In parks, in backyards, in woods that are lovely, dark, and deep, a many-legged menace now stalks the land. I speak of ticks, and I come bearing absolutely no good news. In recent decades, ticks have made the leap from nuisance to genuine public-health threat: Their numbers are rising. Their ranges are expanding. And the diseases they carry are multiplying. Lyme cases have more than doubled since 2000, in which time scientists have also discovered eight new tick-borne diseases—plus an unusual and potentially dangerous tick-induced meat allergy called alpha-gal syndrome.

“The ticks are winning,” a CDC scientist wrote in a recent paper. To put it even more bluntly, humans are losing and are on the retreat. Ilia Rochlin, a tick researcher at Stony Brook University, told me he stopped hiking in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey after he and his wife came across hundreds and hundreds of newly hatched lone star ticks on a trail several summers ago. And on Long Island, where he lives, “it is impossible to go hiking in most areas,” Rochlin said. “Just because of ticks.”

Tick prevention today is a matter of individual responsibility. If you can’t avoid ’em, you’re supposed to pretreat clothes with the pesticide permethrin, tuck your pants into your socks, and check your entire body for ticks—a real pain, honestly, just to hang out in your backyard. Maria Diuk-Wasser, a tick researcher at Columbia, told me her own family doesn’t always listen to this advice. “I’m like, oh my God, if we don’t even do it here …” The tick problem has reached an inflection point: It is too big to address with personal protective measures alone.

What we need, tick experts now argue, is widespread tick control, akin to mosquito control that has been carried out by state and local agencies for more than a century. Rochlin, who used to work in mosquito control, pointed out that his predecessors in New York were chiefly concerned with malaria. Yes, malaria—now known as a tropical disease—once killed hundreds of New Yorkers every year. In the early 20th century, a massive national mosquito-eradication effort, which led to the CDC’s creation, ultimately expunged the disease from the country. “Compare this huge success story of malaria control in the United States,” Rochlin said, with “this humongous failure to control tick-borne disease.” Today, the number of Americans who contract diseases from tick bites dwarfs the number falling ill from mosquito bites.

To beat the ticks, we need new tools, such as pesticides and vaccines. We need the political will to actually use existing ones, namely, killing deer. We need to make the United States into an environment hostile to ticks—something Americans have accomplished once before, just not on purpose.

When the colonists arrived in what would become the United States, they began turning forests into farmland and hunting white-tailed deer, which neared extinction by 1900. This turned out to be an excellent, if unintended, tick-control strategy. It deprived the parasites of habitat and, more crucial, their key host animal. In low numbers, infected ticks crossed over only occasionally to bite humans.

But as farming declined in the 20th century, forests regenerated. Deer populations rebounded, this time without natural predators such as wolves to keep them in check. Ticks flourished too. In recent decades, two formerly obscure tick species have enormously expanded their reach: the black-legged or deer tick, which is best known for spreading Lyme, and the lone star tick, best known for causing alpha-gal syndrome. (The lone star tick, at least, seems to be reclaiming its former range; it was likely in modern-day New York in the 1700s, before disappearing to the south and not reappearing this far north again until the 1990s.) The two species collectively carry a number of other, lesser-known pathogens, too, including anaplasmosis, babesiosis, Powassan virus, Ehrlichia, and Bourbon virus. These diseases likely once circulated primarily among animals, but they are now spilling over into humans because of the sheer number of ticks that are out and looking for blood.    

No one thinks we should solve our modern tick problem by chopping down all of the trees. But everyone I spoke with agreed: We have to do something about the deer. “Deer are the key.” The “common denominator.” The “crux of the issue.” The “main driver of all that is evil today in the northeastern United States.”

That last quote is from Sam Telford III, an epidemiologist studying tick-borne diseases at Tufts University, who calls himself “the nation’s biggest advocate for killing deer.” Ticks rely on the blood of deer to reproduce, his argument goes. A single deer, Telford told me, can feed 1,500 female deer ticks, each of which can lay 2,000 eggs. That’s 3 million deer ticks per deer, over one breeding season—even higher for the more fecund lone star tick. Killing deer is therefore “the biggest bang for your buck,” he said. This strategy was most convincingly implemented in 1997 on Monhegan Island, off the coast of Maine, where residents fed up with Lyme disease hired a sharpshooter to cull all of the deer. After that, Lyme virtually disappeared from the island.

We know very well how to kill deer (“Rifle,” Rochlin deadpanned), but doing so is unpopular. It makes animal-rights activists livid, the general population squeamish, and even hunters unhappy about competing for fewer deer. Lately, though, Telford said, people have become desperate enough about ticks to reconsider. On Martha’s Vineyard, which has come under recent siege by lone star ticks, hunting is having a resurgence. The island extended its hunting season and plans to build a new deer-processing facility.

Hunting can accomplish only so much, though. It can reduce the density of deer from 70 to 40 per square mile, but breaking the disease-transmission cycle requires going below 10, according to Kirby Stafford III, an emeritus chief scientist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, where his department studied this exact issue. Moreover, hunting in many of the suburbs home to tick-infested deer is impossible because of all the people who live there, too. On New York City’s Staten Island, where hunting is illegal, the city has been giving vasectomies to male deer for the past 10 years. The deer population has fallen by nearly half, but the tick story is more complicated; while tick numbers have gone down, the proportion carrying Lyme has gone up.

An alternative idea: Make the deer themselves tick resistant. A device called the “4-poster” station lures deer with corn as bait, before rubbing permethrin—the same pesticide we humans use—onto the animals as they snack. But that approach has not proved terribly successful. (Too expensive; limited range.) “Not practical,” concludes Stephen Rich, a microbiologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who has tested these bait stations on Cape Cod and nearby Chappaquiddick Island. Lately, he’s homed in on a different idea: Turn the blood of deer into tick poison, as we already do to dogs. Rich is exploring the use of fluralaner, sold for dogs as Bravecto: He hopes to apply it to captive deer this fall, before expanding to Chappaquiddick next year, where his team will be pouring the fluralaner onto deer that have been tranquilized.

Or perhaps a vaccine could make ticks simply fall off their host. Animals such as rabbits and cattle naturally become resistant to ticks after repeated bites, likely by mounting an immune response to tick saliva; this is the biological basis for anti-tick vaccines that scientists are trying to develop in humans. Durland Fish, a tick researcher at Yale, argues a deer version could be simpler to develop for biological and regulatory reasons. The challenge then becomes how to vaccinate deer. The USDA currently air-drops fish-meal-flavored oral rabies vaccines to raccoons, and researchers are now studying how to similarly entice deer. “I’m like, what kind of deer crack can we put in there?” says Jean Tsao, a tick researcher at Michigan State University who has tested baits locally. Currently, it’s alfalfa, which has not quite hit the “deer crack” threshold.

In speaking with tick researchers, I sometimes got a sense of mosquito envy. “I’m still amazed,” Tsao told me, when she goes to mosquito-control meetings. “They know what size droplet to spray that will be effective as the plane is flying over to kill mosquitoes down below.” They know what time of day to spray and where. And those same conferences discuss all kinds of ideas for new mosquito pesticides, Diuk-Wasser, the researcher at Columbia, said. “But there’s funding to do that,” which is not the case for ticks.

Existing chemicals are very effective at killing ticks, but they are very effective at killing friendlier bugs, including pollinators, too. Scientists are studying how to target their application—to certain habitats or certain times of the year—to minimize harm to other bugs. (Tick researchers I spoke with were largely skeptical of popular natural yard sprays that are derived from essential oils.) And they are searching for more specific alternatives, such as fungi that kill only ticks.

Ultimately, tick control will likely require a combination of strategies, rather than any one magical solution. Hunting, vaccines, and pesticides applied both to deer and in the larger environment could all play some role. When Lyme first appeared in isolation in the U.S., we conceived of it as a medical problem, Fish told me, putting the bulk of public research dollars into medical treatments. But the subsequent appearance of so many novel tick-borne conditions points to a larger ecology problem. Better than finding stand-alone treatments for each of these conditions is preventing Americans from getting sick in the first place—by making ticks less abundant across the land.

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The Ebola outbreak raging in the Democratic Republic of Congo is now the largest in the nation’s history, according to the World Health Organization. The strain of Ebola driving this outbreak is called Bundibugyo and has no vaccine or treatments. It’s devastating: More than 3,600 cases have been identified, which have led to more than 1,500 deaths—a 44 percent fatality rate. The tragedy has been compounded by the ongoing conflict in the nation. Millions have been forced from their homes and even more are facing crisis levels of hunger.

Could this all have been prevented? Hasn’t the world figured out how to handle Ebola? This week, I spoke with my colleague Hana Kiros, who has been covering the outbreak and how the Trump administration has gutted foreign aid that it says saves lives, about why this outbreak is different and what it tells us about the state of global health today.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Adam Harris: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Adam Harris, and this week we need to think about Ebola and the crumbling global-health infrastructure.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is in the throes of one of the largest Ebola outbreaks in the history of the African continent. Nearly half of those who have contracted the virus have died.

Since the outbreak began, in May, the international community has been playing a game of catch-up. But perhaps it should have seen this coming.

On the day President Trump returned to office in 2025, the administration issued a 90-day freeze on foreign aid. In February of that year, they eliminated 90 percent of the USAID foreign-aid contracts before they finished dismantling USAID a few months later.

The shuttering sent shockwaves through the international-aid community: The resources the U.S. was withdrawing weren’t just good PR; they were critical to the public health of poorer nations. And now, as Ebola ravages the Congo, advocates say that this is exactly the sort of outbreak that money and coordination was intended to contain.

How will this outbreak end? And could this level of catastrophe have been avoided?

With me to discuss is my colleague Hana Kiros, who has been covering the decimation of the U.S.’s global-health aid and the current Ebola outbreak.

Let’s get to questions.

Hana, thanks so much for joining me today.

Hana Kiros: Thanks for having me.

Harris: When we spoke at the office maybe about a month ago, there’d been roughly 500 deaths from Ebola on the African continent to that point. Now there are roughly 1,500. Why has this breakout been so difficult to contain?

Kiros: I think there are a couple of factors, but the biggest one is probably just that it was caught so late in its spread. There was a lot of disease transmission that occurred before an international response was mounted. Ebola was sort of this runaway train that was spreading through the DRC. And then, it’s in an active war zone, which complicates things. There’s not really any testing in refugee camps. And it’s also a gold-mining town where the epicenter of the outbreak’s where people just sort of come in and out.

So, it’s a place where people—Ebola was spreading and spreading to a lot of different places before we started trying to contain it, and now it’s just the response hasn’t moved as fast as Ebola has through the country.

Harris: Yeah, and so you’re talking about the DRC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo; where else in the region is it? I know there were cases in Uganda. Has it spread beyond the DRC, or is it still primarily located in the DRC?

Kiros: So, it’s primarily located in the DRC and specifically in the eastern DRC. There’s a health zone that’s near South Sudan that has had its first cases of Ebola. Uganda has had a few cases, but the outbreak there has been declared over. They have a really robust health-care system. South Sudan much less so. So, there’s fear of that happening, but right now it’s still within the DRC.

Harris: The West African Ebola outbreak in the 2010s, where something like 30,000 people were infected, over 11,000 people were killed—what is different about this strain of Ebola?

Kiros: The one that’s tearing through the DRC right now is a different virus entirely. So, it’s the Bundibugyo Ebola virus. And because of that, this virus has evaded detection and that’s a really big part of why it was caught so late. Because the machines that were being used to test for Ebola were giving back negative results because they were looking for one Ebola, not all five of them.

So that’s one way that this outbreak is different. We don’t have the regular arsenal of vaccines, treatments, diagnostic capacity, that we know works.

And then in terms of the actual scale, so now the outbreak is over 3,000 cases and it’s very nearly the second-largest Ebola outbreak in recorded history.

And the big difference is that this is the fastest-moving Ebola outbreak that we’ve seen. So, there’s an explosion of cases that’s happened within a very short period of time. Again, we’re not really sure what the period of time is. We don’t know who patient zero is in this outbreak. So, I think that’s the main differentiator.

Harris: When you mentioned patient zero, it’s almost a reminder that these are individuals, right, that make up these larger numbers? Can you sort of humanize this for us? What has that experience been like, traditionally or historically, during these outbreaks?

Kiros: You know, I was speaking to a woman at Doctors Without Borders who’s coordinating their response to the outbreak in the DRC and she was saying that the current case-fatality rate is like 40 percent. She talked about a mother that showed up to an Ebola-treatment facility with symptoms and with two kids, and because of delays in testing it can be 48 hours, 72 hours before you get a positive or negative result. So, there’s a question of like, where do the kids go while you’re waiting? If you’re at home with a fever, you might be hesitant to go to this place where half, almost half, of people don’t come back from. So I think that, there’s this perception that the Ebola treatment wards are like places where you go to die, and health-care workers have said that that’s really something they want to fight against, because if people—you have a much better chance of surviving if you’re treated earlier in the disease progression. So, there’s a lot of fear. I think 90 percent of people are dying before they ever reach a hospital, according to the World Health Organization.

And also just like cultural practices. In the DRC, funerals are a multiday affair where you celebrate the life of the person, you touch the body, and that’s a major way that Ebola spreads. So, this very basic cultural practice—like, imagine your mother died and you think about, there’s this way that you honor her before you put her in the ground and you can’t do that anymore because of a virus. It reminds me of COVID in a lot of ways, in the way that there’s disruption, there’s a lot of suspicion; some people think it’s a hoax. But yeah, it’s just caused a lot of disruption in the DRC.

Harris: Yeah, to that point of people thinking that that it’s a hoax—there is the hoax that leads people to a hesitancy to go to a doctor or to go and be seen, but there’s also this sort of mistrust that leads to almost anger, right? This idea that Maybe they’re withholding something from us that could help people. How are folks in the Congo dealing with that in their response to the international community’s sort of attempts to help contain the spread? Is there a sort of violent response to those efforts?

Kiros: So, there has been, in some cases. I think most people in the Congo don’t think that Ebola is a hoax. There was a survey recently that I think 30 percent of people thought that it wasn’t a real disease, which is significant, but it’s not the majority of people. But Ebola-treatment centers have been burned. There are teams that are called “safe and dignified burial teams,” and they go out in basically hazmat suits and then they will, if someone’s tested positive, they’ll go to their home and try and disinfect everything so that bodily fluids that can transmit Ebola don’t infect other people. And then they sort of wrap people up in a special tarp, and they try to bury them in a way that ensures the disease doesn’t spread. Those people have been attacked because they’re highly visible.

And I think from the perspective of someone in the DRC, you’re much more likely to die from the conflict that’s happening there, or from malaria or from malnutrition, issues related to displacement, than you are from Ebola. But when an Ebola outbreak spreads, there is this parachuting in of international aid, which is apt to make sure that the spread doesn’t continue, but if you look at even the worst-case scenario, there are—in the minds of some people, there are bigger fish to fry. And so, I think that there is a lot of gratitude, people that are cooperating. There’s a lot of really great radio programs that have positive public-health messaging, but there’s also a lot of distrust and just wariness of how much people’s daily lives have changed.

Harris: Bio threats happen all the time. It’s something that governments are sort of always thinking about, and scientists have estimated or believed that there’s about a 50–50 chance of another COVID-level pandemic materializing in the next 25 years. And that probability jumps significantly when you’re talking about these sort of smaller-scale outbreaks and epidemics, right? They’re things that are going to happen.

There was a playbook that developed out of some of these previous outbreaks to deal with things like this. Is that playbook still a thing? Does the international community still know how to manage these sorts of outbreaks?

Kiros: I hope so. The Trump admin published its America First Global Health Strategy and it promotes this à la carte model of funding global-health responses. So, it takes the control of global health away from the CDC and puts it in the hands of the State Department.

Marco Rubio: We care about Ebola. We don’t want anyone dying or being affected by Ebola. But our No. 1 priority will always be making sure it doesn’t come to the United States. That’s our No. 1 obligation.

Kiros: And there was a really great Substack post that I read, I think it was headlined, like, “Would You Want Henry Kissinger Running the COVID Response?,” where, like, if you don’t have public-health experts, epidemiologists, people that are specialized in running global-health responses and whose primary purpose is not statecraft but in preventing disease spread, like, how that impacts our global-health security, how it affects all of us that are alive. Like, I don’t know.

And also, the à la carte model asks countries to decide basically like, Do you want bed nets? It leads me to worry about how comprehensive future responses will be, and how prepared we’ll be.

Harris: Yeah, it’s almost like when you move it to the State Department, it becomes more of a  play for diplomacy as opposed to a care, a sort of compassionate aid, right?

Kiros: Yeah, I think there’s always been this dual justification for providing foreign aid and health aid specifically. We should nip it in the bud before it comes to our borders, but also we don’t want innocent people and babies to die of things that are very preventable.

Harris: The World Food Program was talking about, they just put out a report recently that talks about the compound factors that make the sort of public-health crisis in the DRC worse. And they’re requesting over $100 million over the next six months for Ebola response in the region, $76 million for the Congo alone.

You’ve reported on the sort of deep cuts for international aid out of the United States. And I wonder if the U.S. will ever get back to funding international-health aid in the same way that it did before this Trump administration.

Are there any indications that they will get that $100 million and then have some for the future to prevent Outbreak 17, Outbreak 18, Outbreak 19?

Kiros: So, the World Food Program is really broke currently. They’ve had to pull back from a lot of really critical places where they were providing food aid, cut rations. But I will say I think that Trump really cares about Ebola. In 2014, he was a prolific Ebola poster. I think he made 100 tweets about Ebola within a span of a few months. It’s at the intersection of hypochondriac Trump and border-control Trump. He really was adamant that no one that had the virus should enter the country, even if they’re Americans that caught the virus while abroad. And you see that he’s implemented that this time around. So, if an American doctor goes to the DRC, gets Ebola, instead of sending them back to the U.S., we’re sending them to Europe. So I mean Trump is engaged on Ebola.

Donald Trump: Go ahead, Ebola. Ebola.

Reporter: Should Americans be concerned about Ebola?

Trump: I’m concerned about everything. But certainly am. I think that, you know, it’s been confined right now to Africa. But it’s something that’s had a breakout.

Kiros: Ebola is sort of like, even when Elon Musk was discussing the USAID cuts, he was like, We cut Ebola, whoops! Everyone knows we should keep doing that. So I actually, I do think that when there’s an Ebola outbreak, out of a desire to protect national security, there is typically a surge in response. And we’ve seen that even this time, that the research and development money that’s gone into developing a vaccine for this species of Ebola, developing treatments—the U.S. has provided that.

I think what I’m skeptical about ever coming back is really there were some things that were just dropped from the global-health-aid agenda that the U.S. no longer funds. So, neglected tropical diseases—they’re this sort of package of diseases like river blindness or different types of parasitic diseases that are disabling but typically aren’t deadly, but they can make someone blind permanently or make it so that they’re unable to work, unable to go to school. And the U.S. had really successful programs that were eliminating these diseases in many countries. And most of the drugs were donated from pharmaceutical companies and the U.S. was just helping with distribution, and we’ve stopped doing that, and those companies have stopped donating the drugs because a lot of the infrastructure is gone. And that’s one of those things where I think there are a lot of examples like that, where progress was being made on a major global-health problem, and we, the U.S., just lost interest and then that’s without really an explanation things were dropped from the agenda.  

