“You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian. You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that, I commend you, and I thank you again.”
— Steve Witkoff, U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, addressing Russian President Vladimir Putin
Mark Wednesday, October 21, 2026, as “the day words lost all meaning.” My dictionary just ran outside and threw itself off a bridge. Noah Webster arose from his grave and lurched around, howling and tearing at his hair. Samuel Johnson is bellowing something awful; I can hear it across the Atlantic Ocean. George Orwell is sighing; he has been here before.
I have to imagine that Putin is a little insulted at being so gravely misunderstood. With this single word, humanitarian, our envoy has revealed a stunning ignorance of the Russian president’s life’s work. This is like going to Picasso and praising him as a “representational painter,” or calling the Sahara “the wettest place in the world,” or describing Witkoff’s statement as “unembarrassing.”
I see, perhaps, where the misunderstanding began. Putin referred to Trump as a “humanitarian,” and Witkoff thought to himself: Ah! This word clearly has a different meaning than I have been led to believe! I will have to reconstruct its definition from context clues. Maybe it’s someone with P in his name. Maybe it’s someone who doesn’t think that the United States should be in NATO. Maybe it’s someone who would look really good on horseback. Maybe no words mean anything! Maybe they are just phonemes to be thrown at a wall, at random, in the manner of that great representational painter Jackson Pollock.
One of the conditions of freedom is that words have an understood meaning. If Putin is a humanitarian, then Dolly Parton was an axe murderer. Who else gets to be filed under humanitarian if Putin makes the cut? Stalin? The iceberg that sunk the Titanic? Calling Putin a humanitarian is like calling Hannibal Lecter a humanitarian, although there is more of a case to be made for Hannibal because he does, at least, subsist on people.
Let me start over. It is nice and convenient, I think, when words have meaning. It makes it easier to order a sandwich. When words are more of a suggestion, reality evaporates at your touch, and none of your rights is secure. Good luck getting a sandwich then! Real is fake, fake is real, and all your society’s most precious values carry a disconcerting wink: freedom, free speech, meritocracy, equality. When you chant them, when you promise them to one another, you are not sure exactly what you are saying. Their meaning melts like hot wax, and homeland security becomes an unmarked car slamming into your neighbor.
Authoritarians treat words as a game. (Putin, great humanitarian that he is, has some experience with this.) Perhaps war is peace (big news for the Nobel Committee, if true)!
Perhaps the best humanitarian is whoever voids the world of the most people! Perhaps election integrity is the exact opposite of that!
In the spirit of this new, callous disregard for words and their meaning, I say: Great job! Well done! What a magnificent time to be alive, when all of the best people are in charge.
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If you don’t live in Ohio, you’ve probably been blissfully free from thinking about Vivek Ramaswamy since the 2024 Republican presidential primary, which he left after arousing the visceral dislike of pretty much all of his rivals, as well as many voters.
Ramaswamy, who’s now running for Ohio governor, is back in the national spotlight this week, once again in extremely unflattering fashion, because of a campaign ad targeting the Democratic candidate Amy Acton. Acton, a first-time candidate, has leaned heavily on her inspiring biography: She has spoken about experiencing homelessness as well as being raped by her stepfather as a child; she later waited tables and delivered newspapers to put herself through medical school, eventually becoming the director of the Ohio Department of Health.
Most recent polls have shown Acton with a small advantage over Ramaswamy, which may be why his campaign resorted to the appalling commercial. The spot features Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, accusing her of being an inveterate liar. “She’s lied her entire life,” Arthur says. “My daughter needs help, and she can’t help you if she needs help herself.”
The ad immediately drew both outrage and debunkings. “It’s not surprising that Vivek Ramaswamy has stooped to such a despicable low as to attempt to turn the sexual abuse Amy endured at 12 years old from our birth mother’s husband into a political talking point,” Acton’s brother said in a statement. National Review, the conservative magazine, pointed out that court documents provide extensive backup for Acton’s claims, as does contemporary press coverage. She was removed from her mother’s custody at the time; her mother’s husband, Cledith Arthur, whom she accused, left the state after being indicted for sexual assault. He pleaded not guilty and died in 2004.
For a campaign to cast doubt on a rival’s account of childhood sexual abuse is shocking; to do so despite such evidence is despicable. For years, influential MAGA figures insisted that a conspiracy of pedophiles was running the government and other influential institutions. Now some of them treat pedophilia as no big deal. The Trump administration has tried to downplay the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the late sexual predator who was at one time a close friend of the president’s and maintained ties to other administration officials as well. Ramaswamy is opting to dismiss allegations of pedophilia and use them to smear an opponent. At an event earlier this year, he said that Acton has no vision “other than to complain about what someone else did to her.”
Despite his previous willingness to mock Acton’s abuse, Ramaswamy’s campaign didn’t initially claim the ad. It first became public on Monday via the colorful Buckeye State political blogger D. J. Byrnes, known as the Rooster. The version he posted, received from a tipster, didn’t feature any explanation of who had paid for it. But Ramaswamy has since gone all-in. “It is an ad from our campaign,” Ramaswamy said at an event last night. “I would love for this race and this election to be about the substantive issues that impact Ohioans. And unfortunately, Amy Acton has been hiding from those issues.” Axios reports that Ramaswamy (who recently loaned his own campaign $5 million) will spend $4 million airing it. “This is a campaign-ending moment for Amy Acton,” his campaign manager, Jonathan Ewing, said. “The people who know her best keep warning Ohioans about her.”
This is bold, if not wise: The ad has generated widespread condemnation. Even some right-wing influencers who initially spread it, such as Jackie Chea, have had second thoughts: “I have no idea if Amy’s abuse allegations are true, but if they are, then her mother is the monster … I regret framing the post as if Amy was lying about her mother when I can’t be sure about that.” Another, Dan Bostic, wrote, “I’ve never in my life seen someone do something so stupid. It’s hard to even wrap my brain around how someone could possess such horrible political instinct.” (Laura Loomer continues to endorse it, which is telling in its own way. Vice President Vance, meanwhile, was “disgusted”—but by Republican doubters, not by the commercial. He suggested that anything is justified in the name of winning elections. “Whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern,” he said in Cincinnati today, telling his “fellow elected Republicans” to “stop whining about an advertisement.”)
On the other side of the aisle, liberals see the ad as suicidal. “I am very confident that this ad will backfire and blow up in Ramaswamy’s face,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former aide to Barack Obama, wrote. Any predictions now are premature: Knowing how convincing the ad will be, compared with the backlash, is impossible.
But the ad is another example of how Ramaswamy’s obnoxious personality has turned a race that should have been a safe GOP win into a toss-up. The candidate’s favorability rating is deeply negative. His fellow Republicans continue to dislike him. The outgoing governor, Mike DeWine, whose occasional pangs of conscience make him a profile in near-courage, clearly dreaded endorsing his fellow Republican. And although the national environment is friendly to Democratic candidates this year, no Democrat has won a governor’s race in Ohio since 2006; Donald Trump won the state three times. Acton is a first-time candidate most famous for her association with COVID public-health measures, neither of which is an obvious asset. If Ramaswamy loses, there will be no question about who was responsible.
Russia released Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old American who had been imprisoned for more than four years on charges of fighting as a mercenary in Ukraine. The State Department said that the charges were fabricated, and President Trump said today that Russia had agreed to release Hubbard without receiving anything in return.
The Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s request to enforce a policy restricting gender-affirming care for transgender federal inmates. The decision leaves in place a lower-court order blocking restrictions on hormone treatments, gender-transition surgeries, and other accommodations.
A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion to the state, one of the largest penalties ever imposed on a tech company, after a jury found that it had committed 43 million violations of the state’s consumer-protection law by misleading users about data privacy in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Evening Read
Illustration by Alisa Gao / The Atlantic
The Data-Center Rebellion Is Just Beginning
By Paris Marx
Restrictions on data-center development have been part of the conversation in certain parts of the world since the late 2010s. Singapore and the Dutch municipalities of Amsterdam and Haarlemmermeer both issued moratoriums on new projects in 2019, and by 2021, Ireland had introduced bans in certain areas because energy demands were outstripping supply. Some of these moratoriums were later lifted after stricter rules came into place, and over fear of missing out on the investment pouring into AI. Even still, these efforts have only grown since the data-center boom that was spurred by the dash to win the generative-AI race.
In recent weeks, Denmark downgraded data centers to the lowest priority for grid connections, and Thailand placed a pause on further data-center construction—suspending 49 projects where shovels had already broken ground. These moves demonstrate the tension that many governments are facing: trying to balance a desire to push the adoption of generative AI with the reality that the public is not on board with the massive data centers needed to power them.
The internet could be on the verge of a total meltdown. Yesterday, someone posted to a public forum that two major security flaws had been found in a programming language that undergirds the web. The language, called PHP, is used by as much as 70 percent of websites.
In order to protect themselves from hackers, a number of government, hospital, and school websites across Europe went dark this morning. The organization that maintains PHP quickly confirmed it was preparing to announce two major vulnerabilities alongside patches for them. Both weaknesses, officially disclosed today, appear to have existed in PHP for more than a decade but were only just discovered with the use of AI tools. Hackers have already been detected trying to exploit them, likely with the help of AI, and implementing the fixes to address the vulnerabilities could take companies days or weeks. In the meantime, tens of millions of servers, databases, and devices are exposed. “PHP is one of the fundamental pieces of technology that supports the internet,” Sam Rubin, a senior vice president at the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, told me. As of now, the websites of the Finnish health agency, the Port of Rotterdam, the Paris police force, 4Chan, and an unknown number of others are all down while they address the PHP vulnerabilities.
News of these weaknesses in PHP is the capstone in a weeks-long slew of devastating, AI-powered cybersecurity events. In recent weeks, criminals and state-backed attackers have used AI to hack into more than 100 companies, including John Deere and SharkNinja; to automate hacks on some 400 financial institutions in Latin America; and to steal hundreds of thousands of credit-card records from two companies. Since this summer, attackers have hit governments, data centers, and hospitals in Ukraine, Russia, Argentina, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. Also today, the developers of Node—a platform used by nearly half of software developers—disclosed multiple high-severity vulnerabilities. And that’s the abridged list.
For the better part of a year, cybersecurity experts have been warning, with mounting alarm, about an impending cyber-apocalypse. It may have begun. For decades, the internet has been riddled with holes and bugs. Code is finicky, and the standard IT approach has been to fix problems when they arise. For decades, the balance held: Skilled hackers are few, and finding and exploiting vulnerabilities takes time.
Recent advances in AI have totally upended that equilibrium. Top models have become very good at finding holes and writing malware, and can work much faster than even a team of humans. This is true of both open-source AI systems from China, which can be downloaded and used without restrictions, and the even more capable models from OpenAI and Anthropic, which are continually being jailbroken. The rate of software vulnerabilities identified per month has doubled over the past year. Meanwhile, the time that hackers need to begin exploiting those vulnerabilities—figuring out how to break in and out without being caught—has fallen, by some estimates, from weeks to hours. An actual intrusion, if automated with AI, can take as little as 39 seconds. Historical approaches to detecting and fixing vulnerabilities, or monitoring for suspicious internal activity, are insufficient.
AI has created new vulnerabilities, but it also promises to fix them: The vulnerabilities in PHP were discovered independently by a Google-owned cybersecurity company and another effort led by OpenAI. Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, along with other tech firms, are all working with government agencies around the world to shore up their defenses. But, as numerous cybersecurity experts have told me, there is an asymmetry between attackers and defenders that AI is going to exacerbate: Hackers will use new technology with abandon, while companies are methodical and risk-averse—a hospital or electrical grid can’t risk that an AI security tool unintentionally takes a patient off life support or causes a brownout. And attackers need to find only one hole to succeed, whereas defenders need only one oversight to fail.
For a year, criminals and state-backed groups have been experimenting with how to use models to accelerate and automate their attacks. It was only a year ago that Anthropic announced, with great consternation, what it declared to be the first instance of AI-orchestrated cyber-espionage. That still involved a lot of human oversight and required jailbroken Claude agents to work for many hours. Now that the agents are faster and more capable, hackers have gotten more adept at deploying them, and the automation is more extensive. Recent, widespread attacks on South Korean and Japanese websites were reportedly executed by a single Chinese cybercriminal who used AI to target more than 1,000 websites. “This certainly will not be the last large-scale vulnerability identified, because of what’s possible with AI,” Rubin said.
The past 24 hours represent a tipping point. Bulking up IT departments, implementing passkeys, and using two-factor authentication remain important. But the most urgent and practical advice being given now is to retreat: Prepare to simply go offline. The NSA advised companies that cannot immediately fix the PHP vulnerability to take down affected digital services. Hospitals, water utilities, and other crucial services are all preparing for hacks by relearning to operate analog. Store your data in fewer places. We’re running out of time to prepare for the AI-hacking deluge. The dam may have already broken.
Hush! I must hear! It’s an election year, I am a voter, and I need to know the president’s answers to the most pressing questions facing America today: How upholstered are the chairs in the Rose Garden? Is the helipad at the White House any good? How are things progressing with the ballroom? And is the golf course going to be ready soon? No, do not ask about affordability. That is a made-up word. I could not care less about the price of eggs! What am I, a hen?
My concerns are more basic. I demand to hear: HOW IS THE HELIPAD? AND IS THAT GOLF COURSE IN EAST POTOMAC PARK BEING DEVELOPED TO THE HIGHEST STANDARDS OF GOLF, TURNING THAT TRASH ISLAND INTO AN ISLAND OF BEAUTY AND SUCCESS?
I was up late last night. I looked at my bills. Pretty high—but that just means the economy is booming. Still, it was hard to rest. I walked down the hall and looked at my sleeping children. How long could we hope to survive, knowing that at this very moment, in Washington, D.C., a judge is preventing East Potomac Park from becoming one of the world’s great golf courses, instead just letting it lie there, old, tired, beaten up, and useless?
My children say, “Father, Father! When will we be able to afford hamburger?” And I say, “How can you talk about hamburger when you know thatTrash Islandstill needs to be developed to the highest levels and standards of golf?”And they say, “Do you even play golf?” And I say, “Silence!”They don’t have their priorities straight. But I’m glad we have a president who does.
The other day, I was at the gas pump. I hate going to the gas pump, because the numbers there are so high, which I know is a deliberate distraction from the real problems Americans face: the hazardous, dangerous trees on East Potomac Golf Links. No one is safe from those trees.
After that, I stopped by a restaurant and ate some salad. Immediately, I felt sick to my stomach. “That was tainted lettuce,” my family said. “No,” I said, “it is because of the shame, pertaining to the golf course.”
I don’t need a fully staffed FDA monitoring lettuce-borne diseases! I need to know that we are stopping our assistance to Ukraine in defiance of Congress. I need to know whether Vladimir Putin seemed happy when our president talked to him. I really hope that our president impressed him; Putin is a big, important man. Maybe someday, America will be a world power too. If we can just get this golf course in shape, we can build on that momentum.
Don’t you dare say that this isn’t a kitchen-table issue. You haven’t seen my kitchen table, on which a replica of the president’s plans for a truly beautiful arch have sat for the past six months, gathering dust. That arch holds all my dreams. “Why did you buy that and not food?” my children ask. They don’t know what they’re talking about.
Don’t try to appeal to me by talking about the cost of living. IRRELEVANT! I want to know: Does the president have a nice-enough plane? Are the right letters on all the buildings in the capital? Good, beautiful letters, such as T, R, U, M, and P—not bad, subpar letters such as K, E, N, N, E, D, Y? These are my concerns, just as they are the concerns of the whole electorate.
For years, I have been unable to hold my head up high, knowing that we don’t have the greatest ballroom slash military complex ever built. How do you think that feels? Every night, I toss and turn, asking myself: Is New Mexico going to keep its disgusting, embarrassing name? Or will it change it to something nice, like New America? Will they ever manage to cut down those terrifying trees in East Potomac Park, so we can finally feel safe? Hurry, Mr. President! Please, hurry! I don’t know how much longer I can keep living like this.
In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the growing calls for Medicare for All. David discusses how Medicare for All might actually work, why it’s impractical, and why it is fundamentally a promise Democrats cannot keep.
Then, David is joined by Kara Swisher to discuss her new podcast with Hillary Clinton, the dangers of unregulated AI, and the power of the AI oligarchs over American politics. David and Kara discuss the potential of an AI bubble and what responsible oversight of AI would look like.
Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War by Robert Gordon, and whether the AI revolution changes any of Gordon’s pessimistic assessments of what has happened to American growth since 1970.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Let me ask you about what works and things you’ve changed your mind about.
So you have been a career-long advocate for stronger regulation of technology in general—
Kara Swisher: David, let me correct you. Any regulation. We don’t have any.
Frum: What’s your line? “Your local deli is more regulated than the biggest tech platforms in America.”
Swisher: Everything.
[Music]
Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Kara Swisher, host of the On With Kara Swisher podcast, and co-host of Pivot, and co-host, very excitingly, of a new podcast that she will co-star [with] Hillary Clinton. And we’ll be talking about that new podcast with Kara.
This week’s book is The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War by Robert Gordon, an enormously influential book on economic history published a decade ago. And I’ll be discussing whether the advent of the AI revolution changes any of Robert Gordon’s pessimistic assessments of what has happened to American growth since 1970.
But before the dialogue with Kara Swisher and before the book discussion, I want to open with some thoughts about the debate over Medicare for All: the slogan, and the idea of Medicare for All.
It does look like the next Congress will feature many more advocates of the Medicare for All idea than American politics has seen for a long time. There are bills in Congress purporting to offer or designing or proposing a Medicare for All scheme. It’s a slogan on the campaign trail. Let’s take it seriously. Let’s think about this in a real-world way, because we may be talking about this a lot come 2027. What does Medicare for All mean? How would you get there if you were minded to get there?
So understand, Medicare, of course, is the program that provides much health insurance for people over 65. It has components with prescription drugs, but the core of it is that it covers medical and hospital bills for people over 65, with some contribution from the over-65s themselves.
The Medicare for All proposal is to extend this scheme through all of the American economy, covering everybody through the Medicare program and displacing a lot of the health-care insurance that you have now. Which is mostly—those people who get private health insurance get it usually paid for through an employer, out of the worker’s pay, but through an employer.
What would it mean to make this change from a system where much of the health care in the economy is paid for by employer-financed private insurance to one where the U.S. Treasury pays for most health care? So: Half a decade ago, at the end of the 2010s, there was a big study of this. The Congressional Budget Office, and others, too, did a big study of what it would mean to transition to a Medicare for All program. And CBO’s estimate in the year 2020 was that such a program would cost the U.S. Treasury, over the next 10 years, about $30 trillion. The work has not been redone by CBO. But if I think it—if you just figure out prices are higher, you’re going further out into time, you’re starting in 2030 and going to 2040—it’s a good guess that it would cost closer to $40 trillion over 10 years than it would cost to $30 trillion over 10 years.
So where would you get the $40 trillion? The U.S. Treasury is going to be spending a lot more. How would it get the extra $40 trillion? Now, proponents of Medicare for All will say—and they’re not completely wrong about this—they will say: Wait a moment. That’s not $40 trillion of new spending. We’re spending the $40 trillion now or thereabouts. We’re spending it one way. That is, you get mostly from your private insurance through your employer. So we’re just taking $40 trillion from this sector of the economy and moving it over to the government, and net-net, it will even out. Maybe it’s a little bit more expensive than what we have now, but not a lot more expensive.
Let’s suppose they’re right about that. Still, we have one way of financing it now, and we’re going to be moved to another way of financing it along the way. How do you make that transition? What would that look like? The proponents of Medicare for All will say this: Look, when you get a job, if you have health care, you are really paying for the health insurance. Your employer lowers your wages to cover the cost and then pays an insurance company, or they self-insure. But in any way, the employer finances the payment of the health coverage out of the wages that you don’t get. When we move to health care for all, Medicare for All, the employer will no longer be buying private insurance. So your wages should go up, and out of that higher wage, you should be able to pay a higher tax.
But that blackboard analysis blinks the fact, yeah, you’re going to be paying a new tax, probably a payroll tax, maybe some other kind of tax. And it’s going to be quite a big tax that is going to fall on just about every worker in the economy.
Now, again: You’re paying a kind of health-care tax now, because your wages are lower. But the Medicare for All people assume that your employer will raise your wage almost all of what you’re now paying for health insurance through your employer. You’ll get almost all of that money back, maybe all of it. That’s the assumption. And so you’ll be well-positioned to pay the new tax, which will not be heavier than what you’re paying now. But even if that’s all true, it won’t be true for everybody. Some people will be winners; some people will be losers. Some people will be big winners, some people will be big losers, and everybody will see a new tax on their paycheck.
So what Medicare for All means from the point of view of American politics is: The new president elected in 2028—assuming that president is committed to this idea—the new Congress that comes to power either now or in 2029, that new Congress, one of their first orders of business will be passing the biggest and most far-reaching tax increase that Americans have seen on their paychecks since World War II. That’s what Medicare for All means. Start the next Congress, start the next presidency with a massive increase in a visible tax that you explain to American people they won’t really feel—because their wages should be going up if their employer gives them back the money the employer is keeping right now to pay for health insurance.
And aware of the politics of this, some of the Medicare for All proponents have come up with a series of gimmicks to conceal the tax. In 2019, Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed a system where we wouldn’t have a payroll tax. We’d tax large employers in the economy directly. Every employer with 50 employees or more would pay a new tax directly on the employer. It would be invisible to the employee, and that would get us to the transition to Medicare for All.
But the Warren idea has been almost universally derided by experts in the field as completely complicated, unworkable, inviting all kinds of distortion. For one thing, it would mean that no employer in the economy who had 49 employees would ever hire a 50th. The 50th employer would generate a massive new tax on that employer. So on the verge of this AI revolution that is calling into question all kinds of people’s employment, you’d create a massive new tax that would say, If you’re at 49, stay there forever. Never get to 50 employees. So that seems kind of daunting and distorting.
So even if you believe all of these things, you’re signing up for a big project. Now, the really irresponsible people in the Democratic Party, the Bernie Sanderses, will say, We don’t need payroll tax. The billionaires and the millionaires: They’ll pay for it all. But that’s, again, more sloganeering. The math doesn’t work, and anyway, billionaires and millionaires find it quite easy to escape taxes. And the way you would write the tax would be with an increase in income taxes—and that would be seen not just by billionaires and millionaires, but by lots and lots and lots of people.
There is no way around it. Medicare for All means transition to a new kind of program that needs a new kind of funding mechanism that requires a new and highly visible tax that will fall on many, many people. And if you think no Congress will ever pass that thing—which is kind of what I suspect—then when you talk about Medicare for All, you are promising something that you know you cannot deliver.
One of the reasons I think that American politics has seen so much demoralization and polarization over the past 15 years is because you’ve had politicians—President Trump is the worst offender, but he’s not the only offender—who promise things they know can’t happen. You’re not going to restore American manufacturing and make America great again by keeping out foreign products. You can’t pass tax cuts forever and have no spending cuts. Those things, it doesn’t work. Gravity, math—they all exist. And people, if not the candidates themselves, people around the candidates, they know they’re promising things they can’t do and Medicare for All is just such a thing.
Now, where Medicare for All is very useful for a politician, and this goes back to the Bernie Sanders model, if you’re the one senator who is in favor of this idea, and all the other senators say, It’s unworkable. We’re not going to do it, then you can get enormous attention for yourself. You can pose as the one truth-teller in the Senate, the one honest man in the village of the accomplices and the weaklings. You’re the one guy, and you’re saying this one thing, and you don’t have to worry about the unfeasibility of it because no one will ever let you do it. And that’s how you get the career of Bernie Sanders, which is a career of decades in public life, almost no accomplishments of any kind, but an enormous following because of the promises he keeps making.
