Christopher Nolan has directed two movies in which a soldier washes up on a foreign shore and, battle-weary and sodden, fights to return home. The first, 2017’s Dunkirk, dramatized the World War II evacuation in which thousands of Allied soldiers were killed. It received a PG-13 rating from the Motion Picture Association (MPA) for “intense war experience and some language.” The other, this summer’s The Odyssey, is a seafaring adventure that laments the atrocities of the Trojan War—and is rated R for “violence and some language.”

That R is surprising. As the translator Emily Wilson wrote in her site-crashing review for the London Review of Books, Nolan’s film is “a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle.” She meant it pejoratively. But that quality is what has prompted beleaguered English teachers across the nation to receive the film as almost a personal gift. The Odyssey is decidedly chaste, and even stars Zendaya; what better way to get students to engage with an ancient Greek text? And yet, at least while The Odyssey remains in theaters, the R restriction—which means anyone younger than 17 isn’t allowed to attend unless accompanied by an adult—cuts off the audience members who might particularly benefit from being exposed to Homer’s epic.

The United States is a relative outlier in keeping The Odyssey away from younger audiences. Among its Anglophone peers, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Ireland deemed the movie suitable for anyone older than 15; Canada gave it a PG. Much of Latin America rated it equivalent to PG-13, as did Spain, Portugal, and France. Denmark approved the film for ages 11 and up.

So what happened here? As a rule, the MPA never discusses specific titles in public. Ratings are voted on by a board composed of parents from outside the film industry, who have children from the ages of 5 to 15; they must leave the board after a term maximum of seven years, or when all of their children reach legal drinking age. “One of the huge problems with the rating system is that there’s no transparency,” Kirby Dick, a filmmaker, told me. For his 2006 documentary, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Dick hired private detectives to suss out who sat on the board at the time. “We don’t know what their backgrounds are, what the diversity is,” said Dick. “They’re making judgments for all of the country, the entire public, and we have no idea who these people are.”

The identities of today’s raters remain secret, as do their deliberations. Their reasoning is so mysterious that, in 2018, the MPA made headlines just by posting a 46-page document outlining the basics of its history and process. Nearly a century ago, Hollywood operated under the Motion Picture Production Code, a series of self-imposed guidelines that were enforced by “a very stern and efficient Irish Catholic named Joseph I. Breen,” Thomas Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University, told me. Anyone could read its rules: “It kind of operated like case law.” The code grew defunct in the post–World War II era; in 1968, it was replaced by the film-ratings system. Today’s arrangement, styled as a consumer guide that helps families make informed choices, is more permissive than the code, but also more opaque—and more subjective.

A spokesperson for the MPA declined to make the chair of its ratings branch available for an interview, citing scheduling issues. Instead, I called up Ethan Noble, a former Miramax Films executive, and Scott Young, a former MPA senior rater, who, via their firm Motion Pictures Consulting, guide filmmakers through the ratings process. Their job is to anticipate the ratings board’s reaction to matters such as language and content. By my count, The Odyssey featured three uses of the word fuck and its variants, one of which was used to denigrate a beach. But while the movie’s ratings descriptor did highlight language, there’s no hard line governing how many times the word can be uttered before raters impose an R. In recent years, the rating board has demonstrated more flexibility, Noble told me: Today’s PG-13 movies can sometimes get away with more F-bombs, as long as the expletive isn’t “sexually derived.”

Expletives aside, though, what makes a movie “adult” can rarely be quantified. “It’s really about how these certain movies make you feel,” said Noble. Young recalled instances in which a violent scene was deemed less graphic after simple edits to the sound mix: Dial back the sounds of bones crunching or punches landing “and bring up some music, and it completely changes.” Injury and death are considered more intense when affecting a central character—someone the audience has formed an emotional attachment to. But you can mow down an army of zombies, or decapitate an orc, and get a PG-13. “Blood is a factor,” Noble added. “If the blood is red, that’s something that will easily start pushing it more towards R.”

[Read: A Trojan horse is supposed to have humans inside it]

The MPA’s squeamishness can have ironic effects: A movie that keeps the aftermath of violence off-screen, avoiding realistic depictions of what weapons do to bodies, might be open to all ages, but a movie that dwells on those consequences will likely be restricted. Take another example from the Nolan filmography: In The Dark Knight, the Joker “makes a pencil disappear” by driving it into the eye of a mob henchman. The Odyssey, too, features a memorable ocular injury, when Odysseus and company blind the cyclops Polyphemus. The former avoided the more mature rating, apparently shocking the cinematographer who shot it. Casual sadism and glib brutality can squeak by with a PG-13; the wounds of war (and, okay, one overlong scene of husbandly vengeance) can earn an R.

The PG-13 designation has always been an awkward middle child, caught between Hollywood’s clashing commercial incentives: its desire to reach a wide audience and its eagerness to avoid parental ire. Steven Spielberg first proposed the creation of a PG rating “with a little hot sauce on top” in 1984, after widespread indignation at the gory imagery in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. But over time, as superhero franchises saturated pop culture, violence once confined to R-rated movies has arguably become a staple of family entertainment. Gun violence in PG-13 movies exceeded that of R movies by 2012, according to a study from the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and it continued to rise in subsequent years. As less and less distinguished a PG-13 from an R, “the rating issue kind of dissolved,” Dan Romer, one of the study’s co-authors, told me.

Doherty, the American-studies professor, took a harsher view: The distinction between PG-13 and R “in the motion-picture industry and among exhibitors is a total joke and everybody knows it,” he said. “There are a lot of R-rated movies that are aimed at the 15-year-old kid, and everybody, everybody, knows.”

Given the substantial overlap between the two ratings, the casual viewer is left to wonder what earned The Odyssey its R. During lulls in the 172-minute run time, I’d think of the MPA’s rating descriptors, a vocabulary rich with persnickety euphemism: Would I call this flashback “mature thematic”? Was the hero, while steering past the churning waters of Charybdis, experiencing mere “action” or the more threatening “peril”? How much bare human-male backside was visible before Odysseus’s crew was transformed into pigs? In fact, was the entire scene on Circe’s island sort of sexual? (It didn’t seem unsexual.)

Scant visible blood was spilled—surprisingly little, actually, especially considering that, at one point, a man gets bitten in half. Perhaps the script’s emphasis on the hero’s psychological scars from war left the MPA board with the impression that the film contained more vivid carnage than was actually on-screen. Watching a movie like a rater, I found, can be perversely rewarding. The exercise sharpens the senses; it heightens attention to the placement of a cut, to what’s depicted or merely implied. Who, after all, has more faith in the power of cinema than someone gauging how it might affect young minds?

Restricted movies, The Odyssey included, appeal to more people than in the past. “It used to be that the movie industry didn’t want to get an R, because it would limit the audience,” Romer told me. “I think that may be changing.” Box-office data indicate that only 4 percent of the audience was younger than 17—but as anyone who has ever been alive knows, teens always find a way. An R can make a movie feel edgier and more exciting. Perhaps it can also save a movie from feeling, suspiciously, like homework.

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The first time I went to sleepaway camp, I was 10 years old. When I returned home, a month later, my mom opened my footlocker to help me unpack. On top was a tray of my belongings—flashlight, lanyard, marksmanship badge, a few items of clothing, and a stack of letters my parents had mailed to me, many unopened. Beneath the tray were the rest of my clothes, neatly folded, undisturbed since the bag had been packed. I had been too busy having fun to change clothes or read letters.

When my now-adult kids went to camp, I sent them daily emails. The camp printed these out for them, along with its own partially written return messages—templates for how to reply. Each day, a photographer posted to the camp website hundreds of images of children swimming, singing, and playing Frisbee. I scrolled and scrolled, “favoriting” the ones with my kids. When they knew their picture was being taken, they flashed a thumbs-up, our family’s agreed-upon code to signify that all was well. By the time they arrived home, I had put together a photo book with highlights of their summer.

This summer, my young nephew went to sleepaway camp. At the start, parents were asked to complete forms about meal preferences and desired bedtime routines. Throughout, his parents received daily emails with photos exclusively of him. Camp photographers used facial-recognition software to ensure that parents would receive every image of their child.

