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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

I.

“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.

“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.

“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.

Be sure to visit the Nikon Small World competition website to view the full set of winning and honored images.

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.”

“50 Unforgettable Love Stories” is part of The Atlantic’s robust Books section, devoted to essays, criticism, reporting, original fiction, poetry, and book recommendations, as well as The Atlantic’s weekly Books Briefing newsletter. This follows The Atlantic’s earlier books projects “65 Essential Children’s Books,” released in October 2025, “The Best American Poetry of the 21st Century (So Far),” published in March 2025, and “The Great American Novels,” released in 2024.

Press Contacts:
Paul Jackson and Sammi Sontag | The Atlantic
press@theatlantic.com

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.

[Read: The psychiatrist’s case for downsizing a friendship]

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.”

[Read: How ‘somatics’ became the solution to modern life]

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.

​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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.

Walt Hunter

Romeo and Juliet

by William Shakespeare

1597

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.

Serena Dai

Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister

by Aphra Behn

1684

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.

Talya Zax

Evelina

by Frances Burney

1778

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.

Talya Zax

Persuasion

by Jane Austen

1817

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.

Eleanor Barkhorn

Jane Eyre

by Charlotte Brontë

1847

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.

Rachel Vorona Cote

Wuthering Heights

by Emily Brontë

1847

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.

Jeremy Gordon

North and South

by Elizabeth Gaskell

1854

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. 

Judith Shulevitz

Middlemarch

by George Eliot

1871

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.

Judith Shulevitz

The Portrait of a Lady

by Henry James

1881

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.

Haley Mlotek

Anne of the Island

by L. M. Montgomery

1915

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.

Jane Yong Kim

The Age of Innocence

by Edith Wharton

1920

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.

Hillary Kelly

The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

1925

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?

Megan Garber

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

by Thornton Wilder

1927

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.

Jenisha Watts

Arabella

by Georgette Heyer

1949

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?

Melissa Febos

The Price of Salt

by Patricia Highsmith

1952

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.

Charlie Tyson

Giovanni’s Room

by James Baldwin

1956

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.

Merve Emre

Maurice

by E. M. Forster

1971

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.

Adam Kirsch

The Flame and the Flower

by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

1972

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.”

Emma Sarappo

Endless Love

by Scott Spencer

1979

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.

George Packer

The Transit of Venus

by Shirley Hazzard

1980

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.

Talya Zax

Love Medicine

by Louise Erdrich

1984

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.”

Boris Kachka

Beloved

by Toni Morrison

1987

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?

Jenisha Watts

The Remains of the Day

by Kazuo Ishiguro

1989

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 fecklesses 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.

Eleanor Barkhorn

Possession

by A. S. Byatt

1990

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.

Hillary Chute

Mating

by Norman Rush

1991

“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.

Lily Meyer

The Blue Flower

by Penelope Fitzgerald

1995

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.

Lily Meyer

“Brokeback Mountain”

by Annie Proulx

1997

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.

Valerie Trapp

The God of Small Things

by Arundhati Roy

1997

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.

Boris Kachka

I Love Dick

by Chris Kraus

1997

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.

Christina McCausland

Tipping the Velvet

by Sarah Waters

1998

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.”

Walt Hunter

Peel My Love Like an Onion

by Ana Castillo

1999

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.

Emma Sarappo

Atonement

by Ian McEwan

2001

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.

Faith Hill

Call Me by Your Name

by André Aciman

2007

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 The Iliad, 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.

Faith Hill

Forbidden

by Beverly Jenkins

2016

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.

Faith Hill

An American Marriage

by Tayari Jones

2018

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.

Lily Meyer

This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

2019

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.

Elise Hannum

Little Rabbit

by Alyssa Songsiridej

2022

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.

Emma Sarappo

The Safekeep

by Yael van der Wouden

2024

At the beginning of the 1960s, Isabel lives 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.

Sophie Gilbert

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.

[From the October 2026 issue: MAGA is making the world safe for corruption]

“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 Journal editorial 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.

[Leo J. Wise: How corruption got this bad]

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.

[Read: Trump is learning that his bullying has consequences]

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.)

[Watch: How did Trump’s trade fight with Canada go so sideways?]

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.

[Read: One morning of controlled chaos in Maine]

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.

[Read: Why do rich kids love socialism?]

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.

[Read: The blockbuster that captured a growing American rift]

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.

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.

“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.

[Martha Gimbel: Americans are already paying dearly for the national debt]

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.

[Read: Congress might be about to hand Trump sweeping tariff powers]

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.

[Read: Ukraine finds a new set of targets]

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.

[Read: The deferential president]

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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Many people are understandably focused on the question of how AI will transform our civilization. Will it cure cancer? Will it end world hunger? Will it hack everyone’s bank accounts and incubate the next pandemic? But those who are already profiting from this technological revolution also have a more immediate concern. Their problem is—to paraphrase one of my favorite lines from Scarface—what to do with all the cash.

Over the past few days, two of America’s most prominent AI leaders have offered proposals for returning some of the spoils of the AI boom to the public. On Sunday, Anthropic announced that it would set aside 5 percent of the company’s stock in a new LLC—the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund—to be spent on causes it deems to be in the public’s interest. More stock may be added as the company becomes more valuable. If the company goes public at its current projected valuation of $1.5 trillion, the fund could hold $75 billion, making it one of the largest charities on the planet. (For context, the Gates Foundation Trust had about $89 billion in it at the end of last year.) Elon Musk, a centibillionaire and a longtime skeptic of traditional philanthropy, criticized the move and tried to one-up it, writing on X that he’d be giving one share of SpaceX to “every kid in America.” According to The New York Times’ back-of-the-napkin math, this could end up being a donation of more than $10 billion.

What AI’s biggest winners decide to do with their money could have profound consequences for how Americans live their lives. The birth of modern AI may turn out to be the biggest wealth-creation event in human history, yet most Americans are feeling those effects indirectly. AI is making some people’s jobs easier and driving innovation, but it isn’t hitting everyone’s personal finances equally, and almost half of U.S. adults think the technology will widen the gap between the rich and the poor. Musk and Anthropic are now laying out two different visions for AI-driven philanthropy—raising thorny questions about the level of control that the investor class will exert over our shared future.

