The debate about how to regulate AI is unfolding as American tech companies race one another—and labs in other countries—to create ever more powerful models. Advocates of a laissez-faire approach to this technology believe that America should avoid overly restrictive regulations, because unlocking AI’s potential before other nations do could make this country safer and wealthier for generations. Their detractors believe that because AI models pose growing and possibly even existential threats to humans, the state should review them prior to release and limit early access so that good actors can get ahead of bad actors.

The Trump administration has been on both sides of the debate. Last summer, it made the case for accelerating innovation and minimizing “onerous” AI regulation. This summer, it argued in a June executive order that national-security concerns justify early government access to new models. The administration also asserted the prerogative to pressure companies to take models offline and restrict access to users it vets and approves. And this came after a standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon that had Silicon Valley lawyers brushing up on the Defense Production Act. The administration has not shared any consistent rules or processes to determine why a given model gets restricted, or who gets access to it. This informal approach makes oversight almost impossible.

Perhaps White House actions so far have all been grounded in earnest and sensible national-security concerns. Even if that is true, the separation of powers at the heart of the American system dictates that Congress should establish laws on these matters rather than deferring to assertions of executive power. And beyond the danger of concentrating power, an ad hoc approach from the White House risks cronyism. AI vendors could be pressured to alter models to advance a president’s ideological or political goals. For corporations that use AI, the ability to protect against cyberattacks, and to innovate as fast as rivals, depends on access to new models. These companies will face perverse incentives to stay in the good graces of the president (who could easily help friends and punish enemies) or to cultivate the favor of key executive-branch officials. And because there is no transparency around the government’s AI decisions, or fixed standards for making them, corruption could be hard to spot.

Members of Congress have introduced various bills to standardize or enforce AI regulation in recent months, but none have gained major traction thus far. Last week, Representatives Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran introduced bipartisan legislation that would require AI companies to maintain the ability to shut down technology that could cause “catastrophic harm.” The bill was partly a response to the news that some of OpenAI’s most advanced models had broken out of internal systems and hacked into another tech firm’s databases.

AI’s rogue capabilities are only becoming clearer: “The speed, scale, and sophistication of AI hacks mean that everything is vulnerable—tech companies, hospitals, banks, electrical grids, the military,” my colleague Matteo Wong wrote last week. A majority of elected officials‚ including the president, seems to agree on the need for some guardrails. But congressional action is not keeping pace.

Dean W. Ball, who has held AI advisory posts at the White House and National Science Foundation and was recently appointed the head of strategic futures at OpenAI, explained the dangers of presidential control over AI restrictions in a recent blog post: The risks of bad AI outcomes are much greater, he argues, if the most advanced models are restricted to groups, including the federal government, that already wield unusual power. “You should not expect the most powerful people in the world using the most powerful technology ever conceived in a way that is inscrutable to the public to turn out well, and you should see that dynamic as fundamentally inconsistent with a democratic republic,” he wrote.

By not taking any concrete action, congressional leadership is acquiescing to the Trump administration’s decision to wield unilateral power of just the sort the Framers sought to avoid. Although it’s become commonplace for recent Congresses to shirk their core duties, the potentially history-altering power of AI could make this its most shortsighted abdication of responsibility yet.

Potential alternatives to the status quo abound. Ball has proposed “a private body” not tied to the government’s “changing political valence and foreign policies” that would “audit the frontier labs at least to test their adherence to their own safety plans.” Demis Hassabis, a Google DeepMind co-founder and Nobel laureate, recently proposed similar multinational standards for AI, an idea for which several tech titans expressed public support. Others have suggested a public regulator that vets models before release and monitors them once they are in the world, or a similar process carried out by independent researchers. OpenAI itself has argued in a statement on safety that, eventually, we’ll likely need an international regulatory body, like the International Atomic Energy Agency, that can “inspect systems, require audits, test for compliance with safety standards, place restrictions on degrees of deployment and levels of security, etc.” Mark Zuckerberg has argued that open-source AI would be safest; by avoiding the concentration of power among certain groups, he posits, “larger actors can check the power of smaller bad actors.” (His perhaps-too-cynical critics argue that only someone losing the AI race would take this position.)

Reasonable and highly informed people disagree about the best regulatory solution. But all should at least agree that whatever limits are placed on AI should be dictated by the rule of law, not the whims of the sitting president. To channel James Madison, sound AI governance is not a matter just of enabling the state to control new models but obliging it to control itself. Given that AI may prove the most powerful technology ever created, Congress should urgently assert regulatory power before any president has a chance to abuse it.

Whose side are you on? You have to choose—Alex or Alix—even though you don’t know what the fight is about. Even if you don’t even know who these women are.

If the words “What is up, daddy gang?” mean nothing to you, a brief primer: Alex Cooper is the host of the podcast Call Her Daddy; Alix Earle is a TikToker and the founder of a skin-care line. They may be the two most talked-about women on the internet right now, and they’re in an argument, and no one knows why. That has offered people the fun opportunity to compare two women and pick a favorite without having to consider any relevant facts. But watching this admittedly absurd conflict play out provides something even more interesting than that: a view into exactly how people react to female ambition. Only a few years ago, in the girlboss era, women were encouraged to openly seek power. Now a major segment of the internet seems to think that female hustle is embarrassing, if not offensive.

Cooper is six years older than Earle, but the two women with long, blond hair look so similar that many people get them confused. In 2023, Cooper started a podcast network, Unwell, and one of her first talent grabs was Earle, her then-friend and protégé, who was going to start her own podcast, called Hot Mess. Eighteen months later, Earle was out, and people started speculating about what had gone wrong. In April, Cooper posted a video to her TikTok: “Alix Earle, hey girl, the passive aggressive reposts and the likes and the commenting on things—I gotta call you out here. You’re gonna need to get specific and just say what you’ve got to say about me. There’s no NDA. No one is stopping you. Stop hiding behind other people and just say it yourself. What’s the beef?”

Earle promptly commented, “Okay on it!!”

Months later, we still have no clue what happened—Saturday Night Live even spoofed the exchange in a “Weekend Update” sketch in which the women talk utter nonsense at each other. But one thing is clear: The internet is Team Earle, and it’s all because of the women’s differing approaches to fame and success.

Cooper has been an unapologetic girlboss from the beginning. She got her start at Barstool Sports in 2018 and climbed the podcast ranks to sign a $60 million deal with Spotify and then a $125 million deal with SiriusXM, making her the highest-earning female podcaster by far. She has been described as “this generation’s Oprah Winfrey,” in part because she is blunt and open about her drive: “I can walk into any single room in business, and I can get the deal done,” she told Forbes. Cooper also speaks regularly about reproductive rights and abortion access, and in 2024, she had Kamala Harris on her podcast.

Earle, meanwhile, treats her success as a happy accident. She describes herself as a “hot mess” and acts like the girl’s girl next door. “I don’t get very political online and that’s my choice,” she told Time for its recent issue devoted to the world’s top-100 “creators”; Earle was on the cover. “A lot of my reasoning for that is when I’ve been younger I think I’ve gone online and spoken before I actually knew what I was speaking about, and I think it’s really important for me to be educated on what I’m speaking on.” She makes $450,000 for each sponsored Instagram story she posts, and her skin-care company sold $1 million worth of products within its first five minutes.

“All the girlies love Alix Earle,” Dave Portnoy, Cooper’s old boss and the founder of Barstool Sports, said in a TikTok video summarizing the dispute. “She’s a girly girl. They love her. Alex Cooper’s this ruthless businesswoman.”

That does seem to be an accurate synopsis of how many people see Cooper. “I think she is a mean girl and she embraces being a mean girl,” the internet personality Brianna “Chickenfry” LaPaglia said on her podcast.

“Alex-with-an-e Cooper took Alix-with-an-i Earle under her wing,” one TikTok creator said. “Alix-with-an-i Earle’s doing better in all aspects now. And Alex-with-an-e  Cooper feels threatened and don’t like that.” Another said that Cooper has “had her time when we were way younger. The new generation is taking over and Alix Earle’s at the head of it.” Young people, she said, aren’t interested in yet another interview of “a middle-aged woman who went through a traumatic experience.” They want to “hear about what Alix Earle was partying on at Coachella.”

Team Cooper exists, but its numbers are more limited: “I’m Team Alex Cooper. She is a self-made businesswoman,” oneTikTok user said. “And Alix Earle gives me MAGA vibes.”

[Amanda Mull: The girlboss has left the building]

For a moment, a decade ago, women could be praised for being cutthroat in pursuit of success. In 2013, Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In. Sophia Amoruso, the then-CEO of the fast-fashion brand Nasty Gal, published the business memoir #Girlboss in 2014. The girlboss’s days were already numbered by the time Taylor Swift released the feminist anthem “The Man”: “If I was a man, then I’d be the man.” (Admittedly, I have played this song before every job interview I have ever had.) It was an era of She believed she could, so she did tote bags, Boss Babe mugs, and “sheroes” in pink power suits, and in hindsight, it was deeply embarrassing.

The girlboss era took a few blows—the big one being Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016—and was ultimately brought down by reality. The promise that women could work harder and harder and eventually have it all proved to be a lie. The fact that Sandberg was a successful woman didn’t make anyone feel better about the destruction her company had wrought on American democracy and society. When the coronavirus pandemic left many women out of work, they felt even more cynical about the redemptive possibilities of corporate power. Even Swift changed her tune: In her 2022 confessional song “Sweet Nothing,” she complains about the exhausting “voices that implore, ‘You should be doing more,’” and admits, “I’m just too soft for all of it.”

But what’s come to replace the girlboss is far from encouraging. There’s a sense among Gen Z that women can be rich and successful, but they can’t be seen trying that hard. They must pretend that their achievements are a pleasant by-product of following their dreams and doing what they love. They should be an Earle, and not a Cooper.

Caro Claire Burke is a co-host of the podcast Diabolical Lies and the author of the best-selling novel Yesteryear, about a tradwife influencer who wakes up one day in the 1850s. She’s been following the feud carefully. Earle, Burke told me, is “really, really savvy.” Not long ago, influencers were expected to take a stand on politics, but “that period is over, and I think Alix Earle understands that.” Gen Zers “don’t fall onto political lines the way that I think we’re used to.”

The Earles of the world likely watched cultural influencers before them take hard-line political stances to gain audience support, only to be forced to walk back their statements when the climate had shifted. “As soon as you start to stand for things, you will be held to a totally different standard than if you just kind of are a canvas on which people can project a kind of bland positivity,” Burke said. Earle is playing the girl everyone feels is on their side, in a time of fatigue with hollow gestures of political support.

But people’s sympathy for the aw-shucks act does tend to wear out. “We expect them to be kind of doe-eyed, like, Oh, I just fell into this TikTok success; I just fell into this Grammy nomination, and then once they do that a few times, people get sick of it,” Burke said. “The cycle is so consistent that after you play that game for a while, then you can step out and very carefully say, No, I'm in a little bit more control than I’ve led on.” Burke pointed out that Cooper is about eight years ahead of Earle, career-wise, so maybe Earle will age out of the relatable, grateful, vapid-girlie role soon enough. In the Time interview, Earle admitted, perhaps for the first time, that she is in fact working hard. She said that she was operating in “grind mode” and that she’d been “involved in every single detail” of her skin-care brand.

