Last night, Francesca Hong lost the race to be the Democratic candidate for governor of Wisconsin. This is great news for American democracy.

Sorry if that seems harsh—she certainly ran an energetic campaign and came close to winning the nomination—but Hong was a profoundly flawed candidate in an important race. Even the leaders of her own faction of the Democratic Party recognized it, and stayed away: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders apparently know a lemon when they see one. Her narrow loss is a positive reflection on the progressive luminaries’ judgment, as well as a demonstration that the party mainstream eventually managed to sort out a messy and dispiriting primary. The Democrats now have a better chance of winning a crucial swing state’s governorship, against a Republican nominee who, while in Congress, went along with Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Hong’s loss yesterday was unexpected. Two weeks ago, the 37-year-old state legislator was the front-runner in the polls, largely because the Democratic primary had turned into a clown show. One mainstream candidate, Lieutenant Governor Sara Rodriguez, suspended her campaign in mid-July because of financial irregularities. By the end of the month, with less than a fortnight to go before Election Day, former Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes bowed out too. At the time he did so, one poll had Hong 22 points ahead. In the interim, another candidate, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, had returned to the race after previously withdrawing because of a lack of momentum. All the hopes of the Democratic establishment rested on Crowley’s Hail Mary pass.

Why were they so scared of Hong? Partially because she is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization that calls for public ownership of large corporations, looser immigration laws, and the abolition of prisons. Hong has said that she does not agree with all of the DSA platform, but she entered the contest with an unscrubbed Twitter account, full of the most voter-repelling, peak-2020 statements you can imagine. In the COVID era, when joyless leftist platitudes were all the rage, she criticized Thanksgiving as a “colonizer holiday” and “the original superspreader event that killed Indegenous [sic] folx and women.” (Wait, does folx—a baffling attempt to make the already gender-neutral word folks even more inclusive—not include women?) Further searches of her Twitter account revealed that she also disliked Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and even Halloween, which she said was “not my thing.”

[Read: America’s most divided state loves its extremes]

A savvier candidate than Hong might have been able to muscle through the inevitable criticism with an AOC-style acknowledgment that “Woke 1 was crazy.” We all lost our minds a bit during the pandemic shutdown: Remember when Gal Gadot and other celebrities posted that video of themselves singing “Imagine”? But Hong could not manage to distance herself from her comments back then. In what could have been her cleanup operation, an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, she explained that “Thanksgiving is also a time that’s incredibly painful for many people in our communities.” (For the turkey community, definitely.) She clarified a few days later that “I actually love it,” but that she was “kind of a curmudgeon when it comes to holidays in general.” The problem wasn’t just her previous statements, but her inability to back out gracefully from her own rhetorical cul-de-sac.

Despite the buoyant polling, I suspected that Hong was doomed after attending a rally she held in suburban Milwaukee earlier this month. She has an appealing backstory—restaurant worker, single mom, community organizer—and, as I saw from the rally, Korean immigrant parents who were proud as punch to see their daughter running for office. They sat right at the front, behind the television cameras, beaming throughout. Sadly, though, she also had a nervous, rabbity speaking style. At her own event, she looked like the support act to the left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, who said in 2019 that America deserved 9/11, and who had turned up to read a short encomium to socialism from his iPhone. Afterward, she milled around uncertainly while he posed for selfies with a crowd that hungrily pressed against the security barrier.

Apart from their other skills, politicians need a bit of main-character energy. Abdul El-Sayed, the left-wing Senate candidate in Michigan, also carries a lot of baggage—his Muslim faith and Arab name, his advocacy for universal health care, some loose-lipped podcasts in his past—and, like Hong, he has campaigned alongside Piker. But in person, El-Sayed comes off as eloquent, combative, and focused. He is not going to spend the next three months talking about which national holidays he hates most. He also looks comfortable in all kinds of settings: appearing with his white step-grandparents in a campaign ad, campaigning against data centers alongside rural farmers, sparring with TV anchors over U.S. policy toward Israel. And he has boiled down his campaign to a simple three-part slogan: “Money out of politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for All.” El-Sayed is a risky candidate, for sure, but a blue wave might well carry him into the Senate.

That was not true for Hong. Swing voters? Never heard of them. Her campaign rally was pure crack for disaffected leftist Millennials. The emcee introduced every speech by appealing to “ladies, gentlemen, and friends beyond the binary,” while the back of the hall featured an activity zone with blank sheets of paper and crayons. Her volunteer-made campaign pins had slogans such as STONERS FOR HONG and FUCK ICE. If the offerings at the merch store were any indication, her most memorable campaign moment up to that point had come at a community grill, where she flipped burgers and told a bystander: “Reagan fucked us, Paul.” The group of 20-somethings behind me were wearing this slogan on their T-shirts. The crowd at the rally was enthusiastic and idealistic, and Hong might have gotten away with such an event in deep-blue Manhattan, but not in a state that Donald Trump won in 2024.

Notably, Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders were happy to endorse and campaign for El-Sayed, but neither of them gave their blessing to Hong. Neither did Elizabeth Warren. (“I don’t know her,” the senator from Massachusetts said recently, as if channeling the famous Mariah Carey meme.) The left wing of the Democratic Party has had a great primary season, with unexpected wins in New York and even Colorado. But the refusal of its leading figures to endorse a subpar candidate in a purple state suggests that they are being judicious about where they put their time and on whom they stake their reputation. Ocasio-Cortez also declined to endorse Graham Platner, a progressive favorite whose campaign for the Senate in Maine imploded amid allegations of sexual misconduct. With candidates, quality control is everything.

[Idrees Kahloon: The Democrats can’t just laugh off ‘Woke 1’]

In a last-minute intervention, outgoing Governor Tony Evers—who had pledged to stay out of the race—explicitly endorsed Crowley when the latter relaunched his campaign. The gambit worked. Crowley squeaked past Hong at the last minute. That is a nightmare for the Republicans, whose candidate Tom Tiffany was the only serious contender for the party’s nomination. In Congress, he is a member of the hard-right Freedom Caucus and voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. He has been heartily endorsed by Donald Trump—great for the primary, but worse than useless in the general.