The first and most obvious question for Anthropic: What if the company’s understanding of the “public good” doesn’t line up with the public’s wants or needs? Anthropic’s leaders, Dario and Daniela Amodei, have already committed to giving away most of their own personal wealth, and Dario has written on his blog about the kinds of philanthropy he admires. The Gates Foundation and PEPFAR, President George W. Bush’s public initiative for global AIDS relief, are both on his list. But how the firm’s leaders will actually decide to apportion these gifts remains somewhat nebulous. A press release for Anthropic’s fund lists “large donations to traditional nonprofits” and “direct distributions to specific populations” as examples of possible projects. Another stated goal is to remediate the effects of a massive, AI-driven labor-market transformation—an ironic instance of a company trying to solve a problem it helped create.

As many politicians and even AI corporations themselves have argued, this tech is powerful enough, and potentially such an important part of the global economy, that the wealth it creates may merit some degree of public control. Last October, as one possible plan for reckoning with the economic consequences of AI, Anthropic floated the idea of using “sovereign wealth funds to give citizens stakes in AI revenues.” (OpenAI’s leaders have also reportedly considered giving 5 percent of the company to the government.) At least for now, though, the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund isn’t giving anyone outside of the company a stake. And the fact that it won’t be a 501(c)(3), like the Gates Foundation, means that it won’t have to deal with the kinds of mandatory financial disclosures that are meant to keep charitable organizations maximally transparent. A democratic way to approach this project would be for the government to aggressively tax the company and decide for itself how to spend the money. Not every American agrees with their government representatives’ approach to resource allocation, but at least in the public sector, the people have a voice.

Although Musk’s path is also billionaire-led, it gives Americans a much more direct stake. Donald Trump clarified yesterday that Musk’s donation, if it happens, would use the country’s new child-savings accounts (known as “Trump Accounts”) as a vehicle. Rather than earmarking shares for a self-sustaining charitable foundation, Musk would be effectively cutting out the middleman, giving American children a piece of the company that houses his biggest AI bets. It would likely be a smaller total donation than Anthropic’s; one share per child may not turn out to be all that much money in the long run. And Trump Accounts aren’t a perfect dispersal mechanism; parents can’t reject donated shares, and they can’t immediately sell them. Once account holders turn 18, though, they can spend Musk’s gift on whatever they want.

Musk, like other tech billionaires, has questioned traditional modes of philanthropy. He knows that the public knows that giving can be an expression of power and control—a way to  rehabilitate a donor’s image or provide political insulation for the donor and his enterprises. Musk may be getting something out of this too. If more people own a little chunk of the AI economy, will they start to become more receptive to data centers and other Big Tech interventions? The donation could also give recipients a reason to be less critical of Musk and his businesses; people with a stake in the company might be more inclined to tolerate unscrupulous behavior. Still, if he can follow through on his approach (and especially if he continues to donate AI stock, as he hinted in his post yesterday), his gift could have a real impact.

When SpaceX was about to go public earlier this year, my colleague Matteo Wong observed that “by weaving itself into the finances of most businesses and households in America, the AI industry is quickly making itself too big to fail.” AI is already deeply embedded in our life: in the businesses we interact with, in the pension funds and 401(k)s around which we plan our future. These massive donations, which represent a deviation from tech-industry norms, could reshape society for the better. But if the public comes to rely on Anthropic’s investments or on direct payouts from SpaceX, it’ll need to start caring even more about how well these companies perform. Public welfare needn’t be contingent on the whims of a few powerful firms; so much else already is.

Related:

• Choose your overload—Musk vs. Bezos.
• Elon Musk is dropping a boulder in a kiddie pool.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

• Exclusive: Trump Jr. privately breaks with his dad.
• Why is strategy so difficult?
• Helen Lewis on all the president’s hotties
• France will never be enough for the people desecrating it.

Today’s News

1. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is donating roughly $80 million to support Democrats in the midterm elections, and is focused on helping the party win control of the House. Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee is transferring $50 million to groups supporting Republican House and Senate candidates.
2. The United Kingdom announced that it will deploy Royal Air Force fighter jets to Saudi Arabia to defend against missile and drone attacks by the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen. The jets will protect Saudi cities and infrastructure but will not conduct offensive strikes inside Yemen, British officials said.
3. Elon Musk ordered restrictions on Ukraine’s military-grade Starlink service last week, disrupting drone operations and air defenses, according to The Wall Street Journal. Musk reportedly discussed the decision, and President Trump said he did not know who was responsible for the move.

Dispatches

• The Weekly Planet: The Trump administration has mandated that federal firefighters pursue a policy of “full suppression” on every wildfire, Joshua Partlow reports. He explores the sometimes fatal dangers of this aggressive approach.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

• Radio Atlantic: Trump’s “staggering one-two punch” to Ukraine
• Charlie Warzel: You can believe everything.
• Donald Trump really wants this golf course.
• The cynicism of Trump’s climate policy
• Elizabeth Bruenig on the woman who has prevented 200 executions

Evening Read

Theranos-Style Fraud Has Become the Norm

By Idrees Kahloon

Perhaps Elizabeth Holmes was simply ahead of her time: Today, the Theranos founder’s crimes look less notorious amid a pervasive culture of grift and graft.

Her biotechnology company infamously promised to revolutionize medicine by conducting hundreds of tests on mere pinpricks of blood. A decade after it fell into disgrace, and three years after she began serving her 11-year federal-prison sentence for defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars, Holmes is the subject of a new documentary. You Can See Everything, directed by Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder, came about because Holmes and her partner, the hotel heir Billy Evans, invited Fielder, a surrealist sketch comedian, to live with them just before she went to prison. They allowed him to film whatever he saw. The result is unsettling, because Holmes’s placid indifference toward the truth has become more familiar than it was when Theranos unraveled.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Reflect. Lego’s overt outreach to an adult market has changed the nature of its products, Sophia Nguyen reports. She explores what the company lost when it grew up.

