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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. The idea that millions of dead Americans are receiving Social Security checks is shocking, and bolsters the argument that the federal bureaucracy needs radical change to combat waste and fraud. There’s one big problem: No evidence exists that it’s true. Despite being told by agency staff last month that this claim has no basis in fact, Elon Musk and President Donald Trump have continued to use the talking point as a pretext to attack America’s highest-spending government program. Musk seems to have gotten this idea from a list of Social Security recipients who did not have a death date attached to their record. Agency employees reportedly explained to Musk’s DOGE team in February that the list of impossibly ancient individuals they found were not necessarily receiving benefits (the lack of death dates was related to an outdated system). And yet, in his speech to Congress last week, Trump stated: “Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old.” He said the list includes “3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149,” among other 100-plus age ranges, and that “money is being paid to many of them, and we’re searching right now.” In an interview with Fox Business on Monday, Musk discussed the existence of “20 million people who are definitely dead, marked as alive” in the Social Security database. And DOGE has dispatched 10 employees to try to find evidence of the claims that dead Americans are receiving checks, according to documents filed in court on Wednesday. Musk and Trump have long maintained that they do not plan to attack Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the major entitlement programs. But their repeated claims that rampant fraud exists within these entitlement systems undermine those assurances. In his Fox interview on Monday, Musk said, “Waste and fraud in entitlement spending—which is most of the federal spending, is entitlements—so that’s like the big one to eliminate. That’s the sort of half trillion, maybe $600, $700 billion a year.” Some observers interpreted this confusing sentence to mean that Musk wants to cut the entitlement programs themselves. But the Trump administration quickly downplayed Musk’s comments, insisting that the federal government will continue to protect such programs and suggesting that Musk had been talking about the need to eliminate fraud in the programs, not about axing them. “What kind of a person doesn’t support eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending?” the White House asked in a press release. The White House’s question would be a lot easier to answer if Musk, who has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” wasn’t wildly overestimating the amount of fraud in entitlement programs. Musk is claiming waste in these programs on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, but a 2024 Social Security Administration report found that the agency lost closer to $70 billion total in improper payments from 2015 to 2022, which accounts for about 1 percent of Social Security payments. Leland Dudek, a mid-level civil servant elevated to temporarily lead Social Security after being put on administrative leave for sharing information with DOGE, pushed back last week on the idea that the agency is overrun with fraud and that dead people older than 100 are getting payments, ProPublica reported after obtaining a recording of a closed-door meeting. DOGE’s false claim about dead people receiving benefits “got in front of us,” one of Dudek’s deputies reportedly said, but “it’s a victory that you’re not seeing more [misinformation], because they are being educated.” (Dudek did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.) Some 7 million Americans rely on Social Security benefits for more than 90 percent of their income, and 54 million individuals and their dependents receive retirement payments from the agency. Even if Musk doesn’t eliminate the agency, his tinkering could still affect all of those Americans’ lives. On Wednesday, DOGE dialed back its plans to cut off much of Social Security’s phone services (a commonly used alternative to its online programs, particularly for elderly and disabled Americans), though it still plans to restrict recipients’ ability to change bank-deposit information over the phone. In recent weeks, confusion has rippled through the Social Security workforce and the public; many people drop off forms in person, but office closures could disrupt that. According to ProPublica, several IT contracts have been cut or scaled back, and several employees reported that their tech systems are crashing every day. Thousands of jobs are being cut, including in regional field offices, and the entire Social Security staff has been offered buyouts (today is the deadline for workers to take them). Martin O’Malley, a former commissioner of the agency, has warned that the workforce reductions that DOGE is seeking at Social Security could trigger “system collapse and an interruption of benefits” within the next one to three months. In going anywhere near Social Security—in saying the agency’s name in the same sentence as the word eliminate—Musk is venturing further than any presidential administration has in recent decades. Entitlement benefits are extremely popular, and cutting the programs has long been a nonstarter. When George W. Bush raised the idea of partially privatizing entitlements in 2005, the proposal died before it could make it to a vote in the House or Senate. The DOGE plan to cut $1 trillion in spending while leaving entitlements, which make up the bulk of the federal budget, alone always seemed implausible. In the November Wall Street Journal op-ed announcing the DOGE initiative, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (who is no longer part of DOGE) wrote that those who say “we can’t meaningfully close the federal deficit without taking aim at entitlement programs” are deflecting “attention from the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse” that “DOGE aims to address.” But until there’s clear evidence that this “magnitude” of fraud exists within Social Security, such claims enable Musk to poke at what was previously untouchable. Related: DOGE’s fuzzy math Is DOGE losing steam? Here are four new stories from The Atlantic: Democrats have a man problem. There was a second name on Rubio’s target list. The crimson face of Canadian anger The GOP’s fears about Musk are growing. Today’s News Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that Democrats will support a Republican-led short-term funding bill to help avoid a government shutdown. A federal judge ruled that probationary employees fired by 18 federal agencies must be temporarily rehired. Mark Carney was sworn in as Canada’s prime minister, succeeding Justin Trudeau as the Liberals’ leader. Dispatches Atlantic Intelligence: The Trump administration is embracing AI. “Work is being automated, people are losing their jobs, and it’s not at all clear that any of this will make the government more efficient,” Damon Beres writes. The Books Briefing: Half a decade on, we now have at least a small body of literary work that takes on COVID, Maya Chung writes. Explore all of our newsletters here. Evening Read Illustration by John Gall* I’d Had Jobs Before, but None Like This By Graydon Carter I stayed with my aunt the first night and reported to the railroad’s headquarters at 7 o’clock the next morning with a duffel bag of my belongings: a few pairs of shorts, jeans, a jacket, a couple of shirts, a pair of Kodiak work boots, and some Richard Brautigan and Jack Kerouac books, acceptable reading matter for a pseudo-sophisticate of the time. The Symington Yard was one of the largest rail yards in the world. On some days, it held 7,000 boxcars. Half that many moved in and out on a single day. Like many other young men my age, I was slim, unmuscled, and soft. In the hall where they interviewed and inspected the candidates for line work, I blanched as I looked over a large poster that showed the outline of a male body and the prices the railroad paid if you lost a part of it. As I recall, legs brought you $750 apiece. Arms were $500. A foot brought a mere $250. In Canadian dollars. Read the full article. More From The Atlantic The kind of thing dictators do Trump is unleashing a chaos economy. RFK Jr. has already broken his vaccine promise. The NIH’s grant terminations are “utter and complete chaos.” Netanyahu doesn’t want the truth to come out. Republicans tear down a Black Lives Matter mural. Culture Break Music Box Films Watch. The film Eephus (in select theaters) is a “slow movie” in the best possible way, David Sims writes. Read. Novels about women’s communities tend toward utopian coexistence or ruthless backbiting. The Unworthy does something more interesting, Hillary Kelly writes. Play our daily crossword. Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here. President Donald Trump’s administration is embracing AI. According to reports, agencies are using the technology to identify places to cut costs, figure out which employees can be terminated, and comb through social-media posts to determine whether student-visa holders may support terror groups. And as my colleague Matteo Wong reported this week, employees at the General Services Administration are being urged to use a new chatbot to do their work, while simultaneously hearing from officials that their jobs are far from secure; Thomas Shedd, the director of the GSA division that produced the AI, told workers that the department will soon be “at least 50 percent smaller.” This is a haphazard leap into a future that tech giants have been pushing us toward for years. Work is being automated, people are losing their jobs, and it’s not at all clear that any of this will make the government more efficient, as Elon Musk and DOGE have promised. Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: pressureUA / Getty; Thanasis / Getty. DOGE’s Plans to Replace Humans With AI Are Already Under Way By Matteo Wong A new phase of the president and the Department of Government Efficiency’s attempts to downsize and remake the civil service is under way. The idea is simple: use generative AI to automate work that was previously done by people. The Trump administration is testing a new chatbot with 1,500 federal employees at the General Services Administration and may release it to the entire agency as soon as this Friday—meaning it could be used by more than 10,000 workers who are responsible for more than $100 billion in contracts and services. This article is based in part on conversations with several current and former GSA employees with knowledge of the technology, all of whom requested anonymity to speak about confidential information; it is also based on internal GSA documents that I reviewed, as well as the software’s code base, which is visible on GitHub. Read the full article. What to Read Next Elon Musk looks desperate: “Musk has wagered the only thing he can’t easily buy back—the very myth he created for himself,” Charlie Warzel writes. Move fast and destroy democracy: “Silicon Valley’s titans have decided that ruling the digital world is not enough,” Kara Swisher writes. P.S. The internet can still be good. In a story for The Atlantic’s April issue, my colleague Adrienne LaFrance explores how Reddit became arguably “the best platform on a junky web.” Reading it in between editing stories about AI, I was struck by how much of what Adrienne described was fundamentally human: “There is a subreddit where violinists gently correct one another’s bow holds, a subreddit for rowers where people compare erg scores, and a subreddit for people who are honest-to-God allergic to the cold and trade tips about which antihistamine regimen works best,” she writes. “One subreddit is for people who encounter cookie cutters whose shapes they cannot decipher. The responses reliably entail a mix of sincere sleuthing to find the answer and ridiculously creative and crude joke guesses.” How wholesome! — Damon
The automated future just lurched a few steps closer. Over the past few weeks, nearly all of the major AI firms—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Amazon, Microsoft, and Perplexity, among others—have announced new products that are focused not on answering questions or making their human users somewhat more efficient, but on completing tasks themselves. They are being pitched for their ability to “reason” as people do and serve as “agents” that will eventually carry out complex work from start to finish. Humans will still nudge these models along, of course, but they are engineered to help fewer people do the work of many. Last month, Anthropic launched Claude Code, a coding program that can do much of a human software developer’s job but far faster, “reducing development time and overhead.” The program actively participates in the way that a colleague would, writing and deploying code, among other things. Google now has a widely available “workhorse model,” and three separate AI companies have products named Deep Research, all of which quickly gather and synthesize huge amounts of information on a user’s behalf. OpenAI touts its version’s ability to “complete multi-step research tasks for you” and accomplish “in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours.” AI companies have long been building and benefiting from the narrative that their products will eventually be able to automate major projects for their users, displacing jobs and perhaps even entire professions or sectors of society. As early as 2016, Sam Altman, who had recently co-founded OpenAI, wrote in a blog post that “as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs,” new economic models might be necessary, such as a universal basic income; he has warned repeatedly since then that AI will disrupt the labor market, telling my colleague Ross Andersen in 2023 that “jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop.” Despite the foreboding nature of these comments, they have remained firmly in the realm of speculation. Two years ago, ChatGPT couldn’t perform basic arithmetic, and critics have long harped on the technology’s biases and mythomania. Chatbots and AI-powered image generators became known for helping kids cheat on homework and flooding the web with low-grade content. Meaningful applications quickly emerged in some professions—coding, fielding customer-service queries, writing boilerplate copy—but even the best AI models were clearly not capable enough to precipitate widespread job displacement. [Read: A chatbot is secretly doing my job] Since then, however, two transformations have taken place. First, AI search became standard. Chatbots exploded in popularity because they could lucidly—though frequently inaccurately—answer human questions. Billions of people were already accustomed to asking questions and finding information online, making this an obvious use case for AI models that might otherwise have seemed like research projects: Now 300 million people use ChatGPT every week, and more than 1 billion use Google’s AI Overview, according to the companies. Further underscoring the products’ relevance, media companies—including The Atlantic—signed lucrative deals with OpenAI and others to add their content to AI search, bringing both legitimacy and some additional scrutiny to the technology. Hundreds of millions were habituated to AI, and at least some portion have found the technology helpful. But although plain chatbots and AI search introduced a major cultural shift, their business prospects were always small potatoes for the tech giants. Compared with traditional search algorithms, AI algorithms are more expensive to run. And search is an old business model that generative AI could only enhance—perhaps resulting in a few more clicks on paid advertisements or producing a bit more user data for targeting future advertisements. Refining and expanding generative AI to do more for the professional class—not just students scrambling on term papers—is where tech companies see the real financial opportunity. And they’ve been building toward seizing it. The second transformation that has led to this new phase of the AI era is simply that the technology, while still riddled with biases and inaccuracies, has legitimately improved. The slate of so-called reasoning models released in recent months, such as OpenAI’s o3-mini and xAI’s Grok 3, has impressed in particular. These AI products can be genuinely helpful, and their applications to advancing scientific research could prove lifesaving. Economists, doctors, coders, and other professionals are widely commenting on how these new models can expedite their work; a quarter of tech start-ups in this year’s cohort at the prestigious incubator Y Combinator said that 95 percent of their code was generated with AI. Major firms—McKinsey, Moderna, and Salesforce, to name just a handful—are now using it in basically every aspect of their businesses. And the models continue getting cheaper, and faster, to deploy. [Read: The GPT era is already ending] Tech executives, in turn, have grown blunt about their hopes that AI will become good enough to do a human’s work. In a Meta earnings call in late January, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “2025 will be the year when it becomes possible to build an AI engineering agent” that’s as skilled as “a good, mid-level engineer.” Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, recently said in a talk with the Council on Foreign Relations that AI will be “writing 90 percent of the code” just a few months from now—although still with human specifications, he noted. But he continued, “We will eventually reach the point where the AIs can do everything that humans can,” in every industry. (Amodei, it should be mentioned, is the ultimate techno-optimist; in October, he published a sprawling manifesto, titled “Machines of Loving Grace,” that posited AI development could lead to “the defeat of most diseases, the growth in biological and cognitive freedom, the lifting of billions of people out of poverty to share in the new technologies, a renaissance of liberal democracy and human rights.”) Altman has used similarly grand language recently, imagining countless virtual knowledge workers fanning out across industries. These bright visions have dimmed considerably when put into practice: Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to replace human civil servants with AI may be the clearest and most dramatic execution of this playbook yet, with massive job loss and little more than chaos to show for it so far. Meanwhile, all of generative-AI models’ issues with bias, inaccuracy, and poor citations remain, even as the technology has advanced. OpenAI’s image-generating technology still struggles at times to produce people with the right number of appendages. Salesforce is reportedly struggling to sell its AI agent, Agentforce, to customers because of issues with accuracy and concerns about the product’s high cost, among other things. Nevertheless, the corporation has pressed on with its pitch, much as other AI companies have continued to iterate on and promote products with known issues. (In a recent earnings call, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the firm has “3,000 paying Agentforce customers who are experiencing unprecedented levels of productivity.”) In other words, flawed products won’t stop tech companies’ push to automate everything—the AI-saturated future will be imperfect at best, but it is coming anyway. The industry’s motivations are clear: Google’s and Microsoft’s cloud businesses, for instance, grew rapidly in 2024, driven substantially by their AI offerings. Meta’s head of business AI, Clara Shih, recently told CNBC that the company expects “every business” to use AI agents, “the way that businesses today have websites and email addresses.” OpenAI is reportedly considering charging $20,000 a month for access to what it describes as Ph.D.-level research agents. Google and Perplexity did not respond to a request for comment, and a Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment. An OpenAI spokesperson pointed me to an essay from September in which Altman wrote, “I have no fear that we’ll run out of things to do.” He could well be right; the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects AI to substantially increase the demand for computer and business occupations through 2033. A spokesperson for Anthropic referred me to the start-up’s initiative to study and prepare for AI’s effect on the labor market. The effort’s first research paper analyzed millions of conversations with Anthropic’s Claude model and found that it was used to “automate” human work in 43 percent of cases, such as identifying and fixing a software bug. Tech companies are revealing, more clearly than ever, their vision for a post-work future. ChatGPT started the generative-AI boom not with an incredible business success, but with a psychological one. The chatbot was and is still possibly losing the company money, but it exposed internet users around the world to the first popular computer program that could hold an intelligent conversation on any subject. The advent of AI search may have performed a similar role, presenting limited opportunity for immediate profits but habituating—or perhaps inoculating—millions of people to bots that can think, write, and live for you.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Not long after COVID lockdowns began in the U.S. five years ago this week, many readers and writers started to wonder, with a mix of trepidation and curiosity, what the literature about the time period would look like. Half a decade on, we now have at least a small body of work that takes on the pandemic. In some cases, the calamity serves merely as a scene-setting device; in others, it’s a major plot point. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s books section: The world can’t keep up with its garbage. The man who owned 181 Renoirs An unabashedly intellectual murder mystery An all-female society, pushed to extremes As Lily Meyer writes this week, she has taken a special interest in reading these books as they’ve trickled out. But she’s found a fairly common flaw: Many of them attempt to “overcontrol the experience of the pandemic” by leaning on descriptions of what happened. These novels remind readers of widely promoted images of middle-class lockdown—fashioning masks out of old scraps of fabric, wiping down groceries, catching up with friends and family over Zoom—but fail to transcend these rote recitations, or to capture other experiences of the early days of the pandemic. When the world knew the danger the virus posed but didn’t know how to prevent its spread, people lacked a sense of agency: All that many of us could do was wait for news about case counts and vaccines. A writer’s impulse to transcribe details from that time is perhaps an attempt to make that feeling more manageable. But “fiction that asserts too much control loses the possibility of transformation,” Meyer argues. Her point is that no matter what’s happening in the world, life is always unpredictable—and good literature understands this. Meyer notes that she hasn’t found a great pandemic novel yet. What form might this eventual writing take? One type of book she’s hoping for is “a great novel of the mind,” one that “will either reject or undermine the self-controlling impulse” to describe the textures of the early pandemic and will instead examine, in surprising ways, how the catastrophe affected people’s psyches. As I read Meyer’s essay, I remembered Sarah Moss’s The Fell, a 2021 novel that I think may actually meet those criteria—at least in part. In it, a woman named Kate is quarantined with her son in her home in England’s Peak District after a COVID exposure. She quickly grows stir-crazy, and one night, violating government orders, she goes out for a hike—but at some point, she falls and can’t get up. Moss leaves Kate’s perspective to dip into the minds of her son, a kindly older neighbor whom Kate and her son provide with groceries, and a member of the rescue team searching for Kate in the dark and wet night. Though the novel is certainly descriptive, it might also qualify as what Meyer calls an “interior” work. The prose is written as a stream of consciousness, evoking a sense of anxiety that sometimes tips over into the truly scary. For some, the experience of the early pandemic was not immediately life-threatening; often, it was an extended stretch of quotidian dullness spiked with moments of existential dread. But as one character thinks, “people don’t die of dread.” Moss doesn’t exaggerate the stakes of the pandemic for her characters. Instead, she cleverly puts one of them in a genuinely frightening situation that has nothing to do with COVID, reminding the reader that the unfolding events of our lives are, by definition, beyond our control. Illustration by María Medem The Novel I’m Searching For By Lily Meyer Five years after the pandemic, I’m holding out for a story that doesn’t just describe our experience, but transforms it. Read the full article. What to Read If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, by Anne Carson Hardly any of Sappho’s work survives, and the fragments scholars have salvaged from tattered papyrus and other ancient texts can be collected in thin volumes easily tossed into tote bags. Still, Carson’s translation immediately makes clear why those scholars went to so much effort. Sappho famously describes the devastation of seeing one’s beloved, when “tongue breaks and thin / fire is racing under skin”; the god Eros, in another poem, is a “sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in.” Other poems provide crisp images from the sixth century B.C.E.—one fragment reads, in its entirety: “the feet / by spangled straps covered / beautiful Lydian work.” Taken together, the fragments are sensual and floral, reminiscent of springtime; they evoke soft pillows and sleepless nights, violets in women’s laps, wedding celebrations—and desire, always desire. Because the poems are so brief, they’re perfect for outdoor reading and its many distractions. Even the white space on the pages is thought-provoking. Carson includes brackets throughout to indicate destroyed papyrus or illegible letters in the original source, and the gaps they create allow space for rumination or moments of inattention while one lies on a blanket on a warm day. — Chelsea Leu From our list: Seven books to read in the sunshine Out Next Week 📚 Firstborn, by Lauren Christensen 📚 White Light, by Jack Lohmann 📚 Hunchback, by Saou Ichikawa Your Weekend Read Illustration by Allison Zaucha / The Atlantic. Sources: Getty; Euan Cherry / Peacock. Reality TV Just Leveled Up By Megan Garber The Traitors, in that way, might seem to be peak reality TV: all of these people who are famous for being famous making content for the sake of content. But the show has been an ongoing subject of passionate discussion because it is much smarter than that—it’s derivative in a winking way. It doesn’t merely borrow from its fellow reality shows; it adapts them into something that both celebrates reality TV and offers a sly, kaleidoscopic satire of the genre. It is a messy show that lives for drama. It brings a postmodern twist to an ever-more-influential form of entertainment. It’s not just reality TV—it’s hyperreality TV. Read the full article. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Explore all of our newsletters.
Finding someone whose politics you don’t like and using some flimsy excuse to put him in handcuffs is the kind of thing dictators do. In the United States, we pride ourselves on front-loading our political tests: Once you are a citizen, you can say just about anything you want without government interference, but on your road to naturalization, the government can pull you over for certain speech infractions, such as saying nice things about terrorism or expressing a desire to overthrow the American government. The Trump administration may have had such infractions in mind last weekend, when it detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian Palestinian graduate student with U.S. permanent residency, and said it planned to eject him from the country for leading anti-Israel protests at Columbia University. Others have remarked on the legality of this move. The administration still hasn't clearly articulated its case for deporting Khalil. But what little is known about Khalil's activities and the government's case makes me think the decision to deport is most remarkable for its pettiness, its insecurity, and its simultaneous failure to grasp the spirit of America and of academia at their best. Some countries repress dissent; others tolerate it. America is nearly alone in encouraging, even glorifying, it, and giving dissenters every chance to persuade others to their side. One of the more insidious erosions of American power is the implication, by this move, that the United States can no longer withstand the criticism of people like Khalil, and would be stronger without them. Khalil was scheduled to graduate in May with a master’s degree in public affairs. The Trump administration’s suggestion that Khalil “support[s] a terrorist-type organization” seems to be at best an inference from his vigorous rabble-rousing against Israel and the war in Gaza on the Columbia campus, where he’s been a spokesperson and lead negotiator for the anti-Israel coalition Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD). Khalil’s representatives say he is simply advocating for the human rights of Palestinians. The protesters at Columbia seem to favor an approach that might be described as no Palestinian enemies, no Israeli friends. It is unclear which of CUAD’s pronouncements—ranging from reasonable to deranged—Khalil personally agrees with. If he is in favor of human rights, he should oppose CUAD’s unsigned statements, uniformly on the deranged end of the spectrum. They celebrate violence (“the necessity of imposing our demands through force”) and deplore those who try to effect change without armed struggle (reformism is “antirevolutionary,” and “aims merely to make capitalism tolerable”). One statement features an extended tribute to Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader whose “crowning achievement” was the October 7 massacre. That tribute at least sounds like it was written by a human being. Most of the statements are written in a robotic, affected revolutionary jargon: Allies are addressed as “comrades” and Mao and PFLP manifestos are quoted as authorities. They read like the work of a large language model trained for its sins on millions of words uttered by Maoist-Leninists between the years 1965 and 1980. [Adam Serwer: Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is a trial run] It is possible to be outraged at Israel and simultaneously denounce the wanton killing of Israeli civilians. The protesters have chosen a very different path. On October 9, 2023, before the war in Gaza began, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine proclaimed its “full solidarity with Palestinian resistance” and the “counter-offensive” that was the slaughter of more than 1,000 Israelis two days earlier. That group was enveloped into CUAD, whose posted ramblings refer to hostages held by Hamas as “prisoners of war.” It has expanded its writ and pledged last year not to rest until it achieved “the total eradication of Western civilization.” The correct response from Western civilization is to say Bring it on. The view that the West needs dismantling remains, to say the least, unpopular in the West. And the progressively more obnoxious tactics adopted at Columbia reflect frustration at the lack of takers for the activists’ more extreme demands, both at the university and in American politics. The Gaza war has not stopped. Adding the demand that Western civilization burn to ashes is a similarly desperate move, and incidentally antithetical to the approach of the granddaddy of all Columbia Palestinian activists, the late Edward Said—who abhorred philistinism and saw wanton violence against Israelis for the abomination and political dead end that it is. For all I know, Khalil thinks the declaration of war against Western civilization is a foolish form of mission creep. But he seems to have been content to speak for a movement that views civilization as its enemy and Hamas as its friend. The folly of deporting him is most apparent when considering the irony of this position. Khalil did not come to the United States to dismantle it. He came to study at Columbia because its international-relations program is one of the best in the world, and if he wanted to study anywhere other than the United States, he’d have had to settle for a much worse program. Hatred of the West is, like hatred of McDonald’s, an elite preoccupation and often a hypocritical one. To hate America and its politics, and yet seek a U.S. green card, is the equivalent of advocating for quinoa bowls but sneaking a Big Mac. Remember the old Woody Allen joke, where one diner at a Catskills resort kvetches about how bad the food is, and the other agrees and adds that the portions are too small. Khalil has spent much of his time in America complaining that its policies are heinous. Now he is objecting to being forced to leave that same allegedly genocidal country. The Ernie Tubb song “It’s America: Love It or Leave It” encapsulates the Trump administration’s view of this hypocrisy. But America should take the compliment. Certain levels of American patriotism are inaccessible to native-born Americans, who are American by accident of birth and therefore have not, like Khalil, gone to great effort to Americanize themselves. He now looks poised to fight for his right, again enjoyed by native-born Americans only by chance, to remain in America indefinitely. Would he also have contested his deportation from Nazi Germany? Perhaps instead of deporting him, the Trump administration should offer Khalil citizenship. [Graeme Wood: A Gaza protester who’s willing to suffer] Last year, I profiled a Princeton student, David Chmielewski, who undertook a hunger strike in support of Gazans. In doing so he committed no crime, and he used a tactic that, although not totally alien to the Palestinian cause, has been rejected along with all other forms of nonviolence by Hamas. “There’s something very powerful about being able to use your body to show that commitment,” he told me. His hunger strike was small, but it reflected real devotion, expressed in a morally faultless manner. Now Khalil’s body is at stake, and he has a chance to do the same. Columbia University Apartheid Divest has called getting suspended for Gaza “the highest honor.” Surely getting deported for Gaza would be an even higher one, the summa cum laude of activism. The decision to detain Khalil was not his. What happens next, however, is at least partly up to him. So far it appears that he will contest his detention and deportation—and as someone who finds the singling out of immigrants for their politics a loathsome development, I hope that he does, and that he prevails. But if he emerges from immigration detention a free man on American soil, I hope his next step will be to show his commitment to his cause, by shredding his green card and booking one-way passage to a country whose policies he finds more agreeable.
Representative Richard Hudson has a bold prediction for how Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s purge of the federal government will play out for his party in next year’s elections. “I think voters are going to reward us,” the North Carolina Republican told me. “The Democrats have made a huge miscalculation by establishing themselves as the party defending waste, fraud, and abuse.” As chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), Hudson is tasked with keeping the GOP in power, and his enthusiasm suggests that the party leadership won’t be backing away from Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency anytime soon. When I asked Hudson whether he had any concerns about DOGE or its billionaire leader, he replied quickly and unequivocally: “Not at all.” Some of Hudson’s Republican colleagues aren’t so sure. They’ve seen the polls showing how unpopular Musk and DOGE are. They’ve heard from angry voters at town-hall meetings who are worried about the loss of jobs and government services. And now they’ve begun registering their own complaints with the White House and DOGE staffers, both in private and in group meetings that Musk has attended. [Read: DOGE is courting catastrophic risk] The GOP’s fears about DOGE appear to be growing, based on conversations I had with a dozen House Republicans this week. Several of them suggested to me that the Trump administration’s campaign to slash the federal workforce could threaten not only their constituents but also their party’s chance to retain its narrow majority. “There needs to be more of a strategic approach,” Representative Dan Newhouse, a sixth-term Republican from Washington State, told me. “A lot of the directives seem to be arbitrary.” Newhouse said he had expressed concerns to the White House about agricultural cuts in his district and told the administration that DOGE shouldn’t ignore Congress. “It can’t be just one entity” making spending decisions, he said. Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, a former chair of the NRCC, told me that DOGE’s leadership had failed to adequately communicate to the public what the agency is doing and why. “It’s been controversial,” Sessions said. “There’s a lot of good that has come from it, but it needs to be more organized, better explained.” In gently criticizing DOGE, Republicans seem to be weighing their desire to reduce the government’s size and scope—which they have campaigned on for decades—against their unease with the way the administration is going about it. Musk has gloated about feeding entire agencies “into the wood chipper,” and neither he nor Trump has expressed much interest in consulting the branch of government that putatively controls federal spending. (Some Republicans did tell me, however, that in private, Musk has become more receptive to their concerns.) “What people say is Be professional,” Representative Austin Scott of Georgia told me when I asked him what he was hearing about DOGE from his constituents. He repeated the message: “Be professional.” [Read: DOGE’s plans to replace humans with AI are already under way] Even Hudson has sent signals to Republicans that might give them reason to doubt his stated confidence about DOGE’s popularity: Last week he privately urged House Republicans to avoid in-person town halls in favor of teleconferences, which they could more easily control. In our interview, Hudson defended the directive by accusing Democratic activists of “hijacking” public forums in GOP districts. His advice to Republican lawmakers: “If the real people in the district are upset, yeah, you need to take it to heart.” So far, the Republican gripes about DOGE fall far short of a revolt. Indeed, a revolt hardly seems likely in today’s GOP. In his second term, the president has demanded complete loyalty from Republicans in Congress—“NO DISSENT,” Trump warned on the eve of a vote this week on government funding—and with few exceptions, his party has complied. When a single House Republican, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, defected on the funding vote, Trump called for him to face a primary challenger and said he’d meet the same fate as former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who lost her seat after turning on Trump. The next day, The New York Times reported that Musk wanted to contribute $100 million to a group backing Trump’s agenda—a sign that Musk might be willing to use his wealth to help the president keep his party in line. Some of the Republicans I spoke with were all in on DOGE, especially those from districts that Trump easily carried. Representative Andy Harris, the chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, told me that voters in his Maryland district “don’t want their taxpayer dollars paying for fraud, waste, and abuse.” “They want the administration to get to the bottom of it,” Harris said. “They appreciate the efforts that are being made.” Yet because of its proximity to Washington, D.C., Harris’s district includes one of the highest percentages of federal workers of any area represented by a Republican in Congress. I asked him what he’d say to a constituent who had lost their job because of DOGE’s cuts. “I say the same thing to people who are laid off from private industries that have become bloated and inefficient: Look, that’s the way the American economy works,” Harris replied. Some Republicans began our conversation by voicing unqualified support for Trump and Musk—and ended by contemplating the dangers that DOGE poses to their districts. “I can’t tell you the amount of people that came up to me saying, Keep it up. We want this. We need it. The government has been growing so much,” Representative Juan Ciscomani of Arizona told me. Unlike Harris, who won his reelection easily last year, Ciscomani prevailed only narrowly in one of the nation’s most competitive House races. But when I asked about his constituents whose jobs could be jeopardized by federal cuts, Ciscomani’s tone shifted. The southeast corner of Arizona that he represents includes the state’s largest passport-processing center as well as a large number of military veterans, who rely on—and in some cases work at—the Veterans Affairs facilities located in his district. Ciscomani would prefer that Trump and Musk not touch those areas. “I will stand the line on that and defend that,” he told me. Ciscomani said he represents nearly 25,000 federal employees; for comparison, he won reelection last year by only about 10,000 votes. “I’ve got a lot of stake in this, a lot of skin in the game for my district to make sure that we protect these areas,” he said. To the frustration of Democrats, some senior Republicans who communicated their concerns to the White House have won reprieves for federal facilities in their districts that the administration wanted to close. And many GOP lawmakers welcomed Trump’s statement last week indicating that Cabinet secretaries, not Musk, would be in charge of staffing reductions at their agencies—an announcement that followed a reported clash between the DOGE chief and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. [Read: Is DOGE losing steam?] Even though Republicans are starting to feel more backlash over DOGE, they declined a key opportunity this week to wrest back their spending power. On Tuesday, the GOP House majority passed a six-month government-funding bill that did little to restore (or codify) the cuts that Trump and Musk are making. Republican negotiators also rejected Democratic demands to add language to the legislation that would restrain DOGE. As a result, Democrats said the bill further empowers the Trump administration to make cuts unilaterally—an argument that GOP leaders themselves then used to win the support of conservative hard-liners. In some respects, the spending bill is an odd proposal for Republicans to rally around. It would extend Biden-era funding levels through the first eight months of the GOP governing trifecta. Republicans have, in effect, voted to keep spending money on agencies, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, that the Trump administration has all but shut down. GOP leaders say the move buys the party time to develop a budget that locks in the cuts that Musk has identified and, in many cases, already made. But it also prevents Republicans from having to take politically difficult votes that they’ve dodged in the past. When I asked Andy Harris why Republicans wouldn’t vote to cut spending on USAID—an agency that no longer exists, thanks to Musk’s wood chipper—he replied, “We don’t have to.” Hudson said the decision to forgo major cuts in this funding bill was a matter of prudence. “We can’t just cut blindly,” he told me. “We have to know what we’re cutting.” It’s a message that some House Republicans wish he would deliver to Elon Musk.
Since 2018, Doug Ford has been the unlikely premier of the province of Ontario, a close equivalent to the governor of a U.S. state, if more governors looked like longshoremen and gave out their personal-cellphone number to anyone who asked for it. (I didn’t ask Ford for his, but he volunteered it to me anyway when he found out I was a local. “Text twice if it’s important,” he told me. He had 4,616 messages waiting for him.) An old-school retail politician with more than 16 million constituents, Ford is the pugnacious, barrel-shaped leader of a near-trillion-dollar economy at an especially tender time: President Donald Trump has been threatening to bankrupt it, waging a trade war until Ontario and the rest of Canada capitulate and become “the 51st state.” Many of those 4,616 messages were from Canadians scared out of their mind. Ford has always found ways to elevate himself with almost insultingly simplistic positions, showing little interest in the more complex issues of governance. In his first campaign for premier, Ford won on a promise of “buck-a-beer,” vowing to drop the minimum price for a bottle of suds from $1.25 to $1. As a campaign tactic, the ploy worked, but Ford never managed to lower prices. This time around, he saw a grander opportunity in Trump’s then-looming tariff threats and called a snap election for last month, more than a year early. Ford, the leader of Ontario’s center-right Progressive Conservatives, took a shot at Trump’s red MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hats by wearing a blue one that read CANADA IS NOT FOR SALE. Canadians began ordering the hats by the tens of thousands. Ford hoped his suddenly patriotic electorate would forget about the province’s struggling hospitals and colleges, its bonkers traffic, and the indiscretions that have marked his tenure, including a real-estate scandal that is the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation. “It’s all about communicating with the people,” Ford told me. His phone buzzed constantly with encouragement—he leaves it on at night but has learned to sleep through its vibrations—and he was elected to his third majority government, an achievement that hasn’t been seen in Ontario since 1959. Turnout was low because the conclusion was foregone: When Ontarians looked at the candidates and thought about who they’d want to have with them in a fight against Trump, the choice was obvious. They picked Doug Ford. Earlier this week, he seemed set to deliver on his promise to “protect Ontario,” backed by broad, sometimes vitriolic public support. The province generates enough power to sell its surplus to New York, Michigan, and Minnesota, providing light to about 1.5 million U.S. homes and businesses. On Monday, the price went up. [Read: Canada is taking Trump seriously and personally] “We will apply maximum pressure to maximize our leverage,” Ford said at a packed press conference in Toronto, announcing a 25 percent surcharge on America-bound power. “If necessary, if the United States escalates, I will not hesitate to shut the electricity off completely.” He’d already ordered American liquor off store shelves and canceled a $100 million Starlink contract, but the electricity surcharge was the start of an especially dramatic, tension-filled week. On Tuesday morning, Trump escalated: He slapped an additional 25 percent tariff on Canadian steel and aluminum in direct response to Ford’s electricity surcharge, on top of the 25 percent tariff Trump was already going to impose. Ford countered with another lightning round of the American TV appearances that have seen him become the crimson face of Canadian anger. “Stay tuned,” he said. Hours later, Ford blinked. By Tuesday afternoon, he had suspended the electricity surcharge, saying that “the temperature needs to come down.” Trump, in turn, canceled the additional metals tariff, reverting to his original 25 percent imposition, and then took his predictably ungracious victory lap. “President Trump has once again used the leverage of the American economy, which is the best and biggest in the world, to deliver a win for the American people,” the White House spokesperson Kush Desai said. Ford said that a conciliatory call from Howard Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary, and the promise of an in-person meeting had convinced him to take a step back. “It’s called an olive branch,” Ford said. He was also under pressure from his fellow premiers, who were concerned about his high-stakes freelancing; most of the aluminum that Trump was crushing under his retaliatory tariffs comes from Quebec, not Ontario. “I only speak for the province of Ontario,” Ford said when announcing his pullback. “I want to reaffirm that I don’t speak for any other premiers.” Whatever the reasons behind Ford’s about-face, it felt like a quick, even humiliating, fold—not just for him, but for every Canadian who agrees with outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that Trump represents “an existential crisis” to their way of life. “Will you really turn out the lights?” I’d asked Ford on Monday. “Don’t think I won’t,” he’d said. At the time, he seemed to mean it. His next move, and Canada’s, was much less clear. Most Canadians recognize that an all-out trade war would devastate their economy. Many have also long felt a low-level antipathy toward the U.S., held back for decades by fear and the desire to be good neighbors. But just as Trump has given permission for other suppressed thoughts to be expressed out loud, he has set loose a wave of Canadian discontent: Now that he’s threatening to annex Canada anyway, Canadians don’t have much to lose by booing the U.S. anthem at hockey games. They can finally say how they really feel, and for a few weeks at least, Doug Ford became their principal proxy. [Read: Trump’s most inexplicable decision yet] After he’d announced his short-lived electricity surcharge, Ford returned to his office at Ontario’s Legislative Building, which is made of pink sandstone and known colloquially as Queen’s Park. He has never spent much time in it. “His phone is his office,” an aide told me. Room 281 has a single, conspicuous book on its many shelves, titled With Faith and Good Will: 150 Years of Canada-U.S. Friendship. The battleship of a desk is bare except for a lamp that might not be plugged in and a gold plaque that reads FOR THE PEOPLE. Behind it, a tufted leather chair is likewise empty. The premier refuses to sit in it. “Don’t ask me why,” Ford said. “I didn’t do it for a few years, and then it was done.” We took to a pair of couches instead. Ford is a solid man, 60 years old but robust, and he sat on the edge of his seat, coiled like a spring. I asked him how he’d introduce himself to Americans who haven’t caught one of his many appearances on CNN or Fox, the lonely book on Ford’s shelf now feeling like a relic from a forgotten age. “Elbows up,” he said, using a hockey term that has become a Canadian rallying cry. A “Gordie Howe hat trick” is a goal, an assist, and a fight; Howe once said that swinging an elbow was his favorite method of on-ice retribution. Mike Myers recently mouthed “Elbows up” when he appeared on Saturday Night Live to mock Elon Musk. Trudeau said it last weekend. “Elbows up,” Ford said again. “Everyone’s elbows are up.” Americans tend to think of Canadians as “nice” and find the idea of angry Canadians funny. They are wrong on both counts. Americans are nicer than Canadians—warmer, friendlier, more gregarious. Canadians are polite. The difference is subtle but important. There is an unwritten civility contract girding every aspect of Canadian society. The Canadian equivalent of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is “peace, order, and good government,” so enshrined in the constitution since 1867. Most Canadians want uncomplicated lives, a desire for calm that can be misinterpreted by louder people as meekness. This is also a mistake. The bedrock of Canada’s collective tranquility is the knowledge that misbehavior will not be tolerated, and, as in hockey, violations of the code of conduct will be met with hair-trigger aggression. Try cutting a line and see what happens. Canadians say “sorry” a lot, not because they’ve done anything wrong, but because apologies are demanded of them from birth until they learn to live right. Treading gently becomes habit. If I let you into traffic—which I will, because I’m not a child—you need to acknowledge my generosity with a wave, and then we will both go about our day feeling good about ourselves; if you fail to wave, I will get very upset about it, unless you realize your mistake and apologize, in which case we have a good chance of becoming friends. In Canada, conducting yourself honorably after a scrap makes the disagreement disappear. What matters is that you’re a stand-up bud. To a large majority of Canadians, Trump is the opposite of a stand-up bud, and Americans are to blame for electing him. Last week in Calgary, some ominous graffiti showed up on the Centre Street Bridge. “There is no enemy like a friend betrayed,” it read beside a crossed-out image of an American flag. Two months ago, Canadians sent water bombers to help fight the Los Angeles wildfires. Then Trump ramped up his “51st state” and “Governor Trudeau” trolling, and now come his tariffs. None of it sounded like a joke to Canadians, because it wasn’t a joke. It’s the biggest failure to wave back ever, and Canadians know better than to expect an apology. For many, that takes friendship off the table. Trump likes to play make-believe gangster. Doug Ford shouldn’t have needed to pretend. “He’s met a different type of cat,” Ford said to me on Monday. “He’s up against the Fords. We’ve done stuff that no other politician would ever do.” Canadians like a little crackle in their representatives. In 2012, Trudeau fought and won a charity boxing match against Patrick Brazeau, a Conservative senator, and became prime minister not long after. (Last week, Brazeau challenged Donald Trump Jr. to a fight, an offer that, so far, has gone unaccepted.) In 1996, Jean Chrétien, one of Canada’s most popular prime ministers, brought down a protester who got in his way on Flag Day. Chrétien, who hails from Shawinigan, Quebec, saw his choke hold immortalized as “the Shawinigan handshake” and won a second majority the next year. Ford, a.k.a. “DoFo,” has always been his own kind of heavy, a machine seemingly custom-made to take on someone like Trump. His father, Doug Ford Sr., made a fortune with a sticker company that became Deco Labels & Flexible Packaging, purveyors of labels and plastic wraps for groceries. After 60 years, the company is still one of Ontario’s largest printers. Ford Sr. and his wife had four children: Kathy, Randy, Doug, and Rob. He also dabbled in provincial politics, serving one term in the 1990s as the Conservative representative for Etobicoke-Humber, in what used to be Toronto’s western suburbs. Doug, regarded as the brains behind any Ford operation, helped run his father’s campaign. Doug Ford Jr. dropped out of college after two months but earned his own education at his father’s shoulder and, according to a 2013 investigation by The Globe and Mail, as “a go-to dealer of hash” in the 1980s, when he was in his teens and early 20s. (Ford was never criminally charged for his alleged drug dealing and vehemently denied the suggestion at the time.) Several sources told the newspaper that Ford was both envied and admired for the way he conducted his less legitimate enterprise—that he was savvy, careful, and controlled, an almost cinematic exemplar of the trade. Another source said that Randy, who today runs the labels company with Doug, had his own drug operation and favored different tactics. (His lawyer called the allegations “a smear campaign.”) According to the Globe, when Randy was 24, he was charged with assault causing bodily harm and forcible confinement after a customer fell behind on his credit and spent 10 hours locked in a basement. Kathy, largely invisible, has suffered more serious calamity. In 1998, her lover was shot and killed by her ex-husband; in 2005, she survived a gunshot to the face after a mysterious episode in her parents’ house. Only Rob, the youngest of the Ford siblings, grew up relatively insulated from the family’s chaos, although his turn would come. Like Randy and Doug, he was a formidable specimen, a human tank topped with a turret of spiked blond hair. Following an uninspired spell working for his father in sales, he decided to try his hand at local politics. Doug managed each of Rob’s campaigns for a seat on Toronto’s council, which he first earned in 2000 and defended twice. In 2010, Rob was elected mayor, campaigning in part by randomly sticking magnets with his phone number on parked cars, and Doug took Rob’s former council seat, his opening taste of front-room politics and a chance for the brothers to serve their city together. In many ways, the Fords were proto-Trumps, proving adept at turning private scandal into surprising public popularity. In 2014, I was sent by Esquire to profile Rob Ford, who had become famous, and weirdly celebrated, for getting caught on video smoking crack. Doug remained his brother’s keeper. “We love Americans,” he told me, assuming I was one, and I didn’t correct him. From the outside, Rob Ford’s story was treated comedically because he was fat and some of the scenes from his tenure were surreal. During one press scrum, after he’d been accused of telling an aide that he wished to perform oral sex on her, the mayor issued an unusual denial: “I’m happily married,” he said. “I’ve got more than enough to eat at home.” Rob Ford was in fact a tragic figure. He was addicted to drugs and alcohol despite his best efforts to quit them. When I met him, he claimed to have been sober for more than 10 weeks and to have lost nearly 30 pounds. “I’m never going back,” Rob said. Not long after, a video surfaced of him drunk in a Jamaican restaurant speaking a butchered version of patois. He died two years later, at 46, of pleomorphic liposarcoma, a rare and terrible cancer. Today, the largest piece of art in the premier’s mostly unused office is a giant photograph of a triumphant Rob being lifted into the air by a high-school football team he once coached. When Doug Ford looks over his shoulder and sees his lost brother, Rob is forever winning. “A lot of people over the years have counted us out,” Ford said. He was sometimes known as “Angry Doug” in his early years in office. He has since trained himself to have only two public expressions. One is flat and vaguely benign, like he’s daydreaming while waiting for a bus; the other is a wide smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes, like he’s at a party that he wants to leave. But every now and then, for a flash, his mask slips off and the real Doug Ford shines through. “The last thing you should ever do is count a Ford out,” he said. And there he was. All along, Ford’s stated goal was to get everyone to sit down and renegotiate the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, the free-trade agreement that Trump himself brokered in his first term and called “great for all of our countries.” (“I guess he doesn’t think it is anymore,” Ford said.) It’s possible that Lutnick asked Ford to soothe the president with Tuesday’s easy win, that a new free-trade agreement will be negotiated, and that Ford’s brief electricity gambit will help Trump understand that it’s time to pick on somebody else. (Trump called Ford “a very strong man from Canada” after Tuesday’s back-and-forth.) But Trump, who by now may well have forgotten Doug Ford’s name—Lutnick called him “some guy in Ontario” on Tuesday—has threatened to tear up other long-standing border and water-sharing agreements with Canada. Appeasement seems impossible. Mutual trust has been replaced with Canadian resignation that the medium-term pain of finding new, more reliable friends (and trading partners) is the best of the bad options. It’s going to hurt. Canceled vacations are just the start. “We will never again put ourselves in the position of being so dependent on the United States,” David Eby, the leftist New Democratic premier of British Columbia, said last week. Someone else will buy Canadian aluminum, and maybe when the U.S. runs out of airplane parts, and the markets continue to tank, Americans will teach Trump the lessons that Doug Ford can’t. A more immediate change is coming to Canada’s federal government. On Sunday, Trudeau was replaced as the Liberal Party leader by Mark Carney, an economist and the former governor of the banks of Canada and England who brought the U.K. through the calamity of Brexit. “We will have to do things that we haven’t imagined before, at speeds we didn’t think possible,” Carney said after he’d claimed the leadership. He will reportedly rush to call an election to try to secure his mandate as prime minister. If he wins—he’s already picked his slogan, “Canada Strong”—he will take over as the brains of the Canadian operation, in concert with his colleagues in Europe. On Wednesday, the Liberals hit back at Trump with tariffs on more than $20 billion of U.S. goods, including computers and cast iron. Doug Ford, perhaps happily, might soon be reduced to the role of chief muscle. [Read: Justin Trudeau’s performative self-regard] First, though, Canadians, like Ontarians before them, will have to decide their votes by answering a single question: Who will best defend them from Trump’s attacks? Before the president’s bullying campaign began, the Liberals looked doomed, bound to suffer a beatdown at the hands of the federal Conservatives, led by a career politician named Pierre Poilievre. But Poilievre, who has often echoed Trump’s anti-“woke” rhetoric, was surprisingly slow to react to the national mood. Only this week, Poilievre said Carney was using Trump “to distract” Canadians from more substantive issues, an accusation that one columnist deemed “insane.” Now the race is close to a dead heat. “I couldn’t answer that,” Ford said when I asked him why the same crisis that had elevated him, however temporarily, has diminished Poilievre, even though they represent the same party. “I don’t care about political stripes. You’d have to ask him.” Ford knew the answer, though. In Canada, there’s only ever been one. Elbows up.
