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Jeff Flake is something of a maverick in today’s Republican Party. He was an early and consistent critic of President Trump. In December 2015, when then-candidate Trump floated a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering” the United States—a preview of what became his now-infamous executive order barring travel to the U.S. by people from several Muslim-majority countries—Flake, then a United States senator from Arizona, immediately spoke up. The idea repulsed him. He made a visit to a mosque in Scottsdale days later to declare that what people were seeing from Trump on the campaign trail was not representative of America.

“This was a difficult week in Washington—it wasn’t so much the legislative calendar as it was the rhetoric that came forth mostly from the presidential campaign,” Flake, who is a practicing Mormon, said. It was his first visit to a mosque. “That is not in keeping with the values and ideals that have made this country the shining city on the hill that it is.”

Trump went on to win that election. And Flake could no longer stomach the direction his party was headed. He would have been up for reelection in 2018 but decided against running again. As he told my colleague McKay Coppins at the time, he was not interested in the kind of campaign he’d had to have run to win—or even simply to secure Trump’s endorsement. In a memorable speech, Flake decried the deterioration of politics and called for America to look toward its better angels.

It’s been almost a decade since that speech and Trump’s hold over the Republican Party shows few signs of weakening any time soon. Meanwhile, Flake recently endorsed Jon Ossoff, the Democratic senator from Georgia, in Ossoff’s reelection bid over the Trump-endorsed Representative Mike Collins. What does it mean to be a Republican when the party has moved away from the things it has historically claimed to stand for? On this week’s Radio Atlantic, Flake joins me to discuss his endorsement, the Senate, and the party he hopes to reclaim.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Adam Harris: What does it mean to continue identifying with the party if it’s moved beyond the recognition of what it’s been in the past? Which is sort of to say, are you hanging on to a party that isn’t your party anymore?

Jeff Flake: That would be, you know, easy to say right now, but parties sometimes return as well. You see parties flirt with populism and then return, and I’m hopeful that that’s what you see now.

Harris: I’m Adam Harris. This is Radio Atlantic, and this week, a conversation with former Republican U.S. Senator and Ambassador Jeff Flake. We talk about the state of the Republican Party, the Senate, and what it means to be principled in politics.

Flake is known for crossing party lines. Most recently, he endorsed Georgia’s Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff in his reelection campaign against Mike Collins. Collins, of course, is the Trump-endorsed Republican congressman from Georgia.

In announcing his endorsement, Flake told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that his decision boiled down to character, saying: “Character is more important. I’ve been around long enough to know you’ll disagree on issues with people across the aisle, or sometimes in your party. But the more important thing is character.”

In 2017, Flake delivered a fiery speech where he announced that he would not run for another term in office.

Flake: “There are times where we must risk our careers in favor of our principles. Now is such a time.”

Harris: He believed the shift in the Republican party was temporary; he believed the fever would break.

But it’s been almost a decade since that speech. Does he still think that’s possible?

Ambassador Flake joins me now to discuss. Let’s get to questions.

Ambassador, thank you for joining me.

Flake: Hey, thanks for having me on.

Harris: What to you are the characteristics of a moral candidate, of a candidate with character?

Flake: Well, I want somebody who respects the institution of the Senate. And, you know, the Senate and senators have always very jealously guarded their prerogative to push back against any president from their own party or not. That’s just kind of been a hallmark of the Senate. You have six-year terms; you’re more independent; you have more rules than the House does in terms of advise and consent.

Then, too, I would fit in character as well. I have a hard time with people who simply won’t admit the obvious—one when your president loses an election and you’re afraid to tell him. That, I think, doesn’t speak well for character.

So yeah, in this case we have that problem as well. Senator Ossoff’s opponent, you know, simply won’t admit, and claims that President Trump won in Georgia and won the 2020 election. That doesn’t speak well for character. Also with character, it’s realizing in the Senate, too, with the special rules, the supermajority rules of filibuster, that you’re a legislator; you work across the aisle. And I’ve seen Senator Ossoff do that on a number of occasions sponsoring legislation. And then, constituent service as well. When I was ambassador in Turkey, I got calls from Jon Ossoff. I got to know him then because he was advocating on behalf of some of his constituents. So anyway, I’ve been impressed with him.

Harris: I have to reference the speech from the Senate floor in 2017, because it was such a succinct articulation of democratic values and principles. You argued in that speech that “anger and resentment is not a governing strategy,” and you took particular issue with your party’s acquiescence in that regard. How has that dynamic changed at all in the years since, for better or worse?

Flake: Unfortunately, it hasn’t gotten better in terms of my party and, you know, our willingness to stand up and actually govern. As I mentioned before, anger and grievance are not a governing philosophy, but we’ve just kind of fallen in and decided that whatever the president wants, whatever the party wants, that’s where we are. And that unfortunately has not changed much.

You see some people standing up when they’re not running for reelection anymore or have been defeated in a primary, but we need to stand up more. That’s why I like divided government.  You know, a fiscal conservative, I Iook back over the past few decades and the only time we’ve really had good fiscal discipline is when we’ve had divided government. Republicans in particular act more responsible and act more as fiscal conservatives when sometimes we’re in the minority.

Harris: Do you think there will be consequences for the fact that things haven’t gotten better? Do you think that there will be a migration away from the GOP?

Flake: I do, I do. You know, Donald Trump has led a charmed existence politically and he seems to be given a pass that others aren’t given. And if you look around, his imitators have not done well. In Georgia, they haven’t, and in Arizona, where I come from. Arizona is a very red state. We have more than 300,000, you know, more Republicans registered than Democrats.

But we have a Democrat in the governor’s office, two Democratic senators, Democrat secretary of state, and Democrat attorney general—all the elected statewide offices—because we’ve had people try to imitate the president and haven’t done well.

I do think that we’re gonna see a migration, and I’ve written about this, away from the president and his policies. And one, the president has been able to basically control any primary, Republican primary, across the country. That’s waning. And if a president leaves office or is in the last two years of his term, if his policies are really popular, that still lends him power that he wouldn’t otherwise have as a lame duck. But the president’s policies have not done well, in particular, you know, tariff policies, protectionist policies, have led to high inflation, and then also couple that with a war that’s been not popular at all and so, yeah, I think you’re seeing a migration now that, you know—filing deadlines have passed, most primaries have passed, and we’re into the midterm general. And then beyond the midterms, you’ll really see that happening.

Harris: I should ask, do you still identify as a Republican?

Flake: I do, I do. I’m still a registered Republican, and I’m hoping that the party returns to its previous kind of tenets of limited government, economic freedom, individual responsibility, strong American leadership abroad. And I do think that we’re gonna see a return to that. And I think you saw in the Senate, for example, the other day a vote on Russian sanctions. That is a bit of a proxy vote, support for Ukraine but also a support for American leadership, and support for NATO, and support for kind of the old bicameral consensus on foreign policy. So I think you see in elected officials a desire to go back to that, but it’s been very difficult when the president has had such a hold on the party base.

Harris: What does it mean to continue identifying with the party if it’s moved beyond the recognition of what it’s been in the past? Which is sort of to say, are you hanging on to a party that isn’t your party anymore?

Flake: Well that would be easy to say right now, but like I say, parties sometimes return as well. You see parties flirt with populism and then return.

We’re in unfamiliar territory right now, and I think we’re going to be migrating back to more familiar ground. And I do think that that’s where the country really is. I think we’re a center-right country. But the problem right now is, you know, you only have a subset of a subset of a subset that votes in Republican primaries. You have a similar issue on the Democratic side, not as pronounced perhaps, but that just puts all the political incentives to drive to the extremes. But I don’t think that’s where the country is.

That’s why one thing that really excites me about people like Jon Ossoff is I think that they can move the Democratic Party more to its, more to the center, and that would force Republicans to then contest that ground as well. As long as we have Democrats, you know, all the energy on the far progressive side, it allows Republicans to be extreme as well and still be seen as less extreme, I guess.

Harris: Well, actually, I wanted to stick with that for a second, because you’ve said there’s this sort of massive lane in the middle, that most people identify as politically in the middle, but Democratic voters in recent primaries have shown that that’s not exactly where they are either, right? There’s been this feeling that things are broken in part because of some of the middle-ground solutions, right? They’re part of what has led us to this moment where you see candidates like Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan winning the Democratic primary. So, I guess, what does success from the left wing of the Democratic Party tell us about what Americans actually might want right now?

Flake: Yeah, well I think it just proves the point I made before, that when you’re looking at primaries, although there was increased turnout, certainly in Michigan, it’s still a subset of a subset that are determining who the nominee is. And I do think the Democrats in Michigan would have been far better off by, you know, going a different direction. I think they would have had that general election easily. Now it’ll be more difficult, certainly. But I do think, yeah, the same problem is on both sides. I think without a polarizing figure like Donald Trump, who certainly controls primaries on the right and causes Democrats to act in ways that they wouldn’t otherwise. I see people like Gavin Newsom using foul and crude language just because the president does and he wants to match it. And you see that phenomenon all over, and it’s not not been good for politics. I hope we can move away from it. But that’s gonna require leadership. That’s why, in particular I appreciate Jon Ossoff, who’s more of a serious candidate and doesn’t kind of follow that.

Harris: Thinking about that speech from 2017, and where we’ve come since then, right, it’s been roughly a decade. All three branches of government right now have really abysmal approval ratings. People’s trust in institutions is flagging, and you said that the spell will eventually break, right? Once there’s no longer a Trump, we can return to ourselves once more. It seems that you’re still of that belief that the fever is going to break. What are you seeing that gives you that hope that the fever’s going to break?

Flake: Well, it’s been one heck of a fever. It’s been a long time in coming. Well, one, let me just say, I was back in Washington for Lindsey Graham’s funeral last week, and I came away from that believing that, like I’ve said, that this fever will break.

One, I saw Democrats and Republicans. Lindsey was an interesting figure, but if nothing else, he certainly had friends on the Democratic side. I was with him on a lot of those issues on immigration reform in particular and a lot of the foreign-policy issues. And you saw people from all political stripes come out and celebrate a man’s life that way. That made me feel good. At the same time, you had Senators [John] Cornyn and [Thom] Tillis standing up—albeit they’re not staying in Washington after January—but hey, it’s still something to actually stand up to the president and see the Senate acting more like the Senate again.

And I see John Thune keeping some of his members at bay who want to make institutional changes, like getting rid of the filibuster, which would fundamentally change the Senate into a more partisan body than it already is. But I came away from this week even more firmly believing that, you know, this fever will break. And when you look around the country as well, I still think you see that phenomenon that the president’s imitators don’t do as well as he does. So I’m hopeful that that fever will break.

Harris: But you’ve written, right, that we’ve seen folks in the past, lawmakers, the country generally, come together after death or after a tragedy? Two of which you experienced at the congressional baseball practice as well as standing with Representative [Gabby] Giffords at the State of the Union.

But that quickly fades away, and people sort of divide again. Do you think that even if we do heal that there will be that division again?

Flake: Yeah, well, I think you’ve had a lot of people elected, particularly in the last several cycles, who haven’t really been in Washington when there’s been so-called regular order, or, you know, what we’re used to. So it’s gonna be difficult. You’ll always have those voices, and we have a media environment that’s not going back to the way it was before, where there are just a few trusted sources of information. It’s more distributed that way. So it’s more difficult to go back to the way it was. But that’s why it’s going to require real leadership. And leadership is important. We’ve seen that, because the man in the White House now, he’s certainly been effective in where he’s wanted to go and getting people on his side more out of fear of losing primaries. But, by the same token, you’re going to have leaders that actually inspire people, better angels of our nature, and that’s what I’m hoping to see in this next presidential election is people on both the Republican and the Democratic side who will appeal to people’s better angels. And if they do, I think we can get to a better place. It’s gonna be more difficult moving ahead, like I said, just because of the media environment, but it’s not impossible.

Harris: Well, ambassador, we’ll have to leave it there. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Flake: Thanks for having me on.

Summer always overstays its welcome by about a month. After the Fourth of July, which has its charms, nothing but a stretch of relentless heat lies ahead, reaching toward Labor Day, and I begin to yearn for fall. So does the grand, semi-malevolent intelligence that organizes American consumption: By mid-August, grocery stores are stocking their shelves with autumnal goods—pumpkin-pie Pop-Tarts, cinnamon-maple Frosted Flakes, pumpkin-spice cinnamon rolls in pressurized cardboard tubes. As I stroll through the aisles, I gaze wistfully at candy corn while the frosty supermarket air cools the sweat I worked up walking to the store beneath the blazing sun. Late September can’t arrive soon enough.

This summer has been especially hot, worse than most years. Heat waves killed at least 14,000 people in Europe; parts of France recorded 110-degree temperatures in June. Wildfires raged across North America, torching more than 4.5 million acres in Canada and parts of the United States, and forcing 60,000 people to evacuate their homes. The Canadian fires sent heavy smoke billowing over the Northeast, coloring the sky, contaminating the air, and forcing all activities indoors. The warming climate has brought too many ticks and a 10 to 15 percent rise in mosquitoes, along with raised red welts and transmitted viruses. All of this was on my mind as I slathered my children with insect repellent and sunscreen before sending them off to local playgrounds half-consumed by green overgrowth, poison ivy lurking among the leaves. Still, no amount of well-intended prophylaxis stands a chance against little hands and streams of sweat.

[Sarah Zhang: Kill the ticks]

The season comes with a chaotic flurry of activity as the last school bell gives way to day camps, sleepaway camps, and hastily cobbled-together child care spread out, with luck, among family and friends—unwieldy arrangements that cost the average parent thousands of dollars a year. My two daughters arrive home from day camp hours before the workday is done, with dirt on their knees and Popsicle sticks between their teeth. I scramble to squeeze in snacks and entertainment between sentences: peanut-butter-and-jelly crackers here, a paint-by-number kit there, both kids as bored as I am busy. The front yard is apparently too flat to supply sufficient fun on the Slip ’N Slide, though my daughters still scoot valiantly on it when the afternoon grows too monotonous. I hose the grass off their feet and lay down towels before they come back inside, then stay up late doing dishes and laundry after they go to bed.

Another item of business: Both children have summer birthdays, and the pressure of whipping up summertime birthday parties can be enormous. Convening dozens of children during vacation season takes some wrangling. This year, I packed 26 piping bags of icing in a rainbow of pastel colors and made tiny cakes for one daughter and her friends to decorate while seated at long folding tables on the back patio. I also lugged a helium tank and bags of banners, tablecloths, hats, and balloons to the ice-skating rink, and nervously prayed that enough kids would show up to satisfy my other daughter. It all transpired smoothly in the end, and then I found myself with cake crumbs on my shorts and a 10-year-old and 7-year-old, wondering where the time had gone. Summer drags on but then feels fleeting. It’s hard not to experience a certain nostalgia for the moments as they pass.

