“You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian. You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that, I commend you, and I thank you again.”
— Steve Witkoff, U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, addressing Russian President Vladimir Putin
Mark Wednesday, October 21, 2026, as “the day words lost all meaning.” My dictionary just ran outside and threw itself off a bridge. Noah Webster arose from his grave and lurched around, howling and tearing at his hair. Samuel Johnson is bellowing something awful; I can hear it across the Atlantic Ocean. George Orwell is sighing; he has been here before.
I have to imagine that Putin is a little insulted at being so gravely misunderstood. With this single word, humanitarian, our envoy has revealed a stunning ignorance of the Russian president’s life’s work. This is like going to Picasso and praising him as a “representational painter,” or calling the Sahara “the wettest place in the world,” or describing Witkoff’s statement as “unembarrassing.”
I see, perhaps, where the misunderstanding began. Putin referred to Trump as a “humanitarian,” and Witkoff thought to himself: Ah! This word clearly has a different meaning than I have been led to believe! I will have to reconstruct its definition from context clues. Maybe it’s someone with P in his name. Maybe it’s someone who doesn’t think that the United States should be in NATO. Maybe it’s someone who would look really good on horseback. Maybe no words mean anything! Maybe they are just phonemes to be thrown at a wall, at random, in the manner of that great representational painter Jackson Pollock.
One of the conditions of freedom is that words have an understood meaning. If Putin is a humanitarian, then Dolly Parton was an axe murderer. Who else gets to be filed under humanitarian if Putin makes the cut? Stalin? The iceberg that sunk the Titanic? Calling Putin a humanitarian is like calling Hannibal Lecter a humanitarian, although there is more of a case to be made for Hannibal because he does, at least, subsist on people.
Let me start over. It is nice and convenient, I think, when words have meaning. It makes it easier to order a sandwich. When words are more of a suggestion, reality evaporates at your touch, and none of your rights is secure. Good luck getting a sandwich then! Real is fake, fake is real, and all your society’s most precious values carry a disconcerting wink: freedom, free speech, meritocracy, equality. When you chant them, when you promise them to one another, you are not sure exactly what you are saying. Their meaning melts like hot wax, and homeland security becomes an unmarked car slamming into your neighbor.
Authoritarians treat words as a game. (Putin, great humanitarian that he is, has some experience with this.) Perhaps war is peace (big news for the Nobel Committee, if true)!
Perhaps the best humanitarian is whoever voids the world of the most people! Perhaps election integrity is the exact opposite of that!
In the spirit of this new, callous disregard for words and their meaning, I say: Great job! Well done! What a magnificent time to be alive, when all of the best people are in charge.
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If you don’t live in Ohio, you’ve probably been blissfully free from thinking about Vivek Ramaswamy since the 2024 Republican presidential primary, which he left after arousing the visceral dislike of pretty much all of his rivals, as well as many voters.
Ramaswamy, who’s now running for Ohio governor, is back in the national spotlight this week, once again in extremely unflattering fashion, because of a campaign ad targeting the Democratic candidate Amy Acton. Acton, a first-time candidate, has leaned heavily on her inspiring biography: She has spoken about experiencing homelessness as well as being raped by her stepfather as a child; she later waited tables and delivered newspapers to put herself through medical school, eventually becoming the director of the Ohio Department of Health.
Most recent polls have shown Acton with a small advantage over Ramaswamy, which may be why his campaign resorted to the appalling commercial. The spot features Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, accusing her of being an inveterate liar. “She’s lied her entire life,” Arthur says. “My daughter needs help, and she can’t help you if she needs help herself.”
The ad immediately drew both outrage and debunkings. “It’s not surprising that Vivek Ramaswamy has stooped to such a despicable low as to attempt to turn the sexual abuse Amy endured at 12 years old from our birth mother’s husband into a political talking point,” Acton’s brother said in a statement. National Review, the conservative magazine, pointed out that court documents provide extensive backup for Acton’s claims, as does contemporary press coverage. She was removed from her mother’s custody at the time; her mother’s husband, Cledith Arthur, whom she accused, left the state after being indicted for sexual assault. He pleaded not guilty and died in 2004.
For a campaign to cast doubt on a rival’s account of childhood sexual abuse is shocking; to do so despite such evidence is despicable. For years, influential MAGA figures insisted that a conspiracy of pedophiles was running the government and other influential institutions. Now some of them treat pedophilia as no big deal. The Trump administration has tried to downplay the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the late sexual predator who was at one time a close friend of the president’s and maintained ties to other administration officials as well. Ramaswamy is opting to dismiss allegations of pedophilia and use them to smear an opponent. At an event earlier this year, he said that Acton has no vision “other than to complain about what someone else did to her.”
Despite his previous willingness to mock Acton’s abuse, Ramaswamy’s campaign didn’t initially claim the ad. It first became public on Monday via the colorful Buckeye State political blogger D. J. Byrnes, known as the Rooster. The version he posted, received from a tipster, didn’t feature any explanation of who had paid for it. But Ramaswamy has since gone all-in. “It is an ad from our campaign,” Ramaswamy said at an event last night. “I would love for this race and this election to be about the substantive issues that impact Ohioans. And unfortunately, Amy Acton has been hiding from those issues.” Axios reports that Ramaswamy (who recently loaned his own campaign $5 million) will spend $4 million airing it. “This is a campaign-ending moment for Amy Acton,” his campaign manager, Jonathan Ewing, said. “The people who know her best keep warning Ohioans about her.”
This is bold, if not wise: The ad has generated widespread condemnation. Even some right-wing influencers who initially spread it, such as Jackie Chea, have had second thoughts: “I have no idea if Amy’s abuse allegations are true, but if they are, then her mother is the monster … I regret framing the post as if Amy was lying about her mother when I can’t be sure about that.” Another, Dan Bostic, wrote, “I’ve never in my life seen someone do something so stupid. It’s hard to even wrap my brain around how someone could possess such horrible political instinct.” (Laura Loomer continues to endorse it, which is telling in its own way. Vice President Vance, meanwhile, was “disgusted”—but by Republican doubters, not by the commercial. He suggested that anything is justified in the name of winning elections. “Whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern,” he said in Cincinnati today, telling his “fellow elected Republicans” to “stop whining about an advertisement.”)
On the other side of the aisle, liberals see the ad as suicidal. “I am very confident that this ad will backfire and blow up in Ramaswamy’s face,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former aide to Barack Obama, wrote. Any predictions now are premature: Knowing how convincing the ad will be, compared with the backlash, is impossible.
But the ad is another example of how Ramaswamy’s obnoxious personality has turned a race that should have been a safe GOP win into a toss-up. The candidate’s favorability rating is deeply negative. His fellow Republicans continue to dislike him. The outgoing governor, Mike DeWine, whose occasional pangs of conscience make him a profile in near-courage, clearly dreaded endorsing his fellow Republican. And although the national environment is friendly to Democratic candidates this year, no Democrat has won a governor’s race in Ohio since 2006; Donald Trump won the state three times. Acton is a first-time candidate most famous for her association with COVID public-health measures, neither of which is an obvious asset. If Ramaswamy loses, there will be no question about who was responsible.
Russia released Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old American who had been imprisoned for more than four years on charges of fighting as a mercenary in Ukraine. The State Department said that the charges were fabricated, and President Trump said today that Russia had agreed to release Hubbard without receiving anything in return.
The Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s request to enforce a policy restricting gender-affirming care for transgender federal inmates. The decision leaves in place a lower-court order blocking restrictions on hormone treatments, gender-transition surgeries, and other accommodations.
A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion to the state, one of the largest penalties ever imposed on a tech company, after a jury found that it had committed 43 million violations of the state’s consumer-protection law by misleading users about data privacy in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Evening Read
Illustration by Alisa Gao / The Atlantic
The Data-Center Rebellion Is Just Beginning
By Paris Marx
Restrictions on data-center development have been part of the conversation in certain parts of the world since the late 2010s. Singapore and the Dutch municipalities of Amsterdam and Haarlemmermeer both issued moratoriums on new projects in 2019, and by 2021, Ireland had introduced bans in certain areas because energy demands were outstripping supply. Some of these moratoriums were later lifted after stricter rules came into place, and over fear of missing out on the investment pouring into AI. Even still, these efforts have only grown since the data-center boom that was spurred by the dash to win the generative-AI race.
In recent weeks, Denmark downgraded data centers to the lowest priority for grid connections, and Thailand placed a pause on further data-center construction—suspending 49 projects where shovels had already broken ground. These moves demonstrate the tension that many governments are facing: trying to balance a desire to push the adoption of generative AI with the reality that the public is not on board with the massive data centers needed to power them.
The internet could be on the verge of a total meltdown. Yesterday, someone posted to a public forum that two major security flaws had been found in a programming language that undergirds the web. The language, called PHP, is used by as much as 70 percent of websites.
In order to protect themselves from hackers, a number of government, hospital, and school websites across Europe went dark this morning. The organization that maintains PHP quickly confirmed it was preparing to announce two major vulnerabilities alongside patches for them. Both weaknesses, officially disclosed today, appear to have existed in PHP for more than a decade but were only just discovered with the use of AI tools. Hackers have already been detected trying to exploit them, likely with the help of AI, and implementing the fixes to address the vulnerabilities could take companies days or weeks. In the meantime, tens of millions of servers, databases, and devices are exposed. “PHP is one of the fundamental pieces of technology that supports the internet,” Sam Rubin, a senior vice president at the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, told me. As of now, the websites of the Finnish health agency, the Port of Rotterdam, the Paris police force, 4Chan, and an unknown number of others are all down while they address the PHP vulnerabilities.
News of these weaknesses in PHP is the capstone in a weeks-long slew of devastating, AI-powered cybersecurity events. In recent weeks, criminals and state-backed attackers have used AI to hack into more than 100 companies, including John Deere and SharkNinja; to automate hacks on some 400 financial institutions in Latin America; and to steal hundreds of thousands of credit-card records from two companies. Since this summer, attackers have hit governments, data centers, and hospitals in Ukraine, Russia, Argentina, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. Also today, the developers of Node—a platform used by nearly half of software developers—disclosed multiple high-severity vulnerabilities. And that’s the abridged list.
For the better part of a year, cybersecurity experts have been warning, with mounting alarm, about an impending cyber-apocalypse. It may have begun. For decades, the internet has been riddled with holes and bugs. Code is finicky, and the standard IT approach has been to fix problems when they arise. For decades, the balance held: Skilled hackers are few, and finding and exploiting vulnerabilities takes time.
Recent advances in AI have totally upended that equilibrium. Top models have become very good at finding holes and writing malware, and can work much faster than even a team of humans. This is true of both open-source AI systems from China, which can be downloaded and used without restrictions, and the even more capable models from OpenAI and Anthropic, which are continually being jailbroken. The rate of software vulnerabilities identified per month has doubled over the past year. Meanwhile, the time that hackers need to begin exploiting those vulnerabilities—figuring out how to break in and out without being caught—has fallen, by some estimates, from weeks to hours. An actual intrusion, if automated with AI, can take as little as 39 seconds. Historical approaches to detecting and fixing vulnerabilities, or monitoring for suspicious internal activity, are insufficient.
AI has created new vulnerabilities, but it also promises to fix them: The vulnerabilities in PHP were discovered independently by a Google-owned cybersecurity company and another effort led by OpenAI. Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, along with other tech firms, are all working with government agencies around the world to shore up their defenses. But, as numerous cybersecurity experts have told me, there is an asymmetry between attackers and defenders that AI is going to exacerbate: Hackers will use new technology with abandon, while companies are methodical and risk-averse—a hospital or electrical grid can’t risk that an AI security tool unintentionally takes a patient off life support or causes a brownout. And attackers need to find only one hole to succeed, whereas defenders need only one oversight to fail.
For a year, criminals and state-backed groups have been experimenting with how to use models to accelerate and automate their attacks. It was only a year ago that Anthropic announced, with great consternation, what it declared to be the first instance of AI-orchestrated cyber-espionage. That still involved a lot of human oversight and required jailbroken Claude agents to work for many hours. Now that the agents are faster and more capable, hackers have gotten more adept at deploying them, and the automation is more extensive. Recent, widespread attacks on South Korean and Japanese websites were reportedly executed by a single Chinese cybercriminal who used AI to target more than 1,000 websites. “This certainly will not be the last large-scale vulnerability identified, because of what’s possible with AI,” Rubin said.
The past 24 hours represent a tipping point. Bulking up IT departments, implementing passkeys, and using two-factor authentication remain important. But the most urgent and practical advice being given now is to retreat: Prepare to simply go offline. The NSA advised companies that cannot immediately fix the PHP vulnerability to take down affected digital services. Hospitals, water utilities, and other crucial services are all preparing for hacks by relearning to operate analog. Store your data in fewer places. We’re running out of time to prepare for the AI-hacking deluge. The dam may have already broken.
Hush! I must hear! It’s an election year, I am a voter, and I need to know the president’s answers to the most pressing questions facing America today: How upholstered are the chairs in the Rose Garden? Is the helipad at the White House any good? How are things progressing with the ballroom? And is the golf course going to be ready soon? No, do not ask about affordability. That is a made-up word. I could not care less about the price of eggs! What am I, a hen?
My concerns are more basic. I demand to hear: HOW IS THE HELIPAD? AND IS THAT GOLF COURSE IN EAST POTOMAC PARK BEING DEVELOPED TO THE HIGHEST STANDARDS OF GOLF, TURNING THAT TRASH ISLAND INTO AN ISLAND OF BEAUTY AND SUCCESS?
I was up late last night. I looked at my bills. Pretty high—but that just means the economy is booming. Still, it was hard to rest. I walked down the hall and looked at my sleeping children. How long could we hope to survive, knowing that at this very moment, in Washington, D.C., a judge is preventing East Potomac Park from becoming one of the world’s great golf courses, instead just letting it lie there, old, tired, beaten up, and useless?
My children say, “Father, Father! When will we be able to afford hamburger?” And I say, “How can you talk about hamburger when you know thatTrash Islandstill needs to be developed to the highest levels and standards of golf?”And they say, “Do you even play golf?” And I say, “Silence!”They don’t have their priorities straight. But I’m glad we have a president who does.
The other day, I was at the gas pump. I hate going to the gas pump, because the numbers there are so high, which I know is a deliberate distraction from the real problems Americans face: the hazardous, dangerous trees on East Potomac Golf Links. No one is safe from those trees.
After that, I stopped by a restaurant and ate some salad. Immediately, I felt sick to my stomach. “That was tainted lettuce,” my family said. “No,” I said, “it is because of the shame, pertaining to the golf course.”
I don’t need a fully staffed FDA monitoring lettuce-borne diseases! I need to know that we are stopping our assistance to Ukraine in defiance of Congress. I need to know whether Vladimir Putin seemed happy when our president talked to him. I really hope that our president impressed him; Putin is a big, important man. Maybe someday, America will be a world power too. If we can just get this golf course in shape, we can build on that momentum.
Don’t you dare say that this isn’t a kitchen-table issue. You haven’t seen my kitchen table, on which a replica of the president’s plans for a truly beautiful arch have sat for the past six months, gathering dust. That arch holds all my dreams. “Why did you buy that and not food?” my children ask. They don’t know what they’re talking about.
Don’t try to appeal to me by talking about the cost of living. IRRELEVANT! I want to know: Does the president have a nice-enough plane? Are the right letters on all the buildings in the capital? Good, beautiful letters, such as T, R, U, M, and P—not bad, subpar letters such as K, E, N, N, E, D, Y? These are my concerns, just as they are the concerns of the whole electorate.
For years, I have been unable to hold my head up high, knowing that we don’t have the greatest ballroom slash military complex ever built. How do you think that feels? Every night, I toss and turn, asking myself: Is New Mexico going to keep its disgusting, embarrassing name? Or will it change it to something nice, like New America? Will they ever manage to cut down those terrifying trees in East Potomac Park, so we can finally feel safe? Hurry, Mr. President! Please, hurry! I don’t know how much longer I can keep living like this.
In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the growing calls for Medicare for All. David discusses how Medicare for All might actually work, why it’s impractical, and why it is fundamentally a promise Democrats cannot keep.
Then, David is joined by Kara Swisher to discuss her new podcast with Hillary Clinton, the dangers of unregulated AI, and the power of the AI oligarchs over American politics. David and Kara discuss the potential of an AI bubble and what responsible oversight of AI would look like.
Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War by Robert Gordon, and whether the AI revolution changes any of Gordon’s pessimistic assessments of what has happened to American growth since 1970.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Let me ask you about what works and things you’ve changed your mind about.
So you have been a career-long advocate for stronger regulation of technology in general—
Kara Swisher: David, let me correct you. Any regulation. We don’t have any.
Frum: What’s your line? “Your local deli is more regulated than the biggest tech platforms in America.”
Swisher: Everything.
[Music]
Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Kara Swisher, host of the On With Kara Swisher podcast, and co-host of Pivot, and co-host, very excitingly, of a new podcast that she will co-star [with] Hillary Clinton. And we’ll be talking about that new podcast with Kara.
This week’s book is The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War by Robert Gordon, an enormously influential book on economic history published a decade ago. And I’ll be discussing whether the advent of the AI revolution changes any of Robert Gordon’s pessimistic assessments of what has happened to American growth since 1970.
But before the dialogue with Kara Swisher and before the book discussion, I want to open with some thoughts about the debate over Medicare for All: the slogan, and the idea of Medicare for All.
It does look like the next Congress will feature many more advocates of the Medicare for All idea than American politics has seen for a long time. There are bills in Congress purporting to offer or designing or proposing a Medicare for All scheme. It’s a slogan on the campaign trail. Let’s take it seriously. Let’s think about this in a real-world way, because we may be talking about this a lot come 2027. What does Medicare for All mean? How would you get there if you were minded to get there?
So understand, Medicare, of course, is the program that provides much health insurance for people over 65. It has components with prescription drugs, but the core of it is that it covers medical and hospital bills for people over 65, with some contribution from the over-65s themselves.
The Medicare for All proposal is to extend this scheme through all of the American economy, covering everybody through the Medicare program and displacing a lot of the health-care insurance that you have now. Which is mostly—those people who get private health insurance get it usually paid for through an employer, out of the worker’s pay, but through an employer.
What would it mean to make this change from a system where much of the health care in the economy is paid for by employer-financed private insurance to one where the U.S. Treasury pays for most health care? So: Half a decade ago, at the end of the 2010s, there was a big study of this. The Congressional Budget Office, and others, too, did a big study of what it would mean to transition to a Medicare for All program. And CBO’s estimate in the year 2020 was that such a program would cost the U.S. Treasury, over the next 10 years, about $30 trillion. The work has not been redone by CBO. But if I think it—if you just figure out prices are higher, you’re going further out into time, you’re starting in 2030 and going to 2040—it’s a good guess that it would cost closer to $40 trillion over 10 years than it would cost to $30 trillion over 10 years.
So where would you get the $40 trillion? The U.S. Treasury is going to be spending a lot more. How would it get the extra $40 trillion? Now, proponents of Medicare for All will say—and they’re not completely wrong about this—they will say: Wait a moment. That’s not $40 trillion of new spending. We’re spending the $40 trillion now or thereabouts. We’re spending it one way. That is, you get mostly from your private insurance through your employer. So we’re just taking $40 trillion from this sector of the economy and moving it over to the government, and net-net, it will even out. Maybe it’s a little bit more expensive than what we have now, but not a lot more expensive.
Let’s suppose they’re right about that. Still, we have one way of financing it now, and we’re going to be moved to another way of financing it along the way. How do you make that transition? What would that look like? The proponents of Medicare for All will say this: Look, when you get a job, if you have health care, you are really paying for the health insurance. Your employer lowers your wages to cover the cost and then pays an insurance company, or they self-insure. But in any way, the employer finances the payment of the health coverage out of the wages that you don’t get. When we move to health care for all, Medicare for All, the employer will no longer be buying private insurance. So your wages should go up, and out of that higher wage, you should be able to pay a higher tax.
But that blackboard analysis blinks the fact, yeah, you’re going to be paying a new tax, probably a payroll tax, maybe some other kind of tax. And it’s going to be quite a big tax that is going to fall on just about every worker in the economy.
Now, again: You’re paying a kind of health-care tax now, because your wages are lower. But the Medicare for All people assume that your employer will raise your wage almost all of what you’re now paying for health insurance through your employer. You’ll get almost all of that money back, maybe all of it. That’s the assumption. And so you’ll be well-positioned to pay the new tax, which will not be heavier than what you’re paying now. But even if that’s all true, it won’t be true for everybody. Some people will be winners; some people will be losers. Some people will be big winners, some people will be big losers, and everybody will see a new tax on their paycheck.
So what Medicare for All means from the point of view of American politics is: The new president elected in 2028—assuming that president is committed to this idea—the new Congress that comes to power either now or in 2029, that new Congress, one of their first orders of business will be passing the biggest and most far-reaching tax increase that Americans have seen on their paychecks since World War II. That’s what Medicare for All means. Start the next Congress, start the next presidency with a massive increase in a visible tax that you explain to American people they won’t really feel—because their wages should be going up if their employer gives them back the money the employer is keeping right now to pay for health insurance.
And aware of the politics of this, some of the Medicare for All proponents have come up with a series of gimmicks to conceal the tax. In 2019, Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed a system where we wouldn’t have a payroll tax. We’d tax large employers in the economy directly. Every employer with 50 employees or more would pay a new tax directly on the employer. It would be invisible to the employee, and that would get us to the transition to Medicare for All.
But the Warren idea has been almost universally derided by experts in the field as completely complicated, unworkable, inviting all kinds of distortion. For one thing, it would mean that no employer in the economy who had 49 employees would ever hire a 50th. The 50th employer would generate a massive new tax on that employer. So on the verge of this AI revolution that is calling into question all kinds of people’s employment, you’d create a massive new tax that would say, If you’re at 49, stay there forever. Never get to 50 employees. So that seems kind of daunting and distorting.
So even if you believe all of these things, you’re signing up for a big project. Now, the really irresponsible people in the Democratic Party, the Bernie Sanderses, will say, We don’t need payroll tax. The billionaires and the millionaires: They’ll pay for it all. But that’s, again, more sloganeering. The math doesn’t work, and anyway, billionaires and millionaires find it quite easy to escape taxes. And the way you would write the tax would be with an increase in income taxes—and that would be seen not just by billionaires and millionaires, but by lots and lots and lots of people.
There is no way around it. Medicare for All means transition to a new kind of program that needs a new kind of funding mechanism that requires a new and highly visible tax that will fall on many, many people. And if you think no Congress will ever pass that thing—which is kind of what I suspect—then when you talk about Medicare for All, you are promising something that you know you cannot deliver.
One of the reasons I think that American politics has seen so much demoralization and polarization over the past 15 years is because you’ve had politicians—President Trump is the worst offender, but he’s not the only offender—who promise things they know can’t happen. You’re not going to restore American manufacturing and make America great again by keeping out foreign products. You can’t pass tax cuts forever and have no spending cuts. Those things, it doesn’t work. Gravity, math—they all exist. And people, if not the candidates themselves, people around the candidates, they know they’re promising things they can’t do and Medicare for All is just such a thing.
Now, where Medicare for All is very useful for a politician, and this goes back to the Bernie Sanders model, if you’re the one senator who is in favor of this idea, and all the other senators say, It’s unworkable. We’re not going to do it, then you can get enormous attention for yourself. You can pose as the one truth-teller in the Senate, the one honest man in the village of the accomplices and the weaklings. You’re the one guy, and you’re saying this one thing, and you don’t have to worry about the unfeasibility of it because no one will ever let you do it. And that’s how you get the career of Bernie Sanders, which is a career of decades in public life, almost no accomplishments of any kind, but an enormous following because of the promises he keeps making.
But you can only have one of those guys: one in the Senate, maybe a handful in the House. If you have a dozen senators who are promising things like that—if you have 40 or 50 or 60 or 80 or 100 members of the House who are promising those things—the question of the design of the program, the question of the how this is going to be paid for, the question of the massive tax that will fall on Americans on the promise that their wages will go up because the employers will give them back the money the employers are now paying for private health insurance, all of that really comes to the fore.
One of the ways to get to a better politics in America is for politicians to make promises that they know they can keep and that they intend to keep. And one of the ways to keep us on the bad path we’re on now is to have lots of people making promises that sound good to a comparatively small coterie of the voters, but that they know or should know they can’t keep. That they know or should know that they won’t keep. And that they can know or should know are impossible.
We’ve got a lot of that going on right now, and it points the way to further demoralization, further polarization. Change in an advanced society like the United States, in a complex bureaucratic society with a lot of vested interests—it has to be incremental. Even if incremental change is imperfect, that’s the way it has to be, and anyone who promises you a non-incremental change is promising something they can’t deliver and probably don’t mean.
And now my dialogue with Kara Swisher.
[Music]
Frum: Kara Swisher hosts On With Kara Swisher, co-hosts Pivot with Scott Galloway, and has a CNN series on the people trying to live forever. She has just announced a new election-season podcast with a co-host you may know, Hillary Clinton. Kara Swisher is known to her many followers as a tireless and fearless reporter on technology and those enriched by technology.
She is the author of three books, most recently Burn Book: A Tech Love Story from Simon & Schuster, in which she calls Mark Zuckerberg the most damaging man in tech and Elon Musk the most disappointing.
On Election Day, she’ll be onstage in Toronto for a live taping of Pivot, so Canadian viewers and listeners may want to make a note of that.
Kara, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for joining me today.
Swisher: Thank you. Unfortunately, we’re sold out in Toronto because the Canadians love us.
Frum: Oh, congratulations. Congratulations.
Swisher: Thanks, thanks.
Frum: Getting Canadians out on a dark November night.
Swisher: Well, we’re going to get them warm. We’re going to warm them up with dick jokes and insights, so that’s what we’re going to do.
Frum: All right. So let me start by asking you about your new co-host. How did that come to be? Tell me about the project.
Swisher: Oh, you know, it’s really interesting. One of the things I do a lot, and I have done over my career, is I kind of zig when others are zagging or I do something unusual. And, you know, there’s this sort of trope that all Democratic-establishment older people don’t know what they’re talking about, and they need to move aside. And I have said, many of them, I have said directly they should do that. But when I was at this dinner party—and I’ve known Hillary for a long time, and I’ve interviewed her many times on different things I’ve done over the many years—and it was at this, one of these big fancy tables. And Hillary had me sit next to her because we have a really good rapport, and we sort of tease each other a lot in really, in ways people don’t, I think, tease her.
And she had a mind full of really great, fast insights that were fresh to me that I hadn’t heard. And I hear all the insights. And then, you know, the economy: insight. Mamdani: insights, and actually in a way that you were not expecting from her. I was like, it was quite smart, very clear. And I thought, What is in her Wheaties these days? Because she really—she didn’t care anymore, and of course, this is what you hear off the record. And I thought: This is the Hillary you see sort of in those Lauren Boebert/Epstein hearings or in the Benghazi hearings. Very smart, very sharp, often on social media. And I thought: I’m going to bottle that Hillary.
And I just knew. And by the way, it’s racing up the charts right now. We’re now at No. 4, which is, I know that it’s because of her. And it’s because she has these fresh insights, and I wanted to show people the Hillary I know on the topics she’s good at. And so it’s worked. And we have—the rapport is important. But anyway, that’s what we’re doing, and we’re trying it out. And if it really works as both a business and a piece of content, we’re going to keep doing it through the presidential.
Frum: So is it the two of you ping-ponging with each other, or will there be third parties there? How will this work?
Swisher: There’s going to be guests. We just did one to start with. Well, I did it very quick. I do everything I do very quickly, essentially. And it was a germ of an idea, but it’s like Hillary unplugged. Or like, you know, when Johnny Cash came back and was doing Nine Inch Nails? That’s what I feel like I’m doing here. You do want to hear her. And I had tested it on Pivot, where she was spectacular. And we’ll have guests. I want people who disagree with her and who she disagrees with, both on the left and the right. Because that’s, to me, when she’s at her best. And really have some throwdowns. So people—I’m talking about with reasonable people, not insane people. I’m not going to have Laura Loomer go against Hillary Clinton, because it’s kind of ridiculous and pointless. But I want to have robust discussions about difficult issues, and I think, by smart people with substance.
Frum: Will you be able to get her to defend the person she actually is? And what I mean by that is: those people who were prominent in the Democratic Party from 1992 to 2008-ish, 2010. The people who believed in making government more efficient, in expanding trade, and bringing Mexico into North American economic life. That’s what she was associated with, and they came under attack from their party’s left. And they seem just to be, like, shamefacedly mumbling an, Oh, you’re so right, and The establishment was so bad, and Yes, we should burn everything down. But will she, on your program, be willing to stand up for the person she was?
Swisher: Yeah, I think she’ll defend it, and also say what’s good and bad. What I was really struck with on the Pivot podcast is, I was expecting her to do the sort of typical Democratic-establishment Mamdani thing. And she had a very insightful reason why he’s doing well. Here’s where he could go wrong, and stuff like that.
You know, look: Fact of the matter is, she’s been a, whatever you say about the presidential race. And I thought that there’s all manner of complexity there. It’s not just because Hillary lost; Donald Trump really won that election. And the changing tide of the American public, and the sort of attacks that the right had on her for years that end up working after a while. I think she will be very honest. I think she’s at a point—and she did say this—is, people like her more when she’s not running for anything. They like her more when she’s either in office or in service of a, you know, typically a man. It’s a little bit, you know, if I lived back then, I would’ve liked to have Eleanor Roosevelt do a podcast with me. Like all the insight she gained over the years.
And a good thing that she did this week: We were talking about the execution, which has now been canceled publicly by Donald Trump. She said: He’s going to cancel it, and here’s why. And she was 100 percent right. And she analyzed it, and then threw in what they did during the [Osama] bin Laden raid. Which was very helpful to understand the complexity of, like—there were people in the room that wanted to show his bullet-riddled body. They brought in experts; they brought in all kinds of things saying what the best outcome would be. And so she’s got a lot of wisdom sort of hidden in there that can be relevant to today. And again, she’s going to have to admit mistakes. She knows that, and she’s actually willing to do it.
