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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earle promptly commented, “Okay on it!!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Amanda Mull: The girlboss has left the building]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: America is thirsty for Anthony Fauci]

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Lab-leak payback has begun]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The female-midlife-crisis novel]

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

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

[Read: A divorce memoir with no lessons]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photographs and Videos by Ana Hop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: America has a Pangram problem]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

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

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Today’s News

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

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

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Evening Read

An Odyssey for Our Own Time

By Peter Wehner

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

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

Read the full article.

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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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