Next month, just in time for the holidays, Lego will launch its largest set yet: a miniature version of the Basilica of the Sagrada Familia. (“Perfect for anyone who loves visionary design, architecture or travel,” the website proclaims.) The price tag, at $799.99, is a bargain if you assess it on a per-brick basis: The set contains 12,060 pieces, most of which are beige. The instructions are laid out such that the person building the model will re-create the historical timeline of the church’s construction, starting with the crypt. When complete, the model stands about two feet tall and is densely ornamented, frosted with wings and spires and 42 hook-handed figures serving as statues of biblical characters. Antoni Gaudí meant for his masterpiece to inspire awe and, at times, fear; so, too, may this heap of bricks.
Lego fans sometimes refer to their “dark ages”—the period of their life, usually starting in their teens, when they lost interest in their brick sets. Such angst has gone the way of dial-up internet now that Lego, like many other toy brands, actively courts older customers. In the early 2000s, Lego was near bankruptcy; today, powered by an emergent adult demographic, the company is earning record revenues and growing faster than many of its competitors. The situation sounds like a CEO’s daydream: a toy maker that’s ensured its customers will never age out of its merchandise. Yet by embracing the tastes and preferences of the Lego adult, the company has started to make wares that are distinctively un-toylike, losing something essential to their appeal in the process.
Of course, adults have always been able to buy and tinker with Lego sets as they pleased. Only in recent years, however, has the brand been so overt, and so enterprising, in reaching out to this audience. In 2020, the company officially launched its “Adults Welcome” marketing campaign, casting brick-building as a form of stress relief. The next year, when that campaign launched its first global TV ads, the company’s chief product and marketing officer told Ad Age that “children are at the center of everything we do, but we are delighted that the love of Lego building transcends age.”
Since then, the brand has rolled out hundreds of brick sets to suit grown-up interests—packaged in sleek black boxes rather than its traditional cheery egg-yolk yellow. The LEGO Masters reality show, in which two teams face off in preposterously elaborate building challenges, premiered in 2020, has aired for five seasons (with a sixth on the way), and spun off a celebrity holiday special. (A version starring kids was only announced in 2025.) The company’s indoor theme parks, which were originally designed for families, now host special adults-only nights. Today, if anyone tried telling Lego to dial back its engagement with adult fans, it would “run you out of town,” a former executive told National Geographic.
The toy business at large has also started courting older consumers, in response to all sorts of social shifts. Birth rates are falling; kids, favoring screen time, are said to age out of traditional toys earlier and earlier. But adults—a growing share of whom say they don’t expect to have children—have changed too. They’re less invested in traditional markers of maturity, and they hold tight to their youthful passions (and have more discretionary income than kids to pursue them). All sorts of companies now pander to those desires: As my colleague Valerie Trapp reported, Pop Mart’s Labubu campaign last year seemed squarely focused on entry-level office workers; this month, American Girl published its first novel for adults.
What’s been called the “kidult” market—which covers any consumer older than 12—has reached a more advanced stage. Just under half of adults in 2024 had bought a toy for themselves in the prior year, according to a report from the research firm Circana. Households without children now account for 55 percent of toy sales. In another sign of the times, the once-struggling chain Toys ‘R’ Us, which filed for bankruptcy nearly a decade ago, now plans to open 120 new stores, quadrupling its stand-alone locations. Some analysts argue that, in the toy business, grown-ups are no longer a mere sideline but its central source of growth.
For Lego, catering to adult fans represents a dramatic reversal from past practice. In the ’90s, “when they first became aware of us, they were, quite frankly, appalled,” Daniel Konstanski, the author of The Secret Life of LEGO Bricks, told me. Company leaders once worried that the overt enthusiasm of mature hobbyists “would tarnish the brand,” Konstanski said, “or be considered weird, kind of creepy.” That shifted in the early 2000s as the cash-strapped company made tentative overtures to these customers, creating Lego models of an Eiffel Tower, several airplanes, the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars.
The company generally avoided any theme that would be perceived as too adult; even very expensive or intricate sets, such as a model of NASA’s Apollo Saturn V rocket, had roots in topics that might at least theoretically appeal to a child’s interests. “It used to be that there was subject matter that the Lego Group wouldn’t touch,” Graham E. Hancock, the editor of the fan magazine Blocks, told me. Then, in 2015, Lego released a model of the living room that functions as the main set of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory. From then on, in Hancock’s view, the brand shed any hang-ups about making toys aimed exclusively at adults. Many sets now seem like they would baffle a child: Recent releases include models based on The X-Files ($199.99) and The Goonies ($329.99), cultural touchstones from decades before kids today were even born.
Grown-ups may handle toys very differently than kids do—treating them as pristine collectibles, fodder for social-media posts, or even financial investments. But once they’re out of the box, the toys function the same. A plushie shaped like an espresso cup might appeal more to adult sensibilities than to a child’s, but it’s still meant to be cuddled. Similarly, a NeeDoh sensory cube is there to be squished; a Hot Wheels car goes vroom; a Polly Pocket compact unfolds to reveal its Lilliputian world. Regardless of its owner’s age, the telos of the toy remains constant.
In this respect, Lego stands apart from other toy makers. Its grown-up sets don’t just come with different packaging and higher price tags; they also function differently. “It’s important to make that distinction,” Sarah Herman, the author of A Million Little Bricks, a book on Lego history, told me. “The more adult-targeted products are not just a more complicated version of what they’re making for children.” Classic Lego sets provided kids with relatively basic elements, either for open-ended creative building or as props for games of pretend. A kit would provide pieces to build a setting such as a town or space station, along with mini figures to move around.
Adult sets, by contrast, serve almost entirely as decor. Once you’ve constructed your model of a Gustav Klimt painting, potted hibiscus plant, or Darth Vader’s star destroyer—all currently available on Lego’s website—you can’t do anything else with it. It sits on a shelf as a trophy: gleaming, inert, and quasi-sculptural. These bricks do not invite further interaction. Some, forbiddingly, come with informational plaques to stand next to the finished object. At this point, Konstanski estimates, only about half of Lego’s sets are intended for play; the remainder are meant for display.
But the display mindset isn’t strictly confined to adults: Some new sets geared toward a younger audience—a Christmas tree, an Olivia Rodrigo–licensed faux vinyl record—appear purely ornamental. Kids today, more accustomed to digital entertainment, seem to have lost interest in handling physical toys—so much so that Lego, apparently hoping to reengage them, recently rolled out new high-tech bricks, fitted with bespoke computer chips, that light up and make sounds in response to movement. Nearly a decade of research and development went into inventing these brick sets, perhaps in the hope that, after they’re assembled, they won’t be abandoned on a shelf somewhere. The company describes them as “play-focused toys.”
Lego aficionados talk about the toy as a timeless classic. The genius of the product, in their telling, is that its essential components have remained unaltered for decades: A brick from as early as 1958 will click, satisfyingly, with one that comes fresh off the factory line today. This property—the grip between two Lego pieces after they’ve been snapped together—is called “clutch power,” and its constancy is oddly reassuring. It’s a physical sign that our old pleasures still have a secure, precise connection to the present moment, especially when everything else about toys—who buys them, their place in our lives—seems to have changed.
President Trump has previously called climate change a “hoax” and a “scam.” But last month, when the Environmental Protection Agency proposed rescinding the conclusion that greenhouse-gas emissions from the power sector “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare,” it did not question the reality of climate change. Instead, it claimed that large emissions reductions will not be enough to avert harm, and the country is better off doing nothing at all. This is utter nihilism. It is also completely wrong.
The power sector is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the United States (only transportation emits more), accounting for approximately 24 percent of the country’s emissions. The U.S., in turn, is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, after China, accounting for approximately 12 percent of the global total. If the U.S. power sector were a country, it would be the sixth largest emitter of greenhouse gases (fifth if European Union countries were counted individually rather than as a single jurisdiction).
The EPA’s argument is similar to one the agency made in February, when it said that eliminating such emissions from the transportation sector would likewise not make an appreciable difference. Putting these two claims together magnifies the brazenness: The EPA argues that eliminating or substantially reducing about half of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions would be futile and would not meaningfully slow the pace of climate change. It follows from the EPA’s logic that eliminating or substantially reducing the greenhouse-gas emissions of any other sector of the economy would be even more pointless. And the same goes for the emissions of any sector of any country, anywhere in the world.
In fact, according to the EPA’s reasoning, nothing anyone could do anywhere would make any difference. (It also, relatedly, makes a legal claim that it doesn’t have the authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions in the first place.) The agency’s approach is akin to saying that eating a whole loaf of bread is calorie-free as long as the bread is cut in sufficiently thin slices—they’re all so thin that they can’t possibly matter.
These are standards I know well. From January 2023 to January 2025, when I served as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, I was responsible for the review of all significant executive-branch regulations, including this one. The fact is that some of those slices are not thin at all. The U.S. power sector’s greenhouse-gas emissions create enormous damage. In 2022, the power sector emitted more than 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide, more than 68,000 tons of nitrous oxide, and more than 35,000 tons of methane, all three of which are powerful greenhouse gases. Reducing this pollution—and the climate and health damages it creates—would greatly benefit life on Earth. The global advantages of the EPA’s carbon-pollution standards, which the Biden administration announced in 2024 and the Trump administration now seeks to repeal, were estimated to be $20 billion a year—a total that includes savings both from avoiding climate change and from reducing localized pollution that harms human health. Of this total, several billion dollars’ worth of avoided economic damages would accrue to Americans specifically.
A report by the Institute for Policy Integrity estimated that one year’s worth of greenhouse-gas emissions from the U.S. power sector would produce roughly 5,300 additional yearly premature deaths from heat waves and wildfires in the U.S. alone. This figure does not include the significant number of additional deaths from co-pollutants, such as particulate matter, that power plants emit. Putting the magnitude of this effect in context, the report noted that 5,300 deaths are “more than the annual U.S. deaths caused by kidney infections, the flu, firearm accidents, meningitis, bronchitis, appendicitis, and salmonella combined.”
In its proposed repeal of emissions limits, the EPA ignores these effects. Instead, the agency presents an estimate showing that even if the greenhouse-gas emissions of the U.S. power sector were eliminated, the impacts on global mean surface temperature and sea-level rise would be small. The agency wholly ignores the scientific evidence that increased weather-pattern volatility, such as storm surges, not averages of measurements such as temperature, drives most negative impacts of climate change. The EPA’s approach is like saying that an office building is comfortable if its mean temperature is 70 degrees, without checking whether some rooms are at 90 degrees and others at 50 degrees.
The EPA has no good arguments to call the existing evidence into question. The Biden administration’s process to determine the economic damages from greenhouse gases unfolded over several years, and included robust public input and peer review. The EPA casts all of this aside in three steps: First, it acknowledges (against its own interest) that, under the relevant provision of the Clean Air Act, “the appropriate indicator of impact is not emissions or concentrations, but public health and welfare impacts.” Second, although this would suggest that negative consequences of rescinding endangerment findings would be measured by additional forecasted deaths, for example, the EPA in fact does not consider any such impacts. Third, the EPA waves aside all estimates of such consequences using just one word: uncertainties. In its view, uncertainty renders careful estimates of future damages completely invalid.
Hiding behind uncertainties is a cruel trick that the Trump administration has used with abandon. In multiple proceedings from February onward, it has cited “uncertainties” as a reason to stop estimating the local damage from dangerous air pollutants, such as particulate matter and ozone. For decades, those estimates had been provided on the basis of extensive peer-reviewed scientific literature, but the EPA now essentially assumes that this pollution causes no negative health effects, because whatever consequences existed were too “uncertain.”
One curiosity: In proposing the rescission of the endangerment finding, the agency does not dispute the seriousness of climate change. The proposal discusses at some length a July study by the National Academy of Sciences on the attribution of extreme weather events to global climate change—a study well within the mainstream of climate science. The EPA does not take issue with the academy’s study and is therefore implicitly saying that climate change is a serious problem, but that it can do nothing to ameliorate the severely negative consequences.
But this too is wrong. Of course, the benefits of U.S. emissions reductions would be augmented if they were accompanied by correspondingly ambitious actions by other countries. If the U.S. believed that other countries were not doing enough on that front, instead of rescinding its own restrictions, it could use its considerable power on the world stage to induce other countries to do more. The Trump administration is doing the opposite: It withdrew from the Paris Agreement, under which countries, including the United States, pledged to meet emissions-reduction targets, and it stopped participating in international climate negotiations altogether.
The Trump administration is not merely cynical; it is also irrational and wrong. If its nihilism becomes our national policy, as it is proposing, everyone will suffer the consequences.
When I first set out to report and write about what we now call the food system, I ran into a brick wall with editors in New York. This was in the late 1990s and early aughts. I was chasing stories about the new genetically modified crops, the fight over the federal definition of organic, and the rise of gigantic factory farms—stories that would eventually find their way into my book The Omnivore’s Dilemma—but few editors seemed interested.
At first I was baffled. I had read my Wendell Berry and had taken to heart his famous dictum, “Eating is an agriculture act.” Didn’t everybody know that?
A century or so ago, the question of where our food comes from would have been too obvious to pose, let alone investigate and write a book about. In 1900, about four of every 10 Americans were farmers, and everyone else was likely related to one. But as the food chains that fed us grew longer and more intricate, they became invisible to most of us, to the point where urban Americans seemed satisfied with the answer “Food comes from the supermarket.”
For cosmopolitan Americans around the turn of the millennium, the seemingly obvious connection between agriculture and eating was not obvious at all. Maybe that was my problem! “Agriculture” was a distant and musty abstraction, something that happens in I states such as Iowa and Indiana, and was of no conceivable interest to urban readers.
I revised my pitches, dropped the word agriculture, which to the typical editor in New York might as well have been something that happens in Alpha Centauri, and replaced it with food. Instead of pitching a piece about factory farms, for instance, I proposed a story about “how a prime cut of beef finds its way from a pasture in South Dakota to a steakhouse in New York.” It worked, almost like magic. Who isn’t interested in food? It turned out that editors in New York were especially keen on it; many of them were foodies and, at least in those days, had healthy expense accounts.
Mine wasn’t the only or even the first such book: Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2001) and Marion Nestle’s Food Politics (2002) had come out a few years before. All three books sought to connect a series of far-flung dots: between the way we farm and the way we eat, but also between industrial agriculture and obesity (and chronic disease); farm policy and the environmental crisis; the rise of fast food and the collapse of home cooking; monoculture farming and fossil fuels; concentration in the food industry and the hollowing-out of rural America. Another concept you hardly ever heard about back then was “food politics,” as Marion reminded me recently. When in the early 2000s she told the dean of her school at New York University the title of her latest book, he wrinkled his brow and asked, “What does food have to do with politics?” (“No one ever asks me that question anymore,” Marion recently pointed out.)
Food has become a political issue. In the years after The Omnivore’s Dilemma came out, in 2006, something that looked very much like a movement began to take shape. True, it never coalesced around any single issue. For better or worse, the food movement was and remains a baggy coalition of a great many groups pushing a great many different issues: fighting food insecurity, curbing pesticide use, reforming farm policy, promoting farmers’ markets, advancing farmworker and food-worker rights, passing stiffer food-safety laws, promoting animal welfare, and so on.
These factions sometimes work at cross-purposes. For example, activists working to strengthen food-safety rules sometimes run afoul of local food advocates, who worry that the burden of new regulations will hinder the revival of small-farm agriculture. Still, to watch so much activism galvanize around food and farming filled many of us with hope that things might actually change. For me, the high-water mark of that hope came during the 2008 presidential campaign, when Barack Obama gave an interview to Time magazine in which he referenced my critique of the food system.
Because “our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil,” he said, “our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the meantime, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our health care costs because they’re contributing to Type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity.”
Could the nascent food movement have found a powerful new champion? It certainly seemed that way. Obama campaigned aggressively in Iowa, promising to stand up to Big Food and vowing to regulate concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, “just as any other polluter.” On the campaign trail, as I’ve previously written, he told Iowans that they had a right to know where in the world their food came from and whether it had been genetically modified. To critics of the food system, the Obama campaign gave many of us hope that we would have an ally in the White House. (By the way, Obama won Iowa—twice!—the last Democrat to do so.)
But as the candidate and the movement soon learned, the power of agribusiness is formidable. A few short days after his interview with Time, Senator Charles Grassley, a.k.a. the Senior Senator From Corn, seized on Obama’s Time interview as evidence that he was blaming farmers for obesity and pollution. A campaign spokesman played down Obama’s remarks, saying he had simply been “paraphrasing” something he’d read. The episode taught Obama and the rest of us a painful lesson about just what we were up against with Big Food.
Once in the White House, the Obamas occasionally nurtured the hopes of food reformers. In the spring of 2009, Michelle Obama planted an organic vegetable garden on the White House lawn. The small patch excited the food movement but brought down the wrath of the chemical industry.
Chemical-industry groups labeled the Obamas “organic limousine liberals” while an agribusiness trade organization called on the first lady to use pesticides in her garden, never mind that she had no need for them. The dustup was a preview of things to come: Whatever steps the Obamas took to reform the food system would be met by ferocious attacks from industry—and, alas, would all too often result in retreat by the administration. Although Michelle did notch a significant victory with the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which made meaningful reforms to the school-lunch program—reforms that the first Trump administration has rolled back.
Big Food’s favorite line of attack? Depicting efforts to improve the food system as “elitist,” leading America down the path to a “nanny state.” The charge of elitism stung, not least because it contained more than a kernel of truth. The food movement has been mainly a coastal phenomenon, attracting the well-heeled and well educated who could afford to buy sustainably and humanely grown food. Many of the changes the movement sought—such as tighter regulation of factory farms and pesticides, higher pay for food workers, and rules favoring organic agriculture and grass-fed meat—threatened to increase the price of food.
This fact, I think, sharply circumscribed the movement’s power and appeal. Cheap food—which stands as the single great accomplishment of the industrial food system—is bound to be politically popular, even if that cheap food comes at a very high price to our health and the health of our planet, not to mention to the taxpayers footing the bill for crop subsidies. And food has become dramatically more expensive since the Obama years. Americans are living through the biggest jump in grocery prices in half a century; prices have climbed by roughly 33 percent since 2019 alone. Since at least the French Revolution, politicians have been very fond of cheap food, and understandably so.
The legacy of the Obamas’ engagement with food issues has been to make clear to anyone paying attention that food is political, a matter of public debate, and is likely to become more so in the future. How do we know that? Because it will be difficult, if not impossible, to address the climate crisis without addressing the carbon footprint of industrial agriculture—and difficult, if not impossible, to address the explosion in health-care costs without addressing the American diet, which contributes to many of the chronic diseases that most of our health-care dollars go to treat.
Twenty years after the publication of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, you might think—and I certainly hoped!—that my book would have fallen hopelessly out of date. But looking at the landscape of food and farming today, I’m sorry to report that things haven’t changed all that much. King Corn still rules the American heartland, where 95 million acres are dedicated to that single crop, up from 78 million acres when the book was first published. Chemically intensive monoculture farming remains the rule, encouraged by lavish federal subsidies that discourage farmers from trying anything else. The American taxpayer continues to subsidize the least healthy calories in the supermarket. Our government is backing both sides in the war against type 2 diabetes and obesity, spending billions to treat these chronic diseases while subsidizing the crop that gives us high-fructose corn syrup.
Corn remains the essential building block of the food Americans eat; along with soy, its partner in the fields, it gets turned into the meat and dairy and processed foods that dominate the American diet. Meanwhile, the small number of corporations that dominate meatpacking, seed production, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, grain trading and processing, fast-food chains, and supermarkets has only gotten smaller since 2006, as oligopolies tighten their grip on the industrial food chain that feeds most of us.
But not all the news is dire. Some things have changed for the better. Americans are paying more attention to what they eat—both the food’s healthfulness (or lack thereof) and its provenance. Many of us have opted out of the industrial-food economy. Today, you can find organic food in virtually every supermarket; organic is now a thriving $65 billion industry (up from roughly $13 billion in 2005). Add to that the market for local food—the Department of Agriculture estimates that there are now more than 8,100 farmers’ markets in America (up from about 4,000 in 2005) and another 7,200 CSAs, or subscription farms—plus all the animal products labeled grass-fed or humanely raised, and you have an alternative food economy easily approaching $75 billion a year. While the government dithers, consumers are voting with their forks for a different kind of food system.
