Abdallah Makki Muslih al-Rifa was head of IS's most senior decision-making body, the US Central Command said.

Iranian officials are encouraging people to report women who refuse to obey the Islamic republic's dress code, according to a UN report.

Sadegh Zibakalam is in trouble again. The retired 76-year-old professor of political science was already serving an 18-month sentence for criticizing the Iranian regime. He came out on medical furlough—only for Tehran’s prosecutor to start investigating him again. Now Zibakalam, one of Iran’s best-known public intellectuals, whose combined followers on Instagram, Facebook, and X total almost 2 million, is worried he may be sent back to prison.

The new charges stem from a speech he made at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Qatar in January. Expressing one’s opinion can make a person a criminal in Iran. But Zibakalam had voiced not even his own view so much as a sociological observation: that Iranians no longer support the Palestinian cause, and many even cheer for Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump.

“You’ll be surprised, since October 7 last year, [to see] the number of Iranians who hate the Palestinian” groups, Zibakalam said. “But I saw it with my own eyes during the past 15 months … For [so many] of the younger generation of Iranians … their hero was Netanyahu … Everyone was talking about the U.S. elections … hoping and praying that Donald Trump would win.”

Zibakalam is himself a harsh critic of Trump and in the same speech decried the American president as “anti-women, anti-Arab, anti-immigration, and anti-Black.” He has also accused Netanyahu’s government of war crimes and called attention to the “millions of Israelis” who oppose it. Zibakalam thus was not condoning the views he described, but rather lamenting the turn of a population that once backed Palestinian leaders, such as Yasser Arafat. Iranians, he explained, have come to hate anybody associated with their own regime, whose policies oppress them. “I can tell you why they hate Hassan Nasrallah,” he said of the Hezbollah leader slain by Israel last year, and “why they hate Hamas.” The reason, he said, is “simply because the Islamic Republic supports them.”

Zibakalam is what Iranians call a liberal reformist, meaning that even while he recognizes the fundamental unfairness of the political system, he advocates for participation in the hope of staving off the worst or producing incremental change for the better. Last year, many Iranians boycotted the country’s presidential elections, but Zibakalam dutifully voted for Masud Pezeshkian, a reformist who wields little power in a government dominated by the hard-line Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. And yet, even among critics of the leadership, Zibakalam is notably outspoken. He has brushed aside regime taboos to argue repeatedly that Iran’s anti-American and anti-Israeli obsessions do not advance its national interest.

[Read: Iranian dissidents don’t want war with Israel—but they can’t stop it]

Like many Iranian reformists, Zibakalam was a revolutionary in the 1970s. He was born into a religious family in Tehran in 1948 and fell in with Iranian activist circles while studying abroad, first in Austria and then in the United Kingdom, where he was pursuing a doctorate in chemical engineering at the University of Bradford. Having initially flirted with Marxism, he ended up advocating for a left-leaning Islamism, and he headed the Islamic Student Association at Bradford from from 1972 to 1974. The Iranian student organizations he worked with were tightly allied with Palestinian militants. On a return visit to Iran in 1974, he was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison. He was released early, in 1976, and barred from going back to his Ph.D. program in Britain but allowed to teach at the University of Tehran.

Iran’s political space opened slightly in 1978, and Zibakalam helped found the Islamic Association of Academics at that time. A year later, Iranian revolutionaries overthrew the Shah, and he enthusiastically tried to serve the new regime. He was appointed to the prime minister’s office and sent to Iranian Kurdistan as part of a delegation tasked with negotiating with Kurdish rebels. The talks didn’t go anywhere, and Iranian forces went on to brutally suppress the Kurds.

Back in the University of Tehran, Zibakalam advocated for the rupture that became known as the Cultural Revolution. Named after Mao Zedong’s disastrous campaign in the 1960s and ’70s, the Iranian version led to the closure of all universities, the Islamization of their curricula, and the purging of much of their faculty—including female faculty and staff who refused to wear the hijab as well as anyone deemed disloyal to the new regime. Zibakalam has denied playing any role specifically in purging faculty, but in 1998, he publicly apologized for participating in the Cultural Revolution and asked for forgiveness from those affected.

