This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

“No one can predict how a revolution starts,” the Iranian American poet and author Roya Hakakian writes this week in The Atlantic. And make no mistake, she told me in an interview yesterday: The wave of protests now sweeping Iran is a revolution. After 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in police custody following her arrest for improperly wearing the hijab earlier this month, Iranian men and women have filled the streets and set fire to the head coverings that have, for many, come to represent a collective loss of freedom since they were made mandatory following the 1979 revolution. I spoke with Hakakian about Iran’s “Ukrainian moment”—and about what comes next.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Is this the beginning of the end of the internet? What Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson don’t understand about war American family policy is holding schools back.

“We Are All Mahsa Amini”

Kelli María Korducki: You were a young teen when Iran’s mandatory dress code went into effect in 1981, three years before you left the country for good. Do you see any echoes of that transition period in the current moment?

Roya Hakakian: This revolution in Iran is 43 years old. On March 8, 1979, which was barely even a month after the Iranian Revolution had succeeded, women took to the streets to protest the hijab and the ayatollah’s reinstatement of a mandatory dress code.

I was 13. But this confrontation between the women of the country and the regime is the oldest, most enduring standoff in Iran. And I think the women are winning.

Korducki: You write in your essay, “Today I feel what so many Iranian women feel: We are all Mahsa Amini.” What do you mean by that?

Hakakian: What happened to Mahsa Amini happened to every single one of us. We’ve all been stopped [by Iran’s religious police], and some of us have been detained. I was stopped many, many times. When you think back to all the conversations that you have had with the people who have stopped you, you realize that a slight shift in tone or something very, very small could have gone wrong to get the person who had stopped you to deliver a blow to your head. All of us, the women who’ve lived under this regime, we all know what it’s like and that we could be a victim like Mahsa Amini.

Korducki: You write that Amini’s death has sparked an unusual degree of outrage and solidarity across Iran. What’s different about this particular incident, and why is it uniting so many people from such varied walks of life?

Hakakian: I think it’s in part because all previous hopes for change have been lost. In 2009, there were a lot of young people—university students, especially—who really had placed their hope in the 2009 presidential elections and were rooting for [the reformist presidential candidate, Mir Hossein] Mousavi. When Mousavi lost—the votes disappeared—millions of people took to the streets asking, Where is my vote?

Since then, there have been other demonstrations over simple, tangible, legitimate issues that people generally take to their governments. And because none of those things was ever resolved, I think the natural conclusion that people have come to is that the system is rotten and incapable of responding to our needs. So now nobody’s saying, Where’s my vote? They’re simply saying, This cast of characters has to go.

Korducki: You describe the protests as Iran’s “Ukrainian moment,” and call for the U.S. to act accordingly. What do you mean by that?

Hakakian: I testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week, and subsequently had several meetings with various senators. The moment you mentioned Iran, all of these senators started thinking about Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria—that’s their context. And, in fact, that’s the wrong context.

The people in Iran aren’t asking for any foreign powers to invade the country, to come and do the job. They have done the work. They’re not demanding anything from the international community other than the sort of support that the international community, the Western world, must give to those who are vying for democratic values in one of the most dangerous parts of the world. The context to me seems far more similar to the Ukrainian context.

We support Ukrainians in their war against invading Russian forces. Iranians are, in a way, also essentially at war with a very, very powerful and highly armed government, and they need our support now. The regime’s riot police have been throwing women demonstrators against the cement curbs, and there are videos being circulated online that show police opening fire on protesters. Yet the U.S.—which has been investing in democracy promotion in Iran for at least the past two decades—is still sitting at the table and holding nuclear negotiations with these very people. To me, it seems very reasonable to demand that negotiations be stopped until the riot police stop exercising violence.

Like in every other revolution that has ever taken place, if it isn’t supported by governments that believe in the prodemocratic values that the demonstrators are demanding, these protesters will fail.

Related:

The bonfire of the headscarves Iran’s knucklehead assassination strategy

Today’s News

Hurricane Ian made landfall on Florida’s western coast; the Category 4 hurricane is one of the most powerful storms to hit the United States in decades. Follow The New York Times’ live updates here. The European Union proposed new sanctions against Russia as a response to its escalation of the war in Ukraine, including a cap on oil prices and restrictions on trade. Parents of Sandy Hook shooting victims testified in the defamation case against Alex Jones.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: What if the Senate passed an international climate treaty and nobody noticed? That’s what happened last week, Robinson Meyer writes. Wait, What?: Molly Jong-Fast follows the GOP’s frantic search for a new midterm message.