Another important change since The Omnivore’s Dilemma was published was the emergence of a word: ultra-processed, as in ultra-processed foods. The term does not appear in the book, because it wasn’t used to describe a particular type of food until 2009. It was introduced by Carlos Monteiro, a Brazilian epidemiologist, who had been puzzling over a paradox: Brazilians were getting fatter and more diabetic and yet, as a population, they were eating roughly the same quantities of fat, carbohydrates, and protein. He investigated and discovered that what had changed was the form in which people were consuming these nutrients. In place of traditional dishes, they were consuming more ready-to-eat meals, snack foods, and soda. He dubbed these products “ultra-processed,” which he defined as ready-to-eat foods you can’t make at home, because they require a factory and a suite of ingredients—including additives, dyes, and emulsifiers—that no ordinary person keeps in their pantry. (I call them “edible food-like substances.”)
Monteiro’s insight is a powerful one: that the form in which we get our nutrients—whether as traditional whole foods or highly processed food products—has a significant bearing on our health and weight. Subsequent research has shown that people who eat ultra-processed foods end up consuming several hundred more calories a day than those who don’t. Consumption of these foods—most of which contain ingredients derived from corn and soy—has also been linked to several chronic diseases. How big a problem is ultra-processed food? Today it is the source of 55 percent of the calories in the American diet, and that figure is even higher for children—62 percent.
Much to the dismay of the food industry, the term has broken through with the public. (Just the other night, I saw an ad on television for a brand of dog food that boasted it was “real food, not ultra-processed.”) A poll taken in 2025 by a conservative think tank found that 70 percent of likely voters opposed serving ultra-processed foods in school meals; 96 percent favored putting warning labels on such foods. The current secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has no doubt driven up these numbers with his vow to get ultra-processed foods out of the national school-lunch program. We shall see if Big Food lets him.
But the secretary has at his back a large army of activists and voters who are changing the politics of food in ways that could help propel reform. I’m referring to the “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, movement, which Kennedy helped galvanize and then brought into the Trump tent. This is potentially significant. As long as the food movement was coded liberal or left and vulnerable to charges of elitism, there was a ceiling on its political power. But now the people who are calling for a ban on certain pesticides and getting ultra-processed foods out of the school-lunch program are the MAHA moms, and you no longer hear talk of elitism or the nanny state.
I should have seen this coming. There’s a moment in The Omnivore’s Dilemma when I ask a farmer named Joel Salatin who his customers are. His Polyface Farm is one of the most radical in America, and he is a libertarian free spirit with no patience for government regulation or agricultural convention.
He’s designed an intricate food chain that starts with sunlight and grass and supports half a dozen animal species living symbiotically. Who, I wondered, would schlep all the way to Swoope, Virginia, the remote, far-off-the-interstate burg where he farms, to buy his pastured chickens and grass-fed beef?
He described young mothers concerned about the health of their children, many of them drawn from the homeschooling and homesteading community. “People who have already opted out once,” as Joel points out. I met some of these mothers the week I spent working on Joel’s farm. They held fierce views on nutrition that weren’t always aligned with science: Seed oils and grains were a problem; raw milk was a solution; “clean” food was medicine.
These moms were deeply suspicious of institutions of all kinds, including food corporations, the medical system, and especially the FDA; they bridled against the agency’s food-safety rules. Many of these moms had kids with serious health issues that they hoped to address with a change in diet—hence their willingness to travel hundreds of miles to fill their coolers with Joel’s pastured meat and eggs.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was meeting future MAHA moms; it never occurred to me that they might coalesce into a movement that would have the ear of a president. Perhaps not surprisingly, Salatin has become a MAHA hero, invited to appear at rallies and brought in to consult with administration officials. He recently told me that the administration had reached out during the transition to gauge his interest in becoming the agriculture secretary. Imagine that!
It’s not at all clear what, if anything, will come of this new politics. The underlying DNA of MAHA is very different from the DNA of the first-wave food movement. MAHA is fundamentally libertarian, allergic to the sort of government intervention that people in the earlier food movement consider necessary to build a healthier, more just, and sustainable food system.
MAHA’s primary interest is our health as individuals, not the health of the environment; the movement has shown little interest in food insecurity or the rights of food workers. As Marion Nestle put it to me in an email, “The MAHA movement is like Joel Salatin. Everything up to the individual with little attention to policy.” And yet there are promising areas of overlap—around banning agricultural chemicals and the ingredients in ultra-processed foods, as well as supporting local food systems and regenerative farming.
The prospect that MAHA will get very far with an administration that regards all regulation as anathema seems doubtful. The Trump EPA is bent on deregulating agricultural chemicals, much to MAHA’s frustration, and the Trump USDA has been gutting support for small farms and local food systems. (It’s also worth pointing out that a diet of real food is not going to save children from the measles; what the Trump administration is doing to public health in America needs to be viewed in its totality.)
What is encouraging, I think, is that a vocal constituency seeking reform of food and agriculture has emerged on the right, adding its numbers and energy to the earlier wave of food activism coming from the left. Should the Trump administration disappoint or frustrate the MAHA moms, as appears to be happening, they may well look to form alliances with groups that share their priorities. They are nothing if not fierce. Could a new, bipartisan, and far more powerful food movement be built upon these areas of overlap? Early this year, we saw the first evidence of the power of that alliance, when MAHA activists teamed up with Democratic Representative Chellie Pingree, a Maine organic farmer and a leader of the food movement, to strip a provision from an appropriations bill that would have shielded pesticide manufacturers from lawsuits.
The building of coalitions like this one is surely cause for optimism. The demand for healthy food produced in a safe manner is something with the potential to unite us. Who can be against that kind of food? Only a powerful lobby, and one that has been very good at dividing us along lines of class and culture. But that strategy may no longer work, now that there are tens of millions of Americans on both sides of the ideological divide who recognize that our food system is badly broken, that it is responsible for our national eating disorder. This could be the start of something big. We can hope.
One might think that the meaning of a word as common as strategy is clear, but it is not. The invaluable Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus inadvertently captures the confusion: “master plan, grand design, game plan, action plan, policy, program, tactics.” But a master plan is something more specific than a grand design, a policy is what should direct strategy, and tactics exist at a level of intentional action below strategy.
The muddle becomes serious when applied to strategy’s original and most important field of human endeavor: war. The roots lie in ancient Greek, which is why stratēgos was the word for “general.” Many weighty works on strategy in war make the basic ideas clear, and yet, as one can see from the badly botched American war with Iran, strategy is acutely difficult. Here we have a war in which the United States has the world’s most advanced technology, highly skilled personnel, and well-trained and -staffed organizations. The U.S. is operating in a theater of war that it has studied for many decades, in partnership with Israel—the most militarily advanced country in the Middle East—as well as, more quietly, most of the Gulf States, and it is receiving the tacit support of countries such as Great Britain. Its enemy is poor and corrupt, and recently lost a large chunk of its senior leadership in a series of bombings and assassinations. But the result is, in important respects, a shocking setback, as Iran continues to throttle one of the world’s most important waterways.
This happened not because America’s weapons malfunctioned, its sailors and airmen were incompetent, or the problems were novel and unanticipated. Rather, America’s battlefield reversals represent a strategic failure of an acutely embarrassing kind.
Nor is the issue simply incompetent American political leadership, although that has played its role. The history of strategy is a tale of errors, misjudgments, poor assessments, and inadequate follow-through. It was true of the ancient Greeks, when Athens held the high cards in the Peloponnesian War and lost; it was true of Germany and Japan in the two world wars they launched at times and places of their choosing; it is true of Russia today in Ukraine; it is, for that matter, true of the Iranians themselves, who suffered their own strategic failures against Iraq in the 1980s and Israel in recent years.
The seven core questions of strategy may seem extremely simple, and yet they are rarely answered well.
The first is What else is going on? Strategy requires its practitioners to orient themselves to the surrounding environment, for almost never is a country simply facing off against another in isolation. When the Trump administration launched the current round of fighting with Iran, it did so having neglected its environment—indeed, in some ways, having made that environment worse. The U.S. had alienated its European allies, whose active help it needed in keeping the Strait of Hormuz open in the face of mine and surface attacks; it failed to prepare the ground with Gulf allies who would be exposed to Iranian attacks; and it underestimated the extent to which Russia and China had put themselves into a deep partnership with Iran, providing targeting intelligence, the components of military systems, and even some weapons. By fixating on the enemy at hand, the administration neglected the context that had shaped everything else.
Governments collect a great deal of intelligence about things that can be counted—tanks, ships, missiles. They do a much worse job of answering the second question, which can be derived from an unlikely classic of strategy: the 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Paul Newman and Robet Redford play two relatively nonviolent train robbers in the last days of the frontier. One day, as they are holding up a train, a boxcar door slides open and they are pursued by half a dozen men on horseback. Exciting chase scenes ensue as Butch and Sundance try every trick in their extensive playbook to shake them off, but still the pursuit continues. In bafflement, Butch asks Sundance, “Who are those guys?”It is the second great strategic question, and a subtle one.
The two robbers knew how many riders were pursuing them and what weapons they carried. They could probably even tell the breed of horses they were riding. But they did not know what made this band of lawmen so much more persistent and so adept in seeing through their dodges—what motivated them, and what that would mean for Butch and Sundance.
That sort of intelligence is difficult to come by, particularly if you do not know that that is the information you need. President Trump and his key advisers likely knew little about the leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who are now their primary opponents. It is clear that they still cannot fathom how their enemy makes decisions. It is not uncommon for Western leaders to underestimate or simply fail to grasp the ideological or religious motivations of their enemies, and that seems to be part of what has happened in the conflict with Iran. But it seems as well that the administration and its advisers misjudged Iran’s preparedness to launch a protracted, complex war in which it would be outgunned but not necessarily outsmarted.
The problem is probably reciprocal: If Iran’s leaders have taken the so-called TACO bet—“Trump Always Chickens Out”—they have been repeatedly proven wrong, as indeed have been many of Trump’s domestic critics. They may understand Trump, his motivations, his stock of resolve, and his fears as little as he understands them. Or for that matter, as little as the Israelis understood Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, even though they had had him in their prisons for 10 years, or as little as Americans understood the calculus of Japanese decision makers in the fall of 1941.
Sometimes it is possible not even to know who is in charge on the other side. During most of the Vietnam War, American leaders believed that the charismatic Ho Chi Minh or the experienced General Võ Nguyên Giáp were making the decisions. Later they suspected that it was a collective leadership. In reality, the dominant figure was the colorless first secretary of the Communist Party, Lê Duẩn. In the current war, Trump has frequently expressed his frustration at not knowing who is in charge on the other side.
What are we trying to do? is the third and most obvious strategic question, perhaps the easiest to pose and the most deceptive. When critics have gone after the Trump administration over the Iran war, they have usually focused on the supposed unclarity of its goals. They have something of a point, but to a more limited degree than one might think. In truth, the setting of goals, although vital, is a murky and shifting enterprise.
Carl von Clausewitz, who in his lifetime witnessed numerous strategic defeats as well as the ultimate victory of the allied coalition over Napoleonic France, taught that war is a continuation of policy by other means. It may be the most important teaching to take away from his classic, On War, and is certainly the most memorable. But if the ultimate objectives in war are political, then they also have political characteristics—that is, they may be vague, inconsistent, and above all changeable.
George H. W. Bush famously outlined four objectives for American forces in advance of the 1990–91 Gulf War, in an oft-cited example of strategic clarity. A closer look, however, shows that they were anything but clear. The first objective was ensuring the safety of American citizens in the Gulf—but before the bombs fell, that had already been achieved, because the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had released his American and European hostages. American citizens—the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines going into Iraq—were the ones endangered by the war. Expelling Iraq from Kuwait was straightforward enough, but restoring the “legitimate government of Kuwait”—a monarchy backed by a citizenry that included scarcely a quarter of the country’s inhabitants—was not. And as the events of the past 35 years have proven, the fourth objective, ensuring the stability of the Persian Gulf, was a pipe dream.
Moreover, some of the objectives the United States pursued either were unstated (stripping Saddam of his nuclear program and setting up the conditions for his overthrow) or evolved only in reaction to events on the ground (protecting the Kurdish population in the north and, to some degree, the Shia in the south).
This kind of shift in objectives occurs in all wars. Britain entered World War II nominally to save Poland from Germany. It ended up prohibiting Polish troops from marching in the victory parade in London. The United States invaded Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaeda; it ended up attempting to create an Afghan democratic republic.
Considered in this light, the Trump administration’s objective-setting in the Iran war, though messy, is not entirely implausible. Clearly, one objective has been to destroy, or at the minimum badly damage, Iran’s nuclear enterprise; another to limit its ability to threaten its neighbors with missile and drone attacks by dismantling some of its key military industries. A third, and the most questionable, seems to have been to overthrow and replace the regime. That last goal is evidently beyond the current reach of the U.S. military, although the other two have been achieved in some measure. As the war has wound on, the administration has reached for other goals, including the bizarre one of keeping “oil and gas cheap for Americans all over the country,” which Vice President Vance has declared now has primacy over avoiding a nuclear Iran.
One problem with the Trump administration’s objective-setting is the president’s foolish insistence that he has achieved more than he has: His repeated use of the word obliteration actually obscures some real, if far from absolute, successes in pursuit of his first two objectives. As for the third, it was always bound to be a reach but was not beyond the realm of possibility. The administration’s real failures have come in setting what were essentially defensive objectives in addition to the offensive ones, above all securing the Strait of Hormuz. For the rest, like many administrations before, it has promised much more than war can ever deliver—think of the hubris of the “war to end all wars,” or the objective of ending tyranny. In democratic societies, the temptation to justify the hazards and sacrifices of war with overblown rhetoric and absurd aspirations usually overcomes the good judgment of political and military leaders alike.
What are our means? is the fourth question. At a strictly quantitative level it is usually easily answered by counting tanks, missiles, or ships. But those are often the least important variables in the equation. The real variables are whether organizations can do what we want them to do; whether the technical means we have at our disposal are adequate to the task; and whether, if new challenges arise, we have the resources to meet them.
The United States entered the current war with limited stockpiles of its most advanced weapons, limited mine-clearing capabilities, and no frigates whatsoever to escort convoys. It had very little in the way of hardened bunkers for its aircraft in the Persian Gulf, and so suffered some shocking losses on the ground to accurate Iranian missiles (possibly guided by Russian intelligence). And the entire campaign has been predicated on expectations about what bombing could do that were at best highly improbable and at worst totally unrealistic.
The administration clearly overestimated what the U.S. military could do, but one has to wonder whether the armed forces also misjudged their own capabilities. Decades of underinvestment in both passive defenses (for example, concrete shelters, underground command posts) and active ones (for example, surface-to-air missile batteries), not any particular decision of the Trump administration, have exposed the U.S. Air Force to high losses. A similar decades-long lack of commitment to the counter-mine-warfare and the escort-of-convoy missions has made the Strait of Hormuz operation so difficult.
“Know the enemy and know yourself and in a hundred battles you will not be defeated,” goes the saying of the Chinese general Sun Tzu. But military organizations and their leaders frequently fail to understand themselves, and in particular their own weaknesses. America’s lack of preparedness to conduct classical counterinsurgency warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan cost it dearly in blood, money, and time. Most militaries fail to conduct a sober reckoning with their own deficiencies by examining their lack of resources, organizational preparation, or aptitude.
The fifth and sixth questions are What is our priority? and In what sequence should we act? For a country as wealthy and powerful as the United States, these are particularly uncomfortable questions. American leaders often act as though their resources are infinite and few really difficult strategic choices need to be made. That flexibility is one of the blessings (and occasionally the curse) of an astoundingly wealthy and populous country.
Economists like the word trade-off—to get this, you have to give up that. The military uses instead phrases such as economy of force or acceptable risk that mask the blunter truth that some things are more important than others. In the current Iran war, it has become clear that getting control of the Strait of Hormuz has never been the top priority—had it been so, the U.S. would have conducted a variety of operations, probably including seizing some of the smaller islands near the strait.
Setting priorities can be acutely difficult in war. The best decision Franklin D. Roosevelt made during the Second World War was one of priority. Military and political leaders alike had believed in 1941 that Germany would be a more important enemy than Japan and needed to be tackled first. But the war began for the United States with the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941. Over the next six months, Roosevelt agreed to the British proposal to invade French North Africa in November 1942. General George C. Marshall, the chief of staff of the U.S. Army, and Admiral Ernest J. King, the chief of naval operations, thought it a strategic error and opposed it, favoring instead an invasion of France in 1943.
Roosevelt’s calculation was chiefly political: To sustain domestic support for the “Germany first” policy, American forces had to be in action somewhere in the European theater of operations within a year of Pearl Harbor. He got his priorities right, and Marshall and King, who did not think politically, were wrong. (As it happened, a 1943 invasion would probably have been an operational debacle as well for the untried U.S. Army, but that was a separate matter.)
If Roosevelt got priority right, however, he got sequencing wrong. Like most politicians, he did not want to feel trapped by prior decisions—what political scientists call “path dependence.” He believed that he could have the North Africa invasion and still invade France in 1943, and he was wrong. The defeat of German armies in North Africa took longer than expected, and was not completed until March 1943. Sicily loomed as an easy target, and besides, shifting large forces to Britain, particularly before the U-boat menace in the Atlantic was defeated, would take time, so in July the Allies attacked the island and took it. That triggered the fall of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini; the logical next Allied move was therefore a landing in Italy. That occurred in September 1943, in the immediate aftermath of Italy’s defection from the Axis. And that, in turn, led to a swift German occupation of Italy and an ensuing front in Europe that no one had anticipated.
Sequencing, then, was only partially under Roosevelt’s control, or anyone else’s for that matter. One thing led to another, and as is so often the case in war, the contenders looked as though they were playing chess one move at a time, seizing an opportunity without fully anticipating the consequences of doing so.
The final question is in many ways the most difficult: What is our theory of victory? Or, put more simply, Why do we think this will work?
In the case of the Iran war the theory of victory seems to be: We will inflict so much economic pain on the regime that it will give in, either because it will hate to see the Iranian economy ruined or because its people will rise up and overthrow it. But Iran has been suffering self-imposed economic misery for decades, and its leaders, with their own corrupt networks, can live in splendor while others suffer. And as for an uprising, the time to support that would have been when Iranians took to the streets in December and January 2026, before 30,000 were massacred by the Islamic Republic’s repressive apparatus. If there is any theory of victory left for the United States, it is that more reasonable Iranian leaders will replace the extremists—but it would appear at the moment that the hardest of the hard-liners are the ones with the guns.
Articulating a theory of victory is no different from constructing a plausible story—the different characters find themselves in a situation, they do this and that, and there is an outcome. In practice, though, such theories are rarely offered in governmental deliberations—and here I speak from personal experience. I saw that play out while sitting in the Situation Room as senior officials discussed sending more soldiers, or diplomats, or aid money to Afghanistan, without anyone quite broaching the question of how the moves under consideration were supposed to lead to success.
Such failures are entirely common, as the perusal of archival records confirms. Strategy is chiefly about execution—the exceedingly complicated and difficult task of moving forces from one place to another, guiding them through combat, and responding to unforeseen circumstances. There are ancillary activities—diplomatic initiatives, the public presentation of the reasons for war or expositions of why it is going the way it is, the gathering and deployment of financial and industrial resources. All of this requires serious, detailed, and extremely consequential work. To begin telling a story, or even to ask for one, in such a circumstance can seem frivolous at best, and at worst downright subversive of the efforts officials are investing and the sacrifices soldiers are making.
Why is it all so hard? One reason lies in the sheer uncertainty of all wars, in which personalities, contingent events, accidents, bloodlust, shifting political calculations, and sheer good or bad luck play their part. But no less important are the weaknesses of the decision makers themselves.
For one, they are often, if experienced, old and suffering the afflictions of age, or if young, inexperienced and either cocky or timid. Historians will parse the records of the Trump administration or, like the cardiologist of the late Vice President Dick Cheney, wonder what it meant that the president was clearly in poor physical and possibly mental health. He would hardly be alone.
