I don’t know what sort of neurodiverse bucket this puts me in, but I think a lot about mowing the lawn1 relative to how much time I actually spend mowing lawns (~6-7 hours per year). And so I was completely fascinated by The Pudding’s latest post on optimal lawn mowing paths and “why some people mow a lawn better than others”.
They built several digital lawns for people to mow and recorded all of their moves, how often they paused at certain times, and who mowed an optimal path.
Solving the lawn mowing problem is formally called Coverage Path Planning, and is related to one of the most famous path planning problems in computer science: The Traveling Salesman Problem.
Humans turn out to be pretty good mowers, especially those who take their time and have played some video games (including, one would assume, Dig Dug, Pac-Man, Mr. Do!, and any other game where you need to worry about dead-ends).
Sarah, one of the best mowers, spent her attention unevenly on purpose. She had a theory about why.
“The bigger spaces have more cognitive load for you to figure out what the best path is. Whereas the smaller spaces…there are fewer decisions to make.”
She planned the tight, trap-prone sections carefully and winged it on the open ones.
So it’s not about thinking more or faster, but when thinking happens. That’s what a good heuristic does: it spends your attention on the decisions that matter and nothing on the ones that don’t.
The piece is interactive so you get to try your hand at digital mowing as well.
My actual lawn is very irregularly shaped with a few dead-ends & choke points and an added wrinkle that I can’t blow grass clippings into the flower beds (so I can only go one-way the “wrong way” in those areas). So every time I mow, I’m trying to figure out the optimal path so I don’t end up backtracking too much. I probably end up saving about 45 seconds of actual time but boy is it fun from an intellectual standpoint.
During a Cabinet meeting at Camp David on Friday, President Donald Trump touted growing “investment” into the U.S. since he took office.
“There’s never been anything like it from the standpoint of investment into our country,” Trump told reporters and members of his administration. “It’s five to six times higher than anybody has ever seen, than any other country, not just us, has ever had.”
Part of a diatribe about the economy which included a segment about his tariffs, the president was likely referring at least in part to the several trillions of dollars in foreign investment commitments his White House announced beginning last year after Trump leveraged threats of historically high tariffs as a bargaining chip with various countries. (The president employed equally aggressive tactics to elicit financial commitments and expensive gifts from U.S. companies including tech giants Apple and Nvidia.) There’s even a whole page on the White House website titled, simply, “Investments,” touting $10.7 billion in U.S. and foreign investment commitments beneath pulsating text that reads “The Trump Effect.”
The webpage frames the numbers as if they’re dollars already spent. But in many cases, they aren’t.
“The Trump approach remains to be seen,” Ryan Mulholland, a senior international economic policy fellow at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, told TPM.
A year ago, international trade experts and economists told TPM that many foreign governments were playing Trump. Today, some investment agreements are already underway, while others have virtually no mechanism to be executed at all. It remains to be seen whether Trump’s stick approach to foreign economic relations will send real dollars flowing to U.S. companies and workers — or whether it’s just one more way for Trump to enrich himself, his family and companies allied with the president.
‘Where do these deals leave us?’
New money coming from foreign governments to the U.S. is up compared to last year, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. And commitments for 2026 made in 2025 are much higher than those made in 2024. But they’re not the highest in history. New foreign investment commitments were nearly $20 billion higher under former President Joe Biden in 2022. And their impact on U.S. prosperity is much more of a mixed bag.
There’s no indication that new foreign investment in the U.S. stems from Trump’s trade deals, according to available federal data. And most deal-related boosts won’t show up in the most recent figures from the BEA. What is apparent in the data, though, are high-tech investments into the AI industry — new investments that are separate from Trump’s trade policy agreements, a late June research paper from the Federal Reserve showed.
The economic hallmark of Trump’s second presidential term are his tariffs, which his administration has said are aimed at correcting long-running imbalances between the U.S. and its trading partners. One of his attempts at correction — to levy blanket tariffs using a 1970s era law — was struck down by the Supreme Court. A second tariff scheme using a different provision was blocked by a lower court, too. Small businesses are suing Trump right now to overturn his administration’s third attempt at reordering global trade through tariffs, which SCOTUS ruled were a tax on the American people. All the while, Trump and his officials are hammering home the idea that the president’s savvy salesmanship has saved a failing American economy.
“I think other countries have largely figured out that they can give Trump a sort of headline that he likes, and in exchange win all of the details of a trade deal,” Mulholland said.
“Where do these deals leave us? Are we in a better position to create prosperity for everyday people? Are we in a position to work with our partners and allies around the world to solve the challenges that impact people’s lives? I think on both of those scores,” Mulholland continued, “Trump’s very sort of short-term, zero sum kind of view of trade relationships has hurt us.”
Trump is prepared to act if foreign governments fail to uphold their agreement terms, White House spokesman Kush Desai told TPM in an email.
“President Trump means what he says, and he has never hesitated to leverage the might of the American economy to hold trading partners accountable to their agreed-upon commitments,” Desai said.
Meeting Trade Commitments Will Prove ‘Very Difficult’ for Most Countries
Japan agreed to invest $550 billion in U.S. manufacturing sectors including semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and the shipbuilding industry with special financing provisions that mean Japan will pay for the projects at little cost to America. That deal, along with commitments on U.S. tech and manufacturing investments from Taiwan and shipbuilding from South Korea, has progressed the most.
“I guess the only place where we’ve seen some action is really on Japan’s commitments. “The conditions are [once] the project is approved, the Japanese government is obligated to provide financing for it,” Greg Auclair, a statistician and researcher at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told TPM. “That’s a very small list right now.”
Already, Japan and Taiwan have poured about $75 billion into the U.S., Auclair said, though he noted that opaque commitment terms and novel financing mechanisms make it harder to know whether those investments are one-to-one correlations with the trade deals.
Auclair co-published a report suggesting foreign governments will have a hard time financing their commitments to the U.S. Auclair showed that even if some countries with commitments to Trump tap significant portions of their investment capacities and turn them toward the U.S., those nations would still struggle to fulfill their pledges over a 10-year timeline.
“I don’t think they will all be fulfilled,” Auclair’s co-author Adnan Mazarei told Politico in January.
Countries would essentially have to rob Peter to pay Paul — reallocating import schema to benefit the U.S. at the expense of other trading partners, selling foreign assets to purchase more American ones, and bumping up against their own debt capacities.
“Putting everything together,” Auclair told TPM, “it would be possible for them to meet the pledges but very difficult.”
An update to Auclair’s January report will show that the first year of Trump’s presidency saw foreign investment in the U.S. align with the long-run average, he said, pushing back on Trump’s narrative of historic inflows of foreign cash.
In some cases, Trump’s overbearing tactics have pushed countries to take the opposite tack, reducing exposure to the U.S. economy while creating historic trade agreements with other countries.
The European Union in January closed a deal with several South American countries that’d been more than two decades in the making. The bloc of 27 European countries also closed a “landmark” free trade deal with India in January to protect against growing U.S. trade volatility. A bloc of South American countries are now in talks with Japan, and Canada is diversifying its economy away from the U.S. as evidenced by a recent electric vehicle deal with China.
“So there are a lot of instances where governments are seeking to reduce their exposure to the United States, and that is a direct result of Trump’s belligerence on the world stage,” Mulholland said.
Future U.S. presidential administrations, he added, will be limited as a result.
“[Other countries’] ability to negotiate kind of new things with the United States,” Mulholland said, “is going to be hamstrung by commitments that they’ve already made to each other in the deals they did to reduce their exposure to the Trump administration.”
This article has been updated to include a statement from the White House.
This article has been updated to correct the amount of new and planned investment from Japan and Taiwan. It is $75 billion. TPM regrets the error.
The DOJ dropped its case against former Olympian David Hearn, citing the terrible work of Trump's handpicked contractor.
Pirro's office said a Park Service engineer had documented peeling eight days before the accused vandal visited the pool, and a government witness could not connect him to the damage. — Read the rest
"here's a portentous calendricular note/post for today (only) Bradbury ~May 1950 wrote a short story about robotic assistants doing the daily choirs for an apparently extinct humanity and it's dated to occur August 4, 2026:"
In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o'clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o'clock!
Using high-definition open source videos and photos from NASA and his own music, John Boswell (aka Melodysheep) created this mesmerizing eight-minute video recap of the Artemis II mission that enchanted us all back in the spring. Like all of his videos I’ve featured on KDO, this one is really well done.
