’ve all applauded.

But let’s remember Fort McMurray. When oil prices got high during the 2000s (Iraq War 2 anyone?), Canada (and everyone else) saw the potential in its not-even-as-far north oil sands. I actually did convince my bosses to send us north that time. I remember driving Highway 63, known then as the highway of Death…one two-lane, dangerous road to the promised land.

I also remember that it was -40 (real cold in Celsius or Fahrenheit)…My colleague Cookie and I bravely decided to stay warm in the truck and let the cameraman, Chuck, hop in and out while filming the massive mining site, changing batteries…because the cold kills them quickly. I know I should feel worse about that than I do. We did buy him numerous excellent Canadian beers that night to make up for it. Fort Mac was a great place to be a good-looking bartender then, a bad place to be looking for a family home. That’s probably still true. Infrastructure never moves as fast as opportunity.

And just like there, the Arctic is opening faster than Canada (or other places) can build the systems required to secure, supply, and benefit from it.

Beware the Frontier Grifter

Which makes this a good time to talk about boom towns and … the dangers that always come.

Every gold rush attracts prospectors - hard workers and dreamers.

It also attracts Soapy Smith.

During the Klondike Gold Rush, Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith built a criminal empire in Skagway, Alaska. His signature trick was simple: wrap a few bars of soap with paper money, let the crowd watch, then palm the winning bars so the marks bought nothing but soap. He got rich off people who’d come North certain it was their turn to cash in.

When governments start announcing billions, people materialize with Arctic strategies, northern expertise, Indigenous partnerships, revolutionary extraction methods, and reassuringly glossy maps.

Some of them know their stuff. Some of them knew a gal who once went to Whitehorse.

Seeing the opportunity does not remove the physical conditions around it. Nor does it mean that you can execute.

Inukshuk Intelligence

This is why northern and Indigenous knowledge is not the warm and fuzzy section of an Arctic strategy.

It is operational intelligence. It is essential. The people who have lived there for thousands of years are the ones who know how things actually work: where the ground will hold, where to put a thing and where it will sink.

That goes for infrastructure and relationships. Building them takes time. Everyone likes to talk about this like it’s a great game between nations, but the Arctic has been inhabited by people who consider each other family for thousands of years. Denmark or the US? That’s the wrong question.

A lot of northern peoples feel more kinship with each other, across borders, than with the southern governments that harmed them or ignored them. Dida Heilmann said that if it were up to her, Greenland, Nunavut, and Alaska would be one nation. She said they call each other cousins, having more in common with each other than with the flags currently arguing over them.

So, don’t come to these relationships expecting gratitude for your interest.

When NATO parliamentarians visited Canada’s North this month, Inuit and local leaders emphasised the need for investment in ports, airfields, energy, and telecommunications that would serve both defence and the people who live there. They also made a more fundamental point: knowledge of the terrain, weather, ice, and local conditions is indispensable to operating safely.

Politely put: Hey, involve the people who live here.

No Rest for the Weary

So, if you were hoping you’d heard the last of NATO fraying over Greenland’s sovereignty, I’ve got bad news for you. This story is far from over.

Twenty-two years ago, an American passenger looked down at Greenland and told Dida Heilmann that she could not possibly be from there.

Dida’s answer to that passenger, 22 years later, was wonderfully restrained:

“I hope he’s still alive and sees. We’re from Greenland. There is a country.”

If he is, he probably does. Now, everybody wants something from the North: a shipping route around it, minerals beneath it, an airport on it, influence over it, or a military foothold beside it.

Whether it's progress....depends on how it's done.

So yes, take off to the Great White North.

But bring a proper map. Bring an icebreaker. Bring patience. Bring somebody who knows what happens at minus 40. Bring enough humility to understand that roads, ports, relationships, and trust take longer to build than Arctic ambition.

Above all, arrive knowing that you are not the first person to discover the place. It has been home for a long time.

Three things to watch

1. Whether the ICE Pact still has three members in practice

The pact was built to pool icebreaker expertise between Canada, the US, and Finland. Then Washington and Helsinki signed their own deal for eleven ships. Watch where the actual orders land, and whether a single one lands in a Canadian yard. If the pact quietly becomes a two-way street, Canada will discover that pooling expertise was never the same thing as sharing the work.

2. Whether Grays Bay survives its paperwork

The port and road project has just filed its impact statement with the Nunavut Impact Review Board. Watch that review clock, and whether the Inuit-led ownership stays in the driver’s seat as the money arrives. Canada’s new icebreakers come in 2030 and 2032. The window is now, and it is not being held open.

3. Who signs the refining deals

Greenland’s Tanbreez rare earths already have a 15-year buyer. The rock is spoken for. The question is where it gets processed and who finances that, because if the refining lands back in China, the whole race was a lap of honour for the current champion. Follow the offtake and processing agreements, not the ribbon cuttings.

Three questions for leaders

• Are you responding to the Arctic that exists, or the Arctic that looks convenient on your strategy slide?

• Who in your organisation possesses actual northern knowledge, relationships, and operating experience?

• In the gap between political ambition and physical capability, what could you build that creates value for both your customers and the communities already there?

Share

If your team is sitting with these questions (or carefully avoiding them), this is the work I do. I help leaders see in the dark: act on shifting ground without waiting for certainty that isn't coming. Hit reply, or find me at melaniemarshall.com. and imramamedia.com

For many years, I was professionally Canadian abroad.

I carried it with me, like a flag stitched to my backpack. It took coming home to understand it as a responsibility.

Today I was standing in Sankofa Square. In Adinkra, it means to return and fetch it. We go back, and we take the learnings from our roots to go forward. There were folk dance performances from people all over the world: the South Pacific and Mexico and many more places, all these different cultures that make up Canada. Isn’t that a wonderful way to celebrate Canada Day?

And then I watched the Polish dancers relaxing after their turn by dancing to Super Freak.

How Canadian.

I feel Canadian. Finally. I feel at home. Finally. It took longer than I expected. And I hope for every person I saw today, and every Canadian reading this, that you feel it as well.

That is one great beauty of this country: you bring your home with you, and you find home when you arrive.

But I was away for a long time. For decades, while I globetrotted for the BBC, I was Canadian, only in fact. I did think of myself as part of something greater, but I didn’t know what it was to be part of something together. Not really. Only in an abstract, fairly shallow sense.

People I’d meet would say things like, “Oh, Canadian, you’re very nice,” or (smiling) “You’re not American!” I didn’t really think beyond, “I like that people like me.” (Sort of like... Kenzie on Love Island.) I liked being liked, and it opened doors into more worlds.

Mostly, I spent my energy trying to be more British rather than figuring out what it actually meant for me to be Canadian. Twenty years I gave to that project. Win some, lose some, eh?

When I lived for five years in the States, it never occurred to me, unlike so many of my friends, to begin the green card process. I just knew I wasn’t that.

But heed me: it is far more important to think about who we are, and what we want to stand for, than just: what we are not, or if people like us.

BTW, I still haven’t grasped the glowing maple leaf that unlocks that Canadian answer. But I have gotten closer. And I love hearing what folks are thinking about the question, even if, especially when, we might not agree. It is how we figure out who we are.

When I got back, to be honest, I thought maybe it would be a few months before I roamed again. But life has a funny way of sneaking up on you. At first it was good to catch up with friends, to be close to family, to buy dill pickle chips at will. But the stark truth was I felt like a stranger in a strange land. I didn’t feel Canadian, at least not as I’d imagined. For twenty years I had a mythology of what it was to be Canadian. I kept us more as a cartoon than I would tell other people to do about the wide world I reported on.

Back in Toronto, I struggled. I didn’t know how things worked. It seemed like everyone had their own little clubs. I’d spent decades basking in and believing that Canada looked out toward the world, and I found a country almost impossibly obsessed with the USA.

And yet, people were kind. It was good to laugh easily, to eat well, to be safe.

I realised that it’s not just about my identity, it’s about what I can do.

It feels like a very important time to be a good Canadian.

A good Canadian gives another driver the benefit of the doubt when they forget the signal in traffic. A good Canadian waits their turn at Timmy’s. A good Canadian doesn’t wait to jump in when someone is struggling with a flat tire. A good Canadian gives directions to the visitor from Montreal, even though they are a Leafs fan to the end.

(Not much can be done for Senators fans.)

A good Canadian is not someone who is perfect, nor who thinks Canada is perfect. A good Canadian is someone who refuses to give up on making it more decent, more livable, and more welcoming.

As a nation, we have made so many mistakes, most notably in our treatment of our First Nations people. I am not saying more, not to tokenise this, but because I am only starting to learn in depth what it means. But anyone with willing eyes can see there are wrongs to be righted. The foreign journalist in me gasps that there are Canadians who still don’t have clean water.

So, Canada is not close to perfect. But for me, it is close enough to what a country should be that I feel responsible for helping it become better.

Because we have lots of challenges that need figuring out: how young people don’t have to live in shoebox basements, how not to have our ageing parents waiting twelve hours in an emergency room, and what it looks like to have a prosperous, equitable economy that is genuinely not dependent on our neighbour down south.

We stumble forward, and yet we stumble forward together.

I spoke to a room in Calgary a few weeks ago where some of the people there didn’t even think they wanted to be part of Canada anymore, and yet, good God, they all behaved like Canadians. We disagreed respectfully. People, pained, asked me how they could speak to friends and neighbours who didn’t believe in the story of this country anymore. I said this then, and I say it now. However bruised we are, we are not broken.

So it’s probably worth saying this straight out to Alberta: don’t go. It would be a mistake, and I don’t want you to. Whatever has happened, we can work it out.

I was born in Big Sky Country. It is my home. I grew up in Halifax. It is my home. I live in Toronto. It is my home. I have family in Penticton. It is my home. Alberta, you are my home.

If you are an Albertan who thinks the only way forward is to leave, I am hearing you. And we just haven’t had a good or creative enough conversation about the future. Leaving ain’t the way, and protest votes have an ugly way of backfiring.

If you’re an Albertan or other Canadian who is very upset by people wanting out, I get it. And we have to have a positive conversation with them about how this country can speak to all of us. If Canada means anything, it has to include the people who are angry enough to want out. Also, just say it: don’t go. (You don’t have to say please.)

There is no myth of Canadian exceptionalism, and yet to be Canadian is to be exceptional. It is an exceptional thing to live in a peaceful land that is caring, that is largely polite. (If you don’t count drivers in Toronto and Montreal. And can I just say, what is happening with drivers in Edmonton? Are all the turn signals broken? But I digress.)

I used to fall in love with all the wrong people. I spent a lot of time trying to make people love me who didn’t love me, make organisations love me who didn’t love me. It took me a long time to learn the lesson of going where you’re welcome and wanted. One of my themes for 2026 has been exactly that.

Canada is where I am welcome and wanted. And I want to make Canada a place where other people feel welcome and wanted.

I know what it’s like to spend too much time trying to belong somewhere that does not want you. I do not want that for people. I do not want that for provinces. I do not want that for anyone arriving here with a suitcase, grief, hope, or a dog.

And when I say anyone, I mean everyone. Everyone who is willing to recognise each other’s humanity. Aside from that, we can disagree on everything, as long as we do it with a polite, friendly smile, and we can be nice to each other’s dogs.

What are we celebrating today? Well, we’re a young country on very old land. So, perhaps it’s tougher to celebrate all our history. But I think we are celebrating that we have more in front of us as a country than we do behind us.

The world is a scary place, and somehow in the dark, the northern lights of Canada are glowing. That is really super cheesy, but it is how I feel. All the resources we have: our ability to see differently, to build relationships, what is in our ground, what is in our heads, what is in our waters, what is between us. The groundwork we have been laying for generations is now a blueprint. A way for us to exist in a world that needs a new way to be.

If I were to sit all of us down around the campfire (those of you who didn’t run screaming from being outdoors), we could find something to laugh about. We could find something in common, and we could find differences to celebrate. That’s what makes us Canadian.

Canada is not perfect or innocent. But it’s a place where people are arriving, changing, trying, listening and building. There is an unfinished, brave, creative future waiting for us.

We have more ahead than behind. So what do we do with that? We celebrate the ordinary civic miracles. We tell each other the story of Canada we believe in. We don’t give up on any of us. We take part.

I remember, years and years ago, an old boss of mine saying I should be happy I came from a boring country. He had just spent years covering the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath. At the time I thought, oh my God, no! All I wanted was to get out and explore the world.

Now, I thank God I come from a boring country.

Boring means the taps work (for most people). I feel grateful that the water turns on, and that somebody does the work to make that happen. I feel grateful that there are people in WhatsApp groups who care whether or not we are doing our recycling properly (if a bit too intensely). I feel grateful that we have cultures thousands of years old who keep the wisdom of the land and how we can live in harmony. I feel grateful that we know how to party by sea-doo, snowmobile or four-wheeler. I feel grateful that a lot of the time we don’t judge a book by its cover. Not all the time, but a lot of the time.

Sure, sometimes I wake up panicked, thinking, what if I never get to go to Mongolia? Or live in Buenos Aires? But mostly, I want to be ‘bored’ by this country. And there are parts of it I still haven’t seen. I’ve never been up North. I will fix that this year.

So here’s a Canada Day (week?) invitation. Crank up your Kim Mitchell, your Shania Twain, your Rush, your Classified, your Shad, your Tom Cochrane, your Barenaked Ladies, your Gordon Lightfoot, your Great Big Sea, your Joni Mitchell. Let loose laughing at SCTV, Kids in the Hall or Shoresy. Let the fireworks go safely (noiseless for the animals, please).

Then do something today that you take for granted. Celebrate one amazingly boring thing we get to do as a country. Celebrate the pothole fillers. The neighbour who shovels.

My story of Canada, the story of Canada that keeps me home, is that we are a kind and diverse people who learn from our mistakes, who envelop each other, and celebrate each other. That we are determined to keep seeing each other as humans and doing better.

We might differ on what we think should happen with taxes or trash pandas, but we all know to watch out for cobra chickens.

When we do disagree, let’s disagree by telling each other what the story is for Canada that we believe in going forward.

We have more ahead of us than behind us. Don’t give up on any of us.

Happy Canada Day.

"I was dreamin' when I wrote this, forgive me if it goes astray But when I woke up this morning, I coulda sworn it was Judgment Day"

Prince Rogers Nelson

Do you remember this one? The synth calling us to the spotlights. All gorgeous shiny purple and defiant lip curls, joyously dancing like it would never end.

Prince told us, “party like it’s 1999.”

And honestly, RIP Purple One, I get it.

It would be nice if we could all stay in purple lamé forever. But you cannot outdance reality.

That’s why I keep thinking: tonight we’re going to party like it’s 1929.

Not because this is 1929 exactly. Historical parallels get lazy very quickly. I am not saying the market crashes tomorrow. I am saying the mood is familiar.

The late 1920s had glamour, speed, technology, speculation, credit, new fortunes, and a public desperate to live after years of war and pandemic. It also had inequality, debt, workers under pressure, and a market increasingly detached from ordinary life.

Almost a century later, does it sound familiar?

Even after a volatile week for tech stocks, and the Iran conflict’s ongoing impact, J.P. Morgan has just raised its year-end target for the S&P 500 to 7,800, citing AI investment, earnings momentum, and resilient economic conditions.

Meanwhile, consumer confidence is still miserable. Even if it has recovered a bit since May.

So yes, markets can be high.

But a lot of people are not feeling that buzz.

And boy, some people are working awfully hard to explain that away.

From Wall Street to the City to Bay Street, I keep hearing versions of: “We’re not out of touch. Lots of regular people have pensions too.” This is a variant of “the good times are actually benefitting everyone.”

Yes, many do. Lots of people have retirement accounts, mutual funds or other investments in the market. But exposure to the market upside is not the same thing as feeling secure.

You can have a pension struggle with gas prices. You can invest and worry that AI is going to take your job next. A market high doesn’t pay the rent or make grocery bills come down.

And market gains aren’t evenly felt. In the U.S., the bottom half of households holds only a tiny share of corporate equities and mutual fund wealth. Even when people technically “own the market,” they do not own it in the same way.

So, there is definitely a split personality feeling in the economy right now. It worries me.

Not because having two faces is inherently bad.

Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings, had two faces because he could see both ways. Past and future. In and out. What was ending and what was beginning.

If you can genuinely look at both sides of the coin, (and Janus was actually on old Roman coins), that perception gives you wisdom. It can be leadership.

But we are not there.

We are not living in Janus economics.

We are living in Two-Face economics.

Jekyll and Hyde economics.

We aren’t seeing what the other is seeing. We have a dangerously divided self. In stories, they’re villains because they lack awareness of each other. They’re not integrated, and yet, they never stay neatly divided. A fissure opens up. The hidden self takes over. The bill comes due.

Societies work the same way.

How about Russia before 1917? The Tsar had imperial authority. He continued to spend on military pageantry while the state was hollowed out by war and economic loss. Local food shortages became a national grievance. And did anyone see the revolution coming? Well, yes.

The Chairman of the State Duma, Mikhail Rodzianko, tried to warn Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandra it was going to go wrong, and they did what people normally do. They turned a blind eye.