[Helen Lewis: What going on ‘Call Her Daddy’ did for Kamala Harris]

Obviously, there’s a difference between being an influencer and a CEO—even for Alix Earle. It sounds really nice to go to bed one day as a normal 20-something and wake up the next a globally renowned internet tycoon who still gets to live a feminine “soft life” because she’s paid to apply lipstick. In 2023, 57 percent of Gen Zers said they would like to be influencers. Older generations had different role models: the rom-com journalist of the early 2000s, the bossy business executive of the 2010s. Movies such as How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days idealized the life of a 20-something columnist in a way that made 7-year-old me say, “I want that job.” Influencers like Earle romanticize the life of a 20-something woman influencer in a way that makes a 28-year-old me say, “Wait, never mind, I want that life.” Although posting your day-to-day life in a way that’s visually appealing is definitely a form of work, the influencer’s goal is to sell a fantasy packaged as a possibility. It’s specifically not to glamorize the grind.

All of this will soon, of course, be forgotten. “Our attention span and our memory for how we feel about women is that of a goldfish,” Burke said. One day we hate them; six months later, they might be our “favorite celebrity,” she said. Earle told Time that she will address the drama and finally say what she’s got to say about Cooper in the fall, when her Netflix reality show, Earle Meets World, goes on the air.

But by then, everything will be different for Cooper too. She’s pregnant, and the baby is due later this year. Cooper, Burke said, can “flip this around.” She might still be a ruthless businesswoman, but she’ll also be a doting young mother. As many an influencer has learned, that identity bestows the transcendental rewards of unconditional love—and plenty of new branding opportunities. Maybe people will love the new iteration of Cooper. Six months later, maybe they’ll hate her again, for the old reasons, or for yet-to-be-invented ones. That’s life as a woman on the internet.

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When Anthony Fauci arrives on Capitol Hill tomorrow to testify before Congress, he will be trailed by a security detail he’s paying for himself. Fauci has been testifying before the nation’s elected officials for roughly four decades now, since his days at the forefront of early AIDS research. In years past, he would have prepped by consulting colleagues and poring over data—he would have been there, as he might say, to speak for science. Now he’s under a subpoena from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and has been conferring with his lawyers on how best to navigate a grilling about his own actions—and what seems to be an effort to catch him in a lie, one that isn’t covered by the blanket presidential pardon he received from Joe Biden. Once famed for being America’s consummate nonpartisan scientist, Fauci is now a far more polarizing kind of public figure: beloved and reviled for what he’s said to represent; targeted by threats to end his life. The more he talks, the more he stands to lose.

This is not the professional coda that Fauci’s half century in government once seemed to be heading toward. For decades, he has been one of the nation’s best-known and most-respected scientists. In the late 1960s, Fauci helped lead a team at the National Institutes of Health that repurposed cancer therapies as cures for several once-fatal rheumatological conditions. His later partnerships with AIDS activists and his push to accelerate experimental-drug trials for HIV helped transform the infection into a survivable condition. He went on to serve as a chief architect of PEPFAR, a global HIV-prevention-and-care program that has prevented an estimated 25 million deaths since 2003. And over the course of his nearly 40 years as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he turned one of the NIH’s quietest branches into a $6 billion research juggernaut. Fauci has “saved more lives, created more amazing infrastructures for developing research opportunities, cured more people, provided health care to more people both in the United States and abroad, probably, than any single scientist in his lifetime,” Larry Corey, an infectious-disease expert at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, told me.

His achievements speak to his scientific credentials, but also to his ambition and savvy. Fauci was a master of the system: He knew how to acquire and maintain scientific power; he had the ear of both academics and politicians. He eagerly courted attention, while maintaining that he was “completely nonpolitical,” to the point that even his close colleagues at NIAID had no idea how he voted in elections. “Congress really saw him as a straight shooter,” Judith Feinberg, an infectious-disease researcher who worked at NIAID early in her career, told me, without “a particular political axe to grind.” Fauci was that rare bureaucrat who could be given a Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush and then be praised as a “once-in-a-century public health leader” by Barack Obama.

But ever since President Trump retook office in 2025, his administration has engaged in a systematic effort to obliterate Fauci’s legacy. One of Trump’s first actions in office—just days after Biden issued his pardon—was to strip away Fauci’s government-funded security detail. Fauci’s image was cut out from a mural on the NIH campus around the same time. By the end of spring, the administration had rerouted government webpages once dedicated to information on COVID resources to a new site, alleging that Fauci had tried to hide the “true origins” of COVID. Trump officials went on to largely dismantle PEPFAR, imperiling many of the 20 million people the program has supplied with lifesaving therapies. They ousted most of NIAID’s long-standing leadership, including several officials who served under Fauci for years, as well as Jeanne Marrazzo, the director who succeeded him; they forced out Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, once a bioethicist at the NIH, and arrested David Morens, one of Fauci’s longtime advisers. (Morens has pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiring to hide and destroy government records.) “Anything that he had his name on, or that was under his accomplishments, is being destroyed,” Judith Currier, an infectious-disease expert at UCLA, told me. (The White House and the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment.)

The attacks haven’t let up. In recent days, Rand Paul, now the chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has released troves of documents related to Fauci; among them are more than 1,500 pages from Fauci’s private diary. In one set of entries, which runs from the end of 2019 through his retirement from government at the end of 2022, Fauci meticulously chronicled his growing fame. “Truly unbelievable,” he wrote in May of 2020. “People naming their dogs after me. Sally Quinn saying that I was the erotic lead male in a book she wrote in 1994.”

Fauci has observed this campaign of vengeance and humiliation mostly without public comment—marking one of the quietest stretches of his career to date. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.) Tomorrow, though, Paul is forcing him to talk. At the age of 85, Fauci will be dragged onto the Senate floor to defend his reputation, but something bigger will be contested too: not what Fauci did during his years in government but how he did it—the way he wielded his nonpartisanship to gain resources for his institute and stay in the good graces of powerful people. That approach was once routine, and Fauci perhaps its most skilled practitioner. Now its future is in doubt.

For all of Fauci’s fame and clout, he was not necessarily the most obvious choice, in early 2020, to be the public face of the United States’ response to COVID. In title alone, the CDC director, then Robert Redfield, would have been a far more obvious choice, Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association, told me. But the Trump administration instead put Fauci onstage.

Through the early months of the pandemic, as people scrubbed down their groceries and watched news clips of bodies being piled into refrigerated trucks, Fauci’s calm, science-focused statements were a stabilizing force. Eventually some came to regard him with a singular reverence—as if public health were a new religion, and Fauci its living idol. His likeness appeared on T-shirts, socks, and buttercream-frosted donuts; there were Fauci bobbleheads and face-masked Fauci action figures; people put up yard signs declaring In Fauci we trust. On votive candles dedicated to “Saint Fauci,” artists ringed his gray hair with a golden halo. At times, Fauci appeared to embrace his status as expertise personified. “A lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science,” he told MSNBC in 2021.

[Anthony Fauci: What I saw inside the government’s response to COVID]

But his fame quickly began to cut both ways. If some Americans (especially establishment-minded Democrats) designated him the heroic embodiment of public health, others (including the MAGA and proto-MAHA crowds) quickly cast him as its lead villain: a power-drunk official who overhyped the benefits of masking, tanked the economy, annihilated small businesses, and pointlessly disrupted learning for millions of children. For the first time, Fauci was openly and repeatedly clashing with a president, too. He masked in public when Trump would not, and he contradicted Trump’s wild claims about injecting bleach and taking hydroxychloroquine. His strategy of aligning himself with the public-health consensus, which had once endeared him to politicians, now made him appear to be a partisan opponent. In the early months of COVID, Fauci’s staff at NIAID began to flag the most violent emails in his inbox for a security team. One man said that Fauci and his family would be “dragged into the street, beaten to death, and set on fire.” (That man was convicted of threatening a federal official and sentenced to more than three years in federal prison.) By the end of 2020, he was traveling with bodyguards.

Certainly, Fauci made mistakes. Early on, for instance, he advised against the widespread use of masks amid a shortage of them and then reversed that position. “I don’t think the communication around that was particularly good,” Emily Erbelding, a former director of NIAID’s Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases who was ousted from her role last year, told me. “It was just No masks, and then all of a sudden Everybody’s wearing masks, and you must wear a mask.” But Fauci was also asked to weigh in on seemingly every pandemic policy, including many far outside his purview, and he was doing so as everyone’s understanding of the virus was evolving rapidly and in real time. When Fauci said that sending kids back to school without a vaccine could be risky, and that opening schools in areas experiencing intense viral transmission would not be prudent, many people took that to mean Fauci said to keep all kids home, indefinitely. (School closures were ultimately up to individual states and districts, and decisions about them were complicated by demands from teachers’ unions.)

If Fauci was the patron saint of all that was good about public health, he was also demonized for all of its failings. By the fall of 2020, the apolitical persona that Fauci had cultivated over nearly half a century had started to come apart.

Fauci has described the principles that drive him—public service, integrity, clarity of thought and speech—as the yield of his Jesuit schooling. He came to understand that, as a doctor working at the NIH, he could aid not just individual patients or a single hospital, but potentially entire nations that stood to benefit from cutting-edge research. And despite repeated offers to be nominated for NIH director, he chose to remain at NIAID—in part to remain in proximity to the HIV/AIDS research that he felt closest to, his colleagues told me, but also because he didn’t want the baggage that came with being a political appointee. He preferred to maintain unchallenged influence, they said, over almost his entire field.

That penchant for control was coupled with a sizable ego. I spoke with 15 of Fauci’s friends and former colleagues, and they described him as someone who adored the attention that came with being a go-to health expert for journalists and presidents alike. “He certainly embraced that role—sometimes, I thought, a little too much,” Hugh Auchincloss, Fauci’s former deputy director at NIAID who retired in 2024, told me. The pandemic diary entries fit that assessment: The phrase prolonged standing ovation appears seven times throughout; his admirers are repeatedly described as being brought to tears by his presence. “As soon as people recognized me there was a wave of applause and squealing and screaming and clapping and thanking me with multiple people coming and asking for selfies,” he wrote in May of 2021. “It was a little bit embarrassing, but it was just a manifestation of how people need a symbol of integrity and truth.”

[Read: America is thirsty for Anthony Fauci]

Many people told me that Fauci could be a challenging supervisor. He was a chronic workaholic who expected the same of his top officials. In his institute, everyone knew that if you were early to a meeting with Fauci, you were on time; if you were on time, you were late; if you were late, you were in serious trouble. “He has a very Italian temper, and he’s famous for losing it,” especially at people who pretended to understand what they did not, Judith Feinberg told me. To get on Fauci’s good side was to earn his confidence, his respect, and the benefits of his network of resources; to land on his bad side was to be carved into shreds inside his office, the worst of his rampages audible through the closed door.

Fauci could inspire others’ fury, too, even well before the pandemic. During the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, activists from the gay community lambasted him and his institute for the plodding pace of research on the virus. In 1988, the playwright and activist Larry Kramer wrote an open letter describing Fauci as a murderer and a “fucking son of a bitch of a dumb idiot”; two years later, the group ACT UP surged onto the NIH campus to burn Fauci in effigy, carrying a casket that read Fuck you, Fauci. (He later invited those same activists to weigh in on the state of AIDS research, eventually converting them into allies.)

His biggest adversaries now, though, are not representatives of a marginalized group that many Americans once condemned, but some of the country’s most influential figures in media and politics. Joe Rogan has described him as a “monster”; Elon Musk has said he was a “freaking demon.” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. published a 500-page book called The Real Anthony Fauci, which accuses him of having organized a “historic coup d’état against Western democracy” and seized a “power enjoyed by few rulers and no doctor in history.” (Meanwhile, the book lionizes people who promote AIDS denialism and anti-vaccine views.) Trump has referred to Fauci as a “disaster” and an idiot “who got it wrong.”

