Whatever happened to ISIS?

This newsletter is sponsored by Incogni.

Friends —

For a few years, ISIS was the biggest story on Earth. Then it just … wasn’t.

We were told it might last for generations, a brand-new terrorist state the size of Portugal, ruling 8 million people. Instead, it seemed to disappear overnight, at least from the public consciousness.

I remember some of it too clearly. Videos like the one of a captured Jordanian pilot locked in a cage and burned, with the whole thing scored like a movie. Live-streamed beheadings. Mass drownings. That kind of thing doesn’t leave you.

But the part I most wanted to get right is the ending, because it runs straight through two presidents who agreed on almost nothing. Ask an Obama supporter and a Trump supporter who beat ISIS, and you’ll get two confident, opposite answers. I tried to walk through what each administration actually did, as straight as I could, and let you decide.

Here’s one piece of it: when the administrations flipped, the rules of engagement in the Trump presidency loosened. Field commanders could approve strikes on their own, in minutes, instead of sending each one up the chain to Washington and waiting days. And the goal itself shifted, from pushing ISIS out of a city and letting the survivors run, to surrounding the city, sealing the exits, and destroying the fighters where they stood. Mattis called it moving "from attrition to annihilation."

And then there’s the part nobody back home ever added up: what winning cost. Tens of billions of dollars, a city we mostly leveled ourselves, allies left exposed, and camps full of fighters’ kids still sitting in the desert. A messy, expensive story that most Americans barely remember happening.

The full video’s up now, and you can watch it here.

This newsletter is sponsored by Incogni.

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One more, on something completely different. Is nicotine actually bad for you?

Here’s the number that got me: survey a thousand American doctors and four out of five will tell you nicotine causes cancer. It doesn’t — the tar does. That distinction has been in the science since before World War II, and we’ve spent my whole life blaming the wrong culprit.

I’m not here to sell anybody on it. It’s addictive, and I’d think hard before starting. But the gap between what we assume and what’s actually true was wide enough that I had to dig in.

You can watch that video here.

– Ken