Prime Minister Anthony Eden launched the Suez operation of 1956 against Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. At the time, he had been hospitalized with a fever of up to 106 degrees following a set of badly botched gallbladder operations. He had been taking amphetamines and sleeping pills. In a fascinating study of Eden, David Owens, himself a former foreign secretary and a physician, concluded that Eden’s physical health played a large role in the poor decision making that helped produce a major debacle.
Roosevelt was on the edge of death in the last year of World War II; Winston Churchill had a heart attack; and Joseph Stalin, in addition to suffering from hypertension, had become increasingly paranoid. John F. Kennedy took a horrifying cocktail of drugs for his bad back and suffered from Addison’s disease. Woodrow Wilson had an incapacitating stroke that left the U.S. government largely in the hands of his protective wife. These are not isolated cases.
Even healthy younger leaders may find themselves suffering from acute sleep deprivation and other disorders. A flattering portrayal of President Biden’s national security adviser noted that, during the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, Jake Sullivan was getting two hours of sleep a night for days on end. As those who have studied medical residents know, going that short of sleep practically guarantees poor decisions.
The psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky have examined many heuristic shortcuts that distort rational decision making. Almost all of them apply in strategic decision making as well. Take anchoring, our tendency to judge an event, problem, or cost based on some existing piece of information. The trivial case is the extremely expensive bottle of wine put on a restaurant menu with the idea of making the second- or third-most-expensive bottle look reasonably priced.
Strategic anchoring occurs frequently. In the run-up to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, not only Hitler but also his generals concluded that Russia was a fragile giant. They anchored their perceptions on the 1939–40 winter war between the U.S.S.R. and Finland, when 200,000 Soviet troops were killed, wounded, or captured by Finnish militiamen. They paid no attention to the way in which the Soviets had learned swiftly from their failures in that war, and did not account for all of the advantages that Russians would derive from fighting on their own ground.
In a similar vein, both the Russian military and Western observers anchored their perception of Ukrainian fighting power in the 2014 and 2015 rounds of conflict in the Donbas as well as the Russian seizure of Crimea. They had discounted, or simply ignored, the improvements in Ukrainian training and equipment since then, or, in parallel with the 1941 case, the differences that would emerge when Ukrainians were fighting to protect their villages and cities from an army that would commit rape and murder with abandon.
Strategic decision making is rarely a matter of individual choices; more often it is the result of some kind of deliberation. This is true even in the most extreme totalitarian countries. Stalin called the shots, but Marshal Georgy Zhukhov could get a hearing. This leads to another obstacle to sound strategic judgment: collective pathologies. The phenomenon described by Irving Janis as groupthink applies particularly forcefully to strategic decision making: illusions of invulnerability, collective discounting of warnings, unquestioned belief in one’s own inherent morality, stereotyped views of adversaries, self-censorship, and the exclusion of dissidents, or their reduction to marginal status. Lyndon Johnson heard out George Ball, the in-house dissenter on Vietnam, and then moved swiftly on.
These and many other pathologies have beset not only the Trump administration in Iran, but most countries at war. They can be mitigated but not resolved. Formal procedures are less helpful than qualities of character. Of these the most important are empathy, to understand both the enemy and one’s own side; curiosity, because every war is new and distinctive; humility, to accept that one has made mistakes; and above all moral courage, to face facts for what they are and to make decisions accordingly.
The president is singularly deficient in all of these aspects. He finds it difficult to imagine the world as seen by others; he seems to be incurious about the important details of military operations; he is far from humble; and if he is averse to anything, it is admitting that he might be wrong. These traits do not seem, moreover, to be confined to him but are shared by many in his administration.
The strategic virtues, to be clear, are rarely found. But they do exist. Churchill, whose courage was justly famous, was a great war leader. He benefited as much, however, from his empathy as from his courage. His great advantage over Hitler, as the historian John Lukacs has shrewdly noted, is that he could imagine what it was like to be Hitler, but Hitler could never imagine what it was like to be Churchill. One cannot study Abraham Lincoln’s conduct of the Civil War without being struck by his curiosity and humility—neither of which interfered with his resolve and decisiveness.
Nor is it the acknowledged great figures of history alone who show these qualities: When President George W. Bush made the call in December 2006 to surge forces to Iraq despite the apprehensions of his military and political subordinates, he exhibited considerable moral courage. Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol made a number of decisions in the run-up to the Six-Day War that bought Israel at least a modicum of the support and understanding that it would need from abroad, and which, in very different circumstances, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has so profligately squandered.
Some view strategy as so difficult that it is not even worth attempting. These are not only counsels of despair but of nihilism. Some decision makers have shown excellent strategic judgment and used war to achieve their political objectives. The most notable might be Anwar Sadat, the long-underestimated Egyptian president who launched the 1973 Yom Kippur War and used a spectacular early success that could have easily ended in catastrophe to secure the peace he wanted.
War is a hideous thing. There are even more hideous things, however, as anyone who has visited the mass graves of Sarajevo or the slaughter field of Bucha in Ukraine will know. A war with Iran now may well be far less terrible than a war launched by an Iran with nuclear weapons later. Moreover, sometimes war is unavoidable: True pacifists are few, and no nation committed to pacifism has survived the predations of a hostile neighbor that is not.
The chances are good that anyone reading this article lives in a country that is currently at war, or has been at war, or is closely affected by war. It is a near certainty that they live in a country whose borders have been shaped by war, and quite probably one whose form of government has resulted from war. All of us therefore have, or should have, a keen interest in strategy.
Unfortunately, however, its practice will not get any easier in the future. War is spreading to new domains, and employing new and terrible conventional weapons, many capable of acting on the basis of decisions that machines will make in fractions of a second. Nuclear weapons are spreading, and we now face the potential of devastating biological weapons manufactured with the aid of artificial intelligence. The previous experiences and professional knowledge of generals and admirals becomes ever more swiftly obsolete; the hazards of untried political leaders wading through such uncertainty, immensely greater. More countries have the capacity to do terrible things, and are seemingly willing to do so.
None of that is an excuse for neglecting the subject that Aristotle thought essential for a citizen. In his Rhetoric, he talks at length about the subjects an orator must master, including “the military strength of his country, both actual and potential, and also the nature of that strength; and further, what wars his country has waged, and how it has waged them. He must know these facts not only about his own country, but also about neighboring countries; and also about countries with which war is likely, in order that peace may be maintained.”
Strategy is one of the oldest of subjects. It is powerfully shaped by current events and technologies but best learned through a deep encounter with the history of war. It can be studied but rarely mastered, and it is the domain of both calculation and inevitable error. Of one thing we can be certain: As we look at a world in which violence is not the last resort for many countries and organizations hostile to our values and interests, and may very well be the first, strategy will be needed more than ever.
In this new season of Autocracy in America, host Anne Applebaum sits down with leaders in politics, technology, and culture to discuss what can be done now to reverse the slide toward autocracy.
The following is a transcript:
Anne Applebaum: The midterms mark the beginning of the end of President Donald Trump’s second term in office. Although we don’t know who and what the results will bring, we do know that, regardless of what happens, there will now be opportunities to prevent the further degradation of our democracy. This November, the Autocracy in America podcast is coming back, this time to focus on that recovery.
I’m Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic. Join me for interviews with the people who will be leading the charge. I’ll talk with leaders about their plans to work with the administration, to restore international relationships, and to repair the damage done to our economy. I’ll ask what it could look like to retrain and restrain ICE, rescue our cultural institutions, and keep our elections safe.
The new season of Autocracy in America arrives Tuesday, November the 10th, and will be available in video and audio. Subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
For the first time since the dawn of the automobile, the majority of new cars are not powered exclusively by gasoline: So far in 2026, electric vehicles and hybrids are outselling traditional gas-powered cars. As oil prices have gone up and up since the start of the war in Iran, drivers from Hanoi to Hamburg are picking up EVs like never before. According to the energy think tank Ember, 49 countries have broken EV-sales records this year. The prime minister of Thailand recently ditched his Rolls-Royce and commuted to work in an all-electric BYD Sealion.
And then there’s the United States. For all the angst over high gas prices, EVs accounted for just 6.4 percent of new-car sales in the U.S. from July to September. That’s a slight rise from January, before the beginning of the war with Iran—but just barely. The U.S. has long been something of an EV laggard, full of drivers (and a president) who are skeptical of battery-powered cars. But even as gas prices have jumped from $3 to $4.50 over the past year, drivers won’t budge.
America’s car fleet was never going to flip overnight. No one forks over $50,000 for a Tesla the moment gas hits $5 a gallon. “If gas prices are higher for a little while,” Elaine Buckberg, a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability and a former executive at General Motors, told me. “People say, ‘Oh, this is going to pass. I’m not going to go and change what vehicle I own.’” But when high gas prices linger for half a year or longer, Buckberg added, the direction of the car industry can shift. The shortages and lines of the 1970s helped kill the mid-century land yacht. In the 2000s, record-high gas prices tempered the craze for gas-guzzling SUVs and pushed millions of Americans to buy hybrids like the Toyota Prius. Now drivers have a real alternative to the whims of the world oil market. They’re just not taking it.
Americans are not all gasoline loyalists who’ve forsworn battery power. In fact, most drivers now say that they are strongly considering an EV as their next vehicle, and the trend is even stronger among people under 35. Pre-owned EVs are surging, but they represent a sliver of the used-car market, because so few of them are out there. The biggest winner from the gasoline spike has been the plain old hybrid, the green-car solution of the George W. Bush years. Sales in the U.S. have jumped 27 percent over the past year.
To some degree, Americans aren’t making the leap for several long-standing reasons: EVs are too expensive, and the options are lacking. Because the U.S. effectively bans electric cars made in China, we are cut off from buying something such as the BYD Dolphin Surf, an electric sedan that sells for about $22,000 in Europe. Many of the models that drivers are familiar with still cannot be had as an EV. Toyotas such as the RAV4 and Camry now come only as hybrids; last year, Ford killed the electric version of the F-150 pickup truck, this country’s most popular vehicle, citing low sales. Ford is now hyping up a roughly $30,000 electric pickup truck, but that won’t arrive until 2027. Meanwhile, America’s only electric minivan is the struggling Volkswagen ID. Buzz, a modern take on the flower-power bus. And although Tesla’s cars have a lot going for them, plenty of Americans say they won’t touch the brand because of Elon Musk. In short, the EV market is full of holes.
That said, it’s hard not to look at tepid EV sales and wonder whether Americans have lost the plot on electric cars. The price gap between gas and electric cars is closing; more EVs are now available for under $40,000. Charging networks are expanding, and battery ranges are climbing. Compared with even just a year or two ago, buying an electric car comes with fewer trade-offs. And in plenty of ways, EVs are just better. They’re zippy and fun to drive. They don’t require much of the routine maintenance, such as oil changes, that make car ownership annoying. They can do all sorts of things that fossil-fuel burners cannot: refuel at home, keep a house’s lights on during a blackout, store luggage in a “frunk.”
But if gas that’s creeping up on $5 a gallon isn’t enough to persuade people to go electric, what will? When I posed the question to Buckberg, she told me about research she’d worked on while at GM: Drivers were “happy to buy an EV—as long as they don’t have to give up anything they like about their current vehicle,” she said. In other words, it’s not enough for EVs to be good at what they’re good at—especially when relatively few Americans know someone who has one. They need to match the things that gas cars are good at too. Fast chargers are spreading, but not fast enough to free us from the mental load of worrying about where to refuel—something that’s been a given in a nation with a gas station at every corner. And what EVs can’t do yet (unless you’re in China) is recharge in as little time as it takes to pump gas. That’s something American drivers see as a prerequisite, even though most of us don’t regularly take very long road trips and drive an average of 30-some miles a day—a total easily handled by charging at home.
There’s every reason to think that EVs will continue a gradual climb, Corey Cantor, the research director at the Zero Emission Transportation Association, told me. A new wave of hyper-capable electric cars is arriving in America, with ranges above 400 miles per charge. But if EVs really have to do everything gas-powered cars do—and more—before drivers give them a chance, it’ll be a long time before America embraces them en masse. We’re nowhere near the charging speeds that China has achieved nor the density of plugs that would rival the ubiquity of gas stations. Until then, Americans will keep pumping gas into worse cars while the rest of the world has long moved on.
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You might imagine that, given the imminent midterm elections, a spluttering war in Iran, and his sinking personal approval, Donald Trump has enough to worry about. Not so. The president has been posting prolifically on Truth Social over the past two days about protests in France. “The migrants have taken over France. They must CLOSE THE BORDERS, FAST!” he wrote this morning. Trump’s reactions don’t tell us a great deal about the protests or about French society, but they do reveal three things about Trump.
First, Trump’s favorite mode is punditry. Even as the world’s most powerful man, he frequently seems to prefer watching TV and shooting opinions from the hip to engaging in governance. This explains why he continued to give freewheeling briefings, full of his own speculation and medical advice, while the coronavirus swept the United States in 2020, and it might be one reason he’s fixated on France at a time of political peril for his own party.
Second, and related, Trump can’t resist meddling in other countries’ affairs, engaging in behavior that previous presidents would have concluded was inappropriate. The U.S. government has long worked to covertly influence foreign elections, and in some cases encouraged or fomented coups. But presidents have mostly avoided issuing public endorsements or other interventions in partisan politics overseas, two things Trump loves to do. He endorsed the prime minister of Japan for reelection, backed a right-wing candidate for president of Poland, placed tariffs on Brazil for prosecuting his ally Jair Bolsonaro, and lent his administration’s credibility to the reelection campaign of Hungary’s then-President Viktor Orbán. (Orbán lost.) This weekend, he endorsed embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump’s blaming of immigrants in France amplifies the platform of National Rally, a far-right party with fascist roots that is ideologically aligned with MAGA and has its best shot yet at capturing the French presidency for the first time next spring.
But U.S. interference abroad tends to produce some pushback. Leaders and voters in sovereign countries may not like a superpower telling them how to live—especially in a nation such as France, which still sees itself as a global player. Apologists might contend that Trump’s meddling in foreign politics is a sign of strength, projecting American power worldwide, but the brush-off Trump received when begging for international assistance in the Persian Gulf showed the cost of treating allies dismissively. Trump’s approach to the protests is notable because for years, he seemed to get along with French President Emmanuel Macron better than with almost any other foreign leader, a bromance sealed with history’s most awkward handshake. Their friendship seems to have cooled more recently, in part because of tariffs and Trump’s antagonism toward Ukraine. (Notably, the Kremlin is also using France’s protests to score political points.)
Third, Trump views all forms of protest—at least those with which he disagrees—as inherently illegitimate. The violence in France warrants concern: This past weekend, the country saw some of its worst riots in decades; shops were looted and landmarks were destroyed as rioters seemed to take advantage of the mass marches. But in his posts on Truth Social, the president does not simply condemn the violence—he suggests that the riots must be the work of foreign seditionists. The protest movement was in fact sparked by domestic concerns, particularly demands for better funding for the nation’s school system. Macron, in contrast to Trump, has said that many protestors have legitimate demands, even as he has fiercely condemned violence, which he blames on “troublemakers from far-left fringe groups.”
Authoritarians see any popular resistance as a danger to their power, which is why the autocratic Russian regime and the aspiring strongman Trump are united in condemning French demonstrations. And as nationalists, they must also blame the danger on outsiders, even though French authorities have not made any link between immigrants and unrest. “Western liberals imported the third world into France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion,” Vice President Vance posted on X this weekend, along with a clip of the city hall in Limoges, in the old province of Limousin, burning. “They ignored fundamental questions of assimilation and compatibility. They were told it would lead to this and they didn’t listen.” This was not only a missed opportunity for Vance to blame literal limousine liberals for the riots; it was patently absurd. The French don’t need outsiders to teach them how to rage in the streets. They’ve been doing it for centuries. (Trump, an aficionado of Les Misérables, might not have made this mistake.) To the extent that migrants are involved in these protests, it is proof that they have assimilated fully to the French way of life.
Suggesting that Trump and Vance might be wiser to focus on getting their own house in order than to look overseas would be easy, but it misses the point. This weekend, while Trump was posting about French protests, Americans were participating in thousands of “No Kings” demonstrations around the country and Trump’s “border czar” was insinuating that Ilhan Omar, a Democratic lawmaker who is a naturalized citizen, committed immigration fraud. Trump’s attempts to delegitimize protest and whip up xenophobia aren’t ultimately about France. They’re about the United States.
The Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other accused September 11 plotters who are seeking to reinstate a 2024 plea deal that would have given them life sentences. The three men are scheduled to stand trial before a military commission in 2028 and could face the death penalty.
Yesterday, President Trump defended his decision to ease sanctions and tariffs on Russia, saying the move was intended to keep Moscow at the negotiating table for a peace agreement with Ukraine. He also suggested that the talks included negotiations over the release of a hostage, but he did not identify anyone involved.
Houthi forces launched three ballistic missiles at a military camp in Yemen’s Shabwa province, killing at least 47 people and injuring at least 53 others, according to Yemeni military officials. The attack comes amid renewed fighting between the Iran-backed group and Yemeni government forces supported by Saudi Arabia.
The Minimal Requirements for a Society Free From Fear
By Adam Kirsch
In 1989, the year the West won the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama published an essay announcing “the end of history.” He wasn’t claiming that historic events would stop taking place; what was over, rather, was the debate about the meaning of those events. Since the Enlightenment, Western thinkers had believed that history was progressing toward a final destination. According to communism, the engine of progress was class conflict, and history would end in the creation of a classless society. With the failure of the Soviet empire, Fukuyama argued, this idea had been discredited. Only one alternative remained: It was now clear that the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” was “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” There would still be disagreements within liberalism—Fukuyama named religion and nationalism as likely fault lines—but there could no longer be any disagreement about liberalism.
Read. Sarah Anderson’s latest novel accomplishes what Yesteryear couldn’t, Stephanie Hayes writes. In the corporate satire Fallow, a woman is hired to bear children for executives, and her experience skewers the ideal of “having it all.”
Explore. This may be the golden age of sex toys, Sarah Hepola writes. But relying on the convenience of self-pleasure may also be keeping us “cocooned in a little pod of self-gratification.”
This year, the Trump administration gave federal firefighters a mandate: no more letting fires burn. Conventional wisdom among firefighters and public-land managers has held that allowing fires in remote areas to run their course can be beneficial. But now the administration’s new U.S. Wildland Fire Service was to pursue a policy of “full suppression” on every wildfire, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum instructed his workforce, to avoid the possibility of dangerous spread. “Accelerate initial attack,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins put it in her own directive to the Forest Service. “Suppress fires early and limit growth.” And when Yosemite National Park caught on fire last month, that is what firefighters did.
The hazy skies above the park filled with aircraft—planes dropping fire retardant on forested slopes; helicopters ferrying hotshot crews to the blaze. At one point, at least 17 helicopters were in rotation, along with more than 1,000 firefighters. “I’ve worked in Yosemite and with Yosemite for almost 40 years,” Tom Nichols, a former head of fire and aviation for the National Park Service (and no relation to the Atlantic writer Tom Nichols), told me. “I’ve never seen that kind of response.”
At the start, attacking the fire aggressively made sense: It had started near a popular hiking trail and was burning on a slope above Wawona, a small community in the park. It looked to be human caused. In such situations, federal policy, even before this year, called for firefighters to use “full suppression” to try to put it out as quickly as possible, former Yosemite fire officials told me.
But as it developed, the Dome Fire spread to the north and east, farther up the mountains, away from any homes or communities. The resources being poured into fighting it began to baffle some fire veterans. As a former Yosemite official put it to me, “There’s really no reason to be attacking a fire like that.” (I spoke with several sources for this story who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly and hoped to avoid professional repercussions.) Such an aggressive approach can be dangerous. Five days into the effort to put it out, one of the helicopters was doing water-bucket drops from a nearby lake when it crashed. Both pilots died.
“For what?” one federal fire official told me. “There’s nothing out there. Just let nature do its thing.” Another official had to ask: “Did they die in vain?”