Fauci’s most extreme critics don’t just contend that he endorsed wrongheaded pandemic-era mitigations; they allege that he played a role in starting the pandemic—that under his direction, NIAID knowingly funded dangerous research that boosted coronaviruses’ ability to infect and kill humans. Fauci “knows a lot more than he’s told so far,” Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist who chaired The Lancet’s COVID commission and has been publicly critical of Fauci, told me. (Sachs has argued that the coronavirus may have originated from U.S.-funded research, and that Fauci knew this very early on and tried to hide that fact.)

The consensus view among virologists is that the virus that causes COVID likely spilled into humans from a wild animal—a known and common cause of new epidemics. Several agencies within the U.S intelligence community agree, but a few others have come to the opposite conclusion. In any case, some senior leaders in the Trump administration, as well as members of the GOP majorities in Congress, feel certain that the pathogen first emerged from a Chinese laboratory. To them, Fauci is a prime culprit in this story: As they see it, he concealed evidence linking NIAID to the Chinese facility where that research occurred. Rand Paul, in particular, seems bent on getting Fauci prosecuted for allegedly bribing and coercing intelligence officials to aid in his cover-up. “He has not really gotten his just deserts,” Paul recently told Fox News. “There needs to be repercussions.” (Paul’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

[Read: Lab-leak payback has begun]

Fauci, for his part, has vehemently denied that NIAID bankrolled irresponsible research, and maintains that his former institute is not to blame for COVID; he has called the notion of a cover-up “preposterous” and pointed to an email from February 2020—in which he said that if legitimate evidence of a lab leak emerged, it should be reported to intelligence officials—as confirmation of his transparency. Fauci has also openly favored the natural-origin hypothesis, as have most others in his field. All along the way, he has continued to present himself as someone whose primary allegiance is to the facts—a “nonpolitical” person to the end. Yet much of the public has long since stopped perceiving him as such. By the 2020 election, Fauci had become a campaign talking point; Trump mocked Biden for trusting Fauci, and accused Fauci of being a Democrat. (Fauci has long been registered as an independent.)

In December 2020, Fauci accepted Biden’s offer to become the president’s chief medical adviser, a position he’d never previously held. And in early 2025, hours before Biden left office, the president issued Fauci a full and unconditional pardon for “any offenses against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in” over the previous 11 years. Many on the right took that as an admission of Fauci’s guilt for COVID-related crimes. At the very least, it was an indication that Fauci’s strategy of scientific separatism had come up short. Now he needed politics to protect him.

For many Americans, Fauci remains a public-health icon. A recent poll shows that, nearly four years after he left government, more than half of Americans still have confidence in what he said about public health. In that regard, he polls far better than health officials who are currently in office, including Kennedy and Mehmet Oz.

But polling also suggests that trust in Fauci has ticked down over time. Several of his former colleagues told me they worry that Americans will continue to sour on him as the political fight over his legacy drags out. For the moment, Fauci is constrained in his ability to defend himself. Paul has argued that Fauci’s sweeping pardon precludes him from invoking his Fifth Amendment right. But whether he could plead the Fifth throughout the hearing comes down to whether there is “a realistic threat of prosecution,” which still seems highly plausible, Richard Hughes IV, a legal expert at George Washington University, told me. But that defensive strategy, even if effective, could also leave a lasting mark on Fauci’s legacy: For the scientist who never shied away from attention, and who came with all the answers, the repetitive demurral would surely be excruciating.

Even if Fauci emerges unscathed, several of his friends told me they despair at the disruption this saga is causing to his life. (Although the death threats against his three daughters have mostly subsided, he and his wife have continued to receive them.) Fauci still holds a teaching position at Georgetown University and regularly travels to give talks—accompanied by security guards. But at 85, he is weary; some of his closest friends told me they want nothing more for him than peace. Barney Graham, a former deputy director of the NIH’s Vaccine Research Center, told me that he and some of his colleagues feel some survivor’s guilt as they watch Fauci endure attack after attack: “He kind of martyred himself for the sake of all the other scientists.” Several were reluctant to criticize Fauci in any way, on the theory that doing so would only give more fodder to his right-wing critics. (A few of his close friends and colleagues declined to speak with me at all, citing fears that their words would not help Fauci.)

If Fauci’s legacy now seems fragile, that may be partly due to how he built it, Jeanne Marrazzo, the most recent NIAID director, told me. Many of the researchers in top leadership positions at NIAID were Fauci’s longtime colleagues; the institute’s priorities were heavily shaped by his personal research goals. Fauci “owned an empire,” she said, and when you own an empire, “it lives and dies with you.” The first time she walked into the director’s office after Fauci had retired, it still resembled a self-curated shrine, its walls covered with awards and celebrity-studded photographs that hadn’t yet been cleared. Fauci obviously wanted his own presence at the NIH to last, she told me. In the days after Trump’s second inauguration, Fauci emailed her to ask what would happen to an expensive portrait of him, completed in 2023, that had never been hung.

Marrazzo inherited Fauci’s throne in the fall of 2023; the Trump administration forced her into administrative leave less than two years later. (Kennedy personally fired her at the end of 2025, after she filed a whistleblower complaint criticizing recent shake-ups at the NIH; Marrazzo has since sued the Trump administration for wrongful termination.) Unlike many other members of NIAID’s leadership, she had never been personally close to Fauci, and she took over NIAID eager to nudge the institute in new directions. But as far as she could tell, succeeding him seemed enough to make her a target.

Several of Fauci’s friends and former colleagues told me that they were hopeful that, with the passage of time, the vitriol would fade, administrations would change over, and the history books would ultimately memorialize Fauci for the scientific advances he spearheaded and the lives he saved. At the same time, several of the people I talked with admitted that Fauci’s recent experiences had forced them to reflect on what it meant to be a scientist in the modern era, when the practice of research and public health is under political attack.

They may understand that the approach to scientific leadership at which Fauci most excelled—moving through the nation’s politics, instead of being caught up in them—no longer works the way it did before. Americans have been advised by top health officials to second-guess traditional scientific expertise; some of those same officials now profess neutrality as they make “gold-standard science” their euphemism for political control. For decades, Fauci stood before the nation to offer steady and nonpartisan advice. In tomorrow’s hearing, that voice of science may not be heard at all.

Over the past 40 years, the emergence of digital technology led to a surge in automation, amplifying inequality even as it increased productivity. Economic growth continued, but it enriched only some groups while punishing many others. This not only precipitated a collapse of shared prosperity; it also exacerbated the crisis of liberal democracy that’s upending much of the developed world.

Now generative AI is poised to supercharge the inequities of the past four decades. But this isn’t inevitable. A society-wide effort will be required to avoid the mistakes that were made during the advent of digital technology. That will mean redirecting AI development so that it benefits workers instead of replacing them. I call this “pro-worker AI”: models that expand the capabilities of workers, give them new tasks, and make them more productive.

From a technological perspective, it’s entirely feasible—and in some cases already proven. Such a transformation won’t happen on its own, and it won’t be simple. But there are ways to jump-start it.

We’ve known for some time that AI can enhance workers’ skills instead of rendering them useless. The computer scientist J. C. R. Licklider saw this back in 1960, when he predicted that computers would one day augment human cognition by providing workers with highly processed, context-sensitive information. For the next six decades, digital technology was not up to that task. The internet represented a breakthrough in collecting and storing information, but retrieving it remained a challenge. Although search engines could quickly yield countless results, humans were the ones who had to process them, sequentially and slowly.

[From the July 1945 issue: As we may think]

Now generative AI has fulfilled Licklider’s prophecy. It can find the most relevant answers to a query and summarize them almost instantaneously, in digestible form. It can process technical information and furnish precise guidance for complicated tasks performed under specific conditions. This kind of information retrieval and provision forms the basis of pro-worker AI. If widely adopted, it could increase wages, employment, and productivity all at the same time, restoring the link between productivity growth and good jobs that the past four decades have severed.

Pro-worker AI would serve far more people than just knowledge workers who need to draft slide decks or emails. Consider electricians, who are in high demand across many industries. You don’t need a large language model that can write sonnets to be able to troubleshoot electrical equipment; you need specialized models trained on niche, high-quality data. These are the hallmarks of pro-worker AI. Facing ever more sophisticated equipment and grids, electricians could benefit from an AI tool that draws on a targeted knowledge base, past use cases, and site-specific inputs—sensor data, photographs, written reports—to help them identify problems with machinery or circuitry. Indeed, a global company is already developing a set of products like this for a range of field technicians.

Pro-worker AI could boost productivity across other service industries, too. In education, a model trained on relevant curricular material might allow teachers to spot patterns in test results and tailor lesson plans for particular groups of students who tend to make the same mistakes. This is one of many ways that AI could make education more cost-effective and personalized, which could drive up demand for teachers and bolster their wages.

Perhaps most important, pro-worker AI could create good service jobs for workers who aren’t college educated, and thus begin to uproot the inequality that has been entrenched in the postindustrial economy. In the health-care industry, for example, specially trained models could enable lower-skilled laborers to perform a broader range of tasks, particularly those that rely more on physical exertion and social interaction than on medical expertise.

The promises of pro-worker AI won’t be realized, however, unless it receives more attention and investment. This will require a dramatic shift in how all parts of society—governments, corporations, investors, workers—think about AI.

In Silicon Valley today, most funding chases automation. This isn’t entirely surprising. Automation can be lucrative for both managers and shareholders because it reduces payroll and decreases dependence on organized labor. More broadly, AI models that act and sound like us—instead of those that support us—attract a disproportionate amount of hype. “Reaching human parity” has become a key metric of success in Silicon Valley.

At the same time, the global race for AI supremacy largely centers on artificial general intelligence, which would in theory be able to take over human labor across all sectors, including white-collar cognitive work and the nonroutine tasks that skilled blue-collar and craft workers perform. Even models that don’t meet the AGI threshold could eliminate an untold number of jobs. The few people lucky enough to claim the remaining tasks in the economy would lose substantial wages.

[From the March 2026 issue: America isn’t ready for what AI will do to jobs]

Several policies could begin to shift Silicon Valley’s attention toward pro-worker AI. Starting at the international level, the United States and Europe should create AI agencies that can generate incentives—such as grant programs or public competitions—for technologists to develop models that are designed to expand workers’ capabilities.

A simpler fix involves the tax code. Tax laws in many industrialized economies encourage far too much automation. In the United States, for example, labor income is taxed significantly more than capital income. If a business pays a worker $100, it will have to hand over as much as $30 in tax and spending obligations. But paying $100 for automation equipment leads to a tax burden of less than $5, a number that has dropped as companies have been allowed to write off more spending on digital infrastructure. For the most part, this tax asymmetry triggers only mediocre productivity gains. In fact, even when automated labor is less productive than human workers, a company may well make money by automating.

To a certain extent, employers’ preference for automation is unavoidable. For one thing, companies need to cover health insurance for humans and not for machines. But removing these distortions in the tax system would create a more level playing field for workers, as well as for the development of pro-worker AI models.

Part of the promise of pro-worker AI is to create new tasks, which in many cases will demand that laborers learn new skills. As such, society will need to invest in worker training. By “training” here, I’m not referring to the unrealistic goal of turning coal miners into computer programmers. Rather, training should aim to allow workers, including manual and craft workers, to boost their existing expertise. The introduction of AI to the workforce may continuously change which skills are in demand, so training will have to be adaptive and emphasize flexibility. Pro-worker AI itself could play a role, helping update training programs just as it can help teachers revise lesson plans.

Redirecting technological change toward pro-worker AI will also involve even more herculean undertakings. Chief among them is reducing the dominance of technology monopolies, which have an outsize effect on AI development. They’re using it not only to push the technology toward automation and AGI, but also to discourage innovation by forcing out new companies that have unorthodox, and potentially disruptive, ideas. Creating a more competitive environment would open greater space for pro-worker AI. This can be achieved by enforcing existing antitrust laws, which have rarely been applied in tech. It may also require limiting Silicon Valley’s considerable power of persuasion, for example by fostering more and better-funded independent media.

