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In primary elections, politicians run to win over their party faithful, which is often a different demographic than those they need to appeal to in the general election. So strategists, consultants, and party leaders spend a lot of money trying to figure out what voters want—yes, what sort of policy they want on the economy or health care or education, but also what kind of person they want. Parties want to make sure their candidate is electable.

Electability hangs over the primary race in Michigan, where, next Tuesday, voters will decide whether Representative Haley Stevens or Abdul El-Sayed will compete against Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate, to replace the departing Senator Gary Peters. But elections aren’t a formula, and there is no guarantee that voters will support the candidates that party leaders believe they will. And in many recent elections, voters have opted for the populist over the palatable.

On this week’s episode, my colleague Russell Berman joins me to discuss why the Michigan primary matters for the Democrats, and for the future of the Senate at large.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Russell Berman: There’s a huge debate right now in the Democratic primary over electability because conventionally, right, people like Chuck Schumer would say Haley Stevens is the classic

purple-state Democratic Senate candidate. She won a Republican-held House seat. She has an ability, they say, to appeal to independents and moderate Republicans. But if you talk to El-Sayed, which I did, he would say, We’ve tried that and people who lost to Donald Trump should not give us any lectures on electability. And if Abdul El-Sayed wins the primary, it’ll be a real test to see if somebody as progressive as he is can win not a blue state but a purple state.

Adam Harris:  Things are getting tense in Michigan as Abdul El-Sayed and Representative Haley Stevens vie to become the Democrats’ nominee for the state’s open Senate seat in November. The two agree that this race is essential for Democrats:

Abdul El-Sayed: I love America, but I love America enough to be honest about what America owes all of our children.

Haley Stevens: And I’m in this fight not just to win but to get real results, points on the scoreboard, for you, and your family, and our future.”

But they represent different factions of the party in method, and with the primary election fast approaching, they represent two different futures as well.

I’m Adam Harris. This is Radio Atlantic, and this week, we need to think about Michigan and why it matters for control of Congress.

El-Sayed is an epidemiologist and a public-health official whose populist appeal and policy platform has earned the endorsements of Senator Bernie Sanders, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Senator Elizabeth Warren. Stevens, meanwhile, positions herself a moderate Democrat and has been championed by the party’s establishment,people like Senator Chuck Schumer, Representative Jim Clyburn, and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand among them.

Now, Michigan isn’t a deep-blue state, so some Democrats worry that if they elect someone who can energize the base with progressive policy—someone like El-Sayed—they might isolate voters in the general election. And that could lead to Democrats losing a critical seat in the Senate as they seek to gain control of the chamber. But politics isn’t a science, and there’s no crystal ball that can predict how general elections will go.

So, why should Americans be paying attention to a primary race in Michigan? And how might it shape the future of Congress?

With me to discuss is my colleague, Russell Berman, who covers Congress, elections, and all things politics for The Atlantic.

Let’s get to questions.

Russell, welcome to the show.

Russell Berman: Thanks for having me.

Harris: So Russell, you’re in Michigan. What are you seeing on the ground right now? Are there particular issues that voters seem energized about?

Berman: Yes. Well, I mean, Michigan is a huge state for Democrats. They cannot afford to lose it. And you know, there’s a lot of energy for Abdul El-Sayed; there’s a lot of talk about Israel, his willingness to call what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide, that even in the first few events I’ve attended that has come up organically from people. Voters have told me they like that he tells it like it is. He’s a very to-the-point, blunt-spoken candidate.

Abdul El-Sayed: Donald Trump is not himself the disease of our politics. He’s just the worst symptom of the disease of our politics.

And, I mean, again, at least with his supporters, and there are a lot of them, that is really resonating.

Harris: I guess, so, for someone like Haley Stevens, right? The voters are saying that, Look, we like that Abdul El-Sayed is willing to call what Israel is doing in Palestine a genocide, whereas Haley Stevens is receiving money from AIPAC, right? So what are you hearing about the Stevens campaign?

Berman: Well, the dynamic is interesting ’cause it’s, you know, El-Sayed is going all over. He’s having many more events than she is. She at this point is really concentrating on turning out the Black voter base in Detroit. She’s appearing with Congressman Jim Clyburn from South Carolina. She’s having a bunch of events while I’m here in Detroit, going to churches on Sunday morning. She is saying, you know, she voted against that Massie amendment that would have blocked all offensive aid to Israel. I don’t think she’s interested in talking about Israel that much. She’s interested in talking about her background, her work for President Obama on the auto rescue.

Stevens: “You know, we couldn’t have gotten that deal done to save our auto industry without our auto workers.”

She’s really honing in on her Michigander-ness, if you will, her authenticity. There’s been discussions of her accent, and it’s a real authentic Michigan accent. And she’s talking about all what she can do specifically on affordability and other issues to either bring money back or help out Michigan. And so she’s focused, like many Democrats are, on the economy rather than wanting to get into a debate over Israel.

Harris: Hm. You know, it’s interesting because in the backdrop of all of this, she’s doing this event with Jim Clyburn. Because factions have sort of always defined our politics, and this race comes amid a sort of tug-of-war in the Democratic Party between the sort of establishment and its left flank with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, establishment Democrats like Clyburn, right? Folks who supported Joe Biden. And then on the other side, with El-Sayed, you have, you know, Bernie Sanders, AOC, the left flank of the party really sort of supporting him.

So for those who haven’t been following as closely as you and I, why should the rest of America care about this race? What are the implications for Democrats?

Berman: Well, so Michigan is—Democrats cannot afford to lose Michigan if they have any hope, really, of winning back the Senate. They already have an uphill battle. They have a lot of possibilities. There’s been a lot of talk obviously about Maine and North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, and Alaska, but that may not matter if they can’t hold the state of Michigan. Michigan is the one state that Democrats currently hold that they are at risk of losing.

The seat is open because the incumbent Senator Gary Peters, a moderate Democrat, is retiring. And the Republicans have a pretty strong candidate in Mike Rogers, who’s a former longtime member of Congress from Michigan, former chair of the Intelligence Committee in the House. He nearly won the Senate seat that’s currently held by Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat, in 2024, lost by only really a few thousand votes. So he’s very well known statewide. And he’s a Trump supporter, like most, almost all Republicans running for office nowadays are. But he’s, within the current Republican Party, he’s not particularly extreme. So he’s gonna be tough for either Haley Stevens or Abdul El-Sayed to beat.

And there’s a huge debate right now in the Democratic primary over electability because conventionally, right, people like Chuck Schumer, people like Gary Peters, who’s endorsed Stevens, would say Haley Stevens is the classic purple-state Democratic Senate candidate. She won a Republican-held House seat. She has an ability, they say, to appeal to independents and moderate Republicans. She hasn’t taken positions on the far left like El-Sayed in support of Medicare for All or calling for abolishing ICE or calling what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide. But if you talk to El-Sayed, which I did, he would say, We’ve tried that and people who lost to Donald Trump should not give us any lectures on electability. That’s something that one of his supporters, Ro Khanna, says. And so this is gonna be a real test both for progressives if they can win the primary, and if Abdul El-Sayed wins the primary, it’ll be a real test to see if somebody as progressive as he is can win not a blue state but a purple state.

Harris: You know that argument, right? That sort of electability argument—it almost sort of treats politics as a sort of science, right? Where you say that we are, that Chuck Schumer says This is a sort of prototypical Democrat who can win in a purple state, right? It’s a sort of Abigail Spanberger sort of argument.

But if voters disagree with her on policy, wouldn’t they wonder what’s the point of winning an election if things are just going to stay the same, when it’s been demonstrated that voters are looking for change?

Berman: That’s right. You know, that’s exactly, almost exactly, what I heard from a youth-voter event that I went to with El-Sayed where somebody was like, Look, it seems like no matter which party, we elect people and nothing changes, right? And so that is leading them to candidates who really represent change.

And if you look at the history of Michigan, right, in the last decade and a half, it’s one of these three states, along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, that voted for Barack Obama twice, then voted for Donald Trump, his polar opposite who had slandered Obama in every which way, then went back to Biden, then back to Trump, right? And so what is the through line of all of those is that really in almost every election, they were voting for the candidate who represents change, right? And so El- Sayed, he’ll say, I’m against, Trump was against politics as usual. That’s why he won, and I’m against politics as usual. And so for people who are really upset at the system, who’ve given up on the establishment of both parties, that is the voter for him.

Harris: Yeah. You know, speaking of that, sort of, politics as usual and also even on the endorsements, in Maine, after Graham Platner dropped out of the race, Troy Jackson recently said that he wasn’t sure that he wanted Chuck Schumer’s help with his race in the general election, and he said that he definitely wouldn’t support him for leader. I’m wondering, are those sort of establishment endorsements becoming sort of toxic for the candidates who they are purporting to help?

Berman: Depending on who they are, yes, but it’s clear that at this point in his career, Chuck Schumer is kind of like what Mitch McConnell was a few years ago, right, for Republicans, where people running—they wanted Trump’s endorsement, but they didn’t want necessarily, or didn’t need, Mitch McConnell’s endorsement. And so the big endorsement that most Democrats want, even now in some purple states, is from Bernie Sanders more than Chuck Schumer.

Harris: I’ve been thinking about how Americans are sort of down on Congress, right, and Congress’s ability to get things done. And thinking also about that electability argument that we are hearing in Michigan, where if El-Sayed wins a primary, it sort of shows you where, where the base is. But folks like Chuck Schumer will say that, well, statesmanship is the art of compromise, and some of the candidates that we’re seeing now don’t seem willing to compromise and that would affect the way that Congress functions. So what does Congress lose if they lose some of those more moderate, centrist Democrats, if anything?

Berman: Well, this is a trend that we’ve been seeing for really 20 years now, first in the House, where you’ve seen moderates in both parties kind of vanquished; the Republican-moderate caucuses down to, you know, a couple of members who are really not as moderate as the moderates used to be in the Republican Party; and in the Democratic caucus, the Blue Dogs, which used to be a huge force, are now much smaller in number. They’re the more conservative Democrats. And now the development that we’re seeing is this move on to the Senate. And we’ve seen, certainly, Republicans move to the right or move toward Trump. Like the Senate used to be sort of the, and has been a little bit, the bastion of the establishment Republican Party. And you still have what some people would call moderates in Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, and, depending on the issue, a few others. And now we’re seeing this with Democrats. You don’t have Joe Manchin from West Virginia anymore. The question is what’s going to change and how is this going to impact Congress? You’re already seeing it. You’re seeing fewer bipartisan bills, and you’re seeing both parties basically try to win total power, even if very narrowly, where these narrow margins in the House and the Senate, and then just pass partisan legislation on party lines through, you know, what the Republicans have used and what Democrats used under Joe Biden, which is budget reconciliation. This gets around the filibuster. It means they need only 51 votes instead of 60 in the Senate. And so the trend, I think, that we’re going to see is that, even more of that. And then that legislation might look on the Democratic side more progressive than it would have even under Joe Biden, who did pass fairly progressive legislation considering that he himself was a more moderate Democrat.

So I think that’s the trend that we’re gonna see. Now what will be interesting is if the Democrats do take control of the House and Senate this year, the next two years Trump will still be president. And so if they want the government to stay open, let alone pass major legislation, it’s gonna need, by definition, bipartisan support because it’ll be passed by a Democratic Congress and it’ll need to be signed by a Republican president.

Harris: Because the parties are so polarized, right? Because you sort of need that House and Senate, they’re trying to amass as much power as possible so that they can pass legislation along party lines, but you would also need that White House support.

So what could Democrats, if they get these four seats in the Senate, they end up winning the House, what could they actually do with the power, if they had it?

Berman: Well, I think the lowest-hanging fruit is simply oversight, right? Because they would control the committees. They would be able to subpoena the Trump administration. That will be probably the first thing that they try to do. And then they would just use their leverage on, you know, for government, for federal funding, right? I mean, the Trump administration has decimated the federal government and the Democrats would now have the power of the purse, right? So they would be able to say, Hey, we need, we are going to fund the government and then we’ll see how Trump reacts. We’ll see if Trump pivots at all or if he’s perfectly happy to be, to basically have the government all but shut down for two years. It’s gonna be an interesting dynamic. But there’s no guarantee that they’ll be able to work together given, you know, where Trump is right now and certainly where the Democratic Party is right now.

Harris: You know, President Trump will be in Michigan this week. The election is next Tuesday. What are you watching for as we move toward the election?

Berman: Well, it seems like El-Sayed had, and has had, momentum. There was a third candidate in the race, Mallory McMorrow, who is sort of trying to take a lane between El-Sayed and Stevens, progressive but not quite as far left as Abdul El-Sayed. She dropped out. We’re still kind of waiting for the dust to fully settle in terms of there hasn’t been a ton of credible polling to see where her supporters are going. Obviously, the Stevens campaign hopes that they will go to her, and there still is a ton of money coming in on her behalf from AIPAC and from other outside groups and against El-Sayed. And it’s an open question as to whether that will essentially drag her over the finish line in this primary on August 4. But it seems like the energy and the momentum is with El-Sayed. But, as I said, there’s not a ton of polling, so it’s a little unclear.

Harris: Well, Russell, thank you for sharing with us and giving us so much to think about as we move toward next week’s election.

Berman: hanks for having me.

Harris: Hey y’all, one last thing before we go: We’re introducing a new segment today. The Atlantic has been around since 1857, and it has published some of the greatest writers and thinkers, people who have helped define the nation and the world we live in. That’s all to say: We have a lot of good stuff in our archives.

So, occasionally, at the end of episodes, I’m going to share some things with you that I find in there, like this essay from the middle of the last century that reads like it could have been written last week.

In 1943, Robert La Follette Jr., a senator from Wisconsin, was distraught. Americans no longer trusted Congress, the place to which he and his father had dedicated their lives. People said it was corrupt; they said Congress wasn’t doing its job.

Now, criticism sort of comes with the territory in Congress and it’s usually easy enough to brush off. But La Follette’s stress stemmed from the fact that the critics weren’t necessarily wrong. Congress was losing its grip. So, while the world was at war, La Follette turned his focus back to the American project.

He wrote an essay, titled “A Senator Looks at Congress.” It ran in the July 1943 issue of The Atlantic.

“When the President of the United States can seriously propose to repeal an act of Congress by executive order, it is time for the American people to take stock of the situation, war or no war.”

Now, if you don’t know anything else about Robert LaFollette Jr., you should know that he was born to be a politician. They called him Young Bob. His father, Robert LaFollette Sr., is one of the most celebrated figures in Wisconsin’s history, and he was the architect of what was known as the “Wisconsin Idea,” a progressive vision for the state. As governor and then a senator, he pushed for a direct primary, fair tax and labor policy, and reforms to the ways that people could change laws.

Young Bob’s mom, Belle, knew how badly her husband wanted his son to understand his business; to ensure that his sons “grew up as familiar with politics as children raised on the farm are familiar with its days work; and in that same spirit of practical knowledge and experience [be] ready when it came their turn to put their hands to the plow and go straight ahead to the end of the furrow.”

And so, by his 30th birthday, in 1925, Young Bob knew the ins and outs of Congress. He knew what worked; he knew what didn’t. His father died in June of that year. Young Bob was selected to finish out his term, and he quickly put his inherited knowledge to action. He gained national attention of his own during the Great Depression, and he led the congressional committee that investigated the ways that industrialists were violating unionists’ civil liberties.

By 1943, when he wrote for the magazine, Congress was dealing with issues that the Founders could have only dreamed about.

“If the control of governmental policy is to remain with the people’s elected representatives, as the framers of the Constitution intended it should, and not drift into the hands of a relatively irresponsible bureaucracy, Congress will have to streamline its organization.”

His recommendations might seem quaint in our time. He wanted to make working on the Hill financially sustainable for staff. He wanted to reorganize committees. He wanted to create a joint Legislative and Executive Council, which would ensure that laws were being enacted as Congress intended.

But it was his reasons for writing that felt most familiar in our time.

Right now, there is a growing sense that Congress is not only irrevocably broken but subservient to the executive branch. According to a Marist poll, nearly 70 percent of Americans believe that the system of checks and balances is not working well.

Now, La Follette stressed that his reforms would require, as all human institutions do, cooperation. But the problem of the modern era isn’t so much a lack of cooperation as that Congress does what the president wants.

La Follette lost his seat to Joseph McCarthy, the man who spearheaded the second Red Scare, in 1946.

“Congress has an opportunity now to show what it can do,” he wrote in 1943. He urged the legislative body to once again serve as the voice of the people.

And he warned: “If it fails to be constructive, there is no telling how long an impatient people will support representative government in America.”

I wonder what he would make of that warning now. And I wonder what he would make of our politics today.

See you next week.

“A war. A man. A trick. A trick to break the walls of Troy. And burn it—screaming—to the ground.” Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens in the great hall of Ithaca, with a bard singing a hymn about the cunning of Odysseus, the hero of the tale, to the men who have overrun his house—courting his wife, menacing his son—while he is absent. A feast has been turned into a desecration.

The law these men broke was the most sacred in the ancient world: “xenia,” the law of hospitality. The stranger at the door stood under the personal protection of Zeus, the greatest of the gods and the protector of strangers. The bond between guest and host was not mere courtesy; it was the covenant that made trust between strangers possible.

In the Bronze Age, that covenant was foundational. Greece was not a nation; it was a scattering of city-states and island kingdoms with no common law and no shared authority. Travelers had no rights. Xenia was the guarantee that allowed strangers—hosts and guests, both with reciprocal obligations—to trust one another. It was the thread that held a fractured world together.

“Break Zeus’s law and see what they do to you if you give them that excuse,” Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, says to her son Telemachus. And in the movie, Telemachus says that one must always be generous to travelers, because they might secretly be gods in disguise. To mistreat strangers is to risk incurring the wrath of the gods.

The Trojan War began with a breach of hospitality. Paris, a son of the Trojan king, was welcomed as a guest into the Spartan home of King Menelaus—and repaid that welcome by running off with Menelaus’s wife, Helen, said to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Menelaus’s brother, Agamemnon, led a Greek expedition to bring her back. The war lasted 10 years, ending when the Greeks at last sacked Troy by the ruse of the Trojan horse.

[Read: Odysseus’s confession]

The ruse was Odysseus’s idea, a stroke of military genius for which he was celebrated. But in Nolan’s telling, it is not a triumph but a moral failure, one that fills him with such guilt and shame that for a decade he cannot go home. He had turned something sacred into a weapon. The horse was disguised as a holy offering to Athena; the Trojans, afraid to offend the goddess, wheeled it inside their own walls. Once the gates were open, the Greeks spilled out and slaughtered the city.

In the film, unlike the poem, that massacre shadows Odysseus, though we do not understand just how much so until the end. Throughout his journey he is accompanied by Athena, the goddess of wisdom. Only when the film returns to the night Troy fell do we realize she wears the features of a priestess of Athena, beheaded at the goddess’s own altar as the city burned. Odysseus’s divine mentor, the guide who has walked beside him all along, bears the features of a woman he watched die. Whether a goddess ever accompanied him, or whether she is only the ghost of his greatest sin, the film leaves uncertain. What is certain is that until Odysseus can face what he has done, until he tells the truth about himself to himself, and to others, no homecoming is possible.

In the film’s closing stretch, Odysseus returns to Ithaca disguised as a beggar and sees what his world has become. Law and order are collapsing; trust is nonexistent; scheming is rife. The man who once commanded armies discovers how men behave toward someone who can do nothing for them. The only kindness he receives comes from his son and a few loyal servants. Then, near the end of the film, Odysseus says to Penelope, “We are the people from the sea,” by which he means the dreaded outsiders, raiders, and marauders. But they were not the threat after all. The “people from the sea” are the victors of the Trojan War, stripped of their humanity, their civility, their xenia.

Telemachus was not alone in his intuition about gods in disguise. The conviction that the stranger at your door may be more than he appears runs through the Hebrew and Christian scriptures too. When, in Genesis, Abraham looks up at Mamre and sees three travelers, he runs to meet them, washes their feet, and sets a meal before them—not knowing, as the reader does, that he is entertaining the Lord. The letter to the Hebrews tells us to show hospitality to strangers, for some have “entertained angels unawares.” And in Matthew 25, the stranger is Christ himself. “I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” Jesus says. What he is revealing is that the stranger is where God has chosen to be found, and that every person will be judged by how they treat the outcast, the hungry, the sick, the beggar at our door.

Homer’s poem, like the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament, is an ancient text. But as Nolan told The New York Times, the greatness of the poem is that you approach it as something foreign and remote, and then find it “stunningly relevant.” On the treatment of the stranger, he added, nothing has changed—it remains essential to “holding civilization together, or even defining civilization.”