Frum: I’m sort of more interested to hear her not admit mistakes if she doesn’t believe she made them.
What I mean by that is: I’m a graduate of a Republican world where the rule of the game was, if you were in the center of the party, you had a big kick me sign on your back. And the right of the party could say anything about you, and you could never say anything back. And the Democrats seem to have that same relationship with their left.
And I’m thinking about, so Hillary Clinton was instrumental in the negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the Obama administration. She was proud of it. She believed in it. She was right. She defended it in the hardcover edition of the book she published before the 2016 election, and she stripped it out of the paperback edition. And you say, Why not stand up for what you believe? Why the kick me sign?
Swisher: She might have changed her mind, David. It’s called changing. She may have thought more about it and think about it, and—one of the things I really like about her is she thinks in real time. Like, she’s really compared to a lot of Democratic people who would just spout the same crap, essentially, like Everything’s fine. I just feel like she’s willing to throw down, all kinds of ways.
She’s also willing to be flexible about good ideas. And I think where she is right now in her career—she should speak to you about this—but I think where she is in, what fucking works, right? Like she started talking about the execution like, Of course it’s heinous; of course it’s amoral. But let’s not focus on that. Let’s focus on: If they do this, it’s going to be a recruiting video for jihadists. So let’s not do that. She’s very practical. And so I think she will—”whatever works” seems to be where she is in her life. And she’s not worried about, like, The Democratic establishment shouldn’t speak. She doesn’t care. She doesn’t care, and she shouldn’t.
Frum: Let me ask you about what works and things you’ve changed your mind about.
So you have been a career-long advocate for stronger regulation of technology in general—
Swisher: David, let me correct you. Any regulation. We don’t have any.
Frum: Okay.
Swisher: So not stronger.
Frum: What’s your line? “Your local deli is more regulated than the biggest tech platforms in America.”
Okay. So some of the AI executives have, in recent months and years, begun to repeat what you have been saying earlier. And my question to you is, when you hear that, do you think, Okay, look, they’re in a death race, and it drives everyone to do things they don’t wish to do. And if only the competition could be a little less fierce, then maybe they could think more about safety? Or do you think there’s something nefarious going on, that they’ve got some other agenda? Do you take them at their word when they say these things? Are they reformed characters? How do you read it?
Swisher: No. I mean, my approach to most of these people—not all of them, most of them—is, Hello, he lied. Essentially.
And so I think they—it’s a little complex. You know, it’s more complex than the way we binary every single thing we do around technology these days. They’re either villains or they’re heroes. Or they’re this, or they go from this. Or we love them, we hate them. That kind of thing. And life’s not like that, essentially.
What I think is happening is: They hate regulation. They don’t want any. That’s why they sucked up to Trump the first term, and that’s why they sucked up to him this time. Some of them had had real political conversions, but for the most part, they want to make money. They want to dominate. And that has never changed in all the time I’ve known them.
So, as I joked, if Kamala Harris had won, Mark Zuckerberg would’ve identified as they/them if it suited him. They’ll do whatever it takes. And by the way, guess what’s going to happen when the Democrats come in? Oh! He was the worst. I can’t believe I went to dinner at his house 412 times in the last—
Frum:Thank God you got here.
Swisher:Oh!
Frum:I’ve been waiting in this basement, waiting for you.
Swisher:I wasn’t really having a good time at that lunch.
These people literally would sell their mamas down, if they needed to. That’s my feeling on the general populace. And they’re very interested in winning. Winning and shareholder value. I mean, if Tim Cook is going to give a golden statue to Donald Trump, you’ve got to know what’s going on there. Now, I’ve heard since then he actually likes Donald Trump, which—okay, fine. No accounting for taste. But I think it’s all about shareholder value, every single thing they do.
And so I think when they talk about regulation, they want the regulation they want that is good for them. They never think of safety unless they’re forced to. But neither did big pharma, neither did airplanes, [the] car [industry]. Hello, Unsafe at Any Speed. That’s what it took. They wouldn’t have put seat belts in there if they didn’t have to. Or airbags. The chemical companies would love to spew poison, and, Oh well; some people die. And those people were civically interested. The tech people have never been civically interested, ever. Like, they don’t care about other people. And so we just have to make them have safety. And should, because this is very much like nuclear proliferation. This is on the same level of importance. Why are we outsourcing our safety to private industry on a topic that they themselves say is existential?
Frum: Well, this is the thing I find sort of baffling. There are people who say, and there are AI skeptics who say, You know, it’s not that big a deal. It’s the latest computer thing. It’s not transformative. There are people who say that. And if that’s what you believe, okay, yeah, have a light footprint, because how heavily do we regulate word-processing technology? And then there are people who say it’s going to kill us all. Well, if it’s going to kill us all, then it should be illegal. Government should not just regulating; government should be suppressing it. I don’t understand the people who take the view: I want to run a big company that makes products that I fear are going to kill us. Why are you doing that?
Swisher: I think the “kill us all” thing is—you know, with the way tech people talk, you’ve got to have listened to them for so long. They love to say “non-zero chance.” I was doing an interview with Elon Musk once, and he’s like, There’s a non-zero chance we’re in a simulation. Meaning we’re basically a video game for a greater civilization and teenagers are playing Earth, whatever it happens to be, and we aren’t real. We’re all a simulation. Well, it is a non-zero. It’s like there’s a non-zero chance that there is a god sitting up on a cloud. And so that’s what they tend to do.
And so what they know is—I think Elon actually said it best. It’s like, this isn’t just nuclear bombs; it’s things that can set off nuclear bombs without you wanting it to, essentially. And I often recount this dinner party I had in Silicon Valley 10 years ago. Many of the big names right now, they were posing these questions: What would, if you told AI to solve world hunger, what would it do? It would kill half the human race, because that’s the right answer. It’s not the right answer. It’s the answer that would work the quickest, right? And so they just—I think there is an existential crisis. But they don’t—
Frum: Wait a minute. Let me stop you on that. That’s a terrible answer actually, because—even if you’re a Nazi—because killing half the human race is a lot more expensive and time-consuming than feeding the 10 percent of the human race. Do you—
Swisher: Oh, they would do it with a nuclear bomb, my friend.
Frum: Do you think this is a line of work that attracts people with severe personality disorders? And that that distorts their thinking about problems?
Swisher: No, I’m thinking the AI would do it, because it doesn’t have any emotion. It isn’t attached to humanity. When Elon started off, it was interesting. I’ll use him because he was the earliest person to talk to me about the threats—he and [Open AI CEO] Sam [Altman], but mostly Elon—about the threats of AI, and was very concerned. And I think, you know, he’s a science-fiction guy. It also informs him. A lot of these people are science-fiction types. This is part of the air they breathe, essentially. And his first thing was Terminator. And we all have seen that movie where, you know—time machine, comes back, kills the original, blah, blah, blah. And so that’s where they were in sort of this dystopian idea. And that gives the machines a personality, an anthropomorphic personality, when in fact it doesn’t. Or like The Matrix, like they want to keep us as batteries, or they have a malevolence. It’s always a malevolence. Mostly it doesn’t have malevolence at all, because it doesn’t care. And doesn’t care—I don’t mean “hates us.” It means we don’t exist.
So he moved on to the idea that AI treats humans like house cats. Like, we don’t want to kill our house cat. We’ll feed our house cat. But that’s how they look at us. Again, a little too anthropomorphic.
The third one I thought he came upon was the best one. This was later. Which is: We’re building a highway in Georgia, and we put down asphalt. Do we know we’ve killed a lot of ants and anthills along the way? Do we think about it at all? No.
Frum: Okay. So what I meant by that crack about personality disorders is: I wonder whether when we inevitably anthropomorphize everything; that’s the way our minds are constituted. If you have a severely dysfunctional personality, when you anthropomorphize, you imagine the AI to be like you. So when Elon Musk thinks What would an AI be like?, he thinks it would be like him. And, yeah, kind of indifferent to human suffering. I wonder if a more normal person who had read, say, Frankenstein instead of The Terminator might say that this may be a more complex, tragic, meaningful relationship. And the limited—the kind of odd, odd stuntedness in some vectors, combined with obviously great talents in others—makes people poor understanders of the world around them.
Swisher: Yeah; they like to understand everything. The machines have power when they have power. They like to offput their power and their blame onto the machines. And it’s not the machines that are the problem. It’s like saying electricity is the reason we electrocute people. Or the knife was the reason people died. It’s because the person with their hand on the knife killed someone. And so they just want to blame the knife, right? And actually, recently, Jeff Bezos talked about this, like: We can’t be against the knife. We’re against murder. I’m like: Yeah, we’re against murder by you. Like, they don’t like to take that step by focusing in on the machine.
And one of the things they tend to do, a lot of, is remove themselves from the equation—that they aren’t at fault in any way. And this is a longtime thing, you know, with social media. Oh, I don’t know why girls are feeling self-esteem problems. Do boys listen to more porn? I wonder what caused that. Like, they’re very much not of that. And one of the things they’ve done, which I have followed of theirs, is just that, one: that they’re the victims. And two: that they have no consequences for the things they make. And this is the same kind of thing. This is what they made. And my only argument is like, why are we letting them decide on something this important? Because they’re broken people, and we need a bigger pool of people making a decision about something that they themselves say is very important.
Frum: Well, let me ask you about another one of your recommendations that has come true. You argued often that the ownership of TikTok should be shifted from its Chinese founders. Congress passed a law calling for just that. The Supreme Court said that that law was constitutional. Congress had the power to force the sale of TikTok, at least its U.S. operations, to a U.S. operator, and it eventually did happen. But what seems to have happened is, none of the things that are toxic about TikTok have changed. It’s just TikTok has been sold in ways to enrich President Trump’s allies and supporters.
When you look back on that, do you think, Hmm, that’s not what I meant. They didn’t hear me right?
Swisher: I was worried at the time. Many people were worried about the deleterious effects of social media, which are very real, in lots of personality, etcetera. I was worried about propaganda. I was a propaganda-studies major at the School of Foreign Service. So I think about—what could you use these things for? And if I were the Chinese Communist Party, that’s exactly what I’d do. I mean, I’m not mad at them for doing it. It’s just, that’s what you would do to have this. And we had no such service in China to be able to do that. I mean, our best thing is to lob Voice of America over there, and it doesn’t really work. The internet possibly is a way to get through into that culture, but they strictly control their information diet there.
And so I was worried about propaganda. Then I was worried about the ability to shift the narrative with the algorithm. But again, that’s gone back to William Randolph Hearst. I mean, this is not new.
Frum: Where I’m pressing on this is—the Trump administration seems like the nightmare version of the advice you’ve been giving. They have an activist Federal Communications Commission, which is on the march in all kinds of ways to stop things that they don’t like, whether it’s The View or Jimmy Kimmel.
Do any of your feelings about regulation change watching the Trump administration wield these regulatory powers?
Swisher: No, because—we have got to go back. Obviously, after post-Nixon, they went back and fixed a lot of things they didn’t think he would do. We’re going to have to go back and figure out how to deal. If the internet isn’t regulated by the government, then neither should broadcast networks be. It’s not a public good. I mean, at this point, we should just sell it to them, and they should do what they want, and there probably should be some sort of public-access kind of thing.
I mean, we have to really rethink this. Because when you have a moron like Brendan Carr—and I say that very clearly; he’s a moron, but he’s also an unctuous toady and a thirsty person as someone who wants power—in charge of that, you get all the abuses. And of course, they do all the abuses they accused other people, the Democrats mostly, of doing, right? They do exactly—because they think, like, What’s the worst thing a Democrat could do? And really the worst thing is the things they want to do. And so yeah; I worry about that. We have to really rethink the FCC, top to frigging bottom. We’re going to have to do that.
The same thing with the Justice Department. Like, what are we going to do going forward with that? How do we reassert the powers of independence in these judiciary? What do we do when the executive loses its mind, right? And that’s been something that’s happening for a long time, the power of the exec—you know that. I mean, there’s been books and books.
Frum: I don’t think we’ve seen an executive like this ever before. And maybe that’s one of the reasons why advocates of regulation were caught unawares, because there is a long tradition of people who advocate regulation imagining a kind of benign regulator, or at least a disinterested regulator. A regulator will be someone at least non-malicious, somebody like—someone like me. You imagine the regulator in your image. And then you get, Well, wait a moment. What we’ve done is, we’ve empowered—the regulatory move has empowered Donald Trump to redistribute TikTok to his friends. Has empowered Brendan Carr.
None of the evils that you are concerned about have been ameliorated, but a whole lot of new evils that you didn’t want have happened.
Swisher: Yes, but it’s not the regulatory structure. You know, it’s sort of a perfect storm of a Congress that has abrogated its power, a Supreme Court that has abrogated—the nicest way to say it—has abrogated its power, but actually is working for the man, and then an executive willing to break laws.
One of the geniuses of Trump, I hate to say it, is like: He oversteps the line constantly. He eliminates the line. And so, what do you do when you wouldn’t imagine someone would’ve done that? And now we have to imagine, and therefore we have to put up a whole new set of lines and powers. And maybe there’ll be a much less powerful president going forward. Maybe this is the final moment of this executive theory that has been going on for, I don’t know, 100 years now—the growing power of the executive.
Frum: Let me ask you about another thing that I wonder if you’ve thought about, or rethought, since the time.
So during the Biden administration, a lot of the Biden people did want to regulate tech in some way. But they were nervous, kind of for the reasons I’ve been sort of pointing to, they were nervous about content-based [approaches]. They didn’t want to interfere with the business. And so the regulatory energy went into antitrust. It’s like, well—maybe the problem is not that the product is toxic. Maybe the problem is the company producing the toxic is too big, and we will empower Lina Khan to go after the bigness of the companies, as if that got us anywhere. And so there’s a lot of effort to curb the bigness of the platforms, without thinking about what they were doing.
How do you feel about that strategy, looking back on it?
Swisher: I don’t like any one strategy. They are too big. They’re just too big. Nobody can compete in search or in AI. It’s so expensive. It’s going to end up being two companies essentially. The redo of antitrust legislation is long overdue. I think we’re operating on a hundred-year-old law at this point. So we really have to radically rethink what big means and what the damages are. It’s not price, it’s not this, whatever. That needs a radical rehaul, and that’s something everybody knows.
The other thing is the speed at which we can meet these challenges. I mean, listen, [President] Obama, I had a long-going argument with him like: You’re not doing anything, and by the time we do something, they’re going to be too big to do anything about, because they’ll have so much power from a lobbying perspective and just money perspective that we’re not going to be able to stop them.
And then you have Citizens United on top of that, which allows these incredibly wealthy people to manipulate the system. And the numbers are just staggering—the amount how much wealthy people have put into campaigns recently. And so it’s sort of a combination of all the things at once.
So I don’t think it’s just—we have to overhaul antitrust. I really am enjoying a lot of these product-liability lawsuits that are happening in California and across the nation around these companies. It’s really a very effective way to start to go at them, is it not. We’re not going to touch free speech, but your product fucking sucks and is killing people. That’s a really good argument. So our legal system is actually meeting the moment in that regard. And there’ll be more and more. It’s like a cigarette moment. It’s happening. It really is happening. And they’re trying their best to shut it down, but they’re not always winning.
And then the third thing, which I think is the most important, is public sentiment about these people and about the things they do. And data centers—as you know, I’ve talked about, and I think I predicted this rather well—is an expression of voter discontent over all of it. And it’s just a physical thing they can point to in their own neighborhoods that they don’t like. And it is going to have a profound—it is having—a profound effect on this election. It will have a profound effect on the next presidential election, and it will have a profound effect on what we should do about the tax system. Like, that these people, they don’t pay their taxes. They don’t pay their taxes.
Frum: Isn’t the reaction to data centers kind of like the Lina Khan mistake all over again? There’s something that people really are worried about. And that’s: What does AI do to my life, to my job, to my children’s prospects? They can’t get a handle on it. And say, Well, there’s this big real-estate use outside of town. And if AI were a good thing, then this is just something we’d have to get used to, as we had to get used to gas stations. It’s part of modern life. If AI is a bad thing, then the problem is not the data center that serves the AI; the problem is the AI. And yet we have this way to go down these cul-de-sacs of bigness. Or the, I don’t like the data center, or, It’s too noisy. So we don’t talk about what’s important; we talk about what’s accessible.
Swisher: Listen, I spent a lot of time trying to find people who are trying to explain what a good data center is, too. I interviewed a Michigan mayor, and he had put together a great data-center deal. We have to—I say this to people—we have to have them. It’s a question of how we have them. And I think one of the things that tech people have tried to do is shove it down our throats without any consultation.
And I think that is what’s powerful among the voters, and I think it’s absolutely legitimate that people should have a say in how these things are going to go up. We don’t have to just, you know, bend over and take it. We don’t. We do not. And I think that’s what you’re seeing here. And it’s raising great issues of: What do we want to do about the water? And we can do very smart technological things to help save water. What do we want to do about where they’re located? What do we want to do about noise?
But instead, you had Elon Musk dropping one in Tennessee with gas belching this. You have Kevin O’Leary over in Utah acting like a giant asshole. But it was stopped, and it doesn’t mean that his data center was good. The way they approached it was in this typical—it reminds you of when the railroads went through. We’re just going to shove them right through your land. You don’t get a say. You don’t get anything. But today, I think this is a good sign of a healthy democracy pushing back, even if we actually do need some data centers in this country.
Frum: So you, you’re not only a very influential commentator on these tech issues, you’re an adept user of tech, and you’re raising a family. Do you have a personal-hygiene regime for the people you care about and for yourself to get the best out of the technology? And do you have any advice for anybody on what that hygiene regime should look like?
Swisher: Yeah, I mean, I have older kids, and they can do what they want. Like, I’m not—they’re old enough. One is 21, one’s 24. And I see young people moving very quickly away from social media. It’s really interesting. They don’t like it. I don’t mind them using the devices if they’re reading or watching substantive things. What I mind is sort of the mindless doomscrolling or the mindless silliness of it, because I try to stress upon all my kids how addictive it is, right? Because I myself am addicted. You’re addicted, I bet. It’s clearly like a cigarette. It’s got the elements of that, right? And so I like to stress with them of putting it down. My one son bought a box he puts his phone in for three hours, and he just locks it. It’s a lockbox, and it will not open no matter what he does unless he breaks it, and then he’s kind of crazy if he does that. And so I make it clear that just, it’s not controllable in a lot of ways.
The other thing I try to do is say—I’m not one of those people that says, Don’t use it. I’m like, Try it. Try it. I was just bugging my wife. She was going on about AI, and I said, You don’t use it enough to have this opinion. You need to try it to understand it. And she was like, I don’t need to try to understand it. I go, You absolutely have to try it to understand it. And so I advocate people trying it and then figuring out what they like and don’t like.
Another thing is my younger kids, they don’t use it at all. And they will not, I’m telling you, they will not have phones until they’re 16 or 17 probably. And it’ll change by then, so I don’t think I’m going to have to worry that much. But they can use it to watch movies. It’s perfectly convenient. They can use it to, you know, look up things. They do that at school. That’s perfectly fine. It’s a book. It can be used as a book. But I definitely restrict; I will. They’re not at the age where they will be using—they won’t be using social media at all. I won’t allow it.
Frum: You’re warning me that it’s addictive. But you’re also warning me that I can’t have an opinion unless I try it.
Swisher: I think you have to understand—
Frum: Do I, like Ulysses, tie myself to the mast—
Swisher: (Laughs.) Yes! Yes, close your ears.
Frum: Try it a little bit?
Swisher: Absolutely. Yes.
Frum: How do I do that?
Swisher: Well, you have to understand going in that it’s addictive, and you’ve got to figure out some strategies for yourself, like in terms of how to do it. All I’m saying is you need to understand it if you are to talk about it. You know what I mean? You can’t just be ignorant about what it’s doing.
Now, some people just, you know—like I just did an interview with someone, and she’s like, I’ve been down a glacier since 1989. I don’t know what it is. And that’s a perfectly fine way to do it if your job doesn’t depend on it, but a lot of people’s jobs depend on it.
And so I do stress that people should under—I always was, you know, I was sort of the screamer at The Washington Post, saying, Are you ignoring digital? Why are you still on a typewriter? Why aren’t you doing this, this, this, and this? And, Craigslist is going to kill classifieds. I think you need to be fully aware of the technology and understand how it can help work for you, including AI. A lot of AIs can be quite helpful in a lot of ways. And then try to minimize the stuff that is so clearly addictive and stupid and hurtful to your brain, like relationships, AI-bot relationships. Do not partake.
Frum: I was going to ask you about that. Partly because Google is so broken, I use some of the AI platforms as research tools. And I found there’s some prophylactics that I found useful. One—you can set the settings: Never call me by my name. Never tell me it’s a good question. Never praise anything I’ve done. I do not want a relationship with you. I just want to know who won the World Series in 1938. Tell me that. And I do find—
Swisher: Can I add another one?
Frum: Yeah.
Swisher: Give me the provenance of where you got this.
Frum: Yes. I tell it, these are the sources. You can’t use Wikipedia. I’ve got a list of forbidden sources—
Swisher: Or “tell me.” Tell me: Where did this come from?
Frum: Yeah, I’ve got a list of forbidden sources, and there always has to be both a site and a link, so I can check that you’ve quoted it right. Which, by the way, that’s not always true. And, you know, use government documents—even in the age of Trump—if you’re going to give me a statistic. Or, These are reputable organizations; these are not.
But what I’m mostly keen is to avoid anything where it’s a different relationship than I used to have with Google, or a box where I ask it a question and it serves me the answer.
Swisher: That’s excellent hygiene. I mean, I treat AI like a supersized Google, a better and easier Google. Because one of the things about Google is, you’d go to the page, and then you’d go down, and you’d spend a lot of time. It’s sort of like being in a library with all the books on the floor, and you’re kind of looking among them. When it’s properly sourced, it’s invaluable, like in terms of saving time on research and other things. And so I think one of the things that people have to realize—if they use it in that regard, terrific. It’s a terrific thing.
When they start to have relationships with it, which a lot of people do, or they really like it, or they answer them, there’s—like, I just did a great interview with Sherry Turkle, which everyone should read her book called Artificial Intimacy—there’s nothing there. There’s nothing there. I keep saying, I really like my… they have a name for their Claude or whatever. I was like, There’s nothing there. But they think it is because, as humans, we’re so egomaniacal, we tend to, you know, just make it human when it’s just not. And that’s a really important thing that you did.
Frum: You’re an optimist on the employment effects of AI.
Swisher: No. I don’t know. I’m—
Frum: Well, you’re not a doomer. You’re not saying that everyone’s going to be fired.
Swisher: There’s a doomer, there’s a zoomer, and then there’s—is it a boomer? There’s a doomer, a boomer, and a zoomer. I think that’s the way they’ve split among them. I suppose I’m a zoomer.
Frum: Okay, explain. You lost me.
Swisher: Okay. A boomer is, Oh, it’s going to solve everything. And that’s largely marketing from those guys. And it may. It might. It could, for sure. We didn’t know the effects of many things before they came into use. Everything’s going to be great. Nothing’s going to be wrong. It’s not dangerous at all. I just think every historical technology trend has always had an upside and a downside, period. Period. That’s the way it is if you study history. So that’s—this “up and to the right” stuff is nonsense.
There’s those who say it’s going to kill us all. It certainly could, and we should mitigate against that. You should have scenarios of consequences absolutely in place and pay a lot of attention. Nobody should ever have been surprised by the Hugging Face incident and all these incursions by rogue agents. I don’t know why anyone’s been surprised by it. It’s like—of course that’s what it was going to do. And so, the doomers can be a little bit like, There’s nothing about it that’s good. And I’m sorry, that is not the case. It’s like with nuclear energy. There’s a lot to be said about nuclear energy that’s good. There’s a lot that needs to be said that’s bad.
And so I would put myself in the “let’s go thing by thing and make a list of things we don’t want”—and I think that’s relatively easy. Which is, hey, killer drones. Maybe we should have a global decision-making on this one, with everyone deciding what the standard should be. Surveillance: Hey, let’s discuss what AI should be able to surveil and what it shouldn’t, and what parameters, and let that be monitored by government—democratic governments, at least.
There’s all manner of things we can do. And here’s a good thing. Let it help; let’s put all the data about climate change in it, and let it help us figure out solutions. Great thing for AI to do. Cancer research, that kind of stuff. You could go thing by thing.
Frum: So AI investment is what’s holding up the U.S. economy right now. Maybe also health care. We’re now on our way to a 6 percent yield for 30-year U.S. money, and it’s probably going to stay this high for a while and maybe even get higher.
How long can AI investment continue when money costs 6 percent or more?
Swisher: You know, I compare it to the internet, and remember there was a crash there, right? There was that dramatic crash in 2000. And that was nothing. It didn’t cost anything to put up these internet companies. I mean, the price that these numbers are astronomical, especially given their revenue.
Here’s all I know. There’s 12 LLMs. There’s going to be two. Inevitably, it is going to coalesce into a smaller group of people, because the business isn’t that big, you know, ultimately. And it’s not—a lot of times when these tech moguls now, because they’re searching for any way to say that it’s good after they’re the ones that told us it sucked. Which is very funny in a lot of ways when you think about it—you know, Oh, there’s going to be abundance. You don’t have to work.
Like, they’re just making that shit up, just so you know. It’s like going to Mars. Like, Oh, we’re going to live on Mars. Oh, did you know there’s too much gravity there for the human bone? Oh, no, because I talked to an astrobiologist, or We have to go underground because the radiation is going to make us dumb. So we’re going to become what? Trolls? We’re going to actually become trolls? Like, they never want to mess with the details.
Frum: Should the U.S. government nationalize Starlink and SpaceX? And if it does, how does it prevent those companies from bogging down in bureaucracy the way NASA did?
Swisher: You know, we used to have this wonderful thing in this country, the public-private partnership. Which is now gone, right? You know why you have the internet, folks? Because of the government. You know why you have a lot of the drugs you have? Because of the government. You know why you have the space program? Oh, yeah, the government.
And so I think what’s really important is, once we have something that’s a national priority—like space or, you know, AI or something—let’s have these partnerships where they don’t get to drive the car. They’re in the car with the rest of us. And what they want to do is drive the car. Because you know what, Dave? They know better than we do, because they’re smarter than us. But they’re not smarter than us. That’s the biggest lie about them. They’re not. They’re broken people just like the rest of us. And why do they get more decision-making than anybody else? That’s all. I think that’s a pretty easy thing to work through.
But I think this idea of public-private partnerships has always been one of the great things of this country. It really doesn’t happen other places. It’s either top-down like in China, and that certainly has worked to an extent. Or it’s just nothing happens, like in Europe, right? But the idea of a public-private partnership—where corporations work with governments, and some of it’s dedicated to the public good, especially when we’re paying money—seems to me to have worked for a very long time. It’s brought us vaccines. It’s brought us innovations in space. It’s brought us innovations in the internet and digital. And it could continue to do things that are great for most of society rather than a small, tiny few of them.
Frum: If you’re going to have public-private partnerships, what does governance look like? Is there a role for Congress? How does it work that we make sure you don’t get the Brendan Carrs, and telling Jimmy Kimmel not to make jokes. You don’t have Elon Musk saying, I’m blowing hot and cold on Ukraine. I like them this week. I don’t like them next week.
Swisher: I think the problem is three things that I think of. Everyone is like, Oh, it’s the internet that’s, or the tech billionaires that are killing us. I’m like, you know, it’s a really complex thing. Gerrymandering was one thing that has been killing us. We cannot have any elections that aren’t for sure, and therefore nobody has an interest in compromise, right? That’s one.
Two, social media, which has been really deleterious and politicizing people. When people have commonalities, it splits them. As its business plan is to split you from each other. And I throw in Fox News and cable with that, but I don’t think it has as much. It did have an impact; now social media has taken that over.
And the third thing I would say is, this idea that in this idolatry of these rich people, innovators, right? I think it happened previously in our history during the Gilded Age, and it caused all manner of damage for regular people, right? Whether it was children who were being industrialized into these things. And we looked at it and said, No, and we’re going to do this. We’re going to make these rules.
And I think this is the push-pull of the American system, that capitalism is a really vibrant way to move forward. But why do they get to decide?
I think we need a stronger Congress. And the only way we’re going to do that is getting rid of Citizens United, getting rid of gerrymandering. So that we have more elections where people have to compete on ideas, not on loyalty or fealty to Donald Trump or whoever the person happens to be.
Frum: Kara Swisher, thank you so much for joining me today. What a Catherine wheel of sparkling ideas, and we’ll all be listening to the show.
Swisher: You should let your AI be mean to you. That would be interesting. Be meaner. Like challenge it more.
Frum: Yes. I sometimes am mean to it.
Swisher: Oh, it doesn’t like that.
Frum: No, it doesn’t, because it has sort of biases, and then when you challenge it gets a little testy.
Swisher: Can I leave you with one thing?
Frum: Yes.
Swisher: It is us. Like, it is us. It’s trained on us. Where do you think it’s getting its information? And everything you see in our world will be reflected there. Lying, joy, happiness, sycophancy, wisdom will be all in there. And it just depends on the—again, I’ll leave you with one thing.
Many years ago at Google, they had a thing when you would go in, and it would scroll all the queries across the world that were coming in. And you’d see it. And you’d sit there, and you’d go, What are people; what are they doing? It would be like: horse, straw, France, and you’re like, What do they want? What are they looking for? Like I always sat there and I would stare at it trying to figure out what they were.