Read. Twenty years since Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma was published, America’s food system is still a mess—but there are reasons for optimism, he writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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It was fitting that, just hours after the first public screenings of the Elizabeth Holmes documentary began last Thursday, Elon Musk put on a show of his own.

That night, in Texas, Musk unveiled the company’s new Roadster prototype, a car that would defy gravity. Tesla built what was roughly one-half of a roller-coaster loop, which the Roadster climbed before momentarily hanging upside down and then executing a controlled flip and gliding down to Earth. The demo worked. In another stunt, it did a barrel roll over a semi-truck. Each maneuver was powered by air thrusters that guided the car to a soft landing.

The demo was impressive. But watching the clips, I could feel my brain struggling to process what I was being shown. Was this real? The car did climb vertically, flip, and land. But Musk, who has built wildly successful companies, is also famously prone to outlandish claims that don’t always pan out. I couldn’t help but wonder what, if anything, Tesla’s demonstration or Musk had elided. “This will be an actual car that’s on the roads,” Musk said. He got the flying-car headlines he wanted, but will this car actually be released? There are already reasons to doubt it: The car displayed on Thursday won’t be in production until at least 2028, and it features 10 thrusters powered by 600 liters of compressed air. The flying version of the Roadster will be sold “invite-only.” Its price tag is likely to be astronomical. And so Musk isn’t exactly lying here. Rather, he’s making bold proclamations and asking people to take his pledge to deliver as an article of faith.

[Read: ]Imagine every AI agent on Earth buying the same cheap paper towels

Less than 48 hours later, I found myself sitting in a crowded theater, watching the new documentary You Can See Everything, about the disgraced and convicted founder of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, and her husband, Billy Evans. In one scene, Holmes and Evans are hurriedly trying to court investors and research talent to build out what they refer to as Theranos 2.0. This scene is arguably the only time in the film where the duo don’t appear to be filled with existential dread. During phone calls and Zoom meetings, they spit out jargon and look earnestly excited about what they can build if they “get the band back together.” At the end of the sequence, Holmes is asked about why she’s spending her last days with her family building a company, and she responds that this is what she’s meant to be doing here on Earth. It is one of the few moments where I confidently believe her. Whatever she earnestly believes about her own guilt, it seems clear that her identity is inextricably tied to her notion that she is, in Silicon Valley parlance, a builder: a high-agency, visionary type with a remarkable risk tolerance who makes things and isn’t afraid to fail, because she has a monomaniacal obsession with pushing the bounds of what’s possible.

The film, which had the biggest opening for a documentary in more than 20 years, is extremely well suited to a post-truth era. The co-directors, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, bury the audience with unreliable narration such that, when you get to the end, you feel like a participant in the film. It also left me exhilarated, slightly repulsed, and feeling as if I was going insane. In that way, the documentary replicates what it’s like to navigate the informational hall of mirrors we all inhabit. But what I found most bracing about the film—more so than the supposed unknowability of anyone or anything—is how Holmes’s act and affect do not feel like an aberration in 2026. In fact, her behavior embodies the current ethos of Silicon Valley.

When she built Theranos, Holmes was a college dropout with boundless ambitions who styled herself after Steve Jobs. Jobs famously said things such as “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” and Holmes, like Jobs, projected the aura of a person ready to pull the future into the present by any means necessary. Jobs routinely delivered on these promises, and kept many projects secret until they were ready for the masses. Holmes did the opposite, offering a fantastical version of a product that did not exist, obscuring the actual capabilities and lying about the financials. She wasn’t alone; over time, the idea of the builder became more synonymous with a founder’s ideas, charisma, and salesmanship than with the products themselves. “I watched countless founders of hard tech companies present fraudulent products at conferences,” Nikita Bier, a tech entrepreneur who was recently Elon Musk’s head of product at X, wrote on the platform this weekend in response to the documentary. “They had fake studies with fudged numbers. Most of the adults in the room excused it as ‘faking it ‘til you make it.’”

Holmes’s high-profile failure and the collapse of Theranos in 2018 didn’t kill the builder archetype. If anything, the very structure of Silicon Valley became more deeply intertwined with the builder mindset. Fake it ’til you make it (provided it isn’t outright fraud) is a necessary outcome of an industry that’s funded by venture capitalists, who often make strategic bets on projects so early in development that the products are still hypothetical. And so VCs threw unfathomable money at promising but half-baked ideas in the hopes of fabulous payouts. Failures were overlooked, even celebrated as necessary or teachable moments—honorable proof of being a “man in the arena.” In 2022, after Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire was revealed to be an elaborate Ponzi scheme, the writer John Ganz argued that, in an industry built on big bets, the line between frauds and visionaries becomes difficult to suss out until everything implodes. “This is the Fyre Festival era of capitalism: outlandish promises and then a ludicrous debacle.”

Much of that rush to invest has been driven by a culture progressively gripped by the fear of missing out on the next industry-shaking payout. Untold billions were poured into crypto, then NFTs, Web3, and the ill-fated metaverse. In crypto, rug-pulling scams and Ponzi schemes abounded; its boosters said things such as “Have fun staying poor.” Today we’re living through what many suggest could be an AI bubble, and the same mentality persists. Have fun staying poor has been replaced with the idea of a “permanent underclass” of people who failed to get in early and now stand to lose their economic viability, and potentially their human agency altogether. Like Theranos, crypto, and NFTs, the AI industry is defined by claims of its inevitability and its future power (to be certain, chatbots and coding agents are real and powerful in ways the other technologies were not). In this way, AI is a faith-based technology; one’s desire to work on it, bet the success of the global economy on it, love it, or fear its End Times powers is typically predicated on what one can imagine it might become.