Evening Read

Twentieth Century Fox / Pictorial Press / Alamy

Hollywood Learned All the Wrong Lessons From Avatar

By David Sims

When the director James Cameron was working on Avatar, he was holding the biggest bargaining chip imaginable. His last major feature, 1997’s Titanic, was the most successful film in Hollywood history, overcoming its budgetary woes and behind-the-scenes drama to become a box-office phenomenon unlike any other. Avatar was another risky bet in theory, an original sci-fi epic about nine-foot-tall blue aliens called the Na’vi who’d be rendered through advanced CGI and motion-capture technology. But still, this would be a James Cameron film—a fact the director said he had to remind the honchos of during production.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

What did Axios do? The great Senate stalemate Photos: A new generation of shepherds in the French Pyrenees

Culture Break

Paramount Pictures / Alamy; The Atlantic

Read. “Hill Station,” a new short story by Madhuri Vijay.

“They had been driving for hours, and the city still hadn’t loosened its grimy hold.”

Watch. The 1999 comedy Election, starring Reese Witherspoon as an overachieving (and unlikeable) student, Tracy Flick.

Revisit the movie, available to stream on multiple platforms, and then hear from Tracy Flick’s creator, Tom Perrotta, about where the character is now.

Listen. The trailer for Season 3 of our How To podcast series, in which our happiness columnist explores what happens when expectations don’t meet reality.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Journey from the Land of No, Hakakian’s acclaimed 2004 memoir about her own coming-of-age in revolutionary Iran, provides essential context for the current unrest in Iran. “It precisely tells the story of [what happened between] 1977 and 1984, and the transition from monarchy to theocracy, and no hijab to forced hijab,” Hakakian told me in an email following our conversation. The book recounts what Hakakian described to me as “the randomness that we all experienced” in daily-life interactions with Iran’s oppressive regime.

— Kelli

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

'Sham' referenda were held in four regions of southern and eastern Ukraine, which Moscow is now poised to annex

Moscow set to formally annex occupied Ukrainian areas after holding referendum as Kyiv, West decry move as 'illegal'.

At least one person died on Wednesday in the eastern Ukrainian town of Mykolaivka after a Russian attack hit a school used by residents as a shelter.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his generals aren’t the only people who think that the more ruthless, hypermasculine, and reflexively brutal an army is, the better it performs on the battlefield. That view also has fans in the United States.

Last year, Senator Ted Cruz recirculated a TikTok video that contrasted a Russian military-recruitment ad, which showed a male soldier getting ready to kill people, with an American recruitment video that told the story of a female soldier—the daughter of two mothers—who enlisted partly to challenge stereotypes. “Perhaps a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea,” Cruz tweeted sarcastically. The Texas Republican is not alone in trumpeting a Putinesque ideal. Several months earlier, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson had similarly complained about a supposedly “woke” Pentagon, which he likened to the Wesleyan University anthropology department. By promoting diversity and inclusion, he insisted, military leaders were destroying American armed forces, supposedly the last great bastion of merit in the country. More recently, Carlson has complained that America’s armed forces are becoming “more feminine, whatever feminine means anymore,” just as China’s are “more masculine.”

Arguments like these were much easier to make before Putin unleashed his muscle-bound and decidedly unwoke fighting machine on the ostensibly weak Ukrainians, only to see it perform catastrophically. More than seven months into the war, the Ukrainian army continues to grow in strength, confidence, and operational competence, while the Russian army is flailing. Its recent failures raise many questions about the nature of military power. Before Putin ordered his troops into Ukraine, many analysts described his military as fast and powerful and predicted that it would “shock and awe” the overmatched defenders. The Ukrainian armed forces were widely assumed to be incapable of fighting the mighty Russians out in the open; their only option, the story went, would be to retreat into their cities and wage a form of guerrilla war against the invaders.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Ukraine is waging a new kind of war]

The success of the Ukrainian military over the past few months, along with the evolution of the Ukrainian state itself toward a more tolerant, more liberal norm, reveals what makes a better army in the modern world. Brains mean more than brawn, and adaptability means more than mindless aggression. Openness to new ideas and new equipment, along with the ability to learn quickly, is far more important than a simple desire to kill.