But you can only have one of those guys: one in the Senate, maybe a handful in the House. If you have a dozen senators who are promising things like that—if you have 40 or 50 or 60 or 80 or 100 members of the House who are promising those things—the question of the design of the program, the question of the how this is going to be paid for, the question of the massive tax that will fall on Americans on the promise that their wages will go up because the employers will give them back the money the employers are now paying for private health insurance, all of that really comes to the fore.
One of the ways to get to a better politics in America is for politicians to make promises that they know they can keep and that they intend to keep. And one of the ways to keep us on the bad path we’re on now is to have lots of people making promises that sound good to a comparatively small coterie of the voters, but that they know or should know they can’t keep. That they know or should know that they won’t keep. And that they can know or should know are impossible.
We’ve got a lot of that going on right now, and it points the way to further demoralization, further polarization. Change in an advanced society like the United States, in a complex bureaucratic society with a lot of vested interests—it has to be incremental. Even if incremental change is imperfect, that’s the way it has to be, and anyone who promises you a non-incremental change is promising something they can’t deliver and probably don’t mean.
And now my dialogue with Kara Swisher.
[Music]
Frum: Kara Swisher hosts On With Kara Swisher, co-hosts Pivot with Scott Galloway, and has a CNN series on the people trying to live forever. She has just announced a new election-season podcast with a co-host you may know, Hillary Clinton. Kara Swisher is known to her many followers as a tireless and fearless reporter on technology and those enriched by technology.
She is the author of three books, most recently Burn Book: A Tech Love Story from Simon & Schuster, in which she calls Mark Zuckerberg the most damaging man in tech and Elon Musk the most disappointing.
On Election Day, she’ll be onstage in Toronto for a live taping of Pivot, so Canadian viewers and listeners may want to make a note of that.
Kara, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for joining me today.
Swisher: Thank you. Unfortunately, we’re sold out in Toronto because the Canadians love us.
Frum: Oh, congratulations. Congratulations.
Swisher: Thanks, thanks.
Frum: Getting Canadians out on a dark November night.
Swisher: Well, we’re going to get them warm. We’re going to warm them up with dick jokes and insights, so that’s what we’re going to do.
Frum: All right. So let me start by asking you about your new co-host. How did that come to be? Tell me about the project.
Swisher: Oh, you know, it’s really interesting. One of the things I do a lot, and I have done over my career, is I kind of zig when others are zagging or I do something unusual. And, you know, there’s this sort of trope that all Democratic-establishment older people don’t know what they’re talking about, and they need to move aside. And I have said, many of them, I have said directly they should do that. But when I was at this dinner party—and I’ve known Hillary for a long time, and I’ve interviewed her many times on different things I’ve done over the many years—and it was at this, one of these big fancy tables. And Hillary had me sit next to her because we have a really good rapport, and we sort of tease each other a lot in really, in ways people don’t, I think, tease her.
And she had a mind full of really great, fast insights that were fresh to me that I hadn’t heard. And I hear all the insights. And then, you know, the economy: insight. Mamdani: insights, and actually in a way that you were not expecting from her. I was like, it was quite smart, very clear. And I thought, What is in her Wheaties these days? Because she really—she didn’t care anymore, and of course, this is what you hear off the record. And I thought: This is the Hillary you see sort of in those Lauren Boebert/Epstein hearings or in the Benghazi hearings. Very smart, very sharp, often on social media. And I thought: I’m going to bottle that Hillary.
And I just knew. And by the way, it’s racing up the charts right now. We’re now at No. 4, which is, I know that it’s because of her. And it’s because she has these fresh insights, and I wanted to show people the Hillary I know on the topics she’s good at. And so it’s worked. And we have—the rapport is important. But anyway, that’s what we’re doing, and we’re trying it out. And if it really works as both a business and a piece of content, we’re going to keep doing it through the presidential.
Frum: So is it the two of you ping-ponging with each other, or will there be third parties there? How will this work?
Swisher: There’s going to be guests. We just did one to start with. Well, I did it very quick. I do everything I do very quickly, essentially. And it was a germ of an idea, but it’s like Hillary unplugged. Or like, you know, when Johnny Cash came back and was doing Nine Inch Nails? That’s what I feel like I’m doing here. You do want to hear her. And I had tested it on Pivot, where she was spectacular. And we’ll have guests. I want people who disagree with her and who she disagrees with, both on the left and the right. Because that’s, to me, when she’s at her best. And really have some throwdowns. So people—I’m talking about with reasonable people, not insane people. I’m not going to have Laura Loomer go against Hillary Clinton, because it’s kind of ridiculous and pointless. But I want to have robust discussions about difficult issues, and I think, by smart people with substance.
Frum: Will you be able to get her to defend the person she actually is? And what I mean by that is: those people who were prominent in the Democratic Party from 1992 to 2008-ish, 2010. The people who believed in making government more efficient, in expanding trade, and bringing Mexico into North American economic life. That’s what she was associated with, and they came under attack from their party’s left. And they seem just to be, like, shamefacedly mumbling an, Oh, you’re so right, and The establishment was so bad, and Yes, we should burn everything down. But will she, on your program, be willing to stand up for the person she was?
Swisher: Yeah, I think she’ll defend it, and also say what’s good and bad. What I was really struck with on the Pivot podcast is, I was expecting her to do the sort of typical Democratic-establishment Mamdani thing. And she had a very insightful reason why he’s doing well. Here’s where he could go wrong, and stuff like that.
You know, look: Fact of the matter is, she’s been a, whatever you say about the presidential race. And I thought that there’s all manner of complexity there. It’s not just because Hillary lost; Donald Trump really won that election. And the changing tide of the American public, and the sort of attacks that the right had on her for years that end up working after a while. I think she will be very honest. I think she’s at a point—and she did say this—is, people like her more when she’s not running for anything. They like her more when she’s either in office or in service of a, you know, typically a man. It’s a little bit, you know, if I lived back then, I would’ve liked to have Eleanor Roosevelt do a podcast with me. Like all the insight she gained over the years.
And a good thing that she did this week: We were talking about the execution, which has now been canceled publicly by Donald Trump. She said: He’s going to cancel it, and here’s why. And she was 100 percent right. And she analyzed it, and then threw in what they did during the [Osama] bin Laden raid. Which was very helpful to understand the complexity of, like—there were people in the room that wanted to show his bullet-riddled body. They brought in experts; they brought in all kinds of things saying what the best outcome would be. And so she’s got a lot of wisdom sort of hidden in there that can be relevant to today. And again, she’s going to have to admit mistakes. She knows that, and she’s actually willing to do it.
Frum: I’m sort of more interested to hear her not admit mistakes if she doesn’t believe she made them.
What I mean by that is: I’m a graduate of a Republican world where the rule of the game was, if you were in the center of the party, you had a big kick me sign on your back. And the right of the party could say anything about you, and you could never say anything back. And the Democrats seem to have that same relationship with their left.
And I’m thinking about, so Hillary Clinton was instrumental in the negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the Obama administration. She was proud of it. She believed in it. She was right. She defended it in the hardcover edition of the book she published before the 2016 election, and she stripped it out of the paperback edition. And you say, Why not stand up for what you believe? Why the kick me sign?
Swisher: She might have changed her mind, David. It’s called changing. She may have thought more about it and think about it, and—one of the things I really like about her is she thinks in real time. Like, she’s really compared to a lot of Democratic people who would just spout the same crap, essentially, like Everything’s fine. I just feel like she’s willing to throw down, all kinds of ways.
She’s also willing to be flexible about good ideas. And I think where she is right now in her career—she should speak to you about this—but I think where she is in, what fucking works, right? Like she started talking about the execution like, Of course it’s heinous; of course it’s amoral. But let’s not focus on that. Let’s focus on: If they do this, it’s going to be a recruiting video for jihadists. So let’s not do that. She’s very practical. And so I think she will—”whatever works” seems to be where she is in her life. And she’s not worried about, like, The Democratic establishment shouldn’t speak. She doesn’t care. She doesn’t care, and she shouldn’t.
Frum: Let me ask you about what works and things you’ve changed your mind about.
So you have been a career-long advocate for stronger regulation of technology in general—
Swisher: David, let me correct you. Any regulation. We don’t have any.
Frum: Okay.
Swisher: So not stronger.
Frum: What’s your line? “Your local deli is more regulated than the biggest tech platforms in America.”
Okay. So some of the AI executives have, in recent months and years, begun to repeat what you have been saying earlier. And my question to you is, when you hear that, do you think, Okay, look, they’re in a death race, and it drives everyone to do things they don’t wish to do. And if only the competition could be a little less fierce, then maybe they could think more about safety? Or do you think there’s something nefarious going on, that they’ve got some other agenda? Do you take them at their word when they say these things? Are they reformed characters? How do you read it?
Swisher: No. I mean, my approach to most of these people—not all of them, most of them—is, Hello, he lied. Essentially.
And so I think they—it’s a little complex. You know, it’s more complex than the way we binary every single thing we do around technology these days. They’re either villains or they’re heroes. Or they’re this, or they go from this. Or we love them, we hate them. That kind of thing. And life’s not like that, essentially.
What I think is happening is: They hate regulation. They don’t want any. That’s why they sucked up to Trump the first term, and that’s why they sucked up to him this time. Some of them had had real political conversions, but for the most part, they want to make money. They want to dominate. And that has never changed in all the time I’ve known them.
So, as I joked, if Kamala Harris had won, Mark Zuckerberg would’ve identified as they/them if it suited him. They’ll do whatever it takes. And by the way, guess what’s going to happen when the Democrats come in? Oh! He was the worst. I can’t believe I went to dinner at his house 412 times in the last—
Frum:Thank God you got here.
Swisher:Oh!
Frum:I’ve been waiting in this basement, waiting for you.
Swisher:I wasn’t really having a good time at that lunch.
These people literally would sell their mamas down, if they needed to. That’s my feeling on the general populace. And they’re very interested in winning. Winning and shareholder value. I mean, if Tim Cook is going to give a golden statue to Donald Trump, you’ve got to know what’s going on there. Now, I’ve heard since then he actually likes Donald Trump, which—okay, fine. No accounting for taste. But I think it’s all about shareholder value, every single thing they do.
And so I think when they talk about regulation, they want the regulation they want that is good for them. They never think of safety unless they’re forced to. But neither did big pharma, neither did airplanes, [the] car [industry]. Hello, Unsafe at Any Speed. That’s what it took. They wouldn’t have put seat belts in there if they didn’t have to. Or airbags. The chemical companies would love to spew poison, and, Oh well; some people die. And those people were civically interested. The tech people have never been civically interested, ever. Like, they don’t care about other people. And so we just have to make them have safety. And should, because this is very much like nuclear proliferation. This is on the same level of importance. Why are we outsourcing our safety to private industry on a topic that they themselves say is existential?
Frum: Well, this is the thing I find sort of baffling. There are people who say, and there are AI skeptics who say, You know, it’s not that big a deal. It’s the latest computer thing. It’s not transformative. There are people who say that. And if that’s what you believe, okay, yeah, have a light footprint, because how heavily do we regulate word-processing technology? And then there are people who say it’s going to kill us all. Well, if it’s going to kill us all, then it should be illegal. Government should not just regulating; government should be suppressing it. I don’t understand the people who take the view: I want to run a big company that makes products that I fear are going to kill us. Why are you doing that?
Swisher: I think the “kill us all” thing is—you know, with the way tech people talk, you’ve got to have listened to them for so long. They love to say “non-zero chance.” I was doing an interview with Elon Musk once, and he’s like, There’s a non-zero chance we’re in a simulation. Meaning we’re basically a video game for a greater civilization and teenagers are playing Earth, whatever it happens to be, and we aren’t real. We’re all a simulation. Well, it is a non-zero. It’s like there’s a non-zero chance that there is a god sitting up on a cloud. And so that’s what they tend to do.
And so what they know is—I think Elon actually said it best. It’s like, this isn’t just nuclear bombs; it’s things that can set off nuclear bombs without you wanting it to, essentially. And I often recount this dinner party I had in Silicon Valley 10 years ago. Many of the big names right now, they were posing these questions: What would, if you told AI to solve world hunger, what would it do? It would kill half the human race, because that’s the right answer. It’s not the right answer. It’s the answer that would work the quickest, right? And so they just—I think there is an existential crisis. But they don’t—
Frum: Wait a minute. Let me stop you on that. That’s a terrible answer actually, because—even if you’re a Nazi—because killing half the human race is a lot more expensive and time-consuming than feeding the 10 percent of the human race. Do you—
Swisher: Oh, they would do it with a nuclear bomb, my friend.
Frum: Do you think this is a line of work that attracts people with severe personality disorders? And that that distorts their thinking about problems?
Swisher: No, I’m thinking the AI would do it, because it doesn’t have any emotion. It isn’t attached to humanity. When Elon started off, it was interesting. I’ll use him because he was the earliest person to talk to me about the threats—he and [Open AI CEO] Sam [Altman], but mostly Elon—about the threats of AI, and was very concerned. And I think, you know, he’s a science-fiction guy. It also informs him. A lot of these people are science-fiction types. This is part of the air they breathe, essentially. And his first thing was Terminator. And we all have seen that movie where, you know—time machine, comes back, kills the original, blah, blah, blah. And so that’s where they were in sort of this dystopian idea. And that gives the machines a personality, an anthropomorphic personality, when in fact it doesn’t. Or like The Matrix, like they want to keep us as batteries, or they have a malevolence. It’s always a malevolence. Mostly it doesn’t have malevolence at all, because it doesn’t care. And doesn’t care—I don’t mean “hates us.” It means we don’t exist.
So he moved on to the idea that AI treats humans like house cats. Like, we don’t want to kill our house cat. We’ll feed our house cat. But that’s how they look at us. Again, a little too anthropomorphic.
The third one I thought he came upon was the best one. This was later. Which is: We’re building a highway in Georgia, and we put down asphalt. Do we know we’ve killed a lot of ants and anthills along the way? Do we think about it at all? No.
Frum: Okay. So what I meant by that crack about personality disorders is: I wonder whether when we inevitably anthropomorphize everything; that’s the way our minds are constituted. If you have a severely dysfunctional personality, when you anthropomorphize, you imagine the AI to be like you. So when Elon Musk thinks What would an AI be like?, he thinks it would be like him. And, yeah, kind of indifferent to human suffering. I wonder if a more normal person who had read, say, Frankenstein instead of The Terminator might say that this may be a more complex, tragic, meaningful relationship. And the limited—the kind of odd, odd stuntedness in some vectors, combined with obviously great talents in others—makes people poor understanders of the world around them.
Swisher: Yeah; they like to understand everything. The machines have power when they have power. They like to offput their power and their blame onto the machines. And it’s not the machines that are the problem. It’s like saying electricity is the reason we electrocute people. Or the knife was the reason people died. It’s because the person with their hand on the knife killed someone. And so they just want to blame the knife, right? And actually, recently, Jeff Bezos talked about this, like: We can’t be against the knife. We’re against murder. I’m like: Yeah, we’re against murder by you. Like, they don’t like to take that step by focusing in on the machine.
And one of the things they tend to do, a lot of, is remove themselves from the equation—that they aren’t at fault in any way. And this is a longtime thing, you know, with social media. Oh, I don’t know why girls are feeling self-esteem problems. Do boys listen to more porn? I wonder what caused that. Like, they’re very much not of that. And one of the things they’ve done, which I have followed of theirs, is just that, one: that they’re the victims. And two: that they have no consequences for the things they make. And this is the same kind of thing. This is what they made. And my only argument is like, why are we letting them decide on something this important? Because they’re broken people, and we need a bigger pool of people making a decision about something that they themselves say is very important.
Frum: Well, let me ask you about another one of your recommendations that has come true. You argued often that the ownership of TikTok should be shifted from its Chinese founders. Congress passed a law calling for just that. The Supreme Court said that that law was constitutional. Congress had the power to force the sale of TikTok, at least its U.S. operations, to a U.S. operator, and it eventually did happen. But what seems to have happened is, none of the things that are toxic about TikTok have changed. It’s just TikTok has been sold in ways to enrich President Trump’s allies and supporters.
When you look back on that, do you think, Hmm, that’s not what I meant. They didn’t hear me right?
Swisher: I was worried at the time. Many people were worried about the deleterious effects of social media, which are very real, in lots of personality, etcetera. I was worried about propaganda. I was a propaganda-studies major at the School of Foreign Service. So I think about—what could you use these things for? And if I were the Chinese Communist Party, that’s exactly what I’d do. I mean, I’m not mad at them for doing it. It’s just, that’s what you would do to have this. And we had no such service in China to be able to do that. I mean, our best thing is to lob Voice of America over there, and it doesn’t really work. The internet possibly is a way to get through into that culture, but they strictly control their information diet there.
And so I was worried about propaganda. Then I was worried about the ability to shift the narrative with the algorithm. But again, that’s gone back to William Randolph Hearst. I mean, this is not new.
Frum: Where I’m pressing on this is—the Trump administration seems like the nightmare version of the advice you’ve been giving. They have an activist Federal Communications Commission, which is on the march in all kinds of ways to stop things that they don’t like, whether it’s The View or Jimmy Kimmel.
Do any of your feelings about regulation change watching the Trump administration wield these regulatory powers?
Swisher: No, because—we have got to go back. Obviously, after post-Nixon, they went back and fixed a lot of things they didn’t think he would do. We’re going to have to go back and figure out how to deal. If the internet isn’t regulated by the government, then neither should broadcast networks be. It’s not a public good. I mean, at this point, we should just sell it to them, and they should do what they want, and there probably should be some sort of public-access kind of thing.
I mean, we have to really rethink this. Because when you have a moron like Brendan Carr—and I say that very clearly; he’s a moron, but he’s also an unctuous toady and a thirsty person as someone who wants power—in charge of that, you get all the abuses. And of course, they do all the abuses they accused other people, the Democrats mostly, of doing, right? They do exactly—because they think, like, What’s the worst thing a Democrat could do? And really the worst thing is the things they want to do. And so yeah; I worry about that. We have to really rethink the FCC, top to frigging bottom. We’re going to have to do that.
The same thing with the Justice Department. Like, what are we going to do going forward with that? How do we reassert the powers of independence in these judiciary? What do we do when the executive loses its mind, right? And that’s been something that’s happening for a long time, the power of the exec—you know that. I mean, there’s been books and books.
Frum: I don’t think we’ve seen an executive like this ever before. And maybe that’s one of the reasons why advocates of regulation were caught unawares, because there is a long tradition of people who advocate regulation imagining a kind of benign regulator, or at least a disinterested regulator. A regulator will be someone at least non-malicious, somebody like—someone like me. You imagine the regulator in your image. And then you get, Well, wait a moment. What we’ve done is, we’ve empowered—the regulatory move has empowered Donald Trump to redistribute TikTok to his friends. Has empowered Brendan Carr.
None of the evils that you are concerned about have been ameliorated, but a whole lot of new evils that you didn’t want have happened.
Swisher: Yes, but it’s not the regulatory structure. You know, it’s sort of a perfect storm of a Congress that has abrogated its power, a Supreme Court that has abrogated—the nicest way to say it—has abrogated its power, but actually is working for the man, and then an executive willing to break laws.
One of the geniuses of Trump, I hate to say it, is like: He oversteps the line constantly. He eliminates the line. And so, what do you do when you wouldn’t imagine someone would’ve done that? And now we have to imagine, and therefore we have to put up a whole new set of lines and powers. And maybe there’ll be a much less powerful president going forward. Maybe this is the final moment of this executive theory that has been going on for, I don’t know, 100 years now—the growing power of the executive.
Frum: Let me ask you about another thing that I wonder if you’ve thought about, or rethought, since the time.
So during the Biden administration, a lot of the Biden people did want to regulate tech in some way. But they were nervous, kind of for the reasons I’ve been sort of pointing to, they were nervous about content-based [approaches]. They didn’t want to interfere with the business. And so the regulatory energy went into antitrust. It’s like, well—maybe the problem is not that the product is toxic. Maybe the problem is the company producing the toxic is too big, and we will empower Lina Khan to go after the bigness of the companies, as if that got us anywhere. And so there’s a lot of effort to curb the bigness of the platforms, without thinking about what they were doing.
How do you feel about that strategy, looking back on it?
Swisher: I don’t like any one strategy. They are too big. They’re just too big. Nobody can compete in search or in AI. It’s so expensive. It’s going to end up being two companies essentially. The redo of antitrust legislation is long overdue. I think we’re operating on a hundred-year-old law at this point. So we really have to radically rethink what big means and what the damages are. It’s not price, it’s not this, whatever. That needs a radical rehaul, and that’s something everybody knows.
The other thing is the speed at which we can meet these challenges. I mean, listen, [President] Obama, I had a long-going argument with him like: You’re not doing anything, and by the time we do something, they’re going to be too big to do anything about, because they’ll have so much power from a lobbying perspective and just money perspective that we’re not going to be able to stop them.
And then you have Citizens United on top of that, which allows these incredibly wealthy people to manipulate the system. And the numbers are just staggering—the amount how much wealthy people have put into campaigns recently. And so it’s sort of a combination of all the things at once.
So I don’t think it’s just—we have to overhaul antitrust. I really am enjoying a lot of these product-liability lawsuits that are happening in California and across the nation around these companies. It’s really a very effective way to start to go at them, is it not. We’re not going to touch free speech, but your product fucking sucks and is killing people. That’s a really good argument. So our legal system is actually meeting the moment in that regard. And there’ll be more and more. It’s like a cigarette moment. It’s happening. It really is happening. And they’re trying their best to shut it down, but they’re not always winning.
And then the third thing, which I think is the most important, is public sentiment about these people and about the things they do. And data centers—as you know, I’ve talked about, and I think I predicted this rather well—is an expression of voter discontent over all of it. And it’s just a physical thing they can point to in their own neighborhoods that they don’t like. And it is going to have a profound—it is having—a profound effect on this election. It will have a profound effect on the next presidential election, and it will have a profound effect on what we should do about the tax system. Like, that these people, they don’t pay their taxes. They don’t pay their taxes.
Frum: Isn’t the reaction to data centers kind of like the Lina Khan mistake all over again? There’s something that people really are worried about. And that’s: What does AI do to my life, to my job, to my children’s prospects? They can’t get a handle on it. And say, Well, there’s this big real-estate use outside of town. And if AI were a good thing, then this is just something we’d have to get used to, as we had to get used to gas stations. It’s part of modern life. If AI is a bad thing, then the problem is not the data center that serves the AI; the problem is the AI. And yet we have this way to go down these cul-de-sacs of bigness. Or the, I don’t like the data center, or, It’s too noisy. So we don’t talk about what’s important; we talk about what’s accessible.
Swisher: Listen, I spent a lot of time trying to find people who are trying to explain what a good data center is, too. I interviewed a Michigan mayor, and he had put together a great data-center deal. We have to—I say this to people—we have to have them. It’s a question of how we have them. And I think one of the things that tech people have tried to do is shove it down our throats without any consultation.
And I think that is what’s powerful among the voters, and I think it’s absolutely legitimate that people should have a say in how these things are going to go up. We don’t have to just, you know, bend over and take it. We don’t. We do not. And I think that’s what you’re seeing here. And it’s raising great issues of: What do we want to do about the water? And we can do very smart technological things to help save water. What do we want to do about where they’re located? What do we want to do about noise?