The BraunSammlung is a museum of Braun's industrial design in Kronberg im Taunus, up one flight in a building Atlas Obscura describes as a German strip mall. Braun's headquarters is around the corner, and a nonprofit association runs the museum in collaboration with the company. — Read the rest
I don’t begrudge Wisconsin Democratic voters the decision to embark on the Great Francesca Hong Experiment.
But, you know, they shouldn’t have any illusions as to how this is going to turn out.
There are two ideas in tension here.
The first idea is that Democrats, as a party, need to try lots of different stuff. They need to try diligent centrists, Christian libs, populist crusaders, and McKinsey-style technocrats. It’s not crazy to think that they should also try full-monty DSA. You don’t know what the product-market fit is going to be until you test the market.
The second idea is that many of these elections matter. If Hong loses—and I suspect she’s going to get absolutely smoked in November—then there will be a Republican election denier with the power to monkey with certification and voting in a possible tipping-point state in 2028.
So, sure. It’s fine to experiment. But also: You can’t pretend these are free shots.
I have been asked over and over about the DSA-Democratic party split and today I want to propose a solution. Because there’s a way to bring new ideas into the Democratic party while keeping out the people who want to destroy the party.
Donald Trump hates embarrassing failures even when they are, ultimately, his own fault. So when the sealant on his $13.1 million-turned-$16-million Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation started peeling off in sheets days after the pool reopened and the water turned green with algae, he couldn’t simply say that a rushed, no-bid contract handed to his golfing buddy’s company produced shoddy work. Instead he demanded a villain, and the weaponized Justice Department complied.
On July 2, 2026, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro held a triumphant press briefing to announce a felony indictment against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn. Pirro claimed her office possessed solid evidence of guilt proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the 67-year-old had committed a deliberate, forceful and violent act causing over $1,000 in damage to the pool liner when he stopped his bike in June, reached down and touched a loose piece of lining that had already come apart before he ever laid a hand on it. When pressed by journalists like NBC’s Ryan Reilly about photographic evidence showing the liner was already peeling long before Hearn ever stepped near the water, Pirro grew combative, waving off the question with the same on-air contempt she perfected across 14 years as a host at Fox News, and insisted her office would prove the damage in court with expert testimony.
Weeks later, the Justice Department acknowledged something dramatically different.
By late July, as Hearn’s defense counsel moved for release of the grand jury transcripts to expose glaring prosecutorial irregularities, Pirro’s case collapsed. Facing the real possibility of judicial sanctions, an inspector general investigation and disbarment, her office filed a 20-page motion to dismiss the indictment. The filing threw the Interior Department under the bus, claiming Secretary Doug Burgum’s agency had withheld 695 megabytes of crucial documents revealing the damage was caused by contractor error during the rush to finish before the America 250 Independence Day festivities. The department’s own records described repeated installation failures and extensive peeling of the pool liner weeks before the alleged vandalism was ever said to have occurred. Prosecutors asked that the charges be dismissed because the evidence no longer supported Pirro’s claim, evidence that, it bears repeating, had been available to the government the entire time.
The dismissal did not stop with Hearn. Within days, Pirro’s office also moved to drop misdemeanor charges against three more people accused of the same phantom vandalism. Justin Carreno, Sophie Dennison-Gibby and Cameron Thiers all faced lesser counts of destroying property worth less than a thousand dollars, and their attorneys told reporters the common thread was simple: The federal government had just spent millions repainting and relining the pool, and when the work failed, the Trump administration needed a scapegoat. The entire theory of the case — that ordinary citizens had descended on a national monument with knives to sabotage it out of political spite — evaporated once anyone with subpoena power actually looked at the evidence.
The saga of the Reflecting Pool is emblematic of everything amiss in America right now, a perfect diorama of how right-wing media turns Trump’s fantasies into public reality, and then tries to quietly conceal the wreckage once the facts catch up.
The saga of the Reflecting Pool is emblematic of everything amiss in America right now, a perfect diorama of how right-wing media turns Trump’s fantasies into public reality, and then tries to quietly conceal the wreckage once the facts catch up. Fox News was happy to amplify the vandalism narrative when it was useful. But once the case fell apart, the network gave it barely cursory treatment, a striking silence from an outlet that had spent weeks covering the alleged desecration of a national monument when the story served the White House.
That silence makes sense once you remember Pirro’s origins. She spent years at Fox telling viewers whatever the moment required. By her own network’s private assessment, she was a “reckless maniac” whose 2020 election fraud claims helped make Fox liable for one of the largest defamation settlements in American history: a $787.5 million payout to Dominion Voting Systems.
Pirro’s appointment as U.S. attorney represented the full realization of the MAGA media pipeline, in which performative loyalty on television is treated as the primary qualification for federal law enforcement authority. What she is now discovering is that a courtroom does not run on the same rules as a cable television set. At Fox, Pirro could tell her audience whatever she wanted without personal consequence. Telling a federal judge the same kind of thing carries the threat of disbarment and perjury charges, and no amount of bravado previously reserved for on-air broadcasts could change that math.
Predictably, the moment Pirro chose self-preservation over total subversion of the law, Trump turned on her. He spent days publicly berating her, complaining to reporters that she had “folded like an umbrella” and writing on Truth Social that he fully disagreed with his own Justice Department. In a rambling, incoherent stream of consciousness to reporters from the Oval Office on Monday, he continued to insist on the existence of security tapes showing mysterious figures cutting the pool lining with box cutters — tapes no one has ever produced — while simultaneously trying to shift blame for the pool’s historical leaks onto previous administrations. On Monday, Trump met privately with Pirro and Burgum while reports circulated that he was considering replacing her.
After her Senate confirmation in August 2025, Trump promised Pirro would be a powerful crusader, and she has spent the year since prosecuting his perceived enemies with a zeal that has not been matched at trial. Her record in court is poor, with her office winning only half of its first eight criminal trials in 2026 a rate CNN reported was far below the national average. Bloomberg Law’s reporting describes a string of similarly threadbare cases: a man charged with assaulting a federal officer using a Subway sandwich following Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops in the District, who was acquitted by a jury but forced to flee his home after receiving threats; a Maryland woman jailed nearly a week for spitting on an officer at the National Zoo before the charge was quietly reduced and then dropped; a man left with permanent injuries after being tased during a high-speed chase, and whose federal charge also collapsed into a misdemeanor plea. The latter was interviewed by a Bloomberg Law reporter about his ordeal and was, according to the outlet, found dead behind a Washington rowhouse a month later.
As people swept up in this kind of prosecutorial overreach have noted, the goal is not really conviction. It is using state power to inflict maximum disruption on a person’s job, housing and relationships, and to send a chilling message to anyone else who might draw the government’s attention. A conviction, when one happens, is treated as a bonus. The process itself is the punishment.
Pirro will likely survive this particular episode. Trump did not fire her over the weekend, and by Monday he had already moved on to blaming the judge instead. But something has shifted.
The former Fox star who built a television career on never conceding a point is now the first prominent member of this administration to publicly contradict Trump’s own account of a story he has told, in increasingly baroque detail, for weeks. It turns out that feeding Trump’s delusions is a great deal easier from behind a Fox News desk, where no one can hold you in contempt, than standing in front of a federal judge who can.
Even if you scorn Boomer myth-making, the 50th anniversary of “Revolver” — perhaps the Beatles’ best album — is a big deal. It not only sent the band in a new direction, it showed new possibilities in rock music. Look at the state of rock music in the 21st century — when so much of popular music is about artfully recycling existing tropes and styles — and it can be hard to see what the fuss was about. But the album was groundbreaking for a bunch of reasons, and it’s aged better than almost any of the great records of the era.
One way that “Revolver” immediately stood out was its eclecticism. The album that preceded it, “Rubber Soul,” saw the band mostly in acoustic-folkie mode, and the one that followed it, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” was mostly expansive, psychedelic, and orchestrated. Both are masterpieces. (The hype around “Sgt. Pepper’s” has led some to dismiss it, but go listen to it sometime — even overlooking the backstory and concept-album pretensions, it’s packed full of good tunes.) But “Revolver” shows a complex band stretching all over the place: Between an Indian tune, chamber pop, acid-influenced psychedelia, muscular rockers, and everything in between, the album is so wide-ranging that, with the inclusion of one more genre, it would probably not have held together.