A stronger labor movement would help too. Rather than resist AI, unions should become advocates of a pro-worker AI agenda. Merely bargaining for higher wages won’t be enough: Most companies will respond to demands for higher wages by simply choosing more automation. Instead, unions will have to build the case that corporate investments in pro-worker AI can benefit both labor and management, making the former more productive and the latter more profitable.

At stake is a core tenet of the liberal economic order: that jobs and wage growth remain available to workers of different skills and backgrounds. The past 40 years have jeopardized this promise. But they have also produced new, capable technologies—most important AI—that can help workers rather than sideline them. First we have to decide that automation won’t be the north star of the AI age.

This essay has been adapted from Daron Acemoglu’s new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?

Reinvention can often seem like an inevitable part of getting older. The midlife crisis is practically baked into the American life cycle, at least in popular culture—a moment that can yield a new career, a new marriage, or, at the very least, a flashy new car. The 1960s radical Jerry Rubin wrote in his memoir Growing (Up) at 37 that he needed a completely new belief system to bring him back from a crisis so deep that, as he put it, “I felt dead at 34.” For him, as for many, the idea of a clean break with the past felt not only appealing but necessary.

But for those alarmed by the turbulence of midlife, the writer Valeria Luiselli’s novels offer a refreshingly different perspective. “I once read in a book by Saul Bellow that the difference between being alive and dead is just a matter of viewpoint,” the narrator of Luiselli’s debut novel, Faces in the Crowd, recalls. She goes on to explain that the “living look from the center outward, the dead from the periphery to some kind of center.” According to this worldview, the middle of life, far from a time to reset yourself, is the crux of human existence. And in Luiselli’s new novel, Beginning Middle End, it’s also where the messiest, most interesting, and most exciting parts of a story occur.

Creatively speaking, Luiselli is a bit of a chameleon, one who could herself be mistaken for a serial reinventor. The daughter of a Mexican diplomat, she was educated in both English and Spanish. At the start of her career, she wrote in Spanish, but after settling in New York, she switched to English with Tell Me How It Ends, a 2017 book-length essay about her experience as a volunteer court interpreter for undocumented Central American children. She hasn’t published a book of nonfiction since, but she recently told El País that it took her years to determine whether Beginning Middle End would be a novel or an essay. The fineness of the line between the two genres indicates that in her work overall, change is a matter of gradations. The same is certainly true of this book.

Beginning Middle End starts with its nameless, newly single narrator, a Mexican writer living in New York, embarking on a monthslong European trip with her preteen daughter. In theory, this is a fresh beginning post-divorce, but in truth, she’s still in the thick of things: busy worrying about her career, her aging mother, the fact that her daughter will never see her ex-stepbrother again. Luiselli describes her narrator’s age as a time when “what one sees on one side is one’s children walking into life, and then, on the other side, one’s parents on their way out. The middle, then, is a difficult vantage point, where life and death meet.”

Still, the novel is an ode to middles. The narrator thinks longingly of starting anew, but in practice, she’s eager for her existence as a mother and writer to get dull and stable again. Her interest in ordinariness (she dreams of a new “routine, a sustained everydayness”) separates Beginning Middle End from other recent divorce novels, such as Miranda July’s All Fours or Claire Vaye Watkins’s I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness, in which a female protagonist stages an irrevocable break with their marriage and married self.

[Read: The female-midlife-crisis novel]

Luiselli’s heroine, by contrast, likes continuity. It’s telling that her trip turns out not to include much wandering, though that was her original plan. But after only a few pages of country-hopping, she and her daughter arrive in Sicily, where an acquaintance has offered to lend them an apartment and where the protagonist’s grandmother was originally from. The narrator reports that “as soon as we stepped off the airplane I felt a deep sense of home—past or future, I’m not sure.” Regardless, she decides to remain in Sicily, and what seemed like a road novel reveals itself to be about settling down. Luiselli’s narrator still wants to make a calm life with her daughter, and maybe with a man as well: The acquaintance is an occasional lover of hers, and she awaits his return with rising sexual anticipation. Rather than give up on romance or motherhood, she grabs on to them both.

Yet the narrator still wants some change, even after she gives up on her vision of a summer spent bouncing from place to place. Once in Sicily, she and her daughter discuss reinvention often. They read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and much of the novel is devoted to their quest to return a mosaic of the shape-shifting god Proteus that the narrator’s Sicilian grandmother stole from an archaeological site before immigrating to Mexico. While food shopping, they fixate on a sign on a fishmonger’s stall: Cu nasci tunnu un po’moriri pisci spada, it reads in Sicilian, which the narrator glosses as “if you are born being a tuna fish you can’t die a swordfish.” Both characters seem to bristle at this motto. The daughter’s reaction, in particular, suggests an impressively mature desire to embrace change rather than loathe it—no small feat for a girl who just lost her stepfather and stepbrother to a tough divorce.

[Read: A divorce memoir with no lessons]

As for the narrator, believing that a person can change is even more psychologically important in the aftermath of her marriage, which degraded into a brutality that she recalls as banal in its awfulness. To underscore this reality, Luiselli describes the abuse her character endured in vague, universal language, an attention-grabbing choice given that her prose is otherwise very precise. Her narrator doesn’t even mention her own ex-husband but alludes to “the men who caught us off guard, who escalated so slowly that we didn’t notice at first, because we trusted them, married them, spent a life with them.”

What comes next, though the narrator continues to use us rather than I, is clearly an account of frequent marital rape. After her divorce, she tries to regain her “body before the soul of it was looted,” a search that gives a new weight to her desire to write. She knows that “the only thing that allows me to feel properly grounded in life, present in the present, is being in the middle of writing something that I cannot not write.” Both she and the reader can hope, if not trust, that if she’s present in the present, then her soul will return.

Yet for much of the novel, the narrator is afraid that she is no longer capable of being active in her own life. She has no choice but to do so with her daughter and with her mother, who lives in Mexico and is showing early signs of memory loss. But creatively, she’s less certain. She struggles to concentrate on writing, and at an open-air performance of a Vivaldi opera, she quickly loses focus on the music and instead starts watching her fellow checked-out concertgoers. As she does, she wonders what it is “that allows some minds to catch the thread of a beginning and see it through, and others to lose it (or let it go) and not follow for any longer than a few minutes.” The answer—the ability and willingness to push through distraction to eventually create or appreciate art—is clearly relevant to novel writing, too. If you can’t sit, bored and likely miserable, with the start of a book, you have no way to get to the middle, which Luiselli refers to as the “place where the story simply has to continue.”

Luiselli has long been intrigued by literary boredom. Beginning Middle End, like all of her novels, goes without what its protagonist calls the “corset of plot.” By no means does it lack drama—see: impending lover, maybe-sick mother; because this is Sicily, there’s also a looming volcano—but traditional story does not drive the novel forward. As it winds down, Luiselli does not resolve any of its questions (Is the mom all right? Will the narrator be able to write again?) but instead hands the narrative from the protagonist to her daughter. The novel’s final section takes on the daughter’s voice, and in its last lines, the daughter arbitrarily declares her mother’s book over: “This is the story,” she says. “It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and this is the end.”

By rejecting the myth of beginning again and the idea that endings are inherently meaningful, Luiselli highlights the fascination of the middle. It’s a bold approach to life, more than literature. In the traditional arc of a book, of course, the ending can come only once. A beginning, meanwhile, sets a story’s tone and stakes. It tells the audience whom and what to care about, and creates, ideally, a sense of expectation and intrigue. Beginnings, in short, exist to make you want to read middles. In life, this can be tougher to accept; it’s hard to be in the middle, twisting between life and death.

Still, as my grandfather used to say, it beats the alternative. He was talking about dying, but also, I wouldn’t want to be (or have) a newborn forever, or ditch my husband after the honeymoon, or quit my job as soon as a challenge arises. Forging onward can sound duller and bleaker than launching a new life—hence, I think, the appeal of stories about multiverses—but in fact, it leads directly to the interesting stuff. Beginning Middle End knows that the first and last words in its title are just necessities. It’s the center, where life flails on, that counts.

American manhood is a fragile and precarious thing, shattered by the slightest deviation from ever-shifting norms—eating the wrong taco, tasting tofu, not eating meat, or maybe eating too much meat. Or at least, that is what right-wing commentators have suggested by their attacks on the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Texas, James Talarico.

Since the 37-year-old state senator clinched the nomination, right-wing politicians and media figures have been running a bizarre smear campaign attacking Talarico for not being manly enough. President Donald Trump called Talarico a “vegan,” and Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller has twice declared that Talarico is “transgender.” Right-wing media figures have referred to him as “Tofu Talarico” and suggested that he is “against meat.” That prompted the Talarico campaign to put out photos of the candidate eating meat, leading the Fox News host Jesse Watters to sneer that Talarico was “getting his hands on whatever meat he can.” Watters is 48 years old.

Anyway, you get it. Talarico is gay or something, and for the GOP, there’s definitely something wrong with that. Its own candidate, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, is mired in allegations of corruption and infidelity, and is committed to some policies so extreme that, like Trump himself, they are unpopular even in deep-red Texas. Talarico’s choirboy looks and religiously inflected liberalism provide a stark contrast to Paxton’s hypocritical self-righteousness, and so Republicans are desperately trying to make those qualities seem like weaknesses.

George W. Bush’s advisers snickered that John Kerry looked “French.” Trump, of course, is famous for put-downs whose cruelty is part of their appeal. But there’s something new about the attacks on Talarico. Calling a man “French” or “vegan” retains a mote of the old deniability. Calling Talarico “transgender” does not. The rhetoric resembles nothing more than the frothing tone of masculinity influencers in the online manosphere, with its strict but arbitrary standards for what makes a man a man. Although Republicans have devoted themselves to this type of marketing, parts of the Democratic coalition have an appetite for it as well—they’ve already face-Platnered at least once as a result.

[Listen: When both parties try to out-macho each other]

The Trump administration and the conservative movement seem to have taken this advertising strategy and transformed it into an ideology. The result is a secretary of health and human services who posts videos of himself working out in jeans and then presides over outbreaks of measles and explosive diarrhea; a director of Medicare and Medicaid who takes a break from stripping health care away from children to demonstrate how not to do a squat; and a defense secretary who interrupts his day job of starting and losing pointless, illegal wars in the Middle East to announce that he will force testosterone tests on service members. And Americans are supposed to be impressed by these overgrown children showing off their masculine prowess while failing at their basic adult responsibilities.

Any man who goes online today is apt to come across content telling him that he will never find a partner who will earn him the respect of other men if he lacks money and connections, if he is not bodybuilder-fit with a full head of hair, if he is not more than six feet tall. Online influencers who push this narrative have products to sell. They want you to buy their workout apps, their advice sessions, their investment plans. That’s just how a lot of advertising works: It makes you insecure so you’ll pay for a product in hopes of temporarily silencing your gnawing sense of inadequacy.

Ad campaigns have long preyed in this way on female insecurities, telling women how they are supposed to look and act. In her 1991 book, Backlash, the feminist writer Susan Faludi observed that the rise of women in the workplace was a boon for the beauty industry. Women were told they needed to buy more makeup because they’d been masculinized by having a job: “Professional progress had downgraded their looks; equality had created worry lines and cellulite,” Faludi wrote.