I tell this story across three generations because it captures a profound shift in camp life. Of course, some camps explicitly declare themselves tech-free zones, and some families seek out those experiences. But in many instances, summer camps—previously some of the last places a child could exist beyond the reach of their parents—have adopted a kind of surveillance apparatus in the name of information sharing and safety check-ins, turning camp into yet another environment where moms and dads can hover, ever present.

For most of the 20th century, camps operated on a simple premise: Send your child and they will come back changed. The magical ingredient effecting that change was parental absence. Camp meant independence from home and school—and this was a feature, not a bug. Children without their parents were forced to navigate the world on their own. They learned to make friends without mediation (no play dates!), resolve conflicts without referees, and experience homesickness without rescue. But at many camps, all of that is being renegotiated.

Photos taken using facial-recognition technology are but one indicator of this shift. Some camps now employ teams of full-time photographers who roam the grounds all day, documenting daily life. Parents form WhatsApp groups for their children’s bunks within hours of drop-off. Some send their children to camp with two phones: one to surrender at check-in, the other hidden, for calling home. Technology alone didn’t create this new relationship between parents and camp. But it has made it harder to preserve an essential ingredient of the old experience: distance.

None of the changes to camp culture has happened because parents are suddenly worse parents. If anything, many moms and dads today are more emotionally invested in their children than ever. But some have also come to believe that good parenting means vigilance and continuous connection—which can have noticeable effects on kids’ sense of independence.

Jolly Corley, a co-director of Camp Robindel, in New Hampshire, who has worked there since 1992, remembers when she first perceived the transformation. She didn’t observe it in the parents directly; she saw it in her camp counselors. Sometime between 2008 and 2010, she told me, kids started running to her office. “They were like, Counselors are being so mean. They won’t let us leave the cabin! And they were all upset,” she said. “I was like, Oh, here it is.” Young counselors who themselves had been raised by hypervigilant parents—with stranger-danger drills and supervised play dates—had never experienced the sort of freedom that they were now supposed to be giving their campers. They had to be taught what autonomy looked like.

The more I spoke with camp directors, the more I came to understand how the rise of daily camp photography plays into these dynamics—and has reshaped parents’ perception of camp’s very purpose. Michael Marcus has been a co-owner of the boys-only Camp Greylock, in Massachusetts, since 1994. For years, he resisted posting photos. “When you have a photographer come around and the kids know that this picture is being taken, it takes them out of their moments,” he told me. And camp is supposed to be a “pure time for them”—something he was trying to preserve. At a certain point, however, all the camps around Greylock began posting photos. Marcus found himself, “like an idiot, standing on a soapbox explaining to the world why everybody else was wrong but me. That is not a particularly good position to be in.”

So Marcus hired a photographer, and now Greylock posts 50 to 100 photos each day. Some camps, he said, post 500 to 1,000. A few influencer-run operations, with teams of videographers producing content, make summer camp look like a reality-TV show.

Once posted, camp photos can take on a life of their own. They get scrutinized by parents who go looking for reassurance and instead find reasons to fret. “When you see a kid looking focused, they can also look concerned, or they could look worried or unsure of themselves,” Marcus said. And if that’s “the only photo you’ve seen of your son in three days, you might be worried.” Parents will call to ask if their child is sunburned, or if their kid wore the same shirt two days in a row. If four boys are photographed together and a fifth is shown standing two feet to the right, a parent might wonder, Is he being ostracized? “They can read into absolutely everything that’s natural,” Marcus said. “And unfortunately, ‘natural’ doesn’t seem to sell to parents, because everything in life is scripted and produced.”

Diane Goldberg Marcus—Michael’s wife—co-directs Belvoir Terrace, a girls’ camp also in Massachusetts. She recently received an email from a parent alarmed by a photo of her daughter leaning over a painting in art class. The parent asked that the camp tell the girl to drop the class; she was worried about the child’s posture, afraid that she would hurt her neck. When Diane found the girl and asked her about the class, the camper was confused. “What are you talking about?” she said. “I love this class.”

Parent chat groups have further blurred the boundary between home and camp. When a child appears in a photo, or doesn’t, word travels fast. “It’s not even the individual parent,” Michael Marcus told me. For people “trying not to pay attention, even those parents are bombarded by their friends. Every single age group has their own parent chat, and every bunk has a parent chat, and everybody talks about everything.”

Many camp directors now spend a meaningful part of their summer tending not just to their campers but also to the separation anxiety of the adults who sent them—a phenomenon that the psychologist Michael Thompson calls “childsickness.”

Parents once understood their own occasional absence from their kids’ lives as normal. Many now consider their presence normal and expected. If parents habitually track their children’s locations, attend every game and recital, and are always available by text, the experience of not knowing what’s happening with their kid can feel like a problem to be solved. “When you know what your child is doing every second of the day,” Michael Marcus said, “when they disappear, I truly believe that there’s a void that goes on in parents that is very hard for them to deal with.”

Anxious interventions by parents don’t simply alter camp. They can alter children’s belief in their own capabilities. Corley told me that kids arriving at her camp are sometimes overwhelmed by simple challenges. “If you’ve never had to solve the problem,” she said, “you don’t even know the question you’re supposed to be asking.” Many also seem ill-equipped to manage their feelings, because they haven’t practiced this skill without parental oversight. “Parents are helping to do that,” she said. “I would say maybe they are doing it rather than helping. They’re regulating the emotions of the kids.”

For more than 30 years, Derek Edwards has worked at Incarnation Camp, in Connecticut. He uses a phrase for what he witnesses on visiting day, when parents get to drop in and observe the goings-on: fishing for pain. Some parents arrive primed to interview their child about what might have gone wrong: Was someone unkind? Did someone exclude them? Edwards is careful to say that these moms and dads love their children fiercely and want what’s best for them. Still, he has watched parents arrive and, fueled by the emotions of seeing their child, begin looking for reasons to take them home. The kids, meanwhile, tend not to be bothered by whatever their parent has fixated on. “A lot of times,” he said, the child’s not “fussed.”

My 19-year old daughter went to sleepaway camp for the first time when she was 8. She remembers crying at dinner during her first week and desperately wanting to go home. Her counselor sat with her, listened, and steadied her. My daughter stayed—and went back to camp every summer thereafter and loved it. Recently, I told her that I was working on this article and had heard that some camps now allow children to call home regularly. “That’s terrible!” she said. “If I’d been allowed to call home, I would have begged to leave.”

In his book Homesick and Happy, Thompson argues that missing home is not a problem but a vital developmental milestone. Working through their homesickness, children develop a sense of self-assurance by realizing that they can be away from home, make friends, survive, and, ultimately, thrive. This builds a kind of confidence different from the type derived from academic achievement. It is the confidence of a young person who has discovered something about themselves.

My daughter’s example demonstrates yet another benefit of parents’ backing off: allowing children to learn to rely on a broader community. The person who soothed my daughter’s 8-year-old tears was a counselor, and the experience taught her that when she was in distress, she didn’t necessarily need her parents. She just needed a sympathetic teenager, or an adult, to assure her that she could get through it. This is how children learn that people outside their family have their back, Isaac Saposnik, the executive director of Camp Havaya, in Pennsylvania, where my kids were campers, told me—people who “care about them enough” and who “can be trusted when things aren’t going well.”

For many kids, despite the parental hovering, camp is still doing its job. Once, Corley told me, a tetherball got caught in a bush, and some kids at her camp who’d been there for three summers quickly set about trying to untangle it—going at it from different angles, standing on one another’s shoulders to reach a high branch. (“Had a parent seen that,” she said, “they’d be freaking out.”) Three years before this, the kids would have come running to her for help. Now “they were like, Well, we can do this ourselves.”

An irony worth noting is that camp has become more important precisely because of the culture of hyperconnectivity. In a childhood rife with screens, highly curated schedules, and constant supervision, an extended stretch of relative freedom takes on even greater importance. “Without the screens,” Diane Goldberg Marcus told me, “the kids, every year, they have to relearn how to talk to each other.”

When I think back on my footlocker—the unopened letters, the unworn clothes—I realize that I was too busy to attend to any of it because I was completely absorbed in a world that wasn’t home. I didn’t suffer from the lack of daily photos. And, as far as I know, my parents didn’t either. I was also learning valuable lessons: that I could be somewhere my parents knew very little about and still be fine, that places besides home were full of people worth knowing and experiences worth having, and that I could access these things on my own.