The past eight years have warped the tech industry to the point that it can feel untethered from the constraints of reality. You can see it in headlines everywhere if you’re looking. On Saturday, an Anthropic co-founder, Jack Clark, suggested that the U.S. GDP could jump in the next four years from about $30 trillion to $44 trillion thanks to rapid AI-driven progress in many industries. This would be one of the largest periods of growth in U.S. history, a prediction based on nothing more than the most “extreme parameter setting” of an Anthropic economic model the company released this fall. You can see it in the IPO prospectuses for a company like SpaceX, which includes in its ambitions the goal to “extend the light of consciousness to the stars” and initiatives such as asteroid mining and space tourism. And earlier this month, Musk noted that “this will sound super crazy, but I see a path to SpaceX being worth orders of magnitude more than the current Earth economy.” You could call all these claims tech optimism or, as the famed venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote in his 2023 manifesto, necessary for the “glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.” You could also call it speculative fiction.

About halfway through the film, Holmes heads to prison and the documentary shifts to focus on Billy Evans, the man with whom Holmes has two children. With Holmes in prison, Evans has become her unreliable narrator. He is, as others have noted, also a helpful lens to understand the transformation of Silicon Valley. Evans has seemingly embraced Musk and Andreessen’s brand of vice signaling. We see him shooting guns, extolling Charlie Kirk, and lashing out at people on X under the cloak of anonymity (posting as Holmes, using her X account). He makes grandiose claims about his new company but seems embittered and incapable of submitting to hard questions about it. The veneer of excitement that the couple project in the Theranos 2.0 montage is replaced by a paranoia and resentment that people, including possibly Fielder, might be trying to take him down.

It all made me wonder how Silicon Valley might respond to Theranos’s collapse if it were happening today. Reactionary types in the industry might rally around Holmes, insisting that she was too early or needed more time. They might attack the press more forcefully for trying to bring her down (Holmes and Theranos did try to retaliate against whistleblowers and the reporter who broke the story). Trust in traditional media is even lower now than it was back then, and Silicon Valley has a robust ecosystem of very popular, industry-friendly podcasts and creators who could champion Holmes’s narrative. Evans, for instance, appeared last week on the popular All-In podcast. X is now owned by Musk. The truth takes longer to come out; in some cases, it might feel almost irrelevant. The universal outrage that Theranos sparked in 2015, when news first emerged that something was deeply wrong, sounds quaint now.

“When people ask how she got so far, it’s largely explained by the period she did it in,” Bier wrote in his X post about Holmes. “And she got caught when the world suddenly woke up.” I agree with the first part of Bier’s statement and take issue with the second. The brand of delusion that defined Holmes and the twisted epistemological game that You Can See Everything showcases is still deeply embedded in the industry. None of this is to suggest that everyone in Silicon Valley is engaged in rampant, Theranos-like provable fraud. But today’s entrepreneurs are emboldened to make even more outlandish claims about the future, and it’s more difficult than ever to parse what is real, what is knowingly fake, and what is being offered in good or bad faith.

In response to Bier’s post, Jason Calacanis, an investor and a co-host of All-In, noted that there was “much truth” to Bier’s explanation before he offered a rebuttal befitting a true builder—AI will soon solve the Theranos problem: “In the next ten years, a blood testing product will emerge that will make folks go, ‘See, @ElizabethHolmes was just 20 years too early!’”

The builder is never wrong. If anything, they are just early. The future is coming. Just have faith.

*Illustration sources: Justin Sullivan / Getty; Liesa Johannssen-Koppitz / Bloomberg / Getty; Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu / Getty; USA Today / Reuters.

At 8 p.m. on Sunday night, President Emmanuel Macron delivered a national address to condemn the rioting and looting that convulsed France this weekend, from Brittany to Perpignan. His suit and tie were black, instead of his customary navy blue, and he denounced the “seditionists from far-left fringe groups, joined by many criminals, engaged in unbridled violence in our cities.” He decried the grotesque destruction—crystallized in the viral image of a fire consuming the 19th-century wooden roof of the town hall in Limoges—and the methodical sacking of businesses. “Rien ne le justifie, rien ne l’explique, rien ne l’excuse,” he said: Nothing justifies it, nothing explains it, nothing excuses it. Macron acknowledged legitimate concerns about education and the cost of living, distinguished between peaceful protesters and rioters, and called for prosecutions while instructing prefects to consider banning mass gatherings.

It sounded good. But as I was watching Macron live from New York, I called my children in Paris and heard the giddy chaos—the shouts and cheering—still vibrating through the streets below their open window. They told me that some of the stores beneath their apartment were being ransacked as the president was speaking. I had to push from my mind the appalling thought that these rioters might climb into the building’s residential upper levels. Words aren’t enough anymore.

Slowly, the French authorities are starting to grasp that. “The day of disorder and violence that we have just experienced in France is one day too many,” Bruno Le Maire, a former government minister under Macron, wrote on X on Saturday, when there were roughly 2,400 arrests and 1,000 police officers and gendarmes injured, seven of them grievously. At least 3,000 businesses were damaged or looted over the weekend. Yesterday, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced “localized” curfews in Paris and other cities across the country, which is a start. Today, Lecornu added that the military would be deployed this weekend, when further protests are planned. These interventions are welcome. But if the government cannot restore peace quickly, then a state of emergency is the only sane option.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The violence sweeping France was never really about schools]

The “internal decay” besetting France, as my friend the writer Pascal Bruckner phrased it, piggybacks on other, more intelligible causes. Some of the protests began in response to genuine grievances about France’s underfunded schools and exorbitant cost of living. But they have since turned into paroxysms of disdain for healthy civic life—nothing more cerebral, nothing to do with policy. “The high-school students’ cause died on Saturday, October 17,” Bruckner wrote in Le Figaro. “It will not recover, however legitimate its original demands may have been.”

An investigation published in Le Parisien yesterday concurs with Bruckner, suggesting that the recent violence is detached from the educational grievances that originally sparked the student protests. The paper reports that according to French intelligence sources, there is an alliance de circonstance between organized ultra-left militants and a larger group of young people from the banlieues encircling major urban areas, many of whom were not politically engaged and likely never expressed an interest in the movement’s original demands. Some of these insurgents sought confrontation with the state before the scheduled demonstrations even began. Others merely took the opportunity to stuff their pockets and watch their country burn.