Part of what makes The Odyssey so appealing to a modern audience is that it takes civilizing aspects of Greek culture—hospitality and magnanimity—and adds later concepts, some of them influenced by Jewish and Christian ethics that were, to varying degrees, alien to ancient Greek culture: deep introspection, even confession; humility and empathy; sorrow and guilt for the harm one has done, even in victory; the conviction that the conquered count and have worth; and vengeance tempered with mercy. In the film, Odysseus emerges as a figure haunted by his victory in a way that no ancient Greek would have been.  

The Odyssey presents a very human hero to a culture that desperately needs one. Nolan could have told this story several different ways, but he trusted his instinct: A summer audience would embrace an epic story and its complicated hero, brave but broken, fierce but tender toward the weak, a person we admire not so much for his battlefield victories as for his conscience.   

[Read: The Odyssey was never about the gods]

Much of life in the ancient Greek world was harsh, even barbarous—mass executions in conquered cities, torture, the weak discarded at birth, chattel slavery—which is precisely why the Greek commitment to honor and hospitality was remarkable then and still resonates today. So, too, do the later, more humane virtues the film weaves in.

Those virtues are now under assault. Movements and voices in our own country hold them in open contempt, treat mercy as weakness, and feed on vengeance and grievance. Theirs is a Nietzschean ethic, a “master morality,” the code of the strong that Christianity overthrew when it took the side of the slave, the stranger, and the destitute.

But Nietzsche was at least honest about the cost of the revolution he heralded. With God dead, he warned, the morality built on God might collapse as well, and into the gap meaninglessness, fanaticism, and substitute faiths could rush in. Nietzsche declared, with some sorrow, the death of God. Many of his heirs gleefully practice their cruelty in God’s name.

The world that this ethic is creating is harsh and barren, raw and uninviting. It exists in the daily coarseness, in the anger and the ugliness, and in the isolation. There is a weariness in us, and a sadness, at what we have become. Robert F. Kennedy, citing the classicist Edith Hamilton, once issued this call: “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the ancient Greeks wrote so many years ago: ‘to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.’” What Christopher Nolan and his cast have tapped into is our longing for a gentler world. We want to go home.

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In Europe in the 1700s, coffeehouses were sources of coffee, but also conversation. As the MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle points out in her 2016 book, Reclaiming Conversation, many people went to coffeehouses specifically to have rich, deep, sometimes even confrontational discussions: She quotes the British essayist and politician Joseph Addison, who wrote in 1714, “I have taken a particular Care never to be of the same Opinion with the Man I conversed with.”

Contrast this with how, some 300 years later, I engage with my local coffeehouse, Starbucks. I open the app at home and order a latte, then whirl my Honda through the drive-through and collect my drink from an employee, who says, “Have a nice day.” No conversation—just caffeine.

This new way of obtaining java is part of why, according to a recent study published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, people now are talking less and less. For the study, the psychologists Valeria Pfeifer, of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and Matthias Mehl, of the University of Arizona, analyzed data from thousands of participants in the United States, Mexico, Australia, and Europe. The subjects carried around a device that randomly recorded sound bites of their speech throughout the day. In 2005, when the studies began, the average number of words that each participant spoke in a day was 16,632; in 2019, when the research concluded, the average was 11,900. Each year, the participants spoke about 338 fewer words a day than they did in the previous year, amounting to a decline of about 28 percent over the entire time period.

[Read: How to cheat at conversation]

From what I can tell, two main reasons seem to be driving this gradual silencing. The first is that conversation requires, at the very least, the presence of another person. But during the study period, people almost everywhere spent more and more time alone—a trend that only accelerated after the study ended, as the pandemic drove millions of people into further isolation. One major paper found that from 2003 to 2019, the portion of free time that Americans spent alone grew from about 44 to about 49 percent—which may sound like a small increase until you consider that the study excludes time spent working, sleeping, and grooming. In 2006, 21 percent of respondents to a survey in 21 European countries said they got together daily with friends; by 2022, the number was just 12 percent.

The other big factor is the rise of digital communication, such as texting and social media, as well as online shopping, ordering, and many, many other -ings. A generation ago, many of the tasks of daily life required conversations: with the grocery-store cashier, the receptionist at the doctor’s office, the host at the neighborhood restaurant. But today, Pfeifer told me, “you can reserve a table using an app as opposed to calling the restaurant.” She added, “The conversations you have with strangers or maybe people that you don’t know as well—the opportunities for those just seem to have declined a lot in recent years.” Opportunities for speaking with people one does know have also declined, as people tend to send a text or DM instead of calling a friend on the phone. (Indeed, when Pfeifer and Mehl analyzed their data by age group, they found that people under the age of 25, who presumably text more because of their well-known aversion to phone calls, had lost even more words a year than those over 25.)

Whatever the reasons for the decline of talking, it could have negative consequences for mental health. Turkle said that, unlike texting or emailing, face-to-face conversation builds empathy: “We experience the emotion of conversation from within our bodies.” In her book, she points to a study in which researchers compared college friends who communicated face-to-face, and by videochat, audio chat, and online instant messaging. “In-person conversation led to the most emotional connection,” she writes, “and online messaging led to the least.”

Even the loss of relatively shallow conversations can be harmful. Gillian Sandstrom, a psychologist at the University of Sussex and the author of Once Upon a Stranger, studies “weak ties,” or the people we talk with casually throughout the day. She has found that although these interactions might seem meaningless, they boost our sense of well-being, making us feel part of something bigger, even if we’re just buying milk or chatting with a colleague at the office coffee maker. And when we have fewer of these exchanges, we miss them: A recent study published in the journal Science, for example, found that remote workers spent more time alone each workday and also experienced more mental distress than in-person workers. The effects were especially pronounced if the remote worker also lived solo. Talking less can also create a self-reinforcing cycle. When we don’t practice having small interactions, Sandstrom told me, “then we feel more anxious, and then we don’t want to do it.” But these casual interactions sometimes lead to big, important relationships: “How will I find my best friend that I don’t know that I have if I’m too nervous to talk to people?”

[Read: The friendship paradox]

Declines in speech are also a problem, Pfeifer said, because talking exercises the brain differently than texting does. When you have a conversation, your working memory has to retain both what the other person is telling you and what you’re planning to say in response. An in-person discussion is even more complicated: You also have to monitor your body posture and facial expressions so that you react appropriately to what the other person says. When you’re talking face-to-face, you can’t mutter “what the hell” while you type out “sounds great!” Plus, Pfeifer said, in a verbal conversation, you can’t edit or read back what was said, which means you organize your thoughts differently or perhaps try out some ideas you’re not willing to chisel in stone quite yet.

When conversation skills get rusty, other cognitive processes might erode, too, Pfeifer told me. Many people struggle with their attention span, she said, and that could be partly because we don’t have as many chances as we once did to try to follow along as someone tells a lengthy, complicated story. When so much communication happens digitally, she said, “we’re essentially outsourcing a lot of the way our brain works into a device.”

When I use the Starbucks app and similar shortcuts, it’s typically because I don’t want to face the uncomfortable spontaneity of other humans. What if they say something weird—or I do? But, considering this research, I might let more of my own clumsy comments fly and be more receptive to the ones that come my way. I’d rather say something weird, I think, than not say anything at all.

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This summer, the Texas State Board of Education approved a new required-reading list for public schools, mandating what the state’s 5.4 million students will read in every grade from kindergarten to 12th. If you were a student in the past 20 years, or raised one, you’ll recognize most of the titles: picture books such as The Cat in the Hat and The Snowy Day, parables such as The Giver and Fahrenheit 451. What made the Texas list controversial is the inclusion not of a new book, but of a very old one: the Bible. Students will be assigned short excerpts and adaptations from the Old and New Testaments, starting with vivid tales (Jonah and the whale, David and Goliath) and building to more complex and morally challenging passages, such as Job’s complaint against God.

Texas’s decision to start teaching Bible stories—like its requirement to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms, which the state legislature approved last year—is clearly meant to send a political message. But regardless of your political or religious beliefs, there are good reasons to agree that the Bible should be part of young people’s education. For a high-school graduate not to know about the parting of the Red Sea or the Sermon on the Mount is a disadvantage, for the same reason that not knowing about the Puritans or the Civil War is a disadvantage: It leaves them ill-equipped to understand America’s past, and therefore its present and future.

Everywhere you look in American history, you will find the language, stories, and concepts of the Bible—in particular, those of the King James Version, long the standard translation for American Protestants. The most obvious example is slavery, which both Black people and white people saw through a biblical lens. In fifth grade, Texas students will read about Moses and the exodus from Egypt, which enslaved African Americans took as a model for their own liberation; Harriet Tubman was known as Moses for her work with the Underground Railroad. When President Abraham Lincoln discussed the fearful losses of the Civil War in his second inaugural address, he justified them as God’s punishment for the sin of slavery, quoting Psalm 19: “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” For us, the phrase “four score and seven years ago” immediately summons up the Gettysburg Address; for Lincoln’s original audience, it would have sounded like a mournful reference to Psalm 90: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Thou shalt not post the Ten Commandments in classrooms]

As for literature, the titles of classic American novels are a catalog of biblical quotations: East of Eden (Genesis), Absalom, Absalom! (Samuel), The House of Mirth (Ecclesiastes), The Sun Also Rises (Ecclesiastes), Song of Solomon (the biblical book also known as “Song of Songs”). How can you understand Moby-Dick without knowing the story of Jonah and the whale, or appreciate the music of Leaves of Grass if you’ve never heard the rolling lines of the Psalms?

Of course, none of this stopped Texas’s reading list from becoming culture-war fodder. To many liberals, requiring the Bible looks like an attack on civil liberties and cultural diversity. Although the state’s official explanations for the new reading list have avoided mentioning religion, instead framing the Bible stories as part of a “common literary canon,” the Freedom From Religion Foundation said the decision sends “a clear message to nonreligious and non-Christian students and families that they don’t quite belong or should convert.” The Dallas Morning News complained in an editorial that the Texas reading list includes “excerpts from the Bible but no other major religious works,” suggesting that the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita should also be represented.

This is the same kind of criticism often lodged against the idea of the Western canon: Why should the products of one culture, or one gender or ethnicity, be given special status? Such questions are inevitable when a public sphere that used to be dominated by a single group becomes more diverse. In 1963, the idea that public schools might have to teach Bible stories to Hindu and Muslim students was largely hypothetical. In Texas in 2026, it’s a certainty. The state is home to almost 500,000 Muslims and a similar number of Indian Americans.

But saying that Americans have special reasons to study the Bible doesn’t imply that it’s more sacred than the scriptures of other faiths. In the same way, saying that American students should study English doesn’t mean that it’s superior to other languages. Both decisions simply reflect the fact that Americans, like all people everywhere, are situated—that we exist in a particular society with a particular history. If the most important goal of education is to “know thyself,” as the oracle at Delphi liked to say, then you have to know the influences that make you the person you are. And for anyone who participates in American life, the Bible is one of them, directly or indirectly.

Perhaps the strongest objection to Texas’s reading list is that it will require teachers to make such complicated distinctions. The readings for seventh grade include the Sermon on the Mount; imagine trying to explain the literary and historic quality of the verse “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” while remaining strictly noncommittal about the existence of blessings, spirit, and heaven. Parental complaints are guaranteed, and not just from non-Christian households; Christian believers have the biggest stake in how the words of Jesus are explained.

Today, people on the left tend to have a Pavlovian reaction to any mention of religion, especially Christianity, rejecting it as right-wing, evangelical, patriarchal, anti-LGBTQ. Writing in the Texas Observer, the historian Joel Zapata argues that the state wanted students to read Ecclesiastes—“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven”—to make them more docile: “Students will learn that life circumstances are beyond their power to change. They will learn that their place and the place of others in the economy and larger society should not be questioned.”

[Ross Wiener: The Supreme Court is giving liberals an opportunity]

Many conservatives surely do believe that reading the Bible will reinforce their own political values. But anyone who looks at the specific passages Texas chose to require will find something rather more complex and challenging than campaign fodder. In fourth grade, students are supposed to read a section of the Gospel of Luke:

When he noticed how the guests picked the places of honor at the table, he told them this parable: “When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give this person your seat.’ Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up to a better place.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all the other guests. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

How might this story apply to, say, the president of the United States, who is so greedy for honors that he lingered on the winner’s podium at the World Cup? A number of texts on the Texas reading list, such as Ayn Rand’s essay “What Is Capitalism?,” were chosen to affirm our culture’s worship of wealth and success. How might a teacher juxtapose those readings with the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus blesses the poor, the meek, and the merciful? Can any complacent prosperity gospel survive an encounter with the Book of Job?

Many texts that get assigned in schools are moralistic, mainly because they are easy to teach. Texas’s reading list has plenty of examples, such as Kipling’s “If” and, absurdly, Margaret Thatcher’s eulogy for Ronald Reagan (“Ronald Reagan knew his own mind. He had firm principles and, I believe, right ones”). The great power of the Bible is that it seldom says what people think it says or want it to say. It is continually subversive, because the temptations it warns against are with us today just as much as they were 2,000 years ago. Of course, most of what we read in school leaves no lasting impression; students treat reading as work to get through, because that’s what it is. But if reading snippets of the Bible in class inspires any students to keep exploring, they might well end up shocked that this is a book their teachers and parents encouraged them to read.

In 1982, Benjamin Netanyahu was the marketing director of a Jerusalem-based furniture maker when Israel’s ambassador in Washington decided that the 32-year-old had been pitching the wrong product. Instead of selling cupboards to Israelis, he should have been selling Israel to Americans. The ambassador, who met Netanyahu at a conference a few years earlier, brought him to Washington as his deputy. Almost instantly, Netanyahu became the face of Israel on American television—a fixture on Nightline and Larry King Live, pugnacious, eloquent in unaccented English acquired as a boy in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

For the next four decades, through nearly every office he held, Netanyahu’s portfolio never changed: He was the guardian of Israel’s standing in America, a task he never delegated, since he believed that nobody understood it better than he did. And it is a task at which Netanyahu, as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, has failed abjectly.

Just over a decade ago, support for Israel was one of the last remaining bipartisan reflexes in American politics. The harshest thing most mainstream Democrats said about the country was that Netanyahu’s government was obstructing a two-state agreement with Palestinians. But in the years since the October 7 Hamas-led massacre of Israelis and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza, that consensus, which was already losing ground among the Democratic rank and file, gave way. Two years ago, 19 senators in the Democratic caucus voted to block arms sales to Israel; this April, 40 out of 47 did—including most of the presidential aspirants within the caucus. Now, the mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population in the world is an avowed anti-Zionist who campaigned on the promise that he would arrest Netanyahu; a Columbia University activist who joined an October 8, 2023, rally celebrating the Hamas attacks will almost certainly be elected to the next Congress. Leading liberal senators, including Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, have made criticism of Israel a central part of their message.

And the collapse is bipartisan. This month, Vice President Vance—perhaps the likeliest Republican presidential nominee in 2028—told the podcaster Joe Rogan that the financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein “clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence,” a theory for which no evidence exists. Vance accused Israel of scheming against his own diplomacy with Iran. A decade ago, a Republican who talked this way would have been drummed out of the party. Now he is in line to lead it.

[Read: The opening after Netanyahu]

Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, would have shrugged at this turn. A historian of the Spanish Inquisition, he raised his son on the belief that Jewish history is a “history of holocausts”; that anti-Semitism is an immutable fact of Jewish existence in the diaspora, and has been so since Judaism’s daughter religion, Christianity, turned against its mother; that Jews could find safety only behind the iron wall of their own state. Yet the world that Benjamin Netanyahu inherited in the 1980s seemed to refute his father’s dour view. Israel faced enemies sworn to its destruction, but its orchestra played the concert halls of Europe. Its scientists taught in the great universities. American politicians competed to prove their devotion. The diaspora lived with a sense of security unprecedented in Jewish history.

Netanyahu’s early political career also seemed to disprove his father’s fatalism. By 1984, he was Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, and his ubiquity on the airwaves embodied the premise that Americans could be persuaded by Israel’s case, that goodwill could be earned by a telegenic man with carefully calibrated arguments.

The hostility that both Israel and the Jewish diaspora have faced since October 7 can be read as Benzion’s vindication: Anti-Semitism was never really gone, only dormant. But eternal hatred alone can’t account for the severity of the whiplash. It is perfectly fair to stipulate that anti-Semitism accounts for the double standard by which Israel is routinely judged, but hatred isn’t what has caused formerly supportive Democrats to view Israel as a political liability. Anti-Semitism isn’t the principal reason that many Americans have come to view Israel as indifferent to Palestinian suffering. Netanyahu’s choices, rhetoric, and actions encouraged these perceptions, and at every point where the damage might have been contained, he made it worse.

Israeli prime ministers had periodically feuded with American presidents. When Yitzhak Rabin balked at withdrawing farther from the Sinai, Gerald Ford announced a “reassessment” of the entire relationship; Ronald Reagan sold weapons systems to the Saudis over Menachem Begin’s opposition; George H. W. Bush withheld loan guarantees to protest Yitzhak Shamir’s construction of Jewish settlements in Israeli-occupied territories. Each Israeli premier pushed back the same way, by rallying Israel’s support in Congress. When Ford threatened Rabin, 76 senators from both parties signed a letter insisting that U.S. support continue. The fight stayed a dispute between governments. Prime ministers assiduously avoided turning Israel into a partisan cause.

Netanyahu brought a different set of instincts to the job. His politics were formed in his American years, and he was a dual citizen until 1982. What he absorbed in America was a distaste for the Democratic Party and for the liberalism of most American Jews, who, he believed, valued social justice above their Jewishness. They were, in a phrase he used for Rahm Emanuel, “self-hating.” “Earlier during his career,” according to his biographer Anshel Pfeffer, “Netanyahu made more of an effort to hide these feelings and work on his relationship with liberals.” But the longer he governed, the less he concealed them.

On March 3, 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu stood before a joint session of Congress and warned that Barack Obama’s signature diplomatic initiative—a nuclear accord with Iran—would pave the Islamic Republic’s path to a bomb. The Republican speaker of the House had brokered the appearance with Israel’s ambassador, a veteran of GOP politics before he was a diplomat, without informing the White House. No foreign leader had ever been brought into the Capitol by the president’s opposition to argue against him.

Seven years earlier, as he ran for president, Barack Obama was unabashedly sympathetic to Israel. In an interview with this magazine, he professed his “great affinity for the idea of social justice that was embodied in the early Zionist movement”; a secure Jewish state, he said, was “a fundamentally just idea.” Pfeffer noted that more Jews voted for Obama that fall than have ever cast a ballot for Netanyahu’s Likud party under his leadership. In office, Obama signed the largest military-aid package America had ever extended to any nation. Yet from nearly the beginning, Netanyahu treated the president as an adversary to be outmaneuvered, lecturing him on Jewish history in the Oval Office while cameras rolled, footage that the prime minister later cut into a campaign advertisement for himself. He barely disguised his preference for Mitt Romney in 2012. Among Netanyahu’s closest supporters, a hostile portrait of Obama took hold: a latter-day Chamberlain, a naïf, more friendly to Muslims than Jews.

His jibes against Obama added to the alienation of the American left, which was already drifting from Israel. After the collapse of the peace process, there was no longer a compelling vision of coexistence. Successive Israeli governments kept expanding settlements in the West Bank. And Palestinian activists on college campuses shrewdly cultivated allies on the left who had never given the conflict a moment’s thought. Netanyahu had great power to stop the drift, simply by respecting the president, a liberal icon, and expressing his own desire for a just and equitable solution to the Middle East crisis, even if he privately believed that the Palestinians weren’t interested in compromise. But by attacking a Democratic president so directly and courting his opposition, he began pushing his country to one side of America’s partisan divide.

Then came President Trump, whom Netanyahu came to see as “the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House.” In Trump, Netanyahu saw his main chance. His obsequious devotion to the president went beyond the flattery other foreign leaders forced themselves to perform. His campaign plastered billboards of the two men shaking hands. He named a settlement “Trump Heights”; his allies announced that a new rail station near the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism, would bear Trump’s name. Trump rewarded this loyalty by delivering nearly the whole of Netanyahu’s wish list: He moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, tore up Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, and refrained from pressuring Netanyahu to negotiate with the Palestinians.

Once Netanyahu lashed Israel to Trump, many Americans who despised the one duly transferred their loathing to the other. But the Israeli leader figured that it didn’t matter. A Democratic Party steeped in secularism and progressive ideology, he assumed, was ultimately going to loathe Israel regardless. Prominent Jewish figures, both in the Democratic Party and in national Jewish organizations, warned him that he was misreading American politics in general and the Democrats specifically, but their warnings were ignored.

As if to prove their point, the president who followed Trump’s first term sacrificed more for Netanyahu than any of his predecessors. After the October 7 massacre, Joe Biden flew to Israel to show solidarity with a distraught nation, then armed and defended its counteroffensive at serious political cost—despite his growing concern that Netanyahu’s goal of eradicating Hamas was unachievable and would exact an unacceptable toll on civilians.