Still, one works up a sweat managing the hours, such that it comes as something of a relief when the kids abscond to sleepaway camp for a couple of weeks, or to the beach with Grandma and Grandpa for a little while. The house is clean and quiet, and the work gets done. I comb through their old clothes, folding the old ones into donation bags to make room for back-to-school outfits that are one or two sizes larger than last year’s.

[Russell Shaw: The new parent trap]

But there are still a few weeks of summer left when they come home, and though there are dishes in the sink, mud tracks on the floor, and deadlines to meet, I join them on their adventures. We sail across the New York Harbor by ferry to Governors Island, a kids’ oasis where the fresh waters of the Hudson River stream into the salty Atlantic Ocean. There are food trucks, ice-cream stands, enormous slides, and a massive junkyard playground where kids can splatter paint across scrap wood and mount precariously assembled tire forts. It is hot—searing hot—but what I see when I squint through the sweat is resplendent, kids climbing the structures of their own worlds. My two daughters are golden-skinned, with sun-bleached braids; their fine, downy body hair catches the light, lending them an ethereal glow. They look like young gods in the summertime of their lives. This season is their season. The junkyard play feels a little dangerous, but it’s their beauty, not their vulnerability, that transfixes me. When night comes, I help them ignite leftover sparklers, which illuminate their faces with silvery starlight.

Fall arrives like a fever breaking. Mayhem gives way to order, and adventures give way to routines. A cool calmness presides over suburbia. And as I heave heavy pumpkins into my cart at Costco, I know that I will soon get what I have eagerly anticipated: darkness and quiet, discipline and fruitful maturity. I will clock out of work for the day just as the children arrive home from school, hang their backpacks by the door, and huddle around the kitchen table. They will have spent their day learning new skills and new social norms, developing their friendships and knowledge of the world. All of this will change them, subtly but certainly. At these ages, they are constantly being reborn. They still need me to help them with their homework, and they still need me to serve them dinner as the evening proceeds. But they will need me less than they did last year, and next year even less. And as I watch them diligently spell out answers on their worksheets, I will wish that summer had lasted forever.

Crime in San Francisco, Jarico Anderson announced last year, “is over with.” Anderson, who raps under the stage name Dreamllife Rizzy, would know—he’s a convicted felon. Lately, though, he says that cameras have been making criminal life inconvenient. “Soon as you slide past that motherfucker with some stolen plates, they going to issue a warning to every SFPD station in that area, if not the entire city, and they going to start dispatching” officers to that area, Anderson said on an episode of the popular hip-hop and culture podcast No Jumper. “And when they catch you, they’re going to catch you.”

The “motherfucker” in question is an automatic license-plate reader (ALPR)—a camera installed on a light pole or a building that photographs and identifies license plates as they pass below, then adds the image to a centralized database. San Francisco’s roughly 500 ALPRs are provided by Flock Safety, a police-technology firm that claims its ALPRs are deployed in the jurisdictions of more than 5,000 agencies nationwide, recording billions of plate images a month. Networked together, Flock cameras can enable police to track cars in real time, giving them eyes across a city. The cameras also create a record of where cars have been, providing a view of millions of drivers’ movements.

Criminals aren’t the only ones upset about the system. Privacy and civil-rights groups call ALPRs an Orwellian threat to the Fourth Amendment. In cities such as Oakland, California; St. Petersburg, Florida; and Pocatello, Idaho, people have started vandalizing or blocking the cameras. Recently, Flock has become a fixation of the populist right. Last month, Tucker Carlson released an hour-long video claiming that Flock represents the “largest mass-surveillance operation in history” as part of “the coming slave state.” The populist firebrand Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky wants to withhold federal funds from cities that use Flock cameras; Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida wants to ban them outright.

That’s an overreaction. Although research on Flock’s effectiveness is still in the making, ALPRs are likely a valuable tool for any modern police force. Privacy concerns can be best addressed through smart regulation, not bans. Indeed, in our surveillance-saturated society, police cameras can help make the criminal-justice system both fairer and less punitive—if we let them.

[Adam Serwer: Trump should need a warrant to see your phone]

The case for Flock is simple. Cameras help police catch criminals. That reduces crime through two channels: incapacitating offenders who are caught and convicted, and increasing the certainty of apprehension, which theoretically should deter criminals from offending in the first place. But is it true in practice? Although the research base is still developing, the answer is “probably.”

An initial wave of randomized controlled trials from the early 2010s generally found little or no crime-reducing benefit of ALPRs, except a possible reduction in drug-related crime. But these studies collected small samples from small areas and relied on now-decades-old technology. A handful of more recent papers gave reason for optimism, but use weaker research designs that do less to isolate causality. A 2017 study found ALPRs were correlated with a reduction in violent crime; a 2019 paper found suggestive but not conclusive evidence of a reduction in auto theft and robbery; and a 2025 evaluation of Atlantic City’s ALPRs found a reduction in shootings, car thefts, and property crimes. But none of these papers could prove that ALPRs caused these improvements.

There are, however, studies that look at so-called natural experiments—where chance makes an intervention random enough to study it like a randomized trial—that show that cameras in general reduce crime. An analysis exploiting the quasi-random distribution of cameras in Medellin, Colombia, found that they reduced crime by about 19 percent. Another paper showed a 25 percent reduction in crime in subway stations in Stockholm, Sweden, after cameras were installed in them. A third found a 20 percent reduction in areas of Montevideo, Uruguay, where cameras were introduced. And a fourth estimates that nearly tripling cameras per capita in China reduced crime by about 10 percent. ALPRs aren’t exactly the same thing as surveillance cameras, but the consistent effect of the latter on crime should give people more confidence that the former can reduce it, especially in combination with the newer ALPR literature.

Still, many will blanch at using evidence from China to support putting more cameras in American cities. Even if ALPRs make us safer, we are trading at least a little privacy for that security. There are legitimate concerns, too, regarding police abuse of the technology. The Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm, has counted 30 cases where officers have used Flock cameras to “stalk romantic interests.” And surveillance critics have warned that ICE has used Flock data in its immigration crackdown.

These are legitimate concerns, and the privacy threat here is real—but, compared with other intrusions, minimal. In principle, ALPRs collect information about cars’ license plates—a government-issued registration that is required for driving on publicly funded roads. The Supreme Court has been quite clear that “a person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements.” Additionally, Americans have, through the cameras nearly everyone carries in their pockets, voluntarily made far more invasive surveillance a regular feature of daily life. Many people may not like that, but it’s hard to see ALPRs as a major intrusion by comparison.

Although a single photo of a moving car is not a major intrusion, a database full of billions of such photos might be. Such “mosaic” surveillance—so named because many small police actions can add up over time to what counts as a “search” in constitutional law—has faced increasing scrutiny from the Supreme Court over the past decade. A single ALPR photo isn’t a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on “unreasonable search and seizure,” but the Court has recently found queries of similarly detailed data sets to be a search that requires a court-issued warrant to conduct. (Most queries to a department’s ALPR database currently do not require such a warrant.)

The theory of “mosaic” searches is still evolving, and it’s not obvious whether Flock’s system meets the emerging standard for a search. Still, the general concern is sound—most people would consider a police department keeping unlimited, detailed information on everyone’s movements highly intrusive.

Concerns about such systematic surveillance aren’t trivial, especially when that surveillance is done by the government. The Fourth Amendment’s protections exist exactly because of the very real potential for abuse of police officers’ extraordinary powers. The question, though, is whether we need to forgo the crime-reducing benefits of ALPRs in order to minimize the risks to our privacy. Such absolutism is unwarranted: Smart regulations can help obviate these concerns without getting rid of ALPRs entirely.

One easy step would be to set limits on how long departments can retain ALPR data, something several states have already done. (Flock defaults to a 30-day retention period, which some states have lowered by statute to 21—reasonable windows of time for catching criminals while avoiding creating a permanent record of everyone else’s movements.)

States and police departments can also impose stricter rules about access to ALPR data, including requiring supervisory approval and mandating a log of all access to the database to deter abuse and make it easier to identify. Actual ICE queries are a tiny fraction of total searches, but if a city or state doesn’t want ICE accessing their database, they can make that rule easily. Both states and departments can also increase penalties for abusing an ALPR system—there’s no reason to treat cops as immune if they engage in such wrongdoing.

[Read: How license-plate readers have helped police and lenders target the poor]

When critics fixate on abuses, they miss the way that cameras can make policing and punishment more humane. Many approaches to reducing crime rely on increasing the severity of punishment—ratcheting up prison sentences or expanding mass incarceration. The promise of high-tech policing, using cameras and DNA databases, is that it can deter crime without such extreme measures, and as a result demand less overall punishment from the system as a whole.

Take Anderson’s car-thief associates. If they know that a camera will help catch them, they become less likely to steal. If they don’t offend, they aren’t caught, arrested, and incarcerated. Consequently, both crime and punishment fall, leaving everyone better off.

The benefits of that arrangement accrue, in a sense, to criminals. But they accrue far more to the law-abiding. Crime imposes an enormous cost on society—trillions of dollars in time, money, suffering, and lives lost. Criminal victimization can scar people for years after, a fact that shows up in everything from how much they work to how dependent they are on government benefits. Assuming we take reasonable precautions to protect our liberty and privacy, having ALPRs help reduce these costs is clearly worth it.

Flock cameras are an easy target for a populist backlash. But although some of the concerns are reasonable, a panic about a “slave state” shouldn’t determine public policy. Intelligently regulated, ALPRs can be one among many tools in the toolbox of smarter—and therefore less severe—police forces. Dumping the cameras would just be foolish.

For The Atlantic’s September cover story, staff writer Tyler Austin Harper writes about how he came to lose faith in academia, chronicling his recent career as a professor and his decision to leave his tenure-track position after five years at Bates College in Maine. “I saw clearly now what should have been obvious all along. Bates was not a good place to work, nor a moral one. And the problem went beyond a single college: Bates was a node in a higher-education system that offered teenagers an uncertain future in exchange for often unpayable debt, and that asked scholars—enticed by the tweedy dream of a kind of faculty life that has long since been clubbed to death—to keep waiting for the real job that would surely come after the temporary job, and the next.”

Harper began as an enthusiastic assistant professor when he started at Bates: “I saw my academic success as the culmination of several generations of familial sacrifice, paid for by the deferred dreams of others. And I saw American colleges and universities as embodying what was best about this country: the belief that an education is liberating, civilizing, a democratic good for all rather than a luxury to be gatekept. I imagined myself teaching at Bates forever.”

But over time, Harper encountered hypocrisy at Bates and in liberal-elite academia more generally that gradually wore down his initial idealism. He focuses on Bates’s celebrations of DEI and anti-racism, which he felt functioned only as a Band-Aid over the deeper social injustices that he saw the college perpetuating. And he details how, in his view, this infected the courses offered, including a proposal that all students regardless of major take at least two courses “centering” race, white supremacy, and colonialism; influenced who got hired (he served on search committees that passed over more qualified candidates); and shaped the activities on campus.

After a few years at Bates, Harper writes, he “began to see the version of affirmative action that I had defended in my head as a fantasy.” He continues: “I had spent my entire adult life at college, in grad school, and now working as a professor, and I had never before been self-conscious about being a beneficiary of affirmative action. I had always assumed that if I simply worked harder than the people around me—if I read more, went to more conferences, published more and in better venues—then nobody would question whether I deserved to be there. My experience on that search committee, though, disabused me of the notion that any of this mattered at Bates. The school’s culture encouraged us to see professors of color as vehicles for achieving the college’s diversity goals. The inescapable conclusion I arrived at was that I had been hired to be visibly Black first and a scholar second, if at all.”

Harper continues, “Wokeness allowed elite higher ed to create a new model of inclusive exclusion: one in which tuition can continue to climb, acceptance rates can continue to plummet, endowments can continue to expand, and adjunct labor can continue to be exploited as long as the demographics of those paying the tuition and those being exploited continued to get browner, Blacker, more LGBTQAIP2+. It also helped nurture the delusion that elite college graduates were being prepared for lives of civic virtue, and that their highly priced education would be deployed in service of the public good. Never mind the fact that, during my time at Bates, roughly a quarter of the school’s graduates went on to jobs in tech, finance, or consulting—­a startling figure that nonetheless pales in comparison to the nearly half of Harvard and Yale students who end up in these same career tracks.”

Tyler Austin Harper’s “Confessions of a Token Black Professor” was published today at TheAtlantic.com. Please reach out with any questions or requests.

Press contacts:
Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | The Atlantic
press@theatlantic.com

Illustrations by Erin Jia

Updated at 10:12 a.m. ET on August 15, 2026

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As you cross the Androscoggin River into Lewiston, you pass on your left the waterfalls that once set the mills to humming. On your right, affixed to a pockmarked brick mill—now defunct, it had spun tens of thousands of bedspreads a week—a 30-foot-wide marquee sign reads HOPEFUL.

And so I was. My wife and I drove by that unlit sign on the hot May afternoon when we moved from New York to the interior of Maine. It was 2020. The 100,000th American was about to die of COVID. And I was starting my dream job.

Arriving at Bates College, we passed the empty quad, took a left, and pulled our U-Haul up to our new home: a century-old colonial just off campus, ringed by a tangle of blooming lilacs and wild blackberries. Someone had just mowed the grass. As we began unpacking, alternating between unloading boxes and marveling at the house—twice the size and half the rent of our Queens apartment—an older man crossed the street and introduced himself as a retired faculty member. We made Norman Rockwell small talk. His wife, crouched in a shaded corner of her garden, waved with a pair of pruning shears.

The setting was impossibly idyllic. And it was not the first time in my academic career that I’d had occasion to reflect on my good fortune. My path to the professoriat had been a fairy tale. In 2014, I went straight from my bachelor’s degree at Haverford to a fully funded Ph.D. program in comparative literature at NYU. Five years later, during my first season on the infamously brutal academic job market, I won a tenure-track position at Bates, teaching interdisciplinary humanities courses in the school’s popular environmental-studies program. I got the email on December 23, 2019, a Christmas miracle. Topping off this epic run of luck, I signed my contract mere weeks before the country reported its first case of the coronavirus, meaning I was spared from the pandemic freezes and rescinded job offers that would effectively shut down academic hiring.

When I defended my dissertation on Zoom that spring, one of my advisers joked that seeing me with a tenure-track job in hand was like “watching the last dinosaur being born.” It was at once a compliment and a grim acknowledgment of reality. I had won the lottery in an apocalypse. I was going off to the kind of secure, prestigious, fairly remunerated academic job that was rapidly going extinct in a world where most people teaching college courses were stuck in the permanent underclass of contingent labor.