My daughter knows this too. She learned it as an 8-year old, crying in a dining hall. Now she is grateful for that crying, and for the counselor who sat with her instead of handing her a phone. She wouldn’t trade that difficulty for anything, because on the other side of it was the discovery of who she was. That knowledge is no small thing. And for many people, it is the kind of knowledge they can build on only by being, for a while, truly away.

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In the western United States, particularly in fire-prone areas, people have become well versed at preparing to flee. They’re experts at using the tools and technology for monitoring a wildfire’s advance; they consult the Watch Duty app as often as checking the time. They know the three levels of evacuation—Ready, Set, Go—and many perform a running calculation of how much time they might need to get to safety.

On Saturday afternoon, Rita Gregovich was following that script. She wasn’t much concerned about the small wildfire burning across a river from her home in Spokane, Washington, although she’d noticed neighbors running sprinklers on their roofs to make them less immediately flammable and was tracking the fire’s progress on her phone. She was not too worried, either, when she lowered her American flag so that it wouldn’t get too smoky, she told me. Then she stepped around her garage and saw a wall of smoke. “And it was right on top of us,” she said. She and her husband, Dan, would learn, in a moment of rising distress, how much heavier their automatic garage door becomes when the power is out. She would discover what a burning ember feels like when it falls into your shoe.

Nearly 100 large wildfires are burning across the country at the moment, more than half of them in Oregon and Washington, and many of those have prompted evacuations. The three fires converging on Spokane, Washington’s second-largest city, have destroyed 800 to 1,100 homes and other buildings, fire authorities have said, and displaced more than 65,000 people. As more people have moved into forested exurbs and wildfires’ footprints have grown, such evacuations have become a distressingly familiar summer ordeal: a dayslong limbo in relatives’ spare rooms or emergency shelters, pets in hotel lobbies, possessions lugged around in plastic bags. In France and Spain this summer, record-breaking wildfires forced more than 300,000 people from their homes, an exodus that one French minister described as the largest peacetime evacuation in the country’s modern history.

An evacuee, for however long, steps into a kind of parallel existence, in which locations remain familiar but the rhythms of navigating them have changed. The route home is the same, but now a National Guard checkpoint stands in the way. Your boss is still eager to see you at work, but suddenly you’re living in a van at the fairgrounds. Almost as soon as the calculation to flee is complete, you must begin the harder, more uncertain calculation about how to hold together your life until you can return, if you choose to do so. At the Spokane County Fairgrounds, an evacuation site for animals, Jennifer Hynek was trying to ease her anxious horses, which were kicking and pacing, unaccustomed to city water and the confines of a stable after living on an 18-acre ranch, a nonprofit horse-boarding facility. (She also brought five goats, two pigs, two dogs, and four cats, but she “left the chickens all at home,” she told me. “Fend for themselves.”) In one evacuation zone in Spokane that was at the highest level of alert—leaving was mandatory—a sign on the door of the closed Little Garden Cafe read Still level 3, hoping for Weds.

But swaths of devastated land are still smoldering, and more heat and wind are in the forecast. Authorities have not yet been able to say when most evacuees can return home. “I know people want to have certainty about ‘When can I get back to my property? When can I get back to my homes?’ We don’t have it,” Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown told reporters on Monday. “It could be a week. It could be weeks.”

Randall Barkley, a 65-year-old retired Green Beret, spent his first night after leaving home in his Lotus Evora. He loves the two-seat sports car, but he never expected to sleep in it at a park, let alone with another person. He fled on Saturday when he saw flames near a dumpster outside his townhouse and heard the pop of exploding transformers. “The two booms was my cue,” he told me. As he drove away, he watched firefighters hoist patients into vehicles at the Alzheimer’s and dementia-care facility across the street, leaving dozens of tipped-over wheelchairs splayed outside. He and his brother Brian followed the night in the Lotus with one at a “price gouging” motel, as he put it, then a night at Brian’s boss’s house. They never know quite where each day of evacuation will end. “We might sleep in the car downtown,” Barkley told me on Tuesday. “We’re running out of resources.”

The lucky evacuees whose houses still stand may wonder, as they return home to retrieve birth certificates, heart medication, or a pair of pants, whether the gas leak audibly hissing in the wreckage next door will blow them up while they are on their errand. They must consider the inexorably melting side of beef in the now lifeless freezer. The unlucky ones must start thinking about what to buy a teenage daughter who has just lost all of her belongings.

Donna Light learned that her apartment, in a 12-unit building, was gone before she could get there. A friend sent her a photo the day after the fire. She discovered on Facebook that her parents’ home, not far away, had also burned down. On Tuesday afternoon, Light, a 48-year-old who works in hospital administration, poked through the ruins of her apartment, looking for her jewelry and her collection of Polish pottery. Her Honda CR-V was still in its parking spot, charred down to its metal frame. Light had recently given up her rental insurance on her apartment because “nothing ever happens here,” she told me. Her 14-year-old daughter, who kept belongings at both houses, lost everything except for her electronics and a spare pair of pajamas. “We just start from scratch,” Light said.

This is what a successful evacuation looks like, by the most basic measure, at least: So far, in the face of multiple fast-moving wildfires, nobody has been found dead, and first responders have reported no major injuries. The familiarity of evacuation math—when to go, how long to stay away—can be its own kind of protection. Disasters tend to be less disastrous, in certain ways, when the people who face them know what to expect and what’s expected of them.

Police and National Guard soldiers have tended to let people walk or take bikes and scooters back to their properties, but not drive to them. For some people, the walk home covers multiple miles, in the heat of summer, through a bitter pall of smoke. On her way into the disaster zone, Nikki Martin, a 33-year-old caregiver whose home survived, has felt the pang of passing others who had little to retrieve. “One guy held up a brick and a metal Welcome door sign,” she told me. “He said, ‘This is my house, right here.’”

The United States is running out of missiles. After five months of war with Iran, stockpiles of long-range weapons are so low, current and former U.S. defense officials told us, that they don’t believe the U.S. has enough to combat a threat in Asia. The remaining supplies, depending on the munition, are as low as 20 percent of what the Pentagon would like to have in hand. And stores of sophisticated interceptor missiles, such as Patriots and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles, are too depleted to give or sell the weapons to Ukraine or effectively defend against Iran’s launch of ballistic missiles. Even when troops see Iranian missiles approaching, they are forced to decide in a matter of seconds whether to expend a limited number of interceptors or hope for the best, the defense officials told us.  

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this week pleaded with Republicans on Capitol Hill for billions of dollars to replenish America’s dangerously depleted stockpiles of missiles and other crucial munitions. Hegseth’s appeal was nakedly partisan—he ignored Democratic lawmakers entirely—but also long overdue.

The Pentagon this year has awarded tens of billions of dollars in contracts to replenish those arsenals. But signing contracts is not the same as delivering missiles. Those contracts will produce munitions over the coming years, not the coming months. The Trump administration has invested in the defense industrial base to accelerate production, as did the Biden administration, but for crucial systems such as the Patriot, supply is not projected to meet demand until about 2030. Meanwhile, Iran has ramped up production of its offensive drones and ballistic missiles, and enhanced their capabilities. The war is now being shaped as much by industrial supply and logistics as by economic considerations and the politics of the midterms.

President Trump raged at the assessment his national-security team gave him at Camp David on Friday, which showed that the U.S. military was running low on the munitions that would be necessary for Trump to order an escalation against Iran, a senior administration official familiar with the meeting told us. If the U.S. were to strike, Tehran would likely launch a barrage of missiles and drones against its neighbors in the region and the American bases they host.

The president barked at aides and had some pointed words for the Department of Defense’s leadership. (He is not presently considering staff changes, a White House official told us.) Trump has grown frustrated at his inability to escape the stalemate of the war; he’s seething at its toll on the economy and is desperate to move on. In a post on Truth Social earlier today, Trump said that reports of munitions shortages were false and that such “leaks” were treasonous. Manufacturers are shipping “large amounts” of munitions “as needed,” he wrote.

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

White House aides are concerned that Trump is losing his leverage in the conflict. He has threatened Iran many times but has rarely followed through; Tehran knows that. Tehran also knows that the U.S. is running low on munitions despite what Hegseth and the president say in public. Military leverage depends not simply on the U.S. ability to strike but also on its capacity to defend against Iran’s retaliation. Iran has displayed the confidence to further test the U.S., attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz. The White House has maintained that Iran would soon face an economic situation so dire that the regime would be forced to negotiate, and U.S. intelligence reports suggest that Iran is struggling. But the Trump administration has been surprised at Tehran’s resilience, and is no longer certain that the regime will reach the point where negotiation is its only option.

