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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. On Friday, President Donald Trump delivered an unusual speech at the Justice Department. Between fulminating against his political adversaries and long digressions about the late basketball coach Bob Knight, Trump declared, “We’re restoring fair, equal, and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.” Then his administration spent the weekend proving otherwise. People who believe the press is overhyping the danger to rule of law posed by the current administration have pointed out that although administration officials have repeatedly attacked the judicial system, the White House has not actually defied a judge. But that may not be the case anymore, or for much longer. On Saturday in Washington, D.C., Judge James Boasberg issued a temporary restraining order barring the federal government from deporting Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador, which it was seeking to do using a 1798 law that bypasses much due process by declaring an enemy invasion. Nonetheless, hundreds of Venezuelans alleged by the administration to be connected with the gang Tren de Aragua landed in El Salvador, where authoritarian President Nayib Bukele has agreed to take them. Separately, a federal judge in Massachusetts is demanding to know why Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese doctor at Brown University’s medical school, was deported despite a valid visa and a court order temporarily blocking her removal. The White House insists that it did not actually defy Boasberg’s judicial order, but its arguments are very hard to take at face value. “The Administration did not ‘refuse to comply’ with a court order,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “The order, which had no lawful basis, was issued after terrorist [Tren de Aragua] aliens had already been removed from U.S. territory.” She’s trying to have it both ways—the order is unlawful, but also we didn’t ignore it. “The written order and the Administration’s actions do not conflict,” Leavitt said. Although Boasberg’s written order did not specify, the judge told attorneys during the Saturday hearing that “any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States.” Politico reports that the plane left during a break in the hearing, as though the government was angling to get out just ahead of any mandate. During a briefing today, Leavitt also questioned whether the verbal order held the same weight as a written order, which is a matter of settled law. During a hearing early this evening, Boasberg seemed incredulous at the Justice Department’s arguments, calling one a “heck of a stretch.” In the Boston case, a Customs and Border Protection official said in a sworn declaration that the agency had not received formal notification of the judge’s order when it deported Alawieh. CBP said in a statement yesterday that “arriving aliens bear the burden of establishing admissibility to the United States.” The statements of Trump administration officials elsewhere make it even harder to take their actions as anything other than attempting to defy judges. Salvadoran President Bukele posted a screenshot of a New York Post story about the judge’s order on X with the commentary, “Oopsie … Too late” and a laughing-crying emoji. Chief Bureaucrat Elon Musk replied with the same emoji, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared Bukele’s post from his own account. “Border czar” Tom Homan appeared on Fox News this morning and said, “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the left thinks. We’re coming.” These actions should be terrifying no matter who is involved. The fact that Tren de Aragua is indeed a vicious gang doesn’t nullify the law—the administration’s claim that the U.S. is contending with a wartime invasion is ridiculous on its face. Even more important is whether the White House decided to snub a ruling by a federal judge. Nor do customs officials’ claims in court filings that they found “sympathetic photos and videos” of Hezbollah leaders on Alawieh’s phone, or that she told them she had attended the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral, mean the law doesn’t apply. For all we know, her actions may well justify her deportation. (Of course, we have little way of assessing any of these allegations clearly, because the administration has sidestepped the usual judicial proceedings in both cases. A lawyer for Alawieh’s family hasn’t commented on the allegations.) What matters is that the executive branch acted despite a judge’s order. This is what we might call the Mahmoud Khalil test: No matter whether you think someone’s ideas or actions are deplorable, once the executive branch decides it doesn’t have to follow the law for one person, it has established that it doesn’t have to follow the law for anyone. After Khalil was arrested, Trump said that he was “the first arrest of many to come.” No one should have any illusion that the list will stop with alleged Tren de Aragua members. Throughout his career, Trump has tested boundaries and, if allowed to do so, pushed further. His actions at the start of this term show that he is more emboldened than ever, and traditionally institutionalist figures such as Rubio seem eager to abet him. Watching Trump’s DOJ address, supposedly about law and order, offers some ideas of who else he might target while ignoring the law. So do his social-media accounts. This morning on Truth Social, Trump claimed that former President Joe Biden’s pardons of Liz Cheney and other members of the House January 6 Committee were not valid. “The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,” Trump wrote. “In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!” Trump wouldn’t bother with this if he didn’t hope to prosecute the people involved. Although Biden’s pardons were controversial because they were issued preemptively, the idea that an autopen, which allows the user to sign remotely, would invalidate them is concocted out of thin air. (Nor has Trump provided evidence that Biden did in fact use an autopen in these cases.) The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote a justification for the practice in 2005, and presidents have been using them to sign legislation since 2011, without serious incident. The Supreme Court could conceivably rule in favor of Trump’s view—the justices have adopted other long-shot Trump claims—but it is hard to imagine, and would be a real departure. When Trump speaks about law and order, he means it very narrowly. He believes in swift justice for his adversaries, with or without due process of the law; meanwhile, he believes his actions should not be constrained by law, the Constitution, or anything else that might cause him problems, and he has used pardons prolifically to excuse the actions of his friends and allies, whether Paul Manafort and Roger Stone or January 6 rioters. Plenty of presidents have been frustrated by the limitations of the law. Richard Nixon even claimed, years after leaving office, that any action by the president, as head of the executive branch, is de facto legal. But no president until now has so aggressively or so frequently acted as though he didn’t need to follow the law’s most basic precepts. Back in November, my colleague Tom Nichols invoked the Peruvian politician Óscar Benavides. Though he’s little known in the United States, here are a few striking facts about him: He served as president twice, first coming to power not through a popular election but through appointment by an elected assembly. Some years later, he returned to the presidency as an unabashed authoritarian. (Hmm.) “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law,” goes a quote sometimes attributed to Benavides. It could be the motto of the Trump administration over the past four days. Related: The ultimate Trump story Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is a trial run. Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Franklin Foer on Columbia University’s anti-Semitism problem The lesson Trump is learning the hard way How Republicans learned to love high prices Today’s News At least 42 people died after a powerful storm system hit central and southern U.S. states over the weekend, according to officials. The Energy Department, EPA, and NOAA started hiring back probationary employees after federal judges recently ruled that their firings were illegally carried out and ordered their reinstatement. Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are scheduled to speak on the phone tomorrow about a cease-fire with Ukraine. Trump said yesterday that he expects the conversation to include discussions about Ukraine’s power plants, and that there have already been talks about “dividing up” Ukrainian assets. Dispatches Work in Progress: “Buy, Borrow, Die”—this is how to be a billionaire and pay no taxes, Rogé Karma writes. The Wonder Reader: Finding love has never been easy, but this is a particularly tricky moment for romance, Isabel Fattal writes. Explore all of our newsletters here. Evening Read Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Sources: Marsell Gorska Gautier / Getty; naumoid / Getty. Sex Without Women By Caitlin Flanagan What a testament to man—how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties!—that he continued doing anything else after the advent of online porn. Plenty of women, of course, consume and enjoy or create and profit from porn—people of every sexual orientation and gender identity do. But the force that through the green fuse drives the flower (and the money) is heterosexual male desire for women. And here was porn so good, so varied, so ready to please, so instantly—insistently—available, that it led to a generation of men who think of porn not as a backup to having sex, but as an improvement on it. They prefer it. Read the full article. More From The Atlantic Olga Khazan: “How baby-led weaning almost ruined my life” John Green: The world’s deadliest infectious disease is about to get worse. The stain of betrayal in Afghanistan LeBron James and the limits of nepotism One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world. Culture Break Zack Wittman Batter up. Why aren’t women allowed to play baseball? They’ve always loved America’s pastime—but it’s never loved them back, Kaitlyn Tiffany writes. It’s as easy as … Riding an e-bike. Getting around on one might be a bit slower than in a car, but it’s also “transformed my family’s life,” Elizabeth Endicott 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.
Less than a month into the second Trump administration, the White House began publicly toying with the idea of defying court orders. In the weeks since then, it’s continued to flirt with the suggestion, not ignoring a judge outright but pushing the boundaries of compliance by searching for loopholes in judicial demands and skirting orders for officials to testify. And now the administration may have taken its biggest step yet toward outright defiance—though, as is typical of the Trump presidency, it has done this in a manner so haphazard and confused that it’s difficult to untangle what actually happened. But even amid that haze, so much is very clear: Donald Trump’s most dangerous tendencies—his hatred of immigrants; his disdain for the legal process; his willingness to push the boundaries of executive authority; and, newly, his appetite for going to war with the courts—are magnifying one another in a uniquely risky way. The case in question involves Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to accelerate deportations of Venezuelan migrants without going through the normal process mandated by immigration law. The statute, which is almost as old as the country itself, has an unsavory pedigree: It was passed in 1798 along with the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts, part of a crackdown on domestic dissent in the midst of rising hostilities between France and the fledgling United States. Before this weekend, it had been used only three times in the country’s history. On Friday, at a speech at the Justice Department—itself a bizarre breach of the tradition of purportedly respecting the department’s independence from the president—Trump hinted that he would soon be invoking the statute, this time against migrants whom the administration had deemed to be members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. From here, the timeline becomes—perhaps intentionally—confusing. At some point over the ensuing 24 hours, though it remains unclear exactly when, Trump signed an executive order to that effect. Before that order was even public, the ACLU filed suit in federal court seeking to block the deportation of five Venezuelans who it believed might be removed. (In a sickening twist, several of the plaintiffs say they are seeking asylum in the United States because of persecution by Tren de Aragua.) By 5 p.m. on Saturday, Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia had convened a hearing over Zoom. Things had happened quickly enough that the judge apologized at the beginning of the hearing for his casual appearance; he had departed for a weekend away without packing his judicial robes. [Read: ICE isn’t delivering the mass deportation Trump wants] Thanks to the Alien Enemies Act’s age and sparse use, many of the legal questions around its invocation are novel, and Boasberg admitted to struggling to make sense of these issues so quickly. The broad authority to rapidly remove noncitizens clearly appealed to Trump, who has always been adept at identifying and exploiting grants of executive power that allow him to put pressure on the weak points of the constitutional order. In an additional twist, the administration announced that it would be using this authority not just to deport supposed members of Tren de Aragua who lack U.S. citizenship or permanent residency, but to send them to a horrific Salvadorean mega-prison established by El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, the self-professed “coolest dictator in the world.” The problem with this clever scheme, as the ACLU argued during the Saturday-evening hearing, is that the Alien Enemies Act does not actually apply to this situation. The statute provides the president with the authority to detain and quickly remove “all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects” of a “hostile nation or government” in the event of a declared war against the United States or an “invasion or predatory incursion.” The United States is, obviously, not at war with Venezuela; Tren de Aragua, against which the executive order is directed, is not a “nation or government”; and in no reasonable sense is an invasion or incursion taking place. Trump is attempting to get around these many problems by proclaiming Tren de Aragua to be “closely aligned” with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, to the extent that the gang and the Venezuelan government constitute a “hybrid criminal state.” Building on several years of unsuccessful right-wing legal efforts to frame migration across the U.S.-Mexico border as an “invasion,” the executive order likewise frames Tren de Aragua’s presence within the United States as an “invasion or predatory incursion.” These claims range from weak to laughable, and that’s before we consider the range of other legal problems raised by Trump’s use of the law. The best card the government has to play is the argument that courts simply can’t second-guess the president’s assertions here, based on a 1948 case in which the Supreme Court found that it couldn’t evaluate President Harry Truman’s decision to continue detaining a German citizen under the Alien Enemies Act well after the end of World War II. But the circumstances of that case, Ludecke v. Watkins, were substantially different from the circumstances today. During Saturday’s hearing, Judge Boasberg concluded that the ACLU had made a strong argument that the Alien Enemies Act can’t be invoked against a gang. At the ACLU’s request, the judge not only issued a temporary order barring deportation of the five plaintiffs under the Alien Enemies Act, but also blocked the administration from removing any other Venezuelan migrants from the country on those grounds while litigation continues. [Quinta Jurecic: What if the Trump administration defies a court order?] If the chain of events ended there, this would be a familiar narrative about Trump’s hostility to immigration and his penchant for making aggressive arguments in court. But there is another layer to this story that moves it into the territory of potential crisis. While the timeline remains confused, it appears that at least three planes traveled from the U.S. to El Salvador on Saturday evening, two of them departing during the hearing; all three flights arrived in El Salvador (following stopovers in Honduras) after Boasberg issued both oral and written rulings barring the deportations. A White House spokesperson confirmed to The Washington Post that 137 people on the flights had been deported under the Alien Enemies Act. President Bukele has adopted a posture of smug mockery toward the court: “Oopsie … Too late,” he posted on X yesterday morning, with a screenshot of a news story about the judge’s ruling. Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared the post. But the Trump administration can’t seem to decide what exactly happened and whether or not what happened was a gutsy commitment to presidential power or, instead, a terrible mistake. An Axios story published last night quotes a jumble of anonymous officials apparently at odds with one another: “It’s the showdown that was always going to happen between the two branches of government,” one official said, while another frantically clarified, “Very important that people understand we are not actively defying court orders.” The administration appears to have settled on the baffling argument that it wasn’t actually defying Judge Boasberg, because the order didn’t apply to planes that were already in the air and outside U.S. territory. To be clear, that is not how things work. The judge has called for a hearing at 5 p.m. today, when the government will be required to answer a range of questions posed by the ACLU as to when the flights departed and landed and what happened to the people on them. We should pay close attention to what the Justice Department says in court, where lies—unlike quotes to reporters or comments on television—can be punished by judicial sanctions. The administration has talked a big game about its willingness to ignore the courts, but in this instance, it may have engineered a legal crisis at least in part by accident. Will it be able to muster the same audacity when standing in front of a judge?
Greenland—the largest island in the world (that isn’t a continent) and a self-ruling Danish territory—has recently undergone a national election, seen protests seeking autonomy from Denmark, and has prominently become the target of President Donald Trump, who wants to somehow “get” the territory as part of the United States. Several news agencies recently sent photographers to the cities of Nuuk, Ilulissat, and more to cover the local population, their reactions to the larger stories, and their own moves toward independence. The winning party of the March 11 elections is described by the AP as “a pro-business party that favors a slow path to independence,” and opposes Trump’s recent efforts. To receive an email notification every time new photo stories are published, sign up here.
There’s a saying—or maybe a truism—that the test of any new technology lies in its ability to reproduce pornography. Long ago, pornography was the stuff of private collections: crude figurines and drawings that spread their influence only as far as they could be carried. But man could not live in this wilderness forever. He had opposable thumbs and pressing needs, and thus were born woodblock printing, engraving, movable type, daguerreotype, halftone printing, photography, the moving image. Man needed these innovations, of course, to spread the great truths of God, nature, king, and country. But it was never very long before some guy wandered into the workroom of the newest inventor, took a look at his gizmo, and thought, You know what I could use that for? Down through the ages, one thing united these mass-produced forms of pornography: the understanding that no matter how exciting, they were always and only a pale imitation of the real thing. Any traveling salesman who checked into a motel with his copy of Playboy would rather have had a human being on his arm. But then the internet arrived. What a testament to man—how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties!—that he continued doing anything else after the advent of online porn. Plenty of women, of course, consume and enjoy or create and profit from porn—people of every sexual orientation and gender identity do. But the force that through the green fuse drives the flower (and the money) is heterosexual male desire for women. And here was porn so good, so varied, so ready to please, so instantly—insistently—available, that it led to a generation of men who think of porn not as a backup to having sex, but as an improvement on it. They prefer it. Where would this take us? Well, now we know. The heterosexual man can now have what many see as a rich sex life without ever needing to deal with an actual woman. There are men who have fallen in love with sex dolls, the way toddlers fall in love with teddy bears, although for children the toy is a transitional object. Early this month, Elon Musk told Joe Rogan that AI-powered sex robots aren’t far away from the U.S. market: “less than five years probably.” They will be able to provide everything except human connection, and what is that anyway? Human relationships, especially between the sexes, are fraught with diverging interests and needs, and when you get right down to it, aren’t women kind of a drag? With their talk-talk-talk and their dinner parties, and their pouting about laundry that never gets washed the right way? Your sex robot won’t do that. She’ll never make you go apple picking. She will do only what you want to do. Sex has the ability to create or strengthen a bond between people, and—no matter how many precautions you might take against this terrible outcome—you could find yourself emotionally attached to a person you have sex with. Before online porn, men had an obvious incentive to put up with the stress of dating, and they developed the social skills necessary to close the deal: enough resilience to ask a woman out, and then a second woman, if the first one rejected them; the drive to locate a clean shirt; and the skill to make conversation over two orders of chicken piccata. It could be awkward; it could be a nightmare. But whether the resulting attachment lasted half a century or a single week, one thing was certain: While the relationship was going on, they were not a statistic in the loneliness epidemic. They were humans in a world made for humans. But who needs to spiff up now? Porn will never reject you or look at you with a pitying gaze. It’s always there, it never disappoints, and you never have to dig through the clothes hamper for something that smells okayish. As Michael says in The Boys in the Band, one good thing about masturbation is that you don’t have to look your best. Watching online porn has become most adolescents’ first sexual experience. The average 14-year-old boy today has seen more hard-core porn than all of the American fighting forces in the Second World War. (Probably a good thing, because we really needed to win that one.) Because of the internet’s power to desensitize people and wear down their natural responses to shocking things, and because of the way these algorithms work, young people quickly proceed to more and more extreme videos, and—as it has always been—these earliest experiences of sexual events pass deeply into their sense of what sex should be. You can’t spend 15 minutes scrolling through a porn site without coming across a video in which a woman seems to be not performing fear or pain, but actually experiencing those things. If you’re one of those people who enjoy watching coerced sex, you’ll never be bored for a second of your life. As far as the moral equations of watching porn go, the one that matters is: Are you excited by the obvious abuse of women, or have you learned to countenance that abuse as a necessary cost of your own pleasure? And which of those is worse? We’re talking about a private, individual experience. Could that have an impact on society? Surely it does. When straight men don’t need women for sex, a question starts to form: What do they need them for? If it’s having children, these men are going to have to surface out in the world and meet some women, even if they think that means settling for second-best sex. Someone whose adolescence has been spent using a phone and laptop for sex probably isn’t skilled in making conversation with actual women, which will be a problem if he decides to get out among the apple pickers. The porn-first man tends to be an Andrew Tate kind of guy. Former kickboxer, chancellor of Hustlers University, early-episode rejectee from Big Brother (he said a video of him whipping a woman with a belt had been edited to take out the humor and fun of the moment), he’s an influencer and the current president of the He-Man Woman Haters Club. He spent the past two years in Romania after he was accused of rape and human trafficking, but late last month was allowed to travel to the freedom of the United States, only to land in the flypaper of Florida, where he is now the subject of another criminal investigation. (He has denied any wrongdoing.) Tate is charismatic and mesmerizing, a perfect companion to the lonely masturbator. You’re not a loser; you’re a king! He provides hours and hours of online content warning men that women are trying to emasculate them. What he’s gesturing to is an old idea, probably more true than not: that it’s in society’s best interest for men to couple off with women, because women civilize men. When confronted with that notion, women reject it: Their job isn’t to civilize men. When men see the same adage, they feel uncomfortable (what man wants to be “civilized” by another person, especially by a woman?). But men taught that women are “barely sentient,” there to be used and abused, will likely spend their lives alone. The internet’s biggest by-product is loneliness; porn isn’t special in that regard. You and I weren’t made to live this way; we barely are living this way. Many of the traits that make us human—our compassion, our ability to devote sustained thought to a problem, our capacity to fall in love and to sacrifice for the people we love—are meaningless to the algorithms that rule us. They’ve deformed us. Every time I hear a middle-class young woman make the utilitarian argument for why she makes sexual videos on OnlyFans—because she can make in two hours of work what would take her 40 hours to earn waitressing—I think, Here it is at last: end-stage capitalism. The phase in which nothing has any value or meaning other than its sale price. The internet did not arrive like a wave, allowing us to take time to think about our humanity before we put our toes in the water; it arrived like a flood, and we’ve been drowning in it for more than a quarter century. It keeps taking our souls away from us; every passing year, we’re less of who we were. Soon there won’t be much of us left at all. The only thing that can save us is a great unplugging. But we’ll never do that. We love it down here under the dark water.
Later this week, the Trump administration may impose travel restrictions on citizens from dozens of countries, supposedly because of security concerns. According to early reports, one of the countries on the “red” list, from which all travel would be banned, is Afghanistan. Sixty thousand exhaustively vetted Afghan visa applicants and refugees, who risked their lives alongside the Americans in their country as interpreters, drivers, soldiers, judges, and journalists, and who now face imprisonment, torture, and death at the hands of the Taliban, will have the golden doors to the United States shut in their face. As the Taliban closed in on Kabul in the summer of 2021, then-Senator Marco Rubio co-authored a letter to President Joe Biden urging him to “ensure the safety and security of Afghans who have worked closely” with American intelligence agencies: “Abandoning these individuals” would be “a stain on our national conscience.” After the Afghan government fell and tens of thousands of Afghans rushed to the Kabul airport, trying desperately to be evacuated with the last American troops, Rubio excoriated Biden for leaving Afghan allies behind to be killed. Then-Representative Mike Waltz warned that “our local allies are being hunted down.” Kash Patel accused the Biden administration of “the stranding of US personnel and allies.” The Republican majority of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a damning report on the fall of Afghanistan, said that Biden’s “abandonment of our Afghan allies, who fought alongside the U.S. military against the Taliban—their brothers in arms—is a stain on [his] administration.” As for then-ex-President Donald Trump, he was incredulous, telling Sean Hannity on Fox News: “We take the military out before we took our civilians out, and before we took the interpreters and others we want to try and help? But by the way, I’m America first. The Americans come out first. But we’re also going to help people that helped us.” On Inauguration Day, President Trump signed executive orders pausing foreign aid and refugee processing. He turned off the flow of money to private agencies that helped Afghans start new lives in America and shut down the State Department office set up under Biden to oversee their resettlement. Since then, the number of Afghans able to enter the U.S. has dwindled to zero. The travel ban will make the halt official and permanent. All of the outrage at the Biden administration’s betrayal of our Afghan allies from the very Republicans who now command U.S. foreign policy will go down as sheer opportunism. The stain will be on them. [David A. Graham: Biden’s ‘America First’ policy on Afghanistan] “All these fucking people had a lot to say about what was going on in August 2021,” says Shawn Van Diver, a Navy veteran who leads AfghanEvac, a coalition of organizations that help resettle Afghan allies in this country. Politically, Biden never recovered from the chaotic fall of Kabul and the terrible scenes at the airport, climaxing in the suicide bombing at Abbey Gate that killed 13 American service members and 170 Afghans. Biden deserved blame above all for failing to take seriously America’s obligation to vulnerable Afghans who had placed their trust in this country. But during the years following the debacle, AfghanEvac and other civil-society groups worked with the Biden administration to bring nearly 200,000 Afghans to America—a little-known fact that partly redeemed its failures. Now Trump is compounding Biden’s earlier sins, this time in cold blood. Van Diver and his colleagues are scrambling to persuade their contacts inside the administration to exempt Afghans from the coming travel ban. Many of his military friends are stunned that the president they voted for is betraying Afghans they had to leave behind. “I wonder if President Trump knows that Stephen Miller is ruining his relationship with veterans because of what we’re doing to our Afghan allies,” he told me. According to Van Diver, Rubio and Waltz—now the secretary of state and the national security adviser, respectively—are sympathetic to the veterans’ appeal; but Miller, the hard-line homeland-security adviser, will have the final say with Trump. Forty-five thousand Afghans have completed the onerous steps to qualify for Special Immigrant Visas as former employees of the U.S. government in Afghanistan and are ready to travel. Fifteen thousand more Afghans, most in Pakistan, have reached the end of refugee processing as close affiliates of the American war effort. They’ve been waiting through years of referrals, applications, interviews, medical exams, and security vetting. Some of them have plane tickets. Another 147,000 Afghans are well along in qualifying for Special Immigrant Visas.“We did make a promise as a nation to these people that if they stood beside the U.S. mission and worked with us, that they would have a pathway to come build lives here,” a State Department official, who requested anonymity because of a policy against speaking to journalists, told me. “If we don’t keep the promises we make to our wartime allies, then our standing globally should be questioned by any other future potential allies we might have.” Afghans who finally reach the United States, the official continued, “are so incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to be in this country. They believe in the promise of this country.” One young Afghan couple—I’ll call them Farhad and Saman, because using their real names would expose them to danger—are both veterans of the Afghan special forces, and they spent years serving and fighting alongside U.S. Army Rangers and other special operators. After the American departure, they were hunted by Talibs and took shelter in safe houses around the country, while family members were harassed, arrested, and tortured. In 2023, with the help of a small group of American supporters, the couple crossed the border into Pakistan and found lodgings in Islamabad, where they waited with their small children for their refugee applications to be processed. Last summer they were interviewed by the U.S. embassy and passed their medical exams; but security screening took so long that, by the time it was completed, their medical exams had expired. On January 2 of this year, they passed their second medical exams and were told by the International Organization of Migration that they would soon depart for the United States. “But on January 24, we realized unfortunately that Donald Trump is in office and everything is stopped,” Farhad told me by phone. “It was at the very last minute, the last stage. I didn’t expect that this would happen. It made a very bad impact on me and my family.” [George Packer: The betrayal] Recently, stepped-up Pakistani police patrols and raids made the couple flee Islamabad to another region. Their 3-year-old daughter and infant son don’t have visas, and Farhad’s and Saman’s visas expire on April 17, with no prospect of renewal. Fear of being stopped at a checkpoint keeps the family inside their small apartment almost all the time, while their daughter wonders when she’ll be able to start school. They ask neighbors to buy food for them at the bazaar. The Pakistani government has begun to issue warnings over loudspeakers at mosques that local people who rent property to Afghan refugees will face legal consequences. “I’m stressed that the U.S. government is not going to relocate us and will not help us to continue processing our case,” Farhad said. He has sent letters of inquiry to embassies of other countries, with no reply. “I’m worried that eventually somehow I’ll be deported to Afghanistan, and deportation means I’ll be caught by the Taliban and killed. My wife will not be excluded. She will face the same consequences. I’m overwhelmed sometimes when I think what will happen to my kids—they’ll be orphans. It’s too much for me to take in.” When Republican leaders were shaming the Biden administration for abandoning this country’s Afghan allies, they sometimes used the military phrase brothers in arms. Now, as those same Republicans in the Trump administration are betraying the same Afghans all over again, Farhad used the phrase with me. “I fought like brothers in arms with the Americans in uniform for six years, shoulder to shoulder, everywhere,” he said. “If this travel ban happens, the question is, what about the six years of friendship and fighting together? What about helping your friends and allies? That’s the question I have.”
The Founders knew that Americans, for better or worse, had an insatiable desire for overseas trade. “They are as aquatic as the tortoises and sea-fowl,” observed John Adams, “and the love of commerce, with its conveniences and pleasures, is a habit in them as unalterable as their natures.” As early as 1785 he foresaw that Americans would be compelled to form “connections with Europe, Asia, and Africa,” and he advised that “the sooner we form those connections into a judicious system, the better it will be for us and our children.” Thomas Jefferson would have preferred to cease all commerce with the rest of the world and rely on the simple virtues of the “yeoman farmer,” but he knew this was impossible. “Our people have a decided taste for navigation and commerce … and their servants are in duty bound to calculate all their measures on this datum.” Even that much-caricatured “Jacksonian,” Andrew Jackson himself, as president never fired a shot in anger but negotiated more trade agreements with foreign powers than any of his predecessors. The American love of trade made using the practice as a weapon against other nations difficult. When Jefferson forgot his own lesson and tried to embargo trade with Great Britain in 1807 in response to the British navy’s abuse of American merchants on the high seas, his efforts backfired, stirring talk of secession in the New England states that conducted most of that trade. It turned out to be easier to get Americans to support a shooting war with Great Britain than a trade war. Donald Trump is now learning the hard way how vulnerable America is when it comes to trade wars. This is not because the United States doesn’t in theory hold the strongest hand. The American market is the most desired in the world, and any restriction on access to that market should hurt other countries more than it hurts the United States. The ratio of international trade to GDP for the U.S. is roughly 25 percent, compared with more than 60 percent on average for all other nations. In Germany, foreign trade tallies up to 90 percent of GDP. That ought to make the country vulnerable and give the United States leverage. In practice, however, Americans have proved time and again that they have a very low threshold of pain when it comes to trade wars. Jefferson was not wrong to believe that Britain depended heavily on American trade when he launched his embargo in 1807; what he did not anticipate was that his own citizens would cave before Britain did. [Read: How Republicans learned to love high prices] The problem is, or at least has been up until now, democracy, and, more specifically, electoral politics in a federal system where narrow, local interests can have broad national political impact. A trade dispute might harm only one sector of the economy, but if that sector happens to coincide with a crucial voting bloc, it can put the United States at a disadvantage in a contest with a nominally weaker power. A good example of this came during World War I, before the United States had entered the war and Woodrow Wilson was trying to navigate his way through British blockades and German submarine attacks on transatlantic shipping while desperately trying to preserve American neutrality. The United States was far less reliant on international trade then; it was only 11 percent of GDP. But as Wilson learned, even damage to particular sectors of the economy could threaten political upheaval. Although his personal inclinations were pro-British, for instance, London’s threats to blockade cotton as contraband of war infuriated the Democrats’ key southern constituency. Wilson’s secretary of the Treasury, William Gibbs McAdoo, recalled spending “more sleepless nights thinking about cotton” than about anything else during his time in office. The rest of his sleepless nights were spent worrying about finding markets for midwestern grain, much of which had been purchased by Germany and other European nations prior to the war. These specific sectors, because they involved states and regions essential to national political coalitions, had influence on American decision making that exceeded their overall importance to the American economy. [Read: Trump’s most inexplicable decision yet] Trump must believe, as Jefferson did, that the world needs America more than America needs the world, and he may be right—in theory. The problem is that individual voting blocs mean more to him than carrying out a consistent trade war, as he has repeatedly demonstrated during both terms in office. In his first term, the damage done to farmers by his tariffs on imports was sufficiently threatening politically that he had to spend much of the money gained by the tariffs to compensate the farmers for their losses. His vacillations and emendations in his latest rounds of tariffs this year have been similarly motivated by his desire not to alienate Republican voters in particular states—northern-tier states that rely heavily on trade with Canada and automaking states that stand to lose badly from tariffs on auto parts, steel, and aluminum crossing the Mexican and Canadian borders. It is no accident that among the Europeans’ first retaliatory tariffs have been those against Harley-Davidson and American whiskey. Other nations may know their history better than Trump does and have figured out that tariffing sectors of the economy that hit Trump voters can have an impact beyond their dollar value. The United States is a nation split down the middle politically, so marginal voting groups can have a huge effect. This significantly vitiates the American advantage. It would be one thing if Trump’s supporters were willing to suffer economic hardship in order to show their support for the MAGA way. As Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama put it, “There’s going to be some pain with tariffs,” but “no pain, no gain.” The problem for Trump is that, so far, as in the past, even his own voters don’t have much tolerance for pain.