Under the Trump administration’s policy of full fire suppression, so far this year entrapments—when firefighters’ positions are surrounded by flames—are above the average for the previous two decades. At least 17 wildland firefighters, pilots, and contractors have been killed, surpassing the full-year average over the past decade, according to the Wildland Firefighter Foundation. That number includes four firefighters in Colorado who died this summer responding to the Knowles and Gore fires as flames spread amid high winds and low visibility. After that incident, several Democratic senators called on the Interior Department to investigate whether the full-suppression policy put firefighters at undue risk.
Brian Fennessy, the Wildland Fire Service chief, doesn’t think that the new policy is putting firefighters in more danger, he told me. The two pilots’ deaths in the Dome Fire were a tragedy—one he hopes his agency can learn from—but “this was not the year to allow managed fire on the landscape,” he said. The winter was historically warm, and snowpacks were at record lows across much of the western United States. Federal authorities were not about to let fires burn unattended, even in the wild. And the administration’s policy of suppression does mean increasing the number of people and helicopters fighting a given fire, he said: “Instead of two engines and a helicopter, maybe you’ve got four engines, two helicopters, maybe an air tanker.” Given how hot and dry it’s been, had firefighters not focused on putting out fires, in Yosemite and elsewhere, many could have been worse, he said.
The question of whether to harness or extinguish fire is particularly relevant in Yosemite. This is where America’s formal debate over that policy began, after Abraham Lincoln signed a bill in 1864 to grant the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias to California as a public trust. The commission to oversee the area disagreed about the question of annual burning by Native Americans, Stephen Pyne, a historian of fire, told me. Fires set by the Ahwahneechees were “deliberate and purposeful, even artful,” Pyne writes in his book about Yosemite’s fire history, Pyrocene Park: “They burned to keep grasslands open and attract game animals like deer to fresh forage; to keep trees from crowding out annual-grass prairies; to help harvest acorns; to stimulate willows useful for basketry; to promote berries.” Some of the Yosemite’s first commissioners saw the value in that. Others, such as Frederick Law Olmsted, considered such fires vandalism that undermined, as he put it, “the duty of preservation.”
For more than a century afterwards, the suppressionists prevailed until, in 1974, Yosemite leaders allowed a major lightning-caused fire to burn in the Illilouette Creek basin, whose creek runs behind Half Dome, the park’s famous bald mountain. This was the first big test of its new policy to manage certain fires for ecological benefit. Since then, more than 100 fires have come through that basin, and scientists have documented its renaissance. The proportion of the basin covered by dense conifer forest fell by 20 percent, and a mosaic of meadows and grasslands emerged. Biodiversity bloomed, as bees and bats and understory plants thrived. Even streams flowed a bit more abundantly, as fewer trees competed for water and snow had more open space to accumulate, Scott Stephens, a professor of wildfire science at UC Berkeley, told me. The regular burning also makes the basin more capable of handling future fire, he said, by minimizing how much of it burns at a destructive intensity. It’s now “one of the most resilient, functioning forests in all of California.”
Set under the right conditions, prescribed fires, too, can help prevent hotter-burning conflagrations. The evidence was plain just four years ago in Yosemite, when the Washburn Fire bore down on the Mariposa Grove and its revered giant sequoias. The park had conducted more than 20 prescribed fires in that area since the 1970s. And when the Washburn Fire approached the grove, the flames moved around the treated areas as if they were boulders in a stream, sparing the sequoias that have been burning up in great numbers elsewhere in California.
But this year, at least, under the Trump administration’s leadership, the park seems to have stepped back from prescribed burns as well. Although in many recent years Yosemite has done several prescribed fires, this year the park has done none and even canceled a long-planned prescribed fire near the Mariposa Grove scheduled for May, around Memorial Day, according to two people familiar with the decision. They added that Ray McPadden, the superintendent of the park, was concerned it would affect park visitation because it required closing parts of the grove temporarily. (McPadden did not respond to a request for comment; the Wildland Fire Service said Yosemite was looking for an opportunity to complete the burn this fall.)
Over the long term, avoiding fire puts the sequoias at risk, Cicely Muldoon, who retired as Yosemite’s superintendent last year, told me. And on top of that, jettisoning controlled burns, which ultimately keep fires modest, also means that “you’re really putting people in harm’s way.” A little fire—however it starts—can help prevent future huge fires.
Under the Trump administration’s reorganization of federal firefighting resources, superintendents of national parks no longer decide how to manage fires that start within their borders. That authority now lies with the Wildland Fire Service, which is housed within the Department of the Interior. After last summer’s Dragon Bravo fire at the Grand Canyon, a lightning-caused fire that destroyed more than 100 buildings, Trump-administration officials have shunned the notion of letting fires burn for the health of the landscape.
From the beginning, people fighting the Dome Fire—including those from the National Park Service and two different California interagency incident-management teams—did all that they could to put the fire out, for weeks. Because it was burning on remote slopes, these firefighters relied heavily on helicopters to reach the flames, haul in supplies, and drop water. (The teams also sent in mule trains and firefighters hiking on foot.) Crews camped in the woods as they cut fire lines by hand. Such a response is expensive too. Fighting a 6,700-acre fire that has burned no buildings has cost at least $55 million so far, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. The Wildland Fire Service said in a statement that fire managers were concerned about different assets as the fire progressed, including Yosemite West—another nearby community—and the Badger Pass ski area.
In the field, the work was logistically complex, and its tempo was high. Six firefighters got injured or became ill, according to the Wildland Fire Service. People were reporting falls, bee stings, smoke inhalalation, one firefighter told me, and the frequency of incidents was “more than you’d expect” for what they were gaining from keeping the fire at bay, the firefighter said. “People were like, What are we doing? There’s nothing out here. We’re slamming this fire shut,” this person added. “People were questioning that.”
Congestion from so many helicopters caused safety concerns, too, including a close call on September 19 between a firefighting helicopter and skydivers near the Mariposa-Yosemite Airport, a small airfield outside the park. Although an employee from Skydive Yosemite had alerted firefighters about their plans in a morning briefing, when five people jumped from 14,000 feet later that day, they floated down as a helicopter carrying cargo hovered in the vicinity of their landing zone, Paul Wignall, the company’s owner, told me. The helicopter pilot did not appear to be monitoring radio messages from the skydiving plane, Wignall said, and one of the divers drifted close enough to make eye contact with the helicopter pilot. By the time others in the group came down, the helicopter had flown off. Wignall was particularly concerned about the powerful rush of air from the helicopter’s blade. “If he can see a parachute coming, he should get the hell out of there,” Wignall said.
During the incident, the helicopter pilot “took action in response” to the skydivers, the Wildland Fire Service said in a statement, and firefighters later met with the skydiving operator to discuss the incident. The FAA brought in a temporary control tower, and firefighters moved equipment to avoid potential problems, Adrienne Freeman, a spokesperson on one of the interagency incident-management teams for the Dome Fire, told me. Authorities would later close the airport for a week. The day after the skydiving incident, another helicopter went down fighting the fire.
The circumstances of the deadly crash on September 20 remain under investigation. The firefighting community has rallied support for the families of the two pilots who died—Greg King and Ryan Cutter—and held ceremonies to honor their service. The pilots worked for Precision, a Forest Service contractor based in Oregon. After the crash, the use of aircraft on the fire paused as Fire Service managers assessed the safety risk. The losses cast a shadow over the whole enterprise.
The danger of letting a fire burn might very well have been higher than normal because of the hot, dry conditions this year, as Brian Fennessy, the federal fire chief, said. But these types of years are more common now. The next one could be hot and dry too. In Yosemite, and across America, the choice to always put the fires out carries its own risks. The kindling keeps piling up, increasing the chance that the next one will be so big that no one can control it.
In 1996, during the early years of the web, I could see that those of us who were participating online were creating an extraordinary new record of human activity—and allowing it to disappear almost as quickly as we made it.
The web was becoming the place where government officials made promises, journalists published information in the public interest, and ordinary people shared ideas and documented their lives. Yet it was fragile—equal parts consequential and ephemeral.
Many people assume that once something is published online, it will remain forever retrievable. The saying that “the internet never forgets” has produced a dangerously false sense of permanence. In reality, the internet forgets continuously. Websites are constantly revised, deleted, and abandoned altogether.
This is why, 30 years ago, I founded the Internet Archive. I wanted to build a mechanism for permanence in the internet age. Soon after that, I helped build the Internet Archive’s most-used resource, the Wayback Machine, a system that would preserve webpages as they appeared at any one moment in time, allowing future readers to return to those moments. The idea was simple but urgent: If the internet was going to become humanity’s principal publishing platform, then it needed what every great publishing system that came before it had needed. It needed a library.
People all over the world use the Wayback Machine all the time. What began as an effort to preserve the web has become an essential tool for journalists, researchers, historians, and the broader public.
Yet the future of this tool has become extremely vulnerable. The New York Times is now blocking the Internet Archive’s ability to preserve its articles. The Guardian has restricted our access to its published articles and removed articles from some of the Wayback Machine’s interfaces. USA Today and a growing number of other news organizations have also placed barriers in the path of web archivists (even, yes, The Atlantic). As of May 2026, Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab had identified more than 340 local-news sites that were limiting the Internet Archive’s ability to preserve their journalism.
The publishers taking these steps have all pointed to one reason: the unauthorized use of their work by AI companies to train large language models. They complain that our library serves as a back door around paywalls, licensing negotiations, and technical restrictions. The Times has said that it is blocking us because the Wayback Machine allegedly provides “unfettered access” to its work. But this fear-based approach does not take into account that the Internet Archive is taking steps to prevent AI companies from scraping the materials we preserve.
I understand why publishers are angry. Journalism is expensive. Reporting requires skilled people, time, courage, legal support, and institutions willing to withstand pressure. Journalists have watched advertising revenue disappear and subscription growth slow while technology companies build enormously profitable products using material created by others. Publishers have every right to challenge commercial businesses that they believe are inappropriately exploiting their work.
But blocking a nonprofit library is the wrong response to this problem. Impeding the Wayback Machine’s preservation work will not prevent powerful AI companies from gathering training data. It will certainly not restore the advertising-based business model that supported newspapers in the 20th century, a business model that has long since collapsed. What it will do is prevent historians, researchers, courts, ordinary readers—and, most ironic, journalists themselves—from consulting an accurate record of what once appeared on the web. It is difficult to quantify the scale of what we stand to lose. A continuous record of web activity is an enormously powerful accountability tool, especially at a time when seeking the truth and reporting it has become ever more complicated and the informational environment is growing only more complex.
Joe Mullin, who is a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has offered a fitting analogy: Imagine a newspaper announcing that physical libraries will no longer be permitted to preserve copies of its past issues. That is effectively what is happening now. For the past three decades, the Wayback Machine has served as a library for the public web. The destruction of that library is creating holes in the historical record.
A crucial fact in this debate is one that publishers themselves know better than anyone: Journalists rely on the Wayback Machine. They use it to recover deleted tweets, verify past public statements by powerful individuals who wish to avoid scrutiny, examine earlier versions of government documents, and establish what a person or institution said about a subject before some controversy or scandal prompted them to change course. Journalists use the Wayback Machine to see defunct websites and the archives of closed newsrooms. They use it when the primary evidence for a story has vanished from the web.
A news organization that blocks the Wayback Machine may believe it is acting in the best interest of its journalists. But instead it is dismantling one of journalism’s most important investigative instruments.
My argument is simple: The public record needs an independent steward. A society that cannot inspect its past is easier to deceive. In 2017, Katie Hafner and Griffin Palmer, writing for The New York Times, relied on the Wayback Machine to report that private-equity investment was reshaping dermatology practices—expanding the use of physician assistants, increasing the volume of biopsies and procedures, enacting ever more aggressive screening and treatment protocols, and exposing elderly patients to treatments whose benefits were doubtful.
The Wayback Machine gave Hafner and Palmer an empirical record that proved crucial for their story: evidence of change over time. The current website of Advanced Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery (one of the companies they were looking into) showed a sprawling operation with more than 180 locations and 124 physician assistants. But earlier versions of the site showed that the number of physician assistants listed by the company had increased by 400 percent since 2008, amid a debate over whether physician assistants are qualified to properly make diagnoses. When I spoke with Hafner about the story, she told me she could not have made her point as powerfully as she did without the Wayback Machine. The records she retrieved from our archive enabled her to demonstrate the scale, speed, and direction of a corporate transformation, including the rapid growth of a business model that placed many more lesser-trained practitioners in clinics serving vulnerable patients.
Hafner and Palmer are among thousands of reporters whose use of the Wayback Machine has contributed to extraordinary journalism. A politics reporter may find that an agency quietly removed a document, or even a single sentence, in the face of criticism. A city-hall reporter may need an earlier version of a municipal page containing budget figures, meeting records, and public-health guidance. A technology reporter may need to compare successive versions of a platform’s terms of service. An investigative journalist examining allegations against a public figure may need to scour a decade-old webpage that has since been deleted.
Government agencies routinely scrub important information from their sites, and the Wayback Machine is a faster and more practical method of discovery than a Freedom of Information Act request. These are not hypothetical benefits. Over and over and over again, the Wayback Machine has confirmed facts that would be irretrievable without an independent archive.
Our own monitoring finds that more than 100 news articles in a typical month cite or rely on material preserved by the Wayback Machine. We can reasonably assume that there are tens of thousands of additional visits to the Wayback Machine every month, when an archived page might help illuminate the truth.
Mark Graham, who directs the Wayback Machine, recently described having visited The New York Times to meet with data journalists and reporters—and being approached by a senior researcher who thanked him profusely. The researcher said Times staffers used the Wayback Machine constantly and had even found material there that they could not find anywhere else. Consider what that means. Even one of the best-resourced news organizations in the world does not possess a complete, easily usable record of the material it needs.
Plenty of journalists—including at The Atlantic—have championed and defended the importance of the Wayback Machine. MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow has called the Internet Archive a national treasure and said she uses it daily. She and hundreds of other journalists have signed a statement calling for web preservation.
These journalists understand that their work is cumulative. A story links to documents, earlier articles, public statements, data sets, and numerous other verifiable facts in the public record. Future stories return to (and build upon) that evidence. When underlying links die, one of the chains of verification breaks along with it.
In 2024, the Pew Research Center announced the findings of a study that tracked 1 million webpages over a 10-year period. At the end of the study, one-quarter of those pages were no longer accessible. Among pages that existed in 2013, the first year of the study, the loss rate was 38 percent. Even among pages collected as recently as 2021, roughly one in five had disappeared within two years.
This is not the timescale of ancient history. But it is often the timescale of someone’s political career, a long-running lawsuit, or a company’s rise and fall.
Elements of the web disappear for all kinds of reasons, nefarious and mundane. Perhaps a page is deleted during a redesign. Maybe a publication changes ownership, or a content-management system is replaced.
After the Pew study came out, the Internet Archive took a closer look at its data set to determine how much of the lost material had been preserved by the Wayback Machine. The analysis found that 16 percent of the vanished URLs are accessible via the Wayback Machine.
Consider the Rocky Mountain News. Colorado’s oldest newspaper published for nearly 150 years and earned a reputation for forceful accountability journalism that exposed corruption, misspent public money, and institutions that were failing the people they were meant to serve. In its final decade, the paper won four—I repeat, four —Pulitzer Prizes: for photographic coverage of the Columbine school shooting, for its images of Colorado’s devastating wildfires, and for the writing and photography of “Final Salute,” a deeply reported account of Marines killed in Iraq. In 2015, The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance reported the story of how one of the paper’s Pulitzer finalists successfully resuscitated an investigative series of his that had vanished from the web when the paper did. Her story concluded with a link to the series that he’d saved. Even that link is now dead. (Though you can still find the series here.)
No institution, however prestigious, is immortal. The Wayback Machine holds the work of publications that no longer exist, such as the Rocky Mountain News. It preserves the archive of MTV News and BET.com, including decades of cultural reporting removed from the web without warning. It preserves a robust record of early-2000s web culture from Gawker Media. It provides access to work produced by Apple Daily and Stand News, Hong Kong–based news outlets that were forced to shut down in 2021 as part of a government crackdown, as well as independent Russian-language journalism, some of it produced in exile. It holds the only copy of USA Today from September 11, 2001, because the paper’s website was overwhelmed and its online editors continuously updated stories by hand without preserving the changes made along the way.
The Internet Archive is not an AI company. A commercial AI laboratory, a search engine, a research project, and a nonprofit library may all use automated systems to retrieve publicly available webpages. From a server’s perspective, each may appear to be a bot. But not all bots are bad bots. They do not have the same mission, business model, or conduct.
Publishers’ concerns about abusive scraping are merited. I know this acutely because the Internet Archive has itself been subjected to extreme machine traffic. In one incident, an AI startup sent tens of thousands of requests per second and overloaded our systems. We blocked the offending hosts, contacted the company, and worked to stop the behavior.
When a company attempts to extract material at scale, it burdens our nonprofit infrastructure and interferes with access by ordinary users. We understand why publishers object to how AI companies have used their work. But recognizing a problem does not justify attacking the wrong institution and disregarding the public interest. In short, the Wayback Machine has become collateral damage in a fight between publishers and AI companies. Blocking the Internet Archive will not stop AI. Commercial AI companies have crawled the live web, licensed large data sets, purchased access from platforms, obtained third-party collections, and built their own retrieval systems. Publishers can sue those companies, negotiate with them, or build technical controls specifically directed at them. We have already built such controls to protect the material on our site—including the material we preserve from news organizations.
Web archiving belongs to a well-established legal tradition. Courts have repeatedly recognized that copying material for indexing and search can be a transformative fair use. A searchable system cannot function without making technical copies of the material it indexes. In the now-famous Google Books litigation, in which authors sued Google over the digitization of millions of books, courts held that scanning books to create a searchable research tool served a different purpose from selling or reading the original books, and was fair use under U.S. copyright law.
Defending preservation does not require ignoring publishers’ legitimate concerns. The Internet Archive has adapted repeatedly as the web has changed. We use rate limits, filtering, monitoring, and network-security systems to respond to abusive access. We have restricted bulk functionality in particular contexts and optimized important parts of the Wayback Machine for human use.
Those efforts can and should continue. Publishers and archives can distinguish ordinary human consultation from sustained bulk extraction. We can develop better methods for identifying abusive traffic, create responsible-access arrangements, improve communication during high-volume incidents, and discuss access to application programming interfaces separately from the preservation of publicly available pages. Most important, we can preserve records while applying reasonable protections against mass downloading.
The press cannot have it both ways. Journalists describe their work as the first draft of history—but a draft of history must survive if it is to be revised, improved upon, and understood.
That’s a question I get asked a lot as a former federal prosecutor. Donald Trump, his family, and members of his administration are most often the inspiration. Last year, the Qataris gave the U.S. Defense Department a $400 million luxury jumbo jet for the president’s use, which he plans to take with him to his presidential library when he leaves office. Then Trump gave Qatar NATO-like security guarantees. Does that sound like a bribe? Exactly four days before Trump was inaugurated for the second time, the Emiratis invested $500 million in the Trump-family crypto business. Four months later, Trump green-lighted selling them advanced AI chips, which the Biden administration had blocked out of fear that they would fall into the hands of the Chinese. Same question. But even though I hear “Isn’t that illegal?” a lot more than I used to, it isn’t a new question. Former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy and former Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell, a Democrat and a Republican, both took lavish gifts from individuals and entities seeking their help and made national news when they were prosecuted for it. Surely that was illegal?
Common sense notwithstanding, however, the answer is no. Neither Espy nor McDonnell was held accountable, and even Trump’s seemingly egregious misbehavior likely can’t be prosecuted. That’s because starting in the 1980s, the Supreme Court has interpreted anti-corruption laws in ways so narrow as to effectively legalize flat-out corruption. These decisions put whole categories of politicians’ conduct beyond a prosecutor’s reach. It’s an absurd result. But we live in the Court’s world.
