The Atlantic

Photos: Spring in Bloom

2024-03-21T13:20:39-04:00

Tuesday marked the first day of spring, and the Northern Hemisphere has begun to warm, with flowers and trees in bloom. Gathered below is a small collection of images from recent weeks in North America, Asia, and Europe, of people enjoying flowering fields and trees—signs of warmer days to come.

It’s Not the Economy. It’s the Pandemic.

2024-03-21T12:17:11-04:00

America is in a funk, and no one seems to know why. Unemployment rates are lower than they’ve been in half a century and the stock market is sky-high, but poll after poll shows that voters are disgruntled. President Joe Biden’s approval rating has been hovering in the high 30s. Americans’ satisfaction with their personal lives—a measure that usually dips in times of economic uncertainty—is at a near-record low, according to Gallup polling. And nearly half of Americans surveyed in January said they were worse off than three years prior.

Experts have struggled to find a convincing explanation for this era of bad feelings. Maybe it’s the spate of inflation over the past couple of years, the immigration crisis at the border, or the brutal wars in Ukraine and Gaza. But even the people who claim to make sense of the political world acknowledge that these rational factors can’t fully account for America’s national malaise. We believe that’s because they’re overlooking a crucial factor.

Four years ago, the country was brought to its knees by a world-historic disaster. COVID-19 hospitalized nearly 7 million Americans and killed more than a million; it’s still killing hundreds each week. It shut down schools and forced people into social isolation. Almost overnight, most of the country was thrown into a state of high anxiety—then, soon enough, grief and mourning. But the country has not come together to sufficiently acknowledge the tragedy it endured. As clinical psychiatrists, we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when it’s not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and anger—exactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.

The pressure to simply move on from the horrors of 2020 is strong. Who wouldn’t love to awaken from that nightmare and pretend it never happened? Besides, humans have a knack for sanitizing our most painful memories. In a 2009 study, participants did a remarkably poor job of remembering how they felt in the days after the 9/11 attacks, likely because those memories were filtered through their current emotional state. Likewise, a study published in Nature last year found that people’s recall of the severity of the 2020 COVID threat was biased by their attitudes toward vaccines months or years later.

[From the May 2021 issue: You won’t remember the pandemic the way you think you will]

When faced with an overwhelming and painful reality like COVID, forgetting can be useful—even, to a degree, healthy. It allows people to temporarily put aside their fear and distress, and focus on the pleasures and demands of everyday life, which restores a sense of control. That way, their losses do not define them, but instead become manageable.

But consigning painful memories to the River Lethe also has clear drawbacks, especially as the months and years go by. Ignoring such experiences robs one of the opportunity to learn from them. In addition, negating painful memories and trying to proceed as if everything is normal contorts one’s emotional life and results in untoward effects. Researchers and clinicians working with combat veterans have shown how avoiding thinking or talking about an overwhelming and painful event can lead to free-floating sadness and anger, all of which can become attached to present circumstances. For example, if you met your old friend, a war veteran, at a café and accidentally knocked his coffee over, then he turned red and screamed at you, you’d understand that the mishap alone couldn’t be the reason for his outburst. No one could be that upset about spilled coffee—the real root of such rage must lie elsewhere. In this case, it might be untreated PTSD, which is characterized by a strong startle response and heightened emotional reactivity.

We are not suggesting that the entire country has PTSD from COVID. In fact, the majority of people who are exposed to trauma do not go on to exhibit the symptoms of PTSD. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t deeply affected. In our lifetime, COVID posed an unprecedented threat in both its overwhelming scope and severity; it left most Americans unable to protect themselves and, at times, at a loss to comprehend what was happening. That meets the clinical definition of trauma: an overwhelming experience in which you are threatened with serious physical or psychological harm.

[Read: Why are people nostalgic for early-pandemic life?]

Traumatic memories are notable for how they alter the ways people recall the past and consider the future. A recent brain-imaging study showed that when people with a history of trauma were prompted to return to those horrific events, a part of the brain was activated that is normally employed when one thinks about oneself in the present. In other words, the study suggests that the traumatic memory, when retrieved, came forth as if it were being relived during the study. Traumatic memory doesn’t feel like a historical event, but returns in an eternal present, disconnected from its origin, leaving its bearer searching for an explanation. And right on cue, everyday life offers plenty of unpleasant things to blame for those feelings—errant friends, the price of groceries, or the leadership of the country.

To come to terms with a traumatic experience, as clinicians know, you need to do more than ignore or simply recall it. Rather, you must rework the disconnected memory into a context, and thereby move it firmly into the past. It helps to have a narrative that makes sense of when, how, and why something transpired. For example, if you were mugged on a dark street and became fearful of the night, your therapist might suggest that you connect your general dread with the specifics of your assault. Then your terror would make sense and be restricted to that limited situation. Afterward, the more you ventured out in the dark, perhaps avoiding the dangerous block where you were jumped, the more you would form new, safe memories that would then serve to mitigate your anxiety.

Many people don’t regularly recall the details of the early pandemic—how walking down a crowded street inspired terror, how sirens wailed like clockwork in cities, or how one had to worry about inadvertently killing grandparents when visiting them. But the feelings that that experience ignited are still very much alive. This can make it difficult to rationally assess the state of our lives and our country.

One remedy is for leaders to encourage remembrance while providing accurate and trustworthy information about both the past and the present. In the early days of the pandemic, President Donald Trump mishandled the crisis and peddled misinformation about COVID. But with 2020 a traumatic blur, Trump seems to have become the beneficiary of our collective amnesia, and Biden the repository for lingering emotional discontent. Some of that misattribution could be addressed by returning to the shattering events of the past four years and remembering what Americans went through. This process of recall is emotionally cathartic, and if it’s done right, it can even help to replace distorted memories with more accurate ones.

President Biden invited the nation to grieve together in 2021, when American death counts reached 500,000, and again in 2022, when they surpassed 1 million. In his 2022 State of the Union address, he rightly acknowledged that “we meet tonight in an America that has lived through two of the hardest years this nation has ever faced,” before urging Americans to “move forward safely.” But in the past two years, he, like almost everyone else, has largely tried to proceed as if everyone is back to normal. Meanwhile, American minds and hearts simply aren’t ready—whether we realize it or not.

[Read: The Biden administration killed America’s collective pandemic approach]

Perhaps Biden and his advisers fear that reminding voters of such a dark time would create more trouble for his presidency. And yet, our work leads us to believe that the effect would be exactly the opposite. Rituals of mourning and remembrance help people come together and share in their grief so that they can return more clear-eyed to face daily life. By prompting Americans to remember what we endured together, paradoxically, Biden could help free all of us to more fully experience the present.

Even Oprah Doesn’t Know How to Talk About Weight Loss Now

2024-03-21T11:18:01-04:00

Nearly 13 years after the final episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, it’s easy to forget just how vicious the public scrutiny of Winfrey’s body was during her talk show’s decades-long run. But those memories haven’t left Winfrey, and they take center stage in her new prime-time special, Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution. “For 25 years, making fun of my weight was national sport,” she recalls in the opening monologue, which addresses the stigma of obesity and the emerging culture around weight-loss drugs. As evidence, she cites several tabloid headlines that ran while she was on the air: “‘Oprah—Fatter Than Ever’; ‘Oprah Hits 246 Pounds’; ‘Final Showdown With Steadman Sends Her Into Feeding Frenzy’; ‘Oprah Warned—Diet or Die.’”

It wasn’t just weight gain that had inspired ridicule—in response to this relentless commentary, Winfrey staged gimmicky, sometimes dangerous segments devoted to her many attempts to lose weight. Most infamously, after losing 67 pounds on an all-liquid diet in 1988, she wheeled out a wagon containing 67 pounds of animal fat onstage. For years, she’s acknowledged how silly this was; in the special, she specifically says the stunt was born out of “shame.” What Winfrey didn’t understand then, and what she wants others to know now, is that obesity is a serious, chronic disease. But in its eagerness to prove that obesity isn’t a moral failure, Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution ends up reinforcing some of the troubling cultural attitudes that overweight and obese people still face in many walks of life.

Much of the new special hinges on the American Medical Association officially classifying obesity as a disease in 2013, which has led to some notable shifts in public opinion. A recent Pew survey showed that a majority of Americans now believe that willpower may not be enough to lose weight, and that newly popular weight-loss medications such as Ozempic can be good options for those who struggle with obesity. As Winfrey says in the special, these medications offer a way out of painful cycles of self-blame and social ostracization, in part because they serve as proof that being overweight isn’t evidence of someone’s laziness. To the extent that Winfrey has always sold her fans on how to “live their best life,” this special fits right into her personal-responsibility ethos: She repeatedly counsels viewers to release the negativity they feel about their own body, and to “stop shaming other people for being overweight or how they choose to lose or not lose weight.”

In some of the special’s most powerful moments, Winfrey is extremely candid about coming to terms with her personal choice to use medication. After her first time taking a weight-loss drug, she says, she finally abandoned her deeply held belief that people who never need to diet are, “for some reason, stronger than me.” That paradigm-shifting realization is shared by a number of the guests on the special who discuss their experiences with GLP-1-agonist medications, which work partly by mimicking the action of a hormone that increases the production of insulin and helps inhibit food intake. (Though not all of them are FDA-approved for weight loss, these different medicines are better known by their brand names, such as Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, Zepbound, and Victoza.)

When the special leans into the power of these personal testimonies, it’s reliably compelling—peak Oprah sentimentalism, with real-world stakes. Watching a teenager gush about feeling comfortable enough in her body to attend prom is undeniably moving, no matter what stance a viewer might have on weight-loss medications. But in general, the special struggles with navigating more complicated stories—medically as well as socially. For many people, GLP-1 medications either don’t work at all or come with untenable side effects. Yet only one guest speaks about having a bad experience with such treatment, a segment that Winfrey introduces more than 30 minutes into the 42-minute special by telling viewers that “it’s not all pretty.” She also hosts a panel of physicians who explain how these medications work, two of whom have consulted for the companies that produce them—and all of whom downplay the risks of taking the drugs by pointing to the dangers of obesity itself.

Although obesity can indeed lead to other serious complications, watching medical professionals brush over the possible issues with taking weight-loss medications is jarring, especially because no airtime is given to more skeptical physicians. The special also features sales reps from both Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical companies that produce the most popular GLP-1 medications. Their presence makes it easy for the special’s other guests—the doctors and GLP-1 users—to frame the drugs’ high cost (which, for some patients, is easily $1,000 a month) as the sole fault of greedy insurance companies, rather than something that manufacturers can absolutely control themselves.

[Read: The Ozempic revolution is stuck]

Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution often gives more oxygen to the negative interpersonal consequences of weight-loss-drug usage: Winfrey asks her guests about the judgment they’ve received for either taking the medications themselves or allowing a child to, and concludes that naysayers have no business opining on people’s health choices. In that, the special occasionally feels like a project designed to blunt any public disapproval of Winfrey herself using weight-loss medication. But the mean-spirited comments that her guests have received are different from the kind of critique that Winfrey has gotten. Although some of the public obsession with her body is still baselessly vitriolic, Winfrey has, perhaps more than any other figure, helped popularize some of the most harmful weight-loss myths and unsustainable diets.

Last year, during a panel for Oprah Daily called “The Life You Want Class: The State of Weight,” Winfrey said that weight-loss drugs were “the easy way out.” At the time, she was still on the board of Weight Watchers, which has historically counseled its users—mostly women—on losing weight through behavior modification alone. Then, last month, she announced her departure from the board, and said she would donate her shares in the company to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. During Monday night’s special, Winfrey clarifies that this decision was made so that she could interview the Weight Watchers CEO for the show without any perceived conflict.

But distancing herself from Weight Watchers now doesn’t change that Winfrey was its public face for nearly a decade, or that there have been plenty of other ways that she’s propped up diet culture without even trying to promote health. Winfrey’s endorsement drives massive attention to any product, person, or lifestyle—and not always to positive effect. Decades before the Weight Watchers partnership, the wagon-of-fat stunt became (and remains) the most-watched Oprah episode in history. As Aubrey Gordon, a co-host of the podcast Maintenance Phase, noted of the 1988 episode, Winfrey’s public weight loss led to unprecedented sales for the company that sold her 400-calorie-a-day liquid diet: OptiFast, which is still around today, said it received 200,000 calls after the wagon episode aired.

Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution doesn’t really account for these kinds of downstream effects, or delve into Winfrey’s sheer influence. That’s a tall order, and it would take much longer than one hour to seriously reckon with the complexity of Winfrey (the person) being a victim of diet culture, and Winfrey (the media phenomenon) being an accelerant of its ideals. But doing at least some of that work should be a prerequisite for any Winfrey-led special that focuses on the shame associated with body image among women—especially Black women, considering how racism and sexism inform people’s views of our bodies.

Not all fans and commentators who reacted harshly to the news of Winfrey using a weight-loss drug did so because they refuse to believe that obesity is a real disease, or because they felt abandoned by a public figure they once found relatable. Many people have taken issue with what they see as her uncritical praise of the drugs, and with her repeated conflation of weight loss and health. As industries such as entertainment, fashion, and even health care continue to walk back the progress of the body-positivity movement, maybe some shame and blame just need to be redirected to the people profiting from the stigma that others still face.

The Art of Communing With Trees

2024-03-21T10:23:00-04:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

Trees can seem like timeless beings. Many a giant sequoia has racked up three millennia on this Earth. A pine in California’s White Mountains is estimated to be nearly 5,000 years old. A colony of aspens in Utah may well have originated during the Stone Age, and to this day, its leaves glitter gold in the autumn sun.

A tree’s life span, undisturbed by axe or fire, is utterly divorced from the scales on which human affairs operate. And yet, throughout history, people have seen themselves reflected in trees. One of those people was James Russell Lowell, a poet who served as The Atlantic’s first-ever editor. “I care not how men trace their ancestry / To ape or Adam; let them please their whim; / But I in June am midway to believe / A tree among my far progenitors,” Lowell wrote in The Atlantic’s June 1868 issue. He even suggests that “many a lifelong leafy friend” returns his affection: “Surely there are times / When they consent to own me of their kin.”

Lowell’s poem goes on to compare trees to ancient nymphs and to the very spirit of hospitality. But none of these images is as convincing as his vision of ancestor-trees, watching over children’s games and singing “faint lullabies of eldest time.” In June, how can one understand a tree as anything but eternal? It seems no more movable than the earth in which it is planted, incapable of anything but endless growth. Trees may be inscrutable—we can’t discern much about their inner lives—but when they are lush with leaves, they are undeniably certain.

Unlike Lowell, I feel most kinship with trees not when the first hot breaths of summer bathe the Northern Hemisphere, but at this time of year, when any given day might yield snow or blinding sun, or both. In spring, when the first hopeful blossoms and buds begin to pepper bare branches, a tree’s life suddenly moves as quickly as mine, if not quicker. The blooms’ frailty and evanescence seem transposed onto the entire organism, and suddenly, the tree is not an ancestor-deity, but mortal.

Even an ancient tree can seem childlike in March. In a story published in The Atlantic in 1877, a man walking through a grove remarks, “Trees, like children, reveal peculiarities of character more frankly in their budding-time than at maturer stages.” When trees fail to obscure their limbs, the narrator observes, ashes look especially feminine, and young oaks particularly athletic. Like children, they are vulnerable too: The man so fond of budding trees laments to an oak that men are “apt to fall treacherously upon you with the axe,” a tendency he deems a “special American barbarism.”

Ancestor-trees, child-trees: What are we to make of a life that can age and grow young again at the turn of the seasons, that equally distends and contracts our perception of time? Perhaps it is just this ambiguity that allows trees to be such a powerful avatar of humanity. Life, after all, is full of distended and contracted seasons.

In recent years, unpredictable weather has added new confusion to our already fluid sense of time’s passage. The country just experienced its warmest winter on record. In Maryland, where I live, half a foot of snow fell in mid-January; a week later, the weather was practically beachy. When I traveled to Vermont last month, the temperature rose 53 degrees in two days. The famous cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., reached peak bloom last Sunday, earlier than almost any year on record.

I visited D.C’s Tidal Basin the day before peak bloom to commune with the child-trees, and found that the unnamed narrator in that 1877 story had a point: Each tree’s character was on full display. There were slender trees and muscular trees, trees that curved and trees whose limbs angled sharply, trees that reached high and trees whose lowest branches needed to be jumped over, trees that twisted and trees that stretched from the ground like telephone poles. The flowers were saturated pink and cottony white, scent-free and fragrant. Some trees were flush with blossoms, while others had only begun to bud.

Spectacular and ancient and delicate as the trees were, I didn’t immediately see them as ancestors or children or nymphs. Perhaps that shouldn’t have been a surprise. As the narrator said of his own dear trees, “All who knew the oaks seemed to have a conviction that they alone could understand them.” But as I shuffled along with the crush of people in the Tidal Basin, I found that the cherry blossoms had at least one ancestral effect: They had brought us all together to pay our respects to a shared inheritance.

Whatever Happened to All Those Care Robots?

2024-03-21T09:58:31-04:00

The first thing Pepper told me was that he was running out of battery. “He’s got about 15 minutes before he dies,” Emanuel Nunez Sardinha, a Ph.D. candidate in robotics at Bristol Robotics Laboratory, told me. That turned out to be plenty. Sardinha greeted Pepper; then I did. I asked Pepper how he was doing, to which he replied, “How are you doing?” Then Sardinha resumed telling me about the sorts of things Pepper, a friendly, wide-eyed robot designed to assist humans through social interaction, can do, such as talking through an exercise routine while demonstrating upper-body movements (he doesn’t have legs). But Pepper can get “nervous” in crowds—that is, his voice recognition short-circuits in an environment with multiple people talking—which is what seemed to happen at the lab that day. He kept piping up unprompted as we chatted, flustering Sardinha, who, with a gentle apology to Pepper, put him to sleep.

For such an underwhelming little robot, Pepper has managed to inspire remarkable faith in his potential over the years. He wasn’t designed for any particular purpose; he was introduced by SoftBank Mobile and Aldebaran Robotics in 2014 as “the world’s first personal robot that can read emotions.” But roboticists in private companies and academic institutions quickly set about retooling his software for elder care. Ads showed Pepper monitoring the corridors of a care home for wandering residents, and guiding elderly visitors to the appropriate room of a hospital. In the media, researchers voiced lofty aims for him: He might function as a helpful companion for elderly folks living on their own, reminding them to take their medication while engaging them in sorely needed conversation. In a care home, Pepper might help keep an eye on residents, entertain them with games and jokes, or simply offer some of the friendly interaction that overstretched staff cannot. In 2018, Pepper himself appeared before the U.K. Parliament, citing his potential to “reduce pressure on health-care services” and “boost independence, reduce loneliness, and improve the quality of life among elderly people.” The following year, the U.K. government cited Pepper when it announced that it would invest 34 million pounds in developing care robots that “could revolutionise [the] UK care system.”

[Read: The robot revolution in caregiving]

But Pepper has yet to make it very far out of the lab. He and other social robots have been tested out in care settings in multiple countries over the past decade, but very few nursing homes actually own one. Hard data are hard to come by, but Chris Papadopoulos, an expert in health technology at the University of Bedfordshire, guesses that fewer than one in 1,000 U.K. care homes uses a humanoid robot on an ongoing basis. A city council in England made headlines in 2017 when it recruited Pepper to work in its adult-social-care team, but when I called their office to ask how he was getting on, the woman who answered the phone had no idea what I was talking about. Likewise, media portrayals of seemingly widespread use of robotics in Japanese care homes have little basis in reality, James Wright, a visiting lecturer at Queen Mary University of London and the author of Robots Won’t Save Japan, told me. About 10 percent of care homes in Japan use any sort of robot—including monitoring systems or mobility aids—let alone a humanoid. Production of Pepper was paused in 2020 due to lack of demand. (Aldebaran was eventually acquired by United Robotics Group, which still advertises Pepper as “an ally in Healthcare” that can “interact, entertain and provide companionship,” “enhance the efficiency of the administrative process, improve quality and consistency of patient experience” and “support caregivers.”)

There are likely many reasons that the long-predicted robot takeover of elder care has yet to take off. Robots are expensive, and cash-strapped care homes don’t have money lying around to purchase a robot, let alone to pay for the training needed to actually use one effectively. And at least so far, social robots just aren’t worth the investment, Wright told me. Pepper can’t do a lot of the things people claimed he could—and he relies heavily on humans to help him do what he can. Despite some research suggesting they can boost well-being among the elderly, robots have shown little evidence that they make life easier for human caregivers. In fact, they require quite a bit of care themselves. Perhaps robots of the future will revolutionize caregiving as hoped. But the care robots we have now don’t even come close, and might even exacerbate the problems they’re meant to solve.

Some researchers have not given up on Pepper. “There are so many benefits to continual contact and interaction that we are unable to provide to our elderly because of health-care-worker shortages,” Arshia Khan, a roboticist at the University of Minnesota at Duluth, told me. Her lab deployed a fleet of Peppers into eight nursing homes in Minnesota in 2022. She admits that the robots have limitations—they can’t perform physical care yet—but Khan believes that lives would have been saved during the coronavirus pandemic if more elderly people had had robots to interact with when they couldn’t be with others. “Loneliness doesn’t just make a person feel depressed. It actually kills,” Khan said.

There is, to be clear, no evidence that care robots can save lives. And although some research suggests that social robots reduce loneliness or otherwise improve well-being, the conclusion comes with a few asterisks. Many studies involve robotic pets—usually Paro, a soft robotic seal designed to soothe and stimulate people with dementia—not humanoids. Many of the studies are bad: Multiple meta-analyses have lamented that studies on social robots have methodological issues that make it difficult to know what to make of them.

Even higher-quality studies on humanoids such as Pepper have some limitations to consider. As part of a large collaboration between the European Union and Japan, Papadopoulos conducted a study that tested a “culturally competent” version of Pepper. In practice, that meant loading Pepper with knowledge about the local culture—at an English nursing home, Pepper might talk about rugby, for example—and then installing him in residents’ rooms for up to 18 hours over the course of two weeks. Compared with those who weren’t around a robot, residents who got to hang out with Pepper—particularly the “culturally competent” version—reported a boost in emotional well-being. Of course, that doesn’t mean Pepper was actually satisfying residents’ need for human connection: Residents’ self-reported loneliness didn’t significantly improve. In fact, Papadopoulos told me that many residents were initially wary that Pepper might replace human caregivers but came around to him as it became obvious that was “absolutely impossible.” Instead, they saw him “as more of a fun, assistive therapeutic bit of kit … like a television or an iPad or something,” he said.

Whatever care robots’ impact on well-being, multiple studies have found that, far from easing the demands on human caregivers, they can create additional work for them. The most obvious reason is that introducing a social robot into a care home means bringing a fragile machine into a setting full of fragile people. Leaving Pepper or other such devices lying around is simply not an option, because they and residents risk harming each other. As part of the research for his book, Wright spent six weeks in a Japanese care home that was testing out Pepper; the robot was stored away when not in use and closely monitored when he was.

Potential safety issues aside, Pepper didn’t seem to work terribly well without help, Wright told me. Initially, the plan was for Pepper to run exercise classes with residents. “The staff members found out very quickly that if they just let Pepper stand at the front of the room and do its thing, basically, the residents would kind of ignore it,” Wright said. A caregiver had to stand next to Pepper, repeating its words and mimicking its movements to get the residents involved.

Naonori Kodate, an associate professor in social policy and social robotics at University College Dublin, observed something similar while producing a documentary about care robots in Japan; the social robots did seem to get the residents talking and boost morale in the home—but only with some elbow grease from staff. “It’s not like you can just leave the robots and then all the people speak to them and have fun together,” Kodate told me. In fact, to be of much use at all, the robots often needed the help of a human who really knew the residents well.

[Read: The friends who are caring for each other in old age]

The nursing home where Wright conducted his field work also tested Paro, the cuddly seal robot, which was designed for regular handling. The hope was that such a hands-off robot might help soothe the home’s more agitated residents and thus cut down on some of the attention they required from staff members. (Paro’s manufacturer does not advertise it as a labor-saving device; it emphasizes Paro’s capacity to reduce patient and caregiver stress, and to enhance socialization of patients with one another and with caregivers.) Paro didn’t seem to interest the home’s neediest residents much, but others became so enamored with it that staff became concerned. One woman in particular seemed to develop a fixation with the robot, taking any opportunity to wheel Paro back to her room, where she’d put it to bed like a baby and often cry while talking to it. She refused to take meals or go to bed without Paro. So the staff started keeping tabs on who was using Paro when and for how long. “In the end, it just got put on a shelf, because it was easier to do that than to constantly monitor everybody,” Wright told me.

These types of challenges are likely underreported. Care workers are largely overlooked in research on care technology, Cian O’Donovan, a researcher at University College London who is leading a project aimed at developing robotics that empower care workers, told me. One review of research studies on robots in assisted-living facilities noted that the majority of studieshomes do not collect data on the experiences of caregiving staff with the robots, instead focusing on residents’ experiences.

Papadopoulos and his team did consult staff as part of their project, and the concern that Pepper might create additional work for caregivers didn’t come up. But that might be because, as a result of various safety and ethical concerns, the researchers were doing the monitoring themselves, and staff were instructed to carry on as though the robots weren’t there. Such oversight is a common feature of this sort of research. One widely cited study reportedly found that Paro reduced loneliness in the elderly even more effectively than their usual activities did, such as going on a bus trip or playing bingo—but the team tested him in one-hour group sessions guided by a researcher or member of staff. Multiple studies investigating robots’ effect on well-being and loneliness employed a “Wizard of Oz” approach in which all of the robot’s questions and answers were keyed in by a human at a laptop out of sight. The tightly regulated nature of these studies adds an important caveat to their findings: Social robots seem to improve well-being under the careful watch of humans.

Some of the researchers I spoke with are certain that whatever shortcomings Pepper has will be overcome with better technology. Both Khan and Papadopoulos see a future in which robots can do anything a human caregiver can. Recent developments in AI are already allowing social robots to engage in more sophisticated conversation. Even the physical limitations of modern robots are on the precipice of being solved. Papadopoulos pointed me to Google’s newly released Mobile Aloha, a comparatively low-cost robot that researchers have trained to cook shrimp and wash laundry.

[Read: The new casualties of automation]

Other researchers are far more skeptical. Caring for someone isn’t as simple as jumping to do their bidding. Even a robot that can have a satisfying interaction with an elderly person may nevertheless fail to care for them. Paro successfully captivated the woman in the home where Wright did his field work, but only a human caregiver recognized that her reliance on it had curdled into something self-destructive. It’s not just a human touch that Pepper lacks, but a human perspective and the capacity to act on it.

Caregiving is not the fulfillment of a set of discrete tasks; it’s the management of someone’s quality of life. The sort of knowledge required to do it well is person- and community-specific. Kodate told me that he was fascinated by the subtlety of information caregivers relied on to ascertain desires, frustrations, and needs that individuals themselves might not know or cannot express. That’s why care is done best in the context of strong relationships.