And they had a globe where all the queries were coming in, and the globe would spin, and all the different languages and everything else. It was a really great data visualization. And all the questions were light that flowed off the Earth. And when it went around, most of Africa was dark, which was really kind of this weird metaphor, right? Dark Africa. But it was because they weren’t connected, right? And they didn’t have as much connection as other parts of the world, like the United States or in China or wherever. And I looked at that, and I thought: Well, it’s not like they’re not asking questions there. You just can’t see the questions they’re asking.
And I think the ability to ask questions is the biggest ability of a democracy. To ask questions. And you don’t want your questions to be algorithmically generated. And that’s the greatest strength of humanity—is we can ask questions, we can continue to ask questions. And that’s why I don’t think it will kill us, because it can’t ask questions. It can only mimic us like monkeys.
Frum: Kara, thank you so much.
Swisher: Thank you.
[Music]
Frum: Thanks so much to Kara Swisher for joining me today on The David Frum Show.
As I said at the top of the show, this week’s book is The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War by Robert Gordon, published by Princeton in 2016.
When the The Rise and Fall of American Growth was published a decade ago, it caused a great debate. Because Gordon’s argument, based on meticulous arrangements of large amounts of data, was that the internet revolution, social media, the computer itself had not actually done as much to improve American standards of living as the internal combustion engine, electricity, antibiotics, and the innovations of an earlier time. He argued that the American economy, or the American standard of living, grew faster from 1870 to 1970 than ever since. And all the fantastic changes in technology that we have seen didn’t add up to that much in terms of their impact on the overall state of the American economy and the well-being of the typical American.
Robert Gordon, at the time, after a lot of back-and-forth, was admitted to have probably won the argument that the American standard of living has not risen as fast since 1970 as it did before. But come the AI innovation, there is now massive challenge to Robert Gordon’s ideas. And this challenge took the form of a bet, in the world of AI—a famous bet with an economist named Erik Brynjolfsson of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.
In 2020, Erik Brynjolfsson bet Robert Gordon. It was a nominal bet with the proceeds to go to charity, so it’s not a Polymarket Trump-era bet. This was a bet between colleagues, respectful colleagues, to say: I bet you that over the coming decade, the decade of the 2020s, American productivity growth will accelerate. And he put down a specific number. He said it will accelerate past 1.8 percent a year. Gordon took the other side of the bet, and as we stand about halfway through the course of the bet, it looks like Robert Gordon is losing the bet. American productivity has been growing faster than 1.8 percent since 2020, and especially in the past few months as AI kicks in.
So does this prove that AI is indeed a big deal, and that the Robert Gordon thesis was wrong? So two things need to be understood to understand this debate and the bet.
The first is exactly what productivity is. Productivity is a measure of output per worker, per human worker. We now have to specify per human worker. If AI were doing all the apocalyptic things that it’s supposed to do—if it were wiping out millions of jobs, if it were changing the nature of work while boosting output—that would be very obviously disturbing for a lot of people. It would change people’s lives. But from a point of view of the economic statistics, you would see that change, that revolution, in the form of a lot more output; not that much or even less employment. And so output per human worker would be going up fast.
Well, as I say, Robert Gordon lost his bet. Output per worker has been going up faster than 1.8 percent. But that 1.8 is not that great. Between 1948 and 1973, productivity output per worker rose by 3 percent a year, because of highways and antibiotics and the mechanization of agriculture. Three percent a year from ’48 to ’73. Getting around 2 percent a year now. Better than 1.8, but not great.
And all of this, I think, casts some deeper light on what AI is going to do to American work, and that’s why I returned to Robert Gordon’s book this week to refresh my mind about what he said and more importantly, why he said that. Because as disruptive as AI promises to be, most Americans work in fields where it’s difficult to accelerate work. The sectors that dominate American spending and American employment and American prices are health care, education, housing, construction, and personal care. Now, these are activities that are physical, heavily regulated, and labor intensive.
I mean, let’s say that AI is able to completely take over the job of designing new houses. And instead of architects and draftspeople and using older-fashioned computer technology, the AI designs the house from beginning to end with no human input at all. How big a deal is that? Well, if the AI doesn’t speed up the time and cost of getting a permit for the house, if it doesn’t speed up local government—simply making the designing process faster—I mean, it will disturb and disrupt the work of the people who used to do that. But it’s not going to bring down the cost of the house that much, so you won’t get a big productivity bump. And so it is with so many other areas: nursing, teaching, and so on.
When Robert Gordon warned that American growth or observed that American growth had slowed down since 1970, and he predicted that American growth would remain slow, he based that on a couple of observations about the way the American economy has changed. And these are changes that the AI revolution doesn’t seem to be undoing, not yet.
First, he pointed out that the government is much less well-financed than it used to be. There’s a much heavier debt load on the American worker—from government deficits and government debts—than there used to be. Second, we’re not raising human educational attainment as fast as we used to do. When you took the American economy from an economy where most workers had not even finished high school to one where almost everybody had finished high school and many people had finished college, that got you a big bump. In a way that the slight increase in college attainment that we’ve seen over the past years, that doesn’t change it that much. Especially when those people who do not go on to college, when there’s some evidence that their education—the quality of their educational attainment, as measured by standardized tests—that seems to have been declining a little bit since COVID and since the advent of the smartphone.
So educational attainment is not accelerating; may be stalling. The debt burden is heavy, and so much of the economy is still in the world of physical labor, physical things, regulated things. So as you observe and discuss the AI revolution, be mindful that, in the work that I do, and perhaps in the work that you do, AI may be a very big deal. But in the world of work that most people do and where most of us spend most of our money—housing, health care, education, personal care—it isn’t yet making that big a difference, and it may not make that much of a difference to the overall performance of an economy for a long time to come.
I don’t want to diminish what we are seeing. Obviously, the things these machines can do are very impressive. But where’s the benefit? How big is it? Is it really as transformational? And maybe one of the reasons that people in the AI world are so eager to tell us horror stories about the terrible things that AI might do is to compensate a little bit for some of the disappointment about the good things we want it to do but that it isn’t doing yet—and may not do for a long time to come.
That’s it for this week’s edition of The David Frum Show. See you this coming weekend. And I hope you will share the program on whatever platform; like, subscribe. And, of course, if you want to help the program and bring it to more people, the best thing to do is to subscribe to The Atlantic. That’s how you support the work of me and all of my colleagues. See you soon. Bye-bye.
A crucial midterm contest is happening right now in Texas, one that could determine the future of the state and its influence on federal policy and national politics.
No, not the U.S. Senate race—though everyone is watching that one, and with good reason. The Republican, Ken Paxton—who has served as Texas’s attorney general since 2015—is an unusually weak candidate, beset by personal and financial scandals and a reputation for using his office for right-wing culture-war fixations, and weighed down by a deeply unpopular president. On the other side is James Talarico, an unusually strong Democratic candidate, fluent in the language of faith and without the cloud of scandal that haunts his opponent. “This is the most competitive election that we have seen in Texas” in decades, James Henson, the executive director of the University of Texas at Austin’s nonpartisan Texas Politics Project, told me.
But the race I’m talking about is downstream of that: Who will succeed Ken Paxton?
The two major-party candidates vying to be attorney general are Nathan Johnson, a Democratic state senator from Dallas, and Mayes Middleton (“MAGA Mayes,” as his own ads call him), a Republican state senator and GOP mega-donor whose district covers parts of Harris, Brazoria, and Galveston counties. An October poll from the Texas Politics Project shows a dead heat, with Johnson at 48 percent and Middleton at 47 percent.
The Texas attorney general is a very powerful position, one that has frequently been a springboard to higher office—John Cornyn held the job before becoming a U.S. senator, as did Greg Abbott before becoming the state’s governor. The AG is meant to defend the laws of the state, and has certain specific responsibilities, such as enforcing child support and investigating Medicaid fraud. Over the past few decades, however, the role has become something more: a way for ambitious politicians to wage culture wars, cultivate a national profile by taking on right-wing causes, and shape law and policy not just in Texas but nationwide.
The attorney general “helps set legal policy across the country,” Justin Nelson, a Democrat who came within a few points of unseating Paxton in 2018, told me. The race between Talarico and Paxton may be capturing everyone’s attention right now, but “when you’re a senator, you’re one of 100,” Nelson pointed out. There’s only one attorney general of Texas.
When Abbott was Texas attorney general under the Obama administration, he used to joke, “I go into the office, I sue the federal government and I go home.” Paxton—who was acquitted by the Senate in a 2023 trial over accusations of corruption and bribery—has been even more pugnacious.
Early in his tenure as attorney general, Paxton encouraged clerks to refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He used the office to sue the developers of a mosque and housing community north of Dallas for securities fraud; the case fueled right-wing conspiracy theories nationwide about the “Islamization of Texas.” (A state securities commissioner described the case as “horseshit”—ironically, Paxton himself was accused of securities fraud.) He wrote a memo that designated puberty blockers and other gender-affirming health care “child abuse” and that kicked off Child Protective Services investigations of parents of trans children, and most recently used the state’s consumer-protection law to target pediatricians who vaccinate children. He has threatened to investigate public schools to ensure they’re displaying the Ten Commandments. He also filed the case asking the Supreme Court to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
He has tried to prevent women whose pregnancies meet the state’s extremely narrow standards for legal abortion from accessing the procedure. After a court order gave one woman whose child had a fatal abnormality permission to get an abortion, Paxton threatened any doctor who dared perform it, warning that the judge’s order “will not insulate hospitals, doctors, or anyone else, from civil and criminal liability.” Paxton has also tried to sue doctors in other states for allegedly providing abortion medication to Texas residents—an issue that is almost certain to end up at the Supreme Court sooner or later, much like Texas’s original abortion bounty law did, in a foreshadowing of the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. These cases and others have shaped abortion policy nationally, not just in Texas.
An entire accounting of Paxton’s use of the AG’s office to further extreme conservative causes would take too long. But you get the idea. The Texas AG’s office is the “largest legal power in the conservative movement, nationally, period, end of story,” Adam Piper, who runs the Republican Attorneys General Association, told The Texas Tribuneearlier this year. Ali S. Zaidi, the former director of the Texas House Democratic Caucus, told me that “simply removing a Republican” from the Texas attorney general’s office “could have enormous ripple effects across the country for, frankly, generations to come.”
Paxton’s aggressive use of the office isn’t an exclusively right-wing phenomenon; Democratic AGs from California, New York, and other states have been at the forefront of litigation against President Trump’s tariffs, his environmental policies, and his attempt to repeal birthright citizenship. AGs have also pursued consumer-protection issues that the federal government mostly abandoned.
But Nathan Johnson is not presenting himself as that kind of candidate. Instead, he says he wants to return the office to what he sees as its traditional role: “It is there to protect consumers from predatory business practices; it is there to investigate shady relationships between the private sector and the public sector; it is there to keep the system of checks and balances in place in government.”
This is surely a smart pitch for such a red state, and the race is quite close for a place where Democrats haven’t won statewide office since Pulp Fiction was in theaters. Nevertheless, Texas Republicans’ objections to Paxton are less about policy and more about ethics. “I think Mayes Middleton is a stronger candidate than Ken Paxton,” Nelson said, describing Paxton as perhaps the “most corrupt public official in the country.”
Matt Mackowiak, a Republican political consultant, told me that Middleton’s policy views “align with a majority of Texans.” This state has been red for three decades. Voters may be tired of Paxton’s baggage, but that doesn’t mean they’re tired of having a state attorney general who tries to move the state and the country in a conservative direction.
Whoever becomes the next attorney general, he’ll be tasked with enforcing Texas law, which includes that near ban on abortion and a series of restrictions on trans rights that frightened some families so much that they ultimately fled the state. But there’s a difference between enforcing the law and what Paxton has done, which is interpret the law so aggressively that, for example, a pregnant woman whose fetus has a fatal abnormality has to leave the state just to get care. Johnson told me that Paxton’s attempt to sue doctors in New York, Delaware, and California over abortion medication that is banned in Texas was “legally ridiculous.” Texas law, he said, does not apply outside of Texas.
Johnson said he is “not opposed to immigration enforcement” but that he would sue the federal government if immigration authorities violate Texas residents’ constitutional rights. He called the law passed last year requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments unconstitutional, and said he would not strong-arm any schools who declined to follow the law “until the Supreme Court says otherwise.” He also decried Paxton’s effort to use driver’s-license data from the Department of Public Safety to create a registry of transgender Texans. Johnson’s approach, he suggested, would be to simply leave trans people alone.
“We’re talking about not abusing your power to make certain people miserable, to rally your base,” he said. “And I’m happy to say that I don’t think that kind of behavior is being rewarded politically right now in Texas.”
Still, Texas has arguably gotten redder in the past six years. Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the state in 2016 by nine points, Biden by about six, and Harris by about 14. Even in a midterm year with an unpopular incumbent president weighing down the GOP ticket, Democrats have a lot to overcome. Middleton also has a lot more money. In the candidates’ most recent campaign-finance reports, Johnson had taken in a little more than $1 million, whereas Middleton—the inheritor of his father’s oil-and-gas company—had almost $3.5 million in contributions. That money could make a big difference, especially since neither candidate has much name recognition. In the Texas Politics Project poll, 40 percent of voters had no opinion of Middleton, and 48 percent had no opinion of Johnson.
But Zaidi told me that Johnson, being part of the class-of-2018 Democrats who entered office during Trump’s first term, was well equipped to compete in Texas. These officials know how to take on big “policy fights, but in a way that’s not a turnoff for the median voter,” Zaidi said, pointing to Johnson’s work trying to expand Medicaid in Texas—a popular policy but one that Republican state lawmakers have blocked.
The AG race—and those of other state offices—may be decided by the top of the ticket. Johnson, Nelson said, will “rise or fall depending on how well” Talarico and the Democratic candidate for governor, Gina Hinojosa, do. “I think Nathan is well positioned to ride a wave. He’s got his surfboard out.”
If Middleton triumphs, he seems intent on continuing Abbott’s and Cornyn’s legacies. Middleton has said that “there’s no such thing as separation of church and state,” and that “one of the most important things here is backing up President Trump and his border security and deportation agenda.” A recent campaign ad boasts of Middleton’s support of the state’s bathroom bill, “Mayes Middleton: kicking perverted men out of women’s restrooms and locker rooms.” This seems to be a subject of particular importance to Middleton, who recently told an audience that Johnson will “fight to get men in your little girl’s restroom and locker room.”
Nelson believes that, after 30 years of Republican control, Texans are getting tired of these culture wars. They hear Republicans talking about trans people in bathrooms, and they’re “like, Yeah, cool, man, but why is cereal eight bucks and I don’t know if my kid’s gonna have a job?”
The GOP thinks Texans are looking for an ethical conservative who will pursue the same causes as Paxton, and the Dems are betting on widespread fatigue not just with Paxton personally, but with conservative culture-war politics. These visions may be miles apart politically, but as far as the polls are concerned, for now, they’re neck and neck.
Ten years ago, I found myself in Lusaka, Zambia, sitting at a table with a group of extraordinary writers. We had been invited to participate in a 12-day writing retreat by the Caine Prize for African Writing, considered by many to be the most important literary award for authors on the continent. Among our ranks at the retreat were four former winners of the prize (NoViolet Bulawayo, Okwiri Oduor, Namwali Serpell, and me), as well as past finalists and immensely talented Zambian writers. During those two weeks, we wrote and workshopped our stories, and in between—as we ate and gossiped, visited local schools, and read our work to the public—we discussed the great distance between the literature we hoped to produce and the kind of work the marketplace expected from us.
We were all beneficiaries of the Caine Prize, which was first awarded in 2000 to introduce African writing to a wider international audience. At the time, African fiction hardly existed in Western bookstores or newspaper book sections. In the years since, it had flourished, but many of the most successful and celebrated works circled the same themes: war and its aftermath, the scourge of poverty, the persecution and murder of queer people, the trials of immigration to the West, recapitulations of popular American or European stories in African settings.
In Lusaka in 2016, we wondered whether there was room for stories that did not hew to these norms, stories that followed their own idiosyncratic paths, stories that challenged and reconceived what “Africa” means. So many of us, after all, were living examples of the diversity and capaciousness of the term. Even as we pursued originality in our work, we recognized that certain stories (I described them as “accessible” in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books) would continue to earn a disproportionate amount of recognition and acceptance.
A decade later, the Caine Prize has become the setting for a different conversation about African writers and literary authenticity. Two weeks ago, the Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza was named this year’s winner for his story “The Blue Fighter.” Just five days later, the novelist and journalist Vauhini Vara reported in these pages that the AI detector Pangram had flagged almost the entire story as AI-generated.
The allegation quickly became fodder for arguments far beyond the Caine Prize: about the capabilities of artificial intelligence, the state of contemporary literature, and even the legitimacy of Black intellectual achievement. Vara’s story revived fears raised earlier this year, when three regional winners for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize were accused of using AI, that chatbots are already winning prestigious literary prizes by fooling multiple award juries. Critics also worried that contemporary literature had grown so stale that even a machine was capable of creating award-winning prose. But the racial dimensions magnified the controversy. Some people contended that AI-detection tools were being used to unfairly undermine Black and brown authors. For others, the accusations confirmed a long-standing belief that Black and brown writers—and, by extension, Black and brown people—are incapable of achieving prominence without substantial assistance, either from institutions that supposedly favor them over more qualified individuals or, now, from artificial intelligence.
Lost in these debates is a quieter, more unsettling irony: After years of being encouraged by the literary ecosystem—editors, prize committees, magazines, critics—to produce work that is accessible to white audiences, African writers are now facing a new kind of suspicion about their authorship. In short, we have arrived at a moment when writing that conforms to accepted literary conventions—including, in particular, those associated with “African” writing—can also seem suspiciously contrived.
Kundizeza’s story provides a signal example. I found it moving and quite effective in moments, but I also instantly recognized—and predicted—many elements of its plot. The story is narrated by a boy in Zimbabwe whose father abandons his career as a civil engineer to pursue his dream of building aquariums and breeding exotic fish. While his father pours the family’s dwindling resources into the tanks and their expensive equipment, the boy’s mother struggles to keep the household afloat.
Perhaps you can imagine what happens next: The family moves to a poorer neighborhood, the mother finally confronts the father about his obsession, and, over his objections, she sells nearly all of his remaining fish tanks to pay the bills. Kundizeza’s story had many components of prize-winning African literature: a youthful narrator (my own Caine Prize–winning story, “Miracle,” featured one as well); the struggling father with big, impossible dreams; the responsible and enterprising mother who holds everything together; the backdrop of mounting economic hardship.
Kundizeza has denied using AI and has said that he drew on characters and settings from his own life in writing the story. I don’t doubt this, but one reason the story might strike some as AI-generated is that it so neatly encapsulates and deploys the tropes we have come to expect from prize-winning African fiction. If chatbots do anything especially well, it is exactly this: ingesting our preferred tropes and delivering them right back to us.
Readers who raise suspicions about AI usually flag patterns in prose. But there is another pattern worth considering. Chatbots have learned from massive quantities of human writing, including representations of Africa shaped by the literary marketplace. It seems reasonable to expect that if you ask a chatbot to write an “African” story, it will reproduce familiar conventions that have been rewarded for decades.
That said, I don’t believe that a Pangram result should be enough, by itself, to condemn a writer. Earlier this year, the Commonwealth Foundation investigated allegations against several of its regional winners, examining drafts, notes, and time-stamped documents before concluding that AI had not been used to write their stories. In a recent New York Times essay, the Cambridge professor Doyle Calhoun noted that the five literary controversies involving AI that he considered most significant this year all concerned Black and brown writers. The Kundizeza accusation adds another. Whatever the outcome of the case, these controversies reveal a troubling predicament: Even as the literary world struggles to determine what constitutes AI-assisted writing, Black and brown writers have repeatedly been forced to defend the authenticity of their work.
One of the problems with adjudicating these situations is that no one has spelled out what, exactly, constitutes cheating. It is virtually impossible to open up a Microsoft Word or Google document without encountering AI tools that encourage you to rewrite your prose. If you accept that assistance and your work is subsequently flagged by a detection program as AI-generated, have you cheated? What if you drop a completed story into a chatbot text box and request edits? Established writers have the benefit of publishing their work in well-resourced periodicals where it is edited by multiple humans; the resulting article, regardless of how many sentences were drafted, deleted, or polished to a sheen by other hands, is credited to one person. Is it wrong for an emerging writer to seek similar assistance from artificial intelligence? Many people are quick to accuse individual writers of cheating, but technology companies have integrated AI assistance into so many parts of our lives, and the literary world has yet to agree on where assistance ends and authorship begins.
My greatest worry is that the arrival of AI has imposed yet another set of expectations on Black and African writers. Not only must our work satisfy the literary marketplace, but it must also distinguish itself from the machines that have learned to imitate its conventions. Over the years, the establishment has rewarded predictability and accessibility—the very qualities that now make writing suspect. As our Zambian retreat drew to a close a decade ago, many of us reached a conclusion that seemed almost impractical then but feels urgent and essential now: We had to ignore the noise and market signals and, to borrow from the South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, write whatever we liked.
On January 4, 1961, the New York Herald Tribune carried on page 9, subordinated in space to a story on a castle for sale for $12 million, a news item from Russia. It described the new propaganda drive which is in line with the world Communist manifesto recently published. This manifesto declared “the United States is the bulwark of world reaction and the enemy of all the peoples on the globe.”
Writers, lecturers, and agitators are being trained in special schools to spread this propaganda wherever they can. How many Americans read that news item? How many of them glanced at it and shrugged or laughed and dismissed it from their minds? How many of them were aware of the slow and relentless effect of Soviet propaganda among the uncommitted nations of the world and its effect on our standing among many peoples? I don’t know, but I am sure that there were not enough. Not nearly enough. We are facing the greatest challenge our way of life has ever had to meet without any clear understanding of the facts.
There is in most people, at most times, a proneness to give more credence to pleasant news than to unpleasant, to hope that, somehow or other, things “will come out all right.” But this was not the frame of mind that created the United States and made it not only a great nation but a symbol of a way of life that became the hope of the world. One can fight a danger only when one is armed with solid facts and spurred on by an unwavering faith and determination.
On my first visit to Russia I had watched the training of small babies. On my second trip, I studied the older children, their conditioning, their discipline, their docility, their complete absorption in the Communist system. Every child learns his Marxism backwards and forwards. By the time he leaves school, he is prepared to take not only his skills but his political ideas with him, wherever he may be sent, to whatever part of the world.
Wherever I went in Russia I found no personal hostility. But there was an unshaken conviction that the United States not only threatens but actually desires and seeks war. Here we are, equipped with the best communications in the world, and yet we have not learned how to use them in a way that can reach people.
Today, we are one of the oldest governments in existence; ours has been the position for leadership, for setting the pattern for behavior. And yet we are supinely putting ourselves in the position of leaving the leadership to the Russians, of following their ideas rather than our own. For instance, when the Russians set up a restriction on what visitors to the country may be allowed to see, we promptly do the same thing here, in retaliation. Whenever we behave in this manner, we are copying the methods of dictatorships and making a hollow boast of our claim that this country loves freedom for all. We owe it to ourselves and to the world, to our own dignity and self-respect, to set our own standards of behavior, regardless of what other nations do.
By practicing what we preach, putting democracy to work up to the very hilt, showing the world that our way of life has the most to offer the men and women and children of all countries, we may regain our lost leadership. Against those mindless millions we can oppose the unleashed strength of free men, for only in freedom can a man function completely.
When I visited Morocco in 1958 I had my first opportunity to see for myself the difficulties that arise in the transition stage between colonialism and independence. The troubles that Morocco was encountering were, it seemed to me, fairly typical of the basic difficulties of all young nations in transition.
As the French withdrew from Morocco, taking their nationals along, the villages found themselves stripped of teachers and of doctors. Countless villages were without a single person trained to give medical assistance. The Moroccans themselves were not yet prepared to replace the doctors, the teachers, the civil service employees with their own men. It may be decades before they are ready to do so. Where, then, are the necessary people to come from? I feel that in that answer lies the key, or one of the major keys, to the future.
The great problems seem to be that, while people may be able to fight successfully for freedom, they may not yet be prepared to set up a stable and functioning independent government. The French pulled out, but the Moroccans had no one to replace them. They were totally unprepared for self-government. They were, in fact, much worse off than they had been a year before.
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Today, this is happening again, in the Congo with the withdrawal of the Belgians. The time for colonization has gone forever, but some intermediate transition system is essential if chaos is not to follow.
A recent Afro-Asian resolution in the United Nations reveals the difficulty of the position by these words: “Inadequacy of political, economic, social or cultural preparedness” shall not serve as a pretext for denying independence. Now, it is certainly true that such a pretext has often been used in denying the right of self-determination. But it is equally true that without some basic qualifications, self-determination will lead to self-destruction.
In the Near East one finds the fluctuating and uncertain position of young countries which are in transition from the ways of the past to those of the future, with no certain path to tread and with the ultimate goal still obscure. That is becoming the situation of an increasing number of infant nations as they shake off the fetters of colonialism, or of ancient laws and customs, and grope for their own place in the sun. And what that goal is to be, what kind of place they are to occupy, what political philosophy they will choose in the long run will depend in great part on how we, in this country, prepare to meet the challenge.
Is what we are doing good enough? Have the changes that have revealed themselves in recent years, particularly in Africa and the Near East and the Latin American countries, shown overwhelming evidence that we are doing an intelligent job, an adequate job? I am afraid not. Genuinely afraid.
To me, the democratic system represents man’s best and brightest hope of self-fulfillment, of a life rich in promise and free from fear; the one hope, perhaps, for the complete development of the whole man. But I know, and learn more clearly every day, that we cannot keep our system strong and free by neglect, by taking it for granted, by giving it our second-best attention. We must be prepared, like the suitor in The Merchant of Venice — and, I might point out, the successful suitor — to give and hazard all we have.
Man cannot live without hope. If it is not engendered by his own convictions and desires, it can easily be fired from without, and by the most meretricious and empty of promises.
What I learned on these trips around the world has been much on my mind. Why, I wondered, were we not more successful in helping the young nations and those in transition to become established along democratic lines? Why was it that the Russians were doing so much better? The answer can be oversimplified, and an oversimplification is false and misleading. But part of the answer, and I think a major part, is that Russia has trained its young people to go out into the world, to carry their services and skills to backward and underdeveloped countries, to replace the missing doctors and teachers, the scientists and technicians; above all, to fill the vacant civil service jobs, prepared not only by training for the job itself, but by learning the language, by a complete briefing in the customs, habits, traditions, and trend of thought of the people, to understand them and deal with them. Where the young Russians go, of course, they take with them their Marxist training, thinking, and system.
And our young Americans? Are they being prepared to take their faith in democracy to the world along with their skills? Are they learning the language and the customs and the history of these new peoples? Do they understand how to deal with them, not according to their own ideas but according to the ideas of the people they must learn to know if they are to reach them at all? Have they acquired an ability to live and work among peoples of different religion and race and color, without arrogance and without prejudice?
Here, I believe, we have fallen down badly. In the last few years I have grasped at every opportunity to meet with the young, to talk with college students, to bring home as strongly as I can to even young children in the lower grades our responsibility for each other, our need to understand and respect each other. The future will be determined by the young, and there is no more essential task today, it seems to me, than to bring before them once more, in all its brightness, in all its splendor and beauty, the American dream, lest we let it fade, too concerned with ways of earning a living or impressing our neighbors or getting ahead or finding bigger and more potent ways of destroying the world and all that is in it.
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No single individual, of course, and no single group has an exclusive claim to the American dream. But we have all, I think, a single vision of what it is, not merely as a hope and an aspiration, but as a way of life, which we can come ever closer to attaining in its ideal form if we keep shining and unsullied our purpose and our belief in its essential value.
That we have sometimes given our friends and our enemies abroad a shoddy impression of the dream cannot be denied, much as we would like to deny it. The Ugly American, impressive as it was, struck me as being exaggerated. True, one of the first American ambassadors I ever met in an Eastern country was appallingly like a character in the novel. There are doubtless many others, too many others, men who accept — and seek — the position of representative of their government abroad, with no real interest or respect for the country they go to, and no real interest or respect for the image of their own country which they present to other people. Such men buy their positions by gifts of money to their party or seek them because of the glamorous social life they may lead in exotic places. “Oh, you must go there. You’ll have a wonderful time. And the polo is topnotch.”
They often do not know the language of the country; they are not familiar with its government or its officials; they are not interested in its customs, or its point of view.
The Russians, and I say it with shame, do much better. They are trained in the language, history, customs, and ways of life of a country before they go to it. They do not confine themselves to official entertaining but make a point of meeting and knowing and establishing friendly relations with people of all sorts, in every class of society, in every part of the country.
When we look at the picture of Russian greed in swallowing one satellite nation after another and contrast it with the picture of American generosity in giving food, clothing, supplies, technical and financial assistance, without the ulterior motive of acquiring new territory, it is stupid and tragic waste that the use of incompetent representatives should undo so much useful work, so great an expense, so much in the way of materials of every kind.
Of course, what the Russians have accomplished in training their young people for important posts in the underdeveloped countries — which, I must repeat, may affect the future course of these countries — has been done by compulsion. That’s the rub. For what we must do is to achieve the same results on a voluntary basis. We do not say to our young people: “You must go here and take such a job.” But we can show them that where we fail, the Russians will win, by default. We can show them the importance of acquiring the kind of training that will make them useful and honorable representatives of their country wherever they may go abroad.
Perhaps the new frontier today is something more than the new revolution in textiles and methods and speed and goods. It’s in the frontier of men’s minds. But we cannot cast an enduring light on other men’s minds unless the light in our own minds burns with a hard, unquenchable flame.
One form of communication we have failed in abjectly: that is in the teaching of languages. Most school children have several years of inadequate teaching in one language or another. I say inadequate because the study of a language, after all, is inadequate if one cannot learn to read and write it, to speak and to understand it. During the last war, the government found a simplified and most effective method of teaching such difficult languages as Japanese and Chinese to American GIs. In a matter of weeks they had mastered more of the language than formerly they would have acquired in the same number of years. And yet in our schools the old cumbersome, unproductive methods are still in use.