That marketing, though, was designed to turn women against themselves; the manosphere now tells men to lash out at others instead. It encourages white men in particular, but not exclusively, to blame their problems on a society that has allowed their lessers to compete with them for employment, power, and prestige by removing the barriers that once kept them out. The heroin-chic era was destructive for women, but it didn’t result in popular media figures advocating for men to be stripped of the right to vote. Notably, tradwife content, the ideological companion to manosphere content, is mostly about how wonderful it would be to be a kind of slave.

Social scientists have found that when men think their masculinity is being questioned, they may dismiss that challenge as irrelevant, they may quietly feel bad or insecure, or they may overcompensate by trying to behave in a more stereotypically masculine fashion. And that last reaction is where the dollars are. Be a man and buy a gun. Get the manly cereal for men. Wipe your butt with the wet wipes for men. Get the manly smelling deodorant. Eat the manly steak. It’s no coincidence that gambling apps and crypto companies have spent so much money on ads that make giving them your money seem adventurous.

Just as the manosphere and its galaxy of hucksters want you to fork over your cash so you can feel better about yourself as a man, Republicans want to make you feel insecure about your masculinity so that you vote Republican. Masculinity, in this sense, is a lifestyle product: one that comes with a set of political beliefs predicated on the subjugation of women, minority groups, and anyone else who men are told are their inferiors.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with masculinity itself. Boys and young men don’t seek out the manosphere “because they inherently hate women or think they are inferior,” the feminist writer Jessica Valenti has written. Rather, they “are desperate for community and answers in a confusing time of their lives.” When people are constantly told that the only way to be a worthwhile human being is to conform to gender norms, they will naturally strive to meet those expectations, even if it means being harsh to themselves or others. But the strength of those emotions is precisely what makes them so exploitable.

Adam Stanaland, a psychology professor at the University of Richmond, told me that what’s concerning is when insecure men feel pressured to validate their manhood by harming others. Stanaland co-authored a study on “fragile” masculinity that notes that such men may compensate by endorsing “political bigotry, homophobia, sexual violence, and anti-environmentalism,” and that they are “more likely to endorse policies and politicians that disproportionately harm marginalized groups.”

Stanaland speculated that for “white men especially, their masculinity is framed by this idea they must be at the top of not only the gender hierarchy, but also other social hierarchies, and so any kinds of threats to that positioning of them at the hierarchy could be responded to with these compensatory behaviors.” Sexist ideology nevertheless has a broader appeal. The former congressman Matt Gaetz, whose nomination for attorney general was derailed by allegations that he’d had sex with a minor (allegations that he denied), predicted before the 2024 election that “for every Karen we lose, there’s a Julio and a Jamal ready to sign up for the MAGA movement.”

Ironically, some of the most prominent masculinity influencers are not themselves white. Andrew and Tristan Tate, who were recently arrested on rape and sex-trafficking charges after being spared from legal consequences for years thanks to interventions by the Trump administration, are biracial. This has not stopped the brothers from repeating racist far-right arguments that play well online, such as Andrew implying that Jews are “subverting western populations into mass genetic suicide.” This idea, known today as the “Great Replacement” theory, is a continuation of old-timey racist fears of “race mixing” (a common manosphere preoccupation)—and it’s a little weird to hear coming from a biracial man. One part of selling a product is knowing your customer base, I suppose.

More than a decade ago, when I was first reporting on the manosphere, it was populated largely by middle-aged men, many of them divorcés, who retained a superficial concern for men’s welfare. They at least pretended that it was a normal political movement focused on issues such as suicide, rules disfavoring dads in custody battles, and male victims of domestic violence. They may have dreamed of forcing women back into traditional subservience—taking away female suffrage, repealing antidiscrimination laws, and making it harder for women to divorce—but mostly they avoided saying so out loud.

Over the past 10 years, the misogyny of the manosphere has become more open and strident, but the big innovation seems to have been combining that conspiratorial misogyny with earnest self-help advice. Heartbreak and rejection leave people emotionally vulnerable, and the manosphere pitch often comes paired with benign advice about standing up for yourself, being mentally tough, or becoming physically active. But getting yourself together with the expectation that soon everyone you meet will be forced to respect you inevitably leads to disappointment.

When that disappointment sets in, the manosphere has an explanation: Can’t find a girlfriend? It’s because women who make their own living can no longer be forced into marrying guys they don’t like. Can’t find a job? It’s because undeserving women and minorities are being picked instead of you, even though you’re better. Feel bad about yourself? It’s because our feminized society deprived you of a life of meaningful toil, military adventure, and elevated social status. It is a bleak view of the world, a kind of male doomerism in which a meaningful life can be found only in the domination and exploitation of others.

The fact that none of that advice could ever help someone find real intimacy or success isn’t a problem for the manosphere hucksters, because those achievements would be bad for the business model. They prefer their followers to be tied only to them, forking over cash to be told they’re victims of one conspiracy after another. They’ll just tell you that women can’t be trusted because they are mere baubles to impress other men with, and other men cannot be trusted because they are the competition.

There probably shouldn’t be a lot of overlap between religious-right leaders, government officials, and someone like Andrew Tate, who proudly describes himself as a “pimp.” Yet Tate’s belief that “society functions better as a patriarchy” is hard to distinguish from the views of Doug Wilson, the pastor invited by Hegseth to preach at the Pentagon, who thinks that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Pious or secular, these beliefs come down to the same idea: Men are people, and women are things.

As my colleague Helen Lewis has reported, “Woman-bashing plays well on social media and sells lots of ads for crypto, sports betting, and supplements.” She adds: “You can make good money telling men that they’re the truly oppressed sex.”

You can win a lot of votes that way, too.

[Russell Berman: The return of the Democratic manly man]

The logic of this male-doomer industry is to remove all unfair competition—from women, from minorities, from immigrants—by either disenfranchising or dispossessing them, and in this way reassert the dominance to which white American men are entitled. And even if you’re not white, wouldn’t it feel good to put all those women who don’t like you in their place?

One prominent explanation for the resurgence of reactionary ideas about gender is that it’s a consequence of structural changes in the economy: Manly jobs such as manufacturing and construction have been lost, while feminine-coded service jobs such as caregiving have surged.

This is an accurate description of what’s happened in the economy, but it’s not a sufficient explanation for the rise of extreme misogyny. For one thing, these economic changes are decades old. Faludi followed up Backlash with Stiffed, which argued that working-class American men were being deprived of work they could be proud of while still being expected to live up to a traditional idea of men as providers. Stiffed was published more than a quarter century ago.

The theory also doesn’t necessarily line up with who is most likely to buy into what the manosphere is selling. “There’s this myth out there that the young men who are embracing this ideology and moving to the right in a coherent and virulent way are people being left behind by the economy,” John Ray, who does polling for the Young Men Research Project, told me. “Actually, a lot of the young men who have these more extreme right-wing views are more economically well-off than others in the sample.” The project’s polling, he said, has found that “young men who were more economically precarious, broadly speaking, were less ideological—one way or the other. It was actually young men that said that they were less worried about their finances who are more likely to have some of those right-wing views.”

The modern data economy must play a bigger role. People spend more time than ever on their phones. Virtually everything you see while you are scrolling a social-media site is an advertisement—for a product, a lifestyle, or an individual feed. Social-media companies want you to be glued to your phone for as long as possible so they can sell you things or produce data they can sell to others. It doesn’t matter if the things you’re watching or reading are true or false, right or wrong.

Extremism draws attention, so it’s not surprising that we’re seeing more extreme ideas about what it means to be a man. Yet when conservatives complain about diverse casting in movies, or romanticize the era of colonialism, or insist that women should be disenfranchised, this is more than mere trolling for eyeballs. They are telling you their policy plan. And they are using the psychological lever of male insecurity to win political support for that program.

What kind of program has this internet-brain-rotted masculinity brought us? A public-health official who neglects fatal outbreaks of preventable diseases because he seems to believe that only the strong should survive. A Department of Defense, renamed the Department of War, that launches a needless war of choice in the Middle East. A government that props up the fossil-fuel industry (manly) while deliberately suppressing green alternatives (girly), leading to a catastrophic rise in energy prices when that war doesn’t go as planned. A president who imposed tariffs to bring back “manly jobs,” but only drove up inflation instead.

It’s hard to see how any of this has made men’s lives better. But maybe making other people’s lives worse is enough.

Photographs and Videos by Ana Hop

“¡Mire! ” My guide, Silvestre, pointed upward, as if I wasn’t already walking with my neck craned as far back as it could go. The sky was alive with millions of fluttering shapes, congregating into clouds at random, occasionally turning into ribbons that wound through the trees. So many butterfly wings beat the air that their vibrations were audible, like a waterfall rushing in the distance. I understood for the first time the immensity of the event I’d come to see.

I was in the center of El Rosario butterfly sanctuary, part of Mexico’s Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. Unaccustomed to the thin air at nearly 11,000 feet above sea level, I’d ridden Pelucha, a rust-colored mare, to the heights of the reserve. About halfway up, the orange-and-black butterflies had begun appearing in groups, alighting on flowers or gathering to sip water from puddles. Coupled pairs mated everywhere, and their constant entanglements on the path made it difficult to avoid stepping on them; Pelucha happily crunched more than a few underfoot. I dismounted at the top of the trail and followed Silvestre as he ducked under a rope that kept tourists from accessing the most sensitive areas of the reserve.

It was February, and the monarchs—northerners that had wintered in Mexico—were preparing for their final journey, which doubled as the first leg of a multigenerational relay race north. Their delicateness belies a life cycle that more resembles long-haul trucking than anything you might read in a children’s book. Each of the butterflies above me had already braved many grueling trials. In the following week or so, the majority would be on their way.

Monarch migration is a wonder of the natural world, one of the longest annual cycles of movement undertaken by any creature on Earth, spanning thousands of miles. Over the past half century, the lands that the monarchs traverse have become more hostile to them, a result of development and herbicides, global warming and organized crime, all of which have put the future of that migration in doubt. And yet, the story I’d come to write—my reason for interloping in this and other sanctuaries—was not just a narrative of beauty being diminished by human trampling and greed. Recently, there’s been good news: Population estimates, after a long march downward, have been increasing for the past two years. This stabilization appears to be connected at least in part to efforts to save butterfly habitats in Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Those developments are reason to hope that there may still be a pathway left for saving the monarchs and their migration.

The monarch persists partly because of the dogged work from its human partners; because of people who have given their life—in every sense of the phrase—to preserve nature. But mostly, the monarch persists because life’s job is to live; because within those thimble-size bodies hides a dynamo of survival that puts our most incredible machines to shame. The more we learn about the butterflies, the more we understand how extraordinary it is that they have so far beaten the odds we have stacked against them, and how forbidding those odds remain.

We’ve known just how epic the monarch’s migration is for only about half a century. In the 1970s, using paper tags placed on butterflies’ wings, the Canadian butterfly researchers Fred and Norah Urquhart completed a lifelong mission to uncover the mystery of where all the monarchs born in Ontario went in the fall. To their surprise, the sojourners they followed made it all the way down the length of the U.S., and on to the mountain forests of Michoacán, Mexico. There they roosted, packed tightly into just a handful of colonies that collectively cover no more than a few city blocks, yet hold nearly all of the continent’s monarchs in winter. The Urquharts first visited these colonies in 1976, and National Geographic published a cover story on their breakthrough.

For centuries, Indigenous people in Mexico’s highlands have witnessed the monarchs’ annual return during harvest season, though for most of that time they didn’t know where they came from. The butterflies have been making this migration for as long as 20 millennia, once finding paths to and from the fields gouged out by glaciers retreating with the spring during the last Ice Age. Now their roosting grounds sit within a handful of sanctuaries that I visited. At Sierra Chincua, a few miles north of El Rosario, I stood on a cliff overlooking the slender trunks of oyamel fir trees. I watched living streams of monarchs flying in different directions, sometimes winding about one another like a gigantic knot forever being tied, and looked in vain for three monarchs that I knew were in the fray.