Part of the reason “Revolver” worked so well was that the on-again, off-again battle between the band’s three songwriters has reached a point of productive detente. The Beatles had begun as John Lennon’s band, and would soon become Paul McCartney’s: Drugs and indifference and general orneriness would take Lennon far away from the collaboration that a rock group needs. McCartney’s curiosity and squareness — his avoidance of hard drugs, his interest in contemporary art and experimental music, his earnest band diplomacy — was making him more sophisticated and essential with each album. But both were still at the top of their game and working together at least some of the time.
The emergence of George Harrison completed the perfect chemistry: Frustrated over the years by being pushed aside, the guitarist saw three of his songs — the opener, “Taxman,” the Indian “Love You To,” the moderately dissonant “I Want to Tell You” — sneak onto the album.
Throw in Lennon’s rocking “And Your Bird Can Sing” and his psychedelic breakthrough “Tomorrow Never Knows,” and McCartney’s “For No One” and “Eleanor Rigby,” and you have a collection of timeless songs even with an entire side to go.
As lively and inventive as the early Beatles albums were, “Revolver” is also the one that saw them unleashed in the studio. Abbey Road was quite primitive by the standards of our day, and less sophisticated than studios in California. But producer George Martin and Geoff Emerick went out of their way to make instruments sound uncanny, to allow Lennon to indulge strange ideas (a microphone, wrapped in a condom, submerged in water), to incorporate tape loops and unorthodox instruments into the sound.
“Revolver” was so sonically advanced, in fact, that the band stopped playing live around the time of its recording: They saw no way to play its songs outside the studio. In some ways, the process deepened an insularity that would hurt the band creatively and personally.
“Revolver” isn’t perfect. McCartney’s chipper “Good Day Sunshine” and his Motown-inspired “Got to Get You Into My Life” are not among the band’s best music: They’re musically derivative and emotionally forced. Despite its charm, “Yellow Submarine” may not quite fit on the album. “Revolver” would be too grim and brooding with all three of these numbers removed, but they tear its fabric a little bit.
But it’s still a wonder. Part of what’s odd about “Revolver” is that its eclecticism and psychedelia didn’t last long. Music and culture was changing so fast in the ’60s: Bob Dylan released the forward looking “Blonde on Blonde” the same year, and the Rolling Stones briefly dabbled in psychedelia. But by 1968 and ’69, musicians were turning back from the restlessness of “Revolver.” The Stones were in retro-country mode, as was Dylan. Between The Band and Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison, many of the most talented musicians were looking backward. By 1970, Jimi Hendrix — who seemed the most likely to extend the Beatles’ experimentation — was dead.
It’s also safe to say that “Revolver” was the album that kids who grew up in the’70s and ’80s grew into, once their pre-pubescent fascination with earlier, less-challenging Beatles albums wore off. It was the record they were listening to as teens, and it was the one that, possibly more than any other album, was a touchstone for the indie-rock movement of the ’90s. (Just try to imagine the Stone Roses or Oasis or Pavement or Radiohead without it.)
The Beatles experienced a backlash in the United States just before the release of “Revolver” because of Lennon’s remark that the band was “more popular than Jesus now.” More popular or not, as great as their earlier work had been, it was “Revolver” that made them deities.
Anthony Fauci became a symbol of truth and integrity during the pandemic. In his diaries, he’s mostly talking about how he “butt called” Barbra Streisand.
Within months of having her first child, Samantha Savran began hearing from family and friends that she should have a second. Doing so would be the greatest “gift” that she and her husband could give their son, people told them.
At first, Savran agreed. Growing up with a brother, she had liked having a live-in playmate and confidant. But the more she thought about her situation, she grew hesitant. Her birth experience had been traumatic. And she wasn’t sure if having a sibling would be the best for her son, who was thriving. What she and her husband could offer him—Montessori preschool, a family trip to Japan—might not be possible with a second child. But she also knew that sibling relationships could turn painful. In adulthood, her connection with her brother had splintered. They had disagreements that had spiraled into a full-blown falling out, and their relationship was now “difficult,” she told me. “It’s hard to say that I still see it as a ‘gift.’”
The notion that parents should give children a sibling is common. “Life Is Better With Siblings,” declared the headline on a recent New York Timesop-ed by the Catholic University professor Catherine Pakaluk, who argued that, unlike small families, “large families generate moral education the way an engine generates heat.” In a column last year for The Guardian, a writer explained that she had “gifted my daughters each other,” and that doing so was a way of “quietly healing my childhood loneliness.” On social media, heartstring-tugging posts of small children holding hands and nuzzling underscore the point: “A baby brother is the universe’s way of giving a little girl her first real love story,” one mom captioned a video.
When I asked online about this kind of messaging, I heard from dozens of parents who had been on the receiving end. A New York City woman who works in health care, fresh off maternity leave, said a patient had told her that she would be “selfish” not to have a second child. Scarlet de Lemeny, a recently married retail consultant based in Boston, told me that before she’d even set a wedding date, people had advised her to have multiple children—because “they need a friend.” This month, the British celebrity Kate Lawler, who has one 5-year-old, wrote in Metro: “I’m now regularly hounded with abuse when I talk about the positives of having just one, as if raising my daughter without a sibling is the cruellest thing I could possibly do.” This prodding isn’t limited to one-child parents. A mother of two boys told me that she keeps hearing she should “definitely try for a third, so you can have a girl.”
The people who implore women to have more kids usually mean well. It’s lovely, and reasonable, to hope that a sibling might become a child’s lifelong friend and source of support. But the “gift” messaging isn’t always benign. For parents, it can add pressure, guilt, and anxiety to an already huge life decision—particularly for women, who in addition to giving birth tend to bear the brunt of fertility expectations, care responsibilities, and mental and physical health burdens, and to take a hit to their long-term employment and earnings prospects.
The “gift” phrasing also rests on a shaky premise. People, after all, aren’t inanimate objects. They are unpredictable beings with a will and their own motivations. And not even the best of intentions can guarantee that a child will experience a new sibling as a gift.
The sibling bond can be unlike any other. I’ve heard people describe their siblings as their “first phone call,” their “life raft,” their “village.” Some siblings can finish one another’s sentences or seem to sense when something is wrong even when they’re far away, in another state. One of my friends is so close with her brother that he made her the “best ma’am” at his wedding. Another person told me that, when her parents kicked her out, her sister took her in—the same weekend the sister was getting married.
Broadly, research shows that sibling relationships tend to be more positive than negative. One large, recent U.S. survey found that more than half of respondents ages 25 to 35 had “tight-knit” relationships with their full siblings. Although events such as starting their own family can cause siblings to drift apart, they typically experience a “rebound,” the sibling researcher Megan Gilligan, an associate professor at the University of Missouri, told me. In one study, a sample of older adults found that most reported warm, low-conflict sibling ties.
But these bonds can be uniquely complicated. “Sibling relationships are different than our other family ties, and they tend to be more complex,” Gilligan said. “We use the term ambivalence: They can be both very positive and very negative, simultaneously.” The same factors that can make these relationships go so right—growing up together; knowing one another’s triggers, foibles, and flaws—can also make them go very wrong. When aging parents need care or die, for instance, their grown children might find benefits to sharing the costs, decision making, and emotional burden, Gilligan said. But in some families, the same situations can cause conflict and resentment.
Research also indicates that it isn’t simply having a sibling that benefits children—it’s having a good relationship with one. That may sound like plain common sense, but the distinction is crucial. A paper last year identified sibling aggression and abuse as “invisible and widespread public health problems.” One watershed 2013 study found that children who endured sibling aggression, including name-calling and “mean” comments, had worse mental health than those who didn’t.
Still darker and less discussed is sibling sexual abuse. There’s no way to know how common it is, Brad Watts, a Tennessee-based therapist who specializes in sibling abuse, told me. But in more than a decade of working with affected families, he has seen a theme: No family is guaranteed immunity. “It can happen in my home,” he told me. “It can happen in anybody’s home.”
Watts has three boys. He has loved watching them become close friends. But he would never tell someone to “give” their child a sibling. “I can talk about all kinds of siblings that were not ‘gifts,’” Watts said. “They were, more or less, terrors.” Even close sibling relationships aren’t always beneficial. Studies over the years have found that adolescents are more likely to engage in risky behavior, such as smoking or unsafe sex, and even to break the law if another sibling did—especially if their relationship is tight.
Calling a younger sibling a “gift” can create unintended consequences, too, Whitney Goodman, a Miami-based therapist, told me. Although this is surely no one’s intent, the phrasing can imply that a child has been brought into the world in the service of another. The parental preference it suggests may cause children to feel they’re treated or desired differently—one of the most common reasons sibling relationships fracture.