In the five months since the war started, the president has never faced such a weak position. The shortage of interceptors makes escalation dangerous. Nor would expanded strikes guarantee that Tehran will come back to the table.

That may leave diplomacy and concessions as the administration’s least risky option. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have repeatedly said that Iran will never be allowed to control any part of the Strait of Hormuz. But Trump is now considering a deal that gives Iran some control over maritime traffic. The proposed agreement between Oman and Iran, pending U.S. and Gulf approval, would reopen the strait by establishing a jointly managed framework for commercial shipping. Such a deal would give Iran the oversight of the crucial waterway it feels it has earned from the war, while also honoring Oman’s insistence on preserving freedom of navigation.

America’s stockpiles have been under strain for years, but became painfully clear after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The U.S. military fired hundreds of missiles, some costing millions each, during the Trump administration’s 53-day campaign last year against the Houthis in Yemen. That was followed by nearly two weeks of U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran and the interception of Iranian missiles and drones aimed at Israel. During the first 38 days of the Iran war, the U.S. launched thousands of munitions.  

Hegseth has repeatedly denied any shortage, including to Trump as recently as last week, one U.S. official told us. On Capitol Hill, the defense secretary did not make a compelling case for the funding he wants, particularly to legislators who face tough reelections partly because of the war’s unpopularity. Between American voters’ frustrations with rising gas prices and Hegseth’s mixed messages and past combative relationship with Congress, “there is no goodwill for the department here,” one congressional aide told us.

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

Still, Congress is ultimately expected to provide much of the funds the Pentagon says it needs to replenish its stores. But what the U.S. really needs is time. Depending on the weapon, replenishment to prewar levels could take as long as five years, Mark Cancian, who tracks munitions stockpiles for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., told us.

Another three years would get stockpiles “to a level where the joint staff and U.S. commanders in charge of the Asia Pacific would be comfortable,” Cancian said. In theory, that gives Beijing plenty of time to take advantage of American shortages with, say, an invasion of Taiwan.

“Claims of U.S. munition shortages are false,” and the amplification of them is irresponsible, Sean Parnell, Pentagon spokesperson, told us in a statement. “We have everything required to strike at the time and place of the President’s choosing.”

The problem predates the Trump administration. After the Cold War, the U.S. reduced the number, and slowed the pace of production, of vital munitions, figuring that long bouts of peace between short, conclusive wars would provide plenty of capacity. But the military has been almost constantly engaged somewhere in conflicts led by missile strikes: Libya, Yemen, Syria, Iran, Nigeria. And Russia’s war with Ukraine has been defined by rapid advances in munitions. The Biden administration signed contracts to replenish Kyiv’s weapons but could not keep up with demand, Cancian told us.  

The U.S. raced to develop cheaper ways to tackle the Iranian-supplied drones that Russia deployed, and has made some progress. But the stores of interceptors such as Patriots and THAADs were rapidly expended. “There are no good alternatives for stopping ballistic missiles,” Cancian told us. “Without these defensive missiles, attacking missiles will land unopposed. That is what is happening in Ukraine.”

Before Russia’s invasion, the U.S. produced roughly 300 Patriot missiles a year, half of which went to allies. Production has since doubled, but badly trails wartime demand.

Had the Iran war been over in a matter of several weeks, as the administration initially predicted, the U.S. munitions problem would not be so dire. And the problem would be mitigated “if we knew when the war will end,” one defense official told us. “The real problem is that there is no long-term strategy—and we can’t plan around that.”

Before the shortages, the U.S. used its technological advantages to shape its strategy. Now the technological advances of its foes—and the strain they have put on U.S. stockpiles—are forcing Washington to reconsider its strategy again, this time without the long-held assumption that U.S. forces would enjoy an advantage in munitions.

Since November, President Trump has been pushing a plan to paint the granite office building next to the White House, because he thinks it should be white too.

Trump’s proposal for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building is inane, which is why historic preservationists have sued over the project. With its dramatic mansard roof and facade of polished gray granite, the imposing Gilded Age structure has been called a “palace of state.” But painting granite damages the stone and requires expensive upkeep. Moreover, the facade is intrinsic to the design of this century-and-a-half-old building that is revered—and protected as a National Historic Landmark—for its exceptional architecture and prominent role in American history.

In the latest development, preservationists sought emergency relief last week to block the White House from applying test patches of paint to the building. A federal judge then directed the Trump administration to refrain from this and related actions until the court has ruled on the underlying issues; a hearing is tentatively set for August 18.

The EEOB proposal has been overshadowed by Trump’s larger legacy projects, including the White House ballroom and the 250-foot triumphal arch. Like those, the EEOB plan disregards legal and institutional rules in ways that will create dangerous precedents if it is not reversed by the courts. However, the project is notable in that it has no constituency, is of no redeeming value, and would cause irreversible physical damage. Simply put, someone needs to tell the president, Stop.

The EEOB was built from 1871 to 1888 to house the rapidly growing State, War, and Navy Departments. The architect, Alfred Mullett, selected granite for the exterior for aesthetic as well as functional reasons. He sourced the granite from two quarries, in Virginia and Maine. By using the darker, gray Virginia granite for the flat surfaces and the pinker Maine granite for the rusticated base and columns, he highlighted the architectural features of the massive and ornate building.

Mullett’s exuberant French Second Empire design, which reflected the optimism of post–Civil War America, soon fell out of favor, and there were repeated efforts to demolish the building, including by a commission established by President Eisenhower. Fortunately, the cost of demolition impeded such action, and, beginning in the 1960s, architects and historians embraced the EEOB as a Victorian masterpiece.

The Eisenhower building has witnessed at least as much history as all but three others in Washington, D.C.: the White House, the U.S. Capitol, and the Supreme Court. As home to the National Security Council, the National Economic Council, and the Council of Economic Advisers, among other White House offices, the EEOB remains the setting of executive-branch policy making at the highest levels.

Trump apparently doesn’t like the color of the building. “Gray is for funerals,” he said in a November Fox News interview, and he has argued that white would be more congruent with the White House. However, the EEOB dwarfs the White House in size. If it were painted white, the EEOB would appear even larger, visually overwhelming its neighbor.

[Read: Donald Trump’s paint jobs]

History and aesthetics aside, Trump’s plan violates a key rule of building maintenance: Do not paint granite. Granite is a superior building facade that has been used for other distinctive structures in Washington, D.C., such as the Library of Congress and the Old Post Office. Left unpainted, granite requires little maintenance. Once granite is painted, however (and examples are rare), it requires extensive maintenance in perpetuity. Greg Werkheiser, a co-founder of Cultural Heritage Partners, a law firm representing the DC Preservation League (which is suing over the project), has warned that the EEOB could become the Golden Gate Bridge of federal buildings: As soon as painting is finished on one end, it will be time to begin again on the other.

The president and his aides claim to have identified a “magic paint,” made with mineral silicate, that avoids the problems of traditional paint. However, 25 technical experts who were surveyed by Cultural Heritage Partners strongly refute that claim, arguing that mineral-silicate paint is no more suited than traditional paint for use on granite. Although the testing that the White House wanted to begin could help settle such disagreements, the process is unlikely to be transparent or impartial.

Despite its flaws, the president’s proposal to paint the EEOB is still alive because key institutions, including ones with a history of nonpartisanship, have fallen under the sway of the White House. One such institution is the Commission of Fine Arts, a seven-member independent federal agency that reviews the designs of major construction projects within Washington, D.C. The president appoints CFA members (no Senate confirmation is required), and the members select the chair and vice chair. Past chairs of the commission, which Congress created in 1910, include such luminaries as Daniel H. Burnham and Daniel Chester French.

Although the CFA criticized the building earlier in its life, the commission later became an advocate, fending off post-Eisenhower proposals to “modernize” its exterior. Members even told the General Services Administration to “launder, but don’t scour” the exterior so as to preserve the natural patina of the granite. In 2018, the CFA published a richly illustrated history of the EEOB.