For 20 years, I prosecuted white-collar crime at the U.S. Department of Justice. My first criminal trial was Enron. My last was Hunter Biden. In between, I prosecuted on corruption charges the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the mayor of Baltimore; the Baltimore police commissioner; the Baltimore City state’s attorney; and dozens of other politicians, government employees, police officers, and prison guards. I served in leadership positions at the Justice Department and on Capitol Hill focused on corruption. I finished my DOJ career in the department’s Public Integrity Section in Washington, the specialized unit that prosecuted public corruption around the country—until February 2025, when it was effectively shut down. I was one of the prosecutors asked to dismiss the case against New York Mayor Eric Adams. Like nearly all my colleagues in Public Integrity, I declined to do so and left the department that year.
In all that time, I experienced how the Supreme Court restrained prosecutors in cases involving public officials. Even before the start of my career, the justices had begun to chip away at federal anti-corruption statutes, and this project accelerated during my tenure. When FBI agents brought me evidence of misconduct, I often had to turn the cases away, knowing I’d never be able to make charges stick. The longer I served, the harder my job became.
The first of these Supreme Court rulings was McNally v. United States, decided in 1987. In that case, a member of the Kentucky governor’s Cabinet, a local businessman, and a former chair of the Kentucky Democratic Party received hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks from an insurance company that did business with the state. Prosecutors charged them with depriving the public of its right to their “honest services,” a crime under the federal mail- and wire-fraud statutes. The Court reversed their convictions and declared that the public enjoyed no such right. Although federal courts had upheld similar convictions for more than 40 years, the Supreme Court ruled that all those courts had gotten it wrong: It declared that the mail-fraud—and, by implication, the wire-fraud—statute was limited to protecting money and property, not intangible rights such as citizens’ right to good government. Congress reacted swiftly. One year later, a broad bipartisan majority in Congress passed legislation effectively reversing the Court’s decision. But McNally is an outlier in that regard.
In 1999, in United States v. Sun-Diamond Growers of California, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of an agricultural trade association that gave gifts—tickets to the U.S. Open, expensive luggage, even a crystal bowl—to the U.S. secretary of agriculture in the Clinton administration. The Supreme Court held that giving a politician lavish gifts because of his official position was not illegal. Rather than focusing on the conduct at hand, Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for a unanimous Court, spun out a ridiculous hypothetical—that the government’s interpretation of the statute would allow the president to be prosecuted for accepting “replica jerseys given by championship sports teams.” What that claim ignored was the reality that no Justice Department would ever authorize such a prosecution.
In Skilling v. United States, decided in 2010, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of Jeffrey Skilling, a former CEO of Enron Corporation, for conspiring to commit honest-services fraud. I had been one of the prosecutors in Skilling’s trial. Although Skilling was the president of a publicly traded company, not a politician, he was charged with conspiracy to commit honest-services wire fraud for undisclosed self-dealing. Self-dealing is a problem whether the perpetrator is a corporate executive hiding a conflict of interest from shareholders or an elected official hiding one from voters. Except the Supreme Court held that it wasn’t illegal. Confronted with the fact that lower courts had for years upheld honest-services-fraud convictions for undisclosed self-dealing, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s majority opinion noted the “infrequency” of those decisions and how they were not “models of clarity.” That, of course, didn’t mean those decisions were wrong. Remarkably, Ginsburg didn’t even say they were. Instead, she claimed that because bribery and kickbacks were the “basis of most honest-services prosecutions,” that’s what the statute’s application would be limited to. In place of legal analysis, the Court resorted to a game of numbers, and the practical effect was to restrict the number of corruption cases prosecutors could bring under this statute.
In perhaps its grossest pro-corruption decision, the Supreme Court in 2016 reversed Robert McDonnell’s conviction. A jury had convicted the former governor on bribery charges for accepting $175,000 in loans and gifts from the CEO of a nutritional-supplement company that wanted Virginia’s public universities to run clinical trials on his product. The Court held that what McDonnell did for the CEO—setting up meetings, hosting events, talking to other elected officials, all to benefit his company—did not qualify as “official acts,” for which McDonnell could be bribed. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a unanimous Court, adopted the most restrictive of definitions of official acts, things such as voting in the Senate or in an official committee. The decision leads directly to the question Why would a CEO give a governor that much money if these weren’t official acts? The Supreme Court didn’t offer an answer.
Then, in 2024, in Snyder v. United States, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of the mayor of Portage, Indiana, for accepting $13,000 from a company that got more than $1 million in city contracts. Prosecutors charged him with violating a statute Congress had enacted to protect federal money administered by the states, called “666,” after its numbering in the United States Code. The indictment had charged these payments to the mayor as illegal gratuities, which is what the law calls “illegal gifts.” In reversing his conviction, the Court held that 666 covered only bribery, not gratuities. In that year alone, approximately $1 trillion in federal funds flowed to the states. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted in his majority opinion, as many as 19 million state and local officials administer this money. But according to the Supreme Court, there’s nothing wrong with giving them a little something extra for the effort.
That same year, the Court decided Trump v. United States,announcing a sweeping and previously unrecognized doctrine of official-acts immunity for former presidents. Whereas the decisions discussed above left prosecutors room to pursue certain kinds of corruption, the Trump ruling means that presidents, alone among elected officials, can likely never be prosecuted for corruption. That’s because the Court, with Chief Justice Roberts writing for the majority, held that former presidents enjoy absolute immunity for actions within their “core” constitutional authority and presumptive immunity for all other official acts. And worse, unlike the earlier decisions that interpreted statutes and that therefore Congress can reverse by passing new legislation, the Court claimed that presidential immunity was required by the Constitution itself. So only a future Supreme Court that decided to reverse the Trump decision, or an amendment to the Constitution, could cancel the get-out-of-jail-free card the Court gave presidents.
All but the last two decisions, Snyder and Trump, spanned the Court’s conservative-liberal divide. Sun-Diamond and McDonnell were even unanimous. This isn’t partisan politics; it’s political elites protecting political elites. The facts in these cases were egregious, but the Court purported to be saving hapless bureaucrats from overzealous prosecutors in the future. In any event, they haven’t. Instead they’ve told juries of ordinary Americans that what they concluded to be corruption was not. Perhaps to try to obscure what it was doing, the Court used technical rather than normative language, something the Fordham law professor Zephyr Teachout explored more broadly in her paper “Demoralizing Elite Fraud,” in The Yale Law Journal. But that technical language can’t obscure the underlying badness of the conduct that the Court blessed.
Congress can undo much of what the Supreme Court has done: address Sun-Diamond by making it illegal to give a politician gifts because of his position; address Skilling by designating undisclosed conflicts of interest as honest-services fraud; address McDonnell by expanding the definition of official acts in the bribery statute to cover what politicians actually do all day; and address Snyder by amending 666 to cover gratuities. As noted above, Congress already reversed the Court’s decision in McNally, and prosecutors have brought hundreds of honest-services prosecutions ever since, albeit with the limitations the Skilling decision imposed. Addressing Trump v. United States is tougher, but options still exist: Congress could close off the avenues a president can use to enrich himself and try to build his legacy by, for example, prohibiting the U.S. government from accepting gifts such as the Qatari plane, or disqualifying companies that invest in a president’s businesses or donate to his library from bidding on government contracts. That would be a good first step, but more ambitious approaches are needed, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act. Unfortunately, Congress, like the Supreme Court, has so far chosen to protect political elites—in Congress’s case, by doing nothing.
This behavior should be illegal because corruption is poison to democracy. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent in Snyder, “Greed makes governments—at every level—less responsive, less efficient, and less trustworthy from the perspective of the communities they serve.” And Americans know it. Results of a Gallup survey announced last month show that Americans’ perceptions of government corruption are at their highest in 20 years: 89 percent of adults say it is widespread. That is a 10-percentage-point increase since 2025 and includes strong majorities of both Democrats and Republicans. Although the Court has placed politicians beyond the law’s reach, at least for now, the public gets it. Hopefully, a new Congress will too.
In 1989, the year the West won the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama published an essay announcing “the end of history.” He wasn’t claiming that historic events would stop taking place; what was over, rather, was the debate about the meaning of those events. Since the Enlightenment, Western thinkers had believed that history was progressing toward a final destination. According to communism, the engine of progress was class conflict, and history would end in the creation of a classless society. With the failure of the Soviet empire, Fukuyama argued, this idea had been discredited. Only one alternative remained: It was now clear that the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” was “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” There would still be disagreements within liberalism—Fukuyama named religion and nationalism as likely fault lines—but there could no longer be any disagreement about liberalism.
To see how that judgment is holding up, just look at the kinds of titles that political theorists are producing these days: How Liberalism Failed, A World After Liberalism, Liberalism Against Itself. Even Fukuyama wrote a book titled Liberalism and Its Discontents. Across the West, the far right and the far left are on the rise, and the one thing they agree on is their contempt for liberalism. To MAGA and its European cousins, such as France’s National Rally and the United Kingdom’s Reform Party, liberals are rootless elitists who look down on their fellow citizens while coddling immigrants and criminals. To progressives and democratic socialists, liberalism—often qualified with the prefix neo—means ruthless globalized capitalism, prettied up with rhetoric about meritocracy and human rights. Appeals to liberal principles and defenses of the liberal world order have shown little power to rally the public, or even much of the political establishment.
Now that the liberal triumphalism of the post–Cold War era is dying, what can replace it? The answer may lie in another important essay written in 1989—one that received much less attention than Fukuyama’s, but enjoys a cult reputation among keepers of the liberal flame. “The Liberalism of Fear,” by Judith Shklar, has just been published for the first time as a book—a small book, because the essay is only about 8,000 words long, but a timely one. In fact, as the political scientist Mark Lilla says in his introduction, it’s “far more timely today than it was upon its publication.” In 1989, Shklar’s minimalist definition of liberalism as a bulwark against government terror—what she calls, simply, a politics of “damage control”—might have sounded unambitious or uninspiring. In an America where ICE agents shoot protesters and grab people off the street, it sounds prescient.
Shklar’s argument involves history and philosophy, but like all political ideas, it begins with an intuition, a feeling. Communism, one might say, begins in indignation: a refusal to accept a world where some people exploit and others are exploited. Nationalism begins in loyalty: a sense of connection and obligation to one’s own people. There is nothing wrong with these emotions; they are even praiseworthy. But when one political feeling crowds out all others—when everyone and everything is subordinated to the pursuit of social justice or national pride—good can justify the worst evils.
What makes liberalism different from these political ideologies is that, as Shklar writes, it “does not have any particular positive doctrines about how people are to conduct their lives.” Liberalism doesn’t offer a vision of a perfect world—one where injustice is abolished, or where a particular nation reigns supreme. Instead, it is rooted in a justified fear of the real world, where people with power often use it to oppress, torture, and kill. “Liberalism’s deepest grounding,” Shklar writes, is the belief “that cruelty is an absolute evil.” The classic liberal principles outlined by thinkers such as Locke and Mill, the ideas that guided the American and French Revolutions, follow from this basic fear of cruelty. Freedom of religion means that you won’t be burned at the stake for holding the wrong beliefs. Freedom of speech means that you won’t be locked up for saying what you think. The rule of law means that you can be punished only for committing a crime, not because a powerful person is out to get you.
Not coincidentally, these liberal freedoms are framed as limits on the power of the state. “Public cruelty,” Shklar writes, “is made possible by differences in public power,” and the government is always more powerful than any citizen. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; we want the government to have the power to punish crime or defend against invasion. But liberalism believes that there must be strict and effective limits on how that power is used. “The governments of this world, with their overwhelming power to kill, maim, indoctrinate, and make war are not to be trusted unconditionally,” Shklar writes. What the liberalism of fear wants to prevent above all are “habitual and pervasive acts of cruelty and torture performed by military, paramilitary, and police agents in any regime.”
This might have seemed like an odd concern for an American political philosopher in 1989. Police states were disappearing in Eastern Europe; democracy activists were bravely standing up to tanks in Tiananmen Square; Nelson Mandela left his jail cell on his way to becoming president of South Africa. America under George H. W. Bush had its problems, but no one would have put paramilitary violence and police torture high on the list. At a time when Fukuyama was celebrating the end of history, why was Shklar contemplating these specters at the feast?
The most obvious answer is that, unlike most Americans, she had seen them firsthand. Born to a Jewish family in Latvia in 1928, Judith Nisse grew up in the shadow of approaching war and the Holocaust. In an autobiographical lecture, she recalled that as a child, she was traumatized by reading Shakespeare’s play Titus Andronicus, which is full of murder, cannibalism, and severed heads: “To this day I can still feel the fear and horror it inspired.” Her sister tried to comfort her by saying that “these things did not really happen,” but it didn’t help, because “both she and I knew that far worse was going on all around us.” As Jews in Latvia, Shklar recalled, “everyone around us wanted us to be somewhere else at best, or to kill us at worst.” The Nisse family managed to escape at the last possible moment and took an epic journey in 1940 across Russia and the Pacific to Canada. The next year, the Nazis invaded Latvia and the 40,000 Jews of Riga were murdered, most of them shot by German troops and local auxiliaries in a nearby forest.
When Shklar arrived at Harvard’s department of government as a graduate student in 1951, she was struck by how completely her American colleagues ignored the central political experience of their own time: “I knew what had happened in Europe between 1940 and 1945, and I assumed that most people at Harvard also were aware of the physical, political, and moral calamity that had occurred, but it was never to be discussed.” This “isolating” experience “had a lot to do with my later writings,” Shklar noted. At first, she didn’t intend to stay in the academy: “I would have liked to be a literary editor of The Atlantic or some such publication.” But she remained at Harvard for her entire career as a professor, writing about subjects directly or indirectly connected with the European catastrophe: the failure of the Enlightenment tradition, the concept of law in the Nuremberg trials, the nature of cruelty and injustice.
“The Liberalism of Fear” was published three years before Shklar’s death in 1992, and though it wasn’t one of her major works, the title has become a kind of shorthand for her worldview. As Lilla writes in his introduction, for Shklar, “fear of being in another’s arbitrary power is the ur-human experience that modern liberalism was developed to stave off.” In the essay, she discusses the tools that modern liberal societies use for this purpose. Some of these tools are legal: “Without well-defined procedures, honest judges, opportunities for counsel and for appeals, no one has a chance.” Others are political and economic, such as security for private property: “Nothing gives a person greater social resources than legally guaranteed proprietorship.”
But Shklar is most concerned with the ideas and habits of mind that sustain liberal societies. And it is here that her message for today becomes most urgent. The “perfect liberal,” she writes, “respects other people without condescension, arrogance, humility, or fear. He or she does not insult others with lies or cruelty, both of which mar one’s own character no less than they injure one’s victims.” These aren’t the heroic virtues needed to win wars or found empires; they are minimal requirements for a society free from fear. Until recently, they were expected of anyone who hoped to play a role in American public life, regardless of their political views.
Only since Donald Trump got to the White House have Americans realized how much they took for granted the sobriety and politeness of Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama. Trumpism’s assault on liberal democracy isn’t only a matter of laws and policies. From the beginning, it has been about legitimizing cruelty. When Trump mockingly imitated a disabled reporter, or said police officers shouldn’t be “too nice” when putting suspects into police cars, or pardoned an American soldier convicted by a court martial of murdering civilians, he was sending the message that he approves of cruelty, and will support those who commit it.
The federal government and the Republican Party resisted that message in his first term; in his second, they have mostly stopped resisting. We are still a long way from the Europe of Shklar’s childhood. America has been a liberal democracy for a long time, and the majority of Americans are not ready to embrace a politics of cruelty. But that prospect feels a lot less theoretical than it did when “The Liberalism of Fear” was written. In the essay, Shklar says that government terror and cruelty weren’t things of the past, but could be seen in “the foreign news in the New York Times.” Now it’s not just the foreign news that reminds us how much we have to be afraid of—and how much we need the values and institutions of liberalism, no matter how unfashionable they’ve become.
How’s this for a job offer? In the span of no more than 10 years, you’re to have seven babies for C-suite women at a major tech firm. You’ll be on a strict diet and exercise regime, your vitals constantly monitored. You can’t have sex. Or a C-section (lest you forgo the “natural birth bonus”). Nor can you tell your loved ones what your actual job is (as far as they’re concerned, you’re in “consulting”). You’ll get just six months of downtime between pregnancies. And, as the test case for this “groundbreaking pilot program” to make The Company “the world’s most equitable workplace,” you’ll earn more than a million dollars.
In Natalie, the narrator of Sarah Anderson’s very funny debut novel, Fallow, The Company finds a taker—one who isn’t, readers soon discover, quite the sucker she may seem to be. She’s a recent college graduate, wryly aware that she is not the typical striver. Motherhood versus career is not a dilemma that haunts her, which gives her an unusually deadpan perspective on angst about work-life balance. Anderson does more than skewer corporate posturing; she shows Natalie stumbling into unexpected insights about freedom and entrapment.
At 23, Natalie is employed in a soulless call center, fielding complaints on a hotline for disgruntled employees in many spheres, but when her family expresses concern about her future, she says, “I don’t need a path. I have a path. I just need money.” Her job has enough upsides—flexible hours, livable pay, and her friend Libby, who “regularly dosed the communal break-room coffee with CBD oil”—that she might have languished in it forever. But then her wisdom teeth start wreaking havoc and she’s forced to find work that comes with dental insurance. That’s when she happens on the position at The Company.
Natalie, of all people, should be wary of the offer, with its unorthodox contract and its demand for real body-morphing labor. After all, at the call center she’s had to listen to endless complaints about work life (from “disputes between coworkers over fridge real-estate” to “accidents caused by coked-out managers operating heavy machinery”). And, as one of 11 sisters, she’s seen firsthand what multiple pregnancies can do to a woman. Throughout Natalie’s childhood, her mother was “tired and round and looking for a bathroom, body waxing and waning like the moon.”
But she is broke and her jaw is aching, so Natalie convinces herself that a job at The Company isn’t so bad. Seven is four fewer kids than her mom carried for free, plus, she thinks, “I didn’t even have to do the hardest part; I didn’t have to keep the babies.” Staring at the contract’s $700,000 completion bonus, she begins to see the role as a way to earn enough money to opt out for good: “a basic Would You Rather—one decade of my body to win back the rest of my life.” (This being the 2020s, she’s also swayed by the $60,000 cosmetic-surgery bonus. She pictures herself, postpartum, a decade hence: “Thighs slender and firm, colt-like, a gap between them through which light could shine upon every person who stood before me.”)
In prose that is sharp and entertaining, Anderson refreshingly takes on several familiar themes at once: the hidden tolls that working women still face, the stranglehold of Big Tech, the Orwellian nature of corporate-speak, the relentless self-monitoring of wellness culture. Her unifying conceit is that the ideal of “having it all” is not just impossible to neatly pull off, but impossible to simply escape.
If you’re thinking, Wait, we’ve been here recently, perhaps you’ve read Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear, a debut that sold more than 1 million copies within a few months of its release last spring. Burke’s narrator, also named Natalie, is a young Christian tradwife influencer whose lifestyle, as shown on Instagram, is a carefully curated middle finger to the having-it-all quest. Yet as both her influencer business and her family boom, she finds herself caught in a twisted version of just that ideal: the resentful mother of many kids and the secret, stressed-out breadwinner.
From the start, Yesteryear’s narrator seems like little more than her author’s puppet, a caricature devised to puncture the tradwife fervor of the past few years. This kind of formulaic flatness could easily have befallen the people employed by The Company—an Amazon-esque behemoth that “did everything, everywhere, their logo as familiar as your own name.” Instead, Anderson gives revealing cameos to quirky figures, including Shane, the conniving but guileless SVP of People Experience who toggles between HR euphemisms and saying the quiet part out loud. In a presentation about the company’s mission to enhance gender equity through surrogacy, he itemizes how taxing pregnancy can be for a woman and her colleagues alike. “Nausea, exhaustion, bathroom breaks, brain fog—it’s hard on everyone,” he laments. The long-term goal (drastically cutting parental leave) goes unstated at first, but he lets slip that the short-term aim isn’t exactly altruistic, either: An executive named Valerie is “the perfect candidate for the launch,” he tells Natalie, because she was “frankly a nightmare to be around” during her first pregnancy.
Then there’s Astrid, Natalie’s “minder,” a 20-something Scandinavian woman who adds a passive-aggressive energy to Natalie’s mandated workouts, “slowly edging her treadmill speed and incline just past mine, always doing an extra crunch.” Meanwhile, Astrid’s massages feel “80 percent vindictive, 20 percent transformative”—the corporate lean-in ethos (quite literally) operating even among the lowly ranked.
