Turning Pro

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Twelve

and best friends, 

we both saved 

our weekly allowance

to buy magic tricks.

You'd bring a catalogue

from the local magic shop to school,

and at lunch hour 

we'd peruse the pages together;

the sleight-of-hand effects,

coin routines and gimmicked decks,

jugs that never stopped pouring,

boxes with false bottoms,

Houdini escapes.

Those days,

my parents were always fighting 

behind locked doors.

Yours had split years before.

The week you got your license

your father bought you a Tercel—

an orange tin can.

We drove around the city late at night,

stuffed ourselves with steamies and fries

at the local greasy spoon

and talked.

You loved a girl from school, 

didn't reveal the secret.

She wanted you as a friend.

You hoped

for someday.

I slept with her

when you were away at college.

Told myself 

she wasn't yours to lose.

We tried to hide it—

used misdirection.

When you came home

you didn't leave your bed for months

or answer the phone.

A vanishing act

behind closed curtains.

Then one day

you appeared

in your shit-box car.

We went driving.

I thought we'd talk about our futures

like old times.

"I'm going to turn pro," you said.

"Turn pro at what?"

"Tennis. I'm going to be a tennis pro."

"But you don't play tennis,"

I said.

"I've seen Borg,

I can beat him."

“That’d be quite a trick,”

is all I said.

Titleist

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We must be doing something right

when we can stretch out like this;

spend hours and hours

traipsing through estate grounds, 

around man-made ponds,

across escarpments,

batting a smooth dimpled sphere

about the size of a stone

with awkward bent rods

to deliver it into a tiny hole

marked by a small flag

cut into a patch of shaved grass.

It's called Titleist.

A fox hunt without much left to chance;

We dress for the occasion, wear special footwear,

and soft leather gloves. 

Instead of horses we ride vehicles

with rubber wheels and humming electric motors.

Instead of aiming rifles

we swing metal sticks around our heads.

The swings are counted—

the point is to reach par

which means average.

Below par means you're very good.

For the privilege 

we join expensive clubs—

moms with their neighbourhood friends,

dads with business associates,

after rounds, 

over finger food and cocktails

they compare handicaps.

Mom was club champion.

One time when we were kids

dad handed my older brother

his heavy oblong putter, 

told us to practice on the front lawn.

He used it to whack me in the head.

I’ve hated the game ever since.

The Rope-a-Dope War (aka How Iran Won)

For anyone who cared to listen to my opinions since the debacle and tragedy of October 7, 2023, I had one overarching message about where I thought Israel would ultimately find itself down the line. I said Israel would emerge stronger, safer, and regionally more powerful.

And for a few years, at least, I believe I was correct in that assessment.

Those were the days when Joe Biden was in the White House, Antony Blinken was Secretary of State, and Lloyd Austin was Secretary of Defense. Whatever you may think of that group—and they certainly made some mistakes—their competence and decades of experience cannot reasonably be questioned (not even Biden's mental competence, despite what his critics claimed).

Compare them to Trump, Rubio, and Hegseth.

After a devastating security humiliation—the worst in the country's history—Israel's operations against Hamas militants and Iranian proxies were successful beyond expectations. The Hamas attack failed to draw the other members of the so-called Axis of Resistance into the fight. Instead, Israel seized the initiative through a series of surprisingly effective operations: the devastating pager attacks, the killing of Hezbollah's leadership, including Hassan Nasrallah, and the eventual elimination of Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, the principal architects of the October 7 attacks.

Iran was decidedly on its back foot. Domestically, it was facing unrest brought about by years of crippling international sanctions, while citizen protests were steadily growing in both size and frequency.

Its regional proxies also appeared to be on the verge of serious defeat.

The high point, arguably from a strategic standpoint, was Israel's successful campaign to systematically dismantle Tehran's air defense system. That, in turn, opened the door for the U.S.'s limited strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities during the June 2025 "Twelve-Day War."

Trump proclaimed victory, repeatedly declaring that Iran's nuclear program had been "obliterated," which was patently untrue. Nevertheless, Iran was at a low point, as demonstrated by the widespread street protests at the end of December 2025, which the regime was forced to suppress brutally.

A series of tit-for-tat strikes between Iran and Israel followed over the next several months. Iran was against the ropes and needed to demonstrate both its resilience and its capacity to inflict damage.

This led Netanyahu to press Trump for further, more decisive action against Iran. He calculated that the Iranian regime was teetering and argued that the moment had arrived to act decisively to bring it down.