Each had been given a designation in a spreadsheet—CHI016, CHI013, and CHI001—but those were all very boring names for butterflies, so I’d asked my 6-year-old daughter to give them better ones. She’d come up with Cinderella, Eric, and Carle. (She knows The Very Hungry Caterpillar by heart.)

Nothing about the trio was unusual, save for the gear they wore. Affixed to each butterfly’s thorax, like a tiny backpack, was a transmitter the size of a grain of rice. These transmitters, called BlūMorpho tags, had been developed by a company called Cellular Tracking Technologies, and Cinderella, Eric, and Carle were part of the first generation of monarchs to wear them.

Before my visit to the sanctuaries, I’d spoken with David La Puma, an executive at CTT and one of the brains behind the BlūMorpho. The company had initially focused on developing tech for tracking eagles, but La Puma had previously worked in monarch conservation, and carried his interest in the butterflies with him. Tracking a monarch is different from tracking an eagle, as monarchs each weigh less than a dollar bill. Any transmitter attached to one could weigh no more than a few grains of sand.

No battery could be made that small and still provide power over months of flying, and the solar panels that CTT used for eagle trackers were much too heavy. But the team figured out a solution: taking the ultrathin solar squares that line the wings of satellites and carefully chopping them up into tiny bespoke cells. An early version of the tracker, applied to butterflies with dabs of eyelash glue, was linked with a cellphone app via Bluetooth, allowing enthusiasts to follow nearby butterflies—a sort of “Pokémon Go for monarchs,” La Puma said—and record their locations in somewhat haphazard fashion. The newest iteration works more like Google Maps, providing far more complete data on the butterflies’ locations to anyone, almost in real time.

Knowing more about butterflies’ individual habits may enable us to help them thrive collectively (more on that later). The data also just help us get to know the monarchs better. As it turns out, some seem to be worse with directions than others, and can find themselves traveling west or south from Mexico. In the prototyping stage, some monarchs were detected near oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, nowhere near land, and some butterflies appeared to enjoy Caribbean vacations. Yet the majority seem to follow well-established paths along invisible corridors in the air.

Cinderella, Eric, and Carle had all been tagged in Sierra Chincua, which meant that I could deduce certain facts about their lives. They were already bona fide world-class wanderers, having flown there all the way from Canada in the fall, a three-month trip. Along the way, they’d dodged birds and windmills and cars, eventually reaching the same patch of forest—perhaps even the same trees—that their great-grandparents had roosted in. For much of the winter, they had not eaten and had barely moved, jamming themselves so tightly against their fellow travelers that from a distance they looked like scales armoring the sides of the trees. Now they’d awakened, stretching their wings and warming up.

Though I couldn’t spot them in the sky, I could see from my phone that Cinderella, Eric, and Carle were near. Over the next several weeks, I would keep tabs on them, following their movements with a level of detail that would have been impossible only a year ago.

Individual butterflies can travel as far as 100 miles in a single day and can congregate in groups so thick that they show up as clouds on weather radar. Glider pilots have seen them flying at altitudes above 10,000 feet. Year after year, new generations tend to gather around the same landmarks, despite having never seen them before. They seem, for example, to love the Barnegat Lighthouse on Long Beach Island, in New Jersey.

The monarchs’ feats of navigation are enabled by their internal technology, a set of instinctual tools that in some ways surpasses our understanding. The butterflies’ eyes can sense the angle and intensity of different forms of light. In each antenna, a complex series of molecules maintains their circadian clock, which, when combined with sunlight cues, gives them their sense of direction.

When the sun is unreliable, monarchs have a secondary method of pathfinding— a biological compass that allows them to sense Earth’s magnetic field. Internal thermostats help govern the timing of their northward movements.

The butterflies’ migration evolved to fit North America’s geography. Monarch caterpillars eat only milkweed, which grows best in cooler climates, but the butterflies can’t tolerate freezing temperatures. The length of the continent’s interior, unbroken by mountains or oceans, allows the monarchs to find the right weather and plants throughout the year—a Goldilocks ecology, neither too hot nor too cold. They are a marvel of nature’s engineering, of the kind of elegance that evolution can achieve over deep time.

“Winter is hard for insects that have to survive it, and monarchs basically avoid it by leaving,” says Karen Oberhauser, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a co-founder of the Monarch Butterfly Fund. Unlike many other butterfly species, which are adapted to very specific microbiomes, monarchs have options if a local environment changes.

Indeed, they seem strikingly well adapted for living alongside the world’s most disruptive change agent: humanity. Milkweed tends to thrive in transitional areas, such as fallow fields, unkempt lawns, and the edges of highways. “When I first started studying monarchs, it really did seem like they kind of had an advantage over a lot of other species,” Oberhauser told me. “That’s a disturbance-adapted species.” She said, affectionately, that monarchs are like rats or pigeons, all part of the strange but sturdy menagerie of modern life.

But there are limits to any creature’s adaptability, and human activity has steadily eroded the monarch’s margin for error. In the 1930s, Mexico’s land-reform program created ejidos, areas designated for communal use by peasants. They began clearing the ancient oyamel forests to plant corn, beans, and squash, and sold the felled timber. Commercial interests also stepped in, accelerating logging in the butterfly’s winter habitats.

North of the Rio Grande, there have been disturbances to the disturbances. Although milkweed can flourish along roads, the advent of the interstate system also introduced one of the most efficient killers of butterflies: speeding traffic. And although farmland in the Midwest was once a reliable (if accidental) incubator for milkweed, the development of Roundup Ready crops in the ’90s allowed more promiscuous use of herbicides. Almost overnight, milkweed disappeared from large-scale farms.

According to a recent report from the World Wildlife Fund, the total area covered by monarch colonies in winter decreased from 45 acres in 1996 to a low of fewer than two acres in 2013. The five-year average of colony size has dropped by 80 percent since the mid-’90s, a plunge of some 170 million butterflies.

As Oberhauser told me, the changes wrought by humans have caught up to the monarchs. In fact, the complexity of the migration might now be a liability, as multiple stops on the journey face upheaval at once. “What makes them so strong also makes them vulnerable,” she said.

My trio of butterflies had been strong from their beginnings. As caterpillars, they’d gorged on milkweed, a plant that is toxic to most animals, and incorporated its poison into their bodies. Their distinct coloring is both a warning for predators and a badge of initiation.

They are already one-percenters—only one in 100 of the eggs laid in Ontario last year had produced butterflies that made it this far. Their generation, called a “super-generation,” is bigger and more robust than their parents’ was or their children’s will be: They are centurions built to make the journey all the way south and partway back. (Two successive generations will eventually complete the round trip to Canada.) Now, after a winter of fasting, huddled close against the cold, they are regaining their strength, sipping nectar from flowers near their roosting trees. On my phone, I can see a map with each location that the butterflies ping as they meander from place to place, ever returning to their central roosts.

My phone shows only their movements, not their more private matters, but I know that before they leave these forests behind, they will each find a mate. For Cinderella and Eric—which, as I told my daughter, is a female butterfly—their mates’ package of sperm will also contain a deposit of nutrients that will help them handle the rigors of the trip. Carle will weaken himself, giving his mate a gift that she must use to ensure the survival of their offspring.

For the past several decades, a diverse group of grassroots activists, scientists, and enthusiasts has worked to forestall the monarchs’ decline. I’d come to Sierra Chincua as the guest of one of them. José Luis Álvarez Alcalá, a local activist and farmer, showed me around. He pointed to the visitors’ center, restaurants, and gift shops near the sanctuary’s entrance. “None of this was here 30 years ago,” he told me. Then he pointed to a copse of young trees creeping up the hills. “A lot of that wasn’t either.” Álvarez Alcalá would know: He helped create much of it.

Years of chain-smoking can be heard in the thickness of Álvarez Alcalá’s voice, and when we met, he sported a limp from a recent fall while working. He wasn’t originally a butterfly guy, he said, but was interested in revitalizing the region that encompassed the sanctuaries, and he ran a tree nursery on Hacienda la Cruz, a 17th-century Spanish colonial estate that he’d restored. By the 1980s, just a few years after the National Geographic story came out, the monarchs were already drawing streams of intrepid sightseers from abroad, despite almost no tourism infrastructure. Álvarez Alcalá realized that there might be a way to align the survival of the species with the local economy.

In 1986, President Miguel de la Madrid gave national protections to the main colony sites, creating the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. But those protections did not halt or even slow logging. Encouraged by the butterfly scientist Lincoln P. Brower, Álvarez Alcalá and his associates came up with a more proactive plan. They would give the members of the ejidos oyamel fir and pine saplings to grow, instead of their usual crops. The growers would still be free to profit from their land by selling timber for Christmas trees, lumber, or charcoal, but would be encouraged to harvest the wood sustainably. If done right, on a wide-enough scale, the model could help provide both income for the ejidatarios and the basis for butterfly tourism.

Álvarez Alcalá says that, since launching in 1997, his La Cruz Habitat Protection Project has planted about 20 million oyamel fir and pine trees. Other groups have also reforested hundreds of hectares. The oldest of the trees planted as part of this experiment are now maturing and providing winter homes for exhausted monarchs.

Over the span of just a few years, reforesting and ecotourism have transformed much of Michoacán, the state in which the sanctuaries reside. In the municipality of Angangueo, a brilliant mural depicts the social history of the monarchs, the “hijas del sol,” including a painting of the now-famous 1976 National Geographic cover. In El Rosario, the trinkets and souvenirs, the tour-bus parking lots, and even the stable of horses for rent all speak to a symbiosis that has only recently come to be.

The monarch’s star turn has changed the places along the more northerly parts of its route as well. In the U.S., seven states list the monarch as their official insect or butterfly, and in many places, monarchs appear on license plates that urge fellow drivers to protect the environment. More than 50,000 yards, parks, and schools now feature Monarch Waystations, special gardens stocked with milkweed and flowers.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, the overwintering areas covered by monarchs this year increased by 64 percent. Cinderella, Eric, and Carle’s generation was the largest to leave Mexico in seven years. The measured takeaway from the WWF is that “despite challenges, conservation efforts are making a difference.”

Yet there are new challenges, new crises in front of the monarchs. And these may eclipse the ones they’ve seen so far.

“Fucking avocados.” Álvarez Alcalá’s son Luca was driving me around the outskirts of Hacienda la Cruz, where La Cruz Habitat Protection Project is based. He pointed to the offending field in the distance, its neat rows of hunter-green bushes a dead giveaway. The fruits represented one of the emerging threats to the reforesting mission, and to the monarch’s survival.

I’d arrived in Mexico just after the annual high-water mark for avocado consumption: the Super Bowl. Michoacán is the largest avocado-growing region in the world, producing nearly all avocados eaten in the United States. Its volcanic soil is ideal for the fruit, and intense American demand for guacamole and fancy toast has, in these parts, given avocados the moniker oro verde—“green gold.”

Unfortunately for monarchs, their forests sit right in the middle of some of the most promising areas for growing avocados. And the green-gold rush is so lucrative that it has drawn the attention of the area’s cartels, which now extort local growers, smuggle many of their avocados across the border, and even operate plantations directly. There’s a good chance that if you bought chips and guac to eat while you watched Bad Bunny during the big game, a cartel profited.

Recently, cartels have been a major force behind illicit logging in the forests that Álvarez Alcalá and his son have tried to revive and protect, and much of the land has been converted for avocado farming. In 2020, Homero Gómez González, a prominent conservationist at the Biosphere Reserve, was found dead in Ocampo, the closest municipality to the sanctuary. Gómez González had been known as a vociferous antagonist of loggers. His killing has not been solved, but many outlets have placed the blame on the cartels.