But instead, you had Elon Musk dropping one in Tennessee with gas belching this. You have Kevin O’Leary over in Utah acting like a giant asshole. But it was stopped, and it doesn’t mean that his data center was good. The way they approached it was in this typical—it reminds you of when the railroads went through. We’re just going to shove them right through your land. You don’t get a say. You don’t get anything. But today, I think this is a good sign of a healthy democracy pushing back, even if we actually do need some data centers in this country.
Frum: So you, you’re not only a very influential commentator on these tech issues, you’re an adept user of tech, and you’re raising a family. Do you have a personal-hygiene regime for the people you care about and for yourself to get the best out of the technology? And do you have any advice for anybody on what that hygiene regime should look like?
Swisher: Yeah, I mean, I have older kids, and they can do what they want. Like, I’m not—they’re old enough. One is 21, one’s 24. And I see young people moving very quickly away from social media. It’s really interesting. They don’t like it. I don’t mind them using the devices if they’re reading or watching substantive things. What I mind is sort of the mindless doomscrolling or the mindless silliness of it, because I try to stress upon all my kids how addictive it is, right? Because I myself am addicted. You’re addicted, I bet. It’s clearly like a cigarette. It’s got the elements of that, right? And so I like to stress with them of putting it down. My one son bought a box he puts his phone in for three hours, and he just locks it. It’s a lockbox, and it will not open no matter what he does unless he breaks it, and then he’s kind of crazy if he does that. And so I make it clear that just, it’s not controllable in a lot of ways.
The other thing I try to do is say—I’m not one of those people that says, Don’t use it. I’m like, Try it. Try it. I was just bugging my wife. She was going on about AI, and I said, You don’t use it enough to have this opinion. You need to try it to understand it. And she was like, I don’t need to try to understand it. I go, You absolutely have to try it to understand it. And so I advocate people trying it and then figuring out what they like and don’t like.
Another thing is my younger kids, they don’t use it at all. And they will not, I’m telling you, they will not have phones until they’re 16 or 17 probably. And it’ll change by then, so I don’t think I’m going to have to worry that much. But they can use it to watch movies. It’s perfectly convenient. They can use it to, you know, look up things. They do that at school. That’s perfectly fine. It’s a book. It can be used as a book. But I definitely restrict; I will. They’re not at the age where they will be using—they won’t be using social media at all. I won’t allow it.
Frum: You’re warning me that it’s addictive. But you’re also warning me that I can’t have an opinion unless I try it.
Swisher: I think you have to understand—
Frum: Do I, like Ulysses, tie myself to the mast—
Swisher: (Laughs.) Yes! Yes, close your ears.
Frum: Try it a little bit?
Swisher: Absolutely. Yes.
Frum: How do I do that?
Swisher: Well, you have to understand going in that it’s addictive, and you’ve got to figure out some strategies for yourself, like in terms of how to do it. All I’m saying is you need to understand it if you are to talk about it. You know what I mean? You can’t just be ignorant about what it’s doing.
Now, some people just, you know—like I just did an interview with someone, and she’s like, I’ve been down a glacier since 1989. I don’t know what it is. And that’s a perfectly fine way to do it if your job doesn’t depend on it, but a lot of people’s jobs depend on it.
And so I do stress that people should under—I always was, you know, I was sort of the screamer at The Washington Post, saying, Are you ignoring digital? Why are you still on a typewriter? Why aren’t you doing this, this, this, and this? And, Craigslist is going to kill classifieds. I think you need to be fully aware of the technology and understand how it can help work for you, including AI. A lot of AIs can be quite helpful in a lot of ways. And then try to minimize the stuff that is so clearly addictive and stupid and hurtful to your brain, like relationships, AI-bot relationships. Do not partake.
Frum: I was going to ask you about that. Partly because Google is so broken, I use some of the AI platforms as research tools. And I found there’s some prophylactics that I found useful. One—you can set the settings: Never call me by my name. Never tell me it’s a good question. Never praise anything I’ve done. I do not want a relationship with you. I just want to know who won the World Series in 1938. Tell me that. And I do find—
Swisher: Can I add another one?
Frum: Yeah.
Swisher: Give me the provenance of where you got this.
Frum: Yes. I tell it, these are the sources. You can’t use Wikipedia. I’ve got a list of forbidden sources—
Swisher: Or “tell me.” Tell me: Where did this come from?
Frum: Yeah, I’ve got a list of forbidden sources, and there always has to be both a site and a link, so I can check that you’ve quoted it right. Which, by the way, that’s not always true. And, you know, use government documents—even in the age of Trump—if you’re going to give me a statistic. Or, These are reputable organizations; these are not.
But what I’m mostly keen is to avoid anything where it’s a different relationship than I used to have with Google, or a box where I ask it a question and it serves me the answer.
Swisher: That’s excellent hygiene. I mean, I treat AI like a supersized Google, a better and easier Google. Because one of the things about Google is, you’d go to the page, and then you’d go down, and you’d spend a lot of time. It’s sort of like being in a library with all the books on the floor, and you’re kind of looking among them. When it’s properly sourced, it’s invaluable, like in terms of saving time on research and other things. And so I think one of the things that people have to realize—if they use it in that regard, terrific. It’s a terrific thing.
When they start to have relationships with it, which a lot of people do, or they really like it, or they answer them, there’s—like, I just did a great interview with Sherry Turkle, which everyone should read her book called Artificial Intimacy—there’s nothing there. There’s nothing there. I keep saying, I really like my… they have a name for their Claude or whatever. I was like, There’s nothing there. But they think it is because, as humans, we’re so egomaniacal, we tend to, you know, just make it human when it’s just not. And that’s a really important thing that you did.
Frum: You’re an optimist on the employment effects of AI.
Swisher: No. I don’t know. I’m—
Frum: Well, you’re not a doomer. You’re not saying that everyone’s going to be fired.
Swisher: There’s a doomer, there’s a zoomer, and then there’s—is it a boomer? There’s a doomer, a boomer, and a zoomer. I think that’s the way they’ve split among them. I suppose I’m a zoomer.
Frum: Okay, explain. You lost me.
Swisher: Okay. A boomer is, Oh, it’s going to solve everything. And that’s largely marketing from those guys. And it may. It might. It could, for sure. We didn’t know the effects of many things before they came into use. Everything’s going to be great. Nothing’s going to be wrong. It’s not dangerous at all. I just think every historical technology trend has always had an upside and a downside, period. Period. That’s the way it is if you study history. So that’s—this “up and to the right” stuff is nonsense.
There’s those who say it’s going to kill us all. It certainly could, and we should mitigate against that. You should have scenarios of consequences absolutely in place and pay a lot of attention. Nobody should ever have been surprised by the Hugging Face incident and all these incursions by rogue agents. I don’t know why anyone’s been surprised by it. It’s like—of course that’s what it was going to do. And so, the doomers can be a little bit like, There’s nothing about it that’s good. And I’m sorry, that is not the case. It’s like with nuclear energy. There’s a lot to be said about nuclear energy that’s good. There’s a lot that needs to be said that’s bad.
And so I would put myself in the “let’s go thing by thing and make a list of things we don’t want”—and I think that’s relatively easy. Which is, hey, killer drones. Maybe we should have a global decision-making on this one, with everyone deciding what the standard should be. Surveillance: Hey, let’s discuss what AI should be able to surveil and what it shouldn’t, and what parameters, and let that be monitored by government—democratic governments, at least.
There’s all manner of things we can do. And here’s a good thing. Let it help; let’s put all the data about climate change in it, and let it help us figure out solutions. Great thing for AI to do. Cancer research, that kind of stuff. You could go thing by thing.
Frum: So AI investment is what’s holding up the U.S. economy right now. Maybe also health care. We’re now on our way to a 6 percent yield for 30-year U.S. money, and it’s probably going to stay this high for a while and maybe even get higher.
How long can AI investment continue when money costs 6 percent or more?
Swisher: You know, I compare it to the internet, and remember there was a crash there, right? There was that dramatic crash in 2000. And that was nothing. It didn’t cost anything to put up these internet companies. I mean, the price that these numbers are astronomical, especially given their revenue.
Here’s all I know. There’s 12 LLMs. There’s going to be two. Inevitably, it is going to coalesce into a smaller group of people, because the business isn’t that big, you know, ultimately. And it’s not—a lot of times when these tech moguls now, because they’re searching for any way to say that it’s good after they’re the ones that told us it sucked. Which is very funny in a lot of ways when you think about it—you know, Oh, there’s going to be abundance. You don’t have to work.
Like, they’re just making that shit up, just so you know. It’s like going to Mars. Like, Oh, we’re going to live on Mars. Oh, did you know there’s too much gravity there for the human bone? Oh, no, because I talked to an astrobiologist, or We have to go underground because the radiation is going to make us dumb. So we’re going to become what? Trolls? We’re going to actually become trolls? Like, they never want to mess with the details.
Frum: Should the U.S. government nationalize Starlink and SpaceX? And if it does, how does it prevent those companies from bogging down in bureaucracy the way NASA did?
Swisher: You know, we used to have this wonderful thing in this country, the public-private partnership. Which is now gone, right? You know why you have the internet, folks? Because of the government. You know why you have a lot of the drugs you have? Because of the government. You know why you have the space program? Oh, yeah, the government.
And so I think what’s really important is, once we have something that’s a national priority—like space or, you know, AI or something—let’s have these partnerships where they don’t get to drive the car. They’re in the car with the rest of us. And what they want to do is drive the car. Because you know what, Dave? They know better than we do, because they’re smarter than us. But they’re not smarter than us. That’s the biggest lie about them. They’re not. They’re broken people just like the rest of us. And why do they get more decision-making than anybody else? That’s all. I think that’s a pretty easy thing to work through.
But I think this idea of public-private partnerships has always been one of the great things of this country. It really doesn’t happen other places. It’s either top-down like in China, and that certainly has worked to an extent. Or it’s just nothing happens, like in Europe, right? But the idea of a public-private partnership—where corporations work with governments, and some of it’s dedicated to the public good, especially when we’re paying money—seems to me to have worked for a very long time. It’s brought us vaccines. It’s brought us innovations in space. It’s brought us innovations in the internet and digital. And it could continue to do things that are great for most of society rather than a small, tiny few of them.
Frum: If you’re going to have public-private partnerships, what does governance look like? Is there a role for Congress? How does it work that we make sure you don’t get the Brendan Carrs, and telling Jimmy Kimmel not to make jokes. You don’t have Elon Musk saying, I’m blowing hot and cold on Ukraine. I like them this week. I don’t like them next week.
Swisher: I think the problem is three things that I think of. Everyone is like, Oh, it’s the internet that’s, or the tech billionaires that are killing us. I’m like, you know, it’s a really complex thing. Gerrymandering was one thing that has been killing us. We cannot have any elections that aren’t for sure, and therefore nobody has an interest in compromise, right? That’s one.
Two, social media, which has been really deleterious and politicizing people. When people have commonalities, it splits them. As its business plan is to split you from each other. And I throw in Fox News and cable with that, but I don’t think it has as much. It did have an impact; now social media has taken that over.
And the third thing I would say is, this idea that in this idolatry of these rich people, innovators, right? I think it happened previously in our history during the Gilded Age, and it caused all manner of damage for regular people, right? Whether it was children who were being industrialized into these things. And we looked at it and said, No, and we’re going to do this. We’re going to make these rules.
And I think this is the push-pull of the American system, that capitalism is a really vibrant way to move forward. But why do they get to decide?
I think we need a stronger Congress. And the only way we’re going to do that is getting rid of Citizens United, getting rid of gerrymandering. So that we have more elections where people have to compete on ideas, not on loyalty or fealty to Donald Trump or whoever the person happens to be.
Frum: Kara Swisher, thank you so much for joining me today. What a Catherine wheel of sparkling ideas, and we’ll all be listening to the show.
Swisher: You should let your AI be mean to you. That would be interesting. Be meaner. Like challenge it more.
Frum: Yes. I sometimes am mean to it.
Swisher: Oh, it doesn’t like that.
Frum: No, it doesn’t, because it has sort of biases, and then when you challenge it gets a little testy.
Swisher: Can I leave you with one thing?
Frum: Yes.
Swisher: It is us. Like, it is us. It’s trained on us. Where do you think it’s getting its information? And everything you see in our world will be reflected there. Lying, joy, happiness, sycophancy, wisdom will be all in there. And it just depends on the—again, I’ll leave you with one thing.
Many years ago at Google, they had a thing when you would go in, and it would scroll all the queries across the world that were coming in. And you’d see it. And you’d sit there, and you’d go, What are people; what are they doing? It would be like: horse, straw, France, and you’re like, What do they want? What are they looking for? Like I always sat there and I would stare at it trying to figure out what they were.
And they had a globe where all the queries were coming in, and the globe would spin, and all the different languages and everything else. It was a really great data visualization. And all the questions were light that flowed off the Earth. And when it went around, most of Africa was dark, which was really kind of this weird metaphor, right? Dark Africa. But it was because they weren’t connected, right? And they didn’t have as much connection as other parts of the world, like the United States or in China or wherever. And I looked at that, and I thought: Well, it’s not like they’re not asking questions there. You just can’t see the questions they’re asking.
And I think the ability to ask questions is the biggest ability of a democracy. To ask questions. And you don’t want your questions to be algorithmically generated. And that’s the greatest strength of humanity—is we can ask questions, we can continue to ask questions. And that’s why I don’t think it will kill us, because it can’t ask questions. It can only mimic us like monkeys.
Frum: Kara, thank you so much.
Swisher: Thank you.
[Music]
Frum: Thanks so much to Kara Swisher for joining me today on The David Frum Show.
As I said at the top of the show, this week’s book is The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War by Robert Gordon, published by Princeton in 2016.
When the The Rise and Fall of American Growth was published a decade ago, it caused a great debate. Because Gordon’s argument, based on meticulous arrangements of large amounts of data, was that the internet revolution, social media, the computer itself had not actually done as much to improve American standards of living as the internal combustion engine, electricity, antibiotics, and the innovations of an earlier time. He argued that the American economy, or the American standard of living, grew faster from 1870 to 1970 than ever since. And all the fantastic changes in technology that we have seen didn’t add up to that much in terms of their impact on the overall state of the American economy and the well-being of the typical American.
Robert Gordon, at the time, after a lot of back-and-forth, was admitted to have probably won the argument that the American standard of living has not risen as fast since 1970 as it did before. But come the AI innovation, there is now massive challenge to Robert Gordon’s ideas. And this challenge took the form of a bet, in the world of AI—a famous bet with an economist named Erik Brynjolfsson of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.
In 2020, Erik Brynjolfsson bet Robert Gordon. It was a nominal bet with the proceeds to go to charity, so it’s not a Polymarket Trump-era bet. This was a bet between colleagues, respectful colleagues, to say: I bet you that over the coming decade, the decade of the 2020s, American productivity growth will accelerate. And he put down a specific number. He said it will accelerate past 1.8 percent a year. Gordon took the other side of the bet, and as we stand about halfway through the course of the bet, it looks like Robert Gordon is losing the bet. American productivity has been growing faster than 1.8 percent since 2020, and especially in the past few months as AI kicks in.
So does this prove that AI is indeed a big deal, and that the Robert Gordon thesis was wrong? So two things need to be understood to understand this debate and the bet.
The first is exactly what productivity is. Productivity is a measure of output per worker, per human worker. We now have to specify per human worker. If AI were doing all the apocalyptic things that it’s supposed to do—if it were wiping out millions of jobs, if it were changing the nature of work while boosting output—that would be very obviously disturbing for a lot of people. It would change people’s lives. But from a point of view of the economic statistics, you would see that change, that revolution, in the form of a lot more output; not that much or even less employment. And so output per human worker would be going up fast.
Well, as I say, Robert Gordon lost his bet. Output per worker has been going up faster than 1.8 percent. But that 1.8 is not that great. Between 1948 and 1973, productivity output per worker rose by 3 percent a year, because of highways and antibiotics and the mechanization of agriculture. Three percent a year from ’48 to ’73. Getting around 2 percent a year now. Better than 1.8, but not great.
And all of this, I think, casts some deeper light on what AI is going to do to American work, and that’s why I returned to Robert Gordon’s book this week to refresh my mind about what he said and more importantly, why he said that. Because as disruptive as AI promises to be, most Americans work in fields where it’s difficult to accelerate work. The sectors that dominate American spending and American employment and American prices are health care, education, housing, construction, and personal care. Now, these are activities that are physical, heavily regulated, and labor intensive.
I mean, let’s say that AI is able to completely take over the job of designing new houses. And instead of architects and draftspeople and using older-fashioned computer technology, the AI designs the house from beginning to end with no human input at all. How big a deal is that? Well, if the AI doesn’t speed up the time and cost of getting a permit for the house, if it doesn’t speed up local government—simply making the designing process faster—I mean, it will disturb and disrupt the work of the people who used to do that. But it’s not going to bring down the cost of the house that much, so you won’t get a big productivity bump. And so it is with so many other areas: nursing, teaching, and so on.
When Robert Gordon warned that American growth or observed that American growth had slowed down since 1970, and he predicted that American growth would remain slow, he based that on a couple of observations about the way the American economy has changed. And these are changes that the AI revolution doesn’t seem to be undoing, not yet.
First, he pointed out that the government is much less well-financed than it used to be. There’s a much heavier debt load on the American worker—from government deficits and government debts—than there used to be. Second, we’re not raising human educational attainment as fast as we used to do. When you took the American economy from an economy where most workers had not even finished high school to one where almost everybody had finished high school and many people had finished college, that got you a big bump. In a way that the slight increase in college attainment that we’ve seen over the past years, that doesn’t change it that much. Especially when those people who do not go on to college, when there’s some evidence that their education—the quality of their educational attainment, as measured by standardized tests—that seems to have been declining a little bit since COVID and since the advent of the smartphone.
So educational attainment is not accelerating; may be stalling. The debt burden is heavy, and so much of the economy is still in the world of physical labor, physical things, regulated things. So as you observe and discuss the AI revolution, be mindful that, in the work that I do, and perhaps in the work that you do, AI may be a very big deal. But in the world of work that most people do and where most of us spend most of our money—housing, health care, education, personal care—it isn’t yet making that big a difference, and it may not make that much of a difference to the overall performance of an economy for a long time to come.
I don’t want to diminish what we are seeing. Obviously, the things these machines can do are very impressive. But where’s the benefit? How big is it? Is it really as transformational? And maybe one of the reasons that people in the AI world are so eager to tell us horror stories about the terrible things that AI might do is to compensate a little bit for some of the disappointment about the good things we want it to do but that it isn’t doing yet—and may not do for a long time to come.
That’s it for this week’s edition of The David Frum Show. See you this coming weekend. And I hope you will share the program on whatever platform; like, subscribe. And, of course, if you want to help the program and bring it to more people, the best thing to do is to subscribe to The Atlantic. That’s how you support the work of me and all of my colleagues. See you soon. Bye-bye.
A crucial midterm contest is happening right now in Texas, one that could determine the future of the state and its influence on federal policy and national politics.
No, not the U.S. Senate race—though everyone is watching that one, and with good reason. The Republican, Ken Paxton—who has served as Texas’s attorney general since 2015—is an unusually weak candidate, beset by personal and financial scandals and a reputation for using his office for right-wing culture-war fixations, and weighed down by a deeply unpopular president. On the other side is James Talarico, an unusually strong Democratic candidate, fluent in the language of faith and without the cloud of scandal that haunts his opponent. “This is the most competitive election that we have seen in Texas” in decades, James Henson, the executive director of the University of Texas at Austin’s nonpartisan Texas Politics Project, told me.
But the race I’m talking about is downstream of that: Who will succeed Ken Paxton?
The two major-party candidates vying to be attorney general are Nathan Johnson, a Democratic state senator from Dallas, and Mayes Middleton (“MAGA Mayes,” as his own ads call him), a Republican state senator and GOP mega-donor whose district covers parts of Harris, Brazoria, and Galveston counties. An October poll from the Texas Politics Project shows a dead heat, with Johnson at 48 percent and Middleton at 47 percent.
The Texas attorney general is a very powerful position, one that has frequently been a springboard to higher office—John Cornyn held the job before becoming a U.S. senator, as did Greg Abbott before becoming the state’s governor. The AG is meant to defend the laws of the state, and has certain specific responsibilities, such as enforcing child support and investigating Medicaid fraud. Over the past few decades, however, the role has become something more: a way for ambitious politicians to wage culture wars, cultivate a national profile by taking on right-wing causes, and shape law and policy not just in Texas but nationwide.
The attorney general “helps set legal policy across the country,” Justin Nelson, a Democrat who came within a few points of unseating Paxton in 2018, told me. The race between Talarico and Paxton may be capturing everyone’s attention right now, but “when you’re a senator, you’re one of 100,” Nelson pointed out. There’s only one attorney general of Texas.
When Abbott was Texas attorney general under the Obama administration, he used to joke, “I go into the office, I sue the federal government and I go home.” Paxton—who was acquitted by the Senate in a 2023 trial over accusations of corruption and bribery—has been even more pugnacious.
Early in his tenure as attorney general, Paxton encouraged clerks to refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He used the office to sue the developers of a mosque and housing community north of Dallas for securities fraud; the case fueled right-wing conspiracy theories nationwide about the “Islamization of Texas.” (A state securities commissioner described the case as “horseshit”—ironically, Paxton himself was accused of securities fraud.) He wrote a memo that designated puberty blockers and other gender-affirming health care “child abuse” and that kicked off Child Protective Services investigations of parents of trans children, and most recently used the state’s consumer-protection law to target pediatricians who vaccinate children. He has threatened to investigate public schools to ensure they’re displaying the Ten Commandments. He also filed the case asking the Supreme Court to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
He has tried to prevent women whose pregnancies meet the state’s extremely narrow standards for legal abortion from accessing the procedure. After a court order gave one woman whose child had a fatal abnormality permission to get an abortion, Paxton threatened any doctor who dared perform it, warning that the judge’s order “will not insulate hospitals, doctors, or anyone else, from civil and criminal liability.” Paxton has also tried to sue doctors in other states for allegedly providing abortion medication to Texas residents—an issue that is almost certain to end up at the Supreme Court sooner or later, much like Texas’s original abortion bounty law did, in a foreshadowing of the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. These cases and others have shaped abortion policy nationally, not just in Texas.
An entire accounting of Paxton’s use of the AG’s office to further extreme conservative causes would take too long. But you get the idea. The Texas AG’s office is the “largest legal power in the conservative movement, nationally, period, end of story,” Adam Piper, who runs the Republican Attorneys General Association, told The Texas Tribuneearlier this year. Ali S. Zaidi, the former director of the Texas House Democratic Caucus, told me that “simply removing a Republican” from the Texas attorney general’s office “could have enormous ripple effects across the country for, frankly, generations to come.”
Paxton’s aggressive use of the office isn’t an exclusively right-wing phenomenon; Democratic AGs from California, New York, and other states have been at the forefront of litigation against President Trump’s tariffs, his environmental policies, and his attempt to repeal birthright citizenship. AGs have also pursued consumer-protection issues that the federal government mostly abandoned.
But Nathan Johnson is not presenting himself as that kind of candidate. Instead, he says he wants to return the office to what he sees as its traditional role: “It is there to protect consumers from predatory business practices; it is there to investigate shady relationships between the private sector and the public sector; it is there to keep the system of checks and balances in place in government.”