Having served the regime for a few years in academic-management roles, he went back to Bradford in 1984, this time for a Ph.D. in peace studies. He sought to better understand the political upheaval he had helped bring about, and so he wrote his thesis on the Iranian Revolution. He returned to teach at the University of Tehran in 1990 and five years later shot to fame with his first book, How Did We Become What We Are? Seeking the Roots of Backwardness in Iran.

This book was the start of an intellectual journey that has never ceased—an attempt to figure out how Iran could catch up with the developed West. Conspiracy theories and simplistic sloganeering popular at the time tended to blame Iran’s ills solely on colonialism or capitalism. Departing from this austere nativism, Zibakalam offered instead a deep, comparative study of European and Iranian history, dating back to medieval times. The book doesn’t find a clear answer to its titular question but breaks a taboo by searching for one in choices made by Iranians themselves and not just ills done to them by outsiders. It was an immediate best seller and immensely influential inside Iran.

[Read: The fire that fueled the Iran protests]

In the years that followed, Zibakalam became a prominent defender of liberal values and critic of Iran’s foreign policy. The latter is a particular red line for the regime, which does not brook much discussion, let alone criticism, of its posture abroad. As a result of his outspokenness, Zibakalam was hounded out of his teaching position and, starting in 2014, repeatedly prosecuted. In 2011, during the Arab Spring, he’d defended the region’s various movements for democracy and contested the Iranian regime’s narrative that the uprisings were actually an “Islamic Awakening.” In Syria, then-President Bashar al-Assad put down a civil uprising with the help of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Zibakalam spoke out against this; years later, a reporter asked him his opinion of Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general assassinated by the United States in 2020, and he said that the Syrian people should be the judge of him—an extraordinary expression of solidarity with Syrians from inside Iran.

Predictably, out of all his vocal expressions of dissent, Zibakalam has paid the highest price for his stance on Israel. Back in the early 2000s, during the Second Intifada, he criticized the Iranian position on Israel as “more Palestinian than Palestinians” and called for moderation. In 2014, during a public debate with a conservative, he shocked many by declaring, “I recognize Israel as a country because the United Nations recognizes it.” And in 2016, when he was invited to speak at a university in Mashhad, he refused to join in the tradition of trampling an American and an Israeli flag, theatrically hoisting himself onto a banister to avoid stepping on them as he climbed the stairs. “It is wrong to stomp on the flag of any country, because it is a point of identity and a national symbol,” he said after the video of his gesture went viral.

He was explicitly told that he’d lost his teaching position on account of his recognition of Israel. Even so, in 2016, he published a chronicle of the Jewish people from 2000 B.C.E. to 1948, titled Birth of Israel: A History of 4000 Years of Judaism. The book, part of a determined effort to teach his fellow Iranians more about a people their regime wants them to hate, was banned in Iran but widely disseminated via Zibakalam’s Telegram channel and as an audiobook that he read himself. Since October 7, 2023, he has taken part in public debates on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including a televised program in which he called for a historical understanding that showed sensitivity to Jewish concerns.

Zibakalam has been charged and sentenced to a total of five years in prison since 2014, but he managed to stay out of jail until last year; his sentences were repeatedly suspended or turned into fines during the appeals process. His latest book pokes fun at this history with the title How Come They Won’t Arrest You?—a question he says he is often asked. But the day he was supposed to launch that book with a speech at Tehran’s book festival last May, he was finally arrested and sent to Tehran’s Evin prison. Four months later, he was diagnosed with cancer and released on medical furlough.

On coming out of Evin, Zibakalam knew that his continued freedom depended on him keeping his mouth shut, particularly on hot-button issues such as Israel. Nevertheless, in the past few weeks, he has shared several controversial positions with his large audiences online. He compared the open debate in the Israeli press over the cease-fire agreement with Hamas with Iran’s censorship and lack of discussion around an agreement it signed with Russia at around the same time. And when a commercial flight collided with a military helicopter over the Potomac River, in Washington, D.C., in January, Zibakalam called on Pezeshkian to send a condolence message to Trump as a means of opening a dialogue with the United States. He has also posted plenty of criticism of the U.S. administration, denouncing its treatment of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office and comparing Elon Musk’s destruction of the administrative state to the work of Iranian zealots in 1979.