This was the gross miscalculation that marked the beginning of the conflict turning in Iran's favor.

That miscalculation was operationalized on February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel coordinated a military strike aimed at decapitating Iran's leadership. The theory was that removing the regime's senior leadership would either collapse the government or render it impotent, inspiring a widespread popular revolt.

Although militarily successful in eliminating a large portion of Iran's senior leadership—including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and many members of his family—the operation proved to be a major strategic blunder.

Subsequent attacks by Israeli and U.S. forces, including those that killed Defense Minister Amir Nasirzadeh, Revolutionary Guards Commander Mohammed Pakpour, and Ali Larijani, the senior security official acting as Iran's de facto leader after Khamenei's death, along with internal security chief Gen. Gholam Reza Soleimani, only served to demonstrate the depth and resilience of the regime.

We had now entered what I call a "Rope-a-Dope War," borrowing the term from Muhammad Ali's famous boxing strategy during the 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle" against George Foreman.

Iran did not need to go toe-to-toe with adversaries that possessed overwhelmingly superior military capabilities. It merely had to absorb the blows, outlast its opponents, and occasionally lash out at carefully chosen strategic targets to demonstrate that it retained the capacity to inflict meaningful damage. Then, when the time was right and its adversaries had been weakened politically and economically, it could strike decisively.

That is exactly how it played out.

Iran retaliated with drone and missile strikes against U.S. military bases, attacked neighboring Gulf states, and finally closed the Strait of Hormuz.

Closing the Strait of Hormuz—which every military strategist and defense analyst had anticipated as a likely Iranian response since the 1979 Revolution—gave Iran the upper hand permanently. It fundamentally changed the stakes of the war and convinced the Iranian leadership that the longer it could sustain the conflict, the greater its chances of achieving objectives that extended far beyond merely surviving.

Those ambitions included lifting economic sanctions, stabilizing the economy through renewed sources of revenue, consolidating and legitimizing its control over the Strait of Hormuz, driving the U.S. military presence out of the Gulf, reshaping the regional balance of power, and extending Iranian influence throughout the Middle East.

That is where we are now.

Almost three years after October 7, Israel finds itself in a quagmire of its own making in both Gaza and Lebanon. It is despised throughout much of the world, and its relationships with the United States and key regional partners are at their lowest point in decades. The strategic opportunities it once possessed have been squandered.

This is what bad strategic planning and overreach look like when combined with hubris, corruption, ignorance, and incompetent political leadership.

The Abraham Accords are effectively dead. The Gulf states now understand—as much of the rest of the world has for some time—that the United States is an unreliable partner. Iran, meanwhile, is well on its way to becoming the region's dominant power.

Oh yes—I almost forgot the supposed reason for all of this in the first place: Iran's nuclear program.

There is now nothing to stop it from moving forward, and Iran has more motivation than ever to pursue a nuclear deterrent. Trump himself appears to have conceded as much with the recent Saudi agreement to assist the kingdom in developing civilian nuclear energy.

Apprentice

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Body I have trusted

you my whole life

I was never more

than an apprentice

of pleasure and pain

of fight and flight

I took you

for granted

as you grew strong

without asking

as you translated

the world for me;

you will

betray me body

and I can't

blame you.

The Blessing of Inconvenience

Some of you might remember the book The Blessing of a Skinned Knee. We still have a copy on our bookshelf. My wife bought it when our children were young and we were struggling with that bewildering new experience called parenthood. Like most new parents, we were hungry for advice.

Back then, a new phrase was entering the cultural vocabulary: helicopter parenting. It described parents who hovered constantly over their children, overprotecting them, overindulging them, and over-managing every aspect of their lives. Childhood became a carefully curated schedule of lessons, sports, and supervised activities. Children were rarely allowed to be bored, rarely given the freedom to explore their own curiosity, solve their own problems, make mistakes, or develop resilience.

The book argued that this well-intentioned approach was producing emotionally fragile children—kids who had never learned how to cope with disappointment, adversity, or failure. It warned against raising a generation of snowflakes.

At the time, that seemed like a cautionary tale. Looking back, though, helicopter parenting wasn't simply a response to irrational fear. It was a remarkably logical adaptation to the world that was already taking shape.

Parents weren't just preparing their children for life. They were preparing them for a culture increasingly built around comfort, convenience, and the elimination of friction. Every inconvenience was becoming a problem to be solved. Every discomfort, something to be avoided.