Tiffany very obviously wanted to run against Hong, whom he could have painted as a dangerous radical who loves illegal immigration and hates cranberry sauce. Her campaign spent virtually nothing on television advertising, while a super PAC linked to Republicans invested $2.2 million in ads depicting her as too liberal, in what the Times called “a counterintuitive strategy to grow her appeal among Democratic primary voters.” If anyone heard a loud thump in Madison last night, that was the sound of a huge opposition-research file hitting a trash can.

The final winner, however, is democracy itself. Who would bet against Donald Trump calling up swing-state officials in 2028 and asking them to find a few more votes for the Republican candidate for president? After all, that’s exactly what he did in Georgia in 2020. Joe Biden won Wisconsin by just 21,000 votes that year, while Trump took it back by only 30,000 in the next race. For a decade, Trump and his allies have counted on Democrats to sound so out of step with mainstream voters on cultural issues that even his most authoritarian moves look tolerable by comparison. The Badger State is one of the most crucial places on the electoral map. Francesca Hong’s unexpected loss is America’s gain.

You might know a tomato when you see one, but for the federal government, identifying one is harder. Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? In 1893, this question went all the way to the Supreme Court, which decided that, for tax purposes, at least, a tomato was a vegetable. What about milk? For a bureaucrat setting standards, a straightforward explanation such as “liquid from a cow’s udders” won’t quite cut it; according to the FDA, milk is “the lacteal secretion, practically free from colostrum, obtained by the complete milking of one or more healthy cows.”

Even for the government, however, tomatoes and milk are relatively simple to define compared with ultra-processed foods. Although many researchers agree that these creations are negatively affecting people’s health, they cannot agree on what foods do and don’t belong in that category. That’s not keeping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from trying: After months of promising the federal government’s first formal definition of ultra-processed foods, the secretary of Health and Human Services announced on Monday that the department is finalizing one.

He stopped short, though, of sharing the exact text in either the public announcement or at a “food policy celebration” held Monday at HHS’s Washington headquarters; the definition is still being reviewed by the White House. This effort may have real upsides. Having a regulatory definition of ultra-processed foods (or UPF, as they’re often referred to) could at the very least advance inquiries into the harms of these products. But the effort also raises the question: Can the government adequately define a problem before researchers know its true cause?

So far, scientific efforts to define UPF have revealed only how fuzzy the category is. The most commonly used definition, which was developed by Brazilian researchers, takes the most expansive approach: It lumps all foods with industrial ingredients, such as sweeteners and emulsifiers, into the ultra-processed category. A classification system created by academics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, meanwhile, defines “highly processed foods” as products “processed to the extent that they are no longer recognizable as their original plant/animal source.” Yet another well-respected system, this one designed by a French analytics company, attempts to incorporate additional factors, such as a food’s salt, sugar, and fat content, as well as the “function, number, and potential health risk of additives.”

These rubrics are distinct enough from one another that flavored yogurt is an ultra-processed food under the Brazilian system and a moderately processed food under the UNC system. Under the French system, the classification depends entirely on the yogurt itself (even though a paper from the group found that 95 percent of flavored yogurts in French grocery stores were indeed ultra-processed).

Researchers disagree on how to define these foods, because the science around how and why they may be harmful is ambiguous. Epidemiological studies have found that UPF-heavy diets have consistently been associated with a range of maladies including cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. But although researchers suspect that certain additives are causing dietary issues, the number of industrial ingredients or additives in Americans’ food is so large that many more may also be causing trouble. Nor do researchers know what processing steps cause everyday food ingredients to go from healthful to harmful. That means Kennedy and his department are essentially trying to define a food group that no one really understands.

Kennedy is under no illusions about how little we know about the American food supply. He has frequently criticized a decades-old loophole that allows food companies to put new additives in their food without even telling the FDA. On Monday, he announced a new proposal to fix this issue; if finalized, the rule would require companies to let the FDA know when they’re introducing a new additive. But even that won’t fully solve America’s additive problem.

Researchers at the Pew Health Group estimated in 2011 that America’s food supply already features more than 10,000 additives. The new rule would require manufacturers that quietly introduced such compounds to tell the FDA what those additives are but not to submit any scientific proof of the additives’ safety. And although the FDA can do its own review of such ingredients, that process is often glacially slow. (The agency still hasn’t completed its rereview of several chemicals nearly a year after announcing that it was taking a second look at their safety.) Plus, certain additives may be safe when consumed on their own but harmful when consumed alongside other additives. A study published last year found, for example, that consuming a cocktail of emulsifiers, a preservative, and a dye was associated with higher rates of type 2 diabetes but that several other industrial concoctions were not.  

If anything, researchers know less about how processing changes the ways humans digest certain foods. As the term ultra-processed implies, researchers believe that the ways food companies process individual ingredients has had a profound impact on our health. But because that concept is so new, very little research has been done on it. The Brazilian researchers, for example, have cited pre-frying as a mark of ultra-processing, even though it’s hard to imagine that precooking chicken nuggets could meaningfully affect how they’re digested. And although research does suggest that extrusion, which is used to make products such as cereal by pushing ingredients through a heated tube with rotating screws, makes it easier for the body to break down starches, the evidence of any ill effect on humans is limited.

All of this makes Kennedy’s push to define UPF difficult. Any earnest effort to “Make America Healthy Again” cannot ignore the fact that a majority of the calories Americans consume come from ultra-processed foods, and that something in those foods seems to be making people ill. Creating a definition is an obvious first step toward addressing the issue, and the previous definitions for ultra-processed foods have undoubtedly advanced researchers’ understanding of those foods’ impact on our health. A 2019 study using the Brazilian definition found, for example, that people ate faster and gained more weight when fed an ultra-processed diet compared with an unprocessed one.

But for researchers, the definition of UPF serves more as a hypothesis—an idea that they can test and adjust about how to think about this category of food. A government definition of UPF has a different purpose—it can prompt research, but it can also be used to make rules about how foods are tested, advertised, and sold. An overbroad definition could cost food companies millions in unnecessary costs and stoke unsubstantiated fear in consumers; a narrower definition, based on a hunch, could cause the same problems.