On a chilly morning last October, my 8-year-old daughter and I took our new e-bike, which she had named Toby, on its maiden voyage to school. We admired trees exploding in vibrant golds and flocks of geese soaring above. To amuse ourselves, we’d brought along a life-size Halloween skeleton, which sat in the back with my daughter, arms outstretched in a friendly wave. Along the way, people honked, smiled, and stopped to chat. I felt connected to our neighborhood in a way I hadn’t ever experienced. Before Toby, mornings spent driving my daughter to school were monotonous and filled with traffic. Since the purchase, our commutes have become daily highlights. My daughter and I bond with each other and our community, and we get to appreciate the time outdoors, all while saving on car maintenance and mitigating our carbon footprint. But the e-bike has changed our life in many other ways too—some of them unexpectedly profound. Our family’s motivation to get an e-bike started with climate concerns. Kids learn by example, and my husband and I often wondered if we were setting the right one by driving two gas-guzzling cars. But the alternatives were limited. We couldn’t afford to purchase an electric vehicle. Electric scooters were out of the question—they’re meant to transport only one person and can be dangerous for children. I tried biking to school once, my daughter behind me in a trailer. Many miles later, I showed up drenched in sweat—great as a workout, but impractical for day-to-day. [Read: How school drop-off became a nightmare] So when our city introduced subsidies on e-bikes, we decided to give one a try. They’re fairly safe, cheaper than cars, and gentle on the environment. Plus, one study shows that they make for some of the happiest commuters. We chose one in a zippy sky blue, with two padded bench seats, metal safety bars, and oversize storage bags on either side. It’s cheerful and somehow charismatic, befitting its sweet name. From our first trip that October day, it was clear how much easier and more pleasant getting around on Toby would be than driving in a car. We avoided the worst of the car traffic and all the huffing and puffing of cycling. E-bikes are still great exercise—riders burn only about 15 to 30 percent fewer calories on them than people on typical bikes do—but you probably won’t get sweaty enough to need a shower. I also felt good knowing that riding Toby enabled us to act more in line with our environmental values. Research from the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on energy, has found that if all drivers in the 10 most populous American cities switched from cars to e-bikes for trips shorter than five miles—a category that makes up more than 60 percent of all car trips in the United States—the emissions reductions would be “equivalent to avoiding the use of four natural gas plants over the course of a year.” And the costs were affordable for our family. Our e-bike was $1,200 after the subsidy, requires an annual $200 tune-up, and accrues negligible electricity costs. They’re a bit pricier without the subsidies—good ones go for about $2,000—but savings on gas could add up fast. More than the practicality, I’ve appreciated how much easier Toby has made it to connect with my daughter. Sitting directly behind me, she’s more involved in our journey than when she’s in the back seat of a car, so opportunities for learning come naturally. I alert her to upcoming bumps, narrate various turns and stops, and ask her to double-check for cars coming up behind us. We’ve discussed the satisfaction of using our bodies to get somewhere rather than letting the throttle do all the work. Toby can go up to 25 miles per hour, so I’ve explained the importance of slowing down for pedestrians. Being out in the open air also gives us a chance to stop and say hello to people we recognize and to meet our neighbors, which we rarely did before. “We don’t belong in silo’d cars driving around our neighborhoods,” Arleigh Greenwald, a bike mechanic and the creator of the online community resource Cargo Bike Life, told me in an email. Whereas cars shut us off from other people, bikes open up opportunities to bond. Riding them is a step toward “creating a connected community,” Greenwald wrote. [Read: The real reason you should get an e-bike] Of course, e-bikes aren’t for everyone. Families in high-level apartments without elevators would struggle to lug them upstairs. Parking them outside takes some forethought and a good lock. Most batteries last for only about 15 to 60 miles, so the bikes are best for shorter travel. They won’t help much with moving either. Toby can handle Costco runs for our family of three, but probably not for a big family. For those who do use an e-bike, getting around can be tricky. Cities weren’t built for e-bikes, and Greenwald pointed out that some roads aren’t safe for them. She recommended testing routes on your own before you bring your kids, asking local bike shops about safe options, and accepting when you’ll have to go with another mode of transport. “If I’m replacing as many car trips with safe e-bike trips as possible,” Greenwald told me, “I’m doing great!” In our rides, my daughter and I have encountered plenty of these infrastructural hurdles. Some routes don’t have bike lanes or have lanes that end at random spots; others expect us to go up stairs. When this happens, my daughter and I chat about why, and then we contact our local representatives together to request improvements—an important lesson in civic engagement. But once we found our best route to school, these obstacles faded. It takes five extra minutes each way, but that time is spent along a river trail where we’ve spotted herons, kingfishers, and kestrels. Our time outside has otherwise decreased as my daughter has gotten older, so this tether to the outdoors has been a gift. Being in nature can help kids manage stress, grow more self-confident, and maintain their mental health, Pooja Tandon, a pediatrician and researcher at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, told me in an email. I see this in my daughter, who seems cheerful and refreshed most mornings, not half-awake like she used to be. No matter how well her day starts, school can still be an interpersonal minefield. When I picked my daughter up in the car, she dealt with the residual stress by communicating through grunts. Now, perhaps energized by our rides, she tells funny or embarrassing tales, and updates me on the second-grade gossip. I’ve found that challenging conversations are easier on Toby too. When our cat recently passed away, my daughter waited until our commute to ask hard questions about death. Surrounded by nature and without the pressure of direct eye contact, I was able to think calmly about how to answer her in honest, age-appropriate ways. It’s been about five months since Toby’s first journey, and we’ve ridden nearly 1,000 miles. These days, e-biking feels easier than driving, even in situations you might not expect. We recently biked home after school as dark clouds rolled in over the Rockies and the first snowflakes of a late-winter storm feathered the sky. At a red light, we heard my daughter’s name and saw her classmate’s family in an SUV next to us; they seemed shocked that we were biking in the cold. I might have felt that way once too. But we were dressed warmly, and we didn’t want to give up our ride along the river path. That day, we watched waterfowl tuck into the river shallows for the evening and stopped to tell a neighbor with a new baby that we’d shovel their driveway in the morning. I worried that my daughter might have felt embarrassed about the stoplight encounter, but as we unbuckled our helmets in our driveway, she said she bet her friend had been wishing he was on an e-bike too. She clearly understood what I’d come to learn about e-bikes: Yes, our commutes were slightly slower and a little chillier than they once had been, but they were also so much richer.
Julian Barnes opens Changing My Mind, his brisk new book about our unruly intellects, with a quote famously attributed to the economist John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind.” It’s a fitting start for an essay on our obliviousness to truth, because Keynes didn’t say that—or not exactly that. The economist Paul Samuelson almost said it in 1970 (replacing “facts” with “events”) and in 1978 almost said it again (this time, “information”), attributing it to Keynes. His suggestion stuck, flattering our sense of plausibility—it’s the sort of thing Keynes would have said—and now finds itself repeated in a work of nonfiction. Our fallibility is very much on display. Not that Barnes would deny that he makes mistakes. The wry premise of his book is that he’s changed his mind about how we change our minds, evolving from a Keynesian faith in fact and reason to a framing inspired by the Dadaist Francis Picabia’s aphorism “Our heads are round so that our thoughts can change direction.” (In this case, the citation is accurate.) Barnes concludes that our beliefs are changed less by argument or evidence than by emotion: “I think, on the whole, I have become a Picabian rather than a Keynesian.” Barnes is an esteemed British novelist, not a social scientist—one of the things he hasn’t changed his mind about is “the belief that literature is the best system we have of understanding the world”—but his shift in perspective resonates with a host of troubling results in social psychology. Research in recent decades shows that we are prone to “confirmation bias,” systematically interpreting new information in ways that favor our existing views and cherry-picking reasons to uphold them. We engage in “motivated reasoning,” believing what we wish were true despite the evidence. And we are subject to “polarization”: As we divide into like-minded groups, we become more homogeneous and more extreme in our beliefs. If a functioning democracy is one in which people share a common pool of information and disagree in moderate, conciliatory ways, there are grounds for pessimism about its prospects. For Barnes, this is not news: “When I look back at the innumerable conversations I’ve had with friends and colleagues about political matters over the decades,” he laments, “I can’t remember a single, clear instance, when a single, clear argument has made me change my mind—or when I have changed someone else’s mind.” Where Barnes has changed his mind—about the nature of memory, or policing others’ language, or the novelists Georges Simenon and E. M. Forster—he attributes the shift to quirks of experience or feeling, not rational thought. Both Barnes and the social scientists pose urgent, practical questions. What should we do about the seeming inefficacy of argument in politics? How can people persuade opponents on issues such as immigration, abortion, or trans rights in cases where their interpretation of evidence seems biased? Like the Russian trolls who spread divisive rhetoric on social media, these questions threaten one’s faith in what the political analyst Anand Giridharadas has called “the basic activity of democratic life—the changing of minds.” The situation isn’t hopeless; in his recent book, The Persuaders, Giridharadas portrays activists and educators who have defied the odds. But there is a risk of self-fulfilling prophecy: If democratic discourse comes to seem futile, it will atrophy. [Read: The cognitive biases tricking your brain] Urgent as it may be, this fear is not what animates Barnes in Changing My Mind. His subject is not moving other minds, but rather changing our own. It’s easy and convenient to forget that confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and group polarization are not problems unique to those who disagree with us. We all interpret evidence with prejudice, engage in self-deception, and lapse into groupthink. And though political persuasion is a topic for social scientists, the puzzle of what I should do when I’m afraid that I’m being irrational or unreliable is a philosophical question I must inevitably ask, and answer, for myself. That’s why it feels right for Barnes to approach his topic through autobiography, in the first person. This genre goes back to Descartes’ Meditations: epistemology as memoir. And like Descartes before him, Barnes confronts the specter of self-doubt. “If Maynard Keynes changed his mind when the facts changed,” he admits, “I find that facts and events tend to confirm me in what I already believe.” You might think that this confession of confirmation bias would shake his confidence, but that’s not what happens to Barnes, or to many of us. Learning about our biases doesn’t necessarily make them go away. In a chapter on his political convictions, Barnes is cheerfully dogmatic. “When asked my view on some public matter nowadays,” he quips, “I tend to reply, ‘Well, in Barnes’s Benign Republic …’” He goes on to list some of BBR’s key policies: For a start … public ownership of all forms of mass transport, and all forms of power supply—gas, electric, nuclear, wind, solar … Absolute separation of Church and State … Full restoration of all arts and humanities courses at schools and universities … and, more widely, an end to a purely utilitarian view of education. This all sounds good to me, but it’s announced without a hint of argument. Given Barnes’s doubts about the power of persuasion, that makes sense. If no one is convinced by arguments, anyway, offering them would be a waste of time. Barnes does admit one exception: “Occasionally, there might be an area where you admit to knowing little, and are a vessel waiting to be filled.” But, he adds, “such moments are rare.” The discovery that reasoning is less effective than we hoped, instead of being a source of intellectual humility, may lead us to opt out of rational debate. [Yascha Mounk: The doom spiral of pernicious polarization] Barnes doesn’t overtly make this case—again, why would he? But it’s implicit in his book and it’s not obviously wrong. When we ask what we should think in light of the social science of how we think, we run into philosophical trouble. I can’t coherently believe that I am basically irrational or unreliable, because that belief would undermine itself: another conviction I can’t trust. More narrowly, I can’t separate what I think about, say, climate change from the apparent evidence. It’s paradoxical to doubt that climate change is real while thinking that the evidence for climate change is strong, or to think, I don’t believe that climate change is real, although it is. My beliefs are my perspective on the world; I cannot step outside of them to change them “like some rider controlling a horse with their knees,” as Barnes puts it, “or the driver of a tank guiding its progress.” So what am I to do? One consolation, of sorts, is that my plight—and yours—predates the findings of social science. Philosophers like Descartes long ago confronted the perplexities of the subject trapped within their own perspective. The limits of reasoning are evident from the moment we begin to do it. Every argument we make contains premises an opponent can dispute: They can always persist in their dissent, so long as they reject, time and again, some basic assumption we take for granted. This doesn’t mean that our beliefs are unjustified. Failure to convert the skeptic—or the committed conspiracy theorist—need not undermine our current convictions. Nor does recent social science prove that we’re inherently irrational. In conditions of uncertainty, it’s perfectly reasonable to put more faith in evidence that fits what we take to be true than in unfamiliar arguments against it. Confirmation bias may lead to deadlock and polarization, but it is better than hopelessly starting from scratch every time we are contradicted. None of this guarantees that we’ll get the facts right. In Meditations, Descartes imagines that the course of his experience is the work of an evil demon who deceives him into thinking the external world is real. Nowadays, we might think of brains in vats or virtual-reality machines from movies like The Matrix. What’s striking about these thought experiments is that their imagined subjects are rational even though everything they think they know is wrong. Rationality is inherently fallible. What social science reveals is that we are more fallible than we thought. But this doesn’t mean that changing our mind is a fool’s errand. New information might be less likely to lead us to the truth than we would like to believe—but that doesn’t mean it has no value at all. More evidence is still better than less. And we can take concrete steps to maximize its value by mitigating bias. Studies suggest, for instance, that playing devil’s advocate improves our reliability. Barnes notwithstanding, novel arguments can move our mind in the right direction. [Read: Changing your mind can make you less anxious] As Descartes’ demon shows, our environment determines how far being rational correlates with being right. At the evil-demon limit, not at all: We are trapped in the bubble of our own experience. Closer to home, we inhabit epistemic bubbles that impede our access to information. But our environment is something we can change. Sometimes it’s good to have an open mind and to consider new perspectives. At other times, it’s not: We know we’re right and the risk of losing faith is not worth taking. We can’t ensure that evidence points us to the truth, but we can protect ourselves from falling into error. As Barnes points out, memory is “a key factor in changing our mind: we need to forget what we believed before, or at least forget with what passion and certainty we believed it.” When we fear that our environment will degrade, that we’ll be subject to misinformation or groupthink, we can record our fundamental values and beliefs so as not to forsake them later. Seen in this light, Barnes’s somewhat sheepish admission that he has never really changed his mind about politics seems, if not entirely admirable, then not all bad. Where the greater risk is that we’ll come to accept the unacceptable, it’s just as well to be dogmatic.
Photographs by Zack Wittman Everybody knows the secret of life. The secret of life is: Keep your eye on the ball. I’m borrowing that from a 1998 song by America’s sweetheart, Faith Hill, but if you don’t know the song, you still know that simple truth. You also know that to fail is to strike out; to fail valiantly is to go down swinging; to be surprised is to be thrown a curveball; to help a buddy out is to go to bat for him; and to succeed brilliantly is to knock one out of the park. And even if you haven’t seen A League of Their Own, or have somehow missed Jennifer Garner’s Capital One ads, you’ve probably heard the maxim “There’s no crying in baseball.” In January, I was standing in the locker room of George M. Steinbrenner Field, in Tampa, next to my teammates, whom I had met only the night before. When we heard the immortal words of Tom Hanks as Jimmy Dugan, the aggrieved manager of the Rockford Peaches women’s baseball team, piping out of a nearby speaker, we recognized them and laughed. Then we clapped (or took out our phones for photos) as Len Milcowitz, the field coordinator and unofficial emcee of the weekend, emerged wearing a full Peaches uniform to drive home the point. He’d worn it in our honor, he said. “You represent the true spirit of baseball in this country, period,” he told us. By that he meant that we were here only for the love of the game. As women, it was true, we could have no other motive, such as being signed by a team or even reliving high-school glory days. In fact, we had paid about $2,500 for the privilege. There were 87 of us, divided into six teams. This was the first full day of the 2025 Women’s Mini-Fantasy Camp, an annual event advertised with retro panache: “Ladies, opportunity is finally knocking and your chance to experience life as a New York Yankee is here.” Though many Major League Baseball teams host fantasy camps for men, only the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox have offered them for women. This year’s camp was more immersive than usual. On top of receiving full uniforms (to keep!) and access to ice baths and physical therapists and real Yankees catering (memorably good pot roast), we were technically playing in a major-league stadium: The Tampa Bay Rays will be using the Yankees’ spring-training facility this year for their home games because Hurricane Milton took the roof off Tropicana Field. [Read: Climate change comes for baseball] Over the course of two days we would play 35 innings of baseball—five games of seven innings apiece, coached by former Yankees, whom camp employees referred to by the official title of “Legends.” I had several good reasons to be nervous. A friend had encouraged me to read George Plimpton’s 1961 book, Out of My League, which is about him pitching to major-league players at an All-Star exhibition game for a story in Sports Illustrated. I did read it, and that’s how I learned that Plimpton had been “a fanatic about pitching” while in school. I, in contrast, had never played baseball at all, despite being completely obsessed with watching it (at the stadium, on TV, on my phone while at work or at weddings). And I had not trained as much as I’d meant to in the weeks leading up to the camp—I’d gone to the batting cages a few times, played catch with my dad, and done several squats, but it was winter and it got dark at 4 p.m. It had been hard to work baseball into my days. The other problem was that I don’t like the New York Yankees. When I signed up for the camp, I hadn’t thought this would be much of an issue. But then my favorite team, the New York Mets, signed the Yankees’ superstar Juan Soto out from under them, and my situation became politically sticky. When I tested a reveal of my Mets fandom to a friendly seeming woman on the shuttle bus to the opening dinner, she shushed me sharply, and for my own good. So I kept quiet. And in this way, it was easy to get along with my assigned teammates, and it was easy to have a good time, even though our team name was the Pinstripes, which really rubbed the Yankees of it all right in a girl’s face. Our roster ranged in age from 24 to 70, and in experience from Division I softball to, well, me. Two women who’d gone to school together in New Jersey were there celebrating their 60th birthdays—Nina Kaplan, a Boca Raton mother of four who had never played baseball before, and Elizabeth Osder, who goes by Bitsy, a Los Angeles media executive who holds a place in baseball history. On April 21, 1974, she appeared on the front page of the New York Daily News when she became one of the first girls legally permitted to join a Little League baseball team, in New Jersey. Players stretch before a game. (Zack Wittman for The Atlantic) Everyone was there for fun, and so was I, but I was also there because I wanted to briefly see a real-life staging of something that is still mostly a dream and that most people associate only with a 30-year-old Hollywood movie. There’s no crying in baseball, and there are no women in baseball either. Sure, girls can play on Little League baseball teams, as Bitsy did, with boys. They can play on high-school baseball teams with boys. A scant few of them have even played on college baseball teams with boys. But they don’t get their own teams. There is no such thing as high-school or college baseball for women. There is no such thing as professional baseball for women, apart from a World Cup team that is assembled and disassembled every few years. Not only is this the baffling reality; it’s a baffling reality that hardly anybody talks about. [From the September 2016 issue: Breaking into baseball’s ultimate boys’ club] After the World Series ended in October, with nothing to look forward to but the long and empty months before the next baseball season, I settled in to watch Ken Burns’s 1994 documentary, Baseball, which is broken up into nine episodes. “There are only three things that America will be known for 2,000 years from now when they study this civilization,” the writer Gerald Early says in the first one. “The Constitution, jazz music, and baseball. They’re the three most beautifully designed things this culture has ever produced.” Well, women aren’t constrained in their enjoyment of jazz, or of the Constitution (for now), but … Over the nights that I spent being thoroughly entertained by the documentary, I nevertheless felt a pit in my stomach that got deeper and deeper. Burns very explicitly articulates the sport as being foundational to our culture and reflective of our society’s ideals. The game is democratic because it’s fair, egalitarian because it’s simple, and perfectly designed because its creators—energetic, imaginative people—arrived at the measurements for the diamond as if through divine inspiration. Baseball rewards commitment and reveals character; it loves rule-benders but judges cheaters. It has lofty goals and serious expectations, but it allows for theatricality and fun. It glorifies teamwork (double plays, rallies, sacrifices, and even sign-stealing are collaborative) but also reveres the hero (when a man comes up to bat, he comes up alone). It provides a convenient excuse to eat a hot dog. Women play basketball, which is almost as old as baseball but has never carried the same level of cultural significance, and they play soccer, which is not predominantly an American game. They play hockey and lacrosse. They don’t play the vulgar, stupid sport of football, but nobody should. Yet they play basically everything else—every sport ever invented, even the weird ones. For no obvious or practical or logical reason, they are allowed to love, but almost never to play, baseball. They don’t get to play America’s game. Actually, contrary to some of my sweeping statements, in baseball’s earliest days, women were eager to play and sometimes allowed to do so. Several women’s colleges had baseball teams in the mid-to-late 1800s—by 1875, Vassar had a number of them, including the Sure-Pops and the Daisy-Clippers. The all-Black, all-women Dolly Vardens barnstormed in the 1880s as some of the first documented professional women baseball players; their history, largely forgotten, has been revived by the historian Leslie Heaphy, a co-editor of 2006’s Encyclopedia of Women and Baseball (which she is updating). But doctors were convinced, or so they said, that physical activity could render women infertile or even kill them. In 1867, a nationally syndicated newspaper story blamed baseball-playing for a young woman’s death from typhoid. One of the best-known baseball players in the country at the time, John Montgomery Ward, then of the New York Giants, wrote in his 1888 book, Base-Ball: How to Become a Player, “Base-ball in its mildest form is essentially a robust game, and it would require an elastic imagination to conceive of little girls possessed of physical powers such as its play demands.” When the game became big business at the turn of the 20th century, women were welcomed at the ballpark as spectators. Their presence was thought to help civilize the environs and increase the likelihood of entire families becoming fans and spending money on the sport. But that welcome didn’t extend to the diamond. [From the May 1928 issue: Women aren’t fans] A few months ago, I had a long call with the historian Jennifer Ring, the author of the 2009 book Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball. We talked about her work for a while, and then we talked about how much we love baseball. For many years, she said, she’d felt alienated from the game and angry that her daughter, who was an excellent player, had run out of options and was forced to abandon the sport. “There was probably a decade of my life where I was just too pissed off to even watch baseball,” she said. But Ring grew up a fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and she’d recently been roped back in by their World Series run and by the otherworldly superstar Shohei Ohtani. “I watched again this year, and it’s still the game I love,” she told me. “It’s brilliant. And the best players are just thrilling to watch.” Of course, hardly anyone resembles Ohtani, even in Major League Baseball. Mookie Betts, another Dodger great, is nothing like him. He’s seven inches shorter and at least 30 pounds lighter, and plays multiple defensive positions with charisma and flair. Ohtani, one of the best hitters and pitchers to have ever lived, is faintly aloof and carries himself woodenly (and has a fantastic head of hair). “It’s the people’s game because it calls for a variety of different kinds of body types and skills,” Ring pointed out. There are smaller and faster men in the middle infield; bigger guys at the corners; pitchers who look like Gumby dolls and pitchers who look like they belong to the Teamsters. All of this diversity gives the lie to the suggestion that women physically cannot play. But this is a storied idea that has been repeated across generations. In the mid-1920s, the all-female Philadelphia Bobbies were completing a barnstorming tour of Japan, where they surprised journalists, impressed fans, and received celebrity treatment. Back home, girls were being encouraged to play a version of baseball, with a larger ball and a smaller field, that would be more suitable for them—a game variously known as kitten ball, playground ball, diamond ball, and mush ball, and originally invented in the winter months to be played by men, indoors. The game is now called softball. The details were laid out by Gladys E. Palmer in Baseball for Girls and Women, published in 1929. Palmer was an early advocate for girls’ athletics, but her attitudes were still of their time. She offered advice on how to throw properly (girls “do not have a natural aptitude for throwing, which all boys have from early childhood”) and discouraged girls and women from sliding. As Palmer acknowledged, the version of the game she promoted was meant to be “less strenuous.” Members of the Rockford Peaches, 1944. The team was part of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, created by the Chicago Cubs owner and chewing-gum mogul Philip K. Wrigley. (Bettmann / Getty) That word, strenuous, comes up often. It was used by A. G. Spalding, an early baseball executive who also founded the country’s first sporting-goods empire, when he said that a woman was free to wave her handkerchief and root for the home team, but that “neither our wives, our sisters, our daughters, nor our sweethearts, may play Base Ball on the field … Base Ball is too strenuous for womankind.” The same word was used against the 17-year-old pitching phenom Jackie Mitchell, who was signed by the Minor League Chattanooga Lookouts (and who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in a 1931 exhibition game). The baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, reportedly voided Mitchell’s contract, explaining that the baseball life was “too strenuous” for women. One of my great loyalties, odd though it is for even me to contemplate, is to Brett Baty, a 25-year-old from Texas who was a first-round draft pick for the Mets in 2019 and was supposed to be their third baseman of the future. We have essentially nothing in common, obviously. But something about his story has grabbed me. Baty hit a home run in his first major-league at-bat, in front of his family and against a hated division rival, but he’s never been able to string enough of those moments together. He has flashes of brilliance, and then he gets rattled by something. He starts making mistakes and looking bewildered. He loses his head. Then he goes down to the minors and plays with such dignity and grace. He wears the ugly promotional jerseys they make you wear at that level, and he hits some more home runs and learns a new defensive position in case that will help his chances of being called back up. Last year, his best friend, Mark Vientos, ended up taking the job that was supposed to be his and has excelled at it. In the playoffs, during which Vientos broke the Mets’ record for postseason runs batted in, the camera cut to Baty, watching from the dugout, whenever his friend did something great, and he was always, with no hesitation, ecstatic. Then, in the offseason, another insult and injury: His jersey number, 22, just happened to be the one that the superstar Juan Soto wanted, and the Mets reportedly had promised it to him in his $765 million contract. Soto may have gone through the ceremony of offering Baty a fancy present, such as a watch or a car, in exchange for the number, as players typically do in these situations, but it wasn’t immediately clear that he had. I took exception to this even though hardly anybody else—just a few other fans on social media—seemed to care. Are we not owed dignity even when we’re kind of a flop? That’s a long way of explaining how my career as third baseman (baseperson?) for the Pinstripes began and ended. Though I had no experience, I reasoned that I was young and fairly coordinated, and I wanted to try my hand at the hot corner. Our first game was on one of the Yankees’ many practice fields, against another fantasy-camp team, the Bombers. When I walked out in my uniform, I felt like a ballplayer. I thought I’d watched enough of the game on television—almost every night for half of the year—to know what to do, at least basically. I quickly handled the first ball that a Bomber hit down the line to me, and I stood up with plenty of time to throw the runner out. But when I heaved the ball across the infield, it fell far short of the first baseman and way off line. The same thing happened with the next ball that came to me. And the next. My team was down by two runs at the end of the first inning. Then came my time to bat, which was my true fear. I had to be called back and reminded to put on a batting helmet. I panicked and momentarily forgot which side of the plate I was supposed to stand on. It came to me just in time, but I struck out on three pitches. Our coaches were throwing to us, and they were not trying to strike us out. They were “trying to hit your bats,” as they put it. The author at bat, George M. Steinbrenner Field (Zack Wittman for The Atlantic) After this, I sat in the dugout and watched the other women watch the Yankees shortstop, Anthony Volpe, who was working out on a field behind us. (“He wasn’t very friendly,” one of them complained mildly, after admitting that she had more or less been catcalling him.) I moved to center field after a few more wild throws, and Kaley Sullivan, a 30-year-old police officer from California, took over third base. One ball slipped past her, and I scooped it up and threw it back to her; she stepped on the base and made the out. This was a highlight of my life, but in my next at-bat, I managed only two foul tips before striking out again. We lost the game 9–4 and mollified ourselves by saying we would work out the kinks in the afternoon. At lunch, I sat next to Leslie Konsig, a 42-year-old insurance representative and plainly the best athlete on our team, who had been making plays at shortstop as reliably as I had seen the guys do it on TV. It was difficult to look anywhere other than at her on the field. She wore her dark hair in a single braid, smiled easily at everyone, and moved with the ease that comes with total competence. She treated us all like real ballplayers—meaning she was a bit more specific and direct at times than our actual coaches. Leslie was there with her friend Lainey Archenault, 43, an animated woman with a strong Jersey accent. They are both moms, and they play together on a New Jersey softball team called the Sluggers; Lainey conspired with Leslie’s wife to sign her up for the camp as a surprise. Lainey, I learned, is a die-hard Yankees fan who has been watching almost every single game for as long as she can remember. She clocked immediately that I’d chosen the jersey number 0 in reference to the somewhat random relief pitcher Adam Ottavino, who grew up in Brooklyn near where I live and who played for the Yankees in 2019 and 2020. (More recently, he played for the Mets.) Though she has coached her son’s 10-and-under travel baseball team, this was the first time she’d played a game of baseball instead of softball. Growing up, she told me, she’d been obsessed with Don Mattingly—she was left-handed, as he is, so she’d hoped to be a first baseman, as he was. But she’s petite, so that wasn’t in the cards. Instead, she was put in the outfield, which she now prefers, because you get to watch a whole game unfold in front of you. By contrast, Leslie didn’t care much about the Yankees. She was wearing the number 22 and had no idea that it was a sore spot for Yankees fans who were mourning Soto’s betrayal. “I’m more here to play,” she told me. “To feel, like, what it is to be on the field, wear these uniforms, use the amenities.” She’d been the only girl on her Little League team, and she’d played until high school, when she had to switch to softball. But Leslie still had a Yankees-fan story: She’d gone to the 1996 World Series with her dad and his friends, and they were so overcome by giddiness that they’d even included her, at age 14, in the celebratory cigars. This set off some table-wide chatter about the most recent World Series, which the Yankees lost to the Dodgers in somewhat humiliating fashion, capped off by a disastrous