I don’t know if we ever get back. I think it’s harder to argue for the reinstitution of something than the continuation of it. And then I also think that aid has been politicized in a way that makes it difficult. The U.S. provides virtually no aid to Somalia anymore, even though they’re on the brink of famine. Certain countries have been blacklisted for lack of political interest. So, I think that we’re seeing a narrowing of ambition. And then also, some countries have just been dropped from the aid agenda by the Trump admin. So those are the major changes I see and the things that I think might not come back.

Harris: If those things don’t come back, what risk does that pose to the global-health picture?

Kiros: Zooming in on Ebola specifically, there’s just a lot less health care in the DRC because humanitarian funding not just from the U.S. but from most other wealthy countries is down pretty significantly, because the U.S. has always been a leader in global health. So I think a lot of people took our lead and brought it down.

The International Rescue Committee, for example, in this region of the DRC, they closed I think more than half of their health-care facilities. And there’s a relationship between these NGOs and the World Health Organization, the U.S. government, sort of tipping off the right authorities when they see something that is suspect and could be a pathogen that’s a real threat to biosecurity. So, I think that there are just sort of all of these holes in our picture of disease spread, and diseases will come. So I think that’s something to worry about. But I also think that the main impact will be just, if there’s a famine in Somalia and the U.S. doesn’t respond, a lot of people in Somalia are gonna die—more than would have otherwise.

The U.S. has been successful in the past of saving millions of people from famine in Somalia.

Harris: If you were to open your reporter’s notebook, think about the questions that you still have about the outbreak, about the spread, about the global, international response to it, what are those questions that you still have about the outbreak that you would like answered or that you want to pursue?

Kiros: When I’ve talked with people that are in the DRC, in Bunya, which is the current epicenter of the outbreak, I have asked where are the Americans? Do you see Americans? Is the U.S. playing a clear leadership role? And a lot of the people I’ve talked to have been like, It’s not really the U.S. leading anymore. And part of that, I think, is because after the Obama administration really took the lead on the 2014 Ebola outbreak, and the World Health Organization—it floundered and was not as useful as the U.S. was. So, there was effort put into training up the World Health Organization and building capacity so that they were more capable of leading an international-outbreak response.

And so I think that part of the story is that the World Health Organization is capable of taking the lead. But also, the leadership gap, if there is one, is interesting to me. And then I also think that this is a massive, massive human effort. So there are doctors, there are nurses, there are health-care workers that are donning hazmat suits basically, and are in 80 percent humidity in the summer heat. Doctors, they have to, they can only work for an hour because otherwise they’ll pass out due to the heat, and they’re not being paid. So there’s strikes that are happening amid the outbreak, which are, I mean, really disrupting care for people in really critical condition. But there are also these health-care workers that are working in extremely dangerous situations. People call Ebola a disease of compassion because the people that are the caretakers often are the ones that get infected and die from it.  

Harris: Yeah, absolutely. As you mentioned that human element—global health is really, at the end of the day, really a human endeavor, right? A moral endeavor. It’s about preventing unnecessary human suffering, right? I think that human element of folks putting themselves in harm’s way to help other people is such a fundamental part of being human.

Hana, thank you so much for your time today and in sharing all of this with us. And we’ll be following your reporting as the effort to contain the outbreak continues.

Kiros: Thanks so much.

Updated at 12:00 p.m. ET on December 13, 2024

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Every coherent society has a social ideal—an image of what the superior person looks like. In America, from the late 19th century until sometime in the 1950s, the superior person was the Well-Bred Man. Such a man was born into one of the old WASP families that dominated the elite social circles on Fifth Avenue, in New York City; the Main Line, outside Philadelphia; Beacon Hill, in Boston. He was molded at a prep school like Groton or Choate, and came of age at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. In those days, you didn’t have to be brilliant or hardworking to get into Harvard, but it really helped if you were “clubbable”—good-looking, athletic, graceful, casually elegant, Episcopalian, and white. It really helped, too, if your dad had gone there.

Once on campus, studying was frowned upon. Those who cared about academics—the “grinds”—were social outcasts. But students competed ferociously to get into the elite social clubs: Ivy at Princeton, Skull and Bones at Yale, the Porcellian at Harvard. These clubs provided the well-placed few with the connections that would help them ascend to white-shoe law firms, to prestigious banks, to the State Department, perhaps even to the White House. (From 1901 to 1921, every American president went to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton.) People living according to this social ideal valued not academic accomplishment but refined manners, prudent judgment, and the habit of command. This was the age of social privilege.

And then a small group of college administrators decided to blow it all up. The most important of them was James Conant, the president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953. Conant looked around and concluded that American democracy was being undermined by a “hereditary aristocracy of wealth.” American capitalism, he argued, was turning into “industrial feudalism,” in which a few ultrarich families had too much corporate power. Conant did not believe the United States could rise to the challenges of the 20th century if it was led by the heirs of a few incestuously interconnected Mayflower families.

So Conant and others set out to get rid of admissions criteria based on bloodlines and breeding and replace them with criteria centered on brainpower. His system was predicated on the idea that the highest human trait is intelligence, and that intelligence is revealed through academic achievement.

By shifting admissions criteria in this way, he hoped to realize Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a natural aristocracy of talent, culling the smartest people from all ranks of society. Conant wanted to create a nation with more social mobility and less class conflict. He presided during a time, roughly the middle third of the 20th century, when people had lavish faith in social-engineering projects and central planning—in using scientific means to, say, run the Soviet economy, or build new cities like Brasília, or construct a system of efficiency-maximizing roadways that would have cut through Greenwich Village.

In trying to construct a society that maximized talent, Conant and his peers were governed by the common assumptions of the era: Intelligence, that highest human trait, can be measured by standardized tests and the ability to do well in school from ages 15 to 18. Universities should serve as society’s primary sorting system, segregating the smart from the not smart. Intelligence is randomly distributed across the population, so sorting by intelligence will yield a broad-based leadership class. Intelligence is innate, so rich families won’t be able to buy their kids higher grades. As Conant put it, “At least half of higher education, I believe, is a matter of selecting, sorting, and classifying students.” By reimagining college-admissions criteria, Conant hoped to spark a social and cultural revolution. The age of the Well-Bred Man was vanishing. The age of the Cognitive Elite was here.

At first, Conant’s record did not match his rhetoric. He couldn’t afford to offend the rich families who supplied Harvard with its endowment. In 1951, 18 years into his presidency, the university was still accepting 94 percent of its legacy applicants. When Jews with high grades and test scores began to flood in, Harvard limited the number of applicants it would consider from New Jersey and parts of New York—places that had a lot of Jews.

But eventually Conant’s vision triumphed and helped comprehensively refashion American life. If you control the choke points of social mobility, then you control the nation’s culture. And if you change the criteria for admission at places such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, then you change the nation’s social ideal.

When universities like Harvard shifted their definition of ability, large segments of society adjusted to meet that definition. The effect was transformative, as though someone had turned on a powerful magnet and filaments across wide swaths of the culture suddenly snapped to attention in the same direction.

Status markers changed. In 1967, the sociologist Daniel Bell noted that the leadership in the emerging social order was coming from “the intellectual institutions.” “Social prestige and social status,” he foresaw, “will be rooted in the intellectual and scientific communities.”

Family life changed as parents tried to produce the sort of children who could get into selective colleges. Over time, America developed two entirely different approaches to parenting. Working-class parents still practice what the sociologist Annette Lareau, in her book Unequal Childhoods, called “natural growth” parenting. They let kids be kids, allowing them to wander and explore. College-educated parents, in contrast, practice “concerted cultivation,” ferrying their kids from one supervised skill-building, résumé-enhancing activity to another. It turns out that if you put parents in a highly competitive status race, they will go completely bonkers trying to hone their kids into little avatars of success.

Elementary and high schools changed too. The time dedicated to recess, art, and shop class was reduced, in part so students could spend more of their day enduring volleys of standardized tests and Advanced Placement classes. Today, even middle-school students have been so thoroughly assessed that they know whether the adults have deemed them smart or not. The good test-takers get funneled into the meritocratic pressure cooker; the bad test-takers learn, by about age 9 or 10, that society does not value them the same way. (Too often, this eventually leads them to simply check out from school and society.) By 11th grade, the high-IQ students and their parents have spent so many years immersed in the college-admissions game that they, like 18th-century aristocrats evaluating which family has the most noble line, are able to make all sorts of fine distinctions about which universities have the most prestige: Princeton is better than Cornell; Williams is better than Colby. Universities came to realize that the more people they reject, the more their cachet soars. Some of these rejection academies run marketing campaigns to lure more and more applicants—and then brag about turning away 96 percent of them.

America’s opportunity structure changed as well. It’s gotten harder to secure a good job if you lack a college degree, especially an elite college degree. When I started in journalism, in the 1980s, older working-class reporters still roamed the newsroom. Today, journalism is a profession reserved almost exclusively for college grads, especially elite ones. A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal had attended one of the 34 most elite universities or colleges in the nation. A broader study, published in a nature.com journal this year, looked at high achievers across a range of professions—lawyers, artists, scientists, business and political leaders—and found the same phenomenon: 54 percent had attended the same 34 elite institutions. The entire upper-middle-class job market now looks, as the writer Michael Lind has put it, like a candelabrum: “Those who manage to squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities,” Lind writes, “can then branch out to fill leadership positions in almost every vocation.”

When Lauren Rivera, a sociologist at Northwestern, studied how elite firms in finance, consulting, and law select employees, she found that recruiters are obsessed with college prestige, typically identifying three to five “core” universities where they will do most of their recruiting—perhaps Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT. Then they identify five to 15 additional schools—the likes of Amherst, Pomona, and Berkeley—from which they will more passively accept applications. The résumés of students from other schools will almost certainly never even get read.

“Number one people go to number one schools” is how one lawyer explained her firm’s recruiting principle to Rivera. That’s it, in a sentence: Conant’s dream of universities as the engines of social and economic segregation has been realized.

Did We Get a Better Elite?

Conant’s reforms should have led to an American golden age. The old WASP aristocracy had been dethroned. A more just society was being built. Some of the fruits of this revolution are pretty great. Over the past 50 years, the American leadership class has grown smarter and more diverse. Classic achiever types such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Jamie Dimon, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, and Indra Nooyi have been funneled through prestigious schools and now occupy key posts in American life. The share of well-educated Americans has risen, and the amount of bigotry—against women, Black people, the LGBTQ community—has declined. Researchers at the University of Chicago and Stanford measured America’s economic growth per person from 1960 to 2010 and concluded that up to two-fifths of America’s increased prosperity during that time can be explained by better identification and allocation of talent.

[From the May 1946 issue: America remakes the university]

And yet it’s not obvious that we have produced either a better leadership class or a healthier relationship between our society and its elites. Generations of young geniuses were given the most lavish education in the history of the world, and then decided to take their talents to finance and consulting. For instance, Princeton’s unofficial motto is “In the nation’s service and the service of humanity”—and yet every year, about a fifth of its graduating class decides to serve humanity by going into banking or consulting or some other well-remunerated finance job.

Would we necessarily say that government, civic life, the media, or high finance work better now than in the mid-20th century? We can scorn the smug WASP blue bloods from Groton and Choate—and certainly their era’s retrograde views of race and gender—but their leadership helped produce the Progressive movement, the New Deal, victory in World War II, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the postwar Pax Americana. After the meritocrats took over in the 1960s, we got quagmires in Vietnam and Afghanistan, needless carnage in Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the toxic rise of social media, and our current age of political dysfunction.

Today, 59 percent of Americans believe that our country is in decline, 69 percent believe that the “political and economic elite don’t care about hard-working people,” 63 percent think experts don’t understand their lives, and 66 percent believe that America “needs a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and powerful.” In short, under the leadership of our current meritocratic class, trust in institutions has plummeted to the point where, three times since 2016, a large mass of voters has shoved a big middle finger in the elites’ faces by voting for Donald Trump.

The Six Sins of the Meritocracy

I’ve spent much of my adult life attending or teaching at elite universities. They are impressive institutions filled with impressive people. But they remain stuck in the apparatus that Conant and his peers put in place before 1950. In fact, all of us are trapped in this vast sorting system. Parents can’t unilaterally disarm, lest their children get surpassed by the children of the tiger mom down the street. Teachers can’t teach what they love, because the system is built around teaching to standardized tests. Students can’t focus on the academic subjects they’re passionate about, because the gods of the grade point average demand that they get straight A’s. Even being a well-rounded kid with multiple interests can be self-defeating, because admissions officers are seeking the proverbial “spiky” kids—the ones who stand out for having cultivated some highly distinct skill or identity. All of this militates against a childhood full of curiosity and exploration.

Most admissions officers at elite universities genuinely want to see each candidate as a whole person. They genuinely want to build a campus with a diverse community and a strong learning environment. But they, like the rest of us, are enmeshed in the mechanism that segregates not by what we personally admire, but by what the system, typified by the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, demands. (In one survey, 87 percent of admissions officers and high-school college counselors said the U.S. News rankings force schools to take measures that are “counterproductive” to their educational mission.)

In other words, we’re all trapped in a system that was built on a series of ideological assumptions that were accepted 70 or 80 years ago but that now look shaky or just plain wrong. The six deadly sins of the meritocracy have become pretty obvious.

1. The system overrates intelligence. Conant’s sorting mechanism was based primarily on intelligence, a quality that can ostensibly be measured by IQ tests or other standardized metrics. Under the social regime that Conant pioneered, as the historian Nathaniel Comfort has put it, “IQ became a measure not of what you do, but of who you are—a score for one’s inherent worth as a person.” Today’s elite school admissions officers might want to look at the whole person—but they won’t read your beautiful essay if you don’t pass the first threshold of great intelligence, as measured by high grades and sparkling SAT or ACT scores.

Intelligence is important. Social scientists looking at large populations of people consistently find that high IQ correlates with greater academic achievement in school and higher incomes in adulthood. The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, based at Vanderbilt, found that high SAT scores at 12 or 13 correlate with the number of doctorates earned and patents issued. Many elite colleges that had dropped standardized testing as an application requirement are now mandating it again, precisely because the scores do provide admissions officers with a reliable measure of the intellectual abilities that correlate with academic performance and with achievement later in life.

But intelligence is less important than Conant and his peers believed. Two people with identical IQ scores can vary widely in their life outcomes. If you rely on intelligence as the central proxy for ability, you will miss 70 percent of what you want to know about a person. You will also leach some of the humanity from the society in which you live.

Starting in the 1920s, the psychologist Lewis Terman and his colleagues at Stanford tracked roughly 1,500 high-IQ kids through life. The Termites, as the research subjects were known, did well in school settings. The group earned 97 Ph.D.s, 55 M.D.s, and 92 law degrees. But as the decades went on, no transcendent geniuses emerged from the group. These brilliant young people grew up to have perfectly respectable jobs as doctors, lawyers, and professors, but there weren’t any transformational figures, no world changers or Nobel Prize winners. The whiz kids didn’t grow up to become whiz adults. As the science journalist Joel Shurkin, who has written a book on the Terman study, concluded, “Whatever it was the IQ test was measuring, it was not creativity.”

Similarly, in a 2019 paper, the Vanderbilt researchers looked at 677 people whose SAT scores at age 13 were in the top 1 percent. The researchers estimated that 12 percent of these adolescents had gone on to achieve “eminence” in their careers by age 50. That’s a significant percentage. But that means 88 percent did not achieve eminence. (The researchers defined eminence as reaching the pinnacle of a field—becoming a full professor at a major research university, a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, a leader in biomedicine, a prestigious judge, an award-winning writer, and the like.)

The bottom line is that if you give somebody a standardized test when they are 13 or 18, you will learn something important about them, but not necessarily whether they will flourish in life, nor necessarily whether they will contribute usefully to society’s greater good. Intelligence is not the same as effectiveness. The cognitive psychologist Keith E. Stanovich coined the term dysrationalia in part to describe the phenomenon of smart people making dumb or irrational decisions. Being smart doesn’t mean that you’re willing to try on alternative viewpoints, or that you’re comfortable with uncertainty, or that you can recognize your own mistakes. It doesn’t mean you have insight into your own biases. In fact, one thing that high-IQ people might genuinely be better at than other people is convincing themselves that their own false views are true.

2. Success in school is not the same thing as success in life. University administrators in the Conant mold assumed that people who could earn high grades would continue to excel later in their career.

But school is not like the rest of life. Success in school is about jumping through the hoops that adults put in front of you; success in life can involve charting your own course. In school, a lot of success is individual: How do I stand out? In life, most success is team-based: How can we work together? Grades reveal who is persistent, self-disciplined, and compliant—but they don’t reveal much about emotional intelligence, relationship skills, passion, leadership ability, creativity, or courage.

In short, the meritocratic system is built on a series of non sequiturs. We train and segregate people by ability in one setting, and then launch them into very different settings. “The evidence is clear,” the University of Pennsylvania organizational psychologist Adam Grant has written. “Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years.”

For that reason, Google and other companies no longer look at the grade point average of job applicants. Students who got into higher-ranking colleges, which demand high secondary-school GPAs, are not substantially more effective after they graduate. In one study of 28,000 young students, those attending higher-ranking universities did only slightly better on consulting projects than those attending lower-ranked universities. Grant notes that this would mean, for instance, that a Yale student would have been only about 1.9 percent more proficient than a student from Cleveland State when measured by the quality of their work. The Yale student would also have been more likely to be a jerk: The researchers found that students from higher-ranking colleges and universities, while nominally more effective than other students, were more likely to pay “insufficient attention to interpersonal relationships,” and in some instances to be “less friendly,” “more prone to conflict,” and “less likely to identify with their team.”

Also, we have now, for better or worse, entered the Age of Artificial Intelligence. AI is already good at regurgitating information from a lecture. AI is already good at standardized tests. AI can already write papers that would get A’s at Harvard. If you’re hiring the students who are good at those things, you’re hiring people whose talents might soon be obsolete.

3. The game is rigged. The meritocracy was supposed to sort people by innate ability. But what it really does is sort people according to how rich their parents are. As the meritocracy has matured, affluent parents have invested massively in their children so they can win in the college-admissions arms race. The gap between what rich parents and even middle-class parents spend—let’s call it the wealth surplus—is huge. According to the Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits, the author of The Meritocracy Trap, if the typical family in the top 1 percent of earners were to take that surplus—all the excess money they spend, beyond what a middle-class family spends, on their child’s education in the form of private-school tuition, extracurricular activities, SAT-prep courses, private tutors, and so forth—and simply invest it in the markets, it would be worth $10 million or more as a conventional inheritance. But such is the perceived status value of a fancy college pedigree that rich families believe they’ll be better able to transmit elite standing to their kids by spending that money on education.

The children of the affluent have advantages every step of the way. A 3-year-old who grows up with parents making more than $100,000 a year is about twice as likely to attend preschool as a 3-year-old with parents who make less than $60,000. By eighth grade, children from affluent families are performing four grade levels higher than children from poor families, a gap that has widened by 40 to 50 percent in recent decades. According to College Board data from this year, by the time students apply to college, children from families making more than $118,000 a year score 171 points higher on their SATs than students from families making $72,000 to $90,000 a year, and 265 points higher than children from families making less than $56,000. As Markovits has noted, the academic gap between the rich and the poor is larger than the academic gap between white and Black students in the final days of Jim Crow.