An eephus pitch is one of baseball’s many pieces of niche ephemera. It’s a weird trick throw that’s barely ever glimpsed in the professional game—an arcing lob of the ball, traveling at half the speed or less than a normal pitch; it exists only to catch batters off guard. In the director Carson Lund’s beguiling debut film, also called Eephus, a player named Merritt Nettles (played by Nate Fisher) specializes in tossing the pitch and rhapsodizes about its time-stopping sorcery: “It’s kinda like baseball. I’m looking around for something to happen—poof, the game’s over.” If the previous paragraph made your eyes glaze over, you may not be the movie’s intended audience. But to me, these details are pure poetry, and so is Eephus. The plot-free hangout flick quietly has a ton to say about baseball’s eternal appeal, even as the sport weathers the passage of time. Set during the 1990s in Massachusetts, it follows the last recreational-league matchup between two groups of shambling, beer-guzzling baseball enthusiasts; they’re clashing once more before a planned development will pave over the site. Eephus is an elegy, but with just the barest hint of sentimentality—a shrugging send-off that simultaneously cares deeply about America’s pastime. The film begins with the league’s sole enthusiast, Franny (Cliff Blake), settling onto the grass with his portable card table, his pocket binoculars, and his scorecard; slowly, the players begin to dribble onto the field. In red are the members of a team called Adler’s Paint, and in blue are the Riverdogs. The history between the two squads is irrelevant, and there’s barely any information to glean from their overheard dialogue. Instead, Lund (who also co-wrote the film’s script with Fisher and Michael Basta) revels in the minor details, such as the players’ many forms of inventive facial hair and their cute little practice rituals. The drama that does arise feels minor, too, such as a brief moment of panic when the Riverdogs realize that their ninth player hasn’t shown up yet, which would force them to forfeit. [Read: Goodbye to baseball’s most anachronistic rule] Otherwise, Eephus’s story never goes anywhere. Even though it’s clear that at least some of the actors know how to play the game, there isn’t much intense activity to take in. Over and over, the viewer sees shots of players briefly crouching in anticipation of something happening (namely, the delivery of a pitch to a batter), then relaxing when it doesn’t. That’s the magic of baseball: blissful anticipation, with the occasional chance for real action. In lieu of narrative progression, Lund is singularly intent on generating an atmosphere that makes the viewer feel like they’re perched in the bleachers. The perfectly calibrated sound design contributes to this heavily; it is expansive and plangent, with the clack of the bat and popping of the ball heard more distinctly than the yelled instructions or friendly banter from base runners. The director’s attentive scene-setting helps transform Eephus into a dispatch from another era—a memory bouncing through the decades to somehow reach theaters today. The throwback vibe is further cultivated by the cast, which comes across like a cheerfully old-school collection of performers. Among them is the Boston Red Sox alum Bill “Spaceman” Lee, one of Major League Baseball’s best-known practitioners of the eephus pitch back in the 1970s, who appears in a cameo role. The rest of the actors, most of them unfamiliar names, look like they could have walked onto the set through a time tunnel; their stringy beards, craggy faces, and protruding guts recall those of the players from Lee’s era. The renowned 95-year-old documentarian (and fellow Bostonian) Frederick Wiseman also joins to dispense pearls of wisdom in voice-over, dropping well-known quotations from the ball-playing greats between innings. [Read: Climate change comes for baseball] Looking backwards feels inherent to baseball, and I mean this in the warmest manner possible. The game is like the Academy Awards or burger making: an American tradition that, in my opinion, needs little in the way of reinvention. Still, although Lund isn’t going for any major tear-jerking moments, his movie invokes the melancholy sense of something important passing into the mists. None of the characters is able to use a smartphone or check social media, given the period setting, but the couple of kids sitting in the stands observe the amateur teams’ particular brand of fun as if it’s from the Stone Age. Lund cited the Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 masterpiece, Goodbye, Dragon Inn, as an inspiration for Eephus. The comparison is apt on a surface level; Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a famous example of “slow cinema” set in a soon-to-be-closed Taipei theater—an antiquated edifice not unlike an aging ballpark. The film discursively follows some of the picture house’s regulars as they attend its last showtime. Beyond their similar presentations, it’s also Eephus’s kindred spirit thematically: Each one is a quirky ode to a particular hobby that is still extant in our life, albeit becoming something of a relic. Eephus succeeds as a beautiful portrait of a specific pastime. It’s also, delightfully, a low-stakes hang with some dudes swigging Narragansetts—much like baseball itself.
There seems to be a limit to how anti-vax is too anti-vax in the Trump administration. Yesterday, hours before Dave Weldon was slated to begin his Senate confirmation hearing for CDC director, the White House pulled his nomination. Weldon, a physician and former Republican congressman, has long questioned the safety of vaccines. In a meeting last month, he reportedly told one senator that routine childhood vaccines were exposing kids to dangerous levels of mercury and may cause autism. (Both claims are false.) Weldon has denied that he’s anti-vaccination, but his views on vaccines seem to have been his undoing. In a written statement he gave to me and other outlets, he suggested that at least two Republican senators were threatening to vote against him, and that this became “clearly too much for the White House.” But those two senators, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Susan Collins of Maine, voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an ardent vaccine critic who would have been Weldon’s boss as health secretary. Perhaps Weldon’s biggest problem was that he said the quiet part out loud. During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy sidestepped calls for him to declare unequivocally that vaccines do not cause autism, and appeared to convince lawmakers that he’d let Americans make their own decisions about vaccines. “I support the measles vaccine. I support the polio vaccine. I will do nothing as HHS secretary that makes it difficult or discourages people from taking either of those vaccines,” Kennedy told senators. Kennedy is already breaking that promise. As cases of measles are popping up in states across the country—leading to America’s first measles death in a decade—he has propped up unproven treatments such as cod-liver oil. Though Kennedy has said that the measles vaccine helps “protect individual children from measles” and contributes to “community immunity,” he also baselessly questioned its “risk profile” in an appearance on Fox News earlier this week. (In extremely rare instances the vaccine can have serious side effects.) Kennedy’s subversion of vaccines, subtle at times, glaring at others, goes far beyond the measles outbreak. The health secretary is “using the federal government to undermine vaccination in all the ways that it can,” Matt Motta, a vaccine-communication researcher at Boston University, told me. Weldon may have crossed a red line for lawmakers. But in just over a month on the job, Kennedy has taken more steps against vaccines than perhaps any other top health official in modern American history. [Read: His daughter was America’s first measles death in a decade] Kennedy’s wishy-washy comments about the measles vaccine may persuade more parents not to vaccinate their children—which means that more children will get sick, and perhaps die. But his other actions will have an even broader, longer-lasting effect on the overall U.S. vaccination system. Earlier this week, the administration terminated NIH research grants probing how the government can address vaccine hesitancy. Vaccine promotion might seem separate from access, but the two are intertwined, Motta said. Research into vaccine promotion often explores issues such as whether people know where to get shots or whether insurance will cover them. (A spokesperson for Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment.) All the while, the research that the government now is funding may only serve to further sow vaccine distrust. The CDC is reportedly launching a study probing the link between vaccines and autism—even though the connection has already been thoroughly studied and debunked. A 2014 meta-analysis of more than 1 million children found “no relationship” between shots and the condition. Even if the new study comes to a similar conclusion, simply funding such research has consequences, Jennifer Reich, a vaccine-hesitancy researcher at the University of Colorado Denver, told me. The NIH’s new research plays a “powerful symbolic role of making” the link “feel like it is unsettled,” she said. A myopic focus on the purported connection between vaccines and autism is exactly what some lawmakers feared would color Kennedy’s term as secretary. During Kennedy’s confirmation, Cassidy, a physician, raised concerns that Kennedy and his MAHA movement may undermine science by “always asking for more evidence and never accepting the evidence that is there.” Cassidy, who did not respond to a request for comment, may soon have more reason for disappointment. He ultimately voted to confirm Kennedy based on a plethora of promises and his belief, as he said in a speech on the Senate floor, that RFK Jr. would “work within current vaccine approval and safety-monitoring systems.” Yet Kennedy has already hinted that he will change those systems: “We have a vaccine-surveillance system in this country that just doesn’t work,” he recently said on Fox News, adding that “the CDC in the past has not done a good job at quantifying the risk of vaccines. We are going to do that now.” Since RFK Jr. entered office, the health agencies have not abandoned all responsibilities surrounding vaccinations. CDC officials have been directly coordinating with the local Texas health department at the epicenter of the measles outbreak, including helping design outreach materials encouraging vaccination, according to internal emails I received as part of a public-records request. A letter addressed to parents from a local health official, for example, states: “I strongly encourage you to have your child vaccinated as soon as possible.” Perhaps Weldon’s defeat signifies that Washington wants more pro-vaccination efforts like that. But he makes for an easy scapegoat: Unlike RFK Jr., he lacks a devoted fan base backing him up. Kennedy doesn’t need Weldon to do real damage to America’s vaccine infrastructure. The changes he has made so far are likely only the beginning. If Kennedy keeps up this pace, America’s vaccine system may look fundamentally different in one year, or two. The stand against Weldon changes nothing about that.
A collective of women ought to have a name, the way a mass of finches are a “charm,” or parrots a “pandemonium.” The struggle would be to find a term that accurately describes what an assembly of women can do together, and also how markedly different each woman—and group—is from the next. What word can possibly encapsulate the joy of women singing in harmony, the unease with which they might circle one another, the trust and distrust that can grow among their ranks? In Agustina Bazterrica’s new novel, The Unworthy, women are quickly classified. The unnamed protagonist, who writes her story in secret from a former monastery, is one of the titular “unworthy,” a woman given shelter from the toxic, dusty, climate-ravaged outside world but granted no special honors besides, potentially, her survival. Above the monastery’s unworthy hover the “Minor Saints,” “Diaphanous Spirits,” and “Full Auras”—women who have, respectively, had their tongues sliced out, their eardrums punctured, and their eyelids sewn shut—all of whom are elevated (if you want to call it that) to a holy status. These are the “chosen”: With their mauled faces and special privileges (real meat and vegetables instead of the crickets the unworthy eat), they are simultaneously revered and loathed from the very start of the story. The “enlightened,” who hover over even the “chosen,” are locked behind a black door and never seen. Hierarchies breed a hell of a lot of sycophancy and resentment, and this one is no different. Unlike the bunker in The Unworthy, this brand of female dystopia doesn’t exist in a vacuum. All-female communities tend to be weirdly polarized in the cultural imagination. They’re either paradigms of peace and love or bastions of PMS-motivated backbiting. Particularly in genre fiction, the lines can be very stark. In Herland, the 1915 novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman—the author of the proto-feminist school-curriculum staple “The Yellow Wallpaper”—three male explorers discover a community in which women live and reproduce without men. They are awed by the women’s sense of harmony and fitness. Joanna Russ’s snarling 1975 novel, The Female Man, creates four societies. In one of them, women live without men—and without murder and sexual assault—and in another, the two sexes literally battle for dominance. The message of such stories is clear: On their own, women are free of the burden of violence and inequality. The appeal of reading about female utopias has recently reached a new zenith. The novel I Who Have Never Known Men was published in 1995, but after its 2022 reissue, it has gone viral on BookTok and sold more than 100,000 copies in the United States. In the book, a group of women live in underground cages on a planet that some believe is not their own. They don’t know how they got there, but one day their guards flee for no clear reason, and they eventually establish a harmonious and cooperative society. There is sadness and death, but never real strife. Even when they must hurt one another—the narrator “know[s] what to do” with a knife to put her suffering sisters out of their misery—the bloodshed is compassionate. [Margaret Atwood: Go ahead and ban my book] This sunny side of dystopia stands at odds with a countervailing notion of women in isolation—the kind often perpetuated by novels set in boarding schools or convents—which dictates that woman’s natural enemy is woman. In the classic of the genre, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, most women trapped in a theocratic future America are forced to enslave or torture other women, but some of them actively enlist as foot soldiers in the effort. And outside the genre, girls in novels including Andrés Barba’s orphanage-set Such Small Hands and Mona Awad’s Bunny turn to cruelty when the walls close in on them. On the surface, The Unworthy appears to fit squarely into this second canon. Yet Bazterrica’s world building and character development transcend this typology: The monastery is a hellhole masquerading as a shrine, and the women who walk its halls are both fiercely loyal and self-cannibalizing. In Bazterrica’s first novel to be translated into English, the similarly dystopian Tender Is the Flesh, human flesh is an industrialized commodity. In The Unworthy, she has similar preoccupations, focusing on how eagerly women might (proverbially) eat one another up. What stands out, though, is how readily she moves between the two opposing notions of what all-female communities can be. She shows us women pushed to extremes, who react with extreme behavior—but can they be faulted for that? None of this is to say that The Unworthy occupies any sort of middle ground. The novel opens with malice: “Someone is screaming in the dark,” the unnamed narrator writes. “I hope it’s Lourdes. I put cockroaches in her pillow and sewed up the slip, so they struggle to get out, so they crawl under her head or over her face (and into her ears, I hope, nesting there, the nymphs damaging her brain).” Animosity is a founding principle of the story—and of the unworthy’s community. In this bunker run by the “Superior Sister” and an unseen, Wizard of Oz–like “He,” bloody punishments are so frequent that they have become the group’s currency. Women stick needles in one another’s nipples and are made to lie down on glass. They volunteer to walk on burning embers or take floggings with a cat-o’-nine-tails. Still, they are not only grateful to be there but desperate to climb the devotional ladder. The group’s motto is “Without faith, there is no refuge,” which sounds like a standard religious tenet until you read it literally: If the women don’t commit, they will be without a home. The planet is essentially a desert. “The wars,” the narrator writes, “coincided with the disappearance of many territories, many countries, beneath the ocean.” The protagonist grew up in a world “that was degrading minute by minute. A world where water was scarce, and there was no school, no electricity. A world of floods, in which eight months of rain fell in less than an hour.” Bands of adults hunted packs of wild children. The novel’s rendering of global destruction goes beyond most climate fiction—there isn’t a drop of hope or a speck of verdure. No place can guarantee safety, but the Superior Sister implies that the holiness of the monastery’s “enlightened” inhabitants keeps it safe. It’s a tale as old as time: Pray to the right god, sacrifice in the right ways, and protection will encircle you. [Read: The remarkable rise of the feminist dystopia] Except the horrors keep coming, despite the unworthy’s muttered prayers. The narrator’s notes, which she keeps tied to herself underneath her tunic or tucked under wooden floorboards, document her transformation from partial believer to total apostate as tension inside the community ratchets up. Lourdes, she of the cockroach pillowcase, leads a campaign of terror worthy of Robespierre. The women turn on one another more and more. The dynamic unravels even further when a stowaway—who has dragged herself through a hole in the wall—is found at the monastery and deemed clean and worthy enough to join their community. Lucía, the newcomer, possesses a gift, and a moral compass, and the hierarchy of the place begins to shift. Bazterrica’s story—so cinematically gruesome that it could have been written as a treatment for an A24-produced horror film—comes at a strange inflection point for women in this country. (It was originally published in her native Argentina in 2023.) During recent elections, the media have sometimes treated women as a monolithic voting block; some analysts have credited or blamed them for Donald Trump’s or Joe Biden’s electoral victories, regardless of the clear reality that they do not universally share one another’s hopes, fears, or best interests. The Unworthy strips away the idea, implicit in I Who Have Never Known Men and its ilk, that women are inherently good stewards, that their leadership would bring humanity into some kind of karmic balance. It does so not because it disdains women, but because it sees them. Lourdes is dastardly but pathetic. Lucía saintly but carnal. The narrator possesses a kind of bravery that can’t be activated on its own. We learn that the Superior Sister “fought in the water wars, the most violent ones, in which the millenary tribes were bombarded, and that she defended her own until the very end, that she was a prisoner, a slave, that she escaped.” Or so we are told. What we know is that she grips her power like a cane that supports her whole weight. Depicting women in all their complicated glory isn’t especially novel or valiant, but Bazterrica’s novel tries something that most writers shy away from. She makes manifest the rot inside every human, and the tendency to portray them as sinners or saints. She does so not by eschewing extremes, but by embracing them, putting her women in an unendurable situation and then watching their moral compass whirl about in some fictional version of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Ugly times create ugly behavior—unless, that is, you can muster your righteous fortitude and carry on in the right direction.
Updated at 10:56 a.m. on March 14, 2025 Until the second Trump administration took over, the National Institutes of Health—the world’s single largest public funder of biomedical research—was not in the business of canceling its grants. Of the more than 60,000 research awards the agency issues each year, it goes on to terminate, on average, maybe 20 of them, and usually only because of serious problems, such as flagrant misconduct, fraud, or an ethical breach that could harm study participants. “I have been involved with legitimate grant terminations,” one former NIH official, who worked at the agency for many years, told me. “I can count them on the fingers of one hand.” Yet, in a few weeks, the administration has forced the agency to terminate so many of its active research grants—all seemingly on political grounds—that none of the dozen NIH officials I spoke with for this story could say for certain how many termination letters had gone out. Most thought that the number was now well above 100, and would likely continue to rapidly climb. This morning, in a meeting of grants-management staff, officials were told that approximately a thousand more grants could be targeted for termination, beginning today, one official told me. If the administration had not already, in a matter of weeks, exceeded the total number of cancellations the NIH has executed in the past decade, it will soon—perhaps within hours. The NIH—an agency that has long prided itself on its mission of science funded by scientists—spends most of its $47 billion annual budget on driving biomedical innovation: developing new drugs and vaccines, containing epidemics, treating cancer, mitigating the harms of heart disease. But the growing scope of cancellations is revealing how willing Donald Trump’s administration is to claw back those resources for political reasons. (All of the current and former NIH officials I spoke with for this story requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the federal government; the NIH did not respond to a request for comment.) This spate of terminations is the Trump administration’s most aggressive attempt so far to forcibly reshape American science to match its agenda. At the same time, this might also be the most ham-fisted. Many officials told me that, as one succinctly put it, “they’re just going in and picking random grants to terminate.” Although the administration has said it doesn’t want to fund science that touches on certain concepts—gender, DEI, vaccine hesitancy—the terminations so far have few discernible criteria, and don’t operate by consistent protocols; in several cases, they end projects that are only tangentially related to the topics the administration wants to purge. If anything, the grant cancellations have become a game of whack-a-mole, in which political appointees take a mallet to any seemingly relevant research projects that pop into view—without regard to the damage they might do. Notice of grant terminations has arrived from NIH officials, on NIH letterhead. But the decisions about which grants to cancel and why are primarily being made outside the agency, with pressure coming from the Department of Health and Human Services, several NIH officials told me. The first round of cancellations, which began on the evening of February 28, focused mainly on grants that included a DEI component or involved transgender participants; officials at the agency were also told to cut off funding to projects that allot money to China. Another round, which began on Monday evening, targets grants that mention vaccine hesitancy or uptake; that same night, the NIH posted on X that it would cut $250 million in grants from Columbia University, one of several institutions that the Trump administration’s Department of Education is investigating for “antisemitic discrimination and harassment.” Two officials told me they expect several more rounds of cancellations, and several said that, based on recent emails sent to staff, grants involving mRNA vaccines, as well as grants that send funds to work in South Africa, may be next. (HHS did not respond to a request for comment.) The list of grants related to vaccine hesitancy that officials were told to cancel targets dozens of projects. Some—such as a study of vaccine uptake in Alaska Native communities—were perhaps obvious choices, because they so directly addressed vaccine attitudes. But the list also included studies that use vaccine hesitancy as just one of several variables to mathematically model disease transmission. And several researchers who have dedicated their career to studying vaccine behaviors have not yet heard that their grants have been affected. Alison Buttenheim, a behavioral scientist at Penn Nursing, has been watching colleagues’ grants on vaccine uptake get canceled, but as far as she knows, her own NIH-funded work on vaccine hesitancy is still actively funded, though she expects that to change. “I figure it’s only days until it’s axed,” she told me. “It’s unclear why some of us are getting them or not,” Brittany Charlton, who directs the LGBTQ research center at Harvard’s school of public health, told me. One of her colleagues, Nancy Krieger, told me that she’d received a termination letter for a study about measuring discrimination in clinical settings (including sexism and stigma about sexual orientation or transgender identity). But Charlton has yet to receive a letter for her own NIH-funded studies, which focus much more directly on LGBTQ populations. One NIH official put it more bluntly: “It is such utter and complete chaos.” In advance of the terminations, several officials told me, agency leadership solicited lists of grants that might, for instance, “promote gender ideology,” or that involved certain types of vaccine-behavior research. NIH officials responded with curated lists of research projects, in several cases including only the bare-minimum number of grants with the most relevance. But many officials then received back spreadsheets populated with a subset of the grants from their own lists, along with several other grants that made only passing mention of the targeted topics. It was as if, one official told me, someone had performed a Ctrl+F search for certain terms, then copied and pasted the results. Multiple rounds of terminations in, officials at some NIH institutes are still unclear on how this new system of cancellations is supposed to work. Nearly two months after Trump’s executive order on cutting DEI programming, for instance, “we still haven’t gotten a definition of DEI,” one official said. Typically, each NIH grant is shepherded by a team of officials, including at least one program officer, who oversees its scientific components, and a grants-management officer, who handles the budget. When terminations are on the table, those officials are always looped in—usually so they can help determine how to remedy the situation. “Terminations are the final option,” one NIH official told me. But these recent directions to terminate arrived without warning or the usual steps of deliberation, and they instructed grants-management officers to issue letters by the end of the day they received them, two officials told me—leaving no time to push back, or even react. “There is zero protocol,” one official told me. “It is just, We are told, and it is done.” In at least one case, an official told me, a program officer learned that their grantee’s award had been terminated from the grantee. The emailed directives also handed NIH officials prewritten justifications for termination. None cited misconduct, fraud, or even low likelihood for success. But the ones targeting research related to transgender people or DEI claimed that the projects in question were “antithetical to the scientific inquiry,” “often unscientific,” or ignoring “biological realities.” The termination-letter templates also noted the NIH’s obligation to carefully steward taxpayer dollars, accused the projects of failing to employ federal resources to benefit the well-being of Americans, and cited new agency priorities as a reason for ending studies. Letters issued to several researchers studying vaccines, for instance, stated, “It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research activities that focuses [sic] gaining scientific knowledge on why individuals are hesitant to be vaccinated and/or explore ways to improve vaccine interest and commitment.” The terminations sent to scientists studying LGBTQ populations contained similar language, and in some cases said that their projects “provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness.” Those assertions, though, directly contradict the conclusions of NIH officials and the outside scientists who helped award those grants in the first place. No project can receive NIH funds without first being vetted by multiple panels of experts in the field, who judge each proposal based on criteria such as the lead scientist’s track record, the rigor of the study’s design, and the project’s likelihood of addressing a pressing biomedical-research issue. And each proposal submitted to the NIH undergoes two layers of internal review, to ensure that the project meets agency policies and is “aligned with the goals of the institute” potentially funding it, one official told me. Several letter recipients told me that their grants had received perfect or near-perfect scores in early reviews; others told me that their results were well on their way to publication, proof of some return on the agency’s investment. And all addressed important issues in public health: One, for instance, was studying how stress affects alcohol consumption; another, mpox among men who have sex with men; another, the factors that might influence the success of a future HIV vaccine. The NIH, a federal agency directed by a political appointee, does sometimes shift its priorities for scientific or ideological reasons. For instance, some NIH institutes have over time gotten pickier about issuing awards to candidate-gene studies, in which researchers try to confirm whether a specific gene affects a biological trait, one official told me. And the first Trump administration placed restrictions on research that could be done using fetal tissue. Both of those shifts, officials said, meant that certain new proposals weren’t green-lighted. But in neither case was the agency forced to issue mass terminations of projects that had already been declared worthy of funds, officials told me. The clearest example that the NIH officials I spoke with could recall of a grant being terminated at the behest of political leadership was also triggered by a Trump administration: During his first term, Trump pressured the agency to terminate a grant that had been issued to the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which was partnering with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in China. But even that cancellation was partly reversed. In general, “when an administration changes priorities, they change them going forward,” one official said. “They don’t reach back and terminate awards.” Grant cancellations are tantamount to instantaneous salary cuts for scientists, and can force them to halt studies, fire staff, and tell participants that their time and effort may have been wasted. Jace Flatt, a health and behavioral scientist at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, has had two NIH grants axed, for projects looking at dementia and memory loss in aging LGBTQ populations. If he loses a third NIH grant—as he expects to, he told me—“my lab is gone.” Because the terminations arrived without warning, scientists also had no time to prepare: Sarah Nowak, a vaccine researcher at the University of Vermont, told me she found out that her grant investigating childhood vaccine hesitancy in Brazil was likely on the chopping block when she read an article on the vaccine-related grant cuts in The Washington Post on Monday. (Nowak received her letter the next day.) Many studies, once terminated, would be difficult, if not outright impossible, to restart, Sean Arayasirikul, a medical sociologist at UC Irvine, told me. Medical interventions in clinical trials, for instance, can’t simply be paused and picked back up; many studies also rely heavily on collecting data at small and regular intervals, so interruptions are equivalent to massive data holes. Plus, participants released from a study won’t always be willing to come back, especially if they’re from communities that medical research has neglected in the past and that already have little reason to place continued trust in scientists. (Arayasirikul received a termination letter for their work investigating how stigma affects HIV preventive care for people of color who are also sexual and gender minorities.) Terminating grants to match political priorities also creates a fundamental instability in the government’s approach to scientific funding. If researchers can’t count on grants to carry across administrations, their government-funded work will become a series of short-term sprints, making it harder for science to reliably progress. Biomedical breakthroughs—including, say, the generation and approval of new drugs, or clinical trials for chronically ill patients—typically take years, sometimes even decades. And for an administration that has premised itself on efficiency, a never-ending loop of funding bait and switch does not exactly make for minimizing waste. “This says, At any point, we can just up and change our minds,” one NIH official told me. “That is not good stewardship of federal dollars.” Many of the administration’s actions might well be illegal—especially its targeting of DEI, which a federal judge recently deemed a potential violation of the First Amendment. But NIH officials have been put “in an impossible position,” one told me. Their choices are to either carry out the administration’s wishes and risk defying court orders or resist the changes at the agency and directly disobey their supervisors, putting themselves “at risk of insubordination and therefore unemployment,” the official said. Many have been choosing the first option, perhaps because the threat of losing their livelihood has felt so much nearer, and so much more tangible: They have now spent weeks watching colleagues resign, get fired, or be abruptly put on administrative leave. The environment at the agency has become suffocatingly toxic. “People are being screamed at, bullied, harassed,” one official told me. Some that once protested have since relented—perhaps because they now know that the immediate future will bring only more of the same.
If there’s one thing most Israelis agree on after nearly a year and a half of war, it’s the need for a deep, impartial investigation into the catastrophe of October 7—laying bare what went wrong that day, beforehand, and possibly after. The demand for such an inquiry has escalated, voiced in equal measure by gaunt ex-hostages and the outgoing, guilt-ridden, military chief of staff. And if there is one thing that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not want, it is such an investigation. The reason isn’t hard to fathom. A serious probe will likely hold Netanyahu responsible for Hamas catching Israel unprepared. Its conclusions could echo the signs directed at the prime minister at street protests: You’re the boss. You’re guilty. Commissions of inquiry are the normal mechanism by which Israeli governance reckons with its response to extraordinary events. The procedure for creating one is enshrined in law: The cabinet votes to create the commission and defines the scope of its inquiry. The chief justice of the supreme court appoints the members, and a senior judge or retired judge chairs. In the weightiest investigations, the chief justice has chaired the commission. The panel can subpoena witnesses and documents. It can find individuals responsible for actions and omissions. The findings aren’t criminal convictions, but they can include recommendations to dismiss high officials. [Yair Rosenberg: Why 70 percent of Israelis want Netanyahu to resign] The best-known inquiry commissions have near-mythic status in Israeli memory. One investigated how Israel was taken by surprise at the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and its preliminary report sparked the resignation or dismissal first of top generals and then of Prime Minister Golda Meir, ending her career. Another examined Israel’s role in the 1982 massacre, by a Lebanese Christian militia, of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut. The inquiry’s most resounding conclusion was that Defense Minister Ariel Sharon bore “personal responsibility,” because he “ignored the danger of acts of revenge and bloodshed” by the militia. Sharon resigned. Even when he became prime minister many years later, he did not hold the defense post again, as some prime ministers have done. With rare exceptions, the law on commissions of inquiry requires the government to decide to investigate itself. This is the procedure’s weakness, but popular pressure has historically proved effective in forcing the government’s hand. Meir decided to create the commission that ultimately forced her out in response to the public anger, spurred by army reservists returning home from the front. Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s government understood that it needed to act after an estimated 400,000 demonstrators flooded central Tel Aviv in what was then the largest protest the country had ever seen. This history best explains why the public today expects an inquiry commission, and why Netanyahu resists appointing one: Disasters beget commissions, and commissions can beget upheaval. Polling shows that up to 83 percent of Israelis, including a large majority of voters for parties in the ruling coalition, want a state inquiry into October 7. And in recent days, pressure for an inquiry has grown. One reason is that a slew of internal army investigations have been released, probing, among other things, the failure to defend border communities on the morning of the attack, and the years of overly sanguine assessments of Hamas. Those inquiries reinforce earlier press reports based on leaks and add frightening detail. The Military Intelligence Directorate had stopped listening in real time to Hamas walkie-talkies. It had acquired Hamas’s plan for an invasion of Israel—and dismissed it as purely aspirational. Completely misreading Hamas, the army believed that it was deterred from attacking Israel by the outcome of previous fighting. That bias led it to dismiss multiple signs of the impending attack in the hours before it began. The army’s investigation and a parallel one by the Shin Bet counterintelligence agency lay out those bodies’ mistakes. Only obliquely, though, do they say anything about the decisions or negligence of the government. This makes sense; an army investigation of elected leaders would have the scent of a coup. But the publication of the army probes draws attention to the government’s refusal to be investigated. It also fits a pattern. Generals have acknowledged that they let the country down; Netanyahu hasn’t. The military chief of staff on October 7 and after, Herzi Halevi, resigned just after the current cease-fire began in January and left office last week. The disaster occurred “on my watch, and I bear responsibility,” Halevi said when he turned over command. Then he added—pointedly, as Netanyahu was present—“It’s not right that only the Israel Defense Forces investigate an event like this. Establishing a state commission of inquiry is necessary and essential.” Early this month, opposition parties managed to force the Knesset to hold a debate on establishing a state commission. An opposition parliamentarian read a letter from Yarden Bibas, who was taken captive on October 7 and released in the first stage of the now-stalled hostage deal. Bibas was still observing the traditional Jewish week of mourning for his murdered wife and two small children, whose bodies had been returned from Gaza. “I call on you, Mr. Prime Minister,” Bibas wrote, to “unite the people of Israel, bring peace to our souls, fulfill the will of the people and the [victims’] families. Announce today the establishment of a state commission of inquiry.” Netanyahu was required to respond, and he did so with a speech of more than half an hour that included jibes at the opposition and an attempt to link the former prime minister and outspoken government critic Ehud Barak to Jeffrey Epstein. On the inquiry issue itself, he conceded that “it’s crucial to investigate thoroughly everything that happened on October 7.” But, he claimed, a state commission would be “politically tilted” and its “conclusions known in advance.” What he and “a majority of the people” wanted, he said, was an “objective, balanced” inquiry panel. He appeared to be referring to plans that his inner circle had reportedly floated to get around the commission law, possibly by establishing an ad hoc parliamentary panel with coalition and opposition members. Under the commission law, Chief Justice Yitzhak Amit would choose the panel, and the retired chief justice Esther Hayut could conceivably chair it. The prime minister and his coalition regard both judges as too liberal—and too independent. But what they seem to be suggesting instead is to choose the panel on the basis of party, which would be overtly political, as well as lacking the long precedent and settled law of a state commission. [Read: How Netanyahu misread his relationship with Trump] Netanyahu was prime minister for 13 of the 14 years before October 7. A commission of inquiry might look into his strategic choice to allow Hamas to remain in control of Gaza as a means of keeping the Palestinians divided. It might also determine whether the notion that Hamas had been deterred, and so did not pose an immediate threat, was the army’s and that Netanyahu simply failed to question it—or whether generals shaped their evaluations to fit what the prime minister wanted to hear. Such an inquiry could determine what warning signs the prime minister may have ignored in the days and years before the catastrophe. In Israel, a state commission of inquiry is not merely a judicial instrument or a means of settling facts. It’s a ritual of national closure that allows people to put events in order and move on. The commission’s summary of errors and of horrors, its assessment of culpability, its recommendations for the future—all of these help turn trauma into history. Netanyahu is more aware than anyone of what an inquiry might discover beyond what the public already knows. The longer and more insistently he opposes a state commission, the more he reinforces the expectation that he will be weighed in the balance and found wanting.