error-riddled inning that saw a five-run lead evaporate in the decisive Game 5. “We played better than they did, today,” Bitsy Osder said. High on camaraderie, I went into the afternoon games confident that I could improve my performance. For the second game, we were on the main field—an intimidating change of venue, as this meant music blaring over the loudspeakers while we warmed up, use of the giant scoreboard, and an announcer to read off our names as we went up to bat. We were quickly down by three, but my teammates rallied for five runs in the fourth inning, and we ended up winning 7–3. The rally was exhilarating—I was Brett Baty in the dugout. Again, I contributed no hits. I had been dropped to the bottom of the batting order. But I pinch-ran for a teammate and accepted my status as role player. This time, at least, I hit a grounder and was thrown out, rather than just flailing at the plate. Before our third and final game of the day, back on the practice fields, we got a pep talk. One of our coaches, or Legends, was Ray Burris, a journeyman pitcher who played with the Yankees in 1979. (At dinner, he let us each hold the American League Championship ring he’d been awarded in 2012 as a pitching coach in the Detroit Tigers organization.) He sat us down and said: “You’re as good as your last game, and you’re as bad as your first game.” We were not to get big heads. In the third game, we scored four in the top of the first, but the other team, the Captains, scored five in the bottom. I misplayed a ball in the outfield and then stepped on it, shooting it into foul territory, where it skidded away across the dirt. I made a base-running error (as a pinch runner) and I twisted myself up underneath a fly ball and felt my back wrench as it dropped behind me. Then Leslie hit an inside-the-park home run—assisted by two, or possibly four, defensive errors by the other team—and we went wild. But the Captains rallied again in the bottom of the sixth for another five runs and then we were down again, 10–6. My teammates worked a gritty top of the seventh, in our final chance to score. They brought in two runs, making it 10–8. I stared at the lineup card in horror as what was about to happen came together in my mind: I was going to be the last woman up. Two outs, bases loaded. If I hit the ball, we could tie the game—or even win, if there were two, or possibly four, defensive errors. I swung at the first pitch and missed. I let the second pitch go by—ball. I swung and missed at a third pitch. I could feel humiliation a breath away. Then I nicked a foul ball. I could hardly believe the moment was still happening. Then, on the next pitch, I heard what was not quite a crack but was still the perfect sound of bat on ball. We were playing with wooden bats, not the metal ones they have at batting cages, which sound tinny and awful and jangle your hands. I ran in a dead sprint, made it to first base, and didn’t see the ball anywhere. I was safe! But then I turned around and saw that the pitcher had fielded the ball, which had been nothing more than an infield roller, and had thrown it to the catcher for the force play at home. I’d made the last out and the game was over. In the early ’70s, several Major League teams hosted Hot Pants Days, which offered free admission to women who came to the stadium wearing short-shorts. Also at that time, Little League teams that allowed girls to play could be threatened with revocation of their charters. Maria Pepe grew up in an apartment complex in Hoboken, New Jersey, that was full of children, mostly boys. Whenever she was done with her homework, she would join them in playing slap ball, stickball, Wiffle ball, and any other variation of baseball they could make work. “From a young age, maybe 7 years old, I just started playing, and I loved it,” she told me. In 1972, she tried out for Little League and made the Young Democrats team. She pitched three games before angry parents reported her team to Little League’s national office; the league threatened to take away the charter that covered all Hoboken teams, so Pepe’s coach came over to her house and took back her uniform. He let her keep her cap. The National Organization for Women picked up her case in the spring of 1972, filing a complaint with the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights. This caused a big to-do, and newspapers and radio followed the case closely, though Pepe’s parents helped her tune a lot of it out. She did vaguely know that a court was hearing arguments regarding the density of her bones as compared with boys’ bones, presented by Creighton J. Hale, Little League’s executive vice president and director of research. (This argument was based on a Japanese study of cadavers and another about skiing accidents, both of which included only adult bones.) Hale also presented a hypothesis that being hit by a ball could cause breast cancer in girls. Little League’s other arguments were impressively circular. One was that there was no sense in allowing girls to play baseball, because they would not have future opportunities to play it professionally. Another was that the Little League national charter, which specified its purpose as developing “qualities of citizenship, sportsmanship, and manhood,” would be contradicted by the inclusion of girls. Nina Kaplan, a Boca Raton mother of four who had never played baseball before, hustles to first. (Zack Wittman for The Atlantic) Judge Sylvia Pressler found these arguments uncompelling. “Little League is as American as hot dogs and apple pie,” she wrote in her ruling. There was no good reason why “that piece of public Americana should be withheld from girls.” Little League did not acquiesce easily. The organization filed an appeal, which it lost. But by this time, Pepe was too old to play. My teammate Bitsy said that Pepe “took the arrows” for her. Bitsy was one of the first sign-ups, and so news of her first game for the Englewood Orioles was printed in papers across the country. She struck out in her first at-bat, but then drew a walk and scored a run. She was described by the Daily News as “all mouth,” challenging the umpires and instructing her teammates on what to do. She jokes that she thinks her fly was open in one of the newspaper photos. Now easing into retirement, Bitsy plays in two L.A. leagues just for fun. Like many young kids, she fantasized about playing for the New York Yankees. “By the grace of Maria Pepe and the New Jersey Supreme Court,” she told me, “I was able to sustain that fantasy a little longer.” She considers her Little League experience a blessing. She was accepted by her teammates and she had a blast. “I am a very positive, glass-half-full person,” she told me. “I just think my whole outlook in life would have been different if they had said no to me.” For the past 50 years, Little League hasn’t said no to girls who love baseball, but it has set them up to be a minority. Instead of encouraging girls to play baseball after the court decision, Little League encouraged softball for girls and made that their primary option. This example was followed by high schools and colleges, which offer only softball teams for girls and young women. And even if you’re good enough to play with the boys in high school, how do you stick it out, knowing that you could get a college scholarship for softball if you switched? “Anybody who knows the two games knows they are not equivalent,” Leslie Heaphy, the historian, told me. Softball has a bigger ball and underhand pitching, as well as a smaller diamond, a closer fence, and a different style of play that is both faster and simpler. Both are great games, but our culture has accepted a false equivalency, she argued. It’s “just a way of never having to address the issue that women want to play baseball [and] should be allowed to. It should be open to anybody.” Jennifer Ring pointed out that the number of girls playing on boys’ high-school baseball teams hasn’t changed for decades—it hovers between 1,000 and 2,000 out of a total of nearly half a million. In recent years, Little League has held events to honor “Girls With Game,” as they call girls who play baseball or softball. But when I wrote to ask how many girls currently play baseball in Little League International, Kevin Fountain, the organization’s senior director of communications, wrote back to say that the information wasn’t available. He could only say that 32 percent of Little League participants—across baseball and softball—are female. Thinking it might be a matter of a statistic being difficult to calculate for some reason, I wrote back and asked for a couple of alternatives. Could he tell me how many baseball teams have girls on them? Could he tell me whether any Little League baseball teams are girls-only? He could not. In an earlier email, he’d sent me a link to an article about the Maria Pepe Little League Baseball Legacy Series, which was played for the first time in 2024, in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. I noticed that the visiting girls stayed in dorms in the Dr. Creighton J. Hale International Grove—a complex named for the man who’d once argued that they would ruin the sport if they ever picked up a bat. He eventually regretted this position, and when he met Pepe later in life, he told her that his granddaughter had begun playing ball. Throughout the weekend, I had several conversations with women about a new Women’s Pro Baseball League, which was announced in October and is set to debut in 2026. “If it’s within driving distance, I’m going to every game,” Vicky Leone, a retired 58-year-old mother of two, told me. Vicky was a regular at the camp—one of its pillars. Her team, the Bombers, which went undefeated over the weekend, was largely made up of women who had been playing together for years. When I ran into her at dinner one night, she was wearing a onesie covered in the face of her team’s coach, the former Yankees second baseman Homer Bush. She told me that in 2017, during her third year at the camp, she’d asked one of the Legends, Orlando Hernández, a former Yankees pitcher otherwise known as El Duque, to throw her a real fastball. She has no idea how fast he threw it, but she somehow made contact, and hit it out of George M. Steinbrenner Field. “I guess I timed it just right,” Vicky told me. “I didn’t even realize it went over the fence.” A player on the opposing team had to yell at her to stop sprinting as she rounded second, and when she got back to the dugout, her own teammates were losing their minds. A camp employee went and found the ball, and Hernández signed it for her. She still doesn’t know how it happened—“the baseball gods” intervened. Vicky plays in three different softball leagues all year round, but playing baseball at camp for one weekend a year is important to her. “We’re like a sisterhood,” she said. Her teammates, many of whom are roughly her age, are all part of a generation of women who were snubbed by baseball. She grew up wanting to play and would often be dismissed with an Isn’t that cute? When she got older, she would talk about baseball, and boys would ignore her. When she started coaching baseball, parents didn’t want their sons to be assigned to her team. The author loosens up before a game. (Zack Wittman for The Atlantic) Now she sees girls playing in the Little League World Series and has heard about the professional women’s league starting next year. “Sometimes I feel—I wish I was born now and not then, just so I could be a part of that.” But she has more enthusiasm than regret. “I would love to be a coach there, even an assistant coach, keeping book, whatever; I would love to do that,” she told me. “Am I going to? Probably not. But, you know, it’s a dream, and everybody’s got a dream.” The idea for the Women’s Pro Baseball League was announced with a bare-bones press release. It revealed that the league would start next year with six teams “predominantly in the Northeast,” and that it had been co-founded by a lawyer, Keith Stein, alongside Justine Siegal, a well-known figure in the world of women’s baseball. Siegal grew up playing and then became a coach. She’s best known as the first woman to have pitched a major-league batting practice and for creating the nonprofit Baseball for All, which promotes girls’ participation in the sport. [Jemele Hill: Women’s college basketball is a worthy investment] “My whole life has been about getting girls involved in baseball,” Siegal told me when we spoke in December. She is a co-owner of the new league, in charge of baseball operations, and will likely be its first commissioner. She rattled off part of her to-do list: The WPBL will need scouts, tryouts, contracts, stadiums. It will need to create a culture of girls’ baseball from scratch. And so, most important, it will need time and serious backing. Even with the patronage of the NBA, it took decades for the WNBA to reach the levels of interest it has today. The Professional Women’s Hockey League, which also started with six teams just last year, is wholly owned by the chairman of the Dodgers and his wife; they can afford to wait while it finds its footing. A new baseball league will similarly need team owners who are able to front huge costs and are willing to commit to something that might not be profitable for the foreseeable future. Siegal described her vision for the league by comparing it to Angel City FC, the women’s soccer team in Los Angeles. The fan base isn’t enormous, but it’s big enough. “The place is packed; it’s electric. And the athletes are being treated well, making money. They don’t need a second job. And girls know that it’s possible that they, too, could become a professional player.” The only real precedent for a women’s baseball league is the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the subject of A League of Their Own. The league was created by the Chicago Cubs owner and chewing-gum mogul Philip K. Wrigley in 1943 to keep baseball alive as an entertainment industry while many of its brightest stars went to fight in World War II. He was initially the sole owner of the entire league, which was based in the Midwest and rostered only white women. The Racine Belles and South Bend Blue Sox, both of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, face off in 1947. (Bettmann / Getty) The league gave hundreds of women the opportunity to play baseball, and it put on some great games that impressed even seasoned baseball professionals and sportswriters. But there was always a tension, as depicted in the movie, between the gimmick and the game. The league had strict rules about feminine appearance and behavior—players wore skirts, went to charm school, and were taught to scratch at bars of soap to remove the dirt under their fingernails. The league was disbanded in 1954, and the idea was largely forgotten until the release of A League of Their Own. The movie inspired a very brief period of trial and error. A women’s league based on the West Coast played a season and a half before its owner pulled the plug over low attendance, and the Coors Brewing Company sponsored the Colorado Silver Bullets, a barnstorming team managed by the beloved knuckleball pitcher Phil Niekro. “Give them the time all the men have had in this country to play, and you’re going to find a lot of good baseball players,” Niekro told The New York Times after the team’s first year (they went 6–38). The Bullets put on some great games and improved to a winning record in their fourth year. But marketing stunts are not meant for longevity and the Bullets, too, did not last. The U.S. does have a national women’s baseball team, which was featured in the 2024 documentary See Her Be Her. That team competes every two to three years in a Women’s Baseball World Cup, which the U.S. last won in 2006; Japan, which dominates in women’s baseball, has been the champion in the past seven contests. Americans are far behind. See Her Be Her, which aired on the MLB Network the week of the World Series, demonstrated the support that women’s baseball has been able to garner among former major-league stars, including Ichiro Suzuki and Cal Ripken Jr. Ripken, whose 21-year playing career with the Baltimore Orioles ended in 2001, is a member of one of the most famous baseball families in American history. During his own Hall of Fame career, he played alongside his brother Billy and was managed by his father, Cal Ripken Sr. His sister, Ellie, never got to play, though he describes her as throwing harder than he did as a child and growing into a massively talented athlete in other sports. Ripken told me that he and his teammates had watched the Silver Bullets play exhibition games. “I always looked out there and saw my sister and thought, Wouldn’t my sister love to do this? ” I didn’t sense that he was putting on a show—more like it was flatly obvious to someone whose whole life is baseball that everyone should get a chance to enjoy playing it. “I wouldn’t say we were surprised, but our eyes would open, saying, ‘Man, these girls are really good,’ ” he said. “To try to figure out why that didn’t blossom at that time—sometimes they say good ideas, it’s a matter of timing. Maybe this is the right timing now.” On Saturday morning at baseball camp, my beautiful Pinstripes took the lead quickly in our first game, which we won 6–2; again, I did not contribute a single hit. My worst fear was realized as my teammates began to notice—or, probably, they had already noticed, and it just became impossible for them to credibly ignore—that I was by far the worst baseball player on our team. This inspired them to acts of kindness, such as high fives when I had done nothing to earn them and vociferous cheering whenever I was at the plate. In the buffet line at lunch, Ray, our coach, tried to get at the root of my problem, which he diagnosed as mental. I told him about Brett Baty and his many struggles, and though he clearly had no idea who I was talking about or why I was so fixated on him, he seemed to agree that Baty and I had a similar problem, and it was in our brains. “What are you thinking when you’re up there?” he asked me. “I’m thinking, I hope I don’t miss the ball, ” I told him in the spirit of honesty, even though I was already 100 percent sure that this was not the correct thing to be thinking. Ray kindly told me that this was not the correct thing to be thinking. I never wanted to be a baseball player and my performance at baseball camp doesn’t matter. These games, however, were meaningful to women who, by playing them, were making peace with their childhood fantasies after many, many years. One such person was my teammate Susie McNamara, who at 53 years old was attending her third camp. One evening, she told me that she was doing so this time to mark the end of chemo treatments, which she’d finished two months prior. But the first time she came, in 2011, she’d wanted to prove something. Susie grew up in a baseball family. Her grandfather played for the Yankees’ farm team the Newark Bears. Her father was a police officer but also owned a baseball-card shop in Lambertville, New Jersey. He convinced everyone that it would be safe for her to start playing T-ball when she was 4 years old, and, later, that she could play Little League baseball with the boys. She was teased in school, she remembered, for wearing a baseball cap all the time (“It wasn’t, like, a fashion statement,” the way it is now) and for dreaming of being a Yankee. She had to give that up when she was 12, and her primary option was softball. She would go on to play for Mount St. Mary’s, a Division I school in Maryland, but the coaching was terrible and the experience was miserable. Her sophomore year, the team’s record was one win, 31 losses. “I bet that one felt really good, though,” I suggested, but I was wrong. “That one broke my heart,” she said. When she showed up at camp the first time, she thought of it as her opportunity to demonstrate what she could do. The Legends that year included one of her heroes, Bucky Dent, who stopped and stared theatrically when she made an impressive play at third base. She also remembers Darryl Strawberry standing over her after she made a diving backhanded catch in foul territory and screaming, “That was outstanding!” She thought that weekend was probably the best she’d ever played in her life. In our final game, against the Bambinos, the Pinstripes were on fire. The other women had perfected the team’s defense over the course of the weekend—it didn’t hurt that I didn’t touch the ball once—and the only thing left for us to accomplish was a hit from me. I was not the only one who felt this way. Others said it, including Leslie, who told me, “I’m committed to you getting a hit.” (And Lainey, who said, “Let’s go, Ottavino!”) In my first at-bat, I swung on the first pitch and something happened. The ball dribbled up the first-base line and the first baseman scooped it up easily, tagging me as I passed. But a run scored! No hits, but one RBI! The Pinstripes celebrate a victory in their last game of the weekend. (Zack Wittman for The Atlantic) After taking the lead in that inning, we were winning for the entire game, so the pressure on me—from that angle—was quite low. In my second at-bat, my team cheered wildly for me on every pitch. I hit the ball just foul down the first-base line, felt a momentary jolt of hope because of the hard contact, and then struck out. In my third and final at-bat, my team cheered wildly for me again, and I struck out again. “Next year!” I announced, in a voice that was supposed to be playful and make everybody feel less awkward, but actually sounded childish and a bit unhinged. It was ridiculous how upset I was. I was shocked at myself. I hadn’t been expecting it, but the admonition of “no crying in baseball” became suddenly relevant—I had to duck into the tunnel for a few seconds to regain my composure. My teammates, who were geniuses, politely ignored me for five minutes. And then our careers as New York Yankees were over. We had won our final game and went home with a record of three wins and two losses, which you might notice is a .600 winning percentage, higher than that of the actual Yankees last year. We drank Miller Lite in the locker room and swapped phone numbers. I texted my college roommate from Staten Island that I would mail her all the Yankees merchandise that had been included in the price of admission. I texted my boyfriend that I had a new appreciation for the game and was humbled. I texted my dad, “One RBI!” There’s no crying in baseball, and the other thing they’re always saying is that baseball is a game of failure. If you have a really good batting average, you’re failing about 70 percent of the time. Most women, like most men who try the game of baseball, aren’t up to it. They crumble, like me, and like Brett Baty has in the past, though I am confident he will not do so this year. At the start of her book, Jennifer Ring mentions the Burns baseball documentary, noting that it is more than 18 hours long but spends just a few minutes on women playing baseball in the 1800s, and then another few on the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in the 1940s and ’50s. This is particularly strange because the episode about the ’60s and ’70s touches on other issues of the day—Vietnam, civil rights, social unrest—but makes no mention of NOW’s involvement in the Little League legal battle, which would seem to fit in fairly naturally. Baseball is the definitive story of the game in this country, which is why Ring brings it up. “He’s including it in his history, but he’s giving it the position that he thinks it deserves.” Baseball is for the fastidious—a game in which everything matters. Reflecting in 1981 on the past 50 years of his life as a fan, Roger Angell wrote: “All of us who have followed the game with intensity have found ourselves transformed into walking memory banks, humming with games won, games lost, batting averages and earned-run averages, games started and games saved, ‘magic numbers,’ final standings, lifetime marks, Series, seasons, decades, epochs.” Every play is recorded. Every pitch is remembered. It all counts. Every mistake. Every miracle. You can hear the delight and shock in an announcer’s voice when they see something that has somehow never happened before in the history of millions of plays. If you watch enough baseball, you can just feel when something is really something. (Baty’s three-run homer at Tropicana Field, which disappeared into the late, great ceiling and never came down?) In a game in which everything matters, in which we who love it wish to see every possible outcome unfold, how can we stomach the absence of women’s baseball? This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Girls of Summer.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
For decades, this was the widely accepted way to feed a baby: Sit them in a high chair, pop open a jar of mushy pureed peas, scoop some onto a tiny spoon, make an “open wide” face, and—whoosh—make it fly like an airplane into the baby’s mouth. No longer. Over the past 10 years or so, a method called “baby-led weaning” has caught on among many parents. Its proponents claim that infants don’t need to be spoon-fed baby food. In fact, they don’t need to be spoon-fed anything. Parents should give them big hunks of real food to paw at and chomp on as soon as they’re ready to start solids, even if they have only one or two teeth. Just throw an entire broccoli crown or chicken drumstick at your six-month-old and see what they do with it. (The process is called “weaning” because as the baby eats more solids, they’re supposed to drink progressively less breast milk or formula.) By following this method, you can supposedly reduce the risk that your child will grow up to be a fussy eater or an obese adult. I was drawn to baby-led weaning in part because, as a sometime health reporter, I was concerned about childhood obesity. Baby-led weaning also seemed somehow more natural and pure. It didn’t involve Big Baby Food. And it was a way of trusting my baby to know what he needs because he is smart and advanced. Still, as I prepared my then-six-month-old son’s first plate of solid food, I didn’t want to start with a T-bone. I decided to test the waters with something pretty soft. Following a recipe from a popular app called Solid Starts, I stirred a little ground turkey into some sweet potato and put it on my son’s tray. Tentatively, he put the clump in his mouth. Within seconds, he gagged so hard that he threw up all over himself. Mealtime ended with him crying and getting hosed off. [Olga Khazan: Doomed to be a tradwife] This process repeated itself with every food we tried, until a few months in, when he “progressed” to taking bites of food and then promptly spitting them out. We watched with alarm as our son turned 10 months, and then 11, mere weeks from the age—12 months—when he was supposed to stop drinking formula and start getting nearly all of his nutrition from food. Except he was consuming, generously, 50 calories of food a day. My husband and I didn’t know what to do. The internet is so awash in posts and videos about baby-led weaning that I wasn’t sure how to adapt when the method didn’t work. Our pediatrician had not previously been helpful in matters of feeding, so we didn’t ask her. Instead, I reached out to baby-feeding experts, who said that if baby-led weaning fails, spoon-feeding your baby mashed-up or pureed food is fine. I also came away from these interviews with the impression that baby-led weaning has less evidence behind it than its supporters claim—and that like many newfangled, internet-supercharged baby trends, it has the effect of encouraging parents to make raising children way too hard for themselves. Baby-led weaning was pioneered more than two decades ago by Gill Rapley, a British public-health nurse. As she visited families who were introducing solid foods to their babies, she noticed that some babies resisted being spoon-fed. The parents thought the babies didn’t like the food they were offering, but Rapley suspected they didn’t enjoy the process. She would suggest that those parents give their babies large pieces of food to hold instead. “And they would do that,” she told me in an interview, “and it would solve the problem.” In her 2008 book on baby-led weaning, which has sold more than 100,000 copies—a sizable number for a book of this type—Rapley writes that as babies need more nutrients, they will eat more purposefully, as though the baby “instinctively knows that he actually needs this food.” She asserts that the method promotes greater “satiety awareness,” which means a baby-led baby “may be less likely to overeat when they are older.” She writes that the method carries no greater risk of choking than spoon-feeding because the baby is in control of what’s in his mouth, and recommends treating the baby almost like an honored dinner guest, suggesting that you should even avoid wiping a baby’s face between mouthfuls. Baby-led weaning really came into vogue after the 2019 launch of the Brooklyn-based Solid Starts, which features recipes and tips for serving whole foods to infants of different ages. Though parents can simply buy Rapley’s book, many parents seem to learn the technique through the influencers, programs, and apps they find online. Half a dozen pediatricians and infant-feeding experts I spoke with said many patients ask them about the practice, usually after seeing it on social media. Solid Starts has 3.7 million followers on Instagram (more than the 3.6 million babies born in the U.S. in 2022) and millions of downloads. One speech therapist who frequently posts baby-led-weaning tips on TikTok has nearly a quarter-million followers. An assortment of baby-led-weaning Facebook groups each has tens of thousands of members who post pictures of their infants slamming down plates of sausage and pasta. Many of the instructions for how to deploy the method come at a price. One program costs $247, another is $59, and Solid Starts is $20 a month. One specialist offers four months of pediatric “nutrition coaching” for $999. [Carla Cevasco: What parents did before formula] The tone of pro-baby-led-weaning posts is enthusiastic verging on evangelistic: The speech therapist argues in a video that it’s spoon-feeding, not baby-led weaning, that increases the risk of choking. Moms post time-lapse videos of themselves crinkle-cutting carrots, then steaming them, then burning their fingers as they put them through the “squish” test (if it’s squishable, it’s safe to feed a baby). They post videos of their nine-month-olds eagerly chomping on pork chops, or of slightly older babies eating daintily with a fork. “If you want this,” the text reads, “you have to go through this”—a clip of the same baby messily shoveling yogurt into his mouth. All of this content has the effect of making baby-led weaning seem like the only thing you should do. “There’s all these things on the internet, and it’s like, you must be a bad parent if you don’t do baby-led,” Mark Corkins, the chair of the nutrition committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told me. As our own baby-led failures started to pile up, I did feel like a bad parent. But as I looked at the science behind this practice more closely, I started to wonder if I was truly failing, or if baby-led weaning is just not all it’s cracked up to be. Baby-led weaning is billed as “easy” because you’re supposed to be able to offer the baby whatever you’re eating. Some parents do find this approach appealing: One representative comment on Solid Starts’ Instagram page reads, “Feeding our baby the same meals as we eat … is the best thing ever. Introduces her to so many foods and also saves us time and money!” I do not share this enthusiasm, though, because babies can’t eat many of the things adults do. According to most experts, babies under a year old can’t have sugar, honey, unpasteurized or raw cheese, raw seafood, processed or ready-made meals, or additional salt. Rapley also recommends that you avoid artificial colors, flavors, preservatives, sweeteners, and soy milk. Good luck finding a food in America that doesn’t contain at least one of those things. At one point in her book, Rapley, echoing other baby-feeding experts, suggests that babies avoid certain kinds of tuna, but then recommends that at a restaurant, you share with the baby your meal of a “baked potato with tuna” (coming to a Chili’s menu near you!). At home, I’m almost never eating something that’s suitable for a baby. Most days for dinner, I have a big salad with thick, crunchy kale; nuts of some kind; and an unpasteurized cheese—none of which is okay for babies. (“Salads are not great for young children,” Rapley acknowledged.) I often serve the salad alongside a salty, spicy pasta dish, but babies aren’t supposed to have salt. Rapley told me you can just add salt later, to your own plate—which would mean that you’re boiling pasta in unsalted water and searing an unsalted chicken breast for you to eat, and for your little one to gnaw on. Plus, what you’re getting in exchange for this flavor-free lifestyle is not totally clear. The biggest purported benefit of baby-led weaning is that allowing babies to “tune into their bodies,” as Rapley puts it, may help prevent obesity later in life. But this has turned out to not be quite right: Many studies on this question find no difference in weight between babies who are baby-led-weaned versus spoon-fed. Rapley also claims that children who are baby-led, rather than spoon-fed, become less finicky eaters. Some experts I spoke with agreed with this assessment, but one small study found that baby-led weaning made no difference in picky eating. One childhood-obesity researcher, Rachael Taylor of the University of Otago, in New Zealand, told me that a main benefit of baby-led weaning seems to be that it makes parents feel good: “When you talk to parents who like it,” she said, “they love it.” That’s if their babies will do it. Another claim of baby-led-weaning proponents is that whether the baby eats much of anything doesn’t matter; just licking or gumming the food and spitting it out is okay. When I asked Rapley what to do if your baby still isn’t eating enough solid food by the time they turn 1, she suggested that allowing the baby to continue to drink formula might be fine. But infant-feeding experts told me not to do this; they said that babies should be eating lots of actual food by 12 months. If they’re not, Corkins said, “you should have bailed on baby-led a lot sooner.” Another feeding researcher, Charlotte Wright at the University of Glasgow, suggested that families who practice baby-led weaning should combine finger foods with spoon-feeding to ensure that their babies are eating enough. Mark Fishbein, who runs a pediatric feeding clinic at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, told me he wouldn’t recommend baby-led weaning to most families. “There may be some benefit, maybe,” he said, “but the risks are much higher.” Infants doing baby-led weaning gag frequently, which, according to Fishbein, occasionally triggers a feeding aversion that can cause the baby to shun all foods, from a spoon or otherwise. (Rapley acknowledged that excessive gagging “can indeed be a bad thing,” but said that it generally correlates with an underlying problem that baby-led weaning exposes, rather than causes.) When I mentioned a common baby-led food suggestion, a whole piece of meat, to Dina DiMaggio, a pediatrics professor at NYU, she said, “I get worried about things like that”—because big, tough pieces of food can pose a choking risk. [Read: This is no way to talk about children] Still, most experts I spoke with said that baby-led weaning can be a reasonable thing for normally developing babies to try, but that parents of kids with delays or medical issues should proceed with caution. (Rapley has released a companion book geared toward parents of kids with disabilities, claiming that baby-led weaning can work for them, too—though with a “transitional phase” that involves purees or mashed foods.) The upshot seems to be that baby-led weaning is fine if it works for your kid, but that the “traditional” way—spoon-feeding your baby—is also fine. That’s not the impression many parents get, though. “My patients, their parents are very concerned,” DiMaggio told me. They’re just doing baby-led weaning “because some influencer said to do it.” In this way, the evangelizing for baby-led weaning has come to resemble some of the proselytizing for breastfeeding and unmedicated childbirth and so many other things that are supposedly free and easy and best for your baby, but can be anything but for the parents. [Read: The fairy-tale promises of Montessori parenting] Granted, mine is the only baby I’ve ever interacted with at length, but I’ve come to the conclusion that he should not be leading his own weaning. He should not, frankly, be leading anything, because he is—and I say this with all the love in my heart—not that smart. He thinks the trash can is awesome. He doesn’t realize that I don’t die when I go to the bathroom. He believes the Roomba is sentient. He does not, unfortunately, instinctively understand how to eat a diet rich in varied macronutrients, in order to perfectly complement his formula feeds in an age-appropriate way. That’s my job, and I’m going to lead him through it.