Government definitions are not written in stone: In 2024, the FDA overhauled an outdated definition of healthy foods, which was issued amid the low-fat craze of the 1990s and excluded foods such as nuts and fatty fish. But the process of revising the definition took eight years. As Kennedy said Monday, “If you can’t define a problem, you can’t solve it.” But if you define a problem in the wrong way, you probably can’t solve it either.

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Five years ago, the United States was completing its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan when the terrorist group known as the Islamic State Khorasan Province carried out one last murderous strike. ISKP’s suicide attack on the Kabul International Airport killed 13 U.S. service members and about 170 desperate Afghan civilians trying to flee the Taliban’s oppressive rule.

The carnage was a final reminder of what the American military had been doing in Afghanistan to begin with. An Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban, American policy makers feared, would become a haven for terrorists, as it was before the U.S. invasion in 2001. In the 1990s, the Taliban had offered sanctuary to al-Qaeda and like-minded networks, allowing them to train thousands of fighters and plot devastating assaults, including the 1998 embassy bombings, the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, and 9/11. For 20 years, concerns that such attacks might resume kept the U.S. fighting a war that its officials knew they were losing. In April 2021, William Burns, President Biden’s CIA director, warned that pulling out troops would create a “significant risk” of an al-Qaeda resurgence. When Biden withdrew four months later, experts claimed that he had given terrorists a leg up.

Today these fears look overblown. Under Taliban rule, Afghanistan has not become the global terrorist hub it once was. Al-Qaeda, which remains far weaker today than in 2001, hasn’t carried out an attack from Afghanistan on the U.S. or Europe since the withdrawal. Meanwhile, the Taliban has turned into a valuable—though deeply flawed—counterterrorism partner to the U.S., overturning the expectations of analysts who believed the group would revert to being a major sponsor of global terror.

The past five years have confirmed that staying in Afghanistan was folly. But they have also demonstrated a truth that isn’t nearly as accepted: Curbing terrorism often requires working with old enemies.

[From the October 2023 Issue: The final days]

The Taliban is no friend to the United States. The group brutalizes the Afghan people, particularly women, and it continues to shelter militants such as al-Qaeda, which has begun to train more members in Afghanistan since the withdrawal. But unlike in the 1990s, the Taliban provides far less support to terrorists, and, perhaps more important, al-Qaeda poses a much smaller threat.

Before the withdrawal, the U.S. launched drone strikes that killed many of al-Qaeda’s senior leaders, and orchestrated an intelligence campaign that shut down al-Qaeda cells around the world. The group never fully recovered. In 2022, another American drone strike killed al-Qaeda’s head, Ayman al-Zawahiri, proving that the U.S. can undercut the group even without a presence in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda has still not named a replacement for al-Zawahiri, and its de facto leader, Saif al-Adel, is hiding in Iran. The Taliban is reportedly reluctant to allow al-Adel into Afghanistan, an apparent recognition that providing too much support to al-Qaeda could jeopardize its own interests.

The strongest parts of al-Qaeda are no longer in Afghanistan but in Africa, and they present fewer risks: Local branches, such as JNIM in West Africa and al-Shabaab in Somalia, are primarily focused on regional goals instead of global terrorism. Similarly, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, another recipient of Taliban support, has concentrated its attacks on Pakistan rather than on international targets. In 2010, the group attempted to detonate a car bomb in Times Square; in 2020, it signaled that it wouldn’t attack America again—and no evidence has emerged since then that the organization has changed its mind.

As al-Qaeda has dwindled, ISKP has grown into the biggest terrorist threat in Afghanistan. The group is suspected of carrying out deadly attacks in Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and Turkey. It has also plotted campaigns in Europe and inspired plots in the United States. But these have failed or been disrupted, and the Taliban has helped the U.S. thwart ISKP’s ambitions.

ISKP has challenged the Taliban’s religious legitimacy, targeted its leaders, and recruited some of its rank and file. In response, the Taliban has arrested and killed ISKP fighters and leaders. At times, though, the Taliban has taken a more conciliatory approach—for example, persuading ISKP members to surrender in exchange for lenient treatment. Because they now share a common enemy, the U.S. and the Taliban have found opportunities to advance each other’s interests. Indeed, the White House’s counterterrorism chief has described the Taliban as “moderately cooperative counterterrorism partners.” Unlike the collapsed Afghan republic government, the Taliban controls the entire country and has networks everywhere, which Washington has used to its advantage. Thanks to its strong intelligence in the region, America has been able to warn Iran and Russia about the risk of ISKP attacks and to assist European states in disrupting plots.

[Krishnadev Calamur: Talking to the Taliban while still fighting the Taliban]

Afghanistan isn’t the only place where the U.S. has cooperated with former adversaries. In Syria, the jihadist turned head of state Ahmed al-Sharaa works with the U.S. to battle the Islamic State and Hezbollah. America has also cooperated with the Syrian Democratic Forces, even though it has a close relationship with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, an internationally designated terrorist group that targets Turkey.

America’s relationships with unsavory actors can backfire: In Somalia, the U.S. supported warlords to fight al-Shabaab, but their abuses only increased support for the terrorist group. The Taliban’s U.S.-assisted campaign against ISKP has also had serious drawbacks. To prevent defections to ISKP, the Taliban has become even more repressive. In addition, the clampdown on ISKP’s operations in Afghanistan seems to have encouraged the group to turn to international terrorism, because it was no longer as effective locally.

Cooperating with repressive regimes or onetime enemies will always incur costs, both moral and strategic. The job of U.S. policy makers is to constantly assess whether the costs outweigh the security gains that these partnerships can offer, not only to the U.S. but to societies around the world. One of the clearest foreign-policy lessons of the past five years is simple, if uncomfortable: The best counterterrorism option is sometimes the least bad one.

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The Trump administration seems to harbor a hulking obsession with testosterone. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once claimed that the president’s testosterone levels are unusually high for a man of his age, and Kennedy is known to take a supplementary dose of the male sex hormone himself. In April, the FDA moved to expand access to testosterone-replacement therapy for greater numbers of men. And last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that “warfighters” older than 30 will have their testosterone levels checked annually so that they can stay on the “leading edge of lethality.”