In return for the president’s support, Netanyahu shirked nearly every piece of strategic advice the Biden administration proffered. In June 2024 he posted a video in English, presumably targeting an American audience, in which he accused the administration of withholding U.S. weapons. He complained that Biden was preventing him from winning the war. The accusation was wildly exaggerated—the administration ultimately held back a shipment of only one type of bomb—and made Biden look like a chump. As Biden absorbed blows from his left on Netanyahu’s behalf, Netanyahu attacked him from the right.

[Avi Issacharoff: Israel’s human wrecking ball]

The left wing of Biden’s party turned on him, blaming him for the war’s carnage. In the 2024 Michigan primary, where the incumbent president didn’t face a real challenger, more than 100,000 Democrats voted “uncommitted” to protest a president they deemed responsible for Gaza’s suffering. What began as a revolt against Biden turned into a revolt against the Democratic Party’s historic support of Israel. Activists on the left portrayed that support as evidence of the party’s feckless gerontocracy. AIPAC, the lobbying group that had spent more than half a century making support for Israel a bipartisan reflex, became the foil that many Democrats defined themselves against.

The organization’s symbolic importance ballooned as its influence weakened. Gavin Newsom, Cory Booker, Ruben Gallego, and Seth Moulton—none of them stalwarts of the Democratic Socialists of America—all pledged to refuse AIPAC’s money. Moderate Democrats concluded that taking risks to defend Israel had no upside, and not just because of the growing animosity within the party’s base. Netanyahu’s treatment of Biden had shown that loyalty would never be reciprocated. Democrats running for president absorbed the new calculus and have attempted to glean attention for their nascent candidacies through high-profile confrontations with Israel. The divide had been opened by the man who assured Israelis that no one understood the Americans better.

Israel waged war against Iran and its proxies in the name of survival; they have as their plainly stated goal the elimination of the world’s only Jewish-majority state. But survival has a second front: American public opinion. Netanyahu aggressively confronted the military threats—but proceeded to lose on the battlefield that made his career. He had risen to power by persuading Americans on the correctness of his cause, but came to govern as though persuasion were futile, as if his father had been right all along. He never seemed to recognize that his old successes had come amid tailwinds: the Cold War, the wars on terror, decades when America was predisposed to sympathize with Israel’s case. When the zeitgeist turned, Netanyahu did not adjust the argument. He concluded there were no minds to change: The hatred of the Jewish state was immutable. Under Netanyahu, Israeli public diplomacy has treated each new critic not as someone to be persuaded or corrected, but as an anti-Semite revealed.

His indifference to global opinion is on display in his choice of cabinet ministers. In 1988, Israel banned the political party of Meir Kahane, a Brooklyn-born rabbi whose platform was the mass expulsion of Arabs; on many occasions when Kahane rose to speak in the Knesset, the chamber would empty. When Netanyahu assembled the current government in 2022, he anointed one of Kahane’s disciples, Itamar Ben-Gvir, as his minister of national security. Ben-Gvir’s rhetoric could have been written by Hamas propagandists. Last year, as humanitarian groups and even some Israeli commentators warned of an impending famine, he declared there was “no reason for even a gram of food or any aid whatsoever to enter Gaza” and endorsed the bombing of aid depots. Later that year, he championed the “voluntary emigration” of Gaza’s residents.

Ben-Gvir’s racist bluster has become star testimony in the case alleging Israel’s genocidal intent. Yet Netanyahu has never meaningfully condemned him, let alone fired him. Ben-Gvir’s party is part of the ruling coalition. He is therefore essential to keeping Netanyahu in power—in protecting the prime minister from prosecution on long-simmering corruption charges.

Still, Netanyahu could have shown the world somehow that Ben-Gvir spoke only for himself. He could have flooded Gaza with food, a policy that would have undercut Hamas’s domination of the aid market and its profiteering from scarcity. Instead, he pushed out the UN’s main relief agency and entrusted the feeding of 2 million people to an untested outfit called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation—an operation so ill-conceived that its own director resigned before it began, and whose distribution sites periodically became scenes of chaos and death.

[Read: The Israel of October 6 is never coming back]

Netanyahu has never put forward a serious plan for governing Gaza, or for rebuilding it, or for removing Hamas from power—not during the war, and not now. The Biden administration implored him to hand captured territory to a reformed Palestinian Authority, backed by Arab peacekeepers. Netanyahu countered that the PA was weak, corrupt, and unloved in Gaza. Every objection was true, and none of it was the reason for Netanyahu’s refusal. He refused because any realistic form of Palestinian self-governance would have alienated the furthest-right parties in his coalition, which preferred resettling Gaza. So Israel kept fighting without any vision of how the conflict might end. As the destruction mounted, Netanyahu allowed the world to draw its own conclusions about his country’s intentions.

When the Trump administration finally brokered a cease-fire, Israeli troops remained in a buffer zone in Gaza. Netanyahu promised total victory, but failed to dislodge Hamas. Even then, Netanyahu was handed an opportunity without precedent in Israeli history to bolster his nation’s damaged image. The Trump administration, like the Biden administration before it, was prepared to broker Saudi recognition of Israel—the custodian of Mecca and Medina conferring the legitimacy the Muslim world had withheld for almost eight decades. Normalization might have emboldened other Muslim countries—Indonesia, Qatar, a slew of African states—to take the same leap. Having alienated the American left, Israel could have wrapped itself in the embrace of the Islamic world. But Netanyahu would not supply the one thing the Saudis required: a process toward creating a Palestinian state. Such a promise, no matter how vague, would have cost him support on his right, and possibly his coalition. So the Saudi deal went neglected, although the Trump administration now wants to revive it. The nation that styled itself as the leader of the Islamic world was apparently prepared to officially change its mind about the Jews, and Netanyahu declined.

Even if his father was right about anti-Semitism being an unshakable fact of Jewish existence, diagnosing that condition shouldn’t require acceding to it. Netanyahu has governed as if there were nothing he could do to prevent his country from becoming a pariah or to combat the rising hatred directed at the diaspora. He learned nothing from the example of Ukraine’s Volodmyr Zelensky, who supplied the playbook for how an invaded country cultivates international sympathy. Every gesture that might have plausibly improved Israel’s case—the dismissal of a minister, a plan for Gaza, a show of openness to Palestinian statehood—would have threatened his governing coalition and put him in legal jeopardy. He always chose himself.

Bigots would have found a pretext to hate Israel, no matter what. Anti-Israel extremism was flourishing in the American university before October 7, which is why a succession of suspiciously well-organized protests against Israel erupted the day after the worst pogrom since the Holocaust. But Israel will come to regret how much American political support it has sacrificed on Netanyahu’s watch—and not just on the left. Political independents have come to sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis; 60 percent of American adults have an unfavorable view of Netanyahu’s country; a majority of Republicans under the age of 45 oppose renewing Obama’s military-aid package; support among young evangelicals, once the pro-Israel bastion of the electorate, is cratering. Netanyahu’s legacy is Israel’s isolation. Perhaps that wasn’t preventable. His failure is that he never tried to avoid this fate.

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Back in the ’90s, before everyone had a smartphone, were things just … better? Tech-focused nostalgia has become a potent cultural force in recent years, driving sales of “dumbphones,” iPods, CDs, and other retro technology. According to a 2023 survey, 67 percent of Americans wish they could go back to a time “before everyone was ‘plugged in.’” The psychologist behind that survey, Clay Routledge, has found that this sort of nostalgia is more than just a yearning to go backwards. “We can often feel overwhelmed in the moment and in the challenges we face today. It's hard to see past them. Nostalgia can help us step outside of that moment,” Routledge explains. Nostalgia can actually teach us how we want to live now, and in the future.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

 Julie Beck: If you had one word—it can be a noun, it can be an adjective, it can be any part of speech that you want—to describe your overall relationship to technology at this moment in time.

Voice memo: Antagonistic?

Voice memo: Complicated.

Voice memo: Fraught.

Voice memo: Connection.

Voice memo: I think of it as an addiction. Similar to how I relate to, like, sugar or anything else that I sort of compulsively overindulge in.

Beck: What’s your word?

Voice memo: Indentured.

Voice memo: I was gonna say reluctant, but maybe that’s not right.

Voice memo: Very frequent user.

Beck: Okay, that’s a lot of words, but we’ll take it.

Beck: I’m Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Natalie Brennan: And I’m Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic.

Beck: This is How to Touch Grass.

Amy Poehler: Have you heard the young people say “touch grass”?

Tiktok user: I switched to a dumb phone. This is the Nokia 2780.

Amy Poehler: It’s like a term, basically, which is like, Get off your phones.

Subway Takes: Smartphones are evil, they’re ruining society, and we need to just stop. 100% disagree.

Amy Poehler: Get off the internet, and go outside and touch grass.

Tiktok user 2: I nominate everyone for the Touch Grass Challenge. Go outside and touch some grass like I’m doing right now. Go, go, go!

[Birds chirping]

Beck: In this season, we’ll be exploring the often-fraught, always-changing relationship people have with technology. And the ways that, in this moment, the terms of the relationship are being renegotiated.

Brennan: Julie, the way that I would like to renegotiate my relationship to technology is that I would like to throw my phone in the East River.

Beck: Natalie, you could throw your phone in the East River. Why don’t you?

Brennan: It’s not really just about my phone. I wanna throw your phone in there too, Julie. But I can’t take everyone’s phone.

Beck: Mmm.

Brennan: So I think what I mean to say is that I yearn for a pre-phone era.

Beck: I think we’re not the only ones who have this fantasy. It’s all over TikTok.

TikTok user: What’s the biggest trend of 2026 gonna be? Analog. This past year, we’ve seen the rise of nostalgia; the switch from iPhone cameras to digital cameras…

TikTok user 2: Here’s how to actually be more analog in 2026. First, I wanna…

TikTok user 3: The analog era is here. And while audiences say they want to go offline, with Gen Z and millennials openly expressing their desires to break from an online world and find deeper…

TikTok user 4: I stopped using an iPhone three weeks ago and the effects have genuinely been profound. ​

Beck: In the past few years, there’s been no shortage of people advocating for reducing screen time. But another force that has been inspiring people to rethink how they use their devices lately is: nostalgia.

[Music]

Clay Routledge:  We can often feel overwhelmed in the moment and in the challenges we face today. It’s hard to see past them. Nostalgia can help us step outside of that moment.

Beck: Clay Routledge and his colleagues have been studying what’s behind this widespread yearning for a time before smartphones and before social media. Clay is a psychologist who specializes in nostalgia, and he’s also the author of Past Forward: How Nostalgia Can Help You Live a More Meaningful Life.

Beck: Clay, hello, welcome!

Routledge: Hi, Julie.

Beck: I see you’ve got an Atari poster behind you. There’s some kind of video game that is too small for me to see what it is. What is it?

Routledge: On the shelf, I’ve got an old Nintendo, the original NES. Then I’ve got the Robotron arcade game, which is an arcade from the ’80s, and the Atari poster. So yeah, lots of video-game nostalgia from different brands and decades.

Beck: Oh, man. Perfect. Okay. It’s a nostalgia museum at your house.

Routledge: It is indeed.

Beck: Clay, just to get started, what is the point of being nostalgic about anything?

Routledge: So nostalgia is, in psychological terms, what we call a self-regulatory resource. It helps us navigate life in important ways. We don’t know the future; it’s uncertain. And so it can also be a great source of anxiety. Nostalgia can help us step outside of that moment and say, You know, there’s a bigger picture. Right now, maybe I’m experiencing stress or loneliness, or I just went through some difficult challenge, but my life is full of other types of experiences, and if I had these more fulfilling experiences in the past, then I should be able to have them in the future.

Beck: Yeah, I asked you about the past, and you immediately started talking about the future. Do people tend to misunderstand nostalgia by assuming, as I did, that it’s about the past?

Routledge: So nostalgia, the dictionary definition is something like: a sentimental longing for the past. When you present it like that, then it makes sense that people would assume, well, nostalgia might even be people getting stuck in the past.

Beck: Mm-hmm.

Routledge: Or looking to the past too warmly and not, you know, dealing with their present realities head-on. Turns out that when people engage in this kind of nostalgic reflection, in a lot of ways they’re talking about their issues today, and they’re thinking about tomorrow.

So nostalgia actually has this very forward-looking, unexpected, hopeful quality. We often are looking for specific things that can help us with particular challenges and anxieties we’re facing, so—

Beck: Mmm.

Routledge: —and I’m articulating this as if this is happening at some deliberate or conscious level, ’cause I’m talking about more of the scientific study of nostalgia and what we’ve learned from that kind of empirical work. But in reality, of course, this is just happening almost unconsciously. People are often using nostalgia without even realizing it.

Beck: That makes sense to me when it comes to, you know, my own life and my own past experiences, right? But Clay, what about nostalgia for a time from before you were even alive? There was a stat from a survey you worked on that really struck me, which was you found that 60 percent of Gen Z wished that they could return to a time before everyone was, quote, “plugged in.” And the other generations said that too, but they actually lived through that time, whereas Gen Z has no actual memories of a time before the internet existed. So was that surprising to you?

Routledge: It was. When we first found that, I was pretty surprised because most of the work, the research on nostalgia, including the research I’ve done, is focused on autobiographical—

Beck: Mm.

Routledge: —memory, but to your point, what we started to discover with that survey is: People actually have a longing for the past that predates them. Now, of course, if you’ve studied art and culture more abstractly, we’ve long known that people have favorite eras that they’re interested in, whether it’s the architecture or the music or the fashion. So we’ve known there’s this aesthetic nostalgia that’s historical—

Beck: Mm-hmm.

Routledge: —but what we were surprised to find is that young adults have so much to look forward to in the future, and we typically think of youth as very future-oriented, but the majority of them were saying that they longed for a time really before modern technology, but really before they were alive.

And then since that survey, we’ve just done more and more surveys finding that around two-thirds of Gen Z adults say they’re nostalgic for a time before they were alive.

Beck: Right. So this seems like a little bit more than just a like, We’re bringing low-rise jeans back, right?—

Routledge: (Laughs.) Yeah.

Beck: —if they’re saying they would like to live in the past. I mean, how common is it for generations to yearn that way for a past they never actually knew, or is something about this unique?

Routledge: Yeah. There’s not a lot of research or really any research in previous generations when they were the same age as Gen Z. But we do know from our own work, in general, people tend to become nostalgic when they’re going through major life transitions or disruptions, or when the world feels particularly chaotic or uncertain.

Beck: Mmm.

Routledge: Regardless of whether you’re, you know, 20 or 60, sometimes there are sources of cultural inspiration that people wanna draw from in a more shared bank of memories that aren’t just your own, but are the memories we share as a culture. And here’s the key thing, I think, and this is the case with Gen Z too. It really isn’t the case that people want to live in the past.

Beck: Okay.

Routledge: If you start asking people Would they give up all of the modern advances? they say no. What they’re saying is they have a sentiment for some aspect of the past that they think that we’re missing today. I think there is something about Gen Z in this, you know, as digital natives who grew up in this era where this major transition from the analog world to the digital world, that seems to be sparking a particularly potent type—

Beck: Yeah.

Routledge: —of historical nostalgia. And then the irony is technology really is helping facilitate this. Because how are Gen Z adults learning about retro trends? They’re on TikTok, right?

Beck: Yeah.

Routledge: And so it’s funny how the technology that, on the one hand, is the source of frustration and anxiety is also the vehicle through which they’re being introduced to the analog world.

Beck: Okay, so, I was wondering because, you know, when you say you wanna return to another era, an earlier era, maybe they’re not thinking about the things they would be dissatisfied with in the earlier era, right? Like—

Routledge: Right.

Beck: —lack of social progress that we have since made. It seems like you’re saying it tends to be about something particular that they are yearning for rather than, like, a holistic desire to go back to all the things.

Routledge: Yeah, absolutely. You know, one of the things I think people don’t appreciate about nostalgia, ’cause it’s often portrayed as just repeating something.

Beck: Mm.

Routledge: And it really isn’t. It’s more of, like, a revising. There’s a creative process. Humans are really a progress-oriented species. We’re never content; we’re never satisfied. We’re always tinkering. We always think things can be a little bit better, and it’s frustrating, right? Because it often means we’re not ever just really happy. But that’s also the thing that drives us to positive change, and nostalgia’s very much an ingredient of that.

[Music]

Beck: So Natalie, I can remember really distinctly the last time that I was ever truly lost.

Brennan: Mm-hmm.

Beck: It was like two months before I would get my first smartphone. The year was 2013.

Brennan: So you were—how old were you then?

Beck: I was 23.

Brennan: Okay.

Beck: I was in St. Petersburg, Russia, and what I would do to get around in the days before I had Google Maps available on my phone all the time is I would look up directions on the computer before I left, and I would write them down, sometimes on my hand.

Brennan: Totally.

Beck: I had done this: I’d gotten my directions together, I had gone sightseeing, and I was heading back to my hotel. But I was so jet-lagged that I fell asleep on the bus, and when I woke up, I had no idea if I’d already missed my stop or not.

Brennan: Oh no. Do you speak Russian?

Beck: I definitely don’t. Um, but I went up to the bus driver anyways, to try to ask him if we had already passed the stop. A lot of people spoke English, you know, but he got really angry and was like, “You can’t talk to me while I’m driving.” So he wouldn’t talk to me, and I’m freaking out. And this young woman behind me, she can see how upset I am, and she speaks English. So she comes up and tells me, like, yes, we already passed the stop for my hotel. Lovely woman. She gets off the bus with me at the next stop—

Brennan: No!

Beck: —and she drew me a map on a piece of paper that she had, and she was like, “There’s this one really long road. You just have to walk on that road the whole way back.” And the hotel was on that road, so you would see it, you know, looming in the distance. And I remember she said, “It's really far. You’re gonna think that you’re never gonna get there, but I promise if you just keep walking on this one road, you will get back to the hotel.”

Brennan: Oh my God. I’d be crying. Were you crying?

Beck: Oh, for sure.

Brennan: Yeah. (Laughs.)

Beck: So anyway, I set off down the road for a really long time. It felt like miles, multiple miles.

Brennan: You’re alone.

Beck: I’m alone. I was traveling alone. When, out of nowhere, this man comes running towards me.

Brennan: Nope.

Beck: Well, it turns out he’s from a cruise ship that is docked nearby, and he is trying to find McDonald’s.

Brennan: No.

Beck: I tell him what happened. And he says, “Oh, well that’s the same direction as my cruise ship that I need to get back to. Like, I’ll just walk with you until you get back.” Eventually, my hotel appears on the horizon, finally. And there’s really no other word for it; he, like, scampers off into the night, and as he runs away, he shouts, “Goodbye, Julie. I love you.”

Brennan: No!

Beck: So anyway, I made it home safely. And that was the last time I was ever lost in my life.

Brennan: Wow. I’m feeling both jealousy and awe, in that I will—I’ve never had that experience. I mean, I’ve been on public transportation, of course, while my phone has died.

Beck: Yeah.

Brennan: But I have never been an adult without a smartphone.

Beck: I am kind of nostalgic for that memory, because it was one of those moments that really restores your faith in humanity. You know?

Brennan: Yeah.

Beck: Like, I was screwed, and people appeared, and they helped me when I really needed it. And that made me feel, like, swaddled tightly in the fabric of human community. And none of that would’ve happened if I had a smartphone, if I had Google Maps.

Brennan: Yeah. I’ve only really ever had that experience manufactured for me.

Beck: Really?

Brennan: Yes. I went on this program in college. It was called the New England Literature Program.

Beck: Okay.

Brennan: And it’s basically living in cabins on a lake in New Hampshire for six weeks. And when you arrive, they take your phone for the remainder of the program. There’s no personal technology, no phones, no computers.

Beck: Hmm.

Brennan: You read Emerson, Thoreau.

Beck: Of course you do. Who else would you read?

Brennan: You visit Walden Pond. (Laughs.) And on the second day of the program is Get Lost Day.

Beck: Okay.

Brennan: In the morning, we learned how to use a compass, and then, promptly, were blindfolded, which now sounds like a cult, but it wasn’t—

Beck: (Laughs.)

Brennan: —to different locations, in groups, and then shown on a map where we were and where camp was, and told to get back by dinner.

Beck:  Wait, wait, wait. Where—like, describe to me the vibe of, like, where—

Brennan: We were dropped off? Field.

Beck: Field. End of sentence?

Brennan: Yep.

Beck: Field. Okay, okay, okay.

Brennan: In the beginning, you’re quite confident that you’re on track, and I think a few hours in, it became quite clear to us that we weren’t making it back to camp, and that we would just find a ride later in the day. We would ask somebody to take us back to camp, and just kind of spent the day enjoying and exploring.

Beck: Oh, wow. So you just pivoted. You were like, This is never happening. We’re not gonna find our way back.

Brennan: No.

Beck: Let's just be in this field.