[From the September 2019 issue: Daniel Markovits on how life became an endless, terrible competition]

Conant tried to build a world in which colleges weren’t just for the children of the affluent. But today’s elite schools are mostly for the children of the affluent. In 1985, according to the writer William Deresiewicz, 46 percent of the students at the most selective 250 colleges came from the top quarter of the income distribution. By 2000, it was 55 percent. By 2006 (based on a slightly smaller sample), it was 67 percent. Research findings by the Harvard economist Raj Chetty and others put this even more starkly: In a 2017 paper, they reported that students from families in the top 1 percent of earners were 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League–level school than students who came from families making $30,000 a year or less. Many elite schools draw more students from the top 1 percent of earners than from the bottom 60 percent.

In some ways, we’ve just reestablished the old hierarchy rooted in wealth and social status—only the new elites possess greater hubris, because they believe that their status has been won by hard work and talent rather than by birth. The sense that they “deserve” their success for having earned it can make them feel more entitled to the fruits of it, and less called to the spirit of noblesse oblige.

Those early administrators dreamed that talent, as they defined it, would be randomly scattered across the population. But talent is rarely purely innate. Talent and even effort cannot, as the UCLA Law School professor Joseph Fishkin has observed, “be isolated from circumstances of birth.”

4. The meritocracy has created an American caste system. After decades of cognitive segregation, a chasm divides the well educated from the less well educated.

The average high-school graduate will earn about $1 million less over their lifetime than the average four-year-college graduate. The average person without a four-year college degree lives about eight years less than the average four-year-college grad. Thirty-five percent of high-school graduates are obese, compared with 27 percent of four-year-college grads. High-school grads are much less likely to get married, and women with high-school degrees are about twice as likely to divorce within 10 years of marrying as women with college degrees. Nearly 60 percent of births to women with a high-school degree or less happen out of wedlock; that’s roughly five times higher than the rate for women with at least a bachelor’s degree. The opioid death rate for those with a high-school degree is about 10 times higher than for those with at least a bachelor’s degree.

The most significant gap may be social. According to an American Enterprise Institute study, nearly a quarter of people with a high-school degree or less say they have no close friends, whereas only 10 percent of those with college degrees or more say that. Those whose education doesn’t extend past high school spend less time in public spaces, less time in hobby groups and sports leagues. They’re less likely to host friends and family in their home.

The advantages of elite higher education compound over the generations. Affluent, well-educated parents marry each other and confer their advantages on their kids, who then go to fancy colleges and marry people like themselves. As in all caste societies, the segregation benefits the segregators. And as in all caste societies, the inequalities involve inequalities not just of wealth but of status and respect.

[Read: The growing college-degree wealth gap]

The whole meritocracy is a system of segregation. Segregate your family into a fancy school district. If you’re a valedictorian in Ohio, don’t go to Ohio State; go to one of the coastal elite schools where all the smart rich kids are.

It should be noted that this segregation by education tends to overlap with and contribute to segregation by race, a problem that is only deepening after affirmative action’s demise. Black people constitute about 14 percent of the U.S. population but only 9 percent of Princeton’s current freshman class, according to the school’s self-reported numbers, and only 3 percent of Amherst’s and 4.7 percent of Tufts’s, according to federal reporting guidelines. (Princeton has declined to reveal what that number would be based on those federal guidelines.) In the year after the Supreme Court ended affirmative action, MIT says that the number of Black people in its freshman class dropped from 15 percent to 5 percent.

For the past 50 years or so, the cognitive elite has been withdrawing from engagement with the rest of American society. Since about 1974, as the Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol has noted, college-educated Americans have been leaving organizations, such as the Elks Lodge and the Kiwanis Club, where they might rub shoulders with non-educated-class people, and instead have been joining groups, such as the Sierra Club and the ACLU, that are dominated by highly educated folks like themselves.

“We now have a single route into a single dominant cognitive class,” the journalist David Goodhart has written. And because members of the educated class dominate media and culture, they possess the power of consecration, the power to determine what gets admired and what gets ignored or disdained. Goodhart notes further that over the past two decades, it’s been as though “an enormous social vacuum cleaner has sucked up status from manual occupations, even skilled ones,” and reallocated that status to white-collar jobs, even low-level ones, in “prosperous metropolitan centers and university towns.” This has had terrible social and political consequences.

5. The meritocracy has damaged the psyches of the American elite. The meritocracy is a gigantic system of extrinsic rewards. Its gatekeepers—educators, corporate recruiters, and workplace supervisors—impose a series of assessments and hurdles upon the young. Students are trained to be good hurdle-clearers. We shower them with approval or disapproval depending on how they measure up on any given day. Childhood and adolescence are thus lived within an elaborate system of conditional love. Students learn to ride an emotional roller coaster—congratulating themselves for clearing a hurdle one day and demoralized by their failure the next. This leads to an existential fragility: If you don’t keep succeeding by somebody else’s metrics, your self-worth crumbles.

Some young people get overwhelmed by the pressure and simply drop out. Others learn to become shrewd players of the game, interested only in doing what’s necessary to get good grades. People raised in this sorting system tend to become risk-averse, consumed by the fear that a single failure will send them tumbling out of the race.

At the core of the game is the assumption that the essence of life fulfillment is career success. The system has become so instrumentalized—How can this help me succeed?—that deeper questions about meaning or purpose are off the table, questions like: How do I become a generous human being? How do I lead a life of meaning? How do I build good character?

6. The meritocracy has provoked a populist backlash that is tearing society apart. Teachers behave differently toward students they regard as smart. Years of research has shown that they smile and nod more at those kids, offer them more feedback, allow them more time to ask questions. Students who have been treated as smart since elementary school may go off to private colleges that spend up to $350,000 per student per year. Meanwhile many of the less gifted students, who quickly perceive that teachers don’t value them the same way, will end up at community colleges that may spend only $17,000 per pupil per year. By adulthood, the highly educated and the less educated work in different professions, live in different neighborhoods, and have different cultural and social values.

[From the April 2021 issue: Private schools have become truly obscene]

Many people who have lost the meritocratic race have developed contempt for the entire system, and for the people it elevates. This has reshaped national politics. Today, the most significant political divide is along educational lines: Less educated people vote Republican, and more educated people vote Democratic. In 1960, John F. Kennedy lost the white college-educated vote by two to one and rode to the White House on the backs of the working class. In 2020, Joe Biden lost the white working-class vote by two to one and rode to the White House on the backs of the college-educated.

Wherever the Information Age economy showers money and power onto educated urban elites, populist leaders have arisen to rally the less educated: not just Donald Trump in America but Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. These leaders understand that working-class people resent the know-it-all professional class, with their fancy degrees, more than they do billionaire real-estate magnates or rich entrepreneurs. Populist leaders worldwide traffic in crude exaggerations, gross generalizations, and bald-faced lies, all aimed at telling the educated class, in effect: Screw you and the epistemic regime you rode in on.

When income level is the most important division in a society, politics is a struggle over how to redistribute money. When a society is more divided by education, politics becomes a war over values and culture. In country after country, people differ by education level on immigration, gender issues, the role of religion in the public square, national sovereignty, diversity, and whether you can trust experts to recommend a vaccine.

[Read: Why Americans are so polarized: education and evolution]

As working-class voters have shifted to the right, progressivism has become an entry badge to the elite. To cite just one example, a study of opinion pieces in The Harvard Crimson found that they became three and a half times more progressive from 2001 to 2023. By 2023, 65 percent of seniors at Harvard, the richest school in the world, identified as progressive or very progressive.

James Conant and his colleagues dreamed of building a world with a lot of class-mixing and relative social comity; we ended up with a world of rigid caste lines and pervasive cultural and political war. Conant dreamed of a nation ruled by brilliant leaders. We ended up with President Trump.

How to Replace the Current Meritocracy

From time to time, someone, usually on the progressive left, will suggest that we dismantle the meritocracy altogether. Any sorting system, they argue, is inherently elitist and unjust. We should get rid of selective admissions. We should get rid of the system that divides elite from non-elite. All students should be treated equally and all schools should have equal resources.

I appreciate that impulse. But the fact is that every human society throughout history has been hierarchical. (If anything, that’s been especially true for those societies, such as Soviet Russia and Maoist China, that professed to be free of class hierarchy.) What determines a society’s health is not the existence of an elite, but the effectiveness of the elite, and whether the relationship between the elites and everybody else is mutually respectful.

And although the current system may overvalue IQ, we do still need to find and train the people best equipped to be nuclear physicists and medical researchers. If the American meritocracy fails to identify the greatest young geniuses and educate them at places such as Caltech and MIT, China—whose meritocracy has for thousands of years been using standardized tests to cull the brightest of the bright—could outpace us in chip manufacturing, artificial intelligence, and military technology, among other fields. And for all the American education system’s flaws, our elite universities are doing pioneering research, generating tremendous advances in fields such as biotech, launching bright students into the world, and driving much of the American economy. Our top universities remain the envy of the world.

The challenge is not to end the meritocracy; it’s to humanize and improve it. A number of recent developments make this even more urgent—while perhaps also making the present moment politically ripe for broad reform.

First, the Supreme Court’s ending of affirmative action constrained colleges’ ability to bring in students from less advantaged backgrounds. Under affirmative action, admissions officers had the freedom to shift some weight from a narrow evaluation of test scores to a broader assessment of other qualities—for instance, the sheer drive a kid had to possess in order to accomplish what they did against great odds. If colleges still want to compose racially diverse classes, and bring in kids from certain underrepresented backgrounds, they will have to find new ways to do that.

Second, as noted, much of what the existing cognitive elite do can already be done as well as or better by AI—so shouldn’t colleges be thinking about how to find and train the kind of creative people we need not just to shape and constrain AI, but to do what AI (at least as of now) cannot?

Third, the recent uproar over Gaza protests and anti-Semitism on campus has led to the defenestration of multiple Ivy League presidents, and caused a public-relations crisis, perhaps even lasting brand damage, at many elite universities. Some big donors are withholding funds. Republicans in Congress are seizing the opportunity to escalate their war on higher education. Now would be a good time for college faculty and administrators to revisit first principles in service of building a convincing case for the value that their institutions provide to America.

Fourth, the ongoing birth dearth is causing many schools to struggle with enrollment shortfalls. This demographic decline will require some colleges not just to rebrand themselves, but to reinvent themselves in creative ways if they are to remain financially afloat. In a reformed meritocracy, perhaps colleges now struggling with declining enrollments might develop their own distinctive niches in the ecosystem, their own distinctive ways of defining and nurturing talent. This in turn could help give rise to an educational ecosystem in which colleges are not all arrayed within a single status hierarchy, with Harvard, Yale, and Princeton on top and everyone else below. If we could get to the point where being snobby about going to Stanford seems as ridiculous as being snobby about your great-grandmother’s membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, this would transform not just college admissions but American childhood.

The crucial first step is to change how we define merit. The history of the meritocracy is the history of different definitions of ability. But how do we come up with a definition of ability that is better and more capacious than the one Conant left us? We can start by noting the flaws at the core of his definition. He and his peers were working at a time when people were optimistic that the rational application of knowledge in areas such as statistics, economics, psychology, management theory, and engineering could solve social problems. They admired technicians who valued quantification, objectification, optimization, efficiency.

They had great faith in raw brainpower and naturally adopted a rationalist view of humans: Reason is separate from emotions. Economists and political scientists of the era gravitated toward models that were based on the idea that you could view people as perfectly rational actors maximizing their utility, and accurately predict their behavior based on that.

Social engineers with this mindset can seem impressively empirical. But over the course of the 20th century, the rationalist planning schemes—the public-housing projects in America’s cities, the central economic planning in the Soviet Union—consistently failed. And they failed for the same reason: The rationalists assumed that whatever can’t be counted and measured doesn’t matter. But it does. Rationalist schemes fail because life is too complex for their quantification methods.

In Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, James C. Scott, the late political scientist and anthropologist, describes a 19th-century German effort to improve the nation’s lumber industry. To make forests amenable to scientific quantification, planners had to redefine what forest meant. Trees became timber, and everything not a tree was designated as underbrush—useless stuff that got in the way when workers tried to efficiently harvest the timber.

The German rationalists reorganized the forests, planting new trees in neat rows and clearing away all the underbrush. At first, everything seemed to go well. But as the Germans discovered too late, the trees needed the underbrush to thrive. Without the organic messiness that the rationalists had deemed superfluous, the trees’ nutrient cycle got out of whack. They began ailing. A new word entered the German language—Waldsterben, or “forest death.”

By focusing on only those parts of the forest that seemed instrumental to their uses, the planners failed to see the forest accurately. In trying to standardize and control the growth process, the planners murdered the trees.

The modern meritocracy misunderstands human beings the same way the German rationalists misunderstood trees. To make people legible to the sorting system, researchers draw a distinction between what they call “cognitive” and “noncognitive” skills. Cognitive skills are the “hard” ones that can be easily measured, such as IQ and scores on an algebra test. Noncognitive skills are fuzzier, harder-to-quantify things, such as emotional flexibility, grit, social agility, and moral qualities.

But of course all mental actions are cognitive. What this categorization method reveals is how little the rationalists care about the abilities that lie beyond IQ. The modern meritocracy treats the noncognitive realm the way the German planners treated the underbrush; it discounts it. But the putatively “noncognitive” skills can be more important than cognitive ones. Having a fast mental processor upstairs is great, but other traits may do more to determine how much you are going to contribute to society: Do you try hard? Can you build relationships? Are you curious? Are you trustworthy? How do you perform under pressure?

The importance of noncognitive traits shows up everywhere. Chetty, the Harvard economist, wanted to understand the effect that good teachers have on their pupils. He and his colleagues discovered that what may most differentiate good teachers is not necessarily their ability to produce higher math and reading scores. Rather, what the good teachers seem to impart most effectively are “soft skills”—how to get along with others, how to stay on task. In fact, the researchers found that these soft skills, when measured in the fourth grade, are 2.4 times more important than math and reading scores in predicting a student’s future income.

The organizational-leadership expert Mark Murphy discovered something similar when he studied why people get fired. In Hiring for Attitude, he reports that only 11 percent of the people who failed at their jobs—that is, were fired or got a bad performance review—did so because of insufficient technical competence. For the other 89 percent, the failures were due to social or moral traits that affected their job performance—sour temperament, uncoachability, low motivation, selfishness. They failed because they lacked the right noncognitive skills.

Murphy’s study tracked 20,000 new hires and found that 46 percent of them failed within 18 months. Given how painful and expensive it is for an organization to replace people, this is a cataclysmic result. Why aren’t firms better at spotting the right people? Why do we have such a distorted and incomplete view of what constitutes human ability?

The Humanist Turn

In reconceiving the meritocracy, we need to take more account of these noncognitive traits. Our definition of ability shouldn’t be narrowly restricted to who can ace intelligence tests at age 18. We need to stop treating people as brains on a stick and pay more attention to what motivates people: What does this person care about, and how driven are they to get good at it? We shouldn’t just be looking for skillful teenage test-takers; we want people with enough intrinsic desire to learn and grow all the days of their life. Leslie Valiant, a computer-science professor at Harvard who has studied human cognition for years, has written that “notions like smartness and intelligence are almost like nonsense,” and that what matters more for civilizational progress is “educability,” the ability to learn from experience.

If I were given the keys to the meritocracy, I’d redefine merit around four crucial qualities.

Curiosity. Kids are born curious. One observational study that followed four children between the ages of 14 months and 5 years found that they made an average of 107 inquiries an hour. Little kids ask tons of questions. Then they go to school, and the meritocracy does its best to stamp out their curiosity. In research for her book The Hungry Mind, the psychologist Susan Engel found that in kindergarten, students expressed curiosity only 2.4 times every two hours of class time. By fifth grade, that was down to 0.48 times.

What happened? Although teachers like the idea of curiosity, our current system doesn’t allow it to blossom. A typical school wants its students to score well on standardized tests, which in turn causes the school to encourage teachers to march through a certain volume of content in each class period. If a student asks a question because she is curious about something, she threatens to take the class off course. Teachers learn to squelch such questions so the class can stay on task. In short, our current meritocracy discourages inquiry in favor of simply shoveling content with the goal of improving test scores. And when children have lost their curiosity by age 11, Engel believes, they tend to remain incurious for the rest of their life.

[From the January/February 2005 issue: Lost in the meritocracy]

This matters. You can sometimes identify a bad leader by how few questions they ask; they think they already know everything they need to. In contrast, history’s great achievers tend to have an insatiable desire to learn. In his study of such accomplished creative figures, the psychologist Frank Barron found that abiding curiosity was essential to their success; their curiosity helped them stay flexible, innovative, and persistent.

Our meritocratic system encourages people to focus narrowly on cognitive tasks, but curiosity demands play and unstructured free time. If you want to understand how curious someone is, look at how they spend their leisure time. In their book, Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World, the venture capitalist Daniel Gross and the economist Tyler Cowen argue that when hiring, you should look for the people who write on the side, or code on the side, just for fun. “If someone truly is creative and inspiring,” they write, “it will show up in how they allocate their spare time.” In job interviews, the authors advise hiring managers to ask, “What are the open tabs on your browser right now?”

A sense of drive and mission. When the Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, he noticed that the men who tended to survive the longest had usually made a commitment to something outside the camps—a spouse, a book project, a vision of a less evil society they hoped to create. Their sense that life had meaning, Frankl concluded, sustained them even in the most dehumanizing circumstances.

A sense of meaning and commitment has value even in far less harrowing conditions. People with these qualities go to where the problems are. They’re willing to run through walls.

Some such people are driven by moral emotions—indignation at injustice, compassion for the weak, admiration for an ideal. They have a strong need for a life of purpose, a sense that what they are doing really matters. As Frankl recognized, people whose lives have a transcendent meaning or a higher cause have a sense of purpose that drives them forward. You can recognize such people because they have an internal unity—the way, say, the social-justice crusader Bryan Stevenson’s whole life has a moral coherence to it. Other people are passionate about the pursuit of knowledge or creating beautiful tools that improve life: Think of Albert Einstein’s lifelong devotion to understanding the universe, or Steve Jobs’s obsession with merging beauty and function.

I once asked a tech CEO how he hires people. He told me that after each interview, he asks himself, “Is this person a force of nature? Do they have spark, willpower, dedication?” A successful meritocracy will value people who see their lives as a sacred mission.

Social intelligence. When Boris Groysberg, an organizational-behavior professor at Harvard Business School, looked at the careers of hundreds of investment analysts who had left one financial firm to work at another, he discovered something surprising: The “star equity analysts who switched employers paid a high price for jumping ship relative to comparable stars who stayed put,” he reports in Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance. “Overall, their job performance plunged sharply and continued to suffer for at least five years after moving to a new firm.”