Learning to navigate life with someone you didn’t choose to grow up with can be rewarding. But not always. The same large U.S. survey that found “tight-knit” relationships among many full siblings also found that up to one in five sibling relationships were characterized by “detachment”—meaning that siblings were less likely to have frequent contact, to feel emotionally close, or to offer one another social or financial support. In Germany, researchers looking at a nationally representative sample of nearly 6,000 adults found that 28 percent of respondents were estranged from a sibling at least once over the study’s six-year period.
De Lemeny, the Boston retail consultant, has amassed more than half a million followers across TikTok and Instagram by sharing about her life and childhood, and her experience going no-contact with her parents. Many followers ask about her brother, assuming that they must have “trauma-bonded.” When she explains that, actually, she and her brother don’t speak, some are shocked. Others thank her: They weren’t close to their siblings and thought they were alone in this. “It’s a dynamic that doesn’t really get spoken about,” de Lemeny said. “It’s something that carries a lot of shame.”
This silence about conflict and estrangement can have ripple effects in the broader culture. It might lead parents-to-be to assume that, barring some grave unlikelihood, siblings will be friends for life. It also contributes to the narrative that if a person doesn’t “give” their child a sibling, they will be, unequivocally, depriving them of something important.
Anna de Sapio, a social worker in the United Kingdom, gave birth during the first COVID lockdown and struggled with isolation, exhaustion, and postpartum depression and anxiety. Yet when her daughter was only four months old, de Sapio began to get the question: When are you planning to give her a sibling? It made de Sapio feel “depleted,” she told me—as if, no matter how much of herself she gave, it wasn’t enough.
Nearly every mother I spoke with expressed guilt about her decision making: one-child moms for not “giving” their child a built-in best friend; multiple-child moms who after having additional kids felt awful that they had less time and attention for their first. And these days, the pressure is coming not just from friends and family but also from politicians and other public figures: Donald Trump floating “baby bonuses”; Elon Musk arguing that the “number one threat to the West” is low birth rates; tradwives, tech bros, and other proponents of the pronatalist movement who repeat over and over that having more children isn’t a lifestyle choice—it’s a moral good.
Like the “moral good” rhetoric, which assumes that having more babies is all upside, the “gift” rhetoric ignores the fact that having one child may simply be the best decision for many families—including for solo children. Research spanning decades suggests that, contrary to stereotype, only children tend to be just as well-adjusted as kids in multi-child households, enjoy the same or better mental health, and have closer relationships with their parents. They are no more narcissistic, competitive, or lonely than those with siblings. And although they may possess, as very young children, slightly-less-developed interpersonal skills, these differences generally disappear over time.
Plus, let’s be blunt: Regardless of how much parents love every child that they have, additional children can add stress and expense. This can affect the mental well-being of parents and, by extension, their children. Kids generally fare better when their caregivers are in good mental health, can invest more time in caregiving, and are sensitive and responsive to their child’s needs. These nuances may help explain why, on average, children with more than three or four siblings have worse mental and physical health than kids with fewer or none.
The “gift” phrasing misses something else, too: When people frame siblings as gifts and being an only child as a deficit, they discount what many only-child families told me they’ve experienced: the joy that can come from having a small, tight-knit family where jealousies and conflicts are mostly absent, and parents’ time and attention are undivided.
After several years of uncertainty, Savran and her husband made a decision: They would stick to having one child. “Giving the best life we can to the one kid we have,” she said, “and making sure he’s surrounded by friends and ‘framily’ and people who love him, ended up being our priority.” No one knows what a sibling might bring. But this kind of careful decision making—which takes the capacities, joys, and temperaments of already existing family members into account—can be its own gift.
Within months of having her first child, Samantha Savran began hearing from family and friends that she should have a second. Doing so would be the greatest “gift” that she and her husband could give their son, people told them.
At first, Savran agreed. Growing up with a brother, she had liked having a live-in playmate and confidant. But the more she thought about her situation, she grew hesitant. Her birth experience had been traumatic. And she wasn’t sure if having a sibling would be the best for her son, who was thriving. What she and her husband could offer him—Montessori preschool, a family trip to Japan—might not be possible with a second child. But she also knew that sibling relationships could turn painful. In adulthood, her connection with her brother had splintered. They had disagreements that had spiraled into a full-blown falling out, and their relationship was now “difficult,” she told me. “It’s hard to say that I still see it as a ‘gift.’”
The notion that parents should give children a sibling is common. “Life Is Better With Siblings,” declared the headline on a recent New York Timesop-ed by the Catholic University professor Catherine Pakaluk, who argued that, unlike small families, “large families generate moral education the way an engine generates heat.” In a column last year for The Guardian, a writer explained that she had “gifted my daughters each other,” and that doing so was a way of “quietly healing my childhood loneliness.” On social media, heartstring-tugging posts of small children holding hands and nuzzling underscore the point: “A baby brother is the universe’s way of giving a little girl her first real love story,” one mom captioned a video.
When I asked online about this kind of messaging, I heard from dozens of parents who had been on the receiving end. A New York City woman who works in health care, fresh off maternity leave, said a patient had told her that she would be “selfish” not to have a second child. Scarlet de Lemeny, a recently married retail consultant based in Boston, told me that before she’d even set a wedding date, people had advised her to have multiple children—because “they need a friend.” This month, the British celebrity Kate Lawler, who has one 5-year-old, wrote in Metro: “I’m now regularly hounded with abuse when I talk about the positives of having just one, as if raising my daughter without a sibling is the cruellest thing I could possibly do.” This prodding isn’t limited to one-child parents. A mother of two boys told me that she keeps hearing she should “definitely try for a third, so you can have a girl.”
The people who implore women to have more kids usually mean well. It’s lovely, and reasonable, to hope that a sibling might become a child’s lifelong friend and source of support. But the “gift” messaging isn’t always benign. For parents, it can add pressure, guilt, and anxiety to an already huge life decision—particularly for women, who in addition to giving birth tend to bear the brunt of fertility expectations, care responsibilities, and mental and physical health burdens, and to take a hit to their long-term employment and earnings prospects.
The “gift” phrasing also rests on a shaky premise. People, after all, aren’t inanimate objects. They are unpredictable beings with a will and their own motivations. And not even the best of intentions can guarantee that a child will experience a new sibling as a gift.
The sibling bond can be unlike any other. I’ve heard people describe their siblings as their “first phone call,” their “life raft,” their “village.” Some siblings can finish one another’s sentences or seem to sense when something is wrong even when they’re far away, in another state. One of my friends is so close with her brother that he made her the “best ma’am” at his wedding. Another person told me that, when her parents kicked her out, her sister took her in—the same weekend the sister was getting married.
Broadly, research shows that sibling relationships tend to be more positive than negative. One large, recent U.S. survey found that more than half of respondents ages 25 to 35 had “tight-knit” relationships with their full siblings. Although events such as starting their own family can cause siblings to drift apart, they typically experience a “rebound,” the sibling researcher Megan Gilligan, an associate professor at the University of Missouri, told me. In one study, a sample of older adults found that most reported warm, low-conflict sibling ties.
But these bonds can be uniquely complicated. “Sibling relationships are different than our other family ties, and they tend to be more complex,” Gilligan said. “We use the term ambivalence: They can be both very positive and very negative, simultaneously.” The same factors that can make these relationships go so right—growing up together; knowing one another’s triggers, foibles, and flaws—can also make them go very wrong. When aging parents need care or die, for instance, their grown children might find benefits to sharing the costs, decision making, and emotional burden, Gilligan said. But in some families, the same situations can cause conflict and resentment.
Research also indicates that it isn’t simply having a sibling that benefits children—it’s having a good relationship with one. That may sound like plain common sense, but the distinction is crucial. A paper last year identified sibling aggression and abuse as “invisible and widespread public health problems.” One watershed 2013 study found that children who endured sibling aggression, including name-calling and “mean” comments, had worse mental health than those who didn’t.
Still darker and less discussed is sibling sexual abuse. There’s no way to know how common it is, Brad Watts, a Tennessee-based therapist who specializes in sibling abuse, told me. But in more than a decade of working with affected families, he has seen a theme: No family is guaranteed immunity. “It can happen in my home,” he told me. “It can happen in anybody’s home.”
Watts has three boys. He has loved watching them become close friends. But he would never tell someone to “give” their child a sibling. “I can talk about all kinds of siblings that were not ‘gifts,’” Watts said. “They were, more or less, terrors.” Even close sibling relationships aren’t always beneficial. Studies over the years have found that adolescents are more likely to engage in risky behavior, such as smoking or unsafe sex, and even to break the law if another sibling did—especially if their relationship is tight.