After spending most of the 2024 campaign blaming Democrats for inflation and insisting that tariffs don’t increase prices, Donald Trump and his allies have a new economic message: High prices are good. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, for example, recently admitted to the Economic Club of New York that inflation-weary Americans could see a “one-time price adjustment” from Trump’s tariffs, but he quickly added that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.” Representative Mark Alford of Missouri told CNN, “We all have a role to play in this to rightsize our government, and if I have to pay a little bit more for something, I’m all for it to get America right again.” And Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick put his own spin on the argument, telling NBC News that, yes, prices on imports will rise, but American-made goods will get cheaper, and that’s what matters. (In fact, tariffs generally lead to price increases for imported and domestic goods, because the latter face less foreign-price competition.) It’s true that affordable goods and services are not, on their own, the definition of the American dream. But they’re a necessary component of it, and trade is one of the most important drivers of that affordability. Until recently, Republicans understood this quite well. American workers are also American consumers who must devote a sizable chunk of their income to essential goods such as clothing, food, shelter, and energy—goods made cheaper and more plentiful by international trade. Produce and clothing from Latin America, lumber and energy from Canada, footwear and electronics from Asia, wine and cheese from Europe: All of these and more help Americans stretch their paychecks and live happier, healthier lives. Thanks to the internet, moreover, we benefit from internationally traded services too, whether it’s an online tutor in Pakistan, a personal trainer in London, a help-desk employee in India, or an accountant in the Philippines. And we gain from better or cheaper domestic goods and services that are forced to compete with imports on quality or price. Overall, studies conservatively estimate that American households save thousands of dollars a year from the lower prices, increased variety, and global competition fomented by international trade. This increased purchasing power means not only that Americans have more “stuff” but also that their inflation-adjusted incomes are higher. As we just learned the hard way, bigger numbers on your paycheck mean nothing if you’re forced to spend even more on the things you need and want. In fact, one of the big reasons Americans’ inflation-adjusted wages have climbed in recent decades is that the exorbitant prices of things such as housing, health care, and education have been offset by significant declines for tradable goods such as toys, clothing, and consumer electronics. Money left over can also be saved for a rainy day or invested in things such as education and retirement. [Rogé Karma: Trump’s most inexplicable decision yet] The counterargument—until recently associated with the political left—is that cheap and varied consumer goods are not worth sacrificing the strength of America’s domestic-manufacturing sector. Even if we accept that (questionable) premise, however, it doesn’t justify Trump’s tariffs, because those tariffs will hurt domestic manufacturing too. About half of U.S. imports are intermediate goods, raw materials, and capital equipment that American manufacturers use to make their products and sell them here and abroad. Contrary to conventional wisdom, these imports increase domestic-manufacturing output and jobs. Thus, for example, an expanding U.S. trade deficit in automotive goods has long coincided with gains in domestic automotive output and production capacity, and past U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum caused a slowdown in U.S. manufacturing output. Even if domestic manufacturers don’t buy imported parts, simply having access to them serves as an important competitive check on the prices of made-in-America manufacturing inputs. This is why Trump’s recent steel-tariff announcement gave U.S. steelmakers a “green light to lift prices,” as The Wall Street Journal put it. Imports such as construction materials, medical goods, and computers also support many U.S. service industries. And imports are important for leisure and economic mobility. By trading for necessities instead of making them ourselves, Americans have more free time to use for fun or self-improvement (and more disposable income to pursue such things). According to a new study in the Journal of International Economics, “between 1950 and 2014, trade openness contributed to an additional 20 to 95 hours of leisure per worker per year”—invaluable time we can devote to entertainment, family, community, or education. “Access to cheap goods” isn’t the American dream, but it sure helps us achieve it. This is particularly true for low-income workers who have tight budgets and little leisure time. Shelter, food, transport, utilities, and clothes accounted for approximately 68 percent of the poorest 20 percent of U.S. households’ annual expenditures but just about half of the richest 20 percent of households’ spending. It’s easy for someone worth, say, $521 million, like Bessent, to pay a few bucks more for everyday goods and still achieve his goals and ambitions; it’s far more difficult for a single mom with four kids to do the same. Democrats used to be the ones offering a false choice between Americans’ access to affordable (often imported) stuff and our economic well-being. In 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama told a union-sponsored-debate audience in Chicago that “people don’t want a cheaper T‑shirt if they’re losing a job in the process.” And Bernie Sanders famously said in 2015 that Americans “don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.” Back in those days, Republicans defended the link between trade and American prosperity. Today, only a few party outcasts, such as Mike Pence, dare to do so. Trump’s allies have made very clear that they are trying to achieve a dream. It just isn’t America’s.
America’s superrich have always found ways to avoid paying taxes, but in recent years, they’ve discovered what might be the mother of all loopholes. It’s a three-step process called “Buy, Borrow, Die,” and it allows people to amass a huge fortune, spend as much of it as they want, and pass the rest—untaxed—on to their heirs. The technique is so cleverly designed that the standard wish list of progressive tax reforms would leave it completely intact. Step one: buy. The average American derives most of their disposable income from the wages they earn working a job, but the superrich are different. They amass their fortune by buying and owning assets that appreciate. Elon Musk hasn’t taken a traditional salary as CEO of Tesla since 2019; Warren Buffett, the chair of Berkshire Hathaway, has famously kept his salary at $100,000 for more than 40 years. Their wealth consists almost entirely of stock in the companies they’ve built or invested in. The tax-law scholars Edward Fox and Zachary Liscow found that even when you exclude the 400 wealthiest individuals in America, the remaining members of the top 1 percent hold $23 trillion in assets. Unlike wages, which are taxed the moment they are earned, assets are taxed only at the moment they are sold—or, in tax terms, “realized.” The justification for this approach is that unrealized assets exist only on paper; you can’t pay for a private jet or buy a company with stocks, even if they have appreciated by billions of dollars. In theory, the rich will eventually need to sell their assets for cash, at which point they will pay taxes on their increase in wealth. That theory would be much closer to reality if not for step two: borrow. Instead of selling their assets to make major purchases, the superrich can use them as collateral to secure loans, which, because they must eventually be repaid, are also not considered taxable income. Larry Ellison, a co-founder of Oracle and America’s fourth-richest person, has pledged more than $30 billion of his company’s stock as collateral in order to fund his lavish lifestyle, which includes building a $270 million yacht, buying a $300 million island, and purchasing an $80 million mansion. A Forbes analysis found that, as of April 2022, Musk had pledged Tesla shares worth more than $94 billion, which “serve as an evergreen credit facility, giving Musk access to cash when he needs it.” This strategy isn’t as common among the merely very rich, who may not have the expensive tastes that Ellison and Musk do, but it isn’t rare either. Liscow and Fox calculated that the top 1 percent of wealth-holders, excluding the richest 400 Americans, borrowed more than $1 trillion in 2022. And the approach appears to be gaining momentum. Last year, The Economist reported that, at Morgan Stanley and Bank of America alone, the value of “securities-backed loans” increased from $80 billion in 2018 to almost $150 billion in 2022. “The real question is: Why would you not borrow hundreds of millions, even billions, to fund the lifestyle you want to live?” Tom Anderson, a wealth-management consultant and former banker who specializes in these loans, told me. “This is such an easy tool to use. And the tax benefits are massive.” [Annie Lowrey: Trump says his tax plan won’t benefit the rich—he’s exactly wrong] You might think this couldn’t possibly go on forever. Eventually, the rich will need to sell off some of their assets to pay back the loan. That brings us to step three: die. According to a provision of the tax code known as “stepped-up basis”—or, more evocatively, the “angel of death” loophole—when an individual dies, the value that their assets gained during their lifetime becomes immune to taxation. Those assets can then be sold by the billionaire’s heirs to pay off any outstanding loans without them having to worry about taxes. The justification for the stepped-up-basis rule is that the United States already levies a 40 percent inheritance tax on fortunes larger than $14 million, and it would be unfair to tax assets twice. In practice, however, a seemingly infinite number of loopholes allow the rich to avoid paying this tax, many of which involve placing assets in byzantine legal trusts that enable them to be passed seamlessly from one generation to the next. “Only morons pay the estate tax,” Gary Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive and the then–chief economic adviser to Donald Trump, memorably remarked in 2017. “All of this is completely, perfectly legal,” Edward McCaffery, the scholar who coined the term Buy, Borrow, Die, told me. But, he said, the strategy “has basically killed the entire concept of an income tax for the wealthiest individuals.” The tax economist Daniel Reck, who has spent his career documenting the various ways the rich evade taxation, told me that Buy, Borrow, Die is “the most important tax-avoidance strategy today.” The result is a two-tiered tax system: one for the many, who earn their income through wages and pay taxes, and another for the few, who accumulate wealth through paper assets and largely do not pay taxes. Much of the debate around American tax policy focuses on the income-tax rate paid by the very wealthiest Americans. But the bulk of those people’s fortunes doesn’t qualify as income in the first place. A 2021 ProPublica investigation of the private tax records of America’s 25 richest individuals found that they collectively paid an effective tax rate of just 3.4 percent on their total wealth gain from 2014 to 2018. Musk paid 3.3 percent, Jeff Bezos 1 percent, and Buffett—who has famously argued for imposing higher income-tax rates on the superrich—just 0.1 percent. The same dynamic exists, in slightly less egregious form, further down the wealth distribution. A 2021 White House study found that the 400 richest American households paid an effective tax rate of 8.2 percent on their total wealth gains from 2010 to 2018. Liscow and Fox found that, excluding the top 400, the rest of the 0.1 percent richest individuals paid an effective rate of 12 percent from 2004 to 2022. (Twelve percent is the income-tax rate paid by individuals who make $11,601 to $47,150 a year.) One solution to this basic unfairness would be to tax unrealized assets. In 2022, the Biden administration proposed a “billionaire minimum tax” that would have placed a new annual levy of up to 20 percent on the appreciation of even unsold assets for households with more than $100 million in wealth. Experts have vehemently debated the substantive merits of such a policy; the real problem, however, is political. According to a survey conducted by Liscow and Fox, most Americans oppose a tax on unrealized gains even when applied only to the richest individuals. The Joe Biden proposal, perhaps unsurprisingly, went nowhere in Congress. Making matters more complicated, even if such a policy did pass, the Supreme Court would very likely rule it unconstitutional. [James Kwak: The tax code for the ultra-rich vs. the one for everyone else] A second idea would be to address the “borrow” step. Last year, Liscow and Fox published a proposal to tax the borrowing of households worth more than $100 million, which they estimated would raise about $10 billion a year. The limitation of that solution, as the authors acknowledge, is that it would not address the larger pool of rich Americans who don’t borrow heavily against their assets but do take advantage of stepped-up basis. That leaves the “die” step. Tax experts from across the political spectrum generally support eliminating the “stepped-up basis” rule, allowing unrealized assets to be taxed at death. This would be far more politically palatable than the dead-on-arrival billionaire’s minimum tax: In the same survey in which respondents overwhelmingly opposed broad taxes on unrealized assets during life, Liscow and Fox also found that nearly two-thirds of them supported taxing unrealized assets at death. Even a change this widely supported, however, would run up against the iron law of democratic politics: Policies with concentrated benefits and distributed costs are very hard to overturn. That’s especially true when the benefits just so happen to be concentrated among the richest, most powerful people in the country. In fact, the Biden administration did propose eliminating stepped-up basis as part of its Build Back Better legislation. The move prompted an intense backlash from special-interest groups and their allied politicians, with opponents portraying the provision as an assault on rural America that would destroy family farms and businesses. These claims were completely unfounded—the bill had specific exemptions for family businesses and applied only to assets greater than $2.5 million—but the effort succeeded at riling up enough Democratic opposition to kill the idea. The one guarantee of any tax regime is that, eventually, the rich and powerful will learn how to game it. In theory, a democratic system, operating on behalf of the majority, should be able to respond by making adjustments that force the rich to pay their fair share. But in a world where money readily translates to political power, voice, and influence, the superrich have virtually endless resources at their disposal to make sure that doesn’t happen. To make society more equal, you need to tax the rich. But to tax the rich, it helps for society to be more equal.
In January, when the historian Avi Shilon returned to Columbia University from winter break, a thought coursed through his mind: If calm can take hold in Gaza, then perhaps it could also happen in Morningside Heights. Just a few days earlier, in time for the start of the semester, Hamas and Israel had brokered a cease-fire in their war. Over the many months of that war, Columbia was the site of some of America’s most vitriolic protests against Israel’s actions, and even its existence. For two weeks last spring, an encampment erected by anti-Israel demonstrators swallowed the fields in the center of the compact Manhattan campus. Nobody could enter Butler Library without hearing slogans such as “Globalize the intifada!” and “We don’t want no Zionists here!” and “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!” At the end of April, students, joined by sympathizers from outside the university gates, stormed Hamilton Hall—which houses the undergraduate-college deans’ offices—and then battled police when they sought to clear the building. Because of the threat of spiraling chaos, the university canceled its main commencement ceremony in May. Shilon felt that the tamping of hostilities in Gaza made the moment ripe for the course he was scheduled to teach, “History of Modern Israel,” which would examine the competing Jewish and Palestinian narratives about his native country’s founding. But Columbia soon disabused him of his hopes. About 30 minutes into the first session of his seminar, four people, their faces shrouded in keffiyehs, burst into his classroom. A protester circled the seminar table, flinging flyers in front of Shilon’s students. One flyer bore an image of a boot stomping on a Star of David; another stated, The Enemy Will Not See Tomorrow. In the Israeli universities where Shilon had studied and taught, he was accustomed to strident critiques of the country. Sometimes he even found himself sympathizing with them. Taking up difficult arguments struck him as the way to navigate tense disagreements, so he rose from his chair and gingerly approached the protesters. “You’re invited to learn,” he told them. But the protesters ignored him. As one held up a camera to film, another stared at it and delivered a monologue in which she described Shilon’s class—which had barely progressed beyond a discussion of expectations for the semester—as an example of “Columbia University’s normalization of genocide.” After she finished her speech, the demonstrators left the room, but a sense of intrusion lingered. Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the umbrella group that organized protests on campus, posted a video of the action, with the caption: “We disrupted a zionist class, and you should too.” The university later offered to provide security for Shilon’s class because it couldn’t be sure if CUAD was bluffing. Over the past two years, Columbia’s institutional life has become more and more absurd. Confronted with a war on the other side of the world, the course of which the university has zero capacity to affect, a broad swath of the community acted as if the school’s trustees and administrators could determine the fate of innocent families in Gaza. To force the university into acceding to demands—ending study abroad in Israel, severing a partnership with Tel Aviv University, divesting from companies with holdings in Israel––protesters attempted to shut down campus activity. For the sake of entirely symbolic victories, they were willing to risk their academic careers and even arrest. Because the protesters treated the war as a local issue, they trained their anger on Jewish and Israeli students and faculty, including Shilon, some of whom have been accused of complicity with genocide on the basis of their religious affiliation or national origin. More than any other American university, Columbia experienced a breakdown in the fabric of its community that demanded a firm response from administrators—but these administrators tended to choke on their own fears. Many of the protesters followed university rules governing demonstrations and free expression. Many others did not. Liberal administrators couldn’t or wouldn’t curb the illiberalism in their midst. By failing to discipline protesters who transgressed university rules, they signaled that disrupting classrooms carried no price. By tolerating professors who bullied students who disagreed with them, they signaled that incivility and even harassment were acceptable forms of discourse. It was as if Columbia was reliving the bedlam of 1968, which included a student takeover of the university and scarred the institution for decades. And just like in the Vietnam era, the university became a ripe target for demagogues on the right, who are eager to demolish the prestige of elite higher education. And now that Donald Trump and his allies control the federal government, they have used anti-Semitism as a pretext for damaging an institution that they abhor. In the name of rescuing the Jews of Columbia, the Trump administration cut off $400 million in federal contracts and grants to the university. Trump officials then sent a letter demanding—as preconditions for restoring the funds—a series of immediate, far-reaching steps, including suspending and expelling Hamilton Hall protesters, producing a plan to overhaul admissions, and putting the school’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies under “academic receivership.” Mark Rudd, president of Students for a Democratic Society, addresses students at Columbia University in May 1968. (Hulton Archive / Getty) And in an attempt to suppress political views it dislikes, the administration authorized the unlawful detention of Mahmoud Khalil, an alumnus who helped organize campus protests, and sent federal agents to search two dorm rooms. Another graduate student, targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, fled to Canada rather than risk apprehension. The Trump administration’s war on Columbia stands to wreck research, further inflame tensions on campus, and destroy careers—including, in a supreme irony, those of many Jewish academics, scientists, physicians, and graduate students whom the administration ostensibly wants to protect. Trump’s autocratic presence unbalances every debate. But just because his administration is exploiting the issue of anti-Semitism does not mean that anti-Jewish activism is not an issue at Columbia. Somewhere along the way, one of the nation’s greatest universities lost its capacity to conduct intellectual arguments over contentious issues without resorting to hyperbole and accusations of moral deficiency. On Israel, the issue that most sharply divides Columbia, such accusations took a sinister cast. Jewish students faced ostracism and bullying that, if experienced by any other group of students on campus, would be universally regarded as unacceptable. It was a crisis that became painfully evident in the course of the war over Gaza, but it didn’t begin with the war, and it won’t end with it. The story of American Jewry can be told, in part, by the history of Columbia’s admissions policy. At the turn of the 20th century, when entry required merely passing an exam, the sons of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe began rushing into the institution. By 1920, Columbia was likely 40 percent Jewish. This posed a marketing problem for the school, as the children of New York’s old knickerbocker elite began searching out corners of the Ivy League with fewer Brooklyn accents. To restore Anglo-Saxon Protestant demographic dominance, university president Nicholas Murray Butler invented the modern college-application process, in which concepts such as geographic diversity and a well-rounded student body became pretexts to weed out studious Jews from New York City. In 1921, Columbia became the first private college to impose a quota limiting the number of Jews. (In the ’30s, Columbia rejected Richard Feynman, who later won a Nobel Prize in physics, and Isaac Asimov, the great science fiction writer.) Columbia, however, was intent on making money off the Jews it turned away, so to educate them, it created Seth Low Junior College in Brooklyn, a second-rate version of the Manhattan institution. Only after World War II, when America fought a war against Nazism, did this exclusionary system wither away. When I attended Columbia for four blissful years, a generation or so ago, the school was a Jewish wonderland, where I first encountered the pluralism of American Jewish life. I became friends with red-diaper babies, kids raised in Jewish socialist families. I dated an Orthodox woman who had converted from evangelical Christianity. Several floors of my dorm had been nicknamed Anatevka, after the shtetl in Fiddler on the Roof; they had kosher kitchens, and on the Sabbath, the elevators would automatically stop on each of those floors. I studied Yiddish with a doyenne of the dying Yiddish theater and attended lectures with Yosef Yerushalmi, one of the great Jewish historians of his generation. At Columbia, for the first time in my life, I felt completely at home in my identity. I also imbibed the university’s protest culture: I briefly helped take over Hamilton Hall in the name of preserving the Audubon Ballroom, the Upper Manhattan site of Malcolm X’s assassination. Columbia wanted to convert the building into a research center. The leader of our movement, Benjamin Jealous, who went on to head the NAACP, was suspended for his role; I was put on probation. Nostalgia, however, is a distorting filter. Long before the October 7 attack by Hamas on southern Israel that sparked the subsequent invasion of Gaza, there were accusations of anti-Semitism on campus. I tended to wish them away, but after the Hamas attack, the evidence kept walloping me. Although protests against Israel erupted on many campuses after October 7, the collision between Zionists and anti-Zionists was especially virulent at Columbia. Less than a week after the attack, a woman was arrested in front of the library for allegedly beating an Israeli student who was hanging posters of hostages held in Gaza. (The Manhattan district attorney found that the woman hadn’t intentionally hit the student and dismissed the case after she apologized and agreed to counseling.) Soon after the war in Gaza began, the Columbia Daily Spectator interviewed more than 50 Jewish students about their experiences: 13 told the student newspaper that they had been attacked or harassed; 12 admitted that they had obscured markers of their Jewish identity, tucking away Star of David necklaces and hiding kippot under caps to avoid provoking the ire of fellow students. To Columbia’s misfortune, the university had a new president, Minouche Shafik, who’d arrived by way of the London School of Economics. Any leader would have been overwhelmed by the explosion of passions, but she seemed especially shell-shocked by the rancor—and how it attracted media, activists, and politicians, all exploiting the controversy for their own purposes. Panicked leaders, without any clear sense of their own direction, have a rote response: They appoint a task force. And in November 2023, Shafik appointed some of Columbia’s most eminent academics to assess the school’s anti-Semitism problem. (Shafik had hoped to have a parallel task force on Islamophobia, but Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia historian and the most prominent Palestinian scholar in the country, called the idea a “fig leaf to pretend that they are ‘balanced,’” and the idea never hatched.) In “listening sessions” with students, task-force members heard one recurring complaint: that administrators were strangely indifferent to Jewish students complaining about abuse. Rather than investigating incidents, some administrators steered Jewish students to mental-health counseling, as if they needed therapy to toughen them up. Students who had filed official reports of bias with the university claimed that they’d never heard back. (To protect the privacy of listening-session participants, the task force never confirmed specific instances, but it deemed the complaints credible.) Perhaps, early on, one could imagine benign explanations for the weak response. But in June, as the task force went about its investigation, The Washington Free Beacon reported on a series of text messages fired off by four Columbia deans as they attended a panel on Jewish life at Columbia. (A panel attendee who had sat behind one of the administrators had surreptitiously photographed the text thread over her shoulder.) Instead of sympathetically listening to panelists discuss anti-Semitism, the deans unwittingly confirmed the depth of the problem. These officials, whose role gave them responsibility for student safety, snarkily circulated accusations about the pernicious influence of Jewish power. “Amazing what $$$ can do,” one of the deans wrote. Another accused the head of campus Hillel of playing up complaints for the sake of fundraising. “Comes from such a place of privilege,” one of them moaned. After the Free Beacon published the screenshots, Columbia suspended three of the administrators. Not long after, they resigned. A month later, at the beginning of the academic year, the task force published a damning depiction of quotidian student life. An especially powerful section of the report described the influence of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the organizer of the anti-Israel protests. CUAD was a coalition of 116 tuition-supported, faculty-advised student groups, including the university mariachi band and the Barnard Garden Club. CUAD doesn’t simply oppose war and occupation; it endorses violence as the pathway to its definition of liberation. A year ago, a Columbia student activist told an audience watching him on Instagram, “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” At first, CUAD dissociated itself from the student. But then the group reconsidered and apologized for its momentary lapse of stridency. “Violence is the only path forward,” CUAD said in an official statement. That wasn’t a surprising admission; its public statements regularly celebrate martyrdom. When groups endorsed CUAD, they forced Jewish students to confront a painful choice. To participate in beloved activities, they needed to look past the club’s official membership in an organization that endorsed the killing of Jews and the destruction of the world’s only Jewish-majority country. According to the task force, complaining about the alliance with CUAD or professing sympathy for Israel could lead to a student being purged from an extracurricular activity. When a member of the dance team questioned the wisdom of supporting CUAD, she was removed from the organization’s group chats and effectively kicked off the team. A co-president of Sewa, a Sikh student group, says that she was removed from her post because of her alleged Zionism. In an invitation to a film screening, the founder of an LGBTQ group, the LezLions, wrote, “Zionists aren’t invited.” I’m not suggesting that Jews at Columbia feel constantly under siege. When I gave a speech at the campus Hillel group last spring, many members, even some who are passionate supporters of Israel, told me that they are happy at Columbia and have never personally experienced anything resembling anti-Semitism. The pro-Palestinian encampments included Jewish protesters, some of whom received abuse from their fellow Jews. To the task force’s credit, its report acknowledges many such complexities, but it brimmed with accounts of disturbing incidents worthy of a meaningful official response. Unfortunately, that’s not the Columbia way. Had I been wiser as an undergrad, I could have squinted and seen the roots of the current crisis. In the 1990s, Israel was a nonissue on campus: The Oslo peace process was in high gear, and a two-state solution and coexistence were dreams within reach. But the most imposing academic celebrity on campus was the Jerusalem-born Edward Said, a brilliant professor of literature, who had served as a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s legislative arm. During my years at Columbia, Said, who was battling cancer, was a remote figure. A dandy who loved his tweeds and was immersed in the European cosmopolitanism that he critiqued, he taught only a course on Giuseppe Verdi and imperialism. Still, he bestrode the university. His masterwork, Orientalism, was one of the few books by an active Columbia professor regularly included in the college’s core curriculum. That book, by the university’s most acclaimed professor, was also a gauntlet thrown in the community’s face. Said had convincingly illustrated how racism infected the production of knowledge in Middle Eastern studies. Even if scholarship paraded as the disinterested study of foreign cultures, it was inherently political, too often infected by a colonialist mindset. To correct for that bias, admirers of Said’s book concluded, universities needed to hire a different style of academic, including scholars with roots in the region they studied, not just a bunch of white guys fascinated by Arabs. The Middle Eastern–studies department filled with Said protégés, who lacked his charm but taught with ferocious passion. Because they were unabashed activists, these new scholars had no compunction about, say, canceling class so that students could attend pro-Palestinian rallies. Joseph Massad, a Jordanian-born political scientist who wrote a history of nationalism in his native country, became the most notorious of the new coterie soon after arriving in 1999. His incendiary comments provoked his ideological foes to respond with fury and, sometimes, to unfairly twist his quotes in the course of their diatribes. But his actual record was clear enough. Writing in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram in 2003, he accused the Israelis of being the true anti-Semites, because they destroyed the culture of the Jewish diaspora; the Palestinians were the real Jews, he argued, because they were being massacred. Violence, when directed at Jews, never seemed to bother him. This moral vacuity was on full display in the column he wrote in response to October 7, which he called a “resistance offensive,” for The Electronic Intifada, a Chicago-based publication aligned with the more radical wing of the Palestinian cause. His essay used a series of euphoric adjectives—“astonishing,” “astounding,” “awesome”—to describe Hamas’s invasion, without ever condemning, let alone mentioning, the gruesome human toll of the massacre, which included rape and the kidnapping of babies. In fact, he coldly described the towns destroyed by Hamas as “settler-colonies.” Massad has long been accused of carrying that polemical style into the classroom. In the course description for a class called “Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies,” he wrote in 2002: “The purpose of the course is not to provide a ‘balanced’ coverage of the views of both sides.” On the one hand, that’s an admirable admission. On the other hand, Jewish students complained that he treated those with dissenting opinions as if they were moral reprobates, unworthy of civility. In 2004, a pro-Israel group in Boston put together a low-budget documentary called Columbia Unbecoming, which strung together student testimony about the pedagogical style of Columbia’s Middle Eastern–studies program. To take two representative incidents: After an Israeli student asked Massad a question at an extracurricular event, the professor demanded to know how many Palestinians he had killed; a woman recounted how another professor, George Saliba, had told her not to opine on Israel-Palestine questions because her green eyes showed that she couldn’t be a “Semite.” In response, Massad denied ever meeting the Israeli student; Saliba wrote that he didn’t recall the green-eyes comments and that the student might have misconstrued what he was saying. But Columbia’s then-president, Lee Bollinger, instantly recognized the problem and appointed his own task force to examine the complaints. But it would have taken more than a task force to address the underlying problem. The emerging style of the American academy, especially prevalent at Columbia, viewed activism flowing from moral absolutes as integral to the mission of the professoriat. But a style that prevailed in African American–studies and gender-studies departments was incendiary when applied to Israel. With race and gender, there was largely a consensus on campus, but Israel divided the university community. And as much as Bollinger professed to value dissenting opinions, his university was ill-equipped to accommodate two conflicting points of view. And the gap between those two points of view kept growing, as Said’s legacy began to seep into even the far reaches of Columbia. If I were writing a satiric campus novel about Columbia, I would have abandoned the project on January 29. That’s the day the Spectator published lab notes for an introductory astronomy course, written by a teaching assistant, that instructed students: “As we watch genocide unfold in Gaza, it is also important to tell the story of Palestinians outside of being the subjects of a military occupation. Take 15 minutes or so to read through the articles ‘Wonder and the Life of Palestinian Astronomy’ and ‘In Gaza, Scanning the Sky for Stars, Not Drones.’ Remind yourself that our dreams, our wonders, our aspirations … are not any more worthy.” At Columbia, a student couldn’t contemplate the Big Dipper without being forced to consider the fate of Khan Yunis. This was a minor scandal, but a representative one. Over the years, the subject of Israel became nearly inescapable at Columbia, even in disciplines seemingly far removed from Gaza. For a swath of graduate students and professors, Palestinian liberation—and a corollary belief that Israel is uniquely evil among nations—became something close to civic religion. In 2023, at the School of Public Health, a professor who taught a section of its core curriculum to more than 400 students denounced Jewish donors to the university as “wealthy white capitalists” who laundered “blood money” through the school. He hosted a panel on the “settler-colonial determinants of health” that described “Israel-Palestine” as a primary example of a place where the “right to health” can never be realized. Several years ago, the Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning offered a class on “Architecture and Settler Colonialism” and hosted an event titled “Architecture Against Apartheid.” By insisting that Israel is the great moral catastrophe of our age, professors and graduate students transmitted their passions to their classes. So it is not surprising that Jewish students with sympathy for Israel found themselves subject to social opprobrium not just from their teachers, but also from their peers. In its September report, the task force that Shafik had convened described the problem starkly: “We heard about students being avoided and avoiding others” and about “isolation and even intimidation in classrooms, bullying, threats, stereotypes, ethnic slurs, disqualification from opportunities, fear of retaliation and community erosion.” This was the assessment of Columbia professors, many of them unabashed liberals, who risked alienating colleagues by describing the situation bluntly. Pro-Palestinian protesters march around Columbia in April 2024. (Michael M. Santiago / Getty) In September, the task force presented its findings to Columbia’s University Senate, an elected deliberative body that brings faculty, administrators, and students into the governance of the institution. Its creation was a utopian response to the 1968 protests. But the senate session about anti-Semitism was a fiasco. Almost from the start, members began to attack the task-force report’s motives and methodology—even its focus on discrimination against Jews. “No such resources were put into covering anybody else’s subjective experience on this campus,” the English professor Joseph Slaughter said, “and I think that creates real problems for the community.” The hostility to the report wasn’t meaningless fulmination; it was evidence of how a large part of the faculty was determined to prevent the university from acknowledging the presence of anti-Jewish activity in the school. No other university has a governance structure quite like Columbia’s, and for good reason. Most academics with busy lives want to avoid endless meetings with their colleagues, so most professors aren’t rushing to join the senate. In recent years, the senate has attracted those of an activist bent, who are willing to put up with tedium in service of a higher cause. Two members of the rules committee were allegedly part of a faculty contingent that stood guard around the encampments on the quad. They did so even though they had jurisdiction over potentially disciplining those protesters. As it happens, exceedingly few of the protesters who flagrantly disregarded university rules have suffered any consequences for their actions. Columbia didn’t impose discipline on students who stormed Hamilton Hall last spring—at least not until last week, amid Trump’s threat of drastic cuts to the university. But by then, a culture of impunity was firmly rooted. Barnard College is integrated into Columbia, but it has its own set of rules, its own governance structure and disciplinary procedures. And it acted swiftly to expel two of the students who were in the group that burst into Avi Shilon’s class in January. (Columbia had suspended another participant, pending an investigation, and failed to identify the other.) For once, it felt as if the university was upholding its basic covenant with its students: to protect the sanctity of the classroom. But instead of changing anyone’s incentives, Barnard’s hard-line punishment inspired protesters to rush Millbank Hall, banging drums and chanting, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution.” In the course of storming the building, they allegedly assaulted a Barnard employee, sending him to the hospital. For more than six hours, they shut down the building, which houses the offices of the administration, and left only after the college threatened to bring in the police and offered an official meeting with the protesters. But the possibility of police action wasn’t a sufficient deterrent, because a week later, two dozen protesters returned to occupy Barnard’s library. In some deep sense, the university had lost the capacity to reassert control, let alone confront the root causes of the chaos. And looking back over the past few months, I see a pattern of events that, in some ways, is far more troubling than the encampments that received so many headlines. In November, protesters descended on the building that houses Hillel, the center of Jewish life on campus—its main purpose is to provide Jewish students with religious services and kosher food—and demanded that the university sever ties with the organization. The next month, a demonstrator marching up Broadway punched a kippah-wearing Jew in the face. In January, to memorialize the murder of a Palestinian girl, protesters filled the toilets of the School of International and Public Affairs with cement. Skewering two Jewish women affiliated with the school—its dean, Keren Yarhi-Milo, and an adjunct assistant professor at the school, Rebecca Weiner—they spray-painted the message “Keren eat Weiner,” with an image of feces. All of this unfolded as the Trump administration launched an assault on higher education. But thus far, Columbia students haven’t bothered to protest that. Unlike Palestine, which for most students is a distant cause, the stripping of federal funding for the institution will ripple through the lives of students and faculty. But university activism has its sights obsessively locked on Israel. That Trump assault on Columbia has now arrived, in the heaviest-handed form. Anti-Semitism on campus, a problem that merits a serious response, has been abused in the course of Trump’s quest to remake America in his image. Tellingly, the administration’s withholding of federal grants will fall hardest on the hard sciences, which are the part of the university most immune to anti-Semitism, and hardly touch the humanities, where overwrought criticisms of Israel flourish. The indiscriminate, punitive nature of Trump’s meddling may unbalance Columbia even further. A dangerous new narrative has emerged there and on other campuses: that the new federal threats result from “fabricated charges of antisemitism,” as CUAD recently put it, casting victims of harassment as the cunning villains of the story. In this atmosphere, Columbia seems unlikely to reckon with the deeper causes of anti-Jewish abuse on its campus. But in its past—especially in its history of overcoming its discriminatory treatment of Jews—the institution has revealed itself capable of overcoming its biases, conscious and otherwise, against an excluded group. It has shown that it can stare hard at itself, channel its highest values, and find its way to a better course.