The robots we have now may offer a glimpse of both the promise and peril of what care robots could come to be. Most researchers I spoke with saw potential for robotic technology to assist and even bolster a strong caring relationship, but they were doubtful it could ever supplant one. If they are correct, then even future, more capable robots could lead us down a very strange path. Pepper and Paro did not alleviate the demands of caregiving, but they did change them. Carers spent less time interacting with residents and more time monitoring resident interactions with robots. Instead of coming up with their own exercise routines, they mimicked Pepper’s. In other words, care itself became more “robotic,” Wright noted in his book. That’s an attractive prospect from a business standpoint; minimizing the intimacy of care could make the humans who do it more interchangeable. But such a robotic revolution in caregiving would succeed only by further imperiling the relationships that overstrapped and underpaid carers already struggle so much to build.

How It All Went Wrong for Eric Adams

2024-03-21T09:45:00-04:00

On a soggy January day, New York Mayor Eric Adams travels to a theater in the Bronx to deliver his State of the City address. As dignitaries and the odd reporter take their seats, an Afro-Latino jazz band jams onstage, followed by a flamenco dance company, a gospel choir, and a gamut of religious leaders—Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Sikh. “O Lord, in obedience with your holy word, we intercede on behalf of our mayor,” a Latina evangelical minister says, setting the mood. “Bless him with courage like you gave David, wisdom like you gave Solomon.”

Adams, wearing a well-tailored three-piece suit, steps onstage. Union workers raise their arms and sway rapturously. Beaming, he beckons his top aides to stand one by one—all women of color. It’s a stirring display, a power flex by a Black mayor showing off his diverse administration.

Alas, Adams punctuates the scene like this:

“These women, let me tell you something—you may cut the umbilical cord but that fluid that carries you is something that is spiritual and lasts a lifetime.”

“I don’t just like them; I love them!”

The mayor’s amniotic reverie appears to catch one deputy mayor off guard; a forced grin freezes on her face.

Adams himself has a megawatt smile and an ebullient streak, as I saw while following him around the city for a few weeks. The 63-year-old mayor also has a long history of ad-libbing in odd and often self-aggrandizing ways that befuddle his audiences. One day last summer he went before an audience in Brooklyn and proclaimed, “I am the symbol of Black manhood in this city, in this country, and what it represents. I am the mayor of the most powerful city on the globe, and people need to recognize that!” Not long after, he attended an India Day celebration and declared: “I am Gandhi-like. I think like Gandhi; I act like Gandhi; I want to be like Gandhi.” He has insisted that “I am mayor because God gave me the authority to be mayor” and says he designs policy with a “g odl ike” approach.

Not long ago, in fact, it was as if God had parted the electoral sea for him. In the 2021 mayoral election, elites and liberal-left voters divided their ballots between his closest rivals. Adams, a former New York City Police Department captain who first entered public life as an advocate for Black officers, ultimately eked out a one-percentage-point victory in the Democratic primary.

Two years into his term, though, the mayor’s groove is worn, his once-high poll ratings are sickly, and disrespect from fellow politicians is mounting daily. His mayoralty just might be heading toward a crack-up. For close to two years, a river of asylum-seeking migrants, 175,000 so f ar, has flooded the city’s streets and shelters. A visibly rattled Adams, who had not previously managed an agency bigger than the largely ceremonial office of the Brooklyn borough president, proclaimed a budget apocalypse in September. “I don’t see an ending to this,” he said then. “This issue will destroy New York City.”

[Juan Williams: Eric Adams is making white liberals squirm]

November brought a more ominous turn for Adams. Federal agents waved aside his security team, handed him a subpoena, and seized his cellphones and iPad as part of an investigation into his campaign fundraising. And FBI agents late last month s earched two homes of an influential aide to Adams who has also raised money for him.

Adams has not been charged with anything. But the chasm between prophetic destiny and the reality of his mayoralty gets wider and wider. How in the Lord’s name could this have happened?

One frigid morning this winter, I followed him to the Islamic Cultural Center of the Bronx, a mosque that serves West African communities. Many dozens of men, laborers and taxi drivers and shop clerks, crowded about Adams, laughing and holding up cellphones to film him.

The imam praised the mayor before handing him the microphone. Standing in the adoring midst, Adams galloped off on a passionate, almost angry speech. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, he said, he stood with Pakistanis and demanded the release of unjustly detained boys. “No one joined me,” Adams said. “I was by myself.” When a bombing in Lahore, Pakistan, killed 75 people in 2016, he alone wanted to fly to Pakistan and “fight on behalf of these innocent people. I couldn’t get anyone to take a flight with me.”

Each of these anecdotes is at best a concatenation of fact and fiction. Yes, Adams attended vigils after the 2016 bombing. He even discussed joining a group trip to Lahore to meet that city’s mayor, according to a local Pakistani activist with whom Adams’s press office put me in touch. The flight fell through not because others lacked his courage, but because of scheduling conflicts and a State Department travel warning.

The mayor’s claim of leading protests after 9/11 seemed still more grandiose. I wrote in-depth about that community after 9/11, and neither I nor any of the activists I met then recall seeing him at such demonstrations. Adams went to a federal jail on his own to register his disapproval of the detention policy, a spokesperson told me, adding by email that the “mayor does feel that the press should have paid more attention at the time.”

Adams wrapped up his mosque talk pointing at the audience. “You align yourself with those who want to malign me!” he said. Some of the immigrants exchanged puzzled looks. Us?

Adams’s voice rose, and his message became more evident: He suggested that he and his listeners are kindred in a hostile political world. “I was born in this country, yes, but let’s get something clear: I am African. I am African,” he said, adding, “Are we going to allow the enslaver that ripped us away from each other generations ago to rip us again?” He wasn’t talking about how he or his administration might help audience members; he was asking them to stand with him.

What sets Adams apart when things are going well, what makes him sound inescapably different from other New York Democrats today, is his cargo of life experience accumulated in a tough New York far removed from affluent brownstone Brooklyn, the Upper West and East Sides, and the hipster-socialist belt that runs from Williamsburg to Astoria. To be a self-made mayor from the underbelly of an unequal city takes considerable strength and political skill. In a city where some prominent liberal politicians took up slogans such as “Defund the police,” Adams’s background gives him the standing to challenge upscale-progressive truisms.

But as Adams walked into a late-January press conference in City Hall’s elegant mayoral wing, he looked drawn and tired. The left-leaning city council was poised to override his veto of a bill that would require police officers to record the race, ethnicity, gender, and age of every person they talked to during an investigation, even if the conversations were friendly. This legislation, Adams insisted, would drown cops in paperwork and impair crime fighting. He was desperate to defeat it. A day earlier, a sympathetic council member had called Adams. “Eric,” this member said, “you just might be the only Black man in New York politics who opposes this city-council bill.”

The mayor’s impending defeat seemed all the more confounding because the issue should have played to Adams’s strengths. As an ex-cop, he had campaigned as the tough-on-crime candidate. Voters in Black, Asian, and Latino working- and middle-class neighborhoods formed the bedrock of his support, and—unlike the city’s political class—shared his visceral sense of crime’s malignancies. Polls suggest that not only do Black and Latino voters oppose defunding the police, but a majority favor increasing the police budget. Adams touched on this reality often during his campaign. “I challenge you,” he told reporters: “Go through these communities with high crime and you start telling them you are going to pull the police away. You are going to need a cop.”

But at the press conference I attended, he backpedaled. He insisted that compromise remained possible. “I support the concept of this bill, I cannot say that enough,” he said. But, he continued, “I will never do anything or support anything that’s going to erode public safety in the city.”

Later that same day, the city council voted by an overwhelming margin to override his veto. Left-wing members claimed that Adams had ignored Black trauma. They were not elected, said one council member, “to make the NYPD officers’ lives easy or more convenient.”

Lincoln Restler, a tousle-haired white councilman who represents Brooklyn Heights, Williamsburg, and neighboring Greenpoint, rose to explain his vote. A private-school kid and the son of a private-equity investor, Restler grew up in Brooklyn Heights, a genteel neighborhood on a bluff overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge. He sounded intent on reeducating the mayor. “I have been deeply disturbed by his misinformation campaign,” Restler said. “I have news that I’d like to share: Racism exists.”

Restler’s declaration could hardly be a revelation for the mayor. Over the years, Adams—who declined multiple requests for an interview for this article—has told of a mother perched on poverty’s edge in South Jamaica, Queens, scratching for dollars to buy food for her six children and to pay the mortgage after her husband left, and a troublemaking teenager who ran with a gang. In some versions of his story, after a 15-year-old Adams and an older brother stole money, or possibly a television, from a prostitute, two white cops pulled them into the local precinct and beat them. As Adams once recalled it: “They asked, ‘Do you feel like a beating?’ like you might ask, ‘Do you feel like a hamburger?’” Eventually, Adams said, a Black cop told the white cops to stop.

Years later, Adams decided to join the police. He spoke of this improbable epiphany to the journalist Juan Williams in 1999, a conversation Williams later recounted in The Atlantic. Adams figured being a cop was a great hustle; cops were more powerful than the petty criminals he admired. He had seen firsthand that a Black officer could even face down two white ones. “That Black guy was able to go among those white guys and stop this,” Adams told Williams. “He got juice—J-U-I-C-E, as the kids would say.”

Eric Adams at City Hall in 1998. (CHESTER HIGGINS JR./The New York Times/Redux)

Adams graduated from the police academy with top grades and headed into the subways, where he was seen as an effective transit cop. The New York City of the 1980s abounded with dystopian menace. Swaths of the Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn were burned-out ruins. The homicide rate was four to seven times higher than it is today. One night in 1988, a mile from the small brick home where Adams had grown up, in Queens, the police officer Edward Byrne sat in a patrol car guarding the home of a Guyanese woman who had spoken out about drug dealing on her block. Two men walked up; one tapped on Byrne’s window, and the other shot the officer in the head five ti mes. Byrne was among dozens of police officers killed in the ’80s.

The NYPD itself was in turmoil. Adams became the head of two associations of Black officers and rose to captain, all the while challenging his bosses in what was then a majority-white department over racial discrepancies in hiring and promotions, and over police brutality toward civilians. Line cops were expected to keep their lips pressed shut when around reporters, but Adams rarely hesitated to chat with the media. He went on television and testified before the city council about the abuses of the department’s street-crimes unit. Commissioners came to detest him.

His activism, he has maintained, put his life at risk. He has described an incident in 1996, when a dark sedan pulled up beside his car late at night in Brooklyn. A man said his name, and Adams saw a gun barrel sticking out the side window, he recalled three years ago in an interview with The City, a nonprofit local news site. The future mayor hit the gas and heard a shot, and a bullet shattered his back window. He speculated that the shooter might have been a cop but offered no evidence. “When I look back, I’m amazed I was able to get out of the department alive,” Adams told The City.

This tale, as with so much that Adams says, has curious gaps and logical inconsistencies. He told the press that the shooter was Black. But why would a Black officer shoot at a Black captain with a reputation for speaking up for the rights of Black officers? Did a sergeant really advise him, as Adams claimed, not to file a report of the shooting? Adams, who by his own account refused that guidance, told The City that the department simply dropped its investigation. But in fact, A decorated Black detective, Andre Parker, investigated the incident, according to St reetsblog NYC. Although that officer had grown up in the neighborhood where the incident supposedly took place, and knew it well, he could find no corroborating information.

Wilbur Chapman, now retired, was at the time the department’s chief of patrol and its highest-ranking Black officer. He, too, spoke his mind to reporters and was no fan of Adams. “Adams did very little, but he was very good at getting attention,” Chapman told me. When I asked him about that long-ago shooting, Chapman laughed. “Why was he shot at? By whom? I have never heard of a police officer who was shot at and a desk sergeant would not take his report. It’s all one of the mysteries of the 20th century.”

If the police department was one major factor in Adams’s rise to prominence, his religion was the other one. He grew up in the Church of God in Christ, a predominantly Black Pentecostalist denomination. Pentecostalism, a fast-growing evangelical movement, is notable for its emotional services and an outlook imbued with a sense of personal revelation. “There’s a huge emphasis on the work of the spirit as transformative,” Eli Valentin, a political consultant, preacher, and lecturer at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, told me. “When the mayor says he is called personally by God, he is speaking quite literally.”

As a young man, Adams was drawn to a particular Pentecostal church, the House of the Lord in Downtown Brooklyn. Its ministry is grounded in activism for the poor; its motto exhorts, “Be ye not hearers of the word only, but doers also.” The church’s pastor, the Reverend Herbert Daughtry Sr., had served time in prison as a young man and loomed large in the cosmology of New York City activist preachers. He helped persuade Adams to become a cop. “Some of us needed to work outside of the system, and some inside the system,” Daughtry told The New York Times when asked about Adams in 2021. “To model what policemen should be about and to find out what’s going on. Why were we having all these killings?”

By Adams’s account, everything came together—his faith, his work in policing—when God told him to enter politics. “Thirty something years ago I woke up, out of my sleep in a cold sweat. God spoke to my heart and said, ‘You are going to be the mayor January 1, 2022,” he recounted during a Father’s Day service last year at Lenox Road Baptist Church, according to an account of the event in the New York Post. “You cannot be silent,” he says that God told him. “You must tell everyone you know.” Adams took this counsel to heart. “I would tell everybody, ‘I’m going to be mayor on January 1, 2022. People used to think I needed medication.’”

Adams has often expressed his admiration for the city’s first Black mayor, David N. Dinkins, a social democrat who believed in multiracial coalitions and was elected to a single four-year term in 1989. But Dinkins’s emphasis on racial amity was not Adams’s jam. In 1993, Herman Badillo, a former Puerto Rican Democratic member of Congress, ran on an electoral ticket with Rudolph Giuliani, a Republican. Adams lashed out at Badillo, saying that if he was really interested in his community, he would have married a Latina. Badillo’s wife was Jewish.

Adams grew close with the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, a Black nationalist with a long history of anti-Semitic statements. Adams criticized Major Owens, a Black member of Congress from Brooklyn and a liberal icon, for attacking Farrakhan too harshly. In 1994, Adams declared that he would challenge Owens in a primary. But Adams failed to collect enough signatures and implied, without offering evidence, that Owens’s partisans had stolen his petitions.

[From the April 2024 issue: The Golden Age of the American Jews is ending]

As a politician, Adams was flailing. He changed his registration to Republican, saying Democrats had failed the Black community on crime. A few years later he reenrolled as a Democrat, perhaps realizing that the Republican Party offered no sure path in a Democrat-dominated city. Finally, in 2006, he gained election to the state Senate. When I interviewed Adams in that era, he came across as a nuanced critic of the police department, if not particularly conversant on other issues.

His senate tenure is best known for a moment of low comedy. In his first year, he gave a speech complaining loudly that senators were underpaid at $79,500 a year—about $117,000 in today’s money. “I deserve to get paid more, and I’m only a freshman, and I’m complaining,” Adams said. “Show me the money. Show me the money. That’s what it’s all about.”

Behind the scenes, he proved adept at the business of back-scratching and ethically dubious campaign fundraising that has long defined the state Senate. He became chair of that body’s Racing and Wagering Committee, and he played a role in selecting a company to operate video slot machines at the state-owned Aqueduct Racetrack. One evening in 2009, when the contract was still under deliberation, Adams threw a birthday party and fundraiser for himself and loudly thanked one of the contract bidders for his contributions. He did so in front of representatives of another bidder, who later felt like they had no choice but to contribute to Adams’s campaign fund.

The manner in which Adams, top legislative leaders, and New York’s then-governor handled the Aqueduct issue triggered a state inspector general’s corruption investigation, in which the birthday party became a subplot. Under oath, the senator testified that he could not recall whether Aqueduct bidders were present that night. His memory lapses and other explanations for his actions, the inspector general’s report stated, “strains credulity.”

During his senate years, Adams also planted himself in the bosom of the Brooklyn Democratic Party machine. When he set his eyes on the Brooklyn borough presidency in 2013, he ran unopposed. His new office was a fiefdom that reformers had all but stripped of its once-formidable power. But it was still a high-visibility seat in the most populous New York City borough. His political makeover was under way. His persona as a cop with a social-justice conscience played well with white liberals. And the man who had embraced Farrakhan came to build alliances with the borough’s large Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects. (This January, an Orthodox publication, Shtetl, r eported that Adams had sided with members of Agudath Israel, an Orthodox organization, against the state education department’s efforts to demand that religious schools give children a basic education in secular subjects. The poor quality of education at some yeshivas has been a years-long scandal, but Adams urged his audience to fight harder against state oversight. “Where’s our presence in the streets?” he exhorted. “Where’s our outrage when you talk about protecting the foundations of your schools?”)

In interviews, former Adams staffers described him as forever on the move—from a St. Patrick’s Day parade to shopping at Tashkent Supermarket in Brighton Beach, home to many immigrants from the former Soviet Union, to a block party to mosques and churches. No ethnic event was too insignificant. That is good retail politics. But Steve Zeltser, who was hired to be Adams’s man in south Brooklyn, left after becoming unsettled by his boss’s omnivorous flesh-pressing. “No issues seemed to move him,” Zeltser told me. “His ‘vision’ as borough president was how he could become mayor.”

Adams announced his candidacy for New York’s highest office a year after the city adopted ranked-choice voting, which meant that a candidate could win the Democratic nomination without a runoff weeks later against the second-place finisher. He faced three major opponents: the left-liberal MSNBC pundit and former mayoral counsel Maya Wiley, who is Black; the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, an Asian American; and the former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia, who is white. Race and ethnicity are not determinative in city elections, but they are rarely incidental.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic and a nationwide upheaval triggered by George Floyd’s murder the summer before, press coverage of the 2021 campaign fixed on social-justice themes. Adams obliged, but only to a point: He focused more on crime fighting, and promised to get couch-bound workers back into half-empty office buildings. On occasion, he lashed out. In a speech on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, he condemned those who had moved into gentrifying neighborhoods: “Go back to Iowa. You go back to Ohio,” he said. “New York City belongs to the people that were here.”

Many of those newcomers, younger white renters, leaned to the political left and supported his opponents. When Adams edged out his closest contender in the final tally, he suggested this was a rebuke for a leftward-moving Democratic Party. He doubled down on his campaign message: “If Black lives really matter, it can’t only be against police abuse,” he said in a speech the night of the primary. “It has to be against the violence that’s ripping apart our communities.”

After that, his public messaging became more progressive-friendly. He began to talk of building affordable housing, perhaps with an eye to courting liberals before the general election. Behind closed doors, he tended to his right flank: A few nights after his primary victory, he dined at a former mob joint in East Harlem as the guest of a blustery conservative white former cop and a conservative billionaire supermarket baron.

To peer back over five decades of mayors is to see a parade of definable New York types: Edward Koch, a former congressman, took office in 1978, as the city hovered near bankruptcy. Acerbic, funny, peevish, and commanding, he had a gift for selecting top deputies who understood the city and bragged about making other politicians sweat. Dinkins tried to unify a racially torn city during a deep recession and hired some innovative commissioners. The operatic Giuliani, who yearned to liberate the city from the crime that had scarred it for decades, waved off reporters’ questions as “really actually jerky” and demanded police officers’ obedience by saying, “After all, I’m the M-A-Y-O-R.”

His successor, Michael Bloomberg, an impatient builder of bike lanes and parks and housing, personified the power of pro-business technocracy. Bloomberg famously rode out a nasty blizzard in Bermuda and afterward suggested that snowbound New Yorkers should quit complaining—after all, Broadway plays were still full. Bill de Blasio, elected from the Democratic Party’s left wing at a moment of yawning inequality, fancied himself a progressive national leader for the modern age. (He ran for president in 2020 but withdrew before collecting a single delegate.)

Adams’s place in this lineage is not yet evident. He craves power and acclaim, and that’s a start for any New York mayor. But he also struggles with an elementary act of political self-definition: What vision animates his mayoralty beyond the trappings of office and accumulation of power?

Early on, Adams let reporters tag along as he exercised and ate poke bowls and practiced politics. He charmed billionaires and reassured real-estate moguls about taxes and chatted about crime with barbers in Brownsville, Brooklyn. He stayed up as evening bled into early morning. Life was a whirl; why sleep?

Reporters delighted in his metaphysical fixations. Despite his religious upbringing, he espoused the healing properties of crystals and speculated that his girlfriend just might be clairvoyant. Challenged early in his mayoralty about his claims of veganism (he was, it came out, a fish-eating vegan), he told the press: “I eat a plant-based-centered life.”

Governing came less naturally. He values loyalty over management expertise. His hiring is haphazard. He seemed to credit God’s guidance for his preference for “nontraditional people” over experts. “If all the professionals were all that good, then why were we such a mess?” he said, according to the New York Post.

Adams has few close friends in politics. Before a mayoral debate in 2021, as opponents chatted, he sat on a chair behind his podium and meditated. In office, he has drawn his inner circle hermetically tight. Ingrid Lewis-Martin, his closest adviser and de facto enforcer, is married to a man who went through the police academy with him. Philip Banks III, his deputy mayor for public safety, was once the NYPD’s highest-ranking uniformed official—and a friend of Adams within the department. Banks suddenly resigned from the force in 2014, and a federal prosecutor named him an unindi cted co-conspirator in a bribery case. Banks has denied wrongdoing, and Adams has not answered questions about the matter. A mayoral spokesperson told The New York Times that Banks had made honest mistakes.

One can hardly overstate the politically incestuous nature of his administration. Banks’s brother, David, is the schools chancellor and the romantic partner of Sheena Wright, Adams’s first deputy mayor. David Banks has employed the mayor’s romantic partner, Tracey Collins, as a senior adviser to one of his deputy chancellors. When he was borough president, Adams—who has been dogged by questions about where he actually resides—maintained for four years that he was renting a room from a friend in Brooklyn. That friend, Lisa White, reportedly retired in 2019 from a $53,000-a-year job as a 911 dispatcher. When Adams became mayor, the police department hired White as a deputy commissioner at a salary of $241,000. City Hall insists that Adams had nothing to do with her appointment.

Adams takes media questions in January. (Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis / Getty)

Sometimes the Adams administration manages to please his party’s restive left. The mayor com mitted the city to spending $18 million to help erase medical debts held by working-class New Yorkers. He has—after a very slow start—ramped up production of subsidized housing for the working class, and officials found money for special beds for mentally ill homeless people.

Addressing a problem that affects all New Yorkers, his city-planning department has embarked on an ambitious rezoning effort, generally well received, to allow more housing construction in a city starved for apartments. Also affecting everyone are the subways—the arteries of the city. When violence and homeless encampments rendered trains and stations forbidding, Adams sent cops trooping in, and violent subway crime fell for a time.

Kathryn Wylde, the president of the business group Partnership for New York City, can enumerate Adams’s flaws but inclines toward a friendly accounting. “I have great sympathy for his situation,” she told me. “He’s got guns off the streets, he’s confiscated and destroyed illegal motorbikes, and sanitation service has improved.”

Most reviews from the city’s permanent government are more acerbic. Bloomberg was taken with Adams’s centrist-liberal politics and his ability to advocate for victims of police violence even as he spoke of getting tough on criminal violence. He and his aides have invested time and money into trying to make a success of Adams’s mayoralty. The returns are not overwhelming. “Time is running out to put points on the board for a successful reelection,” Howard Wolfson, a former deputy mayor in the Bloomberg administration, told me.

Adams is a micromanager. He demands to sign off on commissioners’ hires and is reluctant to entrust work to subordinates. The wall around his inner circle is not easily breached, and out-of-favor commissioners and deputies email in hopes of snaring meetings. The atmosphere is less New Age than Machiavelli; the mayor believes in crystals, but a knife is handier. “It’s like Succession,” Zeltser, the former borough-president’s-office aide, told me. “You throw daggers to get near him.”

The mayor has created a troop of special a dvisers: a rat czar, a public-realm czar, a weed czar, an efficiency czar, and so on. This tendency can unsettle senior department leaders who coexist with these free agents. Some czars have impressive résumés, while others are known principally for their fealty to the mayor. Denise Felipe-Adams—no familial relation to Adams—is one of the leaders of his newly created Office of Innovation and Emerging Markets. She worked for six years as a special assistant in the borough president’s office, and last year posted on social media that her “bossman” is the “#Realest #Dopestbrother running this city.” “They are his agents of chaos,” noted a prominent businessperson who requested anonymity in hopes of getting phone calls returned by City Hall.

Adams recently proposed a Department of Sustainable Delivery, to try to impose order on the food-delivery business, whose riders hop on souped-up scooters or electric bikes and spin into the night, often riding on sidewalks and against traffic. Why he did not delegate this task to his Department of Transportation went unexplained.

For all of his misadventures as mayor, the debate over the police bill comes closest to revealing the distance between his vision and his skills. To watch this mayor try and fail to impose his will was instructive.

He held a press conference at NYPD headquarters, a fortified tower just east of City Hall, to criticize the police bill, and tore into an antagonist, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, whose home is on an Army base in Brooklyn. “Like, I find it astonishing that we have a public advocate who pushed for this police bill. He lives in a fort! A fort!” Adams said.

The public advocate was uncowed. The mayor, Williams said to reporters, resembled a “bratty” 5-year-old “throwing a temper tantrum.” With that, Williams sliced to the heart of the mayor’s personal conceit. “Eric Adams is not the messiah for New York City. The same God that elected him elected a lot of us on the exact same day.”

It’s a bad sign for the mayor when his roar elicits only eye rolls. Weeks later, mayoral aides walked into City Hall’s elegant rotunda, the traditional DMZ between the council and the mayoral wings, and tried to abscond with chairs just before a council press conference. When that failed, they declined to turn on the lights. The switches are on the mayor’s side of the building, so the press conference took place in the twilight.

On February 5, a retired police inspector who was a former comrade of the mayor pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge brought by the Manhattan district attorney. Dwayne Montgomery, 65, admitted to raising thousands of dollars in straw donations for Adams’s campaign. This practiced form of New York election chicanery works like this: Wealthy contributors are capped in what they can give to a campaign, so they round up people to “contribute” and then reimburse them. Disguising the source of campaign money is against the law. The City, which has done fine work mining the scandal, noted that Adams’s campaign “has been flagged repeatedly for accepting tens of thousands of dollars in illegal donations.” His campaign has repaid some, although not all, illicit donations, and prosecutors have dubbed some givers unindicted co-conspirators.

No less worrisome for the mayor is the news that a U.S. attorney is examining whether the Turkish go vernment funneled illegal donations through straw donors. Why Ankara cared about this city’s mayoral race remains unclear. In November, the FBI raided the Brooklyn home of the mayor’s chief fundraiser, 25-year-old Brianna Suggs. Suggs—whom Lewis-Martin, the mayoral adviser, has described as a goddaughter—has not been charged. When news broke of that raid on her home, Adams was in Washington, D.C., intending to meet with White Hou se leaders and fellow mayors about the migrant crisis. He canceled those meetings and flew back to New York to comfort Suggs after what he termed her “traumatic experience.” Yet he has since said he did not speak to her that day, because he “didn’t want to give any appearance of interference.”

Criminal investigations are unpredictable. Former Mayor Bill de Blasio emerged legally unscathed from his own fundraising scandal. But as a former federal prosecutor told me, when a judge permits the FBI to seize a sitting mayor’s phones, it’s not a great sign.

Adams is not yet politically bereft. Particularly if the FBI probe fizzles, he could remain a formidable candidate in 2025. Even as much of New York’s political world marches to his left or simply writes him off, he retains a base among Black voters. Especially if he faces strong progressive opponents, Adams might rebound among other New Yorkers who shared his views on policing in 2021.