The summer before my first semester of teaching was bliss. I went for long runs along the Androscoggin and the pine-studded Lake Auburn. I arranged books in my sunny campus office and bought snake plants for the windowsill. My wife, who had spent years working at Glacier National Park during college breaks, was thrilled to again be living in a place with real, capital-N Nature. We drank hard cider at a hilltop orchard with views of the White Mountains, made blackberry pie from our own bushes, and posed for photos on the giant boot in front of the L.L.Bean store. Every effort was made to push New York City, with its money lust and voguish pop-ups and puffy-vested financiers and pandemic chaos, far from our minds. We studiously applied ourselves to the task of becoming, if not true Mainers—that requires being born there—then at least credibly Maine-ish.

I believed in American higher education with the dewy fervor of a young missionary. I came from a long line of people possessed by the unshakable faith that college was a ticket to a better life. My grandmother, holler-born in the mountains of West Virginia, didn’t finish high school. My mom made it through an associate’s degree before I came along and she had to abandon her education. I saw my academic success as the culmination of several generations of familial sacrifice, paid for by the deferred dreams of others. And I saw American colleges and universities as embodying what was best about this country: the belief that an education is liberating, civilizing, a democratic good for all rather than a luxury to be gatekept. I imagined myself teaching at Bates forever.

Everywhere in Lewiston, the signs of ghostly wealth, long gone, were visible—the grand factories, endlessly repurposed in the latest revitalization scheme; the paint-peeling mansions on the hill and the cars rusting in formerly stately yards; the addicts on the corners dozing off or holding cardboard signs that pleaded their case. To all appearances, it was a town that had gone bust. That is, until you arrived at Bates, a 133-acre Eden of manicured greens and august buildings smack in the middle of postindustrial purgatory.

Our neighborhood was an informal extension of campus: a mix of homes owned by current or former professors, as well as other properties, such as the faculty house we lived in, that the college owned and rented out. Another home on our street was occupied by a college administrator who was passionate about DEI issues, a woman of color whom I will call Ava. (I have elected not to name the faculty and staff in this story; my goal is not to single out individuals but rather to write about the problems I saw at Bates and in higher education more generally.)

Ava was bighearted and fiery, and seemed to feel some combination of neighborly obligation and professional duty to make sure that her new Black colleague and his nice white wife felt welcome in Maine. These overtures mostly took the form of evening drinks at her house—chairs set a COVID-safe six feet apart, a bottle of chardonnay on the porch between us.

As I got to know Ava, I was surprised to discover that she viewed central Maine as a Stephen King–esque hell, a place where ancient prejudices and violence lay just beneath the friendly college-town facade. She regaled my wife and me with stories of alleged racial offenses, both major and minor, and generally made it clear that she thought Lewiston—an island of diversity in an otherwise famously homogenous, if not notably reactionary, state—was a hub of white supremacy. One evening, Ava confessed to me that when she drove through town and spied the local “crackers” sitting on their porches (not unlike the very porch we were sitting on), she sometimes thought to herself that these townies would probably like to kill her.

I didn’t know what to make of Ava’s views. I won’t pretend that my sensibilities were inflamed by the word cracker, but the epithet also didn’t seem like one that a college administrator should be using—especially at a school that admits a not-insignificant number of white, working-class Mainers. I also had a difficult time taking seriously the idea that I had moved to a place with would-be Klansmen around every corner. I grew up outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—another deindustrialized, permanently revitalizing urban center—and Lewiston felt familiar to me. The people I met were nice, hardworking; they minded their own business. I don’t think it ever occurred to Ava that I could have come from a similar place and similar people.

But although I sometimes found the things she said classist and even offensive, I also genuinely liked Ava. She had a fast wit and a quick laugh. She watered our tomato plants when we traveled to Boston to visit family. We traded texts about the baby fox that scampered through the neighborhood’s yards in the morning and the oversize groundhog that pestered the dogs. I left freshly baked sourdough baguettes on her porch; we commiserated during power outages. Ava struck me as perhaps a touch paranoid, but she was also obviously smart. More important, she was a well-credentialed authority on racism, and I took such people seriously. Why wouldn’t I?

I’d never had great enthusiasm for identity politics; I’d been a socialist since my early 20s, and it had generally been my experience that liberals were as eager to talk about race as they were uneager to talk about class. Yet I also assumed that conservative complaints about “wokeness,” a term just coming into vogue as a pejorative, were essentially Fox News hysteria. Until I got to Bates, I had little reason to suspect that they held any merit.

[From the March 2026 issue: Tyler Austin Harper on the multibillion-dollar foundation that controls the humanities]

At Haverford, the campus politics were of the earthy, stoner, peacenik variety—more focused on “late capitalism” and President Obama’s drone warfare than flamboyant identitarianism. At NYU, the students and faculty seemed more interested in enjoying the hedonistic riches of the city than anything that might reasonably be called “woke.” The new political correctness that was spreading on many elite campuses felt mostly like background noise, and seemed harmless besides.

That’s why, when Ava gave me anti-racist reading recommendations that first summer in Maine, I read them with an open mind. And when I found them disquietingly flimsy, politically bizarre, and, in their naked essentializing, even sort of racist, I assumed that I must be the problem. As a light-skinned Black guy who doesn’t speak African American English, I had rarely been subjected to acute prejudice in my life. I thought that perhaps I simply wasn’t Black enough—“authentically” Black enough—to understand the kind of racial pessimism that had become so mainstream.

Ava was hardly the only pessimist among my new co-workers. Around the start of the semester, I attended an informal orientation event for early-career Black faculty, where I assumed we would talk about our research interests or simply get to know one another. Instead, the gathering felt more like a combined therapy session and HR seminar. At one point, someone casually rattled off a series of local establishments to steer clear of, vaguely implying that they were filled with bigots. Alarmed by the notion that race relations were so bad in Lewiston that there were places I should avoid eating, I asked why one restaurant in particular had earned a reputation for intolerance. My colleague said that a student of color had worked there and not liked it very much.

The source of the most intense racial monomania on campus, I came to realize, was senior leadership. In one of my first encounters with the man who was then dean of the faculty, I mentioned how excited I was to be joining one of the few American colleges founded by abolitionists. At this, the dean—a white biologist who was an expert on sponges—frowned, as though my rosy view of the school’s antislavery history physically pained him. He conceded that, sure, it had been founded by the abolitionist minister Oren Burbank Cheney, but he pointed out that Benjamin Bates, the textile tycoon who had funded the college, had processed slave-picked cotton in his mills. I had come into Bates rather smitten with the idea that I was a Black academic joining the ranks of a faculty whose predecessors had agitated for Black freedom, but the dean seemed to feel that this was actually something to be faintly embarrassed of, a history that was best mentioned, if at all, only after layering on an array of caveats.

I found this kind of endemic self-flagellation to be eye-roll-worthy. But the charged atmosphere at Bates didn’t feel out of step with that of the country as a whole, at least initially. Yes, the college sponsored overearnest discussions of books such as White Fragility and How to Be an Antiracist. Yes, the president of the college bragged that 67 percent of new faculty hires that fall were “BIPOC-identified,” and, sure, it seemed likely that some racial-discrimination laws had been ignored to get that number so high. Yes, college leadership was constantly adding new letters to the sexuality acronym—LGBTQ became LGBTQAIP2+. And, yes, many of us in academia tacked pronouns onto our email signature with the righteous zeal of Martin Luther hammering his 95 theses to the church door. I certainly did. But none of this seemed all that unusual. Bates was weird in 2020. But America was weird in 2020.

That first year, I kept my head down and let the small oddities I noticed pass by without much reflection. Between teaching, grading, student advising, Zoom faculty meetings, twice-weekly COVID testing, wrangling a hyperactive rescue puppy, and trying to survive the Maine winter, I didn’t have much time to think about the college’s (or the country’s) cultural eccentricities. Ironically, that pandemic year turned out to be the sanest one I would experience at Bates.

The request came a couple of weeks into June 2021: Would I co-chair the task force that organized the college’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration?

Before the start of their second year on the tenure track at Bates, professors are assigned service work by the Committee on Faculty Governance. Although they are technically handed their appointments, they can request assignments that align with their interests or aptitudes. I’d volunteered to serve on a committee that was focused on preparing Bates students for graduate school, which was something I really cared about. To make extra money while getting my Ph.D., I’d spent several years working as a freelance grad-school-admissions consultant, and I thought this experience would be an obvious boon. The committee, however, explained that my academic work in the environmental humanities would make me a good fit to lead the MLK Day celebration.

You have got to be shitting me, I thought. I texted a friend and fellow academic in a huff. “Say no,” he shot back. “Or better, say ‘who?’ ”

It was obvious to anyone with eyes that I’d been picked because I was one of the handful of Bates faculty members who didn’t need to wear SPF 50 sunscreen. I admired King as much as the next person, but that wasn’t really the point. The point was that I was getting saddled with Black-Guy Work for which I had no real qualifications. All I knew about MLK, I had learned at my Pennsylvania public high school a decade earlier—which is to say, not very much.

I’d like to tell you that I responded indignantly. Instead, I said yes. I did not want to develop a reputation for being difficult, and I thought (or hoped, anyway) that by agreeing, I might earn some goodwill and eventually get rewarded with an assignment I was excited about. I even began to wonder if I was being too sensitive. Maybe the powers that be really did want me to bring a more ecological perspective to Bates’s annual celebration. And, anyway, was it really so bad if they needed a Black guy to be the face of America’s most famous minority day? In this censorious racial climate, who could blame them?

A month after being asked to co-chair the committee, I received an email that left me further discomfited. This one, from a concerned faculty member, said that a white student of mine—let’s call him Mason—had tried to lynch a Black student.

I read the email with my mouth agape. The professor who’d written it was someone whose academic work I thought highly of; surely she wouldn’t make such an extreme accusation if it had no basis in reality. But I was rather certain that Mason—a crunchy-granola environmentalist type outspoken about his progressive politics—was not a virulent racist. He had taken my Climate Fiction course and written a paper critiquing the “Western colonial empire” depicted in a feminist science-fiction novel I had assigned. How, exactly, had he attempted a lynching?

Mason and several other white students had apparently gotten into a dispute with a Black friend they lived with. The white students had asked their Black housemate to leave, and had said they would call the Lewiston police and say he was threatening them if he tried to get his things. According to my colleague, they had thus conspired to “weaponize state power to terrorize or kill” their Black classmate. “It is not an exaggeration to say their actions were an attempted lynching,” she added.

The professor also accused several students who were evidently brought to tears during the unfolding drama of intentionally leveraging their “white womanhood” by crying. The email concluded by demanding that Mason and the other white students face serious consequences. It also demanded that professors of color be provided “protection” if any of the students involved in this “white supremacist incident” enrolled in their courses.

Someone mentioned that the college might be investigating the incident, but if such an investigation happened, to my knowledge nothing ever came of it. Even so, the email stuck with me.

Whatever had happened among those students, and whoever had been at fault, I was sure the conflict was not driven by racial hatred. I was also troubled by the evidence-free assumption that an encounter between a Black liberal-arts-college student and the police was so likely to end in death that calling 911 was tacitly homicidal. Although Black men are significantly more likely to be killed by the police than white men, the number of unarmed Black men who are fatally shot this way annually in America is minuscule—11 in 2021, for instance. And of course, most of those who are unjustly killed by the cops are not undergraduates at one of the most expensive colleges in the country.

I came to understand the Mason affair as emblematic of the kind of “politics” that dominated at Bates, a place where current and future elites paid—or were paid—for the privilege of cosplaying as radicals, victims, or both. In this upside-down, 133-acre world, an “attempted lynching” was a graver threat to Black undergraduates than student debt, and faculty needed protection from their own students. Some of my colleagues, it seemed, were engaged in an Alice in Wonderland–style reenactment of civil-rights-era struggles, in which glancing racial faux pas and willfully misinterpreted private encounters were treated with the solemnity of nooses swinging from oak trees.

In retrospect, it is no coincidence that wokeness blossomed at prestigious American colleges at the very moment when those schools were facing rising discontent over student debt and tuition costs. For the academic aristocracy, touting fealty to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, trans rights, and other progressive movements served as a convenient distraction from the intractable economic and social issues that the colleges themselves were perpetuating. This allowed higher education to reclaim the moral high ground after Occupy Wall Street and the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign—to say nothing of the anti-elite fury that gave rise to Donald Trump—had kicked mud all over academia’s ivy-twined walls. Even better, embracing social-justice rhetoric and adopting schemes to boost faculty diversity were cheap. Cheaper, anyway, than lowering tuition or hiring more tenure-track professors.

Wokeness allowed elite higher ed to create a new model of inclusive exclusion: one in which tuition can continue to climb, acceptance rates can continue to plummet, endowments can continue to expand, and adjunct labor can continue to be exploited as long as the demographics of those paying the tuition and those being exploited continued to get browner, Blacker, more LGBTQAIP2+. It also helped nurture the delusion that elite college graduates were being prepared for lives of civic virtue, and that their highly priced education would be deployed in service of the public good. Never mind the fact that, during my time at Bates, roughly a quarter of the school’s graduates went on to jobs in tech, finance, or consulting—a startling figure that nonetheless pales in comparison to the nearly half of Harvard and Yale students who end up in these same career tracks.

All of this was the backdrop of the dean’s announcement to faculty, in the fall of 2021, that the college’s next major project would be to napalm the strangling weeds of bigotry that were apparently rooted deep in its soil. “Racism, sexism, ableism, classism are deeply embedded in society, in our fields of study, and in the spaces we occupy,” he observed. “To eradicate these inhibitors, these retardants to progress and educational potential, these poisons,” we were told, would require setting aside “self-censorship” and “dogmatic positions.” Some of this “work” would focus on the individual: “Many of us, especially white faculty and staff, require explicit training.” But as with all cultural revolutions, the real change would involve collective struggle.

The dean explained that every department and program at Bates was to complete a racism self-audit. The goal of this project, innocuously called Foundational Dialogues, was to identify areas where white supremacy, “colonial” frameworks, and other forms of bias might be lurking in curricula and major requirements. To facilitate this work, departments were required to bring in an external consultant. Each major would produce a “curricular transformation plan” and deliver the report to the dean’s office.

To me, the whole initiative rang serious alarm bells for academic freedom: The faculty was being made to accept a highly contestable and expressly political conclusion—that racism was latent in every department and program on campus—and then sent on a treasure hunt to find evidence supporting that predetermined finding. Given that the transformation plan was mandatory, We didn’t unearth any white supremacy hidden in our astronomy courses clearly would not be an acceptable verdict.

Even more disturbing was what the dean said would come next: “serious consideration” of a report from Bates’s Curricular Working Group, a committee composed of faculty and students, which proposed that all students be required to take at least two courses “centering” race, white supremacy, colonialism, and “intersecting experiences of power and privilege” within their major. In other words, the report recommended that every single major on campus—not just those in the humanities and social sciences, but also physics, chemistry, biology, and the like—offer and require two such courses.