The most impressive thing about the sun isn’t what it does to the sky at sunrise and sunset— all that orange and red and purple and pink— but rather what it does to the pines, the most boring of all trees, of all things found in nature, all those little green needles, caught glowing like prairie-fire, blue columbine, and lupine in early spring mornings, blooming among aspens flowering catkins in meadows beside rivers of alpine water rushing from the thaw, all while juncos and chickadees and hermit thrush join in a litany of birdsong.
I need you to watch this 13-second video of ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith walking to his courtside seat at a Los Angeles Lakers game. I need you to notice how Smith, perhaps the biggest voice in sports—in sheer decibels, if not reach—savors the see-and-be-seen pleasures of the courtside experience. That was two years ago. Now imagine how he might have floated into the Lakers’ home arena the night of March 6. Only hours earlier, it had been reported that ESPN had agreed to a new contract with Smith worth more than $100 million. To celebrate, Smith’s agent, Ari Emanuel, had invited him to the game. Larry David would join them courtside, near the end of the Lakers bench. This should have been the perfect atmosphere for Smith to revel in his ascent to the pinnacle of sports media. Instead, his night took a bad turn. Early in the game, Smith made eye contact with Bronny James, a rookie reserve guard on the Lakers and, crucially, the son of the Lakers’ star LeBron James. Bronny has had a rough season. He has been dogged by accusations that he would not be playing in the NBA were it not for his last name. On the road, opposing crowds engage in mocking chants, begging the Lakers coach to put him in. In January, he had his worst game of the season; in 15 minutes, he missed all of his shots and turned the ball over three times. The next morning, on First Take, ESPN’s flagship morning show, Smith made Bronny the subject of one of his trademark rants. For more than four uninterrupted minutes, he pleaded with LeBron—as a father—to stop exposing his son. “Stop this,” he said. “Stop this.” LeBron does not seem to have taken kindly to Smith’s unsolicited counsel. At the March 6 game, near the end of the third quarter, he approached Smith in his courtside seat. Looming over Smith in a manner that does not usually accompany friendly chatter, he barked something. His exact words can’t be heard in a fan video of the encounter, but his menacing tone is legible. According to Smith’s account of the exchange, LeBron said, “Stop fucking with my son. That’s my son.” Smith did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did LeBron, so the details of what he said that night are unconfirmed. But even going by the body language and by related comments that LeBron later made on a hot mic, it does appear that his goal was to intimidate. By confronting Smith, LeBron sent a message not just to Smith but also to members of the wider NBA press corps, few of whom have Smith’s stature and influence: Criticize my son, and there will be consequences. Like many rich and powerful people, LeBron seems to want the fruits of global media stardom for himself and his kids, but not the corresponding scrutiny. LeBron has himself to blame for the sad media spectacle of Bronny’s first season. In the months leading up to last year’s NBA draft, Bronny told reporters that it was his life’s great dream to be drafted by a pro team, any team. In off-the-record interviews, league executives made clear that because Bronny does not have his dad’s skill or size, he wasn’t all that draftable. In his short career at the University of Southern California, which was interrupted by a scary incident of cardiac arrest, he averaged only 5 points a game. By all appearances, it was LeBron who made sure Bronny got drafted, first by puffing him up, saying publicly that his son was already better than many active NBA players. LeBron also made it known that he himself would play for whichever team drafted Bronny. (No prospect has ever been packaged so attractively, with the NBA’s first or second all-time best player as a throw-in.) On draft day, the Lakers selected Bronny in the second round. That night, Bronny shed tears; his dream had come true. At a press conference a few days later, the team’s coach, JJ Redick, tried to quiet any doubts. Bronny had earned the pick, he said, with hard work. At the time, some of LeBron’s critics saw this as contemptible. I wasn’t one of them. Why appoint yourself to the meritocracy police just to make LeBron and his son your first arrests? LeBron’s own father was never in his life. He was still sleeping on friends’ couches late into his childhood. Parenthood means something deep to him; he has described playing with his son as the biggest accomplishment of a career that includes four NBA titles and four MVP awards. There was something beautiful about him using the leverage that he’s amassed in the basketball world to make that happen, by dragging his first-born boy into the league. Was it nepotism? Sure, but human life is shot through with all kinds of advantages of birth, and Bronny’s didn’t seem the most important or unfair. LeBron deserves some empathy, even in the way he dealt with Smith. Nearly all parents experience something akin to his naive desire, a wish to give their kid the future of their dreams while shielding them from pain and disappointment. LeBron may have felt some anguish as he watched his son this season. Few things are as excruciating as watching your kids suffer. No amount of money or fame can insure against it. LeBron may well be haunted by his role in bringing about that suffering. But even one of the greatest athletes of our age doesn’t—and certainly shouldn’t—have the power to protect his adult son from criticism. Indeed, what power LeBron has derives from the intense public curiosity about him as a basketball player and as a person. He was able to conjure a plus-one for a family member on an NBA roster precisely because he has been the league’s main character for a generation now. The media were always going to be interested in Bronny’s performance on the court, even if he’d made it there according to his own ability—and all the more so because he seemingly did not. [Read: The secret code of pickup basketball] LeBron has had more exposure to the NBA’s media ecosystem than any other active player. He knows that it rewards viral rants that lionize or denigrate a player based on their most recent game. And he should have known that Bronny would not be exempt from that dynamic, no matter how fiercely his father was protecting him. Now, by appearing to threaten Smith, LeBron has not only acted like a petty strongman; he has drawn new attention to his son’s disappointing season, enlarging the very story that he sought to suppress. It’s a rare misstep for someone so media-savvy, who has amassed an enormous personal fortune while staying almost entirely scandal-free across a long career that began when he was still a teenager. The mistake is, perhaps, understandable. The emotions of parenthood are gigantic. They can knock anyone off their game, even the great LeBron James. Illustration Sources: Tim Heitman / Getty; Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty; Nathaniel S. Butler / Getty.
The Yiddish poet Chaim Grade survived World War II by fleeing his city, Vilna, now Vilnius, and wandering through the Soviet Union and its Central Asian republics. His wife and mother stayed behind and were murdered, probably in the Ponary forest outside Vilna, along with 75,000 others, mostly Jews. After the war, Grade moved to the United States and wrote some of the best novels in the Yiddish language, all woefully little known. Before he left for America, however, he went back to Vilna, previously a center of Eastern European Jewish cultural, intellectual, and religious life—“the Jerusalem of Lithuania.” In his memoir, My Mother’s Sabbath Days, he describes what he found there. The impossibility of conveying in ordinary Yiddish the experience of walking through the empty streets of one’s eradicated civilization pushes Grade into a biblical register. His mother’s home is intact, he writes, but cobwebs bar his entry “like the angels with flaming swords who barred Adam and Eve from returning to Eden.” Later, he goes to the Synagogue Courtyard. With its impressive library, ritual bath, and houses of worship great and small, it was the Lithuanian Jerusalem’s functional equivalent of the Holy Temple. Now the courtyard lies in ruins, and in his anguish, Grade’s voice takes on the proclamatory cadences of a prophet. Not just any prophet but, I think, Ezekiel, the subject of an early poem of his. Ezekiel did his prophesying from exile before and after the destruction of the First Temple in the Babylonian conquest of 586 B.C.E., another defining cataclysm in Jewish history. In Ezekiel’s most famous vision, he sees a valley full of dried bones and, channeling the words of God, raises the bones, creating an army of the resurrected. Grade wouldn’t have encountered bones—the Nazis ordered Ponary’s corpses to be dug up and burned during the war—but from under the heaps of stones come prayers, “all the prayers that Jews have uttered for hundreds of years.” He hears them without hearing them, because what screams, he says, is the silence. [Chris Heath: A secret diary of mass murder] Grade was born in 1910, came to the U.S. in 1948, and died in New York in 1982; he devoted the second half of his life to re-creating the universe wiped out in the first half. He turned to prose, a form better suited than poetry to inventorying the psychological and material conditions of a complex and divided society, and he developed an almost Flaubertian passion for detail. His main subjects were poor Jews—he himself grew up in a dark cellar behind a smithy—and the hermetic world of Lithuanian Misnagdic rabbis and their yeshivas, which relatively few Yiddish writers of the time knew or wrote much about. Scholarly and strict about Jewish law, Misnagdic Jews looked down on the anti-intellectual, antinomian mysticism of Hasidic Jews. If your image of Old World Jewry comes from Grade’s contemporary Isaac Bashevis Singer, with his kabbalists, dybbuks, and elaborate rabbinic courts, swap in Lithuanian Talmudists conducting self-critique and doing pilpul—close textual analysis—in spartan houses of study. Grade’s father was a maskil, an intellectual who adhered to the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, movement. But the general penury that followed World War I reduced him to working as a night watchman, and he died young, leaving Grade’s mother to support herself and Grade by selling fruit. She sent him to a yeshiva mostly because she could afford it, but also because she was devout. There he was trained in musar, a particularly rigorous—you might even say puritanical—strain of Misnagdic Judaism. Grade studied rabbinics into his 20s, then turned secular and became a member of Young Vilna, a now-legendary group of leftist, modernist Yiddish writers. Although he never became a practicing Jew again, he didn’t turn against his teachers and their maximalist approach. On the contrary, Grade observes their fictional counterparts with a knowing, sometimes cynical, but always loving eye. He doesn’t ridicule them, at least not unduly, nor does he apologize on their behalf, and their single-minded pursuit of Torah can be inspiring. Grade’s novels aren’t oracular, the way the section on postwar Vilna in his memoir was. But his ambition is still biblical. I don’t think the word overreaches. The Torah, thought to have been compiled over centuries in response to catastrophes and traumas, including that same Babylonian exile, is also a product of the impulse to preserve memories and knowledge all but lost in a calamity, lest the dispersed Jews forget who they’d been. Grade considered his undertaking a sort of holy assignment. “I’ve always found it strange that I have so little faith and yet believe, with complete faith, that Providence saved me and allowed me to live, in order to immortalize the great generation that I knew,” he wrote in a letter in 1977. Another striking feature of Grade’s fiction is that it almost never acknowledges the imminent annihilation of the world it so meticulously reconstructs—as if by ignoring that obscene fact, he could annul it. “The mission of his prose after the war is to undo the Holocaust through literature, if you can imagine such a thing,” the historian David Fishman, a friend of Grade’s and lifelong champion of his work, said at a 2012 conference on the writer at the Yiddish Book Center. The risk writers run when they set out to memorialize is that they’ll produce memorials, not literature. Grade didn’t do that. His novels jam almost too much life into their pages. That’s not a criticism, because the streets of prewar Jewish Eastern Europe also jostled and overflowed; Grade’s prose mimetically reproduces the way Jews thronged in their tight quarters. His major accomplishment, though, is at the level of the individual characters. They’re vortices of ambivalence, anxious and raw and at odds with themselves, hypercritical yet hypersensitive, repressed but not undersexed, subject to delusions of grandeur or abasement or both in turns. On the whole, they’re good people. They scheme and bicker and get on one another’s nerves, and yet they have deep family feeling, and few of his protagonists wholly free themselves from a yearning for contact with the divine. The dominant emotion in a Grade novel is tortured loyalty. Sons and Daughters is Grade’s last novel, and the most recent of his fictional works to be translated and published. He wrote it in weekly installments that appeared in Yiddish newspapers, with intermittent interruptions, from 1965 to 1976. When he died a few years later, Grade had adapted some of the columns into the first volume of a novel, but hadn’t finished the second. Neither the first nor the uncompleted second volume saw the light of day until they were brought out this year as a single novel in an English translation by Rose Waldman. Sons and Daughters unfolds during the early 1930s, primarily in shtetls in what was then Poland and is now mostly Lithuania and Belarus. It tells the stories of two families of rabbis that are fragmenting under the pressure of modernity. The rabbis, both of high repute, belong to different generations and display differing levels of stringency—the stricter is a grandfather; the other, his son-in-law, is more lenient but by no means lax. Both expect their own sons to become rabbis too, or at least Torah scholars, and their daughters to marry men of the same ilk. I can’t emphasize enough the intensity of the obligation felt by Jewish parents of the time to make sure that they vouchsafed a life of Torah to their children. Predictably, the children have other ideas. One daughter, loving but stubborn, leaves for Vilna to study nursing. The youngest son, the darling of both families, upsets his father and grandfather by openly aspiring to join the halutzim, or Zionist pioneers; the pious Jews of the day abhorred Zionists because they had the audacity to try to found a state in the Holy Land without the intervention of the Messiah. Even worse, Zionists cast off religious strictures, dressing immodestly and eating treyf (nonkosher) food. The most treyf of the sons is not a Zionist, though. He goes to Switzerland for a doctorate in philosophy, marries a non-Jewish Swiss woman, and doesn’t circumcise their son. Whether his parents realize the extent of his apostasy isn’t clear. The way the family avoids talking about it, you might think that confronting it directly would kill them. The theme of intergenerational conflict may sound familiar to anyone who is acquainted with Sholem Aleichem’s canonical “Tevye the Milkman” stories, or has seen Fiddler on the Roof, which is based on them—or, for that matter, has read Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, or even D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. The battle between parents and wayward children is the archetypal plot of modernization. But Grade has his own approach to it. Sholem Aleichem, the most important figure in the late-19th-century Yiddish renaissance, tells it from the father’s—Tevye’s—point of view. As Ruth Wisse points out in her study of Sholem Aleichem in The Modern Jewish Canon, all of his contemporaries writing on the same topic, in Yiddish or Hebrew or a non-Jewish language, more or less side with the rebels. Grade doesn’t wholeheartedly endorse the values of either generation, though he is slightly more sympathetic to the parents. That makes sense: Nothing strengthens the case for tradition more than its destruction. The parents draw us into their earnest struggle to repress their horror at their children’s deviations from religious norms. The wife of the younger couple plays deaf and lets disturbing information slide by. Her husband, Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen, makes a valiant effort not to recriminate; he blames himself for his children’s choices. Would that he were a simple Jew in a poor village, Sholem Shachne thinks. Then he wouldn’t have spoiled his children. His father-in-law, the more severe Rabbi Eli-Leizer Epstein, is not in the habit of second-guessing himself, and he will be harshly punished for his dogmatism by a deranged son. The son is his father’s fiendish double, an antic, self-loathing imp who, loudly proclaiming his adoration of Eli-Leizer, makes a mockery of him. This character may be Grade’s most magnificently grotesque creation, half demon, half schlemiel. His get-rich schemes end in disgrace; his marriage to a wealthy heiress bankrupts and breaks her. They move back to his hometown, ostensibly to run a store selling fancy china bequeathed to her by her father (which no one in the poor village wants, and which will soon be smashed to pieces), but really to stalk his father and demolish his reputation. Eli-Leizer comes to understand that his son’s aim is to hold up a hideously distorting mirror before him, “bringing him untold humiliation with the mimicking of his piety and his zealotry.” Eventually parents and children start to soften toward each other, but because Grade didn’t finish the second volume, we don’t know for sure whether or how he would have resolved the tensions. In any case, as readers know even if the characters don’t, the Germans would occupy eastern Poland in a few short years, making all other concerns irrelevant. In the background, Grade tracks the whirlwind of history as it picks up speed. Jewish socialist youth groups parade through the marketplace and put on a tumbling show that highlights their muscular and shockingly exposed limbs (they wear shorts). More menacingly, anti-Semitic Polish-nationalist hooligans have mounting success enforcing a boycott against Jewish merchants in villages across the region. All of this really happened in the ’30s. Toward the end of the book, Grade unites life and fiction in the character of a lapsed yeshiva bocher (student) named Khlavneh who has become a Yiddish poet. He is the fiancé of Sholem Shachne’s daughter, the one who went to Vilna to study nursing. Lest we fail to grasp that Khlavneh is a self-portrait, Grade drops hints. The daughter, for instance—an attractive, spirited woman, perhaps the most appealing figure in the novel—is named Bluma Rivtcha, a rhyming echo of Frumme-Liebe, the name of Grade’s murdered first wife, also a nurse and also the daughter of a rabbi. Bluma Rivtcha brings Khlavneh home to meet the family. Over Shabbos dinner, the brother who moved to Switzerland and no longer observes Jewish laws ridicules him for writing poetry in “jargon”—that is, Yiddish, the bastard language of the uneducated Jew, “a common person, an ignoramus, a boor”—rather than in Hebrew, and for thinking that he and his fellow Yiddish writers could capture the spirit and poetry of Jewish life without following Jewish law themselves. Khlavneh refutes the brother in a brilliant show of erudition, then concludes: “You hate the jargon boys and girls because they have the courage to be different from their fathers and grandfathers, even to wage battles with their fathers and grandfathers, and yet, they don’t run away from home.” The father, who everyone thinks will be offended by a guest’s outburst at the Sabbath table, laughs in delight. Grade, having fashioned a world in which the old fights mattered, now gets to win them. In Grade’s lifetime, he was considered one of the most important living Yiddish novelists—by those who could read Yiddish. When Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, some fellow Yiddish writers believed it should have gone to Grade instead. (In a 1974 review, Elie Wiesel had called him “one of the great—if not the greatest—of living Yiddish novelists,” and “the most authentic.”) But he never received the wider recognition he deserved. In 1969, Cynthia Ozick published a short story in Commentary called “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” which paints a comi-tragic picture of a literary universe that has room for only one famous Yiddish writer. An obscure Yiddish poet in New York named Edelshtein rages against an old friend and enemy—Ostrover, another Yiddish writer in New York—who is internationally acclaimed for his colorful tales of love and sexual perversion, dybbuks and other folkloric creatures. In a harassing late-night call, Edelshtein howls at Ostrover that the murder of Yiddish has turned him into a ghost who doesn’t even know he’s dead. [From the January 1979 issue: Lance Morrow on the spirited world of I. B. Singer] Ostrover is Singer, of course, and Edelshtein could have been Grade. Some scholars think he was; others say he was modeled on another forgotten genius, the poet Jacob Glatstein. Ozick herself once said that she’d based Edelshtein at least partially on an uncle, a Hebrew poet. Whichever writer she had in mind, it was a pitch-perfect portrayal of Grade’s situation. And he suffered an additional indignity: His name was posthumously all but erased by his widow, Inna. For whatever reasons, including possible mental instability, she foiled almost every attempt to publish his work, whether in Yiddish or in translation. After his death, she signed a contract with his English-language publisher Knopf to bring out Sons and Daughters (under a different title, The Rabbi’s House), but then she stopped responding to the book’s editor and the project stalled. His unpublished work became available to the public only after she died, in 2010. In the four decades since Grade’s death, Yiddish has had a revival. Chairs in Yiddish have been endowed at major universities. Klezmer is cool. The number of haredim, or ultra-Orthodox Jews, who grow up speaking Yiddish has risen and keeps rising: The haredi community has the highest rate of growth in the Jewish world. To be sure, none of this guarantees that Grade will finally get his due. As a rule, haredim don’t engage with secular texts. And many of those who learn the language in college or read it in translation are drawn to it because it’s coded as politically and sexually radical. In the old days, Yiddish—especially written Yiddish—was associated with women, who were not taught Hebrew. Yiddish literature and theater had their golden age in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when a Jewish left and a Jewish avant-garde defiantly embraced the then-stigmatized dialect. Today, it appeals to some in search of an alternative Judaism: Yiddish is not Hebrew, and therefore not Israeli. In the latest twist in the singular history of Yiddish, it has become the emblematic language of Jewish diasporism, the quest to reinvent a Judaism without a Jewish homeland. Grade’s work, however, is not radical. He dabbled in socialism in Vilna, but then he encountered Soviet Communism. He wrote sympathetically about women and created formidable female characters, but his protagonists are mostly male (as is rabbinic society), and I wouldn’t call him a feminist. Nor does Grade’s account of life in prewar Europe support the diasporist claim that Jews would be perfectly safe without a state. In the introduction to Sons and Daughters, Adam Kirsch calls it “probably the last great Yiddish novel.” In all likelihood, he’s right, but I like to think that a vibrant Yiddish literary culture just might emerge from the ranks of the religious, as it did in 19th-century Europe. Ex-haredim such as Shalom Auslander are writing remarkable memoirs and novels. Admittedly, they’re in English. Any real renaissance of the Yiddish novel would require a critical mass of native Yiddish speakers and writers, who almost certainly would have to come from ultra-Orthodox enclaves—which is not unimaginable. Hasidim are already producing historical and adventure novels in Yiddish. In 2022, the Forward ran an essay by Yossi Newfield, who was raised as a Hasidic Jew, about his discovery of Grade’s novel The Yeshiva: “The struggles Grade so masterfully described between faith and doubt, between Torah and the world, in his words, di kloyz un di gas, were my own.” Intentionally or not, Newfield echoed something Grade wrote in a letter in 1973: “The writer inside me is a thoroughly ancient Jew, while the man inside me wants to be thoroughly modern. This is my calamity, plain and simple, a struggle I cannot win.” The struggle may be an affliction, but it fueled Grade’s masterpieces. Who knows? The next great Yiddish novelist may be growing up in haredi Brooklyn right now. This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Last Great Yiddish Novel.”