Anderson’s greatest feat of character construction is Natalie herself, particularly her voice. She tosses off clever metaphors for her situation. Pregnancy, for example, becomes a housing issue. Weeks after her first delivery, her body is a “slightly looser, wetter version of itself, a room with non-catastrophic water damage.” Summing up the deal she’s struck—constant surveillance and social isolation in exchange for money and a luxury condo with minimalist decor—she remarks, “I myself was a fetus, in a particularly tasteful womb.”
When Shane suddenly announces that she’s required to be in the office three days a week, Natalie reports to work to pursue her pregnancy regimens in view of her “colleagues,” becoming a working mother in an unfamiliar sense: maternity operating according to a calibrated plan. Natalie’s office door is marked Development Manager, and the children she bears fall under “Deliverables” in her performance reviews—biology blurring into corporate strategy, life reduced to a measurable output from the very beginning. (Anderson’s vision is at once outlandish and recognizable: More than a few companies have been known to offer parents perks, including breast-milk delivery for moms on business trips, with the ulterior motive of maximizing productivity.)
Fascinated and repelled by the way the spheres of work and life converge, Anderson gives Natalie a chance to push back—and to discover the difficulty of doing so. Natalie lives for the “fallow periods” between pregnancies, when she’s left to her own devices and structure falls away. Astrid is gone, and so are the Pyrex dishes of healthy food in her company-provided fridge. She gets drunk and high, has sex, and eats mountains of junk. Each time, she’s surprised by the darker feelings that bubble up: “the sadness of excess, a feeling in my brain of bottoming out.” The realization slowly dawns on her that she’s losing touch with her sole friend, Libby, and the one sister she’s close to (the rest are a blur).
Still, Natalie considers these rebellious bursts “sacred,” exhilarated by the sensation that she’s “moving the plot”—even as we watch her cyclical existence get subsumed into the company agenda, which calls for her to be the “best possible vessel.” After her benders, she “atone[s]” with yoga, acupuncture, and spa treatments—her pampering a kind of penance as she dutifully prepares her body for the next baby. Her paychecks, which at first gave her a thrill, leave her feeling hollow. She turns to Wirecutter and Reddit for inspiration about how to fill the void. There, she considers “the type of person I could become. A person with a toaster that had a screen. A person interested in the quality of leather.” Seemingly unable to see beyond being a pregnant person, she buys a comfy couch and calls it a day.
The dark joke of Fallow’s first act is that, without her even realizing it, Natalie’s entire 20s have essentially become one prolonged fallow period in her own development. Anderson captures the way our tech-driven world pulls us into an absurd social experiment that cuts us off not only from others, but also from ourselves. And she’s not done. In the book’s final act, Anderson drops Natalie into a very different petri dish: a feminist commune where dozens of women live off the land and mostly off the grid. As a connection-starved Natalie settles into her new, shared life—making some close friends and embracing her animal-tending duties—Anderson suggests that her drawn-out fallow period might have laid the groundwork for something better.
If this all sounds a little too tidy or corny, rest assured that you’re in good hands. Anderson isn’t out to offer a utopian release from the conundrum of work-life balance; she’s reminding us that the demands of nurture and structure are inevitably muddled. The commune may be a flailing farm with a woo-woo bent, but here, too, much to Natalie’s chagrin, designated labor hours, set mealtimes, and surveillance (via a granola version of Astrid) are part of the deal. What is different is Natalie, who now appreciates that money is a lousy substitute for a path—but that sisterly bonding has real value, even if it comes in bigger doses than she bargained for.
Ever since Zohran Mamdani exhilarated the left with his out-of-nowhere mayoral campaign, mainstream Democrats have been dejectedly searching for an inspirational figure of their own. Where is the Democratic executive who has the media savvy to inspire his own cultlike following while making pragmatic governing decisions and ignoring the incessant demands of progressive activists?
At last, the moderates have found such a Democrat. His name is Zohran Mamdani.
Mamdani’s election, which created the theoretical prospect of 8.5 million Americans living under “the warmth of collectivism,” as he once put it, was met with understandable shock. The reality, however, has been far more mundane.
Mamdani’s campaign platform already contained several gestures to moderates. He said he would retain Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who is, to put it plainly, a billionaire Zionist cop, three things never in favor with the hard left. He also pledged to liberalize permitting to encourage more housing construction by private developers. When TheNew York Times asked him during the campaign, “What’s one issue in politics that you’ve changed your mind about?” Mamdani cited “the role of the private market in housing construction.”
Most important, Mamdani emphasized the importance of efficiency in city services. This might sound like an ideologically neutral goal, and it has been embraced at times by the leaders of left-wing governments—including Milwaukee’s “sewer socialists” during the early to mid-20th century. But efficiency creates tension with progressive interest groups, which generally care less about maximizing taxpayers’ bang for the buck than maintaining secure jobs and high wages for public employees.
Once elected, Mamdani retreated from some of his progressive ambitions. Among his splashiest campaign promises was “fast, free” bus service. Skeptics had questioned the wisdom of forgoing the revenue from bus fares, especially given the possibility that free buses would become mobile homeless shelters inhospitable to other New Yorkers. Mamdani still says he wants free buses, but in his initial proposal, released in concert with Governor Kathy Hochul, he quietly adopted the position of his critics, dropping the plan to eliminate fares and focusing instead on speed and reliability. He shrank another of his most ambitious proposals, universal child care for 2-year-olds, into a more gradual expansion, beginning with a modest increase of 2,000 new seats this fall and a goal of adding more in subsequent years.
During the campaign, Mamdani promised to establish an “Office of Community Safety,” which would cost $1 billion a year and task civilian workers instead of police officers with responding to mental-health emergencies. This notion was itself a compromise. As a state-assembly candidate, he’d endorsed defunding the police. As a mayoral candidate, he suggested shifting responsibilities. But as mayor, Mamdani wound up providing just over $40 million a year for this service, or 4 percent of the promised amount.
As a candidate, Mamdani said he would relinquish mayoral control of schools—a key demand of teachers’ unions, which understand that putting schools under the direction of school-board officials elected in low-turnout races gives the unions enormous leverage over education policy. He reversed that position even before he took office. Perhaps he realized that voters would hold him accountable for school performance, and that his goals would not be served by ceding authority to an interest group whose incentive is to maximize teacher pay and job security rather than to produce good outcomes for students. He has also put off a promise to reduce class sizes, which teachers’ unions care about but which is not an especially cost-effective way to promote learning gains.
Mamdani did follow through on his promise to freeze rent for about 40 percent of the city’s apartments, even though nearly any economist would say that the freeze makes housing less affordable in the long run. But this move merely followed decades of ineffective precedent. Mamdani’s most novel position on housing has been to push for a streamlined approval process to unlock more private home construction.
He has pushed Albany to raise taxes dramatically on wealthy New Yorkers, although so far he has settled for a pied-à-terre tax on second homes worth more than $5 million. And he has continued to pursue his goofy notion of opening city-run grocery stores that he believes would hold down food prices. It is difficult to see how this project could succeed, because public employees have little expertise in the complex supermarket business, and subsidizing public stores to undercut their competitors on price would both threaten small businesses and encourage black-market reselling. But Mamdani met these and other objections to his plan by scaling the public stores back to the size of a small demonstration project.
At the same time, he has made many overtures to moderates. He unveiled an initiative to combat anti-Semitism, which some pro-Palestinian activists have denounced for funding Jewish organizations that are Zionist. He also maintained the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, which has policed terrorist threats and aggressive protest tactics by activist organizations. The DSA has called this group “specialized units used to suppress dissent” and demanded that Mamdani abolish it. Leftists have denounced all of these moves, which prioritize security for the targets of protesters at the expense of the freedom of protesters to harass their targets.
More recently, he has infuriated the left by refusing to fire Tisch after ICE agents shot a New Yorker earlier this month. Instead, Mamdani praised Tisch—one of the best police commissioners in recent memory—for fighting corruption and bringing the murder rate to its lowest level in years.
Mamdani has not abandoned his antagonism toward Israel, which is the issue that animated his early career in politics and has helped endear him to the left. In his statement commemorating the October 7 massacre of Israelis, he devoted most of his attention to Palestinian victims of Israel’s counterattack. But if not everybody loves the balance he has struck, he is at least attempting to strike one. Mamdani has grasped the value, or at least the necessity, of reassuring Jewish New Yorkers of their safety, even if they disagree with him on the Middle East. This commitment has placed him at odds with the most radical elements of the Free Palestine movement, which have sought to make Zionists uncomfortable, if not outright frightened. When anti-Israel activists booed Mamdani and accused him of perpetrating genocide last week, they were responding to the fact that he is acting as a mayor for the city’s entire population, not the most fanatical elements of his base.
It’s possible that, in his heart, Mamdani would rather be leading a genuine socialist revolution than making hype videos of city workers filling potholes. But enacting socialism is notoriously harder than calling for it at a rally. It’s especially tricky to pull off in a city that faces severe fiscal constraints, whose rich denizens can easily move to nearby jurisdictions to protect their wealth, and that relies heavily on cooperation from the state legislature and the governor. A similar mismatch between ambition and authority applies to Mamdani’s vision of a post-Zionist Middle East, which lies well beyond the purview of his municipal powers.
To his credit, Mamdani has confronted quickly the hard realities that other socialist leaders have learned more painfully, trading his Marxist dream of revolutionary transformation for patient gradualism. Mamdani has adapted quickly to the limits of his office. His political talent (and core of allied social-media influencers) has enabled him to maintain his base of adoring fans even as he confines his work to humdrum municipal governance. Mamdani has discovered that socialism can succeed in New York through one simple trick: abandoning socialism.
Suddenly, Canada is in the middle of a defense boom. Like other NATO countries that have skimped on their armed forces for decades, Canada is trying to quickly build up its military in the face of both rising international-security threats and a White House that regularly treats friends like foes. In the absence of trustworthy American leadership, many allies are working to become more self-reliant. But this is easier said than done, especially for Canada, which has enmeshed its own self-defense with the U.S. military more than any other American ally.
Since 1957, when Canada and the United States established the North American Aerospace Defense Command to jointly defend the continent during the Cold War, the Canadian military has grown closer to America’s. The otherwise small and underfunded Canadian Armed Forces is structured to deploy alongside its U.S. counterparts and to interoperate seamlessly with them. This has allowed Canada to make valuable military contributions in both countries’ interest at relatively low cost.
Until Donald Trump’s return to the White House, few in Canada were worried about how deeply intertwined the two militaries had become. Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government had contracted for billions of dollars’ worth of American-made military capabilities, including new surveillance planes, the combat system on Canada’s new warships, and 88 F-35 fighter aircraft. These investments have spared Canada the cost of developing cutting-edge equipment and allowed Canadian forces to operate interchangeably with the U.S. military. As long as the United States remained a benign ally, Canada was getting a great deal.
Trump has shaken Canadian thinking. His repeated talk of making Canada the 51st U.S. state and his jokes about “Governor Trudeau” went from weird to worrisome, and his unprovoked trade war has hurt Canadian businesses and consumers. Early last year, in one of his final speeches as prime minister, Trudeau warned that Trump wants “to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us.” Canada’s longtime military and economic partner had suddenly become a threat.
Trudeau’s successor, Prime Minister Mark Carney, has responded in part by trying to appease Trump. He has addressed long-standing American complaints about Canada’s limited defense spending and has emphasized the importance of continued military cooperation. Carney has increased Canada’s military expenditures to 2 percent of the country’s GDP and agreed to Trump’s demand that NATO countries spend at least 5 percent of their GDP on defense by 2035. Carney has also said that his government is in talks about taking part in Trump’s plans for a Golden Dome missile-defense system. Even amid the tariff fight, Carney has been trying to win the president over by pitching a vision of deeper economic integration with the U.S.—a so-called Fortress North America—to help push back against China’s economic influence. Carney’s defense minister reportedly told the U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that Canada is “moving in lockstep” with the U.S. on continental defense.
Yet Carney is also trying to reduce Canada’s dependence on the U.S. military. He announced last year that “new security threats” necessitated “the biggest investments in our military in generations.” Instead of spending more than 70 percent of the country’s military-capital budget on American equipment, his government plans to route 70 percent of Canada’s defense contracts to Canadian firms within a decade. His government has also been diversifying Canada’s industrial partnerships by negotiating new agreements with European and Pacific allies. This has included selecting a Swedish airborne-surveillance early-warning aircraft instead of an American one, and rethinking that fleet of F-35s—perhaps buying some Swedish Saab Gripen fighters instead.
Most Canadians applaud these efforts, according to polls. And domestic firms are poised to benefit; core defense spending is projected to grow from about $64 billion in 2025 to $160 billion by 2035. But there are good reasons to question whether these ambitions will become a reality. The spending that Carney has pledged would normally be unthinkable during peacetime, and the country will struggle to meet these promises without new taxes, cuts to social programs, or serious debt. Carney has not said how his government will finance these plans through 2035, and the public has not had to make any sacrifices so far.
Another problem is that Canada’s defense industry is neither large nor self-sufficient. Canadian firms will need time to expand their production to deliver Canadian-made capabilities. Those capital costs require access to long-term contracts, not grand political pronouncements.
Even if Carney figures out how to pay for this domestic military buildup, Canada’s dependence on the U.S. military runs so deep, and has been entrenched over so many decades, that pivoting away will involve more than just a few years of strategic spending. Canada cannot mount a major military operation overseas without American support and, like most NATO allies, is utterly reliant on the United States for core capabilities in communications, command and control networks, intelligence, and other areas. Developing non-American alternatives will require unprecedented levels of investment and cooperation among Canada and European NATO allies.
Mounting threats from China and Russia make the challenges of disentangling from the U.S. military only more profound. Despite simmering tensions with the U.S., the defense of North America will always be a joint endeavor, with Washington in the lead.
The Trump administration has already shown that it is willing to use the continental-defense relationship to rebuke its northern neighbor. In May, the U.S. suspended its participation in a joint board for continental defense that dates back to World War II, partly in response to Carney’s widely praised speech at Davos in which he warned that “the rules-based order is fading.” This was troubling for Canada, which is ostensibly on equal footing with the U.S. in well-established continental-defense institutions. If the larger, more powerful U.S. demands that the continent’s defense requires the exclusive use of American equipment, such as the F-35 or U.S.-made surveillance planes, Canada’s options may be limited.
Notwithstanding escalating political and economic tensions between the two neighbors, Canada has been quietly keeping its relationship with the U.S. military steady. Intelligence sharing, military exchanges, and North American air-defense cooperation are operating as normal. Most of the Canadian military leaders I’ve spoken with assume that the relationship between the two countries will largely recover when Trump is no longer in office. Defense planners in both countries recognize the importance of continued cooperation, regardless of tariffs or hostile rhetoric.
Trump may not single-handedly undo decades of close military cooperation between Canada and the U.S., but his presidency has certainly forced America’s northern neighbor to be less trusting and complacent. Canada may not be able to fully divest itself from the U.S. military, but relying too heavily on American defense cooperation and goodwill no longer seems wise. Fixing this problem will require more time and money than Canadians are typically willing to spend, but Canadians appear at least willing to pay this price if it will deliver better security for themselves.
Senator Susan Collins desperately needed to change the subject. As she stepped around cow manure at the annual Fryeburg Fair, a reporter was asking her about President Trump’s musing that he might campaign in Maine during the closing weeks of the election—an invitation that Collins, trying once again to save her seat, almost certainly had not extended to a man with an approval rating of 32 percent in the state. A campaign staffer tried to cut off the questioning, but the nearly 74-year-old Collins has not won five Senate elections through luck alone, and she quickly found a way out of the tricky Trump talk. “I do have some important news today,” she declared to the assembled scribblers.
Collins went on to announce that she had persuaded the Trump administration to speed up the release of $38 million in home heating assistance for Maine. Nevermind that her office had already publicized the news earlier that day, or that none of the journalists with Collins reported for local publications. This was either Collins at her senatorial savviest, or a stodgy politician reaching for a tattered playbook.
As temperatures plunge, the cost of heating oil is as potent a political issue in Maine as the price of gas is everywhere else. Collins has built her reelection campaign on the idea that she alone, as the chair of the Senate’s powerful appropriations committee and the lone Republican elected to Congress in all of New England, can deliver for Maine. She has boasted of bringing home billions for her sparsely populated state over the years. At a debate this month, Collins crowed that she had secured an exemption for road salt—another crucial supply during Maine’s perennial winter freeze—from the tariffs that Trump has slapped on Canadian goods. (“We can’t eat road salt,” her Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson, retorted.)
This strategy has worked for Collins before. In 2020, she defied polls forecasting her defeat and won reelection by nearly nine points over a well-funded Democratic opponent even as Joe Biden carried Maine that year by a similar margin. The contours of that campaign were largely the same as the one Collins is currently waging: Democrats tried to tie her to an unpopular Trump, denounced her claims to be independent, and assailed her vote to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a potential death knell for Roe v. Wade. Collins prevailed by leaning on her bipartisan record and the federal aid she had secured for her state.
Six years later, Democrats have reason to believe that a message that fell short in 2020 will resonate more deeply now. Both Collins and Trump have lower approval ratings in the state than they did then, and the decisive vote Collins gave to Kavanaugh proved consequential when he sided with a majority on the Supreme Court in overturning Roe. (Collins, who supports abortion rights, has said she relied on Kavanaugh’s statements that he considered the 1973 ruling to be settled legal precedent. Earlier this year, however, she told reporters that she did not regret her vote.) Democrats have added ammunition against Collins following a ProPublica report that, in late 2024, the FBI was on the verge of launching a bribery investigation into federal contracts she had helped land for her campaign donors (one of whom had pleaded guilty to making illegal contributions). The probe ended after Trump took office and the Department of Justice slashed its public-corruption units. Collins has denied wrongdoing.
On paper, Maine should be the easiest state for Democrats to flip during a year in which, polls suggest, voters are intent on punishing the GOP. It is the only state that Kamala Harris carried in 2024—she won by seven points—where a Republican incumbent senator is on the ballot. Yet Democrats have not been able to put Collins away. Polls show a close race; Jackson is leading narrowly in some surveys, and Collins is ahead in others. She is faring no worse—and in some cases better—than Republican incumbents running in more conservative states such as Ohio, Alaska, and Kansas.
Collins is benefiting, too, from a Democratic campaign that has at times verged on the shambolic. Party leaders initially tried to recruit Governor Janet Mills to challenge Collins, despite the fact that Mills would have been, if elected, a 79-year-old Senate freshman. Mills entered the race but withdrew when polls showed her getting crushed in the primary by Graham Platner, the progressive oyster farmer. Platner shot quickly to national stardom, surviving the revelation that he had a tattoo resembling an infamous Nazi emblem, but he was forced to withdraw following allegations of sexual assault (which he denied).
Democrats then nominated Jackson, another Bernie Sanders acolyte who had finished third in the party primary for governor earlier this year. Jackson and Collins hail from the same rural county in northern Maine, and he still sounds like he grew up a few miles from the Canadian border. Jackson followed his father into logging before entering politics; he’s served in the state legislature for most of the past two decades, rising to become the leader of the Maine Senate. He lacks both Platner’s strengths and weaknesses—less obviously flawed but also less polished and charismatic. “Troy does not have the energy or the engagement that Graham did,” Wendy Frayer, a 53-year-old social worker from Auburn, Maine, told me at a Jackson rally. “He probably lost some votes.”
Whether Jackson can reassemble, and possibly expand, Platner’s coalition is a key question in the closing weeks. But when I spoke with both Democrats and Republicans in Maine recently, they each argued that the race will turn less on voters’ views about Jackson than on their opinions of Collins. “Troy Jackson is a nonfactor,” one Democrat who’s not working on the campaign told me after being granted anonymity to speak bluntly about the party’s candidate. “The question is: Will the trends catch up with her this year?”
Collins is, at this point in her career, a pretty sporadic campaigner. She does not regularly hold large rallies or town halls, and during a six-day stretch in mid-October that I spent in Maine, her staff notified reporters of only a single public appearance aside from a televised debate with Jackson. (The rivals held four debates over two weeks, so voters have gotten to hear plenty from both candidates.)
