Updated at 8:32 p.m. ET on August 2, 2026

A couple of years ago, squinting into the morning sun on a Dulles International Airport people mover after arriving from London, I found myself chatting with a flight attendant. Looking at the tired travelers packed in around her, she said in her British accent that she always dreaded flying through Washington. “I just can’t believe this is the airport at your nation’s capital.” I told her that she was not alone, and, further, that I usually refer to the hulking people mover as the “hell bus.” Everyone around us looked miserable. She laughed.

People in Washington really, really hate Dulles. It consistently ranks among America’s least liked airports. It has become a particular obsession for Donald Trump, who has called it a “terrible airport” and recently unveiled a $22.5 billion modernization plan that entails a number of improvements, including the elimination of the people movers. (It is not clear why Trump is so preoccupied with Dulles—he’s never, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, been a commercial passenger there—though it is fair to speculate that he stands a better-than-average chance of having the airport’s name changed to something more pleasing to him.)

Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t want to see much, if anything, changed at Dulles. The truth is, I love it. It’s a great airport, even a miraculous one. And while I’ll grant that the sardine-can quality of the people movers is undignified, a little part of me loves them too.

Let’s start with the obvious: The main terminal at Dulles is a thing of wonder, a sparkling monument to the human triumph of aviation. Consider the gorgeous swoop of its Eero Saarinen–designed roof, with a curve that calls to mind the moment of lift at takeoff when you can finally feel Bernoulli’s principle kick in.

Saarinen once described his creation as a “huge continuous hammock suspended between two concrete trees.” I love to walk through it in the very early morning, when the whole place has a sunbeams-through-the-windows-at-Grand-Central feel, long panels of light forming dramatic golden stripes all along the ceiling. I also love it in the late afternoon, when it’s overcrowded with people preparing to crisscross the globe. I love it when it’s somewhat empty and everything feels improbably easy and fast. I even love the seemingly endless windowless corridors—it’s always nice to stretch your legs before or after a long flight. To walk through Dulles is to conjure a feeling of unmatched possibility. You could be going anywhere—and people are.

I’m aware that you could say that about any major transportation hub—that the convergence of so many people going so many places is both awe-inspiring and the entire point of an airport in the first place. But a flight to and from Dulles is also far more likely to go smoothly than at other airports; 81 percent of both arrivals and departures are on time or early, according to the latest Department of Transportation data, making Dulles the second-most-punctual major airport in the nation. (Salt Lake City International is No. 1.)

Compare Dulles with Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, the airport that most locals say they prefer (and many still insist on calling “National,” its 20th-century name). There, only 70 percent of departures leave on time, and a dismal 68 percent arrive on schedule. Roughly 1 percent of Dulles flights end up getting canceled, compared with nearly 4 percent at Reagan. Dulles also gives you more options—some 170 destinations all over the world compared with Reagan’s 100ish.

All of which is why I am unmoved when someone tries to tell me how much more convenient Reagan is. Yes, it is true that it’s a schlep to get to Dulles from downtown D.C.—Reagan is just a few miles from the U.S. Capitol, and easily accessible by bicycle or metro, while Dulles is roughly 30 miles away. But the time you’d save by going to Reagan won’t do you any good if your flight is delayed.

And anyway, must we really optimize every human experience for maximum efficiency? You’re already going to be hurtling through the air at 600 miles an hour, basking in the miracle of human flight. (See also: Louis C.K.’s riff on this subject.) So it takes you a little longer to get to the airport before participating in one of humankind’s most profound achievements—what’s your hurry? We are, as Kurt Vonnegut once said, “here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

I know what you might be thinking. Even the most Vonnegut-ish among us don’t always have the luxury of time to take the scenic route, even if we wish we did. A desire for convenience, especially among frequent travelers, is completely understandable. Yet the hatred of Dulles—so absolute in its consensus—reminds me of other ways in which our culture has hardened. Cynics like to tell one another that they don’t hate the things they hate enough, a notion so pervasive that it has become its own meme, often deployed to shut down a debate and swear loyalty to one’s political in-group. (Canonical examples include: You don’t hate the media enough; You don’t hate Democrats enough; You don’t hate centrists enough; You don’t hate AI enough.) Perhaps it’s just my disposition as a Philadelphian to root for the underdog, but I see reflexive hatred of Dulles as operating the same way: more groupthinky and performative than fair.

Our species is gloriously resilient and adaptable. These are useful qualities, evolutionarily, but also ones that encourage us to take the extraordinary and very quickly denigrate it as mundane. My favorite example of this phenomenon comes from an old cover of The New Yorker—specifically, the October 11, 1930, issue, which features an illustration by the modernist painter and sculptor Theodore Gilbert Haupt. The image depicted is one you’ve seen a million times: a dreamy view of Manhattan at night, as seen from a fixed-wing biplane, all twinkling city lights and skyscraper spires below. But what you may not realize at a glance is just how exhilarating this would have been at the time. A bird’s-eye view was not unusual conceptually—people have used maps since antiquity, the oldest landscape maps dating back at least to the 5th century B.C.E. But most Americans had never seen New York City from the air because most Americans had never flown over the city—or at all.

In 1930, just 6,000 Americans took commercial flights. (An imperfect but useful comparison: Last year, some 906 million travelers moved through TSA checkpoints.) Airplanes hadn’t even yet made the leap from wood-and-fabric to metal. No wonder it was a surrealist who illustrated that particular magazine’s cover—the perspective required someone who could peer into the future, a future in which seeing the city far below the wing of an airplane would feel normal, even clichéd.

By the time Dulles came along, about 30 years later, the jet age had fully arrived. The federal government spent $100 million, promising that Dulles would be the airport of the future when it opened in 1962, a model for every airport built thereafter. And for a while, it actually was. The hell bus in those days was known as the “mobile lounge,” intended to be a waiting room on wheels where chic travelers could sip cocktails and ride, rather than trudge a mile across the tarmac. In christening the new airport, President John F. Kennedy joined his predecessor Dwight Eisenhower—the latter named the airport John Foster Dulles, after his secretary of state—for a ride on the mobile lounge, which newspapers had praised as moving “smoothly and steadily, with dignity befitting their size.” Kennedy then addressed an assembled crowd of 60,000 people, acknowledging Saarinen for having created a most “distinguished ornament of a great country.” (Saarinen, who died the previous year, had called Dulles “the best thing I have done.”) And for a few decades, public sentiment was rather rosy about Dulles and the easygoing, elegant travel experience it provided. Though people always complained about the distance from the city, early passengers delighted in the “beauty and convenience” of the 90-person mobile lounges, and pilots raved about its “huge runways,” according to news reports at the time. In 1982, on the occasion of the airport’s 20th anniversary, The New York Times declared it “certainly the loveliest major airport in America.”

I have a special fondness for ancient structures, aging hotels, old magazines, out-of-print books, and other objects and places that tether us to time soon to be forgotten, but I am not someone who thinks preservation should always stand in the way of progress. And I’m not so sentimental that I’d argue that an airport built in 1962 is just fine the way it is thankyouverymuch. Those who are dissatisfied with the way things are are catalysts in the making of a better world. So I cannot fault the Dulles haters—certainly not those who are, rather than merely complaining, actually trying to do something about it. But I also cannot bring myself to hate Dulles, especially now that it is, to borrow an expression from the novelist and playwright Alasdair Gray, being quickly “hustled into the past.”

Impatience with the status quo can drive the thinking that enriches humanity, and inventions that bring new vantage points from which we see where we once were. But Dulles already does exactly what it always promised, and does so miraculously—it connects you to people from everywhere, to anywhere, including those who are no longer here to see what it has become.

This article has been updated to remove the term “red-eye” to describe the flight from London to Washington.

Sometime after Jack Black hollered “chicken jockey” in 2025’s A Minecraft Movie, and before The Odyssey drove the masses mad with aspect-ratio anxiety, Hollywood finally felt seen—and saved—by Gen Z. Over the past year, trade publications and mainstream outlets alike celebrated the news: Zoomers were coming of age and coming to the rescue of American cinema. Their theater attendance purportedly outstripped that of their elders; their tastes in video-game franchises and low-budget horror undeniably carried the day.

These cheery headlines largely traced back to a single report by Fandango conducted in January. In a survey of 7,000 adults in the United States, the Gen Z responses were eye-popping: 87 percent had watched at least one film in theaters in the previous 12 months; the average Zoomer had seen seven movies in that period. Compare this with Gen X at 70 percent and 6.1 movies, respectively. (It should be noted, though, that Fandango’s survey pool drew disproportionately from movie enthusiasts: 5,091 of the respondents had gone out to see at least one film in the previous year.)

It might seem predictable that Gen Z now drives the box office. The youngest Zoomers are entering high school (and thus making their first independent purchases), and the eldest are rounding out their 20s (and thus reaching for the next rungs on the career ladder). Many of them are in the season of life when discretionary income rises to meet peak discretionary time. But the seemingly outsize fanfare around these numbers makes more sense in light of the turmoil of the past few years. After the upheaval of the coronavirus pandemic, followed by the writers’ and actors’ strikes that snarled the production pipeline, many industry observers feared that Zoomers were a lost demographic. This cohort of young adults, historically a core part of Hollywood’s customer base, had come of age at a moment when there were fewer new things to watch and more reasons—such as streaming—to stay inside.

[Read: The fear of missing The Odyssey]

Theatrical films “don’t have a future if you can’t capture the younger audiences of today, who are going to be the older audiences of tomorrow,” Paul Dergarabedian, a senior analyst for Rentrak, a box-office-research firm, told me. Fandango’s study, which was released ahead of CinemaCon, the annual convention of theater owners, told the industry what it wanted to hear: that people would continue going to the movies.

But the big picture is murkier. “I think that there’s a lot to be optimistic about, but I would not put the return of theatrical back at the feet of Gen Z,” Kevin Goetz, the CEO and founder of Screen Engine, a research and analytics firm, told me. “I wouldn’t proclaim victory quite yet.” Although other surveys also observe strong youth turnout, the proportions are far less dramatic. Pew, for example, found in a survey last summer that 67 percent of people ages 18 to 29 had seen a movie in the theater in the past 12 months.

This year brought real evidence of cinema’s appeal to the youth: The runaway success of Backrooms and Obsession marked the coronation of YouTube auteurs as bankable directors and drew notably fresh-faced crowds. Even with such turnout, this year’s box office is unlikely to return to the heights it regularly reached in the past. More people are staying at home: In 2019, the share of the non-moviegoing population was 24 percent, according to Vista Group, which provides analytics and software for the film industry; in 2024, that number hit 30 percent. People who still go to the cinema do so less often: In 2025, theaters in the U.S. and Canada sold approximately two tickets per capita, less than half of what they sold in 2002.

Other surveys, from more disinterested sources than Fandango, indicate that although theater attendance has somewhat recovered from its pandemic lows, Gen Z sees fewer movies than past generations of youth. In fact, the drop-off is starkest among young people: In 2007, according to data provided to me by Gallup, 18-to-29-year-olds went out to see an average of nine films. In 2025, the same demographic saw 4.3 movies. As their moviegoing frequency has fallen, Gen Zers’ habits have started to converge with those of the general moviegoing population, Matthew Liebmann, Vista Group’s chief product, innovation, and marketing officer, told me. In other words: Kids today don’t behave that differently from older people.

The numbers point to a broader behavioral shift. Moviegoing used to be a matter of habit meeting spontaneity. Teens loitering at the mall, couples on a date, friends gathering for a night out—these groups reliably showed up at the multiplex and would pick a showtime once they were already in the door. Today, patrons generally plan their cinema visits in advance, and the question of what to see has collapsed into the question of whether to go at all.

Once moviegoing went from routine hangout to major outing, theaters had to adapt. Many have, over time, diversified their offerings. In a phone call, Bob Bagby, the CEO of B&B Theatres, rattled off a cruise line’s worth of activities now offered at his various locations, including mah-jongg, trivia, and bingo. Some locations have bocce and pickleball courts; other chains have added ropes courses and axe-throwing. “I’ve seen it,” Bagby told me, of the latter. “Our insurance people said No, no, don’t do that.”

[Read: The great Gen Z dividing line]

But even the core elements of the cinema experience have changed. If you’re going to get people to look up from the screen in their palm, you have to offer the biggest one possible. If seating is reserved, it needs to be  sumptuous. (One theater-chain president told me that its recliners had heating and cooling settings.) If there’s going to be dining, you might consider rolling out a multicourse prix fixe menu—or at least an array of hot options.

If your lobby is being treated like a special destination, it should also look the part. “The Gen Z crowd wants to come in and be somewhere cool,” says Penn Ketchum, the managing partner of the theater chain Penn Cinema, describing the 24-tap self-serve beer wall he installed in one location as part of a $2 million renovation. “They don’t want to come through a dingy, dusty, aged lobby. They want to come in from the parking lot and be somewhere that’s worthy of being in the background of their picture.”

Over time, “people have been trained to spend more at the theater when they go,” Alicia Reese, a senior vice president of equity research for media and entertainment at the financial firm Wedbush Securities, told me. This is a boon for theaters, because concessions have much higher margins than the films themselves. Moviegoing now comes with an air of occasion. In an era of screen abundance, Hollywood has tried to differentiate the theatrical release by creating an artificial sense of scarcity and transience. The industry has borrowed the tactics of touring artists and fashion drops, promoting limited premium-format screenings and slinging special-edition popcorn buckets. But encouraging audiences to associate moviegoing with “all the trimmings and treats,” Liebmann said, also has drawbacks: It creates an “affordability misperception,” which may dampen their appetite for regular visits.