Calling a younger sibling a “gift” can create unintended consequences, too, Whitney Goodman, a Miami-based therapist, told me. Although this is surely no one’s intent, the phrasing can imply that a child has been brought into the world in the service of another. The parental preference it suggests may cause children to feel they’re treated or desired differently—one of the most common reasons sibling relationships fracture.
Learning to navigate life with someone you didn’t choose to grow up with can be rewarding. But not always. The same large U.S. survey that found “tight-knit” relationships among many full siblings also found that up to one in five sibling relationships were characterized by “detachment”—meaning that siblings were less likely to have frequent contact, to feel emotionally close, or to offer one another social or financial support. In Germany, researchers looking at a nationally representative sample of nearly 6,000 adults found that 28 percent of respondents were estranged from a sibling at least once over the study’s six-year period.
De Lemeny, the Boston retail consultant, has amassed more than half a million followers across TikTok and Instagram by sharing about her life and childhood, and her experience going no-contact with her parents. Many followers ask about her brother, assuming that they must have “trauma-bonded.” When she explains that, actually, she and her brother don’t speak, some are shocked. Others thank her: They weren’t close to their siblings and thought they were alone in this. “It’s a dynamic that doesn’t really get spoken about,” de Lemeny said. “It’s something that carries a lot of shame.”
This silence about conflict and estrangement can have ripple effects in the broader culture. It might lead parents-to-be to assume that, barring some grave unlikelihood, siblings will be friends for life. It also contributes to the narrative that if a person doesn’t “give” their child a sibling, they will be, unequivocally, depriving them of something important.
Anna de Sapio, a social worker in the United Kingdom, gave birth during the first COVID lockdown and struggled with isolation, exhaustion, and postpartum depression and anxiety. Yet when her daughter was only four months old, de Sapio began to get the question: When are you planning to give her a sibling? It made de Sapio feel “depleted,” she told me—as if, no matter how much of herself she gave, it wasn’t enough.
Nearly every mother I spoke with expressed guilt about her decision making: one-child moms for not “giving” their child a built-in best friend; multiple-child moms who after having additional kids felt awful that they had less time and attention for their first. And these days, the pressure is coming not just from friends and family but also from politicians and other public figures: Donald Trump floating “baby bonuses”; Elon Musk arguing that the “number one threat to the West” is low birth rates; tradwives, tech bros, and other proponents of the pronatalist movement who repeat over and over that having more children isn’t a lifestyle choice—it’s a moral good.
Like the “moral good” rhetoric, which assumes that having more babies is all upside, the “gift” rhetoric ignores the fact that having one child may simply be the best decision for many families—including for solo children. Research spanning decades suggests that, contrary to stereotype, only children tend to be just as well-adjusted as kids in multi-child households, enjoy the same or better mental health, and have closer relationships with their parents. They are no more narcissistic, competitive, or lonely than those with siblings. And although they may possess, as very young children, slightly-less-developed interpersonal skills, these differences generally disappear over time.
Plus, let’s be blunt: Regardless of how much parents love every child that they have, additional children can add stress and expense. This can affect the mental well-being of parents and, by extension, their children. Kids generally fare better when their caregivers are in good mental health, can invest more time in caregiving, and are sensitive and responsive to their child’s needs. These nuances may help explain why, on average, children with more than three or four siblings have worse mental and physical health than kids with fewer or none.
The “gift” phrasing misses something else, too: When people frame siblings as gifts and being an only child as a deficit, they discount what many only-child families told me they’ve experienced: the joy that can come from having a small, tight-knit family where jealousies and conflicts are mostly absent, and parents’ time and attention are undivided.
After several years of uncertainty, Savran and her husband made a decision: They would stick to having one child. “Giving the best life we can to the one kid we have,” she said, “and making sure he’s surrounded by friends and ‘framily’ and people who love him, ended up being our priority.” No one knows what a sibling might bring. But this kind of careful decision making—which takes the capacities, joys, and temperaments of already existing family members into account—can be its own gift.
If you go to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, you may be able to purchase, for a mere $69.99, a plastic receptacle shaped as a Trojan horse. The horse is used in the film as an image of moral decline. But the repurposing of a sinister instrument of war into a popcorn container hints at the malleability of the conceit: A Trojan horse contains unexpected multitudes.
This mythical item has always been a tricky symbol, used by generations of storytellers and artists to map shifting perceptions of deception in war. The physical design of Nolan’s version is striking and wildly out of keeping with earlier representations, including ancient depictions and the pull-toy design of the giant equine in Wolf Petersen’s fun 2004 blockbuster, Troy. Nolan’s horse rears upright rather than standing on four hooves. The unwieldy creature is discovered half-buried in the sand, and proves almost impossible for the Trojans to lug into the city. This cinematic prop is an extraordinary feat of engineering: It stands nearly 40 feet tall and took hundreds of people to drag up the beach. The physical horror of people being trapped inside as the seawater rises is brilliantly and terrifyingly evoked.
But on a narrative level, Nolan’s horse is light as air. In comparison with other blockbusters—such as, say, the Die Hard films, also action-packed tales of one man’s dangerous journey back to his wife—TheOdyssey contains far more pontificating about values and civilizational decline, but much less coherence and less heart. It gestures at a critique of xenophobia and violence, but it focuses primarily on the perspective of the guilty, traumatized warrior rather than that of his victims. Moreover, the movie’s devoted attention to mechanics, and its heedless willingness to give us massacres as spectacle, undermines its moralizing claims of caring about man’s inhumanity to man. Verbally, we are told that people matter; visually, we are shown that they do not.
In ancient myth, Troy was a wealthy, powerful city whose walls were built by two gods, Apollo and Poseidon. Such walls could never be breached by mere mortals. So when Greek warriors gathered to besiege the city and retrieve the wife and wealth stolen from the Spartan king Menelaus by the Trojan prince Paris, they found themselves at an impasse: The great army, unable to break through Troy’s divinely constructed defenses, remained immobilized on the beach for 10 years.
Things changed only when Athena, the daughter of Zeus and goddess of military strategy, put an idea into the mind of her favorite mortal, Odysseus: to instruct the master craftsman Epeius to build a massive, hollow horse, inside which Odysseus and the other Greeks could hide. Odysseus was, as Nolan obviously recognizes, a mythical Robert Oppenheimer: a hero able to devise the ultimate weapon that could end a seemingly unwinnable war.
We do not know who first told the story of the Trojan horse, but it was in circulation by at least the early seventh century B.C.E. The earliest extant artistic depiction is on a large storage jar (in Greek called a pithos) from the island of Mykonos. It features a long-legged horse that has square cutout windows for the warriors to be seen through; outside the horse, more fighters are enslaving terrified women and children. The image is, like the popcorn-bucket horse, a joke: It would ruin the trick if the horse had windows.
The Homeric Odyssey, along with TheIliad and the poems of Hesiod, were likely composed around roughly the same time as the making of the Trojan-horse pithos, using the new technology that had become available in the Greek-speaking world in the mid-eighth century B.C.E.: the alphabet. This development enabled one or more composers—“Homer”—to create and preserve monumental written poems based on the oral tales about the great, lost days of heroes—characters who did extraordinary things and were closer to the gods than any normal mortal. The myths included partial, fictionalized folk memories of the earlier period of Greek prosperity, when the Mycenaeans built palatial structures and formed extensive trade routes across the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Homer’s Odyssey draws on many generations of preexisting myth but reshapes the old stories for its own era—a time of migration, colonization, urbanization, political and social diversity, and technological change.
In TheOdyssey, Odysseus repeatedly finds new ways to reenact his most famous trick of hiding inside the horse (an assumed backstory not described in the main narrative). He hides in the care of Calypso (whose name suggests “hiding”), beneath the name of No Man, under the sheep of Polyphemus, and in the guise of an old beggar. Eventually, he replicates his triumph at Troy in his own house by technological mastery of another trick involving a wooden weapon (this time, his bow). Odysseus’s mastery of technology enables him to invade a heavily defended home in disguise, achieve an impossible victory, and break an impasse, answering the long-deferred question of which man will claim the household and Penelope as his bride.