The report declared that enacting the proposal “will make our students of color feel safer,” but it didn’t say how or why. Moreover, much of the evidence it cited suggested that the proposal was acutely unnecessary. The committee noted that 94 percent of 2020 Bates graduates had taken at least one course that addressed race, power, privilege, colonialism, or white supremacy. It lamented, however, that “only” 21 percent of Bates courses overall touched on these topics.

The committee also wrote that it had looked at 32 other colleges to see how many had DEI-related course requirements. Although slightly over half had at least one required course, none of the schools placed that requirement within a major—a discovery that the committee seemed to find positively titillating. In the committee’s view, the fact that no peer institution it surveyed had tried to force science majors to take chemistry courses on bigotry, for instance, was proof that the proposed requirement was “unique and transformative” (rather than, say, ill-advised and obviously deranged) and would help advance the goal of “distinguishing Bates from its peers.” The committee even provided examples of hypothetical new courses that could fulfill the requirement, such as “Mathematics for Social Justice,” which could help students understand “the role of mathematics as a gatekeeper and driver of injustice.”

Yet even the report’s most absurd curricular recommendations seemed harmless compared with those found in its “Accountability” section. Outside consultants, it proposed, should be brought in to “train faculty” and enact “the cultural shift we now require”; course-development funds might be restricted to only those professors creating classes about approved topics; it was strongly implied that teaching evaluations, an important metric in the tenure process, should be based in part on demonstrated allegiance to the new norms.

Most ominous was the committee’s argument that an “external oversight group” should be created, one composed of faculty experts from Bates and beyond; college staff, including DEI administrators; students who had taken approved courses; and “community leaders and activists.” The committee provided a list of outside organizations that could furnish the enforcers, including a social-justice-inflected arts nonprofit and a “virtual law firm” that appeared to specialize in selling online DEI seminars.

The whole document struck me as an Orwellian masterpiece, by turns insane and sinister. The only thing that gave me solace was the certainty that the proposal was so self-evidently unhinged that it would never get past the rest of the faculty.

All of this social-justice rhetoric also felt wildly hypocritical. The same October day that the dean promised to abolish “retardants to progress”—including classism—adjunct faculty and staff announced that they were starting a union drive, citing “low pay, and poor working conditions at the college.” The union was intended to be “wall-to-wall,” meaning that it would include not just non-tenure-track faculty but also people working in facilities, the dining hall, and other nonacademic roles on campus. The administration’s skulduggery started almost immediately.

Just over a week after the unionization push became public, the student newspaper took down an article about it from its website when a college spokesperson requested that it do so, citing inaccuracies. (The student journalists denied being pressured by the college to remove the article and said that they wanted to ensure that it was accurate.) Shortly thereafter, a new version of the story appeared with talking points and edits suggested by said spokesperson. The college declared that it would not remain neutral during the unionization drive, and by November, Bates had hired the same consulting firm that was helping Amazon crush labor organizing on Staten Island.

[Tyler Austin Harper: America’s colleges are reaping what they sowed]

I began to develop a case of political vertigo. There I was, joining my colleagues in sifting through our curriculum like anti-racist truffle pigs; assigning an Afro Caribbean graphic novel, Marshallese ecopoetry, and the like to diversify my syllabi; and organizing a “Decolonization and Liberation”–themed MLK Day celebration meant to honor a civil-rights leader who had been assassinated while supporting sanitation workers agitating for basic labor rights. Meanwhile, the college was paying ungodly sums to corporate mercenaries to ensure that it could continue exploiting its most vulnerable employees. But if administrators felt the least bit sheepish about their hypocrisy, they didn’t show it.

I was in a search-committee meeting, reviewing the scores of applicants who had applied for an open tenure-track position in the environmental-studies program, when a colleague from another department shared their thoughts on a candidate whose work focused on the African diaspora. “I’m worried his work will be too close to Tyler’s,” they said.

The comment left me dumbstruck. Too close to Tyler’s? This would have been a good point—it is routine to pass on candidates whose interests are too similar to those of faculty already on campus—except that my research and teaching were about 19th- and early-20th-century British literature, with a focus on science fiction and the history of science. Apparently, my colleague had assumed that, because I am Black, I must be an expert on the African diaspora.

Partway through the meeting, I sent an email to a friend recounting the incident. “All of these good white liberals are so racist,” I wrote. Minutes later, I sent another update. “Now we just nixed a candidate who works on American environmental history and Edward Abbey,” I said, “because he did not ‘even acknowledge the profound whiteness of Edward Abbey.’ ” I did not know what “profound whiteness” meant, exactly. (Were all white people profoundly white, or was it possible, through hard work and good behavior, to become merely moderately white, or even mildly white?) But I did know that, whatever “profound whiteness” meant, it wasn’t good.

It had been obvious to me since my arrival at Bates that I was what conservatives like to call a “DEI hire”—that is, I likely wouldn’t have gotten the job were it not for the color of my skin. True, I’d gone to a top Ph.D. program, had prominent advisers, scraped together an above-average amount of teaching experience, and graduated with distinction. I was more than qualified for the job I was hired to do. But was I more qualified than every other candidate who’d applied? Probably not.

Because of the volume of people earning doctorates and the paucity of good jobs available, the country is flooded with talented scholars who have spent years bouncing from gig to gig, contract to contract, hoping to win a tenure-track position. This system pits people several years out of their Ph.D. program, armed with substantial publication records, against those straight out of grad school. I was in the latter camp. When I applied to the Bates job, I am certain, I was competing against applicants with more teaching experience, a postdoctorate fellowship or two under their belt, perhaps even a published book.

I knew being Black had given me an advantage on the job market—over the past decade, colleges and universities haven’t exactly hidden how desperate they are to hire minorities—but when I’d arrived at Bates I’d also assumed that this boost had been defensible and comparatively modest. I believed that affirmative action was about redressing historical inequalities, and I thought I knew how it was supposed to work: If you have an A– white candidate who is very polished, and a B+ minority candidate who has some rough edges but shows real potential, you hire the minority. After a few years at Bates, though, I began to see the version of affirmative action that I had defended in my head as a fantasy.

One of the first blows to my idealism about the academic meritocracy came in late 2022, when I was serving on another search committee, for an assistant professor in the sciences.

With the exception of educating young people, selecting new tenure-track faculty is arguably the most solemn responsibility professors have. Academia is one of the only fields in America where people are hired for jobs that are intended to be permanent, held until age or infirmity forces them to step aside. At small liberal-arts colleges, where each academic department might have only a handful of faculty members, these decisions are especially consequential.

After a monthslong search, we’d narrowed down the pool of applicants to a trio of finalists, two minorities and one white candidate: I’ll call them Sofia, Charlotte, and Sarah. During their campus visits—in which each of the three candidates put on a teaching demonstration, gave a “job talk” about their research, met with students, and sat for interviews with faculty members—it became clear to me that only Sofia was viable. She was wrapping up an impressive postdoc, had an original research program, and worked on topics that would excite our students. The fact that Sofia also happened to be a woman of color didn’t hurt. She was indisputably the best choice, and I was sure my colleagues on the search committee would agree. Initially, most of them did.

Yet as our deliberations wore on, the mood on the committee shifted. The objection emerged that Sofia, although a brilliant scholar, did not have much experience working across disciplines. There was also some worry that she seemed more focused on research than teaching—not a trivial matter. A small liberal-arts college like Bates is teaching-centric by design, and it did seem like Sofia would have been more at home at a high-powered research institution. I understood these reservations, and in fact shared some of them, but I also thought this put us in a bind.

The other two finalists had clear flaws. Sarah’s trip to Bates had been lackluster to the point of disqualifying, while Charlotte’s had been borderline embarrassing. The latter’s research in biology was, even to my untrained eye, shockingly unsophisticated. “I have substantial reservations about Charlotte’s ability to teach complex, rigorous courses,” I said in my notes from her campus visit. I added that, as far as I could tell, her work didn’t seem much more complicated than walking around and counting animals. As for the mock course she showcased for her teaching demo, it struck me as being pitched at the level of a high-school class. A scientist who had knowledge of her field told the committee that Charlotte’s research was simplistic and 50 years out of date, and that her published work had appeared in middling journals. He questioned whether she was qualified at all.

Given our uncertainty about Sofia and the weakness of our two alternatives, I assumed we would return to our pool of applicants in the hopes of finding a candidate we might have overlooked. Instead, something incredible happened. The majority of the committee members slowly began to convince themselves that Charlotte was the right choice. She had extensive work experience, had a history of teaching interdisciplinary courses, and had developed DEI programs at her current institution. This was all true. But it also did not change the fundamental fact that Charlotte was a remarkably low-wattage academic. The fact that we would entertain giving her a job seemed mostly due to her pigmentation and her enthusiasm for DEI bureaucracy.

The committee’s letter to the dean, who had final say over the decision, summarized the rationale for hiring Charlotte. It was a marvel of sugarcoating, describing her research as “primarily observational and centered on the distribution of species in different kinds of environments.” (In other words, she walked around and counted animals.) It confessed that “we were uncertain whether her research program would develop into something that used some of the most modern tools.” (Which is to say, we weren’t sure if she was capable of abandoning her 1970s methodologies and joining 21st-century science.) And it noted that we were not confident she had the “ability to help our students develop skills that would be most helpful for going into the increasingly digital and computational workplace.” (She might not be able to help our students develop the kinds of proficiencies that would make them employable.) Still, we made the case for giving Charlotte a tenure-track job at one of the most selective liberal-arts colleges in the country.

Thankfully, the dean saved us from ourselves. Although he was a primary cheerleader for DEI on campus—and although he was afflicted with a degree of racial neurosis that would have made Rachel Dolezal blush—the dean was also a biologist, and he must have known that Charlotte had no business at Bates. He voiced “significant concerns” about her research quality, questioned whether she could meet tenure standards, and said he was “very concerned” by the idea that we would knowingly hire someone who lacked the ability to prepare our students for this millennium’s job market.

In the end, Charlotte did not get the offer. But the entire episode left me distressed by what it seemed to suggest about the way many of my colleagues at Bates viewed scholars of color.

Did they really believe, however deeply in the recesses of their subconscious, that the only way to get “marginalized” faculty on campus was to lower academic standards to the subbasement? The idea made me irate, not only because it was racist, but because, selfishly, it made me look bad. Maybe I was not an academic rock star, but I thought I was doing quite respectably at Bates; by any reasonable metric, I was meeting, even exceeding, the college’s expectations for tenure-track faculty. I was placing articles in well-respected journals. An editor at one of the top university presses was interested in my book project. I’d received glowing internal reviews from members of my tenure committee.

I had spent my entire adult life at college, in grad school, and now working as a professor, and I had never before been self-conscious about being a beneficiary of affirmative action. I had always assumed that if I simply worked harder than the people around me—if I read more, went to more conferences, published more and in better venues—then nobody would question whether I deserved to be there. My experience on that search committee, though, disabused me of the notion that any of this mattered at Bates. The school’s culture encouraged us to see professors of color as vehicles for achieving the college’s diversity goals. The inescapable conclusion I arrived at was that I had been hired to be visibly Black first and a scholar second, if at all.

Even more upsetting, my experience on that committee changed how I viewed other newly hired minorities on campus. I sometimes found myself reflexively wondering whether Bates’s professors of color were up to the job, or whether they were underqualified fodder for the school’s social-engineering regime. I could not unlearn what I had discovered: that more than a few people at this elite little college seemed happy not just to move the goalposts for people like me, but to take them down entirely.

The dean, of course, happened to be familiar with Charlotte’s research areas. But if she had been a sociologist or a historian, would he have deferred to the expertise of the faculty on the committee? How many other Charlottes had already been hired at Bates? And how common was this kind of thing at other colleges around the country? It seemed highly unlikely that I had landed at the only school in America so hell-bent on getting minorities through the door that it would make a mockery of academic standards if need be.

I never stopped believing in affirmative action in principle, but I slowly stopped believing in it in practice. I’d understood the spirit of affirmative action to be about recognizing that people from historically underrepresented groups often face additional barriers, about affirming that talented minorities who may be less connected and superficially less refined can nonetheless rise to the occasion if given the opportunity. It seemed to me that the Bates administration’s push to diversify at all costs had led some of my colleagues on the faculty to internalize the opposite idea: that it is not especially important to find minority candidates who are capable of being held to traditional academic norms. Justice and anti-racism required a two-tiered system, a sort of woke Jim Crow, in which radically separate standards were applied to white and nonwhite candidates. In short, I came to see Bates College, self-styled beacon of progress, as an institution that was deeply, incorrigibly racist.

One of my friends, a Black software engineer, has a theory about navigating the 2020s job market as an African American. He jokes (but it is not really a joke) that there are “replaceable negroes” and “irreplaceable negroes.” The goal, he says, is to become an irreplaceable negro: someone who is unfireable because they are too good at their job, because they work for a company that doesn’t have a lot of Black people and can’t afford to lose any, or, ideally, both.

By the spring of my third year at Bates, I’d come to the happy conclusion that I was an irreplaceable negro. I’m pretty sure that I had published more than any other tenure-track humanities professor in my cohort. I taught courses that were popular with students, and, most important, two other Black, pre-tenure male professors had recently left the college. I reasoned that Bates couldn’t afford to bleed any more Black guys, and because I was finding the atmosphere at the college more bizarre and stifling by the day, I resolved to begin speaking my mind.

I was angry about the culture at Bates. I was sick of being treated like a racial prop rather than a professor, which included being continually recruited to do Minority Work I found silly or degrading. In addition to serving on the MLK committee, which I did for several years, I had been asked to be on multiple committees related to the college’s metastasizing diversity bureaucracy—work it seemed that my white faculty friends were rarely asked to do.

But more than this tokenizing, it was the disconnect between the college’s progressive patter and its labor practices that was pushing me toward a breaking point. Environmental studies had lost several non-tenure-track faculty members since I’d arrived, each a fantastic professor. Watching this happen as the administration continued to spend most of its time bleating about social justice left me considerably less patient when college leadership made its next cartoonishly progressive move.

Bates’s Academic Affairs Council was a small but powerful committee composed of the dean and four senior faculty members drawn from the humanities, social sciences, sciences, and interdisciplinary studies. In December 2022, the council circulated draft legislation for a version of the proposal that the Curricular Working Group had suggested back in 2021: the Race, Power, Privilege, and Colonialism requirement, or RPPC, as it came to be known. If the proposal passed a faculty vote, every major would be required to offer at least one course related to “race, power, privilege, colonialism, and their consequences.” Students would be required to take two such courses, one of these in their major. That the council was composed of five white people, with nary a professor of color among its ranks, added a degree of bleak hilarity to the whole affair.

I found it less funny, though, that the council was determined to have its way seemingly regardless of broader faculty sentiment, which early polling had shown was thoroughly skeptical of such a plan. At a March 2023 faculty meeting, the RPPC requirement was put up for debate and comment. I commented.