This is surely a smart pitch for such a red state, and the race is quite close for a place where Democrats haven’t won statewide office since Pulp Fiction was in theaters. Nevertheless, Texas Republicans’ objections to Paxton are less about policy and more about ethics. “I think Mayes Middleton is a stronger candidate than Ken Paxton,” Nelson said, describing Paxton as perhaps the “most corrupt public official in the country.”
Matt Mackowiak, a Republican political consultant, told me that Middleton’s policy views “align with a majority of Texans.” This state has been red for three decades. Voters may be tired of Paxton’s baggage, but that doesn’t mean they’re tired of having a state attorney general who tries to move the state and the country in a conservative direction.
Whoever becomes the next attorney general, he’ll be tasked with enforcing Texas law, which includes that near ban on abortion and a series of restrictions on trans rights that frightened some families so much that they ultimately fled the state. But there’s a difference between enforcing the law and what Paxton has done, which is interpret the law so aggressively that, for example, a pregnant woman whose fetus has a fatal abnormality has to leave the state just to get care. Johnson told me that Paxton’s attempt to sue doctors in New York, Delaware, and California over abortion medication that is banned in Texas was “legally ridiculous.” Texas law, he said, does not apply outside of Texas.
Johnson said he is “not opposed to immigration enforcement” but that he would sue the federal government if immigration authorities violate Texas residents’ constitutional rights. He called the law passed last year requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments unconstitutional, and said he would not strong-arm any schools who declined to follow the law “until the Supreme Court says otherwise.” He also decried Paxton’s effort to use driver’s-license data from the Department of Public Safety to create a registry of transgender Texans. Johnson’s approach, he suggested, would be to simply leave trans people alone.
“We’re talking about not abusing your power to make certain people miserable, to rally your base,” he said. “And I’m happy to say that I don’t think that kind of behavior is being rewarded politically right now in Texas.”
Still, Texas has arguably gotten redder in the past six years. Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the state in 2016 by nine points, Biden by about six, and Harris by about 14. Even in a midterm year with an unpopular incumbent president weighing down the GOP ticket, Democrats have a lot to overcome. Middleton also has a lot more money. In the candidates’ most recent campaign-finance reports, Johnson had taken in a little more than $1 million, whereas Middleton—the inheritor of his father’s oil-and-gas company—had almost $3.5 million in contributions. That money could make a big difference, especially since neither candidate has much name recognition. In the Texas Politics Project poll, 40 percent of voters had no opinion of Middleton, and 48 percent had no opinion of Johnson.
But Zaidi told me that Johnson, being part of the class-of-2018 Democrats who entered office during Trump’s first term, was well equipped to compete in Texas. These officials know how to take on big “policy fights, but in a way that’s not a turnoff for the median voter,” Zaidi said, pointing to Johnson’s work trying to expand Medicaid in Texas—a popular policy but one that Republican state lawmakers have blocked.
The AG race—and those of other state offices—may be decided by the top of the ticket. Johnson, Nelson said, will “rise or fall depending on how well” Talarico and the Democratic candidate for governor, Gina Hinojosa, do. “I think Nathan is well positioned to ride a wave. He’s got his surfboard out.”
If Middleton triumphs, he seems intent on continuing Abbott’s and Cornyn’s legacies. Middleton has said that “there’s no such thing as separation of church and state,” and that “one of the most important things here is backing up President Trump and his border security and deportation agenda.” A recent campaign ad boasts of Middleton’s support of the state’s bathroom bill, “Mayes Middleton: kicking perverted men out of women’s restrooms and locker rooms.” This seems to be a subject of particular importance to Middleton, who recently told an audience that Johnson will “fight to get men in your little girl’s restroom and locker room.”
Nelson believes that, after 30 years of Republican control, Texans are getting tired of these culture wars. They hear Republicans talking about trans people in bathrooms, and they’re “like, Yeah, cool, man, but why is cereal eight bucks and I don’t know if my kid’s gonna have a job?”
The GOP thinks Texans are looking for an ethical conservative who will pursue the same causes as Paxton, and the Dems are betting on widespread fatigue not just with Paxton personally, but with conservative culture-war politics. These visions may be miles apart politically, but as far as the polls are concerned, for now, they’re neck and neck.
Up until a few years ago, you could be forgiven for never having heard much about data centers. When we connected to the many digital services we’ve come to depend on, and executives took to the stage to show off the latest improvements to their products, there wasn’t much talk of the physical infrastructure that made it all possible. But behind the Uber rides, the Amazon shopping, and the countless searches on Google, unremarkable buildings in industrial parks, stuffed full of hard drives and servers, were keeping it all running.
It’s almost staggering to see how quickly data centers have become central to the national discourse. As the number and size of data centers exploded over the past few years, a once seemingly invisible infrastructure rapidly found itself at the center of a political and technological debate. The largest facilities, known as “hyperscale” data centers, can have hundreds of thousands of servers beneath a single roof, and they demand hundreds of megawatts of electricity from the grid—similar to a medium-size city. That scale brings a raft of challenges including pressure on electrical grids, high demands on the water system, and noise and light pollution for people living in their vicinity.
If only a few data centers operated, they might not have become such a significant political issue. But that’s the thing: Since the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, the tech industry has been on a building spree. In turn, the public has woken up to the presence of data centers—and people are not happy about them. A poll in August found that 75 percent of Americans opposed the development of any such projects near where they lived. In a short span of time, these once-overlooked facilities have become the core of a whole new political battleground. Data centers are set to be a key topic in the upcoming midterms, as well as the 2028 presidential elections.
In December of last year, Senator Bernie Sanders called for a national moratorium on data-center construction. “This process is moving very, very quickly,” he said in a video laying out his plan, “and we need to slow it down.” Sanders argued that data centers were part of a wider set of challenges that AI presented for workers’ livelihoods and for people’s personal relationships. In his view, AI was being driven by billionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, who were enhancing their power while openly pushing for technologies that could take people’s jobs and erode human connection, and that did not seem like a healthy path forward. “This moratorium will give democracy a chance to catch up with the transformative changes that we are witnessing,” Sanders said.
This wasn’t just a progressive issue. Donald Trump may regularly praise the AI industry and the data centers that power it, but that hasn’t stopped Republicans from opposing them too. The same month that Sanders proposed a moratorium, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis launched his own broadside against the AI industry. He wanted to empower local governments to reject data-center construction in the state and bring forward a set of standards to limit the risks caused by AI. He assured voters that his campaign had nothing to do with “woke” ideology but was about protecting workers from job loss, communities from data-center encroachment, and society from the “mindless slop” and falsified content generated with AI that could pose “a potential existential crisis for self‑government.”
By the time 2026 rolled around, soaring electricity prices had become a national concern as tech companies drove up energy costs in their pursuit of generative AI. Hundreds of local moratoriums were being passed across the country; in July, New York adopted the first statewide pause on hyperscale data-center projects. As public anger grew, communities were finding that they had some prominent allies. Such sentiments did not end at the U.S. border.
Restrictions on data-center development have been part of the conversation in certain parts of the world since the late 2010s. Singapore and the Dutch municipalities of Amsterdam and Haarlemmermeer both issued moratoriums on new projects in 2019, and by 2021, Ireland had introduced bans in certain areas because energy demands were outstripping supply. Some of these moratoriums were later lifted after stricter rules came into place, and over fear of missing out on the investment pouring into AI. Even still, these efforts have only grown since the data-center boom that was spurred by the dash to win the generative-AI race.
In recent weeks, Denmark downgraded data centers to the lowest priority for grid connections, and Thailand placed a pause on further data-center construction—suspending 49 projects where shovels had already broken ground. These moves demonstrate the tension that many governments are facing: trying to balance a desire to push the adoption of generative AI with the reality that the public is not on board with the massive data centers needed to power them.
In Europe, there’s also been a growing discussion about reducing dependence on U.S. tech companies. In the weeks after Sam Altman unveiled his Stargate plans at the White House, European governments shot back with billions of euros in planned data-center investment of their own. The social and environmental costs were not up for debate; politicians just wanted to keep up. But now many are being forced to reckon with the costs that come with this infrastructure.
Those fights are also playing out in the home of the major tech companies. For all the support that Trump gives the data-center industry—he has said that communities opposing such projects want to be “backwards and poor”—the reality is that politicians in states where the most data centers are clustered are being forced to change their positions as they feel the political winds shifting. Higher power bills and stories about what it’s like to live next to one of these hyperscale data centers have incensed voters. Meanwhile, the industry pours millions of dollars into electoral races to try to avert stricter regulations. The outcome of the November midterms will determine more than just what the next two years will hold for Trump; they could also decide the fate of the data-center boom across the U.S.
Ten years ago, I found myself in Lusaka, Zambia, sitting at a table with a group of extraordinary writers. We had been invited to participate in a 12-day writing retreat by the Caine Prize for African Writing, considered by many to be the most important literary award for authors on the continent. Among our ranks at the retreat were four former winners of the prize (NoViolet Bulawayo, Okwiri Oduor, Namwali Serpell, and me), as well as past finalists and immensely talented Zambian writers. During those two weeks, we wrote and workshopped our stories, and in between—as we ate and gossiped, visited local schools, and read our work to the public—we discussed the great distance between the literature we hoped to produce and the kind of work the marketplace expected from us.
We were all beneficiaries of the Caine Prize, which was first awarded in 2000 to introduce African writing to a wider international audience. At the time, African fiction hardly existed in Western bookstores or newspaper book sections. In the years since, it had flourished, but many of the most successful and celebrated works circled the same themes: war and its aftermath, the scourge of poverty, the persecution and murder of queer people, the trials of immigration to the West, recapitulations of popular American or European stories in African settings.
In Lusaka in 2016, we wondered whether there was room for stories that did not hew to these norms, stories that followed their own idiosyncratic paths, stories that challenged and reconceived what “Africa” means. So many of us, after all, were living examples of the diversity and capaciousness of the term. Even as we pursued originality in our work, we recognized that certain stories (I described them as “accessible” in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books) would continue to earn a disproportionate amount of recognition and acceptance.
A decade later, the Caine Prize has become the setting for a different conversation about African writers and literary authenticity. Two weeks ago, the Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza was named this year’s winner for his story “The Blue Fighter.” Just five days later, the novelist and journalist Vauhini Vara reported in these pages that the AI detector Pangram had flagged almost the entire story as AI-generated.
The allegation quickly became fodder for arguments far beyond the Caine Prize: about the capabilities of artificial intelligence, the state of contemporary literature, and even the legitimacy of Black intellectual achievement. Vara’s story revived fears raised earlier this year, when three regional winners for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize were accused of using AI, that chatbots are already winning prestigious literary prizes by fooling multiple award juries. Critics also worried that contemporary literature had grown so stale that even a machine was capable of creating award-winning prose. But the racial dimensions magnified the controversy. Some people contended that AI-detection tools were being used to unfairly undermine Black and brown authors. For others, the accusations confirmed a long-standing belief that Black and brown writers—and, by extension, Black and brown people—are incapable of achieving prominence without substantial assistance, either from institutions that supposedly favor them over more qualified individuals or, now, from artificial intelligence.
Lost in these debates is a quieter, more unsettling irony: After years of being encouraged by the literary ecosystem—editors, prize committees, magazines, critics—to produce work that is accessible to white audiences, African writers are now facing a new kind of suspicion about their authorship. In short, we have arrived at a moment when writing that conforms to accepted literary conventions—including, in particular, those associated with “African” writing—can also seem suspiciously contrived.
Kundizeza’s story provides a signal example. I found it moving and quite effective in moments, but I also instantly recognized—and predicted—many elements of its plot. The story is narrated by a boy in Zimbabwe whose father abandons his career as a civil engineer to pursue his dream of building aquariums and breeding exotic fish. While his father pours the family’s dwindling resources into the tanks and their expensive equipment, the boy’s mother struggles to keep the household afloat.
Perhaps you can imagine what happens next: The family moves to a poorer neighborhood, the mother finally confronts the father about his obsession, and, over his objections, she sells nearly all of his remaining fish tanks to pay the bills. Kundizeza’s story had many components of prize-winning African literature: a youthful narrator (my own Caine Prize–winning story, “Miracle,” featured one as well); the struggling father with big, impossible dreams; the responsible and enterprising mother who holds everything together; the backdrop of mounting economic hardship.
Kundizeza has denied using AI and has said that he drew on characters and settings from his own life in writing the story. I don’t doubt this, but one reason the story might strike some as AI-generated is that it so neatly encapsulates and deploys the tropes we have come to expect from prize-winning African fiction. If chatbots do anything especially well, it is exactly this: ingesting our preferred tropes and delivering them right back to us.
Readers who raise suspicions about AI usually flag patterns in prose. But there is another pattern worth considering. Chatbots have learned from massive quantities of human writing, including representations of Africa shaped by the literary marketplace. It seems reasonable to expect that if you ask a chatbot to write an “African” story, it will reproduce familiar conventions that have been rewarded for decades.
That said, I don’t believe that a Pangram result should be enough, by itself, to condemn a writer. Earlier this year, the Commonwealth Foundation investigated allegations against several of its regional winners, examining drafts, notes, and time-stamped documents before concluding that AI had not been used to write their stories. In a recent New York Times essay, the Cambridge professor Doyle Calhoun noted that the five literary controversies involving AI that he considered most significant this year all concerned Black and brown writers. The Kundizeza accusation adds another. Whatever the outcome of the case, these controversies reveal a troubling predicament: Even as the literary world struggles to determine what constitutes AI-assisted writing, Black and brown writers have repeatedly been forced to defend the authenticity of their work.
One of the problems with adjudicating these situations is that no one has spelled out what, exactly, constitutes cheating. It is virtually impossible to open up a Microsoft Word or Google document without encountering AI tools that encourage you to rewrite your prose. If you accept that assistance and your work is subsequently flagged by a detection program as AI-generated, have you cheated? What if you drop a completed story into a chatbot text box and request edits? Established writers have the benefit of publishing their work in well-resourced periodicals where it is edited by multiple humans; the resulting article, regardless of how many sentences were drafted, deleted, or polished to a sheen by other hands, is credited to one person. Is it wrong for an emerging writer to seek similar assistance from artificial intelligence? Many people are quick to accuse individual writers of cheating, but technology companies have integrated AI assistance into so many parts of our lives, and the literary world has yet to agree on where assistance ends and authorship begins.
My greatest worry is that the arrival of AI has imposed yet another set of expectations on Black and African writers. Not only must our work satisfy the literary marketplace, but it must also distinguish itself from the machines that have learned to imitate its conventions. Over the years, the establishment has rewarded predictability and accessibility—the very qualities that now make writing suspect. As our Zambian retreat drew to a close a decade ago, many of us reached a conclusion that seemed almost impractical then but feels urgent and essential now: We had to ignore the noise and market signals and, to borrow from the South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, write whatever we liked.
Today The Atlantic launches “50 Unforgettable Love Stories,” a new editorial project that highlights stories of romantic love. The list includes works published across more than four centuries—from its earliest selection, Astrophil and Stella by Philip Sidney, published in 1591, to its most recent, The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, published in 2024. The list below is an effort to name the love stories—novels, of course, but also poetry, plays, and short stories—that are the most enduring.
To arrive at 50 titles, The Atlantic’s Books team asked a jury of scholars, librarians, critics, and authors across genres, as well as many colleagues, to name their favorite titles that were originally written in English. As the introduction to the list says: “We thought of our own personal touchstones, deliberated over the choices, and emerged with a group of standouts: 50 titles you won’t soon forget.”
The editors write that across centuries, “the love story, with all of its attendant joys and sorrows, was an organizing principle of life—and of literature … Today, fictional love is associated with the romance genre and its proliferating subcategories, and you’ll find examples of those books here, but we aimed to think more expansively about its literary manifestations. The love story belongs as much to Arundhati Roy as to Jane Austen; its pulse beats as strongly in the knotty poetry of Anne Carson as it does in the steamy historicals of Beverly Jenkins. It is by turns ecstatic, tragic, cerebral, enthralling, and enlightening. For so many of us, it’s a reason to live and to read.”
Marisa G. Franco is familiar with the art of secure attachment. She’s spent years studying it: that coveted quality that makes some people so trusting, so quick to accept that they are, in fact, loved. She wrote the 2022 best seller Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—And Keep—Friends. She knows how to make connections without being clingy, how to be self-sufficient without pushing people away, how to avoid taking things personally.
Well—she knows how all of that should look in theory. In reality, Franco told me, she can be sensitive. She can get hurt by someone who’s not doing anything remotely wrong. At some point, she realized that she was striving so hard to be secure that she was performing well-adjustedness for her own therapist. “There’s this way that I can lean on the very real parts of myself that feel proud and feel happy and impressive and glittery,” she said. “But there were these other parts of myself that felt ashamed or felt needy, and I would try to not talk about them.” The truth, of course, was that her therapist needed her not to be composed or even coping, but to be honest. And if she wasn’t being honest, she was arguably wasting time.
That lesson is at the core of her latest book, Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment. Nominally, Worth is about how to become more self-assured. But as soon as Franco presents that possibility, she upends it by suggesting that it may be impossible. Maybe most people are just a bunch of insecurities in a trench coat, one stiff wind away from toppling over. Perhaps, she suggests, they should accept their weak or tender spots, all of their little ways of being defensive or touchy—and settle, if anything, for “secure-ish.” This might seem like a defeatist argument for a self-help book, but it’s an apt one at a time when the literary-self-help industry is thriving. Many of Franco’s readers may already be fluent in therapy-speak, ready to chat about attachment theory, and keenly interested, as she was, in presenting themselves as mended and enlightened. She’s not convinced it’s helping.
In the past decade or so, the self-improvement industry has grown colossal. According to Gitnux, a market-research firm, U.S. self-help books earned a collective $813 million in 2023 alone. And the behemoth has sprouted new arms: With the mega reach of platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Spotify, people can consume a constant drip of life advice. One hungry customer might listen to the audio book of James Clear’s Atomic Habits on the way to work, use a meditation app on their lunch break, and scroll through some therapist-influencer posts in the evening. Then, while getting ready for bed, they could turn on The Mel Robbins Podcast—the most followed show on Apple Podcasts last year, from the author of The Let Them Theory, the best-selling book about tuning out other people’s judgments. Gitnux reported that 52 percent of the industry’s patrons were “repeat buyers”—and some analyses have found that the literary-self-help category specifically caters to a pool that’s 80 percent repeat customers. If you’re looking to publish something new in the genre, you have an enormous potential audience of people who take self-optimization very seriously.
That opportunity is also a challenge for authors like Franco. They have to set themselves apart—and maybe even help readers unlearn guidance they’ve already hoovered up. Some writers have started speaking explicitly to this task (which allows them to signal a bit of knowingness about their company in the self-improvement aisle). In his 2021 best seller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, for instance, Oliver Burkeman argues against the idea that any one trick will get you on top of your to-do list; your best hope, he says, is to accept that a human life is terribly brief, far too brief to accomplish all of your goals. In Amir Levine’s 2026 book, Secure, the Columbia University neuroscientist questions the feasibility of mining security within yourself—and instead suggests seeking out people who make you feel valued from the start.
Franco’s approach, too, is a little meta. Before she started this book, she looked around and saw a “group of people that was just trying so hard to heal,” she told me. They could resolve conflict with “I” statements, speaking about their own feelings rather than jumping to blame others. They could set boundaries. They were hoping to become the perfect partner, or break cycles of generational trauma. And yet, she said, “it just didn’t seem like it was working.” She recognized herself in their show of composure. (I pictured the “this is fine” dog grinning vacant-eyed through the flames.) So she didn’t want to give people more ways to go through the motions. She wanted to know: “What does it mean to feel secure in the marrow of your bones?”
A conventional idea of self-worth might involve embracing what Franco called “glittery” attributes: reminding yourself of your strengths, accepting compliments, spending time with people who see your best sides. But she calls on evidence that shows that, much of the time, positive feedback can backfire. Psychology studies have shown that participants with low self-esteem felt worse after receiving compliments or after repeating aloud “I’m a lovable person.” When people received praise for giving a speech, researchers observed actual spikes in their blood pressure. One explanation can be found in “self-verification theory”: the uncomfortable tension one feels between their own self-image (bad and stupid) and how others see them (not perfect, but perfectly valuable). “At the neural level,” Franco writes, “the brains of people who feel unworthy are sticky for criticism and slick for love.” (All of the screenshots of nice messages I’ve saved to my computer, I concede, haven’t fixed me yet.)
Worth, then, is about setting down all of the tools you have for demolishing your flaws—and instead looking at your insecurities plainly, asking where they come from. Franco believes they’re rooted in the past: Even if you had amazing parents and a great childhood, you might still have some formative memories of times when someone made you feel less than, whether intentionally or not. Psychologists use the phrase open memories for the ones you haven’t come to terms with. You push them away, or you fixate on them unhelpfully, or you burst into tears when you talk about them. They’re too painful to bear. They’re also associated, in some studies, with low self-esteem. Securely attached people, according to the classic theory, can describe their own traumas without getting overwhelmed by or denying feeling; their memories still sting, but they’re “closed.” But Franco is speaking to people who might be in such a rush to move forward that they haven’t effectively processed what they’ve gone through.
Thus, Franco walks the reader through some ways to gently fold those memories shut. One is the act of “memory reconsolidation”—which involves recalling a painful event but then changing it in some way, perhaps by imagining a different outcome or picturing what the present version of yourself would tell the version of you from that time. This is different from rumination, she says, which is when you revisit a memory obsessively but superficially. Instead, you really feel what a recollection brings up for you, and then you inject the memory with some new, more positive meaning.
Franco mentions a memory-reconsolidation study in which one participant, for instance, recalled how a partner had lied to her about committing a crime (which he was ultimately arrested for); she then pictured reassuring her younger self that she wasn’t at fault for believing him. A week after this exercise, participants rated their chosen memories as less upsetting and reported higher self-esteem overall. Other studies have shown that similar processes alter activity in the hippocampus, the hub of memory storage. “We become emotional archaeologists, digging out the grounds of our psyche,” Franco writes, “and then we build over them with a new psychological home.”
There’s no way around it: That kind of excavation is painful work. Franco doesn’t believe that you can heal with a sense of urgency—what she calls “dragging the dog across the street on its hind legs”—or bypass vulnerability by using therapy terms, branding your ex as a gaslighter or your parents as narcissists and moving on.
Perhaps devoting so much attention to your own wounds sounds a little navel-gazey; I myself wondered, at times, whether Franco might be preaching self-reflection to a whole lot of people who already monitor their own happiness and growth so much that it makes them miserable. But she argues that the point is ultimately to avoid that kind of endlessly self-involved intellectualizing by having an actual emotional experience. In one study, she says in Worth, the depth of a client’s emotion—how much they expressed feelings such as sorrow and fury—was the best predictor of whether therapy would raise their self-esteem. “I don’t get to change,” she said on our call, “without going through grief.”
And even grieving won’t make you perfectly secure on the other end. The goal, instead, is “integration”: welcoming the hurt and ugly parts of yourself into your self-image along with the shiny parts, and feeling that you deserve kindness anyhow. That message might be especially crucial for the self-help heads—the ones trying so hard to fix themselves that they’re re-creating all the shame that may have made them feel unworthy in the first place.