When people describe Adams as eccentric, they routinely lump together different types of statements. Some things that Adams says are quite idiosyncratic: his bit about umbilical cords, or his recent claim on X that New Yorkers call their city “the Port-Au-Prince of America”—which essentially nobody ever says. By contrast, his mysticism and his claims to be the Lord’s own anointed, while perhaps off-putting to young city dwellers and the secular professional class, are unremarkable to the millions of religiously observant New Yorkers. And even his retailing of conspiracy theories begins to look like a familiar City Hall move, made by politicians from many different backgrounds. It’s the rhetoric of a calculating mayor who is tired of criticism and understands the old politics of them-versus-us.

At a meeting last June, an 84-year-old tenant advocate whose family had fled the Holocaust sharply challenged Adams about why his appointees had supported big rent increases. He stiffened and told her not to point her finger at him. “Don’t stand in front like you treated someone that’s on the plantation that you own,” he said in a video clip that went viral.

In January, Adams met with a multiracial group of senior citizens in Queens. In the overheated community room of an apartment building, the elders greeted Adams with warm claps and smiles. But the migrant crisis was clearly eating at him. “You need to know what they dropped in my lap,” he told his audience. Chicago, Washington, and Los Angeles, he continued—what do these cities have in common? He answered his question: Each has a Black mayor and each faces a migrant wave. He suggested that Greg Abbott, the Texas governor who has been busing border migrants to blue states, is trying to embarrass Black mayors and show that they can’t govern. “You see the hustle?” he demanded. But Adams’s account doesn’t add up. Los Angeles has experienced nothing like the migrant flow into New York and seems to be coping; Denver, which Adams didn’t mention, has been overwhelmed by asylum seekers and has a white mayor.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Something’s fishy about the ‘migrant crisis’]

When making public speeches, Adams plays up his pride in his many “chocolate” advisers. “I hear people outside saying, ‘Fight the power,’” he said in a speech in a Brooklyn megachurch last year, his voice scornful. “Negro, we are the power.” But such politics can register as anachronistic. In the midst of his recent battles with the city council, he suggested to its speaker, Adrienne Adams, who is Black and unrelated to him, that two top Black leaders cannot afford to let each other fail. She flashed a sardonic look at her aides afterward. Yes, she went to the same high school as Adams. But her political destiny is not tied to his.

Adams’s setbacks keep multiplying. This week, a former NYPD staffer filed a lawsuit accusing him of demanding oral sex in exchange for helping her obtain a promotion in the early 1990s; the mayor promptly and emphatically denied the claim, saying, “This did not happen—it did not happen.” In the last week of February, Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller, found that the Adams administration’s issuing of no-bid contracts with companies to deal with the migrant influx had led to “exorbitant” fees that varied “wildly.” The city, Lander found, likely had wasted millions of dollars.

Meanwhile, crime on the subways has rebounded, prompting New York Governor Kathy Hochul to deploy state troopers and National Guard members to help patrol the system. Although New York has recouped its severe employment losses from the pandemic, its growth rate trails that of many other cities. Poverty indicators are rising. Illegal marijuana shops proliferate by the hundreds, and Adams’s handling of the city budget is erratic. As for rats, well, one ran across my feet as I stepped off the Q train recently. No czar in sight.

Adams has become fond of mentioning Mat thew 21:12, in which Jesus evicts the money changers from the temple. At the end of January, he visited P.S. 156, in Brownsville, for a public meeting. At one point, he turned the discussion to Jesus, and to himself. “Jesus walked in the temple, he saw them doing wrong.” What did Jesus do? he demanded of an older woman in the audience. Jesus turned the tables over, she replied. Adams nodded happily and made the inevitable comparison: “I went to City Hall to turn the table over!”

It’s fine, I suppose, to feel enraptured with your godly mission. But I kept returning to a more worldly question: Why, other than to confirm his exalted sense of his destiny, did he want to become mayor in the first place? At times, I wondered whether he could pierce the shroud of his own mysteries.

The more he struggles with managing the city, the more everyone else in government defies him, and the longer the investigations drag on, the more his temple looks like the one in need of cleaning out.

Don’t Miss This Eclipse

2024-03-21T07:30:00-04:00

Right now, a special cosmic arrangement is sliding into place. The moon has positioned itself on the same side of Earth as the sun. The moon has drawn closer to Earth, and its orbit is tilted just so. On April 8, our silvery satellite will pass between our star and our planet, and cast its shadow upon us. In the United States, the darkness will trace a ribbonlike path about 115 miles wide from Texas to Maine, temporarily extinguishing the daylight. Within that area, in cloud-free conditions, the afternoon sun will appear as a radiant white ring suspended in a deep-violet sky: a total solar eclipse. For a few moments, the world will seem upside down, and then the golden sun will burst through again, radiant as ever.

From the perspective of orbital mechanics, solar eclipses are not very special. The sun, the moon, and the Earth align to produce a total solar eclipse somewhere on Earth once every year or two. But for us humans, eclipses are rare. A particular spot on Earth can go centuries without falling in the bounds of totality. The previous American eclipse was only seven years ago, but the next won’t occur until 2044, when the shadow will touch only a sliver of the country. An eclipse as good as the one next month will not occur until 2045. So, if you can, go see it. The spectacle will be worth it.

Throughout human history, many cultures reacted with panic and fear when the sun disappeared without warning; they believed these events to be punishments from displeased gods and omens of a bleak future. Nowadays, we understand the workings of our cosmic neighborhood better than ever before, and we can predict when and where the moon’s shadow will darken the skies across hundreds of years. Instead of breaking the spell, that knowledge has enriched the experience of witnessing a total solar eclipse. We can tap into a uniquely human process that psychologists call “mental time travel,” which allows us to recall past versions of ourselves and imagine the possibilities of our future state. What was I doing in 2017? Where will I be in 2045?

These questions might make you feel a twinge of emotion, sparked by a kind of cosmic introspection that I’ve written about before. It is an exercise in transcendent wonder, or dread, or some other mushy feeling beyond description. The trajectory of our own life is uncertain, but a celestial alignment is a sure thing, as unstoppable as time itself. To be in the path of totality is the ultimate existential experience.

[Read: The existential wonder of space]

Fred Espenak, a retired astrophysicist, has lived his life around eclipses, chasing after totality on every continent rather than waiting for the shadow to come to him. His first total solar eclipse was in 1970, when Espenak was 18 years old, had just gotten his driver’s license, and had persuaded his parents to let him take the family car from New York to South Carolina. He met his wife at the 1995 eclipse, over India. Today he is 72, and has experienced 30 total solar eclipses. “I know there’s a certain point where I’m going to see my last eclipse,” Espenak told me. “Probably within the next 10 to 20 years.” Espenak wishes he could be in New York City in 2079, when totality will cast the skyscrapers in a shimmery deep purple.

You don’t have to be an eclipse chaser to clock the time-warping effects of totality. Jay Ryan, an astronomy enthusiast and a writer, remembers being 8 years old in 1970, when an eclipse traveled up the Eastern Seaboard. Ryan, who lived in Ohio at the time, was disappointed to have missed it and aghast at having to wait until 2017, when he would be 56. “It seemed like an eternity,” Ryan wrote in The Atlantic in 2017. “But a human lifetime passes in a flash.” So have the seven years since the previous eclipse. In 2017, Haven Leeming of Chicago wrote to The Atlantic that she was excited to experience totality in Nebraska with her dad, who had pointed out planets in the night sky to her when she was little. When I checked in with Leeming this month, she told me she’s heading to Texas this time. Her dad will be there, and so will a new member of the family: Leeming’s 4-year-old daughter. She’s too young to understand the movements of giant celestial objects, but she’s old enough to marvel at the soft sparkle of planets overhead with her grandfather.

A total solar eclipse collapses time as we understand it here on Earth, colliding our past and future selves. The illustrator Andy Rash captured this effect in a children’s book, Eclipse, told from the perspective of Rash’s 7-year-old son, who accompanied him to see the 2017 eclipse. On the last page, Rash’s son is a grown man, and sits next to his dad, who is bald with a gray beard. “Years from now, we’ll go again,” the text says. “And once more, we’ll be in the perfect place at the perfect time.” Rash told me he feels keenly the passage of time in his child’s life; his son is a teenager and already Rash’s height, just as the final page of the book shows. In 2045, “my son will be in his mid-30s, and I’ll be quite old,” Rash told me. “I just hope that we are able to get together for that one.”

With the exception of the strands of light that unfurl from the edges of the eclipsed sun, the experience of totality is remarkably consistent. The Atlantic has published several accounts of total solar eclipses over its 167-year history. Each time, the moon’s shadow fell on a different world, but writers were struck by the eclipse’s sudden onset and end. In 1897, the writer Mabel Loomis Todd, recalling totality: “An instantaneous darkness leaped upon the world … With an indescribable out-flashing at the same second, the corona burst forth in wonderful radiance.” Lord Dunsany, in 1939: “The sky darkening to a Prussian blue; and then the huge golden sickle of the returning sun.” Me, in 2017: “There was one last burst of light before it was gone, and in its place emerged a white loop, set against purple shades … Before you can form coherent thought, sunlight bursts through, coating the world in a metallic gold.”

[From the September 1897 issue: In quest of a shadow]

The yawning years between eclipses are a potent reminder that our time on Earth is limited. Espenak makes eclipse almanacs, forecasting the events years into the future, and he knows that bittersweetness well. “I can think about these future eclipses and make detailed predictions of them, but my life is finite,” he said. “These eclipses will go on for millions of years, but we don’t.” This week, I called Donald Liebenberg, a physics and astronomy professor at Clemson University, who has followed totality around the world since 1954. He will be in Texas this time, with his wife. Liebenberg isn’t very sentimental about eclipses; he is more interested in contributing to the study of the corona, the outermost layer of the sun’s atmosphere, which glows in totality and is “much better known now than it was when I started making observations,” he told me. But I had to ask how he felt knowing that he has fewer eclipses ahead of him than he did in his youth. “I just look forward to seeing the next one,” he said.

Liebenberg’s favorite eclipse experience was the one he had aboard the Concorde airplane, which raced through the path of totality at twice the speed of sound when the moon slid in front of the sun in 1973. Liebenberg, dressed in an Air Force flight suit, spent 74 consecutive minutes in the moon’s shadow that day—a tremendous improvement over the handful of minutes that totality lasts over a single spot on Earth.

[Read: The king of totality]

Totality has always been maddeningly fleeting. “The two minutes and a half in memory seemed but a few seconds—like a breath, a tale that is told,” Todd wrote in 1897. In Rash’s book, the young narrator takes in every second: “I try not to blink.” Cosmic spectacles play out on wildly different scales from human lives, but they have this in common: They both go by faster than you’d think. Whether you’re experiencing the disorienting thrill of totality or the small pleasures of the years in between, you always wish you had more time. For all their sparkle, eclipses are ultimately a memento mori, inspiring us to absorb as much wonder as possible before our time on Earth winks out. This year, people across the continental U.S. will have a chance to bask in a rare sight, one that connects humans across generations and millennia. Make sure you’re one of them.

Miranda’s Last Gift

2024-03-21T07:00:00-04:00

I was at the kitchen counter making coffee when my daughter Miranda’s dog approached. Ringo stands about 10 inches high at the shoulder, but he carries himself with supreme confidence. He fixed his lustrous black eyes on mine. Staring straight at me, he lifted his leg and urinated on the oven door.

After the mess was cleaned up, I complained to Miranda, “I don’t think Ringo likes me.”

Miranda replied, “Ringo loves you. He just doesn’t respect you.”

Theoretically, Ringo is a Cavalier King Charles spaniel. You may have seen depictions of the breed peeking at you from portraits of monarchs and aristocrats. But the spaniels in the paintings are almost always the cinnamon-and-white variety known as a Blenheim spaniel. My wife, Danielle, has a Blenheim. The Blenheim Cavalier is a true lapdog: easygoing, obedient, insinuating. Ringo is very different. He is exactly the color of a cup of espresso, mostly black-haired with a little brownish tinge at his extremities. He’s commonly mistaken for a miniature Rottweiler. That confusion is less absurd than it sounds. If an unwelcome stranger steps in his way, 18-pound Ringo will stiffen and growl, murder in his eyes.

Ringo came into my life in the spring of 2018. Miranda had returned to the United States after four years living in Israel. She had thought seriously about staying there, but then the romantic relationship that had kept her in the country ended. Miranda was cast alone upon the open world. She relocated to Los Angeles to start over.

She chose L.A. because the landscape reminded her of Israel, even if the people were as different as could be. “My Israeli friends criticize Los Angeles as so fake,” she told me. “But let me tell you, fake nice is a lot better than authentic rude.”

Los Angeles, however, is not a good place to recover from a broken heart. The huge distances that must be traveled to see a friend, the cultural obsession with the surface of things—they can reinforce loneliness. Normally so cheerful and optimistic, Miranda was slowly succumbing to depression. So Danielle and I bought her a dog.

The dog we meant to buy was a Blenheim. Miranda had grown up with one and dearly loved him. But the breeder Miranda selected had no Blenheims for sale, only a single black-and-tan male. Miranda brought him home.

The friend who drove Miranda and Ringo back to L.A. took some photographs of the two of them in the car. Miranda—this glamorous and sophisticated young woman, who had earned her living as a model in Tokyo, Milan, and Tel Aviv—suddenly looked like her 11-year-old self again. She and Ringo writhed together in mutual delight, Miranda smiling in perfect happiness.

“Ringo is the best gift you and Mom ever gave me,” she said, “including the gift of life.”

I happened to visit Los Angeles a few days later, so I was the first member of the family apart from Miranda to meet Ringo. He worried me. I had imagined a dog that would curl up in Miranda’s lap when she needed an understanding companion, who would gently lick the tip of her nose if she was sad. This dog was a lot—what’s the word?—livelier than that. He was ferociously energetic, utterly inexhaustible. Oh well, I thought, he’s still just a puppy.

Ringo’s energy proved good for Miranda. If there was to be any living with him, he needed a long hike every day, preferably much of it uphill. His infectious spirit got him into situations where Miranda rapidly made new friends. They adapted each to the other. They did almost everything together. Men who sought Miranda’s favor learned to bring treats for Ringo. She once took Ringo with her to Paris, where she charmed waiters into allowing him to sit on bistro chairs and eat cheese off his own plate at the table.

The Miranda-Ringo relationship recalled her favorite fairy tale, “Beauty and the Beast.” So long as his beautiful mistress stood near, Ringo behaved with exemplary propriety. He would cooperate when Miranda maneuvered his strong paws into party costumes: an elf at Christmastime, a hot dog at Halloween. She even taught him to pose for photos. At her word, he would look at the camera and tilt his head fetchingly.

Remove her for even a minute, however, and the beast reappeared. Only Miranda could then calm him. She would scoop him up, squeeze him, and hold him in what she termed “cuddle jail.” His head would drop. His eyelids would close. He would fall asleep, snoring noisily, his furry cheek against her smooth one.

My family inherited a property on Lake Ontario from my wife’s parents. Danielle and I have spent summers there since the early ’90s. The scenery is lovely, but until recently the region offered few amusements other than nature itself. Miranda thought the place dull. But Ringo enjoyed the open spaces and the opportunity to hunt his most detested enemy: birds.

He’d awaken before dawn to bark at them through the sliding glass doors. I’d sleepily fumble with the handle, trying to grab Ringo first, because otherwise he would bite the door so hard that his teeth left marks. He would race out, pausing only to savage a plastic bucket or sink his fangs into a rubber boot—or even my leg, if I got in his way. He would rampage after the birds for half an hour, then return to gulp down his breakfast.

I once confronted Miranda about controlling his behavior. “He’s trying to warn us that we are surrounded by small flying dinosaurs,” she protested.

“Okay,” I said, “but why must he bark so much?”

“Why do you tweet?” she retorted.

At the time, Danielle and I owned two Labrador retrievers. In the summer, we would exercise them by hitting tennis balls into the lake for them to chase. Our stretch of shoreline is stony. Where lake and land meet, the water can be whipped by the wind into crashing surf. That’s no problem for an 80-pound, hard-muscled Labrador. You might expect it to daunt a little spaniel. Yet Ringo joined the game and soon became its champion. He could not swim very far, but he charged into the waves all the same, sometimes biting the rocks on his way. He would wait for one of the Labs to bring a ball closer to the shore, then seize it from them and carry it the rest of the way.

On dry ground, too, he would insist on playing fetch virtually all the long daylight hours of a Canadian summer. I would try to lock away every stray tennis ball in the place, yet Ringo would find one more, drop it at my feet, and bark at my face to demand: “Throw.”

“He won’t leave me alone,” I complained to Miranda.

“He thinks of you as his assistant,” she said.

“Well, that’s a relationship of trust at least.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. He’s a Hollywood dog; he has a lot of assistants. Mom is Assistant No. 1. You’re Assistant No. 2.”

Assistant No. 2 became my family nickname ever after.

Miranda was always nearsighted, but over the course of 2018, her vision deteriorated to the point where she could no longer read even her phone. My wife joked that she was like Marilyn Monroe’s character in How to Marry a Millionaire, the bombshell who needed glasses. But we were worried. We sent Miranda to specialists. The problem was diagnosed: a large brain tumor that was squeezing her optic nerves.

Untreated, the tumor would first blind her, then slowly kill her. But treating it would be no easy matter.

The tumor was a highly unusual kind. It was not cancerous, but it had developed its own network of blood vessels. If the tumor were excised with anything less than perfect precision, with every vessel meticulously cauterized, catastrophic bleeding into the brain could result.

My wife identified the doctor in the United States best qualified to operate on this rare and deadly threat. But how to get on his schedule? When Miranda returned from Israel, she had signed up with the least-expensive HMO she could find in California. She was only 26; how much medicine could she possibly need?

The inexpensive HMO had no intention of allowing access to the right doctor. It insisted on assigning Miranda to its in-house team. That team proposed slicing off the top of Miranda’s skull and then groping down to her brain stem. The doctors candidly confessed that the chances of success were meager.

When Danielle protested that she had found a doctor who promised a less invasive technique with a better hope of success, the HMO’s chief brain surgeon pooh-poohed her. I could have advised him that patronizing Danielle was unlikely to go well, but he kept at it. Then he addressed her as “dear.” The room exploded. “I know why you think this operation cannot be done,” Danielle said. “Since this variety of tumor was first identified in [I forget the year, but Danielle knew it], there have been [again, Danielle knew the number] successful operations in the United States. You’ve performed none of them. Maybe that’s why you misdiagnosed the tumor in the first place. The doctor we want is the only one who has even recognized it for what it is.”

The HMO never relented. Mercifully, we found an opportunity under the Affordable Care Act to shift Miranda to a different insurer that had the right doctor in its network. Miranda’s surgery was scheduled for April 2019 at Stanford University Medical Center. In the meantime, she and Ringo came to live with us in Washington, D.C.

Miranda fatigued easily that winter. It typically fell to my wife and me to walk Ringo together with the big dogs. Ringo would sprint up and down hills, plunge into muddy streams, and generally dismiss commands to “come” or “heel” as impertinent and stupid suggestions. “If Ringo was a human being,” Danielle said, “I’m not sure we’d like him very much.”

Stanford University Medical Center, 2019 (Courtesy of the Frum family)

My wife and I rented an apartment in Palo Alto to be with Miranda during the preparation for the operation and the convalescence afterward. We ensured that the building was dog-friendly, so that Ringo could stay with us. The last thing Miranda needed during this period of stress and fear was responsibility for a dog ready to pick a fight with every stray leaf in his path.

But Ringo intuited that something unusual was happening in his world. This dog that normally put the high in high-maintenance abruptly reinvented himself as a wholly different animal. He quietly accompanied Miranda through every frightening minute. He attended all of her preoperative appointments, right up until the final seconds before she went in for surgery. I’d never imagined a hospital could be so sensitive to a stricken dog owner. But Stanford was, and we still feel grateful.

The doctor had warned us that the operation might take as long as eight hours. It extended to 12. No information or explanation reached us in the waiting room. Terrible thoughts crowded our minds. Our only comfort was to rub our faces in Ringo’s woolly black fur.

Then, at last, the doctor emerged. He carried a celebratory can of Coca-Cola. All had gone well. We glimpsed Miranda’s reddish-gold hair as she was pushed to the recovery room. The surgeon’s microscopic tools had traveled into the brain via Miranda’s nose. There had been no need to shave her head or crack open her skull.

We asked if we could bring Ringo into the intensive-care unit to greet Miranda when she regained consciousness. The doctor consented, but cautioned that it was very important that Miranda’s head remain in exactly the correct elevated position. There must be no disturbance, no motion. Ringo, for once in his life, complied. He lay in Miranda’s lap or on her legs. Ringo lived in the recovery room until Miranda’s release a few days later, his vigil broken only when my wife and I took him out for walks and meals.

When Miranda’s surgeon met with her before her discharge, he declared: “Now go and lead a normal life.” This was a deeply gratifying sentiment, but also not quite the truth. The tumor and the operation had ravaged Miranda’s endocrine system. She was prescribed a complex and ever-changing array of hormones for an array of needs: managing her thirst, regulating her sleep, sustaining her immune system. When COVID-19 struck, we airlifted Miranda out of Los Angeles for good. She came east wrapped in masks, scarves, and gloves. We collected her and Ringo at the airport to live with us. The year 2020 was one of the most difficult in American history for many people: lockdowns, school closures, riots, and everywhere the pall of disease. For Danielle and me, I’m a little ashamed to admit, it was one of the best times in our lives. The fledglings returned to the nest: Miranda and our son, Nathaniel, rejoined their high-school-senior sister, Beatrice.

Miranda was fiercely independent and stoic, often too independent and stoic for her own good. She had braved dangers all her life. In Israel, she smiled her way through photo sessions as Hamas rockets flew overhead. In France, when anti-Semitic thugs tried to intimidate her and some Israeli friends on the Paris subway, Miranda defiantly spoke Hebrew extra loudly. She urged self-doubting friends, “You need to say ‘fuck you’ to more people more often.” Always ready to listen to the troubles of others, she adamantly refused to discuss her own. But for those months, Miranda, for once in her life, let us take care of her as she preferred to take care of others.

Beatrice postponed college for a year and remained with us through the fall. Ten years older, Miranda regarded Beatrice as something of a daughter, as well as a sister. The two of them spent hours in each other’s rooms, laughing and gossiping and planning future adventures, watching movies together long after Danielle and I fell asleep.

The bird life in our wooded part of Washington, D.C., may be even more active than in the open fields of Ontario. Years ago, Danielle and I added a second-?story balcony off our bedroom. A sparrow family built a nest in the eaves above. Ringo interpreted that domestic act as a personal affront and a violent intrusion. He would leap into the air to snap and bark at the nest, either on the balcony deck or, when restrained, through the bedroom’s glass door. Then, at last, Ringo’s hour of triumph: In one of his lunges, he caught a young bird as it lifted from its nest and killed it. Miranda pretended to share the family horror, not very convincingly.

The pandemic passed. Miranda rented an apartment in New York, on the sixth floor of a building in SoHo where the ancient elevator had long ago stopped working. Every time she went in or out, Ringo also had to climb all six floors, each step almost as tall as he was. The exercise bulked up his muscles and sinews. Picking him up to stop him from attacking things became even more challenging than before. He could wriggle and twist with all the power of an athlete who executes hundreds of push-ups a day.

On a visit to that apartment, Nathaniel observed another side of Ringo’s character. Miranda inflated an air mattress for Nat to use as a bed. Early one morning, Nat awoke to see Ringo engaged in passionate motion with the edge of the mattress. “Maybe we should get Ringo a real girlfriend?” Nat asked Miranda.

The dream of normality seemed to have come true. We celebrated family milestones: birthdays, holidays, Nat’s wedding. Miranda and Ringo moved again, to Brooklyn, this time to a building with an elevator. Ringo befriended all the doormen. One day, he bolted into the elevator ahead of Miranda—and the doors closed. Miranda was frantic, imagining the elevator opening in the lobby and Ringo darting into the street. But within moments, the elevator returned. There stood a doorman, grinning, Ringo in his arms.

New York City, 2021 (Courtesy of Evan Amzuri)

Miranda and Ringo explored their new borough together. In her neighbor?hood, America’s worsening drug-?addiction problem could be witnessed on every sidewalk, unconscious bodies slumped on curbs and benches. Beautiful, clever, and privileged as she was, Miranda always identified with society’s misfits and outcasts. She habitually carried an extra water bottle with her to tuck under a street sleeper’s arm to be discovered when he awoke. Ringo would glare disapprovingly, but this was one circumstance in which his wishes did not prevail.

The day after Valentine’s Day this year, my wife had big news for Miranda. She knew that Miranda had always wanted to take Ringo to London, but had been deterred by the British embargo on bringing in pets without lengthy and costly quarantining. Danielle had discovered a work-around and wanted to share it with Miranda. But the conversation never took place. Through the winter, Miranda had suffered a series of bad colds; getting her on the phone had become hard. I texted her, but unusually for her, no swift answer came.

The next morning, February 16, we received the devastating news that Miranda had been found dead in her Brooklyn apartment. Illness overwhelmed her depleted immune system and stopped her heart. She collapsed at about three in the morning. When she was found, Ringo was lying beside her.

For me, the thought of my own death has never been a distressing subject. We live, we love, we yield the stage to our children. I hoped that when the time arrived, I would have the chance for farewells. If that wish were granted, I could with total content ride the train to my final destination. It never occurred to me that one of my children might board the train first, pulling away as her parents wept on the platform.

But so it happened. All the end-of-life decisions that my wife and I had expected to deliberate for ourselves now had to be made at breakneck speed for our cherished daughter. We would bury her at a small, rural Jewish cemetery a short distance from our Ontario home. That way, we could be near her for the rest of our lives, then beside her ever afterward.

Transporting a body from one country to another is never an easy matter. Everything about the process becomes more difficult when the person has died at the beginning of a three-day weekend. My brother-in-law Howard, a successful businessman, stepped in with an enormously generous act of assistance: He chartered a plane to carry Miranda from New York to Toronto.

Wrapped in a blanketed body bag, Miranda was laid on a bench in the aircraft, then buckled in. My wife and I sat opposite her, with Ringo on a leash. As the plane gained altitude, Ringo jumped on Miranda’s chest. He lay there for a long time, then sidled toward her legs, then to her feet. As the flight came to an end, Ringo hopped off Miranda and into my wife’s lap, as if to say, “I belong with you now.” He posted himself beside Miranda’s coffin at the funeral in Toronto. He gazed into the grave as Miranda was lowered into the ground. Then he meekly departed with us.

When a parent loses a child, the nights are the worst. Thoughts come crashing into the mind: every missed medical clue, every pleasure needlessly denied, every word of impatience, every failure of insight and understanding. Like seasickness, the grief ebbs and surges, intervals of comparative calm punctuated by spasms of racking pain. I don’t want to wake my wife, who has a grief schedule of her own, so I slip out of our bed and into the one Miranda used when she stayed with us in Washington. When I do that, Ringo will climb up to sleep at my feet, just as he slept on Miranda’s that one last time.