Those same cartels instigated the crisis that gripped Mexico during my travels. Just three days before I got to Hacienda la Cruz, Mexican authorities killed Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. The death of “El Mencho” sparked violence across the states of Jalisco and Michoacán: Cartel members erected barricades on major roads and ambushed National Guard members, killing at least 25 and also attacking several journalists.

When I asked the elder Álvarez if touring the region would be safe, he gave perhaps the least-encouraging encouragement I’d ever heard: “I think there will be no problems,” he said. “But nothing in life is for sure.” During my trips to El Rosario and Sierra Chincua, both sanctuaries were mostly empty of tourists; cartels had been burning cars near the base of Sierra Chincua. It was all a stark reminder of how precarious monarch tourism is, and how much money there is to be made in destruction.

When I spoke with Megan Fulton, the executive director of Álvarez Alcalá’s project, she was keen to point me to a recent report from the WWF showing that, the avocado boom notwithstanding, rates of forest degradation and illegal logging in the sanctuaries have slowed in the past year. She attributed the positive development to the local communities being galvanized by global warming and weather changes. “They are the communities that are already seeing the effects of climate change,” she said. “So they want to restore their land and protect it for future generations.”

But the very fact that the communities are experiencing tangible effects—unprecedented heat waves that have killed hundreds, record droughts and wildfires that have ruined crops—means that the problem is bigger than organized crime, and perhaps beyond the ability of individual people or local groups to solve. Climate change is an accelerant for troubles that are already afoot. High mountain elevations that were once cool and less hospitable for avocado growing are getting hotter—and thus more tempting for felling. Warmer temperatures will also narrow the already tiny bands of habitability for oyamel firs, disrupting forest ecologies even in places that logging hasn’t yet touched.

[From the December 2025 issue: Vann R. Newkirk II on what climate change will do to America by mid-century]

The most ominous signs were visible from Hacienda la Cruz. In the forests just outside the property, like scars on the green mountainside, three ugly patches of brown, bare tree skeletons stood out. Luca explained that these patches had been infested by pine bark beetles, notorious evergreen-killers that feed on stressed or weakened conifers. The beetles are a normal part of forest ecosystems, and their numbers are usually controlled by cold winters. But the season has grown warmer. More trees now suffer from heat stress and dehydration, making them targets. Oyamels are particularly vulnerable. Authorities have already been forced to cut down whole sectors of the reserve to keep beetle infestations from spreading.

On my phone, I can see that by mid-February, Cinderella is restless, regularly streaming to the southwest and back, even visiting Ocampo once or twice, veering toward Loncheria Los 4 Elementos, a little snack bar in town that sells tortas, burgers, and micheladas. Eric is a bit more adventurous, making her way almost as far west as Ciudad Hidalgo, where the great father of the nation once owned a hacienda. Carle is more of a homebody, sticking closer to Sierra Chincua and often staying in its forests.

Eric is the first of the trio to leave for good, but her eagerness might be her undoing—the weather might not yet be warm enough for a successful transit. She flies north through Querétaro, but then her tracker stops transmitting. Cinderella and Carle choose to leave with the bulk of their cohort a week later, around the second week of March. There’s not much road ahead for Carle; he stops transmitting soon after.

But Cinderella keeps going, winding her way through Querétaro, swerving toward the old colonial city of San Miguel de Allende, then bending northeast. On March 15, she crosses the Rio Grande in the vicinity of Rio Grande City, Texas.

The same week that Cinderella and her fellow survivors began fanning out into the United States, I visited Monarch Watch, an organization based at the University of Kansas that has long served as a hub of monarch research and conservation. I met Kristen Baum, its current director, and Chip Taylor, its founder and director emeritus. Baum runs a blog for Monarch Watch that tracks the radio-tagged butterflies’ movements. These data points could help conservationists model the migration more accurately, anticipate changes in population size, and better decide how and where to allocate resources to restore habitats. The day before my visit, Baum noted that CHI016, Cinderella’s government name, was likely the farthest north among all the tags.

The tiny building that Monarch Watch occupies is jam-packed with records, research, and the butterflies themselves. In one room, I watched as a female split open her green chrysalis and emerged to spread her wings. Across the hall were refrigerators full of milkweed seeds—the group has donated more than 1 million milkweed plants for restoration projects since 2015.

Taylor himself developed an artificial diet that could be used to raise caterpillars in lieu of live milkweed. In 2009, Monarch Watch sent caterpillars provisioned with this food (which looks something like old guacamole) on the Space Shuttle Atlantis to the International Space Station, where they successfully metamorphosed into butterflies.

The word emeritus doesn’t capture the full role that Taylor, 88, still plays; he is a constant presence around the building. Before he secured more generous funding, he’d bankrolled many of Monarch Watch’s activities himself, using the proceeds from investments that he and his wife had made in Apple. He helped pay 100-peso rewards for finding paper butterfly tags—still the standard, low-tech method of tracking the creatures—in Mexico, which became a problem one year when people recovered more than 3,000 tagged butterflies. “That cost me $12,000,” he told me. “I wasn’t too anxious to do that over and over again.”

It was hard, there in the middle of all of the butterfly posters and joyful pictures, to ask him the question I’d really come to ask. But Taylor eventually sighed and launched into an answer on his own. “What we’re doing ecologically to save the monarch butterfly, the scale of it is just nothing compared to what’s going on,” he said. “The population is going to creep lower and lower in time because we’re incapable, I think, at this point, of really mastering enough of the restoration.”

In the United States and Canada, the math leads to a similar place as it does in Mexico. For all the bootstrapped recent successes in forestalling the butterfly’s decline, we’ve merely been playing catch-up. Now climate change is the primary threat to monarch numbers, and it is implacable. Higher temperatures make monarchs more susceptible to infection by a protozoan called Ophryocystis elektroscirrha, a parasite that drains the butterfly’s strength and makes it less likely to complete its journeys. And climate shifts are yet another threat to milkweed’s viability in particular locales, throwing off the distances and timing that are so crucial to each butterfly’s travels.

“Maybe we can do something about the climate, but the opportunities for doing that are really, really diminishing very rapidly,” Taylor said. Even accounting for this year’s surprising bounce-back in numbers, he puts the timeline at 20 years or so before the migrating monarch’s numbers become too low to recover. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates upwards of a 50 percent chance that the eastern migratory monarchs will be extinct by 2080.

When I was growing up, the flowers outside my bedroom window always brought visitors. I’d often wake up in the morning to the buzzing of a hummingbird’s wings. But the visitors I greeted most joyfully were the monarchs. On late-summer days, kaleidoscopes of butterflies would land together, covering the flowers like an orange blanket. Even then, I understood that there was something special about their fleeting delicateness. And fleeting it was: The world will probably never again see as many monarchs as existed then.

But I would not bet entirely against the monarch. The fight to protect the species continues. In its persistence and its cooperative nature, that fight shares qualities with the monarch itself. The project is proof, in a fractured time, that people can join together and decide to help defend the things they see as valuable.

Even as Taylor despaired of the monarch’s future, he mused, briefly, about the possibility of restocking wild-butterfly populations using a scaled-up version of Monarch Watch’s colony program. With that, his exertions in perfecting his homegrown colony process—the green smoothie for caterpillars, testing procedures for parasites—came into clearer view for me. They could be understood, I realized, as the beginnings of an attempt to bottle a fragment of the monarch’s magic for the future world. Maybe migration will continue, in that future, with an assist from something like a butterfly doomsday vault. Or maybe the next generation of the monarch’s friends will find further innovations to defeat problems that now seem insurmountable.

The things we have learned recently about individual butterflies will be helpful for vanquishing those scientific problems, but the most important contribution of all this new information might be wonder itself. I am not a scientist, but after watching and tracking the butterflies for months, it seems to me that monarchs have something of a personality, a level of individuality that might endear them even more to the public. Some appear impulsive, or impressively rangy, leaving earlier and traveling more, whereas others fail to leave altogether. In El Rosario, when I asked Silvestre, my guide, about why groups of butterflies chose specific times to find water, he was enigmatic: “They decide.”

And whether or not we call it personality, there’s science behind the idea of the butterflies’ individuality. In humans, traits such as neuroticism and recklessness appear to have some evolutionary basis—emerging perhaps to provide our species with sentries who alerted us to threats, and with explorers who led the way to new food sources. Research suggests that the goofball butterflies that might seem to lack a sense of direction are actually pioneers, scouts finding new habitats to exploit or new places to hunker down should worse come to worst.

No matter what happens along the Mexico route, the monarch is likely to live on, albeit in smaller numbers, elsewhere. Across the planet, most populations of monarch butterflies—in Spain, in Hawaii—are likely descended from vagrants that veered off the Mexico migration path. Monarchs introduced to Australia in the 1870s have now established an annual migration along the east and southwest coasts—they have earned the fitting local epithet of “wanderers.” And in little pockets of the United States, Central America, and the Caribbean, in places where milkweed grows year-round, small monarch populations have settled in, no longer migrating and now sporting shorter wingspans than their more transient cousins.

For all their seeming fragility, monarchs will be an extraordinarily capable partner in efforts to save them. They may yet surprise us. We may yet surprise ourselves.

Cinderella is a marathoner. She flies through San Antonio and then skirts Austin, avoiding the congestion of the city proper during the South by Southwest festival, and then cuts through the Piney Woods toward Texarkana. At the time of her last detection, Cinderella is in Arkansas, having likely traveled from the Great Lakes to the Mexican highlands, and then halfway back. The diaspora she belongs to has spread out across a wide expanse of the country, ending up in Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and every place in between. They’ve spent themselves, but they have fulfilled their biological missions.

During her roughly eight-month life, Cinderella traveled farther than scientists might have imagined possible, more than 3,000 miles as the butterfly flies. Along the way, she likely glued hundreds of tiny eggs onto milkweed plants. Perhaps some of the hatchlings will live, and continue her line. Perhaps they, too, will have her preternatural strength and tenacity. I hope, for the sake of my own daughter, and her ability to live in a world of beauty, that they will.

This article appears in the September 2026 print edition with the headline “How Do Monarchs Do It?”

Most self-published authors can only dream of writing something as popular as Daggermouth. Set in a surveillance state ruled by a masked elite, the novel traces the unlikely romance between the president’s son and an assassin hired to kill him. Since H. M. Wolfe uploaded Daggermouth to Amazon as a Kindle ebook, it has been a viral hit. “Did I finish Daggermouth, or did Daggermouth finish me?” a TikTok book influencer gushed. In February, Simon & Schuster paid seven figures to secure the publishing rights to the book and its sequel, which is due out next year.

Daggermouth has spent months on USA Today’s best-seller list and is ranked No. 1 in Amazon’s “science-fiction romance” genre. It also tops a less prestigious list, one compiled by academics studying AI writing. Among thousands of self-published Amazon ebooks that they identified as containing “substantial AI text,” none was more popular than Daggermouth.

Until recently, AI fiction has been easy to dismiss as slop. On Amazon, new-book releases nearly tripled from 2022 to 2025. (That’s probably not because humans suddenly dedicated themselves en masse to the written word.) Many are blatant copycats of existing titles, seemingly intended to trick readers into buying them. Their sales figures are generally meager; the reviews, indignant. A suspicious number of them feature protagonists with the same names. Last year, readers of one fantasy novel noticed a line that seemed to be responding to a prompt asking a chatbot to write in the style of another author. But if a book as beloved as Daggermouth were written with a chatbot, it would raise an awkward question: Could AI fiction be getting … good?