And isn't that, after all, what parents are supposed to do? Prepare their children to fit into the world they will inherit?

The playgrounds themselves reflected the change. Hard-packed earth and sand gave way to thick rubber safety mats. Risk was engineered out wherever possible.

Today, even that seems quaint.

Forget the playground altogether. Many children are more likely to be "playing" Roblox or Minecraft on a smartphone than hanging upside down from monkey bars. A skinned knee has become the least of their parents' concerns.

When The Blessing of a Skinned Knee was published in 2001, smartphones didn't exist. The danger parents worried about was that children, left to their own devices—in the original sense of the phrase—might wander the neighbourhood, get into mischief with friends, or come home late for dinner.

Compared with today's digital world, those fears seem almost nostalgic.

Now parents must contend with online predators, algorithmic manipulation, pornography, gambling, cyberbullying, endless social comparison, and a torrent of violent and disturbing content delivered directly into their children's pockets. These are dangers no amount of hovering can fully prevent.

But even those are only the visible threats.

The smartphone's most profound influence is subtler. It trains us to expect that every desire should be satisfied instantly. Need an answer? Google it. Hungry? Tap a screen. Lonely? Scroll. Bored? Swipe. We no longer simply enjoy convenience; we come to depend on it.

Convenience may be the most addictive drug our civilization has ever invented. And the more complex and technologically confounding the world becomes, the more we seek escape—ironically, through technology itself.

Unlike other addictions, it doesn't intoxicate us. It quietly rewires our expectations. It lowers our tolerance for waiting, struggling, persisting, or doing without. It makes friction feel like failure.

In hindsight, perhaps helicopter parenting wasn't creating children who were too delicate for the world. It was creating children perfectly adapted to a world that was becoming addicted to convenience.

The tragedy is that while the world has become more convenient than ever, life itself has not. It's more complex than ever, precisely because of all the effort at greater convenience. 

Relationships still require patience. Character is still forged through hardship. Wisdom still grows through failure. Kindness and generosity still demands effort.

The Homebody Trait

Are you an adventurous type, or a homebody? And is that simply a matter of personality, or could it also be a matter of genetics?

I've always been a homebody. I never cared much for travelling.

The only time I ever lived away from home was for a year in Geneva, Switzerland, while completing my graduate studies. I could have stayed another year to write my thesis, but I couldn't wait to get home.

I attended university in my hometown. The only period of extensive travel in my youth was the obligatory post-high school backpacking trip through Europe. In thirteen weeks I visited twelve countries, from Scandinavia to Yugoslavia.

There were a handful of shorter sojourns after that. The most memorable came while I was studying Russian at university. Our department organized a ten-day trip to the Soviet Union over Christmas break, and I found myself standing in Red Square on New Year's Eve, welcoming 1986.

I've travelled to Israel three times, including a month-long family trip during which we rented a car and explored the country from the Lebanese border in the north to the Negev Desert in the south.

When our children were young, we escaped winter with a few all-inclusive vacations in Cuba, though those hardly count as travelling in my books. Our last real family trip was about ten years ago, to Vienna and Budapest.

I've only taken two trips alone with my wife: one to Israel before we were married, and another to Utah for a hiking vacation.

That's about it.

I'm not counting the trips of my childhood. My grandparents spent every winter in Florida, so we flew down twice a year. In those days, flying still felt like an occasion. We dressed up to board the plane, and there were smoking sections.

We also took several road trips into the United States. Over the years I've probably visited thirty states, every Canadian province except Newfoundland and Labrador, and none of the territories.

Ironically, my children have already travelled more extensively than I ever have. They've been to Europe, Asia, South America, and throughout the Middle East.

Perhaps that's simply because travel is more accessible today than it was for my generation. Airfare is relatively cheaper, flights are more frequent, and crossing continents has become almost routine.

For most of human history, however, the opposite was true. Most people spent their entire lives within twenty miles of where they were born. Today, crossing an ocean can feel almost as ordinary as running an errand.

Since our children left home, home is exactly where I want to be.

My wife, on the other hand, has discovered a new freedom. In the past year alone she's travelled to Mexico, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Austria, and Italy. This fall she's planning a trip to Portugal.

She goes without me. Usually she travels with one or two of our adult children.

When her friends learn she's travelling without her husband, they inevitably ask whether I'm depressed or whether there's trouble in paradise.

There isn't.

I simply don't enjoy travelling very much.