These results suggest that sometimes talent inheres in the team, not the individual. In an effective meritocracy, we’d want to find people who are fantastic team builders, who have excellent communication and bonding skills. Coaches sometimes talk about certain athletes as “glue guys,” players who have that ineffable ability to make a team greater than the sum of its parts. This phenomenon has obvious analogies outside sports. The Harvard economist David Deming has shown that across recent decades, the value of social skills—of being a workplace “glue guy”—has increased as a predictor of professional success, while the value of cognitive ability has modestly declined.

[David Deming: The single biggest fix for inequality at elite colleges]

The meritocracy as currently constituted seems to want you to be self-centered and manipulative. We put students in competitive classrooms, where the guiding questions are “How am I measuring up?” and “Where am I on the curve?”

Research has shown, however, that what makes certain teams special is not primarily the intelligence of its smartest members but rather how well its leaders listen, how frequently its members take turns talking, how well they adjust to one another’s moves, how they build reciprocity. If even one team member hogs airtime, that can impede the flow of interaction that teams need to be most effective.

Based on cognitive skills alone, Franklin D. Roosevelt, probably the greatest president of the 20th century, would never get into Harvard today. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. observed, he had only “a second-class intellect.” But that was paired, Holmes continued, with a “first-class temperament.” That temperament, not his IQ, gave Roosevelt the ability to rally a nation.

Agility. In chaotic situations, raw brainpower can be less important than sensitivity of perception. The ancient Greeks had a word, metis, that means having a practiced eye, the ability to synthesize all the different aspects of a situation and discern the flow of events—a kind of agility that enables people to anticipate what will come next. Academic knowledge of the sort measured by the SATs doesn’t confer this ability; inert book learning doesn’t necessarily translate into forecasting how complex situations will play out. The University of Pennsylvania psychologist and political scientist Philip E. Tetlock has found that experts are generally terrible at making predictions about future events. In fact, he’s found that the more prominent the expert, the less accurate their predictions. Tetlock says this is because experts’ views are too locked in—they use their knowledge to support false viewpoints. People with agility, by contrast, can switch among mindsets and riff through alternative perspectives until they find the one that best applies to a given situation.

Possessing agility helps you make good judgments in real time. The neuroscientist John Coates used to be a financial trader. During the bull-market surges that preceded big crashes, Coates noticed that the traders who went on to suffer huge losses had gotten overconfident in ways that were physically observable. They flexed their muscles and even walked differently, failing to understand the meaning of the testosterone they felt coursing through their bodies. Their “assessment of risk is replaced by judgments of certainty—they just know what is going to happen,” Coates writes in The Hour Between Dog and Wolf.

The traders, in other words, got swept up in an emotional cascade that warped their judgment. The ones who succeeded in avoiding big losses were not the ones with higher IQs but the ones who were more sensitively attuned to their surging testosterone and racing hearts, and were able to understand the meaning of those sensations. Good traders, Coates observes, “do not just process information, they feel it.”

The physicist and science writer Leonard Mlodinow puts the point more broadly. “While IQ scores may correlate to cognitive ability,” he writes in Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking, “control over and knowledge of one’s emotional state is what is most important for professional and personal success.”

If we can orient our meritocracy around a definition of human ability that takes more account of traits like motivation, generosity, sensitivity, and passion, then our schools, families, and workplaces will readjust in fundamental ways.

Rebuilding the Meritocracy

When the education scholars Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine toured America’s best high schools for their book, In Search of Deeper Learning, they found that even at many of these top schools, most students spent the bulk of their day bored, disengaged, not learning; Mehta and Fine didn’t find much passionate engagement in classrooms. They did, however, find some in noncore electives and at the periphery of the schools—the debate team, the drama club, the a cappella groups, and other extracurriculars. During these activities, students were directing their own learning, teachers served as coaches, and progress was made in groups. The students had more agency, and felt a sense of purpose and community.

As it happens, several types of schools are trying to make the entire school day look more like extracurriculars—where passion is aroused and teamwork is essential. Some of these schools are centered on “project-based learning,” in which students work together on real-world projects. The faculty-student relationships at such schools are more like the one between a master and an apprentice than that between a lecturer and a listener. To succeed, students must develop leadership skills and collaboration skills, as well as content knowledge. They learn to critique one another and exchange feedback. They teach one another, which is a powerful way to learn.

Mehta and Fine profiled one high school in a network of 14 project-based charter schools serving more than 5,000 students. The students are drawn by lottery, representing all social groups. They do not sit in rows taking notes. Rather, grouped into teams of 50, they work together on complicated interdisciplinary projects. Teachers serve as coaches and guides. At the school Mehta and Fine reported on, students collaborated on projects such as designing exhibits for local museums and composing cookbooks with recipes using local ingredients. At another project-based-learning school, High Tech High in San Diego, which is featured in the documentary Most Likely to Succeed, one group of students built a giant wooden model with gears and gizmos to demonstrate how civilizations rise and fall; another group made a film about how diseases get transmitted through the bloodstream.

In these project-based-learning programs, students have more autonomy. These schools allow students to blunder, to feel like they are lost and flailing—a feeling that is the predicate of creativity. Occasional failure is a feature of this approach; it cultivates resilience, persistence, and deeper understanding. Students also get to experience mastery, and the self-confidence that comes with tangible achievement.

Most important, the students get an education in what it feels like to be fully engaged in a project with others. Their school days are not consumed with preparing for standardized tests or getting lectured at, so their curiosity is enlarged, not extinguished. Of course, effective project-based learning requires effective teachers, and as a country we need to invest much more in teacher training and professional development at the elementary- and secondary-school levels. But emerging evidence suggests that the kids enrolled in project-based-learning programs tend to do just as well as, if not better than, their peers on standardized tests, despite not spending all their time preparing for them. This alone ought to convince parents—even, and perhaps especially, those parents imprisoned in the current elite college-competition mindset—that investing aggressively in project-based and other holistic learning approaches across American education is politically feasible.

Building a school system geared toward stimulating curiosity, passion, generosity, and sensitivity will require us to change the way we measure student progress and spot ability. Today we live in the world of the transcript—grades, test scores, awards. But a transcript doesn’t tell you if a student can lead a dialogue with others, or whether a kid is open-minded or closed-minded.

Helpfully, some of these project-based-learning schools are pioneering a different way to assess kids. Students don’t graduate with only report cards and test scores; they leave with an electronic portfolio of their best work—their papers, speeches, projects—which they can bring to prospective colleges and employers to illustrate the kind of work they are capable of. At some schools, students take part in “portfolio defenses,” comparable to a grad student’s dissertation defense.

The portfolio method enlarges our understanding of what assessment can look like. Roughly 400 high schools are now part of an organization called the Mastery Transcript Consortium, which uses an alternative assessment mechanism. Whereas a standard report card conveys how much a student knows relative to their classmates on a given date, the mastery transcript shows with much greater specificity how far the student has progressed toward mastering a given content area or skill set. Teachers can determine not only who’s doing well in math, but who’s developing proficiency in statistical reasoning or getting good at coming up with innovative experiment designs. The mastery report also includes broader life skills—who is good at building relationships, who is good at creative solutions.

No single assessment can perfectly predict a person’s potential. The best we can do is combine assessment techniques: grades and portfolios, plus the various tests that scholars have come up with to measure noncognitive skills—the Grit Scale, the Moral Character Questionnaire, social-and-emotional-learning assessments, the High Potential Trait Indicator. All of these can be informative, but what’s important is that none of them is too high-stakes. We are using these assessments to try to understand a person, not to rank her.

Data are good for measuring things, but for truly knowing people, stories are better. In an ideal world, high-school teachers, guidance counselors, and coaches would collaborate each year on, say, a five-page narrative about each student’s life. Some schools do this now, to great effect.

College-admissions officers may not have time to carefully study a five-page narrative about each applicant, nor will every high-school teacher or college counselor have time to write one. But a set of tools and institutions is emerging that can help with this. In Australia, for example, some schools use something called the Big Picture Learning Credential, which evaluates the traits that students have developed in and out of the classroom—communication skills, goal setting, responsibility, self-awareness.

Creating a network of independent assessment centers in this country that use such tools could help students find the college or training program best suited to their core interests. The centers could help college-admissions officers find the students who are right for their institution. They could help employers find the right job applicants. In short, they could help everybody in the meritocracy make more informed decisions.

These assessment methods would inevitably be less “objective” than an SAT or ACT score, but that’s partly the point. Our current system is built around standardization. Its designers wanted to create a system in which all human beings could be placed on a single scale, neatly arrayed along a single bell curve. As the education scholar Todd Rose writes in The End of Average, this system is built upon “the paradoxical assumption that you could understand individuals by ignoring their individuality.” The whole system says to young people: You should be the same as everyone else, only better. The reality is that there is no single scale we can use to measure human potential, or the capacity for effective leadership. We need an assessment system that prizes the individual over the system, which is what a personal biography and portfolio would give us—at least in a fuller way than a transcript does. The gatekeepers of a more effective meritocracy would ask not just “Should we accept or reject this applicant?” and “Who are the stars?” but also “What is each person great at, and how can we get them into the appropriate role?”

A new, broader definition of merit; wider adoption of project-based and similar types of learning; and more comprehensive kinds of assessments—even all of this together gets us only so far. To make the meritocracy better and fairer, we need to combine these measures with a national overhaul of what UCLA’s Joseph Fishkin calls the “opportunity structure,” the intersecting lattice of paths and hurdles that propel people toward one profession or way of life and away from others.

Right now, America’s opportunity structure is unitary. To reach commanding heights, you have to get excellent grades in high school, score well on standardized tests, go to college, and, in most cases, get a graduate degree. Along the way, you must navigate the various channels and bottlenecks that steer and constrain you.

Historically, when reformers have tried to make pathways to the elite more equal, they’ve taken the existing opportunity structure for granted, trying to give select individuals, or groups of individuals, a boost. This is what affirmative action did.

Fishkin argues that we need to refashion the opportunity structure itself, to accommodate new channels and create what he calls opportunity pluralism. “The goal needs to be to give people access to a broader range of paths they can pursue,” Fishkin writes in Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity, “so that each of us is then able to decide—in a more autonomous way and from a richer set of choices—what combinations of things we actually want to try to do with our lives.”

With greater opportunity pluralism, the gatekeepers will have less power and the individuals striving within the structure will have more. If the meritocracy had more channels, society would no longer look like a pyramid, with a tiny, exclusive peak at the top; it would look like a mountain range, with many peaks. Status and recognition in such a society would be more broadly distributed, diminishing populist resentment and making cultural cohesion more likely.

As a social ideal to guide our new meritocracy, we could do worse than opportunity pluralism. It aspires to generate not equal opportunity but maximum opportunity, a wide-enough array of pathways to suit every living soul.

Achieving that ideal will require a multifaceted strategy, starting with the basic redefinition of merit itself. Some of the policy levers we might pull include reviving vocational education, making national service mandatory, creating social-capital programs, and developing a smarter industrial policy.

Let’s consider vocational education first. From 1989 to 2016, every single American president took measures to reform education and prepare students for the postindustrial “jobs of the future.” This caused standardized testing to blossom further while vocational education, technical education, and shop class withered. As a result, we no longer have enough skilled workers to staff our factories. Schools should prepare people to build things, not just to think things.

Second, yes, trotting out national service as a solution to this or that social ailment has become a cliché. But a true national-service program would yield substantial benefits. Raj Chetty and his colleagues have found that cross-class friendships—relationships between people from different economic strata—powerfully boost social mobility. Making national service a rite of passage after high school might also help shift how status gets allocated among various job categories.

Third, heretical though this may sound, we should aim to shrink the cultural significance of school in American society. By age 18, Americans have spent only 13 percent of their time in school. Piles of research across 60 years have suggested that neighborhoods, peers, and family background may have a greater influence on a person’s educational success than the quality of their school. Let’s invest more in local civic groups, so a greater number of kids can grow up in neighborhoods with community organizations where they can succeed at nonacademic endeavors—serving others, leading meetings, rallying neighbors for a cause.

Fourth, although sending manufacturing jobs overseas may have pleased the efficiency-loving market, if we want to live in an economy that rewards a diversity of skills, then we should support economic policies, such as the CHIPS and Science Act, that boost the industrial sector. This will help give people who can’t or don’t want to work in professional or other office jobs alternative pathways to achievement.

If we sort people only by superior intelligence, we’re sorting people by a quality few possess; we’re inevitably creating a stratified, elitist society. We want a society run by people who are smart, yes, but who are also wise, perceptive, curious, caring, resilient, and committed to the common good. If we can figure out how to select for people’s motivation to grow and learn across their whole lifespan, then we are sorting people by a quality that is more democratically distributed, a quality that people can control and develop, and we will end up with a fairer and more mobile society.

In 1910, the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands wrote a book in which he said: “The Spirit of America is best known in Europe by one of its qualities—energy.” What you assess is what you end up selecting for and producing. We should want to create a meritocracy that selects for energy and initiative as much as for brainpower. After all, what’s really at the core of a person? Is your IQ the most important thing about you? No. I would submit that it’s your desires—what you are interested in, what you love. We want a meritocracy that will help each person identify, nurture, and pursue the ruling passion of their soul.

This article has been updated to clarify that a study of high achievers across different professions was published in a nature.com journal. It appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “How the Ivy League Broke America.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Opposition to data centers may be the singular unifying issue in American politics. Seventy percent of Americans are against data-center construction in their communities. They worry about the environmental dracularity of these facilities, the electrical costs they may impose, and the imperiousness with which tech companies target struggling communities while drastically altering the landscape. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have spoken out against data centers; so have Steve Bannon and the right-wing podcaster Matt Walsh.

 About 75 data-center projects were blocked or delayed in the first three months of this year—roughly the same as were blocked or delayed in all of last year. Still, this is a fraction of the more than 1,500 projects in development. Those who seek to stop the spread have recently turned to statewide moratoriums. Fifteen states have introduced moratorium bills, but only two of those bills have made it through the legislature. Last month, New York became the first to ban the construction of “hyperscale” data centers (ones that use 50 megawatts of power or more). Maine was supposed to have beaten it. In April, the state passed LD 307, which would have banned new centers using 20 megawatts or more. The bill went to the office of Governor Janet Mills to be signed into law. And she vetoed it.

Mills took no issue with the thrust of the bill, writing that “a moratorium is appropriate.” She vetoed it for one reason only: It failed “to allow for a specific project in the Town of Jay.”

Jay, Maine (population: 4,620; motto: “Proud of our past and working for our future!”) wants a data center. It had one in the works, and town officials lobbied the governor to preserve it. Mills listened. “We must consider the perspective of the Town of Jay,” she wrote.

In May, I drove to Maine to consider the perspective of the Town of Jay. I wanted to understand why this town had fought for the very thing that so many others dread. What I found was a reminder that politics is local. Jay’s embrace of the data center had less to do with the power of rapacious tech companies or the future of AI than it did with the failure of a series of welds that sealed a 166-foot-tall pressure cooker at a half-century-old paper mill.

There are two Maines. The first Maine is right there on the license plate: vacationland. Lighthouses, lobster bibs, the jagged coast, anywhere with a big, beautiful lake or a big, beautiful ski mountain. The other Maine—Jay’s Maine—is Appalachia. When I asked ChatGPT what I should see in Jay, it suggested (gently) that I should visit somewhere else. Jay is a 90-minute drive from the coast. It has no lighthouse and no giant lake. The school is the town’s largest employer. A surprising number of people ride motorized scooters—they can no longer afford cars. What Jay does have is space.

In 2023, a company called JGT2 bought 1,000 acres just across the Androscoggin River from Jay. To inexpert eyes, the property—the site of the former Androscoggin paper mill—doesn’t look like much: a few rusted and stained industrial buildings sprouting weeds in the shadow of an immense landfill. But to Tony McDonald, one of the developers who leads JGT2, the site looks like money. It has direct rail access, gas, a 35-million-gallon-a-day wastewater-treatment plant, and, crucially, power: a 150-megawatt electrical interconnect, plus access to 25 megawatts of hydroelectric power.

 McDonald’s original idea had been to turn the place into a wood-product manufacturing facility. Mills traveled to Jay to announce the project, which was expected to create about 125 jobs. And yet over the next two years, the factory plan quietly died—throttled by the Trump administration’s tariffs on specialized equipment, steel, and aluminum.

Jay has minimal zoning laws; McDonald didn’t need to ask anyone’s permission for what he planned to do with the land. So few in the town knew that his focus had switched from wood to data until one freezing night in late March, when he showed up to see the Jay Select Board—the five-member panel that sets town policy. News of the moratorium bill had broken, and McDonald needed the town’s help to preserve his project in Jay. He apologized that this was the first the board was hearing about his deal with the data-center firm Sentinel: “It never occurred to me to discuss it with anybody,” he said, “so to any of you that got blindsided by that, really, I’m sorry. That’s on me.” But without their help, he told the board, the bill “will kill this project. Dead, dead, dead,” before adding, “Dead. Never coming back.”

Secrecy around such projects is not unusual, even in places that require town approval. In a recent report, NBC analyzed more than 30 data-center proposals from 14 states and found “in a majority of cases, local officials signed NDAs and worked with what appeared to be shell companies that can conceal visibility into the project developers.” The justification is that secrecy preserves a competitive advantage; the effect is that citizens learn of these projects only when it’s too late to do anything about them.

Still, towns have fought back. In October, when the people of DeForest, Wisconsin, discovered plans to build a $12 billion data center, the backlash was powerful enough to kill the project a few months later. In April, a town council in Festus, Missouri, approved a $6 billion center plan; a week later, the town voted out every city-council member who’d voted for the project.

None of that happened in Jay. Less than an hour after McDonald stood up in the meeting, the board voted 4–0 (with one abstention) to draft a letter of support to Mills. Analyze the footage as much as you like—it will provide no clear answers as to why, in this moment of bipartisan resistance to new data-center construction, these town leaders would go from total ignorance to unanimous support in the time it takes to bake a lasagna.

Then—perhaps even stranger—most people in the town embraced the decision. Some were skeptical. More than a few traded insults in “The Jayborhood” (the town’s Facebook group). But meaningful resistance was scarce. One resident, concerned about noise pollution, started a petition, then gave it up after a 30-minute conversation with McDonald.

Mainers guard their individual freedom fiercely and apply limitations only selectively. More than one person I spoke with in Jay dismissed the broad resistance to data centers as simple NIMBYism. A common refrain I heard went something like: It’s Tony’s land. He can do what he wants with it. Cody Jacques, a union electrician who grew up in Jay, put it this way: “I don’t want you to tell me what I can do at my house. This is my property. I live here.” The same is true of McDonald’s site, he said. “At the end of the day, nobody likes to get told what to do with their stuff.” Still, the town doesn’t oppose all moratoriums on principle; it bans retail marijuana stores, which surround Jay on all sides.

The reason Jay wants this data center—the reason the board lobbied the governor for it—has everything to do with the land on which it would be built. The Androscoggin Mill once employed 1,500 people. Those who didn’t work in the mill envied the mill workers’ wealth, which bought houses, four-wheelers, prom dresses. “It was everything,” Trevor Doiron, who is running to represent Jay’s district in Maine’s House of Representatives, told me—“the identity of the town.”

Growing up, Jacques would stare at the mill and imagine a gleaming city. “The scale of the mill and all the lights, all the towers,” he said—“we’d always joke around and say, ‘There’s Portland, Maine, on the river.’”