[Read: Iran’s return to pragmatism]

Foreign-based media outlets pipe radical views into Iran every day from activists in the diaspora. By comparison, Zibakalam’s positions are relatively moderate. To the irritation of some opponents of the regime, he has refused to endorse its revolutionary overthrow. But the Iranian authorities perceive him as dangerous precisely because he couches his far-reaching demands in sensible, pragmatic language. He dares to ask simple questions plainly—for example, “What business does Iran have in seeking to destroy Israel?”

And sometimes, he just dares to state the facts that everybody can see but that the regime denies. That’s what was once known as speaking truth to power. It’s what he did in Doha, and it’s why he’s once again in trouble with a regime that thrives on silence and fear.

The ninth month of the Islamic calendar is special to Muslims around the world for its many unique blessings.

Authorities in the north African nation said they had dismantled a 12-member cell that was planning attacks on behalf of the jihadist group's regional franchise.

President Donald Trump’s firing of the country’s most senior military officer on Friday night rattled the foundations of the armed forces. It also intensified an already furious game of “who’s next” among senior lawmakers and Washington officials, who have been trading information about the commander in chief’s likely targets.  

Trump fired Air Force General Charles Q. Brown Jr., known as C. Q., who was only the second African American to serve as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president then tapped a relatively unknown officer to replace him—retired three-star Air Force General Dan “Raizin” Caine, who reportedly impressed the president with his swagger and bravado when they met in Iraq in 2018.

Brown’s dismissal, coupled with Caine’s improbable elevation, added to a sense of bewilderment that has prevailed across the national-security establishment in recent days, as the administration purges the upper echelons of career officers and civil servants. Trump also appears poised to remove several other top military leaders—focusing on Black and women officers—and replace them with his handpicked successors. And at the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, and other intelligence agencies, senior officials, as well as personnel who had only been on the job a few years, were bracing to be fired, multiple officials have told us.  

Many of the personnel actions seemed aligned with the Trump administration’s pledge to rid the ranks of “woke” officials whom the president thinks were promoted not because of their credentials, but due to their race or gender.

At the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that he was replacing Admiral Lisa Franchetti, who is the first woman to serve as the chief of naval operations, as well as General James Slife, the vice chief of the Air Force. A draft list of other officers who might be fired circulated this week on Capitol Hill among a small number of lawmakers on the armed-services committees in the House and Senate. The list isn’t final and is subject to the whims of the president and the defense secretary, cautioned two people familiar with it, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters

Brown and Franchetti are on the list, as are other senior officers. A White House official told us that the futures of those officers were being evaluated but that the president hadn’t made a final decision.

A list has also circulated with the names of officers who might be promoted to replace those being removed. People who know those officers told us many were highly capable, and that they were serving in roles meant to groom them for promotion. But moving them up the ranks now was potentially premature and a break with military protocol.

If confirmed by the Senate, Caine’s appointment would break with a generation of norms and traditions governing promotion in the senior ranks of the military. In nearly 30 years, no one has risen to chairman without first serving as a member of the Joint Chiefs. Caine, who retired last year, would leapfrog all of the current members.  

Nothing in his résumé suggests that he was destined to become the highest-ranking officer in the U.S. armed forces. He has not commanded a large number of troops. He has never led a branch of the military. His last job was as associate director for military affairs for the CIA, from 2021 to 2024. The job is a liaison position that has more clout inside the Pentagon than it does at Langley. One thing Caine apparently did have going for him: a memorable encounter he reportedly had with Trump.

According to a New York Times profile, Caine impressed the president when they met, in 2018, because he claimed that the Islamic State could be defeated in a week, not two years, as Trump said his advisers had told him. Trump has told the story on different occasions, and while the details have changed, the conversation stuck in his memory. As, apparently, did Caine.