Gen Z may be filing into more auditoriums than expected these days. And even if they’re doing so less often than their predecessors, and even if their seats are bigger and squishier and spaced less densely than before, their presence certainly ensures some kind of future for the theatrical model. But when you consider the experience that’s been retooled around them, one that depends on so many things beyond sitting in a dark room together as a projector rattles, it’s hard to shake the sense that the pictures have gotten small.

When you approach the freshly gilded twin statues near the Lincoln Memorial, there is no mistaking that they are gold. Very, very gold. Distractingly gold—or, more precisely, covered in 23.75-karat gold leaf costing $5.1 million. The 19-foot statues, called The Arts of War, were once easy to miss but now look a bit like oversized children’s trophies, especially next to the classical and austere Lincoln Memorial. Seeing them is as if, on the walk between Arlington National Cemetery and the National Mall, you’d suddenly stumbled upon a P. F. Chang’s.

This is how President Trump is approaching his redecoration of Washington: glitzy and gaudy, even if out of place. He has already splashed gold all around the White House, but these statues are the most prominent symbols of Washington’s new gilded age. As the scaffolding around the statues came down this week, marking one of the few completions of a Trump-ordered renovation project, the president giddily posted photos on social media—and tourists, commuters, cyclists, and runners paused to take photos of their own of the capital’s latest can-you-believe-it attraction.

Trump has worn his love of gold like a blinging billboard. Mar-a-Lago’s ballroom is inspired by Versailles, and he has proudly bragged of golden bathrooms, golden airplane-seatbelt buckles, and a gold-infused penthouse suite. The Oval Office now looks like a Middle Eastern bazaar crossed with an opulent Cracker Barrel. Thick, gold frames line the walls; gold vases and ice buckets adorn the fireplace mantel; gold stars form a circle on the ceiling; and gold appliqués fill any gaps. (Trump insists that these are real gold, and not painted flourishes from Home Depot.) Last year, he exempted gold bullion from his reciprocal tariffs, and he named his special visa program for wealthy foreigners the Trump Gold Card. He has taken his personally designed presidential challenge coin (which is golden) and glued it to the center of the Oval Office door, at about eye level. The coasters are gold, the curtains are gold, and guests know to come bearing gifts of gold.

When FIFA President Gianni Infantino awarded Trump the first FIFA Peace Prize, it was a golden orb of a trophy. Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook presented the president with a 24-karat-gold base to hold a glass sculpture. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year gave him a golden pager to commemorate an operation in which members of Hezbollah were killed when their pagers detonated. “See,” he said during a meeting with his Cabinet in March while riffing about all of the projects he’d launched in Washington, “I’m a gold person.”

It’s one thing for Trump to have a personal fascination with one of the world’s most expensive metals. It’s another for the president to flaunt it at a time when many Americans are struggling to pay rent, losing their health insurance, and seeing high prices at the gas pump. It may not quite be a “Let them eat cake” moment, but it is one when he seems to be saying: Let them see that I just spent $5 million in taxpayer funds on golden statues.

Trump for decades has loved gold and marble, liberally sprinkling them about his development projects and his personal spaces. Ivana Trump, his first wife, who was the Trump Organization’s vice president of interior design, encouraged Trump’s gold obsession, according to Regime Change, the recent book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan that has a golden cover. (Ivana’s love of the color proved lasting: She was buried in a gold casket.) In the 1980s, Trump bought Mar-a-Lago in South Florida and went on to put $7 million worth of gold leaf on the walls, plus gold-plated sinks near the ballroom. He hired the designer Henry Conversano, known for infusing golden flourishes in the Golden Nugget casinos, to remodel his Trump Tower penthouse apartment and work at his Atlantic City casino. In 1988, he purchased from the sultan of Brunei a yacht that was bathed in gold—couches, sinks, ceilings—and named it the Trump Princess.  

[Read: A decade of golden-escalator politics]

“It was so gaudy. Almost shockingly gaudy. And he loved it. He thought it was the most beautiful thing out there,” Jack O’Donnell, one of Trump’s former casino executives who helped him host parties on the boat, told me. He speculated that Trump may have been inspired by the yacht when he remade the Lincoln Bathroom almost entirely in gold and marble.

Years later, in 2008, when Trump built a hotel in Las Vegas, the 406,000-square-foot facade was coated in a layer of gold-infused glass. More recently, when a group of Trump supporters erected a 22-foot statue of him at his golf course in Doral, Florida, they opted for a gold finish.

“To him gold was the essence of richness and class,” Barbara Res, who oversaw construction for the Trump Organization and was placed in charge of building Trump Tower, told me. “To him it meant, This is gold. This is mine. It’s the best you can get, and I’m the best. That’s how his mind works. I’m going to show you the best by buying the best.” Sometimes, she said, it wasn’t the best. It was a cheaper alternative that looked like gold but actually wasn’t (although she found that he was willing to spend his money for something that was his idea). He liked the design concept trompe l’oeil, a French word that means “deceive the eye,” where painters could make a column that looked like marble.

“It was tricking the eye of the consumer. He loved it,” Res said. “And he took an interest in the gold finishes. It reflects his taste and his ability to spend endless money on something beautiful. That’s what he wants people to believe.”

Whether it’s in his long, red ties; his swooshed-over hairstyle; or his “Thank you for your attention to this matter” social-media posts, Trump is all about branding. Perhaps nothing is more on-brand for him than his affection for gold. “I love the gold, but if you don’t use 24 karat gold, it doesn’t look good,” he told reporters last August. “It just beams,” he marveled in September. “It’s all real stuff,” he said in March. “You can’t imitate it. Someday they’ll discover a paint that will look like gold, and the guy’s going to be the richest man in the world.”

Peter York, a design and culture columnist, wrote in Politico Magazine in 2017 that Trump’s design style is “aspirational, meant to project the wealth so many citizens can only dream of.” Although it’s often associated with Italian Renaissance or French Baroque, York says a better  comparison is more recent. “The best aesthetic descriptor of Trump’s look, I’d argue, is dictator style,” he wrote.

[Read: The YOLO presidency ]

Gold has often been used to represent imperial power, whether in 18th-century France or 19th-century Russia. When Trump went to the Middle East for his first foreign trip of his second term, I watched as he marveled at the gold and marble in the palaces of Doha and Abu Dhabi. “Versailles is not a gold leaf,” he said in June ahead of a trip to the palace. “Versailles is the real deal.”

The two Arts of War statues, called Valor and Sacrifice, were sculpted by Leo Friedlander and cast in Italy. They were dedicated in 1951, offered to the United States as a gift from the Italians for helping rebuild their country after World War II. Each statue shows a nude man and a seminude woman. Two other statues, collectively called The Arts of Peace, are nearby but still undergoing their golden glam-ups.

Each of the statues sits on a granite pedestal ringed with 36 stars, representing the states in the Union at the end of the Civil War. The statues, cast in bronze, were last regilded in 1971 and had since faded. Trump added them to the list of eyesores he wanted fixed before the nation’s 250th birthday, on July 4, and federal officials scrambled to meet his demands.

[Read: ‘Rush project at request of POTUS’]

When I reached out to the White House to ask about the project, the president’s role in it, and his choice of gold, the spokesperson Davis Ingle responded with a statement that made no mention of gold and said, in part: “No other president has done more to beautify our Nation’s interior than President Trump.” He said that the president’s “bold vision” was ensuring that the 250th birthday was filled with “glory and pride.” He referred other questions to the Department of Interior, which did not address any of my questions about the project, its delays, the choice to heavily apply gold, or Trump’s involvement. “Residents and visitors are excited to see the city revitalized to the grand destination it was meant to be,” the department offered in a statement.

Federal officials did not seek competitive bids for the work on the statues, bypassing the typical process and awarding a contract in April for $5.1 million. The project was treated as a high priority by the National Park Service, according to The New York Times, which cited internal documents that referred to it as “a visible, high-impact example of how the N.P.S. is responding to presidential directives.” Extensive market research was not done to determine whether $5 million was a fair price, according to documents obtained by NOTUS, and the agency determined that only one company could meet the requirements of the work and the timeline: the Gilders’ Studio in Maryland.

The company, which did not respond to my message, has done a large number of regilding projects around the country, including the dome of the Georgia State House, the cupola of Faneuil Hall in Boston, and—perhaps most similar to the statues in Washington—the Sherman Monument in Central Park. A description of the project had a mandatory competition date of July 1. But for the past few weeks, as it had for the months before, the scaffolding remained up, and tarps read: We are making DC safe and beautiful.

Only now is the project coming into view, and although Trump is clearly pleased, others are less so. “Fit for an oligarch’s ballroom,” a review in ARTNews reads.

As I rode my bike past the new gilded statues Friday morning, I couldn’t help but wonder what would next succumb to Trump’s Midas touch. If a triumphal arch is constructed across the bridge, will it be just as glaringly golden? Will Trump cast the John F. Kennedy statue outside the Kennedy Center in gold? Is Abraham Lincoln, sitting nearby, at risk? Or the pensive Thomas Jefferson standing in the dome across the way? How far will Trump’s new golden age extend?

The videos that Instagram suggests in my never-ending “For You” feed are usually of a constellation of women. They’re strangers, but I call them “my girls.” One of them is remodeling her house; one is always cleaning and “resetting” the van she lives in; one is sampling pasta and sandwiches at various New York establishments. And each has something special that I can’t explain to you—a je ne sais quoi, a curious style of speaking—so I’ve come to look forward to my regular glimpses of their lives, which I get when I scroll in bed before I go to sleep each night.

I regard these strangers as my intimates in a way, even though some of them are not people I think I would like if I actually met them. One morning, I was watching one on my living-room television while sipping my coffee. My husband walked into the room and winced as one of the women changed into a perfect re-creation of an American Girl–doll outfit (very theater kid, not his thing). I felt a flash of defensiveness—she makes everything by hand! She has a real sense of self! Not to mention a seemingly sweet relationship with her father and pet birds. I kept scrolling and was relieved that another one of my girls hadn’t appeared. She often records herself eating a frozen dinner on her couch while watching police body-cam footage on YouTube to unwind. And I mean no disrespect to her, but if she had shown up, I would have lunged for the remote.

You might be wondering: Why was I watching Instagram on my TV? Instagram’s vice president of product, Tessa Lyons-Laing, has referred to TV as the company’s “next frontier.” As it tries to compete with YouTube and Netflix, Instagram is apparently looking for ways to be … both of them. And so it has launched a stand-alone service for various streaming devices, which it recently expanded with new features to help “friends and family watch together.” This caught my attention: I wanted to try taking the “bad” screen (my phone) and putting it onto the “good” screen (my TV) to see how it would make me (and the people around me) feel.

[Read: The flip-phone cleanse]

Years ago, the “good screen versus bad screen” meme originated as a joke about having an office job. The “bad” screen was a desktop computer at work, whereas the “good” screen was a personal laptop, full of one’s own, delightful, self-chosen digital activities. But in 2022, following the coronavirus-pandemic lockdowns, the writer Kate Lindsay noted a shift. When people referred to the “bad” screen, they now seemed to be talking about their smartphone, which they felt hopelessly dependent on, and when they mentioned the “good” screen, they were referring to the humble television, which now felt wholesome and safe. “We’re so convinced that it’s in our best interest to reverse the effects of social media that even watching a 30-minute TV show uninterrupted seems constructive,” Lindsay observed. But maybe, four years later, the 30-minute-show part is negotiable. Perhaps “good” could come just from giving our thumbs a break, looking up instead of down, and permitting other people to see what we’re doing.

My husband was initially wary of adding his Instagram account to our living-room TV, but he acquiesced, and we had kind of a blast watching his feed together. Most of the videos were of male comedians I didn’t recognize; I sounded like the trope of a Boomer mom as I repeatedly asked, “Do you know him?” whenever a new guy showed up. I didn’t mean “Are you friends?”; I meant “Are they Your Guys?” Sometimes they were, and I was honored to meet them. Sometimes they weren’t; they were just guys. We both laughed to the point of tears at a video that some guy had shared of his dad trying to teach him to bunt a baseball when he was 10 years old. I manually liked it with the remote control and then sent it to myself, from my husband, via direct message. On my TV.

“This intrigues me,” Jonathan Gray, a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me when I asked him about the app. Scrolling has always had a social element, he said, and people will often show a funny or interesting video to the person next to them. But he was skeptical of whether they would want to share every bit of their feed with their loved ones. “It’s one thing when I turn my phone to my wife and say, ‘Hey, you’ll like this,’ but 90 percent of what I see, she won’t want to watch,” he said. “It seems kind of painful.” Plus, his wife is learning how to whittle at the moment, and he doesn’t want to watch a bunch of whittling videos.

[Read: The extras are tired]

Gray also noted that the recommendation algorithms sometimes take big swings and throw new things at users to learn whether they’ll be interested. One might worry a little about the big swings that could appear on your TV, which to others in the room might appear to be something you’ve already expressed enthusiasm about. When I asked the Instagram spokesperson Christine Pai whether the TV app would filter out any weird stuff, she told me that both apps are using the same recommendation system. (The only specific difference she cited is that the TV app will give an edge to horizontal videos, because they are better suited for the display.)

The app does allow users to play themed “channels” based on their preestablished interests, so you don’t necessarily have to show off your entire, highly variable and sometimes unpredictable feed. The idea with the channels seems to be that making the secret, private shame of scrolling into a collaborative activity will give it a new place in the home. It can be more like watching America’s Funniest Home Videos together after dinner and less like sitting side by side, staring silently at something in your lap. People feel ambivalent about scrolling feeds, Marika Lüders, a professor of media and communication at the University of Oslo, wrote to me on this point. We find it entertaining at times, but we also feel embarrassed and guilty about it. To her, moving Instagram from a phone to a TV seems like “a strategy to increase the status of short-form videos,” by putting them on a screen that people (currently) feel less anxiety about.