Here are some quotes from early February 1917:

“Young people run and shout that there is no bread, simply to create excitement, along with workers who prevent others from working. If the weather were very cold they would probably all stay at home. But all this will pass and become calm if only the Duma will behave itself.” Tsarina Alexandra

Or from the Tsar:

“That fat Rodzianko has again sent me some nonsense to which I will not even reply.” Nicholas II, speaking to Alekseyev, February 1917

Within weeks, Nicholas was no longer in charge. When the dance is over, the floor can clear very quickly.

I’ve seen it in places I’ve worked over the decades.

In Cairo, up until January 2011, there was an accepted “deal”: accept two faces, two worlds for this country and you will have stability, growth, and order. Stay quiet and the system holds. Raise your voice and it will be bad news. Going there under Mubarak, it felt like that would never change. It would be Hosni Mubarak, and then it would be his son. The grip was so tight, so tight no one could breathe.

But people need air. The bargain was broken. People didn’t feel stable or prosperous. They knew the truth was poverty, corruption, and repression. You had young people with nowhere to go and families squeezed past the point where patience still looked like wisdom.

So, even though it seemed impossible that a match lit in Tunisia would spread to Cairo, it did. I still remember standing on the roof of our makeshift broadcast headquarters watching Mubarak’s National Democratic Party headquarters burn to the ground. No one believed that could happen. Eventually, Tahrir Square filled.

Whatever has happened since, that was a historic moment.

When you think of Lebanon now, you probably think of Hezbollah and ruins. But in my lifetime, it wasn’t like that. Once, it was “the Paris of the Middle East,” a glamorous Mediterranean hotspot. Even six years ago, in my personal memory, it wasn’t like that. We all loved to visit, for its cosmopolitan vibe, its cafés which felt like a taste of Europe.

What I think of is something people would always say to me there: we know the elites “fight in public by day and party together on the hill by night.”

Through war, civil and external, and peace, it has been under strain for decades, and since 2019 in full economic collapse. But underneath it all, there has been a hollowing out. Unequal and unstable for decades. Sure, because of violent militants, demographic changes, and fragile ecosystems turned bloody, but also, the people would tell you, because of an elite convinced they could keep playing the music and watching everyone dance, from their safe perch in the hills.

I remember watching the last Syrian tank go over the hill in 2005. I remember so many times hearing people chant “Thawra,” revolution, often to a techno beat, with iced coffees in hand. The Lebanese revolt in style. So many times when people have said, “This isn’t what we want, and we know the game is rigged.”

The world too often flattens Lebanon into Hezbollah and ruins. But there is a majority paying for deals gone wrong. A state turned to sand.

And the hill on which the elites perch becomes more and more precarious. That is how contempt enters the bloodstream of a country. As a country bleeds out.

And bleeding out does not always equal revolution, (at least not successful ones, whatever that looks like).

It does not always mean the palace falls, or the government collapses, or the whole system breaks in one dramatic scene.

But it sure as hell does not equal stable growth either. It usually involves things falling apart, and people finding bad answers to good questions.

And now here we are.

I am definitely not saying that we’re one step from a violent revolution or a depression. I am saying that we are clearly in a moment where there are different stories being told and lived. We have a market story and a kitchen table reality.

The markets are high, and the people aren’t buying it. And the answer coming from a lot of elite economic and political quarters, (of all party persuasions), is to treat this as a messaging problem. Or a chance to score points on their opposition. And then, to party together by night.

But they’re missing a massive warning sign. One that I am hearing from people of all political persuasions. Left, right, centre, checked out, furious, exhausted, over it. Different explanations. Different villains. Same feeling.

Nobody is buying the high.

A person can keep spending because life is expensive, and they need a little joy, not because they feel optimistic about their prospects.

A person can own Nvidia or SpaceX or a tech-heavy fund and still feel the system is rigged against them.

A person can have a pension and still look at rent, groceries, AI layoffs, and their children’s future and think: something is very wrong here.

That is the warning sign.

Not anger by itself. People are often angry, and will be until the end of human civilization.

The warning sign is when people start nodding their heads across political lines or clenching their fists. If people from different political places keep describing the same broken bargain, that is not merely polarization. It is a legitimacy warning.

And legitimacy is not soft. It is not sentimental. It is part of the operating system. Without it, people do not believe in institutions. They do not believe in leaders. They do not believe sacrifice is shared. They do not believe the future they are being sold.

I have seen what happens when we don’t reach across a vast chasm. When we don’t integrate two overlapping realities. So have you…on the evening news.

So, our work now is to stop mistaking one face of the economy for the whole body. To stop dismissing what people are telling us because it does not fit our chart. To stop treating lived reality as a political inconvenience, a messaging problem, or a failure of optimism.

History tells us that without changing course, without seeing and believing that multiple things are happening at once, things that cannot just be outdanced, we will not be able to respond in a full and creative way.

It is not inevitable that societies fall into ruin, or that disaster, calamity, or economic shock wake us up. What we call inevitable in hindsight is often blindness to truth in the present.

When people stop believing in a society, they do not always take to the streets crying “the people want the fall of the regime.” But if they get scared, stop buying, and stop trusting, that hurts everyone.

If they start believing and voting for anyone who sounds like they can see the pain, that can turn dangerous.

And sometimes people get to the point where they think, well, “we don’t need water, let the whole thing burn.”

You feel that heat all the way up at the top of the nicest hilltop, skyscraper, or master of the universe retreat.

That is why I keep coming back to Janus.

The way through this is not doom or denial.

The actual Janus could see both ways. That’s what we need to do. We need to lok at markets and kitchens. Earnings and exhaustion. AI investment and fear. Consumer spending and dread. The possibility and terror.

When we see through both sets of eyes, we amplify our potential to find a creative way forward, a stable path in uncertain times.

So yes, by all means, keep the party going. I’ll whip out my purple lamé.

But we don’t have unlimited time here to face the music.

The hour is approaching.

Which ways are you willing to look?

Three questions to consider now:

1. What truth are you dismissing because it is being spoken by someone with less power, less money, or less access than you?

2. Where are your numbers saying “resilience” while people’s lives are saying “strain”?

3. If you had to look both ways, like Janus, what would you have to admit is ending, and what would you have to start building differently?

Over the next 90 days, here is what I’d be watching.

I have been wrong before, (hard to believe I know), but I have also been in enough places where the floor dropped out to know what the creaking sounds like.

So here are four things:

The mood gap. Does consumer confidence recover, or does it stay low while markets stay high? Right now, the University of Michigan sentiment index is at 49.5. In May, it hit its lowest level in its long history. That is not a dip. That is people telling you something. And it matters in the U.S. It matters in Canada. It matters in Europe. Resilience is becoming one of the phrases elites use when they do not want to say exhausted.

The quality of spending. People can keep spending because they are confident. They can also keep spending because life costs more. Food, rent, fuel, medicine, debt payments, childcare, insurance, transport. These are not signs of joy. They are signs of life being expensive. So watch what companies say. Are customers buying what they want, or only what they need? Are they trading down? Waiting longer? Using more credit? Cancelling subscriptions? Delaying big purchases? Chasing discounts?

Fear in the labour market before collapse. The June U.S. flash PMI had a very revealing split: manufacturing activity rose, but factory job cuts hit their worst level since 2009, if you set the pandemic aside. Output looks better while workers feel less secure. That is exactly the kind of contradiction that, in my experience, precedes the moments nobody saw coming. They did see it coming. They chose not to look. Watch the language: efficiency, restructuring, AI transformation, productivity, rightsizing, strategic realignment. A lot of pain now arrives dressed as strategy.

The point where the feeling becomes a number. This is the one I almost hate to include, because it sounds bloodless. Credit stress. Delinquencies. Arrears. Defaults. But that is where the kitchen table eventually shows up in the spreadsheet. If people are using debt to get through ordinary life, if they are missing payments, if small businesses are quietly falling behind, if households are choosing which bill gets paid this month, then the “vibes” were never just vibes. They were early warning signals. The country can look fine on paper while the stress is moving underneath. I have watched that movie. It does not end with everyone realising the numbers were off and calmly adjusting. It ends with someone on a rooftop, watching something burn.

You are driving in from the airport. Every building is white marble, and it is after dark, so the whole city glows. Someone texts to ask for a quick meeting near the world’s largest indoor Ferris wheel. You sigh, the jet lag is real, but you need to know what’s happening on the ground, so you go.

Tomorrow, you are heading into the desert to talk about a deal near a burning gas crater the locals call the Gate of Hell.

Where are you?

Ashgabat, Turkmenistan.

If you got that right, you are probably either a geography teacher, or your trivia team is doing very well. Most people could not find Turkmenistan on a map. I’m not judging. But it is a strategic problem.

Because the countries most people have not had to think about are becoming the countries they cannot afford to ignore.

That is the pattern to watch now. And it usually is. We can often get a bit lazy about where we put our attention and our resources. Like a cart horse making its way around Central Park, we often have a well-worn path of thinking we follow, without really thinking much about it. The trick is to look deeper and further than our mammalian brains tend to go.

I remember when I took the Middle East Jerusalem job for BBC News in 2019, how many seasoned journalists and geopolitical hands told me ‘oh is that semi-retirement?’, ‘nobody cares about that anymore,’ ‘Israel and the Palestinians is a dead issue.’

So...that aged poorly.

That was not about size or power. It was a possibility error: a live story written off because the headlines had moved on. And possibility errors cut both ways. You miss the place that never stopped mattering, and you miss the place that has started to. The old question was: Who is powerful? The better question now is: who is useful? Useful, on this map, means the ability to deliver something through the route. Every country in this piece is an answer to that question.

The old map was built around the places everyone already knew to watch: Washington, Beijing, Brussels, Riyadh, Doha, Tehran, Moscow. The new map is not replacing those powers. It is moving around them.

It is being drawn through countries with ports, gas fields, rail corridors, spare diplomatic phone lines, and geography that suddenly matters more because the obvious routes have become unpredictable or unavailable.

—

That is why Turkmenistan matters.

It holds one of the largest gas fields in the world. Almost all of that gas currently flows east to China, and China is moving quickly to lock in more. In April, Beijing signed a multibillion-dollar deal to expand the giant Galkynysh field, tightening China’s grip on Central Asian gas.

Europe wants some of that gas moving west instead, through a Trans-Caspian pipeline that has spent 30 years wavering somewhere between a strategic dream and a PowerPoint slide. Now the conversation is back. Turkey is signalling that the pieces may finally be moving.

What Turkmenistan is actually doing, while everyone frames this as China versus Europe, is calculating risk.

Selling more to China is easy in one sense. The route exists, the buyer is serious, and the political expectations are understood. Moving gas west requires Ashgabat to believe Europe will stay serious after the headlines move on. Contracts, financing, infrastructure, political cover.

Holding the resource is the easy half. Getting it out takes commitment. And then...someone still has to underwrite the political risk of moving it.

But also, there is a time for all things. And while you’re dithering about sending an exec to ride the Ferris wheel and make friends, China is locking it in. Once it all goes East, the game is over.

—

Then Mozambique. Same question, different ocean.

Mozambique’s LNG story is the kind of story executives like to simplify. Big project.Big restart. Big opportunity.

But the reason it matters is duller and more durable than any of that: geography.

Mozambique ships through the Indian Ocean. It bypasses both the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea. In a world where chokepoints have become weapons, that is leverage.

TotalEnergies’ Mozambique LNG project is now back underway after being frozen for years by an insurgency in Cabo Delgado. Thousands of workers are back on site. First gas is expected toward the end of the decade.

But hey, does Islamic State ring any bells for anyone? They’re in Mozambique.

The insurgency has not gone away. Recent attacks near Palma and Macomia are a reminder that a possible route is not the same thing as a functioning corridor in the real world. And possibilities and usefulness in frontier spaces attract insurgencies and require fluidity. That’s tough when it’s multi-billion-dollar infrastructure projects, not just capital in the ether.

It’s uncomfortable but true: Geography only buys leverage when there is peace enough that you can use it.

But you’d be wrong to look at Mozambique and just see Islamic State. More than 720,000 displaced people have gone home, and in March, aid workers reached Mbau, in Mocímboa da Praia, for the first time in three years. Fragile, yes. But people do not walk home toward a place they believe is finished.

But fragility is why Tanzania now belongs in this piece.

They’ve got a 42 billion dollar bet in offshore gas backed by Shell, Equinor and others.

(Yay, more LNG facts, you might be thinking...but probably not. )

Calling Tanzania ‘the next Mozambique’ is the lazy version. It’s not. Tanzania is the spare key that Europe is having cut.

Another Indian Ocean LNG route. A second way to supply markets without moving through Hormuz. One more African gas story that gets more important every time the old routes look less reliable.

But Tanzania also carries the warning label. LNG projects are slow. This one wouldn’t produce for years. Capital is impatient. Agreements with whoever is in power can be tricky. What is decided in an air-conditioned 5-star conference room meets different realities on the red earth roads. And the ‘little people’ not invited to the conference have a big impact on whether the project becomes real. This is often ignored or discussed rather than engaged with meaningfully. Local legitimacy matters. The route may be strategically attractive, but that does not mean the project automatically becomes real.

This is where the ‘new map’ gets harder than the slogan. The world does not just need new corridors. It needs corridors that can survive politics, insurgency, financing delays, and the attention span of investors. That requires new ways of thinking for corporations used to de-risking as a way of life, and making decisions at a data-level or Shangri-la hotel level.

Then Pakistan, which answers the question in a way nobody finds comfortable.

Pakistan is usually treated as a problem to be managed: nuclear-armed, financially fragile, militarily powerful, politically unstable, close to China, tied to Saudi Arabia, next to Iran, and permanently complicated.

But that is exactly why it has become useful again.

In a crisis, useful often matters more than clean.

When the ceasefire (albeit one of the world’s least sturdy ones) was ready to be discussed, it wasn’t Doha or Geneva that rolled out the red carpet; it was Islamabad.

Pakistan can talk to players who do not trust each other. It sits near the routes everyone is suddenly studying, plugged into China’s corridor ambitions through Gwadar and CPEC, with relationships across the Gulf and a land border with Iran. It has leverage precisely because it is not cleanly inside one box.

That does not make Pakistan stable. It does not make it benign. It makes it unavoidable.

The new order that is emerging requires us to look and think differently about the players we do know.

Usefulness has started to outrank power.

That is why Azerbaijan matters. Nobody needs to become an overnight expert in Baku (or Asghabat or Islamabad for that hat matter) . But Azerbaijan is turning into a modern-day caravanserai: Caspian gas, Middle Corridor rail, Turkey, Europe, Central Asia all passing through. It is one of the places where the new map is already becoming real.

And we all know Turkey is a player. What is changing is how it’s trying to play. Energy, rail, ports, defence, the Caspian, the Black Sea, the Middle East, Europe. Turkey is trying to become...inevitable (but with less of a Thanos vibe), the place the map has to pass through.

Nobody is going to unveil the new order with a ribbon-cutting (and anyone waiting for one will miss it). It is arriving as a messy set of workarounds.

For leaders, this is operational intelligence.

Because if your map only includes the countries you already know, your risk model is probably out of date.

The new map is not being drawn only by the countries with the biggest armies or the loudest speeches.

It is being drawn by the countries that became useful while most people were looking somewhere else.

Sometimes that country is a white marble capital most people could not find on a map.

Sometimes it is a gas project behind a security perimeter, or the next LNG bet down the coast.

And sometimes it is the country nobody quite trusts, but everybody still has to call.

So here’s my bet.

The cart horse will keep its loop around Central Park. Reliable, photogenic, going exactly nowhere new. My money is on the Akhal-Teke, the golden horse, because its coat actually shimmers. But that is not why I would bet on it. I would bet on it because it was bred where there is no path, no water, and no applause.

In 1935, Turkmen riders took them from Ashgabat to Moscow, four thousand kilometres, including three days crossing the Karakum desert on almost no water. Bred for the route nobody believes can be ridden. That is the horse the new map belongs to.

The cart horse gets the park. The golden horse gets the future.

Three questions to ask now

1. Where are we still watching prestige instead of usefulness? The most famous player is not always the most important one. In a disrupted system, the useful country may be the one with the port, the pipeline, the border crossing, the spare diplomatic channel, or the security force holding a project together.

2. Which ‘alternative route’ actually works under pressure? A route that exists on paper is not the same as a route that can carry goods, energy, capital or people when the system is stressed. The serious question: which bypass can still function when politics, violence and financing collide?

3. Who is gaining leverage because everyone else waited too long? Delay is not neutral. Europe’s slow approach to Caspian gas gave China time to lock in capacity. Years of stalled LNG negotiations made East African supply more urgent but also harder to finance. When old assumptions become expensive, the countries that moved early get to set terms.

Three things to watch (with a 90-day test on each)

These are not three news updates. They are the same test run three times: is this country becoming useful, or just staying famous?

1. The Trans-Caspian race. Does Europe put actual contracts and financing behind its interest in Turkmen gas? If not, the remaining capacity keeps moving east. The 90-day test: a signed purchase agreement or financing commitment for Turkmen gas by September, or it was another season of communiqués.

2. East African LNG security and timing. The 90-day test: Tanzania’s host government agreement is targeted for this month. It either signs this quarter or slips again.

3. Pakistan’s corridor-broker role. The 90-day test: Can they actually move the ceasefire forward? And is there a notable economic benefit that flows to them in the next 90 days?