The need for expansive testing or for testosterone replacement is questionable, according to several medical experts I spoke with. But underneath the administration’s preoccupation lies a real trend: Although most men’s levels are still within the normal range, average testosterone has been declining among men for the past several decades. A recent review of studies involving more than a million men all over the world found that average testosterone levels in blood have dropped by about 20 percent over the past half century. A new, unpublished study put the decrease during that basic time period at closer to 50 percent. Some scientists are skeptical of these numbers because testosterone has been measured in different ways over time. But Michael Eisenberg, a urologist at Stanford Medicine who specializes in male fertility, told me that the findings of a decline are “pretty solid.” The testosterone slump, he said, has “manifested across many different study designs.”

Medical researchers aren’t certain what’s causing the drop. The global population is aging, and men’s testosterone levels go down naturally as they get older—but this can’t account for the change, because most studies control for age. One theory is that the environment is playing a role: John Meeker, an environmental-health professor at the University of Michigan, pointed to endocrine-disrupting “forever chemicals,” such as the phthalates in our plastic kitchen utensils and the PFAS in our nonstick pans. These chemicals can interrupt both the creation and the activity of testosterone in the body.

[Read: Pete Hegseth wants YOU to test your testosterone]

Lifestyle shifts seem to be a big part of the story. “Our population is less well than it was decades ago,” Richard J. Fantus, a urologist at the University of Kansas, told me. Manual laborers, whose ranks have decreased over time, have more testosterone than men whose jobs are less physically demanding, and some men who are very physically active are less likely to have clinically low testosterone. Obesity, a condition that about 14 percent of men around the world have, can suppress the hormone. Fat tissue contains high amounts of an enzyme that converts testosterone into estrogen, and excess fat can overheat the testes. When obese men lose weight, including through the use of GLP-1s, Fantus told me, their testosterone levels tend to go up.

Obesity can’t explain the entire decrease, however. One large-scale, recent review found a testosterone slump despite researchers’ adjusting for the subjects’ body mass index. “Even among normal-weight men, we see that same decline,” Eisenberg said. Some analyses, he added, have suggested that testosterone has dropped off most profoundly among normal-weight men. Some other broad societal shifts, meanwhile, have not seemed to affect testosterone in expected ways: Fathers and men with long-term romantic partners have lower testosterone than single and childless men—but even as marriage and fertility rates have slowed in many parts of the world, testosterone levels have continued dropping.

Whatever the cause, the decline is somewhat worrisome because testosterone is important for mood, sexual function, and energy levels, as well as muscle, heart, and bone health. Men whose testosterone levels are too low might struggle with decreased sex drive, fatigue, depression, or muscle loss. Testosterone is needed for sperm production, so low testosterone might impair fertility too. More philosophically, the drop is just kind of strange: Why would an essential hormone suddenly fade away? “It’s kind of frightening,” Eisenberg said, “to think that there’s something that is fundamentally changing our biology.”

What to do about this problem, however, is far from obvious. On a societal level, unwinding dependence on forever chemicals, eliminating obesity, or reversing the trend toward office jobs would be nearly impossible. On an individual level, men who suspect that they have low testosterone can get lab tests. But if they do turn out to have low levels, whether they should pursue treatment is unclear. For men with low levels, testosterone supplements have been shown to improve mood and increase bone density, red-blood-cell count, and interest in sex. But unlike the testosterone the body naturally makes, supplements can paradoxically decrease sperm count, and a man who wants to have kids may want to avoid them for that reason. In addition, Fantus told me, supplementing with testosterone might raise the hormone’s levels but not alleviate symptoms.

[Read: Another symptom of growing isolation]

One approach that most experts I spoke with agreed was unnecessary: widespread monitoring of the sort that Hegseth has proposed for the military. For the 90,000-some female service members older than 30, the policy is useless—testing women for insufficient testosterone is never recommended. For men—especially those without symptoms—the Endocrine Society cautions against broad testing. Peter J. Snyder, an endocrinologist at the University of Pennsylvania who led a major study called the “Testosterone Trials,” told me that to find 800 participants who qualified as having low testosterone, he and his colleagues had to screen more than 50,000 men. “It was harder to get into the Testosterone Trials than to get into the University of Pennsylvania medical school,” he said.

A regimen such as the one the Defense Department is pursuing, Snyder told me, has a higher chance of surfacing false-positive results than accurate ones. Fantus said that broadly screening for low testosterone would mean “we would be overdiagnosing”—which could also lead to overtreating. Hegseth has said that testosterone supplements would be optional, but presumably many service members who receive a low reading might feel pressure to use them.

Perhaps it’s a mistake to see low testosterone as a sickness urgently in need of a cure, when the dip may simply be a marker of modernity. Altered hormones, along with eyestrain and belly paunch, could be part of the price we pay for material comforts. The testosterone dip, in other words, might be a bellwether—another sign that contemporary life is changing humans in ways we are only beginning to recognize.

President Trump has been repeatedly stymied in his efforts to bring the Iran war to a close. Resuming a limited bombing campaign didn’t get it done. Neither did making apocalyptic threats to wipe out Iran’s entire civilization. Every time Trump touts a possible breakthrough in negotiations, the hard-liners in Tehran seem to delight in changing their terms and yanking away a possible deal. It’s like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown, except this time, the pigskin is the Strait of Hormuz.

Nothing has worked. So Trump’s new strategy is to try doing nothing, and see whether that works. The president is de-emphasizing both diplomacy and military action, and instead placing his faith in economic pressure, in the hope that time can accomplish what force could not. This wait-and-see approach is meant to allow stepped-up financial sanctions and a U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports to inflict economic pain. The hope is that a return to this strategy—which was used, in spurts, earlier in the conflict and has been championed by some in the administration all along—will finally force leaders in Tehran to seriously engage in negotiations to open the strait and end the war.

But this new tack will require the president to show patience. Trump is, to say the least, not known for his self-discipline. Or for his ability to stick to a plan. Or for his capacity to avoid being influenced by the last segment he saw on cable TV. Advisers privately acknowledge that a single Truth Social post fired off in anger could lead to an escalation that derails the entire plan. And there are risks even if the strategy works. Iran has repeatedly surprised U.S. officials with its economic resilience; the time now needed to effectively squeeze the country all but ensures that there will be no quick resolution to the war—and no corresponding decline in energy costs—before Republicans try to defend their congressional majorities in November’s midterm elections. But Trump and his aides see few other options to end their war of choice.