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. Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition. Some films impart a message that lasts, especially if they offer another way to see the world. The Atlantic’s writers and editors answer the question: What is a movie that changed your mind? The following contains spoilers for the films mentioned. Priscilla (streaming on Max) Priscilla, Sofia Coppola’s 2023 film about Priscilla Beaulieu’s relationship with Elvis Presley, is terrific to look at but hard to watch. Priscilla is 14 when she meets an already famous 24-year-old Elvis. While still a teenager, she moves with her future husband to Graceland, where she wears sophisticated clothes and sits in plush rooms. As the film critic Anthony Lane wrote in a New Yorker review, to call the movie superficial, “even more so than Coppola’s other films, is no derogation, because surfaces are her subject.” Priscilla is a revisionist project: It aims to tell the other side of Elvis’s story, to convey another perspective on a beloved cultural figure whose life has been the subject of countless books and biopics. So I wasn’t surprised that I left the theater unsettled, with a darker view of this artist whose songs I’d sung in elementary-school revues and whose home I’d visited on a high-school-band trip. But beyond the straightforward record-correcting objective of the movie (which is inspired by Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me), Coppola’s choice to end the film on a stark, ambiguous note reminded me that an abrupt conclusion can be as satisfying as a tidy one. That, in a movie concerned with the way things seem, feels true to life. — Lora Kelley, associate editor *** The Death of Stalin (streaming on Pluto TV) Totalitarianism, when it’s not terrifying, can be absurd—the constant bowing to a Dear Leader, the seemingly arbitrary list of enemies and outlawed ideas that change every hour, the silly pomp of statues and parading armies. It’s almost impossible to capture the humor without undermining the horror. But The Death of Stalin, Armando Iannucci’s 2017 satire, brilliantly reveals the ridiculous side of authoritarian rule, and it opened my eyes to the small, shuffling, utterly banal individuals who undergird even the scariest systems. Iannucci makes little effort at historical accuracy—I mean, Steve Buscemi plays Nikita Khrushchev—but he gets at deeper truths. The story takes place following the sudden death of the titular dictator. The power vacuum that opens is filled with scheming and backstabbing politicians, including Khrushchev, Lavrentiy Beria, and Georgy Malenkov. But Iannucci mines it all for laughs, and they are plentiful. The pettiness, the servility, the insecurity of these men are all on display as they spin around Stalin’s corpse. And watching this transfer of power reduced to a bizarre human drama reminds you about what makes tyranny possible: very ordinary people. — Gal Beckerman, staff writer *** Rivers and Tides (streaming on Tubi) When a friend first showed me Rivers and Tides, I had never heard of Andy Goldsworthy, and I had surely never seen anyone do what he did. The documentary follows the British artist through fields, forests, and tidelands as he creates sculptures and ephemeral works from materials he finds, often challenging our assumptions of what those materials, and their environments, even are. One frigid morning, we observe Goldsworthy snapping icicles apart, and whittling them with his teeth, to reconstruct them into a fluid form that seems to cut back and forth through a boulder; when the rising sun finally hits the sculpture, it’s spectacular. Another day, we see him collect fallen autumn leaves and arrange them over a pool of water into a surreal graphic gradient. Witnessing his way of seeing and collaborating with the world around him transformed me. I haven’t looked at a leaf—or twigs, or snow, or even stone—the same since. — Kelsey J. Waite, senior copy editor *** The Devil Wears Prada (streaming on FuboTV and Prime Video) The Devil Wears Prada came out in June 2006, the same month I graduated from college. I saw it in a movie theater a few weeks into my first full-time job, and it was a revelation to watch its portrayal of the compromises, disappointments, and small victories that come with pursuing a career. The Devil Wears Prada is heightened and fantastical and unbelievable in all sorts of ways: The protagonist, Andy (the role that made me love Anne Hathaway forever), wears over-the-top clothes in an impossibly sleek office and kisses a suave older man on a lamp-lit Paris street. But the film is remarkably realistic and perceptive about work. Andy makes professional choices that alienate her from her parents, her friends, and her boyfriend. Even she doesn’t seem to fully understand why she is so determined to succeed at a job she never wanted in the first place. The film ends with her throwing her phone into a fountain and taking a job that more clearly aligns with her values and goals. But what’s stuck with me are the scenes where she is trying as hard as she can to prove to her boss, and to herself, that she can do anything that’s asked of her. Her ambition is remarkable—and it’s served as both an inspiration and a cautionary tale to me in the many years since. — Eleanor Barkhorn, senior editor *** Anora (available to rent on YouTube, streaming on Hulu March 17) Of all the sex workers depicted in films, the titular protagonist of Anora—a movie that deserves at least three of its five Oscars—might be one of the few who actually feels like a worker. At the strip club, Anora has shifts, a boss, and a mean colleague. Although sex work is technically illegal (albeit somewhat decriminalized) in New York City, she seems to have a somewhat normal job—until one night, when she gets close to Vanya, a new client. The story progresses like “Cinderella,” except the prince is the mediocre son of a Russian oligarch. Vanya marries Anora and gives her a taste of his opulent life. But when Vanya’s parents find out about the marriage, the love story is over. Before watching Anora, I’d imagined that if work conditions improved for sex workers, they would be treated humanely. But Anora showed me—or perhaps reminded me—that society’s contempt for women in this industry is profound, and that better policies, important as they are, might never change that. The beauty of Anora is that it never occurs to her that she is less-than. That a scion of the Russian oligarchy was never going to stay married to her seemed obvious to all of the characters—and perhaps also to the audience—but not to her. Anora screams and fights back, but even she has a limit to the amount of humiliation she can take. At the end of the movie, unable to continue holding her head high, she collapses into tears. — Gisela Salim-Peyer, associate editor Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: His daughter was America’s first measles death in a decade. Teens are forgoing a classic rite of passage. Meet the strictest headmistress in Britain. The Week Ahead Snow White, a live-action remake starring Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot (in theaters Friday) The Residence, a murder-mystery show about an eccentric detective who must solve a murder at a White House dinner (premieres Thursday on Netflix) Red Scare, a book by Clay Risen about McCarthyism and the anti-Communist witch hunt (out Tuesday) Essay Pierre Crom / Getty My Hometown Became a Different Country By Tetiana Kotelnykova Horlivka had always been a Russian-speaking city, but before 2014, our graduation ceremonies and school concerts were held in Ukrainian. We would sing the Ukrainian national anthem at the end of every event. Then, suddenly, the Ukrainian flags were taken down. The anthem was no longer sung. The Ukrainian language vanished from classrooms. The disappearance was so abrupt and absolute that it felt unreal, like a dream whose meaning was obscure to me. I remember asking my teacher why everything had altered so drastically. She didn’t have an answer—or maybe she was just too afraid to say. Read the full article. More in Culture Bong Joon Ho will always root for the losers. The man who owned 181 Renoirs Megan Garber: “I can’t stop talking about The Traitors.” An unabashedly intellectual murder mystery There’s nothing else like Netflix’s Mo. “Dear James”: I hate playing with my children. Catch Up on The Atlantic Elon Musk looks desperate, Charlie Warzel writes. Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is a trial run. Don’t invite a recession in. Photo Album A cheerleader entertains the crowd during the annual Moomba Festival, in Melbourne, Australia. (William West / AFP / Getty) Take a look at these photos of the week, which show a cheerleader in Australia, a train-pulling record attempt in Egypt, Holi celebrations in India, and more. Explore all of our newsletters. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
Nigel Farage loves Donald Trump. The 60-year-old’s day job is as the parliamentary representative for the English seaside town of Clacton, and as the leader of Reform, the latest of his populist right-wing parties. But Farage is often focused on America, and his heavily advertised friendship with the 47th president. He was in Washington, D.C., for the inauguration (and chafing that he didn’t get a prime spot in the Capitol Rotunda). He was also onstage last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference, joking to his American audience that “you gave us ‘woke,’ and we gave you Prince Harry.” As the leader of a party with fewer than half a dozen members of Parliament, Farage knows that his American profile gives him a grandeur he would not otherwise possess. In December, he posed with Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago under a portrait of a young Trump in cricket whites. Days after Trump survived an assassination attempt in July, Farage flew to the United States on a mission funded by a wealthy Reform donor. On his parliamentary financial-disclosure form, Farage recorded the purpose of his trip as being “to support a friend who was almost killed and to represent Clacton on the world stage.” Lucky Clacton. But now Farage’s embrace of Trump has become a liability. The 47th president is broadly unpopular in Britain, where Farage hopes to improve the 14.3 percent vote share he received in last year’s election. (He likely needs to at least double that proportion if he wants to be prime minister one day.) Even worse for him, Trump’s MAGA movement is seen as overtly racist and pro-Russia, two huge turnoffs for the majority of British voters. Even Britain’s right-wing newspapers were outraged by Trump’s shabby treatment of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, while Reform’s existing voters are already outliers in their sharply anti-immigration views. Heading further to the right is not a winning strategy in Britain. Or elsewhere, really. “The populist right around the world has a MAGA problem,” Sunder Katwala, the director of the think tank British Future, told me. “There is a backfire effect in countries that aren’t America.” [Anne Applebaum: The rise of the brutal American] Key figures in Trumpworld, such as Musk and Steve Bannon, continually urge European populists to take more extreme positions on race, immigration, and cultural issues. Hard-liners usually point to the success of the German far-right party AfD (known in English as Alternative for Germany), which placed second in the country’s recent elections, its best showing ever. Musk had enthusiastically endorsed the AfD’s leader, Alice Weidel, and he celebrated the result with a personal phone call to her. In truth, the AfD did not achieve the electoral breakthrough its leaders hoped for. Although conditions were perfect for a populist surge—Germany’s economy is stagnant, and a car attack by an Afghan refugee 10 days before the vote helped keep immigration at the forefront of the national conversation—the AfD struggled to gain a foothold outside the former East Germany. Other parties still refuse to include it in coalition talks. By dabbling in German politics, Trumpworld’s second-most-powerful figure hurt his own business interests while being at best irrelevant to the AfD’s performance. The party “got nothing out of Musk’s backing,” Katwala told me. “It transformed Tesla’s reputation in Germany, but did nothing for the AfD.” Ultimately, Trump’s fundamental positions have limited appeal to most European electorates. His abandonment of Ukraine is so unpopular in Europe that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen—two natural MAGA sympathizers—have carefully distanced themselves from it. As MAGA becomes ever more extreme, allies such as Farage must decide how far to go along with it—in the knowledge that, if they do not oblige, their domestic rivals will. The Reform leader has just fallen out with one of his five MPs, in a drama precipitated by (who else?) Musk, which played out on (where else?) X. Back in January, Trump’s “first buddy” declared his support for the agitator Tommy Robinson, whom Musk credited with publicizing the so-called grooming gangs of men, mostly British citizens of Pakistani descent, who raped and trafficked girls in towns across England. But Farage recognizes Robinson for what he is: a rabble-rouser with numerous criminal convictions. When the Reform leader repeated his long-standing refusal to admit Robinson to his party, Musk declared that Farage “doesn’t have what it takes.” [Read: Elon has appointed himself king of the world] Musk’s preferred alternative to lead Reform was Rupert Lowe, a 67-year-old who used to be chairman of a soccer club. Lowe’s day job is representing another English seaside town, Great Yarmouth, in Parliament. But his passion is posting on X. His disclosure forms show that he now makes about $4,000 a month from pumping out spicy takes on Musk’s social network, and all the attention appears to have gone to Lowe’s head. He recently told the Daily Mail that Farage saw himself as a “Messiah” and that Reform risked being a “protest party” unless its leader surrounded himself with good people. By enormous coincidence, soon after the interview was published, Lowe was suspended from Reform for alleged HR violations. Cast out from Farage’s party, Lowe has since become even more extreme—a known side effect of spending too much time on social media. He wants the families of grooming-gang offenders deported from Britain, not just men convicted of crimes—and perhaps even “entire communities” of British Pakistanis, who he says have ignored the problem. (The white police officers and social workers who might face the same accusation do not appear to bother him.) Lowe claims that his party leader tried to stop him from expressing these views, an assertion that I instinctively believe; Farage, sometimes known as the father of Brexit, has succeeded in disrupting British politics because he knows when a dog whistle is preferable to a whistle. He has repeatedly forced out people from his various parties when their inflammatory rhetoric tipped into overt extremism. In 2018, he left the U.K. Independence Party after it appointed Robinson as an adviser. Farage has a winning formula, Katwala believes: be guided by the British press. “If the Mail and The Telegraph think the candidate has a racism problem, ditch them,” he said, referring to two right-leaning papers. “If it’s just The Guardian”—which leans left—“you’re fine.” In the U.S., however, any such boundaries have collapsed. The breadth of permitted opinion, Katwala said, “goes all the way out to the Proud Boys”—the far-right group whose leader was jailed for his part in the Capitol insurrection, and then pardoned by Trump. Voters outside the United States have one more objection to the MAGA movement: Trump and his allies talk about other countries in a profoundly alienating way. “America First”? Fine, but not “America Thinks Your Tin-Pot Country Is a Joke.” The toxic combination of Trump’s pro-Russia leanings, Vice President J. D. Vance’s arrogance and condescension, and Musk’s sad case of advanced poster’s disease have tanked America’s reputation among its traditional allies. The exultant right-wing influencers who cheer on MAGA’s sassy clapback anti-diplomacy should remember that insulting another country’s politicians is like insulting someone else’s family. I can be rude about my sister, but you can’t. The Trump administration has revived almost every negative stereotype that Europeans have about Americans: too loud, too brash, too big. Vance, who lectures U.S. allies about how to run their affairs, reminds us of every rich guy from suburban Pittsburgh who visits the Amalfi Coast in the summer, drives up the pedestrianized streets, and then complains that the pasta is too chewy and there’s no AC in his 15th-century villa. As a result, even formerly bloodless technocrats have found new vigor when being picked on by the Trump administration. So far, the net effect of MAGA foreign policy has been to get exactly zero concessions from Moscow, while simultaneously reviving the fortunes of Canada’s Liberal Party and helping the mainstream center-right win in Greenland. The new prime minister of Canada, the former central banker Mark Carney, was able to appeal to voters’ patriotism when rebutting Trump’s demand to annex his country, and his punitive tariffs. “Americans should make no mistake—in trade, as in hockey, Canada will win,” Carney said, after taking over the Liberal leadership from Justin Trudeau. The Liberals have been able to stop their opponent Pierre Poilievre’s momentum by painting him as a MAGA lackey. “A person who worships at the altar of Donald Trump will kneel before him, not stand up to him,” Carney said. Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s center-right Christian Democrats, has been similarly energized. During a televised debate ahead of the recent German elections, he attacked the AfD for drawing support from the MAGA movement, painting his rivals as unpatriotic. “The interventions from Washington were no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have seen from Moscow,” he added. Ben Ansell, a University of Oxford politics professor, believes that MAGA’s sympathy for Moscow has given Europe’s mainstream politicians a potent attack line. “We may finally be witnessing the moment of hubris for the past decade’s unstoppable rise of populism,” he wrote in a recent Substack post. When mainstream politicians attack conservative populists, the latter can easily shrug off any criticism as the revenge of elites. “Populists who actually side with an existing foreign enemy, though? Well, that clarifies matters. Now every decision the populist takes can be tied to the foreign enemy.” In recent weeks, Farage’s approval ratings have noticeably fallen. [Read: How not to hand populists a weapon] “If you’re being directly attacked by Trump and you have your own elections, it’s hard to imagine being very successful in those elections by saying: Yes, please,” Ansell told me. Farage is plainly struggling to balance his desire to be close to MAGA with his domestic ambitions. Populist parties define themselves as being against the status quo and the mainstream, but many of their members (and voters) hold eclectic and divergent views on economics and other issues. “These parties are more fragile than people have thought, and now you have this little lever that mainstream parties can use to split them apart—their closeness to much hated figures,” Ansell told me. European voters have long been wary of Moscow’s intentions. What’s new is a sense that the people now running the United States have lined up with Russia—and against Europe. “Vladimir Putin has been around for a quarter of a century,” Ansell said. “It’s Musk and Trump.” Populists outside America might love the reflected glow of MAGA’s power and success, but being linked to the Trump administration means tethering themselves, in the eyes of their home audiences, to an unpopular president, his unpopular celebrity adviser, his unpopular stance on Ukraine, and his unpopular bullying tactics. That is populists’ MAGA problem—and the mainstream’s opportunity to fight back.
In October 1970, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.” In his Nobel Prize lecture, Solzhenitsyn, one of the greatest and most influential writers of the 20th century, warned against the suppression of literature, which helps preserve national memory and truth, and appealed to artists and writers to stand against oppressive governments and violent acts and extravagant lies. “The world is being inundated by the brazen conviction that power can do anything, justice nothing,” the man who had spent nearly a decade in the labor camps of the Gulag told a complacent world. “The price of cowardice will only be evil; we shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.” Solzhenitsyn had served time in Russian prison and labor camps for having criticized Josef Stalin in correspondence with a school friend. He declined to attend the prize-giving ceremony himself, for fear of not being allowed to return to the Soviet Union. (His new wife was expecting their first child.) The text of the address, portions of which are below, was secretly sent to Stockholm and published in 1972. Writers and artists, Solzhenitsyn said, would conquer falsehoods in the end. The “nakedness of violence” would be “revealed in all its ugliness.” And one word of truth would “outweigh the whole world.” His admonition and courage and confidence were needed then, including in Russia; they are needed now, even in America. The “fog of lies” can envelop even shining cities on hills. —Peter Wehner Just as that puzzled savage who has picked up—a strange cast-up from the ocean?—something unearthed from the sands?—or an obscure object fallen down from the sky?—intricate in curves, it gleams first dully and then with a bright thrust of light. Just as he turns it this way and that, turns it over, trying to discover what to do with it, trying to discover some mundane function within his own grasp, never dreaming of its higher function. So also we, holding Art in our hands, confidently consider ourselves to be its masters; boldly we direct it, we renew, reform and manifest it; we sell it for money, use it to please those in power; turn to it at one moment for amusement—right down to popular songs and night-clubs, and at another— grabbing the nearest weapon, cork or cudgel—for the passing needs of politics and for narrow-minded social ends. But art is not defiled by our efforts, neither does it thereby depart from its true nature, but on each occasion and in each application it gives to us a part of its secret inner light. But shall we ever grasp the whole of that light? Who will dare to say that he has DEFINED Art, enumerated all its facets? Perhaps once upon a time someone understood and told us, but we could not remain satisfied with that for long; we listened, and neglected, and threw it out there and then, hurrying as always to exchange even the very best—if only for something new! And when we are told again the old truth, we shall not even remember that we once possessed it. One artist sees himself as the creator of an independent spiritual world; he hoists onto his shoulders the task of creating this world, of peopling it and of bearing the all-embracing responsibility for it; but he crumples beneath it, for a mortal genius is not capable of bearing such a burden. Just as man in general, having declared himself the centre of existence, has not succeeded in creating a balanced spiritual system. And if misfortune overtakes him, he casts the blame upon the age-long disharmony of the world, upon the complexity of today’s ruptured soul, or upon the stupidity of the public. Another artist, recognizing a higher power above, gladly works as a humble apprentice beneath God’s heaven; then, however, his responsibility for everything that is written or drawn, for the souls which perceive his work, is more exacting than ever. But, in return, it is not he who has created this world, not he who directs it, there is no doubt as to its foundations; the artist has merely to be more keenly aware than others of the harmony of the world, of the beauty and ugliness of the human contribution to it, and to communicate this acutely to his fellow-men. And in misfortune, and even at the depths of existence—in destitution, in prison, in sickness—his sense of stable harmony never deserts him. But all the irrationality of art, its dazzling turns, its unpredictable discoveries, its shattering influence on human beings—they are too full of magic to be exhausted by this artist’s vision of the world, by his artistic conception or by the work of his unworthy fingers. Archaeologists have not discovered stages of human existence so early that they were without art. Right back in the early morning twilights of mankind we received it from Hands which we were too slow to discern. And we were too slow to ask: FOR WHAT PURPOSE have we been given this gift? What are we to do with it? And they were mistaken, and will always be mistaken, who prophesy that art will disintegrate, that it will outlive its forms and die. It is we who shall die— art will remain. And shall we comprehend, even on the day of our destruction, all its facets and all its possibilities? Not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words. Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience. Through art we are sometimes visited—dimly, briefly—by revelations such as cannot be produced by rational thinking. Like that little looking-glass from the fairy-tales: look into it and you will see —not yourself—but for one second, the Inaccessible, whither no man can ride, no man fly. And only the soul gives a groan … One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: “Beauty will save the world”. What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes—but whom has it saved? There is, however, a certain peculiarity in the essence of beauty, a peculiarity in the status of art: namely, the convincingness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable and it forces even an opposing heart to surrender. It is possible to compose an outwardly smooth and elegant political speech, a headstrong article, a social program, or a philosophical system on the basis of both a mistake and a lie. What is hidden, what distorted, will not immediately become obvious. Then a contradictory speech, article, program, a differently constructed philosophy rallies in opposition—and all just as elegant and smooth, and once again it works. Which is why such things are both trusted and mistrusted. In vain to reiterate what does not reach the heart. But a work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force— they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them. So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through—then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar TO THAT VERY SAME PLACE, and in so doing will fulfill the work of all three? In that case Dostoevsky’s remark, “Beauty will save the world”, was not a careless phrase but a prophecy? After all HE was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination. And in that case art, literature might really be able to help the world today? It is the small insight which, over the years, I have succeeded in gaining into this matter that I shall attempt to lay before you here today. In order to mount this platform from which the Nobel lecture is read, a platform offered to far from every writer and only once in a lifetime, I have climbed not three or four makeshift steps, but hundreds and even thousands of them; unyielding, precipitous, frozen steps, leading out of the darkness and cold where it was my fate to survive, while others— perhaps with a greater gift and stronger than I—have perished. Of them, I myself met but a few on the Archipelago of GULAG, shattered into its fractionary multitude of islands; and beneath the millstone of shadowing and mistrust I did not talk to them all, of some I only heard, of others still I only guessed. Those who fell into that abyss already bearing a literary name are at least known, but how many were never recognized, never once mentioned in public? And virtually no one managed to return. A whole national literature remained there, cast into oblivion not only without a grave, but without even underclothes, naked, with a number tagged on to its toe. Russian literature did not cease for a moment, but from the outside it appeared a wasteland! Where a peaceful forest could have grown, there remained, after all the felling, two or three trees overlooked by chance. And as I stand here today, accompanied by the shadows of the fallen, with bowed head allowing others who were worthy before to pass ahead of me to this place, as I stand here, how am I to divine and to express what THEY would have wished to say? This obligation has long weighed upon us, and we have understood it. In the words of Vladimir Solov’ev: Even in chains we ourselves must complete That circle which the gods have mapped out for us. Frequently, in painful camp seethings, in a column of prisoners, when chains of lanterns pierced the gloom of the evening frosts, there would well up inside us the words that we should like to cry out to the whole world, if the whole world could hear one of us. Then it seemed so clear: what our successful ambassador would say, and how the world would immediately respond with its comment. Our horizon embraced quite distinctly both physical things and spiritual movements, and it saw no lop-sidedness in the indivisible world. These ideas did not come from books, neither were they imported for the sake of coherence. They were formed in conversations with people now dead, in prison cells and by forest fires, they were tested against THAT life, they grew out of THAT existence. When at last the outer pressure grew a little weaker, my and our horizon broadened and gradually, albeit through a minute chink, we saw and knew “the whole world”. And to our amazement the whole world was not at all as we had expected, as we had hoped; that is to say a world living “not by that”, a world leading “not there”, a world which could exclaim at the sight of a muddy swamp, “what a delightful little puddle!”, at concrete neck stocks, “what an exquisite necklace!”; but instead a world where some weep inconsolate tears and others dance to a light-hearted musical. How could this happen? Why the yawning gap? Were we insensitive? Was the world insensitive? Or is it due to language differences? Why is it that people are not able to hear each other’s every distinct utterance? Words cease to sound and run away like water—without taste, colour, smell. Without trace. As I have come to understand this, so through the years has changed and changed again the structure, content and tone of my potential speech. The speech I give today. And it has little in common with its original plan, conceived on frosty camp evenings. From time immemorial man has been made in such a way that his vision of the world, so long as it has not been instilled under hypnosis, his motivations and scale of values, his actions and intentions are determined by his personal and group experience of life. As the Russian saying goes, “Do not believe your brother, believe your own crooked eye.” And that is the most sound basis for an understanding of the world around us and of human conduct in it. And during the long epochs when our world lay spread out in mystery and wilderness, before it became encroached by common lines of communication, before it was transformed into a single, convulsively pulsating lump—men, relying on experience, ruled without mishap within their limited areas, within their communities, within their societies, and finally on their national territories. At that time it was possible for individual human beings to perceive and accept a general scale of values, to distinguish between what is considered normal, what incredible; what is cruel and what lies beyond the boundaries of wickedness; what is honesty, what deceit. And although the scattered peoples led extremely different lives and their social values were often strikingly at odds, just as their systems of weights and measures did not agree, still these discrepancies surprised only occasional travellers, were reported in journals under the name of wonders, and bore no danger to mankind which was not yet one. But now during the past few decades, imperceptibly, suddenly, mankind has become one—hopefully one and dangerously one—so that the concussions and inflammations of one of its parts are almost instantaneously passed on to others, sometimes lacking in any kind of necessary immunity. Mankind has become one, but not steadfastly one as communities or even nations used to be; not united through years of mutual experience, neither through possession of a single eye, affectionately called crooked, nor yet through a common native language, but, surpassing all barriers, through international broadcasting and print. An avalanche of events descends upon us—in one minute half the world hears of their splash. But the yardstick by which to measure those events and to evaluate them in accordance with the laws of unfamiliar parts of the world—this is not and cannot be conveyed via soundwaves and in newspaper columns. For these yardsticks were matured and assimilated over too many years of too specific conditions in individual countries and societies; they cannot be exchanged in mid-air. In the various parts of the world men apply their own hard-earned values to events, and they judge stubbornly, confidently, only according to their own scales of values and never according to any others. And if there are not many such different scales of values in the world, there are at least several; one for evaluating events near at hand, another for events far away; aging societies possess one, young societies another; unsuccessful people one, successful people another. The divergent scales of values scream in discordance, they dazzle and daze us, and in order that it might not be painful we steer clear of all other values, as though from insanity, as though from illusion, and we confidently judge the whole world according to our own home values. Which is why we take for the greater, more painful and less bearable disaster not that which is in fact greater, more painful and less bearable, but that which lies closest to us. Everything which is further away, which does not threaten this very day to invade our threshold—with all its groans, its stifled cries, its destroyed lives, even if it involves millions of victims—this we consider on the whole to be perfectly bearable and of tolerable proportions. In one part of the world, not so long ago, under persecutions not inferior to those of the ancient Romans’, hundreds of thousands of silent Christians gave up their lives for their belief in God. In the other hemisphere a certain madman, (and no doubt he is not alone), speeds across the ocean to DELIVER us from religion—with a thrust of steel into the high priest! He has calculated for each and every one of us according to his personal scale of values! That which from a distance, according to one scale of values, appears as enviable and flourishing freedom, at close quarters, and according to other values, is felt to be infuriating constraint calling for buses to be overthrown. That which in one part of the world might represent a dream of incredible prosperity, in another has the exasperating effect of wild exploitation demanding immediate strike. There are different scales of values for natural catastrophes: a flood craving two hundred thousand lives seems less significant than our local accident. There are different scales of values for personal insults: sometimes even an ironic smile or a dismissive gesture is humiliating, while for others cruel beatings are forgiven as an unfortunate joke. There are different scales of values for punishment and wickedness: according to one, a month’s arrest, banishment to the country, or an isolation-cell where one is fed on white rolls and milk, shatters the imagination and fills the newspaper columns with rage. While according to another, prison sentences of twenty-five years, isolation-cells where the walls are covered with ice and the prisoners stripped to their underclothes, lunatic asylums for the sane, and countless unreasonable people who for some reason will keep running away, shot on the frontiers—all this is common and accepted. While the mind is especially at peace concerning that exotic part of the world about which we know virtually nothing, from which we do not even receive news of events, but only the trivial, out-of-date guesses of a few correspondents. Yet we cannot reproach human vision for this duality, for this dumbfounded incomprehension of another man’s distant grief, man is just made that way. But for the whole of mankind, compressed into a single lump, such mutual incomprehension presents the threat of imminent and violent destruction. One world, one mankind cannot exist in the face of six, four or even two scales of values: we shall be torn apart by this disparity of rhythm, this disparity of vibrations. A man with two hearts is not for this world, neither shall we be able to live side by side on one Earth. But who will co-ordinate these value scales, and how? Who will create for mankind one system of interpretation, valid for good and evil deeds, for the unbearable and the bearable, as they are differentiated today? Who will make clear to mankind what is really heavy and intolerable and what only grazes the skin locally? Who will direct the anger to that which is most terrible and not to that which is nearer? Who might succeed in transferring such an understanding beyond the limits of his own human experience? Who might succeed in impressing upon a bigoted, stubborn human creature the distant joy and grief of others, an understanding of dimensions and deceptions which he himself has never experienced? Propaganda, constraint, scientific proof—all are useless. But fortunately there does exist such a means in our world! That means is art. That means is literature. They can perform a miracle: they can overcome man’s detrimental peculiarity of learning only from personal experience so that the experience of other people passes him by in vain. From man to man, as he completes his brief spell on Earth, art transfers the whole weight of an unfamiliar, lifelong experience with all its burdens, its colours, its sap of life; it recreates in the flesh an unknown experience and allows us to possess it as our own. And even more, much more than that; both countries and whole continents repeat each other’s mistakes with time lapses which can amount to centuries. Then, one would think, it would all be so obvious! But no; that which some nations have already experienced, considered and rejected, is suddenly discovered by others to be the latest word. And here again, the only substitute for an experience we ourselves have never lived through is art, literature. They possess a wonderful ability: beyond distinctions of language, custom, social structure, they can convey the life experience of one whole nation to another. To an inexperienced nation they can convey a harsh national trial lasting many decades, at best sparing an entire nation from a superfluous, or mistaken, or even disastrous course, thereby curtailing the meanderings of human history. It is this great and noble property of art that I urgently recall to you today from the Nobel tribune. And literature conveys irrefutable condensed experience in yet another invaluable direction; namely, from generation to generation. Thus it becomes the living memory of the nation. Thus it preserves and kindles within itself the flame of her spent history, in a form which is safe from deformation and slander. In this way literature, together with language, protects the soul of the nation. (In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the levelling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion, but its discussion remains another question. Here it is merely fitting to say that the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.) But woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against “freedom of print”, it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another. Silent generations grow old and die without ever having talked about themselves, either to each other or to their descendants. When writers such as Achmatova and Zamjatin—interred alive throughout their lives—are condemned to create in silence until they die, never hearing the echo of their written words, then that is not only their personal tragedy, but a sorrow to the whole nation, a danger to the whole nation. In some cases moreover—when as a result of such a silence the whole of history ceases to be understood in its entirety—it is a danger to the whole of mankind. At various times and in various countries there have arisen heated, angry and exquisite debates as to whether art and the artist should be free to live for themselves, or whether they should be for ever mindful of their duty towards society and serve it albeit in an unprejudiced way. For me there is no dilemma, but I shall refrain from raising once again the train of arguments. One of the most brilliant addresses on this subject was actually Albert Camus’ Nobel speech, and I would happily subscribe to his conclusions. Indeed, Russian literature has for several decades manifested an inclination not to become too lost in contemplation of itself, not to flutter about too frivolously. I am not ashamed to continue this tradition to the best of my ability. Russian literature has long been familiar with the notions that a writer can do much within his society, and that it is his duty to do so. Let us not violate the RIGHT of the artist to express exclusively his own experiences and introspections, disregarding everything that happens in the world beyond. Let us not DEMAND of the artist, but—reproach, beg, urge and entice him—that we may be allowed to do. After all, only in part does he himself develop his talent; the greater part of it is blown into him at birth as a finished product, and the gift of talent imposes responsibility on his free will. Let us assume that the artist does not OWE anybody anything: nevertheless, it is painful to see how, by retiring into his self-made worlds or the spaces of his subjective whims, he CAN surrender the real world into the hands of men who are mercenary, if not worthless, if not insane. Our Twentieth Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors. Our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, racial conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes. The primeval refusal to accept a compromise has been turned into a theoretical principle and is considered the virtue of orthodoxy. It demands millions of sacrifices in ceaseless civil wars, it