Love Island is back. Somewhere in Fiji, a group of very beautiful people in very tiny swimwear are deciding who to couple up with, who to pie off, and who to ‘pull for a chat’ just in case. I have been watching closely (research, obviously), and I keep thinking about the Gulf.

Stay with me.

The Gulf is not dead. The old deal is.

Previously...on Love island.

The United States and Israel went to war with Iran. The Strait of Hormuz closed. And gas prices soared globally, shortages and fears abounded...and then...for a short time, it looked like the worst was over. Oil prices started sliding down. Somewhere, a comms officer started typing the words “return to normal.”

Not so fast. Renewed fighting, Walking away from talks, maritime traffic down to a trickle again. President Trump says this could go on for week or months. Yikes.

And while all of this has been happening or not happening, The Gulf, once “closed off” in a security relationship with the US, has gotten the Ick.

If you have somehow avoided the term, the Ick is that sudden, full-body turn-off you feel for someone you were perfectly happy with yesterday. It is rarely one big thing. It is the accumulation. The way he chews. How he tucks his pants into his socks when he bikes. The war he starts in your neighbourhood and then hands you the bill for.

Once it happens...try as you might to forget...well, things are never the same.

The old deal was simple, and it held for fifty years. The Gulf supplied the oil and hosted the bases. America supplied the muscle and kept both Iran and Israel in check. That was the whole arrangement. Oil for security. Then America and Israel went to war with Iran, the missiles flew over Gulf cities, the export revenue dried up, and the bill for the cleanup landed on the Gulf’s doormat.

So let us use the proper word. The Gulf got mugged off. By two of them at once. Washington broke the rules of a relationship it wrote itself, and Israel took the whole neighbourhood into a war only they wanted. If you’re an Arab State, you do not forget being made to look that foolish, or being that exposed.

The US Navy sailing back to reopen the strait, or bombing Qeshm Island to try and stop the tolls does not change that. You do not credit the arsonist for bringing a hose.

The Gulf is not dumping the United States, though. Nobody is making a scene. Gulf states do not do scenes. They are far too patient, and far too clever for the dramatic door-slam. The ick does not make you scream. It makes you stop closing yourself off. You start actively looking for better partners.

On the first of May, the UAE walked out of OPEC after nearly sixty years. Just left. That is the club Saudi Arabia used to run, the one that moved the world’s oil prices in lockstep, and the UAE stood up from the table mid-series and went to get a drink. OPEC then announced a tiny, symbolic production rise for June and pointedly did not mention the country that had just quit.

For decades you could talk about “the Gulf” as a single thing. One bloc, one oil policy, one direction of travel. Even if they had plenty of family disputes. But now, the Ick is spreading. Everyone is reassessing their relationships. Gulf oil decisions are bilateral now, not bloc. Everyone is single again. Anyone still planning around “the Gulf” as one actor is planning around something that has stopped existing.

Saudi Arabia still means to run the region, though, and it is making moves to secure its throne: a fresh defence pact with Pakistan, buying air-defence from South Korea. The UAE has made it clear it will “step on toes”, to quote the islanders, to get what it wants now. The contest is live, not settled.

Now let’s look at concrete stuff. Literally, concrete and steel. The UAE is racing to finish a second pipeline that runs across the country to Fujairah, on the Gulf of Oman, so its oil can leave without going anywhere near the Strait of Hormuz. This is not about pieing off America. It is about never again letting one narrow waterway, and whoever happens to have a hand on the tap that week, decide whether you get paid. It buys them options. And this week, with the Strait choked shut again, it looks less like a luxury and more like a sane investment of all that cash.

And then there is Casa Amor.

In Love Island, Casa Amor is the second villa. The producers fill it with tempting new options to find out who is actually loyal and who was always going to stray. It’s a great place to be, and it will always be there. The Gulf has a Casa Amor, and it is called China.

China does not have to do anything. It does not prosecute the war. It does not broker the peace. It stands over there, the buyer that both Saudi Arabia and the UAE need, and it waits. A stable partner, a partner that looks good on paper, and has what the Gulf wants - money and no desire to shake things up. Because the Gulf values stability over almost everything. They share that with the Chinese. Stability allows them to make money and plan for the future when the oil is gone.

The UAE made more of a statement (there’s always one.) For fifty years, there has been a quiet rule holding up the entire global economy: Gulf oil is priced and sold in US dollars. That rule, the petrodollar, is a big part of why the dollar runs the world. In April, the UAE’s central bank governor flew to Washington, sat down with the US Treasury secretary, asked for a cash injection, and apparently let it be known that if the dollars got tight, the UAE would start pricing some of its oil in Chinese yuan instead. The Wall Street Journal broke it. Stack that next to the OPEC walkout. In the space of about ten days, the UAE took a swing at both pillars holding up the old order: the one that sets how much oil the world gets, and the one that sets the currency the world buys it in. That’s a serious message.

Within days, a top White House economic adviser was on the record calling the UAE an incredibly valuable ally and promising the Treasury would make every effort to help. You do not rush to reassure someone you think is bluffing. The yuan threat was a negotiating move, and it was also a genuine hedge, and the speed of the American answer told you which of the two Washington was more frightened of. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has had quiet yuan talks running with Beijing since 2023.

A player who wins by waiting is still winning. Call China the clearest beneficiary, just to be exact, because it has not brokered, guaranteed, or fixed a single thing. It only has to stand there in Casa Amor while the Gulf decides, out loud, that it is not closing itself off.

And then there is the bombshell. Israel. You can love or hate a bombshell on Love Island. And the Gulf sure has some mixed-up feelings.

The war turned Israel into the strongest body in the region, almost overnight. It walked in, hammered its (and the Gulf’s) old enemy in Tehran, and rearranged every couple in the place. But being a powerful islander does not make you the most loved (Just ask Huda.) Israel is militarily dominant and more alone than ever, both at the same time. Its enemies are battered, not finished. The neighbourhood it now sits on top of is no friendlier than it was before.

And the Gulf? Well, the bombshell makes them squirm, and they can’t stay away (Jeremiah, is that you?) Israel has the one thing everyone in an uncertain world actually wants, which is defence technology that works. Before this war started the largest arms deal in the history of Israel’s Elbit Systems, turned out to have a secret buyer, and the buyer was Abu Dhabi. Aircraft-protection systems, the kind built to knock incoming missiles out of the sky. The same Emirates that spent this spring absorbing missiles is buying its umbrella from the bombshell.

The United States has stalled the UAE’s F-35 jets for years, nervous that the technology might leak to China. Israel turned around and sold them the protection Washington would not. The old partner withholds. The bombshell delivers.

Underneath it, the rest of the quiet stuff carries on. Leaked CENTCOM documents put Saudi Arabia and Qatar, neither of which will say a public word to Israel, inside the same US-led air-defence programme against Iranian missiles.

Washington, for its part, keeps grafting. They’ve been leaning on six Muslim-majority countries to sign the Abraham Accords as the price of an Iran deal. Sure, land-locked Kazakhstan said yes. But they don’t have much chance of taking anyone on a date along the Persian Gulf.

And again, the whole arrangement rested on the idea that you could couple the Gulf up with Israel and keep the Palestinians out of the villa entirely. Before this war, and the war in Gaza, that seemed to be working. But now, that bet is falling apart.

Saudi Arabia, the one everyone actually tuned in to see, says they’re not “open to exploring the connection” without a real, irreversible path to a Palestinian state. Not much chance of that with the current government, or the Israeli public, or the total lack of Palestinian leadership.

So the Accords get wider on paper and hollower at the centre. Fewer tourists. More quiet weapons. Busier in the basement, quieter on the main stage. Hey, It is what it is.

And then there is the events empire. The Gulf spent a decade building a multibillion-dollar business out of it: the conferences, the summits, the Grands Prix, the reason your CEO kept flying to Riyadh.

The war emptied it in about thirty days. F1 dropped Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. One big crypto summit decamped to Singapore, a global transport summit to Hamburg.

But they’re fighting back with a very Gulf move - throw money at it. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and four neighbours created a single Middle East Tourism Alliance. Dubai alone injected a billion-dirham stimulus. The events economy is not a vanity project. It is a load-bearing wall of the post-oil future. They have no intention of handing it to Singapore, or Lisbon, or anyone else who fancies a turn while they are down. They’re not getting voted off the island.

This is not a region behaving like it’s waiting for rescue. Don’t mistake these moves for being melty.

You do not centralise your oil exports, threaten the world’s reserve currency, and fight this hard to claw back your own conference calendar if you believe the old order is coming home.

The Gulf is no pushover. Saudi Arabia runs one of the largest defence budgets on the planet. With Iran battered it now sits second only to Israel in its own neighbourhood. This is a region buying options from a position of strength, not running from a position of weakness.

And just in case, being bronzed and beautiful beside Lewis Hamilton doesn’t work out, they’re moving even more money elsewhere. Gulf sovereign wealth is pouring into African renewables, into food and farming, into the things a region thinks about once it has decided the oil will not last forever. And is worried that its partners can’t provide it the food on the table it will need. The UAE’s cumulative bet on Africa now runs well past sixty billion dollars.

The Gulf knows how to build. They know how to be patient and watch the desert for the right signs, they know how to move slowly and deliberately.

Twenty years of watching this part of the world taught me one thing. Gulf states do not slam doors. They will smile through the dinner, sign the deal, pose for the photograph, and go on to another dinner with new friends they can hear out, hearing their options before the ink is dry.

So stop reading the signatures. Stop reading what you’d like to believe is true about the Gulf from 10 or twenty years ago. Read the slow but very certain signs of movement. (If you ever get to spend time in the desert, staring at the stars or falcon hunting ... a passion of the Gulf elite, you’ll understand them much better.)

But I can always be wrong, always. So let me point out a place that could be true here. A Hot or cold, they’re repositioning!theory that can never lose is basically impossible to read and pointless. (a bit like Rob.)

Watch for any dropping of the yuan talks. Watch for Saudi Arabia to get the security guarantee they’re after from the United States. Watch for Saudi and Qatar to entertain Israel visibly, and China less so, and then this might be a sulk, not the ick.

Then i’ll have got it wrong. Tell me so! It happens.

But I don’t think so. There was no all-clear this week. The strait is basically “closed off” in the worst possible way! The deal is still supposedly a week away, the way it has been a week away for three months.

All of that accelerates the Ick, if you’re the Gulf who wants to have fun with its events and petro exports and ... lack of war.

Still, I don’t think any of us really know how it will play out exactly. So, I am going to do what every Love Island viewer does at the end of the week. Sit down for the recoupling, and watch very carefully to see who is still in love, and who just got mugged off.

Same Gulf. New deal.

For leaders and their teams:

1. If you’re doing business with the Gulf, are you still treating it as one partner? The UAE and Saudi just stopped agreeing on oil, on OPEC, and on who they court next. Are your deals built for one Gulf, or for several?

2. Who has the ick with us, and are we mistaking their silence for loyalty? Which partner, customer, or key person has gone quiet and patient rather than loud?

3. Are you still operating on the old security map, the one where Washington sets the terms and the Gulf falls in line? Because the Gulf is quietly building its own, and the deals you’re making may be resting on an architecture that’s already gone.

4. The widen-out: And where else are you assuming the old power dynamics still hold, that the people who set the rules last decade still set them now?

This is the third piece in Dire Straits, a short series on what to watch following the Iran war. If you missed Parts 1 and 2, start there. We are looking at where the tectonic plates meet, move, and fracture, and what that means for you. It is part of Signals in the Dark: Field Notes for Uncertain Times, through Imrama Media.

A common misconception about my global insight is that it comes from being amongst the great and the good, in the halls of power. While I’ve met my fair share of movers and shakers, and they have their place, it’s usually...Chatham House.

I always make sure that I stop at a gas station and go to the grocery store. You can tell a lot about how a country is working, what they’re managing and not managing.

The truth is though, Chatham House and the IEA and I end up agreeing on a lot.

This week, I was driving through Kentucky and Ohio, and gas was over four bucks everywhere. Not just right near the airport. Everywhere. People (me included) were filling up with that look, the one where you’re doing maths in your head as the numbers climb. “What can I cut back on? I don’t need to go out this weekend, do I? How much do they pay for human plasma anyway?”

Nobody mentioned the Strait of Hormuz. Nobody mentioned Iran. Nobody expressed their undying devotion to fossil fuels.

The Philippines generally imports 98 per cent of its oil from the Middle East. Now, LPG consumption has dropped 30 per cent in forty days. Thirty per cent. People are going back to charcoal, by necessity.

In Baclaran, south of Manila, a barbecue vendor called Raida Gante has become famous in the local press for keeping her prices at 17 pesos a stick, even though she is struggling and can’t afford the gas, because her customers can’t afford more. But she is putting less meat on each skewer.

That is what an Energy Pandemic looks like at the end of the chain.

Across Southeast Asia, within weeks of the Iran War starting, it hit the kitchen table: rationing, panic buying, and officials told to take the stairs.

In Tuvalu, a tiny Pacific island nation most people have only heard of as the poster child for risks from climate change. Now, it’s a poster child for the Energy Pandemic. The lights are going off. They declared a state of emergency in April. Communities face daily blackouts. Households. Clinics. Water systems. Tuvalu runs on imported diesel. When the tankers can’t get through Hormuz, Tuvalu goes dark.

Last week, the IEA’s Fatih Birol stood up at Chatham House in London and said it out loud: this crisis is more severe than 1973, 1979, and 2022 combined. Not just in oil prices. In flight cancellations. Fuel rationing. Governments rewriting their fiscal plans in real time. Those who have the biggest exposures...going under.

Three months ago, Spirit Airlines was a functioning company. It had problems, yes. It was restructuring. But its business model assumed jet fuel at $2.24 a gallon. By late April, fuel was $4.51. Spirit burned through nearly $100 million in extra fuel costs in two months, and on May 2 it ceased operations entirely. A 34-year-old airline. Gone. Because a strait thousands of kilometres from Fort Lauderdale closed for a few months.

Don’t be the Spirit of businesses past.

(Sorry. But also not sorry.)

Here is where I think the debate framing can fail us. It is still not about green vs. not green. Transition vs. fossil fuels. Believers versus sceptics.

You do not have to believe in climate change to hedge your energy bets. You only have to notice what happens when fuel stops being cheap and predictable. The point is not ideological purity. The point is resilience. Energy diversity. Security, not belief.

The countries and businesses acting fastest are not the ones who care most about the planet. They are the ones who got burned, who are getting burned. (At least when they can afford to.)

Energy diversity will look different everywhere. It may not have anything to do with being green.

There is no single energy transition. There are dozens of them happening simultaneously, shaped by local conditions.

In the Philippines and small island nations, it is about microgrids and getting off diesel. In Vietnam and Indonesia, it is about scaling solar manufacturing fast enough to become exporters, not just consumers. In Latin America, they’re generating more renewables than their grids can handle, so the focus is storage and transmission. In Colombia and rural Indonesia, it is about solar microgrids and island battery systems replacing generators that run on fuel they can no longer afford. In Canada, it is about what’s in the ground: critical minerals, LNG, and Arctic export infrastructure. In Europe, it is about pipelines that don’t run through Russia or Hormuz. And that conversation is happening right now.

In fact, the deals are happening now. Canada and Germany signed their first LNG deal yesterday. Yay, said many, for Canada leaning into its new ‘single woman’ era, consciously uncoupling from the United States. But (and this is the honest version) the economics, and logistics, are still messy. Getting LNG out the East Coast means retrofitting infrastructure built for import not export. That’s the work of years, not quarters.

Still, you can’t deny the movement.

Globally, solar is on track to become the single largest electricity source within six years. Battery storage costs fell 27 per cent last year to record lows.

The United States, one of the prime movers in this crisis, is supposed to be more insulated. More domestic oil production than almost anyone. But through tariffs, battery storage costs are up 56 to 69 per cent. Its own backup plan is becoming more expensive. And how insulated is it when gas is four dollars a gallon in Kentucky?

Exposed is exposed. You are not just exposed to energy. You are exposed to politics, infrastructure and public mood.

Because an energy shock rarely stays in the energy sector. And this Energy Pandemic hasn’t. It runs through food, logistics, chemicals, aviation, tourism, manufacturing, consumer confidence, and the mood of every person watching the numbers climb at the pump.

Remember what I said last week: this is not one crisis. It is an accelerant.

But here is the part of the “energy diversity” conversation that is extra-risky. Raida Gante in Baclaran might be a media darling in the Tagalog press, but she did not choose charcoal because she read the signals like an expert. She went back to charcoal because she didn’t have a choice. Roughly 70 per cent of the world’s population lives in countries that lack sufficient oil reserves to ride this out; and many lack the resources to pivot.

The countries with the money to diversify are diversifying. The countries without it are burning charcoal and rationing clinic power.

So when I say “where are you exposed?”, I am asking: who in your supply chain, your workforce, your customer base, is absorbing a version of this that they cannot pivot out of? What does your business look like if the people who make your products, grow your food, or staff your operations are the ones going dark?

The gas station always tells the truth before the briefing does. But it does not tell everyone the same story.