That makes sense to me, though I find it just as easy to imagine how this may backfire for the company. Many people who are attempting to cut back on their Instagram use remove the app from their phone and use only the desktop-computer version, which is clunkier and less comfortable to scroll through for hours. Using it is so nonintuitive and unnatural that it calls attention to the absurdity of one’s habit. Moving Instagram to a bigger screen, then, is usually a route not to normalizing it in that new space but instead to severing ties with it altogether. The differences between a phone and a TV are even more dramatic and may be even more off-putting.

Surely the novelty will wear off. Last week, while visiting my sister-in-law and her boyfriend, my husband and I asked them to show us their feeds on their TV. My sister-in-law’s was funny because it was full of wedding-planning content—she’s currently waiting on the requisite engagement ring—and because she kept getting videos of this one baby who’s obsessed with Bad Bunny. Her boyfriend got a hairless cat, a guy pretending to be Wolverine, and a recipe for butter-chicken macaroni and cheese. Those were a little funny, too, but because you don’t know him, you don’t get why and you don’t care. After 20 minutes or so, we got bored of the experiment and left for a baseball game. Later, in the quiet of my hotel room, I went back to my own, private phone.

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

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, a staff writer who’s covered the fight over who runs elections in Maricopa County, the arc of the Voting Rights Act, and why election deniers are winning.

Yvonne has a nostalgic fondness for state fairs and rodeos, and she’s excited for an upcoming one in her home state. She also recommends watching anything with Billy Bob Thornton in it, reading Chris Whitaker for a good mystery, and putting down the hair crimper in the year 2026.

— Stephanie Bai, senior associate editor

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: The Hondo Rodeo Fest in Phoenix, where I’ll watch the Turnpike Troubadours sing and the cowboys compete in everything from bull riding to barrel racing. I grew up going to rodeos and competing in county cooking showcases in small-town Idaho, and even though I’ve lived in Arizona for decades, a big piece of my heart still considers Idaho home. Every now and then, I hit the county rodeos outside of Phoenix because the smells, the riders, the announcers, the food on a stick, and the leather-fringe rodeo chaps all remind me of my childhood. I’ve never been to the Hondo Rodeo Fest before, and my husband—who grew up in a small town near Fort Worth, Texas, and is always looking for an excuse to wear his boots—made plans for us to try the big-city rodeo scene. We can’t wait!

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: My guilty pleasure is watching The Real Housewives, and I am loving the new Rhode Island series. (Rosie is my favorite!) I also can’t get enough of the twists and turns of British crime dramas, and I plan on rewatching Jed Mercurio’s Line of Duty (which has been on hiatus) before the next season premieres.  

An actor I would watch in anything: Billy Bob Thornton. He seems to effortlessly channel a variety of complicated, unpredictable, and funny characters. He has a way of making you root for him, even when he’s skirting—or completely breaking—all the rules. I grew up watching him in Westerns with my dad (The Alamo and Tombstone), and he was brilliant in Sling Blade. I’ve loved him in everything since, including Goliath, Landman, and yes, even Bad Santa.

A quiet song that I love: I can’t stop listening to Flatland Cavalry, a country band from Lubbock, Texas, that a friend introduced me to last summer. Their ballad “Mountain Song” takes me back to my childhood in the Mountain West, where I’d spend summer evenings on the back porch of our apple orchard. Our home had a breathtaking view of the area’s towering butte, which resembles a woman’s face, and the song reminds me of my parents, nature, and a simpler time.

A musical artist who means a lot to me: Willie Nelson. He’s part of my core childhood memories. My family spent hours trekking in our motor home to Idaho campsites, the beaches of the Pacific Northwest, and the parking lots of Las Vegas casinos (Circus Circus, anyone?). Those road trips almost always featured my dad behind the wheel, the window half down while he sang along to “On the Road Again” and “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.” (My mom, on the other hand, preferred “Always on My Mind.”)

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I love a good mystery, and All the Colors of the Dark, by Chris Whitaker, drew me in for days. Beginning in small-town Missouri in the 1970s, it follows a serial killer and a missing-person case. The story is so gripping and well written, I didn’t want it to end. When it did, I bought all of Whitaker’s other books, which are piled up on my nightstand.

As for nonfiction, I just binged Regime Change, a new chronicle of the first year of President Trump’s second term, by the New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. It’s exceptional—and the reporting is jaw-dropping.

A cultural product I loved as a teenager and still love: I discovered Selena’s Tejano music when I was in middle school, danced to “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom” throughout high school, and still listen to her rancheras today. (It was an honor to spend time with her dad and sister back in 2005 for a story I wrote about the 10-year anniversary of her death.)

Something I loved but now dislike: Hair crimpers. Love the look, don’t miss the smell of burning hair. A piece of me dies every time I watch my daughter straighten her natural curls, only to singe zigzag shapes into her hair.

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: “The Missing Kayaker,” by Jamie Thompson. It is an irresistible—and infuriating—mystery.

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: My 11-year-old daughter is obsessed with the Athletes Unlimited Softball League, the new women’s professional softball league, and I’m obsessed now too. Our favorite player is Bri Ellis, who plays first base for the Utah Talons. She is kind, funny, strong, and an inspiration for young girls and the moms raising them.

The last thing that made me cry: I’m going to go full mom here. A few weeks ago, we were up in Prescott, Arizona, for a softball tournament. The weather was perfect, and the bases were loaded, with two outs in the last inning. My daughter had two strikes on her and then nailed the ball out to left field for the game-winning hit. I bawled as she rounded first base and then was mobbed at second base by a sweaty mess of preteen girls celebrating their win.

A quote that I return to: I often recall this 1944 diary passage by Anne Frank, which perfectly encapsulates hope for humanity: “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

The Week Ahead

1. Tony, a biopic that follows Anthony Bourdain as he begins his career in the restaurant world (in select theaters Friday)
2. Etna, a novel by Paul Yoon told through the eyes of an ex-military dog returning home after war (out Tuesday)
3. The Shards, a series adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel, set at an elite Los Angeles prep school in 1981 (out Wednesday on Hulu)

Essay

Is This What Comes After AI Slop?

By Will Oremus

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?

Read the full article.

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A few hours after Levi Fishback died last month, at a nursing home in Kentucky, the funeral director called me. She needed to know whether the family wanted an open casket. What songs would Levi have wanted? What color flowers? Who should give the eulogies?

By now I should be used to being asked questions about my father that I don’t know the answers to. I spent the past four years as his medical proxy, the only family member responsible for handling the bills from the nursing home and overseeing his care. But I barely knew the man. I felt uncomfortable deciding whether the nurses should give him a flu shot every fall, let alone choosing what to put in his obituary. I needed to include photos, but I had only one: from my fourth or fifth birthday. I messaged his ex-wife and the stepdaughter he’d raised, along with my half brother’s two children, for more, and they delivered, sending photos of my dad—smiling widely in a suit and tie—alongside them at graduations and family parties. I didn’t know that he’d had that much joy inside of him.

My memories of my dad are like a few scatterplots on the graph of my life. He had lived right across town from me in Lexington, Kentucky, but he would go months without visiting me. From the ages of 10 to 14, I don’t think I saw him a single time. He had his own family—his wife, his stepdaughter, and his son from a previous relationship. When he and his wife got married, his son was the ring bearer and her daughter was the flower girl. I wasn’t a flower girl at the wedding. I didn’t go to the wedding. I didn’t even know about the wedding. They had a piano in their living room that his stepdaughter played. She is a year older than me and went to a rival high school. I would see her sometimes—she was a cheerleader, and she had all the name-brand clothes that the pretty, popular girls wore.

My mom, Trina, was addicted to crack for years and had struggled to take care of me and her four younger kids. Levi must have known it. Once, when I was about 7 or 8, he came to my mom’s door. It had been a bad week, or a bad few weeks. My mom had gone out—I’m not sure when or where—and I was alone with my four little brothers and sisters. Our refrigerator was empty. Dirty plates and clothes lay around, broken toys all over the place. We were untamed children who did what we wanted—my brother Colby was always trying to do backflips off the arm of the couch.

[Read: Jenisha from Kentucky]

Maybe my dad had heard on the streets that Trina’s kids needed help. Or maybe it was a random visit. I was jittery when we opened the door to him. He was a short man with thick eyebrows that dominated his face, but in our eyes, he was a hero. We knew he would help us, because drugs didn’t control his life; he wasn’t damaged like Trina; he was a man who took care of a wife and children. He would recognize our fear and desperation. He stepped inside but stayed close to the door. He looked around like one of the social workers the government sometimes sent, and we huddled around him, watching him judge the mess with his eyes. And then he left. He said he’d come back for me, but he didn’t.

Plenty of people my age are beginning to take care of sick or aging parents. It’s the natural way; you take care of the people who once took care of you. You don’t resent it, because now you’re the strong one, and they’re the vulnerable one, and you owe them everything. But for me, it wasn’t like that.

When I was 9, I was sent to stay with my aunts. While I was gone, the state took my siblings away from Trina; my sister went to an aunt and my brothers were put in foster care. I moved back to Lexington for the fifth grade, and my grandmother took me in—I don’t remember anyone ever suggesting that I could stay with my father. I have one memory of him from that year I came back: For some reason, he showed up at my school and found me in the lunch line. He handed me some money and then pulled me toward him for a hug. I was embarrassed by his affection and don’t think I embraced him back.

I lived with my grandmother until I graduated from high school. Levi would call sometimes. “Jenisha, get the phone. It’s yo daddy,” she’d shout. I’d rush to the phone—toddler-excited to hear from him. A call from my father was like Christmas. Sometimes he’d ask if I wanted him to pick me up the next day, and so I’d spend hours waiting for him to drive up the driveway. Occasionally he would actually show, but usually he wouldn’t.

Once, in middle school, I spent a weekend with him and his wife. I made up a lie: I told his wife that I’d skipped a grade in elementary school. I wanted her to like me and think I was smart; I didn’t think it was a big deal. But a few hours after he’d dropped me back off at my grandmother’s, he called me. He’d found out about the lie and gave me a long lecture, and then a punishment: “You can’t come over here no more,” he told me. I was surprised he was angry. After all, he lied to me all the time—about being on his way to pick me up, about how he would drop off spending money for my field trip or take me back-to-school shopping. But this time he stuck to his word: I didn’t hear from him for a few years after that.

A month before I graduated from college, in 2008, I was in an evening class when he called my cellphone. He and his wife had gotten divorced by then. I stepped out to the hallway to answer. He was calling to tell me that he had a condition, and his doctor said there was a test I could take to see whether I had the “same gene.” He didn’t say what it was, and I didn’t ask any follow-up questions, because he swiftly changed the subject. “You graduating?” he asked, although he knew the answer. I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t ask about the details of the ceremony. He just spouted some compliments: “Man, you graduating. You good with that English. You gotta be real smart to do English in school.” He hadn’t come to my high-school graduation, and he didn’t come to this one, either.

I graduated, packed my bags, and left Kentucky to move to New York City. I was building a new life, and I thought about him only when a guy dumped me. If my own father thought I was worthless and didn’t want to stay in my life, how could I expect a romantic partner to want me? I measured my value by his absence.

Sometimes he’d send me a corny text, something that I couldn’t imagine him ever actually saying: “I love you like a fat kid loves cake,” he wrote once. I treated it like spam. I didn’t see him again until 2015.

By then he had moved to an assisted-living place and was using a walker to get around. His speech was slurred, and his hands shook. I took him out to the all-you-can-eat buffet at Golden Corral. Most of the time, he just smiled, showing his chipped and missing teeth. Later, I heard that his illness was getting worse and that my half brother was taking care of him.

I never quite knew why my brother had lived with our dad and I hadn’t. Maybe Levi was just proud to have a son, and what he felt about me was shame—shame that he was connected to a woman like my mom, a crack addict. Lexington is a small town, and Levi never smoked or used drugs. He’d always claimed that my mom was a one-night stand.

But my brother had his own problems. He was involved in selling drugs, and then in 2022, he disappeared. He told me one thing before he left: “Now it’s your turn.”

I had questions about Levi’s bills and care, but no one could reach my brother. I understood why last year, when he was apprehended and sent to Blackburn Correctional Complex. He’d been on the run from the Lexington police—wanted for trafficking cocaine, fleeing or evading police, and possessing a firearm.

As far as I know he was in touch with Levi only once in those years, when he texted my dad’s ex-wife a message for our dad, and she shared the message with me: “Tell him I said I love him and miss him.” I read that message over and over again, wondering what it would be like to love our dad and miss him. Obviously, my brother knew a different side of Levi. I wanted to love him, too, but it was like trying to touch the air. Yet if I didn’t take care of him, who would?

[Read: Dear Therapist: I don’t want to take care of my aging, homophobic parents]

At times, I resented my brother for what he’d had in the past, and for not being around now. Like when the nursing home called to say there had been “a little smoke incident with one of our dryers and the fire department came here to evacuate.” Or when a nurse left me a voicemail: “Just checking in for the care-plan meeting.” I resented him, and I resented Levi. But I called the nurse back. I went to the meetings. Whenever I went back to Kentucky, I made a point to visit my father. But I didn’t do any more than I felt I had to.

I thought of Levi sometimes as a stranger sleeping at a bus stop. The idea of walking away from him felt cruel—but also liberating. I once wasn’t able to care for myself, and walked away from me too.