drums into our souls that there is no such thing as unchanging, universal concepts of goodness and justice, that they are all fluctuating and inconstant. Therefore the rule—always do what’s most profitable to your party. Any professional group no sooner sees a convenient opportunity to BREAK OFF A PIECE, even if it be unearned, even if it be superfluous, than it breaks it off there and then and no matter if the whole of society comes tumbling down. As seen from the outside, the amplitude of the tossings of western society is approaching that point beyond which the system becomes metastable and must fall. Violence, less and less embarrassed by the limits imposed by centuries of lawfulness, is brazenly and victoriously striding across the whole world, unconcerned that its infertility has been demonstrated and proved many times in history. What is more, it is not simply crude power that triumphs abroad, but its exultant justification. The world is being inundated by the brazen conviction that power can do anything, justice nothing. Dostoevsky’s DEVILS—apparently a provincial nightmare fantasy of the last century—are crawling across the whole world in front of our very eyes, infesting countries where they could not have been dreamed of; and by means of the hijackings, kidnappings, explosions and fires of recent years they are announcing their determination to shake and destroy civilization! And they may well succeed. The young, at an age when they have not yet any experience other than sexual, when they do not yet have years of personal suffering and personal understanding behind them, are jubilantly repeating our depraved Russian blunders of the Nineteenth Century, under the impression that they are discovering something new. They acclaim the latest wretched degradation on the part of the Chinese Red Guards as a joyous example. In shallow lack of understanding of the age-old essence of mankind, in the naive confidence of inexperienced hearts they cry: let us drive away THOSE cruel, greedy oppressors, governments, and the new ones (we!), having laid aside grenades and rifles, will be just and understanding. Far from it! . . . But of those who have lived more and understand, those who could oppose these young—many do not dare oppose, they even suck up, anything not to appear “conservative”. Another Russian phenomenon of the Nineteenth Century which Dostoevsky called SLAVERY TO PROGRESSIVE QUIRKS. The spirit of Munich has by no means retreated into the past; it was not merely a brief episode. I even venture to say that the spirit of Munich prevails in the Twentieth Century. The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles. The spirit of Munich is a sickness of the will of successful people, it is the daily condition of those who have given themselves up to the thirst after prosperity at any price, to material well-being as the chief goal of earthly existence. Such people—and there are many in today’s world—elect passivity and retreat, just so as their accustomed life might drag on a bit longer, just so as not to step over the threshold of hardship today—and tomorrow, you’ll see, it will all be all right. (But it will never be all right! The price of cowardice will only be evil; we shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.) And on top of this we are threatened by destruction in the fact that the physically compressed, strained world is not allowed to blend spiritually; the molecules of knowledge and sympathy are not allowed to jump over from one half to the other. This presents a rampant danger: THE SUPPRESSION OF INFORMATION between the parts of the planet. Contemporary science knows that suppression of information leads to entropy and total destruction. Suppression of information renders international signatures and agreements illusory; within a muffled zone it costs nothing to reinterpret any agreement, even simpler—to forget it, as though it had never really existed. (Orwell understood this supremely.) A muffled zone is, as it were, populated not by inhabitants of the Earth, but by an expeditionary corps from Mars; the people know nothing intelligent about the rest of the Earth and are prepared to go and trample it down in the holy conviction that they come as “liberators”. A quarter of a century ago, in the great hopes of mankind, the United Nations Organization was born. Alas, in an immoral world, this too grew up to be immoral. It is not a United Nations Organization but a United Governments Organization where all governments stand equal; those which are freely elected, those imposed forcibly, and those which have seized power with weapons. Relying on the mercenary partiality of the majority UNO jealously guards the freedom of some nations and neglects the freedom of others. As a result of an obedient vote it declined to undertake the investigation of private appeals—the groans, screams and beseechings of humble individual PLAIN PEOPLE—not large enough a catch for such a great organization. UNO made no effort to make the Declaration of Human Rights, its best document in twenty-five years, into an OBLIGATORY condition of membership confronting the governments. Thus it betrayed those humble people into the will of the governments which they had not chosen. It would seem that the appearance of the contemporary world rests solely in the hands of the scientists; all mankind’s technical steps are determined by them. It would seem that it is precisely on the international goodwill of scientists, and not of politicians, that the direction of the world should depend. All the more so since the example of the few shows how much could be achieved were they all to pull together. But no; scientists have not manifested any clear attempt to become an important, independently active force of mankind. They spend entire congresses in renouncing the sufferings of others; better to stay safely within the precincts of science. That same spirit of Munich has spread above them its enfeebling wings. What then is the place and role of the writer in this cruel, dynamic, split world on the brink of its ten destructions? After all we have nothing to do with letting off rockets, we do not even push the lowliest of hand-carts, we are quite scorned by those who respect only material power. Is it not natural for us too to step back, to lose faith in the steadfastness of goodness, in the indivisibility of truth, and to just impart to the world our bitter, detached observations: how mankind has become hopelessly corrupt, how men have degenerated, and how difficult it is for the few beautiful and refined souls to live amongst them? But we have not even recourse to this flight. Anyone who has once taken up the WORD can never again evade it; a writer is not the detached judge of his compatriots and contemporaries, he is an accomplice to all the evil committed in his native land or by his countrymen. And if the tanks of his fatherland have flooded the asphalt of a foreign capital with blood, then the brown spots have slapped against the face of the writer forever. And if one fatal night they suffocated his sleeping, trusting Friend, then the palms of the writer bear the bruises from that rope. And if his young fellow citizens breezily declare the superiority of depravity over honest work, if they give themselves over to drugs or seize hostages, then their stink mingles with the breath of the writer. Shall we have the temerity to declare that we are not responsible for the sores of the present-day world? However, I am cheered by a vital awareness of WORLD LITERATURE as of a single huge heart, beating out the cares and troubles of our world, albeit presented and perceived differently in each of its corners. Apart from age-old national literatures there existed, even in past ages, the conception of world literature as an anthology skirting the heights of the national literatures, and as the sum total of mutual literary influences. But there occurred a lapse in time: readers and writers became acquainted with writers of other tongues only after a time lapse, sometimes lasting centuries, so that mutual influences were also delayed and the anthology of national literary heights was revealed only in the eyes of descendants, not of contemporaries. But today, between the writers of one country and the writers and readers of another, there is a reciprocity if not instantaneous then almost so. I experience this with myself. Those of my books which, alas, have not been printed in my own country have soon found a responsive, worldwide audience, despite hurried and often bad translations. Such distinguished western writers as Heinrich Böll have undertaken critical analysis of them. All these last years, when my work and freedom have not come crashing down, when contrary to the laws of gravity they have hung suspended as though on air, as though on NOTHING—on the invisible dumb tension of a sympathetic public membrane; then it was with grateful warmth, and quite unexpectedly for myself, that I learnt of the further support of the international brotherhood of writers. On my fiftieth birthday I was astonished to receive congratulations from well-known western writers. No pressure on me came to pass by unnoticed. During my dangerous weeks of exclusion from the Writers’ Union the WALL OF DEFENCE advanced by the world’s prominent writers protected me from worse persecutions; and Norwegian writers and artists hospitably prepared a roof for me, in the event of my threatened exile being put into effect. Finally even the advancement of my name for the Nobel Prize was raised not in the country where I live and write, but by Francois Mauriac and his colleagues. And later still entire national writers’ unions have expressed their support for me. Thus I have understood and felt that world literature is no longer an abstract anthology, nor a generalization invented by literary historians; it is rather a certain common body and a common spirit, a living heartfelt unity reflecting the growing unity of mankind. State frontiers still turn crimson, heated by electric wire and bursts of machine fire; and various ministries of internal affairs still think that literature too is an “internal affair” falling under their jurisdiction; newspaper headlines still display: “No right to interfere in our internal affairs!” Whereas there are no INTERNAL AFFAIRS left on our crowded Earth! And mankind’s sole salvation lies in everyone making everything his business; in the people of the East being vitally concerned with what is thought in the West, the people of the West vitally concerned with what goes on in the East. And literature, as one of the most sensitive, responsive instruments possessed by the human creature, has been one of the first to adopt, to assimilate, to catch hold of this feeling of a growing unity of mankind. And so I turn with confidence to the world literature of today—to hundreds of friends whom I have never met in the flesh and whom I may never see. Friends! Let us try to help if we are worth anything at all! Who from time immemorial has constituted the uniting, not the dividing, strength in your countries, lacerated by discordant parties, movements, castes and groups? There in its essence is the position of writers: expressers of their native language—the chief binding force of the nation, of the very earth its people occupy, and at best of its national spirit. I believe that world literature has it in its power to help mankind, in these its troubled hours, to see itself as it really is, notwithstanding the indoctrinations of prejudiced people and parties. World literature has it in its power to convey condensed experience from one land to another so that we might cease to be split and dazzled, that the different scales of values might be made to agree, and one nation learn correctly and concisely the true history of another with such strength of recognition and painful awareness as it had itself experienced the same, and thus might it be spared from repeating the same cruel mistakes. And perhaps under such conditions we artists will be able to cultivate within ourselves a field of vision to embrace the WHOLE WORLD: in the centre observing like any other human being that which lies nearby, at the edges we shall begin to draw in that which is happening in the rest of the world. And we shall correlate, and we shall observe world proportions. And who, if not writers, are to pass judgement—not only on their unsuccessful governments, (in some states this is the easiest way to earn one’s bread, the occupation of any man who is not lazy), but also on the people themselves, in their cowardly humiliation or self-satisfied weakness? Who is to pass judgement on the light-weight sprints of youth, and on the young pirates brandishing their knives? We shall be told: what can literature possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE. At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood. And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions! Let THAT enter the world, let it even reign in the world—but not with my help. But writers and artists can achieve more: they can CONQUER FALSEHOOD! In the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win! Openly, irrefutably for everyone! Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art. And no sooner will falsehood be dispersed than the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its ugliness—and violence, decrepit, will fall. That is why, my friends, I believe that we are able to help the world in its white-hot hour. Not by making the excuse of possessing no weapons, and not by giving ourselves over to a frivolous life—but by going to war! Proverbs about truth are well-loved in Russian. They give steady and sometimes striking expression to the not inconsiderable harsh national experience: ONE WORD OF TRUTH SHALL OUTWEIGH THE WHOLE WORLD. And it is here, on an imaginary fantasy, a breach of the principle of the conservation of mass and energy, that I base both my own activity and my appeal to the writers of the whole world.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis is a near-perfect predator. In 1882, Robert Koch, the physician who discovered the microbe, told a room full of scientists that it caused one in seven of all deaths. In 2023, after a brief hiatus, tuberculosis regained from COVID its status as the world’s deadliest infectious disease—a title it has held for most of what we know of human history. Some people die of TB when their lungs collapse or fill with fluid. For others, scarring leaves so little healthy lung tissue that breathing becomes impossible. Or the infection spreads to the brain or the spinal column, or they suffer a sudden, uncontrollable hemorrhage. Lack of appetite and extreme abdominal pain can fuel weight loss so severe that it whittles away muscle and bone. This is why TB was widely known as “consumption” until the 20th century—it seemed to be a disease that consumed the very body, shrinking and shriveling it. On a trip to Sierra Leone in 2019, I met a boy named Henry Reider, whose mix of shyness and enthusiasm for connection reminded me of my own son. I thought he was perhaps 9 years old. His doctors later told me that he was in fact 17, his body stunted by a combination of malnutrition and tuberculosis. The cure for TB—roughly half a year on antibiotics—has existed since the 1950s, and works for most patients. Yet, in the decades since, more than 100 million people have died of tuberculosis because the drugs are not widely available in many parts of the world. The most proximate cause of contemporary tuberculosis deaths is not M. tuberculosis, but Homo sapiens. Now, as the Trump administration decimates foreign-aid programs, the U.S. is both making survival less likely for people with TB and risking the disease becoming far more treatment-resistant. After decades of improvement, we could return to something more like the world before the cure. [Read: The danger of ignoring tuberculosis] Anyone can get tuberculosis—in fact, a quarter of all humans living now, including an estimated 13 million Americans, have been infected with the bacterium, which spreads through coughs, sneezes, and breaths. Most will only ever have a latent form of the infection, in which infection-fighting white blood cells envelop the bacteria so it cannot wreak havoc on the body. But in 5 to 10 percent of infections, the immune system can’t produce enough white blood cells to surround the invader. M. tuberculosis explodes outward, and active disease begins. Certain triggers make the disease more likely to go from latent to active, including air pollution and an immune system weakened by malnutrition, stress, or diabetes. The disease spreads especially well along the trails that poverty has blazed for it: in crowded living and working conditions such as slums and poorly ventilated factories. Left untreated, most people who develop active TB will die of the disease. In the early 1980s, physicians and activists in Africa and Asia began sounding the alarm about an explosion of young patients dying within weeks of being infected instead of years. Hours after entering the hospital, they were choking to death on their own blood. In 1985, physicians in Zaire and Zambia noted high rates of active tuberculosis among patients who had the emerging disease now known as HIV/AIDS. TB surged globally, including in the U.S. Deaths skyrocketed. From 1985 to 2005, roughly as many people died of tuberculosis as in World War I, and many of them also had HIV. In 2000, nearly a third of the 2.3 million people who died of tuberculosis were co-infected with HIV. [Read: Tragedy would unfold if Trump cancels Bush’s AIDS program] By the mid-1990s, antiretroviral cocktails made HIV a treatable and survivable disease in rich communities. While a person is taking these medications, their viral levels generally become so low as to be undetectable and untransmittable; if a person with HIV becomes sick with tuberculosis, the drugs increase their odds of survival dramatically. But rich countries largely refused to spend money on HIV and TB meds in low- and middle-income countries. They cited many reasons, including that patients couldn’t be trusted to take their medication on time, and that resources would be better spent on prevention and control. In 2001, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development had this to say when explaining to Congress why many Africans would not benefit from access to HIV medications: “People do not know what watches and clocks are. They do not use Western means for telling time. They use the sun. These drugs have to be administered during a certain sequence of time during the day and when you say take it at 10:00, people will say, ‘What do you mean by 10:00?’” A 2007 review of 58 studies on patient habits found that Africans were more likely to adhere to HIV treatment regimens than North Americans. In the mid-2000s, programs such as PEPFAR and the Global Fund finally began distributing antiretroviral therapy to millions of people living with HIV in poor countries. PEPFAR, a U.S.-funded initiative, was especially successful, saving more than 25 million lives and preventing 7 million children from being born with HIV. These projects lowered deaths and infections while also strengthening health-care systems, allowing low-income countries to better respond to diseases as varied as malaria and diabetes. Millions of lives have been saved—and tuberculosis deaths among those living with HIV have declined dramatically in the decades since. Still, tuberculosis is great at exploiting any advantage that humans hand it. During the COVID-19 pandemic, disruptions to supply chains and TB-prevention programs led to an uptick in infections worldwide. Last year, the U.S. logged more cases of tuberculosis than it has in any year since the CDC began keeping count in the 1950s. Two people died. But in some ways, at the beginning of this year, the fight against tuberculosis had never looked more promising. High-quality vaccine candidates were in late-stage trials. In December, the World Health Organization made its first endorsement of a TB diagnostic test, and global health workers readied to deploy it. [Read: America can’t just unpause USAID] Now that progress is on the verge of being erased. Since Donald Trump has taken office, his administration has dismantled USAID, massively eliminating foreign-aid funding and programs. According to The New York Times, hundreds of thousands of sick patients have seen their access to medication and testing suddenly cut off. A memo released by a USAID official earlier this month estimated that cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis will rise by about 30 percent in the next few years, an unprecedented regression in the history of humankind’s fight against the disease. (The official was subsequently placed on administrative leave.) Research on tuberculosis tests and treatments has been terminated. Although the Secretary of State and Elon Musk have assured the public that the new administration’s actions have not disrupted the distribution of life-saving medicine, that just isn't true. A colleague in central Africa sent me a picture of TB drugs that the U.S. has already paid for sitting unused in a warehouse because of stop-work orders. (Neither the State Department nor DOGE employees responded to requests for comment.) Last year, roughly half of all international donor funding for tuberculosis treatment came from the U.S. Now many programs are disappearing. In a recent survey on the impact of lost funding in 31 countries, one in four organizations providing TB care reported they have shut down entirely. About half have stopped screening for new cases of tuberculosis. The average untreated case of active tuberculosis will spread the infection to 10 to 15 people a year. Without treatment, or even a diagnosis, hundreds of thousands more people will die—and each of those deaths will be needless. By revoking money from global-health efforts, the U.S. has created the conditions for the health of people around the world to deteriorate, which will give tuberculosis even more opportunities to kill. HIV clinics in many countries have started rationing pills as drug supplies run dangerously low, raising the specter of co-infection. Like HIV, insufficient nutrition weakens the immune system. It is the leading risk factor for tuberculosis. An estimated 1 million children with severe acute malnutrition will lose access to treatment because of the USAID cuts, and refugee camps across the world are slashing already meager food rations. For billions of people, TB is already a nightmare disease, both because the bacterium is unusually powerful and because world leaders have done a poor job of distributing cures. And yet, to the extent that one hears about TB at all in the rich world, it's usually in the context of a looming crisis: Given enough time, a strain of tuberculosis may evolve that is resistant to all available antibiotics, a superbug that is perhaps even more aggressive and deadly than previous iterations of the disease. [Read: Resistance to the antibiotic of last resort is silently spreading] The Trump administration’s current policies are making such a future more plausible. Even pausing TB treatment for a couple of weeks can give the bacterium a chance to evolve resistance. The world is ill-prepared to respond to drug-resistant TB, because we have shockingly few treatments for the world’s deadliest infectious disease. Between 1963 and 2012, scientists approved no new drugs to treat tuberculosis. Doing so stopped being profitable once the disease ceased to be a crisis in rich countries. Many strains of tuberculosis are already resistant to the 60-year-old drugs that are still the first line of treatment for nearly all TB patients. If a person is unlucky enough to have drug-resistant TB, the next step is costly testing to determine if their body can withstand harsh, alternative treatments. The United States helped pay for those tests in many countries, which means that now fewer people with drug-resistant TB are being diagnosed or treated. Instead, they are almost certainly getting sicker and spreading the infection. Drug-resistant TB is harder to cure in individual patients, and so the aid freeze will directly lead to many deaths. But giving the bacteria so many new opportunities to develop drug resistance is also a threat to all of humanity. We now risk the emergence of TB strains that can’t be cured with our existing tools. The millennia-long history of humans’ fight against TB has seen many vicious cycles. I fear we are watching the dawn of another.
Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here. In the less than two months since Donald Trump took office, he has upended decades of foreign policy by targeting the country’s allies. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined last night to discuss the effects of his policies in the U.S. and across the globe. Meanwhile, Congress averted a government shutdown on Friday evening, passing a bill that will fund the government through September. Although Chuck Schumer of New York rallied enough votes for the bill, some Democrats now say that the minority leader capitulated to Trump. Especially among House Democrats from districts that the president carried in the election, “they feel as though he kind of left them out to dry,” Laura Barrón-López said last night. Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Laura Barrón-López, a White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour; Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch; and David Sanger, a White House and national-security correspondent at The New York Times. Watch the full episode here.
Steven Soderbergh films are like buses: There’s always another one coming. This isn’t a complaint, exactly, but the director’s prolific nature is on my mind with each of his new projects—he released Presence two months ago, and he’s already got another one? How much effort could he have put into it? Black Bag, a taut spy thriller starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, is an argument for the filmmaker’s ruthless efficiency. Yes, the speed with which Soderbergh has hopped from genre exercise to genre exercise of late is a little dizzying; he’s pumped out works of horror, romance, thriller, and comedy all since 2020. His skill with each, nonetheless, is hard to deny. Black Bag, like the recent Soderbergh movies Presence and Kimi, was written by David Koepp; he’s a Hollywood stanchion who is best known for major blockbusters including Jurassic Park and Spider-Man. Now, though, Koepp is seemingly hell-bent on reviving the midsize feature that Hollywood has been missing. His latest collaboration with Soderbergh, a cat-and-mouse story about a married pair of spies, is a throwback in many ways—but its observations about the intrusive nature of espionage work on their lives feel sharply contemporary. The setup is straightforward. The glamorous Kathryn St. Jean (Blanchett) is a renowned British spy who is accused of being a double agent by an anonymous tipster. The big brass tasks the preening, excessively kempt George Woodhouse (Fassbender) with investigating her and some other colleagues in order to root out the traitor. There is a twist, of course: Kathryn and George are married. The mega-spies live together in a pristine London home that’s a den of class, sophistication, and potential sabotage. Soderbergh has found the two perfect actors for this scenario; they’re impressive yet impassive movie stars who look glamorous even if they’re parked behind a laptop. Their dazzling facades, however, hide unspoken darkness. Blanchett serves glossy, Hollywood oomph, while Fassbender is playing a fussy, British spin on the hit-man character he portrayed so well in David Fincher’s The Killer. George is a major control freak whose freakery just might be getting the better of him. His favorite pastime, it seems, is inviting people over for dinner and dosing the dishes with a truth serum. (“Avoid the chana masala,” he warns his wife.) This is the informal version of administering lie-detector tests, his professional speciality. But despite being a top mole-hunter, George can’t take quite as brutal or direct an approach with his wife. Thus, he must resort to bouncing his suspicions off her co-workers—performed by a fine-tuned group of talented company players. [Read: A movie about the perils of being a control freak] Among them is Tom Burke (from The Souvenir and last year’s Furiosa) as an agent with a proclivity for infidelity and booze; and Marisa Abela (known for Industry and the recent Amy Winehouse biopic) as a tech wiz and his on-and-off love interest. Naomie Harris and Regé-Jean Page fill out the cast as more experienced agents growing tired of George’s parlor games, while Pierce Brosnan lurks in the background as a disapproving boss. Soderbergh wisely leverages everyone’s fame to further confuse the audience: Fassbender’s on-screen tendency toward villainous roles makes him a disorienting protagonist to root for, while Blanchett’s natural gravitas renders her difficult not to trust. At a blissful 93 minutes long, Black Bag keeps audiences happily guessing before dropping its final reveals. Though it has the same intimacy of many a Soderbergh effort of late—he tends to work quickly to keep budgets low and attract big-name talent—the director manages to squeeze in a couple of globe-trotting moments for some visual panache. Yet these foreign missions are largely glimpsed as surveillance on a computer screen. Most of Black Bag is instead set in enclosed spaces: the oppressive blank offices of the British intelligence services everyone works for, or George and Kathryn’s seductive and candlelit home, a welcoming environment that quickly turns into a pit of vipers when all the spies sit down for a meal. Will Soderbergh ever make another truly big movie? Black Bag had me thinking about some of his past hits, such as Ocean’s Eleven; these were large ensemble pieces that had proper scope to them. Black Bag is halfway there, although Soderbergh’s approach has an artfulness to it; he’s telling a sweeping story while keeping the excitement mostly confined. The result, while self-contained, is gripping, quietly sexy, and robustly acted. Plus, given the scarcity of films for grown-ups in theaters right now, I cannot complain about a good update on the drawing-room mystery. But maybe one day I’ll sit Soderbergh down, give him a heavy helping of George’s curried truth serum, and ask if he’d ever consider making a grand action epic again.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning Dating has never been easy. When my colleague Faith Hill scoured the Atlantic archives for early accounts of romance, she found the following proclamation from the 20-year-old female protagonist in a 1888 short story: “I wish I knew some young men! … I should like to know some interesting men!”” But young people today have come of age in a particularly complicated dating era. Dating apps have been around long enough that the swipe is losing its luster; many young daters are both dependent on apps and smart enough to see their shortcomings. Plus, the pandemic upended many people’s social development. Meanwhile, some teens are moving away from romantic relationships entirely: Faith recently spoke with a college professor who spends a lot of time trying to convince her students that a partnership is worth pursuing. Romantic love is an opportunity to add beauty to one’s life, and to spark growth—but that can be hard to remember when searching for it feels so awkward. On Dating Teens Are Forgoing a Classic Rite of Passage By Faith Hill Fewer young people are getting into relationships. Read the article. ‘Nostalgia for a Dating Experience They’ve Never Had’ By Faith Hill Young people are tired of swiping. Now they want serendipity. Read the article. The Most Awkward Part of Living With Your Parents as an Adult By Ginny Hogan For many young adults, living in their family’s home is a new norm. Their dates still don’t always get it. Read the article. Still Curious? The golden age of dating doesn’t exist: Romance in America has never been easy. Faith Hill explored early accounts of dating in The Atlantic’s archives. Why it’s so hard for young people to date offline: Meet-cutes are difficult when nobody wants to talk to strangers, Ashley Fetters wrote in 2019. Other Diversions The man who owned 181 Renoirs An unabashedly intellectual murder mystery Lady Gaga sounds like herself again. P.S. Courtesy of J. Jourdain Each week, I ask readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. In 2017 “I spent a week in Brienz, Switzerland,” J. Jourdain writes. “When the sun set one evening, it cast this golden light on the alps. It was magical.” I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks. — Isabel
When Viktor Orbán gave a speech in 2022 at a Conservative Political Action Conference gathering in Budapest, he shared his secret to amassing power with Donald Trump’s fan base. “We must have our own media,” he told his audience. As a Hungarian investigative journalist, I have had a firsthand view of how Orbán has built his own media universe while simultaneously placing a stranglehold on the independent press. As I watch from afar what’s happening to the free press in the United States during the first weeks of Trump’s second presidency—the verbal bullying, the legal harassment, the buckling by media owners in the face of threats—it all looks very familiar. The MAGA authorities have learned Orbán’s lessons well. I saw the roots of Orbán’s media strategy when I first met him for an interview, in 2006. He was in the opposition then but had served as prime minister before and was fighting hard to get back in power. When we met in his office in a hulking century-old building that overlooked the Danube River in Budapest, he was very friendly, even charming. Like Trump, he is the kind of politician who knows how to connect with people when he thinks he has something to gain. During the interview, his demeanor shifted. I still remember how his face went dark when I pushed on questions that he obviously did not want to answer. It was a tense exchange, but he reverted to his cordial mode when we finished the interview, and I turned off the recorder. What happened afterwards was less friendly. In Hungary, journalists are expected to send edited interview transcripts to their interviewees. The idea is that if the interviewees think you took something they said out of context, they can ask for changes before publication. But in this case, Orbán’s press team sent back the text with some of his answers entirely deleted and rewritten. When my editors and I told them we wouldn’t accept this, they said they wouldn’t allow the interview to be published. In the end, we published it without their edits. That was the last time I interviewed Viktor Orbán. And when he returned to power in 2010 after a landslide election victory, he made sure that he would never have to answer uncomfortable questions again. One of the first pieces of legislation his party introduced was a media law that restructured how the sector is regulated in Hungary. The government set up a new oversight agency and appointed hard-line loyalists to its key positions. This agency later blocked proposed mergers and acquisitions by independent media companies, while issuing friendly rulings for pro-government businesses. The Orbán government also transformed public broadcasting—which had previously carried news programs challenging politicians from all parties—into a mouthpiece of the state. The service’s newly appointed leaders got rid of principled journalists and replaced them with governing-party sympathizers who could be counted on to toe the line. Then the government went after private media companies. Origo, a popular Hungarian news website, was one of its first targets. For many years, Origo—where I had been working when I conducted the 2006 Orbán interview—was a great place to do journalism. It was owned by a multinational telecommunications company and run by people who did not interfere with our work. If anything, they were supportive of our journalism. In 2009, after conducting some award-winning investigations, I was even invited to the CEO’s office for a friendly chat about the importance of accountability reporting. But a few years after Orbán’s return to power, the environment changed. As we continued our aggressive—but fair—reporting, the telecommunications company behind Origo came under pressure from the government. Instead of sending encouraging messages, the outlet’s publisher started telling the editor in chief not to pursue certain stories that were uncomfortable for Orbán and his allies. My colleagues in the newsroom and I pushed back. But after repeated clashes with the publisher over one of my investigations, into the expensive and mysterious travel of a powerful government official, the editor in chief was forced out of his job. I resigned, along with many fellow journalists, and soon the news site was sold to a company with close links to Orbán’s inner circle. Now Origo is unrecognizable. It has become the flagship news site of the pro-government propaganda machine, publishing articles praising Orbán and viciously attacking his critics. Origo is part of an ecosystem that includes hundreds of newspapers and news sites, several television channels—including the public broadcasters and one of the two biggest commercial channels—and almost all radio stations. That’s not to mention the group of pro-government influencers whose social-media posts are distributed widely, thanks to financial resources also linked to the government. This machine is not even pretending to do journalism in the traditional sense. It is not like Fox News, which still has some professional anchors and reporters alongside the openly pro-Trump media personalities who dominate the channel in prime time. The machine built under Orbán has only one purpose, and it is to serve the interests of the government. There is hardly any autonomy. Editors and reporters get directions from the very top of the regime on what they can and cannot cover. If there is a message that must be delivered, the whole machine jumps into action: Hundreds of outlets will publish the same story with the same headline and same photos. In 2022, Direkt36, the investigative-reporting center I co-founded after leaving Origo, wrote about one such example. In the story, which was reported by my colleague Zsuzsanna Wirth, we described an episode in which Bertalan Havasi, the prime minister’s press chief at the time, sent an email to the director of the national news agency. “Hi, could you write an article about this, citing me as a source? Thanks!” Havasi wrote. (The instruction was about a relatively mundane matter: a letter that a European rabbi had sent to Orbán thanking him for his support.) Later, Havasi also told the agency what the headline and lead sentence should be. The news agency followed the instructions word for word. A few years ago, I investigated the pro-government takeover of Index, another of Hungary’s most popular news sites. I obtained a recording in which the outlet’s editor in chief described to one of his employees how Index had received financial backing from a friend of Orbán’s, a former gas fitter who has become Hungary’s richest man thanks to lucrative state contracts. The editor in chief warned that Index had to be careful with news about Orbán’s friend because, without him, “there will be no one who will put money into” the outlet. Just as Orbán explained in his CPAC speech, this sophisticated propaganda machine has played a crucial role in his ability to stay in power for more than 15 years. When the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, a watchdog group of which the United States is a member, published its report on Hungary’s 2022 parliamentary elections, it pointed to the media as a major weakness in the country’s democratic system. “The lack of impartial information in the media about the main contestants, the absence of debates among the major electoral competitors, and the independent media’s limited access to public information and activities of national and local government significantly limited voters’ opportunity to make an informed choice,” the election monitors concluded, after a vote that yet again cemented the power of Orbán’s ruling party. What has happened in Hungary might not happen in the United States. Hungary, a former Eastern Bloc nation that broke free of oppressive Soviet control only three and a half decades ago, has never had such a robust and vibrant independent media scene as the one the U.S. has enjoyed for centuries. But if someone had told me when Orbán returned to power that we would end up with a propaganda machine where the free Hungarian media had once been, with many of the old outlets shut down or transformed into government mouthpieces, I would not have believed it. And I see ominous signs in the U.S. that feel similar to the early phases of what we experienced here. When I read about the Associated Press being banned from White House events, that reminds me of how my colleagues at Direkt36 have been denied entry to Orbán’s rare press conferences. When I see the Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos cozying up to Trump, that reminds me of how big corporations and their wealthy executives, including the owner of my former workplace, bent the knee to Orbán. When I read about ABC settling a Trump lawsuit of dubious merit—and CBS contemplating the same—it brings to mind the way the courts and the government itself can be used to manipulate and bully media organizations into submission. Journalists and anyone else who cares about the free press must understand that democratic institutions are more fragile than they look, especially if they face pressure from ruthless and powerful political forces. This is particularly true for the news media, which is also being challenged by the technological revolution in how we communicate information. Just because an outlet has been around for decades and has a storied history does not mean that it will be around forever. If any good news can be learned from Hungary’s unhappy experience, it is that unless your country turns into a fully authoritarian regime similar to China or Russia, there are still ways for independent journalism to survive. Even in Hungary, some outlets manage to operate independently from the government. Many of them, including the one I run, rely primarily on their audience for support in the form of donations or subscriptions. We learned that it is easy for billionaires and media CEOs to be champions of press freedom when the risks are low, but that you can’t count on them when things get tough. So we rely on our readers instead. If they feel like what you are doing is valuable, they will be your real allies in confronting the suffocating power of autocracy.