The Fryeburg Fair, however, is always a fun stop for Collins, as well as an ideal place for her campaign to demonstrate that her connection to Maine’s voters remains strong. The annual festival is the state’s biggest, drawing upwards of 20,000 people a day and transforming a small town near the New Hampshire border into “Maine’s second-largest city,” according to a fair official who served as Collins’s guide for the day. Fryeburg sits in a rural county that voted overwhelmingly for Collins in 2020, and during a two-hour stroll through the fairgrounds, people flocked to her. “Please win,” one man told Collins as he introduced her to his family. (She offered campaign stickers to the kids.) “I’m doing my best,” the senator replied with a smile. Collins gamely posed for photos with all who sought them, including a pair of teenage boys wearing shirts that read I ❤️ Boobies, which they had purchased from a nearby T-shirt vendor. (One of them did remove his hat for the photo out of respect.) Collins also tolerated the reporters who were trailing her, although as she made her way through a fragrant, high-traffic stretch near the livestock barn, she chided one of them: “Don’t make me walk in shit.”
I was struck by how many people not only recognized Collins but seemed to be familiar with her accomplishments—an indication of both her standing and the imprint of millions of dollars that she and her allies are spending on TV ads. Multiple Collins supporters brought up, unprompted, the record-setting 10,000th consecutive Senate vote without an absence that she cast in June. “Character is huge, and Susan Collins has a great character record,” Chet Charette, the deputy fire chief in Fryeburg, told me. Charette is backing Collins even though he wants to see term limits for members of Congress, which she opposes. (During her first campaign, in 1996, Collins pledged to serve only two terms in the Senate.) “She’s a lot more cognizant than a lot of them are,” Charette said.
By virtue of her lonely position in the middle of a polarized political climate, Collins must also rely on votes from people whom she frequently disappoints. Outside the Portland TV studio that hosted one of her debates, a boisterous crowd of Collins supporters cheered her arrival. When I asked Marc Fournier, a 55-year-old from nearby Westbrook, why he was backing Collins, he began with a disclaimer: “Susan Collins is not my favorite person.” He explained that he was displeased Collins had opposed some key Trump priorities. “She’s giving votes away,” Fournier complained. But he added: “Just because I disagree with her doesn’t mean I’m not going to vote for her.”
As Collins was concluding her visit to the Fryeburg Fair, a man who gave his name as Jim greeted her with a notably less friendly message. He told Collins he had supported her for years, but she had lost his vote when she backed Kavanaugh and helped Trump “stack” the Supreme Court. “You don’t stand up when it’s important,” Jim said. “I do,” Collins protested.
A key explanation for Collins’s political resilience is that in deep-blue New England, plenty of Democratic voters pride themselves on rewarding GOP moderation. In 2024, Vermonters elected Phil Scott, a Republican, to a fifth term as governor by a 50-point margin even as they backed Kamala Harris for president and Sanders’s return to the Senate. New Hampshire has elected Republican governors for the past decade.
Yet that tendency among some Democrats in the region to vote for the “good Republican” extends less and less to federal officeholders in the Trump era, and the force of political gravity that Collins must overcome is stronger this year than ever before. When it was my turn for a question in Fryeburg, I asked Collins what she would say to Mainers who are unhappy with the direction of the country and who might use this election to vote for change. “Well, first of all, I contest the premise of your question,” Collins replied, pointing to her “enormously favorable” reception among the fairgoers. At that moment, a man started loudly heckling her. “You can’t eat road salt, can ya?!” he shouted. “There are always a few exceptions,” Collins observed with a tight smile, before going on with a lengthy defense of her record delivering for Maine. She did not seem especially concerned that her critics have grown significantly in number over the years or that, in a few weeks’ time, they could marshal the votes to end her long career.
A new boogeyman arrived in Democratic campaign ads this year with such force that it was possible to forget it had ever been absent. Slotted between clichés about “rising costs,” the “rigged economy,” and the elusive “fair shot” for the middle class, the familiar villains of billionaires, insurance companies, and “MAGA extremists” were joined by a friend turned foe.
“Big Tech’s invading Ohio, driving up our electric rates, damaging our environment, destroying our farmland,” Representative Marcy Kaptur of Ohio warned in one ad. Roy Cooper, who is running in North Carolina for Senate, said in another: “My plan stops grocery stores from using AI to overcharge you.” A 30-second spot in Wisconsin features Rebecca Cooke, a congressional candidate, promising voters seated around a kitchen table: “I don’t want to be beholden to any of these Big Tech companies.” And the House Majority PAC, a group closely aligned with Democratic leaders that has been attacking Republicans for their proximity to the new baddie on the block, released an ad labeling the incumbent Republican in Wisconsin’s Third District “Data Center Derrick Van Orden”—and suggesting that he was designed by artificial intelligence to serve its interests.
The sudden Democratic revulsion toward Big Tech and all its offspring—data centers, artificial intelligence, tech oligarchs—has defined this midterm election and will likely continue through the early innings of the 2028 presidential campaign. For most of the past few decades, Democrats cast themselves as a futurist party heralding a digital utopia, a posture founded by Al Gore and solidified when Barack Obama traveled to Google’s headquarters in 2007 to announce his presidential campaign’s commitment to “use technology to reach ever-expanding horizons.” Republicans were the ones warning about censorship and centralized power, as corporate executives clumsily adjusted the levers of permissible speech on social media.
But partisan passions on tech have been realigning from the moment President Trump delivered his second inaugural address in 2025, with Silicon Valley’s centibillionaires as background props. The president’s hostility toward attempts to rein in AI has solidified the shift. Democratic politicians and strategists now enter the final weeks of a midterm season convinced that they have uncovered a way to persuade Trump’s voters to at least hesitate before voting for Republicans. “Trump and his anti-AI-regulation posture is dragging the party to a politically suicidal place,” Rob Flaherty, one of Joe Biden’s top digital strategists, told me. “They are grabbing the wrong side of an 80–20 issue at exactly the wrong time.”
Republican campaign advisers, including those in Trump’s circle, admit the new vulnerability—and are taking tentative steps to address it. The president laid out a voluntary Ratepayer Protection Pledge in March, aiming to assure voters that new AI server farms would not increase their utility bill. The Republican-led House voted in September to request that state regulators require those standards, legislation that was then championed by Senator Jon Husted of Ohio, who is in a tight race with his Democratic challenger, former Senator Sherrod Brown. “The data center brand is the anchor,” the National Republican Senatorial Committee wrote in an August memo, describing a drag on Husted’s reelection efforts that was first reported by The New York Times. Republican strategists were also alarmed by how much voters responded to the issue: “This messaging is significantly more effective than traditional messaging tracts, as it introduces new information on a highly relevant, emerging topic.”
But the memo declaring “a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle” had little influence over Trump’s own rhetoric, and the president spent much of September insisting that concerns of an AI-induced apocalypse were a “hoax” and “sick conspiracy.” While his Cabinet went on television to defend data centers as a great American boon, Trump gathered the leaders of the nation’s technology companies at the White House so that he could praise them and they could praise him. Democrats have been delighted. When the progressive data firm Catalist asked in a poll which party Americans trust when it comes to “responding to the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on jobs and society,” they favored Democrats by eight percentage points in July and August. The lead grew to 12 points in September, just as the explosion of television advertising started hitting screens. “Donald Trump decided to convene executives from Big Tech and then lecture the American people that their concerns about data centers are unfounded,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told me in a recent gaggle with reporters. “This is extraordinary stuff.”
The anti–Big Tech ads have saturated swing districts around the country. Reset Tech—a left-leaning group focused on the intersection of AI, media, and democracy that supports more technology regulation—recently used advertising data collected by the tracking firm AdImpact to quantify the messaging shift. From 2020 to 2024, a period that includes three congressional and two presidential cycles, Republican candidates and their allies spent more than $7.3 million on 26 ads that name-checked Big Tech, while Democrats spent just $512,000 on two ads. This cycle the polarities have reversed. Democrats have spent $14 million on 86 ads that mention Big Tech, compared with almost $6.3 million by Republican interests on 37 ads. The contrast in this cycle regarding spots critical of the data-center boom is even more profound: Democratic candidates and groups have run 286 critical ads, compared with 121 ads by Republican interests.
Rishi Bharwani, the U.S. director of Reset Tech, told me that the investments Democrats have made over the past three months to “seed this issue” are now helping produce changes in polling. “This will play a meaningful factor in the outcome of the 2026 midterms,” Bharwani said, “and put Democrats on a strong footing going into the presidential election cycle.”
Democratic strategists began tracking the opportunity earlier this year, when polling from House districts showed surprising concern about AI. In one batch of Democratic polls from March, which I obtained, unfavorable views of AI stood at an average of 63 percent across Maine’s Second District, California’s Twenty-Second District, and Colorado’s Eighth District—all battlegrounds.
New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, was an early tech critic, and her 2025 campaign focused on online safety for children. She told me that she became interested when, during her time in Congress, Republican leaders in the House refused to call a vote for the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act, which had passed the Senate with 91 votes. Since then, she has signed multiple bills in New Jersey that regulate social-media access for children and clamp down on the use of algorithms to set grocery prices and rent. “Trump is the Republican Party in Washington,” she said. “Democrats have to step into this, and they have to lead here, and I think you see it in these campaigns.” Just this week, two candidates from opposite ends of the party’s ideological spectrum—Abdul El-Sayed, the Senate candidate in Michigan, and David Crowley, the candidate for governor in Wisconsin—released plans for technology regulation.
Flaherty and Bharwani argue that the potency of this issue will only grow as AI’s disruption persists. Polls this cycle continue to show that AI barely ranks as a priority for voters. But Democrats believe that they can tie it to the cost of living and economic insecurity—issues that are at the top of the list. A Democratic-aligned super PAC called Tomorrow Together, which Flaherty co-founded, recently began testing the theory with a $4 million ad buy in four House districts. The ads connect concern over Big Tech with the populist frustration over diminished economic opportunity. One of the taglines: “Lining their pockets, emptying yours.”
Bharwani said that the Democrats’ new stance is a recognition that Obama’s vision of a virtuous cycle of tech-driven innovation never came to pass. “What we all experienced was a ton of growth in the tech sector, the creation of numerous new billionaires, and even the world’s first trillionaire, and a bunch of working families basically recognizing that they’re not sharing,” he told me. “These tech companies are actually undermining their economic security and their safety.” That argument is now being served up to prospective 2028 presidential contenders, who will be shaping the next vision for Democratic governance in a nation where technological change continues to accelerate.
President Trump’s inexplicable decision to waive some sanctions on Russia, announced late Friday, essentially gives a pass to the forces of evil in the Kremlin. The move effectively nullifies legislation that was named after the late Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, passed by huge bipartisan majorities in both the House and Senate, and signed by the president. This decision is the latest in a long series that this administration has taken to appease or accommodate the Russians in misguided attempts to get them to negotiate. Russian President Vladimir Putin pockets these naive offerings and still refuses to talk.
Surveys show that most Americans stand with Ukraine as it defends itself against Russia, view Putin as a dangerous threat who shouldn’t be trusted, and want to see the United States offer more assistance to Ukraine.
Few wars in recent history have been so black-and-white: Russia is the guilty party that invaded Ukraine for no good reason. Ukraine is, for its part, defending its freedom, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.
And yet there is much misinformation and disinformation circulating that blurs the picture. To address the problem of phony narratives, it is useful to contrast Russia and Putin with Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
Putin came to power in August 1999, when his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, designated him prime minister and his preferred successor; Yeltsin resigned from office at the end of that year and named Putin acting president, three months before the next presidential election. Putin had used his time as prime minister to deploy brutal force against the Chechens in 1999. Zelensky became the leader of Ukraine in 2019, when he won by a landslide in a free and fair election certified by domestic and international observers. Putin hasn’t won a legitimate election throughout his two-plus decades in power.
Putin is a murderous dictator who kills his own citizens as well as those of his neighbors. He treats his troops as cannon fodder. Zelensky is a democratically elected leader whose term has been extended because Ukraine cannot credibly conduct elections under martial law, which was declared after Russia invaded on a full scale in 2022.
Under Putin, Russian forces deliberately target civilian areas, including hospitals, apartment buildings, and schools. They also seek to destroy energy facilities and water supplies to freeze out Ukrainians and force them into submission. Zelensky and Ukrainian forces focus on Russian energy facilities that provide Putin with funding for his war campaign, but generally seek to minimize civilian casualties.
Putin first started the war against Ukraine in 2014, when he illegally annexed Crimea and then moved into Ukraine’s Donbas region. Zelensky wasn’t even in politics that year, so he can’t be blamed for starting the war.
Putin refuses to end the war, enter serious negotiations, or even entertain a cease-fire. Zelensky and Ukraine have shown tremendous willingness to negotiate, freeze the fighting at its current stage, and sort out the status of Russian-occupied land through diplomacy, without conferring recognition of Russian control.
Putin has ignored Trump’s repeated efforts to end the war, including the recent energy-cease-fire announcement, by continuing to strike Ukrainian energy targets. Zelensky had suspended retaliatory strikes against Russian refineries for three days but lifted that pause after Russia kept bombing Ukraine.
Putin sought to topple the Zelensky government through his full-scale invasion, in 2022, to take over massive amounts of Ukrainian territory and to subjugate the country under Russian rule. Zelensky and the people of Ukraine simply have sought to live in peace and exercise their right to determine their independent future.
Putin wishes to challenge and undermine democratic nations and the institutions that bring them together, such as NATO and the European Union. Ukraine seeks to join these institutions and assume its rightful place as a full member of the Euro-Atlantic community.
Putin supports Iran against the United States, providing both intelligence aimed to target and kill Americans as well as weapons systems to help that cause. Zelensky and Ukraine offered the United States and its allies in the Middle East anti-drone capabilities and insights on how to fight the Iranian Shahed drones, which have been used against Ukraine.
Putin relies on North Koreans and others who have been trafficked into Russia’s side of the war. Casualties are merely a statistic for him and for North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un. Zelensky has never asked the West to send its troops to fight on Ukraine’s side, but he does seek Western assistance to defend against the much larger Russian military.
Putin depends on China’s purchases of Russian energy and provision of dual-use technology to back his war. Ukraine looks to the West for its support.
Putin and Russia are key parts of CRINK, the grouping of the authoritarian regimes in China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea that seek to weaken and threaten the West. Ukraine is the bulwark against a major part of this dangerous alignment.
Putin and Russian forces have launched provocations against Europe and the United States, almost daring war with the West. These have included major violations of NATO airspace; drone attacks and interference with European airports and flights; assassinations and attempted killings on Western soil; cyberattacks; and election interference. Ukraine stands between Russia and Europe, fighting for its freedom as well as the safety and security of the continent.
Putin oversees one of the most corrupt regimes in the world. He has obliterated rule of law and sanctity of contracts, making Russia a highly inhospitable place to do business, including in the energy sector. Ukraine, while experiencing its own problem of corruption, actively seeks to confront that problem while encouraging and desperately needing Western investment. Russia ranks 157th out of 182 nations in Transparency International’s corruption index, while Ukraine ranks 104th. Putin has destroyed Russian civil society; Ukrainian civil society is vibrant and calls out corruption on a regular basis.
What does all of this mean for the United States and Europe? For starters, they should stand unequivocally with Ukraine against Russia. History will reflect poorly on the West if it concludes that our policy and position were wishy-washy at best in a war so clearly black-and-white.
They should provide the military assistance that Ukraine needs to defend itself, save lives from Russian bombardment, regain territory that Russia illegally occupies, and win the war. The war has been an unmitigated disaster for Russia; more than 1.5 million have been killed or wounded, and the conflict has caused severe economic strain. At some point, Russia might reach a breaking point; the West should help accelerate that process, because that may be the only way to get Putin to end the war he started.
Europe should support Ukraine financially to help offset the costs of Ukraine’s forced increased military spending and reconstruction. To do this, Europe should finally move from freezing to seizing the roughly $300 billion in Russian assets that are in Western financial institutions, mostly in Belgium’s Euroclear. These funds, which Russia should never recover after what it has done to Ukraine, would provide a major financial assist to Ukraine and allay the potential burden on the West.
Pressure to end the war should be applied and increased on Putin and Russia, the ones who started it—not Ukraine. This means a serious tightening of sanctions implementation, including stronger enforcement against Russia’s shadow fleet that generates energy-export income, and no business deals with Russia that ease the sanctions pressure and provide financing for its war effort. It means ending loopholes that allow Western-made parts essential for Russian weapons to slip through the sanctions.
The United States should also raise the costs on countries—especially China and India—that import Russian energy. And the West should not sign energy or any other deals with Putin and Russia, as the Trump administration announced on October 9 regarding diesel. Such efforts are read in Moscow as weakness and reinforce Putin’s thinking that he is winning and can outlast the West’s support for Ukraine.
The West should stop inviting Putin to various meetings, such as the G20 gathering hosted this year by the United States. He has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes against Ukraine (specifically the abduction of Ukrainian children, though he is guilty of much more). He is responsible for the worst security crisis on the European continent since World War II. He needs to be isolated and treated as the pariah and threat that he is, not welcomed with red-carpet treatment.
In the past week, the president of the United States has conclusively turned America into an ally of the Russian Federation.
Donald Trump has now abandoned pretense and is openly aiding the Kremlin in its war against a friend and partner of the U.S. The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history. To judge from the available evidence, he has not done so out of a cold calculation of the national interest. Instead, he has based his decisions on his own interests; his open admiration for Russia’s dictator; his resentment of Ukraine’s democratically elected president; and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public.
In September, Trump signed a sanctions bill that Congress had passed, named after the late Senator Lindsey Graham, a pro-Ukraine hawk. The legislation sanctioned Russia as well as other countries that are supporting Russia’s invasion and brutalization of Ukraine. The bill was approved with bipartisan support, but some Republicans and most House Democrats voted against the law, arguing that it contained a trap door, a provision that would allow Trump to suspend the prescribed sanctions at will.
Those critics were correct to be worried. Trump pulled the lever on that trap door just two days before the law was supposed to go into effect. In an executive order signed on Friday, Trump said that “such a waiver at this time is in the national interests of the United States”—he declined to explain exactly how the waiver was in America’s interests—and that the law would remain unexecuted until such time as his administration decides otherwise. This waiver came a short while after Trump lifted restrictions on Russia’s sales of diesel fuel to the U.S. and other markets.
Trump’s recent actions in support of Russia are so obvious that they have generated a rare moment of bipartisan disgust: Both Democrats and Republicans now seem to share a horror at the betrayal of Ukraine, and at the president’s reckless abdication of America’s role as leader of the free world.
The president’s aides are scrambling to explain why this capitulation to Russia isn’t exactly what it looks like. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, when pressed by a reporter, said that the administration would “assess” the impact of the Graham Act after a 60-day period. This was nonsense: The executive order includes no such timeline, and no one seriously believes that the administration is running numbers to decide whether sanctions are a good idea.
Rubio was joined in his excuse making by a handful of desperate Republicans who tried to cast Trump’s decision as some sort of tough-love patriotism. When asked on Sunday whether he agreed with Trump on lifting sanctions, Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma said, “He is choosing the American people first, is what he’s doing.” But few even on the American right seem willing to buy it. Trump loyalist Senator Ted Cruz called Trump’s move “a mistake,” and Senator Darline Graham, who now holds her brother’s seat, broke with Trump as well.
Some conservative commentators, including Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who writes for National Review, expressed considerably more rage. McCarthy wrote on Saturday that Putin is on a “quest to reconstitute America’s Soviet enemy,” and that “President Donald Trump is giving him aid and comfort.” As a lawyer, McCarthy surely did not choose those words at random. Aid and comfort are part of the criteria in Article III of the Constitution of the United States that define treason. McCarthy called for “immediate hearings about this week’s shocking escalation of the Trump-Putin alliance.”
Trump’s decision has nothing to do with American national security. His de facto alliance with Russia is a sordid arrangement rooted in his own fears and hatreds.