It seems to me so obvious that it should not need to be said that we must increase and improve the teaching of languages to our young people, who will otherwise find themselves crippled and sorely handicapped in dealing with people of foreign races and different cultures.
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These are things our children should be told. These are the conditions they are going to have to meet. They ought to be made to understand exactly what competition they will encounter, why they must meet it, how they can meet it best. Yet I rarely find, in talking with them, that they have been given the slightest inkling of the meaning of the Soviet infiltration of other countries, or that the future the Soviets are helping to build is the one with which they will have to contend. I rarely find that anyone has suggested that our own young people should have any preparation whatsoever to cope with the problems that are impending.
That is why, in the course of the past several years, I have fitted into my schedule, whenever I could, occasions to talk with the young. Sometimes they come up to Hyde Park by the busload to ask questions or to discuss problems. Sometimes I talk at their schools or colleges.
The other night, three boys from Harvard, one of them my grandson, came to see me. The head of the temporary government of Tanganyika had requested that some American students be sent there to teach English to their students, so that when the latter came to America to study they would be able to understand and communicate without difficulty. The young American students were also to participate in work projects and live in the native villages, where they could study conditions.
Thirty Americans, as a pilot project, were needed, and the cost for each was estimated at $1500. There was, I am happy to say, no problem in getting recruits. The difficulty came in raising money. The big foundations turned them down, whether because the project seemed unimportant, whether because of the youth of the people involved, or whether because they had failed to draw up a sufficiently complete, telling, and comprehensive prospectus of their plans, I do not know.
I was greatly interested, for it is out of such undertakings that bridges of understanding are built. I urged them to draw up the clearest possible statement of their plan and then to ask for scholarships. Certainly there must be thirty people willing to finance one scholarship each, in order to establish bonds of friendship and cooperation with a young nation.
Of course, there are great numbers of American college students with little information about and even less interest in the world in which they live. They are absorbed in their own concerns, in the social activities and the sports of their colleges, or in planning for their future careers. All this is natural enough. The trouble is that, on the whole, college students in some other countries start much earlier to relate themselves to their world and to become informed about the conditions which they must learn to meet in life.
What can we do to prepare young people to carry the American dream to the world in the best possible way? What I would like to say is this:
Today, our government and the governments of most of the world are primarily concerned — obsessed — by one idea: defense. But what is real defense, and how is it obtained? A certain amount of military defense is necessary. But there comes a point where you must consider what can be done on an economic and cultural basis.
It seems to me that, in terms of atomic warfare, we should henceforth have a small professional army of men who have voluntarily chosen this profession as an obligation to their country. But what then? What about the hundreds of thousands of young people who leave school every year, either from high school or college? Are they, from now on, to have no participation in contributing to the welfare of their country?
Far from it. As matters stand now, we draft young men into the service, train them until they are useful, and then let them go. This seems to me monstrous waste.
It is my own personal conviction that every young person should be given some basic military training that might, eventually, be useful to his country. This could easily be handled either in school or at college. Instead of calling up all young men for compulsory military service, why should it not be possible to offer a counterproposal along these lines:
If you do not want to spend two years of compulsory military training, here is an alternative which is open to you. Whether you finish college or high school, you may decide what country you would like to spend two years in. You will be given two years of basic training, either during school hours or in the evenings. If you want to go, say, to Africa or one of the underdeveloped countries, you will, from the age of fifteen or seventeen, be taught the language, the history, the geography, the economic background of the country. You will be prepared to take with you a skill, or be trained for the most crying need in many transition nations — to fill the civil service jobs that Russia is now so rapidly filling. Or, if you are preparing for a profession, you may make use of that. New industries are needed in these countries; there are technical needs in almost all areas. The economy has to be bolstered in countless ways. New techniques are required in agriculture. And nearly all of these countries need teachers badly.
For people in young nations, which are still in a transition stage and setting up governments, such a course of action on our part could be more valuable than a large standing army or economic aid, particularly when in the new country there is no one capable of administering the aid effectively. Obviously, like anything else, this new concept cannot be carried out well without preparation and the clear thinking out of economic problems, based on comprehensive knowledge of the conditions of the country.
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If we could achieve — and why not? — a cooperation between universities and government, we might be able to equip some of our young people to take up the slack in underdeveloped countries and to bring our skills and our attitudes and our principles to them as free men.
These two-year volunteers could be doctors, engineers, teachers, scientists, mechanics, and administrators. It is possible that a system of scholarships might be worked out, which would enable us to use some of our young talent and ability in helping young countries get established. In such cases, there should be some sort of guarantee, some sort of facilities put at the use of these people when they return to their own country, to enable them to get jobs at home. This service, of course, could be in lieu of military service, but, it seems to me, it would be far more valuable.
The present long period of basic military training, which removes our young men from civilian life for two years and then returns them to it, seems to me a wasteful and pointless procedure. Certainly it could be made possible for them to have much of this basic military training that is required while they are in school. But military service, in an atomic, specialized age, should, like other professions, be on a voluntary basis and become a chosen career.
I have said that the Russians have accomplished by compulsion what we must accomplish voluntarily. But there is one element of this Russian training that is of paramount importance. They have taught their young to feel that they are needed, that they are important to the welfare of their country. I think that one of the strongest qualities in every human being is a need to feel needed, to feel important. Too often, our own youngsters do not feel that they are really essential to their country, or to the scheme of things. We have not had enough imagination to show them how very much we need every one of them to make us the kind of country that we can be.
If many of our young people have lost the excitement of the early settlers, who had a country to explore and develop, it is because no one remembers to tell them that the world has never been so challenging, so exciting; the fields of adventure and new fields to conquer have never been so limitless. There is still unfinished business at home, but there is the most tremendous adventure in bringing the peoples of the world to an understanding of the American dream. In this attempt to understand and to give a new concept of the relationships of mankind, there is open to our youngsters an infinite field of exciting adventure, where the heart and the mind and the spirit can all be engaged.
Perhaps the older generation is often to blame with its cautious warning: “Take a job that will give you security, not adventure.” But I say to the young: “Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, and imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of a competence.”
“Sixty ounces, without even a piece of paper! Ever expect to see it again?”
Malemute Kid shrugged his shoulders.
“Why did he quit?” Prince was interested in the Indian dog-driver whom his partner had just bought out of her Majesty’s mail service.
“Don’t know. He couldn’t desert and then stay here, and he was just wild to remain in the country. Palavered around like a crazy man. Something happened to him when he got to Dawson, — couldn’t make out what, — and he made up his mind on the jump; and in the same breath he said he’d been working to this very end for years. He had everything mixed up. Talked of making me rich, putting me onto a mine with more gold than Eldorado and Bonanza together. Never saw a man take on so in my life. It was only sixty ounces, and the look in his face when I agreed was worth the price.”
“Who is he, anyway?”
“Don’t know. But he’s a fellow to whet your curiosity. I never saw him before, but all the Coast was talking about him eight years ago. Sort of mysterious, you know. They called him the “Strange One,” “Ulysses,” and the “Man with the Otter Skins.” He came down out of the north, in the dead of winter, skirting Bering Sea and traveling like mad. No one ever learned where he came from, but he must have come far. He was badly travel-worn when he got food from the Swedish missionary on Golovin Bay, and asked the way south. We heard of this afterward. Then he abandoned the shore line, heading right across Norton Sound. Terrible weather, snowstorms and high winds, but he pulled through where a thousand other men would have died; missing St. Michaels, and making the land at Pastilik. He’d lost all but two dogs, and was nearly gone with starvation.
“He was so anxious to go on that Father Roubeau fitted him out with grub; but he couldn’t let him have any dogs, for he was only waiting my arrival to go on trail himself. Mr. Ulysses knew too much to start without animals, and fretted around for several days. He had on his sled a bunch of beautifully cured otter skins, — sea otters, you know, worth their weight in gold. There happened to be at Pastilik an old Shylock of a Russian trader, who had dogs to kill. Well, they didn’t dicker very long, but when the Strange One headed south again, it was in the rear of a spanking dog team. Mr. Shylock, by the way, had the otter skins. I saw them. Dogs must have brought him five hundred apiece. And it wasn’t as if the Strange One didn’t know the value of sea otter: he was Indian; and besides, what little he talked showed he’d been among white men.
“After the ice passed out of the sea, word came up from Nunivak Island that he had gone in there for grub. Then he dropped from sight, and this is the first heard of him in eight years. Now where did he come from? And what was he doing there? And why did he come from there? Another mystery of the north, Prince, for you to solve.”
“Thanks, awfully,” was the mining engineer’s response, muffled and sleepy, from his sleeping-furs; “but you have so many confounded mysteries up here that my hands are full as it is. Anyway, I don’t expect I’ll ever hear of the chap again, — nor you, either, of your sixty ounces.”
The cold weather had come on with the long nights, and the sun had begun to play his ancient game of peekaboo along the southern snow line ere aught was heard of Malemute Kid’s grubstake. And then, one bleak morning in early January, a heavily laden dog train pulled into his cabin below Stuart River. He of the Otter Skins was there, and with him walked a man such as the gods have almost forgotten how to fashion. Men never talked of luck and pluck and five-hundred-dollar dirt without bringing in the name of Axel Gunderson; nor could tales of nerve or strength or daring pass up and down the camp fire without the summoning of his presence. And when the conversation flagged, it blazed anew at mention of the woman who shared his fortunes.
As has been noted, in the making of Axel Gunderson the gods had remembered their old-time cunning, and cast him after the manner of men who were born when the world was young. Full seven feet he towered in his picturesque costume which marked a king of Eldorado. His chest, neck, and limbs were those of a giant. To bear his three hundred pounds of bone and muscle, his snowshoes were greater by a generous yard than those of other men. Rough-hewn, with rugged brow and massive jaw and unflinching eyes of palest blue, his face told the tale of one who knew but the law of might. Of the yellow of ripe corn silk, his frost-incrusted hair swept like day across the night, and fell far down his coat of bearskin. A vague tradition of the sea seemed to cling about him, as he swung down the narrow trail in advance of the dogs; and he brought the butt of his dogwhip against Malemute Kid’s door as a Norse sea rover, on southern foray, might thunder for admittance at the castle gate.
Prince bared his womanly arms and kneaded sour-dough bread, casting, as he did so, many a glance at the three guests, — three guests the like of which might never come under a man’s roof in a lifetime. The Strange One, whom Malemute Kid had surnamed “Ulysses,” still fascinated him; but his interest chiefly gravitated between Axel Gunderson and Axel Gunderson’s wife. She felt the day’s journey, for she had softened in comfortable cabins during the many days since her husband mastered the wealth of frozen pay streaks, and she was tired. She rested against his great breast like a slender flower against a wall, replying lazily to Malemute Kid’s good-natured banter, and stirring Prince’s blood strangely with an occasional sweep of her deep, dark eyes. For Prince was a man, and healthy, and had seen few women in many months. And she was older than he, and an Indian besides. But she was different from all native wives he had met: she had traveled, — had been in his country among others, he gathered from the conversation; and she knew most of the things the women of his own race knew, and much more that it was not in the nature of things for them to know. She could make a meal of sun-dried fish or a bed in the snow; yet she teased them with tantalizing details of many-course dinners, and caused strange internal dissensions to arise at the mention of various quondam dishes which they had well-nigh forgotten. She knew the ways of the moose, the bear, and the little blue fox, and of the wild amphibians of the northern seas; she was skilled in the lore of the woods and the streams, and the tale writ by man and bird and beast upon the delicate snow crust was to her an open book; yet Prince caught the appreciative twinkle in her eye as she read the Rules of the Camp. These Rules had been fathered by the Unquenchable Bettles at a time when his blood ran high, and were remarkable for the terse simplicity of their humor. Prince always turned them to the wall before the arrival of ladies; but who could suspect that this native wife, — Well, it was too late now.
This, then, was the wife of Axel Gunderson, a woman whose name and fame had traveled with her husband’s, hand in hand, through all the northland. At table, Malemute Kid baited her with the assurance of an old friend, and Prince shook off the shyness of first acquaintance and joined in. But she held her own in the unequal contest, while her husband, slower in wit, ventured naught but applause. And he was very proud of her; his every look and action revealed the magnitude of the place she occupied in his life. He of the Otter Skins ate in silence, forgotten in the merry battle; and long ere the others were done he pushed back from the table and went out among the dogs. Yet all too soon his fellow travelers drew on their mittens and parkas, and followed him.
There had been no snow for many days, and the sleds slipped along the hard-packed Yukon trail as easily as if it had been glare ice. Ulysses led the first sled; with the second came Prince and Axel Gunderson’s wife; while Malemute Kid and the yellow-haired giant brought up the third.
“It’s only a ‘hunch,’ Kid,” he said; “but I think it’s straight. He’s never been there, but he tells a good story, and shows a map I heard of when I was in the Kootenay country, years ago. I’d like to have you go along; but he’s a strange one, and swore point-blank to throw it up if any one was brought in. But when I come back you’ll get first tip, and I’ll stake you next to me, and give you a half share in the town site besides.”
“No! no!” he cried, as the other strove to interrupt. “I’m running this, and before I’m done it’ll need two heads. If it’s all right, why it’ll be a second Cripple Creek, man; do you hear? — a second Cripple Creek! It’s quartz, you know, not placer; and if we work it right we’ll corral the whole thing, — millions upon millions. I’ve heard of the place before, and so have you. We’ll build a town — thousands of workmen — good waterways — steamship lines — big carrying trade — light-draught steamers for head-reaches — survey a railroad, perhaps — sawmills — electric-light plant — do our own banking — commercial company — syndicate — Say! just you hold your hush till I get back, and then we’ll see!”
The sleds came to a halt where the trail crossed the mouth of Stuart River. An unbroken sea of frost, its wide expanse stretched away into the unknown east. The snowshoes were withdrawn from the lashings of the sleds. Axel Gunderson shook hands and stepped to the fore, his great webbed shoes sinking a fair half yard into the feathery surface and packing the snow so the dogs should not wallow. His wife fell in behind the last sled, betraying long practice in the art of handling the awkward footgear. The stillness was broken with cheery farewells; the dogs whined; and He of the Otter Skins talked with his whip to a recalcitrant wheeler.
An hour later, the train had taken on the likeness of a black pencil crawling in a long, straight line across a mighty sheet of foolscap.
II.
One night, many weeks later, Malemute Kid and Prince fell to solving chess problems from the torn page of an ancient magazine. The Kid had just returned from his Bonanza properties, and was resting up preparatory to a long moose hunt. Prince too had been on creek and trail nearly all winter, and had grown hungry for a blissful week of cabin life.
“Interpose the black knight, and force the king. No, that won’t do. See, the next move” —
“Why advance the pawn two squares? Bound to take it in transit, and with the bishop out of the way” —
“But hold on! That leaves a hole, and” —
“No; it’s protected. Go ahead! You’ll see it works.”
It was very interesting. Somebody knocked at the door a second time before Malemute Kid said, “Come in.” The door swung open. Something staggered in. Prince caught one square look, and sprang to his feet. The horror in his eyes caused Malemute Kid to whirl about; and he too was startled, though he had seen bad things before. The thing tottered blindly toward them. Prince edged away till he reached the nail from which hung his Smith & Wesson.
“My God! what is it?” he whispered to Malemute Kid.
“Don’t know. Looks like a case of freezing and no grub,” replied the Kid, sliding away in the opposite direction. “Watch out! It may be mad,” he warned, coming back from closing the door.
The thing advanced to the table. The bright flame of the slush lamp caught its eye. It was amused, and gave voice to eldritch cackles which betokened mirth. Then, suddenly, he—for it was a man—swayed back, with a hitch to his skin trousers, and began to sing a chanty, such as men lift when they swing around the capstan circle and the sea snorts in their ears:—
“Yan-kee ship come down de ri-ib-er,
Pull! my bully boys! Pull!
D’yeh want to know de captain ru-nns her?
Pull! my bully boys! Pull!
Jon-a-than Jones oh South Caho-li-in-a,
Pull! my bully”—
He broke off abruptly, tottered with a wolfish snarl to the meat shelf, and before they could intercept was tearing with his teeth at a chunk of raw bacon. The struggle was fierce between him and Malemute Kid; but his mad strength left him as suddenly as it had come, and he weakly surrendered the spoil. Between them they got him upon a stool, where he sprawled with half his body across the table. A small dose of whiskey strengthened him, so that he could dip a spoon into the sugar caddy which Malemute Kid placed before him. After his appetite had been somewhat cloyed, Prince, shuddering as he did so, passed him a mug of weak beef tea.
The creature’s eyes were alight with a sombre frenzy, which blazed and waned with every mouthful. There was very little skin to the face. The face, for that matter, sunken and emaciated, bore very little likeness to human countenance. Frost after frost had bitten deeply, each depositing its stratum of scab upon the half-healed scar that went before. This dry, hard surface was of a bloody-black color, serrated by grievous cracks wherein the raw red flesh peeped forth. His skin garments were dirty and in tatters, and the fur of one side was singed and burned away, showing where he had lain upon his fire.
Malemute Kid pointed to where the sun-tanned hide had been cut away, strip by strip,—the grim signature of famine.
“Who—are—you?” slowly and distinctly enunciated the Kid.
The man paid no heed.
“Where do you come from?”
“Yan-kee ship come down de ri-ib-er,” was the quavering response.
“Don’t doubt the beggar came down the river,” the Kid said, shaking him in an endeavor to start a more lucid flow of talk.
But the man shrieked at the contact, clapping a hand to his side in evident pain. He rose slowly to his feet, half leaning on the table.
“She laughed at me—so—with the hate in her eye; and she—would—not—come.”
His voice died away, and he was sinking back, when Malemute Kid gripped him by the wrist and shouted, “Who? Who would not come?”
“She, Unga. She laughed, and struck at me, so, and so. And then”—
“Yes?”
“And then”—
“And then what?”
“And then he lay very still, in the snow, a long time. He is—still in—the snow.”
The two men looked at each other helplessly.
“Who is in the snow?”
“She, Unga. She looked at me with the hate in her eye, and then”—
“Yes, yes.”
“And then she took the knife, so; and once, twice—she was weak. I traveled very slow. And there is much gold in that place, very much gold.”
“Where is Unga?” For all Malemute Kid knew, she might be dying a mile away. He shook the man savagely, repeating again and again, “Where is Unga?”
“She—is— in—the—snow.”
“Go on!” The Kid was pressing his wrist cruelly.
“So—I—would—be—in—the—snow—but—I—had—a—debt—to—pay. It—was—heavy—I—had—a—debt—to—pay—a—debt—to—pay—I— had”— The faltering monosyllables ceased, as he fumbled in his pouch and drew forth a buckskin sack. “A—debt—to—pay—five—pounds—of—gold—grub—stake—Mal—e—mute—Kid—I”— The exhausted head dropped upon the table; nor could Malemute Kid rouse it again.
“It’s Ulysses,” he said quietly, tossing the bag of dust on the table. “Guess it’s all day with Axel Gunderson and the woman. Come on, let’s get him between the blankets. He’s Indian: he’ll pull through, and tell a tale besides.”
As they cut his garments from him, near his right breast could be seen two unhealed, hard-lipped knife thrusts.
III.
“I will talk of the things which were, in my own way; but you will understand. I will begin at the beginning, and tell of myself and the woman, and, after that, of the man.”
He of the Otter Skins drew over to the stove as do men who have been deprived of fire and are afraid the Promethean gift may vanish at any moment. Malemute Kid pricked up the slush lamp, and placed it so its light might fall upon the face of the narrator. Prince slid his body over the edge of the bunk and joined them.
“I am Naass, a chief, and the son of a chief, born between a sunset and a rising, on the dark seas, in my father’s oomiak. All of a night the men toiled at the paddles, and the women cast out the waves which threw in upon us, and we fought with the storm. The salt spray froze upon my mother’s breast till her breath passed with the passing of the tide. But I,—I raised my voice with the wind and the storm, and lived.
“We dwelt in Akatan”—
“Where?” asked Malemute Kid.
“Akatan, which is in the Aleutians; Akatan, beyond Chignik, beyond Kardalak, beyond Unimak. As I say, we dwelt in Akatan, which lies in the midst of the sea on the edge of the world. We farmed the salt seas for the fish, the seal, and the otter; and our homes shouldered about one another on the rocky strip between the rim of the forest and the yellow beach where our kayaks lay. We were not many, and the world was very small. There were strange lands to the east,—islands like Akatan; so we thought all the world was islands, and did not mind.
“I was different from my people. In the sands of the beach were the crooked timbers and wave-warped planks of a boat such as my people never built; and I remember on the point of the island which overlooked the ocean three ways there stood a pine tree which never grew there, smooth and straight and tall. It is said the two men came to that spot, turn about, through many days, and watched with the passing of the light. These two men came from out of the sea in the boat which lay in pieces on the beach. And they were white, like you, and weak as the little children when the seal have gone away and the hunters come home empty. I know of these things from the old men and the old women, who got them from their fathers and mothers before them. These strange white men did not take kindly to our ways at first, but they grew strong, what of the fish and the oil, and fierce. And they built them each his own house, and took the pick of our women, and in time children came. Thus he was born who was to become the father of my father’s father.
“As I said, I was different from my people, for I carried the strong, strange blood of this white man who came out of the sea. It is said we had other laws in the days before these men; but they were fierce and quarrelsome, and fought with our men till there were no more left who dared to fight. Then they made themselves chiefs, and took away our old laws and gave us new ones, insomuch that the man was the son of his father, and not his mother, as our way had been. They also ruled that the son, firstborn, should have all things which were his father’s before him, and that the brothers and sisters should shift for themselves. And they gave us other laws. They showed us new ways in the catching of fish and the killing of bear which were thick in the woods; and they taught us to lay by bigger stores for the time of famine. And these things were good.
“But when they had become chiefs, and there were no more men to face their anger, they fought, these strange white men, each with the other. And the one whose blood I carry drove his seal spear the length of an arm through the other’s body. Their children took up the fight, and their children’s children; and there was great hatred between them, and black doings, even to my time, so that in each family but one lived to pass down the blood of them that went before. Of my blood I was alone; of the other man’s there was but a girl, Unga, who lived with her mother. Her father and my father did not come back from the fishing one night; but afterward they washed up to the beach on the big tides, and they held very close to each other.
“The people wondered, because of the hatred between the houses, and the old men shook their heads and said the fight would go on when children were born to her and children to me. They told me this as a boy, till I came to believe, and to look upon Unga as a foe, who was to be the mother of children which were to fight with mine. I thought of these things day by day, and when I grew to a stripling I came to ask why this should be so. And they answered, ‘We do not know, but that in such way your fathers did.’ And I marveled that those which were to come should fight the battles of those that were gone, and in it I could see no right. But the people said it must be, and I was only a stripling.
“And they said I must hurry, that my blood might be the older and grow strong before hers. This was easy, for I was head man, and the people looked up to me because of the deeds and the laws of my fathers, and the wealth which was mine. Any maiden would come to me, but I found none to my liking. And the old men and the mothers of maidens told me to hurry, for even then were the hunters bidding high to the mother of Unga; and should her children grow strong before mine, mine would surely die.
“Nor did I find a maiden till one night coming back from the fishing. The sunlight was lying, so, low and full in the eyes, the wind free, and the kayaks racing with the white seas. Of a sudden the kayak of Unga came driving past me, and she looked upon me, so, with her black hair flying like a cloud of night and the spray wet on her cheek. As I say, the sunlight was full in the eyes, and I was a stripling; but somehow it was all clear, and I knew it to be the call of kind to kind. As she whipped ahead she looked back within the space of two strokes,—looked as only the woman Unga could look,—and again I knew it as the call of kind. The people shouted as we ripped past the lazy oomiaks and left them far behind. But she was quick at the paddle, and my heart was like the belly of a sail, and I did not gain. The wind freshened, the sea whitened, and, leaping like the seals on the windward breech, we roared down the golden pathway of the sun.”
Naass was crouched half out of his stool, in the attitude of one driving a paddle, as be ran the race anew. Somewhere across the stove he beheld the tossing kayak and the flying hair of Unga. The voice of the wind was in his ears, and its salt beat fresh upon his nostrils.
Sally Deng
“But she made the shore, and ran up the sand, laughing, to the house of her mother. And a great thought came to me that night,—a thought worthy of him that was chief over all the people of Akatan. So, when the moon was up, I went down to the house of her mother, and looked upon the goods of Yash-Noosh, which were piled by the door,—the goods of Yash-Noosh, a strong hunter who had it in mind to be the father of the children of Unga. Other young men had piled their goods there, and taken them away again; and each young man had made a pile greater than the one before.
“And I laughed to the moon and the stars, and went to my own house where my wealth was stored. And many trips I made, till my pile was greater by the fingers of one hand than the pile of Yash-Noosh. There were fish, dried in the sun and smoked; and forty hides of the hair seal, and half as many of the fur, and each hide was tied at the mouth and big-bellied with oil; and ten skins of bear which I killed in the woods when they came out in the spring. And there were beads and blankets and scarlet cloths, such as I got in trade from the people who lived to the east, and who got them in trade from the people who lived still beyond in time east. And I looked upon the pile of Yash-Noosh and laughed; for I was head man in Akatan, and my wealth was greater than the wealth of all my young men, and my fathers had done deeds, and given laws, and put their names for all time in the mouths of the people.
“So, when the morning came, I went down to the beach, casting out of the corner of my eye at the house of the mother of Unga. My offer yet stood untouched. And the women smiled, and said sly things one to the other. I wondered, for never had such a price been offered; and that night I added more to the pile, and put beside it a kayak of well-tanned skins which never yet had swam in the sea. But in the day it was yet there, open to the laughter of all men. The mother of Unga was crafty, and I grew angry at the shame in which I stood before my people. So that night I added till it became a great pile, and I hauled up my oomiak, which was of the value of twenty kayaks. And in the morning there was no pile.
“Then made I preparation for the wedding, and the people that lived even to the east came for the food of the feast and the potlach token. Unga was older than I by the age of four suns in the way we reckoned the years. I was only a stripling; but then I was a chief, and the son of a chief, and it did not matter.
“But a ship shoved her sails above the floor of the ocean, and grew larger with the breath of the wind. From her scuppers she ran clear water, and the men were in haste and worked hard at the pumps. On the bow stood a mighty man, watching the depth of the water and giving commands with a voice of thunder. His eyes were of the pale blue of the deep waters, and his head was maned like that of a sea lion. And his hair was yellow, like the straw of a southern harvest or the manila rope-yarns which sailormen plait.
“Of late years we had seen ships from afar, but this was the first to come to the beach of Akatan. The feast was broken, and the women and children fled to the houses, while we men strung our bows and waited with spears in hand. But when the ship’s forefoot smelt the beach the strange men took no notice of us, being busy with their own work. With the falling of the tide they careened the schooner and patched a great hole in her bottom. So the women crept back, and the feast went on.
“When the tide rose, the sea wanderers kedged the schooner to deep water, and then came among us. They bore presents and were friendly; so I made room for them, and out of the largeness of my heart gave them tokens such as I gave all the guests; for it was my wedding day, and I was head man in Akatan. And he with the mane of the sea lion was there, so tall and strong that one looked to see the earth shake with the fall of his feet. He looked much and straight at Unga, with his arms folded, so, and stayed till the sun went away and the stars came out. Then he went down to his ship. After that I took Unga by the hand and led her to my own house. And there was singing and great laughter, and the women said sly things, after the manner of women at such times. Bat we did not care. Then the people left us alone and went home.
“The last noise had not died away, when the chief of the sea wanderers came in by the door. And he had with him black bottles, from which we drank and made merry. You see, I was only a stripling, and had lived all my days on the edge of the world. So my blood became as fire, and my heart as light as the froth that flies from the surf to the cliff. Unga sat silent among the skins in the corner, her eyes wide, for she seemed to fear. And he with the mane of the sea lion looked upon her straight and long. Then his men came in with bundles of goods, and he piled before me wealth such as was not in all Akatan. There were guns, both large and small, and powder and shot and shell, and bright axes and knives of steel, and cunning tools, and strange things the like of which I had never seen. When he showed me by sign that it was all mine, I thought him a great man to be so free; but he showed me also that Unga was to go away with him in his ship. Do you understand?—that Unga was to go away with him in his ship. The blood of my fathers flamed hot on the sudden, and I made to drive him through with my spear. But the spirit of the bottles had stolen the life from my arm, and he took me by the neck, so, and knocked my head against the wall of the house. And I was made weak like a newborn child, and my legs would no more stand under me. Unga screamed, and she laid hold of the things of the house with her hands, till they fell all about us as he dragged her to the door. Then he took her in his great arms, and when she tore at his yellow hair laughed with a sound like that of the big bull seal in the rut.
“I crawled to the beach and called upon my people; but they were afraid. Only Yash-Noosh was a man, and they struck him on the head with an oar, till he lay with his face in the sand and did not move. And they raised the sails to the sound of their songs, and the ship went away on the wind.
“The people said it was good, for there would be no more war of the bloods in Akatan; but I said never a word, waiting till the time of the full moon, when I put fish and oil in my kayak, and went away to the east. I saw many islands and many people, and I, who had lived on the edge, saw that the world was very large. I talked by signs; but they had not seen a schooner nor a man with the mane of a sea lion, and they pointed always to the east. And I slept in queer places, and ate odd things, and met strange faces. Many laughed, for they thought me light of head; but sometimes old men turned my face to the light and blessed me, and the eyes of the young women grew soft as they asked me of the strange ship, and Unga, and the men of the sea.