Immediately after Miranda died, Ringo did not like anyone else to hold him. At first, I deferred to his resistance. Then I remembered something my sister, Linda, said during the most difficult phase of Miranda’s never-easy adolescence: “Sometimes the kid who seems to want the hug the least is the kid who needs the hug the most.” I experimented with my own version of “cuddle jail.” After a few attempts, Ringo accepted the embrace, then welcomed it.

The author and Ringo, 2021 (Courtesy of the Frum family)

And I think: Over 32 years of life, Miranda gave me many gifts. She gave me joy, and pride, and the wisdom that can be learned only from loving another being more than one loves oneself. Then, at the end, she gave me one last gift, the most immediately necessary of them all. She left me the means to expiate all those sins of omission and commission that crowd my mind at three in the morning. She left me Ringo. For better or worse, I will be Assistant No. 2 to the very end of his days, or mine.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “Miranda’s Last Gift.”

Too Much Purity Is Bad for the Left

2024-03-21T07:00:00-04:00

American leftists are facing a question that has become a perennial bugbear. Come November, should they support the Democratic incumbent Joe Biden to defeat Donald Trump? Or, given their profound reservations about both candidates, should they abstain from voting at all?

Biden’s support for Israel’s brutal war in Gaza has given the conundrum special urgency this year, but the question has become exhaustingly familiar. Four years ago, the country’s largest leftist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, loudly declared that it was not endorsing Biden, despite his backing by a coalition that included Bernie Sanders, Angela Davis, the DSA’s own Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, most major trade unions, and, implicitly, The New England Journal of Medicine. When some in the DSA’s leadership suggested that the organization could at least call on its members in swing states to consider voting for Biden, the majority voted down the proposal. Biden went on to win without any organized help from the DSA.

At moments like these, the American left could stand to learn from the experiences of its international counterparts. The international left seems largely to recognize that it is too small to survive on its own and must therefore build coalitions—most important, to ally with those who defend democracy and basic civic rights. And this is true despite the fact that the left in countries such as France, India, and Japan is a formidable force, boasting organizations with millions of members and sending delegates to serve in legislative and executive office. American leftists, meanwhile, have spent decades mired in niche subcultures of activist groups—they are marginal and yet still spurn coalitions that risk adulterating their purity.

[Helen Lewis: The left can’t afford to go mad]

The United States is relatively rare among democracies in that it has long lacked a far-left party with legislative representation, a distinction that has something to do with the peculiarities of its political system. In most parliamentary democracies, political parties are membership-based and ideologically aligned, whereas in the United States, they are loose coalitions that can encompass a wide range of views.

This protean structure didn’t stop American social movements from achieving important milestones throughout the 20th century—among them, female suffrage, workers’ rights, and an end to segregation. To get there, rights campaigns often had to fight both the Democratic and the Republican establishments. But they managed to mobilize masses, carve out new political spaces, and ultimately make the journey from protest to politics.

Bayard Rustin explained the relationship between movement and party in 1965: “Southern demonstrators had recognized that the most effective way to strike at the police brutality they suffered from was by getting rid of the local sheriff—and that meant political action, which in turn meant, and still means, political action within the Democratic party where the only meaningful primary contests in the South are fought.”

America’s youth-led social-protest movements petered out by the end of the 1970s, however, and the left came to place itself outside the political system, condemning itself to marginality. American leftist activists continued to bring some changes through trade unions, civil-rights organizations, and feminist groups, but they did not coalesce into an organized political movement until 2016, when a democratic socialist senator from Vermont took the step of running in the Democratic primaries. In doing so, Bernie Sanders helped the minuscule DSA grow its membership from 6,200 in 2015 to a peak of 95,000 in 2021 (it now stands at about 78,000).

The DSA is a tiny force in a country of 332 million. And it is less a nationwide political organization than a federation of local activist groups that share a banner despite the wildly divergent politics of their members. The DSA’s elected representatives reliably showed up for Biden in 2020 and have voted for measures such as support for NATO’s enlargement. The national political leadership of the organization, however, has taken diametrically opposed positions. The organization lacks a united political program even on such basic matters as whom to endorse for president.

Many in the DSA good-heartedly argue that what matters is grassroots, and in many cases local, activism, not who gets elected to Congress or the White House. In this sense, the DSA seems more comfortable with the pre-Bernie activism of bumper stickers and single-cause groups than with the prospect of building a cohesive political force.

The international left, by contrast, has both a history of cohesion and the baggage to go along with it. Many leftists are still struggling to transcend the legacy of the 20th century’s authoritarian socialism. Some once-powerful parties of the left have simply disappeared into thin air (as in Italy). New leftist parties, such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, emerged or drew strength from the wreckage of the 2008 global economic recession but didn’t achieve as much as optimists had hoped. Still, socialist parties on multiple continents are major political actors in ways that their American counterparts simply are not, and the reason is at least in part their willingness to forge pragmatic alliances.

This imperative is taken as elementary in much of the world. India’s communist parties have worked within the country’s multiparty democratic structures since its independence in 1947 and have thus also remained relevant in the post-Soviet era. Last year, they came together with the Indian National Congress and a range of left, center-left, centrist, regionalist, and even center-right parties to form the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA). Their aim was to present a united front against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, whose chauvinism and authoritarianism have had a chilling effect on the world’s biggest democracy. Pointing to the threat such forces pose to “the ethos of the country,” Annie Raja, the leader of the Communist Party of India, told a local publication, “At such a juncture, any party which is sincerely wishing to save this country and democracy and secularism must try to unite.”

Similarly, the Turkish left, including the Workers Party and several other Marxist groups, campaigned last year for the centrist presidential candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu, whom it viewed as having the best chance to beat the authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an. Although Erdo?an still won, the left’s campaign gave it new national visibility and its largest parliamentary representation in decades.

In Israel, a left-wing coalition with Arab and Jewish members decided to join Zionist parties of the left and the center in endorsing the centrist Benny Gantz for prime minister, with a goal of ousting Benjamin Netanyahu, seen by the group as a menace to Israel’s democracy.

In countries where democracy itself is not under threat, leftists have learned to make broad alliances in order to remain politically relevant. In Portuguese elections on March 10, the Communist Party, the Left Bloc, and the left-leaning green parties gained about 13 percent of the vote among them. They will now do all they can to exclude far-right and even center-right forces from forming a government. In other words, they are likely to support the center-left Socialist Party, roughly the Portuguese equivalent to Biden’s party. That party’s leader, Pedro Nuno Santos, helped coordinate the support of communists and the Left Bloc for a previous government in 2015–19.

Similarly, in Spain the Communist Party and Podemos are part of a coalition cabinet led by the center-left Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. One of that country’s most popular politicians is the communist deputy prime minister and labor minister, Yolanda Diaz, who has vocally backed the Palestinian cause and was recently in Washington to work with her American counterpart on new regulations protecting workers from artificial-intelligence algorithms.

One can criticize the left for joining governments in Spain and Portugal, but not without acknowledging that the policies these governments have adopted have already changed millions of lives. Spain has passed gender-equality laws that improve transgender rights, offer state-funded paid leave for women who suffer from painful periods (a first among European countries), and mandate greater parity for women in politics and the public sphere. Portugal reversed austerity measures that had included deep cuts to wages, pensions, and social security; The New York Times termed the result a “major revival.” Whatever soul-searching the American left wants to do about its conception of socialism, if it seeks to be a serious political force, it must also attempt to win elections, come to power, and change real people’s lives.

On a subnational level, too, leftists outside the United States have put sloganeering aside to pursue concrete goals in office and show what their ideals can look like in real life. In India’s Kerala, a democratically elected communist-led government has made particular strides in human development, poverty reduction, public education, and, most recently, public health; the international news media lauded K. K. Shailaja, Kerala’s health minister, for her handling of the coronavirus pandemic, even though the state later faced a new wave of the virus.

[Conor Friedersdorf: How October 7 changed America’s free-speech culture]

Closer to home, Chile’s President Gabriel Boric, who was actually endorsed by the DSA, leads a pioneering left-wing government. Patient political work and broad alliances propelled him to the Mint Palace. Former President Michelle Bachelet, from the country’s center-left, supported Boric in 2021, as did an even more liberal predecessor, Ricardo Lagos. That did not stop the Communist Party from enthusiastically joining his government, and Camilla Vallejo, once a fellow leader of the student movement, now serves as a cabinet minister. Under the leadership of its first-ever communist mayor, Irací Hassler, the capital city of Santiago has taken steps to bolster women’s rights by offering support to victims of domestic violence, for instance, while battling food insecurity and publicly condemning discrimination against migrants.

In the first half of the 20th century, the United States actually had a powerful leftist force in the form of the Socialist Party of America. Its members won municipal races in places such as Berkeley, California, and Schenectady, New York. The party’s proud centerpiece was Milwaukee, which had three socialist mayors for a total of 38 years from 1910 to 1960. Those further to the left often made fun of them as “sewer socialists” who cared more about the city’s excellent public-sanitation system than about the socialist revolution (like all good leftist insults, this one had originated as an internal jab within the party).

But Milwaukee’s sewer socialists could boast something that purists simply can’t: They made a difference in the lives of millions of working people. Those are the politics—result-oriented and pragmatic—that convince people to give the socialist left and its ideas a chance. If American socialists truly want to emerge as a serious political force in the world’s most powerful country, they need to stop cosplaying radicalism and learn how to defend democracy, build broad coalitions, and run successful governments.

Whatever You Do, Don’t Do the Silent Treatment

2024-03-21T07:00:00-04:00

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Life for a 19th-century sailor was hard: Months at sea were accompanied by constant danger and deprivation. To make matters worse, mariners saw the same few people all day, every day, in a radically confined space where they were expected to get along and look after one another. On a long voyage, one obnoxious person could make life utterly miserable for everyone.

So sailors used a tried technique to deal with an offender: the silent treatment. They would ignore him completely for weeks on end. That might sound like an innocuous action to you, but in truth, it was far from it. The silent treatment was, according to the writer Otis Ferguson in 1944, “a process so effective in the monotony of ship’s life as to make strong men weep.”

Of course, the silent treatment is a technique used not only by sailors. It can be encountered anytime, anywhere, from home to work. You have almost certainly experienced some form of it. Being subjected to the silent treatment is a lament I commonly hear from others, on whom it is imposed by romantic partners, parents, friends, colleagues.

[Read: What you’re saying when you give someone the silent treatment]

Long-married couples will go for days without speaking. A person will give their oldest friend the cold shoulder. I knew a father who refused to speak with his daughter for 30 years. Silent-treatment inflictors do it because, as the sailors discovered, it was devastatingly effective in imposing pain on the recipient. So much pain, in fact, that it can leave a person scarred and a relationship in ruins.

With some knowledge about how imposed silence actually affects people, you might want to think twice before you freeze out that annoying family member. And you will be better equipped to deal with the silent treatment the next time someone imposes it on you.

You have probably inflicted the silent treatment on others—two-thirds of us have done so, according to the psychologist Kipling Williams in an interview with Daryl Austin in The Atlantic. Williams is arguably the best-known expert on the phenomenon. We use it, studies conducted by Williams and his co-researchers suggest, for two main reasons. The most common one is to punish someone for perceived misbehavior, something they said or did. Behind this, the next most common is conflict avoidance; you might go silent to avoid a major blowup, for example. Other motives can also apply, such as feeling that a relationship has reached a dead end, leaving nothing more to say or do.

Arguably, people who impose silence do so because they believe it works—whether as a punishment, a way to avoid conflict, or a coping mechanism in one of those dead-end situations. Williams and colleagues have reported that about one-quarter of inflictors regard it as an effective tactic. But at what cost? Those on the receiving end describe feelings of pain, and resentment from being ostracized by a loved one. And by pain, I mean literal pain—researchers have been able to identify the part of the brain affected by exclusion: the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which is also characteristically implicated in the sensation of emotional pain.

[Richard A. Friedman: Plenty of people could quit therapy right now]

The effects on an ostracized person are what you might expect from that finding. Williams has shown in his research that being ignored initially provokes reflexive anger and sadness, followed by reflection on the motives and meaning of the treatment, and, when persistent over time, resignation. Not the resignation of being reconciled with a situation but a miserable state of alienation, hopelessness, and depression.

Like all kinds of abuse, silent rejection can impair a victim’s overall competence. In one experiment that asked participants to imagine that they would end up alone in life, this form of silent rejection lowered their ability to think clearly and complete complex tasks. What this suggests is that the silent treatment may be effective in satisfying the inflictor’s aggression, but it is an intensely cruel and disproportionate way to deal with conflict. Not very surprisingly, then, we find that people high in Machiavellianism—a willingness to hurt and manipulate others for their own gain, even a trivial one—may employ this technique with partners and friends.

Given how destructive the silent treatment is, like physical abuse, it can wreck relationships. In one 2009 paper, frequent use of the silent treatment was negatively correlated with commitment to one’s relationship. And according to the Gottman Institute, which conducts research on the success and failure of marriages, the act of cutting off your partner by stonewalling can be a contributory factor to divorce.

Interestingly, the treatment causes relationships to dissolve most consistently when the recipient has high self-esteem rather than low self-esteem. When such a person is ostracized, they have the personal resources to see their partner’s conduct for the gross maltreatment that it is and head for the exit. The unfortunate corollary is that people low in self-esteem, like vulnerable partners in an abusive relationship, are less likely to leave. Lacking the capacity to reject their abuser, they stay to endure the sad silence with the partner who hurts them.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to spot a frenemy—and be a real friend]

Because its aggression is covert, the silent treatment might seem harmless. But it’s really not; it’s terrible. We should all work to avoid engaging in it and, if possible, to avoid receiving it as well. Here are three practical lessons to get the silent treatment out of your life.

1. Silence can be a blaring alarm.
Drawing on my experience of working with a lot of young adults who are dating, I strongly recommend that, as a simple matter of self-defense, people consider quickly abandoning a relationship in which the partner engages in the silent treatment. It is a form of cruelty, and may be an early warning of a damaged person who is willing to hurt you. Naturally, such a rapid exit is not possible in some relationships—in cases, for example, in which parents use it. But at the very least, people subjected to the treatment should force open acknowledgment of the tactic by calling it out and stating that they consider it tantamount to abuse.

2. Break the cycle.
Speaking of families, a lot of research suggests that pathologies can be transmitted down through generations. Thus domestic violence routinely runs in families, and a tendency toward alcohol misuse can be as much as 60 percent inherited (some combination of nature and nurture). Not surprisingly, scholars have found a significant association between parents’ application of the silent treatment and its use by their adult children. If you find yourself freezing out people you care about when you are upset, you could ask yourself whether you saw this as a child; perhaps your parents did it to each other, or to you, so you see it as normal conflict behavior. If so, you have a golden opportunity to break the cycle of this damaging habit.

3. Say what you think.
A question that naturally follows from the last point is: “Okay, so how do I break the cycle?” Researchers have found that people who ruminate on a conflict with their partner—turning it over and over in their mind—are especially prone to punitive actions, including the silent treatment. If this is you, rather than trying to change your ostracizing behavior directly, start with the rumination itself. Maybe you are uncomfortable about expressing your displeasure and bottle it up. That leads you to punish your loved one in a disproportionate and damaging way. Try not to get stuck perseverating on the dispute, and use your words instead.

[Read: The Harry Potter personality test]

The silent treatment is a terrible habit for you and for your loved ones, but I should close by noting that silence per se certainly does not have to be destructive. In fact, one of the best things you can regularly do for yourself and others is to engage in prolonged periods of silence—not the silence of punishment, but the silence of love.

Every year, I participate in a four-day silent retreat, immersed in prayer and contemplation without uttering a single word. My wife does the same—though separately, because together we would not manage 30 seconds without talking with each other. I can think of nothing I do that so wonderfully clears my mind and brings me closer to the transcendent than this extended silence. My biggest problems become manageably small ones; my major resentments shrink to minor annoyances.

Indeed, one way to cope with being given the silent treatment might be to immerse yourself in this type of divine practice. Scholars have found that spiritual practices can be remarkably effective at dealing with the pain of being ostracized by others. Perhaps the only exception to a ban on the silent treatment is when you choose to practice it on yourself.

America’s Magical Thinking About Housing

2024-03-21T06:00:00-04:00

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If you want to understand America’s strange relationship with housing in the 21st century, look at Austin, where no matter what happens to prices, someone’s always claiming that the sky is falling.

In the 2010s, the capital of Texas grew faster than any other major U.S. metro, pulling in movers from around the country. Initially, downtown and suburban areas struggled to build enough apartments and single-family homes to meet the influx of demand, and housing costs bloomed across the region. Since the beginning of the pandemic, even as rent inflation has gone berserk nationwide, no city has experienced anything like Austin’s growth in housing costs. In 2021, rents rose at the most furious annual rate in the city’s history. In 2022, rent growth exceeded every other large city in the country, as Austin’s median rent nearly doubled.

This might sound like the beginning of a familiar and depressing story—one that Americans have gotten used to over the past few decades, especially if they live in a coastal blue state. California and New York, anchored by “superstar” clusters in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Wall Street, have pulled in some of the nation’s most creative workers, who have pushed price levels up. But a combination of stifling construction regulations, eternal permitting processes, legal tools to block new development, and NIMBY neighbors restricted the addition of more housing units. Rent and ownership costs rose in America’s richest cities, until families started giving up and moving out. As the economics writer Noah Smith has argued, California and New York are practically driving people out of the state “by refusing to build enough housing."

But Austin—and Texas more generally—has defied the narrative that skyrocketing housing costs are a problem from hell that people just have to accept. In response to rent increases, the Texas capital experimented with the uncommon strategy of actually building enough homes for people to live in. This year, Austin is expected to add more apartment units as a share of its existing inventory than any other city in the country. Again as a share of existing inventory, Austin is adding homes more than twice as fast as the national average and nearly nine times faster than San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. (You read that right: nine times faster.)

The results are spectacular for renters and buyers. The surge in housing supply, alongside declining inbound domestic migration, has led to falling rents and home prices across the city. Austin rents have come down 7 percent in the past year.

One could celebrate this report as a win for movers. Or, if you’re The Wall Street Journal, you could treat the news as a seriously frightening development.

“Once America’s Hottest Housing Market, Austin Is Running in Reverse,” announced the headline of the top story on the WSJ website on Monday. The article illustrated “Austin’s recent downswing” and its “glut of luxury apartment buildings” with photographs of abandoned downtown plazas, as if the fastest-growing city of the 2010s had been suddenly hollowed out by a plague and left to zombies and tumbleweeds.

Running in reverse. Downswing. Glut. This is the same Wall Street Journal that, in 2021, noted that rent inflation was demolishing American budgets and, in 2022, gawked at all-time-high rents in places like New York City. Sure, falling housing costs are an annoyance if you’re trying to sell your place in the next quarter, or if you’re a developer operating on the razor’s edge of profitability. But this outlook seems to set up a no-win situation. If rising rent prices are bad, but falling rent prices are also bad, what exactly are we supposed to root for in the U.S. housing market?

This is a surprisingly complex question for Americans today. In the U.S., our houses are meant to perform contrary roles in society: shelter for today and investment vehicle for tomorrow. This approach creates a kind of temporal disjunction around the housing market, where what appears sensible for one generation (Please, no more construction near me, it’s annoying and could hurt my property values!) is calamitous for the next (Wait, there’s nowhere near me for my children to live!).

If homeownership is best understood as an investment, like equities, we should root for prices to go up. If housing is an essential good, like food and clothing, we should cheer when prices stay flat—or even when they fall. Instead, many Americans seem to think of a home as existing in a quantum superposition between a present-day necessity and a future asset.

This magical thinking isn’t just a phenomenon of real-estate reporting. It is deeply rooted even in the highest echelons of policy making. Just look at the Democratic Party’s 2020 platform. The document reads (emphasis mine):

Homeownership has long been central to building generational wealth, and expanding access to homeownership to those who have been unfairly excluded and discriminated against is critical to closing the racial wealth gap.

But then the same platform goes on to say (emphasis mine):

Housing in America should be stable, accessible, safe, healthy, energy efficient, and, above all, affordable. No one should have to spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing, so families have ample resources left to meet their other needs and save for retirement.

See the issue? On the one hand, the Democratic Party says we are all relying on homeownership to close the racial wealth gap, which implies that we should root for today’s home values to significantly rise, so that today’s minority owners can build wealth. On the other hand, the party says we need houses to be “above all, affordable.” In that case, we should despair when home values rise too fast, because it implies that the next generation of owners will be priced out of the market.

I don’t think the authors of the Democratic Party platform are careless or clueless. I think they’re doing their best to articulate a folk wisdom: Housing should, somehow, deliver permanent affordability and constant appreciation, at the same time. And perhaps they’re trying to reconcile the awkwardness of a market where ordinary middle-class people are both sellers and buyers of an essential yet expensive good; where high inflation would help some people, while deflation would help others.

Americans’ inconsistent approach to housing doesn’t end with these contradictory desires. In 2022, three economists asked several thousand Americans a few simple questions about how supply and demand works in various markets. For example, if automakers suddenly stopped making new cars and trucks, what happens to the price of used vehicles? Or, if a farm started using an amazing new fertilizer and got a huge boost in grain yield, what will happen to the price of the grain? Contrary to the assumption that Americans don’t understand basic economics, the survey respondents did pretty well on the test. They correctly guessed that a shortage of cars would shift car prices up and that a surge in grain production would shift grain prices down. So far, so good.

Then the economists asked the participants about housing. They said: If a new law makes it easier to build dwellings near train stops, what happens to housing prices? Well, all of a sudden, the laws of supply and demand no longer applied. More than a third of participants said that “a large, exogenous increase in their region’s housing stock” would cause rents and home prices to rise. “The public understands the implications of supply and demand in markets for agricultural commodities, for labor, and even for cars, a durable consumer good that, like housing, trades in new and second-hand markets,” the authors wrote. Only when the subject is housing do many Americans despair that you can never build your way out of a shortage.

Housing is a pit of oxymoronic thinking. The Wall Street Journal tells its readers that it’s bad when rents go up but also bad when rents go down. The Democratic Party platform says homes have to be affordable and also that they ought to appreciate faster than the rate of inflation. Americans in research surveys say that if grain yields surge, grain prices go down, but that if housing construction surges, housing costs go up.

I’m listing these examples not to be despondent about the prospects for housing abundance, but rather to be realistic. Housing is, in fact, both a present need and a future investment. In a dual-side marketplace, I suppose you could argue that any change in price is bad for some party. But the externalities of housing abundance outweigh the loss to any particular party rooting to profit from scarcity. More and denser housing has been found to reduce inequality and raise personal income; to increase individual exercise rates and reduce obesity; to limit carbon emissions and preserve thousands of acres of natural splendor; and even to increase productivity and innovation.

The miracle of Austin is helpful to recognize, because it restores clarity to a simple truth: Houses are essential, but they are not magical. The normal rules of supply and demand apply. Perhaps more blue cities and states should make a point of applying those rules—and build more damn homes.

The Smartphone Kids Are Not All Right

2024-03-21T06:00:00-04:00

I did not know this at the time, but apparently my children were part of a generation of guinea pigs. “It’s as though we sent Gen Z to grow up on Mars when we gave them smartphones in the early 2010s in the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children,” Jonathan Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

Haidt convincingly uses data to argue that a sharp uptick in depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicide among young people is directly tied to the wide distribution of smartphones. He points to surveys that have been asking teenagers for decades questions about mental health, such as: “Life often seems meaningless” or “A lot of times I feel lonely.” Survey results remained pretty consistent, and some numbers were even improving, before they took a sharp, negative turn somewhere between 2010 and 2015.

The solution, Haidt says, is “easy.” In this episode of Radio Atlantic, he advocates that parents don’t give middle schoolers smartphones so they can reclaim the old way of socializing, that social-media platforms raise the minimum age for use to 16, and that schools ban cellphones during the day, among other straightforward solutions. The picture, however, looks a lot less clear when you talk with an actual young person. In this episode, I spoke with my child Jacob, and we juxtapose theory with lived experience. You’ll hear a mother (me) wrestle in real time with the consequences of parenting decisions as Haidt makes the case that we should collectively agree to rescue our kids from this experiment.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: What’s up? What are you up to?

Jacob Rosin: Not much. I just got home. I’m going to do my laundry soon and then pack.

Hanna Rosin: Oh, right. You’re leaving Sunday.

Jacob Rosin: Hm.

Hanna Rosin: Yeah. What’s “hm”?

[Typing]

Hanna Rosin: What are you typing?

[Typing]

Jacob Rosin: I’m just chatting with friends.

Hanna Rosin: Wait, you’re chatting with friends while we’re doing this interview?

Jacob Rosin: I do this all the time. Don’t worry about it.

Hanna Rosin: So you’re going to chat with friends throughout this interview?

Jacob Rosin: Have we started the interview yet?

Hanna Rosin: No, we haven’t.

Jacob Rosin: Okay.

Hanna Rosin: (Sighs.)

[Typing]

Hanna Rosin: Oh my God. Tell me when you’re ready.

Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. And that is my 20-year-old child, Jacob.

Jacob Rosin: I’m ready.

[Music]

Jacob Rosin: Wait—how long will this take? Sorry.

[Music]

Hanna Rosin: This is basically how it goes with me and Jacob. I always think it’s just me and them talking. And I’m always surprised to learn there’s someone else in the room. The feeling is like when you’re at a party and you’re talking to someone, and their eyes are scanning for someone more interesting.

Hanna Rosin: Okay, so what would you say that most of our fights are about?

Jacob Rosin: I mean, I don’t know how to get more specific than phone usage, but I think it also might be phone usage while also not paying attention to something important.

Hanna Rosin: Right, phone usage and then—

Jacob Rosin: Is this a leading question?

Hanna Rosin: No, I am genuinely trying to figure out how close my perception is to your perception.

Jacob Rosin: Okay.

Hanna Rosin: What would you say is my position, or maybe your parents’ position, and what is your position in this fight?

Jacob Rosin: I mean, I think most of the time when I’m on my phone, my friends are in the phone, and the idea is that there’s a real world out there that I should be paying attention to because it is more immediate, and I can’t really come back to it in the same way, I guess.

Hanna Rosin: I see. So you recognize that there’s a world in your phone, there’s a world outside—

Jacob Rosin: That is probably more important to me.

Hanna Rosin: What’s more important to you?

Jacob Rosin: The world on the phone.

Hanna Rosin: And I’m irritated because I think the world outside should be more important to you. Is that a fair summary?

Jacob Rosin: Maybe, yes.

Hanna Rosin: There’s this expression that this MIT professor who writes about stuff has: “We are forever elsewhere.” Do you think that’s true? Does that bother you?

Jacob Rosin: Does it bother me? No. That’s just how I am. I just do that. I think about other stuff.

Hanna Rosin: Does it feel distracting? Or like your mind—

[Typing]

Hanna Rosin: Are you online again?

Jacob Rosin: That was only a brief exchange. I’ll close Discord. Hold on.

Hanna Rosin: (Laughs.)

Hanna Rosin: I’m not sure Jacob is typical, although given what the latest research is showing about how phones intrude into kids’ lives, they might not be that atypical.

Jacob is autistic and did not glide easily into middle- and high-school social dynamics. It was always just much easier for them to have fun with friends online.