Levi was a professional gambler who shot dice and bet on horses. He spent most of his time at the Red Mile Racetrack wagering on standardbreds galloping around the track, or on the simulcast of races around the country that played inside. He took me a few times when I was little, and I remember him staring at the screen, like an airline traveler scanning for their final destination.

But most of what I know about Levi I know from other people. When people learned that he was my father, they always had a story to tell. His nickname was Sonny, and he earned real money at the track, sometimes leaving with bundles of cash. I’ve heard stories of him handing out crisp $100 bills like Monopoly money, or treating a group to breakfast after winning. He was also known to cheat at dice sometimes, by playing with altered dice.

He was estranged from his brother and sister. Their youngest brother had killed himself when he was 18. He’d used Levi’s pistol to do it, and my surviving uncle, Kenny, never forgave him for it. Kenny has told me a little more over the years. Levi ran track even though he was “a short motherfucker,” he told me—which interested me, because I was a runner too, and I was fast. I always wondered where I’d got it from. The truth is Kenny couldn’t stand him. “Your daddy ain’t shit,” he’d say. “It seems like a man would look out for his daughter.”

More recently, I learned about Levi from his nurses. His favorite soda was Pepsi. He loved soft sweets, such as an oatmeal pie. And last year, during a meeting with his care team, I finally learned what his diagnosis was: a form of cerebellar ataxia, a degenerative neurological condition that can be inherited. I thought back to that call from so many years ago, when he had told me I could take a genetic test to find out whether I was at risk. But I didn’t take the test. I still haven’t. I’m afraid. And the last thing I want to think about is whether we share the same gene.

I saw him in April, when I had to fly back to Kentucky for the funeral of another family member. The drive to the nursing home was long, and I was glad—it gave me time to prepare to see this man who was almost a stranger to me. I passed old gas stations, homes with acres of grass, a fresh eggs for sale sign hanging on a residential mailbox. I thought about how I didn’t know the sound of his laugh, how I wouldn’t have been able to describe his voice.

The woman at the front desk greeted me: “Hi, Jenisha.” The other nurses just called me “Levi’s daughter.” They probably assumed we had a normal relationship, that he was a normal parent, and here I was, their patient’s “loved one,” doing my normal duty.

“You’re the only person who comes to see him,” a nurse told me. Maybe she was trying to make me feel proud. But I just felt sad. His ex-wife and stepdaughter visited now and then, but not regularly. Where were all of the people he’d been close with in Kentucky? How was I the only one there, when he was notorious for breaking my heart?

I walked to his room, which he shared with another man, a curtain dividing the space. The television was on—an old black-and-white cowboy movie—but there was no sound. The person in the bed was nothing like the Levi from my childhood, slick-talking and arrogant. He was fragile and could barely lift his head up. He struggled to drink from a straw, and I watched as his mouth kept missing the hole.

Sitting beside him, I dug for emotion, wanting to feel what another kind of daughter would feel. I felt like I was in a movie myself, an actress in a father-daughter scene. Kisses on my forehead. Talks about my first boyfriend. My daddy—who saw me as the most beautiful girl in the world—always wanted his darling daughter close to him. “Don’t leave,” he’d say. “Stay as long as you want.”

But all I really felt was nervous. Even though my father couldn’t speak or stand, even though he had shrunk to 77 pounds and was smaller than I was, being near him still turned me back into that scared little girl hoping for scraps. At one point I asked: “Do you love me? Nod your head if you do.” He responded by moving his head up and down. Watching him use up all of his strength to answer me filled me with a childlike high. At last, he wasn’t going to reject me anymore.

But only a few minutes later, he lifted his hand and flapped it at me. He made the gesture again. I realized he was shooing me away. I couldn’t believe it. “Are you ready for me to leave?” I asked. He nodded yes.

Even at his most vulnerable, even when he was utterly alone in the world, he was still turning me away.

Last month, the nursing home called at 4:39 a.m. “He died peacefully,” the nurse told me.

The day before, I’d talked to Levi on FaceTime and I saw how sunken he looked. Even as he was transitioning, I had little to say to him. “I love you. Are you ready to see your mom?” He nodded.

[Read: Americans are in denial about elder care]

I arranged for other family members to FaceTime, too, and the prison helped set up a call for my brother. The nurse told me that they both were crying. I kept asking her: “Did you tell him that I made it happen? What did my brother say?” My ego wanted them to know that I had made the call possible. I pictured both of them crying. All I could think was: Damn, I wish I could feel what my brother was feeling.

We scheduled the funeral for July 3, two days after my brother would be released from prison. I decided against the open casket. Levi’s body was twisted into the fetal position. To get him into an open casket, the funeral director told me, she’d have to break his legs, arms, and fingers. “I don’t want to do that to Levi,” she said. For weeks, I couldn’t decide whether or not to go to the funeral. My mom said I shouldn’t feel like I had to: “Levi didn’t show up for a lot of things for you,” she reminded me. Paying my respects seemed like the right thing to do. But more than that, a part of me wanted to prove that I was the bigger person. I wanted others—his family, his stepdaughter—to lay eyes on me, and to see that I’d made something of myself in spite of his absence. I wanted them to know that I’d been his emergency contact, the one who took care of him in the end. But the day before, I stayed home. I decided that I would watch it on Facebook Live.

The truth is that I wasn’t mourning my father; I was grieving the loss of what I’d never had. I didn’t cry when he died. But when I heard the speech that his stepdaughter gave at the funeral, the feelings hit me. Like me, she was a runner, and they used to go on jogs together. Someday, she said, she believed she would see Levi in heaven. “Come on,” he’d tell her, “let’s race,” and off they would go again. She said that Levi left her with many happy moments. And that’s when I cried.

I’ll never understand why he didn’t show up in my life, but I have to stop asking. There was a brief chapter of his life when he needed me, a period when he might have recognized me as someone who was important to him. I still wanted to please him, wanted him to see for himself that he’d made a terrible mistake by not being my father. And now that chapter is over.

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

Anthony Fauci returned to Capitol Hill this week, where he faced attacks from Republican lawmakers during a Senate hearing. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss his response, and more.

“The hearing was such a perfect encapsulation of Washington at this moment, with a lot of raised voices and a lot of yelling and virtually no new information,” Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch, said last night. “With a more serious government we would have gotten closer to answers through that hearing.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; Hayes; Nancy A. Youssef, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

In one of my favorite videos of the singer-songwriter Glen Hansard, who died this week at the age of 56, he is standing in a small backyard in Cologne. It’s 2015, and he’s playing “Say It to Me Now,” which he performs in the opening scene of the breakout 2007 indie film Once; it’s a raw, wrenching plea of a song that explodes in its second half. In his guitar is a gaping hole: Hansard’s trusty cedar-topped Takamine—nicknamed “the Horse,” for its endurance—had been with him through many years of busking in Hansard’s hometown of Dublin, where he’d strummed it with sufficient force to cut through the din of the street.

Like its owner, the guitar had little varnish—hence the gash, which exposed its interior. Just as the performance begins to take off—mid–raspy belt, mid–resolute strum—the Horse’s G string snaps, and knocks some of its neighbors out of tune. Hansard coolly flings the limp string to the side, adjusts the tuning pegs with a grin, and sings on.

The sum of the video’s parts—the unassuming backyard, the battered Horse, the mishap taken in stride—tells you everything you need to know about Hansard. Many people might know him only as “the guy from Once,” which won him and Markéta Irglová, his co-star and musical collaborator, the Oscar for Best Original Song. But in this stripped-down performance, we witness the mastery and lack of artifice that defined his music and his life.

The simple scene also harkens to his origins as a street musician. Hansard said time and again that this vulnerable and often trying vocation, which he left school at 13 to pursue, turned him into the artist he was. Busking made him egoless, unflappable—the people’s troubadour.

[Read: A quieter, gentler music festival]

The tributes to Hansard from every corner of the music industry show the profound mark he left over his four-decade career. Songwriters cited his influence on them; collaborators recounted his generosity; his fellow Irishman Bono hailed him as the “voice of the streets.” Other artists recalled how he’d made time for everyone: He’d befriended legends, paid tribute to peers who had passed, mentored those coming up behind him. He gathered his fellow musicians, and they gathered around him.

It’s no coincidence that Hansard shot to fame in the United States with Once: He starred as an Irish busker who falls for a Czech pianist, played by Irglová. The film begins with an unbroken shot of Hansard on a dark, nearly deserted street, guitar case propped open at his feet, singing “Say It to Me Now.” It’s a vocal tour de force, by turns tender and volcanic, that immediately establishes him as a rugged bard roiling with emotion. When he was invited, with Irglová, to perform their poignant, Oscar-winning ballad, “Falling Slowly,” at the following year’s Academy Awards, he put on a nice suit—but still played his beat-up old Horse.

Hansard’s brush with Hollywood was relatively brief. He had many other pursuits: He was the front man of the Frames, one of Ireland’s most successful rock bands, and one-half of the heart-on-its-sleeve folk duo the Swell Season, with Irglová; he also put out a number of solo records. He was recording new music up until the end of his life, and had been busking for decades. His final, two-volume album, a career-spanning retrospective, was called Don’t Settle. He never did. He had just finished work on another record, which he’d hoped to release next spring. Knowing the amount of music he still had in him—that he was nowhere near done—makes his sudden death all the more devastating.

Even as his profile grew, he remained a street musician at heart. He toured with Eddie Vedder, performed with Bruce Springsteen, and earned four Grammy nods, but he appeared to have no interest in hoarding the spotlight; after all, in the parks and streets he had long frequented, there was no spotlight. Music, he believed, was a communal experience, something to be shared and reveled in. “The thing with busking,” he once said, “is, it has to be inclusive—it has to be an open act.”

[Read: How to make music popular again]

His life’s work, it seems, was to bridge the distance between performer and spectator. He often played surprise or impromptu sets in bars, clubs, or the street. At concerts, he could make a large venue feel as intimate as a pub; the amps, lights, and stage were all accoutrements. He invited friends to join him onstage, often doing a number with the opening act or local artists. The audience became his drinking buddies as he regaled them with stories and entrusted them with what felt like secrets. He often encouraged them to join him, and one another, in song; many of his shows included an a cappella sing-along of the Irish folk ballad “The Auld Triangle.”

Everyone who knew Hansard—and most of his fans did feel that they knew him—has their own story that captures his big-tent ethos. I have many. This is one of them: In August 2023, Hansard and Irglová took the stage at Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall, a stop on a reunion tour celebrating the 15th anniversary of Once. Toward the end of the night, Glen appeared onstage solo and said that the night before, he had met a young musician named Gabriel busking on the streets of Boston, and had invited him to tonight’s show. “Come up and sing with me!” he shouted into the orchestra.

Gabriel emerged from the darkness; Hansard threw a reassuring arm around him and handed him a guitar. They stepped away from the microphones, their instruments unplugged; the two men were buskers again. They played “Say It to Me Now.” Strumming in unison, they traded beaming smiles, assuring glances. It was clear that Hansard believed that they both had an equal right to be on that hallowed stage—professional, amateur, old, young, educated, uneducated, it made no difference. It was the music that bound them to each other, and Hansard to those who loved him.

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

We often associate wonder with the faraway and the exceptional. But some of the planet’s most extraordinary spectacles unfold every day, largely unnoticed.

For a recent Atlantic story, the senior editor Vann R. Newkirk II traveled to Mexico to witness one such phenomenon: the annual arrival of millions of monarch butterflies after a migration spanning thousands of miles. The journey still puzzles scientists, but perhaps the most remarkable part is that it continues at all. After decades of decline, monarch populations are showing signs of recovery, thanks in part to years of patient conservation work across North America. It’s a reminder of how much the natural world still has left to teach us about not only what it can do, but what it can survive as well.

Today’s newsletter explores the many ways that nature continues to surprise and inspire us to look a little closer.

On Our Living Planet

The Return of the Monarch

By Vann R. Newkirk II

After years of decline, butterfly populations are rising—for now.

Read the article.

Paradise Revisited

By Helen Lewis

What Darwin saw in the Galápagos

Read the article.

How First Contact With Whale Civilization Could Unfold

By Ross Andersen

If we can learn to speak their language, what should we say? (From 2024)

Read the article.

Still Curious?

• Do animals have fun?: Scientists want an evolutionary explanation for animal play. But maybe the answer is simply that it brings them joy, Sallie Tisdale wrote in 2024.
• Winners of the 2026 World Nature Photography Awards: Take a look at a collection of some of the top images “highlighting the beauty, fragility, and power of the natural world,” curated by Alan Taylor.

Other Diversions

• Tyler Austin Harper: “I love my emotionally stunted friendships.”
• Why animal narrators are all the rage
• Another symptom of growing isolation

PS

My colleague Isabel Fattal recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “I was hesitant to go to Antarctica because I thought it would be uncomfortably cold. Heaven forbid! It turns out, I was so entranced by the landscape, the wildlife, the sounds that I was willing to stand on the open deck for hours,” Jessica D. from Phoenix, Arizona, shared.  

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

— Rafaela

Truth is under threat today from two opposing impulses. The first is subjectivism, or relativism: the denial of the existence of objective truth or the possibility of ever attaining it. This proposition may seem abstract, but it has direct consequences for our civic life. Contrary to what one hears at cocktail parties or in freshman philosophy classes, relativism is the predicate not of tolerance but of repression.

The other impulse poses no less a threat to liberty: the refusal to reckon with our fallibility. All of us, at every conscious moment of our lives, hold in our head some false beliefs. Even when we do our best to be attentive, informed, judicious, and honest, we can still be wrong about profoundly important questions—questions of human nature, the human good, human dignity, and human destiny. We can, for example, be confident that we are on the side of justice, yet profoundly mistaken about what justice demands of us.