Three questions to ask yourself this week:

1. Where are you assuming energy will stay cheap, available, and politically boring?
   Look at transport, heating, cooling, shipping, refrigeration, cloud infrastructure, commuting, events, suppliers, and customer behaviour. The weak point may not be where the fuel bill sits. It may be where fuel quietly holds the whole model together.

2. Who in your chain has the least room to absorb the shock?
   Not the biggest supplier. Not the loudest partner. The most fragile one. The farm, factory, courier, contractor, regional office, vendor, or customer base that cannot simply “pivot” when fuel doubles, power fails, or logistics seize up.

3. What happens to demand if your customers are doing maths at the pump?
   Energy shocks do not just raise operating costs. They change mood. They change spending. They change what feels optional. If people are cutting back on small pleasures to get to work, what does that do to your sales, donations, membership renewals, bookings, or public support?

---

We are very good at moving on. Sometimes that saves us. Sometimes it ruins us.

This is the first piece in Dire Straits, a short series on what to watch following the Iran war. From Qatar to Turkmenistan to the Arctic - we’ll look at where the tectonic plates meet, move and fracture and what that means for you: whether it’s the gas pump or drone defence.

It is part of Signals in the Dark: Field Notes for Uncertain Times, my field-notes series through Imrama Media.

In war zones and disaster zones all over the world, there’s a joke amongst my tribe: when you start doing the ‘what about the zoo animals in x crisis?’, it’s time to go home. We (not just journalists, all of us) go all in on one story. We get tunnel vision about everything (and everywhere else), and in our obsession with minutiae, we can miss the forest and the trees. And then…we’re bored. We want it to be over, and we want to move on.

And so it goes with the war between the US and Israel and Iran. There’s definitely a sense of ‘really, can’t we just move on?’ Or people thinking it’s over because the tempo has slowed, like a war-fly trapped in Amber. But no, we can’t. Because mighty forces have been unleashed, and once things begin to change, fast and slow (h/t Daniel Kahneman), they do not stop because of a big headline, or because we desperately want it to be over.

This is not one crisis, one moment. It is an accelerant. It is accelerating trends already in motion: the Gulf’s shift away from US security guarantees, the rise of alternative trade routes, the realignment of energy priorities, and the erosion of the foundations on which businesses and governments built their strategies.

The IEA calls it the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market;

I call it the Energy Pandemic.

Not to fearmonger. Or because it’s a perfect comparison. But it is useful.

A global that shock starts in one place, then runs through everything: fuel, food, shipping, fertiliser, travel, consumer confidence, work patterns, defence production, and the politics of who gets hurt and who gains.

Like the last pandemic, the pain and opportunity will not be evenly distributed.

Some will be squeezed.
Some will pivot.
Some will profit.
Some will pretend nothing has changed until the change arrives at their own front door.

In my experience, from wars, disasters, political shocks and recovery zones, the headline ending is rarely the real ending. It is usually the point at which the visible crisis changes shape.

The cameras move.
The statements are issued.
The market exhales (and inhales, and exhales again. in this case).
The public tries, understandably, to get back to normal.

But beneath that surface, other things keep moving.

Energy keeps moving.
Trade keeps moving.
Consumer fear keeps moving.
Political incentives keep moving.
The quiet scramble keeps moving.

Remember: this is not one crisis. It is an accelerant.

But one key caveat from years of observing conflict and disaster in the field: Humans are extraordinary at two things: adapting and forgetting. We adapt fast. We rebuild, find workarounds, get on with it.

We keep going brilliantly.

And then we forget why we had to do it in the first place.

We walk right back into the same exposure. COVID is the perfect example. Companies learned overnight to diversify supply chains, rethink work and shorten decision loops. They forgot. Entire societies changed overnight. They forgot.

That’s great for innovation and surviving crises.

It’s bad for pattern recognition and avoiding the same traps.

We want the headline to mean the story is over. But this is the time we need to pay attention.

It’s a trap to file any of this under “Thank goodness that’s over.”

So this series is about what you should pay attention to. Not as a firm predictor of the future, I do not believe in pretending certainty where there is none. But I have created a map of forces already moving, so we can ask better questions and make better decisions while the world remakes itself.

The question is not: can we move on now?

The question is: what is still moving underneath the surface?

And can we adapt quickly enough to the signals, without waiting for certainty that may arrive too late?

Share Imrama

Three questions to ask yourself this week as we set our lens for the weeks ahead:

1. Which parts of your life depend on cheap, predictable energy or travel?

2. Which supply-chain or market-access assumptions have you taken for granted since the shock began?

3. What did you learn during COVID that you have quietly forgotten?

This is also part of the work I’m building through Imrama Media, a production and strategy studio for organisations working in complex, high-stakes environments.

We make films, shape narratives, and advise on soft power for clients whose work needs to hold up under real scrutiny: multilateral institutions, corporations operating in frontier markets, and leadership teams communicating through uncertainty.

If you need help seeing through the fog, get in touch.

3 years after I packed up my life on the road, I stood in a Public Storage unit in Guelph, Ontario and reopened it.

I felt emotional just opening the gate. It surprised me. Then I realised all the boxes were labelled in Hebrew, because leaving Jerusalem, my movers were Israeli. As a result, I had no idea what was in any of them. It was like being all of my past was a surprise, until I started opening boxes one by one. Inside were memories I did not even know I’d forgotten.

My co-host, Dr Heather Collins, calls it a “memory museum,” and honestly that is exactly what it felt like.

Why it hits so hard (a little neuroscience, in human language)

Heather explained something that made the whole moment make sense: the amygdala (emotion) and hippocampus (memory) are close neighbours in the brain. That is why memory is rarely neutral. As she told me, when you remember, you are not just recalling facts. You are reactivating the feeling. You are re-experiencing.

Which is beautiful when the memory is kindness.

And brutal when it is loss.

The beads from Vanuatu, and the dignity that came back with them

One of the objects I pulled from the museum was a beaded necklace given to me by the Prime Minister of Vanuatu after a devastating storm.

I remember waking up in a half-destroyed house to someone knocking because they had brought fruit. Just in case we were hungry. Not because we were the BBC. Because that is what you do when someone is a guest. Later, we were invited to see the Prime Minister, the same man who had wept at a climate conference about his country disappearing under rising seas. I remember sitting on a balcony drinking juice while he gave me those beads. He has since passed on.

When I touched them again now, what came back was not the news. It was the moment. It was his dignity. It was how humbled and happy I felt being there.

That is the thing about talismans. They bring back the part of the story your body stored.

The Mandela tray, and the self I am trying to re-enter

Then there is my beloved Nelson Mandela commemorative tray.

I got it in 1999 as a leaving gift from my first BBC posting in South Africa. I met NELSON MANDELA and, in a moment of total eloquence, only managed to blurt out: “Canada loves you.” So, my colleagues bought me this beautiful tray bearing his image. I carried that tray everywhere for years. In suitcases, it arrived when I did. It was a symbol. A talisman. Proof I belonged to that tribe, that life, that purpose.

And then I left it in storage for years.

When I found again, I actually felt like I owed it an apology. For abandoning it, that part of myself, for so long. It is a part of myself I am bringing back into my work now.

Heather says the system at play is “episodic memory” but the catchier title is “memory museum.” Objects that act as retrieval cues, taking us on a form of mental time travel. We are able to access a different sense of ourselves through memories of ourselves in a different time and place.

Sometimes you do not need motivation. You need a doorway.

A cork for Jessica, and why small objects count

Heather brought out a talisman too.

A cork from a wine bottle served at her cousin Jessica’s memorial service, engraved with Jessica’s birth and death dates. Heather keeps it on her desk, a tiny object that holds grief, love, and continuity.

It is also the argument against grand marble statuary: the object does not need to be grand. It just needs to be meaningful.

When the talisman is gone

I told a story about a towel I bought in a Honduran prison run by MS-13, after negotiating our way in with a guy named “Satan.” The towel had a Bible verse inked on it. Years later, it was accidentally washed as a dish towel, and that was the end of that. I still feel sad about it.

Heather told the story of her Grandmother losing everything to a wildfire. All her photos, talismans, memories gone.

What do you do when you have to let go? or when you choose to let go?

Well, we can ritualise the closure, we can keep the story.

When you cannot control the loss, the story becomes the object.

Tell it. Re-tell it. Keep the neurons firing. Keep the meaning alive.

The guilt box, and permission to let go

Confession: at the beginning of the Arab Spring, I bought Bashar Al Assad souvenirs in Syria because I assumed he was going to fall. I’d not done that in Egypt or Libya and then everyone else had dictator mementos and I didn’t.

Then he brutally held on for years, and those souvenirs became a box of guilt I carried around until I couldn’t bear the weight. I finally dumped it out.

That is also part of the work: not every object deserves to stay.

If the souvenir carries no meaning, or the meaning is corrosive, you are allowed to let it go.

A question for you

If you have one object that can time-travel you back into yourself, what is it?

A piece of jewellery. A cork. A scarf. A rock. A silly mug. A tray. Something tiny that carries a whole chapter.

Drop it in the comments. Tell the story.

It’s a Friday morning in Gaza City when Palestinian journalist Ghada Al-Kurd and I manage to connect after over a week of logistics wrangling. We joke and make small talk, I say ‘how did you start your day?’

Ghada describes waking up and spending ten minutes just thinking about getting out of bed to have a shower (same, girl, same.) She laughs slightly as she calls it a “hard mission, mission impossible.” But in her version, there is no heating, or electricity. You boil water on the gas stove, mix it with cold water, pour it over you, and move fast because you are freezing.

Ghada is funny. Clear. Sharp, but not hard. Our conversation was a delight and a challenge.

I left it thinking: I think she should be the President. Of what? Well, nobody knows. But she should be in charge.

The world she walks through

On her walk to work, she passes a damaged high-rise, partially destroyed, surrounded by markets and tents. A building that could collapse, and there is no real system to keep people away. So people live beside it. Work beside it. Shop beside it.

She describes the fear of simply walking.

And when she talks about what “touches her heart”. It is what she saw on one of the coldest nights recently.

I saw kids between eight, nine and 10. They are selling bread in the street, only for three or four shekels (approximately 1 USD). Those kids should be in with their families, with their parents, they should be in school, or they should be sleeping inside their houses.

She is also profoundly affected by the lack of shelter now in Gaza. About 3/4 of the population are living in tents or makeshift shelters.

“Because no one like before the October 7, we couldn't imagine that all of the people they will live inside tents. This is not like it wasn't even our imagination that we will live the same experience as our grandfathers.”

For months, Ghada and her family lived in a tent. They lacked warmth, safety, privacy, hygiene. When she looks back, she says she doesn’t know how she made it through. Now, when she sees a camping video or tent featured on instagram, she skips it. “it’s a shameful to live inside a tent. I don't like to mention this word in my life.”

Mom Life after War

Ghada is raising two girls, Mira and Fatima, aged 13 and 11. Her face lights up when she talks about them. And our conversation is constantly interrupted by phone calls from them. They want to talk. They want her to come eat with them. She says they don’t like to be separated from her now.

During the worst of the hunger last year, she remembers telling them they had use less sugar each day in their tea. And if someone came and asked, they were to say that they didn’t have any. Then, she remembers crying when alone, because she was out of options.

now, my daughters whenever they are asking for something, immediately, I can go to the market and buy it for them. I don't want them to be deprived from any kind of food. I really want them to live their childhood…”

She’s trying to make up for lost time with their education as well. She is teaching them to be tidy, to respect people, to learn English. She says she shouts at them to practice their English to be like her, but they just go back to watching videos.

But here’s what made me so sad.

“They keep asking me a lot of things about normal, normal phenomena, about the sky, the sun, the stars, the night, like the sea, the fish inside the sea. So they should like they should learn this information in the school, but they don't know anything about this information.”

Imagine that. I know she feels it too. Because she tells me that school was the happiest time of her life.

They don’t believe in leaders anymore

I do want to talk about the future. I ask who people respect, who could unify people. Ghada says the belief in the whole idea of “a leader” coming to save anyone is long gone.

And when she talks about what’s needed, it’s a different kind of figure, and a different kind of future.

“So we need some we need new public figures… maybe young people… they can have like, moderate way of thinking… young people who believe in peace, really believe in peace… And just to stop the blood here in Gaza…just to be Palestinian… we believe in two state solution… So we should live together without fighting… we need someone who believes in this principles in life…

You can tell by all the ellipsis, she was on a roll. At this point, she and I are both half-laughing that she is sounding like a politician. Which is when I ask her the obvious question: would she ever get involved?

“...I don’t want to be like, famous as other people. But at least I can affect on people’s life here in Gaza, this is my wish. I can do something for my people.”

Peace and Dreams

At this point, her colleagues come by, telling her they want to turn the electricity off. So we need to finish up. I ask her if she believes a lasting peace with Israel is possible.

Ghada says she is “all the time optimistic,” and in a stubborn tone, “Why not? If we had like a good leadership, people who believe in peace, I think this will will come true.”

And I ask her what makes her happy now.

“I know it's something… normal for you, but whenever I go back to my bed, cover myself , stop thinking anything, and just go in a deep sleep till morning. I'm isolated from this thinking. When I am sleeping. I'm so happy,”

This conversation was not about abstractions.

It was about boiling water.

About living next to buildings that might fall.

About trying to raise daughters who have already lost too much, without letting them lose everything.

About refusing to give up the idea that people deserve better and that something else could exist.

Important Context

On October 7, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, according to BBC News.

In the war that followed until the ceasefire in October 2025, Gaza’s Ministry of Health recorded over 71,000 people killed. It is Hamas-run, as is everything else in the strip, but their numbers are regarded as reliable by the UN and International media.

In the last week of January, Israeli media cited a senior security force as saying that the Israeli military accepts over 70, 000 Palestinians died.

Since the ceasefire, the health ministry reports that there have been 449 killed. 4 Israeli soldiers have also been killed.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgpd1x00exo

Israel does not allow international media into Gaza to report independently.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says that 206 journalists and media workers have been killed since the beginning of the war - making it the deadliest conflict for the press ever recorded.
https://cpj.org/issue/israel-gaza-war/

https://www.ochaopt.org/

Share

I have to ask you, with everything going on, what are you doing to us? …I saw this and I thought, 85 seconds, I don't need that, with everything going on.

I did what any reasonable person would do when a scientist tells you the Doomsday clock is at 85 seconds to midnight: I accused Professor Daniel Holz personally.

He handled it with calm Midwestern physics energy. (trust me, that’s a thing.)

There’s a directional cause -and-effect problem here. No. I am not doing this. We’re doing it to ourselves.I get no pleasure in announcing the fact that we’re the closest to midnight we’ve ever been. I would like nothing better {than} to be far, far away from midnight.

At this point, I thought he might be a glass-half-empty kind of guy. But he surprised me in the best way.

“The way I think about it is this whole exercise, the whole point of the Doomsday Clock, it’s actually meant it’s an exercise in hope. The whole point of this is that we can turn back the clock.”

“The clock has, you know, turned back in the past. It’s been as far back as 17 minutes to midnight at the end of the Cold War. It goes forward and back. And it kind of depends on our actions. And there are plenty of actions that we can take that would reduce the risk and turn back the clock”

Did you hear that folks? Hope! You know, my favourite thing. Look, if the Doomsday guy agrees with me, I’m not just high on rainbows. But I digress, let’s get back to the dark stuff.

I wanted to know what specifically is on his mind. He got concrete very fast. The New START treaty is set to expire on February 5, 2026, absent a new framework or interim deal. This is not a Cold War leftover. It’s the last remaining agreement limiting US and Russian strategic nuclear forces. What happens if it’s gone? Well, do you remember Game of Thrones? Think of the New START treaty as the Wall. If it falls, radioactive white walkers anyone?

“starting next week, for the first time in over half a century, there will be absolutely no restraints on preventing a runaway nuclear arms race. And that’s completely insane.”

We talked about how with all the craziness of the news cycle hardly anyone has even noticed.

“It’s hard to keep track, but it’s one of the most dramatic things that will happen this year, the end of arms control as we know it. What got us through the Cold War? It will completely evaporate. That is, it’s terrifying, it’s incomprehensible”

Yikes. I agree! I asked Holz what pattern he sees when he looks at the forces pulling us closer to destruction. His answer was basically: leaders behaving as if they’re in the Pre-Oppenheimer world, except now we have nuclear weapons and climate collapse.

“leaders seem to be moving in the direction of naked self-interest and very short-term self-interest, believing that might makes right”

if we go back to the old way… we know how that movie ends. It inevitably leads to World War, but the next World War will be with nuclear weapons.”

“And when you use those nuclear weapons, civilisation ends as we know it. There’s no recovery. You have nuclear winter. It’s just over. It’s everything we take for granted about our world vaporises.”

At this point, my brain flashed back to childhood nightmares after watching ‘The Day After’ and Sting’s pop song about Russians also not wanting to nuke their children.

I want to look for a paper bag, but instead ask how we can get leaders to pull back from their current course.

“I’ve always thought that actually it goes back to the sting song in some sense. I mean, everyone loves their children and loves their families and wants… everything to continue.”

“people don’t want doomsday to happen. If we can make a compelling argument that what we’re doing now is making doomsday more likely, you would hope that people will start to turn back.”