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Decades ago, and probably extending well before that, there was a custom among middle-class Canadian families to send their sons out West to work on the railroad for a spell. The parents’ intention was not only to get the boys out of their hair for a while but also to toughen them up and introduce them to the ways of the world well beyond what would now be called their comfort zones. As it happened, one of my father’s sisters, Aunt Irene, was a vice president of the Canadian National Railways, a sprawling transportation network of trains, steamships, and grand hotels. It was as much a part of the Canadian national identity as the Bonanza star Lorne Greene and Hockey Night in Canada. Aunt Irene was a tall, thin, dignified woman. I don’t think I ever saw her when she wasn’t wearing a twinset and pearls. Family lore had it that during the final chapter of World War II, she had been the wire operator who sent word of Hitler’s death to news organizations across Canada. Afterward, she went to work for the Canadian National Railways, also as a wire operator, and rose through the ranks. Egged on by my parents, I wrote to her, asking for a job. I was 19 at the time. As she described it in her letter back to me, there were two types of positions available. I could be a groundman, at $2.20 an hour. Or I could be a lineman, at $2.80 an hour. Like any sane person, I had a fear of heights and said that I’d like to get a groundman’s job, which I was told entailed lugging equipment to the linemen, who climbed telegraph poles all day. Aunt Irene told me to report to the Symington Yard, in Winnipeg. With only a dim idea of what I was getting myself into, I boarded a train heading 1,300 miles west, to the capital of Manitoba. I stayed with my aunt the first night and reported to the railroad’s headquarters at 7 o’clock the next morning with a duffel bag of my belongings: a few pairs of shorts, jeans, a jacket, a couple of shirts, a pair of Kodiak work boots, and some Richard Brautigan and Jack Kerouac books, acceptable reading matter for a pseudo-sophisticate of the time. The Symington Yard was one of the largest rail yards in the world. On some days, it held 7,000 boxcars. Half that many moved in and out on a single day. Like many other young men my age, I was slim, unmuscled, and soft. In the hall where they interviewed and inspected the candidates for line work, I blanched as I looked over a large poster that showed the outline of a male body and the prices the railroad paid if you lost a part of it. As I recall, legs brought you $750 apiece. Arms were $500. A foot brought a mere $250. In Canadian dollars. There were about 10 of us, and we were led to a room where a severe-looking nurse peered down our throats, checked our hearts, and then asked for urine samples. I filled the beaker to the very top by accident, and when the nurse attempted to pick it up off the table, she couldn’t help but spill a bit down her hand. Two of the tougher-looking recruits behind me thought this was funny, and one patted me on the back. By the afternoon, I was on a train to a small town out on the endless Saskatchewan prairie—my head leaning against the window, my stomach aching from hunger—trying to think of a way that I could get out of this in a few weeks and go home. This was my parents’ idea of what I should be doing. Certainly not mine. A man with the big, meaty hands of someone who used them in taxing labor was sitting beside me. He had brought his own food, and out of a small pouch he pulled a roll that had been wrapped in waxed paper. His sandwich was like nothing I had ever seen before. To me, a sandwich was something made of white Wonder Bread, with baloney or peanut butter and jam inside. But this was a round, soft roll, and the meat was thick and breaded. The man noticed me looking at the sandwich and quietly brought another one out of his pouch. He indicated that I should take it. I made a gesture to say, No, no, I couldn’t. But he just smiled and put it in my hand. I wasn’t sure if he spoke English. I unwrapped the waxed paper and bit in. It was breaded chicken with a glorious sauce. To this day, I don’t think anything I have ever eaten was as welcome or delicious. I thanked him profusely over and over, and he just kept nodding and smiling. We pulled up to a siding, where the conductor said I had to get off. I did as I was told and stood by the tracks as the train pulled away. When it was gone, I looked around. The land was as flat as a billiard table and stretched for miles in every direction. On the siding was a collection of boxcars. A man waved to me in a menacing manner, indicating that I should get over to him, chop-chop-ish. I looked behind me and then turned back to him and gave a Who me? gesture. He nodded, and I hurried over and introduced myself. He said nothing. He was in his mid-40s and built like a refrigerator. His blond hair was short on the scalp. Enormous veins ran down his forehead and around his nose. He had terrifying bright-blue eyes and hands the size of a catcher’s mitt. His incisors were pointed, and one of his upper teeth was enameled in gold. He looked through me, pointed to a boxcar with windows on the side, and left. I walked over to the boxcar, climbed the steps, and opened the door. It was a Saturday, not only a day off but also the day of new arrivals. Men of various ages and sizes were stretched out on the wooden bunks or settling in. There were eight beds on one side of the door and eight on the other. Nobody said a word, but a fellow who was lying down pointed a nicotine-stained finger in the direction of a bottom bunk at the back of the car. I thanked him and sat on the bed and looked around. I was the youngest in the group. Everyone was smoking. Everyone had a mustache. And everyone looked a lot scrappier than the people I was used to. The bed was as hard as the floor. There was a single pillow and a worn gray blanket that lay folded at the foot. As I was to learn in the coming days, all but one of the men had some sort of record—breaking and entering being at the bottom rung of achievement and grand theft auto being at the top. Petty thievery and criminal mischief were almost entry-level accolades. Working on the railroad may have been a hardening regimen for doughy middle-class boys; for others, it was a sort of French Foreign Legion way station between prison gates and semicivilized society. We ate in what was known as the reefer car, a refrigerated boxcar. It was broken up into three parts. One part was the cold box, where ice and frozen meat and other provisions were stored; one part housed the kitchen; and the last part held a long communal dining table. On my first day, I sat down at the end of the table and was joined by a tall, fair-skinned fellow with curly red hair and a decent mustache. His name was Craig Walls. He wanted to be a writer and was taking a year off to earn money for his tuition at the University of Winnipeg. Canadian kids in those days tended to pay their own way through school. Annual college costs were in the $1,200 range, and therefore within striking distance if you worked in construction or on the railroad during the summer. There was a certain pride in the deepness of the blue in the blue-collar job you took. Construction was good. The railroad was better. Working in the oil fields of northern Alberta was the deepest blue of all. Two others at my and Walls’s end of the bunk car became part of our circle, if you could call it that. One was a short, funny, wiry kid named Ernie, who had grand theft auto on his résumé. The other was Errol, a darkly handsome lady-killer. He had syphilis and said that it required him to have a small whisk device inserted into his penis at regular intervals to remove the thin scabs that formed there. I don’t know if he was kidding or not, but when he told us this, Walls and Ernie and I could barely speak. But it did make Errol seem awfully cosmopolitan. The next morning, the newbies were called out by the fellow who had waved to me from the siding. He never announced the fact, but he was the foreman, and his name was Herb Harzbeck. He was German, and there was some talk among the vets on the crew that he had been in the war—on which side was up for debate. The vets called him “Squarehead” behind his back. On the ground were piles of equipment for the newcomers. We were told to grab a set each. There was a big leather belt about four inches wide with slots for tools. There were also spikes attached to braces, with leather straps to hold them to your legs. These were called pole gaffs. The braces went from the instep to just below the knee. They strapped around the top of the calf and at the ankle, and there was another leather strap that went under the boot. After a few false starts, we managed to get the pole gaffs on and hobbled around a bit, the way skiers do with a new pair of boots. There was a pile of leather gloves with long gauntlets that came up almost to the elbow. We sifted through the lot, trying to find pairs that matched and fit. When we were suited up, Herb brought us over to one of the telegraph poles to show us how to climb: hands on either side of the pole; lean back, but not too far. And then drive the first spike into the wood. When that was set, drive the next spike in a little higher. Then the next one, and so forth. He was essentially walking up the pole, and he made it look easy. It was not easy. I’d seen telephone repairmen back home climbing poles that had metal footholds all the way up, almost like ladders. But they wore safety belts that allowed them to lean back and fix whatever needed fixing. Here there were no foot grips. I asked Herb where the safety belts were, and he gave me a dismissive look. There were no safety belts. We took turns trying to climb the pole. There were a number of false starts and tumbles. I could get up maybe three steps before my arms gave out or one of my spikes didn’t dig in deep enough and I fell to the ground. This was all a terrible mistake, I kept thinking. At the end of the demonstration and my own feeble attempts, I worked my way over to Herb and said that there had been some sort of error—that I had signed on to be a groundman. “No groundmen,” he barked. “Just linemen.” Over the next couple of days, my general fear of heights and my more specific fear of falling off a telegraph pole began to subside. I managed to climb a 20-foot pole. And then a 30-foot pole. I began to get cocky, and in an attempt to scramble up one of the taller poles, I slipped near the top and shot straight down. In my shock and embarrassment, I didn’t notice it at first, but I had torn the front of my shirt and ripped big patches of skin off my chest. One of the patches held the few chest hairs I had grown by this point in my life. Herb took me to the reefer car. He cleaned off the blood and put a block of ice on my chest, which eased the pain. Then he wrapped my chest in a bandage. The skin began to heal in a couple of weeks, and within months was back to normal. And lo, where there had been a few sprigs, something approaching actual chest hair began to appear. [Graydon Carter: Christopher Hitchens was fearless] That summer, I had been trying to grow my hair long. I wanted to be a hippie—or at least look like one. But one day, Herb motioned to me and Walls and made us sit down in front of him. He pulled an electric shaver out of his vest and shaved us to the scalp. Aside from the lack of a criminal record, which in this group was like working in a hospital without a medical degree, I wanted to stand out. There is nothing more parochial or bland than being a soft, white Anglican kid from Ottawa. I feigned being something of a Jewish intellectual. In this crowd, the mere fact that I had brought books singled me out as a great thinker. A few of the tougher hands took to calling me “Professor.” Those telegraph poles you see alongside train tracks served two purposes back then. One was for sending telegrams. The other was to enable dispatchers to know where the trains were at any given moment. The telegraph wires would eventually wear out, and our job as linemen was to haul fresh wire up the pole on our shoulders, remove the old wire, let it drop to the ground, and then connect the new wire to the glass insulators on the horizontal wooden spars. Once we had mastered the fine art of climbing, we were ready to be put to use. We were awake at 5 a.m., and after breakfast we suited up and stood around anxiously. Even in late spring, it was cold on a Canadian-prairie morning, a few degrees above freezing. We would wear two or three layers on top to stay warm. A group of us would climb onto a motor car—not one of those contraptions from silent movies, with hand-operated seesaw locomotion, but a motorized cart with benches big enough for five or six men on either side. We would be dropped off half a mile apart, on the assumption that we could each cover half a mile of track before lunch. Illustration by John Gall. Sources: Frank Lennon / Toronto Star / Getty; Paul McKinnon / Alamy; New York Public Library. On that first morning, I jumped off the motor car. There was already a climber half a mile behind me. And in minutes, one would be deposited half a mile in front of me. Other than that, it was just me and nothing but flat prairie. The new telegraph line had been laid out alongside the track. The poles up ahead looked to be no taller than 20 feet. It took me two or three attempts to reach the top of the first one. Like all the others, it was covered in creosote, a black, sticky, coal-tar coating that preserved the wood but stuck to gloves, jeans, and skin. I survived the first pole. I survived the second pole. In four hours, I made it to the spot, half a mile beyond, where the climber after me had been dropped off earlier in the day. The temperature had risen 30 degrees between sunrise and noon, and I had gradually started to remove layers of clothing. The motor car appeared in the distance and came my way. It stopped to pick up other climbers, and then every few hundred yards or so, we’d stop and grab the clothes we had all discarded as the temperature rose. This was in the days before bottled water, and by the time we were picked up, we were parched. There was a big cooler on the motor car, and a ladle. I opened the top and saw that it indeed contained water, but not just water. The surface was awash with dead flies and bits of grass. I dipped the ladle into the cooler and gingerly managed to get it out without picking up any extras. The water was warm and fetid. But it was wet, and I learned to appreciate it. We returned to the railcars for lunch, then went back out for another four hours. One morning, Herb threw a bunch of canvas hats on the ground. “Take them,” he said. We each grabbed one. The hats came with a fine mesh that fell from the brim onto our shoulders. They were mosquito hats. We were heading into a patch where the black flies were horrendous. Black flies are not like houseflies. Canadian black flies are the size of a thumb tip, and they bite. For three days, we lived in those hats. We never took them off. We lifted the netting when we were eating to make way for food. We slept with them on too. At night, the sound of black flies smacking against the mesh screens was unnerving. Evenings were spent smoking, drinking, playing cards, and reading. Then the whole ordeal started again the next morning. Weekends were different. At sundown on Friday, we were given passes on the Canadian National trains and could travel as far as we wanted, as long as we were back at work and ready to climb at 5 o’clock sharp on Monday. On one of our first weekends off, Walls and I decided we’d try to make it to Winnipeg, about 600 miles to the east. I resolved to take a shower before leaving. The routine for this was highly labor-intensive. It involved going to the reefer car and chipping off a chunk of ice about half the size of a cinder block. You put the ice in a pail and then onto a stove to melt it. Then you took the pail and poured the water into a contraption that looked like a watering can and hooked it to the ceiling over the shower area. You pulled the nozzle down a bit, wetted yourself, soaped, and prayed there’d be enough water left to rinse off. There were no sleepers available on that trip to Winnipeg, so they put us in the mail car, near the end of the train. We slept on sacks with the Royal Mail Canada logo on them. Old locomotives in those days had bunks right in the engine, and on a subsequent trip, Walls and I were allowed to sleep there. Meals were taken in the dining car. We were a pretty scruffy lot, so they usually sat us in the back, near the kitchen, where big, muscular men cooked up meals on long grills heated by gas jets. [In Focus: Jack Delano’s color photos of Chicago’s rail yards in the 1940s] By most Fridays, though, we were too worn out to travel. Saturdays were for writing home, reading, and the occasional water fight. The siding was equipped with dozens of fire extinguishers. They were big red canisters that you filled with water and then strapped to your back. There was a pump that you compressed with one hand, and a hose for the other hand. We’d load them up and divide into teams. Often it would escalate. During one fight, we climbed to the roofs of the boxcars and scampered across the tops the way gunfighters did in old Westerns. During one such water battle, we noticed an enormous machine off in the distance. As it approached along the track, we realized that it was a vehicle maybe two stories high and two or three times as long as a boxcar. It crept ahead slowly, deliberately, replacing old track with new track. Half of its large crew loosened the rails in front of the machine. And the other half tightened the new rails down in its wake. As the machine got closer, it became apparent that this was a much rougher-looking crew than ours. We put away our water cannons and just watched as the machine made its way slowly by us. The water cannons were always filled for emergency use. Often this involved putting out brush fires that started in the midday sun when what were called “hot boxes” went by. These were overheated axle bearings that could accidentally ignite the brush. We’d be sent out on motor cars to extinguish the flames. On my first fire call, the wind picked up, and the flames licked skyward and singed my eyebrows down to almost nothing. They grew back, but never as thickly as they had been before the fire. We were advised to stand well clear of the ditches that border the rails when the Super Continental, the railroad’s gleaming passenger train, whisked by every day. One rookie hadn’t heard this bit of useful information, and on his first day, as the train sped through, he got too close. He was soaked and a bit more: Someone had flushed a toilet. Back then, there were no holding tanks on trains; when you flushed, the waste just emptied onto the tracks. The Super Continental came by at the same time every day. Often we’d make a pact to pull our pants down and moon the passengers. Our cook got sick at one point and was sent home to Saskatoon. Herb announced that we’d each take turns cooking a meal. We had complained about the food when the cook was there. But with him gone, it deteriorated rapidly. I had never cooked a thing in my life. When my time came, I went to the reefer car to scout the provisions. There was a large leg of something, so I brought it to the kitchen. A coating of green covered parts of it, and I cut those sections off with a knife. And then I put the meat in the oven. I had no idea what temperature to set the oven at or how long to leave the meat there. I didn’t want to burn it, so I set the oven at medium heat and left it for three hours. I told Walls about this, and he told me I was out of my mind. We raced to the kitchen and opened the oven door. The meat had barely cooked at all. And given that it was about a foot thick, he told me that we would need another four or five hours at high heat. Dinner was late that night, and as we picked through the stringy, undercooked meat, I kept my head low to avoid the looks coming my way from my fellow diners. Our pal Errol had a habit of heading into town to pick up local girls. One night he returned a bit drunk and fell into his bunk. The lights were out and he drifted off to sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night, the door to the bunk car was kicked open, and all of us inside were jolted awake. Three men stormed in with flashlights, going from bunk to bunk. When the light shone into my eyes, I covered them with my hand. The men continued to move down the car until they got to Errol’s bunk. Two of them grabbed him and hauled him outside. We couldn’t see much in the dark, but clearly they were working Errol over pretty badly. Then they left, screaming obscenities, and made their way, flashlights in hand, across the open field. Walls and I ran outside to see if Errol was okay. He was. But just. He had a broken rib and a black eye and was bleeding from the head. We woke Herb and he came and bandaged him up. In the morning, we heard the backstory. It seemed that Errol had tried to pick up one of the men’s girlfriend, and she was up for his affections. He left the crew a few days later, and we never heard from him again. I had signed on for six months, and as my tour of duty was coming to an end, I was still unsure about what I was going to do with my life. I’d had jobs before, but none like this. My parents weren’t alone in making sure their kids were busy during the summer, working at something, anything. An “allowance” was a thing we read about in American books and magazines. As a result, I was always digging around for pocket money. During winters, I had worked as a ski instructor at a local club and sorted mail at the post office over Christmas break. In the summers, I worked as a camp counselor and canoe instructor. I worked as an unarmed bank guard one hot summer, and I pumped gas. Nothing I had done before, or pretty much anything I did after, could match the sense of accomplishment and sheer exhilaration of that half year on the railroad. I liked being around the crew, most of whom had endured hardscrabble childhoods and had just naturally gotten into a bit of trouble in their teens and 20s. When my stint was done, I packed my gear into my duffel bag and said my goodbyes to the other fellows. Walls and I kept in touch for a while, but in the days before the internet, this wasn’t easy. One day, a letter I had sent him came back with a stamp saying he had moved. A decade or so ago, I heard from a friend of his that Walls had died, which saddened me terribly. Out on the line on one of my last days, just before dusk, I was preparing to get picked up for the trip back to the bunk car when I saw the Super Continental in the distance. I clambered up to a field beside the tracks to watch it go by. It was traveling slowly, and in the pink late-afternoon light, I could see into the dining car. There was a young couple seated inside. They were nicely dressed and looked to be having a good time in the amber glow of the table lamp by the window. Lonely, tired, and dirty, I felt a million miles away from the attractive couple. It was then that I resolved that, whatever I did, I was done with showering at the end of the week rather than the beginning of the day. It was time to get on with the life I envisioned for myself. I wasn’t completely sure what that was going to be. But I knew one thing: I wanted to be on the other side of that window. This article was adapted from Graydon Carter’s new memoir, When the Going Was Good. It appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “On Track.” *Lead image sources: Underwood Archives / Alamy; New York Public Library; Touring Club Italiano / Marka / Universal Images Group / Getty
Americans hold all sorts of views on tariffs. Some are opposed on free-market grounds. Others are in favor for reasons of national security or to bring back American manufacturing. Those debates are part of a normal democratic process. But President Donald Trump’s first weeks in office have shown that a principled discussion over tariff policy is simply not on the agenda, because the administration’s tariff policy is nonsense. What we have is chaos. One U.S. uncertainty index of economic policy, which goes back to 1985, has been higher at only one point in the past 40 years: when the coronavirus pandemic began. That, of course, was a global phenomenon that the United States could do little to avoid. What’s going on now, by contrast, is entirely self-inflicted. [Read: Trump’s most inexplicable decision yet] Chaos is Trump’s calling card, but few could have expected how quickly the president would ricochet all over the place on the size, nature, and timing of—not to mention the justifications for—one of his signature policies. Before markets can adjust to one pronouncement, the world’s smartphones buzz in unison announcing that the wealthiest nation in the world, whose dollars hold up the global financial system, is hurtling in another direction once again. Just consider this abridged timeline of the most significant twists and turns thus far: November 25, 2024: Trump posted on Truth Social that on the first day of his new term, he would “sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25 percent Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders.” January 20, 2025: The first day of Trump’s term. No tariffs announced. Instead, Trump signed a memo directing the Commerce secretary to “investigate the causes of our country’s large and persistent annual trade deficits.” January 26: After the Colombian president rejected U.S. military flights carrying deportees, Trump threatened 25 percent tariffs on all Colombian goods. Colombia threatened to respond but deescalated before the new taxes were put in place. February 1: Tariffs against China, Mexico, and Canada are on. February 3: Tariffs (for Mexico and Canada) are off. February 4: Chinese tariffs go into effect, and the Chinese government announces retaliatory tariffs as well as export controls on key minerals. February 11: Trump imposes a 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum from all countries. February 13: Trump threatens reciprocity to any country enacting tariff policies against the United States. February 25: Trump raises the possibility of tariffs on copper. February 27: Canada and Mexico tariffs maybe coming back on? March 1: In the middle of a housing crisis, Trump raises the possibility of tariffs on lumber and timber. March 4: Okay, yes, the Canada and Mexico tariffs are back on. March 6: Just kidding, only for some stuff. March 9: Tariffs “could go up,” Trump says on Fox News. March 11: Ontario threatens 25 percent tariffs on electricity, causing Trump to promise a 50—yes, 50—percent tariff on Canadian aluminum and steel. By the end of the day, both countries backed off these threats. March 12: A big day for tariffs. The 25 percent tax on all imports of steel and aluminum go into effect, and in retaliation, the European Union enacted duties on $28 billion worth of American goods, while Canada announced $21 billion in tariffs on American goods. March 13: Not to be outdone, Trump threatened 200 percent tariffs on wine and other alcoholic beverages from Europe. To recap, the United States is now in a trade war with its largest trading partner (Canada), its second-largest trading partner (the European Union), its third-largest trading partner (Mexico), and its fourth-largest trading partner (China). It’s obvious to the point of cliché that businesses rely on regulatory—and fiscal—policy predictability in order to plan hiring, capital investments, and pricing strategies. And that means these past few weeks have been very rough. How can you begin a capital-intensive project if you have no idea what anything will cost? The chaos of the current trade policy is a strange parallel to the chaos that the Trump administration has unleashed on the federal government. One difference is evident, however: Although markets expected the new president to go on a deregulatory spree, they failed to take his affinity for tariffs seriously—or at least thought things would be executed a little more deliberately. An adviser to prominent energy companies told me that because “infrastructure projects require five to 10 years for permitting and construction,” some of her clients are pausing normal business decisions. “The current environment is so chaotic that it’s difficult to understand effects [on] permitting pathways, community approvals, and supply-chain costs.” She requested anonymity to speak freely about her clients’ struggles in the early days of the new Trump administration. The big companies are in a better spot than small businesses. As we’ve already seen when the Big Three automakers were able to get direct relief from the tariffs, large companies that can provide Trump with good PR are able to get carve-outs from tariffs. But small businesses are less suited to absorbing shocks and are less likely to stay abreast of the day-to-day shifts of tariff policy. Many will be unable to game the system. Uncertainty may also be paralyzing the labor markets. As my colleague Rogé Karma reported last month, job switching is at its lowest level in nearly a decade, even though the unemployment rate remains low. Part of what’s going on is that lack of confidence in the future breeds risk aversion: Employers are too rattled to make a bet on a new hire, and employees are too worried to leave a safe position. [Read: A great way to get Americans to eat worse] Some people—such as those who are worried that a backlash may invigorate American support for free markets—would like the public to believe that the country is in the throes of an “economic masterplan” and that the chaos of this moment will cohere into a reasonable strategy. Color me skeptical. For one, the president and his team have yet to articulate a consistent set of arguments for supporting his vision. Instead, the justifications for the tariff policies change as fast as the policies themselves. If the tariffs are about rebalancing America’s trade and restoring its manufacturing greatness, then why are they being removed? If they’re about improving America’s negotiating position vis-à-vis bordering nations on issues such as fentanyl and immigration, then why are we putting them on Canada? Is Trump doing this to make Americans richer? Is he doing this to balance the budget? To hit back at other countries for their unfair policies? For national-security reasons? To solve the child-care-cost crisis? As the Yale Law professor Jerry Mashaw wrote for Fordham Law Review, “The authority of all law relies on a set of complex reasons for believing that it should be authoritative. Unjustifiable law demands reform, unjustifiable legal systems demand revolution.” That our elected officials are required to explain themselves, to give reasons for the actions they take, is a cornerstone of democratic accountability. Without clear reasons, it’s not just businesses that are at stake. It’s democratic governance. But if sifting through Trump’s roiling sea of rationalizations is important for democratic purposes, it’s also personally significant. Every business, worker, and consumer in the country has a stake in figuring out the why and what of tariffs. [Read: Don’t invite a recession in] Ideologues across the political spectrum resent the American voter’s materialism. Environmentalists moan that the public refuses to bear higher energy costs in order to help mitigate the effects of climate change; animal-rights advocates worry that people won’t pay to ensure better treatment of livestock; farm advocates who already benefit from distortionary subsidies have even advocated for price floors. Now it’s the economic populists insisting that the public should be willing to pay higher prices on the path to restoring American greatness. On Truth Social, Trump posted an article with the headline “Shut Up About Egg Prices,” and Republicans are insisting that it’s worth it to “pay a little bit more” to support the president. But “America First” has always been a better slogan than organizing principle. When people have the option to pay for domestic goods at higher prices, they opt out, time and again. The speed with which Republicans have gone from hammering Democrats about high grocery prices to justifying the inflationary effects of tariffs is remarkable. Yet Republicans are likely to learn the lesson that Democrats did last November: Before they are Republicans, Democrats, or even Americans, my countrymen are consumers first.
The skid steer’s hydraulic breaker rose up toward the sky, then plunged into the street below, rupturing the concrete and the yellow paint overlaying it. The jackhammer’s staccato thundered over the din of passing traffic. It was a Tuesday morning in March, and people walking by covered their ears. Others took out their phones to capture the destruction. The bright-yellow paint, now fragmented into a growing pile of concrete, had spelled out the words Black Lives Matter over two blocks on 16th Street Northwest, about a quarter mile from the White House. The city-sanctioned mural had been created in 2020, after the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes. Floyd’s death catalyzed racial-justice protests nationwide, including in Washington. On June 1, federal authorities used smoke grenades and tear gas to remove protesters from Lafayette Park; President Donald Trump then marched across the park so that he could pose with a Bible in front of a nearby church. Four days later, the area was renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza and the mural was painted. Many believed that it would become a permanent fixture in the district, and originally, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said that it would be, so it could serve as a “gathering place for reflection, planning and action, as we work toward a more perfect union.” But a few weeks ago, Republican Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia introduced legislation that would withhold millions of dollars in federal funding from the city if it did not remove the mural and change the name of the area to “Liberty Plaza.” D.C. was already facing funding uncertainty and has been shaken by layoffs of federal workers in the thousands. Mayor Bowser decided that fighting to preserve the mural was not a battle worth having. [From the January/February 2024 issue: Civil rights undone] “The mural inspired millions of people and helped our city through a very painful period, but now we can’t afford to be distracted by meaningless congressional interference,” Bowser wrote in a post on X. I made my way to Black Lives Matter Plaza on Tuesday, the day after construction crews began removing the mural. I have spent the past several years writing about our collective relationships to monuments and memorials that tell the story of American history. I have watched statues being erected, and I have watched others taken down. In both the United States and abroad, I have wrestled with whether monuments are meant to perform a shallow contrition or honestly account for historical traumas. Part of what I have come to understand is that such iconography can rarely be disentangled from its social and political ecosystem. Symbols are not just symbols. They reflect the stories that people tell. Those stories shape the narratives people carry about where they come from and where they’re going. And those narratives shape public policy that materially affects people’s lives. The removal of the mural is not the same as a change in policy, but it is happening in tandem with many policy changes, and is a reflection of the same shift in priorities. It is part of a movement that is removing Black people from positions of power by dismissing them as diversity hires, rescinding orders that ensure equal opportunity in government contracts, stripping federal funding from schools that teach full and honest Black history, and suing companies that attempt to diversify their workforce. This goes far beyond an attack on DEI; my colleague Adam Serwer calls it the Great Resegregation: What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy. Near the construction site, I walked up to one of the workers holding a stop sign near an intersection. Antonio (he asked me to use only his first name because he wasn’t authorized to speak with reporters) wore a highlighter-yellow vest, his dreadlocks falling down his back from beneath his white hard hat. He told me he lives in Southeast D.C. and remembered feeling a sense of pride when the mural was painted. When he found out that he would be part of the team removing it, he asked not to be behind the wheel of any of the machines. “I just told them I don’t want a part in touching it,” he said, shaking his head. He looked over at the jackhammer pummeling the concrete on the other side of the street. “It was a memorial for the culture, and now I feel like something is being stripped from the culture.” On the other side of the street was a woman in colorful sneakers and a green beanie. Nadine Seiler stood alone holding up a large cloth sign above her head that read Black Lives Matter Trump Can’t Erase Us. “The reason that this is happening is that people want to ‘make America great again,’” she told me. “But the same people who want to ‘make America great again’ don’t want white children to know how America became great in the first place”—by “exploiting people who are not white.” “They’re trying to erase everything,” she said. Seiler doesn’t blame Mayor Bowser for removing the statue: “She has been put in a difficult position, because ultimately she’s going to lose anyway.” She blames President Trump, the Republican Party, and the American people themselves who are standing by and allowing democracy to erode all around them. While I was there, Seiler was the only person I saw rallying against the removal of the mural. She came to the United States from Trinidad 37 years ago, and has become something of a full-time protester. She has history with the Black Lives Matter Plaza: She was among the activists in 2020 who hung hundreds of signs affirming Black lives and inveighing against Trump along the fence that surrounds the White House. On multiple occasions, people came and tore the signs down, so for three weeks Seiler “lived on Black Lives Matter Plaza” to protect them. She told me she’s since become the custodian of those signs, and holds many in storage. I told Seiler I was surprised that more people weren’t there protesting. She said that she wasn’t surprised, but she was disheartened. It was reflective, she said, of the tepid resistance Americans have put up to the new administration more broadly. She’s attended protests over the past several weeks focused on some of Trump’s earliest executive actions: the dismantling of USAID and withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords and World Health Organization; the indiscriminate firing of thousands of federal workers; the blanket access the president has given Elon Musk and his DOGE team to sensitive and classified information; the assault on the rights of trans people; the effort to end birthright citizenship; the pardoning of Capitol insurrectionists; and more. At those protests, she told me, she’d seen maybe 100 or 200 people. This is wholly inadequate given the gravity of what is happening, she said: “There should be thousands of people in the streets. There should be millions of people in the streets.” [Thomas Chatterton Williams: How the woke right replaced the woke left] Someone drove by, slowed down, and took a picture of Seiler’s sign before driving off. “We’re not rising up,” she continued. In many other countries, she said, there has been more robust resistance to the rise of authoritarianism. “We’re just sitting here and taking it without barely any pushback.” She added, “It’s very disappointing to me, because I’m an import, and I was sold on American democracy, and American exceptionalism, and American checks and balances”—she lowered her sign and folded it up under her arm—“and we are seeing that all of this is nothing. It’s all a farce.” Seiler, despite having gotten citizenship two decades ago, doesn’t think that it will protect her if the Trump administration starts going after dissenters. The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder who led protests against Israel at Columbia University and is now in immigration detention, has only reinforced a sense that her days are numbered. “I feel eventually they’ll find a way to come at me,” she said, tears beginning to form in her eyes. Behind us, the pulverizing of concrete continued. Clouds of dust rose up and surrounded the machines that were cracking the street open. It will take several weeks of work for the mural to be completely destroyed and paved over again. I looked down at the fragments of letters in front of me. The first word they chose to remove was Matter.
Chances are low that Joe Rogan will save your soul—or your party. Since Donald Trump’s election victory, countless Democrats have lamented their party’s losses among men, and young men, in particular. One refrain has been a yearning for a “Rogan of the left” who might woo back all the dudes who have migrated to MAGA. If the wishfulness is misplaced, the underlying problem is real: Trump carried men by roughly 12 points in November, including 57 percent of men under 30.. I recently spoke with Democrats across different levels of leadership to see how they were trying to address this electorally lethal gender gap. Two theories for how to win back men, I found, are bubbling up. One is to improve the party’s cultural appeal to men, embracing rather than scolding masculinity. The other is to focus on more traditional messaging about the economy, on the assumption that if Democrats build an agenda for blue-collar America, the guys will follow. These approaches are not necessarily in conflict, but they each present a challenge for the modern Democratic Party. And as pundits and consultants peddle their rival solutions, they highlight another risk: Even if Democrats can settle on a message, will voters believe they really mean it? [Jonathan Chait: Democrats show why they lost] Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts is one of many Democrats who believe that the party has to make a serious, sustained outreach effort to connect with men. What Democrats should not say or do seems more obvious than what they should proactively offer. “No one wants to hear men talk about masculinity,” Auchincloss, a former Marine, told me. “We’re not going to orient society’s decision making to the cognitive worldview of a 16-year-old male.” What Democrats should not say or do seems more obvious than what they should proactively offer. “No one wants to hear men talk about masculinity,” Auchincloss told me. “We’re not going to orient society’s decision making to the cognitive worldview of a 16-year-old male.” Even as he disavowed the idea that solving the guy problem should involve some promotion of testosterone-laced pandering, Auchincloss suggested that the party ought to find its way to a more positive, inspirational message. “We need to embrace a culture of heroism, not a culture of victimhood. Young men need models for their ambition,” he said. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut also notes liberal squeamishness about masculine themes; he says the party is losing male voters in part because even talking about the need to improve the lives of men could run afoul of what he calls the “word police” on the left. Murphy told me, “There’s a worry that when you start talking about gender differences and masculinity, that you’re going to very quickly get in trouble.” The Democratic Party, he thinks, has not been purposeful enough in opening up a conversation with men in general and young men specifically. “There is a reluctance inside the progressive movement to squarely acknowledge gender differences, and that has really put us on the back foot.” For Murphy, the right message might come from an earlier era—a notion that could seem antithetical to the very idea of progressivism. “We cannot and shouldn’t abandon some of the traditional ways that men find value and meaning: in providing protection, in taking high levels of risk, in taking pride in physical work,” he told me. “There’s a lot of worry that all of those traditional male characteristics are somehow illegitimate.” So far, the GOP seems to be doing a far more effective job of engaging male voters in ways that reflect the reality of today’s popular culture. Trump has embraced UFC’s Dana White, and has made grand entrances at MMA fights. (Years before he ran for president, Trump would appear at pro-wrestling events, and he is a member of the WWE hall of fame.) “We have to go where people are consuming culture and sports and entertainment,” Auchincloss told me, “and talk about issues of the day in a way that is coded for political orientation but that is more broadly accessible and interesting.” Last fall, Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona tried this Go where the men are concept. “We should do anything to reach out to voters,” he told me. “And that means men.” Gallego argues that Democrats have been too hesitant to directly address men’s everyday reality, and that this is a grave mistake. “Black, Latino, and white men are not doing well in this country. They’re not obtaining college degrees,” Gallego said. “If we were to look at the numbers and just take out the gender, we would say, Wow, that group of Americans needs some attention. But all of a sudden, if you add the little m next to that, it’s somehow something that we shouldn’t be worried about—and I reject that.” Gallego’s Senate-campaign stops included boxing gyms, soccer watch parties, and Mexican rodeos. Trump won the state at the presidential level by more than five percentage points, but Gallego defeated his Republican challenger, Kari Lake, in the Senate battle with a 2.4 percent margin. “I think the voters, the male voters, understood that I understood them and what they were going through,” he said. The conundrum for Democrats that Murphy identifies is that they are ill-equipped to compete with Republicans for a jacked-up version of manhood because doing so would cut against the interests and rights of a crucial bloc of their coalition: women. “Now the right is offering a really irresponsible antidote, which is to just roll all the progress back and return to an era in which men were dominant politically and economically,” Murphy said. But as cartoonish as MAGA hypermasculinity is, it sends out a signal that “matters to a lot of men—that only the right really cares about the way in which they’re feeling pretty shitty.” No one I spoke with suggested that the Democratic Party would (or should) ever abandon its positions on women’s rights. “I don’t think you have to move away from anything to be inclusive of other things,” Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina told me. One possible Democratic plan, so far as I could discern it, was to keep expanding the parameters of acceptable discourse and opinions, rather than box themselves in. Clyburn said he was surprised to see so many young men break for Trump in November. He believes that his party has gotten itself into a quagmire. “We’ve set ourselves up for this messaging war that we’re losing,” Clyburn told me. “In the last election,” he said, “sound bites that developed around gender inequity caused serious problems. And they’re still causing problems.” [Read: Democrats are losing the culture wars] Or maybe sound bites are not the problem. Last fall, the Democratic strategist James Carville was “certain” that Kamala Harris would defeat Donald Trump. If Carville had adhered to his own maxim—It’s the economy, stupid—he might have seen Trump’s victory coming. One lesson of 2024, some of the elected officials I spoke with said, was that Democratic power brokers were woefully oblivious of the economic struggles of working-class Americans. They also suggested that the project of winning back the working class and the project of winning back men were one and the same. Voters, the admittedly simple theory goes, will support the candidate and party that they believe will improve their daily lives. The MAGA movement has done a keen job of tapping into the discontent and resentment that many men feel over declining job prospects. Democrats need to compete by offering a material path out of despair. “The young men that I’m talking to are not in love with politics, period,” Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia told me. “They want their lives to work. And it’s important that people feel you walking with them and hearing them.” Warnock was adamant that, contrary to certain media narratives, Trump did not triumph in a landslide victory. “He won by the margin of people’s disengagement, because they feel the ways in which the democracy is becoming increasingly undemocratic,” he said. “And my job is not for them to hear my voice; it is to give the people their voice.” The crucial way to reengage disaffected men, multiple Democrats told me, is to champion an economy that “works like Legos, not Monopoly,” as Auchincloss put it. “An economy where we are building more technical vocational high schools, and we are celebrating the craftsmanship of the trades so that young men have a sense of autonomy and being a provider.” Murphy said that his party should aim to build the sort of middle-class prosperity that enables one breadwinner to support a family of four, allowing one parent to choose to be a homemaker. But if Democrats believe that Lego economic policies could be popular, they also know that many voters associate the party with government handouts and top-down programs, which, on the whole, are not very popular. This is something the MAGA movement has figured out, painting all Democrats as out-of-touch, coastal elites. For Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State, the party’s primary political problem is undoubtedly class—which is not something that a change of messaging from “the consultant-industrial complex” can fix, she told me. Rather, authenticity is the only way to make true connections. Voters don’t want to be humored, she believes; they want to be heard. “People who are trying to signal some kind of an alignment with the working class are just undermining themselves,” she said. “The donor class needs to pay more attention to how rooted a candidate is in their community, and less about whether or not a candidate ticks every ideological or policy box.” She stressed the importance of people knowing that their representatives “are actually living in the same reality” as they are—and that a white-collar professional is not always the best fit. She believes that people want to see themselves in their representatives. “There are so many nonpolitical ways to communicate your values that haven’t been respected or exercised,” she told me. Gluesenkamp Perez has gained a national profile for the way she aims to speak for the sort of blue-collar America that many Democrats realize they’ve become disconnected from. She and her husband own an auto repair shop in the Pacific Northwest, and she won reelection in a Republican district that’s supported Trump in the past three elections. “Being able to make a clutch last for 500,000 miles—that’s really cool to a lot of people,” she told me. “I think about all the ways that I’ve seen this sort of unconscious disrespect for people in the trades,” she said. “I’ll hear people say, ‘Well, you know, my dad was just a janitor, and I’m the first person in my family to go to college,’ and I’m like, What does that sound like to everyone in the room who didn’t go to college? That you think you’re better than them.” What became clear from my conversations was that Democrats want to get back to eye level with their potential voters, particularly men. But, as Clyburn and others acknowledged, the party’s progressive social agenda can be an obstacle to its moderate wing. At her town halls, Gluesenkamp Perez told me, she has found her constituents especially fired up over the rules about trans women in sports—an issue that Trump has inflamed. “What I saw was that those people were mostly people that had been driving their girls to sports practice for 12 years, and their kids’ best shot at going to college was a scholarship,” she told me. “This was an argument about resource access, not about morality.” Gluesenkamp Perez has sometimes crossed over to side with the GOP, but she recently voted against Republican-sponsored legislation to keep transgender women and girls out of school sports. She also told me that having a real values discussion is impossible until voters feel respected, and that a candidate is listening to them. A genuine curiosity about the lives of the people who send you to Congress is not a mere nicety but an essential quality for Democrats who seem remote to the people they represent. “A lot of my colleagues just go out there and try to explain stuff to people all the time,” Gluesenkamp Perez said. “A lot of us don’t really have confidence that the spreadsheets they’re pointing to are the full picture.” Just being real could help Democrats appeal to voters of all stripes, but they have to hope that it will resonate with disaffected men—particularly young men—who may have turned toward Trump. Democrats may not have to bend their values completely out of shape to suit the political environment, but they can’t afford to write anyone off.
