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Updated at 11:25 a.m. ET on August 18, 2026

Yesterday in London, Jason Arday, the controversy-plagued British academic and author, was found dead. Made famous as the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s more than 800-year history, Arday had been dogged by weeks of scrutiny amid accusations of plagiarism, fake qualifications, and a fabricated backstory filled with hard-to-believe details.

He claimed to have been mute until age 11 and illiterate until 18, disadvantages that did not deter him from getting a Ph.D., which he earned by age 30. He claimed, too, that he had suffered from various medical conditions throughout his life, including autism, epilepsy, locked-in syndrome, testicular cancer, and a brain tumor. He was, by his account, a world-class endurance athlete who had racked up a variety of impressive feats, including running 600 miles in six days. Then there were his academic accomplishments: Arday was billed as a once-in-a-generation talent, whose research in his field—the sociology of education—was “the best in the world,” according to Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge’s faculty of education. He claimed to have received a book advance of 1.4 million in unspecified currency for his memoir, released this week by Simon & Schuster. It was a meteoric rise, until it wasn’t.

Last month, Nathan Cofnas—a former Cambridge researcher who may politely be described as a philosopher with a special interest in race and IQ, and who may impolitely be described as a professional racist—published in his newsletter what appeared to be significant evidence of Arday’s plagiarism. This month, as it became apparent that much of the Arday legend was most likely just that, the academic became an object of international obsession, especially in British media and on X. He resigned from Cambridge last week, though this did not stem the flood of attention.

The online hive mind, in particular, was brutal until the moment of Arday’s death, at which point the collective swarm did an about-face. The same platform that loosed an algorithmically accelerated torrent of abuse is now dominated by kind remembrances and mawkishness. I find the whole pageantry grotesque.

What I propose is that the public give Arday a courtesy in death that he was often denied in life: Let’s treat him like a person. Not like Cambridge’s magical negro, or like Simon & Schuster’s golden goose, or like the fetish object of internet racists, but like a flawed human being who should still be alive but is not. That requires being honest about who Arday was, not despite his tragic death but because of it. After all, it was systemic, ritualized dishonesty—his own and others’—that undid him.

[Read: Icarus in the faculty lounge]

Here is the truth about Jason Arday: A preponderance of evidence suggests that he was a serial fabulist and unrepentant plagiarist who successfully conned a British academic aristocracy so blinded by do-gooder racial neurosis that it was unable to spot lies that would have been obvious to any Joe Schmo. (Arday denied intentional misconduct and suggested that his apparent plagiarism was a result of his autism, which he said meant that he tended to learn through imitation.) As evidence of those seeming lies mounted, the powerful institutions that had made him continued to back him, doubling down and raising the stakes. Simon & Schuster stood by its author—or perhaps more accurately, stood by its product. Even as the evidence of fraud became all but undeniable, the publisher did not merely declare that it would press forward with Arday’s book; it had the audacity to tout “the professionalism and integrity he has brought to every stage of the publication.”

Then those on the racist right—frothing with glee that they took no trouble to conceal—pressed their advantage, punch-drunk on the double intoxicant of incandescent liberal hypocrisy and a Black man’s failure. The mob swelled, online and in the media. Some people joined out of perfectly legitimate indignation at the apparent obliteration of academic standards that the ordeal attested to. Some joined out of ghoulish pleasure at seeing a beneficiary of DEI, as they cast him, cut down to size.

Everyone following this story would do well to engage in some reflection. I will confess that, until yesterday, I had watched the Arday saga unfold with some combination of amusement and distress. Amusement because of the undeniable comic absurdity to the revelation that the best and brightest minds at Cambridge had been so easily deceived by a man who claimed to have run nine marathons in about as many days on a fractured fibula, and who maintained that his future had been predicted by a Brazilian shaman. Distress because I could relate to some of the things that Arday might have experienced.

[From the September 2026 issue: Why I quit the tenure track]

I have written, in this magazine and elsewhere, about what it is like to be the beneficiary of affirmative action in elite spaces. I have seen, firsthand, the way a specific kind of white progressive treats Black men who have overcome obstacles. They cannot conceal a certain blend of pity and glee when they learn, for example, that my biological father left before I was old enough to walk, or that I was raised for a time by a single mother. It is a look that says, How far you’ve come, and how kind I am for helping you go further. I have always found such encounters stomach-churning. But I can also imagine—if you came up hard and are unaccustomed to kindness—how good it might feel, and how tempting it might be, to do and say things that make people give you that look again and again, whether or not the things you’re saying are strictly true.

Two images have rattled around in my head since the news of Arday’s death. The first is from a 2023 BBC clip celebrating his hiring at Cambridge. Cremin, Arday’s Cambridge colleague, clasps both of his hands in the manner of a cherished loved one as they stare into each other’s eyes. The camera zooms in on their white and Black hands interlocked and lingers there. The second image was posted on X last night: a screenshot of a list of article headlines about the Arday scandal, stretching to several pages, published by one British outlet alone. It represents but a few watts of the international spotlight that had been trained on the academic.

I have been dwelling on these two images—the theatrical interracial handclasp; the pages and pages of monomaniacal media coverage of what was ultimately a niche academic scandal—because together they speak to a terrible reality. Arday was fetishized in his ascendancy by white liberals, for whom he served as a mirror in which they could see their own goodness. And he was fetishized in his downfall by white conservatives who saw him as a test case for their own obsessions with an academic apparatus that they believe is not meritocratic enough—which is to say, not white enough.

The right would have us believe that the Arday scandal is a story of affirmative action taken to its most caricaturish conclusion. Many progressives see it as something else: a racist witch hunt in which self-righteous zealots with suspect motives hounded a man to death. The problem with these narratives—and it is a sticky problem—is that they are both right.

To be a Black person in elite institutions, and particularly in elite academia, is to have the standards simultaneously set too low and too high: too low because only a Black person with Arday’s dubious qualifications and seemingly invented biography could have been elevated to the top of the mountain in academia and publishing; and too high because only a Black person could have been pushed off that mountain with such nakedly racist enthusiasm, his tumbling fall so ruthlessly documented, analyzed, and cheered. When a famous white man errs, people tend to rightly understand his mistakes or transgressions as an individual’s missteps. When a famous Black man does, the errors are typically turned into spectacle, characterized as proof of the inferiority, suspected all along, of his race.

Around the same time yesterday afternoon that I learned of Arday’s fate, I came across another piece of news: an announcement that Ross Barkan, a white novelist and journalist, had just been dropped by New York magazine after the publication—having investigated allegations regarding dozens of instances of plagiarism in Barkan’s writing—concluded that his work “did not live up to our editorial standards.” Swiftly afterward, Barkan announced that he would now focus on writing a new column at The Nation, another venerable outlet. (After the publication of this article, The Nation told me that Barkan had been “in conversations with his editor about a possible column but nothing had been formalized” and that he was “not under contract” with them.)

It is impossible to know what is in someone’s head or heart in their final moments. I have to imagine, though, that Arday understood well enough the world he had entered and how its rules tend to work: When you are Black, some people will open the door for you far wider than they should. And when that door abruptly comes swinging shut, you will be offered no second chances.

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

“Summer always overstays its welcome by about a month,” my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig wrote last week. “After the Fourth of July, which has its charms, nothing but a stretch of relentless heat lies ahead, reaching toward Labor Day, and I begin to yearn for fall.” That yearning is reflected in American consumer culture: “By mid-August, grocery stores are stocking their shelves with autumnal goods—pumpkin-pie Pop-Tarts, cinnamon-maple Frosted Flakes, pumpkin-spice cinnamon rolls in pressurized cardboard tubes.”

This early push to transition into fall can make us lose sight of what’s so special about the season we’re in now. For Bruenig, it’s accompanying her children on adventures and watching them play freely. For others, it might be spending more time with loved ones, travelling, or enjoying the simple pleasure of ice cream (although it is my personal belief that ice cream has no seasonal limits). Today’s newsletter explores how to make the most of the end of summer—without putting too much pressure on yourself to do it perfectly.

If Only This Could Last Forever

By Elizabeth Bruenig

Summer is the worst season of all, and also the most beautiful.

Read the article.

An Easy Summer Project Worth Doing

By Elaine Godfrey

Finding small moments of joy can make every day feel—at least a little—like vacation. (From 2025)

Read the article.

You Can Do Leisure Better, Seriously

By Arthur C. Brooks

If you think of personal time only as “not work,” you could be missing out on truly enriching experiences. (From 2025)

Read the article.

Still Curious?

• Go for a walk: In 2021, Arthur C. Brooks recounted what he learned about transcendence from a very boring 100-mile trek.
• The new parent trap: At summer camp, the kids may be far from home, but technology is keeping many moms and dads tethered to them—and anxious, Russell Shaw writes.

Other Diversions

• The dystopia of modern singlehood
• Our last WiFi-less refuge is gone.
• The elite college students who can’t read books

PS

I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “Last night I couldn’t sleep and sat on the front porch in the dark, surprised to hear rain,” Bliss G. wrote last month. “This morning, no sign of the rain but this one, glorious drop, which even in the breeze, wouldn’t disappear.”

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

— Isabel

The time has come to admit it: The United States has a potty-training problem. In Utah, a law came into effect last year mandating that, with some exceptions, children will not be allowed to enroll in public school without first being toilet trained. Kansas lawmakers introduced a similar bill in January, and at least one district in Florida is considering a policy change that could force kindergartners to stay home until they are out of diapers.

These directives have come about because growing numbers of children are showing up to school unprepared to use the toilet. And U.S. schools aren’t the only ones confronting this issue. In the United Kingdom, the nationally representative School Readiness Survey found that last year, more than a quarter of children were not toilet trained when they began primary school (which most children do the September after they turn 4). Felicity Gillespie, the chief executive of Kindred Squared, the organization that commissions the annual survey, told me this means that teachers “can never really get into the curriculum, because they’re constantly having to take kids out and change their nappies.”

The shift toward delayed potty training, I learned while reporting this article, has been under way for quite a long time. And the sources I spoke with pointed to a few factors driving it. One is that easy access to disposable diapers—which reduce the mess involved in having a child who can’t reliably make it to the toilet—has made the need for training less pressing. Another is that many families with working parents are short on the considerable time needed for monitoring trips to the bathroom. But from Gillespie’s perspective, the root of the issue is that parents are taking a child-led approach to what should be a “100 percent parent-led activity,” she said. “You don’t sit and wait for a child to say, ‘Do you know what? I think I’d like to try wearing pants today.’”

A desire to empower children as decision makers in their own lives, as well as an underlying wariness about parental authority, manifests in many trending parenting philosophies—and is perhaps most recognizable in “gentle” or “respectful” parenting, which emphasizes guidance and persuasion over rules and instruction. Broadly, this approach is rooted in an admirable desire to respect children as humans. The author of The Sovereign Child, a 2025 book that advocates for rules-free parenting, describes a general philosophy of “taking children seriously.” What it amounts to, though, is going to great lengths to avoid just telling your kid what to do.

[Read: Parenting in America keeps getting more intensive]

Potty training offers a strong case study in how easily the child-led approach can break down amid the realities of modern life.

In the United States, official guidance on toilet training has been through a huge evolution over the past century. In a 1938 guide to infant care, the U.S. Children’s Bureau advised that bowel training should begin at six months or earlier and be completed by the child’s first birthday; bladder training should start at 10 months, and daytime dryness should be achieved by age 2.

Things shifted in the mid-20th century, particularly after the pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton published a paper titled “A Child-Oriented Approach to Toilet Training,” in which he argued that a child needed to reach certain physiological and psychological milestones before their training could begin. Brazelton’s emphasis wasn’t really on starting at a particular age but on allowing the child to direct the process. “Don’t rush your toddler into toilet training or let anyone else tell you it’s time,” he said years later, in a 1998 Pampers commercial. “It’s got to be his choice.”

The child-led approach has had formal backing from established experts, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, since the 1960s. To this day, many American parents are coached to wait for signs of their child’s readiness before kick-starting the potty-training process. (Readiness is a fuzzy term, but it essentially means that a child will, in addition to hitting specific physical and cognitive milestones, ideally give indications that they’re motivated to use the toilet, such as expressing discomfort in soiled diapers and a desire to wear “big-kid” underwear.) A University of Michigan poll last year, of a national sample of parents, found that 75 percent reported initiating training when their child “seemed ready.” Other motivations for beginning—preparation for day care or preschool, the high cost of diapers—weren’t as influential.

All of this waiting for readiness has coincided with the emergence of delayed potty training. According to data from the 1950s, a large majority of kids, 80 percent, had completed bowel training by 24 months; only 5 percent were still bowel training after 34 months. Even within a sample of 1950s children whose parents were advised by Brazelton to use his child-oriented approach, 98 percent were daytime potty trained by age 3. Over the next few decades, this timeline was pushed back. A 2001 study found that close to zero percent of kids had completed potty training by 24 months, and only about half had done so by 36 months. Still, that study found that almost all kids had started training before their third birthday. These days, only 21 percent of kids begin potty training before they hit 2—and about a quarter do not begin until after they turn 3.

In parents’ defense, the readiness framework can be hard to follow. Tinne Van Aggelpoel, a Belgian pelvic-floor physiotherapist who has conducted research aimed at understanding the causes and consequences of delayed toilet training, told me that no consensus exists regarding what ought to count as a sign of readiness or when parents can expect signs to manifest. Some, such as the ability to stably sit on a potty, tend to emerge very young. Others, such as the capacity to walk or dress oneself, develop far later. And some seem unlikely to develop until potty training has begun: A child probably won’t start asking to use a potty chair or demonstrate the ability to sit on it for long stretches unless a potty chair is already in the picture. “If you don’t give your child a bicycle,” Van Aggelpoel said, “then they don’t learn to ride the bicycle, right?”

[Read: This influencer says you can’t parent too gently]

The deeper issue, though, is that readiness does not develop in a vacuum. It is influenced by all sorts of social and environmental factors, including diapers, Van Aggelpoel said. Bodily cues—expressions that a child needs relief—are one common sign that a kid is ready to toilet train. But research by Van Aggelpoel and her colleagues suggests that disposable diapers reduce these signals. Without a diaper on, kids squirm and touch themselves when they need to use the toilet. Kids wearing a disposable diaper mostly carry on playing. And of course, to a great extent, readiness boils down to a child’s dissatisfaction with the diapered status quo—the discomfort of which today’s diapers have been explicitly designed to mitigate.

From Van Aggelpoel’s perspective, there’s no such thing as training too early. Continence, like crawling or walking, is a motor skill that develops over time. Its development relies on sensory feedback acquired through a messy trial-and-error process of exercise and repetition. “You do something, and something goes wrong,” Van Aggelpoel said, “and then you know, This was wrong; I need to do it in another way.” Just as children learning to roll, crawl, and walk need plenty of opportunities to lie on the floor, pull up on chairs, and tumble around, children learning to control their bowels need plenty of opportunities to experience all of the bodily sensations that go along with failing to hold it. Disposable diapers directly inhibit this feedback loop.

In the United Kingdom, experts have lately been departing from the readiness-centric paradigm. This past spring, when I was living in England, a health-care provider examining my then-10-month-old told me that there was no need to put off potty training, and then texted me a link to a site offering parents guidance on how to get started. “Should we wait for ‘signs of readiness’?” the FAQs read. “No!” the answer said. “The idea of readiness is not based on good research evidence.”

In the United States, too, experts seem to be subtly backing away from recommending that parents delay. In 2008, guidance from the American Academy of Family Physicians stated in no uncertain terms that the skills required for toilet training do not emerge until after age 2; it cited research suggesting that children benefit little from starting training earlier than 27 months, because the earlier training begins, the longer it takes. But an updated version of the guidance, published in 2019, acknowledged that kids in a lot of countries are trained much earlier—89 percent of Vietnamese children begin training by six months, and 98 percent are trained by 2, for example—and that normally developing children seemed to experience “no harms from early training.”