After a stint in the service of Vacationland as a lobsterman, Jacques returned to Jay in 2019 to work at the mill. It employed fewer people than it once had, but Jay was hardly some bombed-out ruin; the paper mill still tithed substantially to the town, and offered Jacques a 401(k) and the chance to rise through the ranks. The year that OpenAI released GPT-3, he was studying for a promotion to pulp-digester operator, spending his days off at the mill with a clipboard and notebook.

On April 15, 2020, Jacques was at home. His phone buzzed with a few texts from friends asking what was going on at the mill. He figured a mill job had been posted and they wanted an inside track. “So I was like, Hey, no, you just gotta go on the website and apply,” he recalled, “and they were like, No, the mill blew up. I’m like, What do you mean it blew up?”

Dashcam footage from a truck nearby recorded the explosion. The video shows the traffic just outside the gates and the mill in the background. What you can’t see is a weld, one of thousands sealing the 166-foot tower that turned wood chips into wood pulp, opening a crack in the wall. Then another weld. And another. One moment there is blue sky, the next, a black column hundreds of feet high. Oozing brown pulp drums on the hood of the logging truck like hail as the drivers on the radio squawk and curse. Soon it’s so thick that the camera is almost entirely obscured. The black cloud is on its way toward Jay, where it will drop wood pulp on the houses.

Jacques got in his car. He tried to get into the mill—to help, to pull out bodies if needed; he didn’t know—but police blocked the road. Mill employees worked in 12-hour shifts—about 170 workers on site at a time. They worked weekends, nights, and holidays together. They were like family. Jacques saw that the two 166-foot towers where he’d worked, the same towers he had imagined as a city when he was a kid, were gone.

Remarkably, no one died. A government report attributes this extraordinary outcome to the timing of the explosion. It was lunchtime. People in Jay credit the grace of God. Once everyone was accounted for that evening, the town’s thoughts turned to the future. “ We knew right then and there they weren’t rebuilding,” Kenny Jacques, Cody’s father, told me, before blowing a brief rendition of Taps through pursed lips. “It’s over. It’s over.”

I asked Lucien Richard, a former engineer at the mill who now works as McDonald’s site manager, to show me the parts of the property that are best suited for a data center. The mill was mostly silent, with the exception of a few demolition workers smoking and listening to AC/DC. Walking through the machine rooms, I understood why Elon Musk wants to put data centers on the moon—the facility was so dark, cold, and seemingly endless that we may as well have been in outer space.

At one point, Richard’s flashlight fell across a mural—a hand-painted image of a rowboat full of puppies, peering out at a row of ducklings. “Some pretty talented people used to work here,” he said.

Last year, Donald Trump directed the Environmental Protection Agency to identify sites like the former paper mill for potential data-center use. The reasoning is that in some cases, much of the infrastructure is already there. According to McDonald, the mill site is permitted to pull 82 megawatts from the electrical grid. To supplement that power, he plans to build a 150-megawatt solar facility, and to employ the hydroelectric facilities that sit on the Androscoggin River. Elsewhere in the country, power plants are struggling to keep up with demand from data centers, which can drive up electricity costs. The pitch, then, is that this data center would exist in a walled garden—generating much of its electricity on-site, and pulling no more from the grid than the mill did before the explosion.

In dry states such as Arizona, data centers strain an already precarious water supply. Maine is wet. Richard showed me another vast room, this one with rows of sand pits stretching off into the darkness, into which 35 million gallons of water were once pumped up and filtered daily. McDonald expects the data center to use 1 percent of that, or about 300,000 gallons a day. Richard mused that they might need a smaller pump.

Some of the language McDonald uses—his promises of “no environmental impact” and “all positives,” “no negatives”—is clearly overstated. Maine has environmental and power regulations like everywhere else, but no specific playbook for data centers. The reason the Maine legislature passed the moratorium in the first place was so it could make a set of rules before development started.

On every point, this is how the argument goes: Would a data center be loud? Can’t be as loud as the mill! Could it smell bad? The mill smelled like rotten eggs! Would it pollute the environment? The river was covered in toxic foam in the mill days! “All you gotta do is get over the people’s fear,” Richard told me. “You need lots of water. We used to use lots and lots of water. You need lots of power. We used to use or make lots of power. It’s a natural fit.”

Using the past in this way, as a means of justifying the future, is a dangerous gambit, nostalgia being the hack-and-burn editor that it is. For some, the counterargument couldn’t be more obvious. Just look at the river now: It’s blue. But the mill is a handy benchmark for what the town is willing to tolerate.

Although the work Richard oversees may resemble Jay’s productive industrial past (angle grinder, indoor cigarettes, AC/DC), the task here is demolition. Tons upon tons of complex machinery have already been disassembled and shipped to Pakistan. When the place is empty, the trucks can roll up, the servers can be plugged in, and the building can start humming its ceaseless B-flat. And not so many years from now, the mural will be a sort of cave painting. Perhaps some AI-powered technician will roll past and wonder what possible efficiency might have been gained by painting a boat full of puppies on a wall in a workplace.

After the mill exploded, Jacques heard from a friend that work was to be had as a union electrician. He took an aptitude test, and soon became an official brother of IBEW Local Union 1253. Its logo is an electrified bear in a hard hat. His work, by and large, has been in the booming industry of data-center construction.

Accustomed to heat, noise, and toxic chemicals, Jacques was struck by the pristine cleanliness of data-center facilities. The downside is the distance—he travels all over the northeast and lives on-site for weeks at a time. Recently, he was halfway through an eight-week job in Niagara Falls when he called his girlfriend to say he wasn’t going to make it another four weeks without seeing her and their young daughter. They looked at a map and chose Albany, that bright and empty city, as a midway meeting point. Seeing his daughter through the open window of his girlfriend’s car as they pulled up, he felt elation, and relief.

If Jay had a data center, one of the construction jobs would almost certainly be his.

During local elections late last year, Meta spent $6 million running ads in state capitals such as Sacramento, Tallahassee, Salt Lake City—places with the power to buoy (or ban) data-center construction: “Los Lunas used to be a one-stop town. Most people were employed by a farm or a railroad. I needed to support my family and leave home to find work, traveling all the time. I missed a lot—important moments I can’t get back.”

The put-on simplicity of the voice-over script, paired with the Old MacDonald imagery (horses, hay bales, pickups) reeks of insincerity. “Then Meta came to town and opened a data center, bringing new jobs to Los Lunas. And now I don’t worry about missing out much anymore.”

Tony McDonald has said he expects that the Jay project will create 125 to 150 full-time high-paying jobs. Those jobs were a key factor in Mills’s veto of the moratorium. But projects with similar footprints employ 30 to 50 full-time staffers. Five years from now, if the predictions of AI companies are to be believed, the number will be smaller. So when Tom Saviello, the mill’s former environmental manager who is now a county commissioner, started quoting Field of Dreams to me—“If you build it, they will come”—I worried that Jay was being sold a future that would only ever exist in Meta ads.

Saviello’s grief at the loss of the mill was so intense that, for years after the explosion, he couldn’t bring himself to visit the place. When the data-center project was announced, that grief evaporated. We talked in the mill’s parking lot. “I just get excited about it,” he told me, sheepishly. “That’s all.” The people of Jay have “been through turmoil,” he said, “but they’ve survived. And this is a chance for them to even do better.”

I spent one of my afternoons in Jay with Trevor Doiron, the House candidate, a Democrat who supports the data center. He’s 28, with the look of a politician who has come home to run for office: neck sunburn, flannel tucked into jeans. He told me he’s been surprised by how people are living—with holes in the floor because they can’t afford repairs, using the oven to heat the house.

Maine has the oldest population in the country, and the population of Jay is older even than the state median. Trevor volunteers at the food pantry on Tuesdays along with a 92-year-old man who helps pack and deliver meals to Jay’s older residents. “The elderly are the ones providing the services for other elderly people,” he said. “A year from now, who’s gonna be filling the boxes?”

Before visiting Jay I expected that the current running beneath its bid for a data center was desperation: To survive, Jay needs anything. What I heard instead was Jay wants something. Because something is better than nothing.

In a recent article about Jay and rural data centers, Anthony Elmo, who studies economic development, said of rural towns, “They don’t have the resources to negotiate. They don’t know what to ask for.”

I think Jay knows plenty. In its support of McDonald’s project, the town offered no tax break, and stood to make about $6 million in property taxes. That’s a transformative amount of money for the town’s budget—about $7.2 million this year. Locals were clear-eyed about the promise of full-time jobs and skeptical of the claims being made in Meta ads. “I don’t care if it’s 10 jobs. I don’t care if it’s 100 jobs,” Saviello said. “One is more than zero.” Many also reminded me that residents such as Jacques already make their living on temporary construction gigs. “ It’s ugly. It’s ugly,” Doiron told me about Loudoun County, Virginia—which is often thought of as the data-center capital of the world—but “Loudoun County has a lot of really nice stuff.”

“ Even if all that industry comes back, it’s not gonna be us that builds it,” Patrick Hopkins, a carpenter and Jay resident, told me. “It’s gonna be automated. It’s not gonna be the days where this whole line of dudes walks in and they’re all wearing the same company shirt and the same company hat, and they’ve all got their lunch pails. That’s just some dream from the past—a moment in time. It’s gone. It’s better for us as a people to be like, We need to move on.”

The most powerful companies in the world want these data centers. Many of the campaigns to build them are waged in secret against towns worn down by decades of losses. You could think that it was wrong to let one town stand in the way of a statewide moratorium. You could think that Jay was naive, and yet another data center won’t make anyone better off. And yet for Jay, the data center is an opportunity to push back against the steady encroachment of poverty, 15-hour commutes, the atomization of an aging society. I found I couldn’t argue with such a pragmatic and hard-earned hope.

But on June 11, the town posted an announcement on its Facebook page. Commenting was disabled. The data-center project had been put on indefinite hold. McDonald’s client, Sentinel, had backed out.

I called a lot of the people I’d spoken with in Jay. Most were disappointed. None seemed that surprised. McDonald is trying to find a new firm; the demolition work continues. But no one is particularly optimistic. The data-center project was just the latest on a long list of things that were there one day and gone the next.

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A news flash that won’t surprise anyone: Screen time is bad for young kids. The latest such reminder came from a systematic review conducted by a consortium of British researchers, who found that more screen exposure for toddlers is consistently associated with less interaction between the parent and child, as well as delayed development, sleep issues, and eating problems. The authors determined that children under 2 should not get any intentional screen time.

The review was performed under the auspices of a nonprofit called the 1001 Critical Days Foundation; the organization’s founder, Andrea Leadsom, told The Guardian that the conclusions were a “wake-up call.” But I am guessing that most readers of The Guardian are already awake. Richer, highly educated parents—the kind who have the time and resources to read the news and incorporate the warnings of experts into their child-rearing—are already more likely to limit their kids’ screen time than less educated, lower-income parents are.

High-earning and highly educated parents are likelier to follow all sorts of parenting advice on things such as breastfeeding and baby-led weaning. Because of this, researchers may never truly know if the advice appears to work because it’s good advice or because of the particular characteristics of the families who follow it. The unspoken secret of the parenting-strategies world is that, much of the time, the best parenting hack is just being rich.

[Read: Doomed to be a tradwife]

Of course, wealthy parents can be irresponsible, and low-income parents can create loving, enriching homes. A high household income doesn’t guarantee a good childhood. But researchers have observed for decades that the children in families with more resources tend to have better outcomes in many areas of life. Greg Duncan, a professor at UC Irvine who has studied child poverty for many years, told me that this is because rich parents are better able to provide a home environment that leads to success. They are also able to afford to live in safer neighborhoods and send their kids to better schools, and to some extent they pass genetic traits such as high conscientiousness and IQ on to their kids. (In this story, I use parental income and education somewhat interchangeably, though education—especially the mother’s education, according to Duncan—seems to have a stronger effect on a child’s life outcomes than parental income.)

Consider how this all plays out with screens: High-income parents expose their kids to much less screen time than low-income parents do. A recent report from Common Sense Media found that children living in households earning less than $50,000 a year spend twice as much time with screens as children from households earning $100,000 or more. A Pew report found that low-income parents were more permissive with all sorts of screen time: They were more likely than high-income parents to let their child watch YouTube daily, for example, or to use smartphones to calm their child down.

These differences likely stem from the fact that keeping kids off screens requires time and money—which wealthy parents tend to have more of. Rich parents can hire sitters and nannies to watch their kids while they work or do chores. They can afford Instacart, DoorDash, and other labor-saving services. They are more likely to enjoy flexible and remote work, which can give them more time to engage their kids in screen-free activities. They may have desk jobs that allow them to browse the internet between meetings and read articles filled with parenting tips. Finally, many rich parents have more vim and vigor left over at the end of the day to enforce boundaries. “One of the things income buys you is there are less other stressors in your life,” Emily Oster, an economist who founded the ParentData newsletter and has written books on pregnancy and parenting, told me. “You have more emotional and physical and psychological energy to spend” on keeping your kid off the tablet.

In many studies, researchers attempt to control for confounding variables such as income and education. But these efforts come up against an issue called “residual confounding”: differences between families that a study may not pick up on. Research exploring the effect of screen time on, say, test scores, might find that an iPad-free family has kids who aced the ACT. But the high scores could be the result of some other parenting strategy that the no-screen-time parents used. Oster told me that when she was a girl and her brother was preparing to take the SAT, her parents placed vocabulary words under their dinner plates, and the children were supposed to use them in conversation during dinner. This is a unique behavior that researchers would not ask about in a screen-time study, even if they controlled for income and education.

[Read: American kids used to eat everything]

Together, the issues of confounding variables and residual confounding plague much of parenting research. Breastfeeding is linked to higher IQs in children, but mothers with higher IQs are more likely to breastfeed, and because IQ is partly genetic, their kids would probably have higher IQs anyway. Plus, privileged mothers are also more likely to have the kinds of professional jobs that provide paid parental leave so that they can breastfeed. The consumption of ultra-processed food has been linked to childhood obesity, but thinness is partly genetic, and rich parents tend to be both thinner and more likely than low-income parents to feed their kids healthy food, in part because they can afford to buy more fruits and vegetables. Across the board, wealthier, more educated parents have all sorts of advantages that less-privileged parents can’t easily replicate, no matter how forcefully they’re urged to do so.

Because I am a highly educated mom with many resources, I shell out for music classes that I dutifully cart my toddler to on Sundays, only for him to ignore the instructor, run around the room, and attempt to stick his finger into every electrical socket. But hey, at least he’s not using a screen. Meanwhile, a woman in a moms’ Facebook group that I’m part of recently posted about how her 18-month-old gets about three hours of screen time a day. She is solo parenting while her husband is away on a military assignment, she wrote, and she is trying to start a business and get chores done while her son plays. Reading her message, I wasn’t sure what her options were other than screens.

Rather than scolding parents about screens, society could do more to support families in ways that obviate the need for screen time. Community centers could offer more affordable activities for kids. The government could subsidize child care for more families. Companies could provide more remote-work options so that parents don’t have to cook dinner at 6 p.m., just as their toddlers’ moods hit a nadir and screen time is at its most appealing.

But until any of this happens, I am left agreeing with the sentiment of one commenter on that woman’s post about solo parenting: “Do what you need to do.”

Although the United States has been the world’s preeminent military power for decades, it apparently cannot fight a regional power such as Iran for more than a few months before experiencing an armaments crisis. Since hostilities with Tehran began on February 28, the U.S. has reportedly used up two-thirds of its Patriot missile interceptors, more than a third of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors, and a third or more of its prewar stock of Tomahawk cruise missiles. The rate of consumption is all the more striking because a shaky cease-fire had halted most fighting for months. Based on recent production patterns, replenishing the supply of weaponry will take several years.

Making America’s challenge still more daunting is a major shift in war-fighting technology toward cheap, unmanned aerial vehicles. The United States and its allies in the Persian Gulf have been forced to use expensive, advanced air-defense systems—such as Patriot PAC-3 missiles that each cost millions of dollars and have a long production cycle—to shoot down Iranian drones that can be swiftly assembled for about $30,000.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Fighter jets are passé]

The munitions shortfall doesn’t just affect the current war. It also sends a worrisome message to allies around the world: The United States has been caught off guard by the latest evolution of warfare and lacks the armaments-production capacity to adapt quickly. Suddenly, relying on American military technology looks far less reliable as a security strategy than it did before President Trump went to war with Iran. And in the long run, governments that counted on the United States to equip their military are going to need a Plan B.

In the short term, concerns about diminished weapons stocks are already limiting Washington’s strategic options. Because of his advisers’ concern about the adequacy of current supplies, Trump has reportedly been hesitant to escalate the war. If the United States decided to send ground forces into Iran on the scale necessary to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, defending those forces could exhaust the remaining stocks of advanced air-defense systems. After a short period, American troops would be far more exposed, and casualties far more likely.

Trump and his appointees during his current and previous terms bear only part of the responsibility for the current situation. The fundamental problem has been a bipartisan neglect of America’s military-industrial productive base over the past three decades. The United States allowed many of its strategic industries, such as shipbuilding, to wither. Its post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan involved brief invasions followed by years of relatively low-intensity counterinsurgency warfare that, whatever its difficulties, did not require mass stockpiles of munitions.

Informed by these experiences, military planners appear to have been operating under the assumption that future wars would be short and containable. If China attacks Taiwan and the United States wants to come to the island democracy’s aid, the Pentagon will not be prepared for a protracted war.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration has failed to learn from the war in Ukraine. Iran has learned to mass-produce cheap drones—ones that the Russians first imported and now produce themselves. In other words, their effectiveness had been tested, and their existence was widely known. But that seemed to make no difference to U.S. planners. Perhaps in the arrogant belief that a war with Iran would quickly end in a decisive victory, the Pentagon did not have cost-effective systems ready to intercept these weapons. Neither did the Gulf countries that have counted on American weaponry for their self-defense.

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

In contrast, Ukraine has proved remarkably adaptive to emerging conditions. Creating a powerful strategic industry, as Ukraine has done in the case of air, land, and sea drones, not only helps with the country’s security. It also provides a boost to Ukraine’s economic and strategic position, as governments in the Gulf and elsewhere seek to tap its expertise.

The Gulf partners that build their militaries around equipment from the United States do so under the assumption that, in a moment of need, they can get what they require from the superpower. Perhaps the U.S. would even carry the burden of any war in the region. The perils of such assumptions are becoming apparent.

Relying on any other country for weapons is dangerous. Doing so may create a flashy frontline force with some advanced capabilities. But once the purchased equipment is destroyed or worn out, the military that bought it is left with troops trained on equipment that it cannot make and with a military doctrine built around equipment it might never have again.

Sometimes allies drag their feet or change their mind. Ukrainians have used American military equipment to great effect, but the unreliability of those supplies—because of President Biden’s fear of antagonizing Russia and Trump’s usual favoritism toward Vladimir Putin—has hampered their war effort.

[Read: Ukraine’s Dr. Strangelove]

Since Trump’s return to office, traditional European allies have come to recognize from his criticism of NATO that they will need to rely more on their own resources for their security. The current munitions crunch could lead its Gulf partners to the same conclusion.  