Since last year, Trump has replaced the entire CFA with loyalists who have largely rubber-stamped the president’s pet projects. The commission’s April deliberation on the EEOB proposal was typical of its Trump-era approach. Vice Chair James C. McCrery II, an architecture professor at Catholic University and the original architect of Trump’s ballroom, conceded that painting the office building would increase its maintenance needs, but compared it to the laundry costs he gladly incurs so he can wear dressy white shirts. McCrery also argued that the EEOB’s shadowy gray color may have suited the 19th-century War Department but was unnecessary now that the building had no military tenant (National Security Council staff might disagree). Another commissioner predicted that painting the EEOB white would improve morale among its occupants by highlighting their connection to the White House.

Another crucial institution bowing to political pressure is the GSA, which manages federal real estate. The EEOB is the crown jewel in the agency’s portfolio. Under normal circumstances, career staff would have dismissed as laughable a proposal to paint the Eisenhower building, because of the risk to it and the prospect of steep maintenance costs that the GSA can ill-afford. (I am a former public-buildings commissioner at the GSA. I testified in May against the plan before the U.S. National Capital Planning Commission, another body tasked with reviewing it.)

[Read: Inside Trump’s rush job to build his arch]

Circumstances being abnormal, the GSA signed a memorandum purporting to delegate its legal authority over the EEOB project to the White House Office of Administration. The White House is exempt from requirements to review construction projects under the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act—requirements that apply to the GSA and other federal agencies. If the GSA’s delegation is found to be lawful, the White House will have effectively eliminated the need for the project to undergo a crucial but time-consuming review that elicits the views of experts, affected groups, and the public. Although the White House says it will carry out the review voluntarily, critics of the proposal are skeptical, and Cultural Heritage Partners and the DC Preservation League have challenged the GSA’s action in federal court.

Critics of the Trump administration’s GSA gambit fear that it could become a template for exempting other controversial projects from review under NHPA and NEPA. Werkheiser told The Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott that “the precedent is potentially devastating,” and that “anytime the president takes a personal interest in a project he can simply pluck it out of an agency that is subject to review, and put it in his own shop.”

The president’s GSA plan faces a tough legal test (the key issue is whether the White House Office of Administration, which was created by executive order, is a federal agency). However, even if the president loses, the challengers’ victory could be short-lived. The NHPA and NEPA review processes rely on the goodwill of the federal agencies that conduct the reviews. The National Park Service is making a mockery of its review of the president’s proposed arch. The GSA is likely to do a similarly token job on its review of the EEOB proposal. The Trump administration also plans to gut federal historic-preservation rules more broadly, potentially allowing federal agencies and developers to pursue projects such as the arch’s construction and the EEOB’s paint job without soliciting expert or public input.

The president’s destructive approach to the EEOB is ironic given the positive role he played, before his first term, in restoring another granite landmark with a Pennsylvania Avenue address. Like the EEOB, the Old Post Office was a Victorian ugly baby whose critics tried repeatedly to demolish it before the public eventually warmed to it. The Trump Organization invested $200 million to restore the Old Post Office and convert it into a luxury hotel, working closely with historic preservationists at the GSA, which owned the building. The results are impressive. Sadly, the aesthetic taste and respect for history evident in the Old Post Office’s restoration are absent from the president’s plan for the EEOB.

Had the Trump Organization sought to paint the granite exterior of the Old Post Office, the GSA’s answer would have been not just no, but Hell no. The president’s EEOB proposal deserves the same response.

This article was adapted from the author’s written testimony at a May 7 meeting of the National Capital Planning Commission.

Separating facts from lies, and real thoughts from fabrications, can seem more difficult than ever: Words and images are easily faked, and some writers at every stage—students, academics, novelists—are letting machines do the work for them. The author may as well be dead. Ubiquitous cameras are eroding human privacy, creating the sense that we live in a panopticon. And across many popular platforms, information is often shorn of context, if not outright false.

The fact that I feed my kids and pay my rent as a novelist and teacher likely intensifies the queasiness I feel at these developments. Yet my profession also helps me understand that the idea of society coming apart might be the oldest story in the world. In the second half of the previous century, a group of mostly French theorists made this kind of instability their main subject. Systems built by humans were overpowering our ability to make choices, they explained. Society and language, the scaffolding on which our reality was built, were made up and farcical.

I read these guys—mostly guys, often grouped together as structuralists and post-structuralists—in college, and they baffled and entranced me. After a mediocre high-school education spent checking boxes, the thrill of thinking, of elbowing my way through something hard and complicated, felt like coming to life. Trudging doggedly through these difficult, abstruse ideas—roughly 67 percent of which I felt sure I didn’t understand—made the world feel sharper, different. Twenty years later, looking back on their (not inaccurate) cultural diagnoses generates a complicated feeling: I’m reminded of that seductive sensation of stretching one’s brain, even as I hear speculation that artificial intelligence might one day make thinking obsolete.

No book better captures this paradox than The Frenchmen, Emily Eakin’s new book about her encounters with post-structuralist ideas. Eakin entered college as an aspiring academic, but went on to spend her adult life in journalism (she is an editor at The New York Times). Yet despite her experience in two unstable fields, and her focus on thinkers who proclaimed, among other things, “the death of the author,” her book is filled with life. Every page contains evidence of deep research, an eye for telling details, and the pleasure that can comes from sprawling, sometimes consternating thought.

The Frenchmen opens as a sort of intellectual bildungsroman: At Harvard in the late 1980s—and especially in the classrooms to which Eakin gravitated as an undergraduate—French theory was the rage. It seemed both exclusive and rebellious. The protests of the ’60s seemed to be a distant memory, Ronald Reagan was president, and large portions of the population were quietly ignoring the thousands of deaths caused by AIDS. “In an era of complacency and self-satisfaction,” she writes, “theory was a symbol, however small, of intellectual nonconformism, a badge, like a pink mohawk, that marked you as a member of the counterculture, different from—and critical of—the docile horde.” Like so many college kids before her, Eakin, the child of two English-Ph.D. holders from Indiana, came to campus feeling ineffectual and small. The spirit of the times only amplified that impression, but the sheer force and seeming certainty of these fashionable thinkers gave her a sense of power.

[Read: The theory that explains Trump’s UFC fight]

Before long, Eakin comes to the titular French writers: Jacques Lacan (1901–81), Roland Barthes (1915–80), Louis Althusser (1918–90), Paul de Man (1919–83), Gilles Deleuze (1925–95), Michel Foucault (1926–84), Félix Guattari (1930–92), and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). I gave you the dates of their lives because, in Eakin’s telling, they really matter. Having led the reader into their ideas through her own experience, she illustrates how impossible it is to separate any individual thinker’s theories or discoveries from the time in which they lived. This seems obvious, maybe, but in fact it contradicts these philosophers’ core belief in the irrelevance of biography. And to the extent that our lives often feel disembodied today—so much time spent staring at screens—Eakin’s approach is not just a refreshing way of explaining ideas, but also a reminder to readers that we are physical beings first.

One of the primary tenets of most of the Frenchmen was that facts and meaning were difficult to pin down. There was only the text, over which the writer had little control. Even the self was ultimately an unstable text. “Within the structuralist framework,” Eakin explains, “an author was held to be of little account, a ‘fiction’ perpetrated by the ‘linguistic system,’ so it was easy to ignore the philosopher” and instead “focus exclusively on his words.” Eakin’s goal is the opposite: “to re-embody these men—to recover the hidden human element beneath their often stringent antihumanism.”

In carefully parsing not only these men’s arguments but also their lives, Eakin is able to seduce us with their ideas. And by whipping back and forth between theory and life, documenting spats among the players, and jumbling timelines, she lets readers glimpse the twisty paths these ideas followed, the historical currents that accelerated their spread, and the way they still thrum through our lives.

We spend the early chapters with the adolescent Eakin, for whom theory’s appeal was as much aesthetic—scarves and cigarettes, jeans with neckties—as it was intellectual. Eakin spent weeks imagining herself performing as Nadja, the wanton and elusive love interest from André Breton’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same name. “I didn’t know what I wanted to be,” she writes. “I was hung up on something more basic: what it meant to be. I lacked confidence and, more to the point, skepticism. I didn’t know how to take theory in small doses.” This infatuation seemed to acquire the quality of an addiction. “Theory made thinking feel like doing. There was a rigor and beauty to it, an athletic strenuousness.”