Standing at the mic in a cramped auditorium, I laid out my case against the requirement: It was a clear violation of academic freedom. The burden for teaching these new courses would probably default to minority faculty members, who would be further pigeonholed into race work that they may not want to do. And asking professors in the sciences to teach courses on race and colonialism would likely be a disaster. Most Bates science faculty lacked any expertise in these areas, nor did they have much experience discussing fraught social issues in the classroom. I argued that pushing them to act as bigotry experts not only was of dubious educational value, but would likely do more harm than good, especially to students of color who would be subject to their fumbling attempts at teaching racially sensitive topics.

I leaned on this last point especially hard. If my time at Bates had taught me anything, it was that the most reliable way to get progressive white academics to do what you wanted was to translate your concerns into the therapeutic language of racial harm. As if on cue, a professor on the council whom I will call Sandra hastened to assure me that she took potential trauma to minority students very seriously. She insisted that there would be ways to ensure that classroom dynamics did not become unpleasant for them; the key, she explained, would be to foster a “culture of repair.”

When I said that I had no idea what a culture of repair meant (really, I just wanted to see her try to substantiate her hollow jabber), Sandra gave a helpful example of what “repair” might look like in action. She suggested that perhaps there could be a system in which students of color could call out “oops” or “ouch” if somebody accidentally said something racist—as though these were not young adults with basic human dignity paying minor fortunes to be taught by ostensible subject-matter experts, but toddlers learning not to bite their friends when someone grabbed their toy truck. It took every last ounce of my already threadbare professionalism not to lean into the mic and say “Oops.”

I had long privately believed that the specter of student demand was being used as justification to pass legislation that only senior administrators and a few tenured radicals were excited to see put in place. A strange email I received a few days before the March 2023 faculty meeting appeared to confirm this. In it, a member of the student government not so subtly nudged me to support the requirement. When I wrote back explaining the various reasons I did not, she confessed that she and her peers had been asked by the council to encourage (read: guilt-trip) their professors to endorse it. I was disturbed that students were apparently being recruited for an influence campaign. The student told me, too, that she and her peers had been “blindsided” by the proposed requirement, but had been presented with an almost uniformly favorable faculty view of it.

I also got an email, after the meeting, from “oops, ouch” Sandra, who seemed quite anxious that a young Black professor with leftist politics objected to the committee’s vision. During our exchange, she noted that my views on academic freedom were also found among “faculty with libertarian leanings”—as though the mere fact that my opinion was shared by professors who were not liberal progressives was proof that the opinion was illegitimate. She added, “I do have some suspicion about white people using arguments like this to avoid addressing systemic racisms.” To me, it seemed obvious what she meant: Did I, a Black man, really want to be on the same side as people who didn’t want to Do the Work?

I told her that I saw Bates’s new scheme as simply the liberal mirror image of what was already happening in places like Florida, where the state government was policing curricula to advance a racist, homophobic agenda. “I’m not willing to support violating intellectual freedom in higher education just because it happens to be my team that’s doing it,” I wrote.

Sandra seemed stuck: Some minority professors supported the requirement, while others, like me, did not. In my observation, woke white academics—who are largely acculturated to defer to the “lived experience” of their Black and brown students and colleagues—had next to no ability to make decisions when confronted with minorities who disagreed with one another. Encountering “marginalized” people with opposing views tended to create a kind of cognitive paralysis in some of my white co-workers, and I noticed that, in such cases, they usually followed the recommendation of the most recent minority they’d spoken with about the issue. With my friends, I jokingly called this the “last Black person I talked to” problem.

But this problem was also an opportunity: If you could manage to be the last minority voice that a white professor or administrator heard before they made an important decision, they’d often just do what you told them to. With Sandra, apparently, it worked. My rebuttals to the RPPC started to land, and she asked if I could support a version of the proposal that would still force students to take two courses on racism without requiring every major on campus to furnish these courses.

I told her that I could. Although I still privately disliked what seemed to me a naked politicalization of our curriculum, my core objections had always centered on the faculty’s academic freedom, and the absurdity of making chemists teach courses on white supremacy. If the requirement could be fulfilled with classes that were already being taught, or voluntarily added, that compromise seemed worth making, especially if it meant that students would be less likely to be subjected to “Mathematics for Social Justice” slop. Sandra said she would suggest this modification at the next Academic Affairs Council meeting. Less than two weeks later, a new version of the legislation was distributed, now with the major requirement removed. The vote to pass or kill the legislation would take place at the April faculty meeting.

I thought, briefly, that my side had won. Yet a week later, a counterproposal came across the transom, this one buoyed by a small but vocal corner of the faculty that was especially militant about social justice. It restored the original demand that every major create required courses on racism.

By some act of cosmic mercy, I had an unexpected personal matter crop up days before the vote, which meant I would be out of town on that fateful April Monday. I alerted a few colleagues who also opposed the legislation. “I won’t be at the meeting,” I told one, “but honestly that’s good, as I think my head would explode.”

I later learned that professors in the Africana program, one of the centers of performative radicalism at Bates, stood outside the meeting distributing flyers that announced they would effectively hold the curriculum captive if they didn’t get their way. They informed the rest of the faculty that they would not allow their classes to count for the requirement if the less aggressive version of the legislation passed. This would have made any implementation logistically challenging, leaving students to fight over spots in a smaller number of courses that could fulfill their obligations. In what seemed to be an even more cynical manipulation, a number of students—many of them minorities—were brought to the meeting by a white faculty member, apparently as visual aids; they audibly cheered for the counterproposal.

Perhaps some professors were uncomfortable striking down an anti-racism requirement in front of the students, or maybe they recognized that Africana’s threat had put everyone in a difficult spot. It’s possible, I suppose, that the light of truth and progress had simply warmed their frigid hearts. Whatever the reason, Bates’s faculty relented: The vote was 73 percent in favor of a measure that only a small minority had originally supported.

The vote and all that preceded it finally pushed me to speak up in a forum that was more public than a faculty meeting. It didn’t help my less-than-rosy outlook that, just a couple of weeks before the April faculty meeting, the union effort had officially failed. That June, I published an op-ed in The Boston Globe titled “I Am the Wrong Kind of Black Professor.”

Voicing the frustrations that I had long kept mostly private was cathartic. I was also about to begin a yearlong break from Bates, a combined research sabbatical and parental leave. I convinced myself that I could stick it out when I got back. I still adored my students, and loved sharing books and films I cared about with them. And even if my views frequently differed from those of my colleagues in environmental studies, they were kind and open-minded people.

The year that I was away, I tried to find humor, sometimes dark, in the glimpses of Bates madness that blipped on my radar: an email sent to the entire faculty to complain that a campus “Scholar Tea” event was appropriating “Black Queer Southern traditions.” A Martin Luther King Jr. Day meeting I attended where a white social scientist argued that putting a silhouette of a farmer on a poster was problematic—that year’s MLK theme was “Food Justice”—because farmers “default to whiteness” and “tractors reflect whiteness.” The Center for Inclusive Teaching and Learning hosting a “DeStress Fest” for faculty featuring a “Lunch & Play” (Play-Doh, LEGO, “other fun ‘toys’ ”), arts and crafts, and “a soft bunny in the next room to pet.” It was incredible to learn that I worked at an adult day care.

But nothing seemed as humorous after I came back to campus.

My leave had started just a few months after OpenAI’s breakthrough model of ChatGPT was released, leaving dazed professors and administrators flailing in their response to a technology that seemed poised to make the college essay obsolete. I assumed that by the time I came back in the fall of 2024, Bates would have a strategy for dealing with this existential threat to American higher education.

Yet upon my return, I found that, even as Bates faculty panicked about AI-enabled cheating, many of my colleagues seemed to have little collective will to do anything about it. Nor did the administration seem especially concerned that our students now had at their disposal a tool that could do their reading, writing, and thinking for them. I was distressed to find that safeguarding the basic tenets of liberal arts, or providing students with an experience that might still be recognizable as an education, seemed to be a low priority at Bates.

A search committee I joined that fall compounded my disillusionment. By this point, I had mostly lost the capacity to be scandalized by the administration’s questionable DEI policies, or by those policies’ deep tension with the college’s labor conditions. During this search, however, that tension became impossible to ignore. One of the many “diverse” candidates in our search pool was a non-tenure-track professor—I’ll call her Mia—who had been teaching at Bates for multiple semesters. Her research was exciting, her courses were compelling, and she was a hardworking and thoughtful colleague.

Further, it is routine for colleges to give tenure-track jobs to non-tenure-track faculty members: These “internal candidates” have the advantage of being a known quantity, and departments are often eager to do right by a co-worker who has been stuck in career limbo. The path to becoming a tenure-track professor can be grueling—the system asks people to spend the prime of their life moving from low-paying job to low-paying job, from one state to another to another, all in the hopes of one day getting a permanent position. Because many universities cap the number of courses that adjuncts can teach (to avoid having to comply with federal health-care mandates), many of them have to teach half a dozen or more per semester spread across different local colleges—a practice known as “freeway flying”—to cobble together a living. One in four non-tenure-track college educators relies on public assistance. One in three earns less than $25,000 a year.

Mia’s position at Bates was about to expire, and so I assumed that we would take the rare opportunity to hire her onto the tenure track. Once again, I watched a committee talk itself out of an obvious choice.

On a cold morning a few days into 2025, the group arrived at its final decision: We would not be hiring Mia, a result that made it likely that this would be her last semester at Bates, and perhaps her last semester as an academic. If Mia had been a mediocre teacher or scholar, that would be one thing. But the committee agreed that she was absolutely qualified. There just happened to be another “diverse” candidate who was judged to be a marginally better fit, and who did more to expand our curricular offerings. I had watched the college chew up and spit out enough non-tenure-track professors that Mia’s fate shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it did.

I saw clearly now what should have been obvious all along. Bates was not a good place to work, nor a moral one. And the problem went beyond a single college: Bates was a node in a higher-education system that offered teenagers an uncertain future in exchange for often unpayable debt, and that asked scholars—enticed by the tweedy dream of a kind of faculty life that has long since been clubbed to death—to keep waiting for the real job that would surely come after the temporary job, and the next temporary job, and the next.

I had been spared all that. And I was on the cusp of getting the very thing I had wanted since I was a 21-year-old English major in my modernism professor’s wood-lined office, declaring that I would like to do her job one day. My senior colleagues in environmental studies talked about my tenure as if it were a foregone conclusion and openly discussed how I was next in line for program chair. The same January morning we decided not to hire Mia, Bates’s president announced that I was one of four professors—and the only non-tenured faculty member—whom my colleagues had voted onto the powerful Strategic Planning Steering Committee, a body composed of the president himself, various vice presidents, and a member of the board of trustees. I was on the inside track of an inside track, but it felt hollow.

Sitting in that last search-committee meeting, deliberating the fate of a person who, like me, had spent years chasing after a career that felt more like a calling, I was unexpectedly gripped by a granite certainty. I did not want to keep doing this. My academic Stockholm syndrome—You do not leave the tenure track—subsided in a rush. Five years after my adviser had likened me to the last dinosaur, I decided to walk my academic career into a tar pit rather than wait for the asteroid. I sat in my car after the deliberation about Mia ended and sent an email to a confidant explaining that I intended to leave Bates.

The story of elite higher education’s hiring and labor practices and the story of its decades-long creep toward progressive extremism are not separate or even contradictory. They are the same story. In 1969, a survey of 60,000 professors found that 27 percent identified as moderate, 28 percent as conservative, and 46 percent as liberal or left. Now, at some of this country’s top universities, only single-digit percentages of faculty identify as conservative. A 2025 survey of Harvard faculty placed that number at 9 percent.

How this happened is no mystery: The very system that was designed to protect the faculty’s right to free thought collapsed. By 1980, as many as two-thirds of American college professors were tenured. Today, only about a quarter are. We went from a world where most faculty members could say what they think without fear of being fired to one where most people teaching college courses have to worry that their contract won’t be renewed if they cause intellectual offense. It is not surprising that a professoriat disproportionately composed of contract workers would also be one that could be pressured into groupthink.

In a consultant-led meeting I attended near the end of my time at the college, one month into Donald Trump’s second term, the small group of professors and senior administrators present was asked to share what it saw as Bates’s greatest strengths and weaknesses. One of my colleagues said that the college’s greatest strength was its commitment to DEI. Another said that the college’s greatest weakness was that it could be even more committed to DEI. Someone lamented that our ties to the Wabanaki Nations could have been stronger.

As snow turned into slush, I walked by a flyer pasted to a campus building announcing the college’s annual sex week. The technicolor poster proclaimed that Bates would be hosting a game of “dildo ring toss” and would provide “exploration tables” replete with sex toys. Once, I might have seen in that poster a symptom of everything wrong with the college—money wasted on weird bullshit, organized by bureaucrats whose jobs nobody could explain. Now I found it all oddly refreshing. What was Bates if not a place devoted to risk-free ideological masturbation? For a week, at least, we could be honest about it.

Months later, I joined The Atlantic as a full-time staff writer. I was busy enjoying my first fall free from academia when I heard the news: At the November faculty meeting, Bates professors would vote on whether to suspend the Race, Power, Privilege, and Colonialism requirement, which was set to begin in 2026. Cooler minds at the college had evidently judged that, given the political climate, now was not exactly the best time for mandatory courses on the physics of white supremacy or the chemistry of colonialism; such a nakedly politicized curriculum, in fact, could make Bates a target of the current administration. The new legislation proposed that implementation of the requirement be paused until 2029—not coincidentally, after the next presidential election.

I thought I’d feel vindicated. I had argued all along that the RPPC was pointless, unworkable, mad. Now it was dead. Yet, unexpectedly, I was disappointed. Here was one last sign that it had all meant nothing. I recalled the dean’s faint embarrassment, years earlier, when I’d said that I was proud to join a school with an abolitionist past. Although the dead cannot speak, I must assume that embarrassment runs both ways.

Bates was founded in 1855 on the principle that a man is a man wherever he is found and whatever color his skin. In the decade that followed, the college furnished from its ranks 173 students willing to spill their blood for the cause of the Union and human liberation. One of these abolitionist-educated men was Holman S. Melcher, who left Bates to join the 20th Maine Regiment. A year later, at Gettysburg, he helped lead the bayonet charge down the hill at Little Round Top and into the maw of an advancing Confederate force.

Now this same college could not find the spine required to simply stand by a curricular change that its faculty and administrators had breathlessly, earnestly, performatively insisted was an imperative because it was nothing less than a matter of justice.

The vote was unanimous.

This article originally described a sign affixed to the wall of a former mill in Lewiston, Maine, as neon. In fact, it is a marquee sign. The article appears in the September 2026 print edition with the headline “Confessions of a Token Black Professor.”