Brennan: We’re gonna—we are going to touch grass and vibe.

Beck: Okay.

Brennan: I’m sure we were walking for hours, but I think the bigger point, instead, was to, like, get to know each other. You’re placed into vulnerability. You’re going to share this experience. But I do think extremely fondly about the program. Those whole six weeks really just sparkle with nostalgia for me, and I really struggle to differentiate between how much of that experience was the “no tech” of it all—

Beck: Hmm

Brennan: —and how much of it was just the experience at large.

[Music]

Beck: Clay, what do you think the thing is that people who are nostalgic for the ’90s or the 2000s are wanting to bring forward and revise, as you say?

Routledge: If I could sum it up using two words.

Beck: That’d be great.

Routledge: I would say control and community.

Beck: Mm.

Routledge: And the reason I’m picking those two words is because we’ve done, in addition to the surveys, we’ve done a number of qualitative projects that, you know, look at the types of nostalgic-related posts that Gen Z adults make on different social media and websites that they frequent. And what you often find is this sense that they love technology, but they wanna be in control of it, not feel controlled by it.

Beck: Mm-hmm.

Routledge: So it’s that more sense of intentional use, and this is why I think you see these interesting trends like Gen Z buying old iPods and, you know, they wanna have their new iPhone. Everybody wants to have the Uber app and all the different things that make our lives a little more convenient, but sometimes there’s a sense of like, Maybe there’s a more low-tech option that allows me just to listen to music.

Beck: Yeah.

Routledge: And the community. I think Gen Z’s figuring out that there’s something missing in computer-mediated social relationships. And on the one hand, the social media’s really useful ’cause it helps you organize events, meet people you would’ve never met. But at the same time, they look at this time period right before smartphones really became dominant, and they said, Oh, there’s a sense of freedom. There’s a sense of organic social life, and—

Beck: You’re not looking at your phone the whole time.

Routledge: —mm hmm. And they want to build that in. A lot of times, nostalgia’s framed in a very zero-sum sort of framework, where it’s like: You’re either for the past or you’re for the future.

And I think what Gen Z’s showing us is they want both. And there’s something to say intergenerationally about this, which is maybe young people are learning about ’90s fashions on TikTok, but then what we often find is that sparks a conversation with older generations, whether it’s a parent or a coworker you know, or somebody in their run club, that they’re like, Oh, was life really like this? Did you really do this? And it creates a dialogue between generations, which I think, in this era of where everyone has their own screens and their own tailored content, is something that people feel like they’re really missing.

Beck: Yeah. I remember my dad always used to talk about that—that sort of, like, shared experience of music, ’cause you had to, like, put on a record, and so everybody’s listening to the Rolling Stones whether they like it or not. And now, obviously, we just have our sort of, like, isolated pods, and you don’t know that I’m listening to that same Taylor Swift song like 10 times in a row, and you’ll never know.

Routledge: (Laughs.) Now I know.

Beck: Okay. Yeah, I did—yeah, now everybody knows.

[Music]

Beck: We’re gonna take a quick break. When we come back: Why is this analog nostalgia bubbling up now? Do you think it has anything to do with AI coming on the scene?

[Break]

Beck: Clay, why do you think nostalgia for analog technology is so popular right now? Does the buzz about AI have anything to do with it?

Routledge: I think AI is part of it, because if machines can do all this cognitive work, and maybe even creative work, that we thought was the distinct domain of humanity, now you’re seeing more of this holistic thinking of like, what is the essence of being a person?

Beck: Mm-hmm.

Routledge: And this nostalgia, I think, is really helping people get that sense of embodiment, of like, this isn’t just cognition. There’s something about emotion, spirituality, living in the world, having these tactile sensory experiences, in-person, real contact with other real human beings.

Beck: Just with like, all the parts of life that are more than just being a brain in a jar, basically?

Routledge: Yeah, that’s a great way of putting it. And if you look at a lot of the consumer nostalgic trends, many of them driven by Gen Z, they’re very much that, right?

They’re the rise of independent bookstores, the growth of music festivals, book clubs, game nights, old tech, technology that’s not online that you have to—I was talking to somebody the other day about retro video games, and they were saying, “Well, one thing that’s really cool is you have to sit next to each other to play, like two players.”

Beck: Yeah.

Routledge: You’re not playing online. And so I think there’s this idea that even if it’s technology, even if it’s like video games or music, you mentioned vinyl records, which, you know, one of the big drivers of vinyl-record sales is Gen Z. They’re these low-tech, retro-tech trends that really seem to be about being out in the world, handling things, engaging with people. That’s a big driver of this.

[Music]

Beck: Natalie, let’s play a little game where I name a thing that people might be nostalgic for, and then try to psychoanalyze what it means about what they actually want from their relationship to technology.

Brennan: Okay.

Beck: Okay, my first one: I see a lot of memes about people missing the days when people had computer rooms in their home. Like, picture a big wooden entertainment center with a big monitor. The shelves are all covered in CD-ROMs, and then the meme says something like, We used to respect the computer. What does this mean?

Brennan: This is really giving that control element that Clay was talking about—

Beck: Mm.

Brennan: —in that we still want to honor our computer. We love computer time, right? But I think we miss that separation in which your technology wasn’t on you at all times, right? My phone is kind of just a mini computer at this point.

Beck: Yeah.

Brennan: So I think we like having some separation of, like, now it’s time for me to go in the computer room, and when I’m done, it’s done. Does that resonate with you?

Beck: Yeah. It’s a deliberate choice to go in the computer room and sit your butt in front of it and use it and then leave.

Brennan: And then leave.

Beck: I think you’re onto something. Okay, I am personally very nostalgic for Google Reader—

Brennan: Mm.

Beck: —which, for those who may not know, it was an aggregation service for websites’ RSS feeds, which doesn't sound fun, but it was.

Brennan: (Laughs.)

Beck: Um, basically, in the late 2000s, I would use this to, like, follow all my favorite blogs and cooking websites and news sources, and it was all in one place. What do you think I’m actually longing for here?

Brennan:  Okay, well, I think for me what comes up here is feeling like the internet isn’t anymore curated towards what I wanna see. So for example, like I’ll open my Instagram app and I no longer see posts by my friends and family who I follow, but instead I see a lot of pushed posts. The algorithm just sends me what it thinks I wanna see. And so maybe you’re yearning for that time where the internet was curated to your niche hobbies and what you are actually interested in.

Beck: As opposed to just a bunch of slop.

Brennan: Okay, I wanna ask you one. I am also one of the analog Gen Zers who love to shoot film and collect old cameras. Thoughts?

Beck: Um, I don’t know about you, but sometimes I pick up my phone to take a picture of probably my cats, and before I know it, I’m, like, sucked into a million other things on my phone.

Brennan: Mm-hmm.

Beck: So I think, maybe, there’s also something about, like, when you wanna take a picture, you just wanna take a picture, and taking that function out of the everything device and letting it just be its own thing, maybe.

Brennan: It’s that.

Beck: Crushed it.

[Music]

Beck: Clay, I was fascinated to learn that back in the 17th to 19th century, nostalgia was considered a disease, and doctors tried to cure it with leeches. I read that there was this one American doctor who kind of thought the way to cure it was just bullying people, like shaming them with public ridicule. And, obviously, we no longer think nostalgia is literally a disease, but I think a thread of that negative attitude remains. I feel like I sometimes hear other people talk about nostalgia as though you’re trying to hide from reality, and maybe, you know, you should be a little embarrassed. Do you see that reaction from people when it comes to this current cultural yearning for a pre-digital era that, okay, it’s not a disease, but maybe it’s still not good for you?

Routledge: Yeah, definitely. People seem to have this view of nostalgia as anti-progress or holding people back from progress, and I spend a fair amount of time trying to disabuse them of that view and show them decades of empirical research. It really isn’t holding people back. We all have to adjust to change, and nostalgia helps people navigate that in the best way that they can. Even people who don’t think nostalgia’s a barrier to progress, oftentimes you see it characterized as a waste of time.

Beck: Hmm.

Routledge: Like, it’s a trivial thing, and it’s a distraction at best. Actually, nostalgia increases goal motivation. It increases a sense of meaning in life. It increases optimism. It makes people more creative. It increases empathy. Most nostalgic memories are social memories, so nostalgia actually pushes us towards each other.

Beck: When you’re saying that some people are seeing nostalgia as an impediment to progress, do you think some of that has to do with the sort of Make America Great Again brand of nostalgia where, like you’re saying, people are looking to the past to potentially bring things into the future, but sometimes what they want to bring into the future is, for instance, stricter and more stereotypical gender roles?

Routledge: So declinism is the view that things are getting worse and the past was better, whereas nostalgia really is just more of this warm feeling for the past, and I think the two are often conflated. We also find, overwhelmingly, that most of the time, nostalgia in general makes us see the humanity in other people. Or another way of saying it is: Nostalgia might be helping people wrestle with declinism—

Beck: I see.

Routledge: —and hopefully in a more productive and constructive way. A lot of Gen Z might feel like, oh, things are going in the wrong direction and their future’s gonna be worse than the future of previous generations. And there's certainly, you know, a lot of data that support that. Nostalgia’s helping them feel agentic and say, Well, you know what? We can change that. We can do something else.

Beck: It just feels surprising when you see an era that was not a great time for a lot of people recast as something to be nostalgic for.

Routledge: There are people that have nostalgia for COVID, which, again, not that long ago.

Beck: Not that fun, famously.

Routledge: Not that fun. But you know what? What’s interesting is, that wasn’t that surprising to me. When I first started doing this research, I was a professor at the University of Southampton in England. And Southampton’s a city that was heavily bombed during World War II, as a port city, and a good chunk of the city was destroyed. Not a good time. When we were doing this research, this was a little over 20 years ago, we were collecting nostalgic narratives from older British adults. Many of them were young children during that time, and they had this nostalgia.

Beck: Yeah.

Routledge: But what it was is they were saying, Well, this was a time that was defining, character defining. It wasn’t a pleasant time. It shaped our character, shaped our view of the world, shaped our ability to appreciate what’s important in life.

Beck: So how does this sort of personal, individual nostalgia, right, then grow and end up becoming a cultural moment or an internet trend?

Routledge: ’Cause a lot of times what people are really looking for with nostalgia is an opportunity to share memories.

Beck: Hmm.

Routledge: Oftentimes, nostalgia is portrayed as this very isolating, personal experience. After all, this is in your head. You’re experiencing this emotion. But people love opportunities where they can talk about nostalgic experiences, particularly ones where they might have their own idiosyncratic memory of it, but it was shared with other people.

Beck: Mmm.

Routledge: I think this is why people have a nostalgia for television where you had to wait and everyone had to watch the show at the same time, and then the next day we could all talk about it.

Beck: Yeah.

Routledge: You know, people are looking for ways to make contact over shared experiences where their personal nostalgia is woven into a broader cultural nostalgia that connects us.

Beck: And we’ve talked about control a good amount, and, you know, obviously we can’t actually travel back in time to an era when nobody had smartphones. Sam Altman is gonna keep making new iterations of ChatGPT, and I have no control to stop him. But do the things that we’re nostalgic for hold any lessons for how we can exert the control that we do have over the role tech plays in our lives?

Routledge: When the broader world outside of yourself, when you scale out, when it feels like you don’t have any control over that, that can be anxiety provoking; if you just focus your attention on your corner of the world, we actually do have a lot more control. Agency often happens at a local and at a personal level. You can help your neighbors. You can help your family. You can help your friends. You can be involved with those things. And even media engagement’s a way to remind ourselves of that. It’s like, Yeah, I don’t have control over the next internet iteration of a particular technology, but I can go to that retro store down the street and buy some Blu-ray discs and have a movie night at my house and have some people over.

Beck: Yeah.

Routledge: So I think people are really seeking that kind of experience.

Beck:  Are you seeing people actually acting on this pre-digital nostalgia?

Routledge: There is an increased sales in physical media. The live-music market is growing. Mass attendance is up, like young people going to church.

Beck: Right.

Routledge: The number of independent bookstores and the number of chain bookstores, like Barnes & Nobles, is growing. There does seem to be something changing in our culture that’s a push back to the in-person and the analog.

Beck:  Clay, I’ve noticed at many times in this conversation that you’re very optimistic about Gen Z, which is not how I often hear people talking about that generation, especially when it comes to tech. So I’m curious to hear a little bit more about how you’re thinking about it and whether Gen Z is kind of leading this trend for other generations.

Routledge: My thinking on Gen Z has really evolved, so I’m way more bullish on Gen Z—

Beck: Hmm.

Routledge: —than I used to be. So I’m a psychologist, and so when all of this research was coming out about these growing mental-health problems that young people were facing and how Gen Z reported higher rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, pessimism for the future, like everyone else, I was like, This isn’t good.

Young people are supposed to be the ones that are optimistic. They’re supposed to be the ones that look to the future with possibility, and that didn’t seem to be the case. But then I started really studying this historical nostalgia and started seeing, like, yeah, Gen Z has their challenges, and maybe mental health is one of them, but they’re not just sitting there doing nothing about it.

They’re using their creativity and their problem-solving capacities that all humans have to do something about it, and I feel like this historical nostalgia that they’re engaging in is just one example of that. It’s not people my age that remember that time. It’s Gen Z that are saying, Hey, maybe we’re spending too much time online.

And so, for instance, there’s surveys showing that Gen Z are the generation most likely to report disconnecting from their digital devices.

Beck: Hmm.

Routledge: So now I have a different view. It’s a, you know, it’s not a certain view, of course. It’s an optimistic view, though, that Gen Z might not only be doing better than we think they are in navigating their challenges and having the agency to do so, but they actually might lead us out of this mess.

They might be the ones that remind the rest of us that there is an in-person, real-world life. So, you know, I often say that it’s common for people to feel sorry for Gen Z and worry that as digital natives, they were born too late to really appreciate the analog world.

Beck: Hmm.

Routledge: But in reality, it might be that they’re the generation that leads us back to it.

[Music]

Brennan: Mmmm …?

Beck: It sounds like you’re not so sure, Natalie.

Brennan: I said I wanted to throw my phone in the East River, and suddenly now I am tasked with healing everyone’s relationship to technology.

Beck: Not just you. Just you and your entire generation are responsible for the rest of us? Uh …

Brennan: I don’t know. I get so frustrated about this because I feel like I hear it all the time. It’s the same thing with climate change. Like, We’ll be the ones that need to fix all of it. I’m just like, This list is getting a little bit long. We’ve got a lot to fix now.

Beck:  Honestly, I think what talking to Clay made me realize is that so many of us are just looking for inspiration on how to move forward with technology in a way that doesn’t feel bad. Because we have to live in 2026.

Brennan: Yeah.

Beck: It’s never gonna be 1996 again.

Brennan: Right. I think as a joint mission, then I can get behind that.

Beck: When, like, Gen Z doesn’t have to be the leader, nobody’s the leader, nobody’s the follower, we’re just figuring it out together.

Brennan: Yeah, or even bigger picture, when I feel like this is just on each one of us individually versus, you know, something that we’re all just, like, trying to renegotiate together. When it’s an individual mission, I think that’s maybe when I go escapist mode, when I go, like, fantasize about throwing the phone in the river, I wanna go back in time, back to those New England woods, to no phone.

Beck: Back to your fields, back to your compass.

Brennan: Yeah, back to my grass.

[Music]

Beck: That’s all for this episode of How to Touch Grass. This episode was hosted by me, Julie Beck, and co-hosted and produced by Natalie Brennan. Our editors are Claudine Ebeid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Gisela Salim-Peyer. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.

Beck: Next time on How To Touch Grass:

Ashleigh Golden: A priest, a partner, a therapist, or a friend—these people have natural limits. They get tired. They push back. But the chatbot doesn't.

Elias Aboujaoude: These programs are trained to be endlessly validating and endlessly agreeable.

Beck: Turning to AI for help with anxiety could actually end up making you more anxious. That’s next time on How to Touch Grass.

Read more about the Democrats who might run for president in 2028 here.

Updated at 6:53 a.m. ET on July 28, 2026

Governor Wes Moore doesn’t care about saving the Democratic Party; if anything, he thinks it has stood in his way. When we met up in May, he quoted Jay-Z: “Industry shady, it need to be taken over.” The 2001 track is about Jay-Z’s rise to fame, and the ways the recording industry tried to exploit and co-opt him because he was “raisin’ the status quo up.” Moore was talking about a failed political system, and a Democratic Party that, he told me, “tried as hard as they could to get me not to run.” Jay-Z describes himself as a “renegade,” and Moore would like to be seen in a similar light—as the outsider who got himself to the top.

Moore is the first Black governor of Maryland and the only Black governor serving in America today. At 47, he’s a relative newcomer to politics—he was the head of Robin Hood, a poverty-fighting foundation, until 2021—but he’s already being discussed as a possible presidential candidate in 2028. He’s just the kind of Bronze Star–winning, God-praising, son-of-an-immigrant Rhodes Scholar whom many Democratic voters would see as a dream candidate (although he denied to me that he was considering running). But so far, his tenure as governor has been far from smooth.

In May 2025, he surprised many people by vetoing a bill establishing a commission to study the economic effects of slavery and racism on the state’s citizens and to recommend policies that could include reparations. Black legislators were outraged, and the Maryland General Assembly eventually overrode his veto. Moore defended his decision by dismissing the commission as a body conducting mere academic research, when what people needed was real change: “I am not a believer in studies, commissions,” he told me. “I’m like, Are we doing the work or not?” He pointed to big investments in HBCUs and a mass pardon for cannabis convictions as proof of his progressive accomplishments.

[Richard D. Kahlenberg: The Democrats can’t let go of racial preferences]

Moore likes to portray himself as an independent actor, beholden to no one. He has signed legislation that prevents 16- and 17-year-olds from automatically being tried as adults for some crimes, and also increased funding for the police. He has, he boasted to me, vetoed “more bills than any Democratic governor in the history of the state of Maryland” because he doesn’t believe in passing “unfunded mandates.” And he doesn’t care whether the party likes it or not: “I didn’t win because of the Democratic Party,” he said. “I won in spite of the Democratic Party.” He added: “I don’t come from nothing, and I didn’t need nothing, and I’m not owned by anybody. When I’m making my decisions, there is no party boss that I call.”

Although this message seems tailor-made for this moment, in which so many Americans are simultaneously highly partisan yet disgusted by both parties, Moore’s approval rating in Maryland has fallen below 50 percent for the first time. (He’s still expected to win easily in the November election—he won 88 percent of the vote in the June primary, and one of his staffers shared with me an internal poll that found a higher approval rating.) He’s facing a number of challenges, particularly the dogged perception that he lacks authenticity—that he hasn’t been honest about who he really is.

Moore has a politician’s powder-white smile and a bald head that shines like glass. I met him this spring, in Selma, Alabama, where he’d gone to commemorate the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when about 600 civil-rights marchers were attacked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. He began the weekend with a speech at Brown Chapel AME Church. “I know we are built for this, because I know what we are built of,” he told the mostly Black crowd. He listed heroes of the civil-rights movement and then said, “This is our time,” holding up his index finger like a Baptist preacher. Everywhere he went, lines formed. And he played his role perfectly.

A bear hug for Governor J. B. Pritzker of Illinois. A selfie for a Black teenager with braces. “Good morning! Good morning! Good morning! How’s everybody doin’?” Then, pulling on the words like a southerner: “Alllll riiiiiight.” An hour or so later, at the Historic Tabernacle Baptist Church, his words tipped toward preaching: “I know where my worthiness comes from, and it does not come from Washington, D.C.”

A few weeks later, on the Baltimore Orioles’ Opening Day, he stepped out of a black SUV wearing an orange jersey with his name on the back, and a man rushed up to him: “Sign my baseball for when you run for president.”

“Not going to happen,” Moore quickly responded—while signing his name.

Over the next few months, I watched Moore go from boat ride to baseball game to matcha tasting to college-graduation speech. In every situation, he knew exactly who to be. By the time he quoted Jay-Z to me, I understood that he had me pegged, too.

I was fascinated by Moore’s ability to adapt to his different audiences. I grew up having to do the same, and although I appreciate that I can connect with people from both elite and underprivileged backgrounds, I wish I were as much of a natural as he is. Even as a journalist at The Atlantic, I still find myself sometimes intimidated, my voice trembling. Moore moved like water.

But this may be one reason some voters struggle to trust him. When I asked people I know in Maryland, many of them Black, what they think of the governor, I heard things such as He doesn’t say what he means and We don’t know what his agenda is. They thought it was weird that he won without having any political experience. That distrust has been fueled by persistent negative reporting from conservative media outlets.

At the Orioles game, a white man in a USA shirt said, “I appreciate you, Gov,” as Moore autographed his collection of baseball cards. Then Moore walked onto the field, and many people in the stadium booed. He smiled and clapped for himself, and seemed to take no notice of the crowd’s displeasure.

About that Bronze Star.