Within the White House, a new set of statistics is winning the debate. In recent weeks, aides have shown Trump the significant impact that existing sanctions are having on Iran’s economy, two senior administration officials told me. The case has been laid out before the president in Oval Office meetings—and, in at least one instance, in a call from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent while Trump was wrapping up a round of golf—that tightening the current sanctions and issuing fresh, tough ones could force leaders in Tehran to buckle, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. The idea is hardly new: Trump has relied on an economic “maximum-pressure” campaign since his first term to try to force Iran to abandon its nuclear program. And earlier this year, further sanctions were applied.

Aides think it may work this time. And Trump underscored this belief yesterday, telling reporters that “Iran is broke, totally broke.” But he has repeatedly misjudged the Iranians. In the conflict’s early days, Trump was convinced that the war would take a few weeks at most and that—despite warnings provided by the Pentagon—Iran would not try to close the Strait of Hormuz. Those assumptions were wrong, as was the belief held within the intelligence community that Iran would buckle quickly under the economic strain. But the regime seems willing to endure significant hardship, and its own citizens’ struggles, to maintain its grip on power.

And it has responded with its own changing list of demands that includes an insistence on collecting some sort of toll or fee for use of the narrow channel. More than once, and as recently as last week, it appeared that a deal to reopen the strait was close and that Trump was prepared to declare victory in the conflict and move on (conveniently ignoring that the waterway had been open and free for all to use prior to the war). Allies in the Persian Gulf have registered unhappiness at any increased Iranian control over the strait but were told that they would have to live with the new arrangement, at least for a while. Bessent asserted to Trump, and later in interviews, that the Strait of Hormuz would become irrelevant within two years, claiming that up to 70 percent of the energy that transits the waterway will eventually flow through underground pipelines.

But once more, the regime leaders in Tehran altered the deal, this time insisting that the strait would reopen only once the United States paid reparations for losses suffered during the five-month war. That condition was deemed a nonstarter in Washington, and an enraged Trump countered by declaring that the U.S. would need to be paid its own set of reparations for the deaths of American forces over the decades as well as for the families of Iranian protesters slain in the past 50 years, including in recent demonstrations (which won’t happen either). Despite the occasional hopeful-sounding statements from mediators in Oman and Pakistan, negotiations remain at an impasse. Trump has furiously told aides that he doesn’t feel that Iran is negotiating in good faith.

The White House stressed to me that Iran’s economy is already reeling, with soaring inflation, reduced energy revenue, and some agricultural shortfalls. One official added that “there are many levers the president can crank harder in the weeks and months ahead.”

But there is another set of numbers that also informed Trump’s decision to sit tight: the dwindling stockpiles of some U.S. munitions, especially missile defenses. Before the war, there was no monthslong buildup of forces and no large-scale deployment of troops. Although the military has since surged additional forces into the region, many assets—particularly Navy ships—were diverted from other theaters of war rather than trained for the conflict. And as my colleague Nancy A. Youssef and I reported last week, some missile stockpiles are as low as 20 percent of what the Pentagon would like to have. There may not be enough to defend American interests in Asia, and stores of some sophisticated interceptor missiles are too depleted for the U.S. to give or sell the weapons to Ukraine or to effectively defend against Iran’s launch of ballistic missiles.

[Read: Ukraine’s short-lived comeback ]

This shortage has curtailed Trump’s options. Were he to authorize another wide-scale strike against Iran, U.S. officials are not confident in their ability to protect American bases or allies in the region from retaliation. And Iran has proved effective in striking against U.S. forces. Last month, during a renewed stretch of fighting, an Iranian missile slipped through defenses at a base in Jordan and detonated on a barracks housing U.S. troops.

The danger posed by Tehran is so great that the Secret Service took extraordinary measures to safeguard Trump last month when he left a NATO summit in Turkey, which shares a border with Iran. The Qatari-made luxury jet filling in as the presidential aircraft was deemed to lack appropriate defensive measures, so the original, standard Air Force One was purportedly assigned the task of taking Trump out of Ankara. But according to The Washington Post, the threat was so credible that Trump had to secretly move to another aircraft via a small catering truck. The smaller plane carrying the president took off without notice, and the Boeing 747 normally designated Air Force One then departed, carrying some senior officials and the traveling press pool.

Of course, no one in the White House knows whether Trump will be patient enough to stick to the new plan. He has been bored of the war for a while, but perhaps the slow economic squeeze will allow the conflict to slip from the headlines and permit him to focus on other things (such as the Reflecting Pool and maybe Cuba).

But Iranian leaders have proved effective at goading Trump into action, and there are hawks in Congress and the Pentagon who have advocated for wider strikes. The president might also hear from Republicans running for reelection this fall who are saddled with the party’s poor poll numbers and the politically damaging high price of gas, who might beg him to do something—anything!—about it. Trump tends to be swayed by viral social-media posts and cable-news chyrons. His longtime adviser Steve Bannon told me years ago that Trump doesn’t try to “win a news cycle”; instead, he aims to win “a news moment, a news second,” and that trait has only intensified since. It likely wouldn’t take much to get him to shift course again.

But for now, at least, the White House thinks Trump’s best play might be to do just the opposite.

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Over the past few days, the president has continued his crusade against one of the supposed vandals of the Lincoln Memorial’s Reflecting Pool. In a lengthy post on Truth Social on Sunday, he alleged that “a National Park Service career employee, a highly credible witness,” had caught the former Olympic canoeist David Hearn in the act of “ripping and tugging at the Pool’s somewhat delicate coating.”

The problem is that the Department of Justice’s case against Hearn is already effectively over. More than a week earlier, federal prosecutors dropped the charges against him, citing information from the Department of the Interior; the damage to the Reflecting Pool was “the result of a botched installation and not vandalism,” the government’s motion to dismiss reads. That evidence—and the judgment of DOJ—has done little to stop Donald Trump from pursuing this debunked theory over and over again. In recent weeks, the president has repeatedly returned to the same few vendettas and personal obsessions, trying to push them forward no matter the evidence against them. His strategy is summed up by a self-assessment that he gave CNN more than a decade ago: “I am the most fabulous whiner,” he said. “I keep whining and whining until I win.”