These past weeks of pandemonium have driven home for me that no society, not even a society as generous and in many ways enlightened as France’s, can make life sweet enough for angry young men. Nihilists of the kind we’ve seen flood the streets of France from coast to coast will never uphold their end of the social contract, no matter how beautifully it is drafted. This is the essence of Tocqueville’s famous paradox: As societies become more equal—and few societies strive to be more egalitarian than France, thanks to heavy taxation of the rich and a generous social safety net—any perceived or remaining inequalities become intolerable.

The rioters in France are not political actors expressing the “language of the unheard,” but nihilists rebelling against the very idea of a collective national life. Whether their stated justification is racism, Islamophobia, neoliberalism, or something else, they are agents of chaos and spite, lashing out against their productive, decent neighbors, perhaps precisely because those neighbors are productive and decent. And so they burn, shatter, and humiliate the symbols of the established order.

Official government estimates place the number of protesters at more than 500,000. Images from last weekend showed patrols of police forces overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the pillaging. The Macron administration was drastically underprepared for the size of the rebellion and now faces an impossible situation. Any confrontation or escalation risks providing the protesters with a martyr; if that victim comes from a marginalized demographic, the conflagration could spark a full-fledged riot.

[David A. Graham: What Trump’s comments about France say about him]

But the alternative—appeasement—is equally unacceptable. The state cannot expect its law-abiding citizens—the majority of the population, which includes the peaceful protesters—to accept its repeated failures to safeguard them and their livelihoods. A people’s ability to move freely, conduct business, and come and go from their homes through streets that are neither dangerous nor desecrated is a fundamental right. The cost of indulging the anarchists, looters, and rioters who infiltrate mass movements has fallen on the rest of France, who never consented to cover it.

“We are six months away from our presidential election,” Macron reminded the country toward the end of his speech. “And so all those who are telling you today that the urgent thing is to take to the streets—to demonstrate, to create disorder—have only one goal: to damage the republic and hijack the debate.”

He’s correct. But if Macron is unable to contain these forces, which seek to push the political debate into flame-scorched streets and schools and places of business, then he will be handing votes to the far-right leaders who have promised to do so.

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Donald Trump is treating the championship golf course he wants to build in Washington, D.C., with the gravity of an actual emergency. He has posted on Truth Social about the course at least 15 times in the past few days, including a dozen posts around 1 a.m. this morning. He wrote yesterday that work “is scheduled to begin IMMEDIATELY!” And the Trump administration has brought in a team of senior Justice Department lawyers, including the agency’s third in command, to defend its actions in court. Last week, when Katie Zacharia praised Trump after he fired her as press secretary, a photo she posted contained a blurred-out map on Trump’s desk of what appeared to be the golf site. It is literally at the top of Trump’s pile.

A golf-course renovation is probably not the big priority you’d expect from the president just two weeks before the midterm elections, where his party will face voters who are frustrated by high prices and dislike his many vanity projects. But Trump doesn’t seem concerned that he may be risking another Reflecting Pool scandal at a high-stakes moment. On Sunday, he posted design plans for his PGA-worthy golf course. Right before a hearing yesterday, he called the federal judge presiding over a case about the golf course a “crazed lunatic” and claimed that the Interior Department could go ahead with his plan with no approval.

Trump has pushed to glam up the municipal golf course in East Potomac Park near the National Mall for months, insisting in June that work would begin on “one of the Greatest Golf Courses anywhere in the World” on September 1. But starting such a project is more complicated than such a timeline would imply. The entire park is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and would be subject to extensive bureaucratic reviews.

On October 10, the National Park Service, with little notice, cut down more than 400 trees, leaving the timber piled up in the middle of the course and setting off fears among locals that the president planned to blow through the usual red tape and start building. But preservationists and two golfers had sued over the pending changes earlier this year. So it was back to court. There, the government said that the tree removals are part of a 2019 plan to restore the course to its historic state, even though the plan is seven years old and there was no rush before. Ana C. Reyes, the judge in the case, has been skeptical that overgrown vegetation in the park suddenly became urgent enough to necessitate removal over a holiday weekend, especially because it coincided with Trump’s pressure over the course. Reyes insisted yesterday that this could not be a coincidence.

“Both can be true,” a lawyer for the government told Reyes.

“No,” Reyes replied. “Both cannot be true. We’re not dealing with quantum physics here.”

Meanwhile, the design plans that Trump posted have sparked anger among the many locals who use East Potomac Park for recreation. The map appears to remove Ohio Drive, a popular running and cycling route, and to extend the golf course to the man-made island’s perimeter, removing space for picnickers and fishers; it also replaces the park’s three affordable golf courses (one 18-hole and two nine-holes) with a single, pro-level 18-hole course. Even the famous cherry-blossom trees there seem to be at risk of removal. The renovation would significantly shrink who is able to use a place Congress designated in 1897 “to be forever held and used as a park for the recreation and pleasure of the people.”

To get to the bottom of who ordered the tree removals and for what purpose, Reyes called in several Interior and Park Service officials to testify yesterday during a hearing that stretched some seven hours. She wanted to make sense of the contradiction between the government’s position—that this was routine work, not part of any championship-golf-course plan—and Trump’s public statements.

[Read: The cutest target of Trump’s D.C. makeover]

The entire affair has been dizzying. According to Trump’s recent posts, work on the new golf course is ready to begin, the golf architect Tom Fazio has a design, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is “very excited,” and the park will soon be closed for its big makeover. If you ask the Department of Justice, as Reyes did, Trump’s golf-course plan has not been finalized. There has been no “final agency action,” DOJ lawyers argue, meaning that according to the Administrative Procedure Act, the plan cannot yet be scrutinized in court. Fazio has no contract with the government, they said, and there are not yet official plans to close the park. Still, a DOJ lawyer asserted, when pressed by the judge, that Trump’s statements are not incorrect but can be compared to executive orders that are then interpreted by agencies in ways that are consistent with the law. (On Truth Social, Trump also added that “any variance or changes will be made, depending on site conditions, by the Experts in Parks and Recreation, whose experience and knowledge in Seawalls, Landscaping, and Design are second to none.”)

If this seems confusing, that’s because it is. In a summer hearing for the case, Reyes likened the government’s stance to Schrodinger’s cat. Trump’s golf course is somehow simultaneously being built and not being built. Yesterday’s hearings captured the absurdity of the situation and the acrobatics the government seemingly must perform to defend a president who wants what he wants.