As the details of Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest by U.S. immigration agents first emerged this week, attorneys I spoke with were so astonished that they wondered if the government had made a mistake. President Donald Trump and other administration officials had been threatening to punish protesters by taking away student visas, but Khalil was a legal permanent resident with a U.S.-citizen spouse. The Palestinian activist and former Columbia University student hadn’t been charged with a crime. It turns out Secretary of State Marco Rubio identified a second individual to be deported, and included that person alongside Khalil in a March 7 letter to the Department of Homeland Security. Both were identified in the letter as legal permanent residents, The Atlantic has learned. Rubio’s letter notified DHS that he had revoked both targets’ visas, setting in motion plans for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to arrest and attempt to deport them, according to a senior DHS official and another U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe how the operation against Khalil took shape. In addition to the two names in Rubio’s initial letter, the State Department has also sent the names of “one or two” more students whose visas it has revoked, according to the DHS official, who described the first group of names as an opening move, with “more to come.” The officials did not disclose the name of the second green-card holder, and did not know whether the person is a current or former Columbia student, or had been singled out for some other reason. The person has not been arrested yet, the U.S. official said. Khalil, 30, a graduate student who became a prominent leader of campus demonstrations against the war in Gaza last spring, was taken into custody one day after Rubio sent the letter to DHS. The circumstances of his arrest and detention have set off alarms about the Trump administration’s willingness to test First Amendment protections and wield its power over noncitizens in order to intimidate protesters. Trump has said on social media that Khalil’s is “the first arrest of many to come.” The ICE agents who arrested Khalil on March 8 were from the agency’s Homeland Security Investigations division, which typically handles counternarcotics, counterterrorism, and other transnational crimes, rather than civil immigration enforcement. Khalil’s attorney did not respond to inquiries today. [Read: ICE isn’t delivering the mass deportation Trump wants] A copy of the charging document ICE filed—published yesterday by The Washington Post—suggests that the government’s formal allegations against Khalil were drafted in haste. The document, called a Notice to Appear, identifies Khalil as a citizen of Algeria who was born in Syria. It states that he was admitted to the United States “at unknown place on or about unknown date,” even though DHS is the federal entity in possession of visa holders’ entry data. The document then appears to make a significant error, according to Andrew Rankin, a Memphis immigration attorney who has been following Khalil’s case. It states that Khalil became a legal permanent resident under a specific statute in immigration law, which is true, but refers to the wrong one. “The document was written very unprofessionally,” Rankin told me. “When DHS realizes what they’ve done, they’ll be begging the judge to let them correct it.” Although the State Department has broad latitude to revoke a foreign student’s visa and DHS can deport them, someone with legal permanent residency—a green-card holder—has to be stripped of that status by an immigration judge before they can be deported. That routinely happens when a green-card holder commits a serious crime. But Khalil has not been charged with a crime. Trump-administration officials are trying to remove him using an extraordinary and seldom-cited authority in the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows the secretary of state to personally determine that an immigrant’s presence in the United States has “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” [Jonathan Chait: Anti-Semitism is just a pretext] Troy Edgar, who was confirmed earlier this week as DHS deputy secretary, struggled to explain that rationale during a contentious NPR interview broadcast this morning. When Edgar claimed that Khalil had engaged in anti-Semitic political activities in support of Hamas, the NPR host Michel Martin pressed Edgar to say what specific laws he’d broken or whether he had engaged in pro-Hamas propaganda. As Edgar grew flustered, he told Martin she could “see it on TV.” “We’ve invited and allowed the student to come into the country, and he put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity,” Edgar said. Martin asked if protest activity constitutes “a deportable offense.” Edgar didn’t answer. At Columbia, Khalil was one of the protest movement’s most prominent figures. Administration officials say his criticism of Israel fueled anti-Semitism on campus and aligned with the violent radicalism of terrorists. But their case for his deportation rests with the rarely tested authorities of the secretary of state to expel someone based on U.S. foreign-policy interests. Immigration attorneys tracking the case say the administration is looking to test the boundaries of U.S. immigration law and speech protections. The First Amendment does not protect speech that incites violence, Rankin noted. Trump officials, including Rubio, claim that Khalil and other protesters threatened and intimidated Jewish students, but have not cited specific acts. “There are kids at these schools that can’t go to class,” Rubio told reporters this week, referring to Jewish students, many of whom had faced harassment. “You pay all this money to these high-priced schools that are supposed to be of great esteem, and you can’t even go to class.” “If you told us that’s what you intended to do when you came to America, we would have never let you in,” he added. “If you do it once you get in, we’re going to revoke it and kick you out.” The day after Khalil’s arrest, the government whisked him to an ICE detention center in Louisiana. His attorneys said they were unable to speak privately with him for several days. If U.S. immigration courts side against Khalil and declare him deportable, he could file an appeal. If he loses, his attorneys could ask a U.S. district court in Louisiana to stop his deportation. Because he is in Louisiana, his case would fall under the jurisdiction of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has a reputation as the nation’s most conservative appeals court. Two DHS officials said the government moved him to Louisiana to seek the most favorable venue for its arguments. [Adam Serwer: Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is a trial run] Ira Kurzban, a Miami immigration lawyer and the author of a widely used legal sourcebook, said the government’s claims against Khalil have no recent comparison, and would likely be precedent-setting. “This is a test case,” he said. Khalil’s lawyers are trying to get him returned to New York. A district-court judge in New York has barred the government from deporting Khalil until his case is resolved, but the judge has not ordered the administration to return him to New York. Khalil is scheduled to appear before an immigration judge in Louisiana on March 27. In a filing Thursday night, Khalil's attorneys told the district court in New York that their client was being punished for engaging in legally protected protest activity. “The Trump administration has made no secret of its opposition to those protests and has repeatedly threatened to weaponize immigration law to punish noncitizens who have participated,” his attorneys said, asking the court to bring Khalil back from Louisiana, order his release, and block the government’s case. Trump-administration officials view the moves targeting foreign students as part of their wider immigration-enforcement crackdown. Trump is planning to invoke executive authorities, including a wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, as soon as tomorrow, according to a White House official who was not authorized to discuss internal plans. Trump has grown frustrated that the pace of deportations has lagged behind what he promised on the campaign trail, and he has urged DHS officials to accelerate their efforts, the official said. He also said the president may try to use the 18th-century law to target specific groups, including suspected members of the Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that the administration has designated a foreign terrorist organization. Trump previewed that move while he signed executive orders in the Oval Office on Inauguration Day. The White House official cautioned that the timing was fluid and the administration may not publicize it in advance, because it is convinced that press leaks have hindered previous deportation operations. Jonathan Lemire contributed reporting.
He denounced the European Union as “hostile” and “abusive” while threatening to ratchet up tariffs on some of its most famous goods by 200 percent. He openly mused about annexing Greenland while sitting in the Oval Office across from the head of the military alliance that would be called to defend it. He vowed to escalate a trade war with Canada while threatening its very right to exist as a sovereign nation. But when it came to the authoritarian leader in Moscow, President Donald Trump boasted of his relationship with Vladimir Putin and declined to say that he would pressure his Russian counterpart to agree to concessions as part of a cease-fire deal with Ukraine. Trump’s sympathies seemed to lie with America’s foe over its friends, further unnerving already-whiplashed allies watching anxiously as the president’s handpicked envoy met with Putin at the Kremlin. And that was all today—a day not unlike many in the early weeks of this new administration. Trump’s proclamations underscored how quickly the new president has reoriented U.S. foreign policy and the nation’s global priorities. Old allies are now economic rivals. Friendly neighbors are territories to be seized. Authoritarians—not just Putin, but also the leaders of China and North Korea—are to be respected and, potentially, transformed into partners with whom to carve up spheres of influence. The dizzying day began, as it so often does, with an early-morning social-media post. Trump took to Truth Social to escalate his trade war with the European Union, vowing to impose 200 percent tariffs on European wine and champagne in a move that worsened anxiety among consumers on both sides of the Atlantic. He reacted angrily after the EU retaliated against a first wave of U.S. tariffs, with the bloc hitting back by levying 50 percent tariffs on imports of U.S. whiskey and other products. Trump deemed the tariffs “nasty.” Trump wrote, “The European Union, one of the most hostile and abusive taxing and tariffing authorities in the World [was] formed for the sole purpose of taking advantage of the United States.” His claim was both untrue and adversarial. The EU, which has long prized good relations with the U.S., was acting in response to Trump’s initial tariffs, established the day before on goods such as aluminum and steel. EU leaders have made clear their hopes to do away with the tariffs but vowed to stand up for the continent by targeting politically sensitive goods in the U.S. in response to the Trump administration’s aggressive posture. “We will not give in to threats,” Laurent Saint-Martin, France’s minister delegate for foreign trade, posted on X. He added that Trump “is escalating the trade war he chose to unleash.” The tariffs were greeted with dismay by Americans who enjoy the continent’s wine—and by Wall Street, which took yet another trade-war tumble. The markets were further buffeted by Trump’s insistence later in the day that he would not back down from an April 2 deadline to impose an additional 25 percent tariff on Canadian goods. The president has waffled on tariffs with America’s neighbor to the north, imposing one set on steel and aluminum earlier this week only to remove it hours later, but he declared in the Oval Office today that this time, he will follow through. Trump has repeatedly misstated the size of Canada’s existing tariffs on U.S. dairy and lumber products and has wildly exaggerated the amount of fentanyl coming across the border. His broadsides against Canada have poisoned feelings toward the U.S. in Ottawa. “We didn’t ask for this fight, but Canadians are always ready when someone else drops the gloves,” the nation’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, said this week. Yet Trump has not stopped talking about adding Canada as his nation’s 51st state, his rhetoric escalating from taunt to threat, with many Canadians viewing it as an existential worry. “We don’t need anything that they got. We [buy Canadian goods] because we want to be helpful, but it comes a point when you just can’t do that. You have to run your own country,” Trump said today. “And to be honest with you, Canada only works as a state.” Trump delivered that ominous observation in his first meeting of his second term with Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary general. Canada is a member of NATO, and an attempt to annex it by force would trigger the 75-year-old alliance’s mutual-defense pact, known as Article 5, which theoretically could pit the rest of the West against the United States. But Trump further poked at NATO by suggesting that he also has his eye on another piece of land—Greenland, a territory of Denmark—and hinting that he may even send troops there. “We really need it for national security. I think that’s why NATO might have to get involved in a way, because we really need Greenland for national security,” Trump said. “You know, we have a couple of bases on Greenland already, and we have quite a few soldiers, and maybe you’ll see more and more soldiers.” For years, Trump has lusted after Greenland, which is rich with minerals and sits in a strategic location in the North Atlantic. But Denmark has refused to discuss a transfer or sale, even as Greenland this week elected a party that favors gradual independence. Rutte chuckled while Trump discussed Greenland, drawing the ire of some Danish officials, including Rasmus Jarlov, the chairman of Denmark’s defense committee, who said that his nation does “not appreciate” Rutte “joking with Trump about Greenland like this. It would mean war between two NATO countries.” But even as Trump delivered those threats, he pulled his punches with Putin. For weeks, he and his administration have aligned themselves with Moscow’s view of the war in Ukraine. Trump has declared that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is “a dictator,” that Ukraine started the conflict, that Ukraine would not be allowed to enter NATO, the alliance designed as a bulwark against Russian aggression. Trump belittled Zelensky in the Oval Office last month, and his now-lifted pause in U.S. intelligence sharing with and military supplies to Ukraine allowed Russia to gain territory on the battlefield. Even as Trump’s emissary Steve Witkoff traveled to the Kremlin to see if Russia would agree to the 30-day cease-fire proposal developed by the U.S. and Ukraine, the president declined to say today that he would push Putin to take the deal or to make any concessions. “I don’t want to talk about leverage, because right now, we’re talking to them, and [the talks] were pretty positive,” Trump said. “I hope Russia is going to make the deal too, and I think once that deal happens … I don’t think they’re going back to shooting again. I think that leads to peace.” Moments later, Trump went on to declare that he “got along very well with President Putin.” This time, Rutte didn’t laugh.
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. “We will win!” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer chanted at a rally last month protesting Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service infiltrating Treasury Department payments systems. If Democrats want to win, though, they’ll have to fight first, and they don’t seem totally ready for that. Schumer says that his caucus will refuse to vote for a short-term funding bill that would prevent the government from shutting down at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday. (In the House, all but one Democrat—Jared Golden of Maine—voted against the funding patch, but Republicans were unexpectedly united and passed the bill.) But no one seems to completely believe that Democrats will keep up their unified opposition. Politico reports that Democrats may instead settle for a symbolic vote on a shorter-term bill that they know they’ll lose: A White House official told the publication, “They’re 100 percent gonna swallow it. They’re totally screwed.” Democratic leaders have been insisting that the nation is facing a serious crisis caused by President Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg demolition of the executive branch and rule of law. But they have also complained that they have few paths to stop Trump. “I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said last month. “What leverage do we have?” Now Senate Democrats have leverage, and what they do with it will show whether they mean what they say. This is a strange situation for Democrats: As the party that likes to keep government running, even entertaining the idea of a shutdown is novel. But they have reasons related to both policy and politics to take a hard line here. First, if they’re concerned with protecting government services that are essential for citizens, they need to find some way to slow Trump down, because he’s using his power to slash them already. If the government shuts down, some services will be briefly cut. If Democrats keep the government open, some services will be cut—perhaps permanently. The deadline gives them a chance to demand that the White House agree to limitations on DOGE or other Trump cuts in exchange for funding the government. (Complicating the calculus, the White House recently deleted guidance from its website on how a shutdown would work.) Even if Congress passes the GOP’s short-term funding patch, there’s no guarantee that the administration will comply. Trump and his budget director, Russ Vought, have argued that the president should be able to impound funds—in other words, to treat congressional appropriations as a ceiling rather than a requirement, and thus be able to cut funding for whatever they don’t like. (This is plainly illegal, but Vought and others believe that the law that bans it is unconstitutional, and they hope to challenge it in the courts.) This means that simply continuing to fund the government doesn’t guarantee that key programs will stay running, and that extracting concessions from the White House now is crucial. Cautious Democrats worry that the party will be blamed if the government closes. But blamed by whom? Republicans have taken the political hit for previous shutdowns, because the GOP has openly clamored for them. Maybe Democrats would take the hit if they refused to help Republicans, and maybe they wouldn’t; voters surely understand that Democrats are the party of government. But in standing up to Trump’s GOP, they’d be taking the side of most of the public. One new CNN poll found that 56 percent of voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, the lowest mark of his career; another found that 55 percent believe that the cuts to federal programs, which Democrats want to stop, will hurt the economy. Regardless of how independents and Republicans would react, the consequences of not putting up a fight now would be catastrophic for Democratic-voter morale. During Trump’s first two months in office, party leaders have seemed flat-footed and meek, subscribing to what I’ve called a “No We Can’t” strategy. Polling shows that approval of the party and its leaders among Democrats is awful, and the idea of a liberal Tea Party—furious about the Trump administration but nearly as disgusted with Democratic leaders—suddenly seems plausible. Few Democrats envy the chaos and disorder of the post-2010 Republican Party, but they’ve also seen GOP leaders take risks while their own party avoids them. That’s gotten Republicans control of the White House, the House, and the Senate, while Democrats have little to show for their gingerly approach. If Democratic leaders abdicate the chance to take charge now, many in the voting rank and file may not give them another chance. The biggest risk for Democrats is that they’ll try to take a hostage by shutting down the government and discover that they are the hostage: Trump continues to do whatever he wants, and they end up folding in a few days, having obtained no concessions. That’s how most shutdowns end. As a matter of policy, however, this wouldn’t change anything. As a matter of politics, Democrats would at least get caught trying. And if Democrats do take a hit with voters as a whole, so what? If they keep their political standing but lose all of the substantive battles, they won’t have much use for that standing. The longtime Democratic strategist James Carville, last seen misjudging the 2024 election, now says his party should just get out of Trump’s way. “It’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead,” he wrote in The New York Times last month. “Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us.” Carville might be right that this would be an effective electoral strategy; Trump seems determined to make unpopular cuts and tie himself ever closer to the ever-more-unpopular Elon Musk, and the more voters see of Trump, the less they tend to like him. But playing dead makes sense only if one’s opponent is making garden-variety bad policy moves. This is different: Democratic leaders have said that the nation faces a historic crisis prompted by unprecedented and unconstitutional actions from the president. Did they really mean it? Related: The conversation Democrats need to have The Democrats’ “No We Can’t” strategy Here are four new stories from The Atlantic: Meet the strictest headmistress in Britain. Tesla needs a better story. Musk’s Madisonian insight—and its troubling consequences Radio Atlantic: Gaza is struggling to keep clean water flowing. Today’s News A federal judge ordered six federal agencies to reinstate the probationary employees they fired last month. He criticized the Trump administration’s justification for the mass layoffs, calling it a “sham.” The White House withdrew Dave Weldon’s nomination to be the director of the CDC. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to limit the scope of lower-court orders that largely blocked Donald Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship. If the Supreme Court rules in the administration’s favor, some restrictions on birthright citizenship could take effect. Dispatches Time-Travel Thursdays: Throughout The Atlantic’s history, writers have interrogated their marriages (and divorces), Serena Dai writes: “By putting themselves in control of what others hear, they try to make meaning of the life they’ve chosen.” Explore all of our newsletters here. Evening Read Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Sources: Kryssia Campos / Getty; Mimi Haddon / Getty; Tooga / Getty. Academia Needs to Stick Up for Itself By Nicholas B. Dirks The first time Donald Trump threatened to use the power of the presidency to punish a university, I was the target. At UC Berkeley, where I was chancellor, campus police had at the last moment canceled an appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right political pundit who was then a star at Breitbart News, because of a violent attack on the venue by a group of outside left-wing activists who objected to Yiannopoulos’s presence. In the end, although these protesters caused significant damage both on campus and to shops and businesses in downtown Berkeley, the police restored peace. Yiannopoulos was safely escorted back to his hotel, where he promptly criticized the university for canceling his speech. But on the morning of February 2, 2017, I awoke to a tweet reading: “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS?” Read the full article. More From The Atlantic Why 70 percent of Israelis want Netanyahu to resign The death of scandal An unabashedly intellectual murder mystery Culture Break Harold W. Clover / U.S. Army / National Archives Take a look. These images show the final days of World War II in Germany. Watch. “I can’t stop talking about The Traitors,” Megan Garber writes. The show (streaming on Peacock) turns reality stars against one another for TV that is part camp, part satire, and pure genius. Play our daily crossword. Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
Some TV shows catch on because they are great art. Others catch on because they offer soothing distractions from a hectic world. And some catch on because they cause people to text their friends, in a frenzy, “Please watch this immediately because I NEED TO TALK ABOUT IT WITH YOU!!!” When I get texts like that, I almost always oblige: I will take any opportunity to be a good friend by watching bad TV. That is how I came to The Traitors, the hugely popular reality show that has just streamed its third season on Peacock. It is also why I have begun sending my own “Please watch this!” texts to friends. When they ask for more detail, though, I find myself stumbling: How can I explain why they should watch the show when I’m not entirely sure what it is? It’s a reality competition, I might begin, that brings together a group of reality stars. (In a castle! In Scotland!) And they play a version of the party game Mafia, so everyone is sort of scheming against one another. Some people are “killers”—those are the “Traitors”—and they try to “murder” the “Faithfuls,” and anyone might be “banished” … At this point, sensing that I am confusing my audience rather than convincing them, I might switch gears: So the show’s host is Alan Cumming, the actor and international treasure. He wears glorious outfits that are basically characters themselves. And he’ll casually quote Shakespeare and Tennyson? And he pronounces murder like “muuuuurder.” And the whole thing is definitely camp. But it’s satire too? The Traitors plays like a live-action Mad Lib. And it is not one show, in the end, but many. It was adapted from a BBC version that was itself adapted from a Dutch series. It collects its cast from the far reaches of the reality-TV cinematic universe: Think The Avengers, with the heroes in question joining forces not to save the world but to win a cash prize of “up to $250,000.” Contestants live together (as on Big Brother) and are divided into tribes (Survivor). They participate in physical “missions” and vote one another off the show via weekly councils (Survivor again). The Traitors, in that way, might seem to be peak reality TV: all of these people who are famous for being famous making content for the sake of content. But the show has been an ongoing subject of passionate discussion because it is much smarter than that—it’s derivative in a winking way. It doesn’t merely borrow from its fellow reality shows; it adapts them into something that both celebrates reality TV and offers a sly, kaleidoscopic satire of the genre. It is a messy show that lives for drama. It brings a postmodern twist to an ever-more-influential form of entertainment. It’s not just reality TV—it’s hyperreality TV. Earlier iterations of the show were slightly more traditional than the current one: They featured noncelebrity contestants. The most recent, though, benefited from the second season’s genius pivot: It took an upcycle approach to its casting. And so it unites the infamous (Tom Sandoval of Vanderpump Rules; Boston Rob of Survivor), the semi-famous (several Real Housewives), and those who are tangentially connected to fame (a Britney Spears ex-husband; Prince Harry’s distant relative; an influencer known first for his abs and second for being Zac Efron’s brother). Some are gamers—players who, having come from competition-based shows, are well schooled in the art of televised manipulation—and others are personalities. Some come to the show having met already, bringing old rivalries into a new context: Danielle and Britney from Big Brother, Sandoval and Chrishell Stause (the Vanderpump and Selling Sunset stars have long-standing crossover beef). For the most part, though, the contestants are 23 strangers, picked to live in a castle and have their lives taped. [Read: The cruel social experiment of reality TV] Three of those players, initially, serve as the show’s Traitors: the conspirators who bring murder and mayhem, and who manipulate much of the action. The first three Traitors are determined by Cumming, who serves as master of ceremonies and chief agent of chaos. Cumming is, like the contestants, playing both himself and a character: a Scottish laird with a sadistic streak, part Cheshire cat and part jungle predator, prone to purring lines rather than simply delivering them. When he selects his Traitors—the game’s most consequential decision—his rationale is as opaque to viewers as it is to the players. In short order, though, the contestants are treating their game as a morality play. Those who seem “good” as people are assumed to be Faithfuls. Those who do not (Sandoval, Boston Rob) are assumed to be Traitors. Factions form. Mistakes are made. Faithfuls are banished; Traitors perform innocence so well that they earn other people’s trust. People who have played themselves on TV are now playing other people who have played themselves on TV. “I swear to God—to God!” one competitor says, as he assures his fellow contestants that he is not a Traitor. (He is a Traitor.) Another serves up an Oscar-worthy breakdown after a Traitor’s identity is revealed. (The “shocked” contestant is, yes, a fellow Traitor.) Loyalties, betrayals, manipulations: These are the terms of Mafia as a parlor game. These are also, The Traitors knows, the terms of reality TV. I should note that all of this melodrama is taking place against an aesthetic of “Castle” and a series of references to … Guy Fawkes? (I think?) The show features literal cloaks and daggers; Cumming repeatedly wears the capotain hat associated with the 16th-century British rebel; Fergus, the castle’s silent assistant, at one point carries a barrel labeled GUNPOWDER. This is another feature of the show: It blurs the line between reference and allusion. It explodes Poe’s Law as effectively as Fawkes tried to explode the high house of the British Parliament. What, actually, is the show getting at with these Fawkesian hints? Is the connection simply that Fawkes was executed as, yes, a traitor? Is the show making a broader point? Is it making any point? The Traitors raises many such questions. Why, for example, does it do so much to establish its torch-lit, wrought-ironed aesthetic only to adorn its flame-flickered dungeon with sleek camping lanterns that could have come from Bass Pro Shops? Why does one episode feature Epcot-esque re-creations of the moai heads from Easter Island? Why does another feature a wedding? Why does another involve coffins? Why do some of the show’s most climactic scenes—the revelations about who has been muuuuurdered—take place over brunch? Reality TV has, at this point, schools: the romantic realism of The Bachelor, the impressionism of the Housewives, the Dada of Love Island, the pop art of The Masked Singer. The Traitors references all of them—their structures, their tropes, their tones—but also the world at large. It teases and provokes without offering further explanation. It merges truth and simulation, until the two are indistinguishable. That is how the show turns reality into hyperreality—and “reality” into art. Reality TV enjoys some of the same affordances that art does. If The Traitors wants to include cloaks that evoke Eyes Wide Shut and clowns that evoke Stephen King and incredible tartan numbers that may or may not reference the suit that Cher Horowitz wore in the 1995 movie Clueless—if it wants to send new players to the castle in wrought-iron cages, or set a physical challenge within a Viking boat carved to resemble a dragon—the show does not need to justify its decisions. The alchemy that turns “reality” into entertainment ultimately makes reason itself somewhat beside the point. But then: Where is the line between catching a reference and inventing one? The Traitors is not using only reality-TV shows as its source material. It is also using literature. A physical challenge involves a game of human chess (Through the Looking-Glass). Cumming describes revenge as “red in tooth and claw” (Tennyson). He teases upcoming muuuuurders by announcing, “Something wicked this way comes” (Macbeth). He punctuates the revelation of the latest muuuuurder by way of Hamlet: “Good night, sweet prince.” But the obvious references—obvious in the sense that they can be Googled and otherwise sourced—blend with the references that merely insinuate. One of the show’s physical challenges involves bugs. (A reference, maybe, to Survivor? Or Jackass?) Another requires players to dangle from an airborne helicopter (The Apprentice?) and sway on a single tether as they attempt to drop things into a space that has been designated the “Ring of Fire” (Johnny Cash? Circuses? Plate tectonics?). The Survivor-like councils that determine which contestants will be banished take place around a piece of furniture dubbed the Round Table (Camelot? Pizza?). Cumming introduces an early meeting by saying, “It is time to sentence one of you to a fate worse than death: democracy” (ummm?). [Read: Reality TV’s absurd new extreme] Contestants, too, can carry those ambiguities. Ivar Mountbatten, a real-life lord, is the only contestant who hasn’t come from the world of entertainment. You could read his presence as an embedded joke about the British monarchy, that ancient version of reality TV. You could wonder whether he is somehow connected with the Scotland and the Guy Fawkes of it all, since both have sought, in their own ways, to challenge the power of the Crown. Or his presence could be a matter of expedience—whether commercial (Netflix’s historical drama The Crown and its documentary series Harry & Meghan have given the name Mountbatten new recognizability, and he recently became a tabloid name in his own right) or logistical (perhaps his agent knows The Traitors’ producers?). The hall of mirrors, once entered, is difficult to navigate. And soon enough, the questions can compound. Where do the references end? easily gives way to: Where does the appropriation begin? Although scholars can only speculate about what the moai heads of Easter Island meant to the people who created them, we can pretty safely assume that they were more than mere jokes. Here they are, however, re-created in a vaguely plasticine form, as tools in a challenge that might help lower-firmament reality stars get closer to their full $250,000. In another context, this might look like an insult. On The Traitors, though, it becomes a question—about the permissions and limits of reproduction. Cumming, at one point, wears a shimmering pale-green suit, accessorized with a spiked tiara. It gives “Statue of Liberty” but also “Catholic saint.” The tiara-meets-halo might connect to Fawkes, whose Catholicism drove him to fight the Protestant power structure. Or it might connect to debates about iconoclasm, with their questions about religious iconography. Or maybe it’s simply a great accessory? Maybe those “connections” are not connections at all? Camp is its own reference without a source—a term, and a sensibility, claimed and reclaimed so steadily that it has entered the realm of “you know it when you see it.” But one of camp’s features, in most definitions, is performance as a form of resistance: expression and idiosyncrasy serving as a rejection of a stifling status quo. It is queerness, refusing to be constrained. It is authenticity, refusing to apologize. It is absurdity. It is joy. This is The Traitors too. Yet the series performs freedom not just by rejecting the past but also by embracing it—and, possibly, reclaiming some of it. For the aforementioned wedding challenge, Cumming wears a white suit studded with red flowers. The outfit reads like a declaration about the sanctions of marriage and the rites that shape modern society. An outfit he wears in another challenge—a sequined suit in a military style, with neckwear that suggests a Medal of Freedom—does a similar thing. Most reality shows offer escapism: the relief of alternate and insular worlds. But The Traitors is all too aware of the world it is streaming into—one where hard-won rights are threatened, where expression is being curtailed, where a new bit of progress is being banished every day. That awareness serves the show’s satirical edge. It also expands the permissions of camp to The Traitors’ audience. People on Reddit threads puzzle out the references, trying to discern what the allusions might mean—or whether they are allusions at all. They analyze. They debate. Every reality show has a version of that digital second life; The Traitors, though, inspires conversations that stretch far beyond the show’s limits. They bring Hamlet and Tennyson and Alice in Wonderland’s human-chess game to new audiences, in new forms. Along the way, they offer embedded reminders that art is itself a wink to be enjoyed and a mystery to be solved. It is always evolving, reclaimed, and reinterpreted. The works that are venerated today as “high culture”—the stuff of capital-L literature, of exclusivity, of snobbery—began, very often, as works of pop culture. They offered respite, community, wonder. “To be or not to be,” Hamlet said, his angst both performed and very real. He would come to capture, for many, something true and essential about modernity. Before that, though, Hamet was just a guy on a stage, being messy and dramatic, living out his era’s version of a reality show.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here. I was a walking pile of red flags when I started dating my now-husband—and I made sure to point out each and every one to him. I’d just gotten out of a long-term relationship, and my ex was still sleeping on my couch. I’d cheated before, on the ex, years ago. Also, I have a very messy relationship with my mother, which is not entirely my fault but seemed worth mentioning. Telling someone you like all the reasons to not date you might sound counterintuitive, but to me, it was rational: I was trying to control the narrative around any eventual demise. If the relationship went south, I thought, I’d warned him; he would have only himself to blame. One could, I suppose, argue that this habit of mine is uniquely annoying, but the impulse to create a story out of a relationship—and one’s role within it—is not unusual. People write romance novels and breakup ballads. They publish short stories about when they first realized their marriage was doomed and poems highlighting the absurdity of being married to a psychoanalyst. Throughout The Atlantic’s history, writers have interrogated their marriages (and divorces), and by putting themselves in control of what others hear, they try to make meaning of the life they’ve chosen. Being a wife in the Army, for instance, requires tying yourself to the travels of your husband, as Beatrice Ayer Patton wrote in 1941. She recalls a friend who, after announcing her engagement to an Army officer, was encouraged not to marry him because “she would merely be the tail of the kite.” But Patton, whose husband was General George S. Patton, argues that the Army wife is crucial to her husband’s successes and failures—by providing key services such as tailoring, and by presenting a good face to all of his colleagues, whom she sees every day. Patton ends the essay with a response from her friend’s fiancé: “How high can a kite soar without its tail?” In 1905, another woman, who goes unnamed, discovered that in middle age, her marriage had become dull and flat. She is shocked when she meets the new wife of a widower friend, who appears vibrant and youthful despite being about the same age as her. The writer laments: “The first wife worked hard, went without things, saved every penny possible, and then died, and her husband was happier with a new wife, who reaped where the first had sown.” Then the writer has “a revelation”: She just needs to reframe how she sees herself—and behave as if she’s a second wife in a first-wife marriage. Nearly 20 years later, in an essay about becoming the breadwinner in her marriage, the writer Jane Littell mused on the importance of not depending on her husband at all. “The wage-earning wife meets her husband on an equality basis. She is no longer a dependent. She is an equal partner,” Littell wrote in 1924. “The chances for domestic happiness seem greater than in the old-fashioned marriage where a woman could be nothing but what her husband made her.” But the only thing more important than extolling one’s good choices in a marriage is assigning blame when it ends. Often, in heterosexual marriages, the problem is considered to be both the institution and the men. In 1947, the writer David L. Cohn was frank in assessing the “chief factor” in the country’s “appalling divorce rate”: “The United States is the only country where the husband often is not—and does not want to be—a man, but a Boy. He wants, poor thing, not to be wived but to be mothered.” The idea that wives suffer has endured; writers in 1961 and in 2024 have likened marriage to a form of female captivity. Although any of those reasons for divorce may be true in the aggregate, diagnosing the issues of any one individual relationship will always be more complex. In a recent review of Haley Mlotek’s memoir, No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, the writer Rachel Vorona Cote notes that Mlotek refuses to provide the details of her divorce because she rejects the notion that you can create a narrative around your life. Nobody, Mlotek argues, can fully know their own mind. It’s a conclusion that the writer Burnham Hall might have found relatable in 1924. In an essay debating whether he should grant a divorce to his wife, who wishes to be with a lover, he writes: “I doubt if anyone is ever completely honest with himself in such a situation; but one may keep on trying.”
It’s been a bad month for the stock market. But it’s been a terrible month—in fact, a terrible year—for Tesla. Even after rebounding since Monday, perhaps with some help from Donald Trump’s South Lawn salesmanship, Tesla’s stock price is down almost 40 percent since January 1. Some of that drop is down to concrete issues with Tesla’s core car business: Sales last year fell for the first time in more than a decade, and Wall Street analysts are now estimating that they will have fallen again in the most recent quarter. Tesla is facing fierce price competition in China, where its year-over-year sales fell by 49 percent in February, and steeply declining sales in Western Europe. Although the company has promised that it will be rolling out new, more affordable models later this year, details have been sparse at best. The most important driver of Tesla’s share slump, however, can be summed up in two words: Elon Musk. Tesla has always been a “story stock,” which is to say the sort of investment whose price depends less on a company’s economic fundamentals and more on a story of what its future will be. Tesla’s problem right now is that the hero, and narrator, of its story has gone AWOL. Investor expectations of what Tesla is going to achieve have certainly changed over time. In the past, investors were focused on Tesla’s potential to corner the global electric-vehicle market. Today, that ambition has receded, as competition—particularly from China—has intensified. Instead, investors now envision the company dominating the future market for self-driving cars and AI robotics. But the throughline of the Tesla story has always remained the same: the idea of Musk’s genius and ability to guide the company into the future. “It is almost impossible to separate Tesla, the company, from Musk,” the finance professor Aswath Damodaran has written previously. “What you believe about one will drive what you believe about the other.” And it’s because investors have bought into Musk’s over-the-top visions of Tesla’s future that, even now, the company’s shares trade at an outrageous price-to-earnings ratio, and its market cap is greater than that of the next nine biggest car companies combined. The problem for Tesla at the moment is that investors’ faith in Musk has been shaken. His political activities—not only his work for the Trump administration but also his public support of the far-right AfD party in Germany—have led to a backlash against Tesla that certainly seems to have depressed sales in the United States and Europe. His mercurial social-media habits and goofy displays such as waving around a chain saw onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference are not reassuring to major investors. The reverse: A new Morgan Stanley investor survey found that 85 percent of respondents think that Musk’s political involvement is having “a negative or extremely negative impact on Tesla’s business fundamentals.” Aside from all the noise, the simple reality is that Tesla now seems to be far down on the list of Musk’s priorities, behind DOGE, SpaceX, his new AI venture, and X. Musk is running a government agency, serving as the CEO of three companies, funding political campaigns, threatening politicians with potential primaries, and posting nonstop on social media. In the most literal sense, he just isn’t showing that much interest in building cars any more. Since the beginning of the year, he has offered no real vision of how Tesla will deal with challenges such as the global rise of highly competitive EV manufacturers such as China’s BYD. In an interview with Fox Business on Monday, he conceded that he was having “great difficulty” running all of his enterprises; about the best he could offer investors was a quote from a Monty Python movie: “Always look on the bright side of life.” Musk’s seeming indifference to the car business has become so noticeable that in a note to investors this week, the Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives—arguably the biggest Tesla bull on Wall Street—criticized him for “showing no attention to Tesla during this turbulent time.” The appearance at the White House with Trump on Tuesday for what was effectively a car commercial seemed like an implicit recognition by Musk that he needs to change his ways (or at least pretend to do so). As Trump posed in a Tesla Model S that he said he was buying, Musk promised that the company would double its U.S. production over the next two years. Neither man has a great record of keeping promises, but the event was a sign that Musk was doing something to stop the bleeding. Some investors, at least, liked the story: By market close yesterday, Tesla’s stock was up more than 10 percent from its Monday low. Whether that will be enough to make up for the losses of the past four months is another question. Tesla investors are used to volatility; since 2018, the company’s stock price has fallen 40 percent or more on eight different occasions. And story stocks can bounce back quickly if they can recapture investors’ attention and belief. But that will require Musk to demonstrate more conviction and interest in the way he talks about, and runs, Tesla. Right now, he looks like a storyteller who’s lost the plot.
In the last weeks of World War II, Harold W. Clover, a combat photographer in the S-2 Section of the U.S. Army’s 31st Combat Engineer Battalion, documented the scenes and events around him as his unit pushed from the French Alsace into Nazi Germany, then into Austria, where they served occupation duty, in 1945. Clover donated many of his film negatives to the U.S. National Archives—where I recently visited, digitizing most of these prints below for the first time. Clover’s striking photographs capture the lives of war-weary civilians as well as soldiers—sometimes in a playful light—while still depicting the ugly reality of war. To receive an email notification every time new photo stories are published, sign up here.
Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. As a behavioral scientist with a long interest and background in the arts, I’ve always been fascinated by the 20th-century Catalan surrealist painter Salvador Dalí. Many regard him as a genius, but he is at least as famed for his eccentricity as his art. He claimed, for example, to be a reincarnation of the Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross, in whose guise he could “remember vividly,” he said, “undergoing the dark night of the soul.” Where disagreement over Dalí does occur, it centers on whether his madness was real or feigned. Those who believe the latter argue that he was a compulsive liar who manipulated people with his outlandish impostures to gain success. Why might Dalí practice deception in such a bizarre and audacious way? Perhaps a compulsion to deceive was not in spite of his extraordinary creative powers, but actually because of them. “Imagination,” wrote the French philosopher Blaise Pascal in the 17th century, “is that deceitful part in man, that mistress of error and falsity.” To which he added, “I do not speak of fools, I speak of the wisest men.” It sounds as if Pascal had a bone to pick with artists; in fact, he was ahead of his time in divining what, centuries later, researchers found evidence for: an organic link between creativity and corrupt behavior. What Pascal missed was that creativity does not inherently lead to unethical conduct. Creativity is a particular form of power: the power to see new possibilities more clearly than others do. And, like any other power, creativity is commonly misused when not deployed in the service of others. Fortunately, there are ways you can use your creativity that truly enhance your life and others’. [Arthur C. Brooks: Mindfulness hurts. That’s why it works.] Researchers have looked carefully at whether highly creative people tend to be more or less ethical than the population average. At first glance, the evidence is mixed: Some studies show a positive relationship, while others show no association. But closer examination of that apparently conflicting finding tells a different story. Studies showing no connection between creativity and unethical conduct are based on self-reporting surveys, whereas the positive correlation comes from objective measures, such as observation of unethical behavior by other people or in experiments. In other words, creatives say they’re not unethical—surprise!—but are observed to be so by others. One example of this pattern is a 2013 psychological experiment in which college students were offered class credit for participation. They were given a test of their creativity in which they had to come up with one word that would associatively link three random other ones. (For instance, if the prompt words were falling, actor, and dust, a person might connect them with the word star.) They were then asked to rate their own integrity. These exercises were followed by a tedious survey that they had to complete to get the credit. But the survey was designed in such a way that participants could see how to skip part of it undetected (so they assumed), but claim they had fully done it. The cheaters on the survey registered as much more creative in the word test than the non-cheaters, yet the cheaters scored their own integrity at roughly the same level as the non-cheaters rated theirs. Creativity and unethical behavior tend to be most strongly correlated when, as one 2017 study showed, rules are vague and hard to enforce, rather than clear and unambiguous. This can occur in romantic relationships where expectations about exclusivity and fidelity are assumed but not spelled out; differing assumptions can lead to, well, creative ambiguity. If an artist or a musician has been unfaithful to you, this might explain why. (Indeed, poets and artists tend to have more sexual partners than the population average.) Lack of clarity in the mind-numbing million words of the Internal Revenue Code may also explain the problem of “creative accounting” in some businesses’ tax declarations. [Read: Mapping creativity in the brain] If, as I argued above, creativity is not just a gift but also a form of power, then—just as “power tends to corrupt,” as Lord Acton said—humans can be tempted to misuse their creativity. I could argue with Lord Acton, in fact, over whether power is inherently corrupting, but I know, from the extensive research on the topic, that holding power over others can certainly be correlated with unethical behavior such as cheating. One personality trait that links creative power and dishonesty is narcissism. In Dalí’s 1942 autobiography—which a disgusted George Orwell later called “a strip-tease act conducted in pink limelight”—the surrealist showman proudly diagnosed himself a narcissist, a judgment that anyone with even a passing familiarity with his life will find hard to refute. Indeed, narcissism is strongly correlated with many measures of creativity, as well as with unethical behavior. People who are self-absorbed find that this quality helps them tap into their creative potential. But this very self-absorption also tends to make them selfish and willing to cut ethical corners to benefit themselves. That is certainly a risk for people with creative power. But for those who can resist their narcissistic impulses and use their creativity for the good of others, the result is almost bound to be ethical. One way to ensure that you’re using your creative power ethically borrows an entrepreneur’s standard technique by subjecting every decision to a checklist of conditions. For example, a small start-up might stay focused on its mission by making sure that any new opportunity is: 1) sustainable; 2) scalable; and 3) potentially profitable. In an analogous way, I use an ordered algorithm for my own creative work (including this column) to ensure that it meets my ethical standards. It must: 1) glorify the divine; 2) uplift others; and 3) be interesting to me. If a given piece of work meets only criterion 1, or 1 and 2, I might still go ahead with it; but if it does not achieve 1 and 2, I won’t proceed under any circumstances. The idea of setting those ordered criteria is to prevent me from ever engaging in creative work that is snarky, hurtful, or indecent. I recommend it: Even if you don’t see yourself as “a creative,” you can use the approach to apply your own algorithm of ethical service and love for others. [Read: Gaudí’s Basilica: Almost finished after 132 years] Dalí used his prodigious creativity to amplify his own prestige, fame, and wealth. His life and work were marked by egotism, manipulative behavior, and ruined relationships. By all accounts, that did not end well: By the time of his death, he was mired in depression and alienated from others. Despite his evident genius, Dalí is not someone to emulate in your own creative endeavors, artistic or otherwise. A model I prefer is Dalí’s Catalan forebear, the modernist architect Antoni Gaudí, who designed Barcelona’s stunningly beautiful Sagrada Familia basilica. A deeply religious Catholic, he dedicated this and his other works to glorifying God and lifting up the people who saw and used them; the Vatican is considering the case for Gaudí’s canonization. Even Dalí admired and praised Gaudí’s extraordinary creations—but, being Dalí, he couldn’t resist injecting a nasty little jab inside his praise: “Those who have not tasted his superbly creative bad taste are traitors.” In your creative endeavors, be a Gaudí, not a Dalí.