Today, The Wall Street Journal reported that White House officials have asked the Justice Department to consider prosecuting Hearn a second time. By doubling down on his vandalism thesis, Trump is sending a strong message to one of his most ardent supporters, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, whom he already castigated last week for dropping the charges. “I guess she choked,” he told reporters at the time.

The rulings of the Supreme Court don’t seem to sway the president either. On Thursday, he doubled down on another mission of personal importance—limiting birthright citizenship—despite the Court’s recent decision to strike down a previous executive order on the subject. Trump has now issued two new orders that are narrower in scope. One seeks to expand the category of children whom the government can deny automatic citizenship, and the other targets “birth tourism,” a phenomenon in which people travel to the United States “for the purpose of giving birth on American soil”—something that the law already prohibits. These new attempts to upend more than a century of precedent are likely to face significant legal challenges. This tactic wasn’t Trump’s only option: Drawing on Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s June opinion, the president could potentially urge Congress to amend a particular statute or enact new legislation to limit birthright citizenship (although this legislation would be unlikely to pass). Instead, he chose to use the same tool in the hope of getting a different result.

Trump is also forging ahead on his attempts to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. Nearly a year ago, the president tried to fire her over allegations of mortgage fraud. In June, the Court ruled that she couldn’t be fired, in part because the White House hadn’t given her a chance to contest the allegations. Last week, Trump’s longtime aide Dan Scavino sent Cook a letter warning her that she may still be removed and telling her in no uncertain terms that “this is your opportunity to respond.” In this case, Trump appears to be cooperating with the Court, although it’s uncertain whether this procedure will be enough to satisfy it. The note makes clear that the president isn’t letting up in his quest to oust Cook.

Trump’s tenacity in pursuing his own agenda is nothing new. Take, for example, his eight-year attempt to brand former FBI Director James Comey as a criminal, despite a lack of evidence; when, in the fall, the first set of charges against him didn’t stick, Trump’s Justice Department simply tried again. As David A. Graham wrote in his story last week about the birthright-citizenship orders, the president’s recent actions invoke a kind of déjà vu. The commitment to doubling down has become a one-size-fits-all strategy: Trump’s desire to fight back doesn’t necessarily correlate with the odds of victory in a given situation. My colleague Tom Nichols recently noted that the president’s push to prosecute Hearn has only emphasized “just how immune to evidence and logic his beliefs have become.” Trump’s fixation on the Reflecting Pool is also directing his focus away from the issues that midterm voters care about most, such as affordability.

Meanwhile, new setbacks are arriving all the time. On Friday, after an appeals court upheld the block on Trump’s attempts to build a new ballroom for the White House, the president promised to make his case to the Supreme Court. That fight, like so many others, is not over until Trump says it is.

Related:

• Trump’s déjà vu moment on birthright citizenship
• Tom Nichols: Trump’s irrationality is dangerous.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Are men to blame for the birth-rate collapse?
• The Democrats can’t just laugh off “Woke 1.”
• A little bit of shopping, all the time

Today’s News

1. President Trump secretly switched from a presidential aircraft to an alternate military jet in Turkey after last month’s NATO summit in response to an Iranian threat, according to a U.S. official. The White House has not provided details about the threat or the security operation.
2. Russia released the Marine Robert Gilman, who had been imprisoned since 2022, after President Vladimir Putin granted him a pardon on humanitarian grounds, according to U.S. officials. Trump said that no prisoner exchange took place. Gilman, who has reportedly been in poor health, is returning to the United States for medical treatment, according to the state department.
3. Voters are casting ballots today in primary elections across Wisconsin, Minnesota, Vermont, and Connecticut, and South Carolina Republicans are choosing a nominee for a special Senate election following the death of Senator Lindsey Graham. Alabama is also holding delayed U.S. House primaries under a new congressional map.

Evening Read

The Man Who Refused to Sit on the Sidelines

By Sally Jenkins

To a firefighter who is inside one, a fire creates as much darkness as heat. Flames start bright but throw off smoke that can swathe everything in pitch black. Lieutenant Kevin Dowdell did not fight fires so much as he groped through and problem-solved them, relying on half-blind judgment and expertise—and his fellow firefighters to keep flaming debris off his back.

At the cindering end of a successful 24-hour shift with the New York City Fire Department, Kevin would hang up his helmet, so ash-rubbed that it looked salty, and drive home to his wife and two sons in Rockaway Beach, Queens. “Oh, we had a good job last night,” he’d say, elated as well as exhausted. By “good,” his family knew, he meant the fire had been big.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• What do sex and gender even mean now?
• Marlon James returns to realism, and to Jamaica.
• What Mitch McConnell did
• The color recession may be permanent.
• Why MAGA is so obsessed with Fauci

Culture Break

Read. Chang-rae Lee’s new novel, A Tender Age, examines a young man’s attempt to be tough—and its far-reaching consequences, Lily Meyer writes.

Look up. Tomorrow’s eclipse will be Spain’s first in a century. Next year’s will be even more dramatic, Hana Kiros reports.

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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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For several months, I had been on the hunt for new T-shirts. I vaguely had a vision of what they should look like: not so different from my current T-shirts, except in some way elevated and, more urgent, free of stains or holes. Perhaps they could come in interesting colors? Ideally, they would not be made in sweatshops. There were many, many shirts that seemed to meet these criteria—and with a few clicks, they could be delivered to my doorstep, maybe even by tomorrow. And still, I had purchased none of them.

The problem is the overabundance of options. The problem is too much information, or too little information. The problem is inflation, which has eroded any sense I had of what a T-shirt is supposed to cost. Yet none of them alone can explain why shopping is sucking up more of my time—and maybe yours too. “I don’t think people are actually enjoying the shopping process,” Jaehee Jung, a University of Delaware professor who studies the psychology of fashion, told me. “People spend more time contemplating, and the pre-decision process seems to be taking longer.”