Trump has focused on renovation projects with an unprecedented intensity during his second term, working to put his stamp on the nation’s capital in arch, ballroom, and sculpture-garden form. The golf course is unique, though, in that it deals not with the widely known part of Washington’s monumental landscape but with a space people use in their everyday life.

The government has downplayed its golf-course efforts in court; in a filing on Sunday, DOJ lawyers likened the changes to East Potomac to redesigning “all the art exhibits in a Smithsonian Museum” and claimed that they’re relatively minor. Reyes didn’t buy that in court yesterday. Changing the layout of an entire historic golf course is not like changing exhibits, she said; it’s like tearing down an entire museum and building a new one.

The lawsuit has gotten heated at times. Government lawyers have tried and failed to have Reyes taken off the case, asserting in a court filing that “no reasonable observer could consider Judge Reyes sufficiently impartial to adjudicate this case.” Yesterday, she appeared especially careful, sustaining a number of objections from the government to her questions. After a more pointed exchange, she insisted that a government lawyer tell her whether she was yelling. The lawyer said that the question would be very difficult to answer.

Foreshadowing the government’s arguments, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller wrote on X last week that “I missed the part of the Constitutional Convention that put federal judges in charge of golf-course maintenance.” (Reyes had not actually barred routine work on the course; rather, she’d requested notice of “major developments.”)

As the hearing wound down, Reyes noted that during the final break, she had received worried texts from her mother and brother about reported death threats against her. Then she, like Miller, invoked the early days of the republic. A federal judge receiving threats over a golf course, she said, is probably not what the Founding Fathers envisioned.

On October 14, the publisher Faber & Faber announced that it would stop selling books by the Irish novelist Sally Rooney in the United Kingdom. Rooney has declared her intention to donate her earnings to a group called Palestine Action, which was banned last year by the British government. Her publisher concluded that it could not continue to pay royalties that would end up in the hands of a registered terrorist organization. “To sell a writer’s work and not be able to pass on earnings is an unconscionable situation for a publisher,” Faber said in a statement. “As such, and in full agreement with Sally, we have taken the decision that we can no longer supply her works in the UK in any format.” Almost immediately, international best sellers such as Normal People and Conversations With Friends began to disappear from the shelves of British bookstores.

Because of Rooney’s fame as both a “voice of her generation” and a pro-Palestinian activist, Faber’s decision provoked an outcry among advocates of the Palestinian cause, defenders of free expression, and writers and readers. But Rooney’s books haven’t been banned. Rather, their author, an Irish citizen, has decided to challenge the law of a foreign country, the United Kingdom. Britain’s 2000 Terrorism Act makes it a crime if a person “provides money or other property” and “knows or has reasonable cause to suspect that it will or may be used for the purposes of terrorism.” In this expansive language, the publisher would be on the hook along with its star author.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Europe’s free-speech problem]

By promising her royalties to Palestine Action, Rooney has forced her publisher’s hand—the key phrase in Faber’s brief statement is “in full agreement with Sally.” Faber could have tested the law in court, as courageous publishers have done in other cases, but it took a more direct course in cooperation with Rooney. No doubt she knows what she’s doing. She must have anticipated the storm of indignant editorials, social-media posts, and open letters that has followed the withdrawal of her books. At considerable cost to herself and her publisher, she’s using her cultural power to draw attention to the ban on Palestine Action and embarrass the British government into reversing it. This is not a story of literary censorship, but one of civil disobedience for political ends.

If Rooney had earmarked her royalties for Hamas, there would be nothing more to say—she would deserve the wrath of a reasonable law. But Palestine Action isn’t Hamas; nor is it the Hilltop Youth, the movement of violent West Bank settlers. It’s a loosely organized “direct action” group of pro-Palestinian British activists whose immediate goal is to interrupt the transfer of weapons to Israel, and whose tactics amount to vandalism of property. In the summer of 2025, members broke into a Royal Air Force base in Oxfordshire and sprayed red paint on a pair of military planes, which provoked Britain’s Labour government into designating Palestine Action a terrorist organization.

Other acts have been less spectacular but, in some ways, more vile. Vandals defaced and smashed the windows of a Jewish-owned investment business in an Orthodox neighborhood of North London because of its supposed ties to a weapons manufacturer. Thieves announced that they had stolen two busts of Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, from the University of Manchester, where he had once been a senior lecturer in chemistry. They beheaded one, and when a pro-Israel group offered $10,000 for the busts’ return, they proposed sending an amputated ear in exchange for the money. “First bust of Weizmann is dead,” Palestine Action posted on X. “Soon, his Zionist project will be too.” (The second bust turned out to be that of a different chemist.) So far, the group has seriously harmed one flesh-and-blood human being, when a member swung a sledgehammer at a kneeling police sergeant and fractured her back during a break-in at a weapons factory.

Sally Rooney’s favored activists play at being terrorists, but in fact they’re merely criminal and, by almost any definition, anti-Semitic. Britain already has laws that can deal with them. To lump Palestine Action with the Islamic State and al-Qaeda makes the word terrorism almost meaningless. Even worse, the Terrorism Act has been amended so broadly that anyone who “expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organization” in a “reckless” way could get arrested. As a result, hundreds of protesters—white-haired pensioners and vicars as well as keffiyeh-muffled fellow travelers—have been detained in the past year just for holding up placards that say I Oppose Genocide. I Support Palestine Action. This absurdity shows up in a recent report from Britain’s Home Office: There were “3,867 arrests for terrorism-related activity in the year ending June 2026”—an increase of 1,553 percent over the previous year, before Palestine Action was banned.

[Gal Beckerman: A free-speech meltdown]

If the withdrawal from sale of Rooney’s immensely popular novels can persuade the British Parliament to amend the law and expand the permissible speech of political activists, she will have done a service for freedom of expression. But there’s no reason to believe that this is her aim, or that she even cares very much about free speech. Rooney has become a prominent advocate—the literary name and face—for the cultural boycott of Israel, including those writers and publishers who fail to meet her exacting criteria for total separation from the state where they were born and live. She refused to allow her most recent books to be translated into Hebrew until she found an Israeli publisher that supports the boycott movement.