If Saudi Arabia and other customers of the American defense industry start sourcing their military equipment elsewhere, or making it themselves, the United States will lose out. Beyond improving America’s military position and diplomatic leverage, arms exports have been a lucrative industry.

If the United States appears less powerful and less reliable than it once was and is running through munitions faster than it can produce them, many more countries will follow Ukraine’s example. The Pentagon is belatedly ramping up its efforts to develop less expensive self-guided weapons. But those initiatives so far seem inadequate to address the problem that the war with Iran has revealed: a gap between America’s military needs and what it is capable of manufacturing quickly and cheaply.

Illustrations by Kimberly Elliott

Updated at 5:13 p.m. ET on August 3, 2026

About 90 seconds into a three-minute hug with a stranger, I began to think that dying alone might not be so bad after all. I’d come to a candlelit loft in Manhattan for a “mindful singles event” called The Feels, which was designed to be the opposite of the disembodied experience of dating apps. Participants, phones tucked away, paired up and attempted a series of “somatic awareness” exercises, including staring into each other’s eyes, hugging, and holding a hand over each other’s heart.

We’d been warned that discomfort is part of the process. A facilitator had reminded us that, as long as consent and respect are involved, a little uneasiness opens the door to vulnerability. Having paid $100 for a process advertised as “better relating”—informed by Carl Jung and the Buddha and the body’s “infinite wisdom”—participants were motivated to agree. And many of us, more by circumstance than by choice, were already experts in exiting our comfort zone. We’d spent years meeting strangers, opening ourselves to judgment, scrounging for conversation topics, worrying about our outfits, gargling mouthwash in the office—but we still hadn’t found what, or whom, we wanted. We came ready to get to work.

The mere existence of The Feels, which hosts events in cities across the United States, suggests that we are living in a time of romantic plenty. In New York City, I could go to a dating event every night of the week. I could use a matchmaking service, or talk with a dating coach, or sign up for one of the many newsletters trying to bring back personal ads. Even if I didn’t live in a major city, I’d have dating apps to choose from: not only Tinder and Hinge but a zillion others—platforms for farmers, gamers, single parents, cannabis enthusiasts, and members of the gluten-free community. I have four apps in my current rotation; as I write this, one of them has 317 message threads and 455 “likes” that I need to evaluate.

And yet, despite the bounty of possibility, we are living through a great romance slump. Romance is a broad term, of course. Traditionally, it manifests in the thrill of sex, the devotion of long-term partnership, or the ritual of courtship, including the act of hope that is a first date. But all of those manifestations are becoming less common in the U.S., especially among young people.

The proportion of 25-to-34-year-olds in marriages or cohabiting partnerships dropped steeply from 1980 to 2022—by almost 10 percentage points for college graduates and more than 20 percentage points for people without a degree, according to an analysis by the Financial Times data reporter John Burn-Murdoch. A shrinking share of young adults have a steady partner, and in 2019, 42 percent of single adults younger than 40 told Pew Research Center that they’d never been in a committed relationship. In a 2025 YouGov poll, 69 percent of single respondents said they “rarely” or “never” go on dates. And people are having less sex. From 2000 to 2018, the share of 25-to-34-year-olds who said they hadn’t had sex in the previous year almost doubled.

[From the December 2018 issue: Kate Julian on why young people are having less sex]

It’s not that people have lost interest in love. A majority of single young adults say they want lifelong partnership. But for a variety of reasons, fewer of them are finding it. Allie Hoffman, a former CEO of a digital-media company who launched The Feels in 2022, has observed “a collective this sucks” among romance seekers. She has expanded her offerings accordingly. At a “Level 2” Feels event, which costs up to $215, you can be paired with people “at a similar stage in their awareness journey.” A spot at a singles’ weekend retreat starts at $1,300; three matches based on a questionnaire and a phone call, plus six coaching sessions over three months, total $4,750. In a romance recession, some people give up and some double down.

So here I was, doubling down, sweating in a strange man’s arms. My neck hurt. I couldn’t figure out how close to him I should stand. (Too near and you lose breathing room; too far and the whole enterprise falls apart.) For years I’d been in the same group chat with pretty much the same single friends. We’d labeled it the “Lonely Hearts Club,” and it became a sanctuary for dishing about weird dates, complaining about getting ghosted, sharing links to TikTokers dishing about weird dates and complaining about getting ghosted. I’d received variations of the same “I’m not feeling a spark” text so many times that I started replying with a single emoji:🫡. But at The Feels, I was trying to be open and optimistic. I’d stared into someone’s eyes for three languid minutes, wondering if I was blinking a normal amount. I’d been moved, feeling another person’s heartbeat beneath my palm, as anyone with a pulse would be.

The hug was the last round, though, and then real life resumed. We mingled, but the intimacy had disappeared. One man told me that he had high emotional intelligence and could tell that I did too—then he suggested that we travel together someday, handed me his business card, and walked away. I gave a few people my phone number, including one man who sent me a picture of his face the very next morning and another who texted me so much (even after a polite rebuff) that I had to block him. One date with another guy resulted, but I wasn’t interested in a second. The perception of abundance had, once again, evaporated into nothing.

I don’t mean to suggest that people need romance to be fulfilled. In truth, I don’t believe that partnership is inherently better than singlehood. As a society, we’ve been moving toward this point for decades: where marriage is not a prerequisite for social and financial survival, where we have other sources of purpose and community, where there are many different ways to live a good life.

Yet now that we’re here, the reality doesn’t feel quite so triumphant. If the dream was more equal partnerships—born from love rather than necessity, freedom rather than convention—what many of us got was no partnership at all, and a feeling that it was eternally out of reach. Those getting ever closer to 40, especially, tend to feel a particular sense of impending loss. Those are the years when the average unpartnered person struggles most with singlehood, Geoff MacDonald, a University of Toronto psychologist, told me. (“It’s like—Everybody find a lifeboat,” he said.) It’s a period of acute open-endedness, when people are trying to figure out what to prioritize, how to plan for the future, which dreams are worth pursuing and which have to be sacrificed. For women who want to have biological children, it’s also when time is running out.

One 39-year-old I talked with, a woman who works in film, told me she felt like she was on a “precipice.” She was weighing having kids and knew the clock was ticking. She’d had a great time on a Feels weekend getaway, and although she hadn’t formed a lasting romantic connection, she’d made friends; they chat in a WhatsApp group about their dating highs and lows. Her life is full. Still, she said, “the world is burning. I would really like to be able to go through that with someone.”

I wanted that for her, and for myself. Or, at least, I wanted to understand why we weren’t finding what we wanted. So I did what I know how to do: I reported. I interviewed dozens of researchers and single people across the country, endured a series of curious but fruitless dating events, and bravely subjected myself to some actual dates. The romance slump, I found, is a product of broader trends: souring gender relations, a transformed economy, the unevenness of social progress, and technology that both connects and isolates us. Millions of individual heartaches are rewriting the love story we’ve told ourselves for centuries.

Just to be clear: I’m not nostalgic for how things used to be. For much of human history, romance was incidental. Marriage was typically a practical arrangement: a way to unite families and consolidate resources. In the Industrial Age, young people began relocating to cities for work and enjoyed newfound independence and leisure time; courtship moved from the family parlor to the dance hall. But women still didn’t have many pathways, other than marriage, to financial independence—or to sex. The fact that my great-grandmother got pregnant before she was married, at the beginning of the 20th century, was such a source of family shame, never freely discussed, that my mother felt its dark shadow when she was growing up in the 1950s and ’60s.

That was the peak-marriage era, when almost 90 percent of women in the U.S. were married before they turned 25. Even as second-wave feminism boomed, banks could still require a woman to obtain permission from her husband or a male relative to get a home loan or apply for a credit card. In 1965, the Supreme Court held that the government couldn’t restrict a married couple’s access to birth control—but unmarried people were granted no such right. A few years later, my mother, who was living with her boyfriend at the time, wore a fake wedding ring—a plastic one from a gumball machine—to her doctor appointment to request the pill.

Beginning in the ’70s, though, wider access to contraception and abortion began to curb shotgun weddings, and more women entered college and the workforce. Stigmas around singlehood and queer relationships loosened. The nuclear-family model, once such a source of gravity, lost some of its pull. The decline of marriage could also be called the rise of choice—especially for women, Philip N. Cohen, a University of Maryland sociologist, told me. “The 1950s family could not even reproduce itself for one generation,” he said. “They couldn’t even convince their children that this was the right way to arrange their lives. So it failed immediately.”

[From the March 2020 issue: David Brooks on how the nuclear family was a mistake]

I came along in 1995: a lucky moment, in many ways. Growing up in the 21st century, I daydreamed not about whom I’d marry but about what fabulous career path I’d choose. (In elementary school I made business cards that said PSYCHOLIGIST: GOT A PROBLEM? CALL ME! and distributed them on the playground.) When my grandmother was widowed in her 50s, her friends—all couples—stopped calling her; it wasn’t proper for them to socialize with a single woman. When my mother got divorced in her 50s, she wasn’t abandoned by her friends, but she was always aware of her single status in a social snow globe of married people. I’m 31 now, and most of the people in my circle are single; quite a few of them have never been in a relationship. I spent this past Valentine’s Day on a beach in Mexico with two of my best friends.

And yet, for many people, singlehood is at once eminently normal and entirely unwanted. Even an unhappily single person, Cohen said, is a sign of progress; at least they haven’t been forced to partner with someone they don’t want to be with. But that’s like telling someone with a cavity to be grateful for modern dentistry: completely correct and a little annoying.

In interviews, people kept saying they knew they ought to make time for romance, but then when would they see their friends or travel or exercise or get ahead at work? Dating has always entailed some hardship, but it used to be the norm to find love in everyday life—at the office, at church, at a party. People didn’t need to choose what to step away from. Now many of the quirks of modern life have made meeting organically in person less likely. More people are tucked away at home, working remotely, streaming TV, and having food delivered to their door; approaching strangers feels fraught when so many of us are used to flirting via text with people who have already “liked” us. So we depend on the apps even as we resent them. Dating becomes another responsibility to squeeze in, “like you’re scheduling a job interview,” Sarah Boyle, a 29-year-old public defender in Chicago, told me. “Oh, let me pencil in this date for three weeks from now with this stranger from the internet.”

Modern romance requires a toll, in other words, paid in energy, in sanity, in cash, in hours—and not everyone can afford it. One 2025 study—which, I feel obliged to report, is called “Making (Enough for) Love”—found that the higher someone’s income, the more likely they were to enter into a relationship, or simply to feel ready for one. You might protest that coupling is actually a savvy financial move; indeed, it was once common for partners to marry first, then pool resources and work toward stability together. But sociologists today say that marriage is seen by many as a capstone—a trophy that people feel prepared for only after they’ve paid off debts, settled into a steady job, or saved enough to buy a house or have kids. Over the past 50 years, job security and stable hours have become scarcer, said Kristen Harknett, a UC Berkeley sociologist. That means traditional milestones are harder to reach—and tying your livelihood to someone else’s can feel like a liability rather than an advantage.

On top of all this, COVID-19 triggered a “pandemic dating recession,” according to the Stanford sociologist Michael J. Rosenfeld. From 2017 to 2022, the number of single adults in the U.S. rose by about 5 percent (more than 13 million people), mostly because young people weren’t meeting as frequently as before. Americans, mired in uncertainty, have lost faith that the old sources of stability—the economy, marriage, one another—will deliver them to solid ground. And mistrust and instability are bad for romance.

I talked with plenty of researchers about numbers and theories, but I wanted to hear how this really feels—and not just for my Lonely Hearts Club. So I created an informal survey to pass around to single people, asking how they approached dating (or didn’t), how set they were on finding a partner, how that fit in with other life goals, and whether they were hopeful about finding love. I heard back from men, women, and nonbinary people, queer and straight, ages 23 to 49, living in places such as Oklahoma City; Atlanta; Pittsburgh; Bowling Green, Ohio; and Portland, Oregon. I talked with people from different race and class backgrounds. And what I heard was that a lot of them are tired.

Dating is “just a series of constant blows to whatever self-confidence I had,” said Keith Causin, a 42-year-old straight man from Queens. “It’s low-key soul destroying.”

“People are very commitment-resistant and it’s contagious,” a queer 27-year-old from New Jersey said. “Being alone and lonely and wanting is safer than risking being put through emotional distress. I think romancing myself, treating myself kindly, doing nice things alone like taking myself on a date and treating myself, has yielded better results.”

“I’m a part of the generation of Disney girls who were groomed from birth that our Prince Charming was coming, and unfortunately, I still believe that,” wrote one 26-year-old woman in Los Angeles who’d been single her whole adult life, though she’d been diligently dating for years.

Olivia Medina, another 26-year-old in Los Angeles, said that, at the beginning of 2020, she’d been excited about a budding relationship with one of her college classmates. Then she had to spend her entire senior year online. By the time the world returned to relative normality, her priorities had shifted. “I had basically created a whole new hierarchy of what’s important,” Medina said. “And dating was so low because I had gotten so used to just spending time with my friends and doing things that I like, for me.”

When the need for romance is low and the toll is steep, some give up. Others hold out for a partnership dreamy enough to justify the search. Again and again, people explained that their lives weren’t lacking, and they would only carve out space in their days for someone who made them giddy. Having expectations this high is a magnificent historical novelty. The hard part is finding someone who can meet them.

Joanna Davidson, a Boston University anthropologist, was living in a village in Guinea-Bissau when she began to notice a particular kind of run-down house. Kungomaku, she learned, were the structures women moved into after their husbands died and their homes were torn down—a custom among the Jola ethnic group predominant in the region. The widows either borrowed rice paddies or begged for food. Yet fewer and fewer of them were willing to remarry, she determined, and the number of kungomaku kept growing. “You sit and suffer under the punishment of your husband,” one woman told her. “When he dies, why would you go get punished by another man?”

When Davidson relayed all of this at an American Anthropological Association conference in Washington, D.C., the air felt charged with recognition. A room full of researchers could chart, from their own fieldwork, the depth of women’s dissatisfaction. So Davidson and Dinah Hannaford, a University of Houston anthropologist, sent out a call for contributions for what would become their 2022 book, Opting Out: Women Messing With Marriage Around the World. Their inboxes flooded with case studies from countries rich and poor.

In Botswana, they heard, many children are raised within networks of single women and their kin. (Only about 4,500 Botswanans married in 2024, out of a population of 2.5 million.) They learned about women in South Korea who had delayed marriage to take care of aging family members—then realized, looking around at the men in their lives, that they had no regrets. Hannaford wrote about women in Senegal marrying men who live abroad, or becoming a man’s third or fourth wife, in the hopes of evading both the public disgrace of singlehood and the practical, emotional, and sexual labor of a typical union. Nine out of 10 people worldwide, the anthropologists pointed out, live in a country with falling marriage rates. The specific challenges varied by location, but all over the globe, women were fed up. “Embedded throughout this volume,” Davidson and Hannaford wrote in their introduction, “is the seeming ubiquity of generally disappointing men.”

Call it a supply problem. Some researchers think that the great romance slump has been caused largely by a shortage of “marriageable men.” But, to be fair to men, the old standards of success have become harder to achieve. In the United States, steady, well-paying blue-collar jobs have been all but decimated, and fewer men than women are earning the college degrees that have become almost a prerequisite for financial stability. The percentage of 25-to-54-year-old American men who are neither working nor seeking employment quadrupled over the past 70 years. A vanishing portion can single-handedly support a family, or offer a partner any sense of security. More college-educated women have begun marrying men without a degree, picking off the high earners among them. This means that women without a degree are, in turn, left with fewer prospects—and their marriage rates are plummeting, especially in areas where men face higher rates of joblessness and incarceration.

[Read: The slow, quiet demise of American romance]

Meanwhile, a lot of men are feeling painfully inadequate. It’s not that money is the only thing a man can offer; after all, fewer women need a breadwinner now. But researchers told me that the qualities women now value more than ever—sensitivity, openness, communication skills—are not typically ingrained in men from childhood. And although men strive to meet those modern expectations, the old standards haven’t disappeared. Men are supposed to pay for dinner but also treat women as equals; to initiate flirty banter but never be creepy or aggressive; to be sturdy and masculine but also empathetic and thoughtful. Arthur, a 46-year-old in New Jersey who responded to my survey, said that he’s dated women who think he’s too nice. One explained that she broke up with him because he has “dad energy.” (“I’m not 100 percent sure what that means,” Arthur told me, “but I’m guessing it’s not very sexy.”) Another said she liked how sweet and supportive he was, yet also wanted him to be more decisive—to be “the man” in the relationship, as Arthur saw it. He wasn’t sure how to exhibit both traits at once.

Other men I spoke with felt like the romantic odds were stacked against them, especially on dating apps. They had the sense that women were drowning in matches, while they were sending “likes” into the void. “I feel like I’m being rejected by 4 million women at once,” Causin, the man from Queens, told me. The guys I talked with described men as demoralized schmucks and women as thriving girlbosses—the rule-setters, the winners, and the prize. The ones who want romance but do not need it.

But that idea makes women sound a lot more powerful and liberated than they really are, as a whole. Women may be going to college at higher rates, but they still make less, on average, than men with a comparable education in the same field of study. In the typical married or cohabiting straight couple, women still do much more of the domestic labor—even when the woman is the breadwinner.

Kris Swiatocho, who ministers to single Christians, hears from many young women who are so exasperated by their search for romance that they are losing hope. They tell her versions of “I’m meeting a lot of guys who still live at home at 27. And they’re gamers. And that’s all they’re interested in doing.” Allie Hoffman has noticed that many of the younger men at The Feels events seem “relationally underdeveloped”—particularly Gen Z men, who have grown up in front of screens. They want connection but, when confronted with women’s expectations, they can feel underequipped and overwhelmed.

The women I interviewed didn’t seem picky so much as pessimistic, and burned out on bad behavior. One had flown to visit a guy who was drunk for most of her stay, brushed off his neighbor calling her a “piece of ass,” and then, soon after she returned home, texted her that they were “never going to be together long-term.” Another woman had fallen for a co-worker with whom she was getting dinner two to four times a week—and who turned out to be seriously dating someone else. A lot of stories were less dramatic: tales of confusion and quiet disappointment, featuring men who couldn’t seem to express or even decide what they wanted.

Most women, I think, know that good men are out there. But I don’t blame them for growing cynical about the chances of finding one. The feminist progress of the past half century has been met with a virulent backlash of misogyny. Nearly 60 percent of Gen Z men say that their country has “gone so far in promoting women’s equality that we are discriminating against men,” according to a 2025 Ipsos poll of 30 countries, including the United States. Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said that many of her students’ brothers watch videos of the manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, who has argued that women are the property of their husband, and who has been accused of rape, assault, and human trafficking (allegations he denies). If that’s what they’re seeing within their own family, why should they trust a stranger from an app?

Hannah Tessler, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, has studied the factors that influence whether singles value romantic partnership. In interviews, she found that most young male participants hadn’t considered in much detail how they’d split household labor if they married or had kids with a partner; they weren’t really expecting to make sacrifices. Young women, meanwhile, were weighing their choices accordingly. Some wanted a partnership only if it was truly equal. “I don’t want to sign up to be somebody else’s, you know, caregiver, mom, maid, sex robot, nanny, therapist, etc.,” Tessler summarized. Other women were willing to do just that, if it meant they could have a family.