On May 17, 1954, a nervous 45-year-old lawyer named Thurgood Marshall took a seat in the Supreme Court’s gallery. The founder and director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund hoped to learn that he had prevailed in his pivotal case. When Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the Court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, Marshall could not have known that he had also won what is still widely considered the most significant legal decision in American history. Hearing Warren declare “that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place” delivered Marshall into a state of euphoria. “I was so happy, I was numb,” he said. After exiting the courtroom, he joyously swung a small boy atop his shoulders and galloped around the austere marble hall. Later, he told reporters, “It is the greatest victory we ever had.” For Marshall, the “we” who triumphed in Brown surely referred not only, or even primarily, to himself and his Legal Defense Fund colleagues, but to the entire Black race, on whose behalf they’d toiled. And Black Americans did indeed find Brown exhilarating. Harlem’s Amsterdam News, echoing Marshall, called Brown “the greatest victory for the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation.” W. E. B. Du Bois stated, “I have seen the impossible happen. It did happen on May 17, 1954.” When Oliver Brown learned of the outcome in the lawsuit bearing his surname, he gathered his family near, and credited divine providence: “Thanks be to God for this.” Martin Luther King Jr. encouraged Montgomery’s activists in 1955 by invoking Brown: “If we are wrong, then the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong.” Many Black people viewed the opinion with such awe and reverence that for years afterward, they threw parties on May 17 to celebrate Brown’s anniversary. Over time, however, some began questioning what exactly made Brown worthy of celebration. In 1965, Malcolm X in his autobiography voiced an early criticism of Brown: It had yielded precious little school desegregation over the previous decade. Calling the decision “one of the greatest magical feats ever performed in America,” he contended that the Court’s “masters of legal phraseology” had used “trickery and magic that told Negroes they were desegregated—Hooray! Hooray!—and at the same time … told whites ‘Here are your loopholes.’ ” [Read: The children who desegregated America’s schools] But that criticism paled in comparison with the anti-Brown denunciation in Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation two years later. They condemned not Brown’s implementation, but its orientation. The fundamental aim of integration must be abandoned because it was driven by the “assumption that there is nothing of value in the black community,” they maintained. To sprinkle black children among white pupils in outlying schools is at best a stop-gap measure. The goal is not to take black children out of the black community and expose them to white middle-class values; the goal is to build and strengthen the black community. Although Black skeptics of the integration ideal originated on the far left, Black conservatives—including the economist Thomas Sowell—have more recently ventured related critiques. The most prominent example is Marshall’s successor on the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas. In 1995, four years after joining the Court, Thomas issued a blistering opinion that opened, “It never ceases to amaze me that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior.” Desperate efforts to promote school integration, Thomas argued, stemmed from the misperception that identifiably Black schools were somehow doomed to fail because of their racial composition. “There is no reason to think that black students cannot learn as well when surrounded by members of their own race as when they are in an integrated environment,” he wrote. Taking a page from Black Power’s communal emphasis, Thomas argued that “black schools can function as the center and symbol of black communities, and provide examples of independent black leadership, success, and achievement.” In a 2007 opinion, he extolled Washington, D.C.’s all-Black Dunbar High School—which sent dozens of graduates to the Ivy League and its ilk during the early 20th century—as a paragon of Black excellence. In the 2000s, as Brown crept toward its 50th anniversary, Derrick Bell of the NYU School of Law went so far as to allege that the opinion had been wrongly decided. For Bell, who had sharpened his skills as an LDF lawyer, Brown’s “integration ethic centralizes whiteness. White bodies are represented as somehow exuding an intrinsic value that percolates into the ‘hearts and minds’ of black children.” Warren’s opinion in the case should have affirmed Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” regime, Bell wrote, but it should have insisted on genuine equality of expenditures, rather than permitting the sham equality of yore that consigned Black students to shoddy classrooms in dilapidated buildings. He acknowledged, though, that his jaundiced account put him at odds with dominant American legal and cultural attitudes: “The Brown decision,” he noted, “has become so sacrosanct in law and in the beliefs of most Americans that any critic is deemed wrongheaded, even a traitor to the cause.” In her New Book, Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children, Noliwe Rooks adds to a growing literature that challenges the portrayal of the decision as “a significant civil rights–era win.” Rooks, the chair of the Africana-studies department at Brown University, offers an unusual blend of historical examination and family memoir that generally amplifies the concerns articulated by prior desegregation discontents. The result merits careful attention not for its innovative arguments, but as an impassioned, arresting example of how Brown skepticism, which initially gained traction on the fringes of Black life, has come to hold considerable appeal within the Black intellectual mainstream. As recently as midway through the first Trump administration, Rooks would have placed herself firmly in the traditional pro-Brown camp, convinced that addressing racial inequality in education could best be pursued through integration. But traveling a few years ago to promote a book that criticized how private schools often thwart meaningful racial integration, she repeatedly encountered audience members who disparaged her core embrace of integration. Again and again, she heard from Black parents that “the trauma their children experienced in predominantly white schools and from white teachers was sometimes more harmful than the undereducation occurring in segregated schools.” [From the May 2018 issue: The report on race that shook America] The onslaught dislodged Rooks’s faith in the value of contemporary integration, and even of Brown itself. She now exhibits the convert’s zeal. Brown, she writes, should be viewed as “an attack on Black schools, politics, and communities, which meant it was an attack on the pillars of Black life.” For some Black citizens, the decision acted as “a wrecking ball that crashed through their communities and, like a pendulum, continues to swing.” Rooks emphasizes the plight of Black educators, who disproportionately lost their positions in Brown’s aftermath because of school consolidations. Before Brown, she argues, “Black teachers did not see themselves as just teaching music, reading, or science, but also as activists, organizers, and freedom fighters who dreamed of and fought for an equitable world for future generations”; they served as models who showed “Black children how to fight for respect and societal change.” Endorsing one of Black Power’s analogies, she maintains that school integration meant that “as small a number as possible of Black children were, like pepper on popcorn, lightly sprinkled atop wealthy, white school environments, while most others were left behind.” Even for those ostensibly fortunate few flecks of pepper, Rooks insists, providing the white world’s seasoning turned out to be a highly uncertain, dangerous endeavor. She uses her father’s disastrous experiences with integration to examine what she regards as the perils of the entire enterprise. After excelling in all-Black educational environments, including as an undergraduate at Howard University, Milton Rooks became one of a very small number of Black students to enroll at the Golden Gate University School of Law in the early 1960s. Sent by his hopeful parents “over that racial wall,” Milton encountered hostility from white professors, who doubted his intellectual capacity, Rooks recounts, and “spit him back up like a piece of meat poorly digested.” She asserts that the ordeal not only prompted him to drop out of law school but also spurred his descent into alcoholism. Rooks extrapolates further, writing: Milton’s experience reflected the trauma Black students suffered as they desegregated public schools in states above the Mason-Dixon Line, where displays of racism were often mocking, disdainful, pitying, and sword sharp in their ability to cut the unsuspecting into tiny bits. It destroyed confidence, shook will, sowed doubt, murdered souls—quietly, sure, but still as completely as could a mob of white racists setting their cowardice, rage, and anger loose upon the defenseless. The harms that contemporary integrated educational environments inflict upon Black students can be tantamount, in her view, to the harms imposed upon the many Black students who are forced to attend monoracial, woeful urban high schools. To make this point, Rooks recounts her own struggle to correct the misplacement of her son, Jelani, in a low-level math class in Princeton, New Jersey’s public-school system during the aughts (when she taught at Princeton University). She witnessed other Black parents meet with a similar lack of support in guiding their children to the academically demanding courses that could propel them to elite colleges. In Jelani’s case, she had evidence that teachers’ “feelings were hardening against him.” He led a life of relative safety and economic privilege, and felt at ease among his white classmates and friends, she allows, even as she also stresses that what he “experienced wasn’t the violence of poverty; it was something else equally devastating”: We knew that poor, working-class, or urban communities were not the only places where Black boys are terrorized and traumatized. We knew that the unfamiliarity of his white friends with any other Black people would one day become an issue in our home. We knew that guns were not the only way to murder a soul. Frustrated with Princeton’s public schools, Rooks eventually enrolled Jelani in an elite private high school where, she notes, he also endured racial harassment—and from which he graduated before making his way to Amherst College. seven decades have now elapsed since the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown. Given the stubbornly persistent phenomenon of underperforming predominantly Black schools throughout the nation, arguing that Brown’s potential has been fully realized would be absurd. Regrettably, the Warren Court declined to advance the most powerful conception of Brown when it had the opportunity to do so: Its infamously vague “all deliberate speed” approach allowed state and local implementation to be delayed and opposed for far too long. In its turn, the Burger Court provided an emaciated conception of Brown’s meaning, one that permitted many non-southern jurisdictions to avoid pursuing desegregation programs. Rooks deftly sketches this lamentable, sobering history. [From the May 2014 issue: Segregation now ...] Disenchantment with Brown’s educational efficacy is thus entirely understandable. Yet to suggest that the Supreme Court did not go far enough, fast enough in galvanizing racially constructive change in American schools after Brown is one thing. To suggest that Brown somehow took a wrong turn is quite another. Rooks does not deny that integration succeeded in narrowing the racial achievement gap. But like other Brown critics, she nevertheless idealizes the era of racial segregation. Near Integrated ’s conclusion, Rooks contends that “too few of us have a memory of segregated Black schools as the beating heart of vibrant Black communities, enabling students to compose lives of harmony, melody, and rhythm and sustained Black life and dignity.” But this claim gets matters exactly backwards. The brave people who bore segregation’s brunt believed that Jim Crow represented an assault on Black life and dignity, and that Brown marked a sea change in Black self-conceptions. Desegregation’s detractors routinely elevate the glory days of D.C.’s Dunbar High School, but they refuse to heed the lessons of its most distinguished graduates. Charles Hamilton Houston—Dunbar class of 1911, who went on to become valedictorian at Amherst and the Harvard Law Review’s first Black editor—nevertheless dedicated his life to eradicating Jim Crow as an NAACP litigator and Thurgood Marshall’s mentor in his work contesting educational segregation. Sterling A. Brown—Dunbar class of 1918, who graduated from Williams College before becoming a distinguished poet and professor—nevertheless wrote the following in 1944, one decade before Brown: Negroes recognize that the phrase “equal but separate accommodations” is a myth. They have known Jim Crow a long time, and they know Jim Crow means scorn and not belonging. Much as they valued having talented, caring teachers, these men understood racial segregation intimately, and they detested it. In the 1990s, Nelson B. Rivers III, an unheralded NAACP official from South Carolina, memorably heaved buckets of cold water on those who were beginning to wonder, “ Was integration the right thing to do? Was it worth it? Was Brown a good decision?” Rivers dismissed such questions as “asinine,” and continued: To this day, I can remember bus drivers pulling off and blowing smoke in my mother’s face. I can remember the back of the bus, colored water fountains … I can hear a cop telling me, “Take your black butt back to nigger town.” What I tell folk … is that there are a lot of romanticists now who want to take this trip down Memory Lane, and they want to go back, and I tell the young people that anybody who wants to take you back to segregation, make sure you get a round-trip ticket because you won’t stay. Nostalgia for the pre-Brown era would not exercise nearly so powerful a grip on Black America today if its adherents focused on its detailed, pervasive inhumanities rather than relying on gauzy glimpses. No one has pressed this point more vividly than Robert L. Carter, who worked alongside Marshall at the LDF before eventually becoming a distinguished federal judge. He understood that to search for Brown’s impact exclusively in the educational domain is mistaken. Instead, he emphasized that Brown fomented a broad-gauge racial revolution throughout American public life. Despite Chief Justice Warren formally writing the opinion to apply exclusively to education, its attack on segregation has—paradoxically—been most efficacious beyond that original context. [From the October 1967 issue: Jonathan Kozol’s ‘Where Ghetto Schools Fail’] “The psychological dimensions of America’s race relations problem were completely recast” by Brown, Carter wrote. “Blacks were no longer supplicants seeking, pleading, begging to be treated as full-fledged members of the human race; no longer were they appealing to morality, to conscience, to white America’s better instincts,” he noted. “They were entitled to equal treatment as a right under the law; when such treatment was denied, they were being deprived—in fact robbed—of what was legally theirs. As a result, the Negro was propelled into a stance of insistent militancy.” Even within the educational sphere, though, it is profoundly misguided to claim that Black students who attend solid, meaningfully integrated schools encounter environments as corrosive as, or worse than, those facing students trapped in ghetto schools. This damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t analysis suggests an entire cohort stuck in the same boat, when its many members are not even in the same ocean. The Black student marooned in a poor and violent neighborhood, with reason to fear actual murder, envies the Black student attending a rigorous, integrated school who worries about metaphorical “soul murder.” All struggles are not created equal. This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “Was Integration the Wrong Goal?”
Not long ago, I spoke at a university in New Jersey. I told students about the 33 members of my family killed in the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. I described the horrors afflicting my homeland, made a plea for Palestinian independence, and decried the extremism of the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. I also said that Hamas’s kidnapping of Israeli women, elderly people, and children as hostages, and the killing of innocent civilians, were atrocities that did not represent Palestinian values and could easily be condemned without minimizing Palestinian rights or legitimate grievances. Agitators affiliated with Students for Justice in Palestine stood outside the lecture hall shouting. They called me a “traitor” and yelled, “Free Palestine!” How did we get here? How did student activists in New Jersey who claim to represent Palestinians and to care about Gazans make even me, a Gazan American who has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for humanitarian projects in Gaza, their enemy? The so-called pro-Palestine movement has no space for a Palestinian who opposes Hamas’s terrorism and promotes a future of coexistence with Israelis. The moral and political failure of the diasporic movement for Palestinian rights is only one of several obstacles to the Palestinian pursuit of freedom, but it is a particularly telling one. After decades of displacement, military occupation, and political deadlock, we Palestinians have grown far more comfortable analyzing the role of Israeli decision making in worsening our conditions than we are reflecting on our own mistakes. To call for introspection is not to blame the victim or minimize the Palestinian plight. Rather, it is to recognize the desperate need for new thinking. The Palestinian political leadership and its vision of the national project have manifestly failed to inspire meaningful action that could achieve progress. Wishing for the disappearance of 8 million Israeli Jews is not a policy. Hamas and its embrace of “armed resistance” have hijacked the Palestinian discourse. Activism in the diaspora has been captured by extremists—and so it, too, has become an impediment to Palestinian aspirations. In fact, the diaspora “pro-Palestine” movement has spent the past year and a half squandering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to leverage international support for the Palestinian people. Right now, Palestinian independence is further out of reach than ever. And the fault is not only Benjamin Netanyahu’s. [Read: Gaza’s suffering is unprecedented] What Palestinian politics need, and grievously lack, is pragmatism. The conditions we now face are catastrophic in both the West Bank and Gaza: Palestinians have few resources, no military advantage, no political leverage, and virtually no economic viability on our own. Extremist Israeli officials have repeatedly threatened our people with expulsion. These realities mean that the time for maximalist demands and rhetoric is over. But instead of evolving our approaches, many Palestinians are adopting an ever harder ideological line. That impulse stems in part from the imbalance of power between Israelis and Palestinians, and the feeling that adverse conditions are imposed on us from without. But to minimize Palestinian agency is also a mistake: We always have choices, some of which produce better outcomes than others, even under circumstances of constraint. If there is to be any hope for the remaining Palestinians to stay on our lands, we must refuse the cycle of hatred, incitement, violence, and revenge and seek instead a commonsense approach to one of the modern world’s most persistent conflicts. Mine is certainly not a majority position among Palestinians. I have even been told by international media outlets that my perspective is “unrepresentative” and therefore not worthy of being heard. But our community is as diverse in its views as any other. The lack of a political home for divergent, moderate voices has left us without a space to exchange perspectives and stories, or to develop more sophisticated advocacy and policy efforts. I can envision a pragmatic approach to the Palestinian national project—one that rejects violent extremism and armed resistance in favor of a two-nation solution for Palestinians and Israelis. To be pragmatic means abandoning unhelpful and unrealistic demands, such as the right of return to land that has been part of Israel since 1948. It means accepting Israel’s existence, and understanding Israeli security as complementary to the Palestinian pursuit of freedom, dignity, and independence. Two-thirds of Gaza’s population, and all of us who are descendants of 1948 refugees, would have to cease thinking of ourselves as perpetual refugees in our homeland and instead recognize the Strip as our final destination, where we will build our nation. This is a radical pragmatism, and it is desperately needed. (Ironically, embracing this sort of pragmatism would echo what the Zionist movement itself did in 1948, accepting something less than its leaders wanted in exchange for independence.) We would rebrand the embrace of peace and coexistence as courageous, and as necessary to the preservation of Palestinian lives, lands, and heritage. [Read: There is no real-estate solution for Gaza] Some precepts of radical pragmatism are these: Israel is here to stay; it will not be annihilated and can even be a helpful partner in a future that includes a Palestinian state. One cannot be pro-Palestine while also being pro-Hamas. The Oslo years were just one short chapter in the pursuit of peace, and the Palestinian Authority does not embody the full potential of nonviolence and reconciliation as a political strategy. The Palestinian national project must include building a state that can create jobs, pride, and future prospects for our people, not rockets, tunnels, Islamist repression, or corruption. Many things will become possible in Gaza once we recognize the necessity of political and security cooperation with Israel. We could establish an artificial peninsula off the coast, making use of the Strip’s geography; we could repurpose abundantly available rubble to build an airport and seaport, transforming access to and movement in and out of the coastal enclave. I have spoken with thousands of Palestinians over the years who believe, as I do, in the viability of a pragmatic path to peace. Extremists on both sides ignore or suppress our voices, choosing instead to promote narrow interests with maximalist rhetoric. The diaspora should not become their amplifier. Rather, while Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank struggle with the harsh realities of their daily lives, those in the diaspora should help put forward a new Palestinian narrative—one that makes Jewish Israelis our vital allies in solving this conflict and ensuring the prosperous and secure future of both of our peoples. This is not a mere talking point but a necessity for Palestinian survival and self-determination.
When I served as counselor of the State Department, I advised the secretary of state about America’s wars with Iraqi insurgents, the Taliban, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and al-Qaeda. I spent a good deal of time visiting battlefields in the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as shaping strategy in Washington. But when I left government service in 2009, I eagerly resumed work on a book that dealt with America’s most durable, and in many ways most effective and important, enemy: Canada. So I feel both morally compelled and professionally qualified to examine the Trump administration’s interesting but far from original idea of absorbing that country into the union. There are, as Donald Trump and Don Corleone might put it, two ways of doing this: the easy way and the hard way. The easy way would be if Canadians rose up en masse clamoring to join the United States. Even so, there would be awkwardness. [Read: The angry Canadian] Canada is slightly larger than America. That would mean that the “cherished 51st state,” as Trump calls it, would be lopsided in terms of territory. It would be 23 times larger than California, which would be fine for owning the libs, but it would also be 14 times larger than the Lone Star State, which would definitely cause some pursed lips and steely looks there. Messing with Texas is a bad idea. The new state would be the largest in population too, with 40 million people—more than California by a hair, and considerably more than Texas, Florida, or New York. Its size would pose a whole bunch of problems for Trump: Canada is a much more left-wing country than the United States, and absorbing it could well revive the political fortunes of progressives. If its 10 provinces became 10 states instead of one, only three would probably vote for the GOP; the other seven would likely go for Democrats. That might mean adding six Republican senators and 14 Democrats. If Trump were impeached a third time, that might produce the supermajority required for conviction in the Senate. But such political ramifications are purely academic considerations at the moment. Polling suggests that 85 to 90 percent of all Canadians cling to sovereignty. Having been denied the easy way of absorbing Canada, therefore, the United States might have to try the hard way, conquering the country and administering it as a territory until it is purged of Liberals, Conservatives, and whatever the Canadian equivalent of RINOs turns out to be. Unfortunately, we have tried this before, with dismal results. In 1775, before the United States had even formally declared independence from Great Britain, it launched an invasion of Canada, hoping to make it the 14th colony. The psychological-warfare geniuses in Congress ordered that the local farmers and villagers be distributed pamphlets—translated into French—declaring, “You have been conquered into liberty,” an interesting way of putting it. Unfortunately, the Catholic farmers and villagers were largely illiterate, and their leaders, the gentry and parish priests who could read, were solidly on the side of the British against a bunch of invading Protestants. There were moments of brilliant leadership in this invasion, particularly in a daring autumn march through Maine to the very walls of Quebec. There was also a great deal of poltroonery and bungling. The Americans had three talented generals. The first, Richard Montgomery, got killed in the opening assault on Quebec. The second, John Thomas, died of smallpox, along with many of his men. Inoculation was possible, but, like today’s vaccine skeptics, many thought it a bad idea. You can visit the capacious cemetery for the victims on Île aux Noix, now Fort Lennox, Canada. The third general, the most talented of the lot, was Benedict Arnold, who held the expedition together even after suffering a grievous leg wound. Eventually, however, he grew disgusted with a Congress rather less craven and incompetent than its contemporary successor and became a traitor, accepting a commission as a brigadier general in the British army and fighting against American forces. We tried again in 1812. Thomas Jefferson, the original Republican, described the acquisition of Canada as “a mere matter of marching.” This was incorrect. The United States launched eight or nine invasions of Canada during the War of 1812, winning only one fruitless battle. The rest of the time, it got walloped. For example, General William Hull, like other American commanders a superannuated veteran of the Revolution, ended up surrendering Detroit with 2,500 troops to a much smaller British and Indian force. Court-martialed for cowardice and neglect of duty in 1814, he was sentenced to death but pardoned. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is perhaps unfamiliar with the Battle of Chateaugay. The last three letters are, after all, gay, and as such, the battle has doubtless been expunged from Defense Department websites and databases, meeting the same fate as the Enola Gay. Still, it is instructive. An invading force of 2,600 American regulars encountered about 1,500 Canadian militia members, volunteers, and Mohawks under a Francophone colonel, Charles de Salaberry. They were defeated and had to withdraw. Since the War of 1812, Americans have not tried any formal invasions of Canada, but there was tacit and sometimes overt support for the 1837–38 revolt of the Canadian patriotes, a confrontation over Oregon (a sober look at the size of the Royal Canadian Navy dissuaded us from trying anything), and the Fenian raids of 1866 and 1870. The Fenians were rather like the Proud Boys, only better organized and all Irish, and they also ended up fleeing back over the border. Perhaps today’s Canadians are a flimsier lot. The Canadian armed forces are quite small (the army numbers only about 42,000, including reservists), although spirited and hardy. One should note with respect that 158 Canadians were killed fighting alongside American soldiers in Afghanistan. But even if the Canadian military were overcome after some initial bloody battles, what then? Canadians may have gone in for wokeness in recent years, it is true, but there is the matter of their bloody-minded DNA. It was not that long ago that they harvested baby seals—the ones with the big, sad, adorable brown eyes—with short iron clubs. They love hockey, a sport that would have pleased the emperors and blood-crazed plebeians and patricians of ancient Rome if they could only have figured out how to build an ice rink in the Colosseum. [Read: Canada is taking Trump seriously and personally] Parenthetically, there remains the problem of the First Nations (as the Canadians refer to them), whom they treated somewhat less badly than Americans treated Native Americans (as we refer to them). There are about 50,000 Mohawks straddling the U.S.-Canadian border, and they are fearless, which is why you will find them building skyscrapers at terrifying heights above the street. As members of what used to be the Iroquois Confederacy, they were ferocious warriors, and they retain a martial tradition. It is sobering to consider that they may think, with reason, that we are the illegal immigrants who have ruined the country, and therefore hold a grudge. There is a martial spirit up north waiting to be reawakened. Members of the Trump administration may not have heard of Vimy Ridge, Dieppe, the crossing of the Sangro, Juno Beach, or the Battle of the Scheldt. Take it from a military historian: The Canadian soldiers were formidable, as were the sailors who escorted convoys across the North Atlantic and the airmen who flew in the Battle of Britain and the air war over Germany. Canada’s 44,000 dead represented a higher percentage of the population than America’s losses in the Second World War. Those who served were almost entirely volunteers. Bottom line: It is not a good idea to invade Canada. I recommend that in order to avoid the Trump administration becoming even more of a laughingstock, Secretary Hegseth find, read, and distribute to the White House a good account of the Battle of Chateau***. It could help avoid embarrassment.
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.
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