But I have been pretty typical as a parent, trying to figure out what to enforce around phones. Jacob and their siblings were part of the guinea-pig generation, the first kids to get smartphones during puberty. And we, the parents, knew nothing. We had no wisdom to go by. We just watched as they dove in deeper and deeper and had no idea if this was excellent and fresh and creative, or totally ruinous.

[Music]

Hanna Rosin: When did you first get your cell phone?

Jacob Rosin: I remember waking up to look at my phone and look at the results of the 2016 election, so it was at least before then.

Hanna Rosin: Yeah, okay. How would you say it changed your—

Jacob Rosin: Over time, it absolutely made me feel more connected with social media and particularly Discord.

Hanna Rosin: Can you say more about that?

Jacob Rosin: I did not really feel like I had any real friends before that point, even though I allegedly did.

Hanna Rosin: Did you feel like you started to compare yourself to other people or anything like that?

Jacob Rosin: I’ve been doing that since I was born, baby.

Hanna Rosin: What does that mean? What do you mean?

Jacob Rosin: I don’t know if the internet ever brought that habit. I think it’s just a habit. Maybe it started to be negative when metrics got involved.

Hanna Rosin: What do you mean?

Jacob Rosin: Well, if I do something funny, that I think is funny, on Twitter.com and only get one like for it, or it’s whatever—you know what I mean.

Hanna Rosin: Right. Like in school, it’s vague: who likes you, who sits next to you, or whatever. But then on social media, it’s really specific.

Jacob Rosin: In school, I’m not even paying attention to that stuff.

Hanna Rosin: Mm-hmm. But on social media, you are.

Jacob Rosin: Yeah.

Hanna Rosin: In 2017, about a year after Jacob got their first phone, The Atlantic published the story, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”

Destroyed. That is a big word. I don’t know many parents who look at their kid and think, You’re destroyed. But now, in 2024, the question of “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” is less of a question and more of a: Yeah, actually, they probably did.

Jonathan Haidt: All right, is Hannah on already?

Hanna Rosin: Hey, it’s me. Hi, it’s Hanna. I’m sorry—it’s “Hanna Rosin.” It could be “Hannah Rozin,” but it’s not.

Haidt: Yeah, I know. And I’m Jon Haidt. It’s often “Jon Hate.”

Hanna Rosin: So I talked to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

Hanna Rosin: Oh, Jon Haidt. I’ve been calling you “Jon Hate.”

Haidt: As half the world does.

Hanna Rosin: Haidt has a new book called The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Like a lot of parents, I keep up with the research. And for the sake of household peace, I would like to dismiss all this stuff about teens and smartphones as alarmist. But Haidt’s book compiles some pretty compelling data.

Hanna Rosin: The way I understand your research over the last 10 to15 years is you have been trying to counter the argument of alarmism with extremely specific data. I mean that is how I understand the point of this book.

Haidt: Exactly. Sometimes it is correct to be alarmed and, as a professor and social scientist, I want to make damn sure that if I’m going to tell people they should be alarmed, I better be right and I better be able to back it up.

Hanna Rosin: One of the big things that Haidt looked at was data from a national survey called, Monitoring the Future. It’s a wide-ranging survey that dates back to the ’70s, and it asks eighth, 10th, and 12th graders a bunch of questions—everything from what they think of the government to their attitudes toward drug and alcohol use.

But what Haidt was most interested in were questions tracking mental health. In the survey, students are given statements and then agree or disagree with them on a scale of 1 to 5.

Haidt: On Monitoring the Future, there’s some really sad items about meaninglessness, hopelessness, like: I often feel that my life is meaningless or I feel that my life has no purpose.

Hanna Rosin: Or I’m feeling lonely and socially isolated at school. I mean, they’re in a language that is relatable. That’s why I wanted to talk about them. It’s sentences that a teenager could relate to.

Haidt: That’s right. So if you plot with the year on the x-axis going back to the ’90s or sometimes the ’70s, and then you plot a bunch of lines, then what you see is the numbers—the lines—bounce around. A number of them, they really do go down a bit. Down is good. Down is like, I don’t agree with that. I don’t feel depressed.

Hanna Rosin: Fewer people say that, or fewer people agree with those depressing statements.

Haidt: That’s right. And this is also a period when suicide rates are dropping. Gen X had the highest suicide rates in history. For whatever reason, the Millennials are actually doing better than Gen X, and that’s very clear when you look at the ’90s and the 2000s. So you get flat lines, or you get lines sloping down. And if you cut off your data collection after 2010, no hint of a problem.

Now, in 2010, teens are just beginning to get iPhones. But what’s remarkable to me is that the mental-health data doesn’t get worse slowly. The mental-health data is fine in the 2000s. And then all of a sudden—right around 2012–2013—everything falls off a cliff.

Hanna Rosin: I just want to track the timeline, because these are such short periods that people are thinking in their head, Okay, what happened then? What happened then? So 2012 is the wide acceptance of cell phones? Because it’s not when smartphones came around.

Haidt: The iPhone comes out in 2007, but it’s just amazing in that it’s a digital Swiss Army knife, and there were no apps other than the ones that came with it. And then the next year we get the app store, and then we get notifications.

So it’s not until 2010–2011 that you have this thing in your pocket, which is not a digital Swiss Army knife that you pull out when you need something. It is now a portal that millions—millions—of companies now can use to get to you, as a child. Without your parents’ permission or knowledge, they can get to you. They can send you notifications. They can try to get you to stop your homework and: Come—look at what someone just said about you.

So it’s in the 2010s that the phone becomes a master rather than a servant. 2010 is also when Instagram is available for public use. 2010 is also when the front-facing camera is put on. Also, high-speed internet: By 2012–2013, most people do have high-speed internet.

So the point is: Between 2010—when phones weren’t toxic, people weren’t on Instagram, most people didn’t have high-speed data—2010 things were fine. By 2015, everything’s different.

[Music]

Hanna Rosin: For example, what happens if you’re a kid and you make a mistake? Haidt admits that childhood wasn’t perfect before the invention of the smartphone—obviously the smartphone didn’t invent bullying—but now the act of growing up, and everything that comes with it, is on display for thousands and possibly millions to see, including your mistakes.

Haidt: There’s a huge difference between practicing all these things on a small stage—not a stage. Let’s say in a small group where mistakes are not very costly. So you say something stupid, and then your friend is mad at you, and then maybe she gives you the cold shoulder. Maybe she even starts a rumor about you. So that’s the way it always was. That’s very painful, but it’s still relatively low stakes.

What happens when now it’s on a stage, where if you say anything wrong or you anger anyone, she can find an ugly photo of you—maybe she can find a nude photo that you swapped with some boy—and now she can put it out there for the world to see, and thousands of people comment on it. It might even get into the newspapers or something like that.

This is a level of shame and humiliation that no teenager can stand, and this, I think, is one of the reasons why the suicide rate is up. Because when you are being publicly shamed on a big stage, life is a living hell and death is an escape.

Hanna Rosin: But we don’t actually know how many suicides are related to social-media shaming, just to be clear.

Haidt: No, no, that’s right because thankfully suicide is still very, very rare. But what we can say is that it’s up for all groups of teenagers. It’s way, way up for preteen girls. They have very low rates to begin with, but their rates have tripled since before 2010. So it’s way up. And even if it’s anecdotal—that is, even if because so few kids killed themselves. But you know, we saw all those parents at the Senate hearings.

Hanna Rosin: Parents who are against Meta because—

Haidt: Because their kids are dead, yeah. They saw it happen. They can see what happened. The kid was, you know, was bullied, shamed, sextorted. She was on webpages promoting self-harm and suicide. Are they all wrong? I don’t think so.

[Music]

Hanna Rosin: After the break, Haidt offers some solutions for what we should do—we the schools, we the government, and we the parents—about the smartphone problem.

After which, I ask Jacob if they wish they’d never had a cell phone.

[Break]

Hanna Rosin: It’s the early 2010s, and according to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, this is around the time that teen mental health starts tanking. Haidt believes that the uptick in depression, anxiety, and self-harm in young people—it all got really bad when the first teenage girl moved her life online: She downloaded Instagram, posted on Tumblr, and started checking obsessively for comments and likes.

Haidt: And some of her friends did, too, so that now their consciousness, their focus was hours a day on their phones and was happening in the virtual world. That’s when the problems start. That’s the great rewiring of childhood. You get much less eye contact, social contact. It all goes through the screen.

Hanna Rosin: Okay, so the key factor here that shifted is real-time socialization: eye contact, social cues, laughter, navigating the real-time reactions of people. That’s what you’re saying is the key difference? It’s being real time in person with your peers.

Haidt: Yes, there are about 15 different causal pathways. There are many ways that the phone-based life is harming boys and girls, but if I had to pick one, that would be the one.

You know, here I am. I’m a 60-year-old man talking about, you know, Kids these days. You’d think that I’m wrong, right? You’d think, What do I know? You’d think that with all the talk about, you know, Let’s raise the age to 16. Let’s not let kids have smartphones ’til 14—these are the things I say—you’d think that somewhere on planet Earth, there would be a young person who would write an essay saying, This is wrong. I can’t find that person. I found one essay from a woman in Canada that kind of defended it. That’s it.

Hanna Rosin: Wait—just one question. There are plenty of teenagers who would say, The phone opened up whole new worlds to me that were not available to me before.

Haidt: Sure, for individuals, they might say that about themselves, but find me any kind of movement or even any individual who is arguing, No, grownups, you don’t understand. Don’t take away our social media. Don’t stop 11-year-olds from being on it. Middle-school kids should have access. I can’t find that now.

Maybe there’s a TikTok video somewhere where they do that. But each generation, you know, if you try to raise the drinking age, at some point, I bet somebody wrote something saying, No, don’t raise the drinking age. So my point is: Don’t just listen to the correlational data. Don’t just listen to the experimental data, which we haven’t even talked about. Don’t just listen to the parents. Don’t just listen to the teachers, all of whom are speaking with almost one voice: This is messing up our kids.

Talk to the kids. And what you find is, while many will say that they enjoy the social connections on Instagram or TikTok—they’ll say they enjoy it—but they don’t say, And it’s good for us overall.

Hanna Rosin: To me, it’s a little complicated. I have a child who would say they were addicted but also would say that online is where they found their friends and where they found people who shared their interests, and that’s something they couldn’t do in real life. And I find it hard to very simply say it’s all terrible, because I also see the ways in which it’s rewired childhood in a way that I can’t personally access, because I don’t have a lot of friends that I just know online, but in a way that’s also real.

Haidt: That’s right. It greatly increases the quantity of social interactions. That’s true. And it greatly decreases their quality. But here’s the thing: If you were right—that it’s opening up all these possible social relationships, that it’s doing all this good—if you were right, then loneliness should have gone down in the 2010s, and it didn’t. It goes up like a hockey stick.

Hanna Rosin: Right. And I suppose you could have some kids for whom that’s true, but the vast majority of kids are not true.

Haidt: Yep, exactly.

Hanna Rosin: So the last section I want to talk about is solutions.

Haidt: Yes.

Hanna Rosin: I think part of the reason that people resist your argument or want to think of it as alarmist is because the solution seems completely out of reach. If I’m a teenager—

Haidt: No, it’s easy.

Hanna Rosin: (Laughs.) It’s not easy. I mean, if I’m a teenager, I’m listening to this, I’m thinking, This is culture. This is the world we live in. These companies are bigger than I am. The social culture is bigger than I am. The emotional culture is bigger than I am. There aren’t any particular government regulations on any of this. All my friends are here. So for you to tell me, “Okay, go back and play in the woods,” it’s like: with who and when? That just seems like a nonstarter.

Haidt: Okay. Hanna, I have been involved since college in many efforts to bring about social change. I ran a gun-control group in Connecticut in the ’80s. That was hard. To change people’s minds is really hard.

You know what’s easy? Walking into a situation where most people want to change, they don’t like what’s happening, they just need a coordination device, they just need an escape path out of a collective-action problem. And then I can come along, and I can say, Here’s your path. Let’s just do it. Let’s do it at the same time. And then it’s easy. Okay, I’m exaggerating a little bit, but compared to other kinds of social change, this one we can solve in the next year or two.

So here’s how we do it: The reason why so many of us give our kids a smartphone in sixth grade is because she comes to us and says, Dad, everyone else has a smartphone. I’m being left out. That’s a collective-action problem. So what I’m proposing in the book is four norms, and it won’t solve it entirely, but it’ll roll it back most of the way. Four norms.

The first norm: No smartphone until high school. Let’s clear this all out of middle school. Middle-school kids desperately need a more old-fashioned childhood, where they have a few close friends, and they talk and they gossip and they do other things face-to-face.

Hanna Rosin: So this is a parental culture. You can’t legislate that.

Haidt: No, that’s right.

Hanna Rosin: You’re saying change your parental culture.

Haidt: Yep, that’s right. So that’s the first one. The second norm: No social media ’til 16. These platforms are just completely inappropriate. Kids should not be growing up on a stage.

Hanna Rosin: Have you tried that experiment?

Haidt: Yeah. Well, yes. I told my kids no social media in middle school, and my son finally opened his own Instagram account without telling me in 10th grade. But he’d proven himself so responsible. And he was on the track team, which is great, and so they needed to communicate, and he was already at that time, whatever, 14, 15. So I said, Okay. That’s okay. But for my daughter, I’ve said absolutely not—no to Instagram or to Snapchat.

Hanna Rosin: Until what age?

Haidt: Well, for now, I’ve said 16, and I’m hopeful that this norm—so I have to publicize the book really quickly. She’s now 14, so I better get this norm changed next year so that she’ll be able to put up with it. But anyway—

Hanna Rosin: And do you know that she’s not? I mean, the “anyway” is the difficult part. I feel like once you get into the weeds, this is what happens. You will forbid a kid. They can start an Instagram account under any name that you would have no idea about.

Haidt: She watches TikTok on a web browser. She doesn’t have it on her phone, but we don’t need perfect here. What we need is to break the norm. We need to break the pattern where, in every free moment, the phone comes out, and TikTok and Instagram go up. That’s what we have to stop.

Third norm is phone-free schools. There is nothing good that comes from kids having the greatest distraction device ever built in their pockets during class.

And then the fourth norm is more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. If you’re going to take away the phone-based childhood, if you’re going to greatly cut back on screen usage, we can’t just let them look at the wall. We can’t just say, Well, go read a book. Go learn to make canoes, or something. We have to give them back each other. That’s what they really want. That’s where they thrive, is when they can play and hang out with other kids without adults telling them what to do.

So those are the four norms: No smartphone ’til high school. No social media ’til 16. Phone-free schools. More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.

[Typing]

Hanna Rosin: So the reason I’m asking all these questions is because there is this book coming out, called The Anxious Generation. And its argument is that—this is what he writes: “It’s as though we sent Gen Z to grow up on Mars when we gave them smartphones in the early 2010s in the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children.” And the argument is that rates of depression, mental-health issues, all kinds of things just skyrocketed. You know, kids became less able to—

Jacob Rosin: I mean, have you paid attention to the world lately?

Hanna Rosin: What do you mean?

Jacob Rosin: Everything sucks. I don’t think that social media is the cause of that, but social media definitely made people more aware of that. And it was going to start happening no matter what we did about it. I don’t know about the phones.

Hanna Rosin: And do you think that—I look back and think, Should we have put more restrictions? We tried one time, and it was, you know, warfare, but should we have tried harder?

Jacob Rosin: Well, what kind of restrictions do you mean by that?

Hanna Rosin: Forced you to not have your phone at night, you know, put your—

Jacob Rosin: Realistically, yeah, that probably would have helped at some point, but it’s too late now.

Hanna Rosin: Oh God, I feel so bad. So how do you think your life would have been different if you didn’t have a phone?

Jacob Rosin: I think I would have been a lot unhappier, generally.

Hanna Rosin: A lot unhappier.

Jacob Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Hanna Rosin: Yeah. The story that it sounds like you tell about your life and social media is: I got my phone. It gave me a pathway to socializing and social connection. That pathway is addictive, but it’s less lonely because at least I had a pathway to socializing.

Jacob Rosin: Pretty much.

Hanna Rosin: Can I propose an alternative story, and you just tell me what you think?

Jacob Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Hanna Rosin: What if there’s a story that you never got a cell phone? You were lonely and, at some point, you just would have had to socialize?

Jacob Rosin: I don’t think that’s true. I do not think I would have been pushed into it by necessity.

Hanna Rosin: Because that’s what always—like, as a parent, honestly, that’s what haunts me a little bit. I remember when you came back from camp. Remember that camp that you hated?

Jacob Rosin: Yeah.

Hanna Rosin: I remember picking you up from that camp. Where was it? In North Carolina or something?

Jacob Rosin: Yeah.

Hanna Rosin: Anyway, so we picked you up from that camp, and that camp did not allow phones, so you didn’t have your phone for a month.

Jacob Rosin: Yes, I did not.

Hanna Rosin: And you definitely wrote letters of misery from camp—like, summer camp, I-hate-this-place kind of letters. But you were so chatty when we picked you up because you had not had your phone for a month. And I know you hated that place, but I think about that all the time. Like, What if we had just done some experiment of Jacob can’t have a phone for a long time? Would you have been forced to socialize more?

Jacob Rosin: I don’t know how much I would actually follow through. But I might. I don’t know.

Hanna Rosin: You don’t know?

Jacob Rosin: There’s no way to find out now.

Hanna Rosin: I mean, my purpose in talking to you is: There is this book. It’s written by grownups. It’s written by grownups who grew up after the internet age about teenagers. And I’m torn because part of me thinks, like, I ruined Jacob’s life by not taking their phone away more. And part of me thinks, These grownups don’t understand kids, and there’s something we’re all missing about this experience.

Jacob Rosin: I would not at all say you ruined my life by doing that. I actually feel like I only got to live my life because of my phone.

Hanna Rosin: Oh.

Jacob Rosin: And yeah, that probably sounds a little depressing, but I think there might be an assumption among people who say stuff like this that everyone who’s on the phone is using it to replace real human interaction. I totally disagree with that. Everything on the phone is real human interaction. Well, most things. There are things that are not.

Hanna Rosin: And how typical do you think your experience is?

Jacob Rosin: Very not typical.

Hanna Rosin: Oh, very not typical. Okay. But you don’t think I ruined your life then?

Jacob Rosin: No. No.

Hanna Rosin: Thank you. Thank you for saying that.

[Music]

Hanna Rosin: What are you gonna do just now, get back online?

Jacob Rosin: Honestly, yeah. I probably will.

Hanna Rosin: Okay. Okay, that’s fine.

Jacob Rosin: I’ll stop the recording. Actually, maybe I’ll just go watch videos. I don’t know.

Hanna Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Andrea Valdez, fact-checked by Sam Fentress, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Parents who are listening: Please share with us creative strategies you’ve come up with to limit cellphone use without causing domestic warfare. I’ll give you mine: When Jacob was younger, instead of saying, say, Half an hour of screen time, Jacob, I would ask them when they thought they would be done with their video game or conversation. So it might be like 36 minutes or 27 minutes, and that way, they could finish out the game or the conversation, and the endpoint would feel more natural to them. If you have one, send it to radioatlantic@theatlantic.com, and we will share our favorites.

Kids who are listening: If you have creative ideas, please share them, too.

Thank you, Jacob, for playing along. I’m Hanna Rosin. And thank the rest of you for listening.

Hanna Rosin: Okay. All right. Great. All right, love you. I’ll talk to you later.

Jacob Rosin: Bye.

Hanna Rosin: Bye.

Trump’s Dangerous January 6–Pardon Promise

2024-03-20T18:51:00-04:00

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Donald Trump’s plan to pardon people in prison for their crimes on January 6—people he now calls “hostages”—is yet another dangerous and un-American attack on the rule of law.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

A Loyal Cadre in Waiting

This past weekend, Donald Trump stirred up one of his usual controversies by declaring that there would be a “bloodbath” if he isn’t elected. Trump’s supporters played a game of gotcha with outraged critics by claiming that Trump was merely describing an economic meltdown in the auto industry. Unfortunately, Trump decided, as he so often does, to pull the rug out from under his apologists by defending bloodbath as a common expression and clarifying that he meant it to refer to “getting slaughtered economically, when you’re getting slaughtered socially, when you’re getting slaughtered.” Oh.

So much for purely economic “slaughter.” Trump’s threats and violent language are nothing new. But while the nation’s pundits and partisans examine what it means for a presidential contender to mull over “getting slaughtered socially,” Trump has added a much more disturbing project to his list of campaign promises: He intends to pardon all the people jailed for the attack on the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection.

Trump once held a maybe-sorta position on pardoning the insurrectionists. He is now, however, issuing full-throated vows to get them out of prison. On March 11, Trump declared on his Truth Social account: “My first acts as your next President will be to Close the Border, DRILL, BABY, DRILL, and Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned!”

Trump isn’t the first to use the loaded expression hostages in this context: The one-term member of Congress Madison Cawthorn—an embarrassment even by MAGA standards—used it in 2021 before many of those arrested in connection with January 6 were even convicted, and current member and House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, whose nucleonic decay from establishment Republican to right-wing extremist is fundamentally complete, has also used it.

Back in 2021, Trump claimed to be appalled by the violence at the Capitol, but that didn’t last long (and there is no reason to assume Trump was sincere in the first place). Semafor’s Shelby Talcott on Monday detailed how Trump went from “outraged” in 2021, promising that “those who broke the law … will pay,” to offering blanket pardons in 2024. As Talcott wrote, Trump’s “evolution” began with “instinctive support for some of the most hardcore members of his own MAGA movement” and is now “a semi-formal alliance” with the Patriot Freedom Project, which claimed in December to have raised almost $1 million to free people convicted of crimes related to the insurrection.

This is not evolution so much as it is a kind of synergy, however, in which Trump and the right-wing fever swamp feed on each other’s manic energy. The QAnon conspiracy theorists, for example, anointed Trump as their champion, and Trump responded by eventually embracing them in return. When Trump goes to rallies and bellows for two hours at a time while using words such as vermin, or when his response to a question about the Proud Boys is to tell them to “stand back and stand by,” the MAGA ecosystem amplifies him and organizes his sentence fragments into something like guidance.

The only surprise here is that it took Trump this long to adopt a radical position supporting the people who were willing to do violence on his behalf. According to the House Select Committee’s investigation, his own staff had trouble getting him to call off the January 6 mob, to whom he said “We love you.” Many of those convicted for various crimes committed on that day went off to prison convinced they’d done the right thing, and Trump—a sucker for sycophancy—must have been moved by such shows of support, which included people singing to him in jail.

Trump has also shown, both as president and as a businessman, that he has an innate disgust with the whole idea of the impartial rule of law. He’s in serious financial trouble for (among other reasons) lying about the value of his properties when it suited his interests; he has always seemed to believe that rules are for chumps, and that people—especially people named Donald Trump—should be free to enjoy the benefits of whatever they can get away with, legal or otherwise.

Indeed, the whole idea of “legality” doesn’t seem to permeate Trump’s consciousness, unless it is applied to Trump’s enemies or other people, especially those of color, who he thinks deserve punishment. (Trump is the embodiment of the famous statement attributed to the Peruvian strongman ?scar R. Benavides: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”) In his handling of classified materials as well as in his attempt to pressure Ukraine to aid his campaign, Trump has shown that he thinks that laws don’t apply to him if they hinder his personal fortunes.

But in promising pardons, Trump may have a motive even darker than his general hatred for rules and laws. As he makes his third run at the presidency, Trump no longer has a reservoir of establishment Republicans who will support him or serve him. He distrusts the U.S. military, not least because senior officers and appointees thwarted his efforts to use the armed forces for his own political purposes. And although he may yet win reelection, his MAGA movement is now dependent on the kind of people who will go to his rallies and buy the trinkets and hats and shirts that go on sale whenever he speaks.

Where, then, can he find a truly loyal cadre willing to offer unconditional support? Where might he find people who will feel they owe their very lives to Donald J. Trump, and will do anything he asks?

He can find many of them in prison, waiting for him to let them out.

As the historian and scholar of authoritarian movements Ruth Ben-Ghiat has noted, would-be dictators deploy such promises to build groups that will ignore the law and obey the leader. “Amnesties and pardons,” she told me earlier today, “have always been an efficient way for leaders to free up large numbers of the most criminal and unscrupulous elements of society for service to the party and the state, and make them indebted to the rulers in the process.”

The damage to the American constitutional order and the rule of law would be immense if Trump used his power to pardon people such as Enrique Tarrio (the former leader of the Proud Boys, sentenced to 22 years) and the Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes (who drew an 18-year sentence). Hundreds of others are now serving time, many of whom might be more than willing to do anything for a president whose call they answered that winter day and who would now be the patron of their freedom.

Trump is no longer flirting with this idea. The man whose constitutional duty as president would be to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” is now promising to let hundreds of rioters and insurrectionists out of prison with full pardons. And eventually, he will make clear what he expects in return.

Related:

Today’s News

The Biden administration announced new rules for passenger cars and light trucks that will boost sales of electric vehicles and hybrids by limiting tailpipe pollution.
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar unexpectedly resigned, citing the coalition government’s stronger chances of reelection under a different leader.
Last night, a federal appeals court blocked a controversial Texas immigration law that would permit state law enforcement to arrest and detain those they suspect of illegal border crossings, hours after the Supreme Court allowed the law to go into effect.

Evening Read

Dennis Stock / Magnum

Flying Is Weird Right Now

By Charlie Warzel

Somewhere over Colorado this weekend, while I sat in seat 21F, my plane began to buck, jostle, and rattle. Within seconds, the seat-belt indicator dinged as the pilot asked flight attendants to return to their seats. We were experiencing what I, a frequent flier, might describe as “intermediate turbulence”—a sustained parade of midair bumps that can be uncomfortable but by no means terrifying.

Generally, I do not fear hurtling through the sky at 500 miles per hour, but at this moment I felt an unusual pang of uncertainty. The little informational card poking out of the seat-back pocket in front of me started to look ominous—the words Boeing 737-900 positively glared at me as the cabin shook. A few minutes later, once we’d found calm air, I realized that a steady drumbeat of unsettling aviation stories had so thoroughly permeated my news-consumption algorithms that I had developed a phobia of sorts.

Read the full article.

Joe Biden and Donald Trump Have Thoughts About Your Next Car

2024-03-20T18:32:00-04:00

The Biden administration earlier today issued a major new rule intended to spur the country’s electric-vehicle industry and slash future sales of new gas-powered cars. The rule is not a ban on gas cars, nor does it mandate electric-vehicle sales. It is a new emissions standard, requiring automakers to cut the average carbon emission of their fleets by nearly 50 percent by 2032.

This would speed up the transformation of the car industry: The simplest way for automakers to cut emissions will likely be to shift more of their fleets to electric and hybrid models, and the Biden administration estimates that the rule would result in electric vehicles making up as much as half of all new cars sold by 2032. It also gives the country more of a chance of meeting the administration’s goal of cutting U.S. emissions in half by 2030 and eliminating them by 2050. The final rule is a less stringent version of a proposal from last spring, reflecting concessions to the United Auto Workers union that give car companies more leeway in the first three years after it takes effect in 2027.