Daniel specialises in existential risk. I told him that I often do existential angst…so what can those of us without the ‘nuclear football’ following us around DO?

“we all have to do what we can… If you’re a journalist… work on these sorts of topics. If you’re an artist, include this in your work. Anything you know, even just talking to your neighbours, can make a difference. Go out to rallies, of course, vote if you’re in a place where you can vote, anything, everything you know.” [1]
“Take that on board, but then… don’t end up… on the sofa, in a fetal position… use it as a call for action.”

Again, I think, he is quite peppy for a man who spends so much time staring into the abyss (in many forms.)

I bring up a man I met in rural Russia years ago. Uncle Pasha, who was depressed about life under Putin and claimed he was hopeful for one reason only: he thought maybe a black hole would one day swallow up Russia.

Hey, Professor Holz knows about black holes right? Could it save us?

Holz, being a black hole scientist, gently informed me that this plan is, technically, not ideal.

“The black hole part is not going to work out for anyone… black holes are not very localised in their effects that way, so we definitely don’t want that.” [1]

And then, at the end, after all the doom and the treaty talk and the leaders behaving badly, right after my black hole story, I asked what is the bright spot in his day

His answer made me smile.

“Well, black holes, I study black holes, and they’re these beautiful, perfect, profound objects full of mystery.”
“They really are just they’re kind of this perfect encapsulation of both the power of science… but also that it holds this mystery within them… so I love thinking about them.”

Humans really are profoundly fascinating and wonderful, aren’t they? A man who spends his days thinking about nuclear winter, and his joy is black holes.

We’re not doomed folks, not yet.

A Playlist for the Doomsday Anxious

Resources to Learn More

Doomsday Clock - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

A Brief Guide to the New START Treaty

Daniel Holz's Work

The Day After - the Show that gave me NIGHTMARES as a kid

Life after New START

CSIS Feb 3rd event on what comes next

“But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars”. - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Amidst the steady thrum of an endless January, I’ve had a strange mash-up running through my head: “It’s been a long dark night, and I’ve been a waitin’ for the morning,” croons Dolly. “Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead, “ comes in MLK Jr. with his rich baritone.

Last week’s dovetailing of Martin Luther King Jr. Day with Dolly Parton’s 80th birthday, it stirred something in me.

On January 19th, almost everyone seemed to be writing about one or the other on social media. Two icons whose images now sell everything from t-shirts and tea towels to prayer candles.

I’ve got some of those souvenirs. When I drove across America on my ‘Great Beyond’ road trip, I didn’t have much of an itinerary. But the Lorraine Motel, now part of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis and Dollywood in Pigeon Forge were on it.

Then, I was out looking for how people are finding their way forward in uncertain times. What does hope look like now? Now, I just felt that a tugging insistence to consider the double red-letter day as more than coincidence. What if it was synchronicity?

We all need heroes. They show us what is possible. They expand our idea of who we are and can be. There’s a t-shirt you can buy at Dollywood that says, ‘Raised on Dolly,’ and I certainly was. I was also raised on MLK Jr. Which growing up as a middle-class white kid in Nova Scotia in the 80’s, took some doing. They both introduced me to a new world.

My mom listened to Dolly a lot, so I knew Jolene by heart. Along with ‘Coat of Many Colours’, ‘9 to 5’, and my favourite, ‘Islands in the Stream’! She loved to write and tell stories and perform. She was a straight-talking, witty and glamourous woman. She didn’t apologise for who she was. That was a powerful model for a young girl who took heat for taking up a lot of space in the room.

I probably first heard a Martin Luther King, Jr. speech in a history class. It’s hard to believe, but that would have been less than 20 years after he was killed. Twice as much history has happened since then!

With my STRONG sense of justice and love of oratory, I was hooked. I knew power when I heard it. I knew righteousness when I heard it. He was my access point to the realities of racism and the bravery of the civil rights movement. And He introduced me to non-violence as a philosophy that could take on the principalities of an unjust world. That has shaped me profoundly.

They might not have had much in common on the surface. But on me, they had the impact of a depth charge. Two people wholly themselves and devoted to being in service of their calling. It inspired me then, and now.

We need heroes, as children and adults.

When someone becomes an icon, we often blur out the parts of them that remind us of ourselves. And we might forget the moments where their destiny could have just as easily disappeared.

We love our heroes as if they arose fully formed: anointed, wise and quotable. But nobody does. We’re all living, breathing, complicated humans. Even once quotable!

That means they struggled (Dolly had suicidal thoughts), and they got it wrong sometimes (MLK Jr. womanised). When we allow that to be true, we can maybe remember that since we all are flawed, perfection has never been a requirement for impact.

Also, both of them were not always sure bets for merch.

MLK Jr. was surveilled, threatened, called dangerous and divisive, a communist threat. Some white people celebrated when he was assassinated. The push to honour him with a holiday took years and encountered a lot of resistance (Alabama and Missisippi still mark Robert E. Lee’s birthday on the same day). Because he was not allowed to grow old, we don’t know how would have lived out his life. But his family and friends wrestled mightily to keep his legacy alive.

Dolly has been mocked for her looks, underestimated for her brains, and treated like a punchline. Her lauded musical talents were often credited to male colleagues, dismissed as “just country,” then the wrong kind of country. She was in the wilderness for a long time, and yet, she kept creating, kept building, kept sending books to children, kept her publishing…

And here we are. It seems inevitable in the rearview mirror. Just as the future might seem inevitable to some right now.

It’s not inevitable, it’s uncertain. Do not confuse the two. That just removes your agency. It was work then. It might take work again. But I think Dr. King was right that everybody can be great. And that we actually don’t know who the Dolly Partons might be among us.

History never looks the way you think it will look.

The Lorraine Motel is a two-story motor inn that reminds me of the places my parents would stop on summer road trips. Utterly ordinary. For all that I wanted to visit, I struggled to work up the right reverence as I looked at the balcony where Dr. King stood joking with his friends, as he waited to leave for dinner, moments before…everything changed.

I’ve stood in so many places where humans have done ordinary good and ordinary evil to each other, in volumes that later become extraordinary only because of the scale. Sometimes you can feel history. Often you’re just standing there in the present, trying to imagine a past that did not know it was about to become a museum.

Dr. King didn’t know we’d all be quoting the ‘Mountaintop’ speech one day. He wasn’t even supposed to speak that night. He came for a sanitation workers’ strike. He wanted to force Memphis to pay its garbage men fairly. We talk about it now as part of his shift toward economic justice, but remember this was also the daily grind for him and his colleagues. Visiting, supporting, speaking on local issues. Staying in motels, going for dinners at a local supporters house, and repeat elsewhere.

It’s actually when I bring it down to earth, and imagine it in the ordinariness of it all - joking on the balcony, everyone maybe a bit hungry, a family in the next room making a racket, and then…the human shock and horror of the moment. Then the news spreading out like terrifying wildfire.

I think of how afraid people must have been. So many people wondering what would happen next, how bad could things get now. While daily life would carry on too.

It’s been the same for me whether I’ve been at the Anne Frank House or Tuol Sleng Prison - the Khmer Rouge’s infamous torture prison. I always struggle to feel it, until I connect it to times I’ve been in places where history was happening around me, and people were deeply involved in their own humanity, not the ‘Hinges of History.’

In Tuol Sleng, also known as S-21, Pol Pot’s torturers brought in over 12,000 people. Only 7 are known to have survived*. What moved me to tears weren’t the gruesome torture implements on full display. It was the exhibit of mug shots. The Photos of people who for some reason smiled. Some who couldn’t hide their terror or shock. When I imagined them standing in front of me, one by one, their desperation to find something they could say or do that would save them. Well, I felt that.

(*possibly more by some report, but still only a fraction.)

On a happier (and yes, still related) note, when I was at Dollywood, I stood in line to visit the faithful recreation of the Appalachian shack where Dolly grew up. But it was actually her tour bus that got me. Seeing where she slept, did her makeup, kept her wigs!! and hung out with her team, I could imagine the laughs, fears and tears that go along with tens of thousands of miles on the road. Whether they were thinking about making it to soundcheck, or if they’d make it home in time for dinner.

We always imagine that history blazes in and out, alerting us that this is it. But in my experience, it is incredibly ordinary and small. So much so, we might not know until later what our role was in it.

We’ve also been around for a few million years, the universe for billions, so it doesn’t hurt to remember that history is also impossibly long. So, when Dr. King said ““the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” he didn’t mention that it might be almost impossible for us to see that arc.

It just means that if we want the certainty of knowing if we’re in the before or after, then that is probably the only time I would say we’re doomed.

I know. It’s the worst. It’s so hard for us humans, who don’t like the groundlessness that can come from all that uncertainty. How do we live inside that?

Everything I know says, we do it together. At the National Civil Rights Museum and Dollywood, what I remember most was not the top notch curated experience. It was my moments with people. Which tracks. The garment of destiny is not made up of slogans (or god help us, social media).It’s made up of humans being human with each other.

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I turned up to the museum running late, and without enough time to do the exhibits properly. Worn out from weeks on the road, I had lost my pep. I was already in that slightly shameful mental state, where you’re half present and halfway down the highway.

And…I still really wanted to go to the gift shop. So, I said “Can I go to the gift shop, I’m sure my dog can’t come in to the museum.” The manager Daniella was called over. “Well, of course she can. She’s a service dog. You can come in and see everything.” Oh no. My schedule! So…I blamed Sonora. As she performed a flawless down-stay, while I went through the metal detector, I said that she was overwhelmed, she was tired, and I thought it was better if we just went to the gift shop.

Daniella looked at Sonora with pity. She told me about her dog, Lady, and if you are a dog person, you know the rest. Daniella went out of her way to escort the poor, ‘overwhelmed’, wagging-tailed Sonora into a staff elevator and through a back entrance to the gift shop. There, I met they drily humourous Dennis, who was hilariously unhelpful when asked for opinions on civil rights merchandise. He did not care which t-shirt I bought, and was somehow deeply charming. In a place built around a tragedy, raised by moral courage, it’s good to remember it all starts with humans.

Oh, and then the 5th-grade field trip showed up. With Sonora there, the civil rights movement didn’t stand a chance. “Can we pet her?” they asked. I said, “No, she’s working.” They tried anyway, because they are children and she is a beautiful dog and rules are theoretical when you’re ten. And one of the guards, bless him, came swooping in to shoo them off. Not cruel, just firm: absolutely not, small people, back away from the working dog. “It’s okay,” I said. He told me “No, they need to learn. Besides, I could see she didn’t like it.” He smiled and stroked her head. I swear she smiled back. It turns out he also has a dog at home.

Then Dollywood, which should feel like the opposite of the Lorraine Motel, because it is a theme park. Joy with a parking lot. And yet it was also, strangely, a small study in shared space. Families in Trump shirts, gay couples, newly married couples with intellectual disabilities, big groups, little groups, all of them milling around and doing fun things together. Not utopia, not a new political system, just humans coexisting without tension or disrespect. I could feel common ground. And that felt almost radical.

I had an incredible day there. I want to go back and do research on what they’ve built. And yet, the moment I keep coming back to was small. An older staffer came up to me, clocked my cat-eye nails, told me he loved them, and showed me his almond-shaped, cat-eye pinky. He told me he hoped he’d be able to afford to get his done next payday. Even if he had to go nail by nail. We talked about beauty and nail care, and being ourselves and if Dolly could do it, so could we.

Look, I expected to like Dollywood. But I loved it. It fascinated me. It made me think about Dolly not as an icon, but as the deliberate architect of a place where people can be comfortable to be themselves.

Both MLK Jr. and Dolly, in different keys, made and make people feel seen, pulling people toward each other. That ripples out now into a million ordinary and lovely interactions between strangers.

I don’t think we are going to get through this particular stretch of history by finding the perfect quote or the perfect leader or the perfect plan. (though all of those would help.)

I think it will be by remembering what both of them understood in their bones, and what they show in totally different ways. We go through this together.

I keep coming back to this, we didn’t know then what we know now, and we don’t know now what we will know later.

If you are out there and you are afraid right now that these times are worse than they ever have been, I would say: they are different. They are different than they have been.

And there are ordinary, unknown people who will one day be on tea towels in gift shops, and owning gift shops. There will be continuing darkness, for sure. We are in the throes of something, and we can’t see its ending. And there will be unity from events and places we cannot imagine yet. We could try to predict it, and we’ll probably be wrong. It’s more honest to say: we don’t know yet.

So, in the absence of certainty, let’s instead look at our heroes, our icons and honour what we know to be true from what we see in them. From Dolly and MLK Jr: Courage is for the many. Service matters. Joy is a strategy. Non-violence is powerful. Literacy is a liberation tool. Being fully yourself is a public service.

And hey, let’s walk through all the gift shops. Laugh with someone new. And then get back on the road with our dogs beside us.

We keep going, together. Not because the ending guaranteed, but because we are not done yet.

Prompt:

1. Think of 2 of your Heroes - What do they have in common? What is a lesson that you have learned from both of them?

2. What is one way that the history books might be written in the future that you think is impossible now?

3. What would you want to be written in the history books as having done to be part of that?

Watch/Listen

Read

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ‘Mountaintop’ Speech

Learn

Martin Luther King Jr’s Definition of Non-Violence in Detail

The Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute

National Civil Rights Museum

Dolly’s Imagination Library

Dolly Parton’s America

Visit

Dollywood

Some people can’t stand it and shut down entirely. Others lean in, treating it like a show. Who’s winning? Who’s losing? Who’s about to get voted out of the castle or miss out on a recoupling? Headlines become “can you believe it?” chatter instead of signals that real lives are about to change.

This week, the drama is concentrated in a small mountain town in Switzerland.

Davos.
The great and the good.
The powerful and influential.
The people who want to be heard, and the people who decide who gets heard.

Normally, I’m wary of focusing too much on the view from the top. But right now, it matters. We are watching a shift in the world order around politics, security, and the economy.

Unprecedented. 3rd week of January - and I’m calling it, it will be the most overused word of the year.

If there was ever a moment to pay attention to those rooms, this is it.

And there’s a second circle that matters just as much. The analysts. The think tanks. The “friends of, ” in Bravo speak. The people translating power between groups that don’t talk to each other. This is the week to read widely and listen carefully.

And still.

Do not forget this.

There is a reality independent of what the powerful want it to be.

I’ve seen it again and again.
A street vendor in Tunisia sparks the Arab Spring.
Floodwaters after Hurricane Katrina reshape American politics.
Protests in Iran spread like wildfire and shake the regime.
Deaths, uprisings, moments no one predicted dominate the conversation overnight.

We love to say events were inevitable after the fact. The truth is, we are constantly surprised because not everything is controlled from the top. Not everything is decided by the Masters of the Universe.

So yes, indulge a little in the Davos drama. Watch the spectacle. Read the think pieces.

Just remember this:
Not everything is decided over fondue.

And the ground always has the final word.

Think Tanks

The Starter Shelf

Chatham House - global affairs, energy, security, climate, big-picture explainers. Ask me about ‘Chatham House Rules,’ but I won’t tell you…

IISS - International Institute for Strategic Studies, (UK) defence, military, political risk

SIPRI Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, (Sweden) - data-driven peace, arms, conflict, military spending

International Crisis Group (Global, HQ Brussels) conflict early warning and country deep dives

Carnegie Endowment Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Global network) - international affairs with regional depth

ECFR - European Council on Foreign Relations, (Europe) - Europe’s foreign policy debates, China/Russia/geo-economics

Bruegel - (Europe, Brussels) - geo-economics, trade, sanctions, energy and macro policy

CFR -Council on Foreign Relations, CFR (US) - very readable primers, expert interviews, policy explainers

Brookings Brookings Institution (US) - https://www.brookings.edu/ - broad public-policy work, including geopolitics and global economy

Lowy Institute (Australia)] - Indo-Pacific lens, great indexes and accessible analysis

Deep cuts (Probably not at Davos!)

(China/Taiwan)

Sinocism - China policy that is curated and contextual. Subscription.

State of the Strait - tracking the state of Beijing/Taiwan relations.

(Russia/Ukraine)

ISW (Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment) - Do you like maps and read situtation reports? This one’s for you! Subscription-based

Ukraine Conflict Monitor (Muzyka) - Another one that is specialised and subscription based. Not always updated, but careful.

(Global South)

ISS Africa African security, governance, conflict, organized crime, regional dynamics

Igarapé Institute - Brazilian Think Tank, climate security, organised crime

(Middle East)

Middle East Institute - US-based think tank focused on building ties between the US and Middle East. Relatively non-partisan and ideological.

Read/Listen

Foreign Policy Magazine - You can pry it from my cold, dead hands

The Rest is Classified - Intelligence Podcast with BBC Alum Gordon Corera

Share

Subscribe

This morning. Sonora and I went out, in our matching hoodies, to play in the snow.

As we have every day, and night, while the snowstorm was raging this week, when the temperatures hit -15,when it was pure ice everywhere.

My Mexican dog must have been a husky in a former life.

Sometimes, she pretends she needs to pee because she senses fresh snow, and wants to play.

Even at 2:30 AM, It’s generally cuter than it is annoying. Although I am not sure the raccoons living under the deck (who she tried to roust last night) feel the same way.