The purpose of a boycott is to ostracize its targets—to make it difficult or impossible for them to carry on a normal public existence. For writers, this means to be silenced. The only test of a commitment to free speech is the speech of people you disagree with, dislike, even despise. It’s a test that Rooney doesn’t pass and seems to have no interest in passing. Palestine Action should be undesignated as a terrorist organization; its vandals should be prosecuted under ordinary laws; its supporters should be allowed to hold up placards; Rooney’s books should be stocked, sold, and read. But she shouldn’t be turned into a martyr for a principle in which she herself has no real belief.

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Donald Trump Jr. had a simple vision for his father’s foreign policy during the 2024 presidential campaign: If elected, Donald Trump was going to keep America out of another war in the Middle East.

“Remember when they said Trump would get us into a full-blown war with Iran?” he wrote on X that April, as Iran launched a barrage of missiles and drones toward Israel. “Times like these should make us all realize how lucky we were to have Trump, his strength and his resolve.”

Two and a half years later, the president has enmeshed the United States in a full-blown war with Iran—and Trump Jr. isn’t happy about it.

Trump Jr. has repeatedly voiced his opposition to the ongoing Iran war in private conversations, two people who have spoken directly with him about the conflict told us. The president’s son, these people said, opposed the war from its outset and made his opposition known to his father. He has long been skeptical of foreign intervention, these people told us, and believed the U.S. should not enter another Middle East war. Trump Jr. was also especially close to Charlie Kirk, the late conservative activist, who had broken with the Trump administration to oppose the war in Iran.

“Don has kept his views on the subject private, as he would never publicly break with his dad on an issue like this, but I can’t imagine anyone who knows Don would be surprised by his personal views on the subject,” a person close to the president’s son told us. A spokesman for Trump Jr. declined to comment. The White House didn’t respond to questions about Trump Jr.’s position on the war, and an official said in a statement, “Iran has been decimated, and one way or the other, the conflict in Iran will be over very soon.”

The White House’s decision to ally with Israel against Tehran has exposed a deepening rift within MAGA—not just over Iran, but also over what “America First” actually means. The divide pits nationalists who see foreign wars as a betrayal of domestic priorities against hawks who argue that American power must be wielded more aggressively against its adversaries. For years, the two camps coexisted under Trump’s promise of strength without the cost of another major war. Iran has made that balancing act harder to sustain. “Don Jr. is the most MAGA of them all,” one of the people who spoke with him about his opposition to the Iran war told us.

Even within the administration, some of the president’s closest advisers, including Vice President Vance, have voiced private opposition to the war as they deliberated whether to join Israel in its military campaign. Others, including CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, were skeptical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s initial pitch in February that a regime-change operation—particularly one conducted from the air—was remotely realistic.

The political costs are mounting. A Pew Research Center survey conducted over the past month found that 65 percent of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of the Iran operation, compared with 33 percent who approved. Republican approval fell from 69 percent in March to 63 percent. Nearly half of Americans expected the conflict to drag on for more than a year—far beyond the administration’s initial estimate of about four to six weeks.

[Read: Don Jr.’s wedding trap]

The economic consequences have sharpened the political fallout. Rising gas prices, driven by disruptions to the energy markets, are squeezing already strained household budgets. The midterm elections will test whether Republicans can defend a war that many voters oppose, while convincing those same voters that the administration is focused on their economic concerns. Republican candidates have been forced to defend a war with immense costs and an uncertain conclusion—one that the president initiated without congressional approval.

Trump Jr.’s private opposition offers yet another reminder that doubts about the war are not confined to the president’s critics or the fringes of the Republican Party. It also points to a deeper sentiment within the president’s base that he has betrayed key campaign promises: to avoid foreign wars and to make life more affordable for the average American.

Updated at 9:30 a.m. ET on October 21, 2026

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“There are some reasons to be president,” Donald Trump mused at a rally in Georgia earlier this month. Take a wild guess what these might be. The cool armored car? Custody of the nuclear button? The opportunities for immense corruption? Wrong. The leader of the free world was referring to the joy of living in a house guarded by “big, strong, handsome soldiers.” Under Joe Biden, soldiers were not allowed to be hot, because of woke. Even worse, some of them were girls.

Yes, after two grinding years of governance, Trump is back in his happy place, out on the campaign trail, voicing whichever disconnected thoughts crackle and fizz through his frontal cortex. His favorite rhetorical theme lately is an unexpected one: the official presidential dreamboat rankings. In multiple rallies, Trump has gone on and on about the relative hotness of male politicians, soldiers, and even protesters. As a result, people on the internet have diagnosed him with a novel medical condition: gay dementia. After putting in a solid shift in the heterosexuality mines, has the former beauty-pageant proprietor now become so disinhibited that he can no longer repress his thirst for man-flesh?

A less salacious explanation might be that the president has always refined his speeches based on audience feedback, and he’s discovered that his hot-guy material absolutely kills. In 2024, he kept going on about “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” and whether being electrocuted is preferable to being eaten by a shark, simply because the crowds enjoyed those riffs. Today the MAGA faithful get a transgressive thrill from hearing a man put into office by Christian conservatives deliver homoerotic stylings on male beauty. Calling women hot would read as creepy, and might remind audiences of the sexual-assault allegations against Trump, or the locker-room gaucheness of “grab ’em by the pussy.” But lusting after men is good, clean fun, and after a decade pushing the limits of outrageous behavior, here is a taboo that Trump can harmlessly break. Which Democrat is going to mock a guy for being a little bit swishy? Stephen Miller will not dare whisper to his boss: Sir, you know that we keep snidely implying that James Talarico is secretly gay? Your obvious love of buff soldiers is giving—mixed messages.