As recently as 2022, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ webpage outlining the right age to potty train stated that “child-development experts now believe that toilet training works best for most families if it can be delayed until the child is ready to control much of the process herself.” The current page is far less heavy-handed about children calling the shots, advising parents to “expect hesitancy.”

Dorota Talalay, a Polish writer who has pointed out how odd the delayed approach to potty training looks to many people outside the Anglosphere, acknowledged that training can indeed take longer the earlier that you start. But she told me that this doesn’t necessarily mean the training is harder. When she began plopping her child, at six months old, on the potty every 90 minutes or so, she received little resistance. “You just sit them on the potty,” she said, “and because they can’t walk, they just sit there, they do their thing, and then everybody moves on with their lives.”

By contrast, the current U.S. norm of waiting until kids are at least 2 means that potty training is aligned with a child’s “peak defiance,” Talalay said. She may be on to something. Per the Michigan poll, the most common potty-training difficulty that parents cite is the child “not being cooperative.” Oddly enough, then, if the goal is to avoid urging a child to begin training when they’d rather not, the key may be not to delay—but to start early.

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Did Anthony Fauci really get a text from Joan Baez, as his private diary suggests, wishing him a “happy fucking birthday” in the midst of the pandemic? Until now, the answer to that question has remained blessedly unclear. But soon we may have access to the former National Institutes of Health official’s phone. Senator Ron Johnson announced this week that he’d retrieved tens of thousands of messages and hundreds of voicemails from Fauci’s government-issued device and made them fully searchable. In the meantime, though, Johnson has shared just a single set of texts: a Fauci group chat that he considered so explosive in its implications that it had to be released forthwith. “This is a blockbuster revelation,” the senator said on Tuesday. The public had to know.

The texts in question were from a short exchange that Fauci had with two other public-health officials—former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky—in January 2021. Murthy had asked whether either of them knew of “any data or theoretical reason” why an expectant mother might choose to vaccinate early versus late in pregnancy. Walensky answered no, that this was all “data free.”

Fauci agreed, but a couple of hours later, he followed up. After asking around, he’d heard about a theoretical concern: A second dose of the vaccine could lead to fever and cytokine storm—an overactivation of the immune system, also linked to COVID itself—which in turn might lead to early-term miscarriage. In an interview that Fauci gave just one week later, he alluded to the need for balanced thinking on vaccination during pregnancy, given the lack of clinical-trial data. But he noted that thousands of expectant mothers had already gotten shots by then, and no issues had arisen. “We’ve got to be careful,” he said, but “I would rather take my chances with a vaccine than getting infected while I’m pregnant.”

Fauci’s critics now assert that this was tantamount to murder. Fauci knew that COVID shots were killing babies, they argue—he said so in a private text—and then he went out and pretended that the shots were safe. Representative Anna Paulina Luna called this “a crime against humanity and the most evil thing that could’ve ever been done.” Meghan McCain demanded that the 85-year-old be handcuffed, perp-walked, and put in a jail cell for the rest of his life. (“This is not hyperbole,” she noted, rather unconvincingly.) Senator Roger Marshall called for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the matter—either that, he said, or “a full 9/11-style commission.”

Even a cursory reading of the context at the time suggests that Fauci’s group chat doesn’t quite reach the level of a “crime against humanity.” In fact, the new material is unremarkable, unrevealing, and—worst of all—maddeningly irrelevant to the many, far more interesting questions that still surround one of our most important public-health leader’s behavior and decision making during the pandemic.

Despite this week’s operatic calls for justice, there wasn’t really any gap between what Fauci typed into his phone and what he said in public at the time. Indeed, according to the messages released this week, Fauci sent another text to the same two colleagues just one day after he’d voiced his “theoretical” concern about the risks of vaccination. In that message, he gave essentially the same assessment that he’d offer to the public shortly after. He even used similar language: “No red flags” had yet emerged from real-world use, but even so, in the absence of clinical-trial data, “one must weigh the potential risks against the benefits.” (Senator Johnson’s office told me that the records show that “Dr. Fauci withheld information from pregnant women that they had the right to know,” and in doing so he robbed them of informed consent. Fauci, Murthy, and Walensky did not respond to requests for comment.)

That logic still applies. The safety and efficacy of the COVID shot during pregnancy were never tested in a full-scale, randomized clinical trial. But observational data—of which we now possess a very large quantity, after many millions of vaccinations—have not identified any reason to believe that any risk of miscarriage, if present, is significant. If the mRNA shots really were abortions in a needle, as some of Fauci’s critics have alleged—if they really caused a loss of pregnancy in 82 percent of cases, as Senator Ted Cruz and many others claim—then this catastrophic harm would surely have caused at least a blip in U.S. birthrates in 2021, when more than 200 million Americans were fully vaccinated. (As it happens, the number of Americans born that year went up.)

More tempered critics acknowledge that the COVID shots never did turn out to be dramatically unsafe for pregnant women—but then, no one could be confident about the risk at the start of 2021. The text message shows that Fauci clearly was aware of the uncertainty, they argue, yet he buried it in public statements; his crime, in other words, was one of clinical duplicity in the first degree. “He essentially told the public that it was safe for pregnant women to take it when he didn’t know that,” NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya said this week.

But Fauci and the public-health establishment did signal their uncertainty. If anything, they were unusually direct about the known unknowns around this topic—at least compared with their messaging on COVID origins, the value of masking, and the importance of school closures, among other squirrelly, scientific questions. When it came to vaccination during pregnancy, no one hid the fact that the most conclusive safety data were lacking. Fauci made this point both in public and in private; he also said repeatedly, both in public and in private, that the systems used to track vaccines’ adverse events had not yet picked up on any reasons for concern—an assessment that more formal analyses would later confirm. In the meantime, the CDC had already found that getting COVID was itself a major threat to pregnant women’s health, associated with a tripled likelihood of going to the ICU and a 70 percent higher risk of death.

What was this, if not transparency? Vaccines had been made available; the CDC’s official advice was that expectant mothers should discuss the matter with their doctors and reach their own conclusions. In the face of all this cautious, careful guidance, many women did decide to skip the shots: By the end of July 2021, fewer than one-quarter of all the pregnant women in the country had been vaccinated, according to CDC data from the time. That lack of uptake may well have had a grave human cost all its own, given that maternal mortality rates doubled in that year.

In other words, this week’s attacks on Fauci haven’t just inflated the importance of his text message; they’ve reversed its meaning altogether, transfiguring a moment of humility into one of arrogance and self-contradiction. The resulting tangle of misinformation has done little more than bring disgrace to the actual work of determining whether, and how, Fauci and other public-health officials might really have misused their power.

The case against Fauci has always been diverse; its most aggressive prosecutors are a big-tent assemblage of anti-vaxxers, libertarians, and lab-leak truthers. Some believe that he lied about the safety of the COVID shots; others say that he was the capo of immoral lockdown measures, or that he played a role in paying for (and then concealing) the research that started the pandemic. So far, the entire spectacle of this investigation—the email dumps, the diary, and now the texts, as well as the Senate hearing where Fauci refused to answer any questions—has only cast a scattered, insufficient light across a range of matters large and small. To choose just one: Do Fauci’s emails really show, as Senator Josh Hawley and others have asserted, that Fauci cajoled his institute’s grantees for help in winning large cash prizes for himself? The documentary evidence doesn’t indicate that he violated any ethics laws, but it is at least suggestive of self-dealing—and it does at least invite further questions about his use of public office. (When pressed on this during his Senate testimony, Fauci responded as he did to every question, by pleading the Fifth.)

And what about the mystery of COVID’s origins? Released emails and private chats do seem to show that virologists in Fauci’s circle took seriously, over many months, the possibility of a lab’s involvement—yet this idea was rarely given credence in the public sphere. Did Fauci help coordinate some sort of message discipline? How much did he really know about the coronavirus work in China that his institute had funded, and what does he think about that sort of research now? The information we have is inconclusive on these points and many others too.

Fauci remains, in the eyes of many experts, a public-health hero whose work on treating and preventing AIDS and other infectious diseases has saved millions of lives. But there are real uncertainties in his pandemic record and questions as to how he and others led the government’s response to COVID—and these points are only getting lost amid the rampant lust for retribution and the wild overreading of his private records. Fauci’s critics say he papered over gaps in knowledge and in doing so misled the public. Now they’re doing just the same.

This summer, Ukraine began one of the most ambitious campaigns of its war with Russia. It launched drones deep into Russian territory, hitting some of the country’s biggest oil refineries and causing a nationwide fuel shortage. In some areas, Russians have waited for gas for as long as 69 hours, in lines stretching miles. Impatient drivers have beaten and stabbed one another. Even state-controlled media have acknowledged the problem.

Ukraine and its allies seemed to hope that frustrated Russians would rise up in protest. After more than four years, the war had finally “come home.” Now that more citizens were feeling its effects, one might assume, they would demand its end and apply pressure to President Vladimir Putin ahead of parliamentary elections in the fall. But so far, no mass uprising appears likely, now or anytime soon.

Russians are used to inconveniences. Under Soviet rule, they lived with shortages of just about everything. Lines were so ubiquitous that academics theorized about Russian identity being shaped by waiting. Books were published with chapter titles such as “The Queue as a Form of Soviet Life.” The newspaper Socialist Industry estimated that Soviet citizens spent 30 billion working hours a year waiting in line for essential goods.

In the late 1980s, at the peak of Soviet scarcity, my family lived on the outskirts of Gorky, a city east of Moscow. Sometimes my mother would send me shopping. I hated it. At a small, gray store called Vegetables, I would wait in line to pick through boxes of rotting produce, hoping to find an acceptable carrot or beetroot for borscht. Then I went to Bread, where I waited some more. Shelves were half empty. The only item that never seemed to run out was margarine; enterprising salespeople tried to make it more appealing by sculpting it into hedgehogs, which they put in display cases. Lines got even longer on the rare days when cheese or butter were delivered. Meat hardly ever came.

[Read: Ukraine may be just the ally America needs]

Still, nobody protested. We waved away the deprivation and delays. Everyone lives this way, we told ourselves. After all, Soviets knew the cost of complaining. In 1962, thousands of demonstrators gathered to protest wage cuts and government-imposed price increases. In response, Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s government deployed thousands of troops, who killed roughly two dozen demonstrators in what became known as the Novocherkassk massacre.

Russians continue to fear their government. I recently called my former neighbor in St. Petersburg, an art teacher and activist whom I’ll call Svetlana. When I asked whether she had witnessed any street protests, she laughed. “Are you guys living on the moon out there?” she asked me. “Don’t you get how dangerous it is here?”

“It’s even worse than in the Soviet days,” Svetlana continued. “One guy bragged to me the other day that he’d reported his neighbor to the FSB”—the successor of the KGB—simply for listening to anti-war music. She also told me about an acquaintance who had spent two years in prison for leaving a poem and flowers at a monument to a Ukrainian poet. In most households, gripes about the regime don’t leave the kitchen.

At the start of the war, demonstrations were more common. In 2022, police arrested nearly 19,000 anti-war activists, according to OVD-Info, an independent human-rights group. Since then, protests have all but disappeared. This year, one of the most notable critics of the regime was a veteran named Alexander Lunin. In June, Lunin put on his military uniform and recorded a speech denouncing Putin and the war. He posted it on social media, where it received more than 12 million views in 24 hours. The police jailed him, and Lunin publicly apologized for “giving in to emotions due to fatigue.”

Earlier this week, the only anti-war party was banned from parliamentary elections. Far-right politicians had sued the party, named Yabloko, alleging that it had received foreign funding, violated copyright law, and promoted “extremism.” The supreme court ruled in the far right’s favor, removing Yabloko from the ballot. Only a few hundred Russians protested outside the court.

Most Russians seem to have inherited the long-suffering mentality of the generations who grew up under Soviet rule. Rather than tiring of the war, “Russians realize that they are under attack, and that it’s time to stand together and tighten their belts,” Irina Borogan, a journalist who has studied Russian dissidents, told me. When the BBC asked a middle-aged man living in Crimea about the fuel shortages, he shrugged them off: “We are humans. We’ll adapt.”

Last month, I called Konstantin Sonin, an economist and a professor at the University of Chicago who left Russia in 2015. He told me that his friends in Moscow have made only the barest wartime accommodations—such as sending their kids to summer camp in Gelendzhik, a town on the Black Sea coast, instead of one in the heavily shelled Crimea, even though both areas are well within range of Ukrainian drones. He sounded astonished by his friends’ comfort with risk. “We’ve seen what Ukrainians have been capable of coping with,” Sonin told me. “Russians can endlessly adapt to this crisis too.”

[Anne Applebaum: Putin’s human safari is the dystopian future of war]

I heard a similar message from Vladislav Inozemtsev, a Russian economist and political scientist who lives in the United States. Inozemtsev told me that his friends in Moscow have used their contacts to circumvent the fuel shortage and get gas delivered to their door. “It’s twice the normal price, but they can afford it; the middle class quickly adapts to difficulties,” he said, while acknowledging that Russians in rural areas will likely have a harder time.

By some accounts, Moscow hardly looks like the capital of a country fighting a war of attrition. Denis Volkov, the director of the Levada Center, an independent polling organization, described his walk to work to me. The city center, he told me, is filled with decorations that the government has put up: an oversized samovar, an inflatable elephant, sprawling flower beds. Volkov said that he sees no sign of a public revolt. “I would say that the expectations of a revolution in Russia are not based on any real facts,” he said. “All our data proves the opposite.”

A few months before the war, Levada found that Putin’s approval rating was 63 percent. In June, it was 74 percent, although it has been dropping since the start of the year. A majority of Russians—52 percent—said that their country was moving in the right direction. “People blame mainly the West and Washington for all their troubles” instead of Putin, Volkov said. These findings undoubtedly reflect the reluctance of citizens in an authoritarian country to complain to pollsters about their government. Nonetheless, according to Volkov, Levada found that 16 percent of Russians said that they would participate in street protests, up from 11 percent in 2024. Last year, 16 percent of respondents said they felt fear or sadness. This summer, that figure was 29 percent.

Even though there have been no signs of mass protest, Putin is preparing. This year, the Kremlin increased the budget for the national guard and other law-enforcement agencies to a record high of more than $47 billion. Just like Russians who fear the reprise of Soviet-era government violence, Putin also has a precedent to worry about. In 1991, after years of keeping Russians off the streets, the Soviet regime was unable to stop a rally of hundreds of thousands in Moscow, which accelerated its end. Putin may not have much reason to fear such a protest in the near future, but he can’t be too careful.

Photographs by KC McGinnis

Somewhere along the county road between Independence and Manchester, I lost Rob Sand.

This had been a distinct possibility when I agreed to join the 44-year-old Democratic candidate for governor on a segment of a weeklong bike ride across Iowa. Unlike Sand, I am not a biker—merely a leisurely walker and, like any good Millennial woman, an occasional Pilates-doer. Which is why, on a long, low-grade hill dotted with Queen Anne’s lace, my quads began to burn, my pace slowed, and the subject of my story disappeared into a rainbow river of helmets. A minute later, the sag wagon overtook me. Soon so did a 9-year-old boy.

Thankfully, my humiliation was short-lived. These days in Iowa, one can never truly be without Rob Sand. Even as I panted alone at the back of the peloton, I could hear people chattering about the man who would be governor. “Was that who I think it was?” they said. And, “Oh, I just love him!” At one point, a fit-looking cyclist who turned out to be the former NFL wide receiver Tim Dwight pulled up beside me to lament Iowa’s unfulfilled economic potential. “This is why,” he said, “we need Rob.”