She is teaching me to have fun in the winter. A season I have avoided for decades. She is teaching me to stop and have fun when there I am stressed and there is no time. she is honing my ability to switch into the present.

So, I wasn’t going to write anything this weekend. Just rest and play. But today, with the storm letting up a little, I decided to go to the grocery store after our frolic.

Sonora and I chose a route going by one of my favourite houses in my neighbourhood. All over the fence, the garden, there are signs: quotes, sayings to make you smile and/or give you pause for thought.

I love that someone has decided to do this with their small piece of the world.

So, I thought maybe I’d get a sign from the Universe as I went by… a bit of a boost.

Instead, the first sign I saw was… this

“No good deed goes unpunished.”

Surely, that can’t be right! I really don’t believe that.

Instead of leaving defeated, I kept looking. Like I was at a gallery or museum. I saw signs I’d never noticed before. Old favourites, and one from Mahatma Gandhi that seems important for this moment.

The owner of the house came out to get her paper. I said “Thank you, I love your signs. They always delight me when I’m passing by.” “You’re welcome,” she replied, “I do it for me. I’m selfish.”

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

“Thank god,” I yelled as she went back inside. Thank god her selfishness’ was to put reminders of wisdom and joy in the world, thank god so many people (and definitely dogs) are selfish in a way that makes the world better.

We can all waste a lot of time wishing it was a different season. Wishing we had different resources. Waiting for better days.

But there is exploration possible now, even at 2:30 AM. Fun to be had in a blizzard. And impact to be had, with one wooden sign at a time.

So, I selfishly felt I wanted to write. To share some signs with you? And of course, pictures of my dog, my one-being joy jamboree.

On that note, she’s ready for another snow party. Hope you have a great weekend.

If you glance at social media or read the headlines today, you might think the jail doors in Venezuela are swinging open, and families across the country are finally welcoming political prisoners home. But stand outside one of the detention centers with us, and you get a very different picture of how the Post-Maduro era is shaping up. On a day when the voices of those with power have the microphone, hear from those who don’t, but are still seizing the moment to speak up.

At the bottom of this article, we’ve included all sorts of resources for you to learn more, not just the news, but to experience the art, music and poetry of Venezuela

Editor’s note: This piece was written with a Venezuelan journalist GMR. Our contributors or their family members have been anonymised in some cases, marked with an asterisk *. This is for their protection. In others, you’ll note we’ve used a first name only.

Claudia stands nervously at the entrance of Zona 7, one of Venezuela’s notorious detention centres for political prisoners. It’s the evening of Thursday, January 8th. She’s hoping to see her brother, *Alberto Jaimes, walk out its doors. More than a dozen other people are standing watch beside her.

Across Venezuela, mothers, fathers, and spouses have been showing up unannounced at regime prisons in a steady stream - just in case they’re the lucky ones who get to bring a loved one home.

Someone cracks a joke now and then, but mostly they sigh, scroll through their phones, and exchange brief smiles when they catch each other’s eyes.

Since the United States removed Nicolas Maduro from power in a raid on January 3rd, there have been questions about how much change it will bring to a country that has known economic collapse, humanitarian disaster and an increasingly repressive regime since 2012. It is a country that has become synonymous with mass migration and authoritarian rule. And yet, it is rare to hear direclty from those suffering inside the country.

Press freedom has been nonexistent for years. Independent reporting is difficult, and it can be dangerous both for the journalists and the people who speak with them.

“My brother was detained 43 days ago, after a message about Maduro was sent in a WhatsApp group he belonged to,” Claudia says. “I haven’t seen him since his detention. We haven’t even received official confirmation that he’s here.” She explains that families rely on informal sources to locate detainees, as authorities provide no information. “Officers here have told us nothing about where he is or how he’s doing,” she says. “The security forces show absolutely no empathy toward prisoners’ families. They don’t care that we’re sick with worry about our loved ones.”

She’s unusually outspoken, but still pauses to choose her words carefully, conscious of the security forces standing nearby. For their part, the guards seem to ignore the relatives. Both sides are familiar with their roles, yet not with the new territory Venezuela has entered.

When Acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez’s government announced last week the release of “a significant number” of political prisoners, they said it was a “gesture of peace.” They did not specify how many detainees would be freed or when the releases would occur. After Rodriguez’s first phone call with Trump, she vowed to “keep releasing prisoners” detained under Maduro.

US President Donald Trump has been quick to focus on the declaration, mentioning it in press conferences and writing on Truth Social Saturday that “Venezuela has started the process, in a BIG WAY, of releasing their political prisoners.” “Thank you! I hope those prisoners will remember how lucky they got that the USA came along and did what had to be done.”

Even the possibility of a wide-scale release of political prisoners sparked an emotional reaction amongst the general public. “People were crying and saying ‘This is the good news we needed, ‘” said one Caracas resident. “We joke that in 2018, everyone knew someone who had migrated. Now, everyone knows someone who has been detained.”

So far, though, it’s only been confirmed that 84 prisoners have been released (according to Foro Penal, who are widely trusted to have the most accurate numbers. That’s little more than 10% of the estimated total number of political prisoners.

It has included some of the most high-profile figures in Venezuelan politics and activism, such as journalist Biagio Pilieri, politician Enrique Márquez and human rights activist Rocío San Miguel.

None of the released detainees has spoken publicly. Most were freed under restrictions that prevent them from discussing their detention or speaking to the press. Many left the country immediately after their release, including Rocio San Miguel.

Her case became an international cause celebre in recent years, with alarming reports of her declining health in custody.

Rocío San Miguel’s brother, José Manuel San Miguel, made a statement on her behalf, confirming her release and the restrictions she faced. But he said “Rocío remains hopeful that all political prisoners will soon regain their freedom and that a national reconciliation process has begun.”

Political detentions have become widespread since Nicolás Maduro came to power in 2013, succeeding Hugo Chavez. In 2014, there were protests triggered by rising violence, hyperinflation and shortage of basic goods. Maduro went on to rule Venezuela by decree with powers granted to him by the ruling party legislature.

“Venezuelans have endured mass police persecution for years. This is not new,” says Marco, a journalist who specializes in state repression. “There were large-scale detentions during the 2014 protests, but during the 2017 protests, the numbers nearly tripled. and every year it’s just gotten worse, until the 2024 presidential elections, when Maduro’s regime reached a new peak of political detentions in Venezuela’s modern history.”

That election was widely judged by independent observers as having been lost by Maduro and won by the Opposition, represented on the ballot by Edmundo Gonzalez. Nobel Laureate Maria Corinna Machado had been disqualified before the vote. During the protests that followed, there were nearly 3000 detentions in just 3 days.

According to the human-rights organization Foro Penal, before the US attack, there were about 863 people in Venezuela detained for political reasons. Since Maduro’s government began in 2014, Foro Penal has documented over 18,000 cases of politically motivated detentions. In comparison to his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, who detained around 300 political prisoners during his fifteen years in power.

By Friday night, hope had turned into a vigil. Family members lit candles and held up signs with the names of their missing loved ones, and the phrase ‘Que Sean Todos’ - it must be all.

Political arrests are increasingly used as a form of theatre and propaganda.

Especially since the 2024 protests (following Maduro’s refusal to cede power after losing), ‘Operación Tun Tun,’ which translates as ‘Operation Knock Knock,’ has become a common method of arrest. It refers to raids and home arrests carried out by security forces against alleged “enemies of the state.”

The term was coined in 2017 by Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, who controls the police, military and intelligence services. He is a formidable ally, some would say potential opponent, to acting President Delcy Rodriguez. The name comes from a traditional Christmas Carol (hence the music in the link) about people knocking on you door to celebrate together, which explains the soundtrack.

@elvigilantexvenezuelaPublicidad de DGCIM "Terrorismo de Estado Venezolano" Operación "Tun Tun" Hoy le tocó a María Oropeza jefa de campaña @convzlacomando en Portuguesa denunciaba la operación "Tun Tun" que el dictador Maduro ha aplicado para perseguir a los venezolanos, también se la llevaron. Prohibido Olvidar!! Deja tu comentario!! Suscribete A mi canal: https://www.youtube.com/@elvigilantexvenezuela #venezuela #caracas #zulia #maracaibo #valencia #barquisimeto #nacionales #tachira #merida #lara  #Carabobo #venezolanosenargentina🙌 @egonzalezurrutia @mariacorinamachado #venezolanosenchile #venezolanoseneeuu #venezolanosencolombia #venezolanosenperu❤️ #venezolanosenecuador #Argentina #venezolanosenpanama #venezolanosenbrasil   #voluntarioxvenezuela   #noticiasvenezuela #venezolanosxelmundo

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

After the 2024 presidential election, A new wave of Operación Tun Tun arrests unfolded across the country. The government and its supporters posted videos of the arrests on social media, set to ominous music from well-known horror movies.

Sometimes, the tables are turned. María Oropeza broadcast the raid in her home and her own detention. In response, the state-run program El Mazo Dando, a variety show hosted by Diosdado Caballo published a video mocking her as she was being transferred into detention. Maria Oropeza remains behind bars.

Once people are in custody, their situation worsens. Human Rights Groups and the United Nations have documented inhumane conditions, including: a lack of food, sanitation and medical care; as well as beatings and torture.

“I was tortured physically and psychologically,” says Victor Navarro. He was detained in 2018, at just 22 years old, on charges of allegedly committing terrorism funded by the United States. He said all the charges were false. But he was sent to notorious detention center El Helicoide.

He tells a story he has told before, but wants people to remember now.

“I didn’t see the sun for five months. I had no visits from my family and no access to a public defender. Guards stole the food and medicine our families sent us. Sixteen of us were held in a room built for four people, and because there was no running water, we were forced to defecate on our food trays. It was hell. Hell on earth.”

After five months, he was released. Like Venezuelans freed from detention, he left the country. Once detained, a person runs a high risk of being detained again. He lives in Buenos Aires now, where he works to help detainees and their families, and to draw international attention to prison conditions.

“The slow pace of the releases after the announcement has been extremely hard on families. While the news initially brought happiness, it has become tragic that relatives were left waiting without any information.” Navarro says, “Today, many are exhausted, distressed, and even in debt after traveling to Caracas to receive their loved ones. This can only be seen as another form of mistreatment by the government, even as a cruel joke for families who have already endured so much.”

Melania has been waiting seven years for her sister Emerlendris Benitez to come home. In August 2018, Emerlendris was detained after authorities accused her of having links to a drone attack on President Maduro. She has consistently denied those accusations, for which human rights groups say there is no evidence. She was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

When she was detained, Emerlendris was pregnant. While in custody, human rights groups say she was beaten and tortured so severely that it caused a miscarriage. According to her family, she was then forced to receive medical care without information, consultation, or consent. “When my sister was detained, she was brutally tortured and forcibly disappeared for more than a month,” Melania says. “When the pregnancy was terminated, she was taken to a military hospital. We were never informed, and her defense lawyer was never contacted.”

Emerlendris’s son, *Yunior, was five years old when she was arrested. He is now being raised by his grandparents with Melania’s help. For years, they’ve struggled to explain his mother’s absence. “For a long time, we lied to protect him,” Melania says. “About a year and a half ago, we finally told him the truth. He was devastated. He has suffered the most. He deserves to be with his mother, and his mother deserves to be with him.”

The UN Fact-Finding Mission for Venezuela says that Emirlendris’s case isn’t isolated. It has repeatedly found that the Maduro government systematically committed grave human rights violations that may constitute crimes against humanity. Speaking in the days after Delcy Rodriguez was sworn in, Maria Eloisa Quintero, expert member of the Fact-Finding Mission said “Responsibility for these violations is not limited to Nicolás Maduro,” said “Other individuals who exercised command or authority over security forces, or who otherwise contributed to these crimes, must also be held accountable.”

What Joel misses most about his wife, Layla Miranda, is how they talked and laughed in bed even after a bad day or during the hardest moments. When Joel describes his relationship with his wife, he says it’s like a romantic movie: “We’ve been married for 6 years, but our story goes back 23 years. We used to pray and study the Bible together, and it’s never the same without her”. Layla is a nurse who was in charge of monitoring supplies at a warehouse for Venezuela’s Social Security department. In 2022, she was accused in connection with a fire at an IVSS warehouse and charged with terrorism.

She has been detained for more than two years without trial. According to her family, there is no evidence linking her to the case. “They have absolutely no proof against her, so she should be released as soon as possible,” Joel says. “She is innocent and has been robbed of these years of her life. After three years and four months, her trial has not even started.”

Joel wants to share her story with the world, but worries that sharing photos or becoming too high-profile might endanger his wife, or her chances of going free. Instead, he shares the card he wants to give her when she is free.

“Layla,” it reads “Even though time and space conspire, I’ll always find my way to you.” It includes a Bible quote that the couple have leaned on, Isaiah 41:10 “ Do not fear, for I am with you. Do not be dismayed, for I am your god.”

He says the possibility of her release is filling him with anxiety as much as hope. “It feels like we are walking on a tightrope. We do not know if we will make it to the end or fall into the abyss. Right now, I can only hope and pray for a Venezuela where due process is not just words on paper, but a real practice that helps us become a free and fair society.”

By Saturday night, with little sign that there will be a mass amnesty, emotions are running high. Scores of family members refuse to leave the detention centers. Only a week earlier, they wouldn’t have dared to take this step, fearing repercussions for themselves or the person they know who is detained. Now, some of them are sleeping rough, hoping it will draw international attention to their cause and put pressure on the Rodriguez government to follow through on their pledge.

Those with the resources have mattresses and blankets, others huddle together for warmth. One young woman passes the time writing a letter to her brother, detained inside. “I love you my brother,” it reads. “I don’t think I’ll get them to give you my letter, but I’m trying.”

Marino Alvarado, a human rights activist and former coordinator of PROVEA (Venezuela’s most established and respected human rights organization) warns that the narrative around the releases must be tempered with caution. He stresses that the announcement isn’t as important as changing what activists call the “revolving door” policy, in which political prisoners are released only to be detained again shortly after.

“We need conditions that allow exiled people to return to the country,” Alvarado says. “Venezuela needs real change. This is not just about releasing prisoners: it’s about people being able to exercise their rights without fear, without the risk of losing their freedom again.”

Even with that caveat, the limited number of releases have cracked open a door long sealed shut. There is frustration with the gap between rhetoric and reality, but also a small bit of hope. Enough to make the demand that Venezuela be a place detention doesn’t follow displeasing the authorities.

The families still waiting have vowed to keep up the pressure, holding vigils and maintaining a presence outside prisons. As time passes, the economics and realities of life in Venezuela make that more challenging, even if the authorities only continue to watch.

Claudia still waits for her brother, hopeful after weeks of silence.

“Now I’m excited,” she says. “I hope I can see him, hug him. I want this nightmare to end after 26 years. We have to stop being afraid. This is our country. No one can take it from us.”

Melania is determined and skeptical, showing up to support the vigils. “We’ve waited so long, and she’s always been innocent. I can only pray and hope. That’s what we’ve done every day: pray and hope. But we’ve also taken care of so much. All the weight is on us: to find justice, to guarantee her wellbeing. All the weight is on the victims, and the government abuses us at every opportunity they get.”

Joel balances hope and fear, praying that Layla’s freedom will not be another promise deferred. “We’re in the eye of the storm,” he warns. “We have to be so careful now.”

Read More News and Analysis on Venezuela

Caracas Chronicles Substack Local news and analysis from Venezuela written from the ground and by the diaspora.

El Estimulo - independent media from Caracas

Cazamos fake news - fact checking media in Venzuela

Armando.INFO, the most important investigative journalism outlet, speciaizing in corruption

Ana Milagros Parra - exiled political scientist with podcast, Youtube and other content

Read Some Literature, Listen to some music, Look at some art while eating an Arepa

Venezuelan Movie: Pelo Malo

Venezuelan Poets: Hanni Ossot, Rafael Cadenas and Ida Gramcko

Venezuelan musicians: Arca, Elena Rose and Danny Ocean

Venezuelan visual artists: Florencia Alvarado, Sol Calero, Carlos Perna, Jesus Soto, Carlos Cruz Diez, Javier Grajales, Raúl Rodríguez, Yosmel Araujo and Raul Rodriguez

“It’s few words, but very important words that comes out usually.”

Subscribe now

Dida G. Heilmann gives this explanation on how we can understand Greenlanders, and then she explains why.

For “1000s of years” people were hunting in the Arctic. When you are out hunting, you do not speak. You do not make noise. You are quiet “to not scare all the animals away.”

So quiet is skill, history and care. An inheritance for the 57,000 people living here. It is also in fairly short supply right now.

“It’s hundreds of journalists right now in Nuuk and more to come. So it’s very overwhelming.”

Dida is a documentary filmmaker, a photographer, an Arctic Sport/Dene Games athlete and quite a well-known musician. (Despite her humility, you can still hear her music on Nunavut video in the Canadian North.

I’m not among the crowd in Nuuk. But by the time we were done talking, Dida might regret telling me so many beautiful things, as I want to join!

Humble. Proud.

I asked Dida how Greenlandic people feel about shouting their thoughts.

She smiled. “We are quite humble people, but proud.”

Humble and proud. Fair enough. When you’ve survived thousands of years living in tough conditions, and surviving colonization, you’ve earned both. The world is bigger than you, but you’ve seen off pretty big threats and you’re still together.