As President Donald Trump proceeds with his seemingly endless attacks on laws and democratic norms, the question for many has become: What will turn the tide? They may imagine that conditions are ripe for a major scandal—some transgression, previously hidden but then revealed, that is so outrageous, so beyond the pale, that it will rally even those across the political divide. In the past, that is the work that scandal often did. Exposure of serious official misconduct, the lifeblood of scandals, would create openings for reform. As bad as these scandals were—and the underlying story was usually bad, sometimes very bad—scandals contained within them the germ of change. But today, old-fashioned scandals are harder and harder to come by. Watergate is in many ways the textbook example of a scandal and its reforming potential. It had it all: covert and illegal actions by a president in contravention of laws and norms, the revelation of the scandalous activities, and, eventually, bipartisan agreement on corrective action and reform. Those reforms included extensive new regulation of money and politics, protection against the abuse of surveillance power to spy on American citizens, and authority for independent investigations of possible executive-branch criminal misconduct. [Jonathan Rauch: One word describes Trump] This cycle of scandal and bipartisan reform is hardly imaginable today. In the Trump administration, what might have been deemed scandalous at another time, in another presidency, is instead a governing program. The components of the program—“radical constitutional” claims about presidential power, White House direction of investigations against political opponents, the abandonment of constraints on profiting from the office—are openly avowed and openly pursued. What was hidden until exposed in the Richard Nixon years is proclaimed in these Trump years as a show of presidential resolve and as the vindication of an electoral mandate. Nixon had resigned and left his office before he told an interviewer that, by definition, no presidential action can violate the law. Trump expressed the same view—that no president can violate the law if he is striving to save the country—in the first weeks of his second term. He is redefining the presidency, resetting expectations of his office. The death of scandal is a blow to the mechanisms for defending a democracy. More than periodically useful in uncovering corruption, scandal is an essential feature of liberal democracy. It is certainly, the sociologist John Thompson writes, “more common [in such systems] than in authoritarian regimes or in one-party states.” This is because, in democracies, scandal is possible only because there is intense electoral competition, a free press, and protections from reprisal for news organizations, the political opposition, and others that allege and often expose corruption in the government in power. But when democratic norms fray or collapse, scandal collapses with them. In this way, the collapse of scandal is both cause and effect of democratic decline: It makes reform less possible, and it indicates erosion of the conditions that made such revelations possible in the first place. Trump is directly attacking those conditions. He is maintaining and in some instances escalating lawsuits against news organizations. He has fired inspectors general who serve as “watchdogs” in 17 executive-branch agencies. Trump has fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, whose responsibilities include enforcement of the whistleblower statutes, and replaced him with a former Republican member of Congress who is also the secretary of Veterans Affairs—effectively making it a part-time position. He is exploiting the fractured and polarized media environment to create alternative realities, rendering it very difficult for any sort of unified narrative of scandal to emerge and take hold. A sterling example is his redefinition of the January 6 assault on the Capitol as “a day of love,” complete with pardons for most of those convicted for their involvement. The corrective power of scandal was already weakened during the first Trump term. In those years, Trump did not hide his pursuit of profit while in office, and he made efforts to control the Department of Justice for his own personal and political purposes—though nothing like what we are seeing today. These and other actions of the time ignited major controversies and led to two impeachments, but none entailed revelations of actions he was denying. He proclaimed “perfect” the call to the president of Ukraine at issue in the first impeachment, and in the second, his rally and video communications related to the attack on the Capital could not have been more public. After Trump left office, reforms to constrain his version of the presidency were proposed in abundance but went nowhere. Even where scandal does not yield statutory reform, it can serve to reinvigorate weakened norms. An example that may now seem quaint is the furor over the George W. Bush administration’s midterm firing of nine U.S. attorneys. The firing was public; the motive was the stuff of scandal: It emerged that the White House had been deeply involved in the dismissals, acting on concerns that these law-enforcement officials were insufficiently committed to rooting out alleged Democratic Party voting “fraud.” The attorney general denied any questionable motivation and agreed that “it would be improper to remove a U.S. attorney to interfere with or influence a particular prosecution for partisan political gain.” But the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility jointly took up the matter and concluded, “The Department’s removal of the U.S. Attorneys and the controversy it created severely damaged the credibility of the Department and raised doubts about the integrity of Department prosecutive decisions.” The Office of the Inspector General further judged that there was “significant evidence that political partisan considerations were an important factor” in the dismissals. It affirmed that department officials had a “responsibility to ensure that prosecutorial decisions would be based on the law, the evidence, and Department policy, rather than political pressure.” In part because of this scandal, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resigned. This was not all. A special counsel was appointed to consider whether the firings involved any violations of criminal law. She concluded that no violations had occurred but that the law did prohibit some forms of political interference in law enforcement. And she roundly affirmed department “principles” against “undue sensitivity to politics.” The Obama administration advised Congress of these findings and put a strong emphasis on the point: Its attorney general was committed to “ensuring that partisan political considerations play no role in law enforcement decisions of the Department.” [Read: Trump says the corrupt part out loud] There is little reason to imagine that we would see a “scandal” concerned with “undue sensitivity to politics” in this presidency. The norms at the center of the U.S.-attorney scandal are not honored even in the breach, because the breach has been transformed into policy. As the legal scholar (and my collaborator on the Substack newsletter Executive Functions) Jack Goldsmith has noted, the Trump White House’s proclaimed policy of avoiding “‘the appearance of improper political influence’ in law enforcement is doublespeak for the reality of heavy political influence in law enforcement, just as the Justice Department’s ‘Weaponization Working Group,’ which builds on Trump’s ‘Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government’ executive order, is in reality a playbook to weaponize DOJ law enforcement like never before.” Officials appointed to high positions, including the U.S. attorney in D.C. and both the FBI’s director and its recently named deputy director, have appeared eager to investigate those who were involved in investigations of Donald Trump. In this environment, there seems to be one potential opening for scandal on the old model: the role of Elon Musk. Some of the elements of scandal are present in this case of a businessman, situated both inside and outside the government, who has been provided with apparently massive but undefined authority. It’s never quite clear when Musk speaks for himself, for his businesses, or for the government. The administration has given varying accounts of his role in the Department of Government Efficiency. Musk himself has made the extraordinary claim that voters are at least an indirect source of his authority. Last month, he reposted on X: “Dems keep saying ‘No one elected Elon Musk.’ Yes we did. Elon was very visible with Trump and we elected Trump to utilize Elon.” Polls show that even among Republicans, Musk is a controversial figure. It is not impossible to imagine a reform at some point designed to impose limits, or at least greater accountability and transparency, on a president’s use of a private citizen to assume major government functions. Perhaps the picture for reform even without the propulsive force of scandal will brighten if the administration fails to deliver on issues that bread-and-butter voters care most deeply about and they become less tolerant of “long live the king” presidential leadership. Monarchical ambition can founder on the price of eggs and bacon. It can also eventually run aground in conflict with a defining element of American political culture: distrust of government, a belief that it is, as the historian Garry Wills has written, a “necessary evil, one we must put up with while resenting the necessity.” Trump’s aggressive claim that the president is the law is altogether new, and coming fast at the electorate. Perhaps in this limited time, the voters are waiting and seeing. Trump and his allies may not appreciate that they are testing, and may not prevail over, America’s anti-government tradition. After all, they are the government now.
The main attraction in the Wembley neighborhood of northwest London is the eponymous football stadium where the England national team hosts its matches. But just half a mile away, situated in an almost aggressively unbeautified six-story office block, you’ll find an even more impressive repository of human excellence. The Michaela Community School is a “free school.” Like charters in America, these schools aim to provide more pedagogical options to poor and marginalized communities. They are publicly funded, privately run, and controversial—both for their approaches to education and, critics say, for diverting resources from the public system. Around Michaela’s asphalt courtyard, lines from “Invictus,” William Henley’s ode to grit and perseverance—“I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul”—have been blown up to the size of billboards. The slogan “Knowledge is power” adorns a four-story banner hanging from the building’s brick facade. Another banner reads: Private School Ethos—No Fees. Michaela has no admissions filters for entrance into Year 7 (the first year of secondary school in Britain) and draws nearly all its students from Wembley, one of the poorest districts in London. Most students are Black or South Asian, and many are the children of immigrants. Yet its pupils perform at the level of their counterparts at the most prestigious private schools, earning twice the national average on the English Baccalaureate and the General Certificate of Secondary Education. More than 80 percent of Michaela graduates continue their studies at Russell Group Universities (Britain’s top-24 colleges). One joke I heard repeatedly in conversations about Michaela was that a savvy posh family could spare the £50,000 annual tuition for Eton, purchase a flat in Wembley, and rest assured that their child would enjoy the same outsize chances of gaining admission to Oxford or Cambridge. [Read: Is school-discipline reform moving too fast?] Michaela is the brainchild of Katharine Birbalsingh, known widely as “Britain’s strictest headmistress.” Her emphasis on hard work and her unsparing critique of victimization has propelled her to national and international prominence. In her neat and unfussy office hangs a quote from the Black American economist Thomas Sowell: “When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.” A stack of books includes a collection of essays on Booker T. Washington, Shelby Steele’s The Content of Our Character, and Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. Near the doorway is a life-size cutout of Russell Crowe in Gladiator, bloodied sword in hand, with a piece of paper taped to his mouth reading HOLD THE LINE. Birbalsingh is the daughter of Guyanese and Jamaican parents and a former French teacher. In 2010, she gave a viral speech at the Conservative Party Conference lamenting the school system’s “culture of excuses, of low standards, and expecting the very least from our poorest and most disadvantaged.” She argued that teachers were too afraid of “the accusation of racism” to discipline Black boys, and that reform required “right-wing thinking.” Her speech circulated so widely presumably because she wasn’t the only one fed up with the persistent achievement gap between poor and well-off students. And she wasn’t alone in believing that the gentler, more progressive approach to addressing students’ needs, which had gained traction in the United Kingdom (and the United States), hurts kids who are already behind. Nevertheless, she was promptly pushed out of her teaching job as a result of that speech. Four years later, she co-founded Michaela. I visited the academy twice—in December and then again in January—to speak with Birbalsingh and her staff and students, and to rove among the classrooms. Multiple delegations of teachers from other schools in the U.K. and abroad were touring Michaela at the same time to try to soak up its protocols and ethos. Birbalsingh told me that the school receives some 800 visitors a year, and copious guest books in the lobby bore their ecstatic testimonials. The students, impeccable in their gray trousers and navy blazers, are so accustomed to this outside interest that they do not so much as glance at a visitor when he enters the classroom. Those blazers tend to be covered in merit badges: for attendance, club memberships, academic achievement (the “Scholosaurus” badge). Pupils can earn demerits for infractions as minor as failing to maintain eye contact when a teacher is speaking. In the cafeteria, they shout in unison poems committed to memory before taking their seats. Over family-style meals that they both serve and clean up, conversation is guided by a formal question such as: What does it mean to be successful? Lunch—which is vegetarian—always concludes with students randomly chosen to address the room on the theme of gratitude. Teachers then provide candid feedback on these oratorical performances. I listened as one small girl with a braided ponytail gave an appreciation to her instructor for helping her better understand a math problem. She was praised for her delivery, for “doing all the basics: confident, loud; she’s owning the space.” “Black people, Muslim people, minorities of any sort” should not “have to hold their hand out to the white man and say, ‘Please look after me,’” Birbalsingh told me later in her office. She objected fiercely to what she saw as the “patronizing” idea being conveyed to young Black people that “the only way you can get to Oxford is if there is affirmative action of some sort to let you in, or the only way you can get the job is if they have a list of quotas that allows you in because, well, they have to feel sorry for you.” Instead, she’s teaching her students “the knowledge and the skills that they need to be able to make their lives successful.” Birbalsingh, herself a graduate of Oxford, said that she opens the school up to visitors because she wants “to show people what’s possible.” She conceives of Michaela not merely as a stand-alone educational institution making a difference in the lives of the local children lucky enough to attend it but also as a laboratory for expanding our understanding of what is socially and pedagogically possible for “kids from the inner city.” She wants people to take her insights and methodology “back to their schools and make their schools better. A huge part of the mission, actually, is seeding the ideas.” For those who cannot make it to Wembley, she has edited a volume of contributions from more than 20 teachers titled Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way. You won’t encounter them in Michaela’s hallways, but critics of the school are legion. Some say that it is overly focused on test scores and rote memorization. It has little use for “differentiation—catering differently within a lesson to students of varying ability,” George Duoblys observed in a 2017 London Review of Books essay. Teachers have little flexibility—their role, Duoblys wrote, is “reduced to the transmission of an existing body of knowledge by means of a set of optimized techniques.” “Michaela is an absolute monarchy,” Will Lloyd wrote last year in The New Statesman, and Birbalsingh “its formidable, Gradgrindian headmistress-queen.” The article dismisses the school’s conservatism as fetishizing a “pseudo-British” past. Birbalsingh “is never more than 30 seconds from saying she wants to return education to the 1950s, or lamenting that it’s unfashionable to teach what your grandmother would have taught you,” Lloyd writes. “She talks about ‘love,’ but the public persona is more ‘Nightmare Victorian Patriarch.’” [Read: A remarkable school-choice experiment] Michaela isn’t a monarchy, but Lloyd is right that it’s not a democracy either. Call it a benevolent dictatorship. Roughly half of the school’s 700 students are Muslim, and Birbalsingh forbids them from gathering in large groups to pray during recess, arguing that nonobservant students might feel pressured by such outward displays of piety. One student’s family took the school to court over the policy, and last year, a judge dismissed the case, arguing that the student knew about the rule before applying to the school. “If parents do not like what Michaela is,” Birbalsingh remarked, “they do not need to send their children to us.” Birbalsingh is now involved in a contentious dispute with the new Labour government’s secretary of education, Bridget Phillipson, over proposed reforms that would limit free schools’ autonomy by imposing new hiring rules and an as-yet-to-be-defined national curriculum. Birbalsingh argues that teacher-certification requirements would undermine her ability to recruit and develop nontraditional candidates who might be put off by bureaucratic hoop-jumping, and that the national curriculum might force her to lower her own standards. She also called Phillipson a Marxist. Phillipson’s office did not reply to a request for comment. Birbalsingh believes that she’s been punished for her political orientation throughout her tenure at Michaela. “As a teacher, you’re not really allowed to be a conservative,” she told me. She may not always vote conservative (she told me that she didn’t in the previous election, though she wouldn’t say whom she’d voted for). But she embraces the label of cultural conservative—“old-school, Black, small-c conservative,” advocating all manner of progressive taboos: hierarchy, personal responsibility, respectability politics. When she was drumming up grassroots support around London for what would become Michaela, Birbalsingh recalled, she was protested by white people whom she believes had been “bused in from the suburbs.” Opponents argued that the school would take resources away from the public system, which was already short on money for primary schools. “We had to hire bouncers for our events because of the possible violence that might ensue,” Birbalsingh said. “White people would stand up and shout in order to drown out our voices so that the Black people, the Black moms, generally speaking, could not hear what I was saying.” Birbalsingh also struggled to find a space for the school. “That’s why we’ve ended up in this terrible building,” she told me with a laugh. “No school building has six floors. Normally, it’s two floors. You’re not right next to the trains. When my staff are trying to talk to the kids, you can hardly hear them because of the trains. We have no car park for the staff. We have no trees and grass for the kids to run around. It’s by no means ideal. But because I don’t believe in feeling sorry for ourselves, you don’t hear me going on about it all the time.” She added, “I’m not going to spend my time being a victim.” From what I saw, none of this presented a hindrance to learning. Nor was I very convinced that Michaela’s teaching style sacrifices intellectual nuance and rigor on the altar of standardized-test scores. In December, I took a seat in the back of a room of 11- and 12-year-old students involved in a spirited discussion on atheism. When the teacher, a young man named Josh Cowland, posed a question, every single student’s hand shot up. “Atheists therefore argue that God cannot be omnipotent,” Cowland said. “Because what is he not doing?” The students were given 10 seconds to consult their neighbors. “Four, three, two,” Cowland counted down, and on “one,” the room was blanketed in silence, as if you’d slipped on a pair of noise-canceling headphones. Once again, all hands were raised. A boy answered confidently: “He’s not stopping evil!” Another teacher, James Sibley, told me that he knows the school has a reputation for drilling and being strict—as if “you’re going to get a knife in the face” if you get an answer wrong. But the expectations aren’t the problem, he said: “I think children are most unhappy not when there’s pressure on them, but with inconsistency.” “It was quite difficult to adapt to the expectations that the teachers had for us,” one boy told me, “but once we did, it allowed us to be more successful and to be able to have high goals for ourselves as well.” An older girl agreed. “The whole environment is mutually reinforcing the norms of excellence,” she said, “which I think is what’s so difficult in certain schools where even if you want to try your hardest, if you’re not around other people who are doing it, it can be very difficult to be the only person living by certain standards.” That sense of shared purpose is very different from what I remember of my own high school, where kids would laugh in your face for “talking white.” My father, another Black, small-c cultural conservative, also made me recite “Invictus.” From ninth to 12th grade, my best friend, Carlos, and I studied with him for hours in the evenings and on weekends, and we hid this deepest aspect of ourselves from our classmates. All of us judged one another by the quality of our outfits, by our physical indomitability and sexual prowess, and by our ability to evince an above-it-all insouciance in the face of the larger, white society around us. Sociologists call this “cool-pose culture,” and it hobbled my friends and me when we were navigating adolescence. I saw no sign of it at Michaela. In the hallways, the only talk I heard was “Good day, sir,” as I passed earnest boys and girls moving efficiently between their classes. No one roughhoused or wasted time or teased one another. Nor did anyone laugh. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t notice this distinct lack of levity. What was it like to always have to be a model student on display for curious onlookers? By comparison, my friends and I were free—luxuriously so—in ways these children possibly couldn’t even imagine. But that freedom that so many underprivileged and minority children bask in isn’t worth a damn thing if it leads to an adulthood boxed in by self-inflicted limitations. [Read: The challenge of educational inequality] “The stuff that really matters here is who our children are as people,” Birbalsingh told me. There’s “no exam in that,” she said, but you can “look at our children, look at how they walk. Look at how they talk to each other. These are normal inner-city children, but they’re not walking with that bop. They’re not talking with that slang” or being “rude to people on the buses.” None of this is accidental. “We are teaching them how to behave,” she continued, so that they may “live lives of dignity and of meaning.” This all sounds like common sense, but it’s hard to overstate the visceral disdain it can elicit. In a Guardian column about a 2022 documentary on Michaela, Britain’s Strictest Headmistress, Zoe Williams sneered that the film “continues to do the diligent work of Katharine Birbalsingh, in mythologizing herself so furiously that, if you didn’t have a memory or know any better, you would think she invented the phrases ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’” Such condescension would be merely impolite if it weren’t leveraged in service of a status quo that has been failing children who are not already the beneficiaries of privilege. “Competence is controversial,” Birbalsingh said, when I asked her why she thinks there is so much enmity directed at her project. But competence is also infectious. On my second visit, I struck up a conversation with a young teacher named Ryan Badolato from Vertex Partnership Academies, in the Bronx, a charter school with a mission similar to Michaela’s. “I’ve never seen kids so invested in their academic success, praised so much for their hard work, or any group of teenagers as polite and respectful as they all were,” he expanded several days later over email. “Despite the outside world viewing their school as overly strict—a place where students should feel unhappy and eager to leave—what I witnessed was the opposite: They are the happiest and most proud teenagers I have ever met.”
Having recently found widespread recognition in the United States, one of Latin America’s greatest living authors has decided to challenge her newfound readers with a brilliant and bewildering novel about murder, castration, and the illegibility of poetry. Death Takes Me, by Cristina Rivera Garza, underscores the Mexican novelist’s intellectual depth as well as her formal playfulness, and confronts the way an environment rife with violence can shock citizens into numbness. Rivera Garza teaches creative writing at the University of Houston and has lived for decades in the United States, but until recently, only a handful of her more than 20 books had appeared in English. That began to change in 2023, when she published her own translation of the work that would earn her a Pulitzer Prize, Liliana’s Invincible Summer, a fiercely political memoir about the life and death of her younger sister, who was murdered at age 20 by an on-and-off boyfriend. The critical consensus in the Spanish-speaking world is that Death Takes Me, which was originally published in 2008, is among Rivera Garza’s best books—a sophisticated answer to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 that elaborates on the Chilean novelist’s blend of gruesome violence and literary puzzles from a feminist perspective. Whereas Liliana’s Invincible Summer is emotional, sincere, and relatively easy to follow, Death Takes Me is cerebral, fragmentary, and disorienting. Translated by Robin Myers and Sarah Booker, the novel is ostensibly about a series of murders of young men in an unnamed Mexican city, but it often seems more concerned with the study of poetry and psychoanalytic theory than with detective work. At one point, Rivera Garza interrupts the narrative to reproduce a scholarly article that she may or may not have submitted to a real academic journal; at another, she inserts a number of experimental poems that she published under a pseudonym a year before releasing Death Takes Me. The book’s unabashed intellectualism is the product of Mexican literary culture, which tends to abide by the Cuban writer José Lezama Lima’s famous motto, “Difficulty is the only stimulant.” But readers willing to play by Rivera Garza’s rules can expect a reward commensurate with their efforts, the sort of anti-noir novel that a ghostwriting team comprising Jorge Luis Borges, Jacques Lacan, and Clarice Lispector might deliver in response to a publisher’s request for a true-crime number. Like the murders it recounts, Death Takes Me resists interpretation, inducing in the reader a disconcerting mixture of numbness and anxiety. Those familiar with Rivera Garza’s more recent work will soon realize that the book has another, more political dimension. Although it approaches the issue obliquely by reversing the gender of the victims, Death Takes Me is the author’s first sustained meditation on femicide—and perhaps a preliminary study for the memoir she would publish more than a decade later. [Read: A novel that probes the line between justice and revenge] In the novel’s opening scene, a literature professor by the name of Cristina Rivera Garza goes out for a jog and stumbles upon the castrated body of a young man. Yet in the weeks that follow, as she sits down for tense interviews with the female detective in charge of the case and dodges the obsessive pursuit of a suspicious woman who claims to be a tabloid journalist, the aspect of the crime scene that most preoccupies her isn’t the dead man but what she noticed on the wall of the alley where she found him. Using nail polish as ink, someone had scribbled a few lines by Alejandra Pizarnik, an Argentine writer who wrote cryptic poems and anxious diaries about language, sex, and death before dying by suicide in 1972 at the age of 36—and who is also the subject of the academic paper published within the novel. (The fictional Rivera Garza, we later learn, is affiliated with the same university where the author taught while she was writing the novel.) The reader soon notices uncanny parallels between the professor’s work and the detective’s. It’s not a coincidence that the adjective nonsensical can apply to a gruesome murder just as well as to a work of avant-garde literature. Cops and critics are, in some ways, in the same business: that of interpretation. They pay close attention, notice details, find clues; they gather evidence and formulate theories; they make a case for their hypotheses. Their work is a search for meaning—an attempt to make sense of mysterious signs. As the terrified residents of the city continue to stumble upon castrated bodies, there’s no question that the perpetrator of these murders is a serial killer: Poems by Pizarnik are found at each crime scene. That detail alone, the detective insinuates to the professor, is enough to mark her as the prime suspect. The theory is soon put to rest, though, when Rivera Garza starts receiving strange messages from the killer, signed with the names of different female artists. The letters are full of clues that produce nothing: no leads, no real suspects—and no hope. The truth is that, in this city, catching the murderer won’t change much. “It’s been a long time since a man died,” the detective’s assistant observes about halfway through the novel. “So what?” the detective responds, in a tone that the narrator describes as listless and bitter. “Women and children die, too. Women and children and men are still dying, too.” Although the novel keeps the details of its setting ambiguous, it seems to take place in Toluca, an hour away from Mexico City—and the capital of one of the most violent states in the country. Hence, I think, the detective’s hopelessness: In a nation where the murder rate is five times higher than the United States’, her work is condemned to fail. The trope of numb despair as a response to unending horror is one of the hallmarks of 21st-century Mexican literature. Recent entries in this canon include Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season and Clyo Mendoza's Fury, but the seminal example—if we understand that a writer’s nationality does not dictate what literary tradition they belong to—is undoubtedly 2666. That novel’s long list of forensic descriptions of murdered women in Mexico, which stretches for dozens of pages, seems meant to induce in the reader a feeling not unlike the listless bitterness of Rivera Garza’s detective. The discussions of literary theory that fill the pages of Death Takes Me—besides Rivera Garza’s academic paper on Pizarnik, the novel features lengthy sections about the work of French psychoanalysts—serve a similar function to Bolaño’s appropriation of coroners’ dehumanizing language: They evoke detachment in the face of violence. But if this tactic is aesthetically effective and politically powerful, it’s because of the anxiety that courses beneath, in this city where even the detective knows that her work is pointless. [Read: A novel that boldly rethinks the border] The real Rivera Garza, however, seems unsatisfied with the hopelessness that haunts the pages of her own novel. Death Takes Me appears to have been a stepping stone to a more explicitly political confrontation with violence—one that refuses resignation and demands justice. Shortly after the Spanish edition of Liliana’s Invincible Summer was published in 2021, Rivera Garza declared in an interview with El País that “all of [her] previous books” had been preparations to finally “be able to write this one about [her] sister’s femicide.” That last word is important. Since 2012, Mexican law has considered that murders of women who are killed “for reasons related to their gender” constitute a different crime from other homicides. This much-belated change in language was meant to reflect the reality that, according to the United Nations, an average of 10 women are killed each day in Mexico. The legal recognition of the specificity of gender violence was a hard-won victory for the Mexican feminist movement—a struggle that Rivera Garza documents in her memoir. But the subject was already on her mind in Death Takes Me. The difference here, of course, is that it’s men who must learn to live in a country where they can never feel safe: It was no longer a personal fear by then, but paranoia. A cloud of dragonflies. A pod of lobsters. Frenetic destruction. Young men would seek, and eventually find, new ways to protect their genitals … Old men would speak of other, always better times, now gone. Before all of this was happening. Before, when a man was safe … The world, in the aftermath of Four Castrated Men, would be different as a result of being so very much, or exaggeratedly, the same world where the Detective would fail once again. The passage makes a political point, of course, but the implausibility of its gender reversal is also very funny; readers recognize just how common the inverse scenario is. Here lies the greatest success of Death Takes Me: For all the numbness and the horror and the cerebral discussions of poetics, it’s also full of humor. It may well be that the novel’s most important contribution to our moment is that it consciously rejects the language of witnessing, elegy, and moral certainty on display in many contemporary stories about trauma. Death Takes Me, instead, suggests that personal grief and political anger can find expression, too, through ambiguity and irony—and even laughter.
Elon Musk’s assertion of power over some of the government’s largest and most sensitive data systems isn’t merely a contravention of American statutory law, administrative norms, and individual privacy rights. It is an act of constitutional restructuring, and should be understood in those terms. Musk’s team has accessed a Department of Treasury database that guides the disbursement of more than $5 trillion in federal funds. It is tussling with senior officials at the Internal Revenue Service over access to tax returns, among the most protected federal data, and at the Social Security Administration over access to data systems containing medical and bank records. A court has temporarily blocked Musk and his team from obtaining data about millions of Americans’ student loans, but only for now. And just last week, Musk sought access to “the most sensitive of all”: a database reflecting ongoing wage and income information for most working Americans. The Constitution distributes power among the branches of government to prevent its concentration and maintain its balance. It organizes many different forms of power, but particularly significant are the powers that take the form of “instruments,” to borrow James Madison’s term for the government’s material tools. Chief among them, the Constitution commits the “power of the purse” to Congress. By contrast, only the president can wield the power of the sword as the commander in chief of the armed forces. Those two profound instruments, guided by different branches, can also counterbalance each other, as when Congress withholds funding for disfavored armed interventions. [Brian Klaas: DOGE is courting catastrophic risk] Musk’s insight, which he is now putting to such destructive use, is that a third instrument—the power of data—may be as consequential as that of the purse or the sword. The branch of government that controls government data can effectuate legal and political projects not otherwise available to it. And it can use those data to contest other branches’ constitutional prerogatives, as Congress’s purse has frequently done for the president’s sword. Musk seems to have come to this realization long before Trump’s second inauguration. According to recent reporting, Musk “wanted direct, insider access to government systems” if he was going to work with the Trump administration. If he and his allies could not get “access to federal data and payment systems,” he appears to have viewed the effort as “a waste of his time.” It is unsurprising that a technology CEO would see data as a tool valuable in its own right. In the private sector, data are an asset, a currency, a form of market power. Data-rich start-ups, even those with little revenue, routinely get eye-popping valuations. Businesses are acquired not only for the goods they produce or the services they render but also for their data. Companies of all sorts—real estate, car manufacturing, home goods—have restyled themselves in recent years as data companies. Public officials and scholars of constitutional law, by contrast, have missed this important point about the value—and power—of data. They generally approach data from the perspective of individual privacy rights. Those rights are important, and governments should steward data in a way that respects them, now more than ever. But Americans must also come to see data as a source of governmental capacity and a form of governmental power—and view Musk’s attempts to appropriate that power to the president as an extraordinary act of constitutional field-claiming. Some of the consequences of that annexation of power are already unfolding. When Musk and his team of data engineers seized control of the Treasury Department’s payments system—the database used to distribute funds allocated by Congress and properly expended by administrative agencies—that interposed the president into the routine process through which Congress exercises its power of the purse. The White House has not concealed the president’s goal: to use technical control over government data systems to unconstitutionally prevent the expenditure of duly appropriated funds. Data control is impoundment by another name—at least when abused. Musk is acting pursuant to an executive order directing agencies to share “all unclassified agency records” with DOGE. On first glance, directing some executive-branch agencies to share data with others may seem an unremarkable exercise of the president’s authority as head of the executive branch. But that authority is more constrained than it might appear. Administrative agencies are created and governed by laws passed by Congress. The president can direct their activities only within the scope of discretion that Congress confers. If he wishes to exceed or contravene that statutory authority, he must point to a specific constitutional entitlement to supersede Congress’s directives. Musk’s team has cited no statutory authority to access or use the databases it has seized. And the resignations of career civil servants charged with executing Congress’s instructions about how to steward public databases suggest that Musk’s goals for those databases, many of which have not been publicly disclosed, conflict with Congress’s commands. The president’s implicit claim must therefore be that he has the constitutional right to use government data on his own terms and for his own purposes, whatever statutes say. One needs to grasp only the basic principles of structural constitutional law to see why he is wrong. Congress, not the president, has the right to determine how government data should be used and by whom. Data, of course, are not mentioned in the Constitution’s text (except, perhaps, in the census clause, which requires an enumeration of the population every 10 years). There is no general data clause assigning the power over public data to a particular branch, much less to the president. But as I will soon teach my first-year constitutional-law students, the Framers anticipated great social, technological, and economic change. To navigate the innovation and exigency that would result, the document gives Congress alone the authority to “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution” any of the powers that it itself grants. [Read: DOGE’s plans to replace humans with AI are already underway] The federal government is a government of enumerated powers, one that can exercise only the authorities granted to it by the Constitution. That clause—known as the necessary and proper clause—extends the government’s capacity by providing a reserve of adaptive powers that, in the words of Chief Justice John Marshall, create a “Constitution intended to endure for ages.” But that vital trust, the capacity to reassess the means necessary to bring the Constitution’s other authorities to fruition, is vested wisely in Congress. New forms of power, new tools and instruments, must be structured by laws passed by Congress, not amassed and deployed subject to the caprice and impulses of the president. The president has no inherent right to supersede Congress’s statutes authorizing and restricting the uses of the government’s data. The first wave of litigation over DOGE’s attempts to control government data has focused on the Privacy Act of 1974, a 50-year-old law of noble purpose but outmoded design that protects individuals’ right to notice about how the government handles Americans’ data. But Musk’s efforts must also be scrutinized for their consistency with our constitutional structure, not just with individual privacy rights. Litigants should press the separation-of-powers claim that Musk’s efforts to commandeer the government’s data systems in the president’s name exceed the president’s constitutional authority. Americans should see this assertion of an inherent presidential power to control the government’s data assets for what it is—an effort to employ data to unsettle the Constitution’s allocation and balance of powers at what is still the dawn of the government’s digital age. Congress and courts must ensure that government data, and their use, are directed not by presidential decree, but by statute. To fail to see that now is to risk ceding control over the government’s digital power to the president for generations to come.
Israelis want Benjamin Netanyahu to say sorry and go away. A survey released this week by the Israel Democracy Institute found that a staggering 87 percent of Israelis think the prime minister should take responsibility for the events of October 7, and 73 percent want him to resign either now or after the Gaza war. These figures might seem shocking to outsiders, but they are actually old news. Since October 7, the Israeli public has consistently told pollsters that it wants Netanyahu gone—a preference that has held through every twist and turn of the war and has, if anything, intensified over time. The reason for this is simple: Netanyahu not only presided over the worst security failure in Israel’s history but has actively governed against the will of the country’s majority. He and his allies received just 48.4 percent of the vote in late 2022. Still, the Israeli leader did not seek to unite a polarized population by pivoting to the center. Instead he cobbled together a sectarian coalition with unpopular extremist constituencies: far-right messianic settlers and the ultra-Orthodox. Because the votes of both of these groups are necessary for the government to remain in power, they have been able to extort Netanyahu for ever-expanding giveaways and political gains. The result: On core issue after issue, Netanyahu has been the prime minister for the 30 percent. [Anshel Pfeffer: Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s worst prime minister ever] Take the cease-fire deal that is currently in limbo in Gaza. Polls consistently show that some 70 percent of Israelis want the arrangement to continue until all of the hostages are free, even if that means releasing many convicted terrorists and ending the war with Hamas still at large. Likewise, a significant majority of Israelis reject any effort to resettle Gaza. But in his coalition, Netanyahu is beholden to the radical minority that wants not only to restart the war but also to ethnically cleanse Gaza in order to repopulate it with Jewish communities. And so the hostage deal teeters on the edge. Or consider the question of ultra-Orthodox enlistment in the Israeli army. That army is not volunteer; it relies on a universal draft to fill its ranks. But since the country’s founding, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community has been exempt from participation; its young men instead study in government-subsidized religious seminaries while their brethren defend the country. This arrangement was deeply unpopular, but for decades, Israelis grudgingly accepted it in exchange for ultra-Orthodox cooperation on more pressing political matters. But today, as Israel faces combat on multiple fronts, there is no more pressing matter than staffing the strapped armed forces. And given that the ultra-Orthodox community is now the fastest-growing demographic in Israel, its absence from the national defense is no longer tenable. Since October 7, polls show that about 70 percent of Israelis—including a majority of those who voted for the ruling right-wing government—oppose the ultra-Orthodox exemptions. A similar number opposes state subsidies to this community and its religious institutions. None of these preferences has changed government policy. Netanyahu’s disregard for majority opinion predates October 7 and may be his government’s original sin. In January 2023, his coalition announced its first major policy initiative: a sweeping overhaul of Israel’s judicial system that would dramatically disempower the country’s supreme court. This extraordinary reordering of Israeli democracy was not conceived through public debate and brokered consensus, but rather produced by a conservative think tank and rammed through the Parliament on a narrow party-line vote. Polls found that the plan was opposed by—say it with me—some two-thirds of the Israeli public. For a time, mass demonstrations against it paralyzed the country, in the largest sustained protest movement in Israeli history. Only the cataclysmic events of October 7 shelved the overhaul—and now Netanyahu’s coalition is bringing it back. The prime minister’s determination to thwart the Israeli majority has also affected personnel decisions at the highest level. On November 5, 2024, Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant. Polls previously found that Gallant was the most popular elected politician in Israel. But the former army general had opposed the judicial overhaul, rejected Jewish settlement in Gaza, called for the territory to be returned to non-Hamas Palestinian governance, pushed for an earlier cease-fire deal, and repeatedly pressed to draft the ultra-Orthodox into the Israel Defense Forces. In other words, Gallant represented all of the consensus positions of Israeli society—and that’s why he had to go. On January 1, he resigned from Parliament entirely. [Read: The Israeli defense establishment revolts against Netanyahu] These are not cherry-picked, incidental issues. They are the fundamental fault lines in Israeli politics, because they will determine the country’s future. And on every single one, Netanyahu and his government are on the opposite side of the overwhelming majority of the Israeli public. Technically, that’s all within the rules of the game. The prime minister’s coalition may not have gotten a majority of the vote, but thanks to a quirk of the Israeli electoral system, it did get the majority of seats in Parliament, and unless it collapses, it can govern as it wishes until the next election, in 2026. But morally and practically, Netanyahu’s blatant disregard for the preferences of the public is a disaster for Israeli democracy, because it undermines faith in the system’s ability to deliver for its people. Seen in this context, it’s no wonder that polls since before October 7 have consistently shown the current government losing the next election. The war has sublimated the rage seething beneath the surface to the needs of national security. But once Israelis stop fighting Hamas in Gaza, they will inevitably turn their sights on their own leadership.
Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts The ongoing stalemate over extending a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas has 2 million people still trapped in the rubble-strewn Gaza Strip with dwindling medical, food, and water supplies. Last week the Israeli government cut off all aid into Gaza in an attempt to force Hamas to agree to its terms. This week, Israeli Energy Minister Eli Cohen ordered all electric power cut off to Gaza, a move that affects a very crucial piece of remaining infrastructure: a desalination plant. In the throes of war, it can be hard to keep track of any one element of harm or destruction. There are so many places to look. But for people like Marwan Bardawil, his focus on just one thing—his job—is also his salvation, “All the time, I’m run away to the issues, to the professional life, to the work just to not keep thinking on the personal issues.” For nearly 30 years, Bardawil has worked to grow and stabilize the water sector in Gaza. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we learn more about the dire water situation in Gaza through the experience of one man who until now has managed to keep finding ways to get clean water into Gaza. The following is a transcript of the episode: Hanna Rosin: With every day that goes by, the cease-fire in Gaza—if we can even still call it that—seems increasingly fragile. Arab countries have offered a plan. American diplomats met with Hamas. But so far, no agreement, and no consensus, and for the people in Gaza, survival is getting harder by the day. About a week ago, Israel has once again cut off power, which is important because there are still 2 million people living in Gaza, and power helps bring them clean water, and clean water helps keep them alive. [Music] Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. Over a year ago, we did an episode about a man named Marwan Bardawil. He is a water engineer in Gaza, someone who was regularly calculating inflows, outflows; reviewing plans; and engineering new ideas to keep Gazans with some access to clean water, regardless of peace, war—whatever is going on politically. And something about this bureaucrat, trying day after day to keep the water on, really captured the growing desperation of the war. Like, he was just an ordinary guy trying to do a job that was hard before October 7 and continued to get more impossible by the day. When we finished that episode, Marwan was still in Gaza. Like thousands of Gazans, when the war began, he and his family were displaced from the north to the south. And then recently, Marwan made the difficult decision to move his family entirely out of Gaza and over to Egypt, where our executive producer, Claudine Ebeid, caught up with him to try to learn more about what leaving meant for him and for the future of water for the Palestinian people. Claudine, welcome to the show. Claudine Ebeid: Thanks for having me. Rosin: Claudine, there’s so much happening politically at this moment, but I want to step back and talk about the Palestinians themselves—the thousands who have had their lives upended during the war. I know many have left the country. What did Marwan tell you about why he decided to leave? Ebeid: Well, just to remind listeners, Marwan is 61 years old, he’s a father and grandfather, and he and his family were living in the north of Gaza, which was where Israel first launched its retaliatory attack to the October 7 attacks. So five days into the war, under Israeli air strikes, Marwan, his adult children, and two of his granddaughters—they flee the north on foot to the south of Gaza. Then, last summer, like almost a hundred thousand other Palestinians, he decides to flee once more, but this time from Gaza to Egypt. Marwan Bardawil: I’m one of them: no house. And when you lost—when your house has become a rubble, you don’t just lose your house. You lost your house, your memories. So it’s just—it’s like you moved having nothing; you lost everything. Just, you are here; it’s like you saved your body from physical death. Ebeid: Many people fled to Egypt in this little sliver of a window where the border was open, and people planned to get out through basically this company—this Egyptian company—charging US$5,000 for an adult and $2,500 for a child to get people out. So, you know, it’s not an altruistic endeavor. Rosin: Yeah. Ebeid: Ultimately, there were two reasons that really pushed Marwan to leave. From the professional side, he was starting to get pressure—counsel, I think, is the right word—from his boss that if he could get out, he should, because his work was really valuable to them, and they needed him alive. Rosin: Oof. Ebeid: The second reason was this moment that he described to me, where he was driving in his car, and the car in front of him exploded. You know, shrapnel from the car busted through his windshield and injured his shoulder. And I think it was just too close of call. You know, when he described that moment to me, he said three weeks later, he and his family—they were gone. [Music] Rosin: How did water work in Gaza before the war? Because I recall from talking to him that it wasn’t easy, even in the best of non-war circumstances, to keep water flowing. Ebeid: It’s true. Water was never a sure thing in Gaza. It’s a total patchwork of a system there. Basically, they have a combination of water sources. One is coming from Israel. That’s about 10 percent of their water, and that comes from three main connection points. The rest is coming from groundwater that gets treated. So the Palestinian Water Authority says that before the war, there were 306 groundwater wells as primary sources of water. They also have three desalination plants. They’re situated along the coast, and they’re basically treating seawater. The output is not huge. And then they also have a lot of small-scale desalination plants and water tankers that are, you know, just kind of filling in the gaps. So it’s not an ideal system. You have a lot of moving parts. And the source water that you’re starting with is already not a great starting point. Rosin: How much water did make it to Palestinians with that arrangement? Ebeid: The average person in Gaza was getting around 80 liters of water a day. And most Americans—we use about 300 liters of water a day. Rosin: Oh. Ebeid: So that’s what was going on before October 7. Rosin: Right, so that was the baseline before the war. Then comes October 7, and you’ve described the intense bombing campaigns that destroyed a lot of the north. How did that situation look in the eyes of a water engineer? Ebeid: So pipes are getting blown up, and teams are rushing out to try to repair what they can, what damage is happening in various locations, and they don’t know what they’re walking into. We do know that there were two separate occasions in which workers who were either doing a water repair or heading to a repair were killed. So the conditions were really dangerous. And I’m sure you and many people have seen images of the destruction in Gaza. And when I was in Egypt, Marwan shared some of his photos with me. Ebeid: (Gasps.) Oh my God. It’s rubble. Bardawil: Yeah. Ebeid: This is the Palestinian Water Authority office in Gaza? Bardawil: In Gaza, yes. Ebeid: So the office itself got destroyed? Bardawil: Yeah, it’s destroyed. Ebeid: By the summer of 2024, almost every connection point, every desalination plant, every sewage station had either been totally destroyed or had sustained some amount of damage. Rosin: So what did that mean for the people who were trapped in Gaza? Because there were still about 2 million people there. How did that change their lives? Ebeid: This kind of massive destruction of water infrastructure—it does not just affect the water supply; it also leads to diseases. So by the summer of last year, we know that about 600,000 cases of acute diarrhea were reported and 40,000 cases of hepatitis A. And those are diseases that come from contamination of water and from having an open sewage system. And then around that same time, humanitarian aid workers become extremely concerned because they find that a 10-month-old baby has tested positive for polio. And polio is something that can spread through contaminated water. And this was the first confirmed case in Gaza of polio in a quarter of a century. So they go on a massive campaign to vaccinate kids for polio, and that campaign is still ongoing today. [Music] Rosin: Now we’re a few weeks into the cease-fire. Maybe it’s a precarious cease-fire. It’s not really clear. What’s the current water situation? Ebeid: For most of the war, people were getting somewhere near 3 liters of water a day, which is so little, and that was for cooking, for hygiene, for drinking. After the cease-fire, in January, some people in Gaza were starting to get around 7 to 10 liters a day. Rosin: So a little bit better. Ebeid: A little bit better. You know, not a crazy jump, but it was an improvement. Last month, when I checked in with the Palestinian Water Authority, at least one connection point with Israel was flowing again, and one main desalination plant was reconnected to Israel’s power grid. And so that was helping. Rosin: Okay. Ebeid: But this week, as you mentioned, Israel cut off the electricity to that desalination plant. So it’s very possible the water situation could turn dire again very quickly. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Ebeid: I will say that Marwan and his colleagues at the PWA do have a six-month plan that they have started implementing during this cease-fire. Whether they can continue to implement that plan is really up in the air at this moment. Rosin: Even the fact that they have a six-month plan seems really important to note, because what that symbolizes is Gazans rebuilding for themselves, as opposed to the other visions, which are the U.S. or somebody else doing it for them, right? Ebeid: Right. Trump’s vision is a “Middle Eastern Riviera,” as he called it. And in that plan, he talks about displacing all of the Palestinians that live in Gaza, and having them get absorbed by Arab countries, and then the U.S. taking ownership of Gaza. And, you know, presumably then whoever Trump wants to contract with will come in and rebuild Gaza. However, last week, Arab countries came together in Egypt, and they agreed on a plan that could potentially include the water authority. They say their plan will cost $53 billion. It would be one that calls for rebuilding Gaza in a way that doesn’t displace Gazans, and it calls for a Palestinian government to manage the rebuilding. So that vision: very different from Trump’s vision. That vision is a vision of Gazans rebuilding Gaza. Rosin: Okay, so there’s all this destroyed infrastructure, and there are competing visions for how to rebuild it. How does Marwan fit into all of this? Ebeid: You know, Marwan has been building and rebuilding the water infrastructure for decades. You know, one of the reasons that I was interested in following him was that his personal life and his career really kind of let you see the track of what happened in Gaza since 1993. President Bill Clinton: On behalf of the United States and Russia, co-sponsors of the Middle East peace process, welcome to this great occasion of history and hope. Ebeid: The Oslo Accords were signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. And this was a really important moment. Clinton: We know a difficult road lies ahead. Every peace has its enemies, those who still prefer the easy habits of hatred to the hard labors of reconciliation. But Prime Minister Rabin has reminded us that you do not have to make peace with your friends. And the Quran teaches that if the enemy inclines toward peace, do thou also incline toward peace. Ebeid: At that time, there was hope. There was hope that this would be an area that would be able to govern itself; it would be able to build for itself; it would be able to think about its infrastructure for itself. And Marwan’s life and his career sort of map out what happened. [Music] Rosin: After the break: Marwan was right to be hopeful once, even though he wasn’t working with all that much. What does it look like to push through this time around, with even less? [Break] Rosin: Claudine, Marwan has been working on water in Gaza for, like, 30 years. So he knows how to operate with very few resources, very little autonomy. But still, I bet in the early days, like during the Oslo Accords, in the ’90s, the spirit of his work was probably really different. Ebeid: Right. Rosin: Did you talk to Marwan about this? Was there a younger Marwan who had a lot of energy and optimism, and was very excited about Gazans building Gaza? Ebeid: Yeah, you know, he was born and raised in Gaza, studied water engineering in Gaza, and left for a small time to go be a water engineer abroad. After the Oslo Accords are signed, he sees this as his opportunity to come home and to put his engineering abilities to work in Gaza. He’s there raising a family, and he describes, you know, the beginning as a very heady time. There was an idea that the Palestinian Authority was in charge, and that they were going to be able to build a water system. Ebeid: Can you remember that time? Bardawil: Of course I remember. And I remember we put a five-year plan, short term and long term, for the water sector in Palestine. And I remember that I was in a team that consists of 11 persons. We had seven male and four female. And we are sitting in a hotel, and the hotel is like an office, because there was no offices at the time. We used to work ’til midnight on a daily basis. We believed in the peace process. We believed that this process will continue and will end with something good. Ebeid: That was the part that just hit me in my heart. When he is describing to me, like, they are young; they are full of hope. And he talks about getting plans from other small nations so that they can, you know, get an example of: What are the lessons learned? What are the things that we should be thinking about? Could you imagine? Like, We’ve studied to be water engineers, and now we get to, like, build our home’s water system. Rosin: That’s an exciting thing. You get to do the thing that you care about most: bringing water to people, for your own people, in your own country. That’s a very powerful experience. Ebeid: Yes, but more than a decade later, in 2006, Hamas wins an election, and with that comes a period of violence between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Eventually, Hamas controls Gaza. But the Palestinian Water Authority was allowed, I should say, by Hamas to continue doing its work. I think this is because they knew that the PWA knew what to do. They had the engineers, and people need water. And Marwan—he essentially keeps his head down during this time. Rosin: What is it about him that just—did you get any insight into that? Like, what is it about him that just is able to keep focused on the task in these impossible situations? Ebeid: I think Marwan is someone who feels a great responsibility—a great responsibility to the people of Gaza and also to his own family. Bardawil: I am talking about myself. All the time, I’m run away to the issues, to the professional life, to the work just to not keep thinking on the personal issues, because it’s like, you will be burned by just thinking— Ebeid: This is, like, your safe place, is to think about the water issues? Bardawil: Yes, this is the safest. Ebeid: I think it is a safe place to be to think about the thing that you have control over and you know what to do. And it’s based on plans, and it’s based on equations, and yes, sometimes it’s based on diplomatic effort and trying to get other countries to help you. But it’s all in service of something that is a clear human necessity, which is water. And that is not something, to him, that is political. And yet, we are at this moment where politics will be the determining factor of whether people in Gaza will have access to water. [Music] Ebeid: Marwan is still working in what capacity he can for the water sector in Gaza from Cairo, but how long that will last is unknown. When and if Palestinians like him will be able to go back to Gaza is unknown. And the precariousness of this political moment for Gaza it’s really hard to overstate. Rosin: Claudine, thank you so much for coming on. Ebeid: Yeah. Thanks for having me to talk about this. [Music] Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jocelyn Frank. It was edited by Andrea Valdez, engineered by Erica Huang, and fact-checked by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.
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. In 2023, Donald Trump posted that electric-car supporters should “ROT IN HELL.” Now he is showcasing Teslas on the White House lawn. Yesterday, the president stood with Elon Musk and oohed and ahhed at a lineup of the electric vehicles, saying that he hoped his purchase of one would help the carmaker’s stock, which had halved in value since mid-December thanks to a combination of customer backlash and general economic uncertainty. (The stock has rebounded by 7.6 percent since yesterday.) Trump does not own shares in Tesla, as far as we know. He has said that he is supporting the carmaker because protesters are “harming a great American company,” and has suggested that people who vandalize Tesla cars or protest the company should be labeled domestic terrorists. But he also seems interested in helping his friend, the special government employee Elon Musk, maintain his status as the wealthiest man in the world. Yesterday’s White House spectacle was, my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote, “a stilted, corrupt attempt to juice a friend’s stock, and certainly beneath the office of the presidency.” If any other government official had similarly promoted a friend’s product (especially on hallowed White House grounds), they would have been in clear violation of the specific regulation restricting executive-branch employees from using their role to endorse commercial products or services, Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told me. But the president and the vice president are exempt from that regulation, as well as from some of the other ethics rules that govern federal officials. Norms, in this case, are the primary lever for holding the commander in chief accountable. Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his appetite for overturning norms and pushing ethical bounds, so his latest stunt as a Tesla salesman is not altogether shocking. When Trump learned in 2016 that U.S. presidents are exempt from the conflict-of-interest rules that restrict other government officials, he seemed delighted. “The president can’t have a conflict of interest,” he told The New York Times then. “I’d assumed that you’d have to set up some type of trust or whatever.” Despite the lack of legal restriction, modern presidents have generally moved assets into blind trusts, which are controlled by independent managers, in order to diminish any perception that they are profiting from the office (or that they are making policy decisions to boost their own investment portfolios). Trump has shuffled around his assets since taking office but in general has chosen to put his family in charge of managing them. Trump recently said that he’d transferred his shares of Truth Social into a trust controlled by his son Donald Trump Jr., a move that is “irrelevant from an ethics point of view” because the money could still flow to him, Clark told me. And with his own family controlling the trust, Trump likely knows exactly where his money is and can make decisions that would increase the value of his holdings. Presidential conflicts of interest, or even the appearance of them, can undermine public confidence (nearly two-thirds of Americans said they believe that all or most elected officials ran for office to make money, a 2023 Pew Research Center survey found). Trump may not be directly profiting off Tesla, but the problem with him hawking cars poses the same issue as other potential conflicts of interest: What’s good for Truth Social or Trump’s meme coin or Tesla is not necessarily what’s good for the country, and Trump has so far not inspired confidence that he will prioritize the latter. Musk, too, hasn’t assuaged concerns that he will separate his business interests from his role in the Trump administration: Musk’s corporate empire relies on government contracts. And the federal firings he is overseeing through his DOGE initiative are already reshaping agencies that regulate his companies. After he sat in the Teslas and complimented them in front of cameras yesterday, Trump told the press that he would buy one of the vehicles and pay with a personal check. That relatively small financial commitment makes a big statement about the president and where his priorities lie: with the interests of his friend, the billionaire. Related: The Tesla revolt The crypto world is already mad at Trump. (From January) Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Elon Musk looks desperate, Charlie Warzel writes. DOGE is courting catastrophic risk. Don’t trust the Trumpsplainers. Today’s News In response to the Trump administration’s tariffs, the European Union announced that it will impose tariffs on $28 billion in U.S. exports, and Canada added 25 percent tariffs on approximately $20.7 billion worth of U.S. goods. The Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident, remains in ICE detention after his procedural hearing. He was arrested earlier this week in an effort to deport him over his role in protests against the war in Gaza. The Department of Education fired more than 1,300 employees yesterday, leaving the department with roughly half the workforce it had before Donald Trump took office. Evening Read Caroline Gutman / The New York Times / Redux The Man Who Owned 181 Renoirs By Susan Tallman Of all the ways that today’s plutocrats spend their billions, founding an art museum is one of the more benign, somewhere behind eradicating malaria but ahead of eradicating democracy. The art in these museums is almost always contemporary, reflecting the dearth of available old masters along with a global chattering-classes consensus that avant-garde art is socially, intellectually, and culturally important. Few of these tycoons, though, are likely to find the stakes as agonizingly high as Albert C. Barnes did. Read the full article. More From The Atlantic The FAA’s troubles are more serious than you know. Academia needs to stick up for itself. The Iranian dissident asking simple questions Throw Elon Musk out of the Royal Society. Culture Break Netflix / Everett Collection Watch. There’s nothing else like Mo, Hannah Giorgis writes. The Palestinian American sitcom (streaming on Netflix) is the first of its kind—and takes its humor very seriously. Read. “As much as I love the [sci-fi] genre, I always have this desire to betray it at the same time,” Bong Joon Ho, the director of Mickey 17, told David Sims in an interview. Play our daily crossword. Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter. Explore all of our newsletters here. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
For years, Donald Trump’s critics have accused him of behaving like a crooked used-car salesman. Yesterday afternoon, he did it for real on the White House South Lawn. Squinting in the sun with Elon Musk, Trump stood next to five Tesla vehicles, holding a piece of paper with handwritten notes about their features and costs. Trump said he would purchase a car himself at full price. Then Trump and Musk got into one of the cars. Musk explained that the electric vehicle was “like a golf cart that goes really fast.” Trump offered his own praise to the camera: “Wow. That’s beautiful. This is a different panel than I’ve—everything’s computer!” This was a stilted, corrupt attempt to juice a friend’s stock, and certainly beneath the office of the presidency. But you ought not to overlook just how embarrassing the spectacle was for Musk. The subtext of the event—during which Trump also declared that the White House would label any acts of violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism—was the ongoing countrywide protests against Tesla, due to Musk’s role in the Trump administration. In some cities, protesters have defaced or damaged Tesla vehicles and set fire to the company’s charging stations. Tesla’s stock price has fallen sharply—almost 50 percent since its mid-December, postelection peak—on the back of terrible sales numbers in Europe. The hastily assembled White House press event was presented as a show of solidarity, but the optics were quite clear: Musk needed Trump to come in and fix his mess for him. And Tesla isn’t the only Musk venture that’s struggling. SpaceX’s massive new Starship rocket has exploded twice this year during test flights. And Ontario, Canada, has canceled its contract with his Starlink internet company to provide service to remote communities, citing Trump’s tariffs. According to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, Musk is $148 billion poorer than he was on Inauguration Day (he is currently worth $333.1 billion). Just 17 days after wielding a chain saw and dancing triumphantly onstage at CPAC, the billionaire looked like he was about to cry on the Fox Business channel earlier this week. He confessed that he was having “great difficulty” running his many businesses, and let out a long, dismal sigh and shrugged when asked if he might go back to his businesses after he’s done in the administration. The world’s richest man can be cringe, stilted, and manic in public appearances, but rarely have I seen him appear as defeated as he has of late, not two months into his role as a presidential adviser. In the past few weeks, he’s been chastised by some of Trump’s agency heads for overstepping his bounds as an adviser (Trump sided with the agency heads). Reports suggest that some Republican lawmakers are frustrated with Musk’s bluster and that the DOGE approach to slashing the federal bureaucracy is angering constituents and making lawmakers less popular in their districts. DOGE has produced few concrete “wins” for the Trump administration and has instead alienated many Americans who see Musk as presiding over a cruel operation that is haphazardly firing and rehiring people and taking away benefits. Numerous national polls in recent weeks indicate that a majority of respondents disapprove of Musk’s role and actions in the government. Musk’s deep sighs on cable TV and emergency Tesla junkets on the White House lawn are hints that he may be beginning to understand the precariousness of his situation. He is well known for his high risk tolerance, overleveraging, and seemingly wild business bets. But his role at DOGE represents the biggest reputational and, consequently, financial gamble of his career. Musk is playing a dangerous game, and he looks to be losing control of the narrative. And the narrative is everything. Elon Musk is many things—the richest man in the world, an internet-addled conspiracy theorist, the controller of six companies, perhaps even the shadow president of the United States—but most importantly, he is an idea. The value of Musk may be tied more to his image than his actual performance. He’s a human meme stock. A CNN clip from late October captures this notion. In it, a reporter is standing outside one of Musk’s America PAC rallies in Pennsylvania, interviewing the CEO’s superfans, most of whom are unequivocal that Musk is “the smartest man in the world.” He has an engineer’s mindset, one attendee claims, meaning he sees the world differently. Two other men in the clip say that Musk got them to pay attention to politics (and to Trump, specifically). These people had fallen hard for a cultivated image of Musk as a Thomas Edison or Tony Stark type, a great man of history who is single-handedly pushing the bounds of progress. Musk has had great success popularizing electric vehicles and building new rockets (though many still debate his direct involvement in the engineering). These supporters might have been fans of his companies, but they seem to have also fallen for the myth of his genius, a story born out of years of hagiographic books, news articles reporting his hyperbolic claims, and Musk’s own ability to command attention. [Read: Elon Musk’s texts shatter the myth of the tech genius] The image of Musk as a true visionary has proved surprisingly durable. In the early to mid-2010s, Musk took advantage of a different era of technology coverage—one that was more gadget-focused and largely uncritical—to hype his ideas for the future of transportation and interplanetary exploration. At that time, Tesla, his signature project, was coded as progressive and marketed as being in line with climate-change goals. The cultural dynamic of these ideas has changed, but the fundamental product being sold by Musk has not: one man with a singular ability to brute force his way to the future. Musk’s trajectory changed after Trump was first elected president. It was during this period that Musk—already an incessant poster—realized how Twitter could be used to command an unbelievable amount of attention. Even when that attention was negative, the process of repeatedly making himself the main character on the platform elevated Musk’s profile. He became more polarizing (for chastising journalists, behaving erratically, making a supposed weed joke on Twitter that got him in trouble with the SEC, and getting sued for defamation for calling somebody a “pedo guy”), yet this somehow only added to Musk’s lore. For years, valid criticisms of the Tesla executive came with an asterisk: He’s erratic, crude, even a little unstable, but that’s all part of the larger visionary package. Kara Swisher showcased this dynamic well in a 2018 New York Times column titled “Elon Musk Is the Id of Tech.” “I find the hagiography around him tiresome and even toxic,” she wrote. But also, “Mr. Musk’s mind and ideas are big ones.” As Swisher noted, Musk’s attention-seeking at the time had a secondary effect of alienating him from some of his peers and fans. But tweet by tweet, Musk found a different audience, one eager to embrace his visionary image, provided he took up their crusade against “wokeism.” During the pandemic, Musk’s posting frequency intensified considerably as he began to stake out more reactionary territory. He called the COVID-19 panic in March 2020 “dumb” and later that year tweeted that “pronouns suck.” Musk endeared himself to the right wing by positioning himself as a free-speech warrior, a posture that ultimately led him to purchase Twitter. Right-wing influencers and the MAGA faithful saw Musk’s turn as proof of their movement’s ascendance, but what has happened since Musk turned Twitter into X is nothing short of audience capture: Musk has fully become the person his right-wing fanboys want him to be, pushing far beyond a mere dalliance with conspiracy theories and “Great Replacement” rhetoric. It is hardly controversial to suggest based on Musk's posts and blatant political activism that the centibillionaire has been further radicalized by his platform, which he then turned into a political weapon to help elect Trump. Musk’s X and MAGA bets mostly paid off, at least in the near term. Before Musk bought Twitter, I highlighted a comment from Lily Francus, then the director of quant research at Moody’s Analytics, who noted, “I do think fundamentally that a significant fraction of Tesla’s value is due to the fact that Elon can command this attention continuously.” Francus doesn’t go as far as to say that Tesla behaves like a meme stock—which can surge in price after going viral as a result of coordinated efforts online—but that Musk himself has this quality. Musk’s Twitter purchase was a bad deal financially and has been detrimental to X’s bottom line, but his ownership of the platform helped boost his cultural and political relevance by keeping him in the center of the news cycle. Similarly, Musk going all in on Donald Trump, becoming a megadonor to Republicans, and ultimately getting the DOGE gig all resulted in Tesla stock soaring—up until a point. You can argue that there’s a flywheel effect to all of this. Musk’s polarizing, upsetting, attention-seeking behavior has made him unavoidable and increased his political influence, which, in turn, has increased his net worth overall. This has only improved Musk’s standing with Trump, who both respects great wealth and appears flattered by the notion that the richest man in the world wants to spend his time shadowing him around Washington and Mar-a-Lago. Musk is used to being leveraged, trading on his reputation or his illiquid assets to keep the flywheel spinning. To his credit, he tends to make it work. He’s flouted the law when that has been advantageous to his business interests and taken advantage of a culture of elite impunity. He’s long been unafraid to get sued or reprimanded by a government agency. But two important things are different in his current situation. The first is the stakes of his reputational bet—rather than alienating himself from progressives or the media, Musk is threatening to meddle with essential government services, such as Social Security, that millions of Americans rely on. Indeed, Musk floated the idea of cutting Social Security benefits in his Fox Business interview on Monday. Whether he’s in charge of cuts or not, as DOGE’s figurehead, Musk risks infuriating countless people who object to the federal firings. Breaking the government is orders of magnitude different than buying a niche but influential microblogging platform. [Read: There are no more red lines] The second difference is the man he’s tied his reputation to: Trump. Musk’s attention-seeking and fondness for organizational chaos are usually unmatched, giving him an advantage in most of his dealings. This is not the case with Trump, whose shamelessness and penchant for discarding close confidants when they become liabilities are well documented. Musk is rich and powerful, but he is not the durable, singular political figure that Trump is. It is not difficult to imagine a scenario where this ends poorly for Musk. The flywheel could reverse: Musk could become universally reviled, causing the protests to increase and his net worth to shrink. The richest man in the world is valuable to Trump, as is the myth of Musk as the modern Edison. But mere billionaires? They are fungible tokens and easily interchangeable dais members in Trump’s eyes—just ask Mark Zuckerberg. It would be foolish to suggest with any certainty that Musk is cooked. Historically, he’s managed to wriggle out of trouble. Perhaps the most hopeful outcome for Musk is that Trump has too much of his own presidency tied to Musk to throw him under the bus. It’s too early to say. Yesterday’s White House stunt had all the hallmarks of Trump corruption, but there was something else, too—an air of desperation. It was a tacit admission that the protests are working and that Musk and Trump are rattled enough by current sentiment that they’re willing to turn the South Lawn into a showroom. Watching Musk clam up on Fox Business or quietly idle next to Trump in front of the White House, it’s even easier than normal to see past Musk’s trademark bullshitting and bluster. These moments make clear that this time, Musk has wagered the only thing he can’t easily buy back—the very myth he created for himself.
Of all the ways that today’s plutocrats spend their billions, founding an art museum is one of the more benign, somewhere behind eradicating malaria but ahead of eradicating democracy. The art in these museums is almost always contemporary, reflecting the dearth of available old masters along with a global chattering-classes consensus that avant-garde art is socially, intellectually, and culturally important. Few of these tycoons, though, are likely to find the stakes as agonizingly high as Albert C. Barnes did. From 1912 to 1951, Barnes amassed one of the world’s greatest private collections of modern European artwork—more Cézannes (69) and Renoirs (an absurd 181) than any other museum; Matisse’s game-changing The Joy of Life ; Seurat’s extraordinary Models ; the list goes on and on. The Barnes Foundation was officially an educational institution, but was effectively America’s first museum of modern art. (The New York organization that put capital letters on those words is four years younger.) But if Barnes’s collection is a model to emulate, the saga of his organization is a lesson in founder’s-syndrome perils. Coinciding with the centennial of the Barnes’s opening, we have Blake Gopnik’s breezy new biography of the man, The Maverick’s Museum, and Neil L. Rudenstine’s reissued history of the institution, The House of Barnes, first published in 2012, when its legal struggles were above-the-fold news. The two deserve to be read together, because the slippage of identity between the man, the art, and the institution provides both the melodrama and the farce of the tale. Born into ungenteel poverty in 1872, Barnes was smart enough to gain admission to Philadelphia’s selective Central High School and the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. Realizing, perhaps, that he lacked something in the bedside-manner department, he went into chemical research, and in 1902 he and his partner commercially released the antiseptic Argyrol, which became standard in American maternity wards for the prevention of perinatal infections. As a chemist, Barnes was a one-hit wonder, but Argyrol made him a fortune. At first he used his new money in predictable ways. He built a mansion on the Main Line and named it “Lauraston” for his wife. He bought fast cars (a passion that would be the death of him) and joined the local fox hunt. He also did less clichéd things, such as studying philosophy, reading Sigmund Freud, and supporting civil rights. A fan of the pragmatist thinkers William James and John Dewey, Barnes believed that a theory’s worth was measured not by its elegance but by its consequences in the world, and he treated his Argyrol factory as a laboratory for social experimentation. He hired Black and white workers, men and women. Contra then-flourishing notions of top-down, rigidly mandated workplace “efficiency,” Barnes boasted that in his factory, “each participant had evolved his or her own method of doing a particular job.” The “her” in that sentence alone is noteworthy. At the same time, Barnes was a crank of operatic grandiosity—thin-skinned, bellicose, distrustful, fickle, and vindictive. Ezra Pound described him as living in “a state of high-tension hysteria, at war with mankind.” His bile could be witty, but more often traded on playground scatology, ethnic slurs, and sexual taunts. The Philadelphia Museum of Art was “a house of artistic and educational prostitution”; when a newspaper critic took offense at “the fevered passion for unclean things!” (naked people) in Barnes’s collection, he sent a letter impugning her “well-recognized sexual vagaries.” Curious about art, he enlisted the advice of a high-school friend, the Ashcan School painter William Glackens, and in 1912 sent Glackens to Paris with a wish list and $20,000 (about $650,000 today). Finding that the Impressionists Barnes sought were costlier than anticipated, Glackens skewed modern. In the course of two weeks, he bought 33 works, including a Picasso, a Cézanne, and the first Van Gogh to enter an American collection, his spellbinding The Postman. When Barnes made his own trip to Paris a few months later, he spent three times the money in half the time and lived up to every stereotype the French had about American millionaires. “He did literally wave his chequebook in the air,” Gertrude Stein wrote to a friend. Modernism held attraction for someone who considered himself a pugnaciously original thinker. Collecting old art was posh and respectable, but in an America still scandalized by the sight of breasts, collecting modern art was outrageous. Within 10 years, Barnes had acquired some 700 paintings. But art to him was more than a proxy for cultural sophistication and a fat bank account. It made him feel things—intense and important things—and he would spend the rest of his life trying to map precisely how it did so. If his obsession with Renoir’s late, big-bottomed, pinheaded nudes seems “idiosyncratic in the extreme,” as Rudenstine writes, it was shared by Picasso and Matisse, who prized radical departures in form. Barnes was a turbulent person and Renoir was his happy place, full of pretty colors and willing flesh. Cézanne appealed for different reasons. Barnes found heroism in the artist’s “social strangeness,” and saw it mirrored in the art: “His deformations of naturalistic appearances are akin to the brusque remarks … which, when sociability is the rule, project new interpretations upon conventionally accepted ideas.” Barnes’s eye wasn’t perfect—he passed on Van Gogh’s Starry Night—but his instincts were remarkably good. He began buying African sculpture in 1922 and amassed an important collection. He bought old masters whose agitation or distortions recalled the moderns he loved. He bought Egyptian and Greco-Roman antiquities. He bought Native American serapes and jewelry. He bought American folk art and—repudiating the distinction between “art” and “craft”—acquired quantities of handwrought hinges, keyhole plates, and door knockers, which he hung alongside the paintings. To Kenneth Clark, then the head of the National Gallery in London, he wrote that he saw “no essential esthetic difference between the forms of the great painters or sculptors, and those of the iron-workers.” Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Landscape With Figures, Near Cagnes (circa 1910) is one of the Barnes Foundation’s 181 works by the artist. (Sepia Times / Getty) None of this was quite as extraordinary as Barnes liked to pretend. The connection among folk art, handcrafts, and modernism was made by a number of curators and collectors at the time. Concerning the avant-garde, John Quinn, the visionary behind the 1913 Armory Show, was more adventurous, leaning into Cubism and Duchamp’s radical experiments where Barnes balked. (Their rivalry was such that Barnes, tiring of his usual name-calling, hired private detectives to dig up dirt on Quinn.) Others were not far behind. MoMA’s 2024 book Inventing the Modern celebrates the museum’s female founders—Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan—and the energetic idealism required to get these efforts off the ground in an often hostile culture. Barnes exaggerated his temerity in the face of philistines partly because he longed to be recognized as more than just a world-class shopper. Applying his chemist’s brain to locating the “scientific” principles behind his aesthetic experience, he concluded that what mattered in art was form—line, color, space, movement. Contextual data such as biographies and subject matter just distracted from the real act of looking. These formalist ideas had been articulated by various critics and art historians before Barnes, though, as usual, he took them to extremes. His 530-page “statement of principles,” The Art in Painting (1925), includes no titles for works reproduced in the book, lest readers be led astray by subject matter. Much more original was his application of this formalism to John Dewey’s theories of experimental education and social reform. He could cite Dewey’s 1916 book Democracy and Education “almost chapter and verse,” Gopnik tells us. Barnes was convinced that “plain people of average intelligence” could be brought to the kind of art apotheosis he had experienced, just by knowing how to look. He derided art history as a discipline and art scholars individually, but he couldn’t abandon the idea that he himself had expertise other people needed. Like many people who get a lot out of looking, Barnes was annoyed at the casual attitudes of museum visitors. When the Barnes Foundation opened its doors in 1925—in a purpose-built neoclassical building within a 12-acre arboretum adjacent to Barnes’s home—its indenture permitted no posh parties and no unvetted visitors. The art would not travel or be reproduced in color. To see it, you applied to take classes in the Barnes method. It was not a museum; it was a school. Inside, he arranged (and regularly rearranged) the collection in “ensembles” that mixed objects of different ages, origins, and functions. Most people do this at home, but Barnes’s stridently symmetrical arrangements—big artworks in the middle, smaller ones to either side, formal echoes bouncing around the room—were emphatically pedagogical. In Room 15, for example, Matisse’s Red Madras Headdress (1907) is flanked by (among other things) a pair of watery landscapes, a pair of fans, a pair of soup ladles, and a pair of pictures, each showing a woman and a dog (one of them from the hand of William Glackens’s daughter, age 9). The effect is of an art-history curriculum designed by Wes Anderson. Admission was doled out on the basis of whim and choler. Having prior expertise or impressive connections was usually a black mark: T. S. Eliot, Le Corbusier, Barnett Newman, and the heads of both MoMA and the Whitney were among the rejected. Student behavior was monitored. Questioning the method or viewing in the wrong way could get you bounced. Rumor was that Barnes and his second in command, Violette de Mazia, lurked incognito or listened through microphones for heretical conversation. Such ritualistic protocols can actually enhance the experience of viewing: Perceiving the specialness of the opportunity, people will give heightened attention. So while some Barnes students rebelled, others became acolytes. Dewey, one of Barnes’s very few lasting friends, wrote in his book Art as Experience that the educational work of the collection was of “a pioneer quality comparable to the best that has been done in any field during the present generation, that of science not excepted.” Considering that the science of that generation had produced antibiotics and the theory of relativity, that’s quite a claim. Albert C. Barnes, 1872–1951 (Keystone-France / Getty) Fifty-three and childless when the foundation opened its doors, Barnes was not oblivious to the need to arrange its future beyond his lifetime. But his vision for it was inflexible. He unsuccessfully floated prospective partnerships to the University of Pennsylvania, Haverford College, and Sarah Lawrence College, whose exasperated president finally wrote: “You can stuff your money, your pictures, your iron work, your antiques, and the whole goddamn thing right up the Schuylkill River.” Barnes then trained an affectionate eye on nearby Lincoln University—the second-oldest historically Black university in the nation, alma mater of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall. His relationship with Black culture and Black leaders was characteristically complex. He considered spirituals “America’s only great music,” and his admiration for African sculpture was deep. But this appreciation was often tinged with condescension. The only Black painter in his collection was not one of those artists who had been to Paris and absorbed the lessons of modernism, but the self-taught “primitive” Horace Pippin. (Similarly, the women in his collection tended toward the doe-eyed and decorative. He returned the Georgia O’Keeffes he’d bought, but kept his Marie Laurencins.) Still, he forged a relationship with Lincoln’s president, Horace Mann Bond, and in October 1950 altered the terms of succession so that Lincoln would eventually assume control of the foundation’s board. This relationship, too, might well have gone south, but in July 1951 Barnes sped through a stop sign in his Packard convertible and collided with a tractor trailer. For the next 37 years, Violette de Mazia carried the Barnes torch and guarded the Barnes gates. Admission became harder, the dogma stricter, the students fewer but more ardent. When the state forced the tax-exempt foundation to open to the public two days a week, Barnes students picketed. In 1987, the philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto described the sorry state of affairs—the “stunning works” imprisoned in “the sullen museum, with its musty smells and impassive custodians.” [Read: The controversy over moving the world’s best art collection you haven’t heard of] De Mazia’s death, in 1988, snapped the foundation out of its torpor. That it had been careening toward insolvency now became clear, and the only paths to income—admission fees, loan shows, event rentals—were blocked by Barnes’s indenture. The new Lincoln-appointed board fought to break the terms; former Barnes students fought to preserve them. The state fought to increase access; neighbors fought to restrict it. Accusations of racism and corruption bounced around. Eventually the board proposed moving the whole collection to a new location near the Philadelphia Museum of Art. YouTube comments below the 2009 anti-move film The Art of the Steal convey the ensuing outrage: “My soul cries for this loss,” “Shame!!!,” “I Truly hope The Philadelphia Of Art [sic] Burns to the ground … art and all.” If this fury seems disproportionate to the situation—a nonprofit institution in need of funds finds a way to preserve its core assets while increasing public access—it was certainly very Barnesian. The Barnes Foundation has now been on Philadelphia’s Museum Mile for more than a decade. The art is all there—Cézanne’s great The Card Players, the many pink ladies in search of their clothes, the Wes Anderson ensembles. From ceiling vaults to baseboards, every room has been replicated as it appeared when Barnes died. But they sit in a different building, under a different set of rules. Entry is no longer an achievement on par with getting past the bouncer at Berghain. All you have to do is cough up $30. Inside, you can interrupt your viewing with a cup of coffee in the café or a visit to the gift shop, where you can buy a Van Gogh Postman mug or socks adorned with Horace Pippin’s African American family at prayer (a strange choice for footwear, but maybe the logical outcome of pure formalist thought—the colors and shapes look fine on an ankle). [Read: Are fine art museums the next Starbucks?] In other words, outside the re-created rooms, you get the standard, bustling, consumer-oriented museum experience, not arboreal serenity, and inside the rooms, you have to put up with the presence of other people, not all of them models of rectitude. But there is nothing like it. The absence of wall texts can be a welcome relief from current museum practice. And if the ensembles depend more on visual rhyming than on ideas, they really do get you to look. If you want, you can even take classes in the Barnes method, without passing some capricious test of merit. Arthur Danto was right, though: Barnes is still remembered “for the spectacular collection of early modern art that bears his name, for the enthusiasm with which he kept people from viewing it and for the terrible temper he expended on behalf of these two projects. He was a gifted but an extremely tiresome man.” Barnes’s obvious intelligence, Gopnik observes, is “overshadowed, even eclipsed, by his real emotional and social stupidity.” And yet, there is something gripping about his struggle, year after year, to solve the riddle of art. By all accounts, Barnes was a man with no theory of mind: Lacking any insight into the subjective worlds of other people, he found their behavior relentlessly inexplicable and infuriating. It must have been exhausting. In an essay soon after he started collecting, he wrote: “Good paintings are more satisfying companions than the best of books and infinitely more so than most very nice people.” In art, he believed he saw the subjective experience of others—Renoir, El Greco, a Fang craftsperson—made concrete and visible, even measurable. It sat still for examination. His arguments circle endlessly (Rudenstine rightly calls them tautological), seeking the mechanism whereby this subjectivity was transferred from one person to another via form. Each work of art, he wrote, “records a discovery and that discovery can be verified, the artist’s experience can be shared, [but] only by one who has himself learned to see.” Like mercury, however, the objective mechanism he sought for this intuitive process always wriggled away from his touch. Look at Cézanne’s The Card Players or Renoir’s Henriot Family and you see shifting edges, unstable spaces, fragmentation, dissolution, impermanence. But in life, Rudenstine observes, Barnes found “ambiguity, irresolution, incompletion, obscurity … impossible for him to tolerate.” His need to lock things down nearly killed the foundation that was his great life’s work. The tragedy of Barnes was that the things he could understand least held the key to what he loved most. This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Cranky Visionary.”