In a statement, Hegseth indicated that the military purge was not limited to top leaders, noting that the Pentagon was “requesting nominations” for judge advocates general—lawyers—for the Army, Navy, and Air Force.

Representative Jason Crow, a Democrat from Colorado and former Army Ranger, wrote on X that “the purge of senior officers at [the Department of Defense] is deeply troubling, but purging JAG officers worries me the most.” Those lawyers, he noted, interpret the law and determine the constitutionality of actions that commanders take.

Replacing those officers with “loyalists is so dangerous,” Crow said.

During his first term, Trump intervened in several military justice cases that revolved around the line between acceptable combat behavior and war crimes. In the most infamous, he reversed a decision to demote Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who had been convicted of posing with the dead body of an Islamic State prisoner. (Gallagher had been found not guilty of the prisoner’s murder.) Trump’s decision allowed Gallagher to retire as a SEAL.

Challenged by then–Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley about the importance of military ethics and laws to combat troops, Trump responded that he didn’t understand “the big deal,” according to Milley’s recounting of the conversation to The Atlantic.

“You guys are all just killers,” Trump said, according to Milley. “What’s the difference?”

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Peers and scholars reflected on the role Hendricks played within the LGBTQ+ and Islamic communities.

Some 80% of the Old City of Mosul, in northern Iraq, was destroyed under the Islamic State group.

Perhaps you’ve heard: Young people aren’t dating anymore. News media and social media are awash in commentary about the decline in youth romance. It’s visible in the corporate data, with dating-app engagement taking a hit. And it’s visible in the survey data, where the share of 12th graders who say they’ve dated has fallen from about 85 percent in the 1980s to less than 50 percent in the early 2020s, with the decline particularly steep in the past few years.

Naturally, young people’s habits are catnip to news commentators. But although I consider the story of declining youth romance important, I don’t find it particularly mysterious. In my essay on the anti-social century, I reported that young people have retreated from all manner of physical-world relationships, whether because of smartphones, over-parenting, or a combination of factors. Compared with previous generations of teens, they have fewer friends, spend significantly less time with the friends they do have, attend fewer parties, and spend much more time alone. Romantic relationships theoretically imply a certain physicality; so it’s easy to imagine that the collapse of physical-world socializing for young people would involve the decline of romance.

[From the February 2025 issue: The anti-social century]

Adults have a way of projecting their anxieties and realities onto their children. In the case of romance, the fixation on young people masks a deeper—and, to me, far more mysterious—phenomenon: What is happening to adult relationships?

American adults are significantly less likely to be married or to live with a partner than they used to be. The national marriage rate is hovering near its all-time low, while the share of women under 65 who aren’t living with a partner has grown steadily since the 1980s. The past decade seems to be the only period since at least the 1970s when women under 35 were more likely to live with their parents than with a spouse.

People’s lives are diverse, and so are their wants and desires and circumstances. It’s hard, and perhaps impossible, to identify a tiny number of factors that explain hundreds of millions of people’s decisions to couple up, split apart, or remain single. But according to Lyman Stone, a researcher at the Institute for Family Studies, the most important reason marriage and coupling are declining in the U.S. is actually quite straightforward: Many young men are falling behind economically.

A marriage or romantic partnership can be many things: friendship, love, sex, someone to gossip with, someone to remind you to take out the trash. But, practically speaking, Stone told me, marriage is also insurance. Women have historically relied on men to act as insurance policies—against the threat of violence, the risk of poverty. To some, this might sound like an old-fashioned, even reactionary, description of marriage, but its logic still applies. “Men’s odds of being in a relationship today are still highly correlated with their income,” Stone said. “Women do not typically invest in long-term relationships with men who have nothing to contribute economically.” In the past few decades, young and especially less educated men’s income has stagnated, even as women have charged into the workforce and seen their college-graduation rates soar. For single non-college-educated men, average inflation-adjusted earnings at age 45 have fallen by nearly 25 percent in the past half century, while for the country as a whole, average real earnings have more than doubled. As a result, “a lot of young men today just don’t look like what women have come to think of as ‘marriage material,’” he said.