Photographs by Mikayla Whitmore

On any other day when the high was forecast to be 108 degrees, Susie Tyson would not have left her Las Vegas apartment. The stroke she’d had at 30 made her sensitive to the heat, she found; at 67, going out during Nevada’s hottest months would make her dizzy, nauseous, and, in her words, “hurting everywhere.” But on June 17, she had no choice. That morning, a Clark County constable came to evict her and her daughter Shelby from the apartment they’d lived in for nearly 20 years.

The three-bedroom unit was in a stuccoed two-story building, the generic type found in suburban Vegas’s gated complexes, with a spindly olive tree out front. In the summer, they cloistered the place, hanging blankets over their blinds to make the apartment darker and save on the energy bill. Sometimes, they skimped on air-conditioning. Susie and Shelby had wanted to stay in their apartment, and had cleared their clutter enough to pass a housing-authority inspection in June. But that month, their landlord had terminated their lease, saying they’d violated it by leaving the apartment in disrepair and letting their personal property become a fire hazard.

During the weeks that followed the eviction, Susie and Shelby scrambled to find housing, trying not to think about their worst-case scenario—that they could be forced to live outside during a heat wave.

In Las Vegas, heat is the backstory to every summer. It kills car batteries, skyrockets energy bills, makes steering wheels hot to the touch. Heat can make a good day bad, and a bad day worse, for anyone, but some people bear more of its burden than others. For people who are old or work outside or don’t have a stable place to live, the heat is particularly dangerous. When a person’s core temperature gets too hot, their organs can fail, and they can go into cardiac arrest. In recent summers in Vegas, hundreds of deaths have been attributed to heat; one study found that in recent years half of all deaths of homeless people in this county were heat-related.

People have lived in the area that’s now Las Vegas for thousands of years, but only in the past century have they lived like this—tethered to air-conditioning, reliant on year-round shelter. The increasing temperatures threaten to render the city inhospitable. The summer of 2024, which featured one record-breaking 120-degree day, was the city’s hottest ever, and about 400 people in Clark County died of heat-related illness.

In mid-July, when Susie and Shelby had run out of money to pay for the weekly rental where they’d moored themselves for the time being, the temperatures were ticking up to 114 degrees. They could handle the heat or the housing uncertainty, but facing both stresses at once felt impossible. An urgent question loomed: In the middle of a Las Vegas summer, where would they go?

This city was not Susie’s first choice of hometown. Originally from Buffalo, New York, she had lived in California and Oregon before she landed in Las Vegas. Her brother was here, her parents were coming, and she could use child-care help after leaving her husband. The stroke had made her right side weak and, in combination with back issues and a degenerative disc disease, made it necessary to use a cane. She couldn’t work much, and her health issues made driving difficult, in a place where a single errand might send a person a dozen or more miles from home. 

Immediately after the eviction, Susie had Ubered to a hospital; the heat and stress had made her sick. Then, she Ubered to Arizona Charlie’s, a casino hotel 10 miles from the apartment, where she and Shelby stayed six nights and paid about $50 for each one. After bouncing for four more nights between two other casinos, they ended up at Siegel Suites, a weekly rental studio, the cheapest option they could find. Even that cost them $1,000 a month more than the rent they’d been paying.

The studio was also more than an hour’s journey via rideshares and buses to the Macy’s and Target where Shelby, who’s 32, worked part-time, and more than 20 miles from their old apartment. According to Nevada law, they had 30 days to collect any belongings remaining there. On an oppressive July morning, Susie and Shelby took an $8 Lyft to a U-Haul facility near the weekly rental, where they met up with Mia Kells, a woman from a local mutual-aid Facebook group. Susie’s parents and brother had died years earlier, and without family to help, she and Shelby had enlisted Kells as a driver. 

Susie was talkative and apologetic, and quick to smile; Shelby was quiet and firm. During the school year, Shelby taught as a substitute teacher in the Clark County School District and had recently started a bachelor’s degree in early-childhood education, on a scholarship. The two were close—so close, Susie said, that the radio psychic Gary Spivey once told them they were bound together in a past life, but in that reality Shelby was the mother and Susie was the daughter. In this life, Shelby was Susie’s primary caregiver, helping her walk and sometimes dressing her. They were rarely apart. 

Even with air-conditioning, their apartment was stuffy inside. As they sorted through cups, coats, Christmas ornaments, dresses, dolls, DVDs, makeup, and old schoolwork, they moved with a detached sense of purpose, their apartment of two decades no longer feeling like home. In anticipation of the eviction, they’d found a new apartment close to Shelby’s retail jobs. But now they’d lost their housing voucher—public-housing programs can revoke assistance after lease violations—and couldn’t afford the rent. 

Susie collapsed into the couch to sip water. She was winded, and the small fans she’d plugged into the wall were still. 

“The air doesn’t even seem to be working,” Shelby said. She, too, suffered in the heat, especially when her legs swelled and she couldn’t wear the knee braces that helped her manage the pain of her scoliosis.

“I’m melting, literally. I’m sweating,” Susie said. 

By 1 p.m., it was 107 outside. It felt, said Kells, like 107 inside. Their faces were shimmering and flushed, and the mood was grim. 

This was just the beginning of a week of accounting and logistics, during which they would attempt to reinstate the housing voucher and request a social-services payment to cover housing in the next weeks. Their costs were mounting, and the 10 nights in casino hotels, along with the weekly rental—paid only through July 18—had used up Susie’s monthly disability and Social Security checks. At one point, after they’d trekked to the regional housing authority, then been sent to a legal-aid office, an aid worker from another group called to say that they’d been approved for temporary housing—if they could be ready within two hours. But getting back to the rental they’d just paid for and packing up everything they’d be able to bring seemed too tall an order.

A few days later, their best chance of staying even in temporary housing was a friend from social media who had offered to pay for an extra week in the Siegel Suites, Susie said. But the friend’s payment wasn’t going through.

Susie and Shelby took a paratransit bus one last time to the old apartment, to gather jewelry, clothing, and a few pieces of family memorabilia. They couldn’t take anything else. 

“Doesn’t it feel strange to even be here now?” Susie asked Shelby.

A little after 1 p.m., a staffer for the complex locked the apartment. It was 106 degrees out.

Two days later, the heat had broken; the temperature was in the 90s. Shelby took a $9 Uber to a bus stop, so that she was 40 minutes early; sometimes the buses came early, too. In the sky, dark clouds were billowing: The summer monsoon season promised some measure of relief. When the bus arrived, Shelby took a seat near the front. The bus passed her middle school, then the Strip, and then, more than an hour into the trip, climbed to the wealthier area of town, Summerlin, where she worked. 

After the exertion of the week, her mother was unable to stand for more than five minutes before her back started hurting, a stabbing pain. Still, Shelby was feeling hopeful, at least about the next couple of weeks. The online friend’s payment had gone through, so they could stay at Siegel Suites through July 25. Using a payment plan—$40 a month for 12 months—Shelby reserved the studio until August 1. When Susie received her monthly disability payment, they could use that check to pay for a few more weeks and hope to sort out the housing voucher before running out of money again. 

Shelby arrived at the mall before her shift started and looked for a place to do her homework; school took her mind off things. She chose a seat in the outdoor plaza. The more forgiving temperatures didn’t change the fact that she and her mother were still unhoused. Nor did it change the long-term outlook for Las Vegas. The city was in drought, and Lake Mead, the reservoir that fed the city—along with millions of other people in Arizona, California, and Mexico—was projected to hit a record low within a month. Most people in Las Vegas could avoid the heat by hunkering down in air-conditioned cars and air-conditioned buildings. But low lake levels could threaten the power supply of much of the Southwest—and the region’s water supply, too. Drought is hard to escape. 

The next day, July 18, Shelby and her mother would celebrate Shelby’s recent birthday by seeing Ed Sheeran at Allegiant Stadium. They’d bought the tickets back in October, on payments, before they were worried about eviction. When she was younger, her mother had made a habit of calling into radio programs in order to win concert tickets, restaurant gift cards, even a cruise to Ensenada. This would be their first concert in ages. It was difficult to think much further ahead than that.

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Marc Rosenblum, the top statistician at the Department of Homeland Security for more than a decade, resigned in frustration in late July. Three years ago, he established the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, with support from lawmakers from both parties, to provide Congress and the broader public with reliable, timely statistics on immigration enforcement and other homeland-security trends free of political interference. When President Trump returned, that effort was doomed.

During the past year and a half, as the White House directed DHS to run the largest deportation campaign in history, Trump officials blocked Rosenblum’s team from publishing monthly reports. The office’s website went stale, and its immigration-enforcement tables became frozen in 2024, as if nothing has happened since then. In a post on LinkedIn, Rosenblum said he was glad to quit an administration whose values he didn’t share but sad to leave his team operating in a “hostile work environment.”

It’s difficult to think of an issue other than immigration that both plays such a central role in our national politics and has basic statistical metrics that are so poorly understood and easily twisted. Presidential administrations from both parties have tried to spin or delay the release of certain data categories, such as illegal border crossings, when the numbers aren’t favorable. The Trump administration has taken the distortions to extremes. Over the past several months, the White House “border czar” Tom Homan and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin have pledged greater transparency and better data sharing, but the administration’s immigration crackdown continues in a fog of fake numbers and statistical subterfuge.

Arrests and deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement are the data categories most crucial to understanding what Trump is doing in his second term. With DHS’s data office muzzled, the only public source for immigration data has been the ICE website, where the agency periodically publishes enforcement statistics—but it has sometimes gone months without posting updates. ICE statistics show that the agency deported about 400,000 people during Trump’s first year in office, a figure well short of the White House’s goal of 1 million annual removals. Trump officials, starting with Kristi Noem during her time as DHS secretary, found a way to gloss over this fact by claiming that a far greater number of immigrants left the United States voluntarily than were removed by ICE. The department has counted these estimates as “self-deportations,” as if they were confirmed departures rather than rough guesses.

I asked DHS why Rosenblum’s team had been blocked from publishing monthly reports. The department’s press office didn’t answer that question, but it sent a statement: “This is the most transparent administration in American history.” The email was unsigned, and sentences appeared in different-size fonts, as if they had been copied and pasted. The statement said that during the president’s first year in office, “more than 3 million illegal aliens have left the U.S. because of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration including an estimated 2.2 million self-deportations.”

Even the immigration hard-liners in Trump’s MAGA movement aren’t buying it. They say that the administration is backing off the president’s campaign pledge to undertake the largest mass-deportation campaign in history, swayed by pro-business Republicans who are worried about labor shortages and political strategists who warn that aggressive enforcement will hurt the party in the midterm elections. Critics on the right—including Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon, the Fox News host Tomi Lahren, and the MAGA influencer Laura Loomer—have most recently blamed Mullin, who took over from Noem in March.

Mullin has pushed back against critics, insisting that ICE enforcement is the most intense it’s ever been, and that officers averaged 4,200 daily arrests nationwide during the first week of August. DHS hasn’t published data backing that claim, though, and the most recent ICE data show that average daily arrests were fewer than half that amount in July. The discrepancy is typical of the way that immigration data tend to surface in social-media posts or in leaks to right-wing publications or influencers, not in the regular, apples-to-apples systematic way that Rosenblum’s former office was designed to deliver.

The fundamental problem is the same one that U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro faced when she had to tell the president the truth last week about the Reflecting Pool—that the damage to its lining was likely caused by a botched installation, not vandals. The White House’s benchmark for success—1 million deportations a year—has worked better as a rhetorical device than an achievable goal. ICE’s previous record for deportations was 432,238, set in 2013, according to DHS data. The gap between the president’s expectations and the reality of what ICE can pull off endangers the job of any DHS official who acknowledges numbers that fall short. No one wants to tell the president that his deportation claims have no clothes.

Trump’s return path to the White House was paved by embellished immigration data. Illegal border crossings reached an all-time high during the Biden administration, but Trump, Vice President Vance, and other administration officials have repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that 20 to 30 million immigrants illegally arrived during Joe Biden’s term. Last year, DHS published on X an idyllic image of a sandy beach with the caption, “America After 100 Million Deportations,” a figure whose basic math amounted to fantasizing about the forced removal of tens of millions of American citizens. Not to be outdone, the former Border Patrol “commander at large” Gregory Bovino, who remains a hero of MAGA hard-liners, said that he wanted to arrest and deport 100 million people, equal to roughly 30 percent of the U.S. population.

The nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute estimates that the total number of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States increased from 10.8 million in 2019 to 15.8 million in 2024. The Pew Research Center, another nonpartisan group, has similar estimates. White House officials including Stephen Miller have depicted Trump’s crackdown as an urgent remedy to the influx that occurred under Biden. But even as the administration ramps up deportations, it has added to the pool of potential deportees by stripping legal status from more than 1.5 million immigrants who were living and working in the United States with Temporary Protected Status or another form of provisional permission. The number of people whose immigration status the administration has rendered illegal over the past 18 months has so far outpaced the number of immigrants ICE has actually deported.

[Read: The problem with shutting down ICE in blue states]

I spoke to opponents of the administration as well as to Republican supporters frustrated by the lack of transparency and the “self-deportation” estimates DHS has used in lieu of hard data. “I don’t care what the data says. Just give it to me,” Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge at the Center for Immigration Studies, a D.C. think tank that backs Trump’s deportation agenda, told me. He said that the only way to get beyond “the partisan chatter” and allow the public to fairly assess the deportation campaign is for the administration to release reliable counts of the number of people ICE has arrested, detained, and deported.

The ICE website periodically publishes enforcement statistics, but the site went dark from April until July, a period during which ICE arrests and deportations lagged behind the levels reached under Noem. The administration blamed Democrats and the congressional shutdown for the data lapse, but officials I spoke with at DHS told me that staff members working through the shutdown could have continued updating the ICE site. When the agency resumed publishing its statistics last month, arrests and deportations were once more on an upswing.

Mike Howell, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation who worked in the DHS legal office during Trump’s first term, sued the administration last month to force the release of more ICE data. Howell runs a campaign, the Oversight Project, to press the administration to deliver on Trump’s promises, and he helped launch the Mass Deportation Coalition to rally like-minded groups who see themselves as competing for the president’s sympathies with pro-business interests. “The Trump administration’s deportation numbers should be released with the same transparency, regularity, meaningful metrics, and fanfare as other government numbers, like the jobs report,” Howell wrote in a press release after filing the lawsuit. “Americans should be able to track and cheer progress the same way they watch the stock market.”

[Read: Inside Trump’s reversal on ICE]

Howell told me he wants to see the administration target employers and sweep through farms and factories rather than make individual stops in U.S. cities. “It’s the mass-deportation coalition’s view that people aren’t going to leave unless the deportation numbers are much, much larger,” Howell said. His suspicion, he said, is that the administration exaggerates its enforcement data to merely look tough, as a way to prepare the political terrain for a deal with Democrats after the midterms that would provide legal status to some portion of the unauthorized-immigrant population—the scenario that Howell and his allies abhor as “amnesty.”