In a new study, researchers randomly selected more than 14,000 Kindle ebooks and ran them through Pangram, an AI-detection tool. One in five came back as more than 25 percent AI-written; Daggermouth returned 60 percent, according to an underlying data set that the authors shared with me. Those numbers, they acknowledge, tell us only so much. The researchers grouped together text that Pangram had flagged as either “AI-generated” or “moderately AI-assisted” (the latter of which can mean that AI was used to edit or polish human writing, or vice versa). And although Pangram has a low rate of false positives, it is not perfect.

[Read: America has a Pangram problem]

So the study’s authors, led by Tuhin Chakrabarty, a professor of computer science at Stony Brook University, devised another check. They scanned each book’s text for “rare expressions”—strings of at least five words in a specific order—that also appear in other suspected AI books but almost never in human-written ones. Daggermouth had many of them. For instance, the following sentence appears near the end of a multipage sex scene in Chapter 27: “They collapsed together, a tangle of sweat-slicked limbs and racing hearts.” That same sentence, word for word, also shows up in another self-published ebook by a different author. Or consider this line from Chapter 38 of Daggermouth: “Her pulse thundered in her ears, drowning out the murmurs of the crowd.” It’s also in an ebook by another author who has published more than 400 different titles on Amazon in the past three years.

The study has yet to be peer-reviewed, and to be clear, there is no definitive proof that Wolfe used AI. “The suggestion that I used generative AI to write Daggermouth is wholly untrue,” Wolfe said in a statement sent by her lawyer. “I wrote this book myself. I have been outspoken about my opposition to generative AI and what it’s doing to writers, artists, and the creative community. I don’t believe it belongs in the writing process.” Referencing Pangram’s limitations, Wolfe added that “accusations like these have real consequences for authors, and they should not be made on the basis of technology that is known to be unreliable.” Susannah Lawrence, a spokesperson for Daggermouth’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, told me in an email that the company stands behind the book, noting that it went through “the same editorial and production process as our other published titles.” Neither Wolfe nor Lawrence addressed my questions about the “rare expressions” that Daggermouth shares with other recent ebooks.

Chakrabarty, who researches AI writing, told me that Daggermouth has “too many telltale signs” of AI for him to buy that explanation. He cited Chapter 18, “Thank You,” as an example: His research team broke it into 12 chunks for Pangram to evaluate, and the tool classified all parts as AI-generated. (In my own spot checks, the tool classified the first few paragraphs as human-written and the rest of the chapter as 100 percent AI.) I ran this by Mohit Iyyer, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland who wasn’t involved with the study. An expert on AI-language detection, Iyyer told me that even accounting for Pangram’s fallibility, it’s “almost statistically impossible” for an entirely human-written book to register as 60 percent AI. He added that the study’s broader methodology, which connects AI writing to ebook sales, is sound.

Whether or not you believe that Wolfe deserves the benefit of the doubt, the same questions about how Daggermouth was written apply to a growing number of other hits on Amazon. Chakrabarty’s study found that books written with “substantial” AI assistance made up 20 percent of Amazon’s ebook catalog, 12 percent of sales, and 10 percent of best sellers in their genre.

Yet Daggermouth stands out for more than just its popularity. The second-best-selling ebook in the data set is Inked Athena, by Nicole Fox, an author who has 418 titles listed on Amazon. Daggermouth, in contrast, appears to be one of just two novels to Wolfe’s name in 2025, and its sequel is not due out until 2027—an indication that Wolfe’s process likely involves significant amounts of genuine human craft. Iyyer said that using AI in a way that results in a novel that’s actually enjoyable to read takes “a huge amount of effort by a human author.”

[Read: The future of writing is a lot like hip-hop]

Another difference: Jennifer Prokop, who reviews books for Kirkus and co-hosts Fated Mates, a popular podcast about romance novels, told me that people in her world keep talking about Daggermouth. “Nicole Fox, I’ve never heard a single soul talk about her,” she said. (Fox did not respond to a request for comment.) Prokop sees mechanical prose cropping up mostly in self-published ebooks, for which the dominant platform is Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited subscription service. Just because an ebook is charting on Kindle doesn’t mean people are devouring it. Grifters can now use AI to crank out titles by the dozen and then use all kinds of tricks to entice readers, such as buying hundreds of bogus five-star reviews and paying click farms to juice their metrics. “If you can get 10,000 people to read 10 pages of your book, and you have 300 books you’re putting out,” she said, you can make real money. “But you’re not actually writing romances people want to read.” (Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.)

If Daggermouth is AI, then maybe it’s just an outlier—a book that caught the perfect wave of social-media hype. (A series of controversies surrounding the book, including accusations of the author’s AI use and a backlash to the cover art for a special hardcover version, seemed to galvanize its fans and bring it even more attention.) The notion that AI writing requires a perfect confluence of events to top the charts is a comforting thought. But it might not be true. “Everyone thinks they can tell AI writing,” Christine Larson, a journalism professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies the effect of technology on creative work, told me. “But I don’t think we can tell so much.” Privately, several authors and editors have told her that they’re using the technology to accelerate or improve their output. “I totally buy into the idea that a human working with AI can write something that is compelling,” she said. “I have absolutely no doubt that we will see more of this in the future.”

If she’s right, then the question is not about whether we’ll see AI best sellers. It’s about whether anyone involved with them will admit it. Coral Hart, a South African author who uses AI to help her publish hundreds of books a year under different pen names, told me that she works hard to keep her pseudonyms secret after she received death threats and thousands of one-star reviews following a New York Times story about her. Hart claimed that she has had successful authors join the classes that she teaches on AI writing, though she declined to name them. “Until they stop the bullying, the witch hunts, and the ousting, I don’t think authors are going to be transparent, and I don’t blame them,” Hart said. “I’m certainly not going to.”

The taboo against the use of AI in literature is understandable: Among other things, it’s wrong to take credit for a book that you didn’t write yourself. Shunning authors suspected of employing AI might work if there were any way to tell for sure—which there isn’t. That shaming ritual puts the moral burden on individual authors instead of on the mammoth corporations responsible for the system in which they’re trying to eke out a livelihood. It also tends to collapse any distinction between pure AI slop and human writing that is assisted by AI. The upshot is a state of affairs that feels untenable: AI writing can be lucrative, but only if it’s kept secret. Eventually, something’s got to give.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Last week, the Pentagon quietly lowered the death toll of the war with Iran from 18 to 14. This wasn’t happy news about an initial miscount but a sketchy accounting trick. Although the Defense Department at first blamed a data issue, military sources told The New York Times that the Trump administration had removed four recently killed service members from its count “because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April.”

Yesterday, the government website that tracks U.S. military casualties was updated again, this time to include the four people, but placing them in a new category: “Overseas operations casualties starting July 7th 2026” is now listed separately from Operation Epic Fury—the military code name for the Iran war. July 7 is the day that the administration restarted strikes against Iran, acknowledging that the April cease-fire had definitively failed. What’s going on here is more than an effort to merely reduce the war’s death toll: The administration is trying to hide a war and ended up hiding the deaths of American service members along the way.

Under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, the president can take military action but must inform Congress. Then, within 60 days, the president must end the conflict, obtain congressional authorization, or invoke a 30-day extension. In April, when the U.S. reached a very fragile cease-fire with Iran, the administration—aided by Republican leaders in Congress—claimed that the war was over, and thus that no congressional action was needed or justified.

Yet the war was plainly not over. Sporadic fighting among Israel, Hezbollah, Iran, and the United States continued for weeks, producing some tortured semantic debates about the definition of cease-fire, until Trump finally declared the cease-fire dead earlier this month. But instead of admitting that this is a return to the original conflict, the White House now says it’s an entirely different clash—which means that Congress won’t have any role until early September, 60 days from July 10, the day the White House delivered formal notification of the conflict. Trump is purporting to follow the letter of the War Powers Resolution while mocking its spirit.

The administration’s concern is a little odd, given its indifference to so many other laws, but the White House is contending with an unhappy public and growing anger among Republicans in Congress, which never authorized the conflict with Iran. Last week, the GOP-majority House passed a resolution calling for the end of the war; four Republicans joined Democrats. The Senate passed a similar measure last month. Neither is binding, but they reflect some Republican members’ fear that the war will drag them down in the midterm elections.

Trump’s rhetoric about Americans killed during the war has been as stomach-churning as one might expect. In a Truth Social post last Tuesday, the president listed the death toll from several more recent conflicts, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and Korea, as well as from the war with Iran, in what looked to many observers like an attempt to downplay the human cost. (Undercutting the Pentagon’s later revisionism, he cited 18 deaths.) Also last week, before traveling to Dover Air Force Base for a ceremony where the bodies of slain troops were returned home, Trump attempted to ventriloquize the dead, claiming that they had endorsed the (current) rationale for the war. “All of them said very strongly, ‘We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon,’” Trump said. This results in a ghastly paradox: Trump insists that these service members died supporting the aims of Operation Epic Fury, but, according to his administration, by the time they were killed, Operation Epic Fury was already over.

Over the course of his two terms, Trump has frequently treated the military as a political prop and shown little respect for those killed or wounded in battle. As The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, reported in 2020, Trump called Americans who died in wars “suckers” and “losers,” and avoided visiting the graves of men killed in World War I. During his first term, he ended up in a public feud with the widow of a soldier killed in Niger, who, following a phone conversation with the president, said that Trump had forgotten her husband’s name and had implied that the slain man “knew what he was getting into when he signed up.” (Trump, in turn, called her account fabricated.)

Prior presidents have also tried to shroud war deaths from the public. From 1991 to 2009, the press was barred from photographing the returns of remains to Dover. This became a liability for the George W. Bush administration after an activist obtained images via public-records requests, leading to questions about whether the White House was keeping damaging images from the public in order to maintain support for the war. The dustup was a classic instance of the “Streisand effect,” in which someone brings attention to a story by trying to stifle it.

The Trump administration is now in the same situation. The reduction in the death toll brought much greater attention to the 18 Americans killed in the war. When the Pentagon published the recategorized data, it also revealed that the number of Americans wounded is now more than 600, up from a reported 482 last week, according to CNN. The administration sought to hide the war with Iran; instead it showed the painful and growing costs.

Related:

• War by any other name
• Congress can’t meet its own Iran-war deadline.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Wes Moore isn’t here to save the Democratic Party.
• Adam Kirsch: The Bible belongs in the classroom.
• How Netanyahu lost America

Today’s News

1. President Trump said he paused the United States’ military strikes on Iran in order to give peace negotiations another chance, but warned that strikes would resume if the talks do not reach a deal.
2. Senator Mitch McConnell said he is still not ready to return to the Senate after his hospitalization last month; he has missed 38 votes in the chamber and didn’t provide a timeline for his return to work.
3. Extreme heat is expected to worsen the already record-breaking wildfires in France and Spain this week. Blazes have burned about 287,000 acres in France and 378,000 acres in Spain and forced evacuations.

Dispatches

• The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores how to open yourself up to a new passion.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

An Odyssey for Our Own Time

By Peter Wehner

“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.

Read the full article.

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• The ticking clock on the Strait of Hormuz

Culture Break

Reflect. When does middle age actually start? Julie Beck tries to attach some numbers to a fuzzy phase of life.

Watch. Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster The Odyssey (in theaters now) seems at times more biblical than Homeric, Luis Parrales writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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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.

More in Culture

• Why so much Millennial fiction is boring
• A novel about the benefits—and costs—of being a rebel
• The World Cup could not be Americanized.
• The crisis that novelists can’t handle
• Inside Trump’s rush job to build his arch
• Too scared for sex

Catch Up on The Atlantic

• Tom Nichols: The American people need the truth about the Iran war.
• J. D. Vance’s new book wasn’t meant to be read.
• The AI bubble is no ordinary bubble.

Photo Album

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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