Sand, the state auditor, is ubiquitous in Iowa. On any given day, one might encounter him in a TV ad, promising jail time for corrupt politicians; on Instagram, talking through a mouthful of Casey’s breakfast pizza; and at a town hall singing “America the Beautiful” with a bipartisan crowd of gray hairs. Sand is something rarely found in nature: a successful Iowa Democrat. Which is perhaps why his presence generates such mania. Biking with him across the state felt a little like showing up to a middle-school slumber party with Taylor Swift—or riding shotgun in the popemobile. Despite Sand’s bike helmet and lack of signage, hundreds of people recognized him and begged for selfies. “I nearly killed Iowa’s next governor!” yelled a man in Winthrop who bumped into Sand’s bike. People often used both his first and last name, running them together into a single word. “I lent my bike pump to Robsand!” another man declared in Independence. 

Sand’s party has struggled to gain purchase in Iowa since the dawn of the Trump era, and a Democrat hasn’t been elected governor since 2006. The funny thing is, Sand is not a particularly proud Democrat. He tends to refer to the party as “the lesser of two evils” and made a face when I asked whether he enjoyed being in it. “I can’t imagine saying I like being in any political party,” he told me. “I love being a dad.” Before addressing a crowd in Des Moines County last year, Sand’s staff asked for party insignia to be removed from the walls to make the space more inclusive. 

The auditor obviously wants to steer clear of the national party’s noxious fumes. But whereas his progressive contemporaries distance themselves by railing against the establishment, Sand’s campaign approach has been different: Quietly, and with an easygoing optimism that Fred Rogers would envy, Sand questions the concept of partisanship itself. “Our political system is broken, and it’s broken mostly because it’s run by two private clubs” that make voters “feel trapped” into making a binary choice, he told a crowd last month in Newton. “The good news is that Iowa is a place where we have typically said we are going to make politics work for ordinary people.”

National Democrats like what they see—even if they find it tough to describe. Sand “is doing the opposite of what almost every other politician is doing,” the strategist and former Pete Buttigieg adviser Lis Smith told me. He isn’t a loud progressive, but he also doesn’t sound like a corporate moderate, Adam Carlson, a pollster, agreed. “Sand is doing a third thing.” 

In November, Sand will be up against a potentially strong GOP candidate. But his most daunting adversary will be the math: Registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by almost 200,000 in Iowa. Which means that Sand plans to spend the next 11 weeks telling Iowans that he can be trusted, in spite of the D behind his name. Will enough of them believe it?

Sand had been annoyed the last time I wrote about him. I’d included all of the relevant background details in my story: that he grew up in Decorah, a town near the Minnesota border, which explains his long vowels (Sand pronounces it “Dee-corah”); that he went to Brown University and worked a few modeling jobs in Europe before attending law school and working for seven years as a prosecutor. I’d explained that, like any good red-state Democrat, Sand loves to hunt and spends Sunday morning in church—and that his wife’s brothers called him “Baby Jesus” for his tendency toward self-righteousness.

But Sand was concerned about something else: that I had not fully captured his frustration with America’s two-party political system. “I was hoping you’d get more into election reform,” he texted me—a sentence that, I am confident, no one has ever said before or since. At the time, I did not imagine that many readers were pining to hear a state auditor’s thoughts on the decline of bipartisanship. But here we are, three summers later, and Sand is still talking about the same ideas: moving to an open-primary system and implementing “approval voting,” which would allow Iowans to support more than one candidate. More remarkable, voters are listening.

Sand is a Democrat because “Jesus is for the little guy, and the Democratic Party, at its best, is for the little guy.” But his more inclusive vision wouldn’t require party affiliation. The scramble to replace Graham Platner in Maine, for example, wouldn’t have happened under Sand’s system, he said. Or, “if a really old candidate, hypothetically, had a bad debate experience, and everyone was like, Um, maybe this person is too old to do this, it wouldn’t be a crisis.” The reforms would reward civility, Sand added, and prevent one-party domination of a state.

Republicans have had total control over Iowa for a decade. In that time, they’ve dramatically cut income taxes, redirected hundreds of millions of public dollars toward private schools, and restricted abortion after six weeks. Right now, the state is facing a $1 billion budget shortfall and the second-highest cancer rate in the country. 

But Sand does not harp on Republicans. Actually, a Sand political event doesn’t really feel like one: Each town hall begins with a round of applause for the Republicans, independents, and Democrats (for good measure) who showed up, then transitions into a group rendition of “America the Beautiful.” Sand speaks for a while about his policy priorities (corruption, public education, affordability) before opening the floor to questions, some friendly and others confrontational. The event I attended in Newton concluded with a resounding cheer for—you guessed it!—a return to divided government in Iowa.

An observer might fairly describe all of this as just a tad cringe. But one person’s cringe is another’s stirring call for unity. “There’s a movement afoot for change, and he comes along at a good time,” Steve Mullen, a retired teacher, told me in Newton. 

It helps that Sand does not behave like most Democrats. He is not, for example, easily drawn into culture-war debates or bandwagon slogans. Early in his campaign when a radio host asked him whether biological males should be allowed to play in women’s sports, Sand answered succinctly, “No.” In January, after federal officers killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Sand did not join in the calls to abolish ICE. “He’s taken some of the cultural issues that dog Democrats in red states off the table,” Adam Jentleson, the founder of the center-left think tank Searchlight, told me. 

[Read: ‘Abolish ICE’ is back ]

The progressive left, as you might imagine, is not wild about Sand. Some were disgusted, for example, that the Democrat did not release a statement denouncing ICE after Good’s and Pretti’s deaths. Others see Sand’s comments on trans athletes as a betrayal of the LGBTQ community. Still, most seem to find the state auditor tolerable. “He’s a happy warrior for nonpartisan technocratic efficiency and anti-corruption,” Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told me. Sand might slap that on a billboard. 

Iowa’s state auditor can seem a little naive. Even if he becomes governor, Sand would almost certainly be working with a Republican state legislature that won’t be eager to hand him any wins. But Sand says he isn’t worried. “There’s still a lot of people of good faith in that caucus,” Sand told me at a deli in Manchester after we’d finished our bike ride. State GOP lawmakers know that they’ll need to have something to show for their public service when they “reach the pearly gates.” Had Sand met a politician recently? I thought. When I voiced my doubts out loud, Sand looked stricken. “I am really hopeful,” he said. 

Meanwhile, Republicans are busy trying to convince Iowa voters that the auditor is more extreme than his kumbaya suggests. “It’s like The Truman Show,” Zach Lahn, Sand’s GOP opponent, says in one campaign video. “He’s not a moderate.” In another, Lahn pledges to take back Iowa’s public-school curriculum “from the Marxists who hijacked it.” 

Lahn, a former Republican operative, seemed to come out of nowhere in June when he defeated incumbent Representative Randy Feenstra for the GOP nomination. More specifically, Lahn came from Kansas. Although he was born and raised in Iowa, he has lived in Wichita, where he founded a private school, for much of the past decade. The Des Moines Register reported that Lahn splits his time between Iowa and his second home in Kansas, where some of his children live, although Lahn reassured Iowans that if he is elected governor, he will be in the state “as much as humanly possible.” (Lahn did not respond to my requests for comment.)

But Lahn’s outsider status might help him. He has no elected-office experience and is not yet a known quantity in Iowa, which means that he does not wear the albatross of incumbency. So far, he’s campaigned on protecting small farms from corporate agriculture, an unusual Republican position in the state. For this, as well as his pledge to ban mRNA vaccines and improve the state’s water quality, Lahn has also received the MAHA stamp of approval. Several conservative Iowans along the bike route told me that they wouldn’t have voted for Feenstra, but they were considering Lahn’s “new ideas.”

Lately, Republicans have accused Sand of doing too much stumping and not enough of his day job; they’ve also drawn attention to the significant campaign donations from his wife and her wealthy family. But Lahn’s main project ahead of November will be to remind Iowans that Sand, regardless of his rhetoric, is running as a Democrat. At Sand’s Newton town hall, a Lahn supporter named Carrie Atkinson asked the auditor to declare the number of weeks at which he would support a ban on abortion. Sand answered that he thought Roe v. Wade was a reasonable decision. “He didn’t answer my question!” Atkinson told me later. At another event, a local Republican activist named Gary Loeffler asked Sand to justify his support for abortion as a Christian. There are “many verses in the Bible that say life begins at breath,” Sand said, an answer that enraged some religious conservatives.

Republicans believe, or say they believe, that Sand, a wealthy guy with an Ivy League education, is far more liberal than he lets on. Loeffler offered a disturbing visual: Like an infested cob of sweet corn, Sand might look normal on the outside, but inside, he’s “full of worms.”

Luckily, I was able to test Loeffler’s hypothesis—by traveling to Sand’s hometown and peering into the proverbial husk. In Decorah, along the Upper Iowa River, I attended Nordic Fest, a celebration of Scandinavian heritage that included Viking battle reenactments, Nordic dancers, and a parade featuring Sand in the back of a convertible. It felt a little like visiting Bedford Falls with George Bailey. “This is Rob Sand; he’s a good friend of my eldest son!” the announcer said as the auditor drove by. Sand’s aunt, who ran the lefse stand, trotted into the street to give him a package of fresh Norwegian flatbread. Sand’s father asked me in Norwegian if I spoke the language of my ancestors. (I do not.)

After the parade, Sand offered a wry tour of his hometown. Walking down the main drag, he pointed out the old teen center. “Can you guess how many times we went?” Near a statue of a long-snouted woodland creature, he explained: “Trolls are out in the world and can be dangerous.” Quickly, we were overwhelmed by friends and well-wishers. Among them was Andy Rasmussen, Sand’s best friend from high school. Sand was always smart and ambitious, Rasmussen, who does autobody work in Decorah, told me later. He liked to skateboard and bowhunt. He didn’t drink, but he’d give friends rides to parties. “The running joke was that someday Rob’s gonna be president,” Rasmussen said. But what were Sand’s politics back then? I wanted to know. Is he a Trojan horse of socialist corn worms? Rasmussen basically shrugged. “He will generally talk to and listen to anybody that’s out there.”

Others who knew Sand during college and law school similarly described a man committed to listening. At Brown in the early 2000s, Sand frequently criticized the Bush administration in his column in the school paper. Still, he recruited Stephen Beale, a conservative columnist at the paper, to start a new class on conservative thought, featuring readings from Edmund Burke, Barry Goldwater, and Pat Buchanan. Sand is still “being his authentic self,” Beale, who now works as a freelance writer, told me. “He really does care about hearing the other side.”

I thought about Sand’s cheering section at the Nordic Fest parade. “Light ’em up, Rob!” one man had shouted. But Sand had waved him off. “No, no, no,” he’d said.

The next two months may not be so friendly. So far, Sand has outraised Lahn, but Republicans are pouring millions into the state, partly thanks to a high-profile Senate bid from Democrat Josh Turek and three surprisingly competitive House races. Expect ads from both parties to be vicious—and pervasive. On Thursday, screaming activists for Turning Point Action chased Sand around the Iowa State Fair. 

[Read: Democrats might actually win Iowa]

Right now, Sand looks reasonably well positioned for victory. The Cook Political Report has changed its analysis of the race from “lean Republican” to “toss up,” and new polling shows Sand leading Lahn by five points. If he succeeds, Democrats might finally be able to say out loud what many have believed for years: that Iowa still defies partisan categorization.

Many Iowans are only now starting to pay attention. Before I lost Sand on the bike ride, a middle-aged man named Ethan Vaas had rolled up next to us. “Are you who I think you are?” he asked Sand, sounding more suspicious than excited. The two chatted for a moment, but Vaas soon pedaled away, looking unimpressed. An hour later, though, he was back, this time to talk with Sand about his job and his kids. Vaas wasn’t sure how he’d vote this year, he told me later. He typically “leans right.” But there was something different about Sand.

Every dating app, formally or informally, has its thing. Hinge, with its earnest prompts, is wholesome. Tinder, with its quick swipes left or right, is horny. Feeld, with its 30-plus tags for communicating your romantic and sexual desires, is kinky. And Bumble, with its “women message first” rule, was meant from the start to be feminist.

In 2014, Whitney Wolfe Herd launched the platform to solve what she saw as a problem: an epidemic of aggressive men on the apps. If women were the only ones allowed to initiate conversation, Wolfe Herd’s thinking went, they’d be in a position of power and agency; for once, they’d get to be the pursuers. And perhaps the Bumble man, knowing what he signed up for, would be an enlightened type—content waiting patiently to be chosen.

This was the dream of girlboss dating, and how lovely it was while it lasted. It died this past Tuesday, when Bumble announced that men will now be allowed to message women first.

Wolfe Herd told Bloomberg that when Bumble surveyed its female users, two-thirds said they would prefer not having to instigate each interaction. Younger women especially reported that having to go first added pressure. And many said they were fed up with men who seemed to put little effort into romance. In the game of online dating, an opening line is a delicate, high-stakes maneuver: Send something too basic (“Hey”) and you’ll fail to catch someone’s attention; send something too quirky or try-hard (“What’s your biggest fear?”) and you might scare them away. Bestowed with a very important responsibility, apparently, these women wanted to toss the hot potato right back to the men.

[Read: A dating-app nightmare]

This news didn’t surprise me, but it did feel like a tidy summation of how dating has evolved since 2014. When Wolfe Herd founded Bumble, the idea that an app could revolutionize romance and empower women didn’t seem quite so quaint. Online dating had already begun to transform courtship—and fast. If a lot of men were being overly forceful—sending an excess of innocent, excitable texts or of entitled, angry missives—that was partly an unfortunate by-product of their enthusiasm for the technology: They were logged on, present, and interested. Too interested.

Now America is in an era of dating listlessness. Deciding who should message whom first is difficult when no one seems eager to make a move. These days, a typical app experience might go something like: mindlessly open the platform while between tasks, maybe respond to a message or two, then forget to check back in until the next week. The apps have lost their novelty, and they don’t feel radically promising. They’re homework.

The gender dynamics have also changed. Bumble was built on the premise that men, by nature or nurture, are chasers—and that for too long women have simply been their reward. Yet in my reporting on singlehood, I don’t tend to hear women complain about getting bombarded with messages or vigorously hit on. More often, they say that they do want to feel sought after—but instead are constantly seeking, only to be met with a big, apathetic shrug.

If men seem less actively engaged in courtship, maybe it’s because a lot of them are isolated, scrolling social media or playing video games or gambling online rather than prioritizing romance. Maybe they lost social skills in the pandemic lockdown. Maybe they’re nervous about overstepping or watching screenshots of their blunders go viral. Or perhaps something more profound has shifted. The idea of men as pursuers was based on the assumption that they’re the ones with the power. But now many women, having gained a certain level of educational and professional might, aren’t so desperately reliant on men anymore. The rules regarding who leads and who follows are hazy, and in the absence of a clear mandate, a lot of people simply want the other person to do the work.

[Read: ‘Nostalgia for a dating experience they’ve never had’]

I’m not grieving the days of “women message first,” though. Bumble was always a Band-Aid for grislier wounds: an online-dating ecosystem that leaves users with little accountability for their behavior and little recourse when things go bad; a society marred by misogyny, in which many of the wrongs that women face are far worse than a noxious opening pitch. Bumble cut nearly a third of its staff roughly a year ago; since around then, the company’s share price has declined 57 percent. Now the app is launching new features, including one that will deliver a lightly chastising note to people who send perfunctory openers. But those are likely to be superficial fixes too. The age of app optimism is already over.

I’ll keep using dating apps anyway. A virtual conversation, no matter who initiates it, can swiftly go south. Or it can lead to some interesting and beautiful places. That’s the reason, after all, that Bumble’s old rule was never going to change everything: The first hello was always just the beginning.