“And in this manner, through rough seas and great storms, I came to Unalaska. There were two schooners there, but neither was the one I sought. So I passed on to the east, with the world growing ever larger, and in the Island of Unamok there was no word of the ship, nor in Kadiak, nor in Atognak. And so I came one day to a rocky land, where men dug great holes in the mountain. And there was a schooner, but not my schooner, and men loaded upon it the rocks which they dug. This I thought childish, for all the world was made of rocks; but they gave me food and set me to work. When the schooner was deep in the water, the captain gave me money and told me to go; but I asked which way he went, and he pointed south. I made signs that I would go with him; and he laughed at first, but then, being short of men, took me to help work the ship. So I came to talk after their manner, and to heave on ropes, and to reef the stiff sails in sudden squalls, and to take my turn at the wheel. But it was not strange, for the blood of my fathers was the blood of the men of the sea.
“I had thought it an easy task to find him I sought, once I got among his own people; and when we raised the land one day, and passed between a gateway of the sea to a port, I looked for perhaps as many schooners as there were fingers to my hands. But the ships lay against the wharves for miles, packed like so many little fish; and when I went among them to ask for a man with the mane of a sea lion, they laughed, and answered me in the tongues of many peoples. And I found that they hailed from the uttermost parts of the earth.
“And I went into the city to look upon the face of every man. But they were like the cod when they run thick on the banks, and I could not count them. And the noise smote upon me till I could not hear, and my head was dizzy with much movement. So I went on and on, through the lands which sang in the warm sunshine; where the harvests lay rich on the plains; and where great cities were, fat with men that lived like women, with false words in their mouths and their hearts black with the lust of gold. And all the while my people of Akatan hunted and fished, and were happy in the thought that the world was small.
“But the look in the eyes of Unga coming home from the fishing was with me always, and I knew I would find her when the time was met. She walked down quiet lanes in the dusk of the evening, or led me chases across the thick fields wet with the morning dew, and there was a promise in her eyes such as only the woman Unga could give.
“So I wandered through a thousand cities. Some were gentle and gave me food, and others laughed, and still others cursed; but I kept my tongue between my teeth, and went strange ways and saw strange sights. Sometimes, I, who was a chief and the son of a chief, toiled for men,—men rough of speech and hard as iron, who wrung gold from the sweat and sorrow of their fellow men. Yet no word did I get of my quest, till I came hack to the sea like a homing seal to the rookeries. But this was at another port, in another country which lay to the north. And there I heard dim tales of the yellow-haired sea wanderer, and I learned that he was a hunter of seals, and that even then he was abroad on the ocean.
“So I shipped on a seal schooner with the lazy Siwashes, and followed his trackless trail to the north where the hunt was then warm. And we were away weary months, and spoke many of the fleet, and heard much of the wild doings of him I sought; hut never once did we raise him above the sea. We went north, even to the Pribyloffs, and killed the seals in herds on the beach, and brought their warm bodies aboard till our scuppers ran grease and blood and no man could stand upon the deck. Then were we chased by a ship of slow steam, which fired upon us with great guns. But we put on sail till the sea was over our decks and washed them clean, and lost ourselves in a fog.
“It is said, at this time, while we fled with fear at our hearts, that the yellow-haired sea wanderer put into the Pribyloffs, right to the factory, and while the part of his men held the servants of the company, the rest loaded ten thousand green skins from the salt-houses. I say it is said, but I believe; for in the voyages I made on the coast with never a meeting, the northern seas rang with his wildness and daring, till the three nations which have lands there sought him with their ships. And I heard of Unga, for the captains sang loud in her praise, and she was always with him. She had learned the ways of his people, they said, and was happy. But I knew better,—knew that her heart harked hack to her own people by the yellow beach of Akatan.
“So, after a long time, I went back to the port which is by a gateway of the sea, and there I learned that he had gone across the girth of the great ocean to hunt for the seal to the east of the warm land which runs south from the Russian Seas. And I, who was become a sailorman, shipped with men of his own race, and went after him in the hunt of the seal. And there were few ships off that new land; but we hung on the flank of the seal pack and harried it north through all the spring of the year. And when the cows were heavy with pup and crossed the Russian line, our men grumbled and were afraid. For there was much fog, and every day men were lost in the boats. They would not work, so the captain turned the ship back toward the way it came. But I knew the yellow-haired sea wanderer was unafraid, and would hang by the pack, even to the Russian Isles, where few men go. So I took a boat, in the black of night, when the lookout dozed on the fok’slehead, and went alone to the warm, long hand. And I journeyed south to meet the men by Yeddo Bay, who are wild and unafraid. And the Yoshiwara girls were small, and bright like steel, and good to look upon; but I could not stop, for I knew that Unga rolled on the tossing floor by the rookeries of the north.
“The men by Yeddo Bay had met from the ends of the earth, and had neither gods nor homes, sailing under the flag of the Japanese. And with them I went to the rich beaches of Copper Island, where our salt-piles became high with skins. And in that silent sea we saw no man till we were ready to come away. Then, one day, the fog lifted on the edge of a heavy wind, and there jammed down upon us a schooner, with close in her wake the cloudy funnels of a Russian man-of-war. We fled away on the beam of the wind, with the schooner jamming still closer and plunging ahead three feet to our two. And upon her poop was the man with the mane of the sea lion, pressing the rails under with the canvas and laughing in his strength of life. And Unga was there,—I knew her on the moment,—but he sent her below when the cannons began to talk across the sea. As I say, with three feet to our two, till we saw the rudder lift green at every jump,—and I swinging on to the wheel and cursing, with my back to the Russian shot. For we knew he had it in mind to run before us, that he might get away while we were caught. And they knocked our masts out of us till we dragged into the wind like a wounded gull; but he went on over the edge of the skyline,—he and Unga.
“What could we? The fresh hides spoke for themselves. So they took us to a Russian port, and after that to a lone country, where they set us to work in the mines to dig salt. And some died, and—and some did not die.”
Naass swept the blanket from his shoulders, disclosing the gnarled and twisted flesh, marked with the unmistakable striations of the knout. Prince hastily covered him, for it was not nice to look upon.
“We were there a weary time; and sometimes men got away to the south, but they always came back. So, when we who hailed from Yeddo Bay rose in the night and took the guns from the guards, we went to the north. And the land was very large, with plains, soggy with water, and great forests. And the cold came, with much snow on the ground, and no man knew the way. Weary months we journeyed through the endless forest,—I do not remember, now, for there was little food and often we lay down to die. But at last we came to the cold sea, and but three were left to look upon it. One had shipped from Yeddo as captain, and he knew in his head the lay of the great lands, and of the place where men may cross from one to the other on the ice. And he led us,—I do not know, it was so long,—till there were but two. When we came to that place we found five of the strange people which live in that country, and they had dogs and skins, and we were very poor. We fought in the snow till they died, and the captain died, and the dogs and skins were mine. Then I crossed on the ice, which was broken, and once I drifted till a gale from the west put me upon the shore. And after that, Golovin Bay, Pastilik, and the priest. Then south, south, to the warm sunlands where first I wandered.
“But the sea was no longer fruitful, and those who went upon it after the seal went to little profit and great risk. The fleets scattered, and the captains and the men had no word of those I sought. So I turned away from the ocean which never rests, and went among the lands, where the trees, the houses, and the mountains sit always in one place and do not move. I journeyed far, and came to learn many things, even to the way of reading and writing from books. It was well I should do this, for it came upon me that Unga must know these things, and that some day, when the time was met—we—you understand, when the time was met.
“So I drifted, like those little fish which raise a sail to the wind, but cannot steer. But my eyes and my ears were open always, and I went among men who traveled much, for I knew they had but to see those I sought, to remember. At last there came a man, fresh from time mountains, with pieces of rock in which the free gold stood to the size of peas, and he had heard, he had met, he knew them. They were rich, he said, and lived in the place where they drew the gold from the ground.
“It was in a wild country, and very far away; but in time I came to the camp, hidden between the mountains, where men worked night and day, out of the sight of the sun. Yet the time was not come. I listened to the talk of the people. He had gone away,—they had gone away,—to England, it was said, in the matter of bringing men with much money together to form companies. I saw the house they had lived in; more like a palace, such as one sees in the old countries. In the nighttime I crept in through a window that I might see in what manner he treated her. I went from room to room, and in such way thought kings and queens must live, it was all so very good. And they all said he treated her like a queen, and many marveled as to what breed of woman she was; for there was other blood in her veins, and she was different from the women of Akatan, and no one knew her for what she was. Ay, she was a queen; but I was a chief, and the son of a chief, and I had paid for her an untold price of skin and boat and bead.
“But why so many words? I was a sailorman, and knew the way of the ships on the seas. I followed to England, and then to other countries. Sometimes I heard of them by word of mouth, sometimes I read of them in the papers; yet never once could I come by them, for they had much money, and traveled fast, while I was a poor man. Then came trouble upon them, and their wealth slipped away, one day, like a curl of smoke. The papers were full of it at the time; but after that nothing was said, and I knew they had gone back where more gold could be got from the ground.
“They had dropped out of the world, being now poor; and so I wandered from camp to camp, even north to the Kootenay Country, where I picked up the cold scent. They had come and gone, some said this way, and some that, and still others that they had gone to the country of the Yukon. And I went this way, and I went that, ever journeying from place to place, till it seemed I must grow weary of the world which was so large. But in the Kootenay I traveled a bad trail, and a long trail, with a ‘breed’ of the Northwest, who saw fit to die when the famine pinched. He had been to the Yukon by an unknown way over the mountains, and when he knew his time was near gave me the map and the secret of a place where lie swore by his gods there was much gold.
“After that all the world began to flock into the north. I was a poor man; I sold myself to be a driver of dogs. The rest you know. I met him and her in Dawson. She did not know me, for I was only a stripling, and her life had been large, so she had no time to remember the one who had paid for her an untold price.
“So? You bought me from my term of service. I went back to bring things about in my own way; for I had waited long, and now that I had my hand upon him was in no hurry. As I say, I had it in mind to do my own way; for I read back in my life, through all I had seen and suffered, and remembered the cold and hunger of the endless forest by the Russian Seas. As you know, I led him into the east,—him and Unga,—into the east where many have gone and few returned. I led them to the spot where the bones and the curses of men lie with the gold which they may not have.
Sally Deng
“The way was long and the trail unpacked. Our dogs were many and ate much; nor could our sleds carry till the break of spring. We must come back before the river ran free. So here and there we cached grub, that our sleds might be lightened and there be no chance of famine on the back trip. At the McQuestion there were three men, and near them we built a cache, as also did we at the Mayo, where was a hunting-camp of a dozen Pellys which had crossed the divide from the south. After that, as we went on into the east, we saw no men; only the sleeping river, the moveless forest, and the White Silence of the North. As I say, the way was long and the trail unpacked. Sometimes, in a day’s toil, we made no more than eight miles, or ten, and at night we slept like dead men. And never once did they dream that I was Naass, head man of Akatan, the righter of wrongs.
“We now made smaller caches, and in the nighttime it was a small matter to go back on the trail we had broken, and change them in such way that one might deem the wolverines the thieves. Again, there be places where there is a fall to the river, and the water is unruly, and the ice makes above and is eaten away beneath. In such a spot the sled I drove broke through, and the dogs; and to him and Unga it was ill luck, but no more. And there was much grub on that sled, and the dogs the strongest. But he laughed, for he was strong of life, and gave the dogs that were left little grub till we cut them from the harnesses, one by one, and fed them to their mates. We would go home light, he said, traveling and eating from cache to cache, with neither dogs nor sleds; which was true, for our grub was very short, and the last dog died in the traces the night we came to the gold and the bones and the curses of men.
“To reach that place,—and the map spoke true,—in the heart of the great mountains, we cut ice steps against the wall of a divide. One looked for a valley beyond, but there was no valley; the snow spread away, level as the great harvest plains, and here and there about us mighty mountains shoved their white heads among the stars. And midway on that strange plain which should have been a valley, the earth and the snow fell away, straight down toward the heart of the world. Had we not been sailormen our heads would have swung round with the sight; but we stood on the dizzy edge that we might see a way to get down. And on one side, and one side only, the wall had fallen away till it was like the slope of the decks in a topsail breeze. I do not know why this thing should be so, but it was so. ‘It is the mouth of hell,’ he said; ‘let us go down.’ And we went down.
“And on the bottom there was a cabin, built by some man, of logs which he had cast down from above. It was a very old cabin; for men had died there alone at different times, and on pieces of birch bark which were there we read their last words and their curses. One had died of scurvy; another’s partner had robbed him of his last grub and powder and stolen away; a third had been mauled by a bald-face grizzly; a fourth had hunted for game and starved,—and so it went, and they had been loath to leave the gold, and had died by the side of it in one way or another. And the worthless gold they had gathered yellowed the floor of the cabin like in a dream.
“But his soul was steady, and his head clear, this man I hind led thus far. ‘We have nothing to eat,’ he said, ‘and we will only look upon this gold, and see whence it comes and how much there be. Then we will go away quick, before it gets into our eyes and steals away our judgment. And in this way we may return in the end, with more grub, and possess it all.’ So we looked upon the great vein, which cut the wall of the pit as a true vein should; and we measured it, and traced it from above and below, and drove the stakes of the claims and blazed the trees in token of our rights. Then, our knees shaking with lack of food, and a sickness in our bellies, and our hearts chugging close to our mouths, we climbed the mighty wall for the last time and turned our faces to the back trip.
“The last stretch we dragged Unga between us, and we fell often, but in the end we made the cache. And lo, there was no grub. It was well done, for he thought it the wolverines, and damned them and his gods in the one breath. But Unga was brave, and smiled, and put her hand in his, till I turned away that I might hold myself. ‘We will rest by the fire,’ she said, ‘till morning, and we will gather strength from our moccasins.’ So we cut the tops of our moccasins in strips, and boiled them half of the night, that we might chew them and swallow them. And in the morning we talked of our chance. The next cache was five days’ journey; we could not make it. We must find game.
“‘We will go forth and hunt,’ he said.
“‘Yes,’ said I, ‘we will go forth and hunt.’
“And he ruled that Unga stay by the fire and save her strength. And we went forth, he in quest of the moose, and I to the cache I had changed. But I ate little, so they might not see in me much strength. And in the night he fell many times as he drew into camp. And I too made to suffer great weakness, stumbling over my snowshoes as though each step might be my last. And we gathered strength from our moccasins.
“He was a great man. His soul lifted his body to the last; nor did he cry aloud, save for the sake of Unga. On the second day I followed him, that I might not miss the end. And he lay down to rest often. That night lie was near gone; but in the morning he swore weakly and went forth again. He was like a drunken man, and I looked many times for him to give up; but his was the strength of the strong, and his soul the soul of a giant, for he lifted his body through all the weary day. And he shot two ptarmigan, but would not eat them. He needed no fire; they meant life; but his thought was for Unga, and he turned toward camp. He no longer walked, but crawled on hand and knee through the snow. I came to him, and read death in his eyes. Even then it was not too late to eat of the ptarmigan. He cast away his rifle, and carried the birds in his mouth like a dog. I walked by his side, upright. And he looked at me during the moments he rested, and wondered that I was so strong. I could see it, though he no longer spoke; and when his lips moved, they moved without sound. As I say, he was a great man, and my heart spoke for softness; but I read back in my life, and remembered the cold and hunger of the endless forest by the Russian Seas. Besides, Unga was mine, and I had paid for her an untold price of skin and boat and bead.
“And in this manner we came through the white forest, with the silence heavy upon us like a damp sea mist. And the ghosts of the past were in the air and all about us; and I saw the yellow beach of Akatan, and the kayaks racing home from the fishing, and the houses on the rim of the forest. And the men who had made themselves chiefs were there, the lawgivers whose blood I bore, and whose blood I had wedded in Unga. Ay, and Yashi-Noosh walked with me, the wet sand in his hair, and his war spear, broken as he fell upon it, still in his hand. And I knew the time was met, and saw in the eyes of Unga the promise.
“As I say, we came thus through the forest, till the smell of the camp smoke was in our nostrils. And I bent above him, and tore the ptarmigan from his teeth. He turned on his side and rested, the wonder mounting in his eyes, and the hand which was under slipping slow toward the knife at his hip. But I took it from him, smiling close in his face. Even then he did not understand. So I made to drink from black bottles, and to build high upon the snow a pile of goods, and to live again the things which happened on the night of my marriage. I spoke no word, but he understood. Yet was he unafraid. There was a sneer to his lips, and cold anger, and he gathered new strength with the knowledge. It was not far, but the snow was deep, and he dragged himself very slow. Once, he lay so long, I turned him over and gazed into his eyes. And sometimes he looked forth, and sometimes death. And when I loosed him he struggled on again. In this way we came to the fire. Unga was at his side on the instant. His lips moved, without sound; then he pointed at me, that Unga might understand. And after that he lay in the snow, very still, for a long while. Even now is he there in the snow.
“I said no word till I had cooked the ptarmigan. Then I spoke to her in her own tongue, which she had not heard in many years. She straightened herself, so, and her eyes were wonder-wide, and she asked who I was, and where I had learned that speech.
“‘I am Naass,’ I said.
“‘You?’ she said. ‘You?’ And she crept close that she might look upon me.
“‘Yes,’ I answered; ‘I am Naass, head man of Akatan, the last of the blood, as you are the last of the blood.’
“And she laughed. By all the things I have seen and the deeds I have done, may I never hear such a laugh again. It put the chill to my soul, sitting there in the White Silence, alone with death and this woman who laughed.
“‘Come!’ I said, for I thought she wandered. ‘Eat of the food and let us be gone. It is a far fetch from here to Akatan.’
“But she shoved her face in his yellow mane, and laughed till it seemed the heavens must fall about our ears. I had thought she would be overjoyed at the sight of me, and eager to go back to the memory of old times; but this seemed a strange form to take.
“‘Come! I cried, taking her strong by the hand. ‘The way is long and dark. Let us hurry!’
“‘Where?’ she asked, sitting up, and ceasing from her strange mirth.
“‘To Akatan,’ I answered, intent on the light to grow on her face at the thought. But it became like his, with a sneer to the lips, and cold anger.
“‘Yes,’ she said; ‘we will go, hand in hand, to Akatan, you and I. And we will live in the dirty huts, and eat of the fish and oil, and bring forth a spawn,—a spawn to be proud of all the days of our life. We will forget the world and be happy, very happy. It is good, most good. Come! Let us hurry. Let us go back to Akatan.’
“And she ran her hand through his yellow hair, and smiled in a way which was not good. And there was no promise in her eyes.
“I sat silent, and marveled at the strangeness of woman. I went back to the night when he dragged her from me, and she screamed and tore at his hair,—at his hair which now she played with and would not leave. Then I remembered the price and the long years of waiting; and I gripped her close, and dragged her away as he had done. And she held back, even as on that night, and fought like a she-cat for its whelp. And when the fire was between us and the man, I loosed her, and she sat and listened. And I told her of all that lay between, of all that had happened me on strange seas, of all that I had done in strange lands; of my weary quest, and the hungry years, and the promise which had been mine from the first. Ay, I told all, even to what had passed that day between the man and me, and in the days yet young. And as I spoke I saw the promise grow in her eyes, full and large like the break of dawn. And I read pity there, the tenderness of woman, the love, the heart and the soul of Unga. And I was a stripling again, for the look was the look of Unga as she ran up the beach, laughing, to the home of her mother. The stern unrest was gone, and the hunger, and the weary waiting. The time was met. I felt the call of her breast, and it seemed there I must pillow my head and forget. She opened her arms to me, and I came against her. Then, sudden, the hate flamed in her eye, her hand was at my hip. And once, twice, she passed the knife.
“‘Dog!’ she sneered, as she flung me into the snow. ‘Swine!’ And then she laughed till the silence cracked, and went back to her dead.
“As I say, once she passed the knife, and twice; but she was weak with hunger, and it was not meant that I should die. Yet was I minded to stay in that place, and to close my eyes in the last long sleep with those whose lives had crossed with mine and led my feet on unknown trails. But there lay a debt upon me which would not let me rest.
“And the way was long, the cold bitter, and there was little grub. The Pellys had found no moose, and had robbed my cache. And so had the three white men; but they lay thin and dead in their cabin as I passed. After that I do not remember, till I came here, and found food and fire,—much fire.”
As he finished, he crouched closely, even jealously, over the stove. For a long while the slush-lamp shadows played tragedies upon the wall.
“But Unga!” cried Prince, the vision still strong upon him.
“Unga?” She would not eat of the ptarmigan. She lay with her arms about his neck, her face deep in his yellow hair. I drew the fire close, that she might not feel the frost; but she crept to the other side. And I built a fire there; yet it was little good, for she would not eat. And in this manner they still lie up there in the snow.”
“And you?” asked Malemute Kid.
“I do not know; but Akatan is small, and I have little wish to go back and live on the edge of the world. Yet is there small use in life. I can go to Constantine, and he will put irons upon me, and one day they will tie a piece of rope, so, and I will sleep good. Yet—no; I do not know.”
“But, Kid,” protested Prince, “this is murder!”
“Hush!” commanded Malemute Kid. “There be things greater than our wisdom, beyond our justice. The right and the wrong of this we cannot say, and it is not for us to judge.”
Naass drew yet closer to the fire. There was a great silence, and in each man’s eyes many pictures came and went.
Today The Atlantic launches “50 Unforgettable Love Stories,” a new editorial project that highlights stories of romantic love. The list includes works published across more than four centuries—from its earliest selection, Astrophil and Stella by Philip Sidney, published in 1591, to its most recent, The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, published in 2024. The list below is an effort to name the love stories—novels, of course, but also poetry, plays, and short stories—that are the most enduring.
To arrive at 50 titles, The Atlantic’s Books team asked a jury of scholars, librarians, critics, and authors across genres, as well as many colleagues, to name their favorite titles that were originally written in English. As the introduction to the list says: “We thought of our own personal touchstones, deliberated over the choices, and emerged with a group of standouts: 50 titles you won’t soon forget.”
The editors write that across centuries, “the love story, with all of its attendant joys and sorrows, was an organizing principle of life—and of literature … Today, fictional love is associated with the romance genre and its proliferating subcategories, and you’ll find examples of those books here, but we aimed to think more expansively about its literary manifestations. The love story belongs as much to Arundhati Roy as to Jane Austen; its pulse beats as strongly in the knotty poetry of Anne Carson as it does in the steamy historicals of Beverly Jenkins. It is by turns ecstatic, tragic, cerebral, enthralling, and enlightening. For so many of us, it’s a reason to live and to read.”
Marisa G. Franco is familiar with the art of secure attachment. She’s spent years studying it: that coveted quality that makes some people so trusting, so quick to accept that they are, in fact, loved. She wrote the 2022 best seller Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—And Keep—Friends. She knows how to make connections without being clingy, how to be self-sufficient without pushing people away, how to avoid taking things personally.
Well—she knows how all of that should look in theory. In reality, Franco told me, she can be sensitive. She can get hurt by someone who’s not doing anything remotely wrong. At some point, she realized that she was striving so hard to be secure that she was performing well-adjustedness for her own therapist. “There’s this way that I can lean on the very real parts of myself that feel proud and feel happy and impressive and glittery,” she said. “But there were these other parts of myself that felt ashamed or felt needy, and I would try to not talk about them.” The truth, of course, was that her therapist needed her not to be composed or even coping, but to be honest. And if she wasn’t being honest, she was arguably wasting time.
That lesson is at the core of her latest book, Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment. Nominally, Worth is about how to become more self-assured. But as soon as Franco presents that possibility, she upends it by suggesting that it may be impossible. Maybe most people are just a bunch of insecurities in a trench coat, one stiff wind away from toppling over. Perhaps, she suggests, they should accept their weak or tender spots, all of their little ways of being defensive or touchy—and settle, if anything, for “secure-ish.” This might seem like a defeatist argument for a self-help book, but it’s an apt one at a time when the literary-self-help industry is thriving. Many of Franco’s readers may already be fluent in therapy-speak, ready to chat about attachment theory, and keenly interested, as she was, in presenting themselves as mended and enlightened. She’s not convinced it’s helping.
In the past decade or so, the self-improvement industry has grown colossal. According to Gitnux, a market-research firm, U.S. self-help books earned a collective $813 million in 2023 alone. And the behemoth has sprouted new arms: With the mega reach of platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Spotify, people can consume a constant drip of life advice. One hungry customer might listen to the audio book of James Clear’s Atomic Habits on the way to work, use a meditation app on their lunch break, and scroll through some therapist-influencer posts in the evening. Then, while getting ready for bed, they could turn on The Mel Robbins Podcast—the most followed show on Apple Podcasts last year, from the author of The Let Them Theory, the best-selling book about tuning out other people’s judgments. Gitnux reported that 52 percent of the industry’s patrons were “repeat buyers”—and some analyses have found that the literary-self-help category specifically caters to a pool that’s 80 percent repeat customers. If you’re looking to publish something new in the genre, you have an enormous potential audience of people who take self-optimization very seriously.
That opportunity is also a challenge for authors like Franco. They have to set themselves apart—and maybe even help readers unlearn guidance they’ve already hoovered up. Some writers have started speaking explicitly to this task (which allows them to signal a bit of knowingness about their company in the self-improvement aisle). In his 2021 best seller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, for instance, Oliver Burkeman argues against the idea that any one trick will get you on top of your to-do list; your best hope, he says, is to accept that a human life is terribly brief, far too brief to accomplish all of your goals. In Amir Levine’s 2026 book, Secure, the Columbia University neuroscientist questions the feasibility of mining security within yourself—and instead suggests seeking out people who make you feel valued from the start.
Franco’s approach, too, is a little meta. Before she started this book, she looked around and saw a “group of people that was just trying so hard to heal,” she told me. They could resolve conflict with “I” statements, speaking about their own feelings rather than jumping to blame others. They could set boundaries. They were hoping to become the perfect partner, or break cycles of generational trauma. And yet, she said, “it just didn’t seem like it was working.” She recognized herself in their show of composure. (I pictured the “this is fine” dog grinning vacant-eyed through the flames.) So she didn’t want to give people more ways to go through the motions. She wanted to know: “What does it mean to feel secure in the marrow of your bones?”
A conventional idea of self-worth might involve embracing what Franco called “glittery” attributes: reminding yourself of your strengths, accepting compliments, spending time with people who see your best sides. But she calls on evidence that shows that, much of the time, positive feedback can backfire. Psychology studies have shown that participants with low self-esteem felt worse after receiving compliments or after repeating aloud “I’m a lovable person.” When people received praise for giving a speech, researchers observed actual spikes in their blood pressure. One explanation can be found in “self-verification theory”: the uncomfortable tension one feels between their own self-image (bad and stupid) and how others see them (not perfect, but perfectly valuable). “At the neural level,” Franco writes, “the brains of people who feel unworthy are sticky for criticism and slick for love.” (All of the screenshots of nice messages I’ve saved to my computer, I concede, haven’t fixed me yet.)
Worth, then, is about setting down all of the tools you have for demolishing your flaws—and instead looking at your insecurities plainly, asking where they come from. Franco believes they’re rooted in the past: Even if you had amazing parents and a great childhood, you might still have some formative memories of times when someone made you feel less than, whether intentionally or not. Psychologists use the phrase open memories for the ones you haven’t come to terms with. You push them away, or you fixate on them unhelpfully, or you burst into tears when you talk about them. They’re too painful to bear. They’re also associated, in some studies, with low self-esteem. Securely attached people, according to the classic theory, can describe their own traumas without getting overwhelmed by or denying feeling; their memories still sting, but they’re “closed.” But Franco is speaking to people who might be in such a rush to move forward that they haven’t effectively processed what they’ve gone through.
Thus, Franco walks the reader through some ways to gently fold those memories shut. One is the act of “memory reconsolidation”—which involves recalling a painful event but then changing it in some way, perhaps by imagining a different outcome or picturing what the present version of yourself would tell the version of you from that time. This is different from rumination, she says, which is when you revisit a memory obsessively but superficially. Instead, you really feel what a recollection brings up for you, and then you inject the memory with some new, more positive meaning.
Franco mentions a memory-reconsolidation study in which one participant, for instance, recalled how a partner had lied to her about committing a crime (which he was ultimately arrested for); she then pictured reassuring her younger self that she wasn’t at fault for believing him. A week after this exercise, participants rated their chosen memories as less upsetting and reported higher self-esteem overall. Other studies have shown that similar processes alter activity in the hippocampus, the hub of memory storage. “We become emotional archaeologists, digging out the grounds of our psyche,” Franco writes, “and then we build over them with a new psychological home.”
There’s no way around it: That kind of excavation is painful work. Franco doesn’t believe that you can heal with a sense of urgency—what she calls “dragging the dog across the street on its hind legs”—or bypass vulnerability by using therapy terms, branding your ex as a gaslighter or your parents as narcissists and moving on.
Perhaps devoting so much attention to your own wounds sounds a little navel-gazey; I myself wondered, at times, whether Franco might be preaching self-reflection to a whole lot of people who already monitor their own happiness and growth so much that it makes them miserable. But she argues that the point is ultimately to avoid that kind of endlessly self-involved intellectualizing by having an actual emotional experience. In one study, she says in Worth, the depth of a client’s emotion—how much they expressed feelings such as sorrow and fury—was the best predictor of whether therapy would raise their self-esteem. “I don’t get to change,” she said on our call, “without going through grief.”
And even grieving won’t make you perfectly secure on the other end. The goal, instead, is “integration”: welcoming the hurt and ugly parts of yourself into your self-image along with the shiny parts, and feeling that you deserve kindness anyhow. That message might be especially crucial for the self-help heads—the ones trying so hard to fix themselves that they’re re-creating all the shame that may have made them feel unworthy in the first place.