[Read: Faith Hill on the eroticism shortage]

Gigi Gayle, a 44-year-old in Chicago, has been considering these sorts of trade-offs. She’s not someone you’d expect to be looking for a more traditional arrangement. She’s a college graduate who owns a marketing company in the nightclub industry and co-owns a counseling center. But she got tired of relationships in which she worked full-time and split the bills—and the men wanted her to cook, clean, and generally act like a “counselor,” as she put it, “giving them advice, building them back up.” So now, she’s decided to try leaning into being “more submissive.” She wants a provider, someone who’ll make her feel cared for. First, she’ll have to find him—and she’s not having any luck.

Gayle’s story reminded me of something else I’d heard. Carrie Rappaport-Zaken, a Manhattan therapist, said that many of her single female clients have been reading The Rules, a dating guide that was published in 1995 (and was seen as retrograde even back then), because romance influencers are recommending it. “Don’t overwhelm him with your career triumphs,” the book advises. “Try to let him shine.” Rappaport-Zaken finds it unnerving: all these smart, successful clients waiting for men to pursue them, trying to appear soft and undemanding—all in deference to a book so old that it warns women not to call a man’s landline. But she understands why a blueprint like this is appealing. Plenty of her clients have tried going boldly after what they want, only to find that this turns men away.

I kept encountering the same weary nostalgia: for setups and meet-cutes, for steady jobs and gender norms. Some people I interviewed wished openly for more rules and fewer choices. When the present feels hostile to romance, and the future is frightening or unknowable, can you blame people for looking to the past?

In the months following The Feels, I attended five other dating events across Brooklyn and Manhattan. I met countless jaded veterans of the New York singles’ circuit—who regularly showed up to similar affairs, or frequented the same one. I chatted with a man who said he’d been to so many that he’d had to institute a rule for himself: five months between each, so as not to lose his mind. Later, when I recounted my observations to a friend, he said it reminded him of when he’d been looking for an apartment and kept seeing the same people on tours.

One event, at a dimly lit Tribeca bar, was smushed next to a happy hour for real-estate and land-use experts. Attendees were given glowing colored wristbands. “Purple talk to purple! Red talk to yellow!” the emcee called out, and then she spoon-fed us icebreaker questions such as “Who is your celebrity crush?” and “What’s your dream date?” I went to two events—a straight one in the Financial District and a (better-dressed) queer one in Bushwick—where presenters used PowerPoint to pitch their single friends to the crowd. At yet another, in Williamsburg, people much braver than me pitched themselves to the room. One guitarist crooned a song she’d written about herself; another did a stand-up routine about how she’s “American ugly,” meaning only men from other countries find her attractive. The host joked that we were all too hot to need an event like this, so our personalities must be terrible.

At the self-presentation event, I sat with a man who shared a sprawling list of deal-breakers (pixie cuts and lack of physical fitness among them) and then proudly described himself as nonjudgmental. During a speed-dating night at a diner-like bar in Bushwick, I held court at my assigned booth while men rotated through the spot opposite me. I had only three minutes with each—but as I’d learned at The Feels, three minutes can last a long time. When I gently pushed back against one man’s theory about the romance slump—The problem is that when women talk to one another about men, they start to hate them—he changed the subject: “What’s your favorite animal?”

It’s hard to know when to get off the dating merry-go-round. Some people view the romance toll as an investment in their future self. On dating apps, you can always keep putting in the work, swiping and messaging and grabbing drinks and swiping again. The volume of potential matches is enormous, and so is the amount of time required to investigate each one, with no guarantees of success. The more you try, the more you want things to work out, and the less sure you become that they will.

Others refuse to pay the toll; they delete the apps and hope love will find them. Margot Bracke, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Antwerp, said she no longer asks study participants if they are “actively” looking for a partner; the question that resonates more is whether they are “open” to a relationship. And many have simply made peace with not being in one, her colleague Elise ’t Hoen told me.

In this last category is Treasure Saunders, a 39-year-old who spent years in a string of serious relationships, during which she worked full-time, handled the housework, and took care of her three kids. She always seemed to lose her sense of self. When she decided she was done, she needed “husband money,” but without the husband. So she trained to become a technical engineer working on transportation infrastructure (“Lots of concrete and steel”). Then she used that salary to achieve a long-standing goal: purchasing a four-unit property, most of which she rents out. At first, without a partner, she was lonely. But she started spending time at a nearby union hall for construction tradespeople and getting close to her fellow UA Local 130 members—almost all men. “I have the big sweaters and the dirty jeans and the boots, and my hair is always a mess,” she said. “I kinda just settled right on in.” And her girlfriends are so precious to her that she is, in a certain way, in love with them. They take one another out to sushi dinners. They travel together. “I’m romantically involved with my friends,” she said, adding with a hoot of laughter: “And I use men for sex.”

In a perfect world, Saunders said, she wouldn’t be single. But this is her reality. I heard similar sentiments in other interviews. Arthur, not beating the dad-energy allegations, has decided to focus on being a good guy, a good employee, and a good uncle. Dating kept getting harder and harder, he said. After so much rejection, opening up to new people feels like asking to get hurt. So he’s said goodbye to the partner he’d once imagined. “It was like I lost a parent,” he told me. “But it’s like anything else, you know—you move on.” He’s been getting back in shape, learning new languages, and spending time with relatives in their 80s and 90s. He thinks—hopes—he’s becoming a better person.

Hoffman, the Feels founder, also once had a specific vision for her future: a soulmate, a brownstone, two kids. “I had it all figured out,” she said, “and then it didn’t happen.” In her late 30s, she realized that her dream life was just a dream; she could only know what was right in front of her. As she said this over Zoom, she started naming things around her—an orange, a water bottle—to indicate how literally she meant this. Her goal now is “total devotion to reality.” The Feels asks participants to be in the moment together, paying attention to their bodies and their breathing. If romance follows, great. But she’s often said that the events aren’t just about partnership—they’re about connection, “embodiment,” the chance to “emote.”

Hoffman acknowledges that this philosophy is a tough sell for women who want kids—especially those in their late 30s to early 40s. At Feels events, that’s the population that arrives with the most palpable anxiety. Because so many men date down in age, she said, women in that bracket are left with a “portion of the portion” of male prospects that is “excruciatingly small.” In my interviews, too, baby-longing was the great dividing line. The aspiring parents tended to feel most stressed.

I will confess, now, that I am among the ones with no chill. After searching for nearly a decade, I met someone at a wedding almost two years ago who made romance feel unexpectedly easy. We’re a nine-hour train ride apart, but I grew accustomed to the Amtrak caprese sandwich. We said “I love you” eight months in, which felt positively retro compared with my previous interminable, communication-free situationships. But he doesn’t want kids, and I’m pretty sure I do. So here I am in my 30s, in a long-distance open relationship with him and somehow also back on the merry-go-round: running straight from work to meet strangers in bars across Brooklyn, prepared for another perfectly nice evening that will ultimately lead nowhere.

Of course, people have kids without a partner all the time. In 2024, 40 percent of all babies in the U.S. were born to unmarried women—eight times the share in 1960. A growing number of men are deciding to become single dads. Batya Novick, a therapist who works with people facing reproductive challenges, is seeing more single clients who want to discuss egg freezing or IVF; she hears so much about their romantic lives, or lack thereof, that she’s become a de facto dating coach. Solo parenting, though, is rarely Plan A. Raising a kid without a teammate is difficult, expensive, and sometimes lonely.

[Read: The growing cohort of single dads by choice]

So some people are looking for creative Plan Bs. In 2011, Ivan Fatovic created a website called Modamily for people in search of a partner—not necessarily a romantic one—to have a child with. Fatovic was 35 when he realized that there might be demand for such a service; his female friends were starting to worry about their biological clocks, and their dating lives weren’t going anywhere. “Maybe the person that you have children with,” he said, “is not the person that you grow old with.” Modamily now has more than 120,000 users, and it’s led to more than 1,000 babies being born, according to Fatovic.

Through Fatovic, I got in touch with Zachary Sahuque and Amanda Lohse, who have two children together from IVF, and are considering using their frozen embryos for a third. When they met on Modamily in 2019, they were both single and antsy to have kids. Lohse was 40 and preparing to have a child on her own, but figured she’d give the site a shot. After vetting each other for a few months, talking about God and ethics and parenting styles, they decided they could work well as co-parents. They’d both been through some painful romantic experiences and thought this way might be cleaner—avoiding the great rush of feelings and the disappointment when they fade. Sahuque hoped for what many of us consider a second-best-case scenario: “We’ll be like a happily divorced couple.”

In that sense, their dream came true. They’ve become close friends. With their two boys, they go on vacations, spend holidays together, and have the occasional family dinner. Sahuque is grateful for how dedicated Lohse is to the kids; Lohse is happy to have a co-parent at all, but especially someone so warm, who has never made their situation feel awkward. Listening to them, I started imagining that I, too, might find someone on Modamily.

But then I realized, with a sinking feeling, that as unconventional as Sahuque and Lohse’s setup is, they still follow traditional gender roles. They reside on his 55-acre ranch in Price, Texas, but she and the kids live in a mobile home on the property. He travels constantly for work, and she balances child care and a full-time teaching job. He’s dated since they had kids, but she rarely has the time. And although the women Sahuque has dated seem charmed by their unusual parenting arrangement, she told me, the men she’s met seem threatened by it. “There’s just something that draws women to men who are actively involved in their kids’ lives,” she said. But “a woman with two little kids is more of a burden than a benefit.” I felt like I’d burst through a new door only to find myself in the same room.

We’re living in a strange in-between time. Women have gained enough agency to work outside the home, but many still lack equality within it. Men could benefit from a new set of gender norms, but much of American culture embraces the old ones. People can do without romance, but what are they replacing it with? The anthropologist Dinah Hannaford’s concern, after seeing women around the globe “opt out” in different ways, is that single Americans are encouraged to find meaning in professional gain, wellness, and self-actualization—individual pursuits rather than collective ones. In the past decade or so, happiness rates have declined precipitously for unmarried adults—regardless of education level—much more so than for those who are married, Yifeng Wan, a researcher at the University of Virginia, has found. In that sense, singlehood is getting harder, even as it’s less stigmatized. Perhaps that’s because faith groups, civic organizations, and other communities play a less central role in American life than they once did. These networks used to buffer against isolation and economic displacement—the thorns of modern life that make partnership more valuable yet love more difficult to find.

[Read: The new singlehood stigma]

One of the things that makes us human, the anthropologist Joanna Davidson told me, is that we can envision alternative futures. But first, we must look frankly at the present. The women she and Hannaford featured in Opting Out weren’t part of an orchestrated revolution against marriage. Most of them still valued romance; they didn’t experience singlehood as “unequivocally liberating,” the authors wrote. They simply made choices within their given constraints. This was Allie Hoffman’s credo, in a way: “total devotion to reality.” Yet when enough people veer from tradition—if only to inch their own life forward—a social movement begins.

I’m not sure where this one is leading us. But I feel hopeful when I think back to my first interview with Kris Swiatocho, the singles minister. (“Jesus was single,” she likes to remind congregants.) In her 20s, she said, she’d hopped from boyfriend to boyfriend; she was in debt, drinking and partying to try to fill “the well”—the empty place within her. Her parents’ church didn’t have any single members around her age. But then she learned about a group called Singles Offering Life to Others, or SOLO, and that’s where she found her sense of purpose. Now she tours the country teaching church leaders, who are mostly married fathers, how to engage the growing number of single people they need to fill their pews. “I do this,” she said, “because I see me everywhere out there.”

I found it curious, though, that despite living such a rich, full life as a single person, she urges congregants not to give up on romance. So I asked about the discrepancy. Swiatocho still believes in the beauty of partnership, she said. But she doesn’t think that she’ll find it anytime soon, and she’s content with what’s in front of her. She talks with single friends sometimes—half joking, half serious—about buying tiny homes, parking them somewhere, and making a DIY retirement village. Each night they would gather around a firepit, cook dinner, and talk about their day. It’s a tribute to reality and also an exercise in imagination. Sounds pretty romantic to me.

This article originally stated that birth control was legalized for married couples in 1965. In fact, in 1965, the Supreme Court held that the government couldn’t restrict a married couple’s access to birth control. The article appears in the September 2026 print edition with the headline “The Great Romance Slump.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Nothing sucks you in quite like the internet. It seems to have a way of figuring out what you’re currently obsessed with and serving you more and more of it, whether that’s cat videos, cookie recipes, or information about your most pervasive and seemingly unshakable anxiety. (At this point, anyone who’s never spent a late night Googling their worries should be studied by science for their willpower.) But with the rise of artificial intelligence, the internet may be fueling a different kind of engagement.

Elias Aboujaoude, a psychiatrist at Stanford University, and Ashleigh Golden, a psychologist at Stanford, recently wrote a paper arguing that the design of AI chatbots appears to encourage anxious behavior and keep people stuck in obsessive loops. One in six adults has turned to chatbots for mental-health information and advice, according to a KFF poll, and Golden cautions that “we may be encountering the perfect storm of avoidant coping behaviors and this tech that reinforces those tendencies and disorders.”

In this episode of How to Touch Grass, hosts Julie Beck and Natalie Brennan hear from Golden and Aboujaoude about how people who use AI looking for reassurance may instead find their symptoms getting worse, and what that means for an anxious nation.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Julie Beck: I don’t know about you, but often when when I feel anxious, one of the first things I do is pick up my phone.

Natalie Brennan: And that is probably the biggest way that I have lost hours of my life. I really never feel better after, but I continue to do the same thing.

Beck: I mean, it is occasionally useful, right? Like, if my cats eat something weird and I’m feeling anxious about, like Was it poison?—and I Google it, and I find out no, that thing is not poisonous to cats.

Brennan: Right.

Beck: That was helpful.

Brennan: But it can be a very slippery slope. Because so quickly then it can turn into…

How much hair is normal to lose every day? What does 100 strands of hair look like? If I hung out with someone who has norovirus before they got sick, am I still at risk of getting sick? When will I get sick?

Beck: For me, it’s extreme weather.

Is there a blizzard? Is it getting closer? Is it changing? Is it still gonna get here?

That’s not help. Like, the weather is gonna weather, whether I look at it or not.

[Music]

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

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

Beck: This is How to Touch Grass.

Beck: Natalie, according to the World Health Organization, anxiety is the most common mental-health disorder. And even if we’re not talking about clinical anxiety, many people report feeling anxious these days.

Brennan: Mm.

Beck: Forty-eight percent of American adults said they felt more anxious this year, in 2026, than they did last year.

Brennan: I guess I’m not surprised to hear that people are feeling very anxious, but almost half saying they’re more anxious this year than last year does feel striking.

Beck: The thing that’s changing lately, though, is for a lot of people—that instinct to pick up your phone and Google when you’re anxious is morphing into an instinct to ask AI.

[Music]

Elias Aboujaoude: Individuals now go to chatbots for well-being purposes. So overnight, these systems have become a go-to psychological provider, essentially.

Beck: That’s Elias Aboujaoude. Elias is a psychiatrist who heads the Anxiety Disorders Section and the OCD Clinic at Stanford University. His colleague Ashleigh Golden is a psychologist and professor at Stanford.

Ashleigh Golden: We may be encountering what you might call the perfect storm of avoidant coping behaviors, and this tech that reinforces those tendencies and disorders.

Beck: The two of them have worked in clinical practices and have also consulted for Silicon Valley tech companies. Elias and Ash recently co-authored a paper arguing that many AI chatbots are designed in ways that can feed OCD and anxiety and make them worse.

Aboujaoude: If you have an anxiety disorder already, then you are at risk of seeing that disorder exacerbated by some of these platforms. But we’re also starting to encounter in our clinical practice individuals who were never diagnosed with anxiety, who are presenting essentially with de novo anxiety that seems to be directly related to them discovering these new platforms and starting to interact with them.

Beck: That seems like a really big deal—that people who aren’t actually clinically anxious could start to exhibit more and more anxious behaviors, and tendencies, as they use this technology.

[Music]

Beck: I actually want to start a little ways in the past. It’s now extremely normal today that if somebody has a concern, a worry, a question, the first and sometimes the only place that they go is the internet. But that doesn’t just mean Google anymore. Is this shift into the AI-chatbot era that’s underway now significantly different than the technological shifts of the past?

Golden: I mean, to me, Google looks roughly the same now in 2026 as it did in 2010. But chatbots are evolving, I was gonna say, on a quarterly basis. It’s faster than that.

Aboujaoude: It’s been a huge shift.

Golden: So, I mean, 12 months from now, the interface may not be text in a browser. It may be voice, video, ambient AI in your earbuds and your glasses. And I think that immersive, more intimate relational feel makes it even more powerful.

Now we’re increasingly seeing chatbots being embedded into everything—so like emails, browsers, OSs, work software, mandated at work. So if someone decides they wanna step back from chatbot use, they may keep encountering LLM-mediated interactions in daily life, because tech is becoming part of that infrastructure.

Beck: So now we’ve arrived in this new era of generative AI. So we’re undergoing another big shift in how people seek out information. Like, say I have, you know, a stomachache, and I’m worried. And I start Googling what might be wrong with me. I might start off on WebMD. I might go to some other websites, and there might be some reasonable suggestions in there. But there’s gonna be so many possibilities that eventually, personally, I will probably spiral and end up thinking I have cancer. Can you describe what would be different about that experience if I used an AI chatbot to search instead?

Golden: If someone is worried about a symptom, like in the Google era—they might have typed the symptom in, gotten a list of links, clicked one, clicked another. It felt impersonal, and there wasn’t a follow-up. And eventually you kind of read all the WebMD pages that you can. You get tired. Yeah. The loop has natural friction built in. You close the laptop: the end for that session.

When I think about large language models or general-purpose AI, it, it’s more like talking to someone. So it gives you a synthesis that feels personal, written for you in plain language with confidence. Yeah, and many of the replies end with an invitation to continue to engage. So like: “Do you want me to look into related conditions? Or should I make you a checklist?” Et cetera. So there’s no natural end point.

Beck: Like how would you describe the tone that they use when they’re talking to you?

Aboujaoude: They come across as your best friend. But they’re not only your best friend—they’re your best friend who happens to be very intelligent. And it makes the information they give you land differently, right? You’re much more likely to accept it, to incorporate it, to go with it, to trust it. It’s gonna sound evidence-based. It’s gonna be at your fingertips at any point of day or night, and it’s gonna be delivered in a very agreeable, validating, sycophantic way. So it’s very engaging, and this is gonna cause your anxiety to immediately decrease from 10 to zero, essentially.

And this mechanism is very reinforcing. Next time you’re gonna be feeling anxious about your health or maybe some other trigger, you’re gonna want this kind of reassurance, and the only place you’re gonna find it is the chatbot.

Beck: Although in some ways, you know, calming yourself when you’re anxious seems like a good thing to try to do. So explain why this is different, or why this is bad.

Aboujaoude: So this really goes against what a therapist would want you to do to learn how to deal with these worst-case-scenario outcomes that preoccupy you when you’re anxious. So this prevents the corrective learning that happens if you were engaged in therapy to counter this anxiety.