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Last year, I asked The Atlantic’s writers and editors to name a perfect episode of TV, but a perfect finale is especially hard to pull off—and nothing invokes the wrath of fans quite like a bad ending. Here are eight shows that make the most out of their last minutes.

The following contains spoilers for the shows mentioned.

Fleabag (streaming on Prime Video)

Almost nobody is left happy by the final moments of Fleabag—not the heartbroken but resolute “Hot Priest”; not the protagonist Fleabag, watching a fox trail behind the man who has just left her for God; and certainly not the viewer, who has no choice but to let Fleabag look into the camera, shake her head, and leave us behind.

But the best ending is a cathartic one. Fleabag, played by the show’s creator, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is a dry-humored, unabashed, fourth-wall-breaking character who encounters God and new meaning in the second season, which is also the last. She attends a Quaker meeting and is moved by the Holy Spirit to say one of my favorite lines of the series: “I sometimes worry I wouldn’t be such a feminist if I had bigger tits.” She and her sister, Claire, repair their relationship and each kneel, exasperated, before different men to ask for deliverance—Claire from her obnoxious husband, and Fleabag from her suffering. And in the last moments of the finale, after a backyard wedding and the implosion of Claire’s marriage, Fleabag tells the Hot Priest that she loves him, and he tells her, “It’ll pass.” To anybody still reeling from the conclusion of this perfectly short-lived show, that’s also a message to us: This is the end, and one day it will feel like enough.

— Stephanie Bai, senior associate editor

***

Twin Peaks (streaming on Pluto TV and Paramount+)

Twin Peaks had multiple conclusions over its strange life as a TV show, first ending on a shocking second season cliff-hanger in 1991, then failing to resolve that with a follow-up film a year later, leaving fans feeling frustrated by what could have been. But in 2017, the co-creators David Lynch and Mark Frost delivered a magnificent and challenging third season with an even more mind-bending last episode. In the true finale of Twin Peaks, titled “Part 18” or “What Is Your Name?,” the heroic Special Agent Dale Cooper (played by Kyle MacLachlan) finally frees himself from the demonic possession that he’s been under for the entire season and travels back in time to the start of the show to try to undo Laura Palmer’s murder. Whatever he does, however, creates an entirely new world that seems even more confusing, and the screen cuts to black as some new version of Laura lets out a chilling scream. It’s another dramatic cliff-hanger, but this time a more intentional one, underlining the hubris in Cooper’s straight-arrow heroism: Try as he might to fix the world’s wrongs, its fundamental evil and suffering are impossible to scrub away.

— David Sims, staff writer

***

Nathan for You (streaming on HBO Max)

The overarching story of Nathan for You, the brilliant docu-comedy hosted by Nathan Fielder, is easy to miss. Fielder’s show ran for four seasons on an episodic premise: He uses his very minimal business acumen to help local entrepreneurs and store owners boost their foot traffic through absurd means that are clearly destined to fail. Fielder performs the role of a stoic, socially awkward, sometimes-cruel game master with aplomb, but amid all the tomfoolery is a very human through line: Fielder, the show implies, really just wants to connect.

That context explains why the series finale is a moving, feature-length meditation on love, remorse, and loneliness. “Finding Frances” focuses on a man named Bill Heath, who previously appeared on the show as the world’s least convincing Bill Gates impersonator. Fielder endeavors to reunite him with a long-lost old girlfriend, and the episode makes clear that he is afraid that he may eventually become Bill, who, in his 70s, is alone and full of regret, having funneled all of his energy into his career. The quest to locate the titular Frances is full of the usual contrivances, but it’s also sentimental and shockingly earnest. The very last scene—in which Fielder has to choose between his heart and his humor—ends the show with a reveal that rings poignant, even a little sad.

— Allegra Frank, senior editor

***

Cowboy Bebop (streaming on Crunchyroll)

This 1998 anime about bounty hunters adventuring through galaxies aboard a spaceship is nothing like its more famous Cartoon Network contemporaries Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z. Cowboy Bebop isn’t kid friendly (though I did first discover it at age 12): There is bloodshed, sex, and criminal activity, but most of all, there is the profoundly adult theme of running away from one’s past. Among the hunters is Spike, who split from a crime syndicate under circumstances I won’t spoil; Faye, a wanted amnesiac; Jet, the hulking captain, who lost a love; Ed, the quirky teenage hacker left by her father; and Ein, a corgi rescued from a lab.

For me, a perfect finale needs to feel both inevitable and surprising, and it needs to actually round out the story. Cowboy Bebop takes care to draw out every character’s past, and gives them arcs that befit their endings. This does mean that the found family you’ve grown attached to over the course of 26 episodes may not stay together in perpetuity. But I wouldn’t want to see the show finish any other way.

— Shan Wang, programming director

***

Insecure (streaming on HBO Max)

Issa Rae’s namesake character on Insecure routinely looks at herself in the mirror and talks to her alter ego. Her reflection is a little more outgoing and blunt than she is in real life, and in the series finale, that alter ego is once again laughing at her for a situation she put herself in: “You’re down bad. I don’t know where you go from here.” In real life, Issa replies that she just wants “to fast-forward to the part where everything is okay.”

But life is not lived in a series of highs. “One could collect the highest peaks of the whole world but put together they would not be a continent,” Zora Neale Hurston once wrote. “Just a collection of bristling peaks. No nuances of valleys and plains.” Insecure, as a show, follows the relationships and friendships of two Black women in Los Angeles, giving us a look into the minutiae of their daily lives and how big everything can seem. The finale, in contrast, is a series of vignettes showing each central character’s birthday at some point in the future—the moments when they think they have it all figured out, and the moments amid those highs when they remain insecure.

— Adam Harris, Radio Atlantic host

***

The O.C. (streaming on Hulu, Disney+, and HBO Max)

The last season of this popular early-2000s teen drama is somewhat controversial among fans. There are plenty of cringeworthy plotlines (Chris Pratt plays an animal-rights activist named Ché; a main character’s absent father suddenly reappears), but the finale manages to save the show from the mess it’s made. The episode follows Seth Cohen and Ryan Atwood, who was taken in by Seth’s family at the series’ start, as they all prepare to move out of the titular O.C.

The storyline provides closure while leaving just enough open-ended. A flash-forward in the final minutes allows viewers to catch a glimpse of the futures they have yearned to see for these characters: Seth and Summer get married; Ryan goes to college and later offers to help a young boy the way the Cohens once helped him. Set to Patrick Park’s “Life Is a Song,” the montage provides one last moving musical moment on a show known for them. It also delivers what I think all finales should: emotional payoff and an ending that feels earned.

— Kate Guarino, senior editor

***

The Jinx (streaming on HBO Max)

There has never been a finale like the Season 1 finale of The Jinx. The 2015 HBO documentary series investigated the 1982 disappearance of Kathie Durst, the wife of the real-estate heir Robert Durst, as well as the murders of two of his acquaintances. It sounds like your typical true-crime doc. It isn’t.

If, in the 11 years since it came out, you have by some miracle not been spoiled on what happens, do not read the rest of this blurb. I’m serious. To those in the know or stubborn enough to stay for the spoilers, I will say this: I have never been as shocked by anything on television as when Durst seemingly confesses on mic: “Killed them all, of course.”

I know I am bending the rules a bit here—technically, the Season 1 finale of The Jinx isn’t a series finale, but at the time, it was supposed to be. And the evidence revealed in that season directly contributed to Durst’s arrest and eventual murder conviction, which the show covered when it aired a second season nearly a decade later.

The Jinx ruined all other true-crime documentaries for me. If you aren’t going to actually catch the killer, why would I even watch?

— Julie Beck, staff writer

***

St. Elsewhere (available to rent on Prime Video and Apple TV+)

During its run in the 1980s, the NBC medical drama St. Elsewhere engaged in plenty of creative experiments. But the 1988 finale is a masterpiece, a loving homage to time-honored shows such as The Fugitive and M*A*S*H (an autopsy is performed on “patient 4077 … Blake, Henry”). Why so many inside jokes about old TV shows?

Because, as we find out in the show’s last few minutes, the entire series is merely the dream of an autistic boy named Tommy Westphall. The two top doctors at St. Elsewhere are actually, in Tommy’s real life, his grandfather and his construction-worker father, who wonder what Tommy thinks about all day while sitting in front of the TV and staring into a snow globe with a model of the hospital in it.

This amazing moment lives on: It has spawned years of internet theories about the “Tommy Westphall Universe.” If St. Elsewhere is a dream, what about all of the crossovers from other shows? The doctors of St. Elsewhere visit the bar from Cheers, which is also set in Boston; is that show part of Tommy’s fantasies?

It is a fine ending to a quirky series, and almost 40 years later, I still wonder whether so many shows I loved were just dreams in a snow globe.

— Tom Nichols, staff writer

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• A Cold War movie that gives too much credit to Ronald Reagan
• A green light for crooks
• Alexandra Petri: Are the Patriot Games great? No. Are they fun to watch? Also no.

Today’s News

1. Luigi Mangione pleaded guilty to two federal charges of stalking that resulted in death and admitted that he had shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan in 2024. Federal prosecutors said that they will seek a life sentence; Mangione still faces a separate state murder charge and has a trial scheduled for next month.
2. President Trump said that the USS Abraham Lincoln’s deployment of more than 250 days was “not nearly long enough,” rejecting concerns raised by some sailors’ families and Democratic lawmakers about conditions aboard the carrier. The Lincoln, which has been supporting U.S. operations against Iran, is expected to be replaced in the Middle East by the USS George Washington.
3. Vice President Vance said yesterday that keeping oil and gas prices low is now the United States’ “goal No. 1” in the war with Iran, ahead of preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Oil prices rose today after the U.S. threatened to indefinitely maintain its blockade of Iranian ports.

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• The Books Briefing: Emma Sarappo explores a bleak, violent novel’s unexpected delights.

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• Trump’s new plan to get his name back on the Kennedy Center
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Culture Break

Watch. The plot of One Night Only (out now in theaters) is extremely silly. It also contains a grain of truth about singlehood, Faith Hill argues.

Read. For 40 years, Richard Russo has served as America’s portraitist of left-behind people in hollowed-out places, Mark Oppenheimer writes. He examines how Russo’s latest novel, Under the Falls, approaches that same tradition.

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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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This has been a terrific year for movie theaters. Cinemas are on course for their best financial year since before the coronavirus pandemic, powered by large-scale hits such as The Odyssey and surprise small-budget smashes, particularly Obsession and Backrooms. Fears about the decline of the big-screen experience amid the rise of at-home streaming seem to have begun dissipating. But one theatrical stalwart is showing serious signs of weakness: the superhero movie, which helped keep blockbusters afloat for most of the 2010s. Marvel’s most anticipated title last year, The Fantastic Four: First Steps—which reintroduced the fan-favorite comic-book team—failed to meet the studio’s lofty expectations; this June’s DC Comics adaptation of Supergirl was an out-and-out bomb.

By those metrics, one might have predicted a similar slump for this summer’s new Spider-Man sequel, subtitled Brand New Day. Instead, it has broken nearly every box-office record imaginable.

That the film has been able to defy mounting superhero fatigue may seem unexpected. After all, Brand New Day is the fourth Spider-Man entry set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which owns the rights to the character; it’s Tom Holland’s seventh time playing the character. Whereas its predecessor, 2021’s No Way Home, sold itself on bringing back heroes and villains from prior Spider-Man entries, Brand New Day promised a general reset. Its story also feels smaller, the action confined to the hero’s hometown of New York City, where he faces off with more street-level villains. Given the public’s declining appetite for the MCU—long gone are the days when an installment starring a relatively unknown character could make more than $1 billion worldwide—Brand New Day’s streamlined focus seemed like an audience gamble.

[Read: The Dark Knight changed Hollywood movies forever]

Not so: The movie earned $360 million domestically during its opening weekend, shattering a record set by Avengers: Endgame in 2019. Endgame was the grand conclusion of Marvel’s initial saga, featuring Spider-Man alongside every other popular character in the company’s wheelhouse. Yet Brand New Day, with its far less cataclysmic stakes, could be the first-ever film to make $1 billion in the United States and Canada alone; if it doesn’t break the all-time worldwide box-office record held by Avatar ($2.9 billion), it will at least come close. Its popularity is proof that for some costumed do-gooders, the exhaustion with superheroes just doesn’t apply. Maybe the simplest rule of thumb is that although audiences are losing interest in most comic-book adaptations, Spider-Man will always endure.

He initially set a famous box-office milestone back in 2002, when Spider-Man—the character’s major-feature debut, starring Tobey Maguire—grossed more than $110 million domestically during its opening weekend. Since then, even as other actors have assumed the role (including Andrew Garfield and an animated version voiced by Shameik Moore), Spider-Man has remained the most consistent of comic-book movie stars. Sony, which owns the film rights to the Spider-Man franchise, has attempted to build offshoot storylines that don’t feature him but has consistently failed; though the Venom trilogy did well enough, the spin-offs Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter were commercial failures. (Critics hated all of them too.) Yet Spider-Man himself has proved indestructible to theatergoers: The 11 films in which he stars have made nearly $11 billion worldwide.

Brand New Day’s colossal success can’t just be attributed to the hero’s appeal, however. The genius of the co-creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s comic-book invention was that he was more grounded and familiar than DC Comics’ godlike figures, such as Superman and Wonder Woman, or the multibillionaire Batman. Spider-Man, in his original incarnation, was really just a nerdy teen named Peter Parker who readers could relate to, and the installments starring Holland have replicated that zippy, youthful energy. Spider-Man’s brand has also been savvily extended to fans of all ages: Projects such as the wildly popular cartoon Spidey and His Amazing Friends appeal to preschoolers, featuring villains including the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus downgraded from homicidal to simply mischievous; the studio Insomniac Games’ three video games focused on the character are best sellers.

[Read: Steve Ditko’s ordinary people]

Beyond that, the star power of Holland and Zendaya, who plays Spider-Man’s girlfriend, MJ, is on a level few other young actors can claim. They both feature in the summer’s other biggest hit, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and although they largely keep their real-life relationship private, it adds to the authenticity of their romance on-screen. Zendaya in particular has proved exceptionally good at getting young viewers to show up for more daring movies, such as this spring’s The Drama; comparatively, something as broadly crowd-pleasing as Brand New Day is a layup.

The film’s achievements will likely not be taken for granted. Marvel’s next movie, Avengers: Doomsday, will be released in December and stands to benefit from the hype around Brand New Day. The studio is also soft-rebooting the franchise following next year’s Avengers: Secret Wars, in part by leaning on another well-known superhero team—the X-Men, one of whom is deployed as Brand New Day’s surprise antagonist. The industry will probably never return to producing the relentless glut of comic-book adaptations that buttressed the past decade-plus in Hollywood—which is a good thing, because a diversity of genres and cinematic experiences is the wisest thing to have on offer. Perhaps Brand New Day could kick off a more stable new phase for superheroes. No matter what, Spider-Man will keep on swinging.

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Before his latest book, Marlon James hadn’t written a novel set in Jamaica in more than a decade. In the years following his Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, the author focused on his Dark Star Trilogy, set in a fantasy universe. But after that long literary detour, he returned to the land of his birth in his new novel, The Disappearers—which is set primarily in Kingston and follows a group of characters, all queer Jamaican men, who meet while rehearsing a play that will never be seen.