The director Bong Joon-ho’s new movie, Mickey 17, at first seems like a major pivot from his previous one, 2019’s Parasite. After winning Best Picture at the Oscars for the domestic (if gonzo) Korean black comedy, he’s following it up six years later with a lavish Hollywood sci-fi epic starring Robert Pattinson. But even though Mickey 17 is set in outer space about 30 years from now, its hero isn’t that different from those found throughout Bong’s filmography: a working-class schmo. Mickey Barnes (Pattinson) lives on a starship, where he’s taken a position as an “expendable.” The vessel’s wealthy owners aspire to colonize the newly discovered, barren planet they’ve landed upon, Niflheim—so they have scientists subject Mickey to tests that will determine how it can be made hospitable. Every time Mickey dies on the job, which is often, the team generates another copy of him with a human-size printer. Then they put him right back to work. It seems that to Bong, this scenario just sounded like the next evolutionary step of capitalism: one great and terrible leap forward from the contemporary setting of Parasite. When that film begins, the college-aged Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik)—whose family’s attempts to stay financially afloat are central to the grisly and constantly escalating storyline—tries to charm his way into a pizza-delivery gig to help make ends meet. Ki-woo ultimately doesn’t get the job, but the director imagined what would have happened if he did: He “can get into a bike accident doing [a] delivery, and then immediately Delivery Boy 2 would take his place,” Bong told me in an interview (alongside his longtime interpreter, Sharon Choi). “There’s this endless train of delivery boys that can take his place. Three, four, five, six.” That cycle never comes to pass in Parasite, but its plausibility resonated with Bong when he was approaching Mickey 17: “His job’s not as extreme as dying, but he is just as replaceable, and I thought that really connected to Mickey’s situation.” [Read: Mickey 17 is strange, sad, and so much fun] Although Mickey initially sees being an expendable as a rare chance to escape his lackluster life on Earth, he comes to realize that the goal is to test his ability to survive—whether it’s against exposure to harsh environments, unknown viruses, or even floating into space and removing his gear. The cloning process ensures that even death won’t end Mickey’s fatal pursuit; he’s like a more literal version of Parasite’s hypothetically infinite delivery boys. Bong was “immediately drawn” to the protagonist when reading the novel upon which the film is based: Mickey7, by the author Edward Ashton, which the director received when it was still a manuscript. (“I thought the number had to be a bit bigger,” he said regarding the title change.) “He’s like the powerless-underdog character type that I always love,” the director explained. “Things don’t work out for him. He doesn’t get help from society or the country. He’s kind of this loser-type protagonist.” Mickey’s circumstances can be blamed, in part, on his high level of debt. Class consciousness drives nearly all of Bong’s features. Take Snowpiercer, his previous full-fledged sci-fi effort, which was also his first to be shot in English: It imagines a postapocalyptic future where all of mankind lives on an endlessly moving train. The poorest passengers toil away in cattle cars at the back. Parasite’s portrayal of these upstairs-downstairs dynamics is even more overt; the members of the struggling Kim household, who live in a basement-level apartment and juggle odd jobs, alight on a crafty employment scheme after encountering an ultra-wealthy family. [Read: Parasite and the curse of closeness] Meanwhile, Mickey is the most exaggerated example of the have nots imaginable; his life has been deemed meaningless by the upper-crust owners of the ship and their staff, who have no misgivings about using him as their sentient crash-test dummy. Every time Mickey dies in the name of their colonialist dreams, he experiences true suffering. Then he reemerges in shuddering jolts from the printer, like a giant, fleshy sheet of A4 paper. Sometimes, his new body nearly hits the ground, sliding out of the machine without anyone there to catch him. Bong Joon-ho directs Robert Pattinson and Anamaria Vartolomei in Mickey 17. (Alamy) For all the grand scale of Mickey 17’s dystopian setting, Bong sought ways to keep it feeling grounded. He wanted the spaceship in which Mickey and the other intergalactic travelers live to feel mundane and industrial; Niflheim, meanwhile, is a barren, frozen hell populated only by giant, buglike aliens. “This film feels like a story that takes place in a back alleyway, filled with pathetic human beings,” Bong told me of his depiction of the interstellar expedition. “It’s probably the first sci-fi film in history to have a shot where someone is squeezing their pimples,” he said, adding that “it’s almost like we can hear the characters mumbling to themselves.” The utilitarian environments bring to mind those of Ridley Scott’s Alien and John Carpenter’s The Thing—two other sci-fi epics focused on ordinary people who are thrust into some extraordinary circumstance. Alien is an especially relevant touchpoint, as one of the earliest blockbusters to present toiling away in the cosmos not as an adventure but as a gig like any other. An initial conflict, before the eponymous evil creature even arrives aboard, revolves around whether investigating a distress signal is part of the crew’s employment contract. In Alien, “when we see the monster explode out of John Hurt’s chest, the whole atmosphere of that table, it always really stuck with me,” said Bong, explaining that “even within the spaceship, there’s a certain hierarchy—and so it’s blue-collar workers all together.” The director similarly used his film’s futurist trappings to dial up the social examinations to surreal, even comical proportions. The chief villains are Mickey’s humorously flamboyant bosses: Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a preening politician with delusions of grandeur, and his status-obsessed wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette). The couple’s brutal treatment of Mickey contrasts with their interest in populating a new world. “Humans will always be evil, as well in the future, and even when we make our way to space,” Bong told me with a chuckle. [Read: Parasite won so much more than the Best Picture Oscar] But Mickey’s experience with the Marshalls is a particularly cynical vision of humanity. “He’s constantly being printed out and sent out to all these dangerous missions,” Bong said, “but no one feels guilty about it, because they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s his job. His job is to die.’” Pattinson’s performance makes this horrifying lack of remorse legible. The actor affects a Looney Tunes–esque voice—which helps illustrate what a pushover Mickey is—but he also physically communicates how Mickey is carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Bong referred to Mickey as “a character who finds himself in miserable circumstances, has zero self-esteem, and makes the same mistakes over and over again.” The director told Pattinson that he needed a voice befitting that description: “Obviously it can’t be like a Batman tone.” Pattinson has never been afraid of big, goofy swings. Watching Mickey 17 reminded me of his turn in the 2019 historical epic The King, playing the dauphin of France, the oozingly pretentious son of King Charles VI. But the actor’s wildly diverting performance as Mickey was a huge risk in a movie whose mood is otherwise chilly. Bong said that “those 100 percent serious, weighty sci-fi epics” that a movie like Mickey 17 could resemble aren’t to his taste, however. “I need to somehow find cracks to infuse with humor,” he explained—like Pattinson’s seemingly mismatched approach. He also found plenty of chances in the story’s first big twist—when an accident that leaves the 17th iteration of Mickey alive means that another Mickey (number 18) begins to coexist alongside him. Mickey 18 is meaner and more somber, allowing Pattinson to try out a completely different persona. This storytelling opportunity was also one reason Bong upped the character’s death count from the source material, searching for a more thematic number. “Once Mickey 18 appears, 17 goes through a journey of growth,” he said. “You can say that Mickey 17 is a coming-of-age film. And if you think about 18, a lot of societies, that’s when you become an official adult.” The coming-of-age comparison is apt: Mickey 17 came to fruition as Bong stood at something of a crossroads in his career. Although he insists that the production was a smooth process, despite the release date shifting a few times, six years may seem like a long wait for his follow-up to Parasite. But the director admitted that the furor of that movie’s awards campaign—which culminated at the Oscars in February 2020—and the subsequent onset of the coronavirus pandemic were overwhelming. Adjusting to the pressures of newfound global fame can be a steep and isolating challenge, and that’s without the world locking down at the same time. “I would just remember coming back home for the first time in a while and just holding my puppy in my arms,” he said of the post-Oscars period. “It felt like we were in this strange vacuum state.” Mickey 17 does seem like the kind of film to spring from that mindset. It’s bleak and intimate, but it’s also not without fits of puppy-cradling whimsy. “I just feel a lot of joy in coming up with these elements that are so not sci-fi in a sci-fi film,” Bong said. “As much as I love the genre, I always have this desire to betray it at the same time.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
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.
On December 26, 2004, the geological plates beneath Sumatra unleashed the third-most-powerful earthquake ever recorded. A gargantuan column of water raced toward Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, and Indonesia. None of these countries had advance-warning systems in place, so no one had time to prepare before the surge hit. Some 228,000 people died—the highest toll of any natural disaster so far this century. Setting up prevention systems would have been inexpensive, especially compared with the countless billions the tsunami ultimately cost. But governments typically spend money on preventing disasters only after disasters strike, and the affected countries hadn’t experienced a major tsunami in years. After the events of 2004, USAID spent a tiny fraction of its budget to help fund an advance-detection system for the Pacific, which might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives had it been in place sooner. But some people would have seen such an investment as a “waste”—inefficient spending that could have gone toward some more immediate or tangible end. DOGE has turned this dangerously flawed view into a philosophy of government. Last week, Elon Musk’s makeshift agency fired one of the main scientists responsible for providing advance warning when the next tsunami hits Alaska, Hawaii, or the Pacific Coast. The USAID document that describes America’s efforts to protect coastlines from tsunamis, titled “Pounds of Prevention”—riffing on the adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure—now redirects to an error message: “The resource you are trying to access is temporarily unavailable.” More than 800 workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have lost their job in recent weeks, including many who helped mitigate climate disasters, track hurricanes, predict ever-stronger storms, and notify potential victims. Meanwhile, cuts to volcano monitoring are crippling the government’s ability to measure eruption risk. DOGE is also reportedly preparing to cancel the lease on the government’s “nerve center” for national weather forecasts. Musk has categorized as superfluous a good deal of spending that actually makes the country more resilient, at a time when catastrophic risk is on the rise. We never see the crises that the government averts, only the ones it fails to prevent. Preparing for them may seem wasteful—until suddenly, tragically, it doesn’t. [Read: The diseases are coming] The modern, globalized world is the most complex and interconnected environment that humans have ever navigated. That’s why the potential for catastrophic risk—that is, the risk of low-probability but highly destructive events—has never been greater. A single person getting sick can derail the lives of billions. A crisis in one country’s banking sector can crash economies thousands of miles away. Now is precisely the time when governments must invest more heavily in making themselves resilient to these kinds of events. But the United States is doing the opposite. Donald Trump made the same mistake in his first term. In September 2019, his administration quietly eliminated an initiative that it saw as government waste: a $200 million program that tracked novel coronaviruses around the world. Three months later, COVID-19 infected its first victim in Wuhan. The U.S. government spent an estimated $4.6 trillion in response to the pandemic that emerged from that virus—roughly 23,000 times the budget for the preparedness program that could have helped mitigate its effects. Complex systems—say, health care, or government, or industrial supply chains—without any built-in slack or redundancy are efficient but fragile. The effects of any disruption quickly cascade, and the potential for catastrophic risk grows. In 2021, a gust of wind turned a boat sideways in the Suez Canal—and upended the global economy, inflicting tens of billions of dollars in economic damage. Last year’s CrowdStrike outage is another example of an avalanche created by a minor problem within a system that was not resilient. DOGE is courting these kinds of risks by automatically assuming that programs with no immediately obvious function—or at least none that Musk and his minions can discern—are wasteful. Some of its cost cutting may be eliminating genuine waste; no government spends its money perfectly. But DOGE’s campaign is riddled with errors, at the level of both understanding and execution. The agency’s strategy is akin to a climber replacing sturdy rope with low-cost string: We may not realize the full danger until it snaps. Musk developed DOGE’s playbook when he took over Twitter, where resilience matters much less than it does in government. Gutting the social-media platform may have resulted in more harmful content and some outages, including one this week, but the stakes were low compared with the crucial government services that Musk is currently cutting. When X fails, memes go unposted. When the government fails, people can die. The risks are not only to Americans but also to humanity, as technology and climate change have linked the destinies of far-flung people more closely and increased the likelihood of extinction-level calamities. It is not reassuring in this regard that Trump controls the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and that DOGE accidentally fired key people who manage it, that Trump doesn’t believe in climate change and is having Musk slash seemingly every agency designed to mitigate it, and that Musk summarized his view of AI risk by telling Joe Rogan that it presents “only a 20 percent chance of annihilation.” The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction—an organization that DOGE would certainly eliminate if it could—came up with a more sophisticated figure in 2023: By its estimate, there is a 2 to 14 percent chance of an extinction-level event in the 21st century. This is not a world in which the government should be running itself on a just-in-time basis. Musk may flippantly acknowledge the risk in interviews, but DOGE’s fundamental ethos—Silicon Valley will fix what the government cannot—almost entirely ignores it. [Read: The dictatorship of the engineer] Americans can’t rely on Meta, Google, and Apple to build tsunami-early-warning systems, mitigate climate change, or responsibly regulate artificial intelligence. Preventing catastrophic risk doesn’t increase shareholder value. The market will not save us. As DOGE hollows out the Federal Aviation Administration, fires extreme-weather forecasters, and implodes the National Institutes of Health, Americans are left to wonder: What happens when another plane crashes, or a hurricane hits Florida without sufficient warning, or the next pandemic takes America by surprise? Many people may die avoidable deaths for the rest of us to learn that one billionaire’s “waste” is really a country’s strength.
On Mo, the Netflix dramedy about a family of Palestinian refugees living in Houston, national labels are of deep importance. Throughout the series, Mohammed Najjar (played by Mohammed “Mo” Amer) struggles to hold on to employment—and any sense of security—because he’s not yet a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. His situation is made even more complicated by the fact that the American government, and many people he encounters, doesn’t recognize his family’s homeland as a legitimate state. Early in the show’s second and final season, which premiered at the end of January, this sense of placelessness manifests in a frustrating conversation with a powerful diplomat. Mo, who is undocumented, has inadvertently traveled to Mexico and can’t legally return to Texas; he gains an unlikely audience with an American ambassador who offers to help him. But when the politician tries toasting to “your safe return and a peaceful end to the conflict,” gesturing toward unrest in Palestine, Mo can’t stop himself from challenging the nebulous characterization. His indignation gets him thrown out of the ambassador’s house, all but guaranteeing that Mo won’t get home in time for the Najjars’ long-awaited asylum hearing. After two decades spent in legal limbo, Mo once again has to come to terms with his indefinite future as a stateless person. Despite how naturally he seems to inhabit and move between multiple identities—Palestinian, American, racially ambiguous Texan—he can’t lay claim to any of them under the law. This toggling sense of identity is crucial to how the characters of Mo see themselves—and in a recent conversation, Amer (who co-created the semi-autobiographical series with Ramy Youssef) told me the tense exchange with the ambassador is one of his favorites. The disagreement confirms Mo’s character: He’s steadfast in his Palestinian identity, but he’s also brash and prideful in ways that routinely get him in trouble. As Amer put it to me, “He’s willing to ruin his own life to make sure that he’s staying true to it, trying to stay true to himself.” The moment is just one example of how Mo tells an honest, complicated, and, most important, funny story about a Palestinian American family—and the territorial limbo that shapes their lives, even as they live thousands of miles away. [Read: On Mo, it’s either God or therapy] Shows about undocumented people are still rare, and Mo was the first American series to fully focus on a family of Palestinian protagonists. But the newest episodes were made in a particularly fraught climate. Mo’s writers started working on the second season a month before the dual Hollywood strikes began in May 2023. They reconvened that October, just days before Hamas’s attack on Israel and Israel’s ensuing bombardment of Gaza. The mounting death toll in Palestine put the show’s writers in a difficult position. Some viewers may have felt that Mo had a responsibility to address the escalating violence; others could be reflexively uncomfortable with hearing the words settler or occupation, language that pops up periodically in the show’s dialogue, sometimes in heated debates that Mo then defuses with humor. Instead of taking on the news directly, the season follows a main arc that Mo’s writers began developing back in April 2023, Amer told me. It continues a storyline from Season 1, when Mo’s widowed mother, Yusra (Farah Bsieso), started a small olive-oil business called 1947—after the last year before the Nakba, an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe” that refers to the mass displacement of Palestinians after the state of Israel was created. Yusra was born in Palestine, but spent much of her life away from it. After settlers took over her parents’ land in Haifa, her family fled to the West Bank, where many of her relatives still live. Yusra later left for Kuwait with her husband; when the Gulf War broke out, the couple moved once more, to Texas. Whenever Yusra talks about the olive oil she bottles in Texas, her longing for home is obvious—but so is her commitment to creating something from the pain of the protracted separation from her relatives, whom she hasn’t seen in decades. When we spoke, Amer recalled an aunt in Palestine shipping him some homemade olive oil and apologizing for not sending more; settlement blockades had prevented the family from accessing some of their olive groves. Still, he said, it was important to her to send what she could. That same sentiment is palpable when the Najjars finally make it to their family’s groves in Burin in Season 2, where they sing, eat, and commune with their loved ones under the shade of the olive trees. Despite the ever-present threat of violence from settlers and military authorities surrounding the groves, they rejoice because they’re together on the land. It’s one of the show’s most affecting scenes, and an uncommon representation of life in this region. Warm snapshots of life in Palestine are a rare sight in American media and pop culture, where images of Palestinians most often circulate alongside chronicles of conflict and devastation. [Read: A Saturday Night Live monologue that felt more like a prayer] To the extent that Mo’s depiction of violence in the West Bank or the pains of refugee life feels especially timely, it’s largely a reflection of how much American awareness has shifted since October 7. But Amer has also said the creative team’s personal griefs are sublimated in this season, in a way that enhances the show’s resonance. This season, Yusra and her daughter, Nadia, lovingly disagree over the former’s constant attention to harrowing news back home—a dynamic that is incredibly familiar to Cherien Dabis, the Palestinian American actor who plays Nadia. In October 2023, Dabis, who is also a filmmaker, was in Palestine working on a historical drama about a family displaced from Jaffa in 1948. She was forced to evacuate, and to put the feature on hold, all while overwhelmed with fear about what would happen—so the news was always on. As she explained at a recent Mo screening in New York City, “The show was like a container for so many of us to come together and talk about what we were feeling during that incredibly intense, horrific time that is not over and didn’t just begin.” The show’s portrait of the Najjars conveys the existential stakes of their statelessness, but it also highlights the beauty of the relationships they’ve been able to forge. Because the people who love him take Mo—and the Najjars’ struggles—seriously, they aren’t afraid to point out that Mo doesn’t always wind up in hot water because he’s valiantly defending his heritage or standing up for justice in the world. Sometimes, Mo really does seem to be crumbling under the pressures of life in a country where neither his heritage nor his local bona fides are respected. But he’s often just being an impatient, inconsiderate jerk. One of the delights of watching Mo is how clearly the series engages with all of its characters’ complexities—Palestinians, the show’s blundering protagonist included, don’t have to be perfect to hold our attention.
The first time Donald Trump threatened to use the power of the presidency to punish a university, I was the target. At UC Berkeley, where I was chancellor, campus police had at the last moment canceled an appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right political pundit who was then a star at Breitbart News, because of a violent attack on the venue by a group of outside left-wing activists who objected to Yiannopoulos’s presence. In the end, although these protesters caused significant damage both on campus and to shops and businesses in downtown Berkeley, the police restored peace. Yiannopoulos was safely escorted back to his hotel, where he promptly criticized the university for canceling his speech. But on the morning of February 2, 2017, I awoke to a tweet reading: “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS?” I didn’t worry much about Trump’s threat at the time. I now realize that was a mistake. American universities did not cause the onslaught that the second Trump administration is unleashing upon them. But they would be in a much stronger position today if they had made a proactive case to the public for their own importance—and taken steps to address their very real shortcomings. In the aftermath of the Yiannopoulos episode and Trump’s tweet, I worried less about the potential loss of federal funding than about the enormous costs of hiring additional police and converting the campus into a riot zone over and over. Berkeley’s commitment to free speech all but guaranteed that more conflict was in store. Yiannopoulos had announced that he would come back, and Ann Coulter soon accepted an invitation to speak at Berkeley as well. For a time, my concerns seemed justified. Berkeley spent millions of dollars to fortify the campus, and pro- and anti-Trump factions continued to clash. Meanwhile, Trump’s first administration largely spared higher education. Despite relentless criticism of universities for their putative anti-conservative bias, federal support for scientific research retained bipartisan support. [Rose Horowitch: Colleges have no idea how to comply with Trump’s orders] What I failed to appreciate was that the new administration was preparing the ground for a war on the American university—one that it might have carried out had the first Trump White House been better organized. In the context of crises and protests around controversial speakers, along with the growing preoccupation on campuses with offensive speech and so-called microaggressions, Trump and his allies contorted the idea of free speech to build a narrative that the university, rather than the political right, was the chief threat to the First Amendment. State after state introduced legislation, drawing on a template devised by the conservative Goldwater Institute, purportedly to defend free speech but also to enact draconian protocols for disciplining students who engaged in campus protests deemed to prevent others from speaking. (At least 23 states now have statutes in effect conferring some level of authority to state legislatures to monitor free speech on campus, demanding yearly reports, and imposing harsh new rules for student discipline.) Republican politicians began to include denunciations of universities in their talking points; in a 2021 speech, J. D. Vance declared, “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” Now the war has begun in earnest. Trump’s directives to restrict funding for science, especially the mandate to dramatically reduce National Institutes of Health grants for scientific infrastructure, equipment, and lab support—all essential components of university science—will cripple biomedical research across the country. Already, universities are reducing graduate programs and even rescinding informal offers that were made before the spending cuts were announced, and in some cases introducing hiring freezes. If the Trump administration sticks to its decision to cancel $400 million in federal grants to Columbia over the charge of tolerating anti-Semitism, we haven’t seen anything yet. Nowhere is the assault on universities more pronounced than in the campaign to eradicate DEI. A recent Department of Education “Dear Colleague” letter warned that “using race in decisions pertaining to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life” is prohibited. The letter purported to base its guidance on the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision striking down affirmative action, but its language went far beyond the Court’s ruling. The price of noncompliance: no federal funds. This time, I take the threat seriously. Universities have made two general mistakes in the face of sustained right-wing criticism. First, they have behaved as if their societal value is self-evident. In fact, they need to be far more proactive in communicating the enormous contributions they make to the public good: a campaign not just to defend themselves but to remind the country that our universities are among our most crucial assets. Many of the core elements of the technologies that enable our modern lifestyle—the internet, GPS, new immunological cancer therapies, mRNA vaccines, and medical imaging, to take just a tiny sample—have emerged from academic laboratories. Whether one is concerned about democracy, how scientific research can continue to position the U.S. as a global leader, how to solve global issues such as disease and climate change, or how to maintain a competitive edge with other nations such as China and Russia, we need our universities. [Read: A new kind of crisis for American universities] Second, university administrators have too often assumed that because a great deal of conservative criticism of higher education has been made in bad faith, none of it is valid. The truth is that universities have not always honored their commitments to free speech, academic freedom, and open inquiry as well as they should have, and the decline in public support for universities reflects, at least in part, those failures and shortcomings. Offices of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion named values that for years were largely seen as benign. There was broad agreement that students from underrepresented minorities needed to have the opportunities higher education afforded but required special support to thrive in intense and often hostile academic environments for which they had little preparation or family support. Over the past decade, however, these offices grew in size and influence. With that came legitimate concerns about administrative overreach, bloat, and ineffectiveness. At the same time, the liberal consensus was unraveling. Some faculty and students had indeed rejected the premise of free speech, noting that when power inflected all social relations, there was nothing like a level playing field; universities, they argued, should side with those lacking power and limit the speech of the powerful. Concerns about the ways in which prejudice was expressed in everyday interactions, often through unintentional slights and statements, not only surfaced as priorities for administrators but were converted into speech codes and protocols. A new language of “harm” was used to prosecute new canon wars, target faculty who offended students in the normal course of teaching, and deploy a new range of techniques to censor, punish, or “cancel” other members of the university community. All of this came to a head in the protests after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. Without any campus consensus about free speech, open inquiry, and civil discourse, an existing political impasse became even more intractable. When, as Berkeley chancellor, I was petitioned by student and faculty groups to cancel invitations to speakers like Yiannopoulos and Coulter, I worried that to do so would be to invite censorship more broadly, and that any abrogation of free-speech rules on campus would soon be used against other political positions. I warned campus constituencies that the principle of free speech would not only protect liberals when national politics shifted—as they already had in the first Trump administration—but also help enshrine the university’s larger commitments to open inquiry and academic freedom, serious threats to which had already begun. Now my fear that any curtailment of free-speech principles by universities would be used against universities is coming to pass. The new administration is targeting any use of race in statements or programs promoting diversity and inclusion. This effort goes far beyond admissions and hiring decisions, to the point of threatening institutions over the content of their curriculum, making a mockery of the administration’s supposed commitment to free speech. And the attacks on campus protests and DEI are just the opening salvo. [Jonathan Chait: Anti-Semitism is just a pretext] Governor Ron DeSantis has already signed legislation chilling instruction in disciplines including sociology and Middle East history in Florida’s public universities. Given the cuts to science funding at the federal level, we may soon see efforts to control the teaching of climate science, or biology, and maybe even evolution once again. The playbook to take “back” universities includes much more than what we have so far seen. Federal support for scientific research, and for financial aid for students, is part of the postwar social contract that was articulated at a time when America recognized the need for as many of its citizens as possible to receive a university education and for American science to become preeminent. America’s universities, and its science, grew to be the best in the world. This is the time to rearticulate and defend the unparalleled value of our research universities. They are the envy of nations around the globe. We attract the best and the brightest to our shores as students, researchers, and teachers. Creating these extraordinary institutions took the better part of a century, but they can be destroyed very quickly. The attack on the university may eventually backfire politically, but not before it does enormous damage. As higher-education leaders resist efforts to undermine and punish universities for their commitment to knowledge, science, and truth, they must also take care to deliver on the promises they make. Only then will the defense stand a chance of succeeding against the current assault.
With every passing day, it is harder to remember that Elon Musk was not always a political firebrand. The old Musk advocated for his business interests and professed to care deeply about climate change, but he largely stayed out of partisan politics. As a result, he was much more popular. He hosted Saturday Night Live and walked the Met Gala’s red carpet. He also received substantive honors, including election to one of the oldest and grandest institutions of science, the Royal Society. The fellowship put Musk in elevated company: In 2018, he traveled to London to add his signature to the society’s charter, alongside those of Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, and Isaac Newton. Thousands of scientists are now calling for Musk’s name to be blotted out from that charter’s fine vellum pages. The effort kicked off last summer, when 74 fellows (out of roughly 1,600) sent a letter to the Royal Society’s leadership, reportedly out of concern that Musk’s X posts were fomenting racial violence in the United Kingdom and could therefore bring the institution into disrepute. In November, one of the signatories, the neuropsychologist Dorothy Bishop, resigned from the Royal Society in protest of what she saw as inaction; her statement cited Musk’s derogatory posts about Anthony Fauci and the billionaire’s promotion of misinformation about vaccines. Then, last month, Stephen Curry, a biologist who is not himself a Royal Society fellow—or a guard on the Golden State Warriors—wrote an open letter calling for Musk’s expulsion, for many of these same reasons. It has since been signed by more than 3,400 scientists, including more than 60 actual fellows. The society has not taken any disciplinary action in response to these entreaties. Musk himself made no comment on the campaign to oust him until March 2, when Geoffrey Hinton, “the Godfather of AI” (and a member of the Royal Society Class of 1998), lent his voice to the cause. In a reply to Hinton on X, Musk said that only “craven, insecure fools” care about awards and memberships. Despite this I’m-not-mad bravado, Musk seemed stung. He did not respond to emailed questions, but on X, he did accuse Hinton of cruelty. The following evening, the Royal Society convened a meeting to discuss the matter. It took place behind closed doors, and what transpired is still not entirely clear. (In an email to The Atlantic, the society said that all matters relating to individual fellows are dealt with in strict confidence.) According to one report, the society now plans to send a letter to Musk, though what it intends to write was undecided as of last week. At least for now, Musk’s fellowship seems to be safe. This roiling at the Royal Society comes at a tricky time for scientific institutions, especially universities. Having perhaps waded too far into political disputes in recent years, the leaders of these institutions are now trying to stay out of politics at the precise moment when politicians are trying to damage them. Musk may have been spared, so far, by an understandable desire among the Royal Society’s leadership to stay neutral. Scientific organizations that succumbed to political orthodoxies, or enforced them, have often come to regret it. During the Cold War, some scientists in the United States faced professional penalties or outright ostracization because they were suspected of being Communists. In the Soviet Union, dissenting biologists were shipped to the gulag. At the peak of China’s Cultural Revolution, a physicist who worked on the “Western science” of general relativity could be charged with resistance and denounced at a public rally. [Read: The death of government expertise] These cases are extreme, but subtle interminglings of politics and science can be toxic in their own way. They can undermine the atmosphere of free inquiry that gives science its unique power, its ability to sift good ideas from bad in pursuit of a more expansive and refined vision of the universe. Even an institution’s well-meaning statement of support for a social cause may have a chilling effect on any member who does not happen to agree. A scientist’s success is determined in no small part by their peers’ appraisal of their work and character. Scientific institutions should therefore avoid actions that could be interpreted as political litmus tests. They largely do: No university would deny a Donald Trump–supporting grad student’s application for enrollment, at least not as a matter of official policy. And likewise, mere support for Trump should not and would not disqualify Musk from the Royal Society. Of course, Musk’s support for Trump is not the issue here. In her resignation letter, Bishop raised the matter of his scientific heresies, specifically about vaccines, to argue that he breached the society’s code of conduct, which prohibits fellows from undermining the society’s mission. In 2021, Musk posted and later deleted a cartoon that depicted Bill Gates as a fearmongering villain who was trying to control people with COVID vaccines. In 2023, he insinuated that the NBA player Bronny James’s cardiac arrest could have been a side effect of those vaccines. Outrageous as these posts may be, Musk is allowed to be wrong about some things. Scientists are unevenly brilliant, if they are brilliant at all, and some of the best were heretics or even fools on one scientific issue or another. Lynn Margulis revolutionized evolutionary biology. She also promoted pseudoscientific theories of HIV transmission. Freeman Dyson had a better handle on the physical laws of the universe than almost anyone since Einstein, but he went to his grave a climate-change skeptic. Kicking Margulis and Dyson out of polite scientific society for these consensus violations would have impoverished science. [Read: The erasing of American science] The best case for booting Musk from the Royal Society doesn’t concern his beliefs at all. It proceeds from his actions, the way that he is degrading the world of science on Trump’s behalf. In the months since the 2024 election, he has made himself into a tool of Trump’s administration, a chain saw, in his own telling. And with that chain saw, the president has begun dismembering America’s great scientific institutions. The Royal Society is an ancestor of those institutions. During its centuries-long heyday, it funded scientific research that wouldn’t otherwise have been pursued. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health do this today, on a much larger scale. The Royal Society’s members are right to feel a twinge of solidarity as they watch Musk and his Department of Governmental Efficiency push deep staff cuts at the NSF and the NIH, and hear reports that deeper cuts are to come. In their speed and extent, these force reductions have no precedent in the history of American science. Musk has done all of this in the name of efficiency, but scientific research is antithetical to unrelenting thrift. Basic research needs some slack to allow for false starts and trial and error. Musk of all people should know this. When the Royal Society announced that Musk would be made a fellow, it cited SpaceX’s advances in rocketry, first and foremost, and rightfully so. The company has made reusable rockets a reality, and if its larger Starship model starts working reliably, it will enable a host of new wonders in space. But SpaceX’s success required long experimental phases and lots of exploded rockets, all of which cost money. A big chunk of that money came from NASA, a scientific institution whose checks are signed by the U.S. taxpayer. Last week, it was reported that NASA, too, will soon face budget cuts. They are said to be concentrated in its science division. Maybe Musk values scientific institutions only as a means to his personal ends. Maybe he sees them as disposable ladders that he can cast off after he has climbed to new heights of wealth. Either way, scientists are finding it difficult to fight back. They don’t have much money. Their petitions and open letters can be cringeworthy. But at the very least, they ought to withdraw the honors that they have extended to Musk. They don’t have to let him retain the imprimatur and gravitas of the Royal Society, one of the most storied institutions to have come down to us from the Enlightenment. If you give a man a medal, and he returns with a torch to burn your house down, figure out how to stop him, fast. But also: Rip the medal from his chest.
The past few weeks have felt like a Cold War thriller in which an enemy agent somehow infiltrates the top of the United States government. Soldiers fighting for democracy have been abandoned to die in the field. The U.S. president vows to annex Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. Long-established alliances are suddenly teetering. Economic bungling has pushed the country toward recession. The only beneficiaries of this bizarre series of MAGA outrages have been America’s geopolitical enemies. Those of us who have reported for any length of time on the pro-Trump movement are called upon again and again to explain what is happening and why. We attend conferences, join television programs, and meet foreign reporters. And when we do, we find ourselves confronted with what I call the opioid dispenser. [J. D. Vance: Opioid of the masses] The opioid dispenser might be a politician, a business leader, or an academic. Whatever their basis of authority, the opioid dispenser offers a message of reassurance: Yes, these recent actions are very provocative. But they are driven by serious strategic purposes. [Insert an imagined rationale here.] We should focus on the signal, not the noise. It’s a wake-up call, not the end of the world. We must take Trump seriously, but not literally. [Multiply clichés until the allotted time is exhausted.] I compare these bromides to opioids because they soothe immediate pain, but only at the risk of severe long-term harm. Chemical opioids work by blocking pain receptors in the individual brain. Similarly, these calming messages about Donald Trump work by dulling the collective mind. At a conference on European security, the opioid dispenser may tell you that Trump is hostile to the European allies because they do not spend enough on defense. If that were true, then you’d think that increasing defense spending would allay Trump’s hostility. Instead, the administration’s de facto chief operating officer, Elon Musk, publicly insulted Poland, America’s European ally with the most robust defense program on the continent, now funded to the level of almost 5 percent of GDP. A few days earlier, Trump’s vice president gave a television interview in which he mocked “random” countries that “have not fought a war in 30 to 40 years”—widely seen as a slighting reference to France and Britain (though he denied it). This came days after the United Kingdom announced the biggest, most sustained rise in defense spending since the end of the Cold War. (France had already committed, in 2023, to a near doubling of its defense spending over the subsequent seven years.) Shortly before his jibe, the vice president gave a speech in Munich in which he championed Europe’s pro-Russian parties of the far right and far left. Whatever’s going on here, it is not about a wish for more allied defense spending. Justifying Trump’s abject support of Russia, another opioid dispenser will explain the pro-Russia tilt as actually a grand strategy to counter China. That sounds lofty. But the claim unravels upon contact with reality. For sure, an American president who wanted to counter the world’s second-largest economy would want to mobilize strong allies. But Trump has aggressively alienated allies, starting with America’s two immediate neighbors and its historical partners in Europe and the Pacific Rim. It’s not just that Trump wants Russia as an ally; he seems to want nobody else—except maybe Saudi Arabia and El Salvador. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is not actually standing up to China at all forcefully. During his latest campaign, Trump dismissed Taiwan as undeserving of U.S. protection because it “doesn’t give us anything.” Trump’s ravaging of U.S. foreign-aid programs concedes major influence to China, especially in Africa. Musk is significantly vulnerable to Chinese economic pressure on his large business in that country. Trump himself has taken a huge sum from a Chinese investor for his crypto operations. Trump’s enthusiasm for Russian President Vladimir Putin—and avidity for Russian money—dates back 20 years. At a time of economic desperation, Trump earned $54 million on the flip of a Palm Beach property. His former lawyer Michael Cohen told MSNBC that Trump regarded the profit to be the result of Putin’s personal influence. Whatever explains the Trump-Putin bond, acclaiming it as a brilliant, Kissinger-like diplomatic pivot doesn’t pass the laugh test. [David Frum: At least now we know the truth] An opioid dispenser may try to explain Trump’s anti-Canada economic warfare as an anti-drug policy, a response to the flow of fentanyl south across the Canadian border. Yet the fentanyl claim was almost immediately exposed as fiction. And if stopping a narcotics flow was the goal, why would the president demand annexation of Canada or parts of Canada? Trump aides have spoken of ejecting Canada from intelligence-sharing agreements, which again is not what you’d do if your goal were to improve cross-border drug enforcement. Maybe Trump’s 51st-state talk is not to be taken literally, but if taken seriously, as the opioid dispensers advise, the message is unmistakable: These are expressions motivated by animus against Canadian sovereignty, not a wish for improved U.S.-Canada cooperation. To survive a dangerous environment requires accurate assessments of the predators on the prowl. Inventing an alternative Trump—one more rational and less malignant than the actual Trump—may assuage anxiety. But only temporarily. The invention soon collapses under the burden of its own untruth, wasting time in which the victims of its fiction could have taken more effective action to protect themselves.