From the moment the Russian military crossed the border, the Ukrainians have outfought it, revealing it to be inflexible and intellectually vapid. Indeed when confronted with a Ukrainian military that was everything it was not—smart, adaptable, and willing to learn—the Russian army could only fall back on slow, massed firepower. The Battle of the Donbas, the war’s longest engagement, which started in late April and is still under way, exposed the Russian army at its worst. For months, it directed the bulk of personnel and equipment toward the center of a battle line running approximately from Izyum to Donetsk. Instead of breaking through Ukrainian lines and sending armored forces streaking forward rapidly, as many analysts had predicted, the Russian army opted to make painfully slow, incremental advances, by simply blasting the area directly in front of it. The plan seemed to be to render the area uninhabitable by Ukrainians, which would allow the Russians to advance intermittently into the vacuum. This was heavy-firepower, low-intelligence warfare on a grand scale, which resulted in strategically meaningless advances secured at the cost of unsustainably high Russian casualties. And in recent weeks, the Ukrainians have retaken much of the territory that Russia managed to seize at the start of the battle—and more.

I struggle to think of another case in the past 100 years when a major military power has performed as poorly against an adversary it was heavily favored to defeat. The supposedly second-strongest army in the world, with its martial spirit, brilliant doctrines, and advanced equipment, was thwarted and is now being pushed back by a Ukrainian military whose prospects most outsiders had dismissed before the war.

The persistence of the Putin-Cruz-Carlson vision of war is surprising, because we have decades, even centuries, of evidence to the contrary. Since the Industrial Revolution, and in many ways before, the ability to run a complex system has been the cornerstone of strategic success. Though much military popular literature likes to stress the human drama of combat—the bravery and sacrifice, the cowardice and atrocity—it is not nearly as important in victory or defeat as many people assume. In state-to-state wars—a category that includes the current Russian invasion of Ukraine as well as broader conflicts such as the two world wars—the side that can most efficiently deploy more effective equipment operated by better-trained personnel has typically emerged victorious.

The combination of education and technology overcame brute force during World War II, when the most militarily skillful and adaptable countries—the United States and the United Kingdom—were able to fight their enemies at a relatively small cost in casualties. The U.K., even though it fought around the world from 1939 to 1945, lost only 384,000 soldiers in combat. The U.S. lost even fewer, suffering approximately 290,000 battle deaths. The German armed forces, by contrast, lost more than 4 million soldiers.

That the British and American armed forces kept their casualties comparatively low is especially notable because they were confronted with an overwhelming majority of German arms, planes, and ammunition. Because of the sickening number of human casualties, the fighting on the Eastern Front between the Nazis and Soviets is widely deemed World War II’s largest engagement, but Germany had to send far more of its war production to fight the British and Americans than it did to fight the U.S.S.R.

The Ukrainians are trying, albeit with far fewer advantages, to do to Russia what the U.S. and the U.K. did to Germany. Ukrainian forces have learned to skillfully use advanced weaponry—in this case NATO-standard systems such as HIMARS and HARM missiles—to neutralize the brute strength of the Russian army. They have accomplished this because Ukrainian society is more flexible, technologically conversant, and willing to learn than the Russian invaders are. They have shown more cleverness and wisdom, and over time that advantage has allowed them to start taking the initiative.

[From the October 2022 issue: Ukrainians are defending the values Americans claim to hold]

Just as the ability to absorb information is better than lunkhead hypermasculinity in a modern army, diversity and societal integration also bring major advantages. As Ukraine has become more diverse and tolerant, its army has benefited. In contrast with Putin’s homophobic military, the Ukrainian armed forces include LGBTQ soldiers who have incorporated “unicorn” insignia into their uniforms. The valor of these soldiers, and the rallying of the Ukrainian people around a vision of a tolerant and diverse society, has led to an overall increase in Ukrainian support for gay rights—and it underscores the belief that everyone has a role to play in the country’s defense.

The Russian experience could not be more different. Putin has made suppressing gay rights one of the hallmarks of his rule. Determined to capitalize on culture-war tropes of the American right, he has portrayed Russia as a victim of cancel culture. He has retained rigid control over Russian society. While the Ukrainians are opening up, he is clamping down—with what we are now seeing as rather extreme results.

Last week, Putin called for a partial mobilization, which appears to be much broader than was originally announced. Now faced with the prospect of being forced into his army, large numbers of Russian men are desperately trying to get out of the country, and protests and even sabotage have occurred against government authorities. Whether Russian citizens generally view service in Putin’s army as a worthy national endeavor is in doubt. The Ukrainians, conversely, undertook a far more successful conscription at the start of the invasion.

Recent events should banish the idea that the more aggressive killing machine wins the war. Intelligence, technological savvy, and social integration are the assets that matter most on the modern battlefield.

CNN senior international correspondent Ben Wedeman reports from Pisky, a town in Eastern Ukraine that has been partially liberated from Russian forces.

The BBC is given rare access to the front line near Kherson where Ukrainian troops are pushing back the Russian army.