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

• Hard-luck men in hardscrabble towns
• “Disunion,” a short story by Kurt Andersen
• A deeply layered novel about masculinity
• “Stance,” a poem by Deborah Garrison

For this group, which gathers in secret in 1988, seeing and being seen are matters of life and death. The Kingston they inhabit is murderously homophobic, and accordingly, the novel can be quite bleak. But The Disappearers offers some delights too. Recently, in her article about the book for The Atlantic, Stephanie Burt noted that “the novel opens up many pleasures for literary readers,” who may recognize the numerous titles and references sprinkled throughout. I was deeply affected by how, almost universally, the characters seek out anything that proves that gay life exists on a larger scale. Lowbrow works, such as porn films and magazines, are most accessible; Playgirl and Hustler are name-checked. The songs of Boy George, Sylvester, and Prince are lifelines—the homoerotic cover of Prince’s 1988 album, Lovesexy, is an especially powerful beacon. Many of the characters are well read, and they name-drop gay novels such as Andrew Holleran’s Dancer From the Dance and E. M. Forster’s Maurice. For one of the men in particular, the type of hustling, defiant gay life that John Rechy describes in his nonfiction book The Sexual Outlaw is pivotal.

The play they put on, a 1967 drama called Fortune and Men’s Eyes, explores homosexuality among a group of prisoners. Some of its characters see sex as a means for gaining or establishing power; others, as a convenient way to access pleasure. Some are what a modern audience might recognize as gay, whereas others choose partners largely because of their proximity. The cast share the characters’ disparate attitudes toward queerness. But in the Jamaica they live in, there is no room for nuance; any man seen as homosexual is a target for violence. Brutality will soon come to the rehearsal room.

In a way, James has written a gay novel about the uses of a gay novel. When his characters invoke Oscar Wilde and Edmund White, Hadrian and Michelangelo, they’re proving, to themselves and to the reader, that queer life existed long before they came around. But James is not an unskeptical cheerleader for the healing power of visibility and representation. The Disappearers’ major theme, after all, is that being recognized can be a bad thing: Owning these books is a hazard. Buying Lovesexy as a man in 1988 Kingston invites vigilantism. Staging Fortune and Men’s Eyes puts its cast and crew in danger.

So why try to do it? The director and ringleader, Havelock Titus, asks himself this question more than a decade after those hopeful rehearsals. He knew, even at the time, that the effort was a risk. He still doesn’t know “what success would have meant,” because the unstaged play “never had the chance to become a failure.” But Havelock knows on some level that he did it because, just like those who came before him, he wanted to create some kind of evidence that gay men communed and survived in his time and place. In short, he was tired of being erased.

Marlon James Returns to Realism, and to Jamaica

By Stephanie Burt

In his new novel, gay men struggle to escape violence in Kingston.

Read the full article.

What to Read

The Age of Reform, by Richard Hofstadter

History can’t fully explain the present or predict the future, but it can help us understand the patterns of contemporary politics and the likely paths ahead. In 1955, Hofstadter, one of the great American historians of the 20th century, published The Age of Reform—a political and social history of the years 1890 to 1940, the period of populism, progressivism, and the New Deal. Rapid technological change, monopoly power, deep inequality, endemic corruption, mass immigration, nativist demagogues, the transformation of both political parties, repeated efforts at reform, recurring spasms of reaction: Perhaps no other age so resembles our own. Hofstadter is brilliant at analyzing types that feel quite familiar to us today—the crusading urban progressive, the small-town conspiracy theorist. He was a liberal who sympathized with the passion for progress while unsentimentally diagnosing its illiberal ideas and motives. The fevered moralism of that age seems a long way from the paralyzing cynicism of ours. But reading Hofstadter will remind you that reform and reaction not only follow each other, but also often coexist in the same moment; neither ever has the last word. Americans are always dreaming of a better country, and some have actually made it so.  — George Packer

From our list: What’s the one book that explains American politics today?

Out Next Week

📚 Finding Renée Richards, by Julie Kliegman

📚 The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World’s First Super-Terrorist, by Joby Warrick

📚 The Book of Chuck, by LaToya Watkins

Your Weekend Read

Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

By Walt Hunter

Universities find themselves in a surprising position. The only reliable way to evaluate what students have learned may be to bring back pen and paper. Faculty are reverting to in-person, handwritten assignments and timed essays—anything that keeps assessments offline. The unlikely hero of the day is the blue book, sales of which are up by as much as 80 percent for some universities since 2023.

Read the full article.

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Americans do not know enough about the Cold War, and much of what they think they know is wrong. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Republicans took a victory lap, rightly noting that the Soviet collapse was unimaginable when President Ronald Reagan first took office. Liberal critics, however, argued—also rightly—that the Soviet Union was a decaying, economically crippled giant by the time Reagan was inaugurated. In the years since, explanations of the ending of that great conflict have been reduced to the equivalent of partisan bumper stickers: We crushed the Kremlin in the arms race, or The U.S.S.R. imploded without any pressure from the West.

In October 1986, Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev met to discuss nuclear-arms control in Reykjavik, Iceland. At the time, I was a young scholar in Washington, training in Soviet affairs and international relations at Georgetown University and working at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. (I was also a two-time Reagan voter.) When the Reykjavik meeting took place, no one was looking ahead to the collapse of the Soviet Union; Kremlin watchers were, mostly, relieved to see a Soviet general secretary and an American president talking with each other.

The Brink of War, a new film released nationwide today, tries to bring texture and detail to those two days in Iceland. The movie relies on transcripts and other documents from the time, along with interviews with a former secretary of state, the late George Shultz (to whom the movie is dedicated). The film is a welcome corrective to the liberal orthodoxy about Reagan—specifically, that he was a disconnected simpleton who didn’t understand the complexities of the arms race. But it leans too much in the opposite direction: It is too kind to the Gipper, and takes too many liberties with the historical record.

As a viewing experience, The Brink of War is a better film than the only other movie about the summit, a 1987 British production titled Breakthrough at Reykjavik. But that’s because the earlier movie (now no longer available, as far as I can tell) was more accurate—and perhaps, for some viewers, more boring. The diplomats who met in the middle of the night thought they were ridding the world of nuclear arms, and that story has plenty of drama, but The Brink of War forgoes those details in favor of needless melodrama and a focus on fewer personalities.

[Read: The thin line between biopic and propaganda]

The title itself is misleading. The world was not on the brink of war in late 1986. Soviet-American tensions were much higher, and the risk of war much greater, during Reagan’s first term, which were perhaps the most dangerous years of the Cold War since the Cuban missile crisis. In the early ’80s, the Soviet Union was led by Yuri Andropov, a former KGB chief. In 1983 alone, Reagan gave his “Evil Empire” speech and announced the start of his missile-defense plan, the Strategic Defense Initiative; the Soviets shot down a civilian Korean airliner (killing a U.S. congressman); and the Americans overthrew a Marxist regime in Grenada. Andropov died in 1984, and Gorbachev took more than a year to gain power while the Kremlin stumbled along under the caretaker regime of the grievously ill Konstantin Chernenko.

Gorbachev’s arrival cooled some of these tensions. Almost a year before Reykjavik, Reagan and Gorbachev met in Geneva, where they issued a joint announcement that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” This was an important moment: Gorbachev, still consolidating power, was taking a risk by bucking anti-American hawks back in Moscow and standing with Reagan to join him in officially ruling out nuclear war as a rational instrument of policy.

By the time the two men met in Iceland, they were both determined to reduce their nations’ stockpiles of nuclear weapons. For Gorbachev, this reflected both a sincere belief and an economic imperative. The Soviet Union was struggling with the costs of boneheaded decisions such as the invasion of Afghanistan and the deployment of new and extremely threatening Soviet nuclear weapons in Europe. Reagan, despite his reputation among his critics as a warmonger, was actually an abolitionist when it came to nuclear weapons, and on this, he and Gorbachev were of one mind.

Both men had earlier made dramatic proposals to rid the world of nuclear arms. These were roundly dismissed in each other’s capitals as propaganda, but as it turned out, Reagan and Gorbachev were completely serious. The meeting foundered because of Reagan’s commitment to SDI, but the Reykjavik summit, despite its failure to reach any agreements, nevertheless suggested to the two leaders that they agreed about important things.

The Brink of War gets much of this right, but it portrays Reagan as highly prepared and Gorbachev as somewhat nervous. In reality, Reagan was concerned about the meeting, and at the start he relied on notes and cards he had in front of him. One of Gorbachev’s first observations when they met was about all the paper in front of his American counterpart; Reagan at one point dropped all of his notes and had to shuffle through them to get back on track. The film also shows Reagan confidently teasing his negotiating team about being Democrats, which was probably done so that the movie could make the summit seem like a bipartisan effort. It’s true that a few Reaganites were once Democrats, such as the negotiator Richard Perle, but this was not a team of liberals and conservatives. Perle was so distrustful of arms control with the Soviets that his nickname in Washington in the ’80s was the “Prince of Darkness.”

Soon the two leaders took up the proposal first discussed in Geneva for a 50 percent cut in Soviet- and American-weapons stockpiles. Reagan and Gorbachev, in the course of their discussion, agreed to eliminate all nuclear weapons, a move that surprised both delegations. The idea of full abolition—beloved by both leaders but not part of the Reykjavik agenda—was an improvised moment, almost an accident, and not some premeditated masterstroke (as the movie implies) by Reagan. This sudden change drove hours of unexpected negotiations. Both sides, in a very short time, got remarkably close to a major nuclear deal, because their bosses, both Soviet and American, wanted one.

These American negotiators do not get much attention in the film; likewise, the Soviets, starting with Gorbachev himself, get unfair treatment in The Brink of War. The Soviet boss huddles in the bathroom with his wife, hiding from the KGB, as if he were doing something illegal and not presenting positions he’d already raised among Soviet leaders. The film also depicts Gorbachev as something of a drama queen during the meetings, slamming the table and raising his voice. At one point, when Reagan suggests sharing missile-defense technology, Gorbachev stands up and whines about how America will not even share dairy technology so that the Soviets can provide milk to their children.

Reagan did make that missile-defense technology offer, and Gorbachev did in fact dismiss it. What Gorbachev actually said, however, according to records from the meeting, was more restrained: “Excuse me, Mr. President, but I do not take your idea of sharing SDI seriously. You don’t want to share even petroleum equipment, automatic machine tools or equipment for dairies.” This was a kind of sarcastic zinger from the real Gorbachev. But in any case, no Soviet leader would complain to an American president about hungry Soviet kids. It would have been especially out of character for Gorbachev, who Shultz later recalled was not whiny but rather “brisk, impatient, and confident, with the air of a man who is setting the agenda and taking charge of the meeting.”

Other Soviets appear as central-casting scary Communists. The Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze is played as a glowering, skeptical presence by a darkly handsome English actor. The real Shevardnadze looked more like a white-haired professor, and he supported Gorbachev’s proposals. Likewise, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the senior military officer who led the Soviet negotiators, is portrayed as a difficult, stiff military man, but American negotiators, especially Paul Nitze, later spoke of him with great admiration as smart, flexible, and someone the Americans could trust.

The Brink of War also presents Reykjavik as something of a guy’s poker party. Men conduct the work in the movie, but in real life, some of the important negotiations with the Soviets were led by the veteran diplomat Rozanne Ridgway, who does not appear in the film. The two most important women in the film are the wives, Raisa Gorbacheva and Nancy Reagan. Raisa is presented as a chic, smart adviser to her husband. Nancy, who stayed in Washington, is Ronnie’s faithful booster, but she also unfairly comes across as a catty flake, envying Raisa and telling the president that the stars are aligned for a successful summit.

Nancy Reagan, fearful of losing her husband, did indeed consult an astrologer after Reagan was shot. But Karen Tumulty, The Washington Post’s chief political correspondent and the author of a definitive biography of Nancy, told me that Nancy was angry in October 1986 not because she felt upstaged, but because her husband’s advisers had told her that Iceland was not a “summit” and therefore that Raisa would not be there. A scene where Nancy tells Ron about the position of Mars, Tumulty added, “strikes me as preposterous.”

The supreme error in The Brink of War, however, is that it wanders too far from the history of the event in order to depict a successful summit. In life, the two leaders agreed about ridding the world of nuclear weapons, but they both left Iceland full of gloom and bitterness. A deal to eliminate nuclear arms dissolved when Reagan insisted that testing for SDI had to continue. Gorbachev, hamstrung by demands from hard-liners back in Moscow, was equally intransigent that no deal could be made so long as SDI was in the works. The summit-that-was-not-a-summit failed.

As the Reagan biographer Max Boot told me, both Reagan and Gorbachev left “furious and disappointed.” Tumulty cites Nancy Reagan as saying later that it was clear to her, watching from afar, that her husband, “pale” and with his “teeth clenched,” was extremely angry as he said goodbye to Gorbachev. According to declassified Soviet transcripts released years later, as the two leaders stood outside waiting to leave, Reagan accused Gorbachev of not wanting a deal in the first place, adding that he didn’t know when they would meet again. (“I don’t either,” Gorbachev said.) Ken Adelman, one of Reagan’s aides at the meeting, later wrote that Reagan, during that final conversation, recalled Gorbachev saying, “I don’t know what else I could have done.” Reagan answered: “I do. You could have said yes.”

None of this makes its way into The Brink of War. Instead, the film makes much of Reagan trying to get a visa for the sister of Mstislav Rostropovich, a Soviet musical maestro who had defected to the United States. Reagan did raise this issue, and the Soviets relented, but The Brink of War makes it seem as if reaching agreement on this opened the way to more deals later. The movie ends with Reagan doubling back to try one more time on the Rostropovich issue. Gorbachev agrees, the men shake hands, and the last word of the movie is deal.

This is not remotely what happened. According to Adelman, it was Gorbachev, not Reagan, who tried one more time to engage—and not on Rostropovich’s sister but on a nuclear deal. “Can’t we do something about this?” the Soviet leader asked as Reagan got ready to leave. “It’s too late,” Reagan said, and walked out.

[Read: How Hollywood taught a generation to fear the bomb]

In the movie, this coldly enraged Reagan is replaced by a smiling dealmaker who is deeply introspective. In a private moment, he stares at the scar from the 1981 attempt on his life; that night he has a fit of PTSD about the shooting as he tosses and turns. The next day, Reagan emphasizes to Gorbachev that he felt that God had spared his life for a great purpose.

Whether Reagan had PTSD from nearly being murdered is a matter of speculation, but he said no such thing to Gorbachev. The movie is full of lines that sound good from Reagan but that he never said. At one point, he invites Gorbachev to “tear down this wall between us,” as if he were already thinking of the line he would use in front of the Berlin Wall a year later. Nor did he say to Gorbachev that the Soviet people were “pissed off” at their government, a line that rings especially false from Reagan, who did not approve of any kind of swearing. As Boot noted to me, the president would not even spell out the word hell in his own diaries.

All of this is unfortunate, because Reykjavik was a crucial step in ending the Cold War, and The Brink of War could have captured Reagan’s admirable toughness and confidence without exaggerating either the president’s abilities or what happened in Iceland. Reagan deserves great credit for making the end of the Cold War possible not only by holding fast to his belief in the superiority of the American system but also by having the vision to see that the Cold War and its endless nuclear tensions did not need to be accepted by either side as an immutable fact of life. He came into office excoriating the Soviets, and learned—almost too late—that he had succeeded too well in scaring the Kremlin and had brought the world closer to war. Encouraged by Shultz and Nancy, he changed course during his first term, and he found a courageous partner in Gorbachev.

Yet Reagan, especially at Reykjavik, was hobbled at times by rigidity and tunnel vision. At the summit, he tried to lecture Gorbachev on the bankruptcy of Marxism-Leninism—this did not go over well—and the president’s obsession with SDI tanked what might have been the most dramatic arms agreement in history. Gorbachev, too, was intransigent, but by Soviet standards he was practically a radical. Fortunately, Gorbachev would drop his objections to SDI in time for both men to sign a landmark treaty in 1987 that abolished all intermediate range nuclear arms in Europe and made the entire world safer. (Donald Trump foolishly withdrew from this treaty in 2019.)