Tailpipe emissions are an issue not only for the climate: Breathing the soot from car tailpipes is a major health hazard that leads to tens of thousands of premature deaths in the U.S. each year, and the EPA estimates that the rule will cut noxious air pollution enough to provide some $13 billion in annual health benefits. But this rule, outlining a particular version of the country’s automotive future, has arrived just as Republicans are trying to create a wedge issue out of electric vehicles as a signature Biden climate effort. The loudest opponent has been Donald Trump, who over the weekend used the word bloodbath in a tirade against electric vehicles and is sure to make a big deal of the Biden administration’s new rule. What cars Americans will drive eight years from now could easily become the major climate issue in this year’s presidential election.

Even with the rule, plenty of people in the U.S. will still be driving gas cars in 2032, and for a long time after. The average car on the road is more than 12 years old. A gas car someone buys today could still be chugging along in 2036; a gas car someone buys in 2032 could still be zooming down the highway in 2044, when Joe Biden would be 101 and Trump 97—assuming either of them is still alive. And, of course, no consumer would be made to give up their existing gas cars or even to avoid purchasing new gas ones, should they want to.

At the same time, decisions made now about the future of electric vehicles have consequences that Americans will be feeling for more than a decade. Cars and other forms of transit are responsible for the largest share of the U.S.’s planet-warming emissions. And with global warming accelerating at a pace that has climate scientists concerned about the planet entering uncharted climatic territory, the trajectory of transit emissions in the U.S. relates directly to how habitable the planet remains in future decades. The same is true, of course, of all efforts by the federal government to curb climate change, all of which are threatened by a p otential second Trump term.

The Biden administration’s new EV rule would accelerate a transition to electric vehicles that, by all counts, is already happening. Globally, EVs are set to surpass two-thirds of car sales by 2030, per analysis by the energy nonprofit RMI. In the U.S., thanks in part to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, EVs are also trending up: The sector took 10 years to sell the first million electric vehicles in this country. It took two years after that to sell the second million and, last year, reached a new breakthrough pace—1 million EVs sold in a single year. EVs now make up some 9 percent of new U.S. car sales, and sales are still on the rise. But that growth has begun to slow slightly. More Americans drive EVs than ever before, but we are still far from being a nation enthusiastic about or equipped for a plug-in future. Car companies that not so long ago rolled out big-eyed EV plans are now rolling them back a bit.

In Republicans’ framing, though, electrical vehicles are an existential threat to the American car industry, most particularly because they are a stand-in for economic competition with China. Trump, in his remarks on electric vehicles over the weekend, falsely claimed that “they’re all made in China,” and claimed that Biden “ordered a hit job on Michigan manufacturing” by way of rules that incentivize the purchase of electric vehicles. He warned that China would soon try to sell EVs in the U.S., then promised to put a “100 percent tariff” on each car imported to the United States.

Existing tariffs have prevented Chinese EVs from taking over the U.S. market so far. They do pose a threat to American carmakers’ current offerings, should they ever make it here: One expert in the Netherlands recently told The Atlantic that “Chinese consumers are the luckiest EV buyers in the world” because of the range of EVs available there. But competition has advantages too: The threat of incredibly cheap Chinese EVs—some slick models are even in the sub-$10,000 range—has major U.S. automakers such as Ford and Stellantis (Chrysler’s parent company) openly talking about how they need to push innovation faster to keep up. (The Chinese electric-vehicle titan BYD, which offers its “Seagull” hatchback at roughly $9,700, recently surpassed Tesla to top global EV sales.) As I’ve written before, one of the dangers of Trump’s stance on climate change is that it will delay the U.S.’s advance into the future, where new energy and transportation technologies hold the upper hand. Eventually, gas cars will be relics; all we are deciding now is how quickly that future will be ours, and how much climate misery the world should endure in the meantime.

The IRS Finally Has an Answer to TurboTax

2024-03-20T13:54:41-04:00

During the torture ritual that was doing my taxes this year, I was surprised to find myself giddy after reading these words: “You are now chatting with IRS Representative-1004671045.” I had gotten stuck trying to parse my W-2, which, under “Box 14: Other,” contained a mysterious $389.70 deduction from my overall pay last year. No explanation. No clues. Nothing. I tapped the chat button on my tax software for help, expecting to be sucked into customer-service hell. Instead, a real IRS employee answered my question in less than two minutes.

The program is not TurboTax, or any one of its many competitors that will give you the white-glove treatment only after you pony up. It is Direct File, a new pilot program made by the IRS. It walks you through each step in mostly simple language (in English or Spanish, on your phone or laptop), automatically saves your progress, shows you a checklist of what you have left to do, flags potential errors, and calculates your return. These features are already part of TurboTax, but Direct File will not push you to an AI chatbot that flubs basic questions. And most crucial, it’s completely free.

That Direct File exists at all is shocking. That it’s pretty good is borderline miraculous. This is the same agency that processes your tax return in a 60-something-year-old programming language and uses software that is up to 15 versions out of date. The only sure thing in life, after death and taxes, is that the government is bad at technology. Remember the healthcare.gov debacle? Nearly 3 million people visited the site on the day it launched in 2013; only six people were actually able to register for insurance. As of the end of last year, about half of .gov websites are still not mobile friendly.

Direct File isn’t perfect—the program is available in only 12 states, and it isn’t able to handle anything beyond the simplest tax situations—but it’s a glimpse of a world where government tech benefits millions of Americans. In turn, it is also an agonizing realization of how far we are from that reality.

Right now, Direct File is sort of akin to when Facebook (or rather TheFacebook) was a site for Harvard students run out of Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room: Most people can’t use it, and the product is still a work in progress. The IRS has strategically taken things slowly with Direct File. In part to avoid the risk of glitches, it officially launched just last week, well into tax season, and with many restrictions. Only midway through my own Direct File journey did I realize that I owed some taxes on a retirement account, and thus couldn’t actually file on the site. I then sheepishly logged in to TurboTax like a teenager crawling back to their ex; for now, it offers a more seamless experience than Direct File. Unlike on the IRS program, I could upload a picture of my W-2, and TurboTax immediately did the rest for me.

For many years, taxpayer advocates have dreamed of a free government tax portal, similar to websites where you pay parking tickets and renew your driver’s license. Computers and taxes are made for each other: Even as far back as 1991, when most Americans didn’t own a computer, you could have found at least 15 different kinds of private tax software. Lots of other countries, such as Japan, Germany, and New Zealand, already have their own government-run tax sites. According to a distressing New York Times report, Estonians can file online in less than three minutes.

Sure, America’s tax code—unlike Estonia’s!—is an alphabet soup of regulations, but the multibillion-dollar tax-prep industry has also gone to great lengths to stop Americans from filing their taxes for free. After all, why would anyone pay TurboTax upwards of $200 to file if they didn’t have to? (Intuit, the parent company of TurboTax, has an answer: “Filing taxes without someone advocating for your highest refund could be a recipe for overpaying the Internal Revenue Service and [state] departments of revenue, organizations with titles that clearly state their focus, generating revenue for the government,” Rick Heineman, an Intuit spokesperson, told me.)

[Read: The golden age of rich people not paying their taxes]

In 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act shook loose $15 million for the IRS to study the feasibility of creating its own program—and so began Direct File. The program could have been contracted out, as much of the government’s technology is. (The original, disastrous healthcare.gov was the end result of 60 contracts involving 33 outside vendors.) Instead it was made almost entirely by the government’s own programmers, product managers, and designers, Bridget Roberts, the head of the Direct File team, told me.

Engineers created a prototype by mapping out the tax code into a series of steps: The software has to know that a millionaire homeowner doesn’t need to see any of the questions that apply only to low-income renters, for example. Then designers tested language to make sure that taxpayers could easily understand it. “We were going through constant user research—putting pieces of Direct File in front of taxpayers and getting their feedback,” Roberts said. Early guinea pigs were asked to screen-share while they tested Direct File. “That way, if there were any bugs, we would fix them before we moved on,” she said. It all sounds more Sam Altman than Uncle Sam.

The government could not have made something like this even 10 years ago. Unlike in the pre-healthcare.gov days, “now there is a generation of civic-tech innovators who want to go into government or want to work with the government,” Donald Moynihan, a public-policy professor at Georgetown, told me. In the past decade, attention given to the government’s technological deficiencies has led to the creation of agencies such as the United States Digital Service and 18F—both of which hire tech workers for temporary stints in the public sector. Other agencies, such as Veterans Affairs, have hired more than 1,000 of their own tech workers. The salaries are nowhere near as good as in Silicon Valley, but surely a government gig can be more fulfilling than tinkering with the user experience for Instagram share buttons all day. Amid the tech layoffs in 2023, the government launched a tech-jobs board and endeavored to hire 22,000 tech workers. Last month, the federal government began pushing to hire AI talent by boosting salaries and introducing incentives such as student-loan repayment.????

[Read: Why is there financing for everything now?]

That is how you get something like Direct File. Both the USDS and 18F, Roberts said, were brought in to help create the product, working alongside IRS engineers. There have been other successes from these groups too. Consider COVIDtests.gov, where until recently you could order free tests in basically a minute. Or my personal favorite, analytics.usa.gov, where you can monitor how much traffic government sites are getting. (In the past week, it shows, Direct File has gotten nearly 450,000 clicks.) Many .gov websites, although not necessarily wonderful, no longer feel like they’re a time portal to 1999.

But the work has been halting, at best. The more I played around with Direct File, the more frustrated I grew that there isn’t more government technology like it. Certain websites have gotten a facelift, but most of the government’s digital services lag behind: Some state unemployment systems still run on outdated, buggy portals and mainframe computers that crashed during the pandemic, delaying much-needed checks. Last year, a glitch in the Federal Aviation Administration’s 30-year-old computer system grounded thousands of flights and caused the first nationwide stop on air travel since 9/11. “Another healthcare.gov could happen today,” Mikey Dickerson, a former administrator of the United States Digital Service, told me. In fact, a similar debacle is happening right now: The Department of Education’s attempt to revamp its financial-aid form led to dire glitches that have upended the entire college-admissions cycle.

Ultimately, the fundamental reasons the government is bad at tech haven’t changed much. Bureaucracy is bureaucracy, Dickerson told me: Too often, the government operates under a model of collecting a list of everything it wants in a tech product—a months-long endeavor in itself—enlisting a company that can check them all off, and then testing it only when basically all the code has been written. The government is “not capable of keeping up with the crushing wave of complex systems that are becoming more and more obsolete,” he said. Hiring processes remain a problem too. Because the government doesn’t have a good way to evaluate a candidate’s technical skills, it can take nine months or longer to wade through the applicant pool and make a hire, Jen Pahlka, the author of Recoding America, told me. “There’s more people who want to work in government than we can absorb,” she said.

Everything had to go right to unleash Direct File. Congress set aside money. Programmers created something from scratch instead of revamping an online service built on outdated code. All to build the government’s own TurboTax—a long-heralded dream for some of the Leslie Knope types who work in civic tech. But even now, after all this work, the future of Direct File is in doubt. The IRS has not committed to anything beyond this year, and that Americans will clamor for Direct File next spring is not a given: By one measure, Direct File’s total employees are outnumbered by just the lobbyists working for Intuit.

And so, Direct File is the essence of government tech right now—a work in progress. “Increasingly, the face of government is digital,” Moynihan said. “We mostly see government on our phones and laptops, as opposed to going to an office somewhere or calling someone on a phone.” The dream of tapping a button on my iPhone and chatting with the DMV, or the VA, or Medicare, is just that: a dream. But hey, at least until April 15, I still have IRS Representative-1004671045.

Valencia’s Fallas Festival: Welcoming Spring with Fire

2024-03-20T13:45:18-04:00

For hundreds of years, residents of Valencia, Spain, have celebrated the arrival of spring and paid tribute to San Jose, the patron saint of the carpenters’ guild, by building and then ceremonially burning huge monuments made of wood, cardboard, and paper. The monuments, or fallas, consist of ninots, or figures, many of which are caricatures that portray current events and celebrities. The two-week-long festival features parades, fireworks, and fiestas, and ends with the burning of hundreds of fallas, signifying cleansing and renewal.

Flying Is Weird Right Now

2024-03-20T13:03:04-04:00

Somewhere over Colorado this weekend, while I sat in seat 21F, my plane began to buck, jostle, and rattle. Within seconds, the seat-belt indicator dinged as the pilot asked flight attendants to return to their seats. We were experiencing what I, a frequent flier, might describe as “intermediate turbulence”—a sustained parade of midair bumps that can be uncomfortable but by no means terrifying.

Generally, I do not fear hurtling through the sky at 500 miles per hour, but at this moment I felt an unusual pang of uncertainty. The little informational card poking out of the seat-back pocket in front of me started to look ominous—the words Boeing 737-900 positively glared at me as the cabin shook. A few minutes later, once we’d found calm air, I realized that a steady drumbeat of unsettling aviation stories had so thoroughly permeated my news-consumption algorithms that I had developed a phobia of sorts.

More than 100,000 flights take off every day without issue, which means that incidents are treated as newsworthy anomalies. But it sure feels like there have been quite a few anomalies lately. In January, a Japanese coast-guard plane and a Japan Airlines plane collided on the runway, erupting in flames; a few days later, a door blew out on an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 jet shortly after takeoff. Then, in just the past few weeks:

A United Airlines flight in Houston heading to its gate rolled off the runway and into the grass.
Another United flight, en route from Houston to Fort Myers, Florida, made an emergency landing after flames started shooting out of one of its engines.
Yet another United flight was forced to make an emergency landing when a tire fell off the plane moments after takeoff.
Still another United flight, this one heading from San Francisco to Mexico, made an emergency landing due to a hydraulic-system failure.
The National Transportation Safety Board announced that it was investigating a February United flight that had potentially faulty rudder pedals.
Roughly 50 passengers were injured in New Zealand when pilots lost control of a Boeing plane and it plummeted suddenly.
A post-landing inspection revealed that an external panel was missing from a Boeing 737-800 plane that had landed in Oregon this past Friday.

United released a statement to passengers suggesting the incidents on its flights were unrelated but also “reminders of the importance of safety.” In that same statement, Scott Kirby, the company’s CEO, said that the incidents “have our attention and have sharpened our focus.”

This is only a partial list of the year’s aeronautic mishaps, which are prodigious: Consider investigations into Alaska Airlines that revealed numerous doors with loose bolts, the Airbus grounded for a faulty door light, or the Delta Boeing whose nose wheel popped off and “rolled down” a hill as the flight prepared to take off.??

[Read: The carry-on-baggage bubble is about to pop]

Many people are wondering: What is going on with airplanes? In January, the booking site Kayak reported that it had seen “a 15-fold increase” in the use of its aircraft filter for Boeing 737 Max planes, suggesting that anxious travelers booking flights were excluding them from their searches. In response to the palpable audience interest, there’s been an uptick in media interest in aviation stories.

Meanwhile, poking fun at Boeing—whose standards and corporate culture have understandably come under scrutiny in the past few years after it was charged with fraud and agreed to pay $2.5 billion in settlements—has become a meme, a way to nervously laugh at the cavalcade of bad news and to gesture at the frustration over corporate greed that seems to put overcharged air travelers at risk. (Boeing responded to the Alaska Airlines door incident by acknowledging that the company “is accountable for what happened,” and pledged to make internal changes. And last week, Executive Vice President Stan Deal sent a message to employees outlining steps the company is taking to improve its planes’ safety and quality, including adding new “layers” of inspection to its manufacturing processes.)

Despite all of this, flying has, in a historical sense at least, never been safer. A statistician at MIT has found that, globally, the odds of a passenger dying on a flight from 2018 to 2022 were 38 times lower than they were 50 years earlier. The National Safety Council found in 2021 that, over the course of a person’s life, the odds of dying as an aircraft passenger in the U.S. “were too small to even calculate.” One aviation-safety consultant recently told NBC News, “There’s not anything unusual about the recent spate of incidents—these kinds of things happen every day in the industry.” A separate industry analyst told Slate in February, “Flying is literally safer than sitting on the ground … I don’t know how I can stress that enough.” That we know so much about every little failure and close call in the skies is, in part, because the system is so thorough and so safe.

So what’s really going on? I suspect it’s a confluence of two distinct factors. The first is that although air safety is getting markedly better over time, the experience of flying is arguably worse than ever. The pandemic had a cascading effect on the business of air travel. One estimate suggests that in the past four years, roughly 10,000 pilots have left the commercial airline industry, as many airlines offered early retirement to employees during the shutdown and pre-vaccine periods, when fewer people were traveling. There are also shortages of mechanics and air traffic controllers.

All of that is now coupled with an increase in passenger volume: In 2023, flight demand crept back up to near pre-pandemic levels, and staffing has not caught up. It is also an especially expensive time to fly. Pile on unruly passengers, system outages, baggage fees, carry-on restrictions, meager drink and snack offerings, and the trials and tribulations of merely coexisting with other travelers who insist on lining up at the gate 72 hours before their zone boards and you have a perfectly combustible situation. Air travel is an impressive daily symphony of logistics, engineering, and physics. It’s also a total grind.

Trust in Boeing declined in recent months, according to consumer surveys, even if consumers still trust the airline industry as a whole. It makes sense that the distrust in Boeing would bleed outward. All conspiracy theories are rooted in some aspect of personal experience, and plenty of information exists out there to confirm one’s deepest suspicions: The New York Times described Boeing’s past safety issues as “capitalism gone awry” in 2020, and there is plenty of evidence that the company culture hasn’t changed enough since then. At least two aviation experts (one a former Boeing employee) have publicly stated their concerns about flying in certain Boeing planes. It doesn’t help that Boeing is the subject of an NTSB investigation and is struggling to present the requested evidence in the Alaska door case, or that earlier this month a Boeing whistleblower died by suicide.

[Read: What’s gone wrong at Boeing]

Then there is the second factor: vibes. Existing online means getting exposed to so much information that it has become quite easy to hear about individual problems, but incredibly difficult to determine their overall scale or relevance. On TikTok, you might be exposed to entire genres of ominous flight videos: “Flight Attendant Horror,'” “Scary Sounding Planes,” “The Scariest Plane.” Even those who are not specifically mainlining these clips may suffer from an algorithmic selection bias: the more interest a person has in the recent plane malfunctions, the more likely that person might be to see more stories and commentary about planes in general. Meanwhile, an uptick in interest in stories about airline mishaps can lead to an increase in coverage of airline mishaps, which has the effect of making more routine issues feel like they’re piling up. Some of that reporting can be downright sensational, and news organizations are now also covering incidents they would have previously ignored.

This distortion—between public perception of an issue (planes are getting less safe!) and the more boring reality (they’re actually very safe)—is exacerbated by the intensity and density of information. It is a modern experience to stumble upon a meme, theory, or narrative and then see it in all of your feeds. Similarly, platforms make it easier for complex, disparate stories to collapse into simpler ways of seeing the world. Air safety slots nicely into this framework and, given the sterling record of the industry, a couple of loose or missing screws on a Boeing jet begins to feel both like a systemic failure and proof of something bigger: a kind of societal decay at the hands of increasing shareholder value.

These are feelings, vibes. They aren’t always accurate, but often that doesn’t matter because they’re so deeply felt. If that word—vibes—feels more prevalent in the lexicon in recent years, perhaps it is because more weird, hard-to-interpret information is available, pushing people toward trusting their gut feelings. Today’s air-travel anxiety sits at the intersection of these vibes, anecdotes, legitimate and troubling news reports, and the algorithmic distortion of the internet, creating a distinctly modern feeling of a large, looming problem, the exact contours of which are difficult to discern.

The vibes are off—this much we know for certain. Everything else is up for debate.

What Trump Supporters Think When He Mocks People With Disabilities

2024-03-20T12:42:00-04:00

Last weekend, I stood among thousands of Donald Trump supporters in a windy airfield, watching them watch their candidate. I traveled to the former president’s event just outside Dayton, Ohio, because I couldn’t stop thinking about something that had happened one week earlier, at his rally in Georgia: Trump had broken into an imitation of President Joe Biden’s lifelong stutter, and the crowd had cackled.

Mocking Biden is not the worst thing Trump has ever done. Biden is a grown man, and the most public of figures. He does not need to be babied by other politicians or members of the media. Trump disrespects all manner of people, but he had notably avoided mocking Biden’s stutter throughout the 2020 campaign. No more.

[Read: Trump finds another line to cross]

This is bigger than Biden, though. Stuttering is a genetic neurological disorder—one that can be covered under the Americans With Disabilities Act, one that 3 million Americans have. Trump may or may not know that, but he certainly knows that having a disability is something both Democrats and Republicans experience. Scores of Trump supporters are older, and are therefore more likely to be disabled themselves. Most everyone can think of at least one disabled friend or family member, a person they wouldn’t want taunted by a bully on the dais.

On Saturday, as we awaited Trump’s arrival by private plane, my colleague Hanna Rosin and I spent the day wandering the grounds of Wright Bros. Aero Inc., asking rally attendees uncomfortable questions about what they’re comfortable with. Virtually everyone was bothered by specific examples of Trump’s recent bullying. But as they unpacked their thoughts, they continually found ways to excuse their favored candidate’s behavior. Many interviewees repeatedly contradicted themselves, perhaps because of a particular variable: I’m a person who stutters, and that day, I was asking real people how they felt about Trump making fun of stuttering.

A married couple from Dayton, Todd and Cindy Rossbach, were waiting in a long, snaking line to take in their sixth Trump rally. “He’s the best president I’ve ever seen in my lifetime,” Todd said. “Probably Reagan comes in second.” I asked him if he had seen Trump’s comments during the Georgia rally, and specifically, if he had seen Trump imitate Biden’s stutter. He saw it all. “I think he’s got every right to do whatever he wants to do at this point,” Todd said. “The level of, uh, cruelness, may seem tough, but they’re being very cruel with him, so it seems justified.”

His wife spoke up. “I disagree, because I think when you make fun of people, it just makes you look bad,” Cindy said. “It’s not the Christian way to be,” she added a little later. “I just feel like it makes Trump look bad, when he’s probably not a bad person. But he is just stooping to their level, and I don’t like it.” Nevertheless, neither of them felt that Trump could do anything between now and November to make him lose their vote.

Farther back in line was Cheryl Beverly, from Chillicothe, Ohio, who said she works locally trying to get children out of homelessness. Beverly shared that she has a learning disability and has trouble spelling. Even as an adult, she’s regularly ridiculed. “It does hurt my feelings at times,” she said. She acknowledged that it’s hard to “see a lot of people make fun of people with disabilities,” and pointed to the risk of suicide and addiction among members of the community. “We’ll just go in a dark secret hole and not come out,” Beverly said. Yet she also said she still planned to vote for Trump this fall. She was able to separate Trump’s taunts from her personal feelings by chalking his behavior up to politics. If a child asked her about Trump’s belittlement, she imagined that she would liken it to playing a game: “You’re just finding a way for you to become the winner and they become the loser,” she offered. “It’s just trash-talking.”

Near a food truck inside the venue, I struck up a conversation with a woman from Cincinnati named Vanessa Miller. She was wearing a T-shirt that read Jesus Is My Savior, Trump Is My President, and a dog tag inscribed with the serenity prayer. She hadn’t seen, or heard about, the clip of Trump mimicking Biden. “Trump is a good man,” Miller said. “He’s not perfect. Biden is not handicapped. He’s just an ass, and he does not care about this country.” She went on, “If Trump made fun of Biden, well, like I said, he’s not perfect, but it wasn’t about a disability. It was about how he has made this country dysfunctional, not disabled.”

[From the January/February 2020 issue: What Joe Biden can’t bring himself to say]

A bit later, she told me that “Biden doesn’t stutter; he’s mentally incapable of running this country.” But then she did something surprising: She reached out and grabbed my arm in a maternal fashion. “And I feel what you’re—I feel what you’re saying,” she said, acknowledging my own stutter. “People that are unkind to people with disabilities, it’s shameful. It’s awful. Absolutely disgusting. And I guess I understand that, like, in an election, you know, it gets ugly, and elections get competitive, and people say things, people do things.”

I unlocked my phone and showed her a video of Trump’s stuttering impression. She turned her focus to the mainstream media in general. She said that “for the press to inflame and use disabilities to get people riled up is exactly what they want.” Nothing would stop her from voting for Trump.

This pattern continued in nearly every interaction that day: skepticism, a momentary denouncement, then an eventual conclusion that Trump was still a man worth their vote. A woman named Susie Michael, who runs a Mathnasium tutoring center, told me, “I don’t appreciate the making-fun-of part, but he doesn’t have to be my best friend. He just has to do the best job for the country and for me. So I have to overlook that, because everybody has their good points and their bad points.”

Shana, a special-education teacher from Indiana who did not give her last name, told me, “?I would still support him because I feel like people make mistakes. They say things they shouldn’t say. And I feel like God is the judge on that, you know, and that we’re to forgive him.” She noted that if Trump were to mock Biden’s stutter at this rally, she’d be inclined to write him a letter saying that “everybody was born of God and that we shouldn’t be making fun of anybody.”

Saturday’s event was hosted by the Buckeye Values political-action committee, ostensibly in support of the U.S. Senate candidate Bernie Moreno. But Trump, of course, was the real draw. Moreno, who last night won the Ohio Republican primary, was merely among the president’s list of warm-up speakers, alongside South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, and Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio.

When Trump’s plane touched down on the runway behind the stage, the dramatic electric-guitar instrumental from Top Gun played over the loudspeakers. Because of the wind, the teleprompters were swaying, making it nearly impossible for Trump to read his prepared remarks. So he went off script and rambled for about 90 minutes. “Hey, it’s a nice Saturday, what the hell, we have nothing else to do,” Trump said. Most of Trump’s rhetoric vacillated between aggrieved and menacing. He called migrants “animals” and warned of a “bloodbath” next year. (The latter comment came after Trump was talking about the auto industry, though some intuited the remark to refer to political violence.) Trump didn’t bust out his schoolyard mimic of Biden’s stutter this time, but he did repeatedly attack the way Biden speaks. “He can’t talk,” Trump said.

People began filing out long before Trump finished speaking. When the event was finally over, I loitered by one of the merch tables. (A selection of that day’s T-shirt and sticker offerings: Joe and the Hoe Gotta Go, Jihad Joe, Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore, a cartoon Trump urinating on Biden à la Calvin and Hobbes.) One man, a union worker named Joseph Smock, told me that he’d been “red pilled” eight years ago after seeing the effects of illegal immigration in his native California. (He now lives in Dayton.) Unlike many other attendees I spoke with, Smock fully acknowledged Biden’s history with stuttering, rather than dismissing it as a media invention or a political ploy for sympathy. He characterized Trump as someone with a “hard slant.” When, like Biden, you’re in the big leagues, he said, Trump’s “going to hit you, and if he sees a weakness, he’s gonna go for it. Some people like that; some people don’t.”

[Read: You should go to a Trump rally]

A man on an electric scooter, Wes Huff, rolled by with a big grin and his wife, Lisa, by his side. Wes told me that this was their first Trump rally, and that they thought it was “awesome.” Wes is disabled—he has dealt with diabetes and kidney failure, and is missing five toes. He shared that all of his siblings are also disabled. He hadn’t seen Trump’s clip from a week earlier. I asked Huff a hypothetical question: If Biden made fun of a rival for using a wheelchair—someone like Texas Governor Greg Abbott—would he find that offensive? “Yeah. Oh yeah,” he said.

