I know it’s a bit late for Mother’s Day, but I wanted to share this reflection on motherhood, and America’s declining birthrates, by Raina Raskin. Not so long ago, Raskin had something of a revelation when her infant daughter smiled at her for the first time:

That smile blew all those traditional status markers out of the water—better than a million Instagram likes, an Ivy League acceptance letter, a competitive job offer—even though making my baby smile was one of the easiest things I’d ever done. I booped her nose with my finger and made a silly sound. Really, anyone could have done it. But that didn’t diminish my daughter’s amazement, because she doesn’t care if I’m exceptional. She just cares that I’m hers.

This might sound terrible to the average young American woman. We’re a demographic fueled by ambition: about 75 percent of young women say they want to advance to senior leadership in their organization, according to a 2023 study of over 200 companies. And 46 percent of American women think having a happy career is essential to having a fulfilling life, a recent survey found, compared to just 22 percent who say the same thing about having children.

My daughter was born as birthrates in this country hit a record low. And I sometimes worry that some of my peers who are delaying, or forgoing, motherhood do so because they can’t reject the demands of the market, of our meritocracy. I couldn’t either, until my baby smiled at me.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].