Reagan did not win the Cold War alone, but he and Gorbachev made the end of the conflict and a more secure world possible. The Brink of War, whatever dramatic license it takes, underscores that Reykjavik was part of that story. The summit itself turned out to be a failure, but Washington and Moscow later climbed over its wreckage to reach new agreements. Reykjavik did not end the Cold War, but the Cold War could not have moved toward its peaceful ending without Reykjavik and the spirit of discussion it fostered.

The bars are flooded with single people dressed in their sexiest getups and looking vaguely uncomfortable. Each of them is smiling a little too wide, trying a little too hard: They want to leave with one of these strangers, stat. Pair off too fast, and they might get stuck with someone insufferable; wait too long, and they might ride the subway home alone at 3 a.m., trying not to stare at the happy couples sloppy-French-kissing.

Quick: Is this the plot of One Night Only, or is this a random Friday night in a major city?

The new film by Will Gluck, who also directed such rom-com smashes as Easy A and Anyone but You, follows a decidedly bonkers premise: The U.S. government has outlawed premarital sex. It uses biosurveillance to enforce the ban, tracking people’s dopamine, serotonin, and testosterone levels and alerting law enforcement when two singles show hormone spikes at the same time. The only exception is during one 12-hour window every year: a night when unmarried horndogs run wild, dry humping in the streets like 17-year-olds. Owen (played by Callum Turner) thinks he’ll spend the evening with his girlfriend—until she announces that she wants to embrace her one chance to “explore,” meaning sleep with someone else. (He then decides to do some exploring of his own.) Allie (Monica Barbaro) begrudgingly goes out with her friend to find a partner for the night—until that friend immediately splits with a guy she just met, leaving Allie alone in a sea of deeply off-putting suitors.

One Night Only is obviously not a work of realism, even when you ignore the questionable science. For one thing, if strangers in bars talked to one another this much, America might not be in a romance slump. The vibes in this fictional Manhattan are exuberantly randy—unlike in the world we actually occupy, where Gluck reportedly had to cut nudity out of the film because test audiences reacted so negatively to it. When people can have sex only one night a year, the film implies, they lust hard. (“Maybe the fascists were right about this one,” a peripheral character offers.)

But One Night Only does capture something true about the anxieties and pressures of modern singlehood. The prospects can seem both abundant and astoundingly unappealing. Not trying feels like missing an opportunity, but trying might be worse; Allie wants a real connection but doesn’t assume it will be easy to find. And she’s skeptical that a fling could be all that fun if it’s with a person she’s not excited about. The situation isn’t fair: Although their married friends get to have sex whenever they please, Allie and Owen have to go through enough trials and humiliations to fill a 102-minute run time. This is, unfortunately, a completely realistic inequity. Researchers have found that single people who say they’re sexually satisfied tend to report greater well-being. But only about 15 to 30 percent of singles are sexually active at all: no ban needed to keep the partnerless masses celibate.

[Read: Too scared for sex]

The movie is suffused with a sense of loneliness: Allie and Owen always seem to be walking solo down the street or making their way through crowds who don’t register their existence. But they’re not isolated just because they’re looking for companionship. The sense of alienation is also from a society designed by and for couples. In the real United States, single people tend to pay much more for essentials such as rent and groceries. They miss out on tax breaks, health-care benefits, and a bevy of other perks afforded to married couples. Meanwhile, they feel pressured to shell out on dating-app subscriptions, events, and fancy dinners if they ever want to stop paying the “singles tax.”

The movie’s alternate U.S. isn’t so different, in this way: Again and again, the characters are confronted with attempts to either penalize or cash in on their singlehood. A price-gouging store owner sells her last remaining condom for $200. Dating-app scammers lure vulnerable marks. K-Y salespeople push free samples on the street. Ads across the city target singles (“You’ve been training for this one night,” Equinox taunts; “Get lingual for the one night,” Duolingo urges). You get the sense that Allie and Owen are in a rat race: scurrying around and trying to find their piece of cheese but trapped in a maze by authorities who inhibit and exploit them.

So it’s singles against the world—and also against one another. The people Allie and Owen come across seem to be either lecherously sizing them up or treating them poorly (or some combination of the two). The protagonists themselves have an adversarial relationship: a rom-com trope, but in this case, it is explained only by the fact that Owen throws up near Allie’s shoes when they first meet. (And who would mind so much, really, if Callum Turner vomited in their proximity? Especially on a night like this?) The two proceed to deceive each other, insult each other’s appearances, and abandon each other in precarious situations. There’s no solidarity. No one in this movie even seems particularly nice.

In the end, One Night Only doesn’t have much to say about a fascistic government’s overreach or the pleasures and disappointments of casual sex. It’s more of an abstract portrait—an evocation of how singlehood can feel. The screenwriter Travis Braun has said as much. “I set out to write a movie,” he told The Hollywood Reporter, “about the circus that is modern dating.” A circus is exactly what he depicts: a chaotic, ridiculous affair, full of amusing characters performing and vying for attention, never quite masking an unmistakable whiff of sadness.

[Read: Romance on-screen has never been colder. Maybe that’s just truthful.]

If the movie is more goofy than profound, that may be the point. In Braun’s script, the merciless obstacle course of singlehood seems just absurd. One Night Only is one of a whole slate of pointedly unsexy sex comedies that have been released in the past few months; The Invite, The Drama, Pillion, and I Want Your Sex are all, in their own ways, send-ups of passion gone awry. They’re hardly the first to juice awkwardness and romantic missteps for laughs. But most of these films never even depict sex; they’re more about the absence of chemistry than the survival of it despite the odds. Perhaps we’ve hit the point when modern romance is so cringe that it’s merely camp.

One Night Only goes one step further, in that it ends up feeling genuinely sex-negative; Gluck and Braun’s empathy for their protagonists is all mixed up with judgment toward their background characters’ formidable libidos. The film has been criticized for being prudish and regressive, and I can’t say I disagree. But maybe it’s just taking the perspective of its viewers—many of whom are skeptical of sex, cynical about courtship, and not in the mood to celebrate free love. The movie presents a dystopia, after all: It’s supposed to feel grim. That might be the most resonant part about it.

Ever since Donald Trump returned to the White House, his administration has taken a sledgehammer to anti-corruption efforts, destroying policy after policy dedicated to preventing bribery and money laundering in the country. But this week brought the biggest blow yet: The Treasury has obliterated a recent rule to deter devious shell companies, handily reopening the American economy to anyone looking to hide their illicit wealth.

On Tuesday, the Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) announced that businesses formed in the United States would no longer need to disclose their actual owners, and that nearly all the data already gathered on such companies would be destroyed. This move, which Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called “a victory for common sense and American small businesses,” effectively undoes years of progress in curbing devious financial networks, both domestic and foreign. It also delivers a new shelter for wealthy Americans who wish to dodge taxes and move money around undetected. Corporate entities that allow owners to stay anonymous are handy vehicles for corruption—they enable dodgy characters from around the world to stash their proceeds in an otherwise legal American business. After a brief experiment cracking down on these black boxes, the U.S. has decided to let them multiply instead.

Technically, this company registry will still exist, but as a mockery of its former self. When the registry was created a few years ago, it was heralded by many (including me) as the single greatest anti-corruption step the United States had taken in decades. The U.S. had long been the primary provider of anonymous shell companies to anyone and everyone around the world. For as little as $100 and in as little as 15 minutes, any cartel head, human trafficker, oligarch, autocrat, kleptocrat, fentanyl dealer, or corrupt politician in America or overseas could create a shell company in states such as Delaware, Nevada, and Wyoming. Perfectly untraceable and perfectly legal, American shell companies became by the late 2010s the go-to tools for anyone looking to hide their financial tracks for any reason.

[Read: America has never seen corruption like this]

These companies weren’t just the preserve of foreign crooks. The industry in the U.S. has long served wealthy Americans looking to hide their assets and enrich themselves and their families. American shells provided all of the secrecy protections they could want and, after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision eliminated corporate-spending limits in American politics, they became an ideal tool for covertly bankrolling American politicians, saturating U.S. elections in billions of dark, untraceable dollars.

Efforts to end the scourge of American shells finally broke through just as Trump’s first term was coming to a close. The bipartisan Corporate Transparency Act—which passed in early 2021, over Trump’s veto—would finally force these companies to divulge their owners. The legislation wasn’t perfect; unlike the company registries in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, the proposed U.S. shell-company database was to remain private, accessible only to federal officials and investigators. The rule also failed to tackle all of the ways trusts and other vehicles provide impenetrable secrecy for the wealthy and the crooked alike. But the CTA, which took effect in 2024, was deceptively simple: Corporate owners simply had to disclose who was in control. America’s reign of corporate anonymity was finally coming to an end.

Now that’s all gone. The Trump administration has gutted the legislation and is torching nearly all of the gathered data. This cannot all be blamed on Trump or Bessent. Republican allies in Congress are busy trying to pass legislation that will formally repeal the CTA, thus preventing any future administration from restarting the database.

[Read: The watchdogs are barking themselves hoarse]

The American economy is now open for business again for all kinds of mischief. “The United States Treasury has taken a step that enables criminals to continue financing and profiting from their crimes by using anonymous companies formed in the United States as their ‘getaway vehicles,’” Scott Greytak, the deputy executive director of the advocacy group Transparency International U.S., said in a statement. Anyone with dirty money can once more turn to the U.S. to launder it clean. Now anyone, domestic or foreign, can secretly barrel as much money into American elections as they want.

We have no idea how many businesses formed in the United States are sieves for foreign financing—for elections and otherwise. As Michael Sozan of the Center for American Progress wrote in 2019, these corporations allow foreign entities to “exert influence on the nation’s domestic political process.” The anonymity at play ensures that the scope of this threat will stay unknown too.

All of this is in keeping with what has become the most corrupt administration in American history. Not only has Trump and his family watched their net worths balloon by the billion since he returned to office last year, but his administration has also worked relentlessly to topple America’s anti-corruption infrastructure, eliminating task forces dedicated to combatting dirty money, killing the enforcement of anti-bribery statutes, and gutting efforts to force the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share of taxes, among countless other measures. The demolition of the Corporate Transparency Act is just the latest and most dramatic move to cater to the president’s deep-pocketed buddies and fellow cronies. But it surely won’t be the last.

How to describe President Trump’s Freedom 250 Patriot Games? The contest, which took place earlier this week, brought students ages 14 to 17 together from across America to answer the question: What if your high-school gym teacher walked headfirst into a pole and was then asked to throw an Olympics with a budget of exactly $6 and three weeks’ notice?

Trump boasted when announcing the games that “there will be no men playing in women’s sports,” but after watching almost all of the Patriot Games, I’ve realized he meant that nobody, regardless of gender, would be playing anything recognizable as a sport.

When you turn on ESPN’s coverage of the Patriot Games, you see a camera pan slowly over several small American flags stuck into ill-tended grass, while a tune reminiscent of (but legally distinct from) the Olympics theme plays. Welcome to SPIRE Academy, in Geneva, Ohio, where 120 competitors, one boy and one girl from each of the 50 states and … some territories, gathered for the Patriot Games.

Are these the best high-school athletes the United States has to offer? In a word, no. Well, is the person representing Massachusetts at least from the state of Massachusetts? Also no! Well, does this field of competitors at least look like America? Not the America I remember! But Stephen Miller has been busy.

Then what is this? It’s a Trump-produced spectacle, of course! Who chose these contestants? What are they doing at SPIRE Academy, in Geneva, Ohio? And more important, what are these events? The kids are not the reason that at the end of three days, I feel almost punished for trying to take the Games seriously.

I will say that at least the announcers seem to be equally bewildered by what they’re witnessing. Over the course of the games, I notice that their confident proclamations about what is in store for the contestants keep changing from event to event and day to day. Will Victory Hoops (Pop-A-Shot arcade basketball) feature the top-eight or the top-16 contenders? No one seems to know! (It ultimately features the top 16, despite numerous confident announcements and graphics to the contrary.)

If you tuned in only to the finale—sorry, the “Freedom Finale”; every aspect of these games has patriotic branding—you might be forgiven for assuming that the Patriot Games leading up to this point had operated on any kind of recognizable human logic. The finale features four contestants competing on an American Ninja Warrior–style course, and the other 116 competitors lined up behind them in patriotic jerseys. They enter the arena to stirring music and dramatic lighting while sparklers blaze. It looks as though things have been running in a professional manner. Someone tuning in just then might imagine that the whole competition featured such standard tests of skill and not events such as Here, Play Dodgeball, and We’ll Give Half of You 30 Points! They have not been watching the Patriot Games like I have.

Some elements of the Patriot Games make a minimal amount of sense. The contest, for instance, begins with something called the Presidential Qualifier, with a 100-meter dash, 55-meter hurdles, a Flexed Arm Hang, a Pro Agility Shuttle, a Broad Jump, and a Med Ball Throw. After the Presidential Qualifier comes Dodgeball and Kickball. Each event, as far as I can tell, is worth 60 points. But I could be wrong! The way Dodgeball and Kickball work is that you are divided into six teams (Team Freedom, Team Liberty, Team Valor, Team Honor, Team Unity, and Team Courage, of course!) via snake seeding.

Day two offers two of the most spectacular events I have ever seen. Operation Endurance is a military-inspired obstacle course, and everyone is immediately relieved by how much sense it makes. Ropes to climb! An area in which to army-crawl! A jerrican carry! A balance beam! Yes! And you can tell who has won because there is a timer!

But then comes … the Varsity Circuit. This is where you can sense things coming off the rails a bit. The event is divided into six stations, each with an activity representing a sport. There are two football stations, where you run through obstacles and then throw a football at a target. There is a volleyball station, where you serve three balls successfully over the net. There is a baseball station, where you whack a ball off a tee and then run the bases. For the soccer station, you kick a ball at a target. And for tennis, the activity is … catching three tennis balls in a row. Catching! That thing you famously do during the sport of tennis! One announcer tries to zhuzh it up a little bit, so we get this amazing description: “They will be stationed about 15 feet away from the tennis-ball launcher. They have to actually receive this, almost like a punt reception, and they have to do that three times.”

And while they do this, their families wave signs that say things such as ELIZA IS OUR PATRIOT.

Underwhelming as these challenges are, they are also … not that easy for all of the contestants, which means that if you managed to prove your patriotism sufficiently to get selected for the Patriot Games, you’ll most likely win the prize of failing to catch a tennis ball on national television (or at least deep within the bowels of the ESPN app) while the announcer generously remarks that the lights are awfully bright and the volleyball net does seem pretty high. Certainly not a humiliation for you or the president whose idea this was!

After the Varsity Circuit and Operation Endurance, we select our top 16, based on total points. Once we reach the top 16, any pretense that this is an open field for competition where anyone can win gets joyfully abandoned. The top-four scorers are all placed on a single team for tug-of-war against the bottom-four scorers, and—you won’t be surprised to hear this!—they win.

After this, we have Pop-A-Shot basketball! Yes, the arcade game! “Why can’t they just shoot real basketballs? Isn’t this all being filmed on a basketball court? Isn’t this allegedly an athletic competition?” HUSH! JUST ACCEPT THE PREMISE! THESE ARE PROBABLY THE BEST ATHLETES, AND THESE ARE PROBABLY LOGICAL THINGS FOR THEM TO BE DOING!

Look, as someone who has watched Slippery Stairs, a contest in which people try to climb up a slippery stair and some of them fall down and others do not, I understand the power of good announcing to make almost anything seem like a legitimate competition. But the power of good announcing can go only so far, and it cannot do anything when you are watching two students play arcade basketball head-to-head for no discernible reason, and you already know the points will not matter.

Trump appears for the Freedom Finale, which has much higher production value than anything that has come before. “I like a lot of finales,” he says. “We’ve got a lot of good finales.” (Did he prepare those remarks?) During the finale, multiple people fall off the Legally–Distinct–From–American Ninja Warrior Race-Course Equipment, allowing their opponents to win. Thrilling! Everyone gets a medal, and the winners get trophies and scholarship checks. Trump stands smiling in the middle of it all. It looks very Soviet, although the Soviets probably would have realized that the tennis-ball catching was too embarrassing to televise.