A combination of theoretical gloss, intellectual memoir, and group biography, The Frenchmen is never wholly any of the three, and this is both its great strength and the reason that it sometimes loses hold of itself. From Eakin’s early college days, readers move through various philosophies without the confusion and doubling back that reading the actual works frequently entails. We start with Sartre, Marx, and Freud, who give way to Althusser and Lacan. Nearly all of the structuralists thought Sartre’s emphasis on individual agency was absurd in the face of Vietnam, inequality, and the Cold War. People had no power after all; their unconscious, shaped by systems and structures, was actually in charge.

[Read: I will read Ulysses yes]

Such a smooth summary inevitably sacrifices complexity. My own descriptions have already shortchanged everyone I’ve mentioned. But Eakin doesn’t mean to untangle every theory, only to find “the hidden human element” that unites and explains the movement. Over and over, she knocks these philosophers’ experiences up against their thinking, lets us see these men move (sometimes awkwardly, sometimes dashingly) through time and space, and helps us understand how their theories reflected their lives.

How, for instance, does your understanding of Foucault’s theory of power—that society is a trap constructed to discipline and punish—change when you know that he was told by his headmaster that he had to fix his homosexuality if he wanted to stay at school? What might Derrida’s famous notion of différance—that words and signs mean something only in relation to other words and signs—have to do with the fact that he was a French Algerian Jew, expelled from primary school because of his ethnicity? Sartre and Althusser, each fixated on the limits of freedom, had both been prisoners of war and struggled to reintegrate into civilian life. Both Deleuze and Barthes were not admitted to L’École Normale, which was considered one of the best schools in Paris, for different reasons; each went on to defy academic orthodoxy.

Foucault was hospitalized after a suicide attempt; then he dropped acid in Death Valley. Althusser was diagnosed as bipolar, endured shock treatment, and eventually strangled his wife. Derrida was arrested (erroneously) for drug trafficking in Prague; Barthes was struck and killed by a laundry van. Nearly all the Frenchmen were fast drivers and sharp dressers. None of this made them structuralists or post-structuralists, but all of it is fairly extraordinary.

Watching these details accrue leads to conclusions that undermine the doctrines of the Frenchmen: How could biography not be important? And also, how much more fascinating does it make these ideas? Unstable or not, the author is most certainly a text worth talking about. Instead of ideas bestowed by gods, these iconoclastic theories come to look like intellectual insurrections with both global and highly proximate causes. The eruptions of the 20th century, refracted through idiosyncratic, brilliant, sometimes troubled men, engendered new ways of thinking about freedom, collectivity, social control, and artistic creation. In Eakin’s account, you begin to see the alchemy through which these notions caught fire and spread.   

By the time Derrida died, in 2004, the fever of post-structuralism had long broken in the universities—and in Eakin’s mind. In the end, close reading didn’t lead to revolution. The students supposedly radicalized by Marxist theory and its descendants did not slow down the global march toward free markets and political triangulation. In the late ’80s, De Man was revealed to have been a Nazi apologist with a secret family stashed in Europe. Eakin, for her part, dropped out of her Ph.D. program and went on to work at the academic magazine Lingua Franca; she was there when the outlet published an article by the NYU professor Alan Sokal, who revealed that he had duped a journal into publishing a hoax that mocked literary theory. The death knell of the Frenchmen had been rung before the end of the 20th century.

[Read: A bizarre, challenging book more people should read]

When Eakin, by 2004 already at the Times, was asked to read the paper’s prepared obituary for Derrida, she realized how thoroughly these once-vaunted men had been struck down. She laments the article’s “tone of condescension,” its emphasis on how “unintelligible” theory is: “The Times’s Derrida was a caricature I recognized, and it seemed pointless, maybe even pretentious, to object.” Eakin now seems to regret her failure to ask for changes to the obituary, but she mentions extenuating circumstances that most anyone could understand. She was on maternity leave, and she was unsure what difference she could make. I also got the sense that she was deep inside a bureaucratic system whose rules she had learned to accept. But she wonders, years later, if she wrote off theory too easily—or too early. Maybe it seemed dead only because its influence was so diffuse. Its ideas were nowhere—and in evidence everywhere.

Today, when the slipperiness of truth, the ubiquity of surveillance, and the pervasive politics of identity are all self-evident, an intellectual history of deconstruction seems less like a dip into the past than a sharper lens through which to view our present. Eakin’s skill in distilling and then weaving these ideas together within a biographical context not only gives them new life; it also supports her argument that these lives are essential to the work. The Frenchmen immerses the reader in the thinking and feeling of the world that came before it, and it explains, through one particular writer’s experience, the world we live in now.  

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Reports confirming the death of young love are pouring in: Post-COVID declines in dating aren’t rebounding. Way fewer teens and young adults are having sex. In 2019, 42 percent of single adults younger than 40 told Pew Research Center that they’d never been in a committed relationship.

Thirty years ago, my friends and I thought of romance and marriage much the same way screenwriters did: They were just the expected ending. Now this attitude seems to be less and less the norm. It’s not that people don’t want romantic relationships. But chasing them feels to people like it exacts too much of a toll. So over time, they’ve become less of a priority. As a result, we have entered what The Atlantic’s staff writer Faith Hill calls the “great romance slump,” in which romance is no longer the center of people’s lives.

Hill created a survey and sent it to people all over the country. She heard from men, women, nonbinary people, queer people, and straight people. From their answers and insights from research, Hill came up with solid theories about why more people are giving up on love.

On this week’s Radio Atlantic, Hill explains what’s driving the romance slump, and what its long-term implications are for families, the economy, and politics. And we hear from two people Hill interviewed who have given up, at least for now.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: It didn’t happen all at once. Instead, the modern disenchantment with romance unfolded slowly, subtly, but still unmistakably. Post COVID, young people stopped dating as much. If you talk to them about why, what you hear is exhaustion with the apps—the whole hassle of combing through matches, chatting, finding a mutually convenient time, and then dragging yourself out of the house to meet a total stranger.

All of that started to seem less important than seeing friends, caring for family, getting some work done, watching the series that everyone else was talking about. These shifts were made one by one, inside people’s heads. And then all of these individual decisions accumulated over time and turned into something new, something which staff writer Faith Hill calls the romance slump.

Rosin:  I have a question for you, as my colleague. Are you the romance reporter? Is that your actual job?

Faith Hill: (Laughs.)  You know, I’m proud to hold that mantle. I report on some other things, too, but romance and dating and singlehood specifically has kind of become a big thing for me.

Rosin: That’s amazing. So The Atlantic has a romance-and-relationship reporter, and that is you.

Hill: I guess so.

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Faith spent the last several months reporting on what she called the great romance slump. In the last 40 or so years, we’ve seen huge drops in both marriage and cohabitation rates, especially among 25-to-34-year-olds.

Hill: But there’s also just a shrinking share of young adults who have a steady partner. And, you know, in 2019, 42 percent of single adults younger than 40 told Pew Research Center that they’d never been in a committed relationship.

Rosin: That is the statistic that really surprised me.

Hill: I felt the same when I saw that, and I think it’s important to talk about because it’s pretty easy to shrug off the declining marriage rates as kind of: The institution of marriage is not as important to people. You can easily have romance without marriage.

Rosin: Or intimacy without marriage, or children without marriage.

Hill: Right. Exactly. But that’s not the only thing going on. You know, it’s not just about sort of views towards marriage, and I think this is really quite a profound change.

Rosin: Listening to you, I see why you called your story “The Great Romance Slump,” because it is something of a resignation. It’s kind of like a shrug.

Faith: Yes. That’s exactly it. I liked the term for that reason. It, you know, has this kind of subtle, almost passive feel to it. You know, it’s not a sudden and dramatic plummet. It’s not that active. Like, it’s not people all swearing off romance, but rather sort of a lot of people kind of slowly giving up on it kind of captures this pessimism and fatigue.

Rosin: Yeah. It’s like a slight bad smell in the air.

Faith: Yeah, exactly. But it also implies that it’s not necessarily permanent. You know, you can come back from a slump, so there’s that too.

Rosin: Okay, let’s get into some of the reasons this is happening. Some I can just guess right off the bat. I did write a book called The End of Men about a decade ago, so I did a lot of study into how men’s and women’s relationships were changing, and just the basic fact of women being more financially independent, women being able to buy houses. We can have credit cards now—amazing—have any career you want.