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Centuries before bookstores had shelves labeled ROMANCE and fictional hockey players locked eyes across the ice, the love story, with all of its attendant joys and sorrows, was an organizing principle of life—and of literature. The sentiment that another person might “complete” us enchanted both Plato and Jerry Maguire, and the search for that someone, along with the desire to understand why it can hurt so bad, has animated fiction from the beginning. The list below is an effort to name those love stories: novels, of course, but also poetry, plays, and short stories—that we consider to be the most enduring. We asked a jury of scholars, librarians, critics, and authors across genres, as well as many colleagues, to name their favorite titles that were originally written in English. We thought of our own personal touchstones, deliberated over the choices, and emerged with a group of standouts: 50 titles you won’t soon forget.
English is not reputed to be the most romantic language, but it is the most widely spoken. (Focusing on these particular love stories was also a practical way to narrow things down.) Since the end of the Renaissance, when modern English began to take shape, poets and playwrights wrote tales of wooing and marriage, infatuation and betrayal. Their words gave rise to some of our language’s most powerful aphorisms, idioms, and, yes, clichés—think of hearts on sleeves and matches made in heaven. Today, fictional love is associated with the romance genre and its proliferating subcategories, and you’ll find examples of those books here, but we aimed to think more expansively about its literary manifestations. The love story belongs as much to Arundhati Roy as to Jane Austen; its pulse beats as strongly in the knotty poetry of Anne Carson as it does in the steamy historicals of Beverly Jenkins. It is by turns ecstatic, tragic, cerebral, enthralling, and enlightening. For so many of us, it’s a reason to live and to read.
Explore the unforgettable love stories
Astrophil and Stella
by Philip Sidney
1591
Well before the novel existed to plot out the course of infatuation and heartbreak, grand sequences of sonnets chronicled the rise and fall of great loves. One of the most radical of these was Sidney’s, which follows Astrophil (“star lover” in Greek) and his beloved, the celestial Stella, across 108 sonnets and a handful of songs. To woo her, Astrophil displays his wit via the wordplay that poets have long used to capture the messy states of the heart—and show off the dexterity of the writer. But Sidney’s sequence stands out because of his awareness that the formal devices peppered across his poems are “stol’n goods.” And he wrote a truly compelling story, one that keeps us in suspense until the middle of the series, when Astrophil’s eyes meet Stella’s. Although his paradoxical blandishments may not win him his star in the end, they are a triumph in their own right, seducing and amusing us in a portrait of love-tossed misery.
Shakespeare’s tragedy about young lovers from rival families remains, four centuries later, one of the most adapted plays in the English language. In just the past 30 years, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jet Li, Aaliyah, and Angelina Jolie have all played versions of Romeo or Juliet. There’s been a zombie version and several Bollywood ones. The play was even, if you’ll believe it, reinterpreted with gnomes. (His name becomes Gnomeo, obviously.) The story is inescapable but persists, I think, because of its tantalizing core premise: that you could find a love so passionate, so all-consuming, that you’d rather die than be without it.
Behn, best known for her plays and her later novel Oroonoko,was the rare woman to make a living as a writer in the 17th century. This epistolary saga endures, in part, because of its salaciousness. The passion between the aptly named Philander and Silvia, his wife’s sister, is absolutely cursed; their most significant shared interest appears to be bringing upheaval and misery into the lives of everyone they meet. Although the central affair may be unenviable, the book is notable for the sheer range of romantic literary tropes that it helped enshrine—including the wayward lover who only wants what he can’t have, the once-pure soul corrupted by sexual liberty, and the fake relationship that gives rise to real feelings. Above all, it proves that swooning language, nonstop drama, and a tinge of the illicit can make a romance an addictive read, even (and sometimes especially) when its characters are offputting.
Burney’s novel is a romance in every sense of the word. Yes, it’s a book about the golden-hearted young woman of the title, Evelina, falling in love with a wealthy, dashing young man—a preview of the marriage plots of Jane Austen, who counted Burney as one of her favorite authors. But it’s also a romantic novel in the older literary sense, the kind of mildly fantastical tale in which an impoverished Scottish poet considers turning to a life of crime, only to wed an heiress once it becomes apparent that she is not, as was previously suspected, his half sister. Evelina’s blissfully unrealistic quest for both love and personal recognition—spoiler: she turns out to be an heiress too—is both sharply observant and a lark. It deserves more love from a literary culture that adores Austen but often ignores her predecessors.
Austen is the empress of romance, and her work sets the bar for all of the love stories patterned after hers. Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma each could rightfully claim a spot on this list. But Persuasion is Austen’s most mature and realistic novel. It tells the story of a single, not-so-young woman who is reunited after many years with the man she rejected at 19. Its prose is calmer and less intent on cleverness than Austen’s other works, and it is suffused with the disappointments and hardships that accompany any life lived past the age of 20. So the happy ending, when it inevitably comes—this is still a classic romance, after all—feels especially well-earned.
The full title of this coming-of-age novel is Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. That deliberate move emphasizes the authority of the titular heroine—a governess who is poor, orphaned, and unbeautiful—to narrate the story of her life. So it is impossible to discuss the soul-cracking love story between Jane and her employer, Edward Rochester of Thornfield Hall, without paying heed to Jane’s assertion of control when she learns, to her horror, that Rochester is already married to a Creole woman named Bertha Mason. Bertha is treated cruelly by both Rochester and the author, and Jane ultimately profits from her suffering. Whether one blames Jane is another topic. But this famous book’s famous line toward the end—“Reader, I married him”—states her case: Jane’s allegiance is not the passive sort. She owns her decision.
Few, if any, books on this list should be read as a how-to guide for the romantically inclined. That said, you really, really, really shouldn’t model your affairs on the doomed relationship that propels Brontë’s only novel. Wuthering Heights conjures a vision of love as despair and longing, not a living thing to be nurtured but a cold, hard object clutched fervently to your chest. When Victorian-era social mores keep the childhood sweethearts Cathy and Heathcliff apart, Heathcliff decides that nobody in their vicinity should ever be happy, and drafts a revenge plot to upend an already-miserable family. Also, everyone is constantly dying of consumption or trying to kill a dog. Nonetheless, this is the stuff of messy myth, the sort of lifelong obsession that makes all other entanglements seem paltry and cheap. Naturally, the pair is reunited only in death, as their specters meet again on the windswept moorlands.
With the rise of industry in mid-19th-century England came the industrial novel, an improbably romantic genre. In Gaskell’s version, a rocky courtship mirrors the country’s labor wars. The cultured, genteel Margaret Hale is forced to leave a village in the agrarian south for a squalid city in the industrial north (a thinly disguised Manchester), where she gets caught up in the lives of desperately poor workers. Meanwhile, she is befriended by a Byronic, self-made cotton-mill owner, John Thornton. The novel tracks her sentimental education—and his—as they overcome class prejudices and hotly debate Thornton’s obligations to his employees. A strike and near riot lead to a shocking, at least by the standards of the day, public display of affection; the greater the threat of violence becomes, the more the book swoons. Imagine Pride and Prejudice updated for a more political age, and you’ll get a sense of the pleasures of North and South.
Eliot wrote novels about marriages both good and bad, usually bad. In Middlemarch, these unions function as worlds unto themselves—created by, but larger than, the couples inside of them—and the bad ones crush the soul. Two of this novel’s several protagonists, Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, suffer from romantic illusions, and each chooses an utterly unsuitable partner: The idealistic Dorothea thinks she’s marrying a great scholar, but he turns out to be spectacularly mediocre, so tyrannical and small-minded that his last name, Casaubon, has become shorthand for “pettifogging pedant.” Lydgate has a brilliant future as a doctor but falls for a beautiful, vain woman with expensive social aspirations. One of these two will be trapped for life, and the other freed only by an act of God. Eliot is willing to give characters a chance at love, though, and the horribleness of the bad marriages makes the good ones feel like a major spiritual achievement.
Should The Portrait of a Lady be considered one of James’s ghost stories? The characters are alive but their choices linger like a haunting, and when I think of this classic, I feel as though I’m encountering a phantom. The story of Isabel Archer, a young woman who wants to believe that her life is her own to determine, is classic James, down to its settings and psychological contradictions. The friends Isabel encounters are taken with who she is and ache to see her get what she wants, just as the reader will; the men and women who want to use her for their own needs are villains unlike any other—their machinations are what haunt me. This is all to say it’s the most romantic book I’ve ever read, one that understands how dangerous it is to be a woman who believes in love’s powers—and yet how necessary it is to retain that belief, no matter the fears that hang over us.
When readers meet Anne Shirley, she’s an irresistible mess of contradictions: an 11-year-old tomboy who’s vain about her looks, an occasional liar who is also capable of searching honesty. These qualities make her unforgettable to those around her, not least to Gilbert Blythe, the boy in class who teases her, competes with her, befriends her, and ultimately becomes her lifelong love. The joy of the Anne of Green Gables series lies in the specific delights of watching Anne grow up—and in how affectionately it widens its lens to show us Gilbert growing up next to her. Anne of the Island, the third book, is where this happens in earnest, as the two head to college and wrestle with what they want from the wider world. As almost-adults, Anne and Gilbert look for love with other people, get jobs as teachers, and learn about sacrifice and (on one particular night) the possibility of loss. The twists and turns are classic, but you’ll thrill at seeing both of them wend their way toward the other, because you know how lively a partnership theirs will be: These two friends, who know each other better than anyone else, are idiosyncratic as individuals and will be no less so as a couple.
Wharton’s magnum opus is a voyeur’s novel, written for those who love to gawk, by a woman who invited her readers to gape at New York’s “small and slippery pyramid” of Gilded Age high society. Among its velvet-caped, silver-spooned denizens, someone is always, always watching. The Age of Innocence is an agonizing tale of the rigors of unconsummated love. The dutiful Newland Archer is blissfully engaged to the demure May Welland until he spies her cousin, Ellen Olenska—who has just returned from a broken, ruinous marriage—at the opera. Ellen is everything Newland craves: cultured, candid, independent. She’s simultaneously drawn to him and hobbled by guilt. But being together would mean betraying May. So how will they exist—and coexist—in stifling, closely surveilled Manhattan? The novel’s last image, a gaze at a closing window, is as heartbreaking as any of literature’s most dramatic deaths.
I know, I know: The Great Gatsby is a love story in the way that Jaws is a nature documentary. But the romance between Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan—slow-burning, explosive, doomed—endures precisely because it is so richly unromantic. This affair, as it picks up speed, threatens everyone in its path. Gatsby pines for Daisy and waits for Daisy and reinvents himself for Daisy. He builds, and then takes residence in, a Daisy-centric universe. In another novel, that kind of devotion would be something to be celebrated—desire as a physical force, passion as the ultimate plot device. In Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, though, passion is also an omen; like Chekhov’s gun, or George Wilson’s, it is always lying in wait. But the novel, having stripped romance of its giddiness, offers something far more compelling in return: ambivalence. Is this devotion? Is it delusion? Or is it one more party, glittering and wild, that will have to come to an end?
When a rope bridge in Peru collapses in July 1714, killing five people, the Franciscan friar Brother Juniper wants to know: Why did these five souls perish—was it an accident or divine intention? This simple question propels Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel into a brilliant exploration of attachment and its flawed, human expressions—the suffocating love of the Marquesa for her daughter; the self-sacrificing love of young Pepita for the abbess who raised her; the codependent love between the twin brothers Esteban and Manuel, which leaves no room for romance; and the manipulative love of Uncle Pio for the great actor La Perichole. Almost 100 years after The Bridge of San Luis Rey was first published, its last sentence still feels like a surprise ending, somehow striking a hopeful note: “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
Molly Roden Winter
Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
1937
Janie Crawford is a freethinking Black woman who yearns for a steady love, but her quest for it ultimately leads her toward her own highest self. Marriage, in this novel, can be disfiguring, and it forces women to shrink parts of themselves. Before she’s 40, Janie has been through two painful relationships with men who harm her, belittle her, and control her. But even when she’s curled in on herself, Hurston’s microscopic gaze manages to show us the fine grooves of Janie’s heart. Finally, approaching middle age, she meets and marries a younger man named Tea Cake; her feelings for him are so intense that she experiences a “self-crushing love.” But the line that shook me is as follows: “So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.” She genuinely adores Tea Cake, but their marriage, too, will end—and, wisely, she’ll have saved an ounce more of that love for herself.
Arabella is the blueprint for modern Regency romances—the whole etiquette-driven Bridgerton-esque subgenre. The title character is the eldest daughter of a poor country vicar, and she must marry well for the sake of her younger siblings. Mr. Beaumaris is the richest, most eligible local bachelor—and he’s committed to staying single and away from scheming women. To save her pride, Arabella tells Mr. Beaumaris a string of lies. Amused and intrigued, he stays in her endearing orbit, content to watch her navigate the ridiculous situations these lies get her into, until they both fall madly for each other. Hilarious and deeply romantic, the 1949 novel offers historical detail and sharp commentary on the era’s social conventions that make it feel as if Heyer was writing alongside Jane Austen in 1817.
Danica Nava
The End of the Affair
by Graham Greene
1951
The End of the Affair is the fourth and final of Greene’s “Catholic novels.” The book’s autofictional protagonist, Maurice Bendrix, has a passionate affair with the married Sarah Miles. Their union is plagued by his jealousy; after Bendrix’s London apartment is bombed during World War II, Sarah ends things abruptly. A private investigator reveals that Sarah had promised God that she would quit the affair if Bendrix survived. More drama ensues, but the book’s real accomplishment is its close examination of the nature of ardor. I first read it at 19, and although I am not a Catholic, I was raised by one, and I inherited something of his tormented relationship to devotion. The question the book left me with was one that I had wondered before, if cautiously: What if all love derives, ultimately, from the divine?
When Highsmith’s 1952 novel opens, the 19-year-old Therese Belivet is working the Christmas rush at a Manhattan department store. With its crowded workers’ canteen and lonely employees, the store is likened to a prison. One day, a blond woman with a fur coat and gray eyes approaches Therese’s counter, and Highsmith leaves the administered world of the department store for the open road. Compared with Todd Haynes’s ravishing 2015 film adaptation, Carol, the novel is spikier, more political, and attentive to the repression and surveillance of Cold War America. Highsmith’s eye for quotidian detail gives the writing a lived-in quality: When, two-thirds of the way through, the two women share their first kiss, Therese notices the lock of hair toppling over Carol’s scarf, the scratch on the toe of her moccasin. Their devotion is ordinary, anchored in everyday things—but it is this kind of love, the book suggests, that might set us free.
Giovanni’s Room is a novel of terrible romantic abjection. David, an idle American in Paris, frightened and ashamed of his attraction to men, meets Giovanni, an Italian who has fled his country and works at a gay bar. Their love is, from the beginning, doomed by David’s unremitting self-hatred—his imprisonment in his own “dirty body” and his fear of its uncontrollable, irresistible longings. Desire is always shadowed by disgust, which casts a tragic pall over these two lovers in the city of lights.
In 1913, Forster had a life-changing experience: A man touched his “backside—gently and just above the buttocks,” as he described it later. Forster was 34 years old and already established as one of England’s best novelists, but he had never come to terms with his homosexuality, much less written about it. Now he set to work on a love story about two men. What made Maurice revolutionary was Forster’s insistence that Maurice Hall, the repressed, middle-class protagonist, not meet with a tragic ending—the usual fate of gay characters in fiction at the time. Instead, he and Alec Scudder, a working-class gamekeeper, fall in love and, as Alec declares, decide that they “shan’t be parted no more, and that’s finished.” Even after completing the novel, Forster felt it was too radical to publish. When it finally appeared in 1971, after his death, Maurice already seemed a little old-fashioned to critics. But even today, there is great power in the novel’s undefended emotion—the tremulous happiness of a wish fulfilled.
This is the godmother of all bodice rippers. As might be expected of a ’70s novel set in antebellum Charleston, South Carolina, the modern reader may want a heads up: It includes sexual assault, slavery, and kidnapping—but contemporary objections can’t override its compelling central pairing. Heather Simmons, an innocent British orphan, and Brandon Birmingham, a stubborn American ship captain, overcome their harrowing first encounter and cultural differences to give themselves permission to love. Heather learns to take control of her life, and Brandon promises to spend the rest of his making up for any pain she’s suffered. Explicit sex scenes, rare in books of the time, reveal the intimacy usually elided by “fade to black” paragraphs, and their influence can still be found today in heaps of romantic subgenres. Woodiwiss’s detailed, lush prose inspires both wistful admiration and, however begrudging, real respect.
Nichole Perkins
Corregidora
by Gayl Jones
1975
Has Ursa Corregidora ever really been loved? She was a deeply wanted daughter, yes—in part so she could fill the role of a Corregidora woman. From a young age, she has known that her job is to remember the violence done to their family during slavery and to “make generations” that will pass down that memory. Her husband, Mutt, courted her, praised her, and bedded her—then he threw her down the stairs, leading to an emergency hysterectomy that left her childless. Men and women constantly paw at her, demanding affection, fidelity, and sex. So Ursa has a hard shell, and she knows how to hate. She’s scared, though, that she doesn’t know what love looks like. In the course of this short, bleak, transportive book, no one will sweep her off her feet to show her. But she’ll be able to recognize what it’s not: “You can’t kiss where you scratched anymore,” she resolves. “You don’t treat love that way.”
After 45 years, I can still recite this novel’s intense opening lines. I wasn’t 17, as the narrator is—I read the novel during my junior year of college—but I wanted to be, like him, in full obedience to my heart’s most urgent commands. This is the kind of book that, if you allow it, will seize you from the first and never let you go, then consume your imagination long after you finish. Endless Love is an unashamed dive into the monomania of romantic obsession. It contains one of the most honest, longest, bloodiest sex scenes in all of literature. It also conveys the pain and sadness of being that young, wanting that much, and running up hard against the limits of your world and your self. I haven’t read Endless Love since I was 20. Today I might find it marred by its excesses, but that might be a sign of something lacking in myself.
Midway through The Transit of Venus, the awkward, brilliant scientist Ted Tice learns that Caroline Bell—the object of his unrequited passion and the heroine of the novel—has married. In his subsequent daze, he finds that “grief had a painter’s eye, assigning arbitrary meaning at random—like God.” Has personal tragedy ever sounded more enthralling? Hazzard’s masterpiece follows the orphaned Caroline and her sister, Grace, through the decades of profound change that followed World War II, as each discovers how love can circumscribe a life. Few of the relationships in this novel are happy, but all of them are so finely wrought that to read them is almost to live them—to feel, as Ted does, with an intensity that is both painful and enlightening.
The titular potion in Love Medicine does not work as planned. In fact, the overriding theme of Erdrich’s debut novel, a prismatic saga following one Chippewa family, is that love can be neither predicted nor controlled. The Kashpaws form a giant tumbleweed of a family tree, whose complexity owes to a love triangle in the early 20th century. The progenitors are the handsome, passive Nector; his headstrong wife, Marie; and the wandering Lulu, who goes on to have a brood of children with different fathers. Erdrich’s panorama makes room for dozens of fascinating characters, but the love story sets everything in motion, and decades later it comes to a perfectly fitting conclusion. Love Medicine is, among many things, a brief against shame. As Lulu says when she gets to plead her case, “When they tell you that I was heartless, a shameless man-chaser, don’t ever forget this: I loved what I saw.”
Beloved asks readers to imagine something as pure and perfect as love—a mother caring for her child; two broken people trying to make something beautiful—in the face of absolute misery and ugliness. That’s where the book’s potency comes from: the tension between the darkness and the light. Sethe, its main character, has committed unspeakable violence toward her own daughter, but she was motivated by maternal devotion. Having survived that transformational tragedy, she has to decide whether she can allow anyone to love her again. Beloved evokes both the peril of motherhood and its singular power. Reading it, I wanted to fold myself into the pages and then fall out of my skin. It’s painful, but what’s even more devastating is that the novel is one of the most banned books in America. How dare we rob the next generation of its greatness?
This novel is, to borrow a term from Saint Augustine, a story of disordered love. Stevens, the narrator, is an impeccably mannered British butler who loves his country, his profession, and his master—all worthy enough objects of devotion, in the abstract. His fidelity blinds him, however, to the cruelty and fecklessness that his nation and employer are capable of—and to just how humiliating some of his work can be. Even more tragically, his sense of duty compels him to deny love to the flesh-and-blood humans in his midst: He abandons his dying father so that he can better tend to a dinner his master is hosting; he refuses to acknowledge, let alone reciprocate, the clear affection of a fellow servant. The anguish of reading this novel lies in watching a man with such a deep capacity for love direct it to exactly the wrong places.
Possession opens in 1986, in the reading room of the London Library, where mysterious letters discovered by a young academic jolt the plot into action. It ends in the 19th century, with a devastating scene in which the letters’ author stops to chat with a child. In between is a detective story about two sets of prospective lovers more than 100 years apart: In the 1980s, a dueling pair of scholars—one the careful, if old-fashioned, philologist who finds the letters and the other a glamorous, feminist critic—seek to understand a secret romance through notes and correspondence. In the past, we meet the Victorian poets who are the subjects of that search as they leave behind the traces that will be puzzled over and plumbed. The book is extravagant, high-concept, and a total tearjerker, distinctive for its empathy toward its characters and their sense of the possible—and for its many passages of people falling head over heels for each other’s writing.
“Why do we yield” to love, asks this novel’s narrator, “when we don’t have to?” She’s an intellectually voracious anthropologist overwhelmed by a new romance—and she’d “like to know as a woman and a human being, both.” Mating is Rush’s effort to get to the bottom of that unanswerable question: Why is it that sex and love make the smartest, most confident, and most in-control of us fall apart? But the novel isn’t just intellectual; far from it. Rush gives his book every possible kind of drama, from the erotic to the geopolitical—and, what’s more, he imbues his writing with a real (if wry) optimism that has turned Mating into a cult classic of our sometimes-pessimistic age.
When the German Romantic poet Novalis, real name Friedrich “Fritz” von Hardenburg, was in his early 20s, he fell in love with a 12-year-old named Sophie von Kühn. (This utterly inappropriate match was thankfully never consummated, owing to her early death.) In his grief, Novalis wrote a fragmentary novel about a man who longs to see a mysterious “blue flower,” which would provide the material for Fitzgerald’s gently comic, subtly insightful book. Here, Fritz’s idolization of the distinctly ordinary Sophie, whom he calls “my wisdom” and “my Philosophy,” is clearly the ridiculous acting-out of a young man who wants drama—but in Fitzgerald’s skillful hands, it’s also an idealistic, even beautiful, pursuit of the self-abnegation that can come with love.
The source material for the film that won Ang Lee an Oscar and became pop-culture shorthand is only about 10,000 words long. How, in just one short story, did Proulx manage to fit in one of the most stirring depictions of romantic ecstasy that I’ve ever read? Her measured, inventive sentences follow Jack and Ennis, who meet in the summer of 1963 while herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain, in Wyoming, and experience a lightning-strike intimacy that keeps them tied together for decades. Proulx wrote what became the film’s most memorable line—“I wish I knew how to quit you”—but much of the story’s prose should be equally famous. Chronology is dictated here only by desire—years go by in a paragraph; a single embrace oozes across a page. Love, Proulx shows, warps the minutes: Every meeting both lasts forever and ends in an agonizing second.
In her Booker Prize–winning novel about the tragic fallout of a taboo-breaking liaison, Roy repeats a few distinct phrases again and again. One is the image of a “hole in the Universe” that takes various shapes: a person, or a cat, or “History.” Although The God of Small Things overflows with monsoon-drenched flora, industrial pollutants, bitterness, and scheming, it has a love-shaped hole in its center that is filled only at the very end. From the first pages, we know that Estha and Rahel, fraternal twins in a prosperous but dissipated family in India’s Kerala region, have seen their lives ruined after a blurry sequence of events that led to death and exile. Slowly, inevitably, Roy closes in on a brief, forbidden dalliance that defies India’s caste system. Romance, in this story, is usually defined by its absence, and yet passion is everywhere. Sometimes desire blooms beautifully; more often, it remains untended, left to rot.
When this book was first published, the Dick of the title, a real-life sociologist, was quoted in New York magazine denigrating the work as “a bad review of my presence in the world.” This revealed his identity, even though Kraus had tried partly to obscure it—after all, the book isn’t a memoir. It’s instead a species of autofiction, a collection of billets-doux to Dick written by Kraus’s protagonist, also named Chris, with her husband, named Sylvère, like Kraus’s actual then-husband. Her aim is to “take an experience that was so completely female”—the private, abject state of unrequited romantic obsession—and treat it seriously, like material for academic study. What results is a genre-bending feminist work powered by the engine of infatuation. As Chris puts it: “Desire isn’t lack, it’s surplus energy.” Dick is right that he doesn’t come out looking so great, but the book is only nominally about him anyway.
Waters’s moving portrait of the anguish that follows falling in and out of love is as erotic as it is engrossing. After a young girl named Nan becomes smitten with Kitty, a “masher” (or male impersonator), she follows her new flame to London, only to endure a terrible betrayal. The Victorian capital has never been as alive as it is in Tipping the Velvet: The 19th-century theater world gives way to the city’s seedy underground before the book peeks in on socialist organizing. Every plot thread is loaded with commentary on class, sexuality, and gender. Beautiful, passionate, and historically clever, this is no ordinary bildungsroman.
Chinelo Okparanta
Autobiography of Red
by Anne Carson
1998
A little red monster with wings falls in love with the Greek hero Herakles. The two go to hell to visit Herakles’s grandmother, break up, and reunite years later at a Peruvian volcano. Autobiography of Red claims to have recovered this improbable plot from bits of writing by Stesichoros, a Greek poet from the sixth century B.C.E.; Carson begins with invented “fragments” from Stesichoros and three scholarly looking appendixes before starting her original, woozy love story in earnest. Early on, Geryon is 14, abused by his brother and adored by his mother. A chance encounter with Herakles at a bus station leads to a teenage romance and some of the most transcendent love poetry of the late 20th century. Geryon ultimately finds his calling as a photographer; the book concludes with a description of his snapshots, which arrest the characters in a state of longing—with “immortality on their faces, night at their back.”
Flamenco isn’t just a dance for Carmen Santos, she reminds us frequently. It’s a way of life. It gave her the ability to walk without crutches when she was a child, her leg withered by polio; it gave her a living in her 20s; it allowed her to make art when no one believed that she could. And it introduced her to the two great loves of her life: her older mentor, Agustín, who brought her into his company and made her his mistress for 17 years, and the young dancer Manolo, who gave her a year of passion unlike any she’d known before. Now Carmen is approaching 40, living at home in Chicago, and unable to dance—post-polio syndrome is taking away her hard-earned dexterity. Her mother wishes she’d married and had children, but Carmen regrets nothing. And when both Agustín and Manolo come back into her life, she won’t pretend that her heart is closed—but she knows there are things she won’t give up for love.
In one sense, Atonement is a classic love story: a sweeping, romantic account of two people pulled to each other with inexplicable, magnetic force. Yet few interactions between Robbie Turner and Cecilia Tallis actually occur in these pages; their relationship is a specter, mostly present in the hovering question of what could have been. Early on, Briony—a precocious 13-year-old writer—walks in on Cecilia, her older sister, having sex with Robbie, their housekeeper’s son. Misunderstanding what she’s seen, or perhaps motivated to puppet-master reality as she does in her stories, Briony makes a false accusation that lands Robbie in prison. The rest of the book is about her decision’s ruinous repercussions. Some novels cast love as a type of fiction, a comforting yarn spun by humans who can never really access one another’s internal worlds. In Atonement, love is a fact—and the cruelest thing that a story can do is endanger it.
Readers familiar only with the film might be surprised by the elegance and interiority of Aciman’s writing. No author since Proust has given readers such a nuanced understanding of the human heart—not just the forward arrow of reciprocated desire but also the insecurities, crossed signals, ambiguity, and doubt. Call Me By Your Name is a novel that, at last, tells the truth about love.
Andrew Sean Greer
The Song of Achilles
by Madeline Miller
2011
Almost 15 years after The Song of Achilles was first published, the bookstore I co-own, the Ripped Bodice, still sells dozens of copies every month. Few other books have this kind of staying power. Miller’s lyrical retelling of TheIliad, focused on Patroclus and Achilles’s romance, is tender, intimate, achingly sentimental, and—because readers know from the beginning where their story is headed—completely devastating. This is one of those rare stories that seems to become more beloved with every passing year.
Leah Koch
The Marriage Plot
by Jeffrey Eugenides
2011
Eugenides’s love triangle between three brilliant but naive recent college graduates captures the angst and tumult of having one’s ideals tested by disappointment. His characters exit school steeped in 19th-century novels, semiotics, and the academic-seminar trends of the 1980s, which give grammar and form to their fizzing fantasies but also set them up for hard lessons when they inevitably crash into reality. As both a fan of Eugenides and a recovering English major, I ate this up when it came out, in 2011, and revisit it every couple of years out of affectionate nostalgia.
Jon Hickey
Americanah
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
2013
Ifemelu, a feisty, fiercely intelligent fellow at Princeton and a prolific blogger, is considering returning home, to Lagos, after living in America for many years. Her story is juxtaposed with that of her high-school sweetheart, Obinze, who is now married and a successful businessman. They had lost touch in their youth, when Ifemelu migrated to America and Obinze headed to London—but as the book fills us in on their formative years as a teenage couple and the diverging paths that followed, circumstances lead them back to Nigeria and back to each other. In the past, Adichie has objected to the book being classified as a love story, but even she admits that in the end, it is. I agree: Not only is this a love story; it’s an epic one.
Nicole Dennis-Benn
Fates and Furies
by Lauren Groff
2015
The best love stories suggest something about how all relationships function—even when they imply something dark. Fates and Furies concerns the charming and lucky Lotto and his reserved, mysterious wife, Mathilde. First, we hear Lotto’s account of their life together; it’s a compelling drama, if curiously devoid of details about Mathilde’s background. Then we get Mathilde’s version, which reveals how much Lotto never understood, how willing he was to accept a convenient, two-dimensional idea of his wife. Some of the plot details stretch credulity, resulting in a sort of twisted fable of matrimony. Even then, Groff leaves the reader with the chilling suspicion that every ordinary marriage will end, by death or divorce, with its two partners never having grasped the person they’re meant to know best.