Is this America? No, this is Trump’s America, where everything is made up and the points don’t matter, but our leader still wants you to cheer as if they do. Just don’t tell me these are tests of merit. I watched that Pop-A-Shot basketball! Don’t tell me this is the best we have to offer. And don’t embarrass our high-school students like this. They have enough being thrown at them, between the death lettuce and resurgent measles. The last thing they need is the Patriot Games too.

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In January, the Trump administration attempted to fundamentally change the way the United States handles childhood immunizations. Following a memo from the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC updated its vaccine schedule to recommend that some shots no longer be given to all children. A federal court undid the effort in March. In an executive order in May, Donald Trump called on states to adopt the narrower schedule anyway. On Monday, Trump issued a new executive order on the same subject, focused on lowering the number of vaccines that the government recommends for all children. As I wrote earlier this week, this White House has a habit of doubling down when it doesn’t get its way. But only states have the power to put these proposals into practice—and many state policy makers, concerned that the White House is contradicting existing research, aren’t keen to follow its guidance.

According to the new executive order, preventive shots for hepatitis A, hepatitis B, dengue, and other diseases should be recommended for “high-risk” groups only. The order also calls to split up vaccinations for measles, mumps, and rubella—the two-dose MMR shot that has been a standard recommendation for U.S. children for decades—into three separate stages, and directs the attorney general to pursue legal action against states that don’t respect “parental authority, religious freedom, disability accommodations, and equal protection under the law.” (The order says it will align U.S. policy with the best practices of other countries, such as Denmark, but the experts I spoke with highlighted that what works in one country won’t necessarily work in another.)

The mandate may not have any legal authority to compel states to change their guidelines in the near term, although the invocation of the attorney general suggests that litigation may be on the horizon. And the single-disease vaccines that the executive order encourages aren’t yet available in the U.S. But this week’s order risks creating even more uncertainty about vaccines than already exists. “If you set out to write a policy that confuses people, it would look a lot like this one,” Jake Scott, an infectious-disease specialist at Stanford, told me.

Between the policy priorities of the Trump administration and the guidance of public-health experts, Americans have been stuck in a state of vaccine whiplash. When the American Academy of Pediatrics broke with the government earlier this year over its proposed vaccine schedule, the chair of the organization’s committee on infectious diseases told reporters that the recommendations are a “strong departure from the medical evidence and no longer offer the optimal way to prevent illness in children.” Some state lawmakers have been fighting over how best to adapt to the CDC’s changing guidelines; Kansas’s GOP-dominated legislature tried to bring the state’s vaccine rules into alignment with the CDC’s, only for its Democratic governor to veto the effort in April. And many other states have publicly said that they will reject the guidelines.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has questioned vaccines’ safety in the past, has been driving the discussions of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee, as my colleagues Tom Bartlett and Katherine J. Wu reported. And although the secretary has moved away from explicit anti-vax rhetoric in recent months (following a reported White House push for health officials to stick to messages with broad public support), vaccine skepticism clearly lingers within the administration. During the press conference for Monday’s executive order, Trump suggested that the MMR vaccine could be “quite lethal.” There is no evidence for this. Measles, though, can kill: Last year, the U.S. saw its first deaths from measles in a decade.

Rethinking MMR at this moment poses extreme logistical challenges. Even if pharmaceutical companies opted to invest the time and money to introduce these shots to the American market, splitting up the doses would create new problems for caregivers. “We are essentially tripling the operational labor required of the parent or guardian (who must now schedule three separate appointments for their child),” Maimuna Majumder, a Harvard epidemiologist, told me in an email, which is “all but guaranteed to result in missed vaccines.”

In the meantime, the executive order risks misinforming Americans who are already unsure of how they feel about vaccination. The Kaiser Family Foundation released a study in June suggesting that about a third of American adults fall into a “mixed middle group” of vaccine skepticism—they believe some myths and reject others. My colleague Nick Florko, who covers public health, told me that these are the people most likely to be swayed by the administration’s latest push: “Those are the folks that might see this and think, Okay, maybe my belief that I want to delay this vaccine is well founded because the federal guidance now says that we should do that.” Under the White House’s rubric, the Americans who most need clear guidance are those who stand to lose.

Related:

• Kennedy’s handpicked vaccine committee is a mess. (From 2025)
• The U.S.’s most concerning anti-vaccine policy

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Hunger Games, MAGA style
• Trump’s new plan to get his name back on the Kennedy Center
• Our last Wi-Fi-less refuge is gone.

Today’s News

1. The Kennedy Center’s board voted to put President Trump’s name back on the building, months after a federal judge ordered it removed. The board also approved closing the main building for a $250 million renovation, aiming to reopen it in 2028.
2. A federal judge dismissed the Trump administration’s anti-Semitism lawsuit against Harvard, finding that the incidents cited by the government were “too isolated and episodic” to show that the university was violating federal civil-rights law. The administration had accused Harvard of failing to address anti-Semitism on campus and sought the ability to deny the university federal grants.
3. Flock Safety, which operates a nationwide network of license-plate-reading cameras used by police to track vehicles, announced new safeguards after reports that officers misused the system to surveil people. The company said it will cut its default data-storage period from 30 days to seven and add stronger oversight of police searches.

Dispatches

• Time-Travel Thursdays: In 1973, an Atlantic writer predicted that Richard Nixon’s downfall would restrain presidents for generations. Instead, Watergate helped write the script for the scandals that followed, Jake Lundberg argues.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

What I Saw In Sinaloa

By Kevin Sieff

Last Tuesday night, I was eating sushi with a Mexican police chief in downtown Culiacán, a city that had momentarily flickered back to life amid a bloody cartel turf war. At the table next to us was a birthday party. The police chief ordered a salmon roll. Through the window, I could see groups of families and friends walking on the sidewalk, past car dealerships and strip malls, after months of self-imposed lockdown.

Among them were three influencers who pulled up to a KFC down the street. They were dressed as food-delivery workers, carrying insulated bags on their backs, joking with one another and livestreaming everything with their phones. César Gastélum, the group’s front man, had become famous for such innocuous pranks. Even as thousands were murdered by the cartels, Gastélum, a stocky, bearded 24-year-old, posted videos of himself dancing in pajamas, dressing as a priest, sipping iced coffee. He had more than 700,000 followers on TikTok.

Read the full article.

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Listen. Phoebe Bridgers’s new record is a perfect album for a frustrating decade, Spencer Kornhaber argues.

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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.

Historians are generally better off interpreting the past than predicting the future. By training, we’re meant to read sources, not tea leaves. In the fall of 1973, during the middle acts of Watergate’s Shakespearean drama, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. tried to do a little bit of both. In the cover story of The Atlantic’s November issue that year, “The Runaway Presidency,” Schlesinger cast President Richard Nixon’s abuses as the result of long-standing historical trends that had empowered the chief executive, and in the process offered a hopeful prognosis for what was to come. “Watergate,” Schlesinger wrote, “is potentially the best thing to have happened to the presidency in a long time. If the trails are followed to their end, many, many years will pass before another White House staff dares take the liberties with the Constitution and the laws the Nixon White House has taken.”

Nixon resigned 52 years ago this month, marking an end to the scandal, but bringing no such catharsis to our national life and no stop to the runaway presidency. Underscoring just how poorly Schlesinger’s optimism aged, J. D. Vance mused in June that “if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.” As my colleague David A. Graham noted at the time, the remark was a startling admission from a member of an administration that has taken liberties with the Constitution and the laws. It’s also entirely plausible: Scandals that would have previously brought the nation to a standstill barely register for more than a few days, in part because there are simply so many of them under Donald Trump. To understand how Schlesinger got it so wrong, first you have to understand what he got right.

In 1973, Schlesinger published a brick of a book titled The Imperial Presidency. He’d begun writing it as a pamphlet that March, but the project quickly swelled to 200,000 words as the spectacle of Watergate unfolded. The book tracked the aggregation of executive power from the founding onward, which accelerated during World War II and the Cold War. By the early ’70s, the office had grown so far beyond its constitutional bounds, Schlesinger wrote, that it posed “a revolutionary challenge to the separation of powers itself.”

Schlesinger’s Atlantic essay was preaching from his own text. In that account, Nixon’s abuses were symptoms that made visible a larger sickness. The expansion of the presidency, especially in the realm of war and foreign policy, was clear enough, but Nixon showed the dangers and “intoxications” that came with such power at home. Previous presidents may have possessed such authority but, Schlesinger argued, they had the character and restraint not to use it. Nixon was a different kind of case, demonstrating what would happen when a person “not open and modest,” but “from the start ambitious of power and contemptuous of law,” reached the nation’s highest office.

The president’s place at the center of the American political story exacerbated the problem. Congress should restrain the executive to reassert its place in the constitutional order, Schlesinger argued (he had advocated for Nixon’s impeachment as a starting point), but the American people also had a role to play: They must form “a new attitude” toward their presidents, becoming more skeptical and less reverent toward the office. Doing so would administer fewer “intoxications” to its occupant, Schlesinger wrote. But his prescriptions struck his critics as rich, to say the least. As he admitted in The Imperial Presidency, “historians and political scientists, this writer among them, contributed to the rise of the presidential mystique.” Contributed, indeed. Over the course of his career, Schlesinger had endowed Democratic presidents with just the stature he now feared. In 1965, he’d memorialized John F. Kennedy (to whom he served as special assistant) in a book so reverential that the writer Christopher Hitchens later called it “the founding breviary of the cult of JFK.”

Schlesinger may have only got religion because of the sins of the Republican Nixon administration, but he wasn’t exactly wrong. Many others in the moment hoped that Nixon’s transgressions would spark something of a democratic revival to check the dangerous tendencies that had made Watergate possible. And reforms did come: A slew of legislation from 1973 to 1978 attempted to address abuses exposed by Watergate and restrain presidential power on war, impoundment, elections, secrecy, and surveillance.  

What Schlesinger failed to see was that although the dramas of Watergate may have pierced the mystique of the presidency, they also heightened the American fascination with it. Many people did lose their reverence for the office, but they didn’t turn their attention away. Perversely, it seemed that the spectacle of the presidency was enhanced rather than diminished by its subsequent scandals. Watergate supplied more than the inevitable suffix for all presidential crises to come—it also established the script. The crime and the cover-up; the drip of revelations; the question of what the president knew, and when he knew it; the obscure Washington characters thrust into the spotlight; the marathon hearings; the stern reports on the nightly news.

But presidential scandals, which once dominated the media cycle for weeks and months, now come and go at the speed of an attention economy that demands constant novelty. Meanwhile, the institutions that might have checked presidential power now enable it. Congress’s inaction and the Supreme Court’s expansive doctrine of executive authority have brought us closer to Nixon’s later assertion that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” Watergate would be a 12-hour news story today, as Vance suggests, because there’s nothing to stop a new one from happening tomorrow. In an era of revelation without reckoning, we’re more transfixed than ever by the imperial presidency, whether we like it or not.

At the end of his 1973 Atlantic essay, Schlesinger suggested that corruption came to the White House in 50-year cycles, like monstrous cicadas. There is perhaps something to the idea. Start from the abuses of Nixon, in the early ’70s, and go back half a century to the abuses of Warren Harding, in the early 1920s. Do that again, and you would arrive at the scandals that plagued Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency, in the 1870s. Keep rewinding another 50 years—ignore John Quincy Adams’s reputation for probity and rectitude—and you’d land on the “Corrupt Bargain” that gave Adams the presidency in the election of 1824.

The cycle could be projected forward, too: Schlesinger closed with one more prediction, this one more right than wrong. “Around the year 2023,” he wrote, “the American people will be well advised to go on the alert and start nailing down everything in sight.” We can’t say we weren’t warned.

Donald Trump just won’t let go of his plans for the Kennedy Center.

Less than three months after a federal judge ordered the president’s name stripped from the national arts center, Trump’s handpicked trustees have found a new way to try to put him back on the building. During a board meeting today, they voted in favor of a resolution that would return the president’s name to the building’s facade. It would read:

The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts
Restored and Renovated by President Donald Trump

I obtained a copy of the resolution, which contains one more edit to the Kennedy Center’s marble edifice. Once an obscure endowment known as the Trump Kennedy Center Fund reaches $100 million in donations, the resolution would expand the proposed signage’s language to include a third line: Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund. The vote, which was not included on the agenda distributed before the meeting, will likely drag out a legal fight over Trump’s transformation of the center and deepen an institutional crisis that has repelled audiences, artists, and donors since his takeover. Participants voted 20–3 to adopt the resolution, one person familiar with today’s proceedings told me on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter. The three “no” votes were from ex officio members of the board, who are not appointed by Trump but serve by dint of their federal office. Most members of the board are general trustees appointed by Trump. (The board elected Trump chair in February 2025.)

There is also still the matter of the center’s renovation plans. A main item of the meeting was to resolve a problem that has dogged Trump’s plans for the Kennedy Center for months: how to make a convincing case that the center needs to close. A federal judge had previously ruled that the board had failed to sufficiently examine the consequences of a full shutdown when it signed off in March on Trump’s surprise plan to close down the center for two years for a glow-up. Critics, including some ex officio trustees, accuse Trump of using the renovation as a cover for the center’s operational failings under his leadership. This time, board members reviewed a new trove of materials before—once again—voting for a full closure.

I obtained the report, assembled by a consulting firm and a construction-management firm, which presented two scenarios. The two-year-closure plan favored by Trump, which would displace ensembles such as the National Symphony Orchestra until the center reopened, would be covered largely by the $257 million appropriation from Congress that Trump asked for last year. A $560 million plan would extend the renovation to four years but allow programming to continue inside the center. Arts administrators generally try to avoid full shutdowns of major arts venues for fear of breaking audiences’ attendance habits. The uncertainty has deepened a crisis faced by the orchestra, which has been unable to announce its next season.

Paolo Zampolli, a general trustee who also serves as the Trump administration’s special envoy for global partnerships, says he strongly supports the plans to close. “It doesn’t make sense to keep it open,” he told me in a phone call after the meeting. “It’s going to take the double of time and cost the double of money.”

At one point, Trump joined the meeting virtually, delivering a tirade of “epic proportions” about the center’s disarray, the person familiar with the proceedings told me. Kennedy Center leaders under Trump have long claimed that the building is falling apart and that the president helped turn around the institution. Today’s naming resolution honored his “existential and unprecedented contributions” to the center.

“It’s very normal that when people do good things, there’s going to be some kind of recognition,” Zampolli told me, adding that he would support Trump’s name being included “everywhere that it could be possible” at the center. Zampolli, a longtime friend of Trump’s, also said he planned to use his own international business relationships to solicit donations for the institution. “That’s why we’re there,” he said of the general trustees. “That’s why the president chooses us and has confidence in us.”

In a statement, one of the ex officio trustees, Representative Rick Larsen of Washington State, criticized the name resolution. “The courts have already determined that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is the memorial to the late President and that the current president’s name cannot be used in the public spaces of the memorial,” he said. “If and when the renovations are done, let’s talk about an appropriate recognition. Until then, let’s get the necessary renovation work done.”

The Kennedy Center did not immediately respond to my requests for comment, and it has yet to communicate with staff about its renewed plan to close the building, according to two staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal. One of them said employees had suspected leadership would try to proceed with a shutdown, but news of the name resolution was not expected. “The inscription on the wall is them testing the limits,” the person said. The proposal, as well as the renovation plan, could face pushback from the federal judge assigned to the lawsuit over the center’s future, which was filed earlier this year by Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio, one of the ex officio trustees.