But then our conversation migrated back to stuttering in particular. “I actually used to stutter,” he said. He was bullied for it as a kid. He also told me about an old colleague of his who stuttered, who was ridiculed as an adult. Huff was kind and sensitive as he described their friendship, how he would look out for him. “You shouldn’t make fun of disabled people,” he said. He also said he still planned to vote for Trump this fall.

Nature That Cannot Be Driven To

2024-03-20T08:50:19-04:00

To drive to it is to drive through it.
Like a stalker, it is in the back seat of the car.
It’s in the passenger seat, and the wires of the radio.
You want to think of it as a destination,

a two-week break from purchase power,
though you have purchased much to get there.
Certain shoes, with certain soles.
Like an exile in a self-made skiff

in the middle of a tortured sea, nature
is what you have done to it.
Nature is you, and the doing to it,
and your platitudes, and the wishing

you could do more, or could have done more.
Could have done—a part of speech referred to as
a “modal of lost opportunities.” Nature
is the parts of speech, having learned them,

and having forgotten them. It is the singular
pronoun you looking in the mirror,
realizing you could have done more to hold on
to your beauty. Who are you kidding?

You were never beautiful. There was nothing
to hold on to. Nature is how you were born,
with a birthmark that blazed when you cried,
centered right between your brows

like a bull’s-eye. There was a time, you want to say.
You fed apples to horses through barbed-wire
fences. You slept for nights on end
in a fishing shack built on a pier in the middle

of a pond deeper than anyone could calculate.
You knew where the morels grew,
and the watercress, which you pulled and ate
without embellishment. What did it taste like?

It tasted green. Nature is this sort of nostalgia.
It is human nature. How you parse and equivocate,
your selective memory. The tilt of your sentences.
Without habitat, nature encroaches, stripping

the pods from garden peas in the suburbs.
If you have the guts to walk at 3 a.m. you will see
whole antlered herds under the stars, chewing
and peeing at the same time, and watch

the pee steam in the induction light of street lamps.
Foxes hurry down sidewalks
as if they are late for a meeting, counting
their steps, a number that will legitimize

their presence on the planet. No wonder
their smiles are self-satisfied. Rabbits leap
in patterns across boulevards named after trees.
There is something in suburban rabbits

that has evolved toward wickedness,
their tails like an implement developed
for hospitals, to mop up blood.
Nature cannot be redeemed. It is your wish

to redeem it, to set things right.
It is the impossibility of redemption.
It is the lover walking out, their self-justified gait
as they disappear through the tunnel of flowers.

This poem has been excerpted from the collection You Are Here, edited by Ada Limón. ?

I’m Begging the Courts to Stop Citing My Work

2024-03-20T08:41:25-04:00

A little while ago, a reader sent me a Nevada Supreme Court ruling. In the unanimous opinion, the justices cited my work from the mid-2000s criticizing the use of bite-mark identification in criminal trials. For a journalist who writes and reports on the criminal-justice system, getting cited in a court opinion can be gratifying. You want to feel like your work matters; you aren’t shouting into a void.

Even so, a citation isn’t always a win. Of the dozen-odd times I’ve seen my work cited by a court, all but a few were either in a dissenting opinion or in the majority but followed by a nevertheless—a minor concession en route to an opinion that comes down the other way. That’s frustrating, but not surprising. My beat is reporting on flaws in the criminal-justice system, and it’s an institution that can be reluctant to admit its mistakes.

But the Nevada decision the reader flagged for me was something different—and “frustrating” doesn’t quite capture what’s going on. Maddening is more like it, because in this case my work was used to justify an ongoing injustice.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve written at length about how, despite near-universal agreement in the scientific community that matching marks on human skin to a suspect’s teeth is forensic quackery, the courts have continued to allow this sort of analysis to be used in criminal trials. Dozens of people convicted or arrested because of this “science” have been exonerated.

The maddening part of the Nevada opinion, which came down in December 2022, is that the justices appeared to agree with what I’ve reported, and went on to argue that the defendant should have noticed my reporting years ago. Because he failed to do so then, he is prohibited from using it in his appeal now.

That’s all bad enough. Here’s the punch line: While the Nevada Supreme Court says that criminal defendants should have been aware of the reporting I and others were doing on bite-mark analysis back in the mid-2000s, some defendants did notice it then, and begged the courts to do something. The courts ignored them—including the Nevada Supreme Court.

The defendant in the Nevada case was David Middleton, a former police officer who in 1997 was convicted and sentenced to death for the murders of two women in Reno. At Middleton’s trial, prosecutors called the forensic dentist Ray Rawson to testify. Rawson told the jury he had matched a bite mark on the breast of one of the victims to Middleton’s teeth. He also said he could tell that the bite had been inflicted while the woman was still alive, and that it had been painful.

This was significant: Prosecutors argued that biting the victim while she was still alive was a form of torture—a factor in establishing one of the aggravating circumstances they needed to seek the death penalty. Middleton is still on Nevada’s death row.

There were two major problems with relying on Rawson’s testimony. The first was that bite-mark analysis is pure charlatanism. The field relies on three core premises: that every human being has unique dentition that leaves unique bite marks, that human skin is capable of recording bite marks in a way that preserves their uniqueness, and, finally, that analysts like Rawson can use the first two premises to match a bite mark to one person, to the exclusion of all other people.

I’ve never come across any scientific research that supports these premises. And the research I have seen strongly suggests that they simply aren’t true.

The second major problem was Rawson’s track record. The dentist—a prolific expert witness and a former state senator—was an early practitioner of bite-mark identification, and helped write the guidelines that many bite-mark analysts used. You might call him a pioneer, if a person can pioneer a field that has no business existing. (Rawson could not be reached for comment.)

Rawson is among a handful of expert witnesses whose testimony has helped persuade more than one jury to send an innocent person to prison. In the 1985 Wisconsin murder trial of Robert Lee Stinson, Rawson testified in support of the conclusions of another dentist who had said that tooth marks left on the victim were a match to Stinson’s teeth. In a 1986 opinion upholding Stinson’s conviction, a unanimous Wisconsin Supreme Court concluded that “the credibility of the witnesses” and “the weight of the evidence” were persuasive enough “to exclude to a moral certainty every reasonable hypothesis of innocence.” Stinson was exonerated by DNA testing more than 23 years later.

Less than a decade after Stinson’s trial, Rawson testified in the Arizona trial of Ray Krone. According to a local news article published in 2005, Rawson told the jury that because of Krone’s unusual teeth (reporters dubbed him “the Snaggletooth Killer”), he had no problem matching them to the bite mark on the breast of a murdered waitress. Krone, too, was later exonerated by DNA testing.

You might think that with this history, any court that had allowed Rawson to testify would be anxious to fix its mistakes. You’d think there might be some embarrassment, even a rush to review old cases to ensure that Rawson’s testimony hadn’t been used to convict other innocent people. But that isn’t what the Nevada Supreme Court did.

David Middleton’s case is now at a stage known as post-conviction, which comes after a prisoner has exhausted his normal appeals. From what I’ve seen, this is the phase in which prisoners are most likely to find exculpatory evidence, but it’s also the phase in which getting back into court is most difficult.

In most states, for a court to even consider new evidence, a prisoner must show that the evidence could not have been discovered at the time of trial and that it would likely have led to an acquittal. They also face strict deadlines, based on when a court thinks the new evidence should have been found.

It’s this last requirement that trips up many, and it’s what doomed Middleton in his recent litigation. In most states (and the federal courts), any claim based on new evidence must be brought within a year of when the evidence could have reasonably been discovered. Nevada’s rule is more ambiguous; prisoners must file within a “reasonable time.”

These deadlines are difficult to navigate even for skilled lawyers, and even when dealing with clearly new evidence that can be tied to a specific date, such as a confession. But exculpatory evidence rarely comes out in big, revelatory chunks. More often, defense teams find evidence in pieces, then put the pieces together. Another problem they face is that most states offer only one shot at a post-conviction request to reopen a case.

So these prisoners and their lawyers face a balancing act: If they file a claim before they’ve accumulated enough new evidence to decisively prove their client’s innocence, the court will reject it, and their client will be barred from using any of that evidence again—even if they later find other evidence to corroborate it. If they file too late, they’ll be rejected for missing the deadline.

These dilemmas get even more perplexing when the issue involves “science” that has since been discredited. For about a century now, criminal courts have been wildly permissive, allowing quackish forensic disciplines, dubious experts, and theories untested by scientific method into criminal trials. In the past couple of decades, the scientific community has begun to expose the failures of these fields, but the process of reaching a scientific consensus is an incremental one. A study casts some doubt. More studies follow. A scientific body may review the literature and issue an opinion. A series of exonerations or proficiency tests—in which forensic examiners’ analytical skills are tested on cases in which the “ground truth” is known—might further chip away at the field’s credibility.

How can someone convicted with bogus expert testimony know when his one-year deadline to file a claim based on “new evidence” begins? Is it after the first skeptical study? The fifth? The tenth? These prisoners and their attorneys have no choice but to guess when judges might finally be convinced.

The consequences for guessing wrong are dire, as Middleton learned.

The Nevada Supreme Court now seems to agree with scientific bodies such as the National Academy of Sciences that bite-mark analysis is not a credible discipline. The court cites several cases in which people convicted with such evidence were later exonerated, and favorably quotes papers concluding that the practice is “highly questionable,” and that the science behind it is “murky at best.” The court also doesn’t raise any defenses of the discipline. But when did the court reach this view?

The justices don’t say. They say only that Middleton was too late. “Although Middleton represents that [the] changed landscape with respect to bite-mark-identification testimony came to a head around 2013 or 2014,” the court wrote, “we are convinced he could have raised this claim earlier.”

It’s here that the court cites my work. To support their conclusion that Middleton waited too long, the justices refer to numerous media investigations, academic papers, and scientific bodies that have raised concerns about bite-mark analysis. One of the oldest of these is a 2009 article I wrote for Reason magazine.

Reason is a fine magazine, and it publishes terrific reporting on the criminal-justice system. But for a state supreme court to punish a prisoner because, 15 years ago, his attorneys failed to notice an article in a monthly libertarian magazine with a circulation of about 50,000 seems a bit much.

Anyway, if the justices had a better grasp on the history of this issue, they could have gone back a lot further than 2009. Critics have been noting the inherent subjectivity of bite-mark analysis since it first caught on, in the 1980s, but the courts have mostly ignored them.

Despite unanimous agreement by scientific bodies such as the National Academy of Science, the Texas Forensic Science Commission, and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology that bite-mark identification is hokum, every single defendant I’m aware of thus far who has asked a court to exclude bite-mark evidence because of the lack of scientific validity has lost, including rulings in Indiana (2014 and 2015), Pennsylvania (2017 and 2018), and Ohio (2018), well after such organizations started criticizing the field.

Incredibly, in at least three states (Wisconsin, Mississippi, and Connecticut) the controlling case establishing the admissibility of bite-mark identification—the case that prosecutors cite when they want to use this sort of testimony—is a case in which the defendant has been exonerated.

The Nevada Supreme Court’s ruling in Middleton’s case reasoned that defendants convicted with bite-mark testimony should have challenged the validity of such evidence years and years ago. At least three Nevada defendants did exactly that—and the Nevada Supreme Court rejected them.

The first two cases were both in 1982. In those cases, the justices evaluated other evidence to convict the defendants. But the court also refused to consider the validity of bite-mark identification, which allowed prosecutors to continue presenting it to juries.

The court didn’t revisit the issue until 2016, when a defendant, Thomas Collman, challenged the credibility of bite-mark evidence, noting in particular that other dentists believed Rawson’s findings in his case to be “bogus.” As in the Middleton case, Rawson not only claimed to match the bite mark to Collman, but claimed that the bite had been inflicted prior to death and was painful, which helped prosecutors seek the death penalty. (This seems to be typical of how prosecutors use Rawson’s work—he gave similar testimony in another death-penalty case in Arizona.)

Collman argued that the dentist should never have been allowed to testify at trial. He also argued that his trial attorney was deficient for not mounting a stronger challenge to Rawson’s testimony and bite-mark analysis, and that prosecutors violated their Brady obligations—the requirement to provide any exculpatory evidence to the defense—when they failed to disclose that several forensic analysts they had consulted prior to the trial expressed doubts about the reliability of Rawson’s testimony.

The Nevada Supreme Court rejected all of those arguments, reasoning that Collman would likely have been convicted on other evidence. And they also again refused to specifically rule on the challenges to bite-mark identification, and to Rawson.

This time, there was one dissent. Justice Michael Cherry chided his fellow justices for being so dismissive of the fact that a murder conviction and possible death sentence had been won with the help of a testimony relying on discredited methods.

The chronology here is crucial. The Middleton and Collman rulings were just six years apart, and the facts were remarkably similar. They involved the same dubious forensic methods, the same dubious analysis, and the same strategy of using Rawson’s testimony to help obtain a death sentence. Yet although the court rejected challenges to Rawson’s testimony and bite-mark identification in 2016, by 2022 the court appeared to accept that both were no longer credible. But the justices did so while also ruling that it was now too late for any of this to matter.

There’s no point in time in which Middleton could have won. If he had filed in the late 2000s, not only would he have lost; he would’ve been barred from raising these issues later. The court is essentially saying that both Rawson’s expert testimony and bite-mark evidence should never have been allowed into criminal trials. But it’s also saying that nothing can be done about it.

If they had wanted to, the Nevada justices could have seized on several developments in the bite-mark debate over the past decade to put prisoners convicted with bite-mark evidence on notice—to say, “We’ve changed our minds on this, and you’re now on deadline to file.” In 2015, for example, the American Board of Forensic Odontology—the professional organization for bite-mark identification—gave a proficiency test to its members. The results were damning: In the majority of cases, the certified members couldn’t even agree on which of the test photos depicted human—rather than animal—bites. The ABFO subsequently changed its guidelines in 2016, recommending that bite-mark analysis be used only to “exclude” suspects, not to “match” them, as was done to Middleton and dozens of others.

That same year, the Texas Forensic Science Commission—formed after revelations that the state had likely convicted innocent people, including a man executed in 2004, on the basis of junk arson science—recommended that bite-mark analysis be barred from the courtroom. Also in 2016, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology made a similar recommendation. Most recently, in October 2022, the National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded that “forensic bitemark analysis lacks a sufficient scientific foundation because the three key premises of the field are not supported by the data.”

Instead of giving prisoners an explicit out, however, the Nevada Supreme Court shifted its stance so quietly that you’d have to be, say, a journalist who is slightly obsessed with this stuff to even notice it.

It’s possible—probable even—that the justices weren’t fully aware of what they were doing. Still, there’s no mistaking the ruling’s impact: After decades of failing to keep bite-mark identification out of criminal trials, the court finally seems to have conceded that it isn’t a credible field—only to slam the courthouse door on the people such evidence has sent to prison.

Bite-mark cases are relatively rare. The total pool of convictions is probably in the hundreds. But other scientifically dubious areas of forensics, such as firearms identification and blood-spatter analysis, are quite common. Getting the courts to acknowledge the inadequacies of such fields—and of experts who have testified hundreds of times—is going to be even more difficult than it has been with bite-mark analysis, especially because doing so would mean revisiting thousands of old convictions.

Many of the laws that make post-conviction claims so difficult to win today were passed in the 1980s and ’90s, an era in which politicians and law-and-order pundits claimed that too many violent offenders were filing frivolous appeals to delay their execution or had duped liberal courts into releasing them “on a technicality.” Although there were certainly some examples of this, neither practice was widespread. More commonly, the courts had stepped in because in that era’s frenzied rush to convict and carry out executions, states had taken unconstitutional shortcuts, provided inadequate indigent defense, and tolerated police and prosecutor misconduct.

Although the onset of DNA testing in the ’90s showed that many of these prisoners were, in fact, innocent, the laws restricting their access to the courts remained. The result is that many prisoners convicted at the conclusion of trials tainted by forensic evidence now have no way back into court, not because the evidence of their innocence or the unjustness of their trials isn’t persuasive, but because artificial deadlines and procedural roadblocks prevent the courts from ever considering the merits of that evidence.

It’s hard to not be overcome with cynicism when, after you’ve spent years writing about these issues, the courts have finally started to notice your work—only to weaponize it in the service of one of those technicalities.

Six Books That Will Jolt Your Senses Awake

2024-03-20T07:30:00-04:00

Our minds these days are so easily distracted that noticing what’s right in front of us can be hard. Yes, the sun might be glancing off the snowdrifts, and the birds may be chirping away with blithe exuberance. But stress, grief, and anxiety—or, alternatively, excitement for the future—can make us tune out the images, fragrances, and noises at the edge of our consciousness.

But being attentive to the world is both possible and crucial. Sound, touch, smell, sight, and taste can draw us into a rapturous examination of the new, unfurling leaves on a tree or the antics of a honeybee. They can also help us enjoy the equally stimulating encounters of urban life, such as a fleeting impression of a stranger’s perfume on the sidewalk, or the cacophony of voices in a city square. In a harried world, such attunement to detail might require a bit of practice. Thankfully, literature can help us cultivate a more open and receptive state of mind.

The six books below show how sensory richness can make life more enticing. For the people in these novels and memoirs, mindfulness isn’t always easy. But they show how small moments can be rich with feeling, by recalling the cool repose of sitting under a tree or the complex flavors in a delicately aromatic broth. These books don’t just tell us to pay attention; they show us how.

Anchor

Gazelle, by Rikki Ducornet

“Cassia, myrrh, lavender, orris, santal, rose,” recites the perfumer Ramses Ragab, while a young girl listens with fascination. Ducornet’s novel follows 13-year-old Elizabeth and her family as they spend a summer in 1950s Cairo. She is entranced by the glamor of urban Egyptian life: hotel balconies “delirious with flowering jasmine,” shaded moments in “the staggered shadow of the palm grove.” And Ramses, a friend of her father’s, introduces her to the beguiling practice of perfumery. But it isn’t all beauty and splendor; her parents’ marriage is disintegrating, and Elizabeth’s mother departs the family house to engage in conspicuous affairs. As her father retreats from the world to grieve, Elizabeth explores her temporary home by eating ripe dates and figs, admiring carved-ivory chess sets at the market, and drinking hot mint tea. By the end of the summer, she has made peace with the capricious, changeable nature of love: “In this world of water and roses,” she observes, “love spills from one person to the next; like fragrance, like water, its quality is restlessness.”

[Read: Trees have their own songs]

Grove

The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker

The daily rituals of an office job typically offer workers few opportunities to experience transcendent beauty. Not so for Howie, the protagonist of Baker’s eccentrically funny debut novel. The plot of The Mezzanine is deceptively banal: Howie goes to work, rips his shoelace, runs errands on his lunch break, and returns to his cubicle. But this day is made extraordinary through Howie’s cheerfully exuberant outlook on life. No object is too humble for his attention, and he waxes poetic about the beauty of escalators, paper bags, and the elegance of plastic elbow straws. Even the act of sweeping around his apartment furniture with “curving broom-strokes,” he enthuses, “made me see these familiar features of my room with freshened receptivity.” Baker’s writing combines humorous absurdity with the earnest anxieties of youth: Howie, who is 23, laments, “I was a man, but I was not nearly the magnitude of man I had hoped I might be.” But as he diligently navigates adult life, paying his bills and interpreting men’s-bathroom etiquette, he refuses to let his interest in the world become dulled. The novel reminds us that adulthood is richer when we retain a childlike “capacity for wonderment”—especially when it comes to the ordinary objects and rituals of our lives.

Mariner

The Book of Salt, by Monique Truong

“At 27 rue de Fleurus,” the young chef Bình realizes ruefully, “even the furniture attracts more attention than I do.” In Truong’s historical-fiction novel, Bình is a Vietnamese immigrant in 20th-century Paris, where he becomes the private chef for Gertrude Stein and her partner, Alice B. Toklas. While the couple entertain Stein’s endless admirers, Bình labors in the kitchen. One elaborate dinner includes salade cancalaise (the recipe can be found in the real-life Toklas’s 1954 cookbook), where poached oysters become a “dollop of ocean fog” over tender potatoes, topped with truffles. Bình’s position in the household lets him quietly satirize the frivolous, fashionable lives of American expats in Paris. His appearance and speech, with “jagged seams between the French words,” mark him as a foreigner in Paris. But the city is still a refuge for Bình, who was born in Saigon and worked in a colonial officer’s kitchen before he was outed as gay and forced to leave home. Bình’s complicated relationship with the Catholic father who disowned him is pushed into the center when he receives a letter from home with “the familiar sting of salt … kitchen, sweat, tears or the sea.” Truong’s novel highlights the pleasure—and painful memories—that tastes and smells can evoke.

[Read: Each sentence is one you can feel]

Catapult

Two Trees Make a Forest: In Search of My Family’s Past Among Taiwan’s Mountains and Coasts, by Jessica J. Lee

During a difficult climb up Shuishe Mountain, in Taiwan, Lee asks herself whether nature can provide “arboreal answers to very human predicaments.” In Two Trees Make a Forest, she chronicles a three-month visit to Taiwan to reconnect with her heritage, a trip that leaves her feeling less “botanically adrift.” Like a winding hike, Lee’s memoir switches back and forth among family stories, history, and encounters with nature. Trekking through the Taiwanese mountains helps her connect “the human timescale of my family’s story”—her grandparents fled China in the 1940s and then immigrated to Canada in the ’70s—to the “green and unfurling” ecological history around her. At one point, Lee encounters a blooming Barringtonia asiatica tree by a waterfall, where “the slightest disturbance showered the ground in a floral rain.” The beauty of the tree prompts her to learn more about the species: Some botanical texts describe it as native to Taiwan, while others call it a “migrant tree”—much like Lee’s own family tree. Her memoir shows how a walk in the woods can give us a new perspective on questions of culture, heritage, and belonging.

Beacon Press

Still Life With Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy, by Mark Doty

For Doty, a poet, attention is a form of secular faith: “A faith that if we look and look we will be surprised and we will be rewarded,” he explains, “a faith in the capacity of the object to carry meaning, to serve as a vessel.” In his 2001 memoir, Doty’s gaze lingers on great paintings and ordinary household objects alike. On a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Doty stands reverentially before a Dutch still life, where a lemon is rendered in luminous detail: “that lovely, perishable, ordinary thing, held to scrutiny’s light.” Then there’s the half-carved violin decorating the home he shared with his partner, Wally, “like music emerging out of silence, or sculpture coming out of stone.” These object memories are tinged with loss: Wally spent the last years of his life in their home, dying from AIDS. But Doty’s memoir reminds us that the death of a loved one doesn’t extinguish the beauty and joy of the world. “Not that grief vanishes—far from it,” he writes, but “it begins in time to coexist with pleasure.” Close observations can be a source of intimacy and contemplation: They are “the best gestures we can make in the face of death.”

[Read: Recreation through the senses (from 1911)]

New Directions

The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century, by Olga Ravn

What is there to sense in space? In Ravn’s speculative-fiction novel, shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, the isolated human and android employees of a spaceship find solace in the strange scents around them. The cold, impersonal environment makes the workers more attentive to small, earthy sensations, such as the “soil and oakmoss” odor of an object retrieved from an alien planet. These are familiar references to the human employees, but not to their half-human, half-software co-workers. Life on the spaceship is full of heady philosophical dilemmas, with the humanoid employees insisting that they’re also capable of consciousness and feelings. “I live,” one humanoid says, “the way numbers live, and the stars,” while another describes herself as a “flicker between 0 and 1 … part of a design that can’t be erased.” The evocative language softens a novel that’s also a biting satire of workplace surveillance. Conflict is inevitable, and during the tension that arises, one employee remarks: “Everything stands out so clearly, the way it does in grief, when all senses are awakened.”

Critics of the TikTok Bill Are Missing the Point

2024-03-20T07:00:00-04:00

Does Congress really have the power to force a sale of TikTok? Last week, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor of a bill that would require TikTok’s parent company, the Beijing-based ByteDance, to sell the U.S. version of TikTok to an American buyer within six months or have the app blocked. The bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate, but its early momentum seems to have genuinely shocked and dismayed many people, who see it as a xenophobic provocation, a performative-messaging bill, or the first step in a dangerous unwinding of a global, free internet.

Underlying these somewhat confused critiques is a palpable sense of affront and bewilderment, a fierce instinct that something terribly wrong is afoot. In an era of globalization and free trade, the idea of the U.S. government blocking foreign ownership of a tech platform seems so extreme that there must be some darker explanation. But this intuition is mistaken. The idea that we must enact barriers to foreign-government surveillance and political interference is actually a very old one, embedded in both American history and the logic of democratic self-determination. Forbidding a hostile foreign power from controlling a major communication platform fits into a long and important tradition of American self-government.

Congress is worried about the Chinese government’s potential access to the personal data of TikTok’s 150 million U.S. users, and about its ability to influence American public opinion by shaping the content that those users see. ByteDance insists that it doesn’t share user data with, or otherwise do the bidding of, the Chinese Communist Party, but any Beijing-based company must ultimately answer to the Chinese government. The specific substance of these fears—data privacy, algorithmic manipulation—is distinctly modern. But the underlying concerns would have been familiar to American political leaders since the dawn of the republic.

During the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the Framers were quite worried that foreign powers would exploit America’s open form of government to serve their own interests. At the time, the United States was small and weak compared with the powerhouses of France and England, and the Framers feared that favors and financing could seduce officeholders. Alexander Hamilton cautioned that “foreign powers also will not be idle spectators. They will interpose, the confusion will increase, and a dissolution of the Union ensue.” The Constitution therefore forbids foreigners from running for Congress until they have been U.S. citizens for seven years, and famously prohibits anyone but a natural-born citizen from being president. Elbridge Gerry, the great champion of the Bill of Rights, argued at the Constitutional Convention that “foreign powers will intermeddle in our affairs, and spare no expence to influence them. Persons having foreign attachments will be sent among us & insinuated into our councils, in order to be made instruments for their purposes. Every one knows the vast sums laid out in Europe for secret services.”

[Tim Wu: Courts are choosing TikTok over children]

Even the treaty-ratification rule in the Constitution, which requires a two-thirds congressional vote, was included in order to reduce “the power of foreign nations to obstruct our retaliating measures on them by a corrupt influence,” as James Madison put it. And as we all learned during the Trump presidency, Article I of the U.S. Constitution forbids federal officials, without a special dispensation from Congress, from receiving gifts or emoluments from foreign governments. (I was a lawyer on the emoluments lawsuit against Trump, which had overcome preliminary legal challenges when he lost reelection.)

After the Constitution was ratified, Congress regularly used limits on foreign ownership and influence as a mechanism of preserving sovereignty, democracy, and national security. The limits are most pronounced in areas that affect politics, elections, and communications. Foreign nationals who are not green-card holders cannot contribute to political campaigns. Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, lobbyists for foreign governments are far more strictly regulated than other lobbyists. The law, passed in the run-up to World War II, was strengthened after hearings in the 1960s revealed the degree to which foreign money was influencing domestic policy.