Fallibility is a feature of the human condition. Although we can’t eradicate it, we can make progress toward replacing many of our false beliefs with true ones. But to do that, we need to cultivate the virtue of intellectual humility, open ourselves to challenges to our convictions, and rebuild our capacity for civil discourse. Genuine civil discourse recognizes not only that objective truth exists but that it’s often best pursued by engaging with people who are convinced we’ve got it wrong.

[Robert P. George: Universities shouldn’t be ideological churches]

Civil discourse is not mere politesse. It does not consist of listening patiently while someone articulates a view contrary to one’s own. Rather, each party considers the opposing argument in its most favorable light, sincerely entertaining the possibility that their own view is incorrect and should be abandoned. Their goal—a shared goal—is not winning a victory for their tribe; it is getting to the truth.

Achieving civil discourse is hard for us frail human creatures, particularly in our era of ideological partisanship, polarization, identity politics, and conspiracism on both the left and the right. It requires resisting the nearly universal human tendencies to embrace ideological tribalism and fall in love with our opinions. We often regard some of our beliefs—especially moral, political, and religious ones—as so integral to our identity that we experience even good-faith challenges as attacks on our very selves. In other words, we tend to wrap our emotions tightly around our convictions.

In a certain respect, this is helpful, even necessary. We have to be emotionally invested in our convictions if we want to accomplish anything, especially things that require strenuous effort, courage, and sacrifice. It’s important for even mundane matters too. A parent can have a bare belief in the usefulness of getting the kids up, washed, dressed, fed, and sent off to school in the morning. But the belief by itself—as any parent will attest—is not enough. Without some emotional investment, the kids aren’t getting to school on time.

We should aspire to be people of conviction—people who are prepared to act, take risks, and bear burdens for what we believe is good and true. And yet, we need to put some distance between ourselves and our convictions. If we wrap our emotions too tightly around our convictions, we lose the ability to contemplate the possibility that a critic of our view might be right. We then find ourselves descending into dogmatism, if not fanaticism.

Dogmatists and fanatics purport to uphold the truth, but in reality they jeopardize it. They undermine freedom of speech and other basic civil liberties—the prerequisites of truth seeking—because they see no reason to entertain challenges to their beliefs. They know the truth more or less completely, or so they suppose, and therefore have nothing to learn from those with whom they disagree. They regard their critics as enemies of the truth and thus forces to be defeated, even destroyed.

[Arthur C. Brooks: A gentler, better way to change minds]

Relativism may seem like the antidote to this kind of thinking, but it leads to the same result. Relativists claim that there is no truth to be attained, and therefore none to be sought; that there is merely “your truth” and “my truth,” but no such thing as the truth, at least about questions outside the domain of empirical inquiry. In this worldview, people have no good basis for respecting one another’s freedom of speech, thought, inquiry, conscience, or religion. Why should we try to reason with one another about our competing desires or perspectives when there is no truth to reason about or toward? When there is nothing to reason about, there is no rational warrant for civil liberty. There is only power. “Truth” becomes the rule of the strong.

People of goodwill—intellectually and morally serious people of many shades of belief—share a desire to know the truth and live by it, even if that means giving up comforting or cherished convictions that fail to withstand critical scrutiny. To honor this fact is to reject relativism and absolutism. It is to regard reasonable people of goodwill with whom we disagree as friends who can help rescue us from false beliefs and better understand the truth.

This near collapse of civic friendship is a catastrophic threat to public life. Restoring it depends on our capacity to practice civil discourse, which in turn requires us to acknowledge our fallibility—deeply, existentially, and not merely formally. Without such an acknowledgment, it is impossible for people to cultivate the virtue of intellectual humility on which our civil liberty depends.

David Hockney, who died at 88 in June, became famous as a young artist for imbuing 20th-century life with the formality and stasis of early Renaissance painting. His sharp-edged figures stand by the pool or sit by a coffee table in spaces as orderly as those in a Fra Angelico annunciation. The real world does not look so tidy, symmetrical, and enchanting. Except, very occasionally, when it does.

Contrejour in the French Style depicts a window at the Louvre that Hockney encountered shortly after moving to Paris in 1973. With its shade partly drawn, shutting out unwanted sunlight while giving a glimpse of garden, it was, he thought, “a picture in itself.”

Working from a drawing and some photographs, he rebuilt the found scene—tugging here, flattening there. His pathways and parterres are a streamlined echo of the nearby Tuileries, just as his balustrade is a compass-and-protractor enactment of the elegant original. The way the two receding diagonals intersect the wall, window, and walkway to converge at the tree line is an almost perfect diagram of single-point perspective. Hockney used visibly different etching techniques in different territories of the image—soft mats of color for the window blind, meticulous linear hatching for the floor, and splotchy, translucent color for the surrounding wall.

The formal garden, the parquet, the deep window setback, and the dappled wall (a nod to the pointillism of Georges Seurat) all wave the flag of “French Style,” with its distinct history of rules developed in the pursuit of beauty. Soon after Contrejour, Hockney’s own style shifted toward fragmented space, expressive brushwork, and episodic motion. This print, however, still exerts its wistful invitation to bask in quiet emotional weather, and notice the pictorial machinery he was about to dismantle.

This article appears in the September 2026 print edition with the headline “Contrejour in the French Style.”

On July 8, Spain’s supreme court issued a seemingly reasonable decision, unaware that by the end of the month, it would contribute to the deaths of at least 57 people, many by drowning. The court ruled that people who had migrated illegally could be sent back summarily only if they’d circumvented a physical barrier at the border. If no barrier exists—if they’d walked across open ground, say, or swum—then the government must go through a much more complicated process to deport them.

And if you’re trying to swim to Europe from Africa, there may be no better destination than Ceuta, a speck of Spanish territory in North Africa, surrounded by Morocco on its western edge and the Mediterranean elsewhere. Every year, some migrants try to swim to Ceuta, especially in the summer, when the waters are relatively calm. Ceuta has a facility that can process about 500 people at a time. But Thursday, 100 times that number—an estimated 50,000 people—made an amphibious attempt to swarm Ceuta and emigrate illegally from Morocco.

This was evidently a coordinated attempt, assisted by social media. One Facebook group, the now-defunct “Hraga Ceuta,” reportedly featured exact maps of the three-hour maritime journey from the Moroccan town of Fnideq, which bypassed the land border with Ceuta and ensured that anyone who arrived alive would break no barriers and would land on sand or rocks rather than at a fence or turnstile. People showed up with fins, wet suits, and floaties. They discussed going in together on kayaks and coordinating their departures. Their conditions on arrival were not all dire. An El País reporter in Ceuta met an unaccompanied 16-year-old girl, still wet from the sea, her mascara runny, wearing earrings and a gold necklace, “as if just back from clubbing.”

[Read: Migration is splitting Europe apart]

Europe will probably spend weeks trying to figure out exactly what led to Thursday’s catastrophe. (Danish and Italian leaders have called for suspending Spain from Schengen, the free-movement zone that allows someone to travel from Córdoba to Copenhagen without passing through border control.) But one contributing factor is that the supreme court effectively directed migrants to choose life-threatening routes. People saw their shot, and took it. Spain has alleged that human traffickers were among these opportunists. Morocco has been blamed for encouraging the migrants, to cause trouble for Spain. However, the Moroccan king happened to be giving his Throne Day speech nearby in M’diq, and it would have been an odd choice to spring a disaster of this magnitude so close by.

Another possible factor is socioeconomic: the long-term trends in Morocco that make life there miserable and send young people into the sea in search of opportunity. The youth-unemployment rate in Morocco is roughly one-third, and years of drought have led to a farming bust.

This second factor needs scrutiny, however. The past 25 years have been, droughts aside, good for Morocco’s economy. Indeed, its shift away from agriculture and mining and toward modern industry has powered consistent growth, led by such sectors as automotive manufacturing and phosphate processing. Youth unemployment is high, but it’s not much better in Spain, where it is currently about 25 percent, down from a high of 55 percent in 2013. So the migration is from a poor country without jobs to a rich one without jobs. I, too, would prefer a rich one, but the faster-growing economy of Morocco and the not-exactly-healthy labor sector of Spain complicate the picture.

[Rogé Karma: The Spanish exception]

In none of the accounts I have read from journalists in Ceuta do the migrants claim to be refugees—that is, people who fear persecution if they return to their home country. Some Moroccans have protested government policies, and according to reports, at least some of the migrants are sub-Saharan; some of them may have a legitimate asylum claim. But most of the Moroccans seem to be economic migrants, moving away from a country with economic problems but no economic catastrophe. In that sense, they are rational people seeking a better life, as anyone would. Because Spain has officially given swimmers a pass, it is also rational for them to have chosen that route, if they thought they could make it.

Far-right Spanish leaders are calling the incident an “invasion,” and even Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has described it as an “attack.” What I think perturbs Spaniards, and not just those on the right, is the combination of so many migrants’ awareness of the rules—knowing exactly how they work, and acting upon that knowledge for personal advantage—and their brazen unwillingness to submit to those rules when they prove disadvantageous. The name of the Facebook group that coordinated migrants used the Arabic-dialect word hraga. It means “burners,” and refers to the common practice of destroying one’s identity documents upon arrival in the intended country, to thwart even lawful efforts to detain, track, and deport their bearer. This combination of being a stickler for the rules and trying to evade them will leave a bitter taste for many Europeans.

The strongest case for mass immigration has always been that some people have no home to go back to, and need help. But the events in Ceuta seem very far from this category. They will empower right-wing parties that see Ceuta and say: Not a millimeter closer.

Wisconsin has been the nation’s most closely divided state for a quarter century. Since 2000, only one presidential candidate—Barack Obama, twice—has carried the state by more than a single percentage point. But despite its status as a battleground, America’s Dairyland has never been a bastion of milquetoast moderation. Wisconsin has produced both a father of progressivism, Robert La Follette, and the red-baiting conservative Joseph McCarthy. More recently, its voters have backed the liberal stalwarts Russ Feingold and Tammy Baldwin as well as the right-wing Republicans Scott Walker and Ron Johnson.

Francesca Hong is keenly aware of this history. Indeed, she’s relying on it as she tries to persuade Democratic voters to trust her with the party’s nomination for governor later this month. “We’ve been a laboratory for democracy and a petri dish for conservatism,” Hong told me during an interview last weekend at a brewery in Appleton, a small city near Green Bay where she had drawn more than 200 people for a rally.

A state legislator and former restaurateur, the 37-year-old Hong wants to make Wisconsin the country’s biggest lab for democratic socialism. She’s running on an expansive platform that includes creating a public bank and public grocery stores; providing universal child care and free school lunches; paid leave and a $20 minimum wage; and many more favored policies of the progressive left. Hong has filmed campaign videos in restaurant kitchens and on soccer fields, and she’s often wearing a red bandana that evokes Rosie the Riveter and labor solidarity. Her rallies are punctuated by profanity—a fellow state legislator who introduced her on Sunday wore a T-shirt that said Fight the Fuckery—earthy musical acts, and hearty endorsements by like-minded local progressives.

With innovative ads and a grassroots network of more than 7,000 volunteers knocking on doors across the state, Hong’s campaign has shot out far ahead of more experienced and well-known Democratic rivals. (Wisconsin’s current lieutenant governor, Sara Rodriguez, dropped her bid for the top job amid a campaign-finance scandal; its previous lieutenant governor, Mandela Barnes, suspended his candidacy on Thursday and effectively conceded to Hong.) The most recent survey from Marquette Law School—the state’s most reputable pollster—found Hong with 38 percent of the vote in a five-way race, with more than twice the support of her nearest competitor.

Naturally, Democratic grandees are nervous. Republicans, eager to run against a far-left candidate in the fall, have pumped more than $2.5 million into ads aimed at boosting Hong’s profile across the state. David Axelrod, an architect of Obama’s two victories, likened the Democratic primary on August 11 to “a slow-rolling car headed for a cliff.” Whoever captures the Democratic nomination will face Representative Tom Tiffany, a Trump loyalist elected in 2020 from the northern part of the state.

The primary race has alternated between unusual sleepiness and extreme volatility. David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive, suspended his campaign early in July for lack of support, but then jumped back in after Rodriguez dropped out a few weeks later. Wisconsin’s outgoing Democratic governor, Tony Evers (who, if not quite milquetoast, is far more moderate than Hong), stayed on the sidelines for months. Then, with Rodriguez out, he passed over both Hong and his former second in command, Barnes, to back Crowley, who was far behind in the polls. “There’s been a lot,” Kendra Koeppen Mulwana, the director of the statewide group Badger Youth Action, told me with a laugh. “It feels like there’s something new that’s happened everyday.” A few hours after we spoke, Barnes’s withdrawal jolted the race again.

With so much uncertainty, many Wisconsin Democrats have yet to make up their mind even after months of campaigning—a dynamic that, with Barnes out, could give Crowley an opportunity to make a late run at Hong. During a televised debate on Tuesday, none of Hong’s rivals went after her very aggressively. “It’s hard to understand,” Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “There was not really a sense of urgency from the other candidates that you would expect.”

[Read: The Democratic base is angry]

In a phone interview the day before, Crowley also declined to criticize either Hong’s record or her electability, telling me he was focused on “reintroducing” himself to voters. Yet that has also proved difficult with so little time left in the primary. On the day we spoke, Crowley had been scheduled to greet voters at the same Appleton venue where Hong appeared a day earlier, but he canceled the event after a tornado tore through the city. Christine Sinicki, a state representative and former chair of the Milwaukee County Democrats who is backing Crowley, told me that for Crowley to win, Evers would need to campaign across the state with him—something that has yet to happen.