Moore has been accused of making what The Washington Free Beacon called “a litany of false statements about his family history, his upbringing, and his academic, athletic, and military achievements.” The accusations range from minor to significant, and begin with his hometown. The text on the back cover of his 2010 book, The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates, reads: “Two kids named Wes Moore were born blocks apart.” Both “grew up fatherless in similar Baltimore neighborhoods and had difficult childhoods.”

In fact, Moore’s first years were spent in Takoma Park, Maryland—a nice suburb of Washington, which I know because I live about five minutes away. The book itself does mention that his family home was on “the border of Maryland and Washington, D.C.” But many people who read the book still come away with the impression that Moore was born and raised in Baltimore.

It’s true that he grew up fatherless. Moore was 3 when his father died of a virus; he believes that a racist health-care system gave him shoddy treatment. His mother moved with Moore and his sisters to the Bronx, to be closer to her family. He attended the elite Riverdale Country School, but after his grades dropped and he got caught with a smoke bomb in the locker room as a prank, his mother sent him to Valley Forge Military Academy, in Pennsylvania. (His grandparents took out a second mortgage to help pay the tuition.)

He moved back to Baltimore only as a college student, to go to Johns Hopkins University. He was living there in 2015 when the city erupted in protests following the death of Freddie Gray, who suffered a spinal-cord injury while inside a police van. Moore co-authored an account of that period with Erica L. Green, Five Days: The Fiery Reckoning of an American City. (“I am from Baltimore,” he wrote in that book.) He later kept a home in the city while commuting to Robin Hood in New York. After his Baltimore bona fides came under scrutiny in 2022, his campaign said that he had asked his publisher to correct the promotional text on The Other Wes Moore, and it did for later editions.

Moore quickly learned to be more careful: “I’m not a Baltimorean by birth, but I’m a Baltimorean by choice,” he told a crowd in 2022. But a pattern had been established—or at least a line of attack.

In 2010, Stephen Colbert described Moore, a guest on The Colbert Report, as a recipient of a Bronze Star for his service in Afghanistan, where he’d served in 2005 and 2006. The trouble was that he didn’t have a Bronze Star. When reporters raised questions about the medal, Moore’s staff insisted that he’d never told anyone that he had won it, and so he wasn’t responsible for the error. But in 2024, The New York Times obtained Moore’s application for a White House fellowship in 2006 in which he’d written, “the 82nd Airborne Division have awarded me the Bronze Star Medal.” He had an explanation for that too: The senior officer who had helped Moore write the application told him that he was going to get the medal, and so he should include it; the fact that it never actually arrived was embarrassing, but not unusual in the chaos of wartime. And after the controversy surfaced, the military did indeed award him a Bronze Star—just 18 years late.

[From the July 2026 issue: Being Black in Pete Hegseth’s military]

Then the Free Beacon ran a story questioning Moore’s account that his great-grandfather had moved to Jamaica because he’d been targeted by the KKK, based on the fact that reporters couldn’t find contemporaneous newspaper or archival accounts to verify it. This charge seemed more than a little forced—as did the many stories about Moore’s thesis at the University of Oxford. In that same White House fellowship application, he wrote that he’d received his degree in 2003 or 2004, but it wasn’t formally recorded until 2005. He also listed the title of his thesis as “The Rise and Ramifications of Radical Islam in the Western Hemisphere,” but it was later titled “Radical Islam in Latin America in the Late 20th Century and Its Middle Eastern Roots.” Also, the thesis is not stored in Oxford’s Bodleian Library—though there is no requirement for theses to be kept there, and many aren’t. Moore told The Baltimore Sun that he wasn’t “going to spend a second of my time trying to dig” a copy up.

If you’re a little bored, you’re right to be. Some people have compared Moore to Barack Obama, and the demands for him to release more records to back up his past inevitably reminded me of the “birther” conspiracy. At least that conspiracy had some stakes. How much should anyone care that in 2006, Moore said he’d been named to the Maryland College Football Hall of Fame when in fact he had been honored only by a College Football Hall of Fame affiliate called the National Football Foundation?

Moore expresses regret for not being clear about the Bronze Star, but when I asked him about the attacks on his truthfulness in general, he dismissed them. “Do you know who has never attacked my military record? The United States Army,” he said. He told me he lived by a code: “You do not lie, cheat, or steal.” In fact, he said, he was being accused of dishonesty precisely because he was so honest. “It’s basic laws of warfare: You go after your opponent’s strength.” And he pointed out that these accusations surfaced only after he started gaining support. “I went a whole year on a campaign, and no one had a word to say about me,” he said. “And then out of nowhere, it was like the deluge began,” and people from “the right wing started putting stuff out.”  

The Baltimore Sun, which has devoted much space to these controversies, has indeed moved rightward under a new owner, the television magnate David Smith, and the conservative Free Beacon’s tagline is a promise to cover “the enemies of freedom in the way the mainstream media won’t.” Moore told me that Obama had given him advice on surviving these kinds of attacks as a politician, saying, “Listen, this is the part of the game that everyone hates.” But if the questions about Moore’s honesty have been amplified by his opponents, they still trace back to an uncomfortable set of facts: Moore allowed people to call him a Bronze Star–winning Baltimore kid, when the story was more complicated.

In April, one of Moore’s biggest legislative priorities—a redistricting plan that could have helped Democrats pick up a seat in the midterms—died when William Ferguson, the Democratic president of the state Senate, refused to bring it up for a vote. It was “too risky,” Ferguson argued: The new map could be challenged, and a ruling could leave their party worse off.

Ferguson is now pushing to get a constitutional amendment before Maryland voters in November that would better shore up any new map from legal challenges. Moore has framed the legislature’s caution as timidity, but Ferguson has a different take. He told me that Moore had created confusion by waiting months before coming out in favor of the plan, and suggested that the governor embraced it only after Gavin Newsom gained national attention for pushing through a new map in California. “I don’t think that timing was a coincidence,” Ferguson said, adding that Moore tends to emphasize “messaging” over governing. “Comms is dictating policy, and policy is not dictating comms.”

He did, however, credit Moore with working to speedily rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge. Its collapse, in 2024, killed six people and is the most significant catastrophe Moore has weathered as governor. The port of Baltimore was expected to be shut down for many months, but the state got it open again after less than three.

Moore is expected to win a second term in November, but the public’s mistrust has taken a political toll. The Sun and others have accused him of not being forthcoming about the state’s budget, which has seesawed from deficit to surplus to deficit again during his tenure. His vetoing of the reparations bill made some of his core supporters feel that he had misled them. When Moore’s approval rating declined, poll respondents listed the budget and the governor’s trustworthiness among their top concerns.

Something about Moore does feel protean. He’s hard to place. His background can be confusing. Although he’s often compared to Obama, his education was far less rarefied. Obama was the president of the Harvard Law Review; Moore went to junior college before landing at Johns Hopkins. He describes his upbringing as working-class—“a very hardworking family, but it was definitely a working-class family.” Perhaps by income, but by few other definitions. Both parents were college graduates. His father was an anchorman at a radio station and his mother wrote for radio and TV. Although Moore frequently says that she didn’t have a job with benefits until he was a teenager, she had won a Peabody Award and taught journalism at Howard University before he was born. Still, he saw himself as an outsider, and wouldn’t invite his friends from Riverdale back to his neighborhood. He told me that he thought very strategically about fitting in: “Okay, how do I adapt and adjust so I don’t stick out?”

At Valley Forge, he was taught how to mingle with the powerful—how to walk, eat, and speak. As a high-ranking cadet, he attended lunches with former presidents, including Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush. He said he eventually learned to accept that he was different and to be “comfortable in my own skin.” In two separate conversations, he quoted the same Jay-Z line: “I’m comfortable, dog, Brooklyn to Rome.” But he enunciated every word, in a way that sounded stiff. Despite his charisma onstage, up close, he has no swag.

Where he seemed most at home was at the matcha café in Baltimore owned by an old friend of his, who surprised him with a Jamaican sorrel—a tart iced drink. “This right here would make my grandmother proud,” he said. Once, I made a Bernie Mac reference, and he got it immediately, and we shared a knowing laugh. Above all, he was comfortable talking about religion.

“I come from a whole long line of preachers and teachers,” he said. “My great-grandfather was a minister; my grandfather was a minister.” In the summers, he used to stay in his grandfather’s parsonage in Brooklyn. When he told his grandmother that he was running for office, she said, “When you’re done with that, maybe you can become a minister.”

“Asking me not to talk about or to acknowledge God is like asking me not to breathe air,” he told me.

When I asked his mother, Joy Moore, if she thought he would run for president, she said: “I think his faith will take him wherever he’s going to eventually go.” She seemed more annoyed by the questions about his honesty and integrity than Moore was. “They question things that are so personal,” she said. She felt as if the articles interrogating their family history were accusing them all—her grandfather, her father, herself, her son—of being liars. And the Oxford thesis? “I mean, if he knew he was going to one day run for governor, don’t you think he would have kept stuff like that?”

[Read: Something is happening in the Democratic base]

Moore says he’d had no plans to go into politics before 2022. It was his wife, Dawn, who was the political operative, a campaign strategist who’d worked for two lieutenant governors. She and Moore eloped when he was on leave from his service in Afghanistan. While they were dating, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and I was curious about whether she found divulging it to him hard. After all, I know plenty of men who wouldn’t stick around for the common cold. She said she asked him: “How would you feel if you had to take care of me for the rest of your life?” And he said: “How would you feel, if you had to take care of me for the rest of my life?”

Some of the questions regarding Moore’s authenticity amount to a nebulous discomfort with how he comes across, a discomfort I recognize from all the times I’ve encountered it myself. Many people who work in elite careers after growing up relatively disadvantaged, as well as Black people who spend time in primarily white spaces, are accused of not being true to themselves. This is a false dichotomy. We can be true to ourselves while also understanding that success requires us to be supple and adaptable, and to present different aspects of our personalities at different times.

There’s a famous poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar called “We Wear the Mask,” about the way Black Americans shield themselves from racism. I mentioned it to Moore, and he recognized it immediately.

“The mask is heavy,” he said. Moore says he wears his own mask around many people, “not because it makes me more comfortable—it’s because it makes them more comfortable.” Being in spaces where people are “not used to seeing you” is a burden, he said. Being “an enigma” is a burden. “To some people, your presence is inspirational. To certain people, your presence is offensive. To certain people, your presence means progress. To certain people, your presence means we’ve lost something.” You’re a first, or you’re a threat. “That weight does sit on you,” he said. “And it’s heavy.”

This article originally said that Moore signed legislation preventing teenagers from being tried as adults for some crimes. In fact, some teenagers can still be tried as adults after a preliminary hearing in juvenile court.

Toward the end of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus and Penelope finally see each other after 20 years apart. Odysseus, disguised as “an ancient old man” by the goddess Athena, tells Penelope that her husband will return to kill the suitors who have tormented her. “Not one will avoid his death and destruction,” he says. This is Homer’s protagonist: wily, aided by a god, and eager for revenge—reflective of a culture that prized honor, strength, and fealty to a set of interventionist deities.

This is not, however, Christopher Nolan’s protagonist. At key moments in the recent blockbuster adaptation of the ancient-Greek poem, Odysseus’s story seems more biblical than Homeric.

[Read: The Fear of Missing ]The Odyssey

In the film, when Odysseus reunites with Penelope, he hasn’t been turned into an old man. Nolan keeps his identity secret through more naturalistic means: a dimly lit room, a cloak over his body, and latticed sliding doors that separate the two characters. The doors, which are not found in Homer’s poem, are evocative of the screen between priest and penitent in Catholic confession—a setting that Nolan, who was raised Catholic, would be familiar with. And although in Homer’s poem, Odysseus is thirsty for retribution, Nolan emphasizes a different emotion in this scene, one that is integral to the confessional and to Christian life as a whole: contrition.

Odysseus describes deep guilt over his central role in a famous episode of the Trojan War: when Greek soldiers hid inside a wooden horse to trick the people of Troy into letting them into their city. “We left them a gift,” he tells his wife, “an offering of peace, that they took into their home.” In sacking Troy, Odysseus says, he and his fellow soldiers “violated all that’s ever sacred between people”—he recognizes a link between mistreating humanity and disrespecting divinity. He confesses that he “lost his way,” not just temporally or physically but in his soul.

Other aspects of Nolan’s adaptation feel biblical, even Christian, rather than Homeric—a quasi-baptism scene at sea, for example, and the conspicuous absence of the references to sex that populate the poem. The core principle of the film’s moral universe seems to echo the Bible. “Treat others as you would be treated,” Penelope declares early in the film, expressing an ethic that various characters refer to as “Zeus’s law.” Many versions of the idea exist, in secular and religious forms. But in the film, Penelope’s words sound more like Jesus’s Golden Rule than anything in Homer, where the heroes—though bound to host strangers as if they might be gods in disguise—seek to achieve glory more than convey empathy.

[Read: Reading a 3,000-year-old poem to a 3-year-old boy]

The film’s treatment of Odysseus’s lies, too, seems consonant with the Ten Commandments instead of Homer’s moral worldview. In the poem, Odysseus’s lies are often portrayed positively, as evidence of his intelligence and resourcefulness—when he tricks the Cyclops, for example. In the film, however, Odysseus’s falsehoods have dire consequences, an apparent reflection of the biblical assertion that false witness is a sin. Odysseus tasks a young soldier named Sinon—a character who does not appear in the poem—with offering the horse to the Trojans. But he doesn’t tell Sinon that its purpose is to attack the city. Sinon dies as a result of Odysseus’s deception. Later, in Hades, he admonishes his commander: “Did you have to lie to me?”

So did Christopher Nolan make a Christian film, which the Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro and others have suggested since the movie’s release? Not quite. As my colleague Gal Beckerman wrote, Nolan diminishes the role of the gods, treating them as socially useful but not necessarily real. It’s hard to call definitively “Christian” a movie that regards the divine as a possible fantasy. The film is God-haunted, though. Homer may have viewed Odysseus’s deceit and pillaging as glorious. Nolan’s adaptation seems to pass a different judgment. Animated in part by the wisdom of the Bible, this modern Odyssey can’t help but see how the deceptions of war degrade a person and a culture.

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Americans have two stereotypes of Britain. The first is the cozy, parochial world portrayed in my country’s biggest cultural exports—the “soggy bottoms” of The Great British Baking Show, the boarding-school backdrop of Harry Potter, the aristocratic deference valorized by Downton Abbey. The second, now promoted by a zillion MAGA podcasts, is a postapocalyptic hellscape of sclerotic socialism, repressed speech, and rampaging Muslims.

Rupert Lowe, the leader of the British far-right party Restore, has pulled off a neat trick. He sounds like an emissary from the first Britain, thanks to his refined accent and his taste for anecdotes about shooting pheasants. But he understands exactly what the modern American right wants to hear: that the second Britain exists, and only Donald Trump is preventing the United States from heading in the same direction.

Indeed, cranks and conspiracists on the American and British hard right now exist in happy symbiosis. In their ecosystem, Lowe fills a crucial niche: a guy with a posh voice who validates all of their prejudices. He recently appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience to, among other things, push the claim that gangs of Muslim men had raped 250,000 white girls in Britain.

This allegation is his entry ticket to the American podcast circuit. It arises from Lowe’s crowdfunded investigation of “grooming gangs”—a real and troubling phenomenon over the past few decades in several English towns, where men colluded with one another to recruit girls and women to sexually abuse. Early evidence suggests that, although the majority of perpetrators in these cases are white, British Pakistani men are overrepresented. Elon Musk loves talking about grooming gangs, because they justify his belief that Britain is a land of naive “hobbits” who need to be protected by “the hard men of Gondor.” Rupert Lowe, presumably, is one of those hard men.  

[From the July 2026 issue: How Britain became as poor as Mississippi]

Lowe warmed up for his star turn on Rogan by appearing on PBD, hosted by the Trump fan Patrick Bet-David, and DarkHorse, hosted by the former professors Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. Weinstein now promotes conspiracy theories so arcane that the mainstream brain struggles to comprehend them, but he still remains friends with many members of the “intellectual dark web”—a group of heterodox commentators lionized by The New York Times in 2018. Right at the start of Rogan’s show, the podcaster thanked Weinstein, along with Musk and Jordan Peterson, for suggesting Lowe as a guest.

These chummy connections explain why Rogan granted a platform to a man whose party polled just 6.8 percent in a recent special election and has only a single member of Parliament, Lowe himself. (It’s as if a British podcast had seriously interviewed the U.S. Green Party’s Jill Stein about her plans for the presidency.) Lowe used to be a member of a much larger and more popular right-wing populist party, Nigel Farage’s Reform, but he was forced out in an enjoyably catty and melodramatic schism after calling for mass deportations.

Lowe’s marginal position in Britain doesn’t seem to bother his allies in the United States. These days, Farage—despite his personal relationship with Donald Trump—is not hard-line enough for the MAGA elite. They much prefer Lowe, who recently described part of the city of Manchester, in northern England, as a “third world shithole” and has promised that “under a Restore Britain Government, all immigration from Pakistan into our country will end.”

Rogan is a self-declared conspiracy theorist, and one of the reasons he has moved so sharply rightward in recent years is that American conservatism has become a reliable, prolific generator of conspiracy theories. Thanks to Trump’s influence, anyone who might have acted as a gatekeeper or guardian of reality has folded in the face of grassroots pressure to endorse a demon-haunted world of celebrity pedophiles and assassination cover-ups. The audience demands to have its suspicions upheld. Witness the awful spectacle of Kash Patel and Dan Bongino trying and failing to convince MAGA influencers that, now that they’d looked at the Epstein files, they’d realized they were no big deal.

Knowing Rogan’s attraction to the idea of numinous forces controlling the world, Lowe duly played him like a fiddle. He alluded darkly to the World Economic Forum, and the elite Bilderberg group, for reasons that did not need to be explained, because it was assumed that the audience already understood. Also, did Rogan know that the departing British prime minister, Keir Starmer, was a member of the Fabian Society? Of course Rogan did not, because—why would he? The Fabian Society is a gradualist-socialist think tank founded in 1884 by (among others) a vegetarian playwright. It was named after the Roman general Quintus Fabius, whose nickname was the Delayer, to emphasize that it was not a revolutionary organization. Membership involves absolutely no hooded robes, geopolitical puppet-mastering, or child sacrifices.

Nevertheless, Lowe represented the Fabians as a deeply sinister fifth column because their logo was once a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Rogan asked his producer, Jamie, to pull up the logo, and the two men marveled at it as though they were looking at a signed confession from Lord Voldemort himself. (Sadly, they did not inspect the society’s other early symbol, the tortoise, for potential darker meanings.) This is the conspiracist mindset in its full glory: They put their evil plan right there on the logo! That just shows how crafty they are.

Interview podcasts are where fact-checking goes to die. At one point, Lowe and Rogan joked about the hoary aphorism that says anyone who isn’t a liberal at 25 has no heart, but anyone who isn’t a conservative by 35 has no head. Wasn’t this something Winston Churchill had said, they wondered? Producer Jamie was dispatched to look this up, and the VAR judgment came back positive. Except the International Churchill Society has no record of the British leader ever saying this.

This relaxed attitude toward the facts allows Lowe to go on MAGA podcasts and offer a distorted vision of British public opinion, presenting himself as a persecuted truth-teller who is simply saying what everyone is thinking. He pandered to Rogan’s well-established love of hunting by claiming that his own freedom to bear arms was curtailed because Britain had banned handguns after “one murder”—an odd way to refer to the massacre of 16 children and their teacher at a school in Dunblane, Scotland. Since that incident, in 1996, the United States has had more than 1,500 school shootings. Britain has had zero. There is absolutely no wellspring of untapped energy in the country in favor of relaxing gun laws. Lowe was offering pure America-bait.

The most serious failure of fact-checking, however, came when the discussion turned to the report from Lowe’s grooming-gang inquiry, which he has promoted as the antidote to the liberal elite’s refusal to take the issue seriously. The document claims that a quarter of a million “young white girls have been subjected to repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, pregnancy, forced Islamic conversion, and lifelong trauma” in recent years. Even Rogan found this figure implausible: “The number, I want you to say it because it sounds so crazy,” he told Lowe. “If I say it, people—it’s going to sound wrong.”

Imagine a claim so outrageous that even Joe Rogan is nervous about repeating it—appropriately nervous, as it happens. The 250,000 figure comes from taking the estimated prevalence of sexual grooming in Rotherham, one of the worst-affected towns, and extrapolating that across all of Britain. That reasoning is obviously flawed. The report assumes that similar gangs are operating on the same scale everywhere—even in places where no such activity has ever surfaced. The real number of victims is unknown. Nevertheless, Lowe told Rogan that “a minimum of a quarter of a million rapes” was an “incredibly conservative” estimate. Musk has gone further and promoted posts claiming that there were 1 million victims, based on an unsourced figure used by a single politician a decade ago.