So the basic idea that you need a man in order to survive is just not true anymore. What are some of the other reasons that you came across? Or at least, what’s your take on the cause?

Hill: I think that there’s kind of a combination of people needing romance less than they used to, which is great, and also dating being hard in these, you know, very specific frustrating ways. You hear so much about the dating apps, of when people talk about singlehood and romance, and a lot of times, I think people are talking about the sort of distance of the technology making it easier to ghost and people being on bad behavior because of that, kind of a lack of accountability.

[Music]

Hill: And also, you hear a lot about the kind of paradox of choice—like, people are just swimming in options. And I think there’s truth there. But I do kind of think, you know, the big thing that comes to mind for me when I consider online dating is just the toll that it takes on people. You know, when you’re having to set aside time and energy and money to meet strangers, to suss them out on the app, and then meet up with them, and then, you know, try to keep the momentum up, it just is a huge toll.

And, you know, I think that toll means that a lot of people, like, want a relationship but aren’t going to prioritize it. But I think the combination of dating being kind of exhausting and time-consuming and requiring sacrifice from other areas of life, and singlehood being so normal and doable, it starts to make it very easy for romance to just, like, not be the top thing that you wanna pursue.

And, you know, when you want romance but don’t need it, and you don’t feel like it’s gonna be easy to get, and you don’t feel optimistic about those chances or about the people you would be dating, a lot of people are just gonna give it up.

Rosin: And so if you were a sociologist, what would be the sentence? Like, what is the headline in the world of romance that merits bigger attention?

Hill: Well, I would say, you know, romance is obviously a very broad term. Under that umbrella, you know, you might fit sex, dating, partnership, marriage. But all of these forms, particularly among young people, seem to be on the decline.

And I think that shift has a lot of downstream implications. You know, it’s changing how and whether people have families, how people spend their time, how they spend their money, potentially who they vote for. And, you know, if romance is no longer the center of nearly everyone’s life, something else is.

[Music]

Rosin: How fed up with romance do people have to be before they give up? The line is different for everyone, but there are some patterns in people’s breaking points. Faith created a survey and sent it far and wide—she heard back from men, women, nonbinary people, queer, straight, and living in all different parts of the country.

One loud theme that emerges, from the respondents but also from the research, is a gender gap—more women giving up on men, not trusting them to be supportive in the right ways, not getting what they need from them, and not willing to give so much when they’re not getting back.

One of the people that Faith talked to was a woman named Treasure, who drifted away from romance and then did find new things to put at the center of her life.

Hill: Treasure is a 39-year-old woman in Chicago who has been single for a long time, and she’s loving it.

Treasure: I have been single now for 10 years.

Hill: She, for many years, was trying to date seriously, trying to find someone to marry. She was, you know, really a romantic and had high hopes about it.

Treasure: From 18 to about 27, I took dating very seriously.

Hill: She was engaged four different times. In each one, she felt like she was contributing half financially, and yet she was also doing all of the child care. She has three children.

Treasure: I already had two children before I turned 18. I started off as a teen mother. All four relationships failed because it’s like raising another child.

Hill: After that fourth relationship ended, the fourth engagement, that was really the last straw for her.

Treasure: I’m going to get extremely personal here, but I had a miscarriage, and my significant other at the time noticed that I was depressed and noticed that I was upset, and I kept trying to explain to him, “Well, you know, my hormones are changing right now.” I was already four months along. I was like, “I’m really sad right now. I know you feel like you need attention, but right now I can’t do this. This isn’t about you.”

Hill: She said, “You know, the one time that I need something from him, his support, he couldn’t be there.”

Treasure: In my mind, it was like I overperform in these relationships, and when it comes down to the wire and something is needed for me from them, I was not receiving it. And if that’s the case, then what is the purpose?

Hill: I think she just felt really exhausted by holding everyone else up and feeling like the mother to the partners she had.

Treasure: That was the last time for me. I was like, “This isn’t for me.”

[Music]

Hill: She likes to say, you know, she realized if she wasn’t gonna find a husband, she had to make “husband money.” So she did a bunch of training and an apprenticeship, and she ended up becoming a technical engineer in a union job, and that totally changed the financial picture for her, where she felt like, you know, she could be single and take care of her kids herself.

Treasure: I've been in the trades now for nine years, and I choose not to date anymore.

Hill: When she first gave up on dating and romance, she felt really lonely. I think it was a big change. But she realized she just had to start replacing what she had gotten from those partnerships with other things.

Treasure: I adjusted, and I made more friends, and I found myself again. I have new hobbies and go places alone. I travel alone. I go to the movies alone. I go out to dinner alone. I’m literally dating myself, and I’m so much happier. I am the one for me.

Hill: She wishes that she could have found the relationship that she once dreamed about, but she said, “I think at this point, it’s a fantasy.”

Treasure: It’s kinda like, How do you get it all? Is there a way? I haven’t found it. I had to give up romantic love with a spouse in order to achieve everything else that I wanted.

Rosin: That’s so interesting. It’s like when Esther Perel says we look to our partners and we expect everything from them, and that’s not realistic. It sounds like she just took the everything and divided it among people—like, I’m gonna have best friends here. I’m gonna have a community there. I’m gonna make money here, and maybe she just has sex somewhere else. You know?

Hill: Right. Exactly.

Rosin: I bet that there are women who can definitely relate to that. Does she seem happy to you now?

Hill: She really does seem happy. Yeah. She was, I think, one of the happiest people I talked to for this story.

I found that really beautiful to kind of realize that if you can sort of round that bend psychologically, sometimes you just can grow to love your life in the way it is if you sort of lean into it. I don’t think it would necessarily be the same for everyone, but Treasure is really independent, and she has great friendships and meaningful work. I think she just had such a hard time trying to find love that, in comparison, she feels so free.

Rosin: It’s important, because I guess she counts as a post-romance model. Like, it’s not for everyone, but that is a template that might work for some people. Because she did wanna have a romantic relationship at some point. She sought it. She tried many times. And so for anyone in that situation, this is an alternate model that’s maybe hopeful at the other side.

Did you have a sense of how typical she was?

Hill: Yeah, I’ve talked to a lot of people who have sort of stopped searching for romance. I think she might be a little atypical in just how much she’s loving it and thriving.

But I’ve talked to a lot of people who say that they would welcome a relationship if it fell in their lap, but they’re not gonna search for it. They just can’t do that anymore. They’re too exhausted. They spent too much time on it. They wanna focus on other things.

And I actually talked to one researcher who said, you know, she had to stop asking in studies whether people were “actively” looking for a relationship, because what resonated more with people was whether they were “open” to a relationship.

[Music]

Rosin: It’s also interesting because the word slump is sort of a negative word, but Treasure’s case implies that the romance slump is not necessarily a negative thing, because it does open up alternate possibilities, particularly for women.

Hill: I think that’s definitely the hope. And, you know, I think for some people like Treasure, who can kind of pull this off and find meaning and community in all these other ways, it could be really beautiful.

And of course, it is a great thing that this change is happening, partly because women are able to live independently and focus on other things. So I definitely don’t think the shift is all negative. At the same time, you know, the majority of single people do still say that they want a long-term partnership.

And so for me, that’s kind of at the heart of this story. You know, what happens to the people who want love and are struggling to find it or give up on it altogether? I do think that there’s real loss there that we can take seriously, even if, you know, it does open up sort of new ways to think about purpose and community and meaning.

Rosin: Next up: the men. What’s their experience of the romance slump? That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: Okay. We’ve talked about the women’s point of view. What about the men? I wanna talk about one of the guys you interviewed, Arthur. Can you tell me about him?

Hill: Arthur is a guy in his 40s who has spent many years dating. He’s had one-off dates here and there. He’s dated some people for a month or so. He’s had some one-to-two-year relationships. But he’s always felt like it just kind of hasn’t totally worked out.

Arthur: It was always kinda like hedged by them saying stuff like, “Oh, you’re nice and everything. We’ve had some good times, but honestly, you’re not really right for me.”

Hill: Some exes have kind of told him that they feel like he’s almost too nice.

Arthur: I’m not sure how to square that. Like, I mean, I will be, you know, the man and, you know, make all the plans and execute and everything if you want.

Hill: You know, they want him to kind of be more decisive or be the man in the relationship.