The stakes of this election year are high for Democrats across the country, but particularly so in Wisconsin. The party has a chance to end years of Republican dominance in the state legislature and, if they also hold the governorship, secure a trifecta for the first time since 2008. Such an outcome could have ripple effects in Washington, because Democrats would then have the power to redraw Wisconsin’s congressional map and reverse a GOP gerrymander that has given Republicans all but two of the state’s eight House seats. That is one reason Sinicki is worried about nominating Hong for governor. “This is not the time to take a risk,” she told me. “2026 should be a Democratic year.”

When you ask Hong and her supporters how a socialist from Madison can appeal to independent and conservative voters across a state that Trump carried in 2024, they have a ready reply: AI data centers. Hong has proposed a one-year moratorium on their construction, going further than any of her rivals to crack down on development that, according to polls and interviews, is unpopular with voters of all political ideologies.

“I’m willing to stand up to bullies on both sides because I’m fighting for you” is how Hong summarized the pitch she’d make to Wisconsinites who voted for Trump. She told me, “I think that folks want someone to take a firm stance on another massive entity that’s trying to take control of people’s lives right now when people already are so uneasy about rising costs and feeling that it’s not enough.”

Data centers came up repeatedly as I spoke with Hong supporters at the Appleton event. Treston Kaepernick, an 18-year-old who’ll be enrolling at UW in the fall, told me he’s seen Hong signs pop up in his conservative hometown of New London and that he’s encountered Republicans who cite her opposition to data centers as a reason for their support. A Hong canvasser, Matthew Hennes, told me he brings up Hong’s proposed moratorium early in many of his conversations with voters. “That usually gets them very interested,” Hennes said. “From my personal experience knocking on doors and talking to the community, nobody wants data centers constructed in their backyard.”

[From the April 2026 issue: Inside the dirty, dystopian world of AI data centers]

The question for Hong, should she win the primary, is whether her crossover appeal on the issue of data centers can overcome what will surely be millions of dollars worth of ads from Republicans highlighting other positions of hers that might not go over as well with middle-of-the-road voters, such as her past calls to defund the police and abolish prisons. During last week’s debate, she said she did not support “the full platform” of the national Democratic Socialists of America and that although she is a DSA member, she is not running with its endorsement.

Hong is not quite as outspoken in interviews as she is on the stump. When I asked her how she differentiated herself as a democratic socialist from a progressive Democrat, she replied with a fairly anodyne answer that might have fit most Democratic officeholders. “Democratic socialist means that I want there to be more power for working-class people and the workers,” Hong said. “That the mega corporations and the billionaires pay their fair share. That we're unapologetic in taking on corporate interests and the status quo.” As for defunding the police? “I can’t defund or abolish the police as governor, and I won’t,” Hong told me.

Hong addresses what she calls “the E-word”—electability—head-on at her rallies. She cites her sprawling volunteer network and the people who tell her that their “Republican uncle” is supporting her, and the fact that she has more donors and more individual donations than Tiffany. “We’re already beating him!” she exclaimed at one point. “I truly think that in this moment, the more that folks doubt our power, the more power we can actually reclaim,” Hong said later in her speech. “When I hear from folks that there’s only a certain group that’s supporting our campaign, or that it’s fringe or left, one word comes to mind: bullshit.” The crowd roared.

But Democratic voters in Wisconsin are clearly thinking about the E-word too. As I followed Hennes on his canvassing route through Appleton, several people told him they liked Hong’s policies or were leaning toward her. But they also expressed some pause. “I like what she has to say,” Bob Molitor, a 75-year-old retiree, said, “but we’ve got to get a winner.”

Wisconsin’s history suggests the concerns about Hong’s statewide appeal could be overstated. Michael Wagner, a University of Wisconsin political scientist, pointed me to research showing that voters do not punish more extreme candidates. Her chances might be better still in a midterm election when turnout is expected to be lower than a presidential year, he said. “An ideological extremist can absolutely win a statewide election in Wisconsin,” Wagner said.

Democrats such as Sinicki, the former Milwaukee party chair, remain nervous about Hong because so much is at stake for the party. But for others, the favorable political environment for Democrats is reason enough to take the chance. “There’s not a better year to go all out than this one,” Kaepernick told me. With just slightly more than a week to go before the primary, most Wisconsin Democrats seem to agree.

As government prosecutors examined the Reflecting Pool to build their case against a three-time Olympic canoeist accused of violently ripping the lining with his bare hands, everything fell apart. They found that damage was consistent all around the pool, even in the middle, “where a vandal would not likely attempt to peel the lining.” This evening, the office of U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro asked to drop the case against David Hearn, whom she had excoriated after his indictment 29 days ago.

In a striking 19-page legal document filed late this afternoon, her office undermined everything that President Trump has been saying about the damage to the Reflecting Pool for the past six weeks, including the claim that vandals had used a box cutter to slash the floor of the pool. “The damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism,” Pirro’s office wrote in a motion to dismiss the case.

Taken as a whole, the court filing acknowledged what has been obvious to anyone who has spent time at the Reflecting Pool in recent weeks and watched the president’s $16.4 million project deteriorate in full view. Almost immediately after its reopening in June, the shallow pool filled with the green algae that the expensive renovation was supposed to have prevented. As park workers rushed to combat the algae, the pool’s sealant began to peel away in chunks. It was surprising to see outlined in legal language how Pirro’s office claims it felt duped. Rather than continue with evidence it acknowledged is not there, it is dropping the case.

“The Trump administration’s case against Davey Hearn should have never been brought,” his legal team—Norm Eisen, Mary Dohrmann, and Steve Levin—said in a statement. “Its dismissal today does not erase the abuse of government power in arresting and charging a patriotic American who did nothing wrong. The government’s approach was ready, fire, aim. The administration owes Mr. Hearn an apology.” The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Pirro’s office declined to comment beyond what was in the legal filing.

[Read: The canoeist accused of destroying the Reflecting Pool ]

The filing largely blamed Department of the Interior officials for supplying information that was used to present evidence to a grand jury and obtain an indictment. Only afterward did prosecutors realize that they had been misled, and that Interior officials “provided less than fulsome information.” A large amount of data and documents that Pirro’s office later received “strongly suggest that a rushed and botched installation” is to blame, her office stated.

“These documents indicated a rushed and flawed installation process, with repeated failures of the lining during the installation process, and extensive peeling of the lining throughout the Reflecting Pool,” the filing stated. Eddie Wood—an owner of Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which was paid $14.7 million to line the pool—did not immediately respond to messages. Weather delays hampered installation, the filing stated, and rain meant more delays. Internal notes said that the project was “significantly behind schedule,” which caused further urgency to complete the project before the president’s promised deadline of July 4. A quality-control inspector noted blistering in the finished portions of the liner, requiring further repairs.

A final inspection was done on June 9, the filing stated, and crews cleaned the site. But only two days later, on June 11, an engineer at the National Park Service was alerted to peeling in the lining. The fact that officials were scrambling and identifying problems eight days before Hearn was arrested was likely going to cause legal problems in the case.

An open question remains as to how and whether the project, one of the most high-profile priorities for the president, will be completed. The pool has been drained, and the latest legal filing indicated uncertainty over why exactly the lining failed in the first place—and whether problems will emerge again when water is pumped back in.

I attended Hearn’s court hearings, and they often attracted a crowd of supporters. Some dressed as canoeists; others held signs. At one of his recent hearings, four people wore inflatable-frog costumes. The charges seemed ridiculous to his supporters. But when I recently spoke with Hearn, he told me that the case was hurting his ability to sleep at night. He had once carried the Olympic torch for his country, and he was now worried about being the center of a political firestorm. “It’s unsettling,” Hearn told me, “to feel like I’m being targeted by my government.”

Earlier today, I used Google Earth to conjure images of terrible things: office buildings on fire, mass destruction in San Francisco, a smoldering crater in place of the Eiffel Tower. I was able to because Google had just decided to integrate its AI image generator, Nano Banana, into the service, which has historically been used by people seeking satellite or aerial imagery of real-world locations. 

Just open the site, “pick a spot on the map, and start bringing your ideas to life,” Google wrote in a press release announcing the update some 24 hours ago. So I did.

I was easily able to generate those violent images simply by searching for a location on Google Earth, clicking the “Create image” icon, and typing in a few words. The feature also readily doctored stills of less spectacular, and likely less immediately falsifiable, events: a homeless encampment on the White House lawn, protesters outside the Mar-a-Lago resort, immigrants streaming over the U.S.-Mexico border.

Google initially responded by directing people to check any suspicious images themselves. As fake images generated with this new Google Earth feature began circulating around the web, the company stated that it takes “misinformation seriously” and that “every image created with Nano Banana in Google Earth includes the SynthID digital watermark, so if someone is unsure about an image, they can ask the Gemini app or use Lens in Search to see if the image was AI-generated.” At first, Google did not remove or restrict access to the tool. But today, shortly after I reached out with a request for comment, the company reversed course and announced that it is “rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails.”

Before it allowed people to create fake imagery, Google Earth was a unique resource for researchers, journalists, and intelligence officials, particularly those studying armed conflict and natural disasters. Satellite and aerial imagery can be used to monitor crop failure or deforestation, the creation of mass graves, and the results of bombing campaigns. Especially in conflict zones and other areas that are hard for people to reach, satellite imagery is a go-to method for establishing some sort of ground truth. After Google Earth rolled out the AI feature, though, one investigative reporter wrote on LinkedIn that the tool could be used to easily and rapidly create images of drone strikes that look “very close to what we’ve seen in Ukraine, Russia, the Middle East, and other war-torn conflict zones.” And instead of requiring malicious actors to find a screenshot and then get around some AI model’s safeguards, Google rolled everything needed for a misinformation farm into one smooth user interface. It took me all of four seconds to generate a rendering of a Trump Hotel on the Gaza Strip.

[Read: The AI industry keeps breaking the internet]

The problem should have been obvious to Google, whose other products already forbid such edits. I was able to create an aerial image on Google Earth of a plane flying into the new World Trade Center building, but when I tried to do this directly through Nano Banana, the tool refused to edit an image of the building to depict a terrorist attack. Indeed, 9/11 and other high-profile events are well-known, even classic, subjects for AI-image trolling.

This is not Google’s first time launching an AI feature, and in particular an AI image-editing feature, without serious safeguards. Last year, the company released an AI shopping tool that allows you to visualize what clothes might look like on your body by uploading personal photos. As my colleague Lila Shroff and I reported at the time, “With little friction, anyone can use the feature to create what are essentially erotic images of celebrities and strangers. Alarmingly, we also discovered that it can do this for minors.” In 2024, Google Gemini was ridiculed for generating images of a racially diverse group of Nazis but not of any white Wehrmacht soldiers. And Google’s most prominent AI feature, the chatbot-powered answers in its flagship search engine, were an utter disaster upon their rollout—the AI overviews told people to eat rocks and gave other potentially dangerous health advice. Only after tremendous public pressure did the company make a substantial change, and two years later, the AI responses in Google Search continue to be inconsistent and unreliable.

Google is, of course, not alone in releasing AI features that have had embarrassing, dangerous, and avoidable consequences. See, for instance, Elon Musk’s Grok generating more than 1 million sexualized images, including of children, over just a few days, or any number of embarrassing errors made by ChatGPT releases throughout the years. Again and again, the AI industry undercuts its rhetoric about safety by launching products with little or no due diligence. If, as every major AI executive has pronounced, this technology really could upend human civilization, their companies should perhaps start taking that responsibility seriously.

Speaking to reporters today about the war with Iran, President Trump delivered an inspiring pep talk praising the courage and resilience of a brave nation retaining its fighting spirit in the face of adversity. Alas, the subject of his praise was the Iranians.

“Their entire navy is laying at the bottom of the sea,” he said. “They had 200 airplanes—they’re all gone. Every one. They don’t have one airplane. They had anti-aircraft weaponry, very good, but it didn’t work, and it’s all gone. Their radar is all gone. Their leaders are all gone. Everything is all gone! But they’ll fight onward.”

It was probably the most Churchillian rhetoric Trump has managed to muster throughout the entire conflict. Iran shall fight on the beaches, they shall fight on the landing grounds, they shall fight in the fields and in the streets, they shall fight in the hills; they shall never surrender.

This is not just a mystifying rhetorical move, but also a peculiar analysis of the military situation. If Iran’s military is gone, how exactly is it continuing to fight? An extant military of some kind is generally seen as a precondition for waging war.

[Read: This may be Trump’s biggest error in the Iran war]

Trump’s comments might be chalked up to spin or confusion. But his contradictory appraisal of Iran’s capabilities turns out to be very similar to the doctrinaire assessment of leading Iran-war hawks.

Marc Thiessen, the former Bush-administration speechwriter and frequent Trump adviser, recently wrote a Washington Post column that, having been published the evening before the president’s remarks, seemed to anticipate Trump’s case for why the war has been a success and must continue.

“After the Iranian regime’s ballistic missile attack on U.S. troops in Jordan, the time has come for President Donald Trump to take a good, hard look at the advice he is getting on Iran—what has worked, what has failed and who is responsible for those successes and failures,” he begins. This is an audacious way to frame the question, given that Thiessen’s own advice helped bring Trump to the current impasse. But his argument is that the hawks’ strategy in Iran has actually worked, and needs only to be followed a bit longer to produce victory. Thiessen praises the military’s “stunning success on the battlefield—entombing Iran’s nuclear material, destroying more than 85 percent of its defense industrial base, sinking its navy, grounding its air force, decimating its ballistic missile capability, annihilating its conventional military forces and imposing a crippling blockade on its ports.”