The existence of what experts call “group-based sexual exploitation”—wherein men band together to recruit and control victims—is not a conspiracy. Successive legal cases have demonstrated that in several towns across England, these gangs were disproportionately led by men of South Asian origin, and that police and local authorities were wary of publicizing this fact and of moving aggressively to smash the gangs, for fear of stoking racial tension. In three high-profile cases that resulted in criminal convictions—in Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford—the majority of the men involved were South Asian. (White grooming gangs also exist, such as the ones in the rural county of Cornwall and in Glasgow, Scotland.) However, it is also true that the British far right—which is not normally noted for its ardent feminism—has latched on to this issue to press for mass deportations and to make the broader case against any Muslim or nonwhite immigration to Europe at all. During Lowe’s appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, he frequently referred to America and Britain’s shared “Anglo-Saxon” culture.

[Idrees Kahloon: Burnham is Britain’s last chance before Farage]

Lowe is convinced that mainstream news outlets are ignoring his inquiry because of political correctness. The real reason is that his report is an unfocused jumble of personal testimony, with no evident attempt to corroborate the lurid and sometimes unbelievable accusations made by anonymous sources. In one case, a witness known as Kate reported that her captors had filmed her being raped by a dog—an extraordinary allegation. (When a New York Times opinion columnist made a similar accusation against Israeli prison guards, American conservatives were openly skeptical.) Kate also claimed to have seen two other girls killed in retaliation for snitching, and another anonymous victim is quoted as saying that she remembered seeing “a man opening the back of a van and I saw maybe 15, 20 girls locked in dog cages.” Corroborating evidence for those allegations has yet to materialize.

Lowe’s report has had little impact because of its obvious limitations. The government is currently setting up its own official inquiry into the gangs. Rape Crisis, one of the biggest mainstream charities working in the sector, commended the “courage of the survivors” in coming forward to Lowe’s team but added that “framing the issue squarely in terms of immigration” was reductive.

In the MAGA podcast-sphere, nailing down facts is less important than building a vivid narrative. Talking to Rogan, Lowe barely mentioned the victims of the gangs, because his interest was making the case for the mass deportation of Muslims from Europe. At the same time, he told Rogan that Britain is a “matriarchal society” where women are “omnipotent,” which is hard to square with girls being sexually exploited on an industrial scale.

Here in Britain, Lowe is one step up from a nobody, the leader of a second-rate populist party. Our right-wing media much prefers Nigel Farage, who is more careful with his language and who leads a genuine political movement that wins elections.

Farage has lost favor on the American right for the same reasons he has gained ground at home. He fell out with Musk because—I paraphrase lightly—the trillionaire felt that the Reform leader was insufficiently racist. Farage has always refused to admit the prominent far-right activist Tommy Robinson to his party, because the latter was once a member of an explicitly white-nationalist organization, the British National Party.

Farage’s serious desire to be prime minister has left a vacancy for chief British doomsayer to the American right—a vacancy into which Rupert Lowe has gratefully stepped. On the MAGA podcast circuit, the new kid on the block just has to call Britain a “shithole” to be received as a great oracle. Sorry, America, but I suspect that you haven’t heard the last of him.

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Travel has a way of making us curious. We wander unfamiliar streets, strike up conversations with strangers, linger in museums, and notice details that we’d otherwise rush past. But that mindset doesn’t need to be reserved for vacations. Below, Atlantic writers and editors share their advice on how to rediscover the places they know best.

Stop at your neighborhood ethnic restaurant. This is on my mind because the World Cup just ended, and for each day of the tournament, I tried a meal from one of the countries playing that day. Over the course of 32 days, I ate food from 32 different places (the final was the first time I had to duplicate, eating Argentinean cuisine again), mostly without leaving the Washington, D.C., area.

Every day, I felt like I was taking a new trip. Two blocks from where my kids go to school, I found an Uzbek restaurant that I’d never known existed. I walked into an Egyptian place down the street from my house that I’d previously overlooked. When I went to a Haitian restaurant one evening, I felt like I’d been transported to Port-au-Prince. I had Senegalese food for the first time. I sampled ćevapi at a Bosnian restaurant and vori vori soup at a Paraguayan spot.

By doing so, I saw my neighborhood in a brand-new light and discovered what surprises are around the corner in even the most familiar places.

— Matt Viser, staff writer

***

One way to see the place where you live through fresh eyes is to borrow someone else’s. When a friend visits from out of town, I'll give them a little time, in deference to custom, to stretch their legs and get their bearings. Then they’d better buckle up, because I’m going into tour-guide mode. Did my college buddy who drove up from Baltimore bargain for a whirlwind circuit of my objectively not-that-interesting Delaware town? Doesn’t matter. The nerdy facts and local lore that I’ve accumulated over the years will come spilling out with rapid-fire enthusiasm and questionable accuracy. (“See that hill over there? General Washington once walked up it looking for the British, saw none, and walked back down.”)

Landmarks that I haven’t been to in years will be explored anew. Drinks and subpar nachos will be shared beneath the musty rafters of the tavern where the surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon once imbibed. Inevitably, my friend will ask questions about my town that I had never thought to ask. We’ll go looking for the answers. And new local knowledge will be gleaned, with which future visitors will someday be regaled.

— Will Oremus, staff writer

***

I live in Chicago—which means there’s no shortage of places to try and things to see. However, getting stuck in a routine of going to the same neighborhood spots can be easy. One way I’ve found to break myself out of that pattern is to tack on a new experience to something I already have to do: I’ll visit a nearby coffee shop after getting my driver’s license renewed downtown, I’ll get on the L train to dinner early enough to wander through an unfamiliar neighborhood, I’ll pop into a new grocery store after a workout class, or I’ll take the scenic route along the lake as I drive out to the suburbs. It’s a low-effort way to discover new corners of the city without the pressure of planning out an entire excursion—and it makes even the most mundane errands a little more exciting.

— Katie Anthony, associate editor

***

I’ve always found meeting strangers easier while traveling than when I’m at home. Planes are like dive bars, in the sense that within these dimly lit, claustrophobic spaces where drinks are served regularly, you may find yourself making friends with a seatmate in 32C. My brother once asked to borrow a laptop charger from a stranger at the airport, and somehow, that stranger ended up at my next birthday party. In new cities, taxi drivers and tour guides become temporary companions.

So why not re-create that openness at home? Host a party and tell people to bring plus-ones. Use those bruised bananas to make bread for the neighbor you still haven’t met. Buy coffee for the person standing in front of you in line at the café. Or here’s a ridiculous idea: Ask a stranger for directions—even if you already know where you’re going. Perhaps they’ll send you along a new route that you never would have chosen yourself.

— Lila Shroff, staff writer

***

This week, I’m visiting my hometown of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for my grandfather’s 90th birthday. I come here at least three times a year, so I’m used to the same routine: my daily hour-long morning walk around the neighborhood, pickleball with my very competitive and skilled father, a pilgrimage to Franklin Street to relive my college days, and so on.

What’s new on this particular trip is the addition of my six-month-old son. He’s at a fun age where, with bright, Carolina-blue eyes, he perceives his surroundings and knows he’s somewhere unfamiliar but comfortable. Bringing him along for all of my Chapel Hill activities has given me a fresh perspective on coming home. By going with him to the local pool, putting him in a new He’s Not Here Blue Cup onesie, and seeing as much family with him as possible, I’m reexperiencing my hometown through his eyes. As my son takes in the sights and sounds of North Carolina, I gain a deeper appreciation for where I grew up and for my own parents, who created those traditions for me.

— Michael Leibel, senior editor

***

Take a city tour. A long time ago, I spent a couple of summers working as a tour guide and bus driver in Alaska, where I would lead tours of Anchorage and Valdez. Whenever somebody local would come aboard (usually with family from out of town), I’d be nervous, afraid they’d be bored or that I might get some facts wrong. Instead, I almost always heard that they had come away with a new outlook on a place that they passed by every day or had always meant to visit.

You don’t even need to have out-of-town guests as an excuse—just hop on a tour bus or boat for an afternoon, and you’ll almost certainly notice something you’d overlooked before.

— Alan Taylor, senior editor

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

• The fear of missing The Odyssey
• Where did all the computer-science professors go?
• Why Widow’s Bay is the show of the summer

The Week Ahead

1. Spider-Man: Brand New Day, about what happens to Peter Parker after the world has forgotten that he exists (in theaters Friday)
2. Furious, a crime-thriller series inspired by the 1987 film Black Widow about an FBI agent hunting a serial killer (out Monday on Hulu and Disney+)
3. Biological War, a book by Annie Jacobsen, the best-selling author of Nuclear War, on how a lab accident or a biological attack could spiral into a global pandemic and societal collapse (out Tuesday)

Essay

Music’s New Superstar Is Here—And She’s Rather Relaxed

By Spencer Kornhaber

Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey are two of music’s great masters of emotional excess, and it’s long seemed fitting that they’ve shared one of Billboard’s highest achievements: the longest-running Hot 100 No. 1 for a solo woman. That record was set over 14 weeks by Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” in 1992 and 1993, and then matched by Carey’s “We Belong Together” in 2005. (We’re talking about non-holiday tracks; the 22-week reign of Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is in a class of its own.) The enduring dominance of songs by these two volcanoes of vulnerability seemed to prove an iron law of pop: Greatness comes from giving all of oneself.

Their record has now been equaled by the 27-year-old country singer Ella Langley, a very different artist indeed.

Read the full article.

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On July 20, 1976, Viking 1—the first successful Mars lander in history—touched down on the red planet. Fifty years later, revisit some of the images from NASA’s Viking program.

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It was probably inevitable that the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey, would become a battleground in the broader fight over President Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. The privately run jail reopened last year as the only sizable facility of its kind in the New York City metro area, with capacity for 1,000 ICE detainees. Trump officials have been threatening for months to intensify ICE enforcement in New York, making Delaney Hall essential to their plans. It’s also smack-dab in a blue sea of state and local governments dominated by Democrats whose constituents are furious at ICE.

Protesters have rallied outside Delaney Hall since May to denounce poor conditions inside the facility, operated by the GEO Group on a $1 billion, 15-year contract. Trump officials say that complaints about the facility are overblown and that protesters’ true goal is to drive out ICE.

New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill and other prominent Democrats have joined calls for Delaney Hall to be shut down, and they’re suing the Trump administration to block ICE plans for a larger jail in another part of the state. 

In recent years, blocking or limiting ICE jails has generally been an effective tactic for immigration activists because it constrains the government’s ability to arrest and hold large numbers of immigrants. It also drives up costs by forcing ICE to relocate detainees. Squeezing ICE’s capacity has worked in tandem with so-called sanctuary policies adopted by state and local jurisdictions that try to limit or prohibit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. The result is a geographic imbalance in ICE infrastructure: There are relatively few detention centers close to northern and coastal cities with large immigrant populations, while a disproportionate number of the agency’s jails are concentrated in Texas and Louisiana. 

But the keep-ICE-out approach has downsides that Democrats rarely acknowledge. And now that ICE is swimming in cash, a strategy that relies on starving ICE of resources might turn out to be not just futile, but counterproductive. 

Since Trump returned to office, Republicans have used the budget-reconciliation process to channel more than $100 billion in additional funding to ICE, 10 times the agency’s annual budget. ICE opponents can make it harder to open new immigration jails in blue cities and states, but the administration now has all the money it needs to ship detainees to southern states, where detention costs are generally lower. When Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” traveled to New Jersey last month to defend conditions inside Delaney Hall and meet with Democratic officials, he said protesters’ calls to close the jail would backfire.

John Gihon, a former ICE attorney in Florida who is a board member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told me that when ICE facilities shut down in Democratic-run states and cities, it’s “a small-time win” for activists but it leaves detainees worse off.

“ICE is going to find the bed space,” Gihon said. “A lot of time, it’s going to be farther away from a blue state, and farther away from friendly federal courts, in a place with terrible conditions.” In addition to being more distant from family members, immigration courts in Texas and Louisiana have judges who reject asylum claims at some of the highest rates in the country, federal data show. And sanctuary cities such as New York and Chicago generally have more legal-aid organizations that can help ICE detainees get out of custody and fight deportation. “When I have a detention center near me that I can drive to, I never have to worry about my client missing a phone call,” Gihon told me. 

That’s not to say that advocates have no reason to fight for better conditions, or to get immigrants out of ICE custody. At least 52 detainees have died while detained by ICE since Trump returned to office, two and a half times the rate of fatalities from his first term, according to a report published last month by Human Rights Watch.

But Democrats calling for Delaney Hall to close should be careful what they wish for, Gihon told me. “If you shut that place down, everybody gets sent to Louisiana,” he said. “And most of them are not going to get out.”

ICE relies on a patchwork of jail facilities and immigration detention centers, many of which are privately run, to hold the immigrants it arrests and seeks to deport. The agency currently has about 65,000 detainees in custody nationwide, down slightly from January but still close to record levels. Trump officials say they need to boost detention capacity to 100,000 to hit their goal of 1 million deportations a year.

Opponents of Trump’s immigration crackdown have scored some victories lately in their battle to stop the expansion of ICE detention centers. The “Alligator Alcatraz” camp in the swamps of south Florida has been closed. In Maryland, a federal judge has blocked ICE’s attempt to open the state’s first large immigration detention facility. And Trump officials have scaled back plans to create a national network of ICE megajails out of converted warehouses, and are instead preparing to sell or repurpose several properties purchased during a billion-dollar spending spree last winter.

The backlash to ICE has picked up momentum around the country as more Democrats condemn the agency and endorse calls to eliminate it. A YouGov poll conducted in March found that three-quarters of Democrats and more than half of independents favor abolishing ICE. The survey was conducted after the killing of two U.S. citizens protesting the ICE crackdown in Minneapolis.

[Read: ‘Abolish ICE’ is back ]

Homan, who used to run ICE, has waged a counter-messaging campaign in defense of his former agency and its legal authorities. He met with Newark Mayor Ras Baraka to ask for more support from city police, and ate a meal in the Delaney Hall cafeteria, pronouncing the spaghetti “good.” And he leveled a warning last month to Sherrill and other Democrats calling for the jail’s closure. "You want to shut down the facility?” Homan said. “Then every illegal alien we arrest in that state, we’ll fly to Texas. We’ll fly to Arizona, detain them there, because we’re going to keep arresting people. We’re going to keep detaining people. We’re going to keep removing people.”

Detainees picked up by ICE in the New York City area and held at Delaney Hall remain close to their families. (One of the demands of recent protests was increased visitation hours.) If the facility is shut down, Homan said, immigrant families will see their loved ones shipped out of state. “How does that benefit the migrant community?” he asked.

Attorneys and immigrant advocates I’ve spoken with deplore Homan’s threats, but acknowledge that ICE’s funding surge has put them in a bind. They’re not giving up calls to shut down immigration jails and stop ICE from opening new ones. Yet for detainees who are already in ICE custody, they concede, that approach is likely to make outcomes worse. The rates at which immigration judges grant protection to immigrants seeking asylum vary widely, for instance; New York City courts have some of the highest approval rates, while courts in Houston have among the lowest.

The advocates I spoke with said ICE opponents, by and large, have not yet reckoned with the implications of ICE’s new financial resources, and remain committed to tactics that try to limit arrests and deportations by making it as difficult as possible for the agency to operate in their communities.   

Claire Trickler-McNulty, an attorney who oversaw ICE policy and planning under Joe Biden and who now advises advocacy organizations, told me the agency’s geographic imbalance developed partly because detention facilities in southern states were lower cost and logistically convenient for deportation flights or bus transfers to Mexico. Trickler-McNulty said activists who want to fight Trump’s crackdown should call for safe, humane detention and, more important, fewer detainees. “My view is you want to be very clear on who needs to be detained and for how long, and manage those cases very closely, so that people aren’t spending too long in detention,” Trickler-McNulty said. “If we accept the premise that we are going to have immigration detention for a certain segment of the population, then that is what you would want.”

ICE officers arrested nearly 40,000 people last month nationwide, the highest one-month total since Trump reentered office, according to the agency’s most recent data. Thanks to a hiring surge last fall, ICE has added about 8,000 officers, doubling the size of its workforce. Homan has threatened to marshal those forces to surge operations in New York City and other sanctuary jurisdictions, where immigrants generally face lower risk of arrest and deportation.

[Read: The truth about ICE’s recruiting push ]

Last January, soon after Trump took office, I was invited on a ride-along with William Joyce, the second-highest-ranking official in New York City for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division, which handles deportations. Joyce told me he had fewer than 100 detention beds available, leased from a jail about 60 miles north of the city, in Orange County, New York. When space ran out there, he had to send detainees to jails in Pennsylvania, Virginia, or farther south. The lack of ICE-jail capacity in the New York City metro area has led to overcrowding at the agency’s processing center inside 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. (A suspect was arrested there Monday after a failed arson attack at the building’s entrance that did not result in serious injuries.) Joyce, like a lot of ICE officials in sanctuary jurisdictions, had a limited budget to work with, and prioritized using the available jail space for detainees with serious criminal histories over those whose only violations were immigration-related. 

Such trade-offs are no longer necessary. Nearly 40 percent of immigrants taken into custody have no criminal records, according to Homan. “We’re arresting everybody we find,” he said Tuesday on a podcast hosted by Katie Miller, the wife of the Trump aide Stephen Miller.

The ICE detainee population has also soared because the Trump administration has made it harder for judges to issue bonds that would allow immigrants fighting deportation to be released and continue working while they await their next court appearance. And the Laken Riley Act, signed by Trump nine days after taking office, has expanded the range of criminal charges that render someone ineligible for release, to include shoplifting and theft.

Last fall, then–Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem oversaw the purchase of at least 11 large warehouse properties around the country at a cost totaling more than $1 billion. The acquisitions were part of a $38 billion ICE plan to build a national network of megajails with capacity for as many as 10,000 detainees. But the agency faced intense opposition to the plan, including in Republican-led states, and ICE officials found themselves facing a red-tape labyrinth as they sought permits from local governments for their sewer and water upgrades. The warehouse purchases, which were directed by Noem and her de facto chief of staff, Corey Lewandowski, are now under internal investigation by DHS’s inspector general.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who replaced Noem in March, has said the department is scaling back and reevaluating the ICE-warehouse plan. Department officials say they may repurpose or sell several of the warehouses, boosting ICE capacity elsewhere by purchasing privately run facilities from ICE contractors and adding space at existing jails. 

[Read: The $97 million Utah warehouse ICE bought for $145 million ]

Trump officials are still looking to boost their jail capacity in the Northeast. After the administration bought a large warehouse in Roxbury, New Jersey, for $129 million in February, state officials and the Republican-led town council sued to stop ICE from converting it into a detention center, citing environmental concerns. The government said last month that it was no longer planning to go forward with the conversion, but after Sherrill celebrated the announcement as a “major victory,” Mullin abruptly reversed course, and declared that the department “will NEVER back down.” As of last week, attorneys for the Trump administration told the court they’re still figuring out what to do with the warehouse, and they gave no timeline for the decision.

Suavity is a sorely missed ingredient in the American presidency. The effortless charm of a Roosevelt or a Reagan, a Bush or a Clinton, projected a particular brand of power. Suave means a kind of athletic ease and self-command in difficult, spotlighted circumstances, the assurance that solutions are at hand if only we all hold our composure and act right-headedly. Here was the ultra-suave Barack Obama’s message to the basketball player Caitlin Clark in a small but noteworthy exchange over the WNBA All-Star weekend: It never hurts to be winsome. In fact, it can help you win.

Can you imagine Donald Trump in the same situation, what he’d have done or said, the race-baiting and appeal to baseness? As if Trump would even deign to meet a WNBA player, that is. He prefers to use the league’s players from afar for his own purposes. His White House has made the WNBA a flash point for attacks on transgender athletes, and he and his hard-right allies have tried to make Clark out to be a victim of racial violence on the court. Congressional conservatives even called for the federal government to investigate the WNBA for civil-rights violations because of players fouling her. Here is how Trump used another young woman he views as an adversary, the CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins, at the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner yesterday, while Obama was visiting WNBA players in Chicago: After Collins received an award for “excellence under deadline pressure,” Trump barked from the podium that it was a “fake” prize, that she didn’t deserve it, and then he went to some lengths to demean her. Not suave. Not winning.

The WNBA has been difficult to watch at times this season, so rife with racial tensions, toxic fan behavior, and carping over officiating that it seems a microcosm of a country in crisis over dirty play in seemingly every societal arena. Much ill will has swirled around Clark, the superstar 24-year-old guard for the Indiana Fever, who can be either mesmerizing to watch or tiresome, depending on how aggrieved she feels on the day. Clark has complained that she is intentionally targeted with hard fouls—and sometimes she is, but not because she’s white. Mauling is the guaranteed, time-honored way to stop an otherwise insuperable player. Clark is the fastest in league history to hit 200 three-pointers, the first to ever score 45 points with 11 assists in a game, and such a head-clutchingly great passer that she can make defenses look like they’re lost. And Clark’s got a plenty-hard edge of her own. She can jaw so vociferously at referees that she’s gotten seven technical fouls this season, one away from a suspension.