In one of only two extensive passages in Homer that evoke the horse explicitly (a long episode that Nolan excises), Odysseus, while enjoying the lavish hospitality of the Phaeacians on Scheria, asks a blind poet to sing the story of the Trojan horse. The poet complies, and Odysseus weeps at the story of his greatest triumph. The narrator offers a surprising simile: Odysseus sobs “as pitifully as a woman weeps” while watching her warrior husband die in a failed attempt to defend his city and his children. The woman falls desperately on her dying husband, but his killers are behind her, hitting her with spears as they force her into a life of enslavement. The simile suggests a connection between the victorious Odysseus and the victims of his greatest success. We are not told whether Odysseus is crying because he feels guilt and pity at the thought of those he has killed, tricked, and enslaved, or because he is tormented to be trapped so far away from either the battlefield or Ithaca—the spheres where he can be honored and known. The scene is a memorable reminder that warfare has victims as well as victors, and that it may sometimes be difficult to tell which is which.
After many misadventures, and eight years in the beds of two different goddesses, Odysseus makes it home from eastern Troy to western Ithaca. He is able to move from what Homer’s contemporary Hesiod calls the brutal “age of bronze” and the glorious “age of heroes” into the conflict-ridden “age of iron,” because he has mastered not only warfare with bronze weapons but also the more social skills of rhetoric, cunning, and technology—skills that enable him to survive and win eternal glory, even when he is far from the battlefield. Homer’s Odysseus specializes in clever scheming—in Greek, mētis—and the narrator does not invite us to moralize against a flexible relationship with the truth.
Many centuries later, Virgil set his Roman epic, TheAeneid, in the aftermath of the Trojan War, and modeled its narrative on both TheOdyssey and TheIliad. The protagonist, Aeneas, is like Odysseus in that he is a warrior on a journey from Troy to his western homeland. But whereas Odysseus returns to his original home, Aeneas is a migrant Trojan, fleeing his fallen city for a new homeland to which he has never been: Italy, where he will begin the historical process that is fated, one day, to lead to the foundation of the glorious city of Rome. Virgil reinvents the story of Odysseus in a double way. Homer’s hero becomes both the pious refugee, Aeneas, and the cruel liar, Ulysses (the Roman name for Odysseus), who destroys a city through his unscrupulous wiles.
Homer leaves the Trojans to decide for themselves whether to take the horse into the city. But Virgil adds a character who persuades them to do so: Sinon, a cousin of “cruel Ulysses,” who shares his penchant for lies. Sinon, whose name means “harmer,” is found bound and alone after the Greeks pretend to sail away. He tells the Trojans a pitiful story about how he barely escaped being sacrificed by Ulysses, claiming that the horse is an offering specifically for Athena (Minerva in Latin), who will ensure the city’s salvation if they take the horse inside. Yielding to their pious respect for the gods, and their eagerness to show mercy toward vulnerable suppliants, the Trojans free Sinon from his bonds and take the deadly horse inside their city. Aeneas, who narrates the story to the Carthaginian queen Dido, comments (in the translation by Scott McGill and Susannah Wright):
His tactics and the tears he falsely shed
now captured us—we who had not been beaten
by Tydides, Thessalian Achilles,
ten years of warfare, or a thousand ships.
The addition of Sinon makes it clear that deception happens not primarily through inanimate mechanical objects but through people deliberately using rhetoric to manipulate audiences, and through the choices of those audiences about what and whom to believe. With the Sinon episode, Virgil asks his readers to consider whether cities and civilizations may fall for noble motives rather than because of moral failures.
Virgil’s version of the Trojan-horse episode was written in the time of the first Roman emperor, Augustus. The new leader was a canny manipulator of words and imagery who presented his revolutionary autocratic regime as if it were in line with Roman tradition. Virgil showcases the dangers of deception and offers an account of how easily good people can be deceived. The scene offers an ambivalent reflection on the culture and politics of its time. We might read Sinon’s deceptions in light of his Greekness: Perhaps the future Roman people need fear no such schemes, as long as they hold fast to their own identity and maintain suspicion of all foreigners, especially Greeks. But we can also see a dark shadow in Augustus’s manipulation of the Roman people through clever storytelling that disguised and enabled the destruction of the old Republic and the slide into one-man rule.
Where Virgil’s Ulysses is cruel and predatory, and his mendacious instrument, Sinon, is unambiguously a bad guy, Nolan re-creates Sinon as his film’s sinless moral center. The focus on “sin” is presumably the reason for the odd but consistent pronunciation of the name: More normally pronounced by English-speakers as Sigh-non or See-non—echoing the long i of the Latin—in Nolan’s film, it’s always Sin-none as if to reinforce the Christlike innocence of Elliot Page’s version of the classical “harmer.” Nolan’s Sinon is not a trickster but a poor innocent to whom Odysseus has lied by omission, in failing to tell him about the trick with the horse. The episode is a cautionary fable about a director who fails to trust an actor to play his part: Odysseus lies so that Sinon will give the most convincing possible performance when he falsely tells the Trojans, with his dying breath, that the horse is a gift.
The film’s oft-invoked “Zeus’s law” is explained as a version of the Golden Rule: We must host beggars and strangers kindly, to “do as we would be done by,” and because they could be gods in disguise (a quite different point). The unkindness of Penelope’s suitors to Odysseus’s poor dog Argos and to the blind Eumaeus is a clear violation of this principle. Yet the film also suggests that the law of Zeus is concerned with a quite different moral problem: deception. The horse is presented as the ultimate violation of the law of Zeus, because it entails wielding a weapon of mass destruction disguised as a gift. The Homeric Zeus is a cunning schemer, whereas Nolan’s Zeus takes a particularly hard line on deceit, especially in relationships between hosts and guests. The film’s arch-villain, the lead suitor, Antinous, proves his villainy by being a bad guest, and a bad host, and an entertainingly weaselly liar. The horse is presented as breaking “civilization” because it represents the moment when the good guy, Odysseus, echoes the behavior of the bad guy by being a deceitful, ungrateful guest. But the film does not explain what “hospitality” has to do with a narrative situation in which the Greeks have been besieging Troy for 10 years already; the Trojans are not their hosts but their enemies in war. If the war is bad, it is nonsensical to suggest that the most important turning point is the use of the horse rather than Agamemnon’s choice to invade Troy in the first place and Odysseus’s choice to yield to the empire’s demands. The visually impressive spectacle of the horse on a stunning stretch of pristine beach (shot in Essaouira, Morocco)contributes to the narrative muddle: The Greeks have supposedly been encamped there for the past decade, yet it shows no sign of human habitation.
Nolan shot the Calypso episodes in the disputed Moroccan-occupied territory of Western Sahara without the consent of the Indigenous Sahrawi people. The choice underlines the lack of seriousness in Nolan’s thinking about his themes: the ethical and cultural costs of entering other people’s homes uninvited, for the purpose of extracting resources without respect for an unwilling host.
In Homer, deception is relatively benign. In Virgil, it is evil. But in both poems, we learn directly about how the Greeks enacted their schemes, as well as the decision-making process of the pious, thoughtful Trojans. In Nolan, we never see Odysseus planning the construction of the horse or lying to the innocent Sinon, and his Trojans take mere seconds to make up their minds. The film is not interested in the social or psychological questions of how people deceive and are deceived. Deception is a fait accompli: The horse appears on the beach in the opening sequence as if deposited there by helicopter, and Sinon does not know that he is not telling the truth. What matters cinematically are the logistics: the rolling of the horse uphill and the claustrophobic, waterlogged interior. Once the ambush of the Trojans begins, the camera lingers repeatedly not on the human actors but on the enflamed, toppling buildings and the great gates of the city, whose slow-moving mechanism is observed at great length. The script tells us loudly that people matter, but the camera shows us that what matters is the mechanical challenge of moving objects through space.
Nolan’s Odysseus goes to war to protect his biological son, Telemachus, but in so doing betrays his quasi-son, Sinon—an irony whose emotional impact is dulled by the film’s frenetic pacing. Page is a luminous, heartbreaking presence on-screen, whereas the Trojans are mostly masked nonentities. Odysseus’s moral development is retold in miniature on the island of Circe, where he shoots what he thinks is an animal but then realizes was actually a human being. Yet neither Odysseus nor the film itself seems to move beyond the occasional moment or two of noticing the humanity of all humans. The face of the slaughtered deer-man is not shown, and the film’s narrative rushes on. The final massacre of the cartoonishly bestial suitors inside Odysseus’s house is presented with thrilling exuberance, and the camera does not linger on the pain and humanity of those who die or allow for the possibility that they, too, should be mourned. Instead, the long, repetitive final fight sequence fixates, again, on logistics: how the weapons are hidden, and how they descend from the storeroom through a hole in the ceiling. The film’s primary fascination with maneuvering objects creates a mismatch between what we see and what we are being told to think and feel. We see inside the horse, but we do not see inside the characters or their world.