Part of that is age. My body no longer adapts easily to unfamiliar beds, unfamiliar food, or changing time zones. I've also become a nervous flyer ever since a harrowing approach into Toronto a few years ago. We were literally seconds from touching down when the aircraft suddenly pitched sharply upward and aborted the landing. The pilot later explained we'd encountered severe wind shear.

Flying itself has also become an increasingly unpleasant experience. I'm taller than average, and I'm convinced airline seats have become smaller over the years. Everything about flying seems worse than it once was: the delays, the uncertainty, the endless fees. Passengers used to be treated like customers. Now we're treated more like cargo.

By the time I arrive somewhere overseas, it takes me two days just to recover from getting there.

Yet I often feel as though I have to justify not wanting to travel.

Somehow we've come to equate travel with living life to the fullest. If you aren't posting selfies from exotic destinations, people wonder whether you've somehow given up on life itself.

Recently, though, I've begun to wonder whether there's something deeper going on.

As my mother grew older, she became a homebody too.

So did her parents.

My grandfather retired relatively young after building a successful business. He could easily have spent his retirement travelling the world in five-star luxury.

He had absolutely no interest.

Instead, he rode his bicycle every day for exercise and spent countless happy hours painting in his studio.

His daughter—my mother—was much the same. She had every opportunity to travel but rarely did. She wasn't a recluse. She was active in her neighbourhood, but seldom ventured beyond it. When she sold her house, she moved into a condominium down the street. When she decided condo living wasn't for her, she bought another house around the corner.

That got me thinking.

We know that genetics influence everything from eye colour and body type to the risk of diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, and depression. Personality traits themselves are partly inherited.

Why not this?

Perhaps some people are simply wired to seek novelty while others are wired to find deep satisfaction in familiar surroundings.

Perhaps being a homebody is every bit as much a part of one's nature as being an introvert or an extrovert.

I think we're fortunate to live in an age when travel is largely a matter of choice. In many ways, the ability to move freely around the world has become a symbol of prosperity. Owning a private jet has become the ultimate status symbol.

Not very long ago, however, crossing continents usually meant something entirely different. It meant you were fleeing war, persecution, famine, or poverty in the hope of giving your children a better future.

Seen from that perspective, perhaps staying home is the greater luxury. Maybe the greatest privilege isn't having the freedom to leave.

It's having the freedom to stay home.

5786

I watched a five-hour YouTube video this weekend.

I didn't think that was possible. My attention span usually taps out after about 45 minutes. But once I started, I couldn't stop. Thank goodness I had nothing important planned. Vacuuming the carpets and cleaning the bathrooms will have to wait another week.

The marathon video was by an Australian named Stevie Baskin. It's essentially a five-hour debunking of American mentalist Oz Pearlman.

If you don't know who Pearlman is, look him up. His popularity has skyrocketed over the last few years through television appearances and social media, where he performs astonishing feats of apparent mind reading and divination.

Pearlman is an entertainer—a magician in the tradition of David Copperfield or David Blaine. The difference is that he doesn't describe what he does as magic or illusion.

You may ask, if he's a magician, why would he need to be debunked?

Because Pearlman says that what he does involves skills he has spent decades learning. He reads subliminal cues—tiny, unconscious signals that people unknowingly reveal—and it is these highly developed observational abilities that allow him to "read people" and make astonishingly accurate deductions. He has even written a book claiming to teach others how to develop these abilities.

What bothers Baskin is that these abilities, at least in the form Pearlman presents them, simply do not exist.

Certainly, people communicate non-verbally, and psychology has much to say about body language and unconscious behaviour. But those phenomena bear little resemblance to what Pearlman actually does on stage or on television. 

Baskin spends five hours painstakingly dissecting Pearlman's performances, replaying footage from his best-known television and podcast appearances frame by frame, exposing the sleight of hand, gimmicks, audience management, backstage shenanigans (he calls it 'meta-deception') and classic methods that magicians have relied on for generations.

His argument is not that Pearlman lacks talent. Quite the opposite, Pearlman is extraordinarily skilled. The problem, Baskin says, is that Pearlman attributes those skills to something they are not, which matters.

Baskin suggests Pearlman's marketing may even stray into deceptive advertising by using claims about psychological abilities to sell books. But his deeper concern is philosophical rather than legal.

It's one thing to watch an entertainer knowing you're being fooled. Quite another to be persuaded that the impossible is actually possible.