That has done nothing to help calm matters in a league whose product is being torn apart by internal resentments and external malignity. In mid-June, when Alyssa Thomas of the Phoenix Mercury was suspended for a game for hitting Clark in the throat—inadvertently, according to Thomas—she received death threats, was subjected to racial slurs, and inspired those bad-faith congressional demands for an investigation. “Now we’re being painted as thugs,” Thomas told reporters. In mid-July, Chelsea Gray of the Las Vegas Aces, who is almost as superb a player as Clark, received a vile message after her team lost to the Fever. Gray decided to post it on social media so everyone could see what Black players can deal with when they go against the league’s white darling. You s* a** ugly a** read a message that also called her the N-word. Gray wrote on her post, “People act like we just make this s* up.”

That was the backstory when Obama surprised the WNBA All-Stars players by walking in on them during practice for tonight’s game. They were milling around an indoor court at the newly opened Obama Presidential Center on Chicago’s South Side when the man with his name on the building sauntered across the floor in jeans and a white broadcloth shirt to welcome them—and to gently remind them of certain truths: It has taken 30 years of effort by underpaid and unsung athletes for the league to finally arrive as a popular mass spectacle, and no matter what team the players are on, they’re all in that endeavor together. The WNBA’s growing commercial success is based in its relatability and affordability compared with men’s pro leagues, but also in the audience’s sense that it is watching not just a game but the slow triumph of women gaining power for themselves. “People paying attention to your excellence, I think, has been something, for basketball fans generally, a sight to see,” Obama told them.

The former president took pains to make clear that he’s a genuine follower of the league. He made small remarks to various players about their seasons as he posed for photos. Then Obama spotted Clark. “Oh hey!” he said. “Caitlin! You’re great!” He leaned in closer, to deliver a more personal message, picked up by a hot mic. “Don’t let all this nonsense get you down,” he told her. “I always say one of the things that was luckiest for me was that I didn’t get famous ’til I was, like, 45. So I was an old-ass man. I mean, you’re my daughter’s age. And to have that much burden and, you know, nonsense. So don’t lose that joy. The game’s, like, the game. And you’re a hooper. And you hoop.”

“I try—sometimes,” she said shyly.

“You’re always hooping,” he said. “And you’re on a nice little run right now.”

There was a sweetness in the moment, a subtle teaching. In the nicest way, Obama shored Clark up, but also reminded her that she is a greater player and public figure when she just plays the game, accepts the inevitable bad calls and frustrations, and doesn’t let the web-brewed poisons into her blood. Left unspoken was the fact that no one has been subject to more unfairness than Black women who can’t buy a call from refs, and don’t get their own signature sneaker deals, either. Obama chose not to corner Clark on that point. Instead, he gave her grace. And perhaps because he did so, she will have more grace with her opponents—and they will, with her.

Clark is a peerless young player who can be a bit of a brat when she gets batted around. She’s learning. “Sometimes, I think, people don’t always realize, like, I’m 23 or 24 years old and I’m trying to navigate a lot of different things while trying to play basketball at the same time,” she told the press after meeting Obama. “So, it was cool to hear that from him and I think, honestly, it’s probably a good reminder for all of us to treat people with respect, treat people with grace.”

It was a quietly interesting and complicated encounter, and a heartening reminder of what “presidential” can look like. Clark already knows how to win. But Obama gave her a lesson in how to be winning.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.

President Trump weighs escalation of the war with Iran as criticism of the conflict grows. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss some of the frustration from Republican lawmakers, voters, and conservative media.

Among Republicans in Congress, discontent is growing over “a lack of answers from this administration on what the objective is, what the timeline is, what the ramifications are, and what the end game actually is” in Iran, Leigh Ann Caldwell, the chief Washington correspondent at Puck, said last night. “When members of Congress are asked to fund billions and billions of dollars, when their constituents are the ones being put on the line for this, patience obviously wears quite thin.”

Joining guest moderator Vivian Salama, a staff writer at The Atlantic, to discuss this and more: Caldwell; Adam Harris, a host of Radio Atlantic; Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News; and David Sanger, a White House and national-security correspondent at The New York Times.

Watch the full episode here.

The only thing anyone can reliably tell you about middle age is that it’s in the middle of life. What’s the middle? Well, it’s after the beginning, and before the end.

Okay, we can do a little better than that: Middle age comes after young adulthood, and before what we used to call “old age” but now might more decorously refer to as “older age” or “late life.” But to get more specific, to figure out when precisely middle age begins and ends, is a daunting challenge.

The average life expectancy in the United States is 79. So if you cut that in half, 39.5 is the precise statistical midpoint of the average American life. But that doesn’t reveal much—middle age isn’t just a point in time but a phase of life. How long does that phase last? When does it start? When does it end? How can you tell when you’re in it? These, it turns out, are very fraught questions.

I am 35. Is a 35-year-old middle-aged? If you ask my friends, they’d be quick to say I’m “still young,” but the word still carries a note of reassurance that I find troubling. Is a 66-year-old retiree middle-aged? Maybe, maybe not—but they sure don’t want to be called “old.” Is a 29-year-old middle aged? Surely not, yet The Wall Street Journal ran a story a couple of years ago about 20-somethings who claimed they felt middle-aged.

[Read: When are you really an adult? ]

When pollsters ask the populace about when middle age begins and ends, they get a variety of answers. In one survey, the median response put middle age as lasting from 40 to 60. In another, the average British person said that middle age begins at 35 (hello!) and ends at 58. Meanwhile, 55 percent of Americans think 65 is still middle-aged. And according to that Journal story, 20 percent of people ages 25 to 34 say they feel middle-aged.

If anyone could authoritatively answer the question “When is middle age?” I figured it would be Margie Lachman. She is a psychologist studying midlife at Brandeis University and the author of the recent book Primetime: A New Vision for Midlife; she’s also worked on the massive longitudinal Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study for all of the 30-plus years it’s been running. Yet even she cannot decide on a firm definition for when middle age begins and ends. Her official definition, in her book and her research, is 40 to 60, “plus or minus 10 years.” Even among scholars, the boundaries of middle age are fuzzy.

One reason for that fuzziness, Lachman told me, is that how you think about middle age depends on what age you currently are. The older people are, the later they tend to think middle age starts and ends. According to data Lachman shared from MIDUS, people in their 20s define middle age as starting around 39 or 40 and ending around 53, 54, or 55. Those numbers inch up with each successive decade of life. The oldest group in the study, people in their 70s, say middle age begins around 48 or 49 and ends from 62 to 65.

[Read: When does someone become “old”?]

Ageism is likely to blame for a lot of this. In a youth-obsessed culture, it makes sense that people want to consider themselves young for as long as possible. In Primetime, Lachman writes that she’s found that many people in their early 40s “actively resist the idea that they are middle-­aged,” and many in their late 60s or 70s “insist that they are still middle-aged.” Indeed, research shows that the older someone is, the later they think old age begins, too. And middle age has its own branding problem: “The No. 1 word attached to midlife is crisis,” Chip Conley—the founder of the Modern Elder Academy, an organization that offers workshops for making the most of midlife, and the author of Learning to Love Midlife—told me. (This association persists despite evidence showing the midlife crisis is mostly a myth.)

On top of that, the appearance of aging itself is changing. Celebrities get plastic surgery, Botox, and fillers to retain or restore youthful faces—and are more open about it than they once were—further confounding how we perceive the phases of life. (Saying the 70-year-old Kris Jenner is “old” feels odd when, after her much-publicized facelift, her facial skin is stretched so taut you can scarcely detect a single wrinkle.) Even the faces of ordinary people who don’t get work done are generally aging more slowly, The Cut reported, because overall, people smoke less than they used to and use more sunscreen. Wrinkle-reducing retinol is widely available in creams, gels, and serums at any old drug store. Anti-aging is now such a normal part of beauty routines that even some children are using products to prevent wrinkles they’re nowhere near having.

This isn’t the only factor shifting back our aging goalposts. Many milestones that people once used to define adulthood (marriage, home ownership, having kids) are happening later in life, if they happen at all. Given the association of middle age with responsibility, perhaps people don’t feel middle-aged unless they’re tied down in some way. Indeed, some of the 20-somethings who said they felt middle-aged attributed it to becoming parents or taking on major work responsibilities at a young age.

Also complicating the definition of middle age is the fact that people are living longer. And as they do so, their quality of life in their later years will vary depending on their physical and cognitive limitations. Because American culture has such a negative view of what it means to be “old”—all aches and pains and forgetting where you put the car keys—if someone is aging and feeling good, they may think I can’t possibly be old, because I can do everything I want to do, Lachman said. And if they don’t feel old, they may continue to identify as middle-aged well into their 60s and beyond.

[Read: The puzzling gap between how old you are and how old you think you are]

Increasing longevity is one of the reasons that Conley sees middle age as a very long stage of life. He believes it lasts from 35 to 75, in three stages: “early midlife,” from 35 to 50; the “core of midlife,” from 50 to 60; and “later midlife,” from 60 to 75. Although 75 might seem to be pushing it, given that Americans’ average lifespan is 79, Conley pointed out that “for math reasons,” the longer someone has lived, the longer they are likely to live. That is to say: 79 is an average that takes into account all deaths from people of all ages. And if you make it to 65, you’ve dodged many of the things that might have killed you when you were younger. According to the Social Security Administration, the life expectancy of a 65-year-old American is actually 83 for men and 86 for women. And I haven’t seen anyone try to claim that an 80-something is still middle-aged.

Lachman played along gamely as I fixated on the numbers, but really, that’s not how she likes to define middle age. “Chronological age does not tell you much about anybody, except how long they’ve lived,” she told me. She prefers to think of middle age in terms of the roles people take on in their life and in their community. Being middle-aged, to her, means truly being in the middle—having people both younger and older than you looking to you for help and guidance. That might mean you’re in the sandwich generation: caring for children and starting to support aging parents. Or it might mean you’re a leader in your workplace, mentoring younger colleagues and relied on by older ones. “In midlife, you’re giving more than you’re getting in general,” Lachman said.

This definition of midlife also has ambiguous boundaries, which Lachman readily admits. But despite the vagueness around when middle age actually is, both she and Conley believe it’s a useful term. “Being in the middle of anything, I think, is a really meaningful point,” Lachman said. “It’s a great opportunity to look back and look ahead.”

At this point in my quest to define middle age, I started losing my grip a little. If you want to be precise about it, a life really only has one beginning and one end, and the rest is all middle. So a 2-year-old could be middle-aged. A 90-year-old could be middle-aged. We’re all born middle-aged, and then we die.

Just kidding. Ultimately, middle age might be better understood as a feeling that creeps up on you than as a clear turning point. No one thing brings it on, though parenthood, caregiving, or other responsibilities could fuel it. It’s a time of life that is often both exhausting and fulfilling: when you’ve lived enough life to have learned some lessons, and also have plenty of time ahead of you to make changes. That might be accurate, but it’s still not satisfying. I want the numbers! So I asked Lachman: If you have to choose, when does middle age start and end? “45 to 65,” she said. So there you have it. I’m officially “still young” for 10 more years, if anyone’s asking.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

Over the past two decades, Matt Seaton discovered something about himself: He loves building walls. Seaton started by mending a stone wall at the Vermont home his wife inherited from her parents, and then, he writes, “bit by bit—which is the way with walls—my interest and knowledge deepened until what had begun as recreation morphed into a hobby job, mending other people’s walls.”

Eventually, Seaton’s new passion changed his life: “In what probably struck friends and family as an act of lunacy, I quit my day job as an editor at this magazine and became a part-time waller.”

Not all of our passions turn into part-time jobs, but Seaton’s story is a reminder that sometimes the things that bring us the most joy are the ones we stumble upon. Today’s newsletter explores how to seek out—or just open yourself up to—a unique new hobby.

On Unique Hobbies

The True History of New England’s Stone Walls

By Matt Seaton

Why we love them, and why I build them

Read the article.

Six Underrated Hobbies to Try Out

By Stephanie Bai

Picking up a new pastime is no small feat.

Read the article.

Eight Books for Dabblers

By Sophia Stewart

Casual pursuits can enrich our lives, regardless of whether we’re any good at them.

Read the article.

Still Curious?

• How hobbies infiltrated American life: America has a love affair with “productive leisure,” Julie Beck wrote in 2022.
• How leisure time became work: The rise of the attention economy has accelerated our habit of engaging with our hobbies in a data-driven way, Shirley Li wrote in 2021.

Other Diversions

• Why so much Millennial fiction is boring
• Too scared for sex
• How the American office became inevitable

PS

I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “I moved to Rhinebeck, New York, to a modest condo in July of 2023,” Maria F, 73, writes. “This sunset over the pond directly off of my porch appeared three days after I moved in.  Three years later, I continue to welcome evenings with these ever-changing sunsets, grateful for these moments that remind us to be present.”

I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.

— Isabel

In 2010, the National Park Service installed an outdoor exhibit at the President’s House Site near Independence Hall in Philadelphia, which told the stories not just of George Washington but also of those he’d enslaved. One was Ona Judge, who escaped and evaded Washington’s yearslong effort to recapture her. Their names—Judge, Hercules Posey, Christopher Sheels, Austin, Richmond, Giles, Moll, Paris, and Joe—are still carved into a stone wall in huge letters.

In January, the Trump administration took that exhibit down, and last week, after months of legal wrangling, the NPS installed a new exhibit at the site, one that fundamentally changes the story visitors will find there. Where once the exhibit focused squarely on the individuals Washington enslaved, the new exhibit views Washington’s ties to slavery through the lens of his personal conscience, extensively highlighting his statements opposing slavery. In the sole panel now summarizing Washington’s participation, nearly every paragraph makes some mention of his ostensible antislavery views.

The new exhibit at the President’s House Site offers a profoundly misleading interpretation of Washington’s history with slavery, denying visitors an opportunity to contemplate the irreconcilable tensions between American slavery and American freedom. Rather than focus on the decades he spent actively enslaving other human beings—including while president in Philadelphia—the exhibit now uses Washington’s private statements questioning slavery and his posthumous emancipation of the people he enslaved to diminish the importance of the institution to his life. These revisions distort our history and deprive Americans from encountering history’s full complexity at the site where it happened.

The changes are part of a wider effort by the Trump administration to rewrite and sanitize American history following a March 2025 executive order targeting the Smithsonian and other federal history installations and a corresponding order from the U.S. Department of the Interior two months later. As a result, NPS staff have been ordered to change exhibits, publications, and other materials, particularly historical information that the administration views as insufficiently patriotic or disparaging toward prominent historical figures.

The revisions at the President’s House Site have drawn intense scrutiny, exemplifying both the aims and the limits of the broader effort. Even where the text acknowledges that Washington owed his status and livelihood to slavery and maneuvered to keep people in bondage, the interpretation focuses mostly on his “private doubts” about slavery and his private approval of efforts to gradually abolish it. Most notable, the new exhibit emphasizes the emancipation provisions of Washington’s last will and testament. “In death,” a panel explains, “George Washington committed his most public and personal anti-slavery act.” This is true and important, but it's presented in a way that overshadows Washington's lifetime of enslaving.

The Trump administration is hardly the first to find this selective editing of Washington’s legacy useful. For more than two centuries, highlighting Washington’s antislavery bona fides has functioned as a politically convenient rhetorical tool. Where Americans once invoked this interpretation of Washington to bring an end to slavery, conservatives are now reviving it in a way that denies the institution really mattered at all.

For the entirety of his adult life, George Washington enslaved other human beings. He bought and sold people, exploited their labor to build his substantial wealth, directed their punishment, and pursued those who attempted to escape. Over the last two decades of his life, however, Washington privately voiced his uneasiness, expressing an opposition to separating enslaved families and a wish to see Congress or state legislatures gradually end the institution. In his will, Washington directed that all of the 123 enslaved people he owned outright be emancipated following his and his wife’s deaths. (Martha Washington freed them early, about a year later, at the beginning of 1801; she died in 1802.) That group included a little fewer than half of the more than 300 enslaved at Mount Vernon at the time; the rest were owned by the estate of Martha Washington’s first husband, leaving Washington legally unable to free them.

When Washington died, in December 1799, some Americans immediately began shaping Washington’s legacy in a way that would support the cause of Black freedom. Two weeks after Washington’s death—and just one day after Henry Lee forever memorialized Washington as “first in the hearts of his countrymen”—Richard Allen, a free Black minister and a co-founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, delivered a eulogy. “We, my friends, have peculiar cause to bemoan our loss,” Allen told his congregation of Black Philadelphians. This was not only because of Washington’s singular contributions to the nation. Allen also claimed Washington supported Black freedom. “He whose wisdom the nations revered,” Allen said, “thought we had a right to liberty.”

Allen stood on firm ground. Remarkably, he was among the very first to mention publicly that Washington had freed the people he enslaved. Through this final act, Allen believed, Washington had redeemed himself: “He dared to do his duty, and wipe off the only stain with which man could ever reproach him,” Allen said. ”He ‘let the oppressed go free.’”

[Read: How America gave up on its own story]

As the antislavery movement gained momentum in the decades that followed, abolitionists used this same framing. In 1838, John Quincy Adams relayed Washington’s antislavery legacy to the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society and concluded that “George Washington was thus, in the broadest and most comprehensive sense of the word, an ABOLITIONIST.” Even William Lloyd Garrison—whose abolitionist newspaper The Liberator published blistering denunciations of Washington’s slaveholding—at times saw the rhetorical utility of touting Washington’s actions against slavery. In 1848, Garrison told a packed crowd in Boston’s Faneuil Hall that he had encountered a case of a man who was declared insane because he used his will to free his slaves. Garrison pointed dramatically to the portrait of Washington that flanked the stage and bellowed, “There! There is a man who was insane when he died! There stands George Washington, who by his will emancipated his slaves!”

In 1857, the Washington biographer and social-reform advocate Caroline Kirkland wrote that Washington believed slavery was “an evil so obvious” that the United States would soon abolish it. “On the whole, the testimony of Washington against slavery is clear and explicit enough, and no one can quote him as its apologist,” Kirkland wrote, “although we may regret that he had not time to turn his attention more decidedly and efficiently toward its abolition.”

Other abolitionists balked at this celebration of Washington’s antislavery credentials. In 1853, the abolitionist Parker Pillsbury mocked the reverence some had for Washington’s will. “I have heard a good deal said before of deathbed repentance,” Pillsbury said, “but I never heard it very highly extolled.” Instead, some abolitionists condemned Washington in speeches and newspapers, reminding audiences that he was “a slaveholder to the day of his death.” The abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond, for example, in 1858 even called Washington “a traitor to the cause of freedom.”

Yet for some abolitionists, the potential benefit of this intellectual sleight of hand was well worth it. Their selective invocations of Washington may have obscured his complicity, but some abolitionists truly believed doing so would help bring the horror of American slavery to an end. If George Washington saw fit to free the people he enslaved, the argument went, then what could be more American than ending slavery?

When war finally brought slavery to an end, this distorted view of Washington ceased to be of use as a political emblem. As much of the nation adopted the Lost Cause narrative about slavery following the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction, many white Americans saw no need to discuss Washington’s ties to slavery at all, preferring instead a heroic depiction of Washington, focused on his many contributions to the country, that could unify the fractured nation.

In the century that followed, however, some Americans still insisted on reckoning with Washington’s involvement in slavery. During both the Jim Crow era and the civil-rights movement, Black scholars and activists in particular emphasized Washington’s slaveholding to make clear the deep roots of modern racial injustices. Meanwhile, decades of new scholarship since the mid-20th century have revealed profound insights about the lives of enslaved people and the central role of slavery in American history, and the movement for racial reckoning in 2020 vaulted this knowledge to the front of public consciousness.

Whereas once Washington’s antislavery credentials were wielded to bring slavery to an end, today some conservatives highlight Washington’s ostensible opposition to slavery to deemphasize slavery’s foundational importance in American history. Against a growing insistence that slavery has profoundly shaped American society in ways the country has yet to fully reckon with, they now selectively highlight Washington’s purportedly antislavery views to wave slavery away as a momentary aberration in America’s glorious history of freedom.

The Trump administration articulated this logic clearly in 2021 in the report from the 1776 Commission, convened at the tail end of President Trump’s first term as a conservative rejoinder to The New York Times’ “1619 Project.” “The most common charge levelled against the founders, and hence against our country itself,” the report states, “is that they were hypocrites who didn’t believe their stated principles, and therefore the country they built rests on a lie.” It follows this with a plain assertion—“This charge is untrue”—and argues that it damages civic cohesion.