In the final sequence of the movie, Odysseus leaves home for yet another journey. It draws heavily on Alfred Tennyson’s poem Ulysses, whose narrator abandons his “agèd wife” and leaves his son, Telemachus, on the throne of Ithaca, while he departs for the “untravell’d world” “to follow knowledge like a sinking star.” Matt Damon as Odysseus likewise embarks in a boat toward the sunset, although he gets to take his wife (played by Anne Hathaway) along for the ride. The self-imposed exile of Odysseus enables his son (Tom Holland) to rule over the Ithacans who survive. The camera depicts the newly becrowned prince as a sunlit golden boy, who can receive the power and wealth won by his father’s bloody hands without having to taint his own—although we have been given no reason to believe that Telemachus is ready for the role, or that the concentration of power and wealth in one man is beneficial for anyone.
The final goal of Nolan’s Odysseus is not infinite knowledge but redemption: He is at last awake from his amnesia and intends to bury the comrades left uninterred on his journeys. Yet the waking vision of the protagonist, and hence also of the film, remains extraordinarily narrow. There is no suggestion that he will offer burial to the Trojans, or the suitors, or the various foreigners killed during his journey. Despite Odysseus’s spiritual awakening, the dead remain as dead as ever. But there is a spectacular sunset and yet another lavish display of a large vehicle grandly making its way through space, across churning waves.
Nolan’s Odyssey is itself a kind of Trojan horse. The script grandly insists on the importance of human kindness, while the camera shows us an entirely different set of values. In these times of hatred and misinformation, we need more than the “apparent magic” of deceptive images. We need art that is truthful about the costs and the necessity of compassion, and that recognizes that a sense of spiritual superiority may not protect us from lies. These lessons are legible in Homer and Virgil, but are elided by Nolan’s visually stunning, emotionally empty film.
If you go to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, you may be able to purchase, for a mere $69.99, a plastic receptacle shaped as a Trojan horse. The horse is used in the film as an image of moral decline. But the repurposing of a sinister instrument of war into a popcorn container hints at the malleability of the conceit: A Trojan horse contains unexpected multitudes.
This mythical item has always been a tricky symbol, used by generations of storytellers and artists to map shifting perceptions of deception in war. The physical design of Nolan’s version is striking and wildly out of keeping with earlier representations, including ancient depictions and the pull-toy design of the giant equine in Wolf Petersen’s fun 2004 blockbuster, Troy. Nolan’s horse rears upright rather than standing on four hooves. The unwieldy creature is discovered half-buried in the sand, and proves almost impossible for the Trojans to lug into the city. This cinematic prop is an extraordinary feat of engineering: It stands nearly 40 feet tall and took hundreds of people to drag up the beach. The physical horror of people being trapped inside as the seawater rises is brilliantly and terrifyingly evoked.
But on a narrative level, Nolan’s horse is light as air. In comparison with other blockbusters—such as, say, the Die Hard films, also action-packed tales of one man’s dangerous journey back to his wife—TheOdyssey contains far more pontificating about values and civilizational decline, but much less coherence and less heart. It gestures at a critique of xenophobia and violence, but it focuses primarily on the perspective of the guilty, traumatized warrior rather than that of his victims. Moreover, the movie’s devoted attention to mechanics, and its heedless willingness to give us massacres as spectacle, undermines its moralizing claims of caring about man’s inhumanity to man. Verbally, we are told that people matter; visually, we are shown that they do not.
In ancient myth, Troy was a wealthy, powerful city whose walls were built by two gods, Apollo and Poseidon. Such walls could never be breached by mere mortals. So when Greek warriors gathered to besiege the city and retrieve the wife and wealth stolen from the Spartan king Menelaus by the Trojan prince Paris, they found themselves at an impasse: The great army, unable to break through Troy’s divinely constructed defenses, remained immobilized on the beach for 10 years.
Things changed only when Athena, the daughter of Zeus and goddess of military strategy, put an idea into the mind of her favorite mortal, Odysseus: to instruct the master craftsman Epeius to build a massive, hollow horse, inside which Odysseus and the other Greeks could hide. Odysseus was, as Nolan obviously recognizes, a mythical Robert Oppenheimer: a hero able to devise the ultimate weapon that could end a seemingly unwinnable war.
We do not know who first told the story of the Trojan horse, but it was in circulation by at least the early seventh century B.C.E. The earliest extant artistic depiction is on a large storage jar (in Greek called a pithos) from the island of Mykonos. It features a long-legged horse that has square cutout windows for the warriors to be seen through; outside the horse, more fighters are enslaving terrified women and children. The image is, like the popcorn-bucket horse, a joke: It would ruin the trick if the horse had windows.
The Homeric Odyssey, along with TheIliad and the poems of Hesiod, were likely composed around roughly the same time as the making of the Trojan-horse pithos, using the new technology that had become available in the Greek-speaking world in the mid-eighth century B.C.E.: the alphabet. This development enabled one or more composers—“Homer”—to create and preserve monumental written poems based on the oral tales about the great, lost days of heroes—characters who did extraordinary things and were closer to the gods than any normal mortal. The myths included partial, fictionalized folk memories of the earlier period of Greek prosperity, when the Mycenaeans built palatial structures and formed extensive trade routes across the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Homer’s Odyssey draws on many generations of preexisting myth but reshapes the old stories for its own era—a time of migration, colonization, urbanization, political and social diversity, and technological change.
In TheOdyssey, Odysseus repeatedly finds new ways to reenact his most famous trick of hiding inside the horse (an assumed backstory not described in the main narrative). He hides in the care of Calypso (whose name suggests “hiding”), beneath the name of No Man, under the sheep of Polyphemus, and in the guise of an old beggar. Eventually, he replicates his triumph at Troy in his own house by technological mastery of another trick involving a wooden weapon (this time, his bow). Odysseus’s mastery of technology enables him to invade a heavily defended home in disguise, achieve an impossible victory, and break an impasse, answering the long-deferred question of which man will claim the household and Penelope as his bride.
In one of only two extensive passages in Homer that evoke the horse explicitly (a long episode that Nolan excises), Odysseus, while enjoying the lavish hospitality of the Phaeacians on Scheria, asks a blind poet to sing the story of the Trojan horse. The poet complies, and Odysseus weeps at the story of his greatest triumph. The narrator offers a surprising simile: Odysseus sobs “as pitifully as a woman weeps” while watching her warrior husband die in a failed attempt to defend his city and his children. The woman falls desperately on her dying husband, but his killers are behind her, hitting her with spears as they force her into a life of enslavement. The simile suggests a connection between the victorious Odysseus and the victims of his greatest success. We are not told whether Odysseus is crying because he feels guilt and pity at the thought of those he has killed, tricked, and enslaved, or because he is tormented to be trapped so far away from either the battlefield or Ithaca—the spheres where he can be honored and known. The scene is a memorable reminder that warfare has victims as well as victors, and that it may sometimes be difficult to tell which is which.
After many misadventures, and eight years in the beds of two different goddesses, Odysseus makes it home from eastern Troy to western Ithaca. He is able to move from what Homer’s contemporary Hesiod calls the brutal “age of bronze” and the glorious “age of heroes” into the conflict-ridden “age of iron,” because he has mastered not only warfare with bronze weapons but also the more social skills of rhetoric, cunning, and technology—skills that enable him to survive and win eternal glory, even when he is far from the battlefield. Homer’s Odysseus specializes in clever scheming—in Greek, mētis—and the narrator does not invite us to moralize against a flexible relationship with the truth.
Many centuries later, Virgil set his Roman epic, TheAeneid, in the aftermath of the Trojan War, and modeled its narrative on both TheOdyssey and TheIliad. The protagonist, Aeneas, is like Odysseus in that he is a warrior on a journey from Troy to his western homeland. But whereas Odysseus returns to his original home, Aeneas is a migrant Trojan, fleeing his fallen city for a new homeland to which he has never been: Italy, where he will begin the historical process that is fated, one day, to lead to the foundation of the glorious city of Rome. Virgil reinvents the story of Odysseus in a double way. Homer’s hero becomes both the pious refugee, Aeneas, and the cruel liar, Ulysses (the Roman name for Odysseus), who destroys a city through his unscrupulous wiles.