During Trump’s first term, when record numbers of Central American families crossed the southern border illegally, DHS officials delayed many releases of monthly data until they could package the numbers in a press release with a favorable spin. The Biden administration initially did this, too, but as it faced intense criticism over record numbers of illegal crossings and images of chaos at the southern border, DHS officials came under pressure from lawmakers from both parties to share more data. The department’s most recent appropriations bill includes new oversight provisions requiring DHS officials to publish more data, but compliance remains spotty.

The Office of Homeland Security Statistics was set up outside the typical political review process for a reason, Blas Nuñez-Neto, the top border-policy official at DHS under Biden, who helped start the office and was Rosenblum’s supervisor, told me. “With all of these independent statistical units—whether it’s the Bureau of Labor Statistics or some of the other statistical agencies—what makes them special is that they’re supposedly not reporting to political appointees; they’re just producing raw data,” Nuñez-Neto said.

Nuñez-Neto acknowledged that immigration statistics aren’t the same as economic indicators, because immigration data are a measure of a given administration’s own performance on border enforcement—the pace of deportations, for example. “What OHSS was doing was to report on data that is internal to the department’s functioning,” he said, “so there was always a bit of tension.”

[Read: The border wall is back]

During the final year of Biden’s term, as a bipartisan group of senators attempted to negotiate a new border-security deal (which Trump eventually killed), lawmakers funded Rosenblum’s office at levels beyond its requested amount. His team began producing the kinds of user-friendly data tables that allowed the broader public to compare key statistics over time. Their last data set was published January 16, 2025, four days before Trump returned to office.

Rosenblum, who declined to be interviewed, said in his LinkedIn post that it’d been “an honor to serve the public by improving DHS data quality and supporting evidence-based policymaking,” and added a parting shot at the administration. “Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change,” he said.

DHS officials have not said when, or if, Rosenblum’s office will resume publishing monthly reports. In the meantime, others are happy to fill the void. Last weekend, the Turning Point USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvert wrote on X that he was told by “a source at DHS” that the department had compiled a report that states there have been 1,461,529 “total alien forced departures” over the past 12 months.

In the comments below the post, which had more than 700,000 views, Kolvert said he wasn’t sure how “total alien forced departures” were calculated. The category is not one used by the DHS statistics office, and although Kolvert claimed that the report had already “dropped,” it has not been published anywhere.

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It wasn’t that long ago that “body positivity” was all over the internet. Oppressive beauty standards hadn’t gone away by any stretch, but many people on social media were pushing against limits on what an “ideal” body could look like. Now things have swung in the opposite direction, with the rapid uptake of GLP-1s and the resurgence of a skinny ideal, combined with a new frankness about plastic surgery. The calls for “self-love” and “health at any size” can be harder to hear these days over the roar of looksmaxxers and influencers talking about weight loss and cosmetic procedures.

In this episode of How to Touch Grass, hosts Natalie Brennan and Julie Beck talk with Atlantic staff writer Sophie Gilbert, the author of Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, about how the culture of the internet got even more image-focused and the role that social-media algorithms play in distorting what people consider “normal.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Phone ringing]

Natalie Brennan: Hi, Mom. It’s Natalie.

Mom: Hey.

Brennan: Can you hear me?

Mom: Yeah, I can hear ya.

Brennan: We’re working on an episode, it’s about bodies, and we did an interview that was all about, like, what’s happening online at this exact moment in terms of body image, etc., and I just wanted to tell you a story about something I really remember from when I was little.

Mom: Okay, sure. Go ahead.

Brennan: There was this day that you and I were in Stop & Shop together, which was most days, I guess. (Laughs.)

Mom: That’s true. At least for me, yes. (Laughs.)

[Music]

Brennan: Julie, that’s my mom.

Julie Beck: Hi, Natalie’s mom.

Brennan: And we are going to get back to my mom, but first, I’m Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic.

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

Brennan: This is How to Touch Grass.

Brennan: Julie, this is not an uncommon scenario. I call my mom, put her on the spot with some big story or question, and ask her what she makes of all of it.

[Music]

Brennan: You know how there was all of the magazines at the checkout aisle?

Mom: Yeah, yeah.

Brennan: This was, like, the early 2000s, so I’m sure they were just covered with images of women’s bodies or celebrities’ bodies. And I was probably really longingly looking at these women and, like, sighing and being frustrated.

Mom: Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah.

Brennan: And you were so direct and totally saw what I was doing and were just like, “This is these people’s jobs. Their work is making sure that they look like this. They have full-time nutritionists. They have—

Mom: Cooks. Trainers. Yup. Mm-hmm.

Brennan: Like, this is their life, and their lives kind of exist in these magazines, and our lives kind of exist in this different world.

Mom: Right. Right.

Brennan: And I remember at that age being like, That’s a very helpful distinction for me.

Mom: Right.

Brennan: I just feel like that conversation must be so different between parents and children today.

Mom: Right.

Brennan: Because I don’t know that that delineation exists anymore.

Mom: Which is sad because, you know, like you on the checkout line, kids kinda look to what’s happening in society to kind of gain a little bit of a identity outside of their family, let’s say, right?

Brennan: Right. Right.

Mom: And it’s not just walking on the supermarket line and looking at magazines.

Brennan: No.

Mom: It’s on your phone. It’s on your computer. It’s everywhere. So I feel like maybe some of the good …

Brennan: Julie, my mom and I went back and forth a bit about this memory—about how things have really changed in my lifetime from, you know, magazines to social media to the place that we are at online now.

Beck: I mean, magazines to online I feel like was maybe chapter one of a transformation. Like, we’ve been online for a while now, right?

Brennan: Yeah.

Beck: And yet, I feel like the transformation is not over. Somehow lately we’re entering a new chapter where the pressure of the body-image stuff that we see online feels even more inescapable today than it did just a few years ago.

Brennan: Well, I’m really curious about this feeling that I’ve been having lately, which is this question of yeah, is there something specific about this exact moment on the internet that is making us feel worse about ourselves? Because yes, it does feel like we’re in a new chapter, but what is it? What changed?

[Music]

Beck: Natalie, when you and I were planning this season, we knew that we wanted to talk about the effect of the internet and social-media algorithms on our relationship with our bodies. And we both knew immediately that the person we had talk to about that was our colleague Sophie Gilbert. Sophie’s a staff writer at The Atlantic, and she’s the author of Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves.

Beck: Sophie, am I crazy or was there actually a time not that long ago when the internet seemed to offer maybe a bit of an antidote to the relentless pressure of beauty standards?

Sophie Gilbert: No, you’re not crazy at all. And I actually, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I really think the moment that you are referring to peaked around 2016.

Beck: Okay.

Gilbert: Which, uncoincidentally, was at the end of the Obama era. So—

Beck: Well.

Gilbert: —I mean, 2016 was the year that the Barbie doll was relaunched with different body types, and it was very much this moment where people were sort of talking a lot more about body positivity or even just body neutrality, like this idea that the beauty ideal that we’d long been aspiring to—sort of white, impossibly thin—that it was not reflective of most people.

Beck: Yes.

Gilbert: But there really was this sort of feeling in 2016 that we were coming to accept ourselves with more kindness and more care, and stop sort of the parade of self-loathing that I think was certainly part of my adolescence and my 20s, and particularly the era of the 2000s.

Beck: And I feel like there was something, at least at first, that was relieving about social media just showing us normal people. And as you mentioned, the body-positivity movement that came along with that, that at least for a little while, was really fueled by social media.

Gilbert: I mean, there were some incredible influencers who sort of came of age on Instagram and, you know, just opening the conversation, broadening it, and encouraging people to approach themselves with neutrality if they couldn’t quite get all the way to positivity. People were being blunt about how damaging fatphobia is, how much it hurts people, how completely unproductive it is. There were so many sort of positive voices coming to the fore in that moment that social media really elevated. There have been studies done on body-positivity content and the effect that it had. I think there was one study showing what being exposed to body-positive content on Facebook did to teenage girls. And teenage girls after seeing images that were body positive, they reported feeling much happier about themselves. They reported better self-esteem. It was not just talk. I know people are sort of cynical about things like the Dove campaign for Real Beauty.

Beck: Yeah.

Gilbert: But just because it was coming from corporations doesn’t mean that it didn’t have a positive impact, which I think is important to remember.

Beck: And you can—you can still find some of that more affirming content, right? It’s not totally gone or anything.

Gilbert: No, you totally can. And one place where I think it has really stuck around, which is tremendously helpful, is in parenting. Like, we do not talk to children about their bodies in the way that I remember my mother talking about her body or, God forbid, about other people’s bodies. Like we are—

Beck: Yeah.

Gilbert: —much more, I think, sensitive and attuned to how to raise kids to think positively about their bodies and what they can do, and how they can be, you know, strong and happy, and not be so focused on what they look like. I think the problem is when we start trying to apply that to ourselves. That’s where things get a little stickier.

Beck: Yeah. So, I mean, those things still exist to some degree, but I do feel like the overall vibe of social media feels very different now. (Laughs.)

Gilbert: Yeah.

Beck: How have you seen things change?

Gilbert: Probably of over the last two to three years, maybe since COVID. And definitely sort of accompanying the rise of GLP-1s as a sort of cultural force, not as a, you know, as a health treatment so much, but as a cultural force. There has been a resurgence in this kind of skinny ideal on social media. There are skinny influencers, SkinnyTok, which is this influencers on TikTok who are advising people how to be skinny, how to calorie restrict, and sort of not only advising them, but also talking about why skinniness is the only thing that people should sort of aspire to. During the 2000s, there was so much criticism of women and their bodies. I’m sure you remember the magazine covers of— there was no way for women to win in that era. They were too thin; they were too fat; they were too, you know, they hadn’t bounced back from pregnancy fast enough. And I think we’re all a little wounded from that era, and so we’re very loath now to criticize anyone’s body or to talk really about anyone’s body, anyone who happens to be especially a young female celebrity in the public eye. But it’s also impossible not to notice that stars do seem to be getting a lot thinner. And it’s hard for me and I’m sure for everyone to not worry about what that is doing to us as a culture. It feels like we’re in this period again of living through the sort of heroin chic era of the ’90s as a teenager of, you know, there’s a new cultural ideal of extreme thinness, and that is not an easy thing to live through.

Beck: What kinds of things are you seeing get traction online with people’s social-media algorithms that maybe reinforce that cultural ideal?

Gilbert: Yeah, like I’m thinking of the influencer Liv Schmidt. I think she was banned from TikTok but is still on Instagram, and she has a diet community. She charges people to be in her sort of secret community, and she’ll give you tips. She really seems to be pushing this idea that skinniness will bring you blessings from the universe.

Beck: Mm.

Gilbert: But she doesn’t—she would never sort of come out and outright critique someone else’s body, I think. Everyone has adopted language that—it’s not quite that harsh. Whereas if you compare her to—there’s a diet book that came out in the 2000s called Skinny Bitch. And it was written by two women in the modeling industry, I think, and it is an extraordinary book because it just berates the reader. It’s like, You are a disgusting fat pig. You need to stop eating.

Beck: Oh my gosh.

Gilbert: It’s a horrendous text, but it was a best seller. The language of skinny influencers is not as harsh, but in some ways that just makes it more insidious, I think. I just think everything now in this age that we’re currently in is so much more relentless. Back in the ’90s I would read magazines with my teenage friends, and we would have to, like, pick up a paper magazine to see pictures of very skinny models. But now, if you’re a teenager and you go on your phone, like my God, it’s everywhere. It’s all you’re exposed to. You’re sort of bombarded with imagery.

Beck: Right, like Teen Vogue wasn’t coming again ’til next month—

Gilbert: (Laughs.)

Beck: —at least. Whereas, like, Instagram is all the time.

Gilbert: It is all the time, yeah.

Beck: I think it’s not only, you know, the extreme skinniness and the GLP-1s that we’re seeing, but there’s also sort of new honesty about altered bodies on social media, right? Like plastic surgery and fillers and Botox and other kinds of cosmetic procedures that people are getting done. There just seems to be a sort of new willingness to be honest about that—especially online—which, I guess is nice that they’re not just gaslighting you into thinking they just drink a lot of water and that’s why they look like that. But why do you think our culture’s gotten more open about that?

Gilbert: We are in a moment right now of very conspicuous consumption in terms of our faces and our bodies. It’s sort of—there’s a kind of peacocking going on right now in the culture that applies in all different sort of ways, especially in beauty, especially with regard to money and power. And it’s all connected, and it seems to be getting more and more and more extreme by the day. But at the same time, you’re also monetizing your own value. You’re bringing more attention to yourself, more sort of currency for yourself as a famous person. We really were in this moment where people were questioning whether or not our worth as human beings is directly associated with how we look. And it feels like we’ve just veered all the way away from that point now, where suddenly it’s like, Nope, nope, ’cause we’re in this sort of heavy image-centric, like pivot-to-video era where everything is images all the time. Suddenly everyone is just like, No, it’s how you look is everything.

Beck: It’s interesting what you said about the sort of “pivot to video” of it all. Do you think that’s the main thing that feels different? Like, are we even more image-focused now than we were in the era of body positivity, which also involved images, right?

Gilbert: I think that’s a huge part of it. I do think certainly post-Instagram, post-TikTok, as our attention spans decline and we read less and we talk to our friends less and we spend less time in community, we are all on our phones for hours and hours and hours a day looking at images of ourselves, of each other. I don’t think anyone is supposed to see their own face as much as we do now.

Beck: Yeah.

Gilbert: 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: As someone whose preferred mediums are text and audio, it kind of bums me out, man.

Gilbert: I know, man. I became a writer for a reason. I don’t wanna be camera ready.

Beck: I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the similar shift that I feel like has been happening for men as well.

Gilbert: Yes. No, they totally has, and this is what’s been so interesting about the last five years specifically for me, is that for the first time, you are seeing men exposed to the same sort of intensity of the beauty industry in the way that women have been for decades, and they’re not coping with it well. Obviously, you know the term looksmaxxing and this community of men who are intent on—

Beck: Regrettably, yes.

Gilbert: —maximizing their handsomeness by allegedly hitting themselves in the face with hammers or doing crystal meth to keep their weight down. I mean, all these absurd things that looksmaxxing influencers talk about. Men are sort of, again, being saturated in the same kind of negative sort of hate-yourself language that women have been exposed to for years. There are higher rates of eating disorders now among men. Men are apparently now a lot more worried about their penis size, to the point where people are getting fillers. It’s like all these new anxieties that men are suddenly being encouraged to feel about themselves in a way that is profoundly depressing but also fascinating to me because they’re understanding more of what we’ve lived through all this time.

[Music]

Beck: We’re going to take a quick break. But when we come back: Are body modification and beauty trends actually as common as they seem to be online?

[Break]

Beck: Natalie, the thing that’s really interesting to me about how overt beauty standards are right now is that it’s not something you do in the shadows so that in public you can seem effortlessly hot. We’re showing off the effort.