What they want from the world

At one point, I asked Dida what she would ask from people outside of Greenland right now, in this moment of spotlighted attention.

Her answer was not dramatic.

Curiosity. Respect.

Not saviour energy. Not hot takes.

Just curiosity and respect.

Dark humour, because people still have to live

When I asked what people are laughing about behind closed doors, Dida did not pretend it is all light.

She says Greenlandic humour “can be very dark humor,” and that it can be “some kind of way to survive.”

She names the traumas they experience “lots of suicides” and “alcohol problems.”

But they still find humour in dark times. Not because it’s all light, but because that’s how you get through it together.

She told me how the joke making the rounds after the White House meeting on Greenland’s future today was about the Danish and Greenland leaders stepping out to take a smoke break afterwards. She said all the Greenlanders, even the ex-smokers were watching and thinking: “I know the feeling.”

This is why I love talking to people who live close to the edge of things. They do not romanticise life. They also do not stop being funny. Generally, they get even funnier.

The noise machine

There is a moment where we are trying to find a Greenlandic word for this feeling.

This moment.

Dida cannot find a single word for it. She just says, honestly, that it is complicated.

Then she says something that is not about Greenland only. It is about now.

“All the media now, they are blowing things up and making some fear and trying to manipulate.”

“So if you’re not calm and collected, it would be easy to be manipulated.”

And later, she names what sits under so much of the noise.

“There’s a lot of fear out there, insecurity.”

You can say that again.

Listening, not performing

Later in our conversation Dida talks about listening. About how easy it is to be distracted in the modern world, and what happens when you get quiet enough to hear yourself.

“There’s so much noise… But if we can listen to ourselves and be calm, we get all the answers.”

She talks about the ways we escape that listening. Cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, too much work, too much working out, and gambling.

Not because people are weak. Because noise is easy to find, and it’s our habit.

Nature as meditation

She tells me where she goes to find her quiet. She meditates not by sitting and forcing it.

“When I’m out shooting photography in the nature, it’s my meditation. It’s quiet.”

She talks about boating into the fjord where everything is quiet. You hear the waterfall, the birds, and sometimes whales.

And then she talks about the eagle.

“When I see an eagle… it’s my majestic… Powerful… So I think one of my spirit animals are Eagle.”

When she captures an eagle photo, she says: “It’s magic for me.”

At this point, whether Dida knew it or not, I was mentally buying my ticket. (Although I’m not sure I’ll be good at the quietly helping part.)

Grateful Words

Toward the end of our beautiful conversation, I felt so grateful that we’d had a connection that went deeper than commentary. It was fitting that when I asked her to share her favourite words in Greenlandic, she shared:

Qujamasuppunga - I am thankful

Asanninneq - Love

Asavakkit - I love you

That pretty much wrapped it up for me. I felt the expansiveness of her generosity and a new worldview. Plus new words to practice.

“Few words, important words” is not only a cultural reason why the Greenlandic people are overwhelmed by the arrival of the world’s press.

It is a practice.

Maybe it is one we all need right now. There’s so much more in our conversation. Please watch or listen now.

Share

Watch the whole conversation

Watch Didi’s Musical Hit

Dida G. Heilmann links

Instagram: Dida74Scorpio
Facebook: Dida G. Heilmann
TikTok: 🇬🇱🌹Dida 74🌹🇬🇱

Learn more about Arctic Sport and Dene Games

www.awg2026.org
www.weio.org

“It’s the breakfast foundation of my country!”

Journalist Gabriela Mesones Rojo is waxing lyrical about Arepas, while also telling me how it’s a barometer of normalcy for Venezuelans. We’re having a wide-ranging conversation after she’s come back from grocery shopping for herself and her family (and her 3 cats.)

She’s in Caracas, I’m in Canada, and I’m again reminded how it’s the human moments which connect us, and also us to better understand and learn.

So, if you only ever encounter Venezuela through headlines you can’t bear, this is your way back to the humanity: what people buy first when they’re scared, what people want now, what hope sounds like when it’s been bruised (again), and why art, cinema, poetry, and food might your pathway in. (If you can’t bear to watch one more news report.)

Below is our a version of our interview, lightly edited for length and clarity, with verbatim pull quotes from Gabriela throughout.

It’s a pleasure to share this conversation with you.

GMR: Things have been pretty quiet the last couple of days, after Saturday. I think people were very eager to buy food, buy medicine, and get back to their homes. But now I feel everything is going back to normalcy, little by little. Little by little, stores have begun to open.

…During the evening, everyone tries to be home. It's extremely silent. And there are, of course, some areas where collectivos have taken control, and they have imposed sort of an unofficial curfew…

MM: and that a little like having your dad tell you what to do, when the collectivo tells you not to, not to be there, you just don’t?

GMR: Yeah, you definitely follow instructions. Also, everything is closed, so going to the street would be kind of unpurposeful.

Gabriela and I start talking about what you can tell from grocery shopping, particularly in a country with chronic food insecurity.

GMR: “So just to also give a little bit of context, in Venezuela, we have experience with food shortage… So, of course, nervous buying is sort of a PTSD reaction because we know what it’s like to have food and medicine and gasoline shortage.

…The first day, on Saturday, the first thing everyone did was go out to get the Essentials. And people were buying a lot of essentials. I remember I was in the line. I did about four hours queueing that first day. It was four hours. It was very slow. And I remember that the supermarket had a glass door, and we were looking inside that what people were buying, and there were people thinking away, 15,20, Harina pan.

And of course, people in {the} queue were saying, you know, food we all need to eat…So this is a worry that has been on people’s minds, but now, you know, a couple of days have passed, and I have to say, I’m pretty happily shocked that the supermarkets have stocked up pretty quickly.

I went back to the supermarket today, and they had Harina pan, but as you mentioned, it’s the first thing that Venezuelans go out to buy when there is some sort of crisis, and it was completely stocked up with Harina pan, {and} with some canned goods, milk, and water. Maybe it was less stocked with stuff like meat and vegetables, but when it comes to long-term food, it was pretty stocked. I was very happily surprised.”

MM: “And Harina Pan, just for those of us who don’t know, it’s something everyone eats, everyone loves. It’s the bread, right? “

GMR: “So, yeah, Harina pan is a corn flour. It is very important in Venezuela. It’s what we use to make arepas, which is like the breakfast foundation of our country, mainly, it is iconic over here. And it’s a flour that lasts a very long time, and it’s sort of a round bread that you can fill with anything. You can fill it with ham, cheese, meat. So, depending on what you have to fill it up, it can be a really good meal.

So that’s why Venezuelans, you know, this is the first thing on their minds. We have to go buy Harina Pan! “

MM: “So we’re seeing stores are open, the streets were relatively quiet in terms of the official presence of authorities. And third, the Harina pan, the arepas are in the stores. So that gives you a feeling that Venezuelans are finding some sort of adaptation to the way things are right now. Is that fair to say?”

GMR: “I also get the feeling that people are very afraid of chaos. So, I get the feeling that people are doing their best not to be part of that chaos. I think that’s why people are following collectivo’s orders also so easily. And, you know, also in the same queue that I mentioned, people might be getting a bit upset seeing that people inside were buying all of the food.

Still, people were very patient, very organized, and, you know, very quiet. And I think this says a lot. We’ve lived chaotic moments in the past, and we’ve dealt with them, and right now, the feeling I have is that everyone’s trying to keep things as peaceful and as unproblematic as possible.”

We talked more about the new political reality people are living with, and how they’re holding the contradictory impulses of being hungry for change, while fearing chaos.

GMR: We have faced a humanitarian emergency since 2014, people have been struggling a lot. We have one of the biggest refugee crises in the world. We’ve had food shortages, medicine shortages. Our public health system has completely collapsed. 400 media outlets have shut down…

Delcy, of course, has been in Chavismo since the beginning. She has been a high-ranking official since the beginning. She’s an extremely smart woman. She’s a very astute woman… I think on one hand, people are scared because she doesn’t represent a change. Of course, she is one of the faces of the regime, and she has been one of the high-ranking faces of the regime for years, for decades. So, of course, people are scared, ‘what is this going to look like?’ I think people are also impressed, because she is the person who’s going to deal with the new {American} reality in Venezuela. You know… how the US is going to control Venezuelan oil, how much they’re going to dictate in the country? {it seems like} she’s the one who’s helping them deal with all of this. So this is very contradictory. She has been a revolutionary, anti-imperialist, you know, very vocal, a lot of strength put against imperialism, so to see her in this position is very contradictory.

On the other hand, I think people are a little bit disappointed. I think they were hoping that Maduro was going to come out, and Maria Corina Machado and Edmundo Gonzalez were going to come in, and it was just going to be as easy as that.

And the truth is that, you know, I wish democratic transitions could be as simple. And right now, I think the choice to leave Delcy in her position is a good choice to keep order and to keep Venezuela a little bit away from chaos. “

We talked about what would win more average Venezuelans over.

GMR: “So without a doubt, I’d say, releasing the political prisoners. Right now, we have almost 800 political prisoners, all of them in very dire situations.”

Some of them have pretty hard charges on them, like terrorism or spying against Venezuela. So it would be the release of this political prisoners and dropping those charges…”

We turned our attention to the stereotypes and misconceptions that people have about Venezuelans. Gabriela made the point that people should do more than simply avoid the ‘thugs and thieves’ stereotypes. I asked her what the best of Venezuela is for her.

GMR: “I would say that the best of Venezuelan people is how contradictory we are…My mom has a story when she was pregnant with me, and I’ve always felt this story represents Venezuela so well. She was very pregnant with me. She had a huge belly, and she was trying to get on a bus, and the bus started {to move}, so she almost fell, so this guy helped her out, and he was so mad at the driver, like, ‘Don’t you see that this lady, she’s pregnant, you just put her in danger. This is unacceptable, how we treat women on the street!’ And my mom was like, ‘Oh, my God, he’s such a gentleman.’ So he got her on the bus, he sat her down, he made sure she was okay, and then he proceeded to rob the boss. So for me, this is something that’s so Venezuelan, someone can do something that’s maybe morally questionable, and one minute later they will also do something that’s very morally accepted and very kind and very generous to people. So I know that some people hate these sorts of contradictions. I actually enjoy them a little bit.

MM: That’s an amazing story, and it speaks to the nuance that really exists in humanity, quite frankly, right? But we don’t like to admit it.”

We talked about all the ways that Venezuelans maintain hope and resilience during rolling crises.

GMR: …”I wouldn’t describe Venezuelans as a hopeless people. I’m actually amazed all the time because when something happens, it’s so easy for us to get hopeful, like, you know, change is coming.”

MM: What do you think keeps that hope coming back for Venezuelans? What is it that either you hear from people, or if you can say what you personally feel?

GMR: “I think different things. For example, people believe, well, people have a lot of hope for their family members who left the country to come back…because it is very painful. I know migration is the most normal thing in the world, but for example, how many grandparents are growing old without even meeting their grandchildren? So of course, family is a huge thing, and it’s no coincidence that Maria Corina Machado’s campaign was focused on ‘Our children are going back’, because a lot of people want this.

…When we had the information that Edmundo had won the election, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, is my family going back? Are we going to be all together again? [MM: Gabriela hasn’t seen her sister in six years.] So I think that’s hugely important. And also I think Venezuela is a country with so much to do, so much {that is} unexplored. You know, culturally, business, so many things. So many things that we can really offer and produce….People usually have the idea that there is a lot of money to be made here in Venezuela.

So whenever you talk to someone who has a business, even if it’s a small business. The first thing they tell you is, ‘I’m crazy{ready} for this government to leave so we can really start working and making money and doing things and… exporting our culture to the world… not through migration or displacement, but {through} good expectation of what we’re doing…”

MM: How important is humour as a coping mechanism for Venezuelans?

GMR: “I think we deal with everything with humour. I think we put humour so much in the equation that I’ve been in some situations when I’m like, we’re a little bit toxic, like, we can’t use humour for everything. But, yeah, we do it. We’re from the Caribbean, so why not? Why not laugh about it?”

MM: How would you rate the Venezuelan meme game?

GMR: “100! I love it. I’m impressed by it. During the bombings, like the bombings hadn’t stopped. We were still hearing bombs, and we were still at home thinking, are we gonna be bombed? It was very tense, and there were already memes of the bombs. I was very impressed by the meme game of the people.”

As for what keeps her sane and grounded, I loved her answer.

GMR:“I have a lot of things, my family, my cats, are fundamental. I make them pay rent by forcing them to be in my arms when things get really hard…I’m a huge fan of nature. And Caracas is one of the greenest cities I know… a random tree on the street, I would just look at it and be very impressed with how magnificent that tree is.”

When I asked her what we could be doing for Venezuelans, she had good advice. If you want to do something, start with contact. Start with listening.

GMR: “I would say, Read local media, listen to Venezuelan voices, and if you have a Venezuelan friend, call them up, tell them that you can hug them. Because Venezuelans in the diaspora, they get so nervous when this happens. It’s also very psychotic, because sometimes I think it’s worse for the people abroad, because they have to go on with their daily lives. Like, here, it is easy to say, I’m nervous. I don’t want to go to work today because I’m so tense. Your boss will understand.

If you live in London, for example, your boss isn’t going to understand that. So it does feel very divisive for them that on one side, they have to go on with their lives. They have few people to talk to. So if you have a Venezuelan friend, call them, send a lovely text message, offer a hug, a beer, whatever you do with your Venezuelan, take care of your Venezuelan people.

MM: Right now, is there a Venezuelan beer they should be offering?

GMR: Polar. I’m actually a fan of cerveza sulia, but Polar is the iconic classic one.

As we laughed about this very humane way to reach out to people, Gabriela dropped the mic with this wisdom about how to stop doomscrolling, news-avoiding or missing the signal for all the damn noise.

GMR: I just feel it’s a good moment to get close to Venezuela…I think it’s the moment for you to start reading, you know, Venezuelan poets and listening to venezuelan {music} and maybe going to the arepara in your neighborhood, and watching Venezuelan cinema…

I didn’t study journalism. I’ve been doing journalism for the last almost decade of my life, but I went to university and I studied art history. And the reason why I was in love with it because it did help me understand. It made me understand through feelings. It made me understand. Sometimes I looked at a face in a portrait and I’d be like, she’s upset about what’s happening. So we’re talking a lot about nuance, and I think art and culture are great for this.

Sometimes, also watching the news is not good for a lot of people. So when I say ‘stay informed on Venezuela, it doesn’t necessarily mean, you know, stay informed in your news channel.’ Just read poetry, watch cinema. You know, investigate who our artists are. There are so many artists in the diaspora that you know. I think those things can really help out to get to know not only the information, the contextual information that we need, but also this emotional, almost spiritual information that we need.”

Subscribe now

Chunk Won. Hope Did Too.

Fat Bear Week has come early, and we’ve been blessed with a winner.

Chunk. Scar-faced. Broken-jawed. Big Boi on a redemption arc. Twice a bridesmaid, never a bride. Now, he’s on top, having beat no-name (for now) 856 in the final.

His victory is a lesson in hope. Yes, you heard me right.

The internet’s vote on how a bear bulks up to survive winter can teach us how to prepare for uncertainty. How to fatten ourselves up with the habits that carry us through the rough unknown to the other side.

Actually, all the finalists have something for us.

Not just slow and steady Chunk. Also laser-focused Grazer. And chaotic-good Flotato.

Each finalist at Katmai’s Fat Bear Week shows us how to train our Hope Muscle. Even if that muscle is hard to see under all that chonk. (I feel you, fat bears.)

Fat Bear Week isn’t just cute. Although it is deeply adorable. It is about survival. Different bears lean into different strategies so they can live through the coming winter and amble into another spring. Salmon. Berries. Honey. Maybe cubs. You get it. Good times.

To get there, it’s daily. Hungry. Messy. We enjoy watching it as much as they love salmon. And we can learn from them as much as they love salmon.

Where the Wild Things Are

The famous fat bears live in Katmai National Park and Preserve in southern Alaska. It is stunning and remote. Volcanic landscapes. Mountains. Walls of leaping salmon. And some very BIG brown bears.

Years ago, former ranger Mike Fitz started putting up Live cams all over the park including at Brooks Falls, where many bears come to snack on Salmon. His goal: to allow people to experience the wonder of the place.

What they were interested in…surprised him. He was getting questions from people who noticed a big difference between the scrawny ursines of Spring and the ‘plush’ creatures wandering by the cams in September.

In 2014 the park and explore.org started Fat Bear Week to celebrate the bears’ hard work and teach people what real preparation looks like. It started as education, it became a sensation.

Lessons from the Finalists

Each bear shows us a way of being in the world with agency despite the uncertainty around us and in the future. And yet, they keep going. That’s how I define hope.

Chunk (32). Once painted as the villain for “being a bear doing bear things.” This year he came back with a broken jaw and still put on weight one fish at a time. Lesson for us: Just the next right thing. One salmon. Then another. It adds up.

Grazer (128). Tough mother. Last year’s champion. She lost a cub (to Chunk), kept the other safe, and still did what mattered most. Feed for the win. Lesson for us: focus on what you can control. Tune into your inner compass and act on it. She lost her crown but still ended up “very fat.”