Homer leaves the Trojans to decide for themselves whether to take the horse into the city. But Virgil adds a character who persuades them to do so: Sinon, a cousin of “cruel Ulysses,” who shares his penchant for lies. Sinon, whose name means “harmer,” is found bound and alone after the Greeks pretend to sail away. He tells the Trojans a pitiful story about how he barely escaped being sacrificed by Ulysses, claiming that the horse is an offering specifically for Athena (Minerva in Latin), who will ensure the city’s salvation if they take the horse inside. Yielding to their pious respect for the gods, and their eagerness to show mercy toward vulnerable suppliants, the Trojans free Sinon from his bonds and take the deadly horse inside their city. Aeneas, who narrates the story to the Carthaginian queen Dido, comments (in the translation by Scott McGill and Susannah Wright):
His tactics and the tears he falsely shed
now captured us—we who had not been beaten
by Tydides, Thessalian Achilles,
ten years of warfare, or a thousand ships.
The addition of Sinon makes it clear that deception happens not primarily through inanimate mechanical objects but through people deliberately using rhetoric to manipulate audiences, and through the choices of those audiences about what and whom to believe. With the Sinon episode, Virgil asks his readers to consider whether cities and civilizations may fall for noble motives rather than because of moral failures.
Virgil’s version of the Trojan-horse episode was written in the time of the first Roman emperor, Augustus. The new leader was a canny manipulator of words and imagery who presented his revolutionary autocratic regime as if it were in line with Roman tradition. Virgil showcases the dangers of deception and offers an account of how easily good people can be deceived. The scene offers an ambivalent reflection on the culture and politics of its time. We might read Sinon’s deceptions in light of his Greekness: Perhaps the future Roman people need fear no such schemes, as long as they hold fast to their own identity and maintain suspicion of all foreigners, especially Greeks. But we can also see a dark shadow in Augustus’s manipulation of the Roman people through clever storytelling that disguised and enabled the destruction of the old Republic and the slide into one-man rule.
Where Virgil’s Ulysses is cruel and predatory, and his mendacious instrument, Sinon, is unambiguously a bad guy, Nolan re-creates Sinon as his film’s sinless moral center. The focus on “sin” is presumably the reason for the odd but consistent pronunciation of the name: More normally pronounced by English-speakers as Sigh-non or See-non—echoing the long i of the Latin—in Nolan’s film, it’s always Sin-none as if to reinforce the Christlike innocence of Elliot Page’s version of the classical “harmer.” Nolan’s Sinon is not a trickster but a poor innocent to whom Odysseus has lied by omission, in failing to tell him about the trick with the horse. The episode is a cautionary fable about a director who fails to trust an actor to play his part: Odysseus lies so that Sinon will give the most convincing possible performance when he falsely tells the Trojans, with his dying breath, that the horse is a gift.
The film’s oft-invoked “Zeus’s law” is explained as a version of the Golden Rule: We must host beggars and strangers kindly, to “do as we would be done by,” and because they could be gods in disguise (a quite different point). The unkindness of Penelope’s suitors to Odysseus’s poor dog Argos and to the blind Eumaeus is a clear violation of this principle. Yet the film also suggests that the law of Zeus is concerned with a quite different moral problem: deception. The horse is presented as the ultimate violation of the law of Zeus, because it entails wielding a weapon of mass destruction disguised as a gift. The Homeric Zeus is a cunning schemer, whereas Nolan’s Zeus takes a particularly hard line on deceit, especially in relationships between hosts and guests. The film’s arch-villain, the lead suitor, Antinous, proves his villainy by being a bad guest, and a bad host, and an entertainingly weaselly liar. The horse is presented as breaking “civilization” because it represents the moment when the good guy, Odysseus, echoes the behavior of the bad guy by being a deceitful, ungrateful guest. But the film does not explain what “hospitality” has to do with a narrative situation in which the Greeks have been besieging Troy for 10 years already; the Trojans are not their hosts but their enemies in war. If the war is bad, it is nonsensical to suggest that the most important turning point is the use of the horse rather than Agamemnon’s choice to invade Troy in the first place and Odysseus’s choice to yield to the empire’s demands. The visually impressive spectacle of the horse on a stunning stretch of pristine beach (shot in Essaouira, Morocco)contributes to the narrative muddle: The Greeks have supposedly been encamped there for the past decade, yet it shows no sign of human habitation.
Nolan shot the Calypso episodes in the disputed Moroccan-occupied territory of Western Sahara without the consent of the Indigenous Sahrawi people. The choice underlines the lack of seriousness in Nolan’s thinking about his themes: the ethical and cultural costs of entering other people’s homes uninvited, for the purpose of extracting resources without respect for an unwilling host.
In Homer, deception is relatively benign. In Virgil, it is evil. But in both poems, we learn directly about how the Greeks enacted their schemes, as well as the decision-making process of the pious, thoughtful Trojans. In Nolan, we never see Odysseus planning the construction of the horse or lying to the innocent Sinon, and his Trojans take mere seconds to make up their minds. The film is not interested in the social or psychological questions of how people deceive and are deceived. Deception is a fait accompli: The horse appears on the beach in the opening sequence as if deposited there by helicopter, and Sinon does not know that he is not telling the truth. What matters cinematically are the logistics: the rolling of the horse uphill and the claustrophobic, waterlogged interior. Once the ambush of the Trojans begins, the camera lingers repeatedly not on the human actors but on the enflamed, toppling buildings and the great gates of the city, whose slow-moving mechanism is observed at great length. The script tells us loudly that people matter, but the camera shows us that what matters is the mechanical challenge of moving objects through space.
Nolan’s Odysseus goes to war to protect his biological son, Telemachus, but in so doing betrays his quasi-son, Sinon—an irony whose emotional impact is dulled by the film’s frenetic pacing. Page is a luminous, heartbreaking presence on-screen, whereas the Trojans are mostly masked nonentities. Odysseus’s moral development is retold in miniature on the island of Circe, where he shoots what he thinks is an animal but then realizes was actually a human being. Yet neither Odysseus nor the film itself seems to move beyond the occasional moment or two of noticing the humanity of all humans. The face of the slaughtered deer-man is not shown, and the film’s narrative rushes on. The final massacre of the cartoonishly bestial suitors inside Odysseus’s house is presented with thrilling exuberance, and the camera does not linger on the pain and humanity of those who die or allow for the possibility that they, too, should be mourned. Instead, the long, repetitive final fight sequence fixates, again, on logistics: how the weapons are hidden, and how they descend from the storeroom through a hole in the ceiling. The film’s primary fascination with maneuvering objects creates a mismatch between what we see and what we are being told to think and feel. We see inside the horse, but we do not see inside the characters or their world.
In the final sequence of the movie, Odysseus leaves home for yet another journey. It draws heavily on Alfred Tennyson’s poem Ulysses, whose narrator abandons his “agèd wife” and leaves his son, Telemachus, on the throne of Ithaca, while he departs for the “untravell’d world” “to follow knowledge like a sinking star.” Matt Damon as Odysseus likewise embarks in a boat toward the sunset, although he gets to take his wife (played by Anne Hathaway) along for the ride. The self-imposed exile of Odysseus enables his son (Tom Holland) to rule over the Ithacans who survive. The camera depicts the newly becrowned prince as a sunlit golden boy, who can receive the power and wealth won by his father’s bloody hands without having to taint his own—although we have been given no reason to believe that Telemachus is ready for the role, or that the concentration of power and wealth in one man is beneficial for anyone.
The final goal of Nolan’s Odysseus is not infinite knowledge but redemption: He is at last awake from his amnesia and intends to bury the comrades left uninterred on his journeys. Yet the waking vision of the protagonist, and hence also of the film, remains extraordinarily narrow. There is no suggestion that he will offer burial to the Trojans, or the suitors, or the various foreigners killed during his journey. Despite Odysseus’s spiritual awakening, the dead remain as dead as ever. But there is a spectacular sunset and yet another lavish display of a large vehicle grandly making its way through space, across churning waves.
Nolan’s Odyssey is itself a kind of Trojan horse. The script grandly insists on the importance of human kindness, while the camera shows us an entirely different set of values. In these times of hatred and misinformation, we need more than the “apparent magic” of deceptive images. We need art that is truthful about the costs and the necessity of compassion, and that recognizes that a sense of spiritual superiority may not protect us from lies. These lessons are legible in Homer and Virgil, but are elided by Nolan’s visually stunning, emotionally empty film.
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