Jenkins is one of the most important voices in modern romance, and Forbidden is a perfect example of what she does best. Set during Reconstruction, the novel follows Black characters building lives, communities, and futures in the aftermath of slavery. Yet the weight of that history never overwhelms Rhine and Eddy’s sharp, funny courtship or the rich world that surrounds them. Jenkins has spent decades showing us that Black history is also a story of joy, ambition, and friendship. Forbidden expands our understanding of who gets to be at the center of the American conversation—and it’s also incredibly fun to read.
Leah Koch
Normal People
by Sally Rooney
2018
Rooney is a master of miscommunication. Her two protagonists here, Marianne and Connell, are as star-crossed as Shakespeare’s doomed lovers, and not only because they, too, come from tragically incompatible homes. The main problem, rather, is that they cannot speak plainly about their desires. A classic example: Connell asks Marianne if she wants to see other people, hoping she’ll say no; she thinks that he’s breaking up with her and coldly replies, “Sure.” Revisiting the book recently, I felt the desperate need to ask them to please use their words. But Normal People is about being young—really young—and navigating feelings that are more powerful than your expressive abilities. I found the novel painfully effective at transporting me back to my teens: a time when everything happens in high definition, someone can feel both made for you and completely inscrutable, and the stakes seem paralyzingly high even when they’re patently low. That’s a bit how falling in love feels at any age.
Jones’s breakout fourth novel is set in Atlanta—and, like much of her work, it’s an ode to her hometown. It also has more to say about the contemporary American justice system than almost any other novel written in this century. At the start of the book, Celestial, its artist heroine, is newly, happily married to a striver named Roy, a former small-town boy thrilled to take his place among Atlanta’s Black bourgeoisie. But when Roy is wrongfully arrested and incarcerated, Celestial discovers that even her family wants her to perform a stifling public role as his loyal wife that, no matter how much she loves him, leaves no room for the complexity of her grief and loneliness. When her longtime friendship with her childhood neighbor Andre turns romantic, the position that Roy’s imprisonment has put her in is revealed to be untenable—and Jones reveals Celestial to be a heroine for the ages.
In this otherworldly novella, love spans time—and then breaks it. Red and Blue are two futuristic agents embroiled in a war fought across universes and decades; their job is to warp world events in order to benefit their opposing governments. Their correspondence begins with taunts before morphing into mutual curiosity, fascination, and, finally, a passionate and forbidden alliance. Their letters explore yearning with such beauty that I challenge any reader to be unaffected. Red’s and Blue’s very essences are at odds, yet they find each other through battle, through centuries, and through twists in their own timelines that hint of betrayal—but are actually proof of a selfless commitment to a dreamed-of future. El-Mohtar and Gladstone’s deft epistolary romance is, in every sense of the word, timeless.
Ashley Herring Blake
Before I Let Go
by Kennedy Ryan
2022
When we first meet the central couple in Before I Let Go, they are already divorced. A series of tragedies have pushed Yasmen and Josiah apart, and they’re separately navigating grief while still co-parenting and working together. Heartbreak and second chances are familiar territory in romance novels, but Ryan’s novel transcends the commonplace. Her story starts with intense passion and adoration—and then, when the unrelenting stressors and crises of the real world interfere, Ryan asks: Is love alone enough to sustain a marriage? Through Yasmen and Josiah, the reader experiences tender moments of self-doubt and self-loathing, the pride of watching someone build themself up, and the spark of desire reigniting after years of being swept aside. Their reconciliation isn’t wrapped in a perfect bow; it’s messy, mercurial, and imperfect—as Ryan writes, “the stuff real happily ever afters were made of.”
Krystle Champagne-Norwood
You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty
by Akwaeke Emezi
2022
Feyi, a Nigerian American artist living in Brooklyn, is dealing with the death of her husband in complicated ways. She pushes for a risky hookup in a bathroom at a party; she paints canvases with animal blood. None of it stops her from having vivid nightmares about how Jonah died—but she’s still trying to move on. She has a not-quite-boyfriend, Nasir, who sweeps her off to his family’s luxurious Caribbean-island estate. Once there, she finds herself drawn to Nasir’s father, Alim, who recognizes Feyi’s sadness. The resulting entanglement is tense, chaotic, and, it must be said, pretty sexy. But the novel isn’t just about the thrill and devastation of an inconvenient attraction. Emezi considers the ways that loss can reshape desire—and the relief that comes from not only being wanted by someone, but also being understood by them.
That title is what he calls her—no real names here. He’s “the choreographer,” and she’s just “Rabbit.” They meet in Maine, at an artist’s residency, where nothing happens between them. When they catch up in New York, she’s pulled to him like a dowsing rod to water. She’s queer and hasn’t been with a man in ages. He’s an established artist—rich, powerful, and two decades her senior. At 30, she feels that she knows herself well enough, as a writer and a woman, to indulge her erotic curiosity. Then, before she realizes it, she’s caught in his rip current, being pulled further and further away from everything she knows. The only part that terrifies her: She likes it. Adores it, even. Their partnership remakes everything she’d taken for granted, and Little Rabbit is the story of a person learning to accept what her body’s already decided.
At the beginning of the 1960s, Isabellives alone in her family home, a house she doesn’t own but has nonetheless burrowed into and absorbed as her whole way of life. One night at dinner, her brother and landlord, Louis, introduces Eva, his girlfriend, who repulses the tightly wound Isabel with her “violently peroxided bob” and overt sexuality. When Louis suggests that Eva move in with Isabel for the summer, Isabel’s furious suspicion turns into erotic obsession. Van der Wouden builds the revelations so elegantly that to spoil them would feel like critical malpractice. The house is more than a house; Isabel’s sour, anxious misanthropy is more than simple repression. And Eva is so much more than a vehicle for sexual awakening—she’s also a puzzle, and she inspires a reckoning. But the ferocious connection between the two women seems to incinerate all of the layers of history and conflict that engulf them, creating space for something new.
Donald Trump has spent nearly two years investigating, suing, or prosecuting anybody in politics, media, or government who ever defied him. Now, with Democrats poised to win control of one or both chambers of Congress, the administration and its allies are prepared to slip back into their familiar pose of victimhood.
The putative evidence of imminent GOP persecution comes from Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who recently told the Vox journalist Astead Herndon during an event at the University of Chicago that Democrats should pursue accountability for the administration to, among other goals, deter new graduates from enlisting in corrupt schemes. “I want young people coming out of school to say, ‘Should I go work for the Trump administration?’” she said. “I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that.’” Slotkin made these remarks last Tuesday, attracting little notice at the time because she didn’t say anything particularly noteworthy. Five days later, a tidal wave of conservative outrage suddenly crashed over her.
The Republican response has been revealing. Even Trump-skeptical conservatives are signaling that, just as they have in the past, his party will rally behind him the moment someone proposes that the laws of the country should be enforced if Trump is found to have engaged in misconduct. He has trained members of his party to sublimate any concern they may have about his actions beneath their partisan instincts. However queasy Trump might occasionally make them, they will return to his side the moment he faces the prospect of legal consequences.
“It is absolutely disgraceful to threaten young Americans for participating in politics and serving their country,” Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, complained. “This type of thinking is terrible for our country,” Ari Fleischer, the former press secretary to President George W. Bush, chimed in. Columns by the Trump legal adviser Mike Davis in Fox News and the writer Miranda Devine in the New York Post depict Slotkin as a goon who was menacing bright-eyed youth for no reason other than their partisan affiliation. “Slotkin is a lowlife who’s ruining her state,” Trump said in front of the White House when prodded for a reaction by a reporter.
Trump went even further, as is his wont. “That’s a hell of a statement,” he told reporters. “Slotkin said that there should be prosecutions in order to scare people from going into politics.”
In point of fact, Slotkin didn’t say anything about prosecutions. She was discussing congressional oversight and specifically describing a scenario in which Democrats had control of Congress but not the executive branch.
She was arguing for a measured and focused approach, prioritizing only the most blatant forms of corruption.
“We do have to have accountability for the unbelievable corruption that we are living under right now,” she said. “But you can’t just make that your whole personality. So you have to pick signature cases, and you have to go after people and projects that are just super egregious.”
Later in the conversation, Herndon noted that Trump has largely insulated himself from accountability by stacking the courts and installing loyalists throughout his party and the federal government. That’s when Slotkin pointed out that exposing the administration’s corruption might deter ambitious Republicans from joining the administration during its final years.
The outraged responses omitted the first part of Slotkin’s remarks, which point out the need to investigate the administration’s pervasive misconduct. Out of context, it sounds as if Slotkin is threatening young Republicans because of malevolence. But in context, her comments are understandable, even generous. If you knew a young person who had been planning to go to work for Elizabeth Holmes, deterring them by exposing the Theranos founder as a con artist would have been doing them a favor.
Pretending that the Trump administration is innocent is just the first line of defense. The fallback argument against investigating, and perhaps eventually prosecuting, any corruption is that doing so will set off a cycle of retribution.
A Wall Street Journaleditorial accuses Slotkin of “essentially promising a scorched-earth lawfare campaign” that will invite reprisals. “This is where the multiple prosecutions that Democrats unleashed against Mr. Trump in the Biden years are taking us. Mr. Trump is retaliating with similar attempts to criminalize political differences. And now Ms. Slotkin is vowing more of the same. Down this road lies more bitterness and political dysfunction,” the Journal editorial laments. Jack Goldsmith, a former Bush-administration legal adviser, makes a similar argument in a Substack column.
The fear that the two parties are locked in a cycle of retribution has a certain high-minded but superficial appeal. It’s true that Trump faced investigations after leaving office, and that he has cited these investigations as a rationale for his reign of legal terror.
But Joe Biden did not behave in a remotely similar fashion. He appointed an attorney general, Merrick Garland, who commanded bipartisan respect. Garland operated cautiously, following traditional procedure, and appointed Jack Smith as a special counsel when evidence of Trump’s refusal to cooperate with the investigation—taking classified documents, stonewalling repeated requests to return them, and then trying to mislead federal investigators—was too blatant to ignore. Trump did face one questionable prosecution: Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan prosecutor, charged that his hush money to Stormy Daniels was a campaign-finance violation. But that was not something Biden directed.
Besides, Trump’s ambition to imprison his opponents preceded anything Biden did, as anybody who remembers the “Lock her up!” chants should readily concede. Trump was unable to effectively prosecute his enemies during his first term, largely because he was stuck with a Justice Department whose staff was committed to traditional norms of independence, not for lack of trying. To the contrary, Trump spent most of his first term trying to make his attorneys general act like Roy Cohn. He pressured Ukraine’s government to gin up an investigation of Biden, and he eventually appointed a special counsel, John Durham, to investigate various enemies, only for Durham to fall on his face.
The most logical way to understand Trump’s motive is that he has always viewed laws as suggestions rather than hard requirements, and tended to assume that people in power will abuse it to protect their friends and punish their enemies. Democratic lawfare did not implant this belief in Trump. He and his allies are going to continue investigating fake crimes and committing real ones, because Trump fundamentally does not believe in the rule of law.
What is most peculiar is that the Democrats aren’t the party that has decided to elevate this question in the closing days of the midterm campaign. The Republicans are. Why, you might wonder, did a phalanx of Republicans emerge several days after the fact to start screaming about Slotkin?
Anti-anti-Trump Republicans, of which the Journal is a leading voice, often invoke the Mueller investigation and the first Trump impeachment as radicalizing events that reignited their wavering partisan attachment. The misguided Bragg indictment of Trump helped rehabilitate him among Republicans who had been ready to move on after January 6. As Davis wrote on X, “Dear @ElissaSlotkin: You are rallying fractured Republicans right before the midterms.”
Trump in his second term has operated with complete impunity. The Republican Congress is not even pretending to conduct oversight over the executive branch, and the Justice Department is not even pretending to care whether the president and his allies follow the law. The president grasps that if he ever has to face accountability, his party will back him up. Trump has two modes: flaunting his impunity and wallowing in victimization. For the moment, he finds the latter more politically useful.
The shortest flight path from Russia to the United States would take an enemy bomber over the North Pole and across Canadian airspace. During the Cold War, that simple fact was the impetus for the creation of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, which forged an integrated radar network across the two countries, effectively treating North American airspace as a single defensive zone.
Today, there’s less concern about a Russian barrage landing on U.S. soil, but NORAD remains relevant. Russian bombers still fly near Alaska and the Canadian Arctic. China’s expanding nuclear arsenal poses its own threat. Other airborne objects require vigilance, a lesson underscored by the mysterious flight path, in 2023, of a Chinese spy balloon, which NORAD shot down. This should matter to President Trump, who has identified the Western Hemisphere as a security priority. He even has a name for his approach: the “Donroe Doctrine.”
But all is not well at NORAD, the world’s only binational military command, headquartered at the Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs. NORAD, which was founded in 1958, now demonstrates how the president’s disdain for U.S. allies risks undermining the military cooperation that has kept the United States safe for decades.
Positions at NORAD and other integrated combatant commands in the United States used to be plum posts for ambitious Canadian military officers, giving them a chance to coordinate with Americans on intelligence, air and missile defense, and joint operations. That’s changing. U.S. and Canadian officials told me that Canada has lately struggled to find senior officers willing to take the jobs, a problem acute enough that Canadian officers have shared their concerns with counterparts in Colorado Springs, Ottawa, and Washington. The reasons are threefold, according to current and former officials who described the dynamic to me on the condition of anonymity in order to address a sensitive subject. Although the influence and sophistication of the U.S. military once made the postings desirable to ambitious officers, some now fear that time in the United States might hurt their chances for future promotions if relations spiral further out of control. They also see diminishing returns from a posting in which they’re likely to have their access curtailed as a byproduct of political tensions. And they face resistance from their families, who worry that anti-Canadian sentiment whipped up by Trump might make the country inhospitable, even temporarily.
Canadian officers considering U.S.-based posts don’t believe that they’ll be treated as equals, according to several who spoke with me. While the Trump administration has bullied and threatened numerous allies, these officers perceive particular hostility toward Canada—in part because of the vehemence of the trade dispute, and in part because Prime Minister Mark Carney has been willing, at times, to stand up to Trump. “If you’re a two-star general in Canada, and you’ve got maybe one or two extremely important jobs left in your career, will you use one of them to take up a position in the States, where you might be underemployed, with little access and little meaningful work to show for it?” one Canadian officer asked.
Some of the officials I spoke with noted that strained relations had not yet caused a tactical breakdown—no one had taken their eye off radar scopes or infrared cameras. And that’s what a NORAD spokesperson emphasized in response to my questions, issuing a statement saying that high-level Canadian roles at the binational command “remain fully staffed and highly regarded as career-enhancing opportunities, with Canadian personnel and their families fully integrated and operating with the systemic access required to execute binational defense operations for the homelands.”
The true impact of Canadian reluctance to serve in the United States may become manifest only in a crisis. In addition to the essential national-security functions performed by NORAD, the command also fosters camaraderie between the ranks of the two militaries. That’s vital if the U.S. military should ever need to project force to the north, including by moving personnel across Canada. Several of the people I spoke with raised the prospect of a conflict with China, which would quickly threaten Alaska, a crucial strategic hub. Moving U.S. forces to the noncontiguous state would depend on Canadian cooperation. In such a situation, Washington would want Canadian commanders who have served in the United States, so that American officers aren’t building new partnerships but are depending on people they’ve known for years. Canadian generals who’ve passed on postings in the United States because of friction between the two countries are much less likely to be sympathetic.
Since he returned to power last year, Trump has alienated longtime allies while praising rogue states such as North Korea. He has called Germany a “broken country” and said that French President Emmanuel Macron “always gets it wrong.” As a group, European leaders earned the epithet “weak.” He has imposed steep tariffs on their countries and threatened a foundation of Western security by raising doubts about U.S. fidelity to Article 5 of the NATO charter—that an attack on one is an attack on all.
Still, when I speak with senior officers in various allied countries—even Denmark, where the armed forces prepared for a possible U.S. invasion of Greenland earlier this year—they maintain that military-to-military cooperation continues despite political disagreements. Canada may be the first place where that is cracking. “The day-to-day relationship has deteriorated,” David Perry, an Ottawa-based defense analyst, told me. “There’s been a tangible change in the way the two countries interact on defense and security.”
That Washington is now choosing to alienate its northern neighbor is ironic because Canada, like other NATO members, is in the process of investing in the type of hard power that will make it an even more useful ally. When I met with Canada’s defense minister, David McGuinty, in February, the government had just released its first defense–industrial strategy, a plan to get weapons faster and—given geopolitical strife—to get more of them from Canadian suppliers. “Obviously continuing to work with the U.S.,” McGuinty said, “but now much more expansively looking to diversify.”
Earlier this year, the Canadian government promised to review whether to move forward with a full order of F-35 stealth fighters, which are produced by Lockheed Martin. This month, the government paused its acquisition of U.S.-made Black Hawk helicopters because of trade and diplomatic friction with Washington, according to CBC News and Radio-Canada. Canada is spending billions to upgrade radars, sensors, and other systems. Its participation in Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” would extend and strengthen the defensive shield, with the potential to protect both countries. But it’s hard to put much faith in protection from a bully. “Trust is easy to lose and hard to build,” Christopher Sands, the director of the Center for U.S.-Canada Studies at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, told me.
The current rancor is entirely different from past trade disputes, which have often been combative—“like a courtroom drama,” Sands said. But the fighting once stayed out of public view, managed by low-profile diplomats. Now the public is in the audience and can’t look away from the president’s antics, which have “poisoned people-to-people relations.” The armed forces couldn’t remain immune forever.
An executive order on Trump’s first day back in office, in January 2025, made Canadian officers wonder whether the U.S. military might be used against them. The order assigned U.S. Northern Command, which shares NORAD’s Colorado headquarters, to the mission to “seal the borders and maintain the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and security of the United States.” It did not specify the southern border, causing Canadian officials in Colorado to ask their counterparts, as relations worsened over time: Are you planning to militarize the northern border, one of the world’s longest undefended and peaceful frontiers? U.S. officials tried to reassure them that any action would be cooperative.
But the guarantee of cooperation became difficult to sustain. Defending new tariffs imposed on Canada in February 2025, Trump wrote on social media that “Canada ceases to exist as a viable Country” without U.S. support. “Therefore, Canada should become our Cherished 51st State.” Early on, references to Canadian statehood had elicited laughs during staff meetings at NORAD. But the mood soon changed. In April, Trump rebuffed the suggestion that his talk of annexation was just bluster. “I’m really not trolling,” he said in an interview with Time.
By the end of the year, jokes within the binational command about the 51st state were met with silence or curt rebuttals. Attitudes had shifted dramatically. An Angus Reid Institute poll found that almost half of Canadians said that their government should view the United States as an “enemy” or “potential threat,” while only 27 percent called Washington a friend and ally. Canadian officers serving in the United States divulged to colleagues that their families didn’t want to visit them over the holidays, because they were afraid of crossing the border or encountering animosity in American communities. In addition to the joint command in Colorado Springs, Canadian generals have served as deputy commanders of U.S. Army corps in North Carolina, Texas, and Washington State.
In early 2026, Carney named the dynamic generated by Trump’s hostility to American allies. “We are in the midst of a rupture,” he said, calling on the world’s middle powers to band together to resist bullying and defend international institutions. (Later, in an interview with The New York Times, Carney said that it would have been “irresponsible” not to take into consideration the possibility that Trump might use force against Canada.)
The president’s insults might have been dismissed as a rhetorical feint—a way to demand better trading terms or shake loose more military spending—but the scorn for Canada was echoed by senior Pentagon leaders. In May, Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, used social media to complain about Canada’s military readiness and announce that the Trump administration was pausing its participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defense, a bilateral advisory body to coordinate security policy. “A strong Canada that prioritizes hard power over rhetoric benefits us all,” Colby wrote. “Unfortunately, Canada has failed to make credible progress on its defense commitments.” The board hadn’t met since 2024, so the move was mostly symbolic. But Colby’s withering review prompted nervous questions inside NORAD: Who is this guy, and how much power does he have?
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s approach was even less subtle. In August, he posted a photo of two young female Canadian cadets. Their physical appearance seemed not to impress him; he captioned the photo “this is real.” The post stunned Canadians for its crassness and unprofessionalism. Wayne Eyre, who served as chief of Canada’s defense staff from 2021 to 2024, told me that he found Hegseth’s intervention “highly insulting.” It was followed, the next month, by a cartoon image that Trump circulated on his Truth Social feed of him beating Carney with a hockey stick—“unimaginable conduct by the president of the United States, even in our most dystopian imagination,” as one Canadian official put it to me. U.S. military leaders at NORAD have tried to put on a brave face, reporting to visitors that binational cooperation is continuing unimpeded. But away from the spotlight, Canadian officers will acknowledge the strain, current and former officials told me.
Eyre warned that cooperation of the kind that he helped oversee is more vulnerable than it might appear. “It’s sad, disappointing, and disturbing to see that deep relationship come under attack,” he said. “In my view, it’s a case of the U.S. undergoing self-harm by discarding and calling into question its competitive advantage, which is this system of alliances.”
Most of what the public knows about NORAD comes from its Santa Tracker, a lighthearted simulation of Santa Claus’s journey around the world on Christmas Eve. That’s because the command’s real business—guarding the skies—is mostly invisible. That is, until it stops working.
The clouds, piled in a dark heap over the Blueberry Ridge mobile-home park in Wells, Maine, looked like they would open up any minute. Residents sat in neatly arranged folding chairs behind a double-wide trailer, waiting for Troy Jackson, the state’s Democratic Senate candidate, to appear. Meanwhile, campaign staffers buzzed around like hornets out of a nest, freshly kicked. I was seated at the periphery, flanked on the left by two pockmarked fake deer—3-D archery targets—and on the right by an elderly chain-smoker who politely angled her cigarette away from me as she talked. She told me that she didn’t know much about Jackson but was going to knock on doors for him anyway. “He seems like he’s down-to-earth,” she said. “That he’s one of us.”
Jackson is one of them. He’s a fifth-generation logger born to a 16-year-old high-school dropout, and, as he is fond of repeating, he grew up as a “poor kid in a town full of poor kids.” At one time, he lived in a mobile home. A slick banner on his campaign website declares: Mainer By Birth. Logger By Trade. Senator for the People.
I’d come to Blueberry Ridge to see Jackson, who replaced Graham Platner as the nominee in July, after Platner resigned due to multiple scandals. The park was bought by a real-estate-investment company in 2021, and a group of residents has claimed that the new owners have made life there more expensive and worse. Now the group is pushing for a rent cap, and Jackson was there over Labor Day weekend to show support. When he addressed the crowd, his voice was measured but tinged with what sounded like genuine frustration. “The greed that’s happening right now in this country, that people in mobile-home parks are feeling, is like something I’ve never seen,” he said. Jackson marveled at a mason jar of muddy tap water that got passed around, apparent evidence of the park’s deteriorating living conditions. He seemed to be in his element, and after the event was over, he stayed to shake hands and talk about the travails of mobile-home life until his staffers pulled him away.
The next stop on his tour that day was People’s Inclusive Welding, a school in South Portland whose mission is to provide a “safe and supportive environment for underserved and underrepresented communities to learn a skilled trade.” There, Jackson watched a torch demonstration, surrounded by the language of hyper-progressivism: a metal slab emblazoned with the text WHAT’S YOUR SAFE WORD?; a door covered in dozens of stickers with radical messages (SOLIDARITY MEANS WEARING A MASK and DESTROY ALL BORDERS); a gigantic mural, painted the colors of the trans flag, proclaiming BLM and ACAB—an abbreviation for “All Cops Are Bastards.” He seemed to instinctively edge away from the mural as a local-news outlet snapped photos of him.
The contrast between these two events—one at a trailer park populated mostly by retirees, the other at a shop catering to progressive urban tradespeople—reflects the tensions in the Jackson campaign as a whole. Jackson seems to be attempting to pair a left-leaning, economically populist package with “woke” cultural ideals, which working-class voters tend to reject. Jackson’s unsuccessful run for governor earlier this year was endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America and Bernie Sanders, who affirmed his support for Jackson’s Senate bid and has appeared at campaign events on his behalf. Several labor unions have also endorsed Jackson. He supports Medicare for All, bans on congressional stock trading, tax cuts for workers, and tax hikes for billionaires. He also favors restricting assault weapons and abolishing ICE. As a state senator, he voted in favor of trans women being housed in women’s prisons, and of qualified trans teens receiving treatments such as hormone therapy without parental consent; he voted against a ban on trans women’s participation on women’s sports teams. In 2023, he co-sponsored legislation to allow later-term abortions after fetal viability.
On economic issues, Jackson is in sync with the working-class and rural voters he says he is championing. Sixty-three percent of Americans without a college degree and 76 percent of those who make less than $50,000 a year say that the government should be responsible for ensuring health-care coverage, for example. On cultural matters, however, Jackson is out of step with many of those he claims to be giving a voice to. Most Americans without a college degree say that protecting gun rights is more important than gun control, and that guns make the country safer. These Americans are also more likely than college graduates to express negative views about illegal immigration. Likewise, a majority of people making less than $50,000 a year or who did not go to college say that abortion is morally unacceptable, whereas those making more than $100,000 or who did go to college say the opposite.
On gender identity, majorities of Americans without a four-year college degree say that gender transitions are morally wrong, that trans people should play on sports teams that match their birth sex, and that being trans is not an innate condition but is instead caused by social factors. Similar trends play out in Maine, where people without a four-year college degree are more likely than people with a degree to view illegal immigration as a serious problem, and where trans women’s participation in women’s sports is unpopular across the electorate. (I asked the Jackson campaign for an interview so that he could elaborate on his views, but it refused multiple requests.)
Despite its down-home signifiers and KICKING ASS FOR THE WORKING CLASS T-shirts, the Jackson campaign’s pairing of leftist economic populism with progressive cultural stances fits seamlessly into the broader professional-class insurgency roiling the Democratic Party. This movement, which some have referred to as a Democratic “tea party,” appears animated by a theory of persuasion that one might call “left maximalism.” The tacit wager of left maximalists, including Jackson, seems to be that enough working-class voters will stomach unpopular left-wing cultural policies provided that a candidate also supports popular left-wing economic positions.
This strategy has shown some signs of success lately, as evidenced by the DSA-endorsed candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier’s surprise primary win in New York City’s Thirteenth Congressional District, one of the poorest in the state. She managed to unseat an incumbent establishment opponent despite arguing that deportations are wrong under any circumstance and that national borders and prisons should be abolished—views that are not exactly common among the working class. Similarly, before Platner’s collapse, he used a left-maximalist approach to win his primary. It remains to be seen, however, whether left maximalism will fly as a general-election strategy in Maine. Winning will require Jackson to hold together a coalition that includes both college-educated residents of prosperous coastal cities and towns, and the rural, socially moderate, working-class voters Democrats have been alienating in recent years.
The frictions in the Jackson campaign’s platform call to mind the work of Daniel Bell, a mid-20th-century sociologist who once described himself as “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture.” In his 1976 book, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Bell argued that capitalism had started to undermine itself. As Bell observed, capitalism took root in the United States during the 19th and early-20th centuries, when the country’s social life was defined by puritanical moralism and the Protestant work ethic. Americans saved money, prioritized the public good, toiled mostly without complaint, and were disinclined to acquisitiveness.
But after World War II, he wrote, thrift and public spiritedness were displaced by consumerist individualism, which focused on permissiveness, pleasure, and the self. Writing during a decade of economic crisis and high inflation, Bell warned that unfettered capitalism would weaken important institutions, cultural values, and social bonds—and ultimately lead to a society as unstable as it was selfish. If Bell was right to spotlight the “cultural contradictions of capitalism” in the 1970s, the cultural contradictions of anti-capitalism may well prove to be one of the most potent political conundrums of the 2020s: The American left has produced an environment that alienates many working-class people from candidates espousing economics designed to benefit them.
Jackson, apparently trying to manage these contradictions, is acting as though he can be everything to everyone. One minute, his team is launching a folksy ad, set at a backyard barbecue, about loggers paying more taxes than billionaires. The next minute, the campaign is dropping a side-eye-emoji’d social-media clip of the candidate sassily sipping boba tea beside a Pride flag. Depending on your perspective, this mishmash is reflective either of a politician who is trying to represent all Mainers, or of a man whose cultural politics sit uneasily alongside those of the working-class electorate—not to mention his own past beliefs. When Jackson first (and unsuccessfully) ran for state office in 2000, he did so as a Republican. By 2002, he was an independent, and by 2004, a Democrat. Yet even after changing his party affiliation, he voted against same-sex-marriage legislation in 2009, and received a perfect score from an anti-abortion group, Maine Right to Life, in 2010. By 2017, though, Jackson had done an about-face. He eventually began receiving accolades from pro-choice organizations for his support of abortion rights. Jackson, who was raised Catholic, has described abortion as an issue he has long wrestled with, and has said that he was simply persuaded that his prior views were wrong.
It is more than possible that Jackson’s pivot did come from a sincere change of heart, rather than from a cynical calculation about the concessions necessary to succeed as a Democrat. And the mixed messages of Jackson’s current campaign are not irreconcilable. Jackson can court the Rural Flannel-Wearing Tree Cutters and the Urban Boba Wokes at the same time, and perhaps he really will win enough of each for the Maine electoral math to work out in the Democrats’ favor. Polling shows a tight race, and the Iran quagmire, Donald Trump’s subbasement approval rating, and rising heating-oil prices in advance of the Maine winter are unlikely to do his opponent, the five-term Republican incumbent Susan Collins, any favors. But what may work as a matter of immediate tactics is not necessarily a strategy for fundamentally reshaping the demographics of the Democratic Party within the state, or outside it.