Flotato (602). This bear makes sure there is joy in the journey, often napping while floating (hence the name.) After all, if you don’t have the...bear necessities...what are you fighting for? Still, He also eats. A lot. He reminds us that joy and rest are not luxuries. Going with the flow can get you a long way.

Train your Hope Muscle this week

Which bear speaks to a challenge you’re feeling about your ability to make change in the world? Pick a bear. Practice their move for seven days. Report back.

Chunk: Just the next right thing.
This is about one tiny move on the urgent AND important problem in front of you. Set a three-minute timer. Send the email. Open the document. Book the call. When the timer ends, stop. If there is energy left, do one more three-minute round. Don’t ‘boil the ocean’ , grab a fish every chance you get. Micro-actions beat Macro-anxiety.

Grazer: Focus on your inner compass.
Sit. Breathe. Make the exhale three seconds longer than the inhale. Do that three times. Now ask yourself two questions: What matters most right now? What matters most one year from now? The overlap is your North Star. Focus all your energies in that direction, and perhaps most importantly, drop actions and priorities that don’t align. Ask yourself: Does this serve me heading Due North?

Flotato: Be present. Find joy.
“The journey doesn’t end and you might not win.” Write down what you felt when you read that. Shift your focus to now. Write down ten good and/or beautiful things about your life exactly as it is today. Pick one and enjoy it on purpose. Tomorrow, pick another. Joy is fuel. Use it.

At the end of the week, sit down and review: how has it been to live with this Bear? What did it teach me? How has it helped me move forward?

Our Elder Kinsmen

I did not come up with the idea of Bears as teachers. Indigenous cultures across North America revered them as ‘Elder Kinsmen’ for their courage, strength and wisdom. They were seen as healers and teachers.

They were also seen as protectors and guardians to warriors, both fierce and compassionate. Bears fight for what’s right, even when it gets tough out there. Bears knew how to heal their own wounds and keep moving (ahem, Chunk.)

Chunk has the title for now, but his win doesn’t negate the strategies of my beloved Flotato or dethroned Grazer or in-need-of-a-name 856 (he’s a patient old fella…Job? )

They still made it to the winter, and the cycle will turn for them too. As it turns for us.

Dive Deeper

Book a Call

Watch Chunk's Story

Watch Bears Live - Explore's Bear Cams

Meet the Bears of Fat Bear Week

4 hours of Bears - Prepare to be soothed

Nat Geo on Fat Bear Week (Pretty Pictures of Course)

Bear Medicine - by Native Hope

The Bare Necessities

I’m a little behind on 2025. While so many were posting their ‘30 days of power’ or tips to ‘Hustle through the Apocalypse’, I’ve been…not doing that.

I want to keep my word to write to you more consistently, I really do. But my underlying vow is to write only what I know to be true, only what I can see clearly. And the only clarity I’ve had was ‘Wait.’

I guess I wasn’t ready to come out of the oven yet. As the kids say ‘Let her cook.’ (a thousand cool young people psychically groaned just now, knowing not why.) You might relate. Sometimes we need more time for things to deepen and grow in the nourishing dark. Sometimes we’re just worn right down to the bone.

So, instead, I’ve been spending a lot of time staring at the sky. The light-blue expanse threaded with birdsong; the soft pink-orange of dusk given dimension by clouds; and so much time staring into the velvet dark, awed by the stars.

Partly I needed time to ponder because I know (deep down in my root system) that I will be talking about hope this year. A lot. What audible noise did you make? A derisive snort? A sad sigh? I know it’s in short supply right now. I feel that, even in my own heart.

And yet…I still believe that things (things, much like the royal ‘we’) can be better, and we are not doomed. I even believe we can imagine a much better future from here. But I do not know when or how, and so much is not guaranteed. And people are suffering now. Paradox on Paradox…my thoughts are tangled together. Wait. Not yet. So, I kept my mouth closed and eyes looking up.

I love watching how many variations there are on a starry night. One evening the Moon and Venus take center stage dancing against a deep purple backdrop; the next the stars are leaping out, brilliant before the sky is even dark. Some nights are swirling and obscure. I sit in the dark for a long time before I can see one star.

The latter feels like where a lot of us are right now. Whatever your vantage point, you might need to sit for a while before a glimmer appears. And somehow you will need to hold a soft gaze and a straight back, amidst a whirlwind of chaos.

So I finally got some starshine. We’re going to talk about full-on hope another day. Right now, I want to talk to anyone who can’t see it yet. Who is also watching and waiting. Who senses the wisdom in resisting the lure of animal panic or wild despair. But has no clue what else to do.

I want to offer some wisdom that my Aunt passed on to me. It’s been a useful mantra for me in some pretty extreme situations, whether I was in a warzone; dealing with a lover who’d done me wrong; or dealing with a lover who’d done me wrong in a warzone . I believe it can be a lodestone for you as you chart your course now:

Stay Calm, Be Brave, Wait for the Signs.

Stay Calm - Breathe. Meditate. Check in with each of your 5 senses. Tell yourself nicely ‘I’m safe right now. It’s okay to take my time.’ The more grounded you are, the less likely you are to hare off in the wrong direction; if you have full command of your faculties, the better your decisions will be; and the better shape your nervous system is in, the better shape you’ll be in to survive what could be a long game (in any open-ended crisis, this is true.)

Be Brave - I am not talking about standing on a frontline with a flamethrower, let’s redefine bravery. Bravery is moving through circumstances beyond your control with a focus on what matters to you. So, focus on something that matters to you. It can be something personal, like your pets or your family. It often is…ideology is rarely the driver people think it is. I remember the zookeeper in Odesa who wouldn’t leave his animals, and was taking in the pets that people fleeing couldn’t bring with them. Whatever your thing is, hold on tight. It will enhance your ability to move through uncertainty, and act as a powerful antidote to fear. And being brave buys you time.

Wait for the Signs - I know…patience…ugh! Well, it beats digging through the entrails of a sacrifice for our portents. At least I didn’t suggest that! Sometimes the best thing we can do is wait, with curiosity and openness. Slow discernment is still a form of action. It is not the same as being frozen.When we combine that kind of awareness with presence and connection - we will be pulled in the direction of our next right thing. How can we be sure? It will taste a bit like hope. Or as my teacher Martha Beck says when we’re going in the direction of our authentic selves, ‘it feels like freedom.’ (hint: think back to a time you’ve felt it before.) And if we then keep on with intention, we might even see that a pattern emerges, like a murmuration of starlings or a constellation. That is some next-level s**t.

However, we can’t be there for the pull if we’ve run off in a wild panic. So soften your eyes and wait. The stars are still there. Your stars are still there. They will appear.

And yes, this is all easier said than done (isn’t pretty much everything?) But it can be done.

Of course, even having followed my own advice, part of me just now thinks ‘ Oh no, I haven’t said it all. Or enough of it. What have I missed?’ But that’s the feverish mood of the moment (and being human.) The good thing is I don’t have to say it all. Not by myself. And not right now. Neither do you. I just have to say the thing that is poking out from behind the clouds, and above the soil for me.

In a way, it is fitting that I’m writing this now.. This weekend marked the Celtic festival of Imbolc or in Catholic terms, Saint Brigid’s Day. Traditionally, this is actually the start of Spring. Even though we have a long way to go. But nothing in nature starts out fully formed or in bloom. It all starts as a sense, as a stirring, deep under the cover of the dark. And we, my friends, are part of nature.

Imbolc is a reminder that life and light will be coming back. It is a festival of candles and snowdrops, of small steps forward. Those Celts knew you couldn’t force the turning of things, even if the world itself is on fire (which it was on a fairly regular basis back then too.) But they celebrated the beginning of new life anyway. Even when winter covers the surface of things.

I know there’s a lot of howling right now - the winds of change, the wolf at the door, social media. There are conflicting, urgent and not terribly helpful messages - act now or all is lost, do and say something big about everything or all is lost, no matter what you do or say, all is lost. I’m not sure anyone really thinks they’re winning (except maybe my dog, and your dog. And all the cats of the world.)

I’m not going to try to sell you too hard on hope just yet. That’s growing under the earth and in a distant galaxy. And when the time is right, I know I’ll be talking to you more about that. And I think I’m finally ready to talk here about my experiences as a journalist, which still makes me a believer.

For now, I just hope you’ll stop beating yourself up for not being first out of the gate; or able to leap large geopolitical forces or insurmountable personal circumstances in a single bound. Please trust there might be wisdom in your timing. And moving at your pace is not the same thing as standing still.

Maybe I’m a little behind, or maybe I’m not. I don’t think you are either. Stay Calm. Be Brave. Wait for the Signs.

Prompt: What would be doing differently if you trusted your timing? that the light would return?

Action: What is your favourite natural thing? Birds? The Sky? Your dog? Watch that for 7 days with soft eyes. What do you notice?

Share

With Me

Book a Call

Listen -

Music goes beyond the conscious and verbal. Please dose yourself liberally with tunes! A few from me as a jumping-off point.

Wait for it from Hamilton

Grow - Facesoul

Better Days - Dermot Kennedy

Love to be Loved - Peter Gabriel

Stand by me - Tracy Chapman

Solfeggio Frequencies 528 HZ - Spotify playlist

Read

The Myths of Imbolc and Bridget/Saint Brigid

On the trail of a Celtic Goddess

The Resistance will not be rushed by Anne Lamott (or anything by Anne Lamott)

Finding your own North Star by Martha Beck

Watch

The Night Sky

Don’t worry, I’m not implying the beloved blue-footed booby is a demon (I wouldn’t want to make a tit of myself.) As someone who recently spent 3 weeks in the Galapagos, I can confirm they are delightful residents of Paradise.

And as someone who recently spent 3 weeks in the Galapagos (I swear I’m not rubbing it in, it’s an important point), I can also confirm that there is nowhere on earth you can go where your demons will not follow.

If anywhere had a shot, it was Isabela. Every day was sunny, spent with exotic animals and great people doing work that lights me up. There was wow and wonder thrumming in my veins. And yet…at some point, imperfection entered the chat.

Isn’t that how it always happens? Two crazy kids are having a nice walk in a garden…and then all hell breaks loose. It wasn’t quite that dramatic for me. No snakes on trees. I didn’t look up and spot two horned creatures waving at me from across the square. No, it was way more banal, and I’m sure way more familiar to you.

It started with a pulled muscle. I woke up, excited for another day of pleasure and purpose. I leapt out of bed and the pain nearly brought me to the floor. I felt fear. Fear that my trip was ruined. Fear that history was about to repeat itself. I had injured myself seriously on a volcanic island seven years ago, and it had brought on some life-changing losses. I didn’t know what was wrong, but what if…what if…what if…

The good-time high was over. The call was coming from inside the house.

Pain had opened the door for fear. Fear held that door open for a stream of stories and hair-raising tales. Whether or not I was grievously wounded (I wasn’t), a womp-womp trombone had sounded in my Hallelujah chorus. And without even being conscious of it (at first), I had the thought that all perfectionists (practicing or recovering) have “Oh no, I’ve ruined it!”

For a few days, I really felt like that was true. One small step for Mel, one giant limp for all my demons. Suddenly, I felt trapped. Everywhere I went, there the worst of me seemed to be. I was afraid, envious, greedy and angry. I felt emotionally needy and defensively prickly at the same time - what a lovely combination to be and be around.

Sure, this wasn’t every second of every day, because…ummm…Galapagos… but still, what a comedown. Also, Ugh, blech, gross. Everything was perfect and I ruined it! Everything on the outside was still postcard-worthy but now I might as well have been pulling up a fourth chair in a windowless room in Hell. And I felt like I had a snowball’s chance of escaping it.

This filled me with shame and terror that even in the most beautiful place on earth, I could not hold on to good and beautiful things.

In response, I created my own mash-up on repeat in my head, Taylor Swift’s Anti-hero “Hi, I’m the problem it’s me,” and a mantra so desperate, it was almost a prayer: “I do not want this, I do not want this, I do not want this.”

Which, fun fact, changed absolutely nothing. So, although that song is a banger, if you’re currently banging your head against the walls, I don’t recommend this first approach…at least not once you can help it.

What finally changed? Well, once again, it was the work of a moment. I went on a snorkelling trip, determined that my inner flagellation would eventually make everything FINE. Instead, I’d had a problem with my mask and while I was sorting it…I had been left behind. Oh s**t.

I was in pain from trying to keep up with my sore leg; then I was scared because I lost sight of both the group and the boat. I was alone in strange waters; which also made me angry at the guide and my friends; and I was envious of all the amazing animal moments I was sure they were having.

I thought of all the mental anguish of days past and the parental saying “I’ll give you something to cry about” floated through my head. Also…again, Oh s**t.

Then I gave myself that moment of stillness. Literally, I stopped… and floated. I thought…yeah…all of those might be valid. And I am currently okay.

I thought of a Buddhist idea that I’d read about Bodhisattva’s visiting the hell realms because if the tortured and the damned could become conscious for even a millisecond aka ‘the fall of a lotus petal’, then hell could immediately turn into a heavenly realm, and they would see the demons were actually buddhas.

I looked at the rocks, realised I could clamber up onto them if I needed; and at some point, my friend would notice I was missing and make them come find me. I felt an urge to laugh at the absurdity of it all, but held onto my snorkel (and my s**t.) I was still buoyant, warm and in the Galapagos for g-d’s sake! Why not try and explore and see if I could enjoy myself?

I swam forward, no longer in a rush. I saw a giant sea turtle, then realised there were three all together - wise and wonderful. Wow. It didn’t seem they’d ever been in a rush in their lives. I felt honoured to share that moment in space and time with them.

No Mud, No Lotus isn’t just a reminder to tough things out, it’s a reminder that mess can lead to magic. I was convinced I had ruined my whole trip. I was wrong.

As I kept swimming, I had more moments of fear and anger. After all, I like to read about Bodhisattvas, I am not one. But something had shifted. I felt lighter. Buoyed by the fact that all it took for Paradise to reappear was for me to stop fighting my ‘bad’ feelings so hard.

I’d been stuck on the idea I’d ruined everything by bringing my demons to this beautiful place. But honestly, they were always present. The mistake I’d made was trying to push them down and out when they spoke up. I’d been doing the adult equivalent of putting my fingers in my ears and saying ‘I can’t hear you’ over and over again.

There was nothing inherently wrong with any of my feelings. It’s okay to be scared of being injured again. It’s normal to get angry once in a while, or to long for someone to tell you they think you’re swell even when you’re bossy.

Feelings are messengers letting us know that something needs taking care of - even if it’s just our blood sugar. They can be helpful if they’re listened to, respected and properly contained. If not, it can start to get pretty demonic.

In this case, I told my fear and anger that I absolutely understood why they had something to say, and we were all on the same side. But for now, we were okay. And like Dory, we were going to ‘just keep swimming.’ And we did, marveling at a black-tipped reef shark, scores of neon rainbow fish and shoals of ghostly white fish.

When I eventually did find the group, I was relieved and irritated and not in the mood to tip the guide. But my feelings didn’t have me by the throat. I was able to be exactly where I was - in one of the most idyllic places on earth, grateful and happy to dive underwater when someone called out ‘Turtle!’

For the rest of the trip, my demons didn’t hide and I didn’t ask them to. They even piped up helpfully on my behalf a few times. It didn’t work perfectly, but it worked.

But most importantly, over and over again, I was reminded that perfection does not exist and is not required for experiences of the awe-inspiring variety.

On our last day, my friend and I got up early to go snorkelling. I’m not a morning person, but marine iguanas are…and swimming with them is worth it. Concha de Perla is a glorious spot - and this was a glorious snorkel. There were marine iguanas in the water, sea lions cavorting, I felt positively aquatic. Then I saw a giant parrot fish - iridescent and magical. Just as I mouthed wow into my snorkel, it swam past while taking a massive poo. Huh… not quite what I was after. I kept swimming. How much more wonder could I squeeze out of this swim? I caught sight of another big parrot fish…it also took a massive poop. Hmmm…A bit later on, a final majestic parrot fish and…and, you guessed it, a final poop. Okay universe, I’m listening…what incredibly subtle lesson are you giving me this time?

The Parrot Fish were beautiful, the experience was incredible and the s**t was always going to be there. So, you can have unrealistic expectations, and decide that if it’s not perfect, everything has turned to s**t, or you can just accept that once in a while, s**t happens, and move on. I smiled to myself and swam on. It was still paradise.

Prompt: Try to imagine your next big, scary feeling as an actual demon. What do they look like? What colour are they? Do they have hair? horns? a tail? What kind of clothes do they wear? Get as detailed as you can. Then, write about what that tells you about the feeling and your relationship to it?

Action: Next time one of your demons shows up, take a deep breath (in and out), ground your feet into the floor and check to see if you’re okay. If you are, ask what the message it has for you. Ask how you can help it find peace.

Share

Book a Call

Listen

Paradise by Coldplay (but this is the Urban Love Reggae Version)

Anti-Hero by Taylor Swift

Demons by Doja Cat

Think Grow Podcast with Yumi Sakugawa

Read

Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe by Yumi Sakugawa

Start where you are - A guide to Compassionate Living by Pema Chodron

Nothing Gold can Stay by Robert Frost

The Language of Emotions by Karla McLaren