[Read: The Kennedy Center’s latest defense raises a new mystery]

The name resolution will likely renew speculation about why a tarp is still draping the Kennedy Center’s facade. The covering, fastened tightly to a towering system of scaffolding, has obscured John F. Kennedy’s name since June, when leaders say they complied with U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper’s order to remove Trump’s name from the building. So far, they have not provided a compelling reason for why the tarp is still up.

A spokesperson previously told me that it would remain up “as crews address maintenance needs of the marble and soffit panels.” But the center will have to elaborate on that reasoning in its filing next week, if the tarp is still up.

When Trump took over the Kennedy Center, he promised to make it “hot” again, accusing the former leadership of allowing the building to crumble and the finances to wither. But if his tenure was meant to prove the thesis that he could make the Kennedy Center great again, the evidence is lacking. For many patrons and artists, the center has simply become too politicized to go anywhere near. The latest design tweak almost certainly won’t change that.

The semiquincentennial events that President Trump has personally directed have been a celebration of his very particular version of America. The bloody UFC fight on the White House lawn was followed by the sparsely attended Great American State Fair and a world-record-breaking July 4 fireworks show held alongside a dangerous lightning storm. Next weekend will bring a high-speed car race through the museum-lined streets of Washington. But of all of these festivities, the Patriot Games in Ohio this week might have been the oddest.

Organizers convened 120 teenagers from across the country—in their telling, the “next generation of leaders, competitors, and champions,” but also whoever happened to respond to an online request for personal essays and video entries—at a high school in Geneva, Ohio (population 5,924), roughly 45 miles northeast of downtown Cleveland. For three days, they competed in gym-class staples such as ball tosses, long jumps, tug-of-war, dodgeball, and an arcade-style basketball game called Victory Hoops. The field was narrowed to eight contestants who competed before the president on Tuesday night, clambering through a Ninja Warrior–style obstacle course while wearing red, white, and blue. One boy and one girl were crowned champions, and each was given a $125,000 scholarship.

Over the past several days, ESPN has streamed more than 26 hours of this contest, and I have consumed many of those hours—but I have yet to fully understand why this competition happened or what it has to do with American history, or even with American culture at this moment. I could barely follow how the various events were scored. It was like watching a nationally televised field day—with wholesome moments and cheerful contestants along the way—but it was unclear what the grand takeaway was supposed to be. (Perhaps that will be revealed when the event is condensed into a one-hour special airing tonight on ABC.) More than anything, it was a reality-television-style snapshot of the America that Trump most wants to see. The contestants were overwhelmingly white, in a country where roughly half of children are not, and many spoke openly of their Christian faith or their affection for this particular president.

[Read: The YOLO presidency]

When Trump showed up on Tuesday night, accompanied by the ESPN commentator Pat McAfee, the crowd erupted. “He’s got that Michael Jordan glow,” one spectator said. “We love you, Mr. President!” one man yelled. “2028!” another exclaimed. Outside the arena, a football-field scoreboard displayed a score of 45–47 in Trump’s honor. The crowd chanted “USA! USA! USA!” when he arrived and danced to his favorite song, “YMCA,” before he left.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” Trump told ESPN’s Laura Rutledge during an onstage interview, a few yards from dozens of teenagers. “I’m very proud of the group of people in this room. You see the spirit and the love of the country, our great country. And our country’s never done better.”

In that moment, it became clear that this gathering, like so many others this president has overseen, was actually all about Trump. This was his vision of the Hunger Games, MAGA style. He was front and center, watching the grand finale unfold and eyeing golden trophies he could present. But who were these contestants, and how were they chosen? Why these random events? And what does this all say about our country, and how does it mark our 250 years as one?

The Patriot Games, it must be said, seldom made for great television. I watched kids’ arms quiver as they tried to keep their chin up and over a bar—at least one lasted scarcely a second. Some struggled to cross the monkey bars in an obstacle course. Others tripped over the hurdles on the track, knocking over almost every one. (“A natural hurdler? Not really,” the announcer remarked.)

In one contest, the teenagers were asked to navigate an obstacle course of sorts: bear-crawl under a net, high-step through tires, weave between slalom poles, climb up and down a cargo net, walk across a beam, flip a tire (once for girls; twice for boys), traverse the monkey bars, carry two jerricans, leap onto hanging panels, and push a red button. In another contest, they went through a circuit of various sports. They attempted to kick a soccer ball into a bull’s-eye, catch three tennis balls, run through a maze of tackling dummies, throw a football into a target, serve a volleyball three times, hit a T-ball, and, finally, run around a few bases. In between challenges, some kids offered brief, out-of-breath analysis. “I did a lot better than I thought I would on the monkey bars,” concluded Gabriel Hayes, who was representing the Shawnee Tribe. “I just got kinda tired, to be honest,” said Remy Taylor, from Delaware.

The announcers revealed the kinds of small biographical details familiar to anyone who has watched the Olympics, attempting to humanize the athletes by highlighting their love of macaroni and cheese, Greek mythology, or Legos. Some were members of JROTC or the Future Farmers of America. Many came from military families, and aspired to carry on that tradition. There were at least three sets of siblings. Multiple boys wore a cross necklace, and several of the girls had a cross painted on their body. “I just want to say, it’s the glory for God. Thank you, Lord, for this opportunity,” said Max Biondolillo of Florida, after finishing the obstacle course. “Thank you, Jesus. That’s all I can say. Thank you, Jesus,” Seylah Brown, representing North Carolina, said after completing the circuit of sports.

The biographies suggested that the organizers might have struggled with recruitment in some deep-blue jurisdictions. The boy representing Puerto Rico has a southern accent and resides in Texas. Elsie Bruckart was the contestant for Vermont, but her hometown was listed as Bellbrook, Ohio. Her cousin Rebekah Roberts competed for Maine, but her hometown was Cornish, New Hampshire. Bobbi Vickers was representing Massachusetts, but she is from California. “I get a bunch of questions, like Why are you representing Massachusetts and not your home state?” Vickers told CNN. “But I think it’s really cool, because a lot of my family is from there and my favorite basketball team is actually the Boston Celtics.”

People familiar with the process told me that the athletes were selected through applications that required submissions of performance data and athletic statistics, along with a personal-essay and video submission. Freedom 250 did not respond to questions about why certain states were represented by competitors living in other states, or why there was such a lack of diversity among the contestants.

Danielle Alvarez, a spokesperson for Freedom 250, the Trump-aligned group that organized the games, said in a statement that the Patriot Games were one of the “unforgettable signature events” meant to “celebrate our country and inspire the next generation.” Organizers told me that they’d sought to create a range of challenges, aiming to show that the winner has mastered many different skills.

[Read: Inside America’s ugly birthday battle]

Often, during the events, the producers displayed the scores for only the top-10 contestants, shielding from embarrassment those who struggled. The announcers remarked several times that just because a contestant hadn’t performed well in one discipline didn’t mean they wouldn’t do better in another. Coaches shouted encouragement from the sidelines like summer-camp counselors: Give it your all! Finish the race! Be proud of the process! Some contestants had said beforehand that they had little clue before they arrived in Ohio what events would be included. “I’ve never really played soccer before,” said the girl representing Michigan. “I don’t know how to throw a football,” said the girl representing the Virgin Islands.

“It was hard. It was challenging. I mean, I’ve never played any of these sports. Like, I’m a cheerleader,” Laynie Arrowood, the 16-year-old representing the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, told the sideline reporter good-naturedly. “I’m not good at throwing football—obviously not good at soccer! But it’s okay. I tried my best.” Most of the contestants did seem to be enjoying themselves, and several said they’d made close friendships over the days they’d spent together. Some said they understood how Trump’s involvement had politicized the competition but were baffled as to why they had come under scrutiny. “We can’t vote,” Jonah Beauregard, a 17-year-old from Massachusetts, told The Boston Globe. “We can’t do anything in our power to do anything to help it.”

Trump announced in May 2023 that, if elected to a second term, he wanted to host “major sporting contests for high-school athletes” as part of the country’s 250th celebrations. “These Patriot Games will allow young Americans from every state to show off the best of American skills, sportsmanship, and competitive spirit,” he said in a campaign video.

America has a rich athletic history, and the youth-sports industry in this country generates an estimated $40 billion in annual revenue. But to find a precedent for these games, you’d have to go further afield. The Roman emperor Nero, in 59 C.E., began hosting the Ludi Juvenales, a series of youth games in a festival to mark the transition from boyhood to manhood. In ancient Greece, athletic competitions began when boys turned 12. And the International Olympic Committee stages a Youth Olympic Games every four years for those ages 15 to 17.

Andy Hall, an ESPN communications director, told me that Freedom 250 approached the network last year about televising the event. He said that the network is not paying for the rights to carry it, but he would not say whether it was being paid and declined to provide any viewership data on how many people were streaming the content. (The link was buried inside the ESPN app and took me some time to find.) He said that the network had no role in organizing or planning the games, and that it was televising them as it would games organized by other entities. The content will all be repackaged into an hour-long ESPN special that will air tonight on ABC. Representatives for ABC did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Hall declined to further comment. The Federal Communications Commission ordered a review earlier this year of the network’s licenses. Airing the president’s competition on its national platform may buy the network some goodwill.

On Tuesday night, Trump sat as the finalists worked through a course that involved swinging from ropes, carrying two kettlebells, and climbing up a wall. Kennadi Fuhrman, a soccer player from Kansas, won the girls’ competition, crediting “God, all the way.” Rockwell Myers, a tennis player and ballroom dancer from Utah, won the boys’. “It’s been amazing, and it’s taught me so much,” he said. “It really, really puts an emphasis on how important it is to put God first in your life and make him your No. 1 priority.”

Trump came onstage and helped present the trophies and oversize checks. “Incredible people. I like the audience also, I have to tell you. But what a great bunch of young athletes,” he said. Confetti went off, falling onto the contestants. One blue piece stuck in the president’s hair.

Michael Scherer contributed to this report.

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Until very recently, airplanes were one of the last places where you couldn’t count on having good Wi-Fi. Even the Amazon’s most remote villages have high-speed internet, but for years, the typical in-flight connectivity experience could have been best summed up by the aviation Reddit thread titled “WiFi horrible?”

Now major airlines have started rolling out Wi-Fi that is both free and usable. In June, United announced that by the end of this year, nearly 1,000 of its planes would be getting high-speed Wi-Fi via Starlink, the network of low-Earth-orbit satellites owned by SpaceX. Other major airlines, including Delta, JetBlue, and Alaska, are partnering with either Starlink or its closest competitor, Amazon Leo, to offer better Wi-Fi in the next year or two. This new technology provides almost the same internet experience you’d get on the ground, Seth Miller, an airline-industry analyst, told me. This is not Wi-Fi that’s “good for an airplane.” It’s just … good.

As technology conquers this final Wi-Fi frontier, air travel will never be the same. The fickleness that made in-flight Wi-Fi infuriating was also its own kind of luxury: Planes were a bastion of unreachability. And once that luxury is gone, we may miss it.

Delivering the internet to a metal tube traveling at 500 miles per hour, 30,000 feet above the Earth, is so difficult because the tube is both far from internet sources and constantly moving. In the early days of plane Wi-Fi, aircraft had what were essentially giant mobile hot spots attached to their bellies, which would connect to cell towers on the ground. (This was Gogo’s in-flight Wi-Fi which, let’s be honest, never really Gogo’d.) For the past decade or so, major airlines have connected instead to satellites about 22,000 miles above the Earth, which provided Wi-Fi good enough to send an email (sometimes) but too slow for Instagram. The satellites that Starlink and Amazon Leo use travel much closer to the Earth and the plane, so they’re about 10 times less laggy, Miller said. With these connections, people can use social media, play online poker, and—in theory—Zoom, though many airlines still forbid or discourage video calls.

This level of connectivity might sound like a win: Airplane travel is a cramped, chaotic experience; the least you might ask is for the ability to scroll through TikTok when the limited catalog of in-flight movies gets stale. The pitch, as Grant Milstead, the vice president of digital technology at United Airlines, told me, is that with faster, free Wi-Fi, the plane can become a “living room in the sky”—where, just like in a living room on the ground, people can have the TV on for entertainment, their laptop out for productivity, and their phones nearby for messages and social media. Some people are clearly embracing that reality: On a recent 10-hour flight, the guy next to me prepped a slide deck, listened to Spotify, and flirted over DM with someone I sincerely hoped was his girlfriend.

But this level of connectivity also means that, on a plane, you can no longer be blissfully unaware of what’s happening back on the ground. Before Starlink, someone on a business trip might still decide to expense suboptimal Wi-Fi to keep up the pretense of working. But for the rest of us, “Sorry, I was on a plane” was one of the last socially acceptable reasons a person could be unreachable while doing nothing except eating Biscoff cookies. A plane ride meant hours set aside to watch movies, read, or doodle, free of guilt and earthbound demands. Instead of responding to a message from your mother-in-law, you could look out the window and see rivers transformed into green ribbons. While my seatmate worked on his slide deck, all I did was watch Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick and slam Bloody Mary mix. It was glorious.

The level of disconnection on a plane might have once been an inconvenience, but now people pay good money for enforced breaks from their phone. Sixteen years ago, when Starbucks started offering free Wi-Fi, this magazine declared, “It’s about time!” These days, many cafés withhold Wi-Fi and ban laptops as a selling point. At least 10 million people use the Opal app, whose premium tier costs $100 annually, to lock themselves out of distracting apps, while others pay $59 for the Brick to do the same. Subpar airplane Wi-Fi included this kind of detox with the price of your ticket.

No one will argue that breathing stale air in a seat that offers 30 inches of leg room counts as a wellness retreat, and the research on how much dedicated tech detoxes actually improve well-being is mixed. Still, a disconnected plane ride “might create an opportunity to temporarily remove some of the demands that normally compete for our attention—email, work messages, social media, news, and notifications,” Lisa Walsh, a psychology professor who researches happiness at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, told me. Flying was a rare, bounded period of time untethered from the world below. Whether or not someone might benefit from that time depends on how they spend it, Kostadin Kushlev, a psychology professor at Georgetown who studies technology and well-being, told me. A nice use of a plane ride might include actually talking to the strangers next to you (an act tied to well-being, he said), letting your mind wander (also linked to well-being), or even just really focusing on Top Gun (research has yet to link Tom Cruise to well-being, but you never know). Kushlev told me about how, during grad school, he once set aside a flight to journal about what he wanted from his life and future. “It really kind of changed my trajectory,” he said. Now, with enough to keep him busy on the plane, he said, “I don’t bother.”

Of course, passengers don’t have to log into the Wi-Fi. But as fast connections become ubiquitous on planes, expectations may begin to shift. We already spend just about every moment of our life near our phones—at work, at the grocery store, at parties, at concerts, in bed, and, for the 75 percent of Americans who’ve copped to this, in the bathroom—where anyone can message us. Now people could easily expect a response while we’re hurtling through the lower stratosphere, too. (And if you don’t reply, people will know it’s because you wanted to eat Biscoff cookies and ignore them.) Connectivity also means the plane becomes just another place to be productive. Milstead, the United executive, told me that one of the company’s customers vibe-coded a website for his new business from the air. Meanwhile, people have already started complaining online about fellow passengers taking Zoom calls and Microsoft Teams meetings onboard. When your seatmate is leading a Q1 strategy session, staring out the window and daydreaming—one of the most distinct opportunities of flying—may seem like time wasted.

If 30,000 feet is yet another place where Zoom meetings are unavoidable, it’s hard not to see a future in which we are nostalgic for the recent past when the Wi-Fi was bad. The early aviator Anne Morrow Lindbergh once wrote that flying is “a miracle that has nothing to do with any of its practical purposes—purposes of speed, accessibility, and convenience.” Instead, a plane ride was an opportunity to watch the familiar world grow strange. Most people who fly no longer treat the experience like a miracle, but now we barely need to notice we are up in the air. It’s just another place to check Instagram.