First, Trump knows that Republicans are almost certainly facing a beating in the midterm elections, in part over the price of gas—a spike caused by the kind of war in Iran that he promised during his 2024 campaign to never start. He is desperate to do anything he can to lower the price of gas, and because he does not seem to understand how the international economy works, he may well believe that some janky diesel deal with Russia will alleviate high fuel prices in the United States. (It will not, although it will certainly help some Russian companies.)
As Malcolm Rifkind, a former defense minister of the United Kingdom, put it this weekend: “Donald Trump has shown himself as a person to be repulsive; as a President of the United States to be a disgrace to his own people as well as to his international responsibilities. We all know his actual reasons for this are a grubby attempt to win a few more votes in the midterms by trying to get oil prices down.” The result, Rifkind rightly added, is that Trump will now be “directly responsible” for the deaths of Ukrainians who will die while Putin uses the Russian alliance with America to continue the fighting.
But even if the American economy were in better shape, Trump’s history with Putin suggests that he was never going to allow the sanctions in the Graham Act to be enforced. Trump’s suspension of the law is a signal to Ukraine, to Russia, to Europe, and to America’s NATO allies that the Trump White House and Putin’s Kremlin are now on the same side.
Trump’s man-crush on the Russian dictator has been well documented and need not be recounted in all its unctuous detail. His attachment is so obvious that for years it has sparked various complicated theories about its origins, but Occam’s razor suggests a more direct explanation: Trump is a weak man who is intimidated by stronger and smarter men. His humiliating relationship with Putin is different only in degree from the way he interacts with other authoritarian leaders, including China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un (a dangerous totalitarian with whom Trump claimed to have fallen in love).
As if to prove the point, this afternoon Trump posted a whiny screed on his Truth Social site in which he pleaded with the public to understand how overmatched he is against Putin. Trump tried to explain that he is accommodating the Russian leader because he doesn’t “want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table.” In a deeply pathetic admission, he warned that angering Putin could have consequences in Iran: “Perhaps more importantly, Russia is doing very little, if anything, to help the Islamic Republic of Iran, compared to what they could be doing, and I want to keep it that way, and will, unless stupid people get in the way.” He then said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has gotten so much money from the Biden administration and from Europe that “he doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did.”
Consider what the American president just told the entire world: Please don’t interfere in my relationship with a murderous dictator, or he might help the country that America’s men and women in uniform are fighting at this very moment. The leader of the most powerful nation on the planet—yes, that’s still the United States right now—is trying to get everyone else, including the American Congress, to avoid antagonizing Putin, instead of warning Putin not to even think about aiding Iran. Nothing better illustrates just how weak a supplicant Trump has become in his relationship with the Kremlin boss.
Trump engages in this kind of personalized diplomacy in part because he believes himself to be—against all evidence—a master dealmaker. But the greater irony, considering how much he rails against globalism, is that he also behaves this way because he is in fact a globalist himself. He does not view the world as a collection of sovereign nations; he sees it instead as territories run by mob bosses. The weaker ones, especially America’s allies, can be abused and threatened at will. The stronger godfathers, including America’s dedicated enemies, are peers and thus treated with respect. The interests of the innocent millions in those countries are of no consequence. What matters is what’s good for Trump, his underbosses, and his family.
Trump also seems to be motivated by his open loathing of Zelensky, a hostility that can be traced back to Trump’s first term, when the unwillingness of Ukrainian authorities to be part of a scheme to investigate Joe Biden led to Trump’s first impeachment. But Trump’s antipathy toward Zelensky is more than score-settling: To him, it seems, Zelensky is a loser, a nobody who is causing needless trouble for his friend Vladimir. The American president cannot understand why Zelensky and his people do not simply accept their situation and lie down under Russia’s tank treads.
Earlier this month, Trump called for Zelensky’s removal. Now he seems determined to let Putin, rather than the people of Ukraine, fulfill that demand.
In the words of another famous Russian named Vladimir, What is to be done? The answers are not comforting.
Congress, when it reconvenes, can try to pass new legislation, but a bill amending the Graham Act would require a veto-proof majority to become law. Republicans have shown no interest in taking the power to tariff out of Trump’s hands, and they are equally unlikely to strip him of the power to lift the sanctions they just tried to impose. The courts are also unlikely to challenge the president when he invokes national security, which he does for almost everything he wants.
An additional problem is that both Trump’s secretary of defense and his vice president are likely to support a policy aimed at securing a Russian victory. Vance joined Trump in an attempt to bully Zelensky during their infamous meeting in the White House in early 2025, and he is unlikely to ask Trump to reconsider helping Putin. Pete Hegseth, for his part, appears willing to say and do whatever keeps him in the Pentagon. America’s senior military officers may be sympathetic to Ukraine—as are most American citizens—but the idea that the adolescent, self-styled “secretary of war” is going to suddenly deliver a mature and stoic defense of democracy against Russian imperialism is laughable.
For the foreseeable future, Ukraine’s fate depends on aid from Europe. Perhaps Europe will continue to step up, and a new Congress might try to demand more support from the White House. But everyone will have to hurry: Winter is coming.
Zelensky, sadly, knows that a Russian victory looks to be exactly what Trump wants. If “the United States will support Putin,” he said on Sunday, “it’s unbelievable. It’s a tragedy.” He added: “Of course, if these two countries will be together, of course we will not prevail. And we will not be able to stand.”
A world in which the White House is allied to the Kremlin was, until now, the stuff of paranoid fiction. Manchurian candidates and red presidents were fantasies, dark tales that Americans told themselves, like ghost stories around a campfire. But this alliance now exists. If Stalin and his Cold War successors could see what Trump and Putin have created, and how the mighty United States has been humbled and humiliated, they might think that their evil hopes were not wrong, but only that they dreamed them too early.
This is the moment I knew that the whole vibrator thing had gone too far: It was about a year ago, and I’d ordered a replacement rabbit, the model I’d fallen for around 2007, amid the vibrator renaissance brought about by Sex and the City. An early episode of that zeitgeist show features the prudish Charlotte, having reluctantly bought a “Rabbit Pearl” on the advice of her friend Miranda, becoming so addicted to her new toy that she stops leaving her apartment, thus turning the rabbit into a cultural icon for female pleasure.
More than a quarter century had passed since that innocent moment, and the rabbit—once a battery-operated device with a clunky rotating shaft and dainty bunny ears that shivered with astonishing proficiency—had turned sleek and space-age. The rabbits I ordered had USB chargers and a variety of speeds. They had safety locks and silencers, like guns.
I didn’t want all these added features—22 speeds was about 20 too many—but I could never remember the name of the most recent one I’d ordered, so I had to Google best rabbit vibrators, a quest that once upon a time had taken me to niche women’s websites but now took me to The New York Times’ Wirecutter.
It’s not that the newer rabbit models don’t work; it’s that they do too much. I mean, I wouldn’t buy a spatula that also dusted the floor. My latest model was so fancy and complicated that it took me a while to figure out how to switch it on, but the real problem was that, once it was on, I could not figure out how to turn the thing off.
The day I received it, I was about to record a podcast, a detail that sounds irrelevant until you realize what I was up against: I could not have a vibrator droning on in the background of an hour-long audio conversation. I spent minutes that felt like hours desperately pushing three buttons in alternating sequences only to be thwarted—the rabbit would not turn off. It thumped, it jittered, it whirred round and round. I determined that the only way to shut the damn thing up would be to run down its battery. Racing to beat the clock before the podcast began, I bolted to my front door to place the infernal device outside, where its insistent whirring wouldn’t be picked up by the mic. Just before I got there, I somehow hit the right sequence, and the vibrator finally shut down.
What a sad modern portrait: a single woman, living alone, with a rabbit vibrator jackhammering haplessly against her door.
Around that time, I happened to be listening to Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast when I heard a sex therapist say, “Turn down the speed on your vibrators.” Shepard—a modern man in the sex-positive mold—sounded confused; he seemed to be under the impression that vibrators were good for women.
Weren’t we all?
I’d been thinking about turning down the speed on my vibrator for a long time, but I’d considered my affliction personal, not society-wide. Now it was dawning on me that the problem wasn’t simply mine. Women are being sold egg-shaped suction devices in the pages of New York magazine, and BookTok influencers pair with sex-toy companies for promotional collabs. Yes, there is a bookmark that doubles as a vibrator. (“Building a world where women choose their pleasure + their power,” reads the Instagram bio for Her Little Bookmark.)
Does this consumer game of one-upmanship amid the mainstreaming of vibrators even matter? There are too many varieties of women’s razors, too, and I don’t care. But what worries me is how this points in the direction in which so much of modern life has been barreling: self-pleasure, self-love, self-care, self, self, self.
This is where my mind goes when I read or hear a certain type of brittle “Don’t need a man, I have a vibrator” argument,a flex that’s been prevalent on social media for at least a decade. I’d love to see a chart of the well-documented sex recession laid across a chart of vibrator sales. A vibrator may get you off better than a man (or a woman, for that matter), but will it clean the gutters? Hold you in the dark? Kill the rat skittering around the attic? I write these words, and then I think: But wait, what if one day it can?
I arrived late to vibrators, or perhaps I should say masturbation, in the relatively vibrator-shy ’90s. I was a few years out of college, sharing pitchers of beer with my buddy Aaron, and we were about halfway through the second pitcher when I shared a very personal detail: I’d never had an orgasm.
Not ever? Aaron was fascinated but not judgmental; in fact, another female friend had recently confessed something similar, and he’d researched the problem late one night (he was in law school, and miserable) and discovered that her predicament was both common and easy to solve.
“You need the Cadillac of vibrators,” he said, referring to the Hitachi Magic Wand, a personal massager that resembled a large white microphone. The Hitachi, he’d learned, launched women into such paroxysms of pleasure that it had acquired cult status. And he’d heard that you could buy it at Walmart.
Walmart? I was incredulous. Walmart had famously eighty-sixed popular albums by Marilyn Manson and (of all people) Sheryl Crow, but Aaron explained that this was part of the ruse. All of those “personal massagers” I’d seen in Sharper Image catalogs? Those were vibrators. Why else were they waterproof? I had to admit that he had a point.
We drove to Walmart but it didn’t have the Cadillac of vibrators. Unwilling to end our adventure, Aaron picked up an alternate model he declared the “Ford Taurus of vibrators.” The picture on the front resembled a plug-in hand mixer. Whatever, I’d come this far.
That night, alone in my garage apartment, I unwrapped the box, drank some red wine to set the mood, and plugged the Ford Taurus of vibrators into an outlet, only to discover that the cord didn’t reach the bed. Was there an extension cord around? Never mind. I lay down nervously on a small braided rug, staring at the slowly rotating blades of the ceiling fan, and turned on the power, only to discover that hell no. It felt like industrial turbines were juddering against my most sensitive spot. Hard pass.
But a few nights later, I got an idea. Back in high school, my mother had given me a Brookstone mini-massager she’d bought at the mall, a stocking stuffer for a teen daughter with D cups and upper-back pain. I’d been lugging it from apartment to apartment like a kitchen utensil I never used. It was demure and beige, the size of a small flashlight, and it was waterproof. Huh, never noticed that. Drumming up my courage, I closed the curtains, lit votive candles, uncorked a bottle of wine, and settled under the covers with a device I would eventually know as the “pocket rocket.”
And that name fit. I felt like I was being shot into space.
The history of vibrators is a bit murky. In the Next Room (Or The Vibrator Play) is a 2009 Broadway production dramatizing the idea that Victorian doctors used early vibrators on women deemed “hysterical,” a term derived from the Greek word hystera, for “womb,” the supposed origin of women’s madness.
Did this happen? I like to think so. Evidence suggests that even the ancient Romans applied this approach to treating female mental illness. The second-century physician Galen wrote of treating a woman whose brain he believed to be dangerously bathed in her unreleased sexual fluids. He applied “manual stimulation,” and ta-da, “she was cured.” (The patient “took great pleasure from this,” Galen noted.)
Of course, the technology that transformed society, according to most accounts of women’s liberation and the sexual revolution, was birth control. The pill came out in the ’60s, but in many states only married women could get a prescription. It wasn’t until the ’70s that the pill went mainstream, allowing women to set a course for their own reproduction, a power they’d never had, at least in such potent and efficient form. But the sexual revolution and women’s liberation could also be at odds with each other. On one hand were Our Bodies, Ourselves, consciousness-raising sessions, hand mirrors held between the thighs. On the other hand were the normalization of casual sex without consequence, the “zipless fuck,” the rise of Penthouse and skirt hems—all seeming to serve men’s pleasure more than women’s. Or did they? Helen Gurley Brown and Erica Jong argued otherwise.
But then, in 1976, a sex educator named Shere Hite published The Hite Report, possibly the most revealing document ever produced about women’s sexual proclivities (more revealing, I’d say, than the more famous studies from Alfred Kinsey). To read The Hite Report now is to be gobsmacked by the sheer industriousness of women in the pre-vibrator era. Everyday items such as carrots and candles became ersatz phalluses; women sought climax under running bathwater or against the flat, vibrating side of an electric shaver. One woman even made creative use of an ashtray. The raw-liver scene in Philip Roth’s 1969 novel, Portnoy’s Complaint,may be the most famous over-the-top depiction of masturbation in American literature, but The Hite Report may be Portnoy’s feminine counterpart, with its robust chronicle of women’s sometimes Byzantine pursuit of pleasure.
For all The Hite Report’s descriptions of private erotic delight, though, the book’s strongest running theme is the deep and shameful fear expressed by women who were not gettingthemselves off, and didn’t know how. “I finally had an orgasm,” a woman tells people at a swanky party in 1979’s Manhattan, “and my doctor told me it was the wrong kind.”
By the ’70s and ’80s, bored grocery shoppers could flip through Helen Gurley Brown’s Cosmopolitan to find new blow-job techniques while in the checkout line. But in the 1989 film Parenthood, a family dinner is interrupted by a power outage, and the everyman played by Steve Martin searches for a flashlight only to find his divorced sister’s big dildo buzzing in his hand as the lights flicker back on. She’s mortified.
I got the message: As a woman, giving pleasure to your partner was good; seeking pleasure for yourself was embarrassing. As a teen, I had Parenthood and Fast Times on VHS, and I studied them to become a more sophisticated version of myself. Believe it or not, the idea of masturbation never occurred to me. Put my hands down there? That was my boyfriend’s business. Not long after he and I broke up, he started hanging out with a cool college girl who drew a map of the clitoris. When he told me this over the phone, I was furious and humiliated. And also: Could I borrow that drawing?
For women of my generation, messages about sexual pleasure were mixed at best. Dr. Ruth was on the airwaves, adorably chirping about the joys of sexual freedom and toys that could assist women in their quest. But when I was in college, Joycelyn Elders was forced to resign as Bill Clinton’s surgeon general. Her alleged crime? She talked about the benefits of masturbation.
Self-pleasure is the foundation of all human sexuality, the late Betty Dodson used to say. Dodson was a pioneer of sex-positive feminism who taught workshops for women with the same body hang-ups she’d once had. Dodson died in 2020, but her legacy is etched across the early 21st century, in shows such as Girls and stores including Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, which infamously sold a jade egg for insertion into the vagina.
By the 2010s, sex toys were everywhere. Posters for Grace and Frankie, a Netflix comedy starring 70-something Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, featured the silver-haired heroines holding purple vibrating-wand massagers like light sabers. A charming 2016 Netflix seriescalled Love, about dating in Los Angeles, features a scene wherein the beautiful but troubled protagonist tumbles into bed with her suitor only to reach into her bedside drawer, pull out her vibrator, and go to town on herself as he waits, awkwardly, for her to finish.
I took the point—self-pleasure could go too far; moderation was the prudent path—but I was about 40 when I saw that Netflix show. I was chronically single and trying to date sober (another story entirely), and I was not ready to slow down the odyssey of delights kicked off by my Brookstone pocket rocket. My bedside drawer was filled with items bought on a whim (a tongue-shaped pink vibe, a pocket rocket shaped like lipstick to sneak past airport security). I collected vibrators from online depots that sent the products in discreet packaging.
The idea that vibrators, touted as a way to encourage women’s sexual exploration, might be keeping them from experiences they craved—intimacy, physical touch, actual relationships—was something of a taboo subject in those years. I doubt many sex therapists wanted to be on record telling women to masturbate less when many women didn’t masturbate at all. The arrival of the MeToo movement in 2017 pushed the battle of the sexes closer to a full-scale war; shocking reports about “good guys” such as Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer (Matt Lauer?!) left women I knew wondering whether it was simply safest and best to opt out of dating entirely.
But I was dismayed to find women on social media braying that they didn’t need a man if they had a vibrator. Because … was it possible that part of the reason I hadn’t found the long-term partner I wanted so badly was that I had too many vibrators? I’m not saying vibrators kept me from dating. I dated a ton. I’m saying that when the dating market proved challenging and the men not quite right, it was all too easy to return to my empty house at the end of a less than stellar evening, pluck out a buzzing rocket ship from my nightstand drawer, and find release.
I think it was 2022, late in the pandemic era, when I started wondering whether that drawer, so clogged with toys that it was becoming hard to shut, had turned into a paltry substitute for the beauty I had assumed life would deliver, to love and be loved by another. I noticed that sex with a man I cared about left me feeling saturated and soul-satisfied, whereas getting off with a mechanical device left me sleepy and only lightly relieved, like I’d managed to scratch a stubborn itch.
I dated a man who stroked the pale skin of my inner elbow in the most electric way, and when he was gone, I tried replicating this in my bed, but it never worked. I needed the surprise of his touch. I have spent most of my adulthood alone, at least from a relationship standpoint, and it’s not a bad way to be, but therapists and dating experts will tell you it’s only in relationship to others that we truly know ourselves.
“You’re too picky.” I’ve heard it a million times, and I’m guilty as charged. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ve fought too hard for this odd, beautiful life to share it with a man who doesn’t fit. And yet I know from my closest friendships and creative partnerships that living side by side requires work. Conflict, civil disagreements, crossed wires that leave me feeling rattled and badly misunderstood—that’s how I learn. That’s how I grow.
I worry that technology-induced orgasms on demand made it too easy for me—and made it too easy for society at large—to stay cocooned in a little pod of self-gratification: Netflix, DoorDash, Amazon Prime, conversations that weren’t real conversations, mediated through the flat screens of text and social media. It feels good in the instant, and it can feel awfully empty as the years pass. If you keep scratching that stubborn itch, do you ever address the reason you’re itching in the first place?
When Gloria Steinem died last month, I thought about the line she made famous in the ’70s heyday of second-wave feminism: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Was it a joke? A slogan more than a commandment? In 2000, Steinem married the entrepreneur David Bale, and after he died, she was grief-stricken. I doubt that line, clever and quotable, was ever meant to be taken literally, but the glib notion that women don’t need romantic love remains one of the most pernicious strains of the female-empowerment age.
I am now 52. I’ve never been married, and I’ve never had kids, and although I’ve come to terms with that, I wonder how the combination of certain early-21st-century ideas about women’s independence and certain vibrator technologies shaped the trajectory of my romantic life.
I don’t plan to give up masturbation, or vibrators, though I’ve tossed several, including the jackhammering rabbit of doorstep-thumping fame. A technological assist can be helpful—and fun—but when it becomes a crutch, or even a solitary delivery system, maybe it’s time to rethink how we’ve valorized the vibrator, or at least the notion of vibrators everywhere all the time, every day of the week.I’ve started to see vibrators as proto–sex robots that have been Trojan horsed into the culture under the guise of female pleasure only to acquire Bluetooth capabilities and talismanic status among the women who swear by them. How long before these things start talking with us? Answering our emails? Doing our taxes?
We live in a convenience culture whose engine runs on the tantalizing promise that we can skip the hard parts—the cooking, the cleaning, the infinite search for a better half—but I have learned that the hard part is also, in many instances, the best part. Pushing past those frustrating challenges into discovery can be a source of such pleasure.
The great lie of modern culture is that we don’t need one another. Maybe not all women need men, but I’ve come to realize that this one does. Of course, men need women too. Men need men, and women need women, and so on. The salesmen of the 21st century will keep slinging their wares: DIY! AI companion! Chatbot boyfriend! Like so much of our day-to-day lives, getting off is becoming more efficient, easier, faster.
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