Enough of the serious chin-stroking electoral analysis, though. You want to hear which men America’s greatest president considers to be stone-cold babes. Step forward, Jon Husted of Ohio, with your glorious, rippling glutes and your valiant crusade against energy-efficient dishwashers. At a campaign stop for the Republican senator in Dayton, Trump discovered that Husted used to be a star football player. Naturally, the president looked for evidence of this in Husted’s buttocks—the windows to the soul. As he later told a crowd in Youngstown: “I don’t do this with men very often.” (A lie.) “I started examining his body because I didn’t know he was a great athlete. And I looked and I watched up and down. I looked at his ass.” The crowd laughed, which encouraged Trump to add that he also admired Husted’s hands, which he said were “like claws.”

[Read: The king of queens]

Days later in Kentucky, Trump returned to the theme of Husted’s badonkadonk. “I examined his ass, and then I looked at his shoulders. I looked at his feet. I looked at his hand. I looked at his jawline,” he told the crowd. “I then patted him on the shoulder, and it was like a piece of steel. I’m still recovering.” The Ohio candidate had gained “nine or 10 points since I talked about that,” he said. (Also a lie.)

Trump has always had a weakness for a photogenic guy. He reportedly chose members of his Cabinet, such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, after seeing how good they looked on television. He’s long made a habit of singling out attractive men in his audiences, entreating the rest of the crowd to join in his appreciation. (“Get up here, please. I want to see,” he told a muscled young man at a Coast Guard ceremony this spring.) Back in February, the president described a “very powerful” steel-factory owner who was so grateful for his policies that “he said, ‘Sir, I want to kiss you so badly.’” In May, my colleague Ashley Parker chronicled some of the men whose looks had Trump favorably assessed. These included the president of Paraguay (“young and handsome”), military pilots (“perfect specimens”), and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (“under that beautiful exterior is a killer”).

The president’s homoerotic stylings have become more obvious, however, because he has so little else to talk about on the campaign trail. Crooked Hillary and Sleepy Joe have long since departed the scene, Shifty Schiff’s impeachment plans went nowhere, and the fake-news media have been replaced by MAGA toadies. With few enemies left (except his own terrible judgment) Trump is struggling to develop new material. Like many older people, he has retreated to his comfort zone, and his comfort zone is guarded by big, strapping men in uniform. “They’re always great-looking, these four-star guys. I don’t know if they get the job by their look,” he told a rally in Kansas this week. He also praised the rock singer Ted Nugent for having a son who was “a beautiful-looking guy.”

The president has ruminated so often on male beauty lately that it’s become very obvious that he has a type. His taste in men turns out to be somewhat basic—white, beefy, butch; think corn-fed midwestern fireman—and thoroughly partisan. At the same rally in Georgia where he enthused about the White House guards, Trump incorrectly declared that Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, was not a “good-looking man,” unlike his Republican challenger. “I actually think Mike Collins is a good-looking man—and he’s all man. He’s all man,” added Trump. “I’m not sure about Ossoff.” (Let me save you a click: Collins is a mulleted 59-year-old with a touch of latter-day Newt Gingrich about his facial features, whereas Ossoff is so cute that he clearly had to shave off his beard in order to be taken seriously.) Trump went on to declare that the GOP candidate for Georgia governor, Rick Jackson, was also a “very handsome, distinguished, beautiful-looking guy.” In Kansas, Trump expanded his hotness rankings to encompass the crowd. Describing one loyalist’s confrontation with a protester, he noted approvingly that “the MAGA guy beat the crap out of him. Not that that matters. Good-looking guy.”

Trump’s MAGA goggles do have some limits. Last month, he went through a phase of roasting Ken Paxton, devoting sections of multiple speeches to what a schlub he found the Republican Senate candidate in Texas to be. “He may not be the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen,” the president observed on September 9, adding the next day: “I’m not sure if I like your look. I’m not sure if I like the way you dress. I don’t like the way you talk.” Sad! Paxton, apparently, has a face not even a homoerotically inclined Republican president can love.

An enthusiasm for buff young men in uniforms (or out of them) has always been one of the hallmarks of authoritarianism—a form of governance enamored of strong male bodies, and the promise of violence that they contain, even when the rulers consider overt homosexuality degenerate. Mussolini’s Italy simultaneously exiled dozens of gay men to the island of San Domino and produced the jaw-droppingly campy naked statues at the Stadio dei Marmi in Rome. Many dictators end up mired in camp: Muammar Qaddafi had an all-female bodyguard troop. Turkmenistan’s Saparmurat Niyazov renamed April after his mother and built a gold statue of himself that rotated to face the sun. Emperor Bokassa I of the short-lived Central African empire tried to make his coronation ceremony an exact replica of the one held by Napoleon Bonaparte, but was hampered by having to hold it in a basketball stadium.

[Read: The surprising reason for the new homophobia]

Donald Trump’s simultaneous love for unchecked executive power and a well-turned male ankle is therefore part of a rich historical tradition. At the same time, it is also one of the many ways in which his political style represents a departure from typical American conservatism. From the 1970s onward, the Republicans were the party of the “moral majority” and “traditional values.” The idea that the party’s base is casually homophobic is still such conventional wisdom that J. D. Vance, a Millennial who very obviously had LGBTQ friends in his student years, now has to play-act as an old-school social conservative to show the depth of his political conversion. When a man at a rally in Texas shouted out that he loved Vance, the vice president replied: “I love you too, sir. In a totally platonic way, to be clear. I’m the vice president, not James Talarico.”

Vance does not seem to have grasped that his boss’s campiness is key to his political appeal—it’s the secret sauce that transforms nastiness into showbiz sass. Trump is politics’ answer to Joan Rivers, and his persona is influenced by all the flavors of American fakery: the carnival barker, the reality-TV host, the kayfabe world of professional wrestling. He looks like a man doing a drag performance as himself.

Trump’s embrace of camp also reflects his immunity to shame. I get the sense that Vance is crippled with embarrassment by the thought of that famous picture of him in eyeliner and a blond wig. His unease with gayness, campiness, and femininity reads as insecurity. By contrast, Trump loves Sunset Boulevard and doesn’t care who knows it. Hell, he even went to Liza Minnelli’s wedding. That authenticity and disinhibition means he can get a crowd of white Christians in Kentucky to listen to his homoerotic ramblings—and applaud.