In January, the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch published an analysis of the “relationship recession” that lent strong support to Stone’s theory. Contrary to the idea that declining fertility in the U.S. is mostly about happily childless DINKs (dual-income, no-kid couples), “the drop in relationship formation is steepest among the poorest,” he observed. I asked Burn-Murdoch to share his analysis of Current Population Survey data so that I could take a closer look. What I found is that, in the past 40 years, coupling has declined more than twice as fast among Americans without a college degree, compared with college graduates. This represents a dramatic historic inversion. In 1980, Americans ages 25 to 34 without a bachelor’s degree were more likely than college graduates to get married; today, it’s flipped, and the education gap in coupling is widening every year. Marriage produces wealth by pooling two people’s income, but, conversely, wealth also produces marriage.

Contraception technology might also play a role. Before cheap birth control became widespread in the 1970s, sexual activity was generally yoked to commitment: It was a cultural norm for a man to marry a girl if he’d gotten her pregnant, and single parenthood was uncommon. But as the (married!) economists George Akerlof and Janet Yellen observed in a famous 1996 paper, contraception helped disentangle sex and marriage. Couples could sleep together without any implicit promise to stay together. Ultimately, Akerlof and Yellen posit, the availability of contraception, which gave women the tools to control the number and the timing of their kids, decimated the tradition of shotgun marriages, and therefore contributed to an increase in children born to low-income single parents.

The theory that the relationship recession is driven by young men falling behind seems to hold up in the U.S. But what about around the world? Rates of coupling are declining throughout Europe, as well. In England and Wales, the marriage rate for people under 30 has declined by more than 50 percent since 1990.

And it’s not just Europe. The gender researcher Alice Evans has shown that coupling is down just about everywhere. In Iran, annual marriages plummeted by 40 percent in 10 years. Some Islamic authorities blame Western values and social media for the shift. They might have a point. When women are exposed to more Western media, Evans argues, their life expectations expand. Fitted with TikTok and Instagram and other windows into Western culture, young women around the world can seek the independence of a career over the codependency (or, worse, the outright loss of freedom) that might come with marriage in their own country. Social media, a woman veterinarian in Tehran told the Financial Times, also glamorizes the single life “by showing how unmarried people lead carefree and successful lives … People keep comparing their partners to mostly fake idols on social platforms.”

[Read: The happiness trinity]

According to Evans, several trends are driving this global decline in coupling. Smartphones and social media may have narrowed many young people’s lives, pinning them to their couches and bedrooms. But they’ve also opened women’s minds to the possibility of professional and personal development. When men fail to support their dreams, relationships fail to flourish, and the sexes drift apart.

If I had to sum up this big messy story in a sentence, it would be this: Coupling is declining around the world, as women’s expectations rise and lower-income men’s fortunes fall; this combination is subverting the traditional role of straight marriage, in which men are seen as necessary for the economic insurance of their family.

So why does all this matter? Two of the more urgent sociological narratives of this moment are declining fertility and rising unhappiness. The relationship recession makes contact with both. First, marriage and fertility are tightly interconnected. Unsurprisingly, one of the strongest predictors of declining fertility around the world is declining coupling rates, as Burn-Murdoch has written. Second, marriage is strongly associated with happiness. According to General Social Survey data, Americans’ self-described life satisfaction has been decreasing for decades. In a 2023 analysis of the GSS data, the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman concluded that marriage was more correlated with this measure of happiness than any other variable he considered, including income. (As Stone would rush to point out here, marriage itself is correlated with income.)

The social crisis of our time is not just that Americans are more socially isolated than ever, but also that social isolation is rising alongside romantic isolation, as the economic and cultural trajectories of men and women move in opposite directions. And, perhaps most troubling, the Americans with the least financial wealth also seem to have the least “social wealth,” so to speak. It is the poor, who might especially need the support of friends and partners, who have the fewest close friends and the fewest long-term partners. Money might not buy happiness, but it can buy the things that buy happiness.