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Centuries before bookstores had shelves labeled ROMANCE and fictional hockey players locked eyes across the ice, the love story, with all of its attendant joys and sorrows, was an organizing principle of life—and of literature. The sentiment that another person might “complete” us enchanted both Plato and Jerry Maguire, and the search for that someone, along with the desire to understand why it can hurt so bad, has animated fiction from the beginning. The list below is an effort to name those love stories: novels, of course, but also poetry, plays, and short stories—that we consider to be the most enduring. We asked a jury of scholars, librarians, critics, and authors across genres, as well as many colleagues, to name their favorite titles that were originally written in English. We thought of our own personal touchstones, deliberated over the choices, and emerged with a group of standouts: 50 titles you won’t soon forget.
English is not reputed to be the most romantic language, but it is the most widely spoken. (Focusing on these particular love stories was also a practical way to narrow things down.) Since the end of the Renaissance, when modern English began to take shape, poets and playwrights wrote tales of wooing and marriage, infatuation and betrayal. Their words gave rise to some of our language’s most powerful aphorisms, idioms, and, yes, clichés—think of hearts on sleeves and matches made in heaven. Today, fictional love is associated with the romance genre and its proliferating subcategories, and you’ll find examples of those books here, but we aimed to think more expansively about its literary manifestations. The love story belongs as much to Arundhati Roy as to Jane Austen; its pulse beats as strongly in the knotty poetry of Anne Carson as it does in the steamy historicals of Beverly Jenkins. It is by turns ecstatic, tragic, cerebral, enthralling, and enlightening. For so many of us, it’s a reason to live and to read.
Explore the unforgettable love stories
Astrophil and Stella
by Philip Sidney
1591
Well before the novel existed to plot out the course of infatuation and heartbreak, grand sequences of sonnets chronicled the rise and fall of great loves. One of the most radical of these was Sidney’s, which follows Astrophil (“star lover” in Greek) and his beloved, the celestial Stella, across 108 sonnets and a handful of songs. To woo her, Astrophil displays his wit via the wordplay that poets have long used to capture the messy states of the heart—and show off the dexterity of the writer. But Sidney’s sequence stands out because of his awareness that the formal devices peppered across his poems are “stol’n goods.” And he wrote a truly compelling story, one that keeps us in suspense until the middle of the series, when Astrophil’s eyes meet Stella’s. Although his paradoxical blandishments may not win him his star in the end, they are a triumph in their own right, seducing and amusing us in a portrait of love-tossed misery.
Shakespeare’s tragedy about young lovers from rival families remains, four centuries later, one of the most adapted plays in the English language. In just the past 30 years, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jet Li, Aaliyah, and Angelina Jolie have all played versions of Romeo or Juliet. There’s been a zombie version and several Bollywood ones. The play was even, if you’ll believe it, reinterpreted with gnomes. (His name becomes Gnomeo, obviously.) The story is inescapable but persists, I think, because of its tantalizing core premise: that you could find a love so passionate, so all-consuming, that you’d rather die than be without it.
Behn, best known for her plays and her later novel Oroonoko,was the rare woman to make a living as a writer in the 17th century. This epistolary saga endures, in part, because of its salaciousness. The passion between the aptly named Philander and Silvia, his wife’s sister, is absolutely cursed; their most significant shared interest appears to be bringing upheaval and misery into the lives of everyone they meet. Although the central affair may be unenviable, the book is notable for the sheer range of romantic literary tropes that it helped enshrine—including the wayward lover who only wants what he can’t have, the once-pure soul corrupted by sexual liberty, and the fake relationship that gives rise to real feelings. Above all, it proves that swooning language, nonstop drama, and a tinge of the illicit can make a romance an addictive read, even (and sometimes especially) when its characters are offputting.
Burney’s novel is a romance in every sense of the word. Yes, it’s a book about the golden-hearted young woman of the title, Evelina, falling in love with a wealthy, dashing young man—a preview of the marriage plots of Jane Austen, who counted Burney as one of her favorite authors. But it’s also a romantic novel in the older literary sense, the kind of mildly fantastical tale in which an impoverished Scottish poet considers turning to a life of crime, only to wed an heiress once it becomes apparent that she is not, as was previously suspected, his half sister. Evelina’s blissfully unrealistic quest for both love and personal recognition—spoiler: she turns out to be an heiress too—is both sharply observant and a lark. It deserves more love from a literary culture that adores Austen but often ignores her predecessors.
Austen is the empress of romance, and her work sets the bar for all of the love stories patterned after hers. Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma each could rightfully claim a spot on this list. But Persuasion is Austen’s most mature and realistic novel. It tells the story of a single, not-so-young woman who is reunited after many years with the man she rejected at 19. Its prose is calmer and less intent on cleverness than Austen’s other works, and it is suffused with the disappointments and hardships that accompany any life lived past the age of 20. So the happy ending, when it inevitably comes—this is still a classic romance, after all—feels especially well-earned.
The full title of this coming-of-age novel is Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. That deliberate move emphasizes the authority of the titular heroine—a governess who is poor, orphaned, and unbeautiful—to narrate the story of her life. So it is impossible to discuss the soul-cracking love story between Jane and her employer, Edward Rochester of Thornfield Hall, without paying heed to Jane’s assertion of control when she learns, to her horror, that Rochester is already married to a Creole woman named Bertha Mason. Bertha is treated cruelly by both Rochester and the author, and Jane ultimately profits from her suffering. Whether one blames Jane is another topic. But this famous book’s famous line toward the end—“Reader, I married him”—states her case: Jane’s allegiance is not the passive sort. She owns her decision.
Few, if any, books on this list should be read as a how-to guide for the romantically inclined. That said, you really, really, really shouldn’t model your affairs on the doomed relationship that propels Brontë’s only novel. Wuthering Heights conjures a vision of love as despair and longing, not a living thing to be nurtured but a cold, hard object clutched fervently to your chest. When Victorian-era social mores keep the childhood sweethearts Cathy and Heathcliff apart, Heathcliff decides that nobody in their vicinity should ever be happy, and drafts a revenge plot to upend an already-miserable family. Also, everyone is constantly dying of consumption or trying to kill a dog. Nonetheless, this is the stuff of messy myth, the sort of lifelong obsession that makes all other entanglements seem paltry and cheap. Naturally, the pair is reunited only in death, as their specters meet again on the windswept moorlands.
With the rise of industry in mid-19th-century England came the industrial novel, an improbably romantic genre. In Gaskell’s version, a rocky courtship mirrors the country’s labor wars. The cultured, genteel Margaret Hale is forced to leave a village in the agrarian south for a squalid city in the industrial north (a thinly disguised Manchester), where she gets caught up in the lives of desperately poor workers. Meanwhile, she is befriended by a Byronic, self-made cotton-mill owner, John Thornton. The novel tracks her sentimental education—and his—as they overcome class prejudices and hotly debate Thornton’s obligations to his employees. A strike and near riot lead to a shocking, at least by the standards of the day, public display of affection; the greater the threat of violence becomes, the more the book swoons. Imagine Pride and Prejudice updated for a more political age, and you’ll get a sense of the pleasures of North and South.
Eliot wrote novels about marriages both good and bad, usually bad. In Middlemarch, these unions function as worlds unto themselves—created by, but larger than, the couples inside of them—and the bad ones crush the soul. Two of this novel’s several protagonists, Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, suffer from romantic illusions, and each chooses an utterly unsuitable partner: The idealistic Dorothea thinks she’s marrying a great scholar, but he turns out to be spectacularly mediocre, so tyrannical and small-minded that his last name, Casaubon, has become shorthand for “pettifogging pedant.” Lydgate has a brilliant future as a doctor but falls for a beautiful, vain woman with expensive social aspirations. One of these two will be trapped for life, and the other freed only by an act of God. Eliot is willing to give characters a chance at love, though, and the horribleness of the bad marriages makes the good ones feel like a major spiritual achievement.
Should The Portrait of a Lady be considered one of James’s ghost stories? The characters are alive but their choices linger like a haunting, and when I think of this classic, I feel as though I’m encountering a phantom. The story of Isabel Archer, a young woman who wants to believe that her life is her own to determine, is classic James, down to its settings and psychological contradictions. The friends Isabel encounters are taken with who she is and ache to see her get what she wants, just as the reader will; the men and women who want to use her for their own needs are villains unlike any other—their machinations are what haunt me. This is all to say it’s the most romantic book I’ve ever read, one that understands how dangerous it is to be a woman who believes in love’s powers—and yet how necessary it is to retain that belief, no matter the fears that hang over us.
When readers meet Anne Shirley, she’s an irresistible mess of contradictions: an 11-year-old tomboy who’s vain about her looks, an occasional liar who is also capable of searching honesty. These qualities make her unforgettable to those around her, not least to Gilbert Blythe, the boy in class who teases her, competes with her, befriends her, and ultimately becomes her lifelong love. The joy of the Anne of Green Gables series lies in the specific delights of watching Anne grow up—and in how affectionately it widens its lens to show us Gilbert growing up next to her. Anne of the Island, the third book, is where this happens in earnest, as the two head to college and wrestle with what they want from the wider world. As almost-adults, Anne and Gilbert look for love with other people, get jobs as teachers, and learn about sacrifice and (on one particular night) the possibility of loss. The twists and turns are classic, but you’ll thrill at seeing both of them wend their way toward the other, because you know how lively a partnership theirs will be: These two friends, who know each other better than anyone else, are idiosyncratic as individuals and will be no less so as a couple.
Wharton’s magnum opus is a voyeur’s novel, written for those who love to gawk, by a woman who invited her readers to gape at New York’s “small and slippery pyramid” of Gilded Age high society. Among its velvet-caped, silver-spooned denizens, someone is always, always watching. The Age of Innocence is an agonizing tale of the rigors of unconsummated love. The dutiful Newland Archer is blissfully engaged to the demure May Welland until he spies her cousin, Ellen Olenska—who has just returned from a broken, ruinous marriage—at the opera. Ellen is everything Newland craves: cultured, candid, independent. She’s simultaneously drawn to him and hobbled by guilt. But being together would mean betraying May. So how will they exist—and coexist—in stifling, closely surveilled Manhattan? The novel’s last image, a gaze at a closing window, is as heartbreaking as any of literature’s most dramatic deaths.
I know, I know: The Great Gatsby is a love story in the way that Jaws is a nature documentary. But the romance between Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan—slow-burning, explosive, doomed—endures precisely because it is so richly unromantic. This affair, as it picks up speed, threatens everyone in its path. Gatsby pines for Daisy and waits for Daisy and reinvents himself for Daisy. He builds, and then takes residence in, a Daisy-centric universe. In another novel, that kind of devotion would be something to be celebrated—desire as a physical force, passion as the ultimate plot device. In Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, though, passion is also an omen; like Chekhov’s gun, or George Wilson’s, it is always lying in wait. But the novel, having stripped romance of its giddiness, offers something far more compelling in return: ambivalence. Is this devotion? Is it delusion? Or is it one more party, glittering and wild, that will have to come to an end?
When a rope bridge in Peru collapses in July 1714, killing five people, the Franciscan friar Brother Juniper wants to know: Why did these five souls perish—was it an accident or divine intention? This simple question propels Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel into a brilliant exploration of attachment and its flawed, human expressions—the suffocating love of the Marquesa for her daughter; the self-sacrificing love of young Pepita for the abbess who raised her; the codependent love between the twin brothers Esteban and Manuel, which leaves no room for romance; and the manipulative love of Uncle Pio for the great actor La Perichole. Almost 100 years after The Bridge of San Luis Rey was first published, its last sentence still feels like a surprise ending, somehow striking a hopeful note: “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
Molly Roden Winter
Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
1937
Janie Crawford is a freethinking Black woman who yearns for a steady love, but her quest for it ultimately leads her toward her own highest self. Marriage, in this novel, can be disfiguring, and it forces women to shrink parts of themselves. Before she’s 40, Janie has been through two painful relationships with men who harm her, belittle her, and control her. But even when she’s curled in on herself, Hurston’s microscopic gaze manages to show us the fine grooves of Janie’s heart. Finally, approaching middle age, she meets and marries a younger man named Tea Cake; her feelings for him are so intense that she experiences a “self-crushing love.” But the line that shook me is as follows: “So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.” She genuinely adores Tea Cake, but their marriage, too, will end—and, wisely, she’ll have saved an ounce more of that love for herself.
Arabella is the blueprint for modern Regency romances—the whole etiquette-driven Bridgerton-esque subgenre. The title character is the eldest daughter of a poor country vicar, and she must marry well for the sake of her younger siblings. Mr. Beaumaris is the richest, most eligible local bachelor—and he’s committed to staying single and away from scheming women. To save her pride, Arabella tells Mr. Beaumaris a string of lies. Amused and intrigued, he stays in her endearing orbit, content to watch her navigate the ridiculous situations these lies get her into, until they both fall madly for each other. Hilarious and deeply romantic, the 1949 novel offers historical detail and sharp commentary on the era’s social conventions that make it feel as if Heyer was writing alongside Jane Austen in 1817.
Danica Nava
The End of the Affair
by Graham Greene
1951
The End of the Affair is the fourth and final of Greene’s “Catholic novels.” The book’s autofictional protagonist, Maurice Bendrix, has a passionate affair with the married Sarah Miles. Their union is plagued by his jealousy; after Bendrix’s London apartment is bombed during World War II, Sarah ends things abruptly. A private investigator reveals that Sarah had promised God that she would quit the affair if Bendrix survived. More drama ensues, but the book’s real accomplishment is its close examination of the nature of ardor. I first read it at 19, and although I am not a Catholic, I was raised by one, and I inherited something of his tormented relationship to devotion. The question the book left me with was one that I had wondered before, if cautiously: What if all love derives, ultimately, from the divine?
When Highsmith’s 1952 novel opens, the 19-year-old Therese Belivet is working the Christmas rush at a Manhattan department store. With its crowded workers’ canteen and lonely employees, the store is likened to a prison. One day, a blond woman with a fur coat and gray eyes approaches Therese’s counter, and Highsmith leaves the administered world of the department store for the open road. Compared with Todd Haynes’s ravishing 2015 film adaptation, Carol, the novel is spikier, more political, and attentive to the repression and surveillance of Cold War America. Highsmith’s eye for quotidian detail gives the writing a lived-in quality: When, two-thirds of the way through, the two women share their first kiss, Therese notices the lock of hair toppling over Carol’s scarf, the scratch on the toe of her moccasin. Their devotion is ordinary, anchored in everyday things—but it is this kind of love, the book suggests, that might set us free.
Giovanni’s Room is a novel of terrible romantic abjection. David, an idle American in Paris, frightened and ashamed of his attraction to men, meets Giovanni, an Italian who has fled his country and works at a gay bar. Their love is, from the beginning, doomed by David’s unremitting self-hatred—his imprisonment in his own “dirty body” and his fear of its uncontrollable, irresistible longings. Desire is always shadowed by disgust, which casts a tragic pall over these two lovers in the city of lights.
In 1913, Forster had a life-changing experience: A man touched his “backside—gently and just above the buttocks,” as he described it later. Forster was 34 years old and already established as one of England’s best novelists, but he had never come to terms with his homosexuality, much less written about it. Now he set to work on a love story about two men. What made Maurice revolutionary was Forster’s insistence that Maurice Hall, the repressed, middle-class protagonist, not meet with a tragic ending—the usual fate of gay characters in fiction at the time. Instead, he and Alec Scudder, a working-class gamekeeper, fall in love and, as Alec declares, decide that they “shan’t be parted no more, and that’s finished.” Even after completing the novel, Forster felt it was too radical to publish. When it finally appeared in 1971, after his death, Maurice already seemed a little old-fashioned to critics. But even today, there is great power in the novel’s undefended emotion—the tremulous happiness of a wish fulfilled.
This is the godmother of all bodice rippers. As might be expected of a ’70s novel set in antebellum Charleston, South Carolina, the modern reader may want a heads up: It includes sexual assault, slavery, and kidnapping—but contemporary objections can’t override its compelling central pairing. Heather Simmons, an innocent British orphan, and Brandon Birmingham, a stubborn American ship captain, overcome their harrowing first encounter and cultural differences to give themselves permission to love. Heather learns to take control of her life, and Brandon promises to spend the rest of his making up for any pain she’s suffered. Explicit sex scenes, rare in books of the time, reveal the intimacy usually elided by “fade to black” paragraphs, and their influence can still be found today in heaps of romantic subgenres. Woodiwiss’s detailed, lush prose inspires both wistful admiration and, however begrudging, real respect.
Nichole Perkins
Corregidora
by Gayl Jones
1975
Has Ursa Corregidora ever really been loved? She was a deeply wanted daughter, yes—in part so she could fill the role of a Corregidora woman. From a young age, she has known that her job is to remember the violence done to their family during slavery and to “make generations” that will pass down that memory. Her husband, Mutt, courted her, praised her, and bedded her—then he threw her down the stairs, leading to an emergency hysterectomy that left her childless. Men and women constantly paw at her, demanding affection, fidelity, and sex. So Ursa has a hard shell, and she knows how to hate. She’s scared, though, that she doesn’t know what love looks like. In the course of this short, bleak, transportive book, no one will sweep her off her feet to show her. But she’ll be able to recognize what it’s not: “You can’t kiss where you scratched anymore,” she resolves. “You don’t treat love that way.”
After 45 years, I can still recite this novel’s intense opening lines. I wasn’t 17, as the narrator is—I read the novel during my junior year of college—but I wanted to be, like him, in full obedience to my heart’s most urgent commands. This is the kind of book that, if you allow it, will seize you from the first and never let you go, then consume your imagination long after you finish. Endless Love is an unashamed dive into the monomania of romantic obsession. It contains one of the most honest, longest, bloodiest sex scenes in all of literature. It also conveys the pain and sadness of being that young, wanting that much, and running up hard against the limits of your world and your self. I haven’t read Endless Love since I was 20. Today I might find it marred by its excesses, but that might be a sign of something lacking in myself.
Midway through The Transit of Venus, the awkward, brilliant scientist Ted Tice learns that Caroline Bell—the object of his unrequited passion and the heroine of the novel—has married. In his subsequent daze, he finds that “grief had a painter’s eye, assigning arbitrary meaning at random—like God.” Has personal tragedy ever sounded more enthralling? Hazzard’s masterpiece follows the orphaned Caroline and her sister, Grace, through the decades of profound change that followed World War II, as each discovers how love can circumscribe a life. Few of the relationships in this novel are happy, but all of them are so finely wrought that to read them is almost to live them—to feel, as Ted does, with an intensity that is both painful and enlightening.
The titular potion in Love Medicine does not work as planned. In fact, the overriding theme of Erdrich’s debut novel, a prismatic saga following one Chippewa family, is that love can be neither predicted nor controlled. The Kashpaws form a giant tumbleweed of a family tree, whose complexity owes to a love triangle in the early 20th century. The progenitors are the handsome, passive Nector; his headstrong wife, Marie; and the wandering Lulu, who goes on to have a brood of children with different fathers. Erdrich’s panorama makes room for dozens of fascinating characters, but the love story sets everything in motion, and decades later it comes to a perfectly fitting conclusion. Love Medicine is, among many things, a brief against shame. As Lulu says when she gets to plead her case, “When they tell you that I was heartless, a shameless man-chaser, don’t ever forget this: I loved what I saw.”
Beloved asks readers to imagine something as pure and perfect as love—a mother caring for her child; two broken people trying to make something beautiful—in the face of absolute misery and ugliness. That’s where the book’s potency comes from: the tension between the darkness and the light. Sethe, its main character, has committed unspeakable violence toward her own daughter, but she was motivated by maternal devotion. Having survived that transformational tragedy, she has to decide whether she can allow anyone to love her again. Beloved evokes both the peril of motherhood and its singular power. Reading it, I wanted to fold myself into the pages and then fall out of my skin. It’s painful, but what’s even more devastating is that the novel is one of the most banned books in America. How dare we rob the next generation of its greatness?
This novel is, to borrow a term from Saint Augustine, a story of disordered love. Stevens, the narrator, is an impeccably mannered British butler who loves his country, his profession, and his master—all worthy enough objects of devotion, in the abstract. His fidelity blinds him, however, to the cruelty and fecklessness that his nation and employer are capable of—and to just how humiliating some of his work can be. Even more tragically, his sense of duty compels him to deny love to the flesh-and-blood humans in his midst: He abandons his dying father so that he can better tend to a dinner his master is hosting; he refuses to acknowledge, let alone reciprocate, the clear affection of a fellow servant. The anguish of reading this novel lies in watching a man with such a deep capacity for love direct it to exactly the wrong places.
Possession opens in 1986, in the reading room of the London Library, where mysterious letters discovered by a young academic jolt the plot into action. It ends in the 19th century, with a devastating scene in which the letters’ author stops to chat with a child. In between is a detective story about two sets of prospective lovers more than 100 years apart: In the 1980s, a dueling pair of scholars—one the careful, if old-fashioned, philologist who finds the letters and the other a glamorous, feminist critic—seek to understand a secret romance through notes and correspondence. In the past, we meet the Victorian poets who are the subjects of that search as they leave behind the traces that will be puzzled over and plumbed. The book is extravagant, high-concept, and a total tearjerker, distinctive for its empathy toward its characters and their sense of the possible—and for its many passages of people falling head over heels for each other’s writing.
“Why do we yield” to love, asks this novel’s narrator, “when we don’t have to?” She’s an intellectually voracious anthropologist overwhelmed by a new romance—and she’d “like to know as a woman and a human being, both.” Mating is Rush’s effort to get to the bottom of that unanswerable question: Why is it that sex and love make the smartest, most confident, and most in-control of us fall apart? But the novel isn’t just intellectual; far from it. Rush gives his book every possible kind of drama, from the erotic to the geopolitical—and, what’s more, he imbues his writing with a real (if wry) optimism that has turned Mating into a cult classic of our sometimes-pessimistic age.
When the German Romantic poet Novalis, real name Friedrich “Fritz” von Hardenburg, was in his early 20s, he fell in love with a 12-year-old named Sophie von Kühn. (This utterly inappropriate match was thankfully never consummated, owing to her early death.) In his grief, Novalis wrote a fragmentary novel about a man who longs to see a mysterious “blue flower,” which would provide the material for Fitzgerald’s gently comic, subtly insightful book. Here, Fritz’s idolization of the distinctly ordinary Sophie, whom he calls “my wisdom” and “my Philosophy,” is clearly the ridiculous acting-out of a young man who wants drama—but in Fitzgerald’s skillful hands, it’s also an idealistic, even beautiful, pursuit of the self-abnegation that can come with love.
The source material for the film that won Ang Lee an Oscar and became pop-culture shorthand is only about 10,000 words long. How, in just one short story, did Proulx manage to fit in one of the most stirring depictions of romantic ecstasy that I’ve ever read? Her measured, inventive sentences follow Jack and Ennis, who meet in the summer of 1963 while herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain, in Wyoming, and experience a lightning-strike intimacy that keeps them tied together for decades. Proulx wrote what became the film’s most memorable line—“I wish I knew how to quit you”—but much of the story’s prose should be equally famous. Chronology is dictated here only by desire—years go by in a paragraph; a single embrace oozes across a page. Love, Proulx shows, warps the minutes: Every meeting both lasts forever and ends in an agonizing second.