Baskin says he chose to focus on Pearlman because of the comments he kept reading online. Many viewers genuinely believed Pearlman possessed superhuman perceptual abilities. They weren't enjoying the illusion; they had mistaken it for reality.

We live in an age saturated with deception. The music we hear is digitally perfected. Our online appearances are filtered. Our social media lives are carefully curated performances. Conspiracy theories circulate more quickly than facts. Political leaders lie with astonishing frequency, and millions willingly accept those lies.

Increasingly, we lose track of where the performance ends and reality begins. It often seems like we  prefer the performance over the reality. I suspect that's what really troubles Baskin.

I appreciate a good magician as much as anyone. In fact, I practised the art of prestidigitation myself as a kid. I spent my weekly allowance buying magic tricks, took sleight-of-hand lessons, and even performed at a few children's birthday parties. My parents hired the local magician Henry Gordon to perform at my bar mitzvah.

Magic, when honestly presented as an artform, is wonderful.

On one hand, perhaps Baskin goes a little overboard. Pearlman is undeniably an exceptional performer and entertainer.

On the other hand, there is no denying that he walks a fine ethical line by presenting his performances as demonstrations of psychological mastery rather than theatrical illusion. It becomes uncomfortable listening to interview after interview in which he distances himself from traditional magicians, implying that what he does belongs to a different category.

He does this because he wants to leverage his skills to appeal to other lucrative markets, namely self-improvement. In that sense, he resembles countless online influencers, selling mental fitness the way others sell physical fitness and personal optimization.

Here is where I make a left turn.

Listening to Baskin reminded me of a conversation I had two weeks ago with my regular Friday Lubavitch visitors, whose weekly mission is to persuade me to wrap tefillin.

I asked one of them how old the universe was.

Without hesitation, Menachem answered, "Five thousand seven hundred and eighty-six years."

"According to cosmologists," I replied, "it's closer to 14 billion years."

They simply stared at me as though I had lost my mind.

I didn't pursue the discussion. There was nowhere for it to go. We weren't disagreeing over a fact. We were inhabiting different conceptions of reality. For them, the universe cannot exist outside the boundaries established by Torah. Anything beyond those boundaries simply isn't part of the world they understand.

What does this have to do with Oz Pearlman? In my mind, quite a bit.

The question isn't whether magic is real. It's about the limits of reality itself.

If you understand the Bible as a profound collection of stories conveying moral insight and human wisdom, it can be appreciated in much the same way we appreciate a magician's performance. We know we're experiencing something symbolic, imaginative, and meaningful. We may even glean lessons about psychology, perception and the human condition.

But once symbolism becomes literal history, something changes. Evidence begins yielding to belief. And once we become comfortable placing doctrine above evidence, there is no obvious principle limiting what else we might come to accept. In a way, if you believe the universe is 5768 years old you are susceptible to believing almost anything. 

That, I think, is the self-deception Baskin fears.

Not merely believing that someone can read minds from subliminal cues, but gradually losing the habit of distinguishing between performance and reality. He isn't attacking magic. He's actually defending it.

If you're going to deceive your audience, then be honest about the deception. Let people marvel at the craft without misleading them about the nature of the world. Because dishonesty has a way of justifying itself.

Pearlman's most famous routine involved correctly revealing people's bank PIN numbers on television. He famously performed it with Joe Rogan and later with a co-host of The View.

Later, that co-host disclosed that Pearlman had privately "prepped" her before filming. During that conversation he persuaded her to enter her real PIN into her phone's calculator, assuring her that the televised performance would use a fake number. Instead, during the broadcast, he revealed her actual PIN. She was stunned and later said she felt violated.

Baskin demonstrates how Pearlman almost certainly obtained the number. The effect was brilliant, but the method was deeply unethical. It isn't all that different from a scammer tricking someone into revealing confidential information through social engineering.

Near the end of his video, Baskin quotes magicians Penn & Teller: "The best lie is one that the audience tells itself."  

I've been thinking about that line ever since. Perhaps that's what Pearlman is really selling. Not mind reading, but permission to suspend your critical faculties. And perhaps that's what every successful deception ultimately sells. Not the lie itself. The desire to believe it.

Maybe 5786 is just another PIN code. Four digits that unlock a particular picture of reality.

Once entered, everything on the other side begins to make sense—not because it is true, but because you've accepted the assumptions that make it true.

That's what worries Baskin. And perhaps it should worry the rest of us as well.