Arthur: But I mean, that does kinda come at the cost of me being somewhat less, you know, supportive and more demanding, because it kinda has to be that way.

Hill: One person said that he has “dad” energy.

Arthur: I’m not 100 percent sure what that means, but I’m guessing it’s not very sexy.

Rosin: Ugh.

Hill: Right?

Rosin: That’s trauma. I mean, that could be great, I guess, but it sounds like he did not take it as a good thing.

Hill: Right, and I think this person didn’t take it as a good thing in the romantic context. She wasn’t looking for “dad” energy.

Rosin: Yeah. That gets into something very important, which is the impossible dilemma that men seem to be in.

It’s very hard to know how to be, because you mentioned earlier that part of the problem between Treasure, who we talked about, and lots of women, was that men could not see their needs or weren’t open or communicative enough. And yet, here is poor Arthur maybe trying to be that way and getting dinged for it.

Did you hear men talk about their confusion over roles?

Hill: Yeah, absolutely. I think we’re in a kind of confusing in-between time, where there are sort of these new standards for men that they’re trying to reach, like this—you know, being kind and communicative and emotionally open—but at the same time, the old standards haven’t really gone away fully.

So a lot of men did still feel like they were expected to pay for everything on the dates and, kind of, take the lead on everything, initiate flirting, kissing. And they felt sort of torn between those two and confused. Like, they were trying to kind of exemplify all of these traits at once—like, be sort of masculine and sturdy, but also gentle and empathetic—and feeling like they were sort of always falling down on the job on one of those sides.

Rosin: And did Arthur have any positive experiences? Like, did he have any success or things that worked for him?

Hill: He definitely had some, you know, relationships that ended in friendships. And so it hasn’t been all, you know, a bad time. And yet, I think he felt like he was just putting so much into it. You know, he still very deeply wants to find love.

Arthur: I’m human, right? Like, I want to go out and, like, meet people and, you know, kiss the pretty ladies and all that.

Hill: But he just feels like he can’t be prioritizing it anymore.

Arthur: There’s so much going on. I’ve got all this stuff that I need to learn. I wanna go play with my niece and my nephew. You know what I mean? So something had to give, and I decided it was kinda like, You know what? This romantic stuff is not going my way anyway. Instead of being, like, top three things in my life, let’s bring it down to, like, maybe the bottom of the top 10.

Hill: He’s kind of pulled back from it. He’s focusing on being a good uncle, a good person, a good employee. So he’s like, “Let me just focus on myself and being the best person I can be,” and that has been a real sort of grief that he’s carrying.

Arthur: It really broke my heart to feel like I wouldn’t find my person. Like, it really did. I carried that. It was like I lost a parent. Like, it really felt that hard.

Hill: He feels like he kind of had to at least temporarily say goodbye to this partner he kept expecting to show up.

Rosin: Did Arthur have a moment in the same way that Treasure did? Like, a moment where he thought—you know, like Treasure’s miscarriage moment—where he thought, I gotta stop?

Hill: I think for him, it was a little bit more gradual over time, like, just realizing sort of how draining this was. He also talked about COVID. There was a huge pandemic dating recession, and a big part of that was just young people not meeting as much. You know, the singlehood rates rose a lot after COVID.

But there’s also another element, which is something that Arthur talked about, which is, you know, feeling like he actually lost some social skills when he was isolating in COVID. You know, he just was, obviously, not seeing people as much for a long time, and then when the world kind of opened up there, you know, it takes a while to sort of get back into the social life you used to have.

Arthur: The world fully started opening up again, and I found myself feeling awkward. You know, it’s like being 17 again and, like, afraid to talk to the pretty girl you see.

Hill: I think a lot of people can relate to that, right? Like, in the dating context or otherwise, just, like, feeling weirdly socially rusty. And that does not make making good chat and being charming with a stranger easy. Like, dating is already pretty hard socially.

Rosin: Yeah. Yeah. You said that Arthur was focusing on other things. How do you hear something like that? Like, do you hear that to mean he’s given up on romance? He’s not actively dating?

Hill: I think that’s kind of one of the big questions of this piece, you know: How much is this a sad thing for people, or how much is it kind of a triumph that people can have other priorities? And I think it’s a big mix. You know, I do think he has a meaningful and full life, and he’s getting a lot of purpose and enrichment from the relationships and the hobbies he does have.

But at the same time, you know, he says himself that he is yearning for a partner. You know, he wants to do all of this with someone.

Arthur: I do wanna find somebody that I can wake up in the morning and snuggle with, you know, for the next 20 or 30 years.

Hill: And so I think it’s kind of both at once. You know, I’m very happy for him that he is able to find meaning in these other ways and that he has taken kind of, you know, a break from dating when it was not feeling good. But at the same time, he’s not getting something that he wants. And I want that for him.

Rosin: So you’re a romance reporter. You’re also an adult woman looking for a long-term partnership. So I’m curious what this reporting experience has done to your outlook. Did you talk to all these people and feel comforted and more hopeful? Or did you talk to all these people and think, Oh, we just have to really accept a new reality? Like, We are entering a kind of post-romance, post-marriage age, and we have to be creative about how we adapt to it?

Hill: Yeah, it’s a little bit of both. I definitely feel comfort in the sense that there are so many great people who just have been struggling with this for a really long time, and it does make one feel less alone in it.

So there’s something really important about knowing there are, like, structural forces at work and a lot of luck too.

Rosin: Like, It’s not just me. Like, The world is conspiring against me in some way.

Hill: Right. Exactly. But at the same time, of course, that makes you feel, like, a little more pessimistic, right?

Because it’s not like I can just change something about myself. It’s like, yeah, you know, dating is really hard right now, and a lot of people are in this situation. And we can’t just sort of fix all of the things that are making it hard.

Rosin: Yeah. You’ve mentioned the yearning a couple of times. I wonder if that made you pessimistic or hopeful. Like, when I think of tens of thousands of young people yearning for a partner, it makes me sad, but maybe also makes me happy. Like, it’s a motivating factor. How did you receive that?

Hill: Yeah, I think the yearning is kind of a beautiful thing. I mean, it’s a human emotion, you know? It can be positive in that it drives people forward to look for something that they really want.

And I love to hear when people can sort of find peace with singlehood and close that door if that makes their life better. And yet, at the same time, I think that’s the thing with the slump, right? Like, a lot of people who do want partnership are just kind of giving up. And I think the yearning is one thing that is gonna kind of keep people having hope and still trying. You know, I wouldn’t want all of that to go away. And I also hope that, you know, people can maybe channel the yearning into other parts of life.

Like, I do think there’s not such a clear objective divide between the romantic and other forms of love and passion. And, you know, I think maybe these single people who are turning their attention elsewhere are really bringing a lot of their heart and soul because they’re looking for other ways to kind of fill the center of their life and, like, give love. And I think that makes them—it gives them sort of a powerful energy.

Rosin: Yeah. Can I ask: Did you shift in any way? Like, after doing all of this reporting and talking to all of these people and finding all of this company in the looking for romance in an ambivalent way, did you make any decisions about your own life?

Hill: I didn’t make any clear ones, but I will say, you know, when I talk to people who have stopped dating—and, you know, a lot of those people are enjoying their life more now than when they were dating, ’cause they weren’t having a good time; that’s why they stopped. So it does, it feels pretty tempting, and I do start to think, you know, of all the different things I could be doing with my time.

Like, I feel like I might be a better daughter and a better friend, and maybe I could, like, start writing fiction or—you know, my mind starts racing, and I think those are good things to be thinking about. We all do have limited time on this Earth, and we have to make choices about how to use it. So that’s something I’m considering, but I also know that some people I talk to, you know, when I checked in after we had an interview, they had had, you know, some dates with someone they were really excited about. I talked to at least one person who was like, “Oh, I found someone. Like, he’s the one. I am not right for your story anymore.” So that also was a reminder that, you know, if you do keep trying, for a lot of people, eventually, like, there is, you know, someone who makes the rest of it all feel like it was worth it to lead to that. So I’m split.

[Music]

Rosin: Ugh. We can never give up on the rom-com ending.

Hill: Yeah.

Rosin: It’s just how we are. We’re just built that way. Well, Faith, thank you so much for joining me today.

Hill: Thank you so much.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes with help from Jacob Smollen and Jinae West. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Fact-checking by Genevieve Finn and Álex Maroño Porto. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.