Cultural politics, not economic politics, are the left’s primary barrier to winning back the working class. Left maximalists tend to treat the working class as a junior partner rather than as their primary constituency. Progressive urban professionals may get the economic and social politics they want, while rural and working-class voters are asked to compromise their moral and cultural belief system in exchange for promises of health care and an increased minimum wage.
After Jackson departed Blueberry Ridge, I stuck around the backyard to talk with some residents. One was a union tinsmith and lifelong Democrat who told me he doesn’t care about culture-war issues and is more worried about how labor is being fleeced. Another was a tollbooth worker and three-time Trump voter who was dismayed that the president he’d voted for had done so little for the little people. He seemed ready for something different, and sympathized with Troy Jackson’s anti-corporate politics, but said that he could never vote for Jackson because of his stances on immigration and gender issues.
Progressives may wonder why a Mainer whose trailer park is allegedly being wrecked by an investment firm would care more about immigration policy than affordability issues as he decides which candidate to support. But one could also ask the opposite question: Why are highly educated leftists, and politicians such as Jackson who appeal to them, often unwilling to give even an inch on social issues? If socialists and populists—even blue-collar leftists such as Jackson—are so wedded to progressivism that they do not compromise with the working class, the question is not simply whether such a left can win. The question is whether it truly remains left at all.
There are two Michael Jordans, both widely regarded as the Greatest of All Time. One is an NBA legend. The other is a pumpkin. In 2023, the 2,749-pound Goliath set the world record for heaviest pumpkin. Michael Jordan weighed as much as a small car and was even more massive—so broad that it would just barely fit in a parking space. Like all giant pumpkins, its flesh was warped by all that mass—sort of like Jabba the Hutt with a spray tan.
It is hard to imagine how a pumpkin could get any bigger. But you might have said the same thing about the previous world-record holder, a 2,702-pound beast grown in Italy in 2021, or the world-record holder before that, a Belgian 2,624-pounder in 2016. Each year around this time, giant pumpkins across the globe are forklifted into pickup trucks and transported to competitions where they break new records.
Michael Jordan set the record at California’s Half Moon Bay Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off, considered the Super Bowl of North American pumpkin-growing. The first winner of the competition, in 1974, weighed just 132 pounds. In 2004, the winner clocked in at 1,446 pounds. “At that time, we thought, Gee whiz, can we push these things any farther?” Wizzy Grande, the president of the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, an organization that establishes global standards for competition, told me. Yet in just another decade, the record passed the 2,000-pound mark. “We’ve zoomed past that now,” Travis Gienger, the grower from Minnesota who cultivated Michael Jordan, told me. For champion growers, there’s only one thing to do next: try to break 3,000.
Last year, Michael Jordan weighed in at a world-record 2,749 pounds. (Alex Washburn / AP)
Giant pumpkins aren’t quite supersize versions of what you find in the grocery store. All competitive pumpkins are Curcubita maxima, the largest species of squash—which, in the wild, can grow to 200 pounds, about 10 times heavier than the common Halloween pumpkin. But decades of selective breeding—crossing only the largest plants—has created colossal varieties.
Virtually all of today’s champions trace their lineage to Dill’s Atlantic Giant, a variety bred in the 1970s by a Canadian grower named Howard Dill. Very competitive growers source their seeds from one another, through seed exchanges and auctions, where a single seed can be sold for thousands of dollars, Michael Estadt, an assistant professor at Ohio State University Extension who has cultivated giant pumpkins, told me. Seeds from Gienger’s champions are in high demand, yet even he is constantly aiming to improve the genetics of his line. “I’m looking for heavy,” he said.
Yet even a pumpkin with a prizewinning pedigree won’t reach its full size unless it’s managed well. Like babies, they require immense upkeep, even before they are born. Months before planting, at least 1,000 square feet of soil per pumpkin must be fertilized and weeded. Once seedlings are planted, they have to be watered daily for their entire growing period, roughly four months. No mere garden hose can do the trick; each plant needs at least one inch of water a week, which allows the pumpkin to gain up to 70 pounds in a single day. The fruit and leaves must also be inspected at least once daily for pests and disease—no small feat as their surface area balloons. Quickly spotting and excising the eggs of an insect called the squash-vine borer, then bandaging the wounded vine, is paramount. One day, you might have a great pumpkin, “then boom, the next day, all of the vine is completely dead,” says Julie Weisenhorn, a horticulture educator at the University of Minnesota who has grown giant pumpkins—named Seymour (744 pounds) and Audrey (592 pounds).
Growers can keep pushing the pumpkin weight limit by ensuring that a plant isn’t pollinated by a variety that has subpar genes. To do so, they hand-pollinate, painstakingly dusting pollen from a plant’s male flowers into the female ones. This usually leads the plant to bear three or four fruit, but only the most promising is allowed to survive. The rest are killed off in an attempt to direct all of the plant’s resources toward a single giant. In the same vein, wayward vines are nipped, and emerging roots thrust deep into the ground, in hopes of harnessing every last nutrient for the potential champion.
Still, some factors are beyond anyone’s control. The weather can literally make or break a pumpkin. Too much rain can cause a pumpkin to grow too quickly, cracking open its flesh, which would disqualify it from competition. Too much sunlight hardens the flesh, making it prone to fractures. It’s not uncommon for giant pumpkins to have custom-built personal sunshades. North America’s giant-pumpkin capitals—Half Moon Bay, Nova Scotia, and Minnesota—have nature on their side, with low humidity and nighttime temperatures. Cooler nights mean less respiration, which means less wasted energy.
Yet nature bests even the world’s champions. This year, Gienger couldn’t break the record he set with Michael Jordan; he blames cold and wet weather, which made it harder to feed micronutrients to his pumpkin, Rudy. (At 2,471 pounds, it still won the Half Moon Bay competition.) And no matter how big a pumpkin grows, it needs to pack a few extra pounds for the road: Once they’re cut from the vine, they rapidly lose their weight in water. A pumpkin can drop roughly 10 pounds in a single day.
All of the experts I spoke with believe that 3,000 pounds is within reach. “It’s still an upward trend,” said Grande, who noted that a 2,907-pounder has already been recorded, albeit a damaged one. Pumpkin genetics are continually improving; more 2,000-pounders have been grown in the past year than ever before, according to Grande. Growers are constantly developing new practices. Each year, the Great Pumpkin Conference holds an international summit for growers and scientists to trade techniques (last year’s was in Belgium, and this year’s will be on the Green Bay Packers’ Lambeau Field). Shifting goals have precipitated new (and expensive) methods: Carbon dioxide and gibberellic acid are being used as growth stimulants; some pumpkins are fully grown in greenhouses.
The reason giant-pumpkin weights increased 20-fold in half a century is the same reason runners keep running faster marathons, that skyscrapers keep clawing at the sky, and that people spend so much on anti-aging. To push nature’s limits is a reliably exhilarating endeavor; to be the one to succeed is a point of pride. Food companies, in particular, build their entire businesses on developing the biggest and best. Wild strawberries are the size of a nickel, but domesticated ones are as huge as Ping-Pong balls. Industrial breeding turned the scrawny, two-and-a-half-pound chickens of the 1920s into today’s six-pounders. There’s still room for them to grow: Strawberries can get as big as a saucer, and the heaviest chicken on record was a 22-pounder named Weirdo. But foods sold commercially are subject to other constraints on growth, such as transportation, storage, processing, and customer preference. Unusually big foods are associated with less flavor, and their size can be off-putting. When it comes to food, there is such a thing as too big.
Giant pumpkins, by contrast, have a singular purpose: to become as heavy as possible. They don’t have to be beautiful, taste good, or withstand transport, because they are not food. When companies develop boundary-pushing crops and animals, that tends to be an isolationist enterprise, shrouded in secrecy. But in the giant-pumpkin community, there is less incentive to guard seeds and techniques. Most competitions are low-stakes local affairs, and nobody ever became rich off giant pumpkins, not even Howard Dill.
Breaking records is largely seen as a communal effort. “The secret to our success is that we are a sharing community,” Grande said. In a few contests, the investment is worth it—the Half Moon Bay prize for world-record-breakers is $30,000—but “it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme,” Estadt told me. People do it, he said, “for the thrill of the win.”
All of the pumpkin experts I spoke with acknowledged that there must be a limit. But nobody has any idea what it is. Four thousand pounds, 5,000—as far as growers can tell, these are as feasible as any other goal. Every milestone they reach marks another human achievement, another triumph over nature. But even the most majestic of pumpkins inevitably meets the same fate: devoured by livestock, and returned to the earth.
Until about middle school, I got an annual ear infection, as well as a bout of strep throat about once every two years. For these ailments, I would inevitably be prescribed what was referred to in my home as “the pink stuff.” It was the antibiotic amoxicillin, in its pediatric liquid form, and it was a bright, chemical pink. It was delicious.
My recurrent infections may have given me more experience with amoxicillin than the average child, but the flavor was beloved enough that the internet nostalgia factory has picked up on it. A subreddit dedicated to nostalgia has a couple posts about it, one with more than 13,000 likes. There are rhapsodic tweets, and pins on Pinterest, and the pink stuff even made a cameo on a BuzzFeed list of ’90s childhood memorabilia. (Although amoxicillin has been on the market since 1972.)
What does it taste like, to inspire such devotion and meme-ing? That’s harder to answer than it seems like it should be. The flavor is often described as bubble gum, but that’s not how I remember it. I remember something fruitier, an artificial strawberry-adjacent taste.
“In my recollection it’s like a chalky, not-very-sweet strawberry, or other anonymous fruit,” says Nadia Berenstein, a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the history of flavor science. “I remember a sort of anonymous fruitiness. But definitely the chalkiness.”
An informal office poll that I sprang on my co-workers who remembered taking the drug in their youth yielded mixed results. A couple votes for bubble gum, a couple for “chalk.” My colleague Vann Newkirk provided the most evocative description: “cheap strawberry syrup, but with an aftertaste somewhere between chewing rubber gloves and aspartame.”
If I concentrate, I can summon the sense memory of the taste like a ghost to the back of my throat, and I believe I’m remembering it correctly, but I can’t quite describe it accurately. So I went on a quest to figure out just what this flavor is, where it came from, and maybe, just maybe, to taste it again.
* * *
The original formulation of amoxicillin was created by Beecham Laboratories, which later, through an elaborate series of mergers, became GlaxoSmithKline. I contacted Glaxo to see if anyone there could shed some light on where the flavor came from. “What I have been told is that the pink bubble-gum flavor which I think you are referring to was developed specifically for the U.S. market at a former GSK site in Bristol, Tennessee, and the reason for this was that the penicillin molecule has an inherently bitter taste,” a spokesperson for the company told me in an email. (Amoxicillin is in the penicillin family.) The artificial sweetener aspartame is sometimes described as bitter—so my colleague Vann was really onto something there.
But amoxicillin has been available as a generic drug since shortly after it went on the market in the 1970s, which means the version of the drug that I and my fellow ’90s babies had was probably not usually the one manufactured by GSK. “Amoxicillin is one the first drugs that developed a robust generic market,” says Jeremy Greene, a professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. A further impediment to trying to pinpoint the precise flavor I remember is that apparently many pharmacies now offer a variety of flavors that can be added to any children’s medicine.
I bothered a pharmacist at my local CVS to help clear this up. Though most of the amoxicillin he had in stock was in pill form, he also showed me a jar of powder, which he would mix with water to create the pink liquid suspension, should a child be prescribed some. “I can smell it, you know, when I prepare [it],” he told me. “It has a flavor.” It’s fruity, he said, “somewhere between strawberry and cherry.” This particular CVS gets its amoxicillin from Teva, one of the biggest manufacturers of generic drugs, the pharmacist said.
Here’s where it gets interesting. On Teva’s website, two of the four strengths of liquid amoxicillin the company offers are listed as being “Mixed Berry Flavored.” The other two are described as “Pink, Fruit-Gum Flavored.” Now, Teva is not the only generic manufacturer of amoxicillin by any stretch (one made by Sandoz that I found contains raspberry and strawberry flavors). But the existence of these two similar-but-different flavors might explain why some people remember the pink stuff as tasting like bubble gum, while others remember fruitiness.
Another potential explanation is that human memory is endlessly fallible, but I like the idea that favors my detective skills more.
* * *
Taste is a factor in children’s medicine in a way that it’s just not for adults, who are prescribed pills for most things. And children often need the extra enticement of a familiar flavor to be coaxed into taking their medicine. But flavor used to be considered a more integral part of medicine for all ages—more than just something added to make it palatable.
Under the humoral theory of medicine, Berenstein says, “tastes themselves were correlated with the body’s humors.” So if someone’s four humors—black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm—were seen to be out of balance, they’d likely be advised to avoid certain tastes, and eat more of others. A melancholic person, for example, might want to avoid vinegar (sour—just like them), and eat more sugar to balance themselves out. “It wasn’t about a spoonful of sugar making the medicine go down,” Berenstein says. “A spoonful of sugar was the medicine.”
And for bitter herbal preparations that served as medicine, Greene adds, the bitter taste was “proof of efficacy”: If it tastes gross, it must be working. But in the 20th and 21st centuries, the Western understanding of medicine came to focus on active ingredients. What Greene calls “the sensuous dimensions of medicine” got “systematically written out of the stories we tell ourselves about pharmaceuticals and the way they work.” But medicines “nonetheless have physical properties,” he says, “and those physical properties certainly influence our experience of them.”
Making children’s medicines tasty makes the experience of being sick less stressful for kids, and helps doctors and parents get kids to take them peacefully. But there is also the danger, if they are too tasty, that kids will consume them in secret, and overdose.
Children’s aspirin is a stark example of that. St. Joseph Aspirin for Children was released in 1947. It was orange-colored and orange-flavored and often advertised as “candy aspirin.” And “within a few years of its introduction, the incidence of aspirin poisoning in young children increased dramatically, almost five hundred percent,” writes Cynthia Connolly, a professor of nursing at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the history of pediatric health care.
“I, myself, am a former aspirin-poisoned child,” Connolly told me. It happened in 1961 or 1962, when she was 3 or 4 years old, she says. “My parents kept it up high because they knew I loved it. It had a wonderful granular taste; it tastes like a SweeTart. One time when they weren’t looking, I got up there and got the St. Joseph Aspirin for Children, took almost the whole bottle, and then fell off the counter and broke my arm. While still holding the medicine by the way.” Her parents found her when she screamed, and she had to go to the hospital and get her stomach pumped—and her arm set.
The dangers of candy aspirin led to the development of the safety cap, Connolly writes. And the pharmaceutical industry came to realize that it probably wasn’t a great idea to sell medicine as “candy.”
“You may recall the public service announcements from the ’80s,” Greene says, “of pills singing a chorus that went, ‘We’re not candy, even though we look so fine and dandy. Too much of us is dangerous.’ It’s a great song.”
* * *
It has been suggested to me by a couple well-meaning dream-crushers that perhaps if I tasted amoxicillin again today, it wouldn’t be the same, either because the formulation had changed, or because my palate had. Or, perhaps it was never really as delicious as I remember.
“Our memories, especially memories of being patients, are so wrapped up in moments and experience and become invested over time with additional meaning,” Greene says. “Either your vulnerability at that moment and the ability of the medicine to help you feel better, or perhaps a certain childhood relishing of this sick role, of remembering those days in which you get to stay home and watch television. I think it’s likely that you’re both encountering nostalgia for flavor and the way that particularly significant memories are oftentimes associated with smells and flavors.”
I was thwarted many times in my attempts to taste amoxicillin again. Greene initially offered to let me do a taste test, then retracted that offer after thinking it through. I asked colleagues to let me know if their kids got prescribed the drug. One person had just thrown some away, and the only other person who got some while I was reporting—my colleague Ian Bogost—lives in Georgia. Ian and I talked about finding a way to get the amoxicillin to DC, but ultimately we were too worried about the legality of transporting his child’s prescription across state lines, just so I could taste it (even if it would be a very small taste).
But while I was reporting on amoxicillin’s flavor, several people mentioned to me that the flavor they most associated with childhood illness was that of grape Dimetapp cough syrup. Greene was one of those people—but he says he recently got it for his kids and tasted it, and “it does not live up to the nostalgia that I have generated for it in my head.”
As it became clearer and clearer that I was not going to get to taste amoxicillin again, I thought that at least my colleagues could revisit their childhood memories. Unlike the flavor I was seeking, Dimetapp can be purchased over the counter. So—not that I encourage anyone else to do this—I purchased some cough syrup and fed it recreationally to myself and my colleagues. We had a Dimetapp taste test at my desk, taking very small sips of the bright purple liquid off of plastic spoons from the kitchen.
It’s not something I ever had as a kid. My adult assessment is that it tastes pretty good. Like a melted grape Jolly Rancher, but slightly more acrid. It did not disappoint my boss Ross Andersen, who grew up with it, though. “That’s like the Proustian madeleine,” he said, after tasting a couple drops. It took him right back to his temps perdu. Vann Newkirk similarly found it “classic” but perhaps a little more medicinal than he remembered.
But my madeleine moment was not to be. Regarding his daughter’s amoxicillin, Ian assured me, “It tastes just like you think it does,” which is both small consolation, and an impossible thing for him to know with any authority.
“I’m trying to think of what the analogy is here,” Greene says. “Not the forbidden fruit, but somehow this is almost like a sort of ambrosia that you have no access to.”
Part of the nostalgic aura that surrounds amoxicillin’s flavor may well be because there isn’t a great way for adults to taste it again, unless you have kids who get prescribed it. It’s easier to romanticize something that can never be recaptured again—much like youth itself.
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“BALANCED BUDGET!!! DJT” Donald Trump posted that promise on February 7, 2025, the 18th day of his current presidential term. During the 2024 campaign, he had promised even more: the elimination of the entire national debt in a single term of office.
Trump insisted that he could reach his budget goals without disagreeable spending cuts. At a rally in St. Cloud, Minnesota, in July 2024, Trump pledged to make “not one penny” in cuts to Social Security and Medicare. He repeated that “not one penny” promise countless times through 2024, including in the Republican platform. Instead, he proposed eliminating deficits and debt with magic money from growth, from crypto, and—above all—from tariffs. Tariffs would generate so much revenue that they might replace the income tax, maybe even finance a $2,000 dividend for every American taxpayer.
Basic budget math contradicted Trump’s fantasies. The United States imported about $3.3 trillion in goods in 2024. The budget deficit for that year was about $1.8 trillion. To imagine that tariffs could eliminate the budget deficit required believing that the Trump administration would impose a 55 percent tariff on all imports—including oil, natural gas, and electricity—and that consumers would pay this tariff without altering their buying behavior at all. That was all obviously absurd.
But there was a Plan B to balance the budget! Let Elon Musk do it! At a rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden in October 2024, Musk boasted that he could save $2 trillion in wasteful spending. That was the genesis of the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk’s guerrilla war against the U.S. government. This adventure not only likely violated the Constitution but also almost certainly worsened the deficit. DOGE reduced the IRS auditing staff by nearly one-third. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that the ensuing collapse in federal enforcement efforts will cost the Treasury more than $860 billion in revenue over the next decade.
Fast-forward to the present. The budget deficit for the fiscal year that ended on September 30 is about $2 trillion, or about $160 billion more than in Joe Biden’s last complete year as president. Next year’s deficit is likely to be even bigger. When Trump spoke of eliminating the national debt, total debt stood at nearly $35 trillion. On the current trajectory, total debt could reach $45 trillion by 2028.
To put that another way: The U.S. debt reached $10 trillion for the first time during the financial crisis of 2008. That once seemed a crushing burden. Now an extra $10 trillion in debt is the cost of just four years of Trump’s fiscal recklessness.
Some highlights of how this record was achieved: In 2025, Trump and the Republican-led Congress passed a tax bill that made the 2017 tax cuts permanent—and added more tax reductions on top of them. The tax legislation will directly reduce government revenues by $4.5 trillion over the coming decade. Trump’s cuts to food stamps and Medicaid reduced spending by $1.1 trillion. Altogether, Trump’s budget plans netted out to $3.4 trillion in direct costs over the decade ahead—a sum that grows to $4.1 trillion because of the rising costs of debt service in the Trump era.
Trump’s biggest budget idea was to substitute tariffs for other government revenue sources. This plan proved not only economically unrealistic but also illegal. Tariffs are taxes, and taxes must be voted for by Congress, according to the Constitution. Congress delegated some emergency tariff authority to the president, but not enough to create a permanent new scheme of revenue. The Supreme Court confirmed this basic rule in February 2026.
The situation will continue to get worse. The Trump administration estimates that the Iran war has cost about $45 billion. That figure covers operational costs such as fuel and munitions. But in March, the Pentagon requested an additional $200 billion to meet a wider range of war-related needs, and Trump’s fiscal budget for 2027 seeks $1.5 trillion for the U.S. military, up 44 percent from pre-Iran-war levels.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act reduced income taxes on Social Security benefits, and Trump’s inflation has driven increases in Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment. The Social Security trust fund is now projected to be exhausted in 2032, forcing either big tax increases or big benefit cuts.
An early warning that Trump’s monetary promises should not be trusted came at that same 2024 St. Cloud rally where Trump promised no cuts to Social Security, when Trump stiffed the town with $209,000 in event fees. As the midterm elections near, Trump has accused the Democrats of threatening the country’s economy with socialism and communism. Yet his administration has managed to wreck the country’s finances worse than any government in U.S. history, without the excuse of an economic crisis or a successful major war. October 1 marked the start of America’s fiscal new year. A new Congress will face a new fiscal reality.
Over the next eight weeks, as winter envelops Ukraine, Russia plans to use the frigid weather as a weapon. Its arms factories have already made enough missiles and drones to take down Ukraine’s electrical grid, as well as the heating systems that millions of people rely on to stay warm. Homes far from the front will become deadly for their inhabitants as temperatures fall.
In that same time frame, three events taking place thousands of miles away could determine Ukraine’s future. The first is America’s Election Day, now two weeks away; leaders in Kyiv fear that if Democrats win one or both chambers of Congress, President Trump may turn even further against them in those final weeks of full Republican control of Washington. The second is a proposed summit in mid-November in southern China, where Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to meet with Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to plan how to end the war—without having a seat at the table for Ukraine.
The third is the G20 summit at Trump’s Miami-area golf course, scheduled to take place in mid-December. The president has visions of standing between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as they sign a peace deal, even if he has to strong-arm Ukraine to do it, according to advisers. One Ukrainian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss internal conversations, told us that it’s hard not to feel left out of decision making that will dictate the country’s future: “It looks like this is all happening without us.”
The U.S. president, who used to brag that he could resolve the war in 24 hours, has tossed aside some sanctions on Russia and struck a deal with Putin to import diesel from Moscow, giving a boost to the Russian war machine. He and his allies have threatened Kyiv, demanding that Zelensky stop attacking Russian oil refineries or risk losing access to American intelligence, weaponry, and satellite communications that it uses to defend itself. The calendar is now Ukraine’s foe—and so, Ukrainians fear, is Donald Trump.
Trump’s war in Iran has appeared to throttle Republicans’ chances in the midterms; the unending conflict, and the resulting surge in oil and gas prices, has eroded the GOP’s poll numbers and fueled Democrats’ hopes of taking both chambers of Congress. Stymied in his efforts to bring that war to a close, Trump recently shifted his focus to resolving the Ukraine conflict, in part to bring fuel prices down. But the way he’s chosen to try to do that has provided his fellow Republicans with a nasty October surprise. In a first for a U.S. president, Trump has sided with a traditional adversary, Russia, over a democracy that is not only fighting for its existence but also acting as a bulwark against a wider war. Trump’s diesel deal with Putin will have a negligible impact on American energy prices, but it’s a financial lifeline for Moscow.
Trump has demanded an energy cease-fire—he even announced one earlier this month that had no basis in reality—yet has focused his ire entirely on Ukraine’s attacks on Russian oil refineries. He blames those strikes for the rise in energy prices while ignoring the real culprit, Iran’s ability to defy the United States and close the Strait of Hormuz. He’s convinced himself, three people close to him have told us, that Ukraine’s attacks on the refineries are, in part, meant to undermine Republicans’ chances next month—and, by extension, Trump. The president has ignored Moscow’s attacks on Ukraine’s electrical grid, and yesterday, hours after a drone strike on a public park killed six people, including two children, he downplayed its strikes on Ukraine’s cities, declaring that Russia had not “been doing much.” An image of one of the dead children, a 1-year-old killed as she sat in her stroller, was broadcast around the globe.
More pressure could be coming. Trump aides have threatened to withhold arms sales unless Kyiv stops targeting Russian diesel plants; this week, the administration delayed approving the transfer of missiles that Ukraine needs for its defense. Ukraine in the past week has said that it has not consistently received early warnings of attacks and no longer has full Starshield satellite access, which is impeding its ability to defend itself against Russia’s new fleet of jet-powered drones. (The Wall Street Journal reported today that Starshield’s creator, Elon Musk, ordered the slowdown. The White House and Musk had previously denied involvement.)
Some in Trump’s orbit have suggested that the United States go further and stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine. Trump’s deference to Putin has been a theme for a decade, yet this new round of kowtowing has handed Republicans another obstacle ahead of the elections. In a rare act of defiance, a handful in the party have denounced the president’s decisions, including his move to undercut a Russia-sanctions bill that he signed only a month ago in honor of its champion, the late Senator Lindsey Graham. The quick betrayal of Graham’s legacy was a blow for some of his Senate colleagues; GOP aides told us that Graham’s sudden July death cost Ukraine its most vocal champion in Trump’s inner circle, and that no one has stepped up to fill that void.
Michael Froman, who worked in the Clinton and Obama administrations and is now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told us that cutting off Kyiv from American weapons or intelligence might, in fact, prolong the war because it “would undermine Ukraine’s position at the negotiating table and make it less likely Russia would be willing to negotiate on any of the key outstanding issues.”
Officials with both parties predict that the Democrats will capture the House next month; the Senate appears to be a true toss-up. Kyiv will be carefully watching the results. A Democratic win next month will, in the long run, likely help Kyiv, and some of the more hopeful members of Zelensky’s camp believe that Republican defeats could force Trump to focus more on domestic issues, resulting in him leaving Ukraine alone. But other observers on both sides of the Atlantic fear that the opposite could be true. A president without a friendly Congress tends to fall back more on foreign policy, where he needs little help from Capitol Hill. Either way, the new Congress won’t be seated until January 3, leaving Trump unchecked for two more months and perhaps motivated to wield power before his party moves into the minority. Another major national election would not be for two years—plenty of time for Trump to push Ukraine without fear of voters punishing Republicans. “He could get distracted at any time,” one outside Trump ally told us. “But right now, he’s furious at Ukraine, and he wants Zelensky gone.”
Two weeks after Election Day, Trump plans to board Air Force One bound for a series of summits in Asia. Earlier this month, Trump overruled White House aides who had counseled against him calling to wish Putin a happy birthday, warning that little good would come of it. In that conversation, Trump authorized the diesel deal, and Putin suggested something grander: a meeting of the world’s great powers to divide up the world. Or at least Ukraine.
Putin proposed that he, Trump, and Xi hold a trilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in Shenzhen, China, in mid-November to discuss a variety of issues, including Ukraine. Trump told reporters yesterday that he is open to attending the meeting, which would be his first face-to-face encounter with Putin since their unproductive summit in Alaska last year. It is no surprise that Trump is drawn to the idea; his deference toward Putin is rivaled only by his regard for Xi, whom he hosted in lavish fashion at the White House last month. He has previously been intrigued by the idea of the three powers—China, Russia, the United States—dividing the globe into spheres of influence, although Moscow these days hardly wields the international clout of Washington or Beijing.
The idea of two authoritarians and their admirer plotting to slice up sovereign nations alarmed much of the West. And how, Kyiv demanded, could Ukraine’s future be decided with no input from Ukraine? But some in Trump’s orbit have backed the idea, belittling Ukraine as a corrupt backwater with no autonomy. Putin has never viewed Ukraine as a legitimate country, and Trump has held a grudge against it since 2019, when he was impeached (for the first time) after pressuring Zelensky to dig up damaging information about Trump’s political rival Joe Biden. He and his Ukrainian counterpart had a shouting match at the White House early in Trump’s second term, causing the U.S. to briefly withhold intelligence. Since then, Zelensky has tried to flatter Trump to stay on his good side, but those niceties have vanished as the American president has demanded that Ukraine pick a new leader.
Many of those in Trump’s orbit are unsympathetic to Ukraine’s plight and see the war not as a battle for the modern, rules-based world order—with its cardinal tenet prohibiting the seizure of land by force—but as an impediment to future business deals with Russia, some of which could enrich members of the president’s inner circle. Pushing Ukraine into taking a deal, even if that means it has to give up its claim on the Donbas, would open up avenues to dealmaking on Russia’s diesel, rare-earth minerals, and other resources. Zelensky has balked at any territorial concessions. “Our worry is that they are looking at this as a new Yalta Conference, to divide the world into spheres of influence,” another Ukrainian official told us.
Trump’s ideal timeline for some sort of Russia-Ukraine peace agreement, as we reported last week, would be in December at the G20 summit. That bit of history, were it to occur, would take place at one of Trump’s own properties. In Trump’s first term, he pushed to host the 2020 G7 at his golf course in Doral, just outside of Miami. But Trump abandoned the idea amid bipartisan blowback over his plan to personally profit off the event.
This time, there has been nary a Republican whimper of protest about Trump’s venue choice, but some have lodged complaints about the president’s other idea for the summit: to invite Putin. The Russian leader has yet to agree to show up, but if he does, it would be the first time he has attended a multilateral summit in a Western country since his invasion of Ukraine. It would allow him to take another step in shedding his status as an international pariah, though it is hard to imagine that European leaders are eager to talk with Putin.
Zelensky, who has already committed to attending the G20, has made clear that he would be willing to sit down with Putin, no matter the venue, to work out an agreement to end the war. If Trump has his way over the next eight weeks, it might be not a negotiation, but a capitulation.
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