Alas, Trump tried to turn this victory into a negotiated deal. Big mistake: “Result? Iran fired five ballistic missiles at a U.S. military base in Jordan,” Thiessen writes. The same Iranian military that Trump had already destroyed took advantage of his cessation of hostilities to attack us.

This seems to suggest that destroying Iran’s military does not mean that it will stay destroyed. Indeed, a recent Wall Street Journal report found that Iran has quickly rebuilt much of its infrastructure and military capability. The same principle would imply that “entombing Iran’s nuclear material” is useful only if Iran cannot dig it back out again, which it likely can. The natural conclusion is that bombing Iranian military installations has limited, reversible effects, and requires endless application.

No, no, no, Thiessen counters. “No one is advocating indefinite war,” he proceeds to argue. “What many are advocating is completing the military plan that was paused in April when the ceasefire took effect—executing the final few weeks of the campaign the U.S.-Israeli combined force was carrying out.” Just a few more weeks of bombing will finish the job permanently.

Those of us who closely study Thiessen’s columns for clues as to what Trump is likely to say next will notice something familiar here. After the April cease-fire, Thiessen wrote, “U.S. military commanders had about two weeks’ worth of targets left,” and allowing just two more weeks of strikes would leave Iran “fully crippled militarily.” He repeated this claim at the end of that month. “If he decides to resume major combat operations and finish the job, Trump is just 14 days away from a decisive victory in Iran,” he wrote.

[Read: A tragedy in Iran might persuade Hegseth to change course]

The cease-fire has since crumbled, and Trump has had more than three weeks to attack remaining targets. Yet now the final destruction of Iran’s military is “a few weeks” away.

One barrier to once again finally re-destroying the Iranian military is that the United States’ capacity to sustain combat operations is finite. A week ago, journalists reported that Trump held back from carrying out bigger strikes owing to a shortage of munitions, especially interceptors to defend against the inevitable Iranian counterattack. United Nations Ambassador Mike Waltz went on NBC’s Meet the Press this past Sunday to insist that this was untrue. The military “has everything that it needs to conduct this campaign as effectively as it needs to be,” he insisted. Also, he added, “the people that are leaking this nonsense deserve to be in jail.”

Threatening prison time for people who leak information that he claims isn’t even real about the American military seems like overkill. But when you are as passionate about operational security as Waltz, no measure is excessive. And he seems to have transposed upon our military the Schrödinger’s-cat state of military preparedness that we have projected onto our adversary, depleted yet dangerous. The two combatants, in their paradoxical states, appear to be well matched.

Later in Trump’s remarks, a reporter asked him if Americans should expect Iranian attacks to continue. Called upon to inspire his countrymen to endure ongoing sacrifice, he replied: “They’ll get weaker. They’ll get a little stronger, maybe, now. But they’ll get weaker, and then they peter out. Uh, yeah, sure. I think so.” Churchill could not have put it better.

In the summer of 1985, representatives from five Western European countries met aboard a riverboat in Schengen, a wine-making village in Luxembourg, to celebrate the removal of checkpoints at their borders. According to the treaty they approved, which became known as the Schengen Agreement, the signatory countries sought “solidarity between their peoples by removing obstacles to free movement,” forming a borderless zone that gave tangible expression to principles of liberal internationalism that were ascendant as the West glimpsed victory in the Cold War.   

Schengen has succeeded spectacularly, at least by certain metrics. It has grown to include 29 countries, from Portugal to Poland, and more than 450 million people. Four decades on, it remains one of Europe’s most popular policies among people who benefit from it—those who work, study, shop, date, and live across borders, able to cross multiple European states in a matter of hours, without ever stopping their car. But as a mechanism to build European solidarity, Schengen has been a failure.

The latest evidence of that came this week, when as many as 60,000 migrants from Morocco rushed into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, which sits on the North African coast of the Mediterranean. Ceuta has a population of only 83,000 and isn’t even on the European continent. But because it is part of Spain, entering Ceuta, in theory, affords access to 29 countries. The migrants swam or climbed over fences to reach the tiny territory. Several dozen have died.

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, decried the situation as an “attack” and a violation of his country’s territorial integrity, vowing that the migrants would be turned back; according to Spain’s interior ministry, more than half of them already have been. Sánchez blamed trafficking gangs, and others pointed a finger at Moroccan authorities for possibly instigating or enabling the huge number of crossings into the Schengen Area, dwarfing equivalent single-day figures from the European migration crisis in 2015. Morocco’s ambassador to Spain disputed such allegations.

[Rogé Karma: The Spanish exception]

The political blowback for Sánchez, a leftist whose pro-immigrant position has differentiated him in an era of resurgent nationalism, was predictable. Criticism came from his domestic opposition in Madrid, as well as from the White House, where President Trump saw an opportunity to paint Europe as lax on immigration and identify an edge for his party as the midterms approach. “That’s going to be us in three years if the wrong side gets in,” Trump told Fox News.

The most notable reactions, however, came from other European capitals, which once committed themselves to freedom of movement as a basis for cross-border solidarity, an integral part of shared European Union membership that also includes a common trade policy and, in most cases, a shared currency. Giorgia Meloni, the right-wing prime minister of Italy, called for the suspension of Spain’s Schengen membership (for which there is no formal process), and her foreign minister blamed the Spanish government for the chaos, labeling its plans to grant legal status to more than half a million migrants “profoundly wrong.” In response, Madrid summoned the Italian ambassador, accusing foreign leaders of “partisan demagoguery.”

Other countries backed Meloni. Finland’s interior minister argued that Spain had “completely failed to protect the Schengen Area’s external border from infiltration,” adding in a post on social media, “This cannot continue.” France increased checks at its border with Spain, and the chancellor of Austria, which is about 1,000 miles from the Iberian Peninsula, said his country was weighing whether to close its borders.

There is no evidence that any of the new arrivals in Ceuta have crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to the Spanish mainland. Transiting the strait typically requires a ferry or plane, and involves border and identity checks that validate whether passengers have the relevant visas. Meanwhile, there aren’t legal mechanisms to suspend a country’s Schengen membership, especially unilaterally. What other countries can do is reintroduce controls at their borders. The authority to do so was written into an implementing convention approved by the signatory states in 1990, and they’ve made liberal use of it. Italy had already reimposed checks at its land border with France because of the anticipated presence of “radical activists” at a festival in Piedmont, in northwestern Italy, and earlier today, Meloni’s government halted passport-free travel at air and sea borders with Spain. Austria had already reintroduced controls at borders with four of its neighbors, citing irregular migration through the Balkans, the burden of migrants on its asylum system, and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

But these piecemeal steps to police borders aren’t grandiose enough when there’s political hay to be made of immigration. Meloni can’t be outdone by her deputy prime minister and coalition partner, Matteo Salvini, who has taken to social media in recent days to urge, vaguely yet repeatedly, “Suspend Schengen.” Marine Le Pen, the far-right firebrand in France and a candidate for president in next year’s elections, vowed today to restrict the agreement if she came to power. Le Pen’s party, now called National Rally, has expertly channeled anger about Schengen. Amid the 2015 refugee crisis, when more than 1 million people crossed into Europe, mostly in flight from the Syrian civil war, party representatives performed death rites on the riverbank near where the agreement was signed 30 years earlier. They laid a funereal wreath on a star-etched monument to the system of free movement created there.

[Read: Europe’s far right is turning on Trump ]

The corps of mid-level diplomats who created Schengen gave little consideration to its political consequences. “We did our job as junior ministers,” the French representative, Catherine Lalumière, told me as part of research for my book on the history of the agreement. They thought that borderless travel would fulfill promises made by the Treaty of Rome, the founding document of European integration, and advance both the development of a common market and the cultivation of solidarity among member states.

Except there were signs of a potent backlash already at that time. In 1983, the National Front, as Le Pen’s far-right party was then known, came to power for the first time in French municipal elections, in a small town called Dreux. A year after Schengen’s creation, the party entered the national Parliament for the first time, in elections held in 1986. As anti-immigrant populism gained influence in France, the government in Paris helped lead the drafting of Schengen’s implementing convention, trying to pair internal freedom of movement with security at Europe’s external borders. Language about “solidarity” present in the original agreement was nowhere to be found in the 1990 document. Instead, more than half of the convention’s 142 articles dealt with security and the exchange of data necessary to crack down on unwanted immigration of the kind now seen in Spain’s offshore exclave.

The crisis in Ceuta is likely to be contained, and quickly. But if Europe’s reaction to a surge of immigration is to isolate individual states, rather than to use the tools it created to protect freedom and manage human displacement in a globalized world, Schengen really is at risk.

The American right sacrificed its supporters to its COVID-era delusions and lies. Right-wing politicians and media influencers disparaged masking. They derided safety advice against indoor gatherings. They spread crazy lies about COVID vaccines once those became generally available. Many conservative Americans who made the mistake of trusting their political and media leaders paid with their life.

Pew Research Center compared the 20 percent of the U.S. population who lived in the country’s most pro-Trump counties with the 20 percent who lived in the most pro-Biden counties. The most pro-Trump counties suffered nearly 70,000 more COVID deaths than the most pro-Biden counties did.

In the face of right-wing resistance, the United States fully vaccinated only about 66 percent of the population by the end of April 2022. Had the U.S. achieved full vaccination within the first 16 months that the shots were available—as was materially feasible—the death rate from COVID could have been cut in half, according to some estimates, and more than 300,000 lives could have been saved.

If you are hunting for a COVID villain or villains, then, there are many beckoning targets. Investigate the crooks who promoted quack remedies such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for profit or plain crackpot mania. Investigate the sources and pathways of anti-vaccine disinformation. Investigate the pattern and funding of Russian support for anti-vaccine disinformation by following the map already provided by the U.S. State Department’s work on the subject. Investigate the response by U.S. public-health agencies, including the CDC, to better prepare for the next pandemic.

But the present Congress is investigating none of that. Instead, a Senate committee has fixed on Anthony Fauci, the physician and pandemic-era chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The Senate obtained his diary—reportedly from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who claims to have found it on a government server—and then, outrageously and gratuitously, published 1,100 pages of it for the world to see.

[Read: The unmaking of Anthony Fauci]

Regarding the many accusations and insinuations hurled at Fauci, the first thing to be said is this: Even if any of them were true, none would have made the slightest difference to the immediate and urgent problem—what to do to save lives from a deadly new virus.

Senator Rand Paul and others want Americans to believe that Fauci was aware of the possibility that the coronavirus was intentionally created in a Chinese lab, even as he insisted in public comments that the virus had a natural origin. He may not have been forthcoming; the scientific verdict remains uncertain. But whatever its origin, the virus really killed people. The U.S. scientific community’s first and supreme job was to protect people. It did. Scientists discovered and developed the COVID vaccines that brought the pandemic to an end. It’s the anti-vaxxers, not the scientific community, who should stand indicted in the light of 2026.

Did scientists, including Fauci, sometimes speak with excessive certainty about the extent of their knowledge in the early weeks of the pandemic? Perhaps. That seems a lesser offense, however, than the president putting American lives at risk by consciously telling lies for personal advantage.

When the pandemic struck, President Trump’s immediate concern was that it might depress the stock market. Trump had started a trade war with China in February 2018. That trade war tumbled U.S. capital markets; at the end of that year, The Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. stock indexes had suffered their steepest annual drop since the global economic crisis of 2008. Trump’s priority in 2019 was to negotiate a face-saving exit from his failing trade war. That December, Trump unveiled a “Phase One” deal —but markets remained nervous and skeptical. When reports spread about a lethal outbreak in China, Trump appointed himself chief international cheerleader for the Chinese government. CNN counted 37 separate compliments by Trump to Chinese leaders in the opening months of 2020. That February 7, for example, Trump tweeted: “Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation.” Nothing must interrupt Trump’s hopes for a trade deal that would boost the stock market and thus—he assumed—get him reelected in 2020.

As it became apparent that the virus had escaped China and reached the United States, Trump minimized the danger—although in private conversations with the reporter Bob Woodward, the president revealed that he expected a mass-casualty catastrophe for the United States as early as February 2020. He admitted to Woodward that his deception was intentional: “To be honest with you, I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic.” In early March that year, Trump resisted allowing passengers to disembark from a virus-stricken cruise ship because once the people were on U.S. soil, their cases would augment the number of recorded infections. He said he would rather not let them off, because “I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”

Trump allies made it explicit that to recognize the danger of COVID was to commit a thought-crime against Trump. Rush Limbaugh said on his radio program on February 24, 2020: “Folks, this coronavirus thing, I want to try to put this in perspective for you. It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus.” He continued, “Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.” Trump declared at a White House event at the end of the month that the virus would soon disappear on its own. (Trump reasserted his prediction of spontaneous disappearance repeatedly through the spring and early summer of 2020.) In early March, Trump dismissed COVID as far less deadly than the common flu.

As infections and deaths surged in March and April, two imperatives gripped the MAGA world. The first was to fix blame for the mounting disaster on an external hate object. Far-right websites introduced claims that COVID had originated as a Chinese “bioweapon” in January. By late February, the bioweapon language spread among Republican members of Congress. On March 16, Trump tried to rebrand the coronavirus as “the Chinese virus.”

But “blame China” took MAGA only so far. If China was to blame, whether because of malice or accident, then Trump looked all the greater a fool for having courted China so hard through 2019 and into 2020. And “blame China” did not offer any exit from the shock that was killing Americans, had shut down the U.S. economy, and was threatening to defeat Trump in November.

Thus, the second imperative: Find a fast-and-easy miracle cure. The first candidate was an antimalarial drug, hydroxychloroquine, touted on Fox News nearly 300 times in March and April—and cautiously endorsed by Trump at a press conference on March 19. When hydroxychloroquine flopped, it was replaced as the great right-wing hope by a deworming drug, ivermectin. After the podcaster Joe Rogan contracted COVID in the fall of 2021, he told his fans that ivermectin, vitamins, and other home remedies had cured him.