To counter these claims, the report leans on the antislavery Washington. “George Washington owned slaves,” the report states, “but came to detest the practice, and wished for ‘a plan adopted for the abolition of it.’” It continues: “By the end of his life, he freed all the slaves in his family estate,” ignoring the fact that the emancipation occurred after Washington’s death and applied to fewer than half of those who were enslaved at Mount Vernon. The report wields Washington’s purported opposition to slavery to assert that any study of slavery’s place in American history should focus on efforts to abolish it—a rejoinder of sorts to “The 1619 Project” and the 2020 demonstrations for racial justice, during which more Americans came to recognize the way slavery had fundamentally shaped the nation.

This take on Washington appears elsewhere too. Florida’s revised social-studies curriculum from 2023 includes Washington on a list of figures instrumental in ending slavery, and it ignores his role in perpetuating it. In the 1776 Curriculum, from the Christian, conservative Hillsdale College, the authors offer a similar (if slightly more nuanced) take on the matter.

The Trump administration has entirely ignored Washington’s ties to slavery in other contexts (such as in the fleet of mobile museums traveling around the country this year), but officials seemed to recognize that total erasure wasn’t tenable at the President’s House Site, given the focus of the former exhibit. Instead, the new exhibit dilutes the story of slavery by surrounding it with material that has little to do with the President’s House at all, such as biographies of individual Founders and the ins and outs of various constitutional structures. It frames information about slavery almost exclusively through the lens of antislavery progress.

[Read: Here come Trump’s ‘Freedom Trucks’]

Other panels still offer very brief biographies of the nine people Washington enslaved at the site, which used to be nearly the entirety of the exhibit; it actually includes them twice, seemingly in an effort to cover more space. One panel also describes the successful efforts of Ona Judge and Hercules Posey to escape from slavery. Yet even these panels are peppered with qualifications, for example: twice mentioning that Washington purchased tickets for enslaved people to visit the theater.

Where Washington is discussed directly, it’s mostly his opposition to slavery that comes through. Even Washington’s schemes to undermine Pennsylvania’s gradual-abolition laws—he periodically rotated the people he enslaved out of the state before the law would free them—are countered with some other antislavery action, such as his private statements hoping for abolition and his eventual emancipation of the people he enslaved, without ever interrogating that contradiction.

More broadly, although the statements in the new exhibit are individually factual, they’re put together in a way that’s fundamentally misleading. A few lines in Washington’s private correspondence and his posthumous emancipation orders are given far more weight than a lifetime of owning Black Americans as property—a misplaced emphasis that distorts the history and also robs his later act of emancipation of meaning.

In a statement after the NPS first removed the previous exhibit, the Department of Interior said, “The President has directed federal agencies to review interpretive materials to ensure accuracy, honesty, and alignment with shared national values.” Last week, following the completion of these changes, the department acknowledged “the evils of slavery including its injustices and hypocrisies.” It defended the new exhibit by saying, “These new panels are full of historical context.”

Yet, despite the administration’s ability to parrot the jargon of historians and museum professionals, the politically motivated revisions it has forced across the National Park Service and elsewhere are anathema to standards and ethics of those fields.

These losses are especially acute in Philadelphia. Nearly 175 years ago, Pillsbury, the abolitionist, lamented that Americans heaped praise on Washington while ignoring the enslaved people who made his life and achievements possible. “No glory has ever covered their names; no honor has ever been paid to their memory,” he said. “No monument commemorates their dismal toil.” The President’s House Site exhibit once corrected that imbalance. Not anymore.

Many Americans see this whitewashed, censored version of the nation’s past for what it is. Time and again, a majority of Americans express their desire to engage with a full and accurate American history. In Philadelphia, the Trump administration has had to use the power of the federal government to ensure they won’t get it.

If President Trump has one true skill, it is conjuring up alternate realities and getting his supporters to accept them. The examples are everywhere: dismissing stories he doesn’t like as “fake news” from corrupt media, casting the January 6 rioters as victims, election denial. After he baselessly insisted that there had been rampant mail-in voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, 11 states made mail-voting access more restrictive. His repeated false claims in 2024 that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets led to real threats against the community. Trump builds a world, and by virtue of his power and influence, all of us end up living in it in some way or another.

That era may be coming to a close, in large part because of the way he and his administration have bungled the war in Iran. Trump seems unable to spin this conflict, divert sufficient attention away from it with a new controversy, or end it outright. His social-media posts, which once acted as a de facto assignment editor for the mainstream media, no longer command the same attention or respect. Now, interspersed with AI slop and inexplicable middle-of-the-night reposting binges, Trump’s Truth Social screeds sound more like the fevered ramblings of a radicalized Facebook uncle. For the past five months, he’s been trying to convince the American public (or at least his Truth Social followers) that the war is over, or ending, or a rousing success. His administration is even retroactively changing on the Pentagon’s website the number of American service members who have died in the conflict. But no one seems to be falling for it. His posts don’t have the juice. His alternate universe is no match for the harsh reality of war.

[Read: The war is lost. Now fix what it broke.]

In the Trumpian vision of the world, the U.S. invasion of Iran was not only necessary but also urgent: In February, Trump alleged that Iran was attempting to rebuild its nuclear-weapons program and had continued developing long-range missiles that were threatening U.S. allies and could reach the United States “soon.” But Trump’s claim is dubious, at least according to a March 2025 U.S. intelligence assessment, which noted that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” Experts also cast doubt on the strength of Iran’s missiles: “There is little evidence that Iran could build missiles that reach the United States in the near future,” Emma Sandifer of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation told FactCheck.org in March.

Justifications aside, the attacks, which were not authorized by Congress, were immediately unpopular with Trump’s base, which elected him in part for his isolationist tendencies. (On Election Night 2024, Trump even remarked, “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”) Iran’s predictable retaliation, closing the Strait of Hormuz and drastically cutting off crucial supply routes for oil and other natural resources, subsequently drove up prices for goods around the world—immediately exacerbating the unpopularity of the conflict and shocking the markets. The fallout appeared to take Trump by surprise, and in the early weeks of the war, he used his bully pulpit for damage control: On March 9, with Brent-crude futures spiking to nearly $120 a barrel, he gave an interview to CBS News suggesting that the “war is very complete, pretty much.” Oil futures swiftly plunged to less than $90 a barrel.

Trump used this tactic repeatedly. On March 20, he posted on Truth Social that the U.S. was “close to meeting our objectives” in Iran. Oil futures dropped. On March 23, he signaled that discussions between the U.S. and Iran were productive, leading Brent crude futures to plummet by 13 percent. Each time, Trump offered no real proof of his claims, yet markets responded to his version of the story. An NBC News analysis found 32 examples of the president suggesting that the war was coming to a close. “We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!” Trump posted on March 7, in response to the United Kingdom considering sending military support. In late March, Trump posted that operations were “winding down”; that same day, he rejected a suggestion from Pope Leo that there should be a cease-fire. In early April, he posted that Iran had asked for a cease-fire; later, Iran called his claims “false and baseless.”

Tenuous agreements between the U.S. and Iran have been broken repeatedly. On July 12, the U.S. resumed heavy air strikes on Iran following an Iranian attack on a container ship in the region. As my colleagues Nancy A. Youssef and Jonathan Lemire recently reported, “The Trump administration is back at war. It just doesn’t want to admit it.” The commander in chief has become the boy who cried “Mission accomplished.”

[Nancy A. Youssef and Jonathan Lemire: War by any other name]

As a result, Trump’s posts have become more erratic. On June 23, in response to rising gas prices, Trump posted on Truth Social, in all caps, to nobody in particular, “EVERYONE, KEEP OIL PRICES DOWN. I’M WATCHING! YOU’RE PLAYING RIGHT INTO THE HANDS OF THE ENEMY. DON’T DO IT!” And his posts no longer seem as able to influence the market. A recent report from Axios claimed that bond-market traders have stopped paying strict attention to Trump’s social-media feeds to read the economic tea leaves: “Researchers from JPMorgan show that for the most part, his social media posts are noise, with very little ability to move the market.”

And yet, Trump is attempting to double down. Last week, Truth Social announced that it plans to sell early access to posts from certain accounts (presumably including the president’s) and is considering charging as much as $100,000 a month. The clear implication is that Trump or his close associates will share government news that will move markets, giving paying subscribers a distinct first-mover advantage. Trump currently owns 41 percent of the stock through a family-run trust in Trump Media and Technology Group, the owner of Truth Social. Thus, the decision to charge access is akin to the president’s family profiting off his position as leader of the free world. (Trump Media and Technology Group did not respond to a request for comment.)

Trump is president, so obviously, any statement he makes attracts attention. But simply being president has never been Trump’s superpower. His chief skill, first as a mogul with an uneven history and then as a politician, is molding his image in a way that reflects how he sees himself: as the genius, adored, yet constantly victimized center of the universe. This, of course, is delusional. Yet somehow, he’s managed to make that fantasy at least partially real: He has, after all, been the main, divisive figure in American life for more than a decade.

With Trump, it can feel as if there are no limits—to his shamelessness, his lies, his graft, or his ability to sow chaos, lose interest, and move on to the next outrage. But it’s possible that we’re finally glimpsing the limitations of his ability to control the narrative. For too long, Trump has been the force that made reality feel flimsy, pliable. But in the Iran conflict, he’s met an immovable object. Now reality may just be catching up.

Back in June, at the closing press conference for the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, Donald Trump explained why he had called a halt to hostilities with Iran. Continued bombing would not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and as long as the war went on, commercial ships would stay away while emergency oil supplies dwindled.

“We run out of reserves in about four weeks,” he warned, conjuring up images of shortages, bedlam, surging prices, and a market collapse on the scale of 1929. Trump told the press that he had studied presidents, and “the one president I did not want to be was the late, great Herbert Hoover.”

Fast-forward to late July. The United States has bombed Iran for nearly two weeks, hitting coastal-surveillance sites and weapons-storage facilities as well as bridges, tunnels, rail lines, airports, and electrical infrastructure. Iran has answered with missiles and drones aimed at American bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, and Qatar, as well as strikes on oil installations and a desalination plant, and repeated attacks on commercial shipping in and around the strait. Iran also claims to have struck Amazon’s cloud-computing infrastructure in Bahrain, but this has not been independently verified.

[Andrew Exum: The war is lost. Now fix what it broke.]

Trump resumed the war despite having already explained why military force could not achieve its most pressing objective. He has not resolved this tension. It may be irresoluble. In the meantime, he is betting that Tehran will buckle before economic pressure forces him to do the same.  

To understand where we are, consider how the cease-fire collapsed. Each party believed that it had won the war and that the other should accede to its interpretation of the agreement on the strait. Article 5 of the memorandum of understanding stated that Iran “will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge, for 60 days only, from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman and vice versa.” The Trump administration took this to mean that Iran was obligated to open the strait without tolls for 60 days. But Tehran read it as permission to manage and control access through the waterway. Consequently, Iran sought to funnel ships through corridors it approved, and attacked or threatened vessels that used other routes.

In doing so, Tehran made a serious error in judgment. If it had laid low, it could have reaped the benefits of economic concessions for 60 days and then gradually introduced a toll. Instead, Trump felt compelled to respond, and the agreement broke down. Amos Hochstein, a senior adviser for energy and investment under President Biden, told me that Iran had thought it could boil the proverbial American frog, but it turned the temperature up too high too fast, and the frog got angry.

Trump is clearly frustrated. Further escalation is likely. He has mused about striking Pickaxe Mountain and is reportedly considering limited ground operations—for example, seizing Kharg Island, which is a hub for Iran’s oil exports. The Wall Street Journal reported that the United States is sending more forces, medics, and weaponry to the Middle East to give Trump additional military options. But such options were ruled out as implausible or reckless during the war, and their viability has not improved with time.  

If Trump continues with limited strikes, he will face the very problems that he laid out in France last month. Hochstein posted on X that the current escalation in the Strait of Hormuz could be more economically dangerous than the previous one, because Russia, the U.S., and China can no longer buffer world markets as they did: Russia has reduced its diesel exports, U.S. crude and strategic reserves are unusually low, and China is cutting its oil consumption less deeply than before. In his view, markets are already signaling the inflationary risk, leaving Trump with a narrowing window to make a deal before another disruption produces a sharper fuel-price and financial shock, possibly as soon as mid- to late September.

Iran seems to want to keep the conflict at a simmer. It is striking back against the United States but has avoided direct attacks that would bring Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, or Israel fully into the war, even as it applies pressure indirectly, most dramatically through the Houthis’ campaign against Saudi shipping in the Red Sea. Reuters reported that Iran had previously asked the Houthis to prepare to close the Red Sea route if the United States struck Iranian power infrastructure.  

Meanwhile, Trump seems to be actively working to keep the Gulf states on board as he continues the war. Two weeks ago, his administration significantly loosened restrictions on the export of advanced semiconductor chips to the UAE, something Abu Dhabi has been wanting for years. Then, on Wednesday, he announced that he had approved a civil nuclear-enrichment deal with Saudi Arabia. The Biden administration, in which I served, negotiated a similar arrangement with Riyadh as part of a broader deal to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. That deal, which stalled after October 7, would have provided for U.S. enrichment inside Saudi Arabia rather than giving it the ability to autonomously enrich its own uranium. The technical details of the Trump deal are unknown.

[Graeme Wood: Does Iran have a plan?]

No sooner was the Saudi agreement announced than Israeli former officials and experts criticized it, on the grounds that it would fuel regional proliferation and did not require Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel. On Thursday morning, Trump posted that the deal would not be approved without normalization—which was puzzling, given that the accord had been signed the day before. Hours later, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said that if the Saudis don’t join the Abraham Accords, “the deal is off,” which likely means that the administration will not submit it to Congress for review, as is required by law.

Washington is trying to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, offer new economic and technological commitments to Gulf states, protect two maritime choke points, and fight an open-ended air war, all while the energy reserves and political patience needed to sustain those projects are running down.

Trump may inflict more pain on Iran, but this is unlikely to compel Tehran to abandon its attempt to control the Strait of Hormuz. Perhaps Iran will agree to put its ambitions on hold for 60 days in the hope that the previous agreement can be revived. But if the two sides remain gridlocked, Trump will have to decide whether to pay the economic price for continuing a low-intensity war indefinitely; escalate, with all of the risks that entails; or walk away.

Since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took office, more than a year ago, I’ve been trying to understand the MAHA movement from the inside. I’ve sat in on MAHA Institute roundtables, roamed the conference halls of anti-vaccine gatherings, and talked with grassroots supporters across the country. They tell me their concerns about toxic chemicals and ultra-processed foods and the worrying rise in childhood chronic conditions. But when I share what I’m hearing with my colleagues in medicine and public health, many chide that engaging with MAHA is completely pointless. For them, the whole movement is nothing more than a subversive anti-vaccine, anti-science syndicate.

That assumption is wrong. MAHA is an opportunity, and one the public-health sector—academics, doctors, and leaders of advocacy groups—cannot afford to squander. Yes, MAHA’s anti-vax wing is very loud and litigious. But for many in the MAHA movement, their top issues lie elsewhere: environmental pollutants, the cost of health care, and a bone-deep conviction that health institutions have been captured by the industries they’re supposed to regulate. These are not fringe, unscientific concerns. They are concerns that millions of Americans have been angry about for decades, long before the MAHA label even existed. And they are concerns that many in public health share—if only they could see beyond that label, and make common cause.

MAHA’s greatest achievement to date is not policy but politics. It has shown that people are hungry for a movement that fights for their health visibly, loudly, and in plain language.

That’s why a movement just two years old draws support from four in 10 Americans, according to polling from KFF. MAHA supporters cite the cost of health care as their top priority, followed by restricting chemical additives in food and limiting corporate influence in food policy. At the same time, nearly eight in 10 MAHA supporters consider long-established vaccines such as those for measles, mumps, rubella, and polio safe, and only 4 percent cite vaccines as their reason for supporting the movement. That disconnect alone shows that MAHA is not synonymous with a solely anti-vaccine constituency. It represents and reflects something far larger.

[Tom Bartlett: The Trump administration casts out the ‘soul’ of MAHA]

When I sat down with Nancy Fuller, a lifelong Democrat and, more recently, a MAHA supporter, at a Christian coffeehouse in rural Ohio, she told me that what she likes about the movement is its willingness to try. Ever since her son was diagnosed with autism, decades ago, she has wondered whether environmental exposures or maybe vaccines were to blame, and she has spent years watching health institutions dismiss parents like her as ignorant or uninformed. In her view, public health steps up to the plate only when it already knows the outcome. Whether the issue is autism, AI, or something else, MAHA swings at anything and everything. That means more misses—and occasional hits—on issues everyone else had decided were too complicated, too compromised, or too politically inconvenient to touch. MAHA has never been shy about naming problems loudly and promising to take them on, even—and sometimes especially—when that means going after powerful corporations and other major institutions that others had learned to work around.

This is not a model public health should replicate wholesale. Many of MAHA’s swings have been genuinely reckless—pushing unproven and often dangerous wellness hacks, fabricating falsehoods about vaccine ingredients, and making claims that run counter to all credible evidence. But public health has been too cautious, setting the bar for evidence too high. On ultra-processed foods, environmental toxins, and drug prices, public health’s problem was rarely insufficient data. It was insufficient nerve.

Public health was not always so timid. The field was born as a potent political force, arguing for safer workplaces, cleaner water, better housing. Somewhere along the way, it shrank into the background, with many of its leaders preferring to see themselves as a technical and technocratic enterprise that operates outside the fray. The problem with invisible shields is that nobody knows they’re there. When the field was forced out front, as it was during the coronavirus pandemic, many Americans experienced public health not as a shield, but as a scold—speaking in acronyms and waving data-filled reports. In COVID-19’s shadow, trust in essential health agencies including the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration has dropped to all-time lows. Fewer than half of Americans now have confidence in the CDC to carry out its core responsibilities, a nearly 40 percent drop from the start of the pandemic.

Now essentially out of power, the public-health community has been justifiably alarmed by what’s happened over the past year. The administration has prioritized politics over sound public-health policy in determining what’s approved by the FDA or what research is funded by the NIH. Severe staffing cuts at the CDC have weakened the response to health threats such as screwworm and Ebola. Many key leadership posts at the agency remain empty—the CDC has had a confirmed director for only 29 days of this administration. On immunizations, RFK Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services altered the childhood-vaccine schedule in ways that reflect ideology, not epidemiology. It also overhauled the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the expert body that has guided U.S. vaccine policy for decades. In response, the American Academy of Pediatrics distanced itself from the CDC and positioned itself as an independent, evidence-based guide for childhood vaccinations. More than two dozen states have already broken rank with the CDC’s recommendations. The result is a fracturing of vaccine guidance, a reflection of the fact that Americans no longer trust a single institutional voice on vaccines.

Public health has had some success at stopping the damage. In March, a federal judge sided with the AAP in its case against HHS, blocking the new vaccine schedule and ruling the ACIP overhaul a violation of proper scientific procedure. (HHS has appealed the ruling.) In effect, this overturned most federal actions on vaccines of the past year. Many in public health have treated that win as vindication. But court cases cannot substitute for winning in the court of public opinion.

One step to winning back the public’s trust would be a serious reassessment of the field’s financial relationships. The AAP’s own donor page lists at least 10 pharmaceutical companies as supporters, including six that manufacture vaccines the AAP recommends. And the six health organizations that sued HHS collectively received millions of dollars in donations from the pharmaceutical industry. Each organization maintains that these gifts are used to fund education or advocacy programming, not to influence policy recommendations or approvals.

[Nicholas Florko and Tom Bartlett: MAHA swing voters are an illusion]

In a low-trust environment, however, the appearance of a conflict is still bad, and RFK Jr. has made this entanglement the centerpiece of his critique. Public health’s refusal to acknowledge it has handed him an argument he doesn’t deserve to keep winning. If these societies can accept money from anyone, it’s worth asking why the donor pages are dominated by the very companies whose products they evaluate and recommend. If public health wants to save vaccine infrastructure in this country, it has to end these entanglements.

The distrust that fuels MAHA is far older than the movement, and it will not evaporate in three years. The conditions that allowed MAHA to flourish—the trust deficit, the corporate entanglements, the gap between research and community, the invisibility of public health in people’s daily lives—have been festering for decades.

Public health must recognize there is opportunity in entropy. The path forward for the field is simple, but requires public health to do something it has been reluctant to do: Show up. Visibly. Politically, but not in a partisan way. There are fights that are strongly supported by both sides, including air quality in neighborhoods sharing zip codes with industrial facilities, lead and toxins in the water kids are drinking, and the poor quality of the food Americans eat and its clear negative impact on our health. These are issues where public health can stand next to communities, name what is harming them, and fight like it means something. What MAHA understands—imperfectly and sometimes dishonestly—is that people do trust institutions, but not because those institutions have good data. They trust them because they feel like those institutions are on their side.