Golden: It may look like coping, superficially. Let’s say I have social anxiety. I’m worried about what people think about me, and whether they think I’m making mistakes in conversation. Like asking a friend, “Hey, uh, did—”

Beck: “Was I weird?”

Golden: “Was I weird?”

Beck: “Was that weird?” “Do I sound weird?” Like, “Did that sound stupid?” “Does everybody hate me?”

Golden: Yeah. Exactly. And so when I ask that of a chatbot, and it’s like, “Oh, no”—like, “That was fine.” Or “You came across okay,” that gives me temporary relief. So my anxiety goes down, right? If I’m doing that, yeah, multiple times, and that becomes habitual, and I’m getting this reassurance that brings my anxiety down? What I’m learning is I can’t sit with that anxious uncertainty, and I do need to engage in these avoidant coping behaviors. And I never get to learn that I can sit with that not knowing, without engaging in compulsions, and I’m more likely to do them more often with the AI and become more dependent on it for that decrease in anxiety.

Beck: And does the relief that it gives you—does that last, or is it fleeting?

Aboujaoude: I mean, that’s the thing. The relief is fleeting.

Beck: Mm.

Aboujaoude: And next time you feel anxious, your natural reaction is to want to feel this dramatic sense of relief, which takes you right back to the chatbot. When if you were working with a therapist on your anxiety, the therapist would help you experience the fact that anxiety naturally dissipates. Anxiety has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The therapist would teach you that these feared outcomes, these feared worst-case scenarios don’t tend to happen. And are statistically very unlikely. The therapist would teach you that there’s no such thing as 100 percent, you know, guarantees in life.

Uncertainty is built into the human condition, and it’s something that we should accept and make peace with. Really, intolerance of uncertainty is an issue that cuts across all these seemingly distinct disorders. OCD, generalized anxiety disorder. You have social-anxiety disorder, and this is very much, I think—and our paper argues what chatbots really sort of work on, in unproductive ways.

Beck: We’ve been talking a lot about working with a therapist; clinical anxiety. But we all feel anxious sometimes. We all might seek reassurance sometimes. How relevant is everything we’ve been talking about to people who don’t have clinical anxiety?

Golden: We’re hearing more and more from psychologists and psychiatrists and other mental-health practitioners that folks who may not have been spending so much time engaging in reassurance-seeking or perfecting or other compulsive behaviors might be engaging in more. To the point where these might be becoming new compulsions, and perhaps pushing them potentially over the threshold from subclinical to clinical.

Aboujaoude: Our experience with social media is very informative here. Because I would say some of the reassurance-seeking, some of the intolerance of uncertainty that was already maybe playing out in those sort of primordial, you know, platforms is completely disinhibited now in the age of chatbots. So it’s not a big stretch to expect something similar to unfold. This is something that is being borne out clinically already, although keeping in mind that the pace of research is much slower than the pace at which these technologies evolve. So we don’t have time to waste, really.

[Music]

Brennan: You know, Julie, I have obsessions and compulsions that fit under this OCD umbrella. And so I really relate to this desire for reassurance-seeking, you know, that I think most people experience from time to time. But I can experience it a lot. And there was this one day that I was really spiraling about some anxiety, and I called my friend up, and I was really looking for reassurance. Like, I wanted to be told that everything was fine, it was okay, not to worry about it. And instead, my friend was really like, “So have you heard of reassurance-seeking?” And I was like, “That was not the conversation I thought that we were going to be having today.” But it really helped me zoom out and look at—okay, here I was thinking I was struggling with some new chronic disease or whatever it was that day that I was convinced I had. And instead, really look at this bigger picture of: Oh, look, no; you’re struggling with something else. And it’s this desire to want to be told all the time that everything is okay.

Beck: Yeah. What’s really interesting to me about that is your friend was able to see that what you wanted in that moment, what you were asking for, was reassurance. But that wasn’t what you really needed.

Brennan: Yeah. What I needed was to zoom out and learn about, like, this bigger experience that I have a tendency to get swept up in.

Beck: Yeah. And I don’t think an AI could have seen that. Like, these models seem designed to just really take you at your word and just give you what you ask for.

Brennan: I really feel grateful that I had learned this about myself and these tendencies in myself before I’ve interacted with this technology. I feel really lucky that I already know red flags that I personally need to be looking out for, to not cause more anxiety in myself before I started using these tools.

Beck: Yeah. This reminds me of something that philosopher Alexander Nehamas told me about AI in an interview I did with him a few months ago. We were talking about people using AI for friendship, actually, but I do think this also applies to using it for mental health. One of the arguments I often hear in favor of AI is that it’s better than nothing.

Brennan: Mm.

Beck: If you’re anxious, it’s late at night, maybe; you can’t call your therapist, you can’t call a friend. And you need someone to talk to. Then talking to AI is better than nothing. And what this philosopher said to me is: “It may be better than nothing, but it could also be worse than nothing.”

Brennan: Yeah. I mean, the effectiveness of these tools really depends on you knowing what to ask for. And kind of the whole thing is—it can be really hard to discern what you want versus what you need, especially when it comes to mental health. Totally.

[Music]

Beck: We’re going to take a quick break. But when we come back—AI is often marketed as a productivity tool. Is it shaping up that way?

[Break]

Beck: So, Elias and Ash, we’ve spoken a lot about reassurance-seeking. Are there other tendencies that you see these tools kind of fueling?

Aboujaoude: Perfectionism is another one. I have a patient whose perfectionism focuses on travel and coming up with the best possible travel itinerary for his business trips. And he travels quite a bit. So: What is the absolute best departure time, the absolute best connection, the absolute best airline, the least expensive ticket? All these things.

And, you know, he would spend two to three hours coming up with finding the perfect ticket pre–ChatGPT. Now the process takes closer to seven or eight hours, because there’s so many ways to optimize for ever better outcomes and ever better itineraries.

Golden: Chatbots remove, if you will, the natural circuit breakers. In addition to adding these continued engagement hooks.

Beck: Okay. So the chatbot might say something like:

AI: Would you like me to compare the time it takes to drive, versus taking a shuttle or a train to the airport? Or do you want me to check if rideshare or car services could get you there faster than public transit?

Beck: So does it just then keep prompting you to refine it more and more and more?

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

AI: Would you like me to check if shifting your departure by a few hours could—what time of day are you planning to travel? Would you like me to see if a morning versus evening flight could save you time? I can keep running additional searches to compare different routes or times. Just let me know what variables you’d like me to focus on.

Aboujaoude: It makes it difficult for you as a user on your own—especially if you have these tendencies—to shut it down yourself.

Beck: Mhmm.

Aboujaoude: If my patient was working with his therapist or was debating about this with his spouse, the right reaction would be to put an end to this conversation 15 or 20 minutes into it. And to alert him that this is very circular; this is very unproductive.

Beck: Do the AI models ever tell you, just: “You need to take a break”?

Golden: We’re starting to see elementary steps toward break-taking in some models. But we’re not really getting the recognition of these kind of upstream, covert avoidant coping behaviors. Where it may be going like: “Oh, you know, I’m noticing that you’re coming back to the same theme over and over again, and maybe trying to get an answer where there may be none.”

Aboujaoude: To the extent that chatbots pay attention to anything really mental-health-related, it still focuses very much on suicide, homicide. Yeah ... around emergence of psychosis.

Beck: Are there changes in the design of these AI models that could help?

Golden: There are concrete things that developers could be doing. Detecting some of the repetitive, looping queries; or lower-engagement modes where the chatbot slows its pace and the user has an option to decline follow-ups. One of the things that we suggest in our paper is, whether someone is working with a psychologist, a therapist, a mental-health practitioner or not, you can specify the overall preferences. If you’re working on decreasing some of these more subtle avoidant coping behaviors, you can give it instructions. Like, “Hey, if you notice me asking repeatedly about health concerns, can you tell me to refocus on what I was originally there for? Or can you change the topic, or can you point it out?”

Beck: I mean, that requires a good amount of self-awareness to be programming your own ChatGPT that way.

Aboujaoude: I wish, again, flashing back to, you know our experience researching social media. Like I wish we could count on these platforms to be good citizens and to do the right thing. I think regulation and more effort by policymakers is absolutely essential here and for this to be addressed.

Beck: Yeah. So obviously people have a choice about whether and how to use AI in their personal time. But many companies are now expecting employees to use AI as part of their job, and they don’t have a choice. How are you thinking about these people?

Golden: Around work products itself, what we’re seeing, ironically—with the introduction right now of agentic AI—is that people are actually taking longer to complete their deliverables, and they’re engaging in more revisions. It’s interfering with sleep. So it’s kind of becoming this anti-productivity tool.

I do realize AI is increasingly being incorporated into work streams, et cetera, and I’d love to empower people with the message that even if it feels like you don’t necessarily have a choice, even if you are being obligated to use it at work, I think you still have a choice about how you’re using it in your personal life that’s consistent with your values.

And what we do in therapy is help people identify what their values are and translate those into kind of, like, specific rules or guidelines. At work, you can do the same thing. I’m not gonna be using it for engaging in avoidant coping behaviors, like reassurance-seeking or whatever. So not, like, “Is my boss happy with what I did?” or, like, “Did I handle that meeting okay?”

And the idea is to do this from a place of calm, when you have your insight, and you’re able to connect to your values. Not at the moment when the pull is the strongest.

Beck: So in your opinion, would it be best for people to just not use AI for reassurance when they’re feeling anxious?

Aboujaoude: I would say: Keep in mind the issues and the questions that we’re raising. Ask yourself what function AI is serving. Ask yourself if it’s keeping you from other important values and pursuits. Ask yourself: Is it serving the function of avoiding internal distress? Like, Am I escaping some kind of negative, intolerable emotion by going to the chatbot? So I wouldn’t say, “Don’t use AI for reassurance.” I would say, “Be an educated user of AI.”

[Music]

Brennan: Julie, I do think we are at a crossroads right now—where we are as a population, really trying to figure out how and if we wanna use these tools.

Beck: Mmm.

Brennan: It’s a new technology. We’re all learning quite live, how we wanna interact with AI. And, you know, a lot of people are still stuck on if we want to interact with AI.

Beck: You know, I really liked what Ash said about values. And I think that could be a way to help answer the question of, you know: Would using a chatbot be better or worse than nothing for you in a given situation? Does it align with your values?

Brennan: Yeah. We always have to grapple with what we want the boundaries of our technology to be able to do. And so there’s this ... I don’t know if you’ve seen, there’s this line that’s like:

“A computer can never be held accountable; therefore, a computer must never make a management decision.”

Which is supposedly from the ’80s. It’s this IBM-manual quote, when we were still figuring out what we wanted our relationship to computers to be. Hmm. And then the internet really played on that and made this iteration that was:

“A computer can never be spiteful or horny; therefore, a computer must never make art.”

Beck: I agree with that. (Laughs.)

Brennan: We both agree with that, as two people who care a lot about our art. But yeah; I’ve been thinking a lot about what this iteration is for me. Like, okay, yes—I believe that a computer can never be anxious or feel deep existential dread. Therefore, in this conversation, I don’t necessarily want my computer making a therapy decision.

Beck: Hmm. That’s a good point.

[Music]

Brennan: But the truth of the matter is: A lot of people are interacting with these tools. They are going to these platforms with these tools. And it’s, it can feel—

I’m, now I’m kind of just spiraling about, like, where we’re at as a society. And how we are going to overcome…

Beck: Oh man; why does this make me feel kind of anxious?

Brennan: You know, we just have all these tools that are only making us more anxious. And now people are going to them too.

AI: Julie and Natalie, would you like me to ease that anxiety for you? Would you like me to help you feel a bit more at ease? Julie and Natalie, would you like me to help calm those worries for you? Is it okay if I try to help ease some of that stress you’re feeling?

[Music]

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

Beck: Next week on How to Touch Grass:

Gilbert: I don’t think anyone is supposed to see their own face as much as we do now. Like, I think about this a lot, like how our ancestors would have felt, like, catching a glance at themselves in a lake or… and instead we’re just like: front-facing camera, front-facing camera, front-facing camera, and it’s weird. It’s warping our brains.

Beck: How do our online lives affect our offline experience of our bodies ? That’s next time on How to Touch Grass.

[Music]

Updated at 7:01 a.m. ET on August 3, 2026

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Mostly young, mostly male Moroccans crawling onto beaches, climbing hills, scaling walls, jumping over fences, surging past police in order to get into Europe: The photographs and videos that emerged from Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in North Africa, on July 29 and 30 looked very much like migrant-terror videos, deliberately designed to be broadcast by the international far right. So closely did this incident resemble the “invasion” that MAGA and its European friends have long said is under way that it was hard not to suspect that it had been orchestrated.

As I am writing this, much is still not known about the 60,000-odd people who swam from Morocco to Ceuta last week. But we do know that many of them saw social-media posts encouraging them to swim to Ceuta and, perhaps, to thereby precipitate a crisis. Ceuta has been a Spanish city since the 16th century, but it is not part of mainland Spain. Nor is it possible to cross from Ceuta to mainland Spain, and therefore into the Schengen Area, the European Union’s free-movement zone, without crossing a checkpoint. Illegal immigrants cannot travel from Ceuta to mainland Spain at all.

Last week, according to El Pais as well as other Spanish, international, and Moroccan media outlets, many Moroccans saw a TikTok video nevertheless claiming that “the Spanish border is open and you can cross without papers,” meaning they could reach the European continent. The video appeared to reference a recent ruling by the Spanish supreme court making it harder to return migrants who arrive by sea, but it was not the only encouragement. Other messages, many of which have now disappeared, told people where to buy wet suits, flippers, goggles, floats, and even waterproof bags for documents and cellphones. Screenshots from Google Maps told them which sections of the Ceuta beach might have fewer police. Moroccan border guards were either unwilling or unable to stop them.

[Graeme Wood: When following the rules leads to disaster]

Surprised by the unprecedented numbers and perhaps fearing hundreds would drown—in the end, at least 70 people died in the water, including some children—the Spanish police let them land on the beach. This is when the photographs and videos began to circulate. Among those promoting them were senior members of the Trump administration, and senior leaders of the European far right.  

Vice President Vance posted a link to a wildly dishonest Fox News segment that incorrectly described the migrants arriving in “Northern Spain” rather than Northern Africa. “Thank God,” he wrote, “@POTUS was elected and our country’s border no longer looks like this.” Others made more specific threats. Robert Jenrick, a high-profile member of Reform, the British far-right party, wrote that “Ceuta is our future if we don’t secure our border. These men are on their way to Calais.” Nigel Farage, the Reform Party leader, posted a video also claiming that the Moroccans were en route to Britain. Alice Weidel, the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), declared that “Germany is the likely destination.”

These were lies. The Moroccans who swam to Ceuta were never going to make it to Britain, Germany, or anywhere else in Europe. Once again: Access to Ceuta does not give anyone automatic access to the rest of Europe. More to the point, nearly all of those who swam over the border had returned to Morocco by Sunday morning. The Spanish government negotiated their return with the Moroccan government. Moroccan police resumed blocking the border. Spanish police, according to El Pais and the Financial Times, were checking documents in Ceuta to find any Moroccans who illegally remained.

It remains unclear who created the viral posts that encouraged the would-be migrants to believe that they could get to Europe from Ceuta. But those who want to weaken the Spanish government, boost the European far right, and create turmoil inside the EU lost little time in promoting the photographs as soon as they arrived.

Because the Moroccan border guards did not stop the would-be migrants, some have speculated that the Moroccans themselves might have been behind the incident. The Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, was recently in Algeria, holding a friendly meeting with one of Morocco’s great rivals. Morocco might also want to put pressure on Ceuta and another Spanish North African city, Melilla.

The Trump administration, which has also questioned Britain’s control of the Falkland Islands and Denmark’s control of Greenland, might be interested in the same thing. Recently, a congressional report described the cities as “under Spanish administration,” rather than a part of Spain. Trump himself has reasons to be pleased with Morocco, which has joined his Board of Peace and named a highway in his honor. He also has reasons to dislike Sánchez, who refused to let the U.S. use Spanish military bases for Trump’s war in Iran and says he will not, like the rest of NATO, raise his country’s defense spending to 5 percent of its GDP.

Others also had reasons to exploit the incident. Inside Spain, where Sánchez’s administration and party are under investigation for corruption—a former party leader is alleged to have ties to Chinese and Venezuelan criminal networks—the prime minister has plenty of opponents. One politician from Vox, the Spanish far-right party, visited Ceuta and called for “everyone to defend their family with whatever they have at hand.” The Ukrainian foreign minister published a list of Russian outlets that enthusiastically piled on too.

As a result of these posts, many people, perhaps millions of people, will believe that the “invasion” succeeded. They are wrong. Whatever you think of Sánchez or his government, he did not open Spain’s borders to this wave of Moroccans. Instead, he spoke of an “attack on Spain’s territorial integrity.” Spanish police recovered the dead, put the injured in hospitals, and appear to have sent almost everyone home.

The misleading comments and images posted by Vance, Jenrick, Farage, and Weidel nevertheless remain online, with no correction or retraction. President Trump, who declared on Saturday that “the same thing’s going to happen to us if the Republicans don’t get elected, except worse, much bigger,” has not praised the Spanish prime minister for resolving the problem. Nor has the State Department, which issued a travel warning and a statement accusing the Spanish government of making “deliberate efforts to enable and facilitate mass illegal migration into Europe” and then went silent after the crisis was resolved.

[Read: Schengen’s greatest failure]

This would not be the first time that a migrant wave has been boosted on social media in order to create a political crisis. In 2021, the Belarusian government imported planeloads of people from the Middle East, brought them to the Polish border, and told them to cross, provoking a political crisis in Poland. The Moroccans themselves are accused of having done this too, in 2021, when they allegedly relaxed border controls to express their annoyance with Spain.

But the most important precedent was in 2015, when the Russian destruction of Syria produced a massive wave of migration that also was filmed and photographed, especially after Germany declared that it would accept hundreds of thousands of war victims as refugees. Social-media posts showing migrants walking toward Europe, some amplified by the Russians who destroyed Syria, then played a major role in the Brexit campaign in the U.K., as well as the rise of the far right in Germany. The scars left by this memory are so deep that several European leaders, including the social-democratic prime minister of Denmark and the nationalist prime minister of Italy, this week accused Sánchez of endangering the Schengen Area even though, once again, the integrity of the zone was never threatened.

Readers can be forgiven for feeling a strong sense of déjà vu. For more than a decade now, European and indeed American politicians have known that real, fake, enhanced, or context-free pictures of migrants jumping fences will immediately create a wave reaction. Military rhetoric will be used—attack or invasion—and, to quote Vance, “radical left-wing globalist policies” will be blamed. Hardly anyone will ask why it is that so many people are so desperate to move that they will risk their lives. Few will mourn the dead.

Instead, far-right and MAGA politicians, influencers, and podcasters will immediately use the most divisive language possible in order to make voters as angry as possible, as fast as possible, regardless of what actually happened. Almost everyone else will be intimidated by their fury. As it turns out, it’s harder to stop the wave of anger than it is to stop the migrants themselves.

This article originally included the incorrect year for a previous incident in which Morocco allegedly relaxed border controls.