Everywhere, someone is selling something: on Instagram and TikTok, over email and via text. At this point, the boundary between “shopping” and “not shopping” has all but collapsed. There is now a third state: “a little bit shopping.” Shopping is visiting a store or website on purpose, examining the wares, and either buying or not buying them. A little bit shopping is the constant thrum of consumer opportunities that lead mostly to more consumer opportunities. It is looking at a pair of shoes, which leads to looking at another pair of shoes, and another, and then you’re $15 short of the minimum for free shipping and is there anything else you need? It is the feeling of being haunted by the targeted ads that populate your social-media feeds. Even if you never click on them, their very presence contributes to the overwhelming sense that the retail landscape is infinite—so infinite that perfection must exist, and if you look long enough and hard enough, somewhere in the universe, it is probably on sale.

[Read: There is too much stuff]

In small doses, a little bit shopping can be fun, a private thrill. It is both a genuine attempt at making a purchase, and a hobby that is infinitely expandable to fill any length of time. Who among us has not scrolled through sweater sales while trapped on a work call? It does not require spending money, nor does it apply to urgent and essential purchases: You don’t a little bit shop for baby Tylenol. “No matter what you’re doing on the computer,” Wendy Woloson, a material historian at Rutgers University at Camden, told me, “it seems like there’s a really easy drift into the shopping mode.”

Unlike brick-and-mortar stores, the internet never closes. You can a little bit shop forever, until you are also a little bit miserable. Shopping in person, then, ought to solve the problem, but it often doesn’t. A survey of 30 retailers by the consulting firm AlixPartners found that, on average, they carried only 9 percent of their online offerings in store. The shoes are out of stock in your size, but have you checked the website? You could stand in line to buy lesser, uglier shoes and be done with it, but why? Online, beautiful shoes are infinite and, in theory, instant.

The more mindful you are about various concerns—overconsumption, worker exploitation, microplastics—the higher the bar climbs: I need not only black pants, but ethical black pants that I can wear to the beach, but also to the opera, and that will be flattering from now until my death. No such pants exist, which is why I don’t have any, but as long as you’re a little bit shopping, the possibility exists.

This state of perpetual shopping has been building for ages. People were a little bit shopping on Amazon and eBay in 2005. But the feeling has become even more acute in recent years as e-commerce has taken over and affiliate marketing has boomed. In addition to sites such as Wirecutter and The Strategist, and every media property with a gift guide, all kinds of influencers have opinions about what you should buy (and may receive a commission if you do).

[Read: What happened to Wirecutter?]

My own digital social life is a mix of people I know, people I don’t know, brands that post like people, and people launching brands. Here is my high-school lab partner’s baby. Here is a plate of pasta. Here is a picture of an antique lamp for sale from an estate-sale company in Texas. “Everyone is trying to either make money or gain recognition”—and thereby make money—“for their taste,” Isabel Slone, who writes about fashion on the Substack Freak Palace, told me. An influencer can help move $1 million worth of swimsuits in three hours. For a solitary activity, a little bit shopping is perversely social. It is pleasantly intimate, knowing how an opinionated stranger feels about their chef’s knife, or their microwave, or the life-changing sweater that got them through their divorce and is available right now if you click the link in bio. Whether it is helpful consumer education is a separate question: “I do think that the affiliate-link economy,” Slone said, “contributes to this constant feeling of not knowing exactly what is good.”

There is, of course, a way out. You could stop caring. You could embrace the good-enough and the suboptimal, understanding that a little bit shopping is a trap that keeps you shopping all the time. Eventually, I bought a T-shirt, which is in all ways absolutely adequate, and in no sense exceptional. And then, the next day, I saw a post about a T-shirt, which was better. I clicked.

In her first argument as a lawyer before the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously quoted the abolitionist Sarah Grimké, who said, “I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” At some point, however, Ginsburg was encouraged to use an alternative to the term sex.

“I’m typing all these briefs and articles for you and the word sex, sex, sex is on every page,” her secretary at Columbia Law School told her. “Don’t you know that those nine men”—that era’s Supreme Court justices—“they hear that word, and their first association is not the way you want them to be thinking?” The secretary suggested substituting gender to “ward off distracting associations.”

But sex and gender don’t mean the same thing. The two terms have never been stable. Still, I recall a time when, among educated people, sex was typically understood to refer to matters of biology, such as a person’s reproductive organs, and gender to refer to matters that are socially constructed, such as the norm of dressing little boys in blue pants and little girls in pink dresses. Today, there seems to be no standard usage. Parents throw gender-reveal parties to disclose the sex of their baby. President Trump said in his 2025 inaugural address, “It will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female”—but “male” and “female” are sexes. A statute in California defines sex (in part) as follows: “‘Sex’ also includes, but is not limited to, a person’s gender. ‘Gender’ means sex, and includes a person’s gender identity and gender expression.”

The confusion that results from this lost distinction causes problems in academia––see the recent kerfuffle in anthropology––as well as in medicine, law, public policy, and more. People mistake meanings and talk past one another about matters that are fraught even when definitions are clear. How did we get into this semantic mess?

The concept of a “gender role” was introduced in a 1955 paper by the researcher John Money to signify “all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman.” He believed that people born with ambiguous or atypical genitals, whom he called “hermaphrodites or intersexes,” contributed to “this new meaning of gender.” Would such individuals operate in society as men or women? He thought that rearing would better predict a person’s “gender role” than biology.

The term gender identity, first defined as “one’s sense of being a member of a particular sex,” dates back to at least the early 1960s. The psychoanalyst Robert Stoller wrote that “gender role is the overt behavior one displays in society, the role which he plays.” By the ’70s, feminists were the most prominent group to adopt gender and related terms, using them to differentiate biological differences between men and women from differences imposed by society. In the 1972 book Sex, Gender, and Society, the feminist sociologist Ann Oakley suggested that biology may play little or no role in determining gender identity (that is, one’s sense of being a member of a particular sex). If a biological predisposition to a male or female gender identity exists at all, she wrote, it “may be decisively and ineradicably overridden by cultural learning.” In the 1990 book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler challenged the common assumption that gender mirrors sex and is binary, arguing that “a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way.” Butler also argued that “perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender,” and the supposed distinction between them “turns out to be no distinction at all.”