In her Booker Prize–winning novel about the tragic fallout of a taboo-breaking liaison, Roy repeats a few distinct phrases again and again. One is the image of a “hole in the Universe” that takes various shapes: a person, or a cat, or “History.” Although The God of Small Things overflows with monsoon-drenched flora, industrial pollutants, bitterness, and scheming, it has a love-shaped hole in its center that is filled only at the very end. From the first pages, we know that Estha and Rahel, fraternal twins in a prosperous but dissipated family in India’s Kerala region, have seen their lives ruined after a blurry sequence of events that led to death and exile. Slowly, inevitably, Roy closes in on a brief, forbidden dalliance that defies India’s caste system. Romance, in this story, is usually defined by its absence, and yet passion is everywhere. Sometimes desire blooms beautifully; more often, it remains untended, left to rot.
When this book was first published, the Dick of the title, a real-life sociologist, was quoted in New York magazine denigrating the work as “a bad review of my presence in the world.” This revealed his identity, even though Kraus had tried partly to obscure it—after all, the book isn’t a memoir. It’s instead a species of autofiction, a collection of billets-doux to Dick written by Kraus’s protagonist, also named Chris, with her husband, named Sylvère, like Kraus’s actual then-husband. Her aim is to “take an experience that was so completely female”—the private, abject state of unrequited romantic obsession—and treat it seriously, like material for academic study. What results is a genre-bending feminist work powered by the engine of infatuation. As Chris puts it: “Desire isn’t lack, it’s surplus energy.” Dick is right that he doesn’t come out looking so great, but the book is only nominally about him anyway.
Waters’s moving portrait of the anguish that follows falling in and out of love is as erotic as it is engrossing. After a young girl named Nan becomes smitten with Kitty, a “masher” (or male impersonator), she follows her new flame to London, only to endure a terrible betrayal. The Victorian capital has never been as alive as it is in Tipping the Velvet: The 19th-century theater world gives way to the city’s seedy underground before the book peeks in on socialist organizing. Every plot thread is loaded with commentary on class, sexuality, and gender. Beautiful, passionate, and historically clever, this is no ordinary bildungsroman.
Chinelo Okparanta
Autobiography of Red
by Anne Carson
1998
A little red monster with wings falls in love with the Greek hero Herakles. The two go to hell to visit Herakles’s grandmother, break up, and reunite years later at a Peruvian volcano. Autobiography of Red claims to have recovered this improbable plot from bits of writing by Stesichoros, a Greek poet from the sixth century B.C.E.; Carson begins with invented “fragments” from Stesichoros and three scholarly looking appendixes before starting her original, woozy love story in earnest. Early on, Geryon is 14, abused by his brother and adored by his mother. A chance encounter with Herakles at a bus station leads to a teenage romance and some of the most transcendent love poetry of the late 20th century. Geryon ultimately finds his calling as a photographer; the book concludes with a description of his snapshots, which arrest the characters in a state of longing—with “immortality on their faces, night at their back.”
Flamenco isn’t just a dance for Carmen Santos, she reminds us frequently. It’s a way of life. It gave her the ability to walk without crutches when she was a child, her leg withered by polio; it gave her a living in her 20s; it allowed her to make art when no one believed that she could. And it introduced her to the two great loves of her life: her older mentor, Agustín, who brought her into his company and made her his mistress for 17 years, and the young dancer Manolo, who gave her a year of passion unlike any she’d known before. Now Carmen is approaching 40, living at home in Chicago, and unable to dance—post-polio syndrome is taking away her hard-earned dexterity. Her mother wishes she’d married and had children, but Carmen regrets nothing. And when both Agustín and Manolo come back into her life, she won’t pretend that her heart is closed—but she knows there are things she won’t give up for love.
In one sense, Atonement is a classic love story: a sweeping, romantic account of two people pulled to each other with inexplicable, magnetic force. Yet few interactions between Robbie Turner and Cecilia Tallis actually occur in these pages; their relationship is a specter, mostly present in the hovering question of what could have been. Early on, Briony—a precocious 13-year-old writer—walks in on Cecilia, her older sister, having sex with Robbie, their housekeeper’s son. Misunderstanding what she’s seen, or perhaps motivated to puppet-master reality as she does in her stories, Briony makes a false accusation that lands Robbie in prison. The rest of the book is about her decision’s ruinous repercussions. Some novels cast love as a type of fiction, a comforting yarn spun by humans who can never really access one another’s internal worlds. In Atonement, love is a fact—and the cruelest thing that a story can do is endanger it.
Readers familiar only with the film might be surprised by the elegance and interiority of Aciman’s writing. No author since Proust has given readers such a nuanced understanding of the human heart—not just the forward arrow of reciprocated desire but also the insecurities, crossed signals, ambiguity, and doubt. Call Me By Your Name is a novel that, at last, tells the truth about love.
Andrew Sean Greer
The Song of Achilles
by Madeline Miller
2011
Almost 15 years after The Song of Achilles was first published, the bookstore I co-own, the Ripped Bodice, still sells dozens of copies every month. Few other books have this kind of staying power. Miller’s lyrical retelling of TheIliad, focused on Patroclus and Achilles’s romance, is tender, intimate, achingly sentimental, and—because readers know from the beginning where their story is headed—completely devastating. This is one of those rare stories that seems to become more beloved with every passing year.
Leah Koch
The Marriage Plot
by Jeffrey Eugenides
2011
Eugenides’s love triangle between three brilliant but naive recent college graduates captures the angst and tumult of having one’s ideals tested by disappointment. His characters exit school steeped in 19th-century novels, semiotics, and the academic-seminar trends of the 1980s, which give grammar and form to their fizzing fantasies but also set them up for hard lessons when they inevitably crash into reality. As both a fan of Eugenides and a recovering English major, I ate this up when it came out, in 2011, and revisit it every couple of years out of affectionate nostalgia.
Jon Hickey
Americanah
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
2013
Ifemelu, a feisty, fiercely intelligent fellow at Princeton and a prolific blogger, is considering returning home, to Lagos, after living in America for many years. Her story is juxtaposed with that of her high-school sweetheart, Obinze, who is now married and a successful businessman. They had lost touch in their youth, when Ifemelu migrated to America and Obinze headed to London—but as the book fills us in on their formative years as a teenage couple and the diverging paths that followed, circumstances lead them back to Nigeria and back to each other. In the past, Adichie has objected to the book being classified as a love story, but even she admits that in the end, it is. I agree: Not only is this a love story; it’s an epic one.
Nicole Dennis-Benn
Fates and Furies
by Lauren Groff
2015
The best love stories suggest something about how all relationships function—even when they imply something dark. Fates and Furies concerns the charming and lucky Lotto and his reserved, mysterious wife, Mathilde. First, we hear Lotto’s account of their life together; it’s a compelling drama, if curiously devoid of details about Mathilde’s background. Then we get Mathilde’s version, which reveals how much Lotto never understood, how willing he was to accept a convenient, two-dimensional idea of his wife. Some of the plot details stretch credulity, resulting in a sort of twisted fable of matrimony. Even then, Groff leaves the reader with the chilling suspicion that every ordinary marriage will end, by death or divorce, with its two partners never having grasped the person they’re meant to know best.
Jenkins is one of the most important voices in modern romance, and Forbidden is a perfect example of what she does best. Set during Reconstruction, the novel follows Black characters building lives, communities, and futures in the aftermath of slavery. Yet the weight of that history never overwhelms Rhine and Eddy’s sharp, funny courtship or the rich world that surrounds them. Jenkins has spent decades showing us that Black history is also a story of joy, ambition, and friendship. Forbidden expands our understanding of who gets to be at the center of the American conversation—and it’s also incredibly fun to read.
Leah Koch
Normal People
by Sally Rooney
2018
Rooney is a master of miscommunication. Her two protagonists here, Marianne and Connell, are as star-crossed as Shakespeare’s doomed lovers, and not only because they, too, come from tragically incompatible homes. The main problem, rather, is that they cannot speak plainly about their desires. A classic example: Connell asks Marianne if she wants to see other people, hoping she’ll say no; she thinks that he’s breaking up with her and coldly replies, “Sure.” Revisiting the book recently, I felt the desperate need to ask them to please use their words. But Normal People is about being young—really young—and navigating feelings that are more powerful than your expressive abilities. I found the novel painfully effective at transporting me back to my teens: a time when everything happens in high definition, someone can feel both made for you and completely inscrutable, and the stakes seem paralyzingly high even when they’re patently low. That’s a bit how falling in love feels at any age.
Jones’s breakout fourth novel is set in Atlanta—and, like much of her work, it’s an ode to her hometown. It also has more to say about the contemporary American justice system than almost any other novel written in this century. At the start of the book, Celestial, its artist heroine, is newly, happily married to a striver named Roy, a former small-town boy thrilled to take his place among Atlanta’s Black bourgeoisie. But when Roy is wrongfully arrested and incarcerated, Celestial discovers that even her family wants her to perform a stifling public role as his loyal wife that, no matter how much she loves him, leaves no room for the complexity of her grief and loneliness. When her longtime friendship with her childhood neighbor Andre turns romantic, the position that Roy’s imprisonment has put her in is revealed to be untenable—and Jones reveals Celestial to be a heroine for the ages.
In this otherworldly novella, love spans time—and then breaks it. Red and Blue are two futuristic agents embroiled in a war fought across universes and decades; their job is to warp world events in order to benefit their opposing governments. Their correspondence begins with taunts before morphing into mutual curiosity, fascination, and, finally, a passionate and forbidden alliance. Their letters explore yearning with such beauty that I challenge any reader to be unaffected. Red’s and Blue’s very essences are at odds, yet they find each other through battle, through centuries, and through twists in their own timelines that hint of betrayal—but are actually proof of a selfless commitment to a dreamed-of future. El-Mohtar and Gladstone’s deft epistolary romance is, in every sense of the word, timeless.
Ashley Herring Blake
Before I Let Go
by Kennedy Ryan
2022
When we first meet the central couple in Before I Let Go, they are already divorced. A series of tragedies have pushed Yasmen and Josiah apart, and they’re separately navigating grief while still co-parenting and working together. Heartbreak and second chances are familiar territory in romance novels, but Ryan’s novel transcends the commonplace. Her story starts with intense passion and adoration—and then, when the unrelenting stressors and crises of the real world interfere, Ryan asks: Is love alone enough to sustain a marriage? Through Yasmen and Josiah, the reader experiences tender moments of self-doubt and self-loathing, the pride of watching someone build themself up, and the spark of desire reigniting after years of being swept aside. Their reconciliation isn’t wrapped in a perfect bow; it’s messy, mercurial, and imperfect—as Ryan writes, “the stuff real happily ever afters were made of.”
Krystle Champagne-Norwood
You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty
by Akwaeke Emezi
2022
Feyi, a Nigerian American artist living in Brooklyn, is dealing with the death of her husband in complicated ways. She pushes for a risky hookup in a bathroom at a party; she paints canvases with animal blood. None of it stops her from having vivid nightmares about how Jonah died—but she’s still trying to move on. She has a not-quite-boyfriend, Nasir, who sweeps her off to his family’s luxurious Caribbean-island estate. Once there, she finds herself drawn to Nasir’s father, Alim, who recognizes Feyi’s sadness. The resulting entanglement is tense, chaotic, and, it must be said, pretty sexy. But the novel isn’t just about the thrill and devastation of an inconvenient attraction. Emezi considers the ways that loss can reshape desire—and the relief that comes from not only being wanted by someone, but also being understood by them.
That title is what he calls her—no real names here. He’s “the choreographer,” and she’s just “Rabbit.” They meet in Maine, at an artist’s residency, where nothing happens between them. When they catch up in New York, she’s pulled to him like a dowsing rod to water. She’s queer and hasn’t been with a man in ages. He’s an established artist—rich, powerful, and two decades her senior. At 30, she feels that she knows herself well enough, as a writer and a woman, to indulge her erotic curiosity. Then, before she realizes it, she’s caught in his rip current, being pulled further and further away from everything she knows. The only part that terrifies her: She likes it. Adores it, even. Their partnership remakes everything she’d taken for granted, and Little Rabbit is the story of a person learning to accept what her body’s already decided.
At the beginning of the 1960s, Isabellives alone in her family home, a house she doesn’t own but has nonetheless burrowed into and absorbed as her whole way of life. One night at dinner, her brother and landlord, Louis, introduces Eva, his girlfriend, who repulses the tightly wound Isabel with her “violently peroxided bob” and overt sexuality. When Louis suggests that Eva move in with Isabel for the summer, Isabel’s furious suspicion turns into erotic obsession. Van der Wouden builds the revelations so elegantly that to spoil them would feel like critical malpractice. The house is more than a house; Isabel’s sour, anxious misanthropy is more than simple repression. And Eva is so much more than a vehicle for sexual awakening—she’s also a puzzle, and she inspires a reckoning. But the ferocious connection between the two women seems to incinerate all of the layers of history and conflict that engulf them, creating space for something new.
Donald Trump has spent nearly two years investigating, suing, or prosecuting anybody in politics, media, or government who ever defied him. Now, with Democrats poised to win control of one or both chambers of Congress, the administration and its allies are prepared to slip back into their familiar pose of victimhood.
The putative evidence of imminent GOP persecution comes from Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who recently told the Vox journalist Astead Herndon during an event at the University of Chicago that Democrats should pursue accountability for the administration to, among other goals, deter new graduates from enlisting in corrupt schemes. “I want young people coming out of school to say, ‘Should I go work for the Trump administration?’” she said. “I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that.’” Slotkin made these remarks last Tuesday, attracting little notice at the time because she didn’t say anything particularly noteworthy. Five days later, a tidal wave of conservative outrage suddenly crashed over her.
The Republican response has been revealing. Even Trump-skeptical conservatives are signaling that, just as they have in the past, his party will rally behind him the moment someone proposes that the laws of the country should be enforced if Trump is found to have engaged in misconduct. He has trained members of his party to sublimate any concern they may have about his actions beneath their partisan instincts. However queasy Trump might occasionally make them, they will return to his side the moment he faces the prospect of legal consequences.
“It is absolutely disgraceful to threaten young Americans for participating in politics and serving their country,” Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, complained. “This type of thinking is terrible for our country,” Ari Fleischer, the former press secretary to President George W. Bush, chimed in. Columns by the Trump legal adviser Mike Davis in Fox News and the writer Miranda Devine in the New York Post depict Slotkin as a goon who was menacing bright-eyed youth for no reason other than their partisan affiliation. “Slotkin is a lowlife who’s ruining her state,” Trump said in front of the White House when prodded for a reaction by a reporter.
Trump went even further, as is his wont. “That’s a hell of a statement,” he told reporters. “Slotkin said that there should be prosecutions in order to scare people from going into politics.”
In point of fact, Slotkin didn’t say anything about prosecutions. She was discussing congressional oversight and specifically describing a scenario in which Democrats had control of Congress but not the executive branch.
She was arguing for a measured and focused approach, prioritizing only the most blatant forms of corruption.
“We do have to have accountability for the unbelievable corruption that we are living under right now,” she said. “But you can’t just make that your whole personality. So you have to pick signature cases, and you have to go after people and projects that are just super egregious.”
Later in the conversation, Herndon noted that Trump has largely insulated himself from accountability by stacking the courts and installing loyalists throughout his party and the federal government. That’s when Slotkin pointed out that exposing the administration’s corruption might deter ambitious Republicans from joining the administration during its final years.
The outraged responses omitted the first part of Slotkin’s remarks, which point out the need to investigate the administration’s pervasive misconduct. Out of context, it sounds as if Slotkin is threatening young Republicans because of malevolence. But in context, her comments are understandable, even generous. If you knew a young person who had been planning to go to work for Elizabeth Holmes, deterring them by exposing the Theranos founder as a con artist would have been doing them a favor.
Pretending that the Trump administration is innocent is just the first line of defense. The fallback argument against investigating, and perhaps eventually prosecuting, any corruption is that doing so will set off a cycle of retribution.
A Wall Street Journaleditorial accuses Slotkin of “essentially promising a scorched-earth lawfare campaign” that will invite reprisals. “This is where the multiple prosecutions that Democrats unleashed against Mr. Trump in the Biden years are taking us. Mr. Trump is retaliating with similar attempts to criminalize political differences. And now Ms. Slotkin is vowing more of the same. Down this road lies more bitterness and political dysfunction,” the Journal editorial laments. Jack Goldsmith, a former Bush-administration legal adviser, makes a similar argument in a Substack column.
The fear that the two parties are locked in a cycle of retribution has a certain high-minded but superficial appeal. It’s true that Trump faced investigations after leaving office, and that he has cited these investigations as a rationale for his reign of legal terror.
But Joe Biden did not behave in a remotely similar fashion. He appointed an attorney general, Merrick Garland, who commanded bipartisan respect. Garland operated cautiously, following traditional procedure, and appointed Jack Smith as a special counsel when evidence of Trump’s refusal to cooperate with the investigation—taking classified documents, stonewalling repeated requests to return them, and then trying to mislead federal investigators—was too blatant to ignore. Trump did face one questionable prosecution: Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan prosecutor, charged that his hush money to Stormy Daniels was a campaign-finance violation. But that was not something Biden directed.
Besides, Trump’s ambition to imprison his opponents preceded anything Biden did, as anybody who remembers the “Lock her up!” chants should readily concede. Trump was unable to effectively prosecute his enemies during his first term, largely because he was stuck with a Justice Department whose staff was committed to traditional norms of independence, not for lack of trying. To the contrary, Trump spent most of his first term trying to make his attorneys general act like Roy Cohn. He pressured Ukraine’s government to gin up an investigation of Biden, and he eventually appointed a special counsel, John Durham, to investigate various enemies, only for Durham to fall on his face.
The most logical way to understand Trump’s motive is that he has always viewed laws as suggestions rather than hard requirements, and tended to assume that people in power will abuse it to protect their friends and punish their enemies. Democratic lawfare did not implant this belief in Trump. He and his allies are going to continue investigating fake crimes and committing real ones, because Trump fundamentally does not believe in the rule of law.
What is most peculiar is that the Democrats aren’t the party that has decided to elevate this question in the closing days of the midterm campaign. The Republicans are. Why, you might wonder, did a phalanx of Republicans emerge several days after the fact to start screaming about Slotkin?
Anti-anti-Trump Republicans, of which the Journal is a leading voice, often invoke the Mueller investigation and the first Trump impeachment as radicalizing events that reignited their wavering partisan attachment. The misguided Bragg indictment of Trump helped rehabilitate him among Republicans who had been ready to move on after January 6. As Davis wrote on X, “Dear @ElissaSlotkin: You are rallying fractured Republicans right before the midterms.”
Trump in his second term has operated with complete impunity. The Republican Congress is not even pretending to conduct oversight over the executive branch, and the Justice Department is not even pretending to care whether the president and his allies follow the law. The president grasps that if he ever has to face accountability, his party will back him up. Trump has two modes: flaunting his impunity and wallowing in victimization. For the moment, he finds the latter more politically useful.
The clouds, piled in a dark heap over the Blueberry Ridge mobile-home park in Wells, Maine, looked like they would open up any minute. Residents sat in neatly arranged folding chairs behind a double-wide trailer, waiting for Troy Jackson, the state’s Democratic Senate candidate, to appear. Meanwhile, campaign staffers buzzed around like hornets out of a nest, freshly kicked. I was seated at the periphery, flanked on the left by two pockmarked fake deer—3-D archery targets—and on the right by an elderly chain-smoker who politely angled her cigarette away from me as she talked. She told me that she didn’t know much about Jackson but was going to knock on doors for him anyway. “He seems like he’s down-to-earth,” she said. “That he’s one of us.”
Jackson is one of them. He’s a fifth-generation logger born to a 16-year-old high-school dropout, and, as he is fond of repeating, he grew up as a “poor kid in a town full of poor kids.” At one time, he lived in a mobile home. A slick banner on his campaign website declares: Mainer By Birth. Logger By Trade. Senator for the People.
I’d come to Blueberry Ridge to see Jackson, who replaced Graham Platner as the nominee in July, after Platner resigned due to multiple scandals. The park was bought by a real-estate-investment company in 2021, and a group of residents has claimed that the new owners have made life there more expensive and worse. Now the group is pushing for a rent cap, and Jackson was there over Labor Day weekend to show support. When he addressed the crowd, his voice was measured but tinged with what sounded like genuine frustration. “The greed that’s happening right now in this country, that people in mobile-home parks are feeling, is like something I’ve never seen,” he said. Jackson marveled at a mason jar of muddy tap water that got passed around, apparent evidence of the park’s deteriorating living conditions. He seemed to be in his element, and after the event was over, he stayed to shake hands and talk about the travails of mobile-home life until his staffers pulled him away.
The next stop on his tour that day was People’s Inclusive Welding, a school in South Portland whose mission is to provide a “safe and supportive environment for underserved and underrepresented communities to learn a skilled trade.” There, Jackson watched a torch demonstration, surrounded by the language of hyper-progressivism: a metal slab emblazoned with the text WHAT’S YOUR SAFE WORD?; a door covered in dozens of stickers with radical messages (SOLIDARITY MEANS WEARING A MASK and DESTROY ALL BORDERS); a gigantic mural, painted the colors of the trans flag, proclaiming BLM and ACAB—an abbreviation for “All Cops Are Bastards.” He seemed to instinctively edge away from the mural as a local-news outlet snapped photos of him.
The contrast between these two events—one at a trailer park populated mostly by retirees, the other at a shop catering to progressive urban tradespeople—reflects the tensions in the Jackson campaign as a whole. Jackson seems to be attempting to pair a left-leaning, economically populist package with “woke” cultural ideals, which working-class voters tend to reject. Jackson’s unsuccessful run for governor earlier this year was endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America and Bernie Sanders, who affirmed his support for Jackson’s Senate bid and has appeared at campaign events on his behalf. Several labor unions have also endorsed Jackson. He supports Medicare for All, bans on congressional stock trading, tax cuts for workers, and tax hikes for billionaires. He also favors restricting assault weapons and abolishing ICE. As a state senator, he voted in favor of trans women being housed in women’s prisons, and of qualified trans teens receiving treatments such as hormone therapy without parental consent; he voted against a ban on trans women’s participation on women’s sports teams. In 2023, he co-sponsored legislation to allow later-term abortions after fetal viability.
On economic issues, Jackson is in sync with the working-class and rural voters he says he is championing. Sixty-three percent of Americans without a college degree and 76 percent of those who make less than $50,000 a year say that the government should be responsible for ensuring health-care coverage, for example. On cultural matters, however, Jackson is out of step with many of those he claims to be giving a voice to. Most Americans without a college degree say that protecting gun rights is more important than gun control, and that guns make the country safer. These Americans are also more likely than college graduates to express negative views about illegal immigration. Likewise, a majority of people making less than $50,000 a year or who did not go to college say that abortion is morally unacceptable, whereas those making more than $100,000 or who did go to college say the opposite.
On gender identity, majorities of Americans without a four-year college degree say that gender transitions are morally wrong, that trans people should play on sports teams that match their birth sex, and that being trans is not an innate condition but is instead caused by social factors. Similar trends play out in Maine, where people without a four-year college degree are more likely than people with a degree to view illegal immigration as a serious problem, and where trans women’s participation in women’s sports is unpopular across the electorate. (I asked the Jackson campaign for an interview so that he could elaborate on his views, but it refused multiple requests.)
Despite its down-home signifiers and KICKING ASS FOR THE WORKING CLASS T-shirts, the Jackson campaign’s pairing of leftist economic populism with progressive cultural stances fits seamlessly into the broader professional-class insurgency roiling the Democratic Party. This movement, which some have referred to as a Democratic “tea party,” appears animated by a theory of persuasion that one might call “left maximalism.” The tacit wager of left maximalists, including Jackson, seems to be that enough working-class voters will stomach unpopular left-wing cultural policies provided that a candidate also supports popular left-wing economic positions.