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. This morning, President Donald Trump used the standard diplomatic channel—his Truth Social account—to announce retaliation against Canada for Ontario’s new electricity tariffs, which were themselves retaliatory. “I have instructed my Secretary of Commerce to add an ADDITIONAL 25% Tariff, to 50%, on all STEEL and ALUMINUM COMING INTO THE UNITED STATES FROM CANADA, ONE OF THE HIGHEST TARIFFING NATIONS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. This will go into effect TOMORROW MORNING, March 12th,” Trump wrote. The rest of the message is much stranger, again promising the annexation of Canada: “The artificial line of separation drawn many years ago will finally disappear, and we will have the safest and most beautiful Nation anywhere in the World.” Earlier this evening, Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, pulled back the electricity tariffs after securing a meeting with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and the White House dropped its threat. Ford likely recognized that no matter how belligerent a stance Trump takes, he can be easily induced to change his mind. Consider what’s happened with tariffs over the past 45 days. On February 1, Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on both Canada and Mexico, to take effect on February 4. On February 3, he announced a one-month pause in implementation. On February 26, he said he might not actually impose the tariffs until April 2; the next day, he said they’d start on March 4. On March 2, Lutnick suggested that the tariff situation was “fluid.” On March 4, the tariffs went into effect after all. Confused yet? We’re just getting started. That afternoon, with stock markets reacting poorly, Lutnick suggested that the tariffs might be rolled back the next day. Indeed, on March 5, Trump announced that he was suspending parts of the tariffs related to auto manufacturing until April. And then, on March 6, he suspended all of the tariffs until April. Trump once told us that trade wars are “easy to win.” Now he seems unsure about how to fight one, or whether he even wants to. If the defining feeling of the start of the first Trump administration was chaos, its equivalent in this term is whiplash. The president and his aides have been changing their minds and positions at nauseating speed. Many of the reversals seem to come down to Trump’s caprices. On February 19, he called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “a dictator.” About a week later, he disavowed that. “Did I say that? I can't believe I said that,” he told reporters. “I think the president and I actually have had a very good relationship.” The next day, Trump berated Zelensky in the Oval Office, sent him packing, and began cutting off military help to Ukraine. This afternoon, the U.S. restarted military and financial aid once again. Another leading cause of whiplash is Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service. Last week, the General Services Administration put up a list of more than 400 buildings that the cost-cutting crew had deemed inessential for government operations. The inventory included some eye-raising entries, including the Robert F. Kennedy building—headquarters of the Justice Department—and the main offices of the Labor Department and the FBI, but also some peculiar ones, such as steam tunnels underneath Washington, D.C. (One imagines that the wrong buyer could cause a great deal of mayhem with those.) Within hours, more than 100 entries had been removed from the list; by the next day, it was gone entirely, replaced by a “coming soon” message—though not before revealing a semi-secret CIA facility. DOGE and other efforts to slash the federal workforce keep overstepping and requiring reversals. In some cases, officials seem to be discovering that the things Trump wants are either impracticable or too politically toxic to effect. Musk posted on X that if federal workers didn’t respond to an email, it would be tantamount to their resignation. Then the threat was removed. Then Musk sent another email. Thousands of federal workers have been laid off, only to be called back to work. Some workers who accepted a buyout offer were then fired; others had the offer rescinded. Musk tittered over canceling and then uncanceling Ebola-prevention programs, though some officials dispute that they were actually uncanceled. The administration planned to shut down the coronavirus-test-distribution program, then ultimately suspended but did not end it; it killed but then resuscitated a health program for 9/11 survivors. Trump isn’t just going back on specifics. Some of his core campaign propositions are also looking shaky. Despite campaigning on the deleterious effects of inflation, he now says that it’s not a top priority. He promised booming wealth for Americans; now he can’t rule out a recession and is warning that people will need to endure some pain (for what higher purpose, he hasn’t made clear). And even though Trump has long said that he won’t cut Medicare or Social Security, Musk is now targeting them and calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme. This kind of vacillation creates an obvious credibility problem for the president and his administration. As I wrote during Trump’s first presidency, foreign leaders quickly concluded that he was a pushover, easily convinced by flattering words. Trump practically always folded in a negotiation. This history, combined with his mercurial moods, mean that counterparts don’t assume they can take him at his word. In the case of Canada, Trump seems to have come out with the worst possible outcome: Canadian leaders believe he’s deadly serious about annexing the country, a quixotic goal, but they have no reason to take his bluster about tariffs, which he can actually impose, all that seriously. The situation might be even more dangerous if observers took Trump at his word. His dithering has given markets the jitters, but the economic impacts might be more dire if traders acted as though they expected him to follow through on all of his tariff threats. (After he said this past weekend that a recession is possible, markets plunged. Did investors believe he had some secret plan up his sleeve until then?) Uncertainty is bad for markets, but the problem is larger than that. One of the most fundamental roles of the state is to create a sense of consistency and stability for society. That provides the conditions for flourishing of all kinds: economic, artistic, cultural, scientific. Trump is both seeking to seize more power for himself and refusing to exercise it in a way that allows the nation to flourish. Today, my colleague Adam Serwer wrote about the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University who has not been charged, much less convicted, of any crime. This, too, calls into question the stability of the rule of law—specifically, the long-standing fact that the First Amendment and due process apply to legal permanent residents. (Last month, I wrote that Trump’s actions were showing that his commitment to free speech was bogus. He seems determined to prove me right.) The first months of the Trump presidency have been whiplash-inducing, but in the long term, the failure to set and follow consistent rules threatens national pain much worse than a sore neck. Related: Mahmoud Khali’s detention is a trial run. The free-speech phonies Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: His daughter was America’s first measles death in a decade. ICE isn’t delivering the mass deportation Trump wants. The only question Trump asks himself Today’s News Ukraine has agreed to an immediate 30-day cease-fire if Russia accepts the plan proposed by the United States. Ontario suspended its 25 percent electricity surcharge for some U.S. states after Donald Trump threatened a 50 percent tariff on steel and aluminum for Canada. The former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who started a widespread crackdown on drugs, was arrested on an International Criminal Court warrant for crimes against humanity. Dispatches Work in Progress: “The chaos emanating from Washington comes at a time when the economy is already slowing,” Annie Lowrey writes. Maybe don’t invite a recession in. Explore all of our newsletters here. Evening Read Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Kent Nishimura / Bloomberg / Getty; Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty. Anti-Semitism Is Just a Pretext By Jonathan Chait The [Trump] administration is threatening more arrests of foreign-born campus activists, and more funding cuts, all supposedly to contain anti-Semitism, at the same time that it is elevating anti-Semites to newfound prominence and legitimacy. Donald Trump opposes left-wing anti-Semitism because it is left-wing, not because it is anti-Semitic. And his campaign to supposedly stamp it out on campus is a pretext for an authoritarian power grab. Read the full article. More From The Atlantic A great way to get Americans to eat worse The way of the gun America is sleeping on a powerful defense against airborne disease. “Dear James”: I hate playing with my children. Culture Break Warner Bros. Pictures Watch. Mickey 17 (out in theaters) is sad, strange, and so much fun, Shirley Li writes. Read. Literature is still describing the experience of the coronavirus pandemic. Lily Meyer is still searching for a great COVID-19 novel that transforms that experience. Play our daily crossword. P.S. On my evening to-do list once I finish this newsletter: Pick up my copy of my colleague Olga Khazan’s Me, but Better at my local bookstore. In 2022, she wrote one of my favorite Atlantic stories ever about her three-month attempt to change her own personality. In the book, which is out today, she goes deeper. Olga is a very funny writer and great at sorting through and explaining complicated science, but for me, what makes her such an outstanding journalist is her ability to see and question a lot of the things that most people take for granted. I feel safe guessing that her research didn’t change that part of her personality. — David Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
The opening salvo of President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign has made immigrants across the United States fear that simply going to work, school, or the supermarket might result in a life-altering arrest. Sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, real and imagined, are everywhere on social media. Teachers say students are panicked that ICE will take their parents while they’re in class. One Maryland doctor who treats patients with cancer and chronic pain from worksite injuries told me that many are skipping appointments. “They’re terrified,” he said. That much, according to Trump officials, is going to plan, backed by a $200 million messaging campaign called “Stay Out and Leave Now.” The results of the actual deportation push appear to be more modest, though not for lack of effort. ICE officers, some working six or seven days a week, made about 18,000 arrests last month, according to internal data I obtained. (ICE stopped publishing daily-arrest totals in early February as its numbers sagged.) By comparison, the agency tallied roughly 10,000 arrests in February 2024. The latest government data show that deportations were actually higher toward the end of Joe Biden’s presidency, when ICE was removing a larger number of migrants picked up along the Mexico-U.S. border. [Rogé Karma: The truth about immigration and the American worker] At its current pace, ICE is nowhere near delivering what Trump promised. The president made mass deportations a centerpiece of his campaign and said during his inauguration speech that ICE would deport “millions and millions of criminal aliens.” Vice President J. D. Vance said that the administration would “start with 1 million.” But ICE doesn’t have the resources or staffing to do what Trump wants. The agency has fewer than 6,000 enforcement officers nationwide. Much of their work is essentially immigration case management—ensuring compliance with court appointments and monitoring requirements—not kicking down doors in tactical gear or staging mass roundups in the streets. ICE has never deported 1 million people in a year, let alone half that many. Tom Homan, the White House “border czar,” who has been working out of an office at ICE headquarters in Washington, told me on Friday that the mass-deportation campaign remains on track and just needs Congress to cough up the money to allow it to kick into a higher gear. Trump is happy with the results so far, Homan insisted. “The president has never told me he’s not happy,” Homan said. “I’m not happy.” Administration officials are considering ways to help ICE boost its numbers, including legal tools to potentially give officers new authorities to enter homes. But in the meantime, the gap between Trump’s expectations and reality has senior officials in immigration enforcement on edge. The administration is churning through ICE leaders, blaming them for failing to deliver results. ICE staff members were stunned last month when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the demotion of the agency’s acting director, Caleb Vitello, barely a month into the job. Vitello, a career ICE official who is also a certified mindfulness coach, had been viewed by his colleagues as a solid pick to steer the agency through a stressful time of intense scrutiny. He had worked in the White House with Stephen Miller during Trump’s first term. ICE officials figured he’d be as capable as anyone of managing the agency’s many masters—Miller, Noem, and Homan. ICE started off the new administration with a conspicuous show of force, but the enforcement blitz soon began to fade. Vitello tried to issue daily quotas for the number of immigrants officers should arrest, but ICE teams were coming up short. They had burned through the lists of names and addresses they’d compiled prior to the inauguration, and they were too busy trying to make their quotas to research new targets. More and more people were refusing to answer the door when ICE knocked, leaving agents waiting outside. The administration targeted several “sanctuary” cities that limit cooperation with ICE, but their big operations brought underwhelming results. Noem blamed internal leaks and “crooked deep state agents” at the FBI for the relatively modest figures. It was a baffling claim. She and Homan had been conducting ICE raids on live television, even bringing along Dr. Phil to publicize the effort. Everyone knew they were coming. On February 11, Noem ousted Vitello’s key deputies at ICE. Ten days later, she tried to demote Vitello. Noem wanted to bring in a trusted former aide and GOP political operative, Madison Sheahan, the head of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, who’d gotten that job in 2023 at age 26. Noem wasn’t aware that ICE leadership roles typically require years of law enforcement or litigation experience, according to one senior DHS official who spoke with me on condition of anonymity. Although Sheahan had restored black-bear hunting to Louisiana and scored federal dollars for oyster farms, she wasn’t a lawyer or a cop. Vitello remained in the acting-director role, leaving ICE staff puzzled about who was in charge. DHS did not respond to a request for comment. [Gisela Salim-Peyer: The ‘right way’ to immigrate just went wrong] On Sunday, two weeks after Vitello’s demotion was announced, ICE named a new acting director, Todd Lyons, a veteran official Noem had promoted less than a month earlier to oversee enforcement operations. Sheahan was named to the deputy-director role. Noem called the pair “work horses” who would deliver “results” and “achieve the American people’s mandate.” The leadership stumbles point to the core problem with Trump’s grandiose deportation plan, which has the potential to become the “Build the Wall!” equivalent of his second term. Trump wants ICE to erase the immigration wave of the past decade and spearhead a MAGA social and cultural transformation. He has ordered federal law-enforcement agencies from across the government—the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals, even the FBI—to drop what they’re doing and help ICE catch more immigrants. Homan’s mission is twofold: stopping illegal migration and ramping up deportations. One of those things is already undermining the other. Illegal border crossings hit record levels under Biden but declined sharply last year as his administration shut off asylum access and worked with Mexico to crack down on unlawful crossings. Trump’s return to office—which has been accompanied by the deployment of thousands of U.S. soldiers and the threat of a one-way ticket to Guantánamo—has sent the border numbers plunging in recent weeks to levels not seen since the 1960s. Fewer border crossings leaves ICE with a smaller number of easy deportees. That puts more of an onus on ICE to find deportees in U.S. cities and other communities nationwide, a much more resource-intensive task. Not every ICE arrest leads to a deportation, and so far, Trump’s removal numbers are lagging behind last year’s, when Biden deported more than 271,000 people during the 2024 fiscal year, the highest total in a decade. Most of those deportees were migrants taken into custody along the Mexico-U.S. border, not immigrants arrested by ICE well inside the United States. Homan was at ICE in 2012, when the agency set its high-water mark with 409,000 removals and Barack Obama was derided as the “deporter in chief” by immigrant advocates. Homan speaks of that era with nostalgia, a time before the sanctuary movement pushed Democratic mayors to eschew cooperation with ICE. During the past decade, the agency has lost much of its ability to work with police and jails in the big U.S. cities that ICE considers its most “target-rich” environments. Now one of the challenges for Homan, Miller, and others is to get the president to turn his attention to enforcement metrics besides deportations, such as higher numbers of ICE arrests and fewer crossings at the Mexico-U.S. border. “People have focused on deportations, but they got to remember we’ve secured the border,” Homan said. Under Biden, millions of migrants who crossed the Mexico-U.S. border were released into the United States with pending asylum claims and temporary residency, he noted. Biden curbed access last year, but Trump has ordered that the doors be slammed shut. Yesterday, DHS said that it will roll out a new mobile-application tool called “CBP Home” for migrants to tell the government when they voluntarily leave the United States. Its name is a play on the CBP One app that Trump pilloried on the campaign trail: Biden officials used CBP One as a queue-management tool for asylum seekers and migrants from Mexico trying to schedule appointments to arrive at border crossings. Trump has made CBP Home one more way to scare people into leaving. “Self-deportation is the safest option,” the department said when announcing the new app. The administration is trying a variety of strategies to raise its deportation figures closer to what Trump wants. Other approaches for getting more aggressive are under review but haven’t been attempted yet. Homan says that ICE’s “aperture”—the demographics of the immigrants it wants to arrest—will widen once the agency finishes tracking down “the worst of the worst.” ICE told Congress last summer that there were about 650,000 immigrants with criminal records on its docket—a pool of potential deportees large enough to keep officers busy, Homan said. ICE data show that the top-three criminal categories in that group are traffic offenses, which include drunk driving; immigration violations, such as illegally reentering the United States; and assault. [Adam Serwer: The deportation show] ICE officers have been ordered to drop Biden-era rules that took a hands-off approach to immigrants who lacked legal status but hadn’t committed crimes. An internal memo sent to ICE officers last month that I obtained has instructed the agency to arrest more of the immigrants who report at ICE offices for mandatory “check-ins” as part of the terms of their provisional status in the United States. That includes immigrants who entered the U.S. legally under one of the Biden administration’s “lawful pathways” programs, if they haven’t already applied for asylum protections. And it directs officers to take a new look at immigrants who aren’t eligible for U.S. residency but whose deportations have been deferred because they are at risk of torture or persecution in their home country. The ICE memo urges officers to assess whether those immigrants can be sent to third countries, as Trump officials secure deals with El Salvador, Guatemala, and others to take immigrants that the United States can’t easily deport. The well-worn ICE tactic known as “knock and talk” that attempts to convince immigrants to open their door for officers has had diminishing returns as the publicity around the deportation campaign has left more potential deportees on guard. Officers can’t force their way into a residence without a criminal warrant signed by a judge—a message that advocacy groups and social-media users have disseminated widely. (Homan has called for the Justice Department to consider whether Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others who share “know your rights” bulletins can be charged with impeding federal officers.) Trump officials have been looking for a work-around to solve the problem of closed doors. Last month, DHS created a registration requirement for immigrants residing in the United States without legal status. Homan and two other DHS officials said that registry violations could allow ICE to bring criminal charges that would potentially give the agency a new way to enter a private residence without consent. The administration is also working to get ICE more money, the lack of which has been perhaps the agency’s biggest impediment. Trump has backed a continuing resolution to fund the government through September that includes approximately $500 million in new money for ICE, equal to about 5 percent of the agency’s annual budget. The additional funds would allow ICE to continue adding detention capacity and removal flights incrementally, but they wouldn’t buy the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history. [Rogé Karma: Why Democrats got the politics of immigration so wrong for so long] That’s the goal of the budget-reconciliation package that GOP lawmakers in the House and the Senate are negotiating with each other and intend to pass without Democratic votes. The sums they’re discussing are staggering. The bill advanced by Senator Lindsey Graham, the budget-committee chairman, would provide $175 billion for border security and immigration enforcement, roughly 20 times ICE’s entire annual budget. One Democratic Senate staffer tracking the bill told me that it’s likely months away from a vote but could be approved this summer. “It’s effectively a blank check,” said the staffer, who was not authorized to speak to reporters on the record. The money could finance the expansion of ICE capacity from its current level of about 45,000 detainees a day to Homan’s goal of more than 100,000. Most important, it would allow ICE to channel federal dollars to pro-Trump states and counties, where the agency can train more sheriff’s deputies and other local cops to make immigration arrests. That’s when Trump’s mass-deportation campaign could get a mass-deportation force to carry it out.
On the campaign trail last fall, President Donald Trump promised a “new era of soaring income, skyrocketing wealth, millions and millions of new jobs, and a booming middle class. We are going to boom like we’ve never boomed before.” On Fox News this weekend, he promised a “period of transition.” He added: “It takes a little time. But I think it should be great for us. I mean, I think it should be great.” When the host asked, “Are you expecting a recession this year?” he didn’t say no. The White House has traded a message of prosperity now for a message of prosperity soon, forecasting that the budget cuts and tariffs the Trump administration is implementing will redound to the country’s welfare in the near future: Businesses will bring their overseas operations back to America; a leaner government will leave more income for American firms and households. But economists doubt that the Trump administration’s policy changes will promote growth. And Trump’s message isn’t inspiring confidence among businesses and consumers. That alone might be enough to pitch the country into a downturn. Already, Trump’s policies are slowing down the economy. The administration has kicked off a global trade war. It announced tariffs on Canada and Mexico, spurring the Canadian government to retaliate with its own tariffs, which then spurred Washington to retaliate for the retaliation; abruptly reversed some of the levies; increased tariffs on China, causing China to impose tit-for-tat measures; added tariffs to aluminum and steel products; proposed “reciprocal” tariffs on countries with taxes on American goods; and floated the idea of putting export tariffs on American agricultural products. The tariffs are slowing trade and increasing costs for American consumers. Companies including Best Buy, Target, and Walmart have warned that they will have to bump up prices as import costs rise. Moreover, the unpredictability around the implementation of the tariffs has led to chaos in the markets. An index of policy-related uncertainty hit its highest-recorded level, aside from the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. Businesses are less sure of the country’s prospects now than they were after 9/11 or during the housing-market collapse in 2007. Manufacturing firms are pulling back on investment; companies are slowing down mergers and acquisitions; firms are downgrading their earnings estimates. The stock market has lost $4 trillion in value, as traders dump equities for safer investments. Asked to clarify the White House’s trade policies this weekend, Trump responded: “We may go up with some tariffs. It depends. We may go up. I don’t think we’ll go down, or we may go up.” Businesses should stop whining about needing policy certainty, he said: “They always say that we want clarity,” but they “have plenty of clarity.” The real issue, he argued, was that “our country has been ripped off for many decades, for many, many decades, and we’re not going to be ripped off anymore.” Beyond new taxes on businesses and consumers, the Trump administration is rescinding federal contracts and firing tens of thousands of federal workers, in many cases illegally. These cuts have not yet shown up in the jobs report, but economists expect them to, starting next month. Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement firm, estimates that the government has let more than 60,000 workers go—enough to wipe out nearly half of the employment gains the economy notched last month—and notes that private businesses are amping up layoffs as well. The Trump administration argues that the country has to go through a “detox period,” as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it. Yet the administration is not just cutting waste and eliminating fraud. The cuts at the IRS, for instance, are likely to reduce federal revenue by denying the government the resources it needs to audit high-income taxpayers. The Social Security cuts could interfere with seniors’ ability to access their retirement benefits. The chaos emanating from Washington comes at a time when the economy is already slowing. Consumers are still being battered by high prices, particularly for housing; credit-card debt and default rates are climbing; the labor market is seizing up, with workers afraid to quit their jobs and hiring rates falling. As a result, indexes of consumer sentiment and small-business optimism are plunging. Last month, households became more pessimistic about current labor conditions, future business conditions, future income, and future employment prospects, the Conference Board reported. Voters’ fear of a “detox period” or a “period of transition” could itself force the country into a literal vibecession, as households, feeling dour, pull back. Consumer spending makes up roughly two-thirds of the economy, and consumers make spending decisions not only on the basis of their own finances but also on their sense of where the country is headed. Reading the headlines on tariffs and hearing about DOGE-related job cuts, some families might put off the purchase of a new car. Others might cut short a summer vacation, decide to wait on a home-improvement project, or quit ordering pizza on Fridays. At the same time, firms might decide to wait on building a new plant or expanding into a new region, reducing employment gains and sapping revenue from other firms. A downturn could result—or, even worse, given the tariffs’ impact on prices, a period of stagflation. Congress and the Federal Reserve would be faced with the choice of increasing spending and lowering interest rates to help create jobs, or lowering spending and increasing interest rates to hold down prices, incapable of doing both at the same time. The Trump White House might compound the pain by, as Elon Musk suggested, slashing Medicaid and Social Security benefits to finance tax cuts for rich households. “It takes a little time,” Trump said of his promised boom. “But I think it should be great.” Instead, we might have a recession. We might have it soon. It definitely won’t feel great.
Last week, Mother Jones reported that Kingsley Wilson, the deputy press secretary for the Defense Department, has posted in recent years a long string of bigoted far-right posts—including endorsing the claim that Leo Frank, a Jewish man lynched in 1915 in one of the most ghastly anti-Semitic killings in American history, was a rapist and a murderer. In light of this disturbing news, the Trump administration leaped into action to combat anti-Semitism … on campus. The administration announced that it was slashing $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” It followed up this action by detaining Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian anti-Israel activist who led protests at Columbia as a grad student last year. The arrest was carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism,” according to the Department of Homeland Security. One can question the effectiveness of Columbia’s actions to combat anti-Semitism, but the allegation that it has failed to act is simply untrue. After the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks began tearing the campus apart, the school commissioned a task force on anti-Semitism. It called in police to clear out a building takeover by anti-Israel activists. Just a few weeks ago, two Barnard students were expelled after disrupting an Israeli-history course and distributing flyers depicting a Jewish star being stepped on by a jackboot. [Adam Serwer: Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is a trial run] The Trump administration, by contrast, really has done nothing about anti-Semitism in its own ranks. The administration is threatening more arrests of foreign-born campus activists, and more funding cuts, all supposedly to contain anti-Semitism, at the same time that it is elevating anti-Semites to newfound prominence and legitimacy. Donald Trump opposes left-wing anti-Semitism because it is left-wing, not because it is anti-Semitic. And his campaign to supposedly stamp it out on campus is a pretext for an authoritarian power grab. If you wish to understand the thought process that led to this point, a good place to begin would be a short missive written last month by Christopher Rufo, an influential conservative activist and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Rufo argued that the ascendant right needs to reject left-wing “cancel culture,” but not settle for returning to liberal norms. “All cultures cancel,” he wrote. “The question is, for what, and by whom.” This echoed, either consciously or unconsciously, Vladimir Lenin’s famous dictum, “Who, Whom?,” by which he defined politics as entirely a question of which class would dominate the other, rejecting any possibility of liberal accommodation. Rufo chose as his explanatory example the case of Marko Elez, a DOGE staffer who resigned after his exposure for having written openly racist posts (including, literally, “I was racist before it was cool”), only to be rehired after a public intervention by Elon Musk and J. D. Vance. “The vice president rejected the calculus of left-wing cancel culture,” Rufo explained, “demonstrating instead that forgiveness, loyalty, and a sense of proportion should be part of the decision-making process in such controversies.” The key term here is loyalty. Protection would be afforded only to allies. “We should propose a new set of values that expands the range of acceptable discourse rightward,” Rufo argued, which would enable the right to “protect its own members from unjust cancellation attempts” and “enforce just consequences on political opponents who violate the new terms.” [Yair Rosenberg: The anti-Semitic revolution on the American right] The sole guiding principle at work is the defense of allies and the punishment of foes. Trump and his allies may purport to be following other values, but they barely bother with even the pretense of consistency. Trump will claim to defend free speech while launching a campaign to punish campus demonstrators on the basis of their viewpoints. (Many anti-Israel protesters have espoused ghastly political views, including support for the October 7 murders, but free speech means nothing if not preventing the government from punishing ideas it disagrees with.) He will occasionally justify his repression as simply a crackdown on disorder and other forms of misconduct, while granting sweeping pardons to the perpetrators of a violent mob assault on the Capitol. That spirit of pure will to power—who, whom—has defined the administration’s gleefully selective approach to “combating” anti-Semitism, which in practice seems to mean using anti-Semitism as a pretext to intimidate its opponents while simultaneously cultivating its own anti-Semitic faction. Trump’s rise over the past decade has broadened the Republican coalition in many ways—including by pulling in far-right activists previously considered too racist to be permitted in the tent. During his first campaign and presidential term, Trump courted these factions with wink-and-nod rhetoric: calling his movement “America First” (a label previously used by the isolationist right before World War II), gesturing toward the “Great Replacement” theory (the idea, circulated by white supremacists, that mass immigration is a left-wing plot to transform American politics and culture), attacking his Republican critics as “globalists,” and refusing to denounce even virulently racist figures, such as David Duke, who supported him. During his second term, the embrace is far less subtle. Winks and nods have been replaced by public Nazi salutes. Andrew Tate, the notorious manosphere influencer and alleged sex trafficker, recently received a special intervention from the White House allowing him to travel to the United States, presumably because he is loyal to Trump. (The president has denied involvement in that decision.) His extensive list of moral abominations includes overtly anti-Semitic statements, including praise for Hamas and the October 7 attacks. It would be an exaggeration to say that Trump has turned the GOP into a white-supremacist or Nazi party. The still-disturbing reality is that he has brought white supremacists and Nazis into the coalition. As such, they receive his protection. Right-wing anti-Semitism has exploded as a consequence of the Trumpist no-enemies-to-the-right principle. Elon Musk has made X both more central to conservative messaging and distinctly friendlier to anti-Semitic messages. Just this past week, the popular podcaster Joe Rogan credulously interviewed a notorious anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist. It is true that anti-Semitism has also surged on the left, frequently disguised as anti-Zionism. The key difference is that it has utterly failed to gain legitimacy within the Democratic Party. Indeed, the movements that have given comfort to anti-Semitism on the left have exuded hostility toward the Democrats, sometimes even expressing a preference for Trump. Democrats have managed to keep left-wing anti-Semitism marginal because they recognize that it exists. By denying right-wing anti-Semitism, Republicans have allowed it to spread. [Conor Friedersdorf: How colleges should address anti-Semitism] Jew hatred is now crossing a threshold of political viability such that even prominent Republicans in safe congressional seats hesitate to denounce it. Consider this telling response by Senator Lindsey Graham to Kingsley Wilson’s anti-Semitic invective: “I’m not gonna tell them who to hire, but I do know that Trump doesn’t believe any of the things she’s talking about, and I’ll leave it up to them to determine if they think she’s the right spokesperson. If what you say about these posts are true, then she’s completely off-script with President Trump.” Graham is trying to signal, as tepidly as possible, that the White House should fire Wilson by calling her “off-script with President Trump.” But by saying he won’t tell Trump whom to hire, he frees the president from any standard of accountability. Graham opposes anti-Semitism, but his opposition must yield to the highest imperative, Trump is always right. The rise of anti-Semitism on campus since October 7, 2023, is real. But the Republican campaign to use it as a justification to extend political control over universities has nothing to do with protecting Jews, and everything to do with undermining liberal democracy.
The federal government has provided no evidence that Mahmoud Khalil has committed a criminal offense, and yet on Saturday night, he was taken by agents of the state from his home and renditioned to a detention facility where neither his pregnant wife nor his lawyer have had access to him. Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the United States and Palestinian activist who helped lead the protests at Columbia University over the Israel-Hamas war last spring, seems to have been disappeared by the U.S. government because of his political views. Khalil was among the students urging the university to cut financial and educational ties with Israel. (Unlike with other categories of immigrants, revoking the status of legal permanent residents generally requires evidence of wrongdoing.) Yesterday, President Donald Trump announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had “proudly apprehended” Khalil, describing him as a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student.” A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson described Khalil as having “led activities aligned to Hamas.” There is, notably, not even a hint of an allegation of criminal behavior in that description. They do not accuse him of being a member of, fighting for, or providing material support to any terrorist group, all of which are prosecutable crimes. The phrasing aligned to implies that if Trump-administration officials think the views of a green-card holder are unacceptable, they can deprive him of his freedom. How does one even prove they are not “aligned” with Hamas, a subjective and arbitrary judgment that could be thrown at anyone deemed too critical of the Israeli government? Government officials have told reporters that Khalil’s green card was revoked under a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that authorizes the secretary of state to expel an “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” Trump supporters have a remarkable ability to coalesce around whatever explanation they are told to repeat, so the arguments defending the detention are likely to orient around this justification. The idea that Khalil’s views might have “serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the United States is an obvious pretext for expelling him—and a message to others who might hold or express similar beliefs. Trumpists simply do not approve of his politics and have therefore resorted to using the power of the state to deport him. Trump has styled himself a champion of free speech, but this is what Trumpists mean by “free speech”: You can say what Trumpists want you to say or you can be punished. [David A. Graham: The free-speech phonies] Trump has announced as much, declaring that the administration would not tolerate “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.” That is an admission that Khalil’s arrest is not about consequences for American foreign policy but about punishing speech. The administration is using the power of the state to silence people who express political views that Trump dislikes. And it is worth noting that Trumpists define any criticism of Trump as “anti-American.” Due process is a cornerstone of democracy and the rule of law. Without it, anyone can be arbitrarily deprived of life or liberty. Leaders who aspire to absolute power always begin by demonizing groups that lack the political power to resist, and that might be awkward for the political opposition to defend. They say someone is a criminal, and they dare you to defend the rights of criminals. They say someone is a deviant, and they dare you to defend the rights of deviants. They call someone a terrorist, and they dare you to defend the rights of terrorists. And if you believe none of these apply to you, another category might be “traitor,” the label that Trump and his advisers, including the far-right billionaire Elon Musk, like to give to anyone who opposes them. Trump’s assault on basic First Amendment principles may begin with Khalil, but it will not end with him. Trump’s ultimate target is anyone he finds useful to target. Trump and his advisers simply hope the public is foolish or shortsighted enough to believe that if they are not criminals, or deviants, or terrorists, or foreigners, or traitors, then they have no reason to worry. Eventually no one will have any rights that the state need respect, because the public will have sacrificed them in the name of punishing people it was told did not deserve them. The Trump administration began its drive for absolute power by ignoring congressional appropriations of foreign aid, which are laws. It calculated that Americans would be callous enough not to care about the catastrophic loss of human life abroad and that the absence of backlash would enable the administration to set a precedent for defying duly passed laws without consequence. Trump began his assault on antidiscrimination law with a vicious campaign against trans people—but has already broadened that campaign into a sweeping attempt at a great resegregation of American life. The detention of Mahmoud Khalil begins a dangerous new phase, in which the Trump administration will attempt to assert an authority to deprive people of due process based on their political views. The Anti-Defamation League, a pale shadow of its former self, enthusiastically endorsed Khalil’s detainment absent due process, saying it “appreciated” the Trump administration’s “bold set of efforts to counter campus anti-semitism” by “holding alleged perpetrators responsible for their actions.” Although the statement includes the caveat that “any deportation action or revocation of a Green Card or visa must be undertaken in alignment with required due process protections,” praising the Trump administration for arresting Khalil absent any such process makes clear that the question of Khalil’s guilt is an afterthought. One source of legal authority that the administration appears to be citing is the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, whose co-sponsor Senator Patrick McCarran believed that Jews were “subversive rats that need to be kept out” of the country. If there is one obvious lesson of Jewish history, it is that when governments persecute people based on their political views and ethnic background, it is unlikely to end well for Jews. The ADL learned different lessons from that history, I suppose. This sort of reaction, where a self-styled civil-rights organization endorses depriving people of their basic rights of speech and due process because they find the target unsympathetic, is what the Trumpists are counting on. Trumpists are counting on as many people as possible shutting off their conscience, because the administration has picked a target it hopes few will defend. They are counting on the public deciding that free speech and due process are optional for this category of people or that one, and that they will be safe, as they have done nothing wrong. The Trump administration wishes to lull people into this complacency until it is too late to react. This kind of arrogance has a poor track record historically. Despots are always in need of powerful enemies to justify an insatiable drive for absolute power. Where none exist, they will invent them. Mass graves across the world are full of those who believed they had nothing to fear. This is what is important: It does not matter if you approve of Khalil’s views. It does not matter if you support the Israelis or the Palestinians. It does not matter if you are a liberal or a conservative. It does not even matter if you voted for Trump or Kamala Harris. If the state can deprive an individual of his freedom just because of his politics, which is what appears to have happened here, then no one is safe. You may believe that Khalil does not deserve free speech or due process. But if he does not have them, then neither do you. Neither do I.
Editor’s Note: Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at dearjames@theatlantic.com. Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get “Dear James” in your inbox. Dear James, I love my kids more than life itself. My 6-year-old boy is funny, sensitive, smart, and beautiful. My 3-year-old daughter is a riot; she makes everyone around her scream with laughter. She’s also freakin’ cute. But lord help me if either of them asks me to play dress-up, a board game, or Legos. I’ll give myself some credit. My husband and I both work full time as schoolteachers. During the winter, my husband coaches sports on the weekends, so I’m cooped up alone with the kids, which feels like a cruel human experiment. Yet even when the weather gets nicer, I’d rather sit on a deck chair with my laptop than play soccer or tag with my darling cherubs. Sure, it gets easier as it gets warmer and brighter in the evenings, but I’m still bogged down by endless laundry and dishes, and I rarely get a break, because my kids are too little to venture out in the yard on their own. Every afternoon, I’m riddled with mom guilt, knowing I’m supposed to be savoring these moments. My husband regularly sings Trace Adkins’s “You’re Gonna Miss This” to me, mockingly. I’m not looking to get rid of the guilt; I’ve read enough parenting blogs to know that eventually, I’ll probably be managing the crippling feeling that the kids are growing up too fast. What I want is to want to play with my kids. I want to pick them up from school and be excited to play Zingo, hide-and-seek, and fairy princess. I want to want to play a family game of Monopoly instead of watching Frozen for the 1,896th time on a Friday night. How do I get there? Dear Reader, You’re absolutely right: This is a cruel human experiment. The psychedelic locusts who run the universe, nine feet tall and grinding their forelegs together like violin bows, surpassed themselves in horrid ingenuity when they designed the nuclear family. They get high on the clouds of shame it produces; the drone of its neurosis delights them. Three or four or five humans of different sizes in a closed space, fatally attached and working up new varieties of stifled misery, for years … Perfect. But there are ways to beat the locusts—ways to short-circuit or break out of the experiment. I’m not going to presume to give you tips on how to enjoy your children (for example, make them play with you, according to an entertainment syllabus designed around your interests). You’re a schoolteacher; you know all of this already. I’m not going to tell you about my friend Tom, who once said to me that most of his life as a parent seemed to be spent “fobbing off” his children in one way or another. I’m not even going to preach about the concept of fertile neglect and the ecology of the imagination—which must be allowed to renew itself, without interference, without parents. (In other words: Get your kids settled somewhere sort of safe, and then guiltlessly clear out. Leave them be.) No, the core advice is this: Let yourself off the hook. Completely. Confound our insect overlords by simply refusing to emit the fumes of parental angst that they enjoy so much. Shut yourself down as a shame-producer! Extend to your trying-very-hard self the same compassion you would offer to anyone else in the same situation. Why should you have the faintest interest in board games or Legos, for God’s sake? You’re an adult. Not only that; you spend much of your working life attempting to engage and instruct children. When you get home, and when you get a minute to yourself, it’s time to luxuriate in some minor grown-up vices. It’s time to smoke rank cigarettes and watch films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In the dark. Wishing you hours of private naughtiness, James By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it in part or in full, and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.
The wonder of the American supermarket is the way it exists outside of seasons. Stroll into any major grocery store on a dreary winter day, and you’ll find a bounty of fresh summer fruits and vegetables waiting for you: avocados, tomatoes, berries, bell peppers, cucumbers, squash, and green beans. The American supermarket does not, however, exist outside of economics. These fruits and vegetables are largely grown in Mexico, meaning they are roped up in President Donald Trump’s trade war. Last week, he enacted 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico; two days later, he backtracked, suspending most of the tariffs until April 2. (His 20 percent tariff on products from China remains in effect.) Presuming that the president follows through, expect lots of goods to get more expensive: tequila, lumber, that $11 handheld vacuum you bought from Temu on a whim. But perhaps the most direct way that Americans feel the tariffs will be at the grocery store. Nearly 60 percent of the fresh fruit in the United States is imported, as is more than one-third of the country’s fresh vegetables. Most of that travels in from Mexico, but Canada also plays a part in America’s food supply. Twenty percent of the country’s vegetables, by value, come from our neighbor to the north. For all the debate around what people should eat, one thing pretty much everyone agrees on is that fruits and veggies are good for you. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., on a campaign to “Make America healthy again,” has promoted numerous dangerous ideas about the American diet—but he’s right that Americans aren’t eating enough greens. The tariffs will worsen the problem. “People are going to immediately eat less fruits and vegetables, and will more likely rely on processed foods,” Mariana Chilton, a public-health professor at Drexel University and the author of The Painful Truth About Hunger in America, told me. A direct consequence of Trump’s tariffs could be pushing Americans to eat worse than they already do. Ideally, tariffs could be offset by growing more produce in the U.S. That is precisely what Trump calls for as part of his “America First” agenda. But as The Atlantic’s Yasmin Tayag wrote last month, doing so would require an overhaul of the food system: “More land would have to be dedicated to growing fruits, vegetables, and nuts, and less of it to grains and sweeteners. It would also mean addressing labor shortages, increasing the number of farmers, finding suitable land, and building new infrastructure to process and ship each new crop.” So how much more expensive will produce get? The tariffs apply to the value of a product at the border, not the retail price, so it’s not as simple as just slapping on a 25 percent surcharge on avocados. Over the course of the next year or so, if the tariffs take effect, the Budget Lab at Yale projects a 2.9 percent increase on fruits and vegetables. “These sound like small numbers,” Ernie Tedeschi, the lab’s economic director, told me. “These are not small numbers.” It’s the equivalent of “two years’ worth of fresh-food inflation in one fell swoop.” And that 2.9 percent increase is an average, meaning it encompasses all produce prices—including fruits and vegetables grown in the U.S. If you’re a big tomato eater and you like a side of green beans, the tariffs are going to especially hurt. The Budget Lab expects a 1.7 percent bump on food prices overall. But this, too, wouldn’t be evenly distributed. On the opposite end of the cost spectrum, packaged foods would be among those least affected. They are made with imported fruits and vegetables, some of which may be coming from Mexico and Canada, but the overall amount tends to be negligible. (There just isn’t that much tomato on a frozen pizza.) “There might be other things that those food companies may be importing,” David Ortega, a food economist at Michigan State, told me, such as packaging. But “the pressure there is going to be a lot lower than in the actual fresh produce.” In other words, Twinkies may get a little more expensive, while tomatoes may get a lot more expensive. That’s going to make it harder for people to eat healthy, Sarah Bowen, a sociologist at North Carolina State University, told me. In her research interviewing moms about their food choices, “one of the things that came up again and again was that people wanted to buy healthier food, and especially fresh fruit, but they couldn’t afford it,” she told me. “We asked moms, ‘If you had more money to spend on food, what would you buy?’ And by far the most common answer was fresh fruit, specifically strawberries, grapes, things that kids like.” Even if you can swing it, there is a point where the discerning—or even vaguely price-conscious—consumer hits a limit and thinks, You know what, no. “It’s clear that people are already very worried about food prices,” Bowen said. Of course, these changes will happen only at the margins. Lots of people might still buy an avocado that costs an extra 50 cents. And tariffs could have a perverse and uncomfortable upside, Caitlin Daniel, a researcher at Harvard, told me. Among the first purchases to go when budgets get tight is food that “people want to cut anyway,” she said—salty snacks, cookies, soda. That would be a limited victory. “In general, you’re probably going to see a decline in consumption of fresh produce, and that’s not good,” she said. The millions of Americans who already don’t eat enough vegetables will have even more of a reason not to do so. Even before the tariffs, fresh fruits and vegetables made up only “roughly a tenth” of the average middle-class grocery budget, Tedeschi said, drawing on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Survey data. The solace is that Americans still have plenty of ways to cut their broccoli costs. “There’s some latitude for substitution,” Daniel said. Instead of buying fresh, people might buy canned or frozen options “with really no change in diet quality,” she said. America grows tons of other fruits and vegetables; most of the country’s spinach, for example, is already grown domestically. Price alone cannot explain why Americans eat the way they do. But the tariffs could underscore just how fundamental it is for understanding the country’s diet. Daniel has found in her research that people go to great lengths to continue eating fresh produce even when cash-strapped. “Whether people cinch up at the level of trying to buy from cheaper retailers,” she said, “going in on more couponing, shopping at multiple stores in search of deals—all of these things are going to contribute to what the ultimate impact on health is.” Tariffs or no tariffs, telling people what to eat is less effective than ensuring that they’re actually able to buy it. For an administration that wants to “Make America healthy again,” raising the prices of fruits and vegetables might not be the place to start.
The top entries in the 2025 Sony World Photography Awards Open Competition were just announced, and competition organizers have once again shared some of the winning and shortlisted photos selected from more than 419,000 submissions in 10 categories: Architecture, Creative, Landscape, Lifestyle, Motion, Natural World & Wildlife, Object, Portraiture, Street Photography, and Travel. Captions were provided by the organizers and photographers. To receive an email notification every time new photo stories are published, sign up here.
In the early evening of March 7, 2020, I was on my cellphone in an airport terminal, telling a friend that I was afraid to write an article that risked ruining my journalistic reputation. I had been speaking with the small but close-knit aerobiologist community about the possibility that the new coronavirus could travel easily from person to person through the air—not just through large droplets that reach only a short distance from an infected person or through handshakes. The scientists had stressed that the idea of airborne transmission of the new virus was still mostly theoretical, but they’d seemed pretty concerned. When my story came out the following week, it was, to my knowledge, the first article by a journalist to make the case that the virus causing COVID-19 might travel efficiently through the air, and could potentially cover many meters in a gaseous cloud emitted with a cough or a sneeze. To avoid stoking undue worry, I had argued against calling the virus “airborne” in the headline, which ran as “They Say Coronavirus Isn’t Airborne—But It’s Definitely Borne by Air.” That idea was not immediately accepted: Two weeks later, the World Health Organization tweeted, “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.” As the pandemic unfolded, though, it became clear that the coronavirus did indeed spread through airborne transmission—even if the WHO took more than a year and a half to officially describe the coronavirus as a long-range airborne pathogen. By then, amid the loud debate over mask mandates, vaccine boosters, and individuals’ responsibility for the health of others, a parallel debate had emerged over ventilation. Wearing an N95 or receiving a third COVID shot were ultimately individual choices, but breathing safer air in indoor spaces required buy-in from bigger players such as education departments and transit agencies. Some advocates held up clean air as a kind of public good—one worth investing in for shared safety. If it had succeeded, this way of thinking would have represented one of the most lasting paths for governments to decrease people’s risks from COVID and from airborne diseases more generally. In the United States, the federal government regulates the quality of air outdoors, but it has relatively little oversight of indoor air. State and local jurisdictions pick up some of the slack, but this creates a patchwork of rules about indoor air. Local investment in better air-quality infrastructure varies widely too. For example, a 2022 survey of COVID-ventilation measures in U.S. public-school districts found that only about a quarter of them used or planned to use HEPA filters, which have a dense mesh for trapping particles, for indoor air. An even smaller fraction—about 8 percent—had installed air-cleansing systems that incorporated ultraviolet light, which can kill germs. For decades, experts have pushed the idea that the government should pay more attention to the quality of indoor air. In his new book, Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, the journalist Carl Zimmer shows the long arc of this argument. He notes that Richard Riley, a giant in the field of aerobiology who helped show that tuberculosis can be airborne, believed that individuals shouldn’t have to ensure that the air they breathe is clean. Just as the government regulates the safety of the water that flows into indoor pipes, it should oversee the safety of air in indoor public spaces. More than half a century before the coronavirus pandemic, Riley positioned this idea as an alternative to requirements for widespread masking, which, he said, call for “a kind of benevolent despotism,” Zimmer reports. If cleaner air was the one of the best ways to reduce the societal burden of disease, then the two best ways to achieve it were to push people to wear masks in any public space or to install better ventilation. The latter approach—purifying the air—would mean that “the individual would be relieved of direct responsibility,” Riley reasoned in a 1961 book he co-authored: “This is preventive medicine at its best, but it can only be bought at the price of civic responsibility and vigilance.” Medical breakthroughs in the years that followed may have deflated enthusiasm for this idea. Zimmer writes that the huge advances in vaccines during the 1960s made the world less interested in the details of airborne-disease transmission. Thanks to new vaccines, doctors had a way to prevent measles, the WHO launched a campaign to eradicate smallpox, and polio seemed on its way out. On top of that, researchers had come up with an arsenal of lifesaving antibiotics and antivirals. How viruses reached us mattered less when our defenses against them were so strong. In the first year or so of the coronavirus pandemic, though, one of the only defenses against COVID was avoiding it. And as a debate raged over how well the virus spread in air, the science of aerobiology was thrust into the spotlight. Some members of the public started fighting for good ventilation. A grassroots effort emerged to put homemade air purifiers and portable HEPA filters in public places. Teachers opened classroom windows when they learned that their schools lacked proper ventilation, travelers started carrying carbon-monoxide monitors to gauge the air quality aboard planes, and restaurants began offering outdoor dining after diagrams were published showing how easily one person eating inside can expose those seated nearby to the virus. The federal government did take some small steps toward encouraging better ventilation. In mid-2023, the CDC put out new recommendations urging five air changes an hour (essentially replacing all of the air within a room) in all buildings. But it was a recommendation, not a requirement, and local governments and owners of public buildings have been slow to take on the burden of installing or overhauling their ventilation systems. Part of this was surely because of the daunting price tag: In 2020, the Government Accountability Office estimated that approximately 36,000 school buildings had substandard systems for heating, ventilation, and cooling; the estimated cost for upgrading the systems and ensuring safe air quality in all of the country’s schools, some experts calculated, would be about $72 billion. Portable HEPA filters, meanwhile, can be noisy and require space, making them less-than-ideal long-term solutions. For the most part, momentum for better indoor air quality has dissipated, just as interest in it faded in the 1960s. Five years after COVID-19 precipitated lockdowns in the U.S., the rate of hospitalizations and mortality from the disease are a fraction of what they once were, and public discussion about ventilation has waned. Truly improving indoor air quality on a societal scale would be a long-term investment (and one that the Trump administration seems very unlikely to take on, given that it is slashing other environmental-safety protections). But better ventilation would also limit the cost of diseases other than COVID. Tuberculosis is airborne, and measles is frighteningly good at spreading this way. There is also evidence for airborne dissemination of a range of common pathogens such as influenza, which in the U.S. led to an estimated 28,000 deaths in the 2023–24 flu season. The same holds true for RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, which each year causes 58,000 to 80,000 hospitalizations of children under age 5 in the United States, and kills as many as 300 of them. Virologists are also now asking whether bird flu could evolve to efficiently transmit through air, too. For those of us still concerned about airborne diseases, it feels as though little has changed. We’re right where we were at the start of the pandemic. I remember that moment in the airport and how I’d later worried about stoking panic in part because, during my flight, I was the only person wearing an N95—one that I had purchased months ago to wear in the dusty crawl space beneath my home. On the plane, I felt like a weirdo. These days, I am, once again, almost always the lone masker when I take public transportation. Sometimes I feel ridiculous. But just the other week, while I was seated on the metro, a woman coughed on my head. At that moment, I was glad to have a mask on. But I would have been even more relieved if the enclosed space of the metro car had been designed to cleanse the air of whatever she might have released and keep it from reaching me.
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