Brennan: Yes. The best way that I’ve been marking this shift is before 2015, it was such a big deal that Kylie Jenner would not admit that she had gotten her lips done.

Beck: Oh my God, I remember that.

Brennan: And now, recently, she commented on someone’s TikTok with the exact dimensions, material, and doctor who did her boob job.

Beck: Oh my gosh.

Brennan: And the comment ends, quote, “Hope this helps LOL.” Which I think just really shows there’s this proving now of how hard you worked to be this beautiful.

Beck: Right. I mean, if there are two things American culture loves, it is hard work and the pursuit of individual success. (Laughs.)

Brennan: That’s correct.

Beck: So I feel like beauty just ends up feeling like another way you should be self-optimizing, and you don’t have to be ashamed of your self-optimization. Like, you kind of show it off.

Brennan: I feel very stuck in my algorithm, stuck as what it thinks I want as a 30-year-old woman in a city, and it doesn’t matter at this point how quickly I hover or swipe away from content regarding body optimization and alteration. There is this version of my online identity that I have both built for myself and the algorithm has built for me. And at this point, I mean, it feels like I don’t know how to escape that content without just staying off social media.

Beck: Yeah, it does feel pretty inescapable. And, like, the way that cosmetic procedures get talked about, not just on social media where they’re trying to get you to buy something, but even in the news, it’s talked about, like, Everyone is doing it. They’re doing it more. They’re doing it younger. Like, okay, listen to these headlines. These are just a few that I found recently. “The Forever-35 Face.” “The Facelift Is Better Than Ever, and Everybody Wants One.”

Brennan: Mm.

Beck: “The Year All My Friends Got Botox.” “Leg-Lengthening Surgery Is Gaining Popularity Among Men Seeking to Be Taller.” “How Botox Went Middle Class.” “Where Have All the Hooded Eyes Gone?” “Suddenly Everyone Is Looking Extra Wide-Eyed and Awake. Is Upper Bleph Surgery the Reason Why? “Everyone’s On Ozempic, So Why Will No One Talk About It?”

[Music]

Beck: Sophie, you shared a stat with me recently that was so fascinating about the gap between what seems normal and common online and then what the reality actually is.

Gilbert: Yes. No, I like to do this because I think, especially talking about my own book over the past year, one of the things that often comes up is, like, the internet is not real life and yet it can feel very real. And so the more that we can remember that it is not real life, the healthier we can be. So the question that I asked you, I think, I asked you and some other people to guess what percentage of American women get Botox.

Beck: I think I guessed at the time, like, 17 percent.

Gilbert: I think someone else guessed like 15, ’cause there’s this sort of presumption when you feel like everyone you know is getting it or talking about it. It’s sort of—it’s a fair assumption, I think. And then I looked it up. It’s sort of hard exactly to quantify, but the figure seems to be somewhere between 1.5 and 2 percent.

Beck: Wow.

Beck: So for all we talk about Botox, for all the Are people getting baby Botox? and What age is best for Botox? it’s actually not that common. There are way, way, way, way, way, way more of us who don’t do it. That’s not to place a judgment value on whether someone decides to or doesn’t decide to. It’s just to say, I think there’s so much discussion online about beauty treatments, and specifically sometimes about really extreme beauty treatments, that they can feel very normalized, and it’s healthy for us to remember that it’s not that way.

Beck: So is that stat, is that all adult American women of any age?

Gilbert: Yes, yes.

Beck: I’m still really—I’m still really surprised by that. So is it that the trend is increasing, but overall it’s still just a really small percentage of people, or what’s the deal?

Gilbert: It is increasing. It’s not increasing by that much. From what I can figure out, I think Botox usage has gone up 50 percent over the last 10 years, which is not really that much considering how much it went up in the 2000s when it first was popularized in our culture. And I should say, too, that it’s expensive, so it’s very much a sort of—

Beck: Yeah.

Gilbert: —selective expense, and there are lots of people who can’t afford it and might want it but don’t have that in their budget. But it is, yeah, it’s a fascinating statistic.

Beck: Something I’m noticing in this specific moment is that this newfound emphasis on body modification feels hard to talk about. Because it’s like we have held on to one value from the body-positivity era, which is you can talk about your own body, but don’t comment on other people’s bodies. So are we stuck in that place of having a conversation with old language, or what’s going on here?

Gilbert: Yeah, it’s really difficult, right? I think because we’re sort of traumatized from this moment where there was so much relentless critique and obsessive, like, nitpicky focus on women’s bodies in the public eye, I think we’ve rightfully have recognized as extremely damaging, and we do not want to go back to that place. But it does kind of maroon us now in a place where—there’s also something about the way that women are appearing in public at the moment. We’ve seen a lot more images recently of very, very, very slender celebrities. I would say past the point of slender, even.

Beck: Yeah.

Gilbert: That is making us uncomfortable, and we don’t really have ways to describe it without—’cause obviously, we’re not wanting to criticize anyone for their body, because we know how damaging that can be. But also, what is really troubling to me is the cultural impact. I think there are ways maybe to critique it as a cultural trend and not without picking on anyone individually, but it’s one of the things—this sort of backlash from the 2000s—is one of the things that makes this moment so hard to talk about.

Beck: Right, it’s a really hard conversation to have. Like, even right now as we’re talking about it, I’m worried people are going to think we’re saying, Actually we should be judging and commenting on other people’s bodies more, which is not what we’re saying. But when there’s a big cultural shift toward valuing a certain type of look, when enough people are making similar choices, that does affect how people feel about their own bodies. And then if you shut down that bigger conversation by saying, We shouldn’t talk about this at all, because it’s not appropriate to comment on other people’s bodies, and everyone should just do whatever they want, then we lose the opportunity to question this pretty damaging new collective beauty standard that is developing. For instance, the rise of GLP-1s: It’s led to this new era of “thin is in” again.

Gilbert: I think what you just said is really interesting with regard to GLP-1s, right? Because they’ve been really revolutionary medical treatments for lots of people.

Beck: Right.

Gilbert: I have family members on them who have just had the most profound experiences, whose health has been transformed at an individual level. They’re enormously beneficial and helpful and positive for so many people. And speaking of statistics, I think one in eight Americans now is on a GLP-1, so much, much higher uptake than Botox. But we live in a society, and more than one thing can be true at the same time, right? Something can be positive at an individual level and it can also have really damaging cultural ramifications. There has been such a tendency towards extreme thinness that has accompanied this kind of Ozempic era. And that has a potentially damaging impact on the kids, the girls and the boys who are growing up in this era, and holding that up as a standard to aspire to, because it’s an impossible standard, and it’s not healthy, and it’s something that I think we need to find ways to call out while also acknowledging that everyone does have an individual choice to do whatever they need to do for their health.

Beck: I think the issue for me feels like the separation of your individual choice from, like, the stew that you live in. ’Cause even if you’re not a celebrity or an influencer, your choices do still influence your friends and your family and people who see you and know you.

Gilbert: I think one way that is maybe productive, or one thing that is maybe productive for people to think about is that we don’t have to opt in to these beauty standards, to these regimes, to these sort of, like, money-making enterprises. And in some ways, I think we should celebrate opting out as a form of rebellion. Like, the most radical thing you can do right now is just accept yourself exactly as you are, to refuse to have the sort of self-obsession of constantly critiquing yourself and wondering how you could change yourself. I think Naomi Wolf wrote about this in The Beauty Myth, which, you know, she’s gone wayward since then, but I think about it all the time. It’s this idea that this is all a project of distraction, especially for women.

Beck: Mm.

Gilbert: Like, when we’re so focused on keeping ourselves small, it seems so conservative in some ways. If you keep women completely obsessed with themselves and the project of self-maintenance, they’re not thinking about what else they actually need or how to change the world or what they would do if they had power to organize or to demand changes at their workplace or in their homes. It’s a big, big project of distraction. And so the more that we can refuse to be swayed by it, the more that we can embrace sort of visibly aging, visibly being unkempt as a sort of, actually quite a profound choice and one that is meaningful and has meaning for lots of other women as well, not just for us, then maybe the more we can kick-start a sort of, a pushback against this movement.

Beck: Yeah. You used the word distraction, and that stood out to me because I feel like we have the greatest technologies of distraction of all time, in our pockets all the time. So maybe it makes sense that there would be an unholy alliance between the distraction of beauty standards and the distraction of the algorithm.

Gilbert: There is definitely a growing, actively misogynist movement on the right that, for example, does want women to opt out of the workplace and to be completely entrenched in the domestic sphere. And it’s no coincidence to me that so many of the visible avatars for that movement who are women are so groomed. And the idea of clean-girl beauty and stuff like that, it’s all part and parcel of the same thing, which is like, This is what you should be thinking about, ladies. Don’t worry about the other stuff. We’ll take care of that.

Beck: Well, and it’s also—it makes people money, right?

Gilbert: Yeah.

Beck: It makes the beauty companies money, and it makes the tech companies money if you keep, like, scroll, scroll, scrolling.

Gilbert: Anytime anyone gets that rich off of making other people feel bad about themselves, I think we should raise an eyebrow.

Beck: You know, for all of their faults, which have been enumerated many times, earlier versions of social media were at least, like, a little bit more collective, a little bit more about connection, right?

Gilbert: Mm-hmm.

Beck: For instance, Instagram used to show you your friends’ posts in chronological order.

Gilbert: Yeah.

Beck: And now it shows you individually targeted videos from accounts you never chose to follow, and your actual friends just get, like, buried in there.

Gilbert: Yeah.

Beck: So to me, it feels like less of a place to connect and more like a place to consume.

Gilbert: It’s more of a place to be sold things. Instagram is a mall now, I think. It’s whatever can compel us to click the “Buy” button. You know, 10 years ago, there was a lot more text-based social media.There were sites like Tumblr.

Beck: Mm-hmm.

Gilbert: People would write long, long Facebook posts that were just text and didn’t have images or video attached. I mean, it’s that the sites—the social-media sites—have just become so, so, so, so image-heavy. It is very, very gendered and it’s very, very focused on getting us to buy things.

There’s a great quote by John Berger in his 1977 book, Ways of Seeing, about why beauty ads are damaging, and he says something like: The beauty ad steals the woman’s love of herself as she is and sells it back to her for the price of the product. Which is so much of what’s going on. It’s this idea that we cannot be allowed to love ourselves as we are, because if we do, we simply will not buy enough.

Beck: Do you have any kind of advice for how to deal with this?

Gilbert: I think logging off can be profoundly effective, like having a digital detox, removing ourselves from these sort of fake people who feel like they’re real but are not. And spending more time face-to-face with real people, talking to them, and having sort of broader concerns and broader interests. It’s very strange to be saturated in visual perfection all the time. And when you go out in the real world and you see what people actually look like, it’s different. Sounds so trite and so basic, but it can be really powerful.

Beck: What do you think that an individualistic social-media environment does to our ability to see collective problems or come up with collective solutions?

Gilbert: We’ve been living in an individualistic culture for sort of 30 years now. Basically, the moment that third-wave feminism, which was so much about, like, improving on second-wave feminism to make it more inclusive and more successful for other women, and thinking collectively and not just think—as soon as that was replaced by post-feminism and this idea that, like, Any woman can do anything she wants, ’cause that’s her choice, and she can make money and wear whatever she wants and have sex with anyone she wants.The minute that that shift happened, we lost, I think, all the force of—I’m speaking about feminism, but it speaks broadly to other kinds of activism and progress as well. You simply cannot change the world if you are only thinking about yourself.

Again, it comes back to this project of distraction and the idea that we should all be so focused on ourselves and the project of ourselves, and how to have our revenue streams and, our side hustles and our five-to-nines. And because if we do that, we’re not actually thinking about other people. We’re not going to community board meetings or school meetings or PTA meetings. We’re losing that sense of looking beyond ourselves. I think we need so much more of that, and I hope, I hope that it comes soon.

Beck: Is the solution to just get offline and touch grass, or to change the culture of the internet, or a little bit of both?

Gilbert: A little bit of both, but I would say, actively remembering the force that body positivity had in the 2010s and what it was able to do and the real impact that it had in the culture, and to sort of remember that that’s possible, I think, and that it can be done again. To remember that online lives are not real, and online beauty standards are not real. The thing I keep coming back to is, again, just like divorcing this idea that our value as human beings is how we look. There’s so much that’s liberating when you learn to let that go, and it does get easier as you get older and older; I can tell you from 43. But anything that we can do to reclaim our love for ourselves and our acceptance of ourselves and our sense of value as humans is profoundly positive.

[Music]

Beck: Natalie, Sophie used a phrase that I’ve heard a lot, especially since starting to work on this podcast. The internet is not real. And I know what she means to say, but I kind of have a problem with that way of thinking about things.

Brennan: Oh, interesting.

Beck: Well, the internet is real. (Laughs.) It really exists. There are real tubes under the ocean that carry data. There are massive data centers that exist in physical space, and they use up real energy. You know, I have real conversations on the internet with real people who really exist.

Brennan: Yeah.

Beck: And the things people look at online do have real effects on their lives, on their mental health, and even potentially on their bodies, as we were just talking about.

Brennan: Yeah. I think the spirit of The internet isn’t real is trying to connote that there’s this alternative, right? That you can opt out and embrace that which is offline. I think it’s just trying to communicate a tension that a lot of us are trying to find separation from. I saw this quote from Haley Nahman on Substack recently that said, “The mirror worlds of social media and Hollywood and women’s media may present our participation as inevitable, but this is effectively an advertisement for a future that doesn’t have to exist.”

And I think what people are feeling right now is that they wanna push back against that inevitability. They want to create an alternative future. You know, my mom said something to this extent. “Maybe it’s not about what is versus what isn’t inherently real, but about choosing what reality you want to exist in.”

Mom: Your reality has to be centered inside of you, not outside of you. That’s a screen, and that screen isn’t telling you the real story of who you are. Right? And listen, I mean, even as a 60-something mom, I still fall into the trap of seeing things on my Instagram feed that make me think, Oh, maybe I should be doing that, or maybe I should … You know? It is so easy to be influenced, but then you just always have to come back to, like, I have to be who I am. I have to live in my own world. But you know what? It’s all in how people are talking to one another and how you’re talking to your children. And so all of that still matters. Talking matters.

Brennan: Yeah. Talking def matters. Well, thanks for talking with me today.

Mom: Oh, you’re so welcome. I love you.

Brennan: Love you.

Mom: Bye.

Brennan: Bye.

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, with 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: When it comes to how technology is changing learning, are we thinking about things all wrong?

Michelle Miller: We have to remind ourselves, technology, whether it is a knitting needle or it’s a social media or a chatbot, is something that, at least collectively, we human beings created because it did something that we very much wanted. So it is part of us.

Beck: That’s next time on How to Touch Grass.