This strategy has shown some signs of success lately, as evidenced by the DSA-endorsed candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier’s surprise primary win in New York City’s Thirteenth Congressional District, one of the poorest in the state. She managed to unseat an incumbent establishment opponent despite arguing that deportations are wrong under any circumstance and that national borders and prisons should be abolished—views that are not exactly common among the working class. Similarly, before Platner’s collapse, he used a left-maximalist approach to win his primary. It remains to be seen, however, whether left maximalism will fly as a general-election strategy in Maine. Winning will require Jackson to hold together a coalition that includes both college-educated residents of prosperous coastal cities and towns, and the rural, socially moderate, working-class voters Democrats have been alienating in recent years.
The frictions in the Jackson campaign’s platform call to mind the work of Daniel Bell, a mid-20th-century sociologist who once described himself as “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture.” In his 1976 book, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Bell argued that capitalism had started to undermine itself. As Bell observed, capitalism took root in the United States during the 19th and early-20th centuries, when the country’s social life was defined by puritanical moralism and the Protestant work ethic. Americans saved money, prioritized the public good, toiled mostly without complaint, and were disinclined to acquisitiveness.
But after World War II, he wrote, thrift and public spiritedness were displaced by consumerist individualism, which focused on permissiveness, pleasure, and the self. Writing during a decade of economic crisis and high inflation, Bell warned that unfettered capitalism would weaken important institutions, cultural values, and social bonds—and ultimately lead to a society as unstable as it was selfish. If Bell was right to spotlight the “cultural contradictions of capitalism” in the 1970s, the cultural contradictions of anti-capitalism may well prove to be one of the most potent political conundrums of the 2020s: The American left has produced an environment that alienates many working-class people from candidates espousing economics designed to benefit them.
Jackson, apparently trying to manage these contradictions, is acting as though he can be everything to everyone. One minute, his team is launching a folksy ad, set at a backyard barbecue, about loggers paying more taxes than billionaires. The next minute, the campaign is dropping a side-eye-emoji’d social-media clip of the candidate sassily sipping boba tea beside a Pride flag. Depending on your perspective, this mishmash is reflective either of a politician who is trying to represent all Mainers, or of a man whose cultural politics sit uneasily alongside those of the working-class electorate—not to mention his own past beliefs. When Jackson first (and unsuccessfully) ran for state office in 2000, he did so as a Republican. By 2002, he was an independent, and by 2004, a Democrat. Yet even after changing his party affiliation, he voted against same-sex-marriage legislation in 2009, and received a perfect score from an anti-abortion group, Maine Right to Life, in 2010. By 2017, though, Jackson had done an about-face. He eventually began receiving accolades from pro-choice organizations for his support of abortion rights. Jackson, who was raised Catholic, has described abortion as an issue he has long wrestled with, and has said that he was simply persuaded that his prior views were wrong.
It is more than possible that Jackson’s pivot did come from a sincere change of heart, rather than from a cynical calculation about the concessions necessary to succeed as a Democrat. And the mixed messages of Jackson’s current campaign are not irreconcilable. Jackson can court the Rural Flannel-Wearing Tree Cutters and the Urban Boba Wokes at the same time, and perhaps he really will win enough of each for the Maine electoral math to work out in the Democrats’ favor. Polling shows a tight race, and the Iran quagmire, Donald Trump’s subbasement approval rating, and rising heating-oil prices in advance of the Maine winter are unlikely to do his opponent, the five-term Republican incumbent Susan Collins, any favors. But what may work as a matter of immediate tactics is not necessarily a strategy for fundamentally reshaping the demographics of the Democratic Party within the state, or outside it.
Cultural politics, not economic politics, are the left’s primary barrier to winning back the working class. Left maximalists tend to treat the working class as a junior partner rather than as their primary constituency. Progressive urban professionals may get the economic and social politics they want, while rural and working-class voters are asked to compromise their moral and cultural belief system in exchange for promises of health care and an increased minimum wage.
After Jackson departed Blueberry Ridge, I stuck around the backyard to talk with some residents. One was a union tinsmith and lifelong Democrat who told me he doesn’t care about culture-war issues and is more worried about how labor is being fleeced. Another was a tollbooth worker and three-time Trump voter who was dismayed that the president he’d voted for had done so little for the little people. He seemed ready for something different, and sympathized with Troy Jackson’s anti-corporate politics, but said that he could never vote for Jackson because of his stances on immigration and gender issues.
Progressives may wonder why a Mainer whose trailer park is allegedly being wrecked by an investment firm would care more about immigration policy than affordability issues as he decides which candidate to support. But one could also ask the opposite question: Why are highly educated leftists, and politicians such as Jackson who appeal to them, often unwilling to give even an inch on social issues? If socialists and populists—even blue-collar leftists such as Jackson—are so wedded to progressivism that they do not compromise with the working class, the question is not simply whether such a left can win. The question is whether it truly remains left at all.
The shortest flight path from Russia to the United States would take an enemy bomber over the North Pole and across Canadian airspace. During the Cold War, that simple fact was the impetus for the creation of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, which forged an integrated radar network across the two countries, effectively treating North American airspace as a single defensive zone.
Today, there’s less concern about a Russian barrage landing on U.S. soil, but NORAD remains relevant. Russian bombers still fly near Alaska and the Canadian Arctic. China’s expanding nuclear arsenal poses its own threat. Other airborne objects require vigilance, a lesson underscored by the mysterious flight path, in 2023, of a Chinese spy balloon, which NORAD shot down. This should matter to President Trump, who has identified the Western Hemisphere as a security priority. He even has a name for his approach: the “Donroe Doctrine.”
But all is not well at NORAD, the world’s only binational military command, headquartered at the Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs. NORAD, which was founded in 1958, now demonstrates how the president’s disdain for U.S. allies risks undermining the military cooperation that has kept the United States safe for decades.
Positions at NORAD and other integrated combatant commands in the United States used to be plum posts for ambitious Canadian military officers, giving them a chance to coordinate with Americans on intelligence, air and missile defense, and joint operations. That’s changing. U.S. and Canadian officials told me that Canada has lately struggled to find senior officers willing to take the jobs, a problem acute enough that Canadian officers have shared their concerns with counterparts in Colorado Springs, Ottawa, and Washington. The reasons are threefold, according to current and former officials who described the dynamic to me on the condition of anonymity in order to address a sensitive subject. Although the influence and sophistication of the U.S. military once made the postings desirable to ambitious officers, some now fear that time in the United States might hurt their chances for future promotions if relations spiral further out of control. They also see diminishing returns from a posting in which they’re likely to have their access curtailed as a byproduct of political tensions. And they face resistance from their families, who worry that anti-Canadian sentiment whipped up by Trump might make the country inhospitable, even temporarily.
Canadian officers considering U.S.-based posts don’t believe that they’ll be treated as equals, according to several who spoke with me. While the Trump administration has bullied and threatened numerous allies, these officers perceive particular hostility toward Canada—in part because of the vehemence of the trade dispute, and in part because Prime Minister Mark Carney has been willing, at times, to stand up to Trump. “If you’re a two-star general in Canada, and you’ve got maybe one or two extremely important jobs left in your career, will you use one of them to take up a position in the States, where you might be underemployed, with little access and little meaningful work to show for it?” one Canadian officer asked.
Some of the officials I spoke with noted that strained relations had not yet caused a tactical breakdown—no one had taken their eye off radar scopes or infrared cameras. And that’s what a NORAD spokesperson emphasized in response to my questions, issuing a statement saying that high-level Canadian roles at the binational command “remain fully staffed and highly regarded as career-enhancing opportunities, with Canadian personnel and their families fully integrated and operating with the systemic access required to execute binational defense operations for the homelands.”
The true impact of Canadian reluctance to serve in the United States may become manifest only in a crisis. In addition to the essential national-security functions performed by NORAD, the command also fosters camaraderie between the ranks of the two militaries. That’s vital if the U.S. military should ever need to project force to the north, including by moving personnel across Canada. Several of the people I spoke with raised the prospect of a conflict with China, which would quickly threaten Alaska, a crucial strategic hub. Moving U.S. forces to the noncontiguous state would depend on Canadian cooperation. In such a situation, Washington would want Canadian commanders who have served in the United States, so that American officers aren’t building new partnerships but are depending on people they’ve known for years. Canadian generals who’ve passed on postings in the United States because of friction between the two countries are much less likely to be sympathetic.
Since he returned to power last year, Trump has alienated longtime allies while praising rogue states such as North Korea. He has called Germany a “broken country” and said that French President Emmanuel Macron “always gets it wrong.” As a group, European leaders earned the epithet “weak.” He has imposed steep tariffs on their countries and threatened a foundation of Western security by raising doubts about U.S. fidelity to Article 5 of the NATO charter—that an attack on one is an attack on all.
Still, when I speak with senior officers in various allied countries—even Denmark, where the armed forces prepared for a possible U.S. invasion of Greenland earlier this year—they maintain that military-to-military cooperation continues despite political disagreements. Canada may be the first place where that is cracking. “The day-to-day relationship has deteriorated,” David Perry, an Ottawa-based defense analyst, told me. “There’s been a tangible change in the way the two countries interact on defense and security.”
That Washington is now choosing to alienate its northern neighbor is ironic because Canada, like other NATO members, is in the process of investing in the type of hard power that will make it an even more useful ally. When I met with Canada’s defense minister, David McGuinty, in February, the government had just released its first defense–industrial strategy, a plan to get weapons faster and—given geopolitical strife—to get more of them from Canadian suppliers. “Obviously continuing to work with the U.S.,” McGuinty said, “but now much more expansively looking to diversify.”
Earlier this year, the Canadian government promised to review whether to move forward with a full order of F-35 stealth fighters, which are produced by Lockheed Martin. This month, the government paused its acquisition of U.S.-made Black Hawk helicopters because of trade and diplomatic friction with Washington, according to CBC News and Radio-Canada. Canada is spending billions to upgrade radars, sensors, and other systems. Its participation in Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” would extend and strengthen the defensive shield, with the potential to protect both countries. But it’s hard to put much faith in protection from a bully. “Trust is easy to lose and hard to build,” Christopher Sands, the director of the Center for U.S.-Canada Studies at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, told me.
The current rancor is entirely different from past trade disputes, which have often been combative—“like a courtroom drama,” Sands said. But the fighting once stayed out of public view, managed by low-profile diplomats. Now the public is in the audience and can’t look away from the president’s antics, which have “poisoned people-to-people relations.” The armed forces couldn’t remain immune forever.
An executive order on Trump’s first day back in office, in January 2025, made Canadian officers wonder whether the U.S. military might be used against them. The order assigned U.S. Northern Command, which shares NORAD’s Colorado headquarters, to the mission to “seal the borders and maintain the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and security of the United States.” It did not specify the southern border, causing Canadian officials in Colorado to ask their counterparts, as relations worsened over time: Are you planning to militarize the northern border, one of the world’s longest undefended and peaceful frontiers? U.S. officials tried to reassure them that any action would be cooperative.
But the guarantee of cooperation became difficult to sustain. Defending new tariffs imposed on Canada in February 2025, Trump wrote on social media that “Canada ceases to exist as a viable Country” without U.S. support. “Therefore, Canada should become our Cherished 51st State.” Early on, references to Canadian statehood had elicited laughs during staff meetings at NORAD. But the mood soon changed. In April, Trump rebuffed the suggestion that his talk of annexation was just bluster. “I’m really not trolling,” he said in an interview with Time.
By the end of the year, jokes within the binational command about the 51st state were met with silence or curt rebuttals. Attitudes had shifted dramatically. An Angus Reid Institute poll found that almost half of Canadians said that their government should view the United States as an “enemy” or “potential threat,” while only 27 percent called Washington a friend and ally. Canadian officers serving in the United States divulged to colleagues that their families didn’t want to visit them over the holidays, because they were afraid of crossing the border or encountering animosity in American communities. In addition to the joint command in Colorado Springs, Canadian generals have served as deputy commanders of U.S. Army corps in North Carolina, Texas, and Washington State.
In early 2026, Carney named the dynamic generated by Trump’s hostility to American allies. “We are in the midst of a rupture,” he said, calling on the world’s middle powers to band together to resist bullying and defend international institutions. (Later, in an interview with The New York Times, Carney said that it would have been “irresponsible” not to take into consideration the possibility that Trump might use force against Canada.)
The president’s insults might have been dismissed as a rhetorical feint—a way to demand better trading terms or shake loose more military spending—but the scorn for Canada was echoed by senior Pentagon leaders. In May, Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, used social media to complain about Canada’s military readiness and announce that the Trump administration was pausing its participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defense, a bilateral advisory body to coordinate security policy. “A strong Canada that prioritizes hard power over rhetoric benefits us all,” Colby wrote. “Unfortunately, Canada has failed to make credible progress on its defense commitments.” The board hadn’t met since 2024, so the move was mostly symbolic. But Colby’s withering review prompted nervous questions inside NORAD: Who is this guy, and how much power does he have?
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s approach was even less subtle. In August, he posted a photo of two young female Canadian cadets. Their physical appearance seemed not to impress him; he captioned the photo “this is real.” The post stunned Canadians for its crassness and unprofessionalism. Wayne Eyre, who served as chief of Canada’s defense staff from 2021 to 2024, told me that he found Hegseth’s intervention “highly insulting.” It was followed, the next month, by a cartoon image that Trump circulated on his Truth Social feed of him beating Carney with a hockey stick—“unimaginable conduct by the president of the United States, even in our most dystopian imagination,” as one Canadian official put it to me. U.S. military leaders at NORAD have tried to put on a brave face, reporting to visitors that binational cooperation is continuing unimpeded. But away from the spotlight, Canadian officers will acknowledge the strain, current and former officials told me.
Eyre warned that cooperation of the kind that he helped oversee is more vulnerable than it might appear. “It’s sad, disappointing, and disturbing to see that deep relationship come under attack,” he said. “In my view, it’s a case of the U.S. undergoing self-harm by discarding and calling into question its competitive advantage, which is this system of alliances.”
Most of what the public knows about NORAD comes from its Santa Tracker, a lighthearted simulation of Santa Claus’s journey around the world on Christmas Eve. That’s because the command’s real business—guarding the skies—is mostly invisible. That is, until it stops working.
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“BALANCED BUDGET!!! DJT” Donald Trump posted that promise on February 7, 2025, the 18th day of his current presidential term. During the 2024 campaign, he had promised even more: the elimination of the entire national debt in a single term of office.
Trump insisted that he could reach his budget goals without disagreeable spending cuts. At a rally in St. Cloud, Minnesota, in July 2024, Trump pledged to make “not one penny” in cuts to Social Security and Medicare. He repeated that “not one penny” promise countless times through 2024, including in the Republican platform. Instead, he proposed eliminating deficits and debt with magic money from growth, from crypto, and—above all—from tariffs. Tariffs would generate so much revenue that they might replace the income tax, maybe even finance a $2,000 dividend for every American taxpayer.
Basic budget math contradicted Trump’s fantasies. The United States imported about $3.3 trillion in goods in 2024. The budget deficit for that year was about $1.8 trillion. To imagine that tariffs could eliminate the budget deficit required believing that the Trump administration would impose a 55 percent tariff on all imports—including oil, natural gas, and electricity—and that consumers would pay this tariff without altering their buying behavior at all. That was all obviously absurd.
But there was a Plan B to balance the budget! Let Elon Musk do it! At a rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden in October 2024, Musk boasted that he could save $2 trillion in wasteful spending. That was the genesis of the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk’s guerrilla war against the U.S. government. This adventure not only likely violated the Constitution but also almost certainly worsened the deficit. DOGE reduced the IRS auditing staff by nearly one-third. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that the ensuing collapse in federal enforcement efforts will cost the Treasury more than $860 billion in revenue over the next decade.
Fast-forward to the present. The budget deficit for the fiscal year that ended on September 30 is about $2 trillion, or about $160 billion more than in Joe Biden’s last complete year as president. Next year’s deficit is likely to be even bigger. When Trump spoke of eliminating the national debt, total debt stood at nearly $35 trillion. On the current trajectory, total debt could reach $45 trillion by 2028.
To put that another way: The U.S. debt reached $10 trillion for the first time during the financial crisis of 2008. That once seemed a crushing burden. Now an extra $10 trillion in debt is the cost of just four years of Trump’s fiscal recklessness.
Some highlights of how this record was achieved: In 2025, Trump and the Republican-led Congress passed a tax bill that made the 2017 tax cuts permanent—and added more tax reductions on top of them. The tax legislation will directly reduce government revenues by $4.5 trillion over the coming decade. Trump’s cuts to food stamps and Medicaid reduced spending by $1.1 trillion. Altogether, Trump’s budget plans netted out to $3.4 trillion in direct costs over the decade ahead—a sum that grows to $4.1 trillion because of the rising costs of debt service in the Trump era.
Trump’s biggest budget idea was to substitute tariffs for other government revenue sources. This plan proved not only economically unrealistic but also illegal. Tariffs are taxes, and taxes must be voted for by Congress, according to the Constitution. Congress delegated some emergency tariff authority to the president, but not enough to create a permanent new scheme of revenue. The Supreme Court confirmed this basic rule in February 2026.
The situation will continue to get worse. The Trump administration estimates that the Iran war has cost about $45 billion. That figure covers operational costs such as fuel and munitions. But in March, the Pentagon requested an additional $200 billion to meet a wider range of war-related needs, and Trump’s fiscal budget for 2027 seeks $1.5 trillion for the U.S. military, up 44 percent from pre-Iran-war levels.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act reduced income taxes on Social Security benefits, and Trump’s inflation has driven increases in Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment. The Social Security trust fund is now projected to be exhausted in 2032, forcing either big tax increases or big benefit cuts.
An early warning that Trump’s monetary promises should not be trusted came at that same 2024 St. Cloud rally where Trump promised no cuts to Social Security, when Trump stiffed the town with $209,000 in event fees. As the midterm elections near, Trump has accused the Democrats of threatening the country’s economy with socialism and communism. Yet his administration has managed to wreck the country’s finances worse than any government in U.S. history, without the excuse of an economic crisis or a successful major war. October 1 marked the start of America’s fiscal new year. A new Congress will face a new fiscal reality.
Over the next eight weeks, as winter envelops Ukraine, Russia plans to use the frigid weather as a weapon. Its arms factories have already made enough missiles and drones to take down Ukraine’s electrical grid, as well as the heating systems that millions of people rely on to stay warm. Homes far from the front will become deadly for their inhabitants as temperatures fall.
In that same time frame, three events taking place thousands of miles away could determine Ukraine’s future. The first is America’s Election Day, now two weeks away; leaders in Kyiv fear that if Democrats win one or both chambers of Congress, President Trump may turn even further against them in those final weeks of full Republican control of Washington. The second is a proposed summit in mid-November in southern China, where Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to meet with Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to plan how to end the war—without having a seat at the table for Ukraine.
The third is the G20 summit at Trump’s Miami-area golf course, scheduled to take place in mid-December. The president has visions of standing between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as they sign a peace deal, even if he has to strong-arm Ukraine to do it, according to advisers. One Ukrainian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss internal conversations, told us that it’s hard not to feel left out of decision making that will dictate the country’s future: “It looks like this is all happening without us.”
The U.S. president, who used to brag that he could resolve the war in 24 hours, has tossed aside some sanctions on Russia and struck a deal with Putin to import diesel from Moscow, giving a boost to the Russian war machine. He and his allies have threatened Kyiv, demanding that Zelensky stop attacking Russian oil refineries or risk losing access to American intelligence, weaponry, and satellite communications that it uses to defend itself. The calendar is now Ukraine’s foe—and so, Ukrainians fear, is Donald Trump.
Trump’s war in Iran has appeared to throttle Republicans’ chances in the midterms; the unending conflict, and the resulting surge in oil and gas prices, has eroded the GOP’s poll numbers and fueled Democrats’ hopes of taking both chambers of Congress. Stymied in his efforts to bring that war to a close, Trump recently shifted his focus to resolving the Ukraine conflict, in part to bring fuel prices down. But the way he’s chosen to try to do that has provided his fellow Republicans with a nasty October surprise. In a first for a U.S. president, Trump has sided with a traditional adversary, Russia, over a democracy that is not only fighting for its existence but also acting as a bulwark against a wider war. Trump’s diesel deal with Putin will have a negligible impact on American energy prices, but it’s a financial lifeline for Moscow.
Trump has demanded an energy cease-fire—he even announced one earlier this month that had no basis in reality—yet has focused his ire entirely on Ukraine’s attacks on Russian oil refineries. He blames those strikes for the rise in energy prices while ignoring the real culprit, Iran’s ability to defy the United States and close the Strait of Hormuz. He’s convinced himself, three people close to him have told us, that Ukraine’s attacks on the refineries are, in part, meant to undermine Republicans’ chances next month—and, by extension, Trump. The president has ignored Moscow’s attacks on Ukraine’s electrical grid, and yesterday, hours after a drone strike on a public park killed six people, including two children, he downplayed its strikes on Ukraine’s cities, declaring that Russia had not “been doing much.” An image of one of the dead children, a 1-year-old killed as she sat in her stroller, was broadcast around the globe.
More pressure could be coming. Trump aides have threatened to withhold arms sales unless Kyiv stops targeting Russian diesel plants; this week, the administration delayed approving the transfer of missiles that Ukraine needs for its defense. Ukraine in the past week has said that it has not consistently received early warnings of attacks and no longer has full Starshield satellite access, which is impeding its ability to defend itself against Russia’s new fleet of jet-powered drones. (The Wall Street Journal reported today that Starshield’s creator, Elon Musk, ordered the slowdown. The White House and Musk had previously denied involvement.)
Some in Trump’s orbit have suggested that the United States go further and stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine. Trump’s deference to Putin has been a theme for a decade, yet this new round of kowtowing has handed Republicans another obstacle ahead of the elections. In a rare act of defiance, a handful in the party have denounced the president’s decisions, including his move to undercut a Russia-sanctions bill that he signed only a month ago in honor of its champion, the late Senator Lindsey Graham. The quick betrayal of Graham’s legacy was a blow for some of his Senate colleagues; GOP aides told us that Graham’s sudden July death cost Ukraine its most vocal champion in Trump’s inner circle, and that no one has stepped up to fill that void.
Michael Froman, who worked in the Clinton and Obama administrations and is now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told us that cutting off Kyiv from American weapons or intelligence might, in fact, prolong the war because it “would undermine Ukraine’s position at the negotiating table and make it less likely Russia would be willing to negotiate on any of the key outstanding issues.”
Officials with both parties predict that the Democrats will capture the House next month; the Senate appears to be a true toss-up. Kyiv will be carefully watching the results. A Democratic win next month will, in the long run, likely help Kyiv, and some of the more hopeful members of Zelensky’s camp believe that Republican defeats could force Trump to focus more on domestic issues, resulting in him leaving Ukraine alone. But other observers on both sides of the Atlantic fear that the opposite could be true. A president without a friendly Congress tends to fall back more on foreign policy, where he needs little help from Capitol Hill. Either way, the new Congress won’t be seated until January 3, leaving Trump unchecked for two more months and perhaps motivated to wield power before his party moves into the minority. Another major national election would not be for two years—plenty of time for Trump to push Ukraine without fear of voters punishing Republicans. “He could get distracted at any time,” one outside Trump ally told us. “But right now, he’s furious at Ukraine, and he wants Zelensky gone.”