Trump lost the presidency and—after the failure of his attempted coup d’état—left office in January 2021. By then, vaccines had been developed. Now two new imperatives gripped right-wing America.

The first was to sabotage COVID recovery to do to Joe Biden’s new presidency what someone (but who?) had done to Trump’s. The second was to profit financially and politically from the reservoir of COVID paranoia that had accumulated on the American right.

If the vaccine rollout could be stalled or thwarted altogether, the Biden presidency would be blighted. At the same time, influencers and Republican politicians bidding for followers could use vaccine hesitancy to their personal and career advantage.

The arc of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s COVID response is illustrative. DeSantis began as a highly responsible actor on vaccines. Through the first half of 2021, he promoted vaccination in his state. He argued—correctly, in hindsight—that the state could combine a vaccination program with the abolition of lockdown mandates and an early return to in-person classroom teaching. Florida children went back to school in August 2020—and soon were outperforming their peers in Democrat-governed states that deferred to teacher-union wishes to postpone classroom reopenings.

Sometime over the course of 2021, however, DeSantis seemed to have decided that he could exploit COVID conspiracy thinking to win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. In September 2021, DeSantis appointed the vaccine opponent Joseph Ladapo as Florida’s surgeon general. Although DeSantis prudently accepted the first-round COVID vaccination in spring 2021, he turned evasive when asked months later whether he had taken the recommended booster. “I’m not going to let that be a weapon for people to be able to use. I think it’s a private matter.” DeSantis never quite repudiated his past support for vaccination. But he aligned himself with the ever wilder ideas of vaccination adversaries. In December 2022, DeSantis called for a state grand jury to investigate harms allegedly caused by COVID vaccines.

[Read: What Anthony Fauci didn’t say]

The gathering anti-vaccination movement battened on anti-Semitism, racism, and general looniness. Viral TikTok campaigns in the fall of 2021 promoted the label “pure blood,” implicitly associating unvaccinated status with white-nationalist identity. Republican officeholders generally refrained from endorsing these more extreme fantasies. But Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, among others, still traffics in the false claim that thousands of people have died because of injuries from COVID vaccines.

This is the route that has brought Fauci to the Senate hearing.

Democrats and liberals have their own post-COVID soul-searching to do. Blue states kept schools closed too long. They showed hypocrisy when they pivoted from demanding lockdowns in the spring of 2020 to welcoming mass George Floyd protests in the summer. Their analysis of lockdowns may have underweighted harms, especially to small businesses and otherwise healthy schoolchildren. Continued masking after the advent of vaccines could have enabled anti-social and even criminal behavior. The Biden administration in 2021 and 2022 exploited the genuine need for post-pandemic recovery to pass lavish spending bills that probably accelerated inflation. Americans should, as best as they can, delve deep into the exact degree of Chinese-government culpability for the coronavirus—not because it makes (or would have made) any actionable difference to the COVID response, but because it may serve as guidance for future dealings with China. The fullest obtainable history of COVID will reveal much that Americans need to know about the truthfulness, competence, and danger of the Chinese regime.

Fauci may have misjudged, mishandled, or misstated many particulars. He was a scientist and bureaucrat unaccustomed to—and dazzled by—celebrity. History will judge his actions with more dispassion than the present day can or will. One thing that people should keep in mind, however, is that Fauci was thrust into his pandemic-leadership role because of Trump’s shameful and deadly dereliction of duty. Trump’s record of dishonesty, callousness, and selfishness during the pandemic is a documented reality. The imputations against Fauci are mostly fantasies.

No mistakes by blue America or by the scientific community begin to compare with the brutal indifference to the well-being of Americans—and the betrayal of their own cruelly deceived supporters—that disgraced MAGA and the broader right wing in the pandemic years. Their consciences should be heavy. They seek now to transfer their own burden of guilt onto Fauci. The reckoning is a lie. The transfer is a fraud.

Less than a decade ago, when I was working on technology stories, my colleagues and I ran into an issue that I’m pretty sure had not occurred to the people who founded this magazine in 1857: how to style the word influencer, which was an occupation and cultural force, but one just emerging. We weren’t sure that all of our readers would know what one was, and we also didn’t know how exactly we would define the word ourselves. I spent the fall of 2018 sending a lot of emails about whether we needed to encase the word in scare quotes.

Quaint! Many—but not all that many—years later, influencer is very much a real job, no explanation required. As of 2023, 27 million Americans were paid to make online content in one form or another, at least according to one marketing consultant company. Enthusiasm from influencers can turn a random business into a sensation, while their ire can do the opposite. Donald Trump’s White House is full of influencers, but Joe Biden’s courted them too, in apparent recognition of their power. This week, Arizona State University announced that it would begin offering a bachelor’s degree in content creation—influencing by another name—through its journalism school.

In some ways, the influencer industry is more legitimate than it’s ever been. But it has always been precarious, and more than a decade into its existence, it is neither novel enough to be exciting nor established enough to have a real professional code. In an oversaturated market, rage bait is the last sure way to get attention, despite the way it alienates people over the long term. AI is swiftly becoming the dominant way many people get personal-seeming advice about how to live their life, which makes the usefulness of aspirational online content even less apparent than it ever was. And so, although influencers—especially lifestyle influencers—have never been universally respected, they lately seem to be openly reviled.

[Read: What happens when the tradwife dream goes wrong?]

Naturally, much of the influencer backlash lives online. A few months ago, someone asked on Reddit, “What’s an industry that provides zero value to society but makes billions of dollars?” Among the 5,300-plus responses: Ticketmaster, sports-betting companies, multilevel marketing schemes, private prisons, and—several times over—influencers. A hilarious number of people have found internet fame by making content about how much they hate other people who are internet-famous for making content. (“Everyone Is Finally Turning on TONE DEAF Influencers” is the title of one recent video, made by an Australian YouTuber with nearly 300,000 subscribers and a clothing line.)

But the juiciest fights play out in the physical world, which is where influencers very literally bump up against the people who can’t stand them. A few years ago, a coffee shop in Brooklyn banned photography after too many influencers clogged the café with tripods and handheld lights; earlier this month, Indonesia indicated that it would crack down on people creating content for pay while on tourist visas.

Last week, the scene of the debate was a gift shop in Nantucket, an island that has recently been overrun by vacationing influencers, just like Bali, Iceland, and Santorini before it. The store’s operators, evidently fed up with the stream of people filming inside, had a sign made that read No Influencers, hung it up in the store, and posted a picture of it on Instagram. There, it drew the attention of thousands of people, including Paige Paul, who has about 2 million followers across platforms, is married to a famous tennis player, and has been spending time on the island since she was a child. Paul, previously known as Paige Lorenze, declared the sign a misogynistic slight against an industry that is overwhelmingly female. The store’s owner, John Sylvia, said it was meant as a joke for locals, but the sentiment clearly came from an earnest annoyance: “A lot of people are tired of feeling like extras in someone else’s video,” he told New York magazine.

The fight felt freighted. Influencers today are a bit like plastic surgeons, or plumbers: On a societal level, many people sure seem to like what they do—they just don’t necessarily want to be right next to them while they’re doing it.

But influencers are unique in how they seem to be everywhere, particularly in places where people are trying to do things other than be on their phone to watch influencers. Of course we love the game and hate the player: It’s much easier to be annoyed by individuals than by concepts, especially when those individuals are, often, pretty annoying.

[Read: An urgent question for anyone who uses social media]

You’d need to be pretty clueless to not feel a little weird about the online attention economy and all it entails—the vanity; the grift; the slop; the desperation; the calculated intimacy; the endless consumption; the creeping sense that everything and everyone is actually just there to make you feel kind of bad about yourself and then sell you something. Social media can, of course, unite like-minded people, but it can also reward the kind of tribalist reactionaryism that can conflate disliking some women with disliking all women, or make an anti-consumerist folk hero out of a store that sells $2,750 baskets. The industry that Paul and her cohort belong to is unquestionably grim—but the industry isn’t walking around town with a selfie stick. There’s a reason that the sign doesn’t say no influencing, but rather no influencers.

As for the sign: Sylvia’s post was liked more than 10,000 times before it was removed (by Instagram, according to the store); a second one has now been liked even more. “They couldn’t have predicted it would get the traction that it ultimately did,” People magazine wrote of the store in one of many articles about the sign that have popped up online over the past few days.

Sure. I will grant that the future is inherently unpredictable. But it is undeniable that posting the sign online is its own kind of influencing, insofar as it involved leveraging the internet’s focus and wrath for one’s own benefit. (“Came for the friendship baskets, stayed for the shade,” the original post’s caption trolled.) The sign is handsome, and crucially, it is inside the store—if you want to see it up close, you need to go in, past the baskets. Visitors have already started posting the sign on social media, and the store’s Instagram account has added about 8,000 followers, according to an interview that Sylvia’s partner, Jessica Jenkins, did with The New York Times. “It’s come with a lot of drama,” she told the paper. “But it also brings in business.” Any influencer would understand that.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.

In biological science, anthropomorphism is best avoided; nonhuman organisms should be studied on their own terms, without human qualities projected onto them. But that rule goes out the window in fiction—especially the kind in which animals are the main characters. As a child, the writer Rachel Vorona Cote was captivated by novels told from the perspective of chatty puppies and noble horses; the “imaginative leap” of making them think prompted her to realize what fiction could do. In an essay this week for The Atlantic, Cote wrote about Paul Yoon’s new novel, Etna, concerning a dog conscripted into a war, as well as other tales that endow animals with an innocence that their bipedal characters lack. But I’d like to recommend a couple of hilarious stories by Franz Kafka (trust me!) that do something very different.

First, here are four new stories from the Atlantic’s Books section:

• The most interesting part of your life
• The revelatory cringe of Anthony Fauci
• “Independence Day,” a poem by Franz Wright
• The Bible belongs in the classroom

Many contemporary animal stories, Cote writes, focus on creatures in peril. Etna follows a dog who, after the fighting ends, must make an Odyssey-like journey home. Yoon’s novel shares a theme with Henry Hoke’s 2023 novel, Open Throat, which is told by a mountain lion living in the Hollywood Hills, and with the recent films EO and Flow. All these works feature dignified animal narrators struggling to survive in the mess that people have made of their world. “Etna may lack the privilege of human sovereignty and the benefits of advanced intelligence,” Cote writes, “but he is free of the hubristic delusions that underwrite so much human-produced wreckage.”

The beasts in two of Kafka’s last works, on the other hand, are full of hubristic delusions. (His most famous animal is probably a giant bug, the protagonist of his novella The Metamorphosis—but that one starts out as a man.) These short stories, which Kafka wrote late in life and never quite finished, feature narrating critters. “Investigations of a Dog” stars a curious and philosophical canine, and “The Burrow” follows a hypervigilant mole (or maybe a badger—he doesn’t describe his appearance much, but we know he’s got issues). The dog story is sometimes read as a satire of academia; the hound proposes elaborate theories to explain where food comes from. Little does he know—because he either can't see it or chooses not to—that humans exist, and that he and his social, freedom-loving peers are merely pets.

The mole/badger, by contrast, is a fragile neurotic. He has spent years constructing a complicated underground burrow with an impregnable “Castle Keep” at its core. “There I sleep the sweet sleep of tranquility, of satisfied desire, of achieved ambition,” he thinks. “For I possess a house.” We soon learn that this satisfaction is fleeting and illusory. The more the narrator has, the more he has to lose, and he descends into paranoia, imagining that unknown predators will soon destroy him or—worse—his castle. You don’t have to be a post-structuralist like Jacques Lacan (who referenced “The Burrow” in his theoretical writings) to see the mole as an allegory for human accumulation and striving, which has a way of magnifying, rather than easing, existential anxiety. Kafka’s varmints, in other words, are no better than us; they are creatures of both instinct and self-justification, overcompensating for what they don’t know.

And what’s so hilarious about that? Humor is subjective, but animals can generate comedy in the most serious of tales: I find the idea of a house-proud mole or a canine academic pretty funny, and I can’t be alone. The philosopher Aaron Schuster, who wrote a whole book about Kafka’s dog story, called these works “screwball tragedy.” I think that’s a fair gloss and a good way of describing some of my favorite fiction. These particular stories may introduce us to bizarre mammals, but like any good screwball tragedy, they leave us laughing and crying over ourselves.

Why Animal Narrators Are All the Rage

By Rachel Vorona Cote

A new novel helps explain why so many storytellers enlist animal narrators to explore humanity.

Read the full article.

What to Read

How Music Works, by David Byrne

Byrne’s book could be called a memoir or a manual, but whether you’re primarily interested in the New Wave pioneer’s career or actually attempting to start yours, the depth of knowledge he shares on the music industry makes this a worthy read. Byrne’s chapters range widely: One covers how the structure of performance spaces can inform the type of music played within; another provides a thorough examination of the development of recording technology (and its effect on music). Perhaps the most revelatory section is the one concerning money: The singer documents in granular detail how much he spent and earned for one record, pulling back the curtain on a process that’s ordinarily very hush-hush. You’ll finish with a greater respect for all that musicians do, whether they’re superstars or just starting out in the back of a bar.  — Juliet Izon

From our list: What to read to really understand music

Out Next Week

📚 The Amateur, by Chris Bohjalian

📚 The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, by David Zirin

📚 The Women in White, by Sarah Pekkanen

Your Weekend Read

A Brief Exchange That Shows the Enormous Difference Between Trump and Obama

By Sally Jenkins

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

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