In 1997, the sex researcher Milton Diamond and the psychiatrist Keith Sigmundson reached the conclusion that sex is a distinct and important category. The two revisited a case that Money had included in his research. “The penis of an XY individual was accidentally ablated”—that is to say, severely damaged or removed—“and he was subsequently raised as a female,” the authors recounted. “Initially this individual was described as developing into a normally functioning female.” Money had treated the case as confirmation that nurture reliably overrides nature. But the story later changed: When older, the patient rejected “this sex of rearing” and “switched at puberty to living as a male.” This mattered in part because, the authors explained, “the standard in instances of extensive penile damage to infants is to recommend rearing the male as a female.” They urged doctors to reconsider that practice.

The importance of sex as a category was further affirmed in 2001 by a group of experts convened by the Institute of Medicine (since renamed the National Academy of Medicine). Recounting several public-health guidelines that excluded women of child-bearing age from clinical trials on the erroneous assumption that they “will not differ significantly in response to treatment in most situations,” the report noted: “Sex, that is, being male or female,” is “an important basic human variable that should be considered when designing, analyzing, and reporting findings from studies.”

But the importance of sex as a category of study did not guarantee sex a stable place in scholarship, as the Harvard evolutionary biologist David Haig showed by documenting a dramatic decline in the term sex and a rise in gender in the titles of academic articles between 1945 and 2001. At first, feminist scholarship converged on socially constructed gender and biologically determined sex, Haig wrote, but “that distinction was difficult to maintain,” because “no term remained to refer to situations in which causation was unknown, disputed, or involved an interaction between biology and culture.” Soon gender spread to other disciplines, and eventually gender rather than sex began to appear even in scholarship on the physiology of animals. “Among the reasons that working scientists have given me for choosing gender rather than sex in biological contexts,” Haig wrote, “are desires to signal sympathy with feminist goals, to use a more academic term, or to avoid the connotation of copulation.”

By the 2000s, yet another obstacle to mutual understanding arose: What people meant by gender was changing, not only in academic discourse, but in popular usage. For many of the early feminists, gender was a cage built by society. Parents gave little girls but not little boys Easy-Bake Ovens, reproducing a gendered expectation that girls would grow up to do the cooking. But as the decades wore on, gender came to carry a second meaning, one very different from social norms imposed from the outside. The term now sometimes refers to an internal aspect of a person’s sense of self, or even the essence of who they truly are.

While some people kept using gender as shorthand for something from which they sought liberation––to weaken gender norms was to fight the patriarchy––others saw it as an identity, perhaps innate, that individuals discerned and expressed, and that a just society ought to affirm. In 2014, Facebook announced that users would no longer have to identify as male or female––they could choose among at least 58 “gender” options (including intersex, a term that tells us something about a person’s reproductive or sexual anatomy but not about their gender identity).

That brings us to the present era, when sex and gender loom larger than ever in political, legal, and cultural debates––but usage keeps changing faster than the public can keep up, and many semantic choices are made for reasons other than advancing shared understanding. Three examples help illustrate the dysfunction that can result:

1. When Australia asked individuals to note their sex in its 2021 census, the form gave three options: male, female, and nonbinary, “to allow respondents to participate in the Census when the male and female sex categories did not accurately describe their sex,” the Australian Bureau of Statistics explained. Among the 25,422,788 people that the census counted, 43,220 respondents chose nonbinary.
   
   But this “did not yield meaningful data,” the bureau later acknowledged, because the respondents hadn’t agreed upon a definition of nonbinary. Among the small number of respondents who selected nonbinary and explained why, “a very small number” indicated that they were intersex; “a small number” noted their sexual orientation; and three-fifths listed a gender identity. The bureau found the data unusable “to estimate the prevalence of any specific group.” The 2026 census will ask about sex and gender separately.
2. A 2024 study from JAMA Ophthalmology reviewed pivotal clinical trials in the field between 1995 and 2022. It sought to determine whether sex and gender were used correctly (relying on the National Institutes of Health definitions of sex as “a biological characteristic, reflected genetically by chromosomes and physiologically by sex hormones, internal reproductive organs, and external genitalia” and gender as “an aspect of identity that is self-determined and influenced by sociocultural and environmental factors”). The researchers found that in 85 trials, “over three-quarters applied sex and gender terminology incorrectly” and that “no trial reported how sex or gender were collected,” even though “sex and gender are gaining increasing recognition as important determinants of disease epidemiology, health outcomes, and health care disparities.” The authors concluded that the “policies of biomedical journals on sex and gender are incongruous and uncoordinated” in a way that hurts the field’s mission.
3. In a 2023 interview with Time magazine, the soccer player Megan Rapinoe objected to barring trans women from playing on the same sports teams as biological females. “I see trans women as real women,” she declared. “What you’re saying automatically in the argument—you’re sort of telling on yourself already—is you don’t believe these people are women.” But her formulation elides the fact that women is used variably, sometimes to signify sex and sometimes to signify gender.
   
   Many proponents of segregating sports by sex do not reject the gender identity of trans women. For example, in the prominent case of Lia Thomas, a trans woman who, controversially, swam on the women’s team at the University of Pennsylvania, 16 teammates sent a letter to Penn that stated, “We fully support Lia Thomas in her decision to affirm her gender identity and to transition from a man to a woman. Lia has every right to live her life authentically. However, we also recognize that when it comes to sports competition, that the biology of sex is a separate issue from someone’s gender identity.” Only by distinguishing between sex and gender can we distinguish between two different viewpoints: that sports leagues should reject a trans person’s account of their own gender, or that gender is irrelevant to this debate and sex alone should govern policy around eligibility to play.

Different ideological groups will continue deploying language that best suits their ends. But we all ought to value terms that are accurate and aid mutual understanding. Clarity is best advanced by using sex to refer to biology––and, when appropriate, to specify whether the particular trait relevant to a given discussion concerns gametes, chromosomes, hormones, anatomy, or some combination. In contrast, gender should be used to refer to matters that are socially constructed––and concepts such as gender norms, gender identity, and gender expression should be used to distinguish different conceptions of gender from one another. If and when disputes arise about whether we’re referring to sex or gender or a mix, speakers should explain why they chose a given term and what precisely they mean by it.

These usage conventions can’t tell us who belongs on what sports team or what is required or forbidden under antidiscrimination law, nor can it settle any number of other debates. But they can help us all better understand and engage in them.