Two weeks after Election Day, Trump plans to board Air Force One bound for a series of summits in Asia. Earlier this month, Trump overruled White House aides who had counseled against him calling to wish Putin a happy birthday, warning that little good would come of it. In that conversation, Trump authorized the diesel deal, and Putin suggested something grander: a meeting of the world’s great powers to divide up the world. Or at least Ukraine.
Putin proposed that he, Trump, and Xi hold a trilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in Shenzhen, China, in mid-November to discuss a variety of issues, including Ukraine. Trump told reporters yesterday that he is open to attending the meeting, which would be his first face-to-face encounter with Putin since their unproductive summit in Alaska last year. It is no surprise that Trump is drawn to the idea; his deference toward Putin is rivaled only by his regard for Xi, whom he hosted in lavish fashion at the White House last month. He has previously been intrigued by the idea of the three powers—China, Russia, the United States—dividing the globe into spheres of influence, although Moscow these days hardly wields the international clout of Washington or Beijing.
The idea of two authoritarians and their admirer plotting to slice up sovereign nations alarmed much of the West. And how, Kyiv demanded, could Ukraine’s future be decided with no input from Ukraine? But some in Trump’s orbit have backed the idea, belittling Ukraine as a corrupt backwater with no autonomy. Putin has never viewed Ukraine as a legitimate country, and Trump has held a grudge against it since 2019, when he was impeached (for the first time) after pressuring Zelensky to dig up damaging information about Trump’s political rival Joe Biden. He and his Ukrainian counterpart had a shouting match at the White House early in Trump’s second term, causing the U.S. to briefly withhold intelligence. Since then, Zelensky has tried to flatter Trump to stay on his good side, but those niceties have vanished as the American president has demanded that Ukraine pick a new leader.
Many of those in Trump’s orbit are unsympathetic to Ukraine’s plight and see the war not as a battle for the modern, rules-based world order—with its cardinal tenet prohibiting the seizure of land by force—but as an impediment to future business deals with Russia, some of which could enrich members of the president’s inner circle. Pushing Ukraine into taking a deal, even if that means it has to give up its claim on the Donbas, would open up avenues to dealmaking on Russia’s diesel, rare-earth minerals, and other resources. Zelensky has balked at any territorial concessions. “Our worry is that they are looking at this as a new Yalta Conference, to divide the world into spheres of influence,” another Ukrainian official told us.
Trump’s ideal timeline for some sort of Russia-Ukraine peace agreement, as we reported last week, would be in December at the G20 summit. That bit of history, were it to occur, would take place at one of Trump’s own properties. In Trump’s first term, he pushed to host the 2020 G7 at his golf course in Doral, just outside of Miami. But Trump abandoned the idea amid bipartisan blowback over his plan to personally profit off the event.
This time, there has been nary a Republican whimper of protest about Trump’s venue choice, but some have lodged complaints about the president’s other idea for the summit: to invite Putin. The Russian leader has yet to agree to show up, but if he does, it would be the first time he has attended a multilateral summit in a Western country since his invasion of Ukraine. It would allow him to take another step in shedding his status as an international pariah, though it is hard to imagine that European leaders are eager to talk with Putin.
Zelensky, who has already committed to attending the G20, has made clear that he would be willing to sit down with Putin, no matter the venue, to work out an agreement to end the war. If Trump has his way over the next eight weeks, it might be not a negotiation, but a capitulation.
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Many people are understandably focused on the question of how AI will transform our civilization. Will it cure cancer? Will it end world hunger? Will it hack everyone’s bank accounts and incubate the next pandemic? But those who are already profiting from this technological revolution also have a more immediate concern. Their problem is—to paraphrase one of my favorite lines from Scarface—what to do with all the cash.
Over the past few days, two of America’s most prominent AI leaders have offered proposals for returning some of the spoils of the AI boom to the public. On Sunday, Anthropic announced that it would set aside 5 percent of the company’s stock in a new LLC—the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund—to be spent on causes it deems to be in the public’s interest. More stock may be added as the company becomes more valuable. If the company goes public at its current projected valuation of $1.5 trillion, the fund could hold $75 billion, making it one of the largest charities on the planet. (For context, the Gates Foundation Trust had about $89 billion in it at the end of last year.) Elon Musk, a centibillionaire and a longtime skeptic of traditional philanthropy, criticized the move and tried to one-up it, writing on X that he’d be giving one share of SpaceX to “every kid in America.” According to The New York Times’ back-of-the-napkin math, this could end up being a donation of more than $10 billion.
What AI’s biggest winners decide to do with their money could have profound consequences for how Americans live their lives. The birth of modern AI may turn out to be the biggest wealth-creation event in human history, yet most Americans are feeling those effects indirectly. AI is making some people’s jobs easier and driving innovation, but it isn’t hitting everyone’s personal finances equally, and almost half of U.S. adults think the technology will widen the gap between the rich and the poor. Musk and Anthropic are now laying out two different visions for AI-driven philanthropy—raising thorny questions about the level of control that the investor class will exert over our shared future.
The first and most obvious question for Anthropic: What if the company’s understanding of the “public good” doesn’t line up with the public’s wants or needs? Anthropic’s leaders, Dario and Daniela Amodei, have already committed to giving away most of their own personal wealth, and Dario has written on his blog about the kinds of philanthropy he admires. The Gates Foundation and PEPFAR, President George W. Bush’s public initiative for global AIDS relief, are both on his list. But how the firm’s leaders will actually decide to apportion these gifts remains somewhat nebulous. A press release for Anthropic’s fund lists “large donations to traditional nonprofits” and “direct distributions to specific populations” as examples of possible projects. Another stated goal is to remediate the effects of a massive, AI-driven labor-market transformation—an ironic instance of a company trying to solve a problem it helped create.
As many politicians and even AI corporations themselves have argued, this tech is powerful enough, and potentially such an important part of the global economy, that the wealth it creates may merit some degree of public control. Last October, as one possible plan for reckoning with the economic consequences of AI, Anthropic floated the idea of using “sovereign wealth funds to give citizens stakes in AI revenues.” (OpenAI’s leaders have also reportedly considered giving 5 percent of the company to the government.) At least for now, though, the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund isn’t giving anyone outside of the company a stake. And the fact that it won’t be a 501(c)(3), like the Gates Foundation, means that it won’t have to deal with the kinds of mandatory financial disclosures that are meant to keep charitable organizations maximally transparent. A democratic way to approach this project would be for the government to aggressively tax the company and decide for itself how to spend the money. Not every American agrees with their government representatives’ approach to resource allocation, but at least in the public sector, the people have a voice.
Although Musk’s path is also billionaire-led, it gives Americans a much more direct stake. Donald Trump clarified yesterday that Musk’s donation, if it happens, would use the country’s new child-savings accounts (known as “Trump Accounts”) as a vehicle. Rather than earmarking shares for a self-sustaining charitable foundation, Musk would be effectively cutting out the middleman, giving American children a piece of the company that houses his biggest AI bets. It would likely be a smaller total donation than Anthropic’s; one share per child may not turn out to be all that much money in the long run. And Trump Accounts aren’t a perfect dispersal mechanism; parents can’t reject donated shares, and they can’t immediately sell them. Once account holders turn 18, though, they can spend Musk’s gift on whatever they want.
Musk, like other tech billionaires, has questioned traditional modes of philanthropy. He knows that the public knows that giving can be an expression of power and control—a way to rehabilitate a donor’s image or provide political insulation for the donor and his enterprises. Musk may be getting something out of this too. If more people own a little chunk of the AI economy, will they start to become more receptive to data centers and other Big Tech interventions? The donation could also give recipients a reason to be less critical of Musk and his businesses; people with a stake in the company might be more inclined to tolerate unscrupulous behavior. Still, if he can follow through on his approach (and especially if he continues to donate AI stock, as he hinted in his post yesterday), his gift could have a real impact.
When SpaceX was about to go public earlier this year, my colleague Matteo Wong observed that “by weaving itself into the finances of most businesses and households in America, the AI industry is quickly making itself too big to fail.” AI is already deeply embedded in our life: in the businesses we interact with, in the pension funds and 401(k)s around which we plan our future. These massive donations, which represent a deviation from tech-industry norms, could reshape society for the better. But if the public comes to rely on Anthropic’s investments or on direct payouts from SpaceX, it’ll need to start caring even more about how well these companies perform. Public welfare needn’t be contingent on the whims of a few powerful firms; so much else already is.
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is donating roughly $80 million to support Democrats in the midterm elections, and is focused on helping the party win control of the House. Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee is transferring $50 million to groups supporting Republican House and Senate candidates.
The United Kingdom announced that it will deploy Royal Air Force fighter jets to Saudi Arabia to defend against missile and drone attacks by the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen. The jets will protect Saudi cities and infrastructure but will not conduct offensive strikes inside Yemen, British officials said.
Elon Musk ordered restrictions on Ukraine’s military-grade Starlink service last week, disrupting drone operations and air defenses,according to The Wall Street Journal. Musk reportedly discussed the decision, and President Trump said he did not know who was responsible for the move.
Dispatches
The Weekly Planet: The Trump administration has mandated that federal firefighters pursue a policy of “full suppression” on every wildfire, Joshua Partlow reports. He explores the sometimes fatal dangers of this aggressive approach.
Illustration by Adam Maida / The Atlantic. Source: Michael Kovac / Getty.
Theranos-Style Fraud Has Become the Norm
By Idrees Kahloon
Perhaps Elizabeth Holmes was simply ahead of her time: Today, the Theranos founder’s crimes look less notorious amid a pervasive culture of grift and graft.
Her biotechnology company infamously promised to revolutionize medicine by conducting hundreds of tests on mere pinpricks of blood. A decade after it fell into disgrace, and three years after she began serving her 11-year federal-prison sentence for defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars, Holmes is the subject of a new documentary. You Can See Everything, directed by Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder, came about because Holmes and her partner, the hotel heir Billy Evans, invited Fielder, a surrealist sketch comedian, to live with them just before she went to prison. They allowed him to film whatever he saw. The result is unsettling, because Holmes’s placid indifference toward the truth has become more familiar than it was when Theranos unraveled.
Reflect. Lego’s overt outreach to an adult market has changed the nature of its products, Sophia Nguyen reports. She explores what the company lost when it grew up.
It was fitting that, just hours after the first public screenings of the Elizabeth Holmes documentary began last Thursday, Elon Musk put on a show of his own.
That night, in Texas, Musk unveiled the company’s new Roadster prototype, a car that would defy gravity. Tesla built what was roughly one-half of a roller-coaster loop, which the Roadster climbed before momentarily hanging upside down and then executing a controlled flip and gliding down to Earth. The demo worked. In another stunt, it did a barrel roll over a semi-truck. Each maneuver was powered by air thrusters that guided the car to a soft landing.
The demo was impressive. But watching the clips, I could feel my brain struggling to process what I was being shown. Was this real? The car did climb vertically, flip, and land. But Musk, who has built wildly successful companies, is also famously prone to outlandish claims that don’t always pan out. I couldn’t help but wonder what, if anything, Tesla’s demonstration or Musk had elided. “This will be an actual car that’s on the roads,” Musk said. He got the flying-car headlines he wanted, but will this car actually be released? There are already reasons to doubt it: The car displayed on Thursday won’t be in production until at least 2028, and it features 10 thrusters powered by 600 liters of compressed air. The flying version of the Roadster will be sold “invite-only.” Its price tag is likely to be astronomical. And so Musk isn’t exactly lying here. Rather, he’s making bold proclamations and asking people to take his pledge to deliver as an article of faith.
Less than 48 hours later, I found myself sitting in a crowded theater, watching the new documentary You Can See Everything, about the disgraced and convicted founder of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, and her husband, Billy Evans. In one scene, Holmes and Evans are hurriedly trying to court investors and research talent to build out what they refer to as Theranos 2.0. This scene is arguably the only time in the film where the duo don’t appear to be filled with existential dread. During phone calls and Zoom meetings, they spit out jargon and look earnestly excited about what they can build if they “get the band back together.” At the end of the sequence, Holmes is asked about why she’s spending her last days with her family building a company, and she responds that this is what she’s meant to be doing here on Earth. It is one of the few moments where I confidently believe her. Whatever she earnestly believes about her own guilt, it seems clear that her identity is inextricably tied to her notion that she is, in Silicon Valley parlance, a builder: a high-agency, visionary type with a remarkable risk tolerance who makes things and isn’t afraid to fail, because she has a monomaniacal obsession with pushing the bounds of what’s possible.
The film, which had the biggest opening for a documentary in more than 20 years, is extremely well suited to a post-truth era. The co-directors, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, bury the audience with unreliable narration such that, when you get to the end, you feel like a participant in the film. It also left me exhilarated, slightly repulsed, and feeling as if I was going insane. In that way, the documentary replicates what it’s like to navigate the informational hall of mirrors we all inhabit. But what I found most bracing about the film—more so than the supposed unknowability of anyone or anything—is how Holmes’s act and affect do not feel like an aberration in 2026. In fact, her behavior embodies the current ethos of Silicon Valley.
When she built Theranos, Holmes was a college dropout with boundless ambitions who styled herself after Steve Jobs. Jobs famously said things such as “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” and Holmes, like Jobs, projected the aura of a person ready to pull the future into the present by any means necessary. Jobs routinely delivered on these promises, and kept many projects secret until they were ready for the masses. Holmes did the opposite, offering a fantastical version of a product that did not exist, obscuring the actual capabilities and lying about the financials. She wasn’t alone; over time, the idea of the builder became more synonymous with a founder’s ideas, charisma, and salesmanship than with the products themselves. “I watched countless founders of hard tech companies present fraudulent products at conferences,” Nikita Bier, a tech entrepreneur who was recently Elon Musk’s head of product at X, wrote on the platform this weekend in response to the documentary. “They had fake studies with fudged numbers. Most of the adults in the room excused it as ‘faking it ‘til you make it.’”
Holmes’s high-profile failure and the collapse of Theranos in 2018 didn’t kill the builder archetype. If anything, the very structure of Silicon Valley became more deeply intertwined with the builder mindset. Fake it ’til you make it (provided it isn’t outright fraud) is a necessary outcome of an industry that’s funded by venture capitalists, who often make strategic bets on projects so early in development that the products are still hypothetical. And so VCs threw unfathomable money at promising but half-baked ideas in the hopes of fabulous payouts. Failures were overlooked, even celebrated as necessary or teachable moments—honorable proof of being a “man in the arena.” In 2022, after Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire was revealed to be an elaborate Ponzi scheme, the writer John Ganz argued that, in an industry built on big bets, the line between frauds and visionaries becomes difficult to suss out until everything implodes. “This is the Fyre Festival era of capitalism: outlandish promises and then a ludicrous debacle.”
Much of that rush to invest has been driven by a culture progressively gripped by the fear of missing out on the next industry-shaking payout. Untold billions were poured into crypto, then NFTs, Web3, and the ill-fated metaverse. In crypto, rug-pulling scams and Ponzi schemes abounded; its boosters said things such as “Have fun staying poor.” Today we’re living through what many suggest could be an AI bubble, and the same mentality persists. Have fun staying poor has been replaced with the idea of a “permanent underclass” of people who failed to get in early and now stand to lose their economic viability, and potentially their human agency altogether. Like Theranos, crypto, and NFTs, the AI industry is defined by claims of its inevitability and its future power (to be certain, chatbots and coding agents are real and powerful in ways the other technologies were not). In this way, AI is a faith-based technology; one’s desire to work on it, bet the success of the global economy on it, love it, or fear its End Times powers is typically predicated on what one can imagine it might become.
The past eight years have warped the tech industry to the point that it can feel untethered from the constraints of reality. You can see it in headlines everywhere if you’re looking. On Saturday, an Anthropic co-founder, Jack Clark, suggested that the U.S. GDP could jump in the next four years from about $30 trillion to $44 trillion thanks to rapid AI-driven progress in many industries. This would be one of the largest periods of growth in U.S. history, a prediction based on nothing more than the most “extreme parameter setting” of an Anthropic economic model the company released this fall. You can see it in the IPO prospectuses for a company like SpaceX, which includes in its ambitions the goal to “extend the light of consciousness to the stars” and initiatives such as asteroid mining and space tourism. And earlier this month, Musk noted that “this will sound super crazy, but I see a path to SpaceX being worth orders of magnitude more than the current Earth economy.” You could call all these claims tech optimism or, as the famed venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote in his 2023 manifesto, necessary for the “glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.” You could also call it speculative fiction.
About halfway through the film, Holmes heads to prison and the documentary shifts to focus on Billy Evans, the man with whom Holmes has two children. With Holmes in prison, Evans has become her unreliable narrator. He is, as others have noted, also a helpful lens to understand the transformation of Silicon Valley. Evans has seemingly embraced Musk and Andreessen’s brand of vice signaling. We see him shooting guns, extolling Charlie Kirk, and lashing out at people on X under the cloak of anonymity (posting as Holmes, using her X account). He makes grandiose claims about his new company but seems embittered and incapable of submitting to hard questions about it. The veneer of excitement that the couple project in the Theranos 2.0 montage is replaced by a paranoia and resentment that people, including possibly Fielder, might be trying to take him down.
It all made me wonder how Silicon Valley might respond to Theranos’s collapse if it were happening today. Reactionary types in the industry might rally around Holmes, insisting that she was too early or needed more time. They might attack the press more forcefully for trying to bring her down (Holmes and Theranos did try to retaliate against whistleblowers and the reporter who broke the story). Trust in traditional media is even lower now than it was back then, and Silicon Valley has a robust ecosystem of very popular, industry-friendly podcasts and creators who could champion Holmes’s narrative. Evans, for instance, appeared last week on the popular All-In podcast. X is now owned by Musk. The truth takes longer to come out; in some cases, it might feel almost irrelevant. The universal outrage that Theranos sparked in 2015, when news first emerged that something was deeply wrong, sounds quaint now.
“When people ask how she got so far, it’s largely explained by the period she did it in,” Bier wrote in his X post about Holmes. “And she got caught when the world suddenly woke up.” I agree with the first part of Bier’s statement and take issue with the second. The brand of delusion that defined Holmes and the twisted epistemological game that You Can See Everything showcases is still deeply embedded in the industry. None of this is to suggest that everyone in Silicon Valley is engaged in rampant, Theranos-like provable fraud. But today’s entrepreneurs are emboldened to make even more outlandish claims about the future, and it’s more difficult than ever to parse what is real, what is knowingly fake, and what is being offered in good or bad faith.
In response to Bier’s post, Jason Calacanis, an investor and a co-host of All-In,noted that there was “much truth” to Bier’s explanation before he offered a rebuttal befitting a true builder—AI will soon solve the Theranos problem: “In the next ten years, a blood testing product will emerge that will make folks go, ‘See, @ElizabethHolmes was just 20 years too early!’”
The builder is never wrong. If anything, they are just early. The future is coming. Just have faith.
At 8 p.m. on Sunday night, President Emmanuel Macron delivered a national address to condemn the rioting and looting that convulsed France this weekend, from Brittany to Perpignan. His suit and tie were black, instead of his customary navy blue, and he denounced the “seditionists from far-left fringe groups, joined by many criminals, engaged in unbridled violence in our cities.” He decried the grotesque destruction—crystallized in the viral image of a fire consuming the 19th-century wooden roof of the town hall in Limoges—and the methodical sacking of businesses. “Rien ne le justifie, rien ne l’explique, rien ne l’excuse,” he said: Nothing justifies it, nothing explains it, nothing excuses it. Macron acknowledged legitimate concerns about education and the cost of living, distinguished between peaceful protesters and rioters, and called for prosecutions while instructing prefects to consider banning mass gatherings.
It sounded good. But as I was watching Macron live from New York, I called my children in Paris and heard the giddy chaos—the shouts and cheering—still vibrating through the streets below their open window. They told me that some of the stores beneath their apartment were being ransacked as the president was speaking. I had to push from my mind the appalling thought that these rioters might climb into the building’s residential upper levels. Words aren’t enough anymore.
Slowly, the French authorities are starting to grasp that. “The day of disorder and violence that we have just experienced in France is one day too many,” Bruno Le Maire, a former government minister under Macron, wrote on X on Saturday, when there were roughly 2,400 arrests and 1,000 police officers and gendarmes injured, seven of them grievously. At least 3,000 businesses were damaged or looted over the weekend. Yesterday, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced “localized” curfews in Paris and other cities across the country, which is a start. Today, Lecornu added that the military would be deployed this weekend, when further protests are planned. These interventions are welcome. But if the government cannot restore peace quickly, then a state of emergency is the only sane option.
The “internal decay” besetting France, as my friend the writer Pascal Bruckner phrased it, piggybacks on other, more intelligible causes. Some of the protests began in response to genuine grievances about France’s underfunded schools and exorbitant cost of living. But they have since turned into paroxysms of disdain for healthy civic life—nothing more cerebral, nothing to do with policy. “The high-school students’ cause died on Saturday, October 17,” Bruckner wrote in Le Figaro. “It will not recover, however legitimate its original demands may have been.”
An investigation published in Le Parisien yesterday concurs with Bruckner, suggesting that the recent violence is detached from the educational grievances that originally sparked the student protests. The paper reports that according to French intelligence sources, there is an alliance de circonstance between organized ultra-left militants and a larger group of young people from the banlieues encircling major urban areas, many of whom were not politically engaged and likely never expressed an interest in the movement’s original demands. Some of these insurgents sought confrontation with the state before the scheduled demonstrations even began. Others merely took the opportunity to stuff their pockets and watch their country burn.
These past weeks of pandemonium have driven home for me that no society, not even a society as generous and in many ways enlightened as France’s, can make life sweet enough for angry young men. Nihilists of the kind we’ve seen flood the streets of France from coast to coast will never uphold their end of the social contract, no matter how beautifully it is drafted. This is the essence of Tocqueville’s famous paradox: As societies become more equal—and few societies strive to be more egalitarian than France, thanks to heavy taxation of the rich and a generous social safety net—any perceived or remaining inequalities become intolerable.
The rioters in France are not political actors expressing the “language of the unheard,” but nihilists rebelling against the very idea of a collective national life. Whether their stated justification is racism, Islamophobia, neoliberalism, or something else, they are agents of chaos and spite, lashing out against their productive, decent neighbors, perhaps precisely because those neighbors are productive and decent. And so they burn, shatter, and humiliate the symbols of the established order.
Official government estimates place the number of protesters at more than 500,000. Images from last weekend showed patrols of police forces overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the pillaging. The Macron administration was drastically underprepared for the size of the rebellion and now faces an impossible situation. Any confrontation or escalation risks providing the protesters with a martyr; if that victim comes from a marginalized demographic, the conflagration could spark a full-fledged riot.
But the alternative—appeasement—is equally unacceptable. The state cannot expect its law-abiding citizens—the majority of the population, which includes the peaceful protesters—to accept its repeated failures to safeguard them and their livelihoods. A people’s ability to move freely, conduct business, and come and go from their homes through streets that are neither dangerous nor desecrated is a fundamental right. The cost of indulging the anarchists, looters, and rioters who infiltrate mass movements has fallen on the rest of France, who never consented to cover it.
“We are six months away from our presidential election,” Macron reminded the country toward the end of his speech. “And so all those who are telling you today that the urgent thing is to take to the streets—to demonstrate, to create disorder—have only one goal: to damage the republic and hijack the debate.”
He’s correct. But if Macron is unable to contain these forces, which seek to push the political debate into flame-scorched streets and schools and places of business, then he will be handing votes to the far-right leaders who have promised to do so.
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