Other laws limit foreign control of different forms of infrastructure. The Defense Production Act authorizes the executive branch to block proposed or pending foreign corporate mergers that threaten national security. Vessels transporting cargo between two points in the United States must be U.S.-built and U.S.-owned. Certain defense contracts cannot be awarded to foreign-government-controlled companies unless specifically authorized by the secretary of defense. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission can issue licenses for constructing dams or transmission lines only to U.S. entities, and geothermal lessees have foreign-ownership limits. As the Vanderbilt University law professor Ganesh Sitaraman has argued, the body of law limiting foreign ownership in various sectors can mostly be understood through the lens of platform regulation: They prevent foreign governments from taking over core elements of infrastructure.

This includes communications infrastructure. Limits on foreign ownership have been a part of federal communications policy for more than a century. The Radio Act of 1912 was the first federal limitation on ownership of communications infrastructure, forbidding foreign ownership of radio stations. It expanded and set a blueprint for later communications rules—Rupert Murdoch, for example, had to become an American citizen to avoid Federal Communications Commission rules banning foreign owners of American TV networks—which were based on the twin fears of espionage and propaganda. TikTok, of course, falls right at the intersection of those fears.

Any effort to restrict a communication platform inevitably invites concerns about the First Amendment, but constitutional claims on behalf of foreign governments are extremely weak. In 2011, for example, a federal court rejected a challenge to the federal laws prohibiting foreign nationals from making campaign contributions. Then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh wrote that the country has a compelling interest in limiting the participation of foreign citizens in such activities, “thereby preventing foreign influence over the U.S. political process.”

Some opponents of the TikTok bill argue instead that if the app is blocked in the U.S., that will restrict the free-speech rights of its users. The ACLU, for example, argues that a TikTok ban would be “a dangerous act of censorship on the free speech of so many Americans.” This is an argument that the ACLU and others might want to reconsider, because its boundless logic could swallow up any effort to regulate communication-based tech platforms. Suppose Congress passed a tough data-privacy law, for example, and Discord, unable to afford the cost of compliance, announced it would have to shut down U.S. operations. By the ACLU’s logic, the data-privacy law could be struck down as a violation of Discord users’ First Amendment rights. The free-speech argument against the TikTok bill is, in other words, a powerful and indiscriminate deregulatory weapon. (Although a federal court blocked Montana’s TikTok ban last fall, it did so largely on the grounds that a state, as opposed to Congress, lacked the power to legislate on the basis of national-security concerns.)

Critics of the TikTok bill also argue that it would do nothing to solve the fundamental problems posed by the biggest tech platforms. A U.S.-owned TikTok would not inherently be better for public dialogue, data privacy, or teen mental health than the current version. Even if China were cut off from direct control, it could still easily get data on Americans from commercial data brokers. Moreover, the bill would not touch the activities of Google and Meta, which have more users than TikTok and exert vastly more control over public discourse. “All of the social media platforms are information minefields, rife with deceptive content from state actors, corporations, paid influencers and others,” the tech journalist Julia Angwin wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “Their algorithms fuel our worst impulses by highlighting content that promotes anger and outrage. They strip mine our data to make money. Forcing TikTok to merge with another data-hungry social media platform won’t solve any of that.”

This is all true—it just isn’t a reason to oppose the current TikTok bill. I have long advocated for legislation to ban surveillance-based business models and hold platforms accountable for the content they promote, as well as for aggressive antitrust enforcement to break up the big homegrown tech monopolies. Forcing a TikTok divestiture would do none of those things. It would address one specific issue: control over a dominant communication platform by a hostile foreign superpower with a well-documented interest in influencing domestic politics in the U.S. and other countries. Yes, Congress should do so much more: pass comprehensive privacy reform, impose regulations on dominant tech platforms, and strengthen competition laws. But a law that solves only one problem is a lot better than nothing. And for those who think that restricting a Chinese app will create a new era in a deglobalized internet, China already blocks Instagram, Google, YouTube, WhatsApp, X (formerly Twitter), and Facebook, and a number of Asian countries have banned or limited TikTok within their borders on grounds similar to the proposed American legislation.

[Kate Lindsay: America will be fine without TikTok]

In fact, passing piecemeal legislation might be the first step toward Congress rebuilding the legislative muscle to pass those other more sweeping laws. Since the 1980s, American policy has largely treated nonmilitary interactions with foreign states as a subset of supply-side economics, with the goals of maximizing production and efficiency while tearing down barriers to trade. As both Democrats and Republicans lionized the free flow of capital as the most urgent priority, we focused less on traditional, unquantifiable concerns, such as democracy and sovereignty.

The basic premise of democratic self-government is the idea that people collectively make the rules of their community and collectively direct their laws. That promise may be more honored in the breach, but it remains the right aspiration for liberal democracy. Self-rule requires a closeness between the people who are governed and the institutions of power. Could American corporations or individuals wreak just as much havoc on public discourse as the Chinese government? Yes. But on some level, that is part of the democratic bargain. Members of this political community must have unique rights to shape the institutions that coerce and constrain their behavior—rights not afforded to people, corporations, or governments outside the community. The U.S. has a sorry history of meddling in other countries’ elections. It is not a history we should hold up proudly, or rely on to allow foreign meddling in our own elections. We should instead affirm the historic norm that countries have the right to protect their communications, politics, and private data from foreign governmental control.

Germany’s Zombie Government Is Fueling the Far Right

2024-03-20T07:00:00-04:00

At a time when far-right movements are surging across Europe, Germany seems to occupy a zone of its own.

On one hand, the country’s far-right Alternative for Germany—the party that wants to make abortion an “absolute exception,” shut down the Ramstein U.S. military base, and turn Europe into a “fortress” against migration—has been gathering strength, its poll numbers rocketing in the past two years from 10 percent to 19 percent.

On the other hand, the country’s civil society and politicians seem to have woken up to the threat: More than 1.4 million citizens have participated in street protests since January against a plan to deport foreigners and naturalized Germans; Bavaria’s populist prime minister, Markus S?der, has proposed cutting all public financing for the AfD; and the government in Berlin is working on a law to protect the constitutional court from a takeover by the nationalist party.

What a contrast with other European countries, such as Finland and Italy, where far-right parties are already part of the government, or France and the Netherlands, whose publics seem to have accepted that nationalist, anti-immigration politicians will soon capture the highest office in their country. Germans are still resisting.

But when it comes to the deeper motivations for the far-right resurgence, Germany appears to be frozen on a destructive course. Europe’s largest economy has stagnated since 2019. With no reprieve in sight, the country’s proud industrial champions have begun to announce large-scale job cuts. And Olaf Scholz’s centrist coalition doggedly insists on balancing the budget, thereby further weakening the economy and producing new social crises—such as when Berlin announced that it would cut agricultural tax breaks to save money, leading to mass protests by German farmers.

[Rogé Karma: What is going on with Europe’s economy? ]

All of this economic trouble is a boon to the AfD, which accuses Scholz of spending money on Kyiv and refugees rather than on German citizens. And recurring strikes—by train operators, health-care workers, and kindergarten staff, among others—are paralyzing public life.

German citizens had grown accustomed to calm and order; now their society is agitated and their government unpredictable. In a January poll, 83 percent of Germans said they were worried about their country—the highest reading since the early 2000s, when unemployment was in the double digits. Federal elections are only 18 months away, and behind closed doors, even Scholz’s supporters concede: The 65-year-old is on course to become the first one-term chancellor since the 1960s.

That would be a major change even from 2020, when German media praised John Kampfner’s cheekily titled book Why Germans Do It Better. The British journalist argued that the Federal Republic’s powerful economy and stable political system were models to the world. Now the German commentariat worries about the country’s economic déclassement. The government is paralyzed, as Scholz’s center-left SPD, the Greens, and the pro-business FDP can’t agree on anything. Literary buffs jokingly speculate on who could become Germany’s equivalent of Michel Houellebecq—the chronicler of his country’s descent.

The AfD poses a threat that many see as singular, both because of Germany’s history and because of the party’s unabashed extremism. Whereas other far-right parties in Europe have come to power by moderating their positions—ditching plans to leave the European Union, for example, or dialing back support for Russian President Vladimir Putin—the AfD has risen despite, or perhaps because of, its radicality. The AfD still flirts with a Dexit from the EU and wants to immediately halt weapons deliveries to Ukraine. Its figurehead, Alexander Gauland, has said that “Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.”

In early January, investigative journalists revealed that an AfD member of Parliament and the personal adviser to the party’s leader, Alice Weidel, attended a meeting in a hotel near Potsdam where Martin Sellner, an Austrian neo-Nazi activist, was invited to speak. Sellner, who plastered swastika stickers on a synagogue at age 17, is the author of the extremist bible Regime Change From the Right and calls for the “remigration”—in other words, forced removal—of millions of foreigners and naturalized Germans in order “to preserve the ethno-cultural identity” of Europe. Even the meeting’s location had a sinister resonance: Potsdam is not far from Wannsee, where the Nazis drew up plans for the logistics of the Holocaust in January 1942.

Jens Schlueter / Getty; Moises Saman / Magnum

But on the new twilight planet of German politics, despair is only a heartbeat away from hope. Reports of the Potsdam meeting prompted the biggest demonstrations against the far-right in Germany since the early 1990s, bringing together citizens from across generations and social classes. Many protesters expressed the conviction that the moment has come for Germany to make good on its postwar promise of “never again.” The people have a duty, some told interviewers, to fight the far-right resurgence before it is too late. Even Helene Fischer, Germany’s biggest schlager-music star, who has broad appeal among conservative voters, is calling for Germans to turn out for the European elections in June and pick one of the traditional parties. Opinion polls last month and this month have reflected the new energy: Support for the AfD has been dropping, if modestly—from a high of 21 percent in 2023 to 19 percent now.

The AfD certainly has Germany’s political elite worried, however—enough that serious discussions are afoot as to how the country’s institutional order can be made Nazi-proof. Participants on television talk shows debate whether the government should ban the AfD or whether doing so would just allow the party to gain favor by portraying itself as a victim of the political elite.

[Anne Applebaum: Why is Trump trying to make Ukraine lose?]

The constitutional court at Karlsruhe in any case rejected a similar proposal, in 2016, to ban an earlier neo-Nazi party, the NPD. S?der, the Bavarian prime minister, has proposed instead to cut off the AfD from the state’s generous party financing. This move is more likely to pass muster with the constitutional court, which in January banned Die Heimat (the NPD’s successor) from receiving state funding and tax breaks. Scholz is weighing the chances of making a similar move against the AfD. His coalition is also looking to fortify the courts against the AfD’s rising power by making changes to the law governing the constitutional court subject to a two-thirds majority in Parliament rather than the simple majority they require now.

Kathrin Spirk / OSTKREUZ / Redux

What’s puzzling, however, is that if Scholz really wants to stop the AfD, the most urgent and constructive measures lie well within his grasp: He could take on the economic problems that have been fueling the extremists’ rise. These are not even terribly difficult problems to address. But the permanently squabbling coalition in power seems unwilling or unable to make a plan.

Germans’ principal worries are about inflation and poverty. And they’re right to be concerned: They’re getting poorer. Real wages have been falling every year since 2020. Industrial production is a whopping 9 percent below pre-pandemic levels. As Volkswagen and others realize that the good times won’t come back soon, they’ve been announcing job cuts. The auto supplier ZF reportedly wants to axe 12,000 jobs across Germany within the next six years. And as Germans fret about the future, they save more. Public infrastructure, such as trains and schools, is showing the strains of chronic underinvestment. Scholz, who boasted in 2023 that Germany was about to experience another “Wirtschaftswunder” (economic miracle), has the worst economic track record since Gerhard Schr?der. No wonder his popularity has dropped to 20 percent—the lowest rating of any chancellor since the survey began, in 1997.

You might imagine that an unpopular government facing a flagging economy and a rapidly rising far right would try to go big on fiscal policy to limit the damage. But Scholz’s coalition is doing the opposite. Christian Lindner, the finance minister, belongs to the FDP and has staked his reputation on being a fiscal hawk. Nearly half of the FDP’s members want it to exit the ruling coalition, according to a recent referendum. If the party does so, the coalition will collapse, and Scholz might well become the shortest-serving chancellor in the Federal Republic’s history.

Scholz, meanwhile, is a true Boomer who wears 2000s-style box suits with shoulder pads and believes that in a globalized world, every nation must create its own economic success by boosting exports and keeping public finances in check. As the SPD’s secretary-general under Schr?der, he forced his party to adopt the now-infamous package of reforms that bet on lowering wages for ordinary Germans to reboot the export-driven industry. He boasts in speeches at home and abroad that Germany is the world’s third-biggest economy and has the lowest debt burden in the G7.

But history has marched on, and Scholz has been slow to recognize it. Russia’s war against Ukraine has been a major economic shock to Germany, and it is not a temporary one so much as a harbinger and an expression of profound global shifts. Berlin would have been shrewd to read the writing on the wall when its most important trading partner, China, refused to condemn the invasion, or when Donald Trump encouraged Russia to attack European countries that weren’t spending 2 percent of their GDP on defense.

In this new world, German prosperity can be ensured only if Europeans come together in a union whose economy is less dependent than it has been on foreign autocrats and whose security is less reliant than it has been on the United States. When Russia attacked Ukraine, Scholz missed the opportunity to initiate such an epochal shift in Germany’s economic model and defense stature. Now Trump’s Republicans are blocking aid to Ukraine, and Scholz is still not acting as a European leader: Instead of proposing a European plan to make up for the shortfall, he’s publicly criticizing other EU countries for not supporting Kyiv as much as Berlin has.

And thus Germany’s problems persist, as though nothing has changed since the German poet Heinrich Heine wrote in 1841, “The German, out of fear of all innovations whose consequences cannot be clearly determined, avoids important political questions for as long as possible or tries to come up with a makeshift solution through detours. And in the meantime, the questions accumulate and become more and more complicated.”

Economic pressures are not the only ones closing in on Scholz’s coalition from the right. The AfD was founded in 2013 to protest the EU’s “bailout” of Greece in the Eurozone crisis, but it really gained national significance only in 2015, when a million Syrian refugees came to Germany. Now the migratory flows from Africa have resumed, coinciding with an influx of refugees from Ukraine. Scholz has at once stood behind Germany’s generous immigration policy and tried rhetorically to tack right. The ambivalence has hardly served him.

[Read: Liana Fix and Caroline Kapp on why Vladimir Putin is embracing Germany’s far right]

Dating back to the Cold War era, parts of German society have had deeply ingrained pacifist, pro-Russian, and anti-American beliefs. Moreover, many Germans fear Russian retaliation because the country does not have a nuclear deterrent of its own. A recent poll showed that 61 percent of Germans don’t want Scholz to give Ukraine the long-range missiles it has been asking for. In the interest of preserving his reelection chances, Scholz has been seeking to avoid being seen as a “war chancellor.” The war in Gaza is another headache: 61 percent of Germans think that because of the high toll on civilians, Israel’s military response to the Hamas massacre on October 7 is not justified. But Scholz’s government has voiced next to no criticism of the Israeli government.

Finally, the AfD benefits from a population-wide counterreaction to the coalition’s climate agenda. Among Germany’s paradoxes is that it has one of the strongest green parties in Europe but also one of the populations most reluctant to make lifestyle changes in order to help the planet. In a poll of seven European countries, Germans were the least willing to switch to electric cars or renovate their houses to make them more climate-friendly. The AfD is the party that speaks to those wanting to stick to diesel cars and gas boilers.

Scholz is leading a zombie government paralyzed by a backlash against a deteriorating economy, high migration, divisive foreign policy, and an ambitious climate-change agenda. Particularly when it comes to economic policy, the German elite seems to want to sleep through 2024 and wake up only after the next parliamentary elections in 2025. But the country is very likely at an inflection point that will set its political trajectory for decades to come.

The good news is that not even the gloomiest pessimists expect the AfD to accede to power after the federal elections scheduled for autumn 2025. But by then the AfD may well prove to be Germany’s second-biggest party, and the party system may be so fragmented that unstable and ineffective three-party coalitions, such as the one Scholz is leading today, may be the country’s only option. A German paralysis that persists beyond 2025 will know only one winner: the AfD.

The Problem With ‘Affordable’ Child Care

2024-03-20T07:00:00-04:00

Imagine a politician stepping up to a podium and promising that voters will not pay more than 7 percent of their income for their kid to go to public school. This scene likely strikes you as absurd. Public education fits into a basket of services that Americans generally agree are so essential that they should be accessible to all and funded by taxes. There is no meaningful debate over “affordable” public schools, “affordable” libraries, “affordable” parks, “affordable” streets, or “affordable” fire departments; most people seem to take for granted the fact that they are free.

Child care should be seen as one of these essential services. It makes it easier for parents to work, set down roots, and have the number of kids that they want. Much like public education, it helps children develop knowledge and skills. A comprehensive child-care system can benefit whole communities—including people without children—by reducing poverty, supporting health and safety, and building social connectivity. Yet most politicians aren’t striving to make child care free; they’re striving to make it affordable. This framing accepts the damaging premise that child care should be a private market commodity. It’s time we instead see child care as the vital service it is—one that undergirds national prosperity and should be universal and free.

[Read: The case for public child care]

Although there’s never been a serious national effort to implement a universally free program, a free-for-some child-care system did seem possible in the U.S. at one point. In 1971, Congress passed a bill to establish a federally funded, locally run network of child-care programs that would be free for low-income families and on a sliding scale for everyone else. But momentum died quickly after Richard Nixon vetoed that legislation, and the coalition supporting it splintered, perhaps leading some people to conclude that an ambitious child-care overhaul was a political impossibility. There have been efforts since to make child care more affordable, but the most sweeping of these have faltered. Widespread conservative opposition to a universal system and unease over mothers working outside the home have made the road rocky. Some critics point to the struggles of a universal (though not free) model in Quebec, which some argue was rolled out too quickly, resulting in care of variable quality. Plus, any major program—especially a free and universal one—would be more expensive to taxpayers, who might resent that even the wealthy can access it for free (a critique that has also derailed efforts to make college free). One of the most notable failures was 2021’s Build Back Better Act, which would have funneled $400 billion into child care. In this political context, it makes sense that those who want better child care might settle for affordability if they believe it might realistically improve a broken system, even if it won’t completely fix it.

Political viability, however, does not always lead to thoughtful policy design—which becomes evident when you look at how affordability is defined. Consider the common line—touted by President Joe Biden and both Democratic and Republican bill proposals, including Build Back Better—that only the wealthiest families should pay more than 7 percent of their income. That number does not derive from any careful calculation of what parents can afford without hardship. Rather, it’s the average of how much American families were paying from 1997 to 2011. The Obama administration used that statistic in 2016 to recommend reducing the cap on co-pays from 10 percent to 7 percent for those receiving subsidy vouchers. Although the effort certainly helped low-income families, those who aren’t eligible for the voucher now typically end up paying more—on average, 8 to 19 percent of their income, depending on their kid’s age, what type of provider they use, and where they live, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. And even a 7 percent co-pay can be hard for poor families to meet. Still, despite its inconsistent application and the burden it may pose, the 7 percent figure has become gospel for many lawmakers and was recently codified from a recommendation into a requirement. If, however, the national average for child-care costs in that time period had been 9 percent or 4 percent or anything else, that would have likely become the “affordability” benchmark.

[Read: The devaluation of care work is by design]

This is just one example of the seemingly arbitrary frameworks that shape American child-care policy and, in turn, family life. Another is that one specific form of child care for one specific age band actually is, in many cities and states, free for everyone: public pre-Kindergarten. Pre-K serves mostly 4-year-olds, along with some 3- and 5-year-olds, and might have a slightly more academic bent, but it’s otherwise largely indistinguishable from a high-quality child-care program for that age range. In fact, many providers offer both child care and public pre-K. The division between the services stems from a 19th- and early-20th-century system that stratified care options by class. Back then, lower-income families got “group child care,” which was underfunded and overcrowded and sometimes even had dirty facilities; middle- and upper-class families, meanwhile, received the much more attentive and better-resourced “preschool education.” In the following decades, pre-K was folded into the public-education framework, and child care came to be seen as part of the ill-regarded welfare system: Reformers in the 2000s concluded that child care “had effectively become a ‘bad brand,’” the sociologist Sandra Levitsky wrote in a 2019 report. Rather than working to improve child care’s reputation, many instead attempted to officially incorporate pre-K into the public-school system.

Although this move might have seemed politically expedient, undercutting child care has hurt kids and left families scrambling. For one, focusing on 3- and 4-year-olds leaves younger children out—even though learning starts before birth and continues from there. It also adds extra stress for parents, as pre-K programs are generally aligned with the school day and school year. Many parents must still struggle to secure care before and after pre-K hours, and during summer vacations. And this strain can affect kids too: Their health, happiness, and cognitive development are all tied up with parental well-being. But more fundamentally, creating divisions between care and education fails to recognize how closely intertwined—and necessary—both are. Schools aren’t just for learning; they also serve a major child-care function. And child-care educators aren’t just watching kids; they are, much like schoolteachers, developing relationships with children and guiding them as they gain skills and knowledge and grow into full people.

[Read: The problem with kindergarten]

Child care, then, has come to occupy a strange position: crucial yet significantly undervalued. The policies governing it are capricious, filled with random benchmarks and major blind spots. Laws rarely consider certain types of caregivers, such as stay-at-home parents and family, friends, and neighbors. There are no major national efforts to address child-care needs for the after-school and summer periods. Access to care often relies on luck. As a recent headline from the Hechinger Report put it, “Free Child Care Exists in America—If You Cross Paths With the Right Philanthropist.” Of course, a truly effective system would demand a tremendous level of government investment. But the U.S. has no problem spending more than $800 billion every year on public K–12 schools. That system may be flawed, but at least enrollment in a public school doesn’t require a waiting list or depend on the largesse of a billionaire or an employer.

The need for a stronger commitment becomes clear when you look at the best child-care systems in the world, which also fail to guarantee free care. Exemplars such as Finland and France have only quasi-universal systems that retain distinctions between paid child care and free preschool. Granted, the parent fees for child care are generally modest and have a cap—in Finland, the maximum fee is 295 euros ($320) a month, which would make most American parents salivate. But these systems otherwise contend with many of the same issues U.S. programs do, such as underfunding and staffing shortages. Without a mindset and policy shift, we’ll continue to struggle to remedy these pains.

[Read: The reason child care is so hard to afford]

In the U.S., some people are starting to acknowledge that “free” should at least be on the table. Recently a report from an influential New York think tank argued for a universal “free or low cost” option: “There is a strong moral and economic case that child care should be a guaranteed right, just like public education.” Voters may be on board. A new survey of New Yorkers from researchers at Cornell and the University of Buffalo found that nearly 80 percent agree that child care should, like public schools, be universal and free. New Mexico came closest to implementing this vision, at least temporarily; it used pandemic-era funding to waive co-pays for working- and middle-class families receiving subsidies. As The New Republic reported, the move improved financial stability, civic engagement, and quality of life for parents and child-care educators. Although there’s no permanent statewide program like that, some states, including several Republican-led ones such as Kentucky, have made child care free for the kids of child-care providers, regardless of income.

Trying to solve the child-care crisis by striving for affordability accepts largely unchallenged assumptions and a legacy that devalues care. America needs a system that reflects child care’s key role for kids, families, and community vibrancy. Making it accessible to everyone—not just those with a certain income—can help create a sense of solidarity, instead of forcing people to get bogged down in questions of who deserves aid. Child care is indispensable to the national fabric, and “affordable” is not good enough. It should be free.

There Was No Russian Election

2024-03-20T06:00:00-04:00

There was no election in Russia last weekend. There was no campaign. There were no debates, which was unsurprising, because no issues could be debated. Above all, there were no real candidates, bar one: the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, the man who has just started his fifth, unconstitutional term in office.

Russians did line up at polling stations, but these were not actually polling stations. They were props in an elaborate piece of political theater, a months-long exercise in the projection of power and brutality. While that exercise unfolded, Putin’s only significant political opponent, Alexei Navalny, died under mysterious circumstances in a prison north of the Arctic Circle. Two Russian presidential candidates collected the requisite number of signatures to stand, both said they opposed the war in Ukraine, and both were removed from the ballot. Three practically unknown people were allowed to remain on the ballot, but they did not criticize Putin and did not oppose him in any way. One of them declared that he hoped Putin would win. In Russian-occupied Ukraine, men in balaclavas forced people to vote at gunpoint.

Some Western media nevertheless covered this orchestrated drama as if it really were an election. Reporters interviewed voters, cited “exit polls,” even commented on the “results,” as if these things mean anything in a country whose leadership lies openly about everything: economic statistics, war casualties, Russian history. Reuters ran a headline declaring Putin had won “in a landslide.” The earnest coverage was exactly what Putin hoped he would get. He knows, after all, that he is an illegitimate leader, and he knows that he abandoned the Russian constitution. This non-election was his messaging exercise, designed to show Russians, and the rest of the world, that he intends to stay in power anyway, illegally. He especially needs the foreign press, which is widely and frequently quoted inside Russia, to help him demoralize his internal opposition and frighten external opponents. Foreign recognition gives him the legitimacy he craves.

[Read: Putin’s ‘rabble of thin-necked henchmen’]

This grotesque charade was in addition a form of distraction, because Putin also knows that his war in Ukraine is an ongoing disaster for Russia. The number of dead, wounded, and missing Russian soldiers now exceeds 315,000. The Ukrainian military claims that there were nearly 6,000 Russian casualties just last week. The Russian navy has lost several ships to Ukrainian drones, and has now retreated from the western part of the Black Sea. The Russian air force has lost several planes to Ukrainian missiles just in the past month, and the army, hundreds of tanks. Ukrainian sabotage and drone strikes have now hit multiple Russian oil refineries, cutting production by as much as 10 percent. Putin needs to deflect Russian attention, and our attention, away from all of these fiascos. Once again, foreign press coverage helps, especially in the United States, where Russian money, Russian propaganda, and Russian influence in the congressional Republican Party have successfully held up military aid for Ukraine for more than half a year. Putin isn’t winning in the Black Sea, but he can win in Washington, if only he can inject a bit more hopelessness and helplessness into the American debate.

Finally, Putin has a more universal goal: By holding this non-election and calling it an election, the Russian regime mocks democracy itself. Putin’s critics want political alternatives, not just a different leader. They use the language of democracy and rights. Navalny once spoke of a “virus of freedom” that spreads rapidly and cannot be snuffed out. Putin needs to halt this virus, undermine this language, kill off any hope that Russia could ever be a different kind of place.

He also needs to eradicate the virus of freedom everywhere else that it flourishes, in order to prevent it from reinfecting Russia. On Sunday, this dictator who murders his opponents commented on Donald Trump’s legal troubles, which he described as the “use of administrative resources” against him. “The whole world is laughing at it,” he said. Trump is accused of breaking multiple laws in multiple states—while in business, while president, and even since he left office. By describing him as a victim of political persecution, Putin demeans the very idea of rule of law, and supports the Trump campaign at the same time.

In the Cold War era, this form of argumentation was known as whataboutism: deflecting criticism of your own system by attacking someone else’s. Back then, we recognized this verbal game and we had some resistance to it. Not all of us do anymore. We might have to relearn the games played by dictators—and we can start by calling things by their real names. So I’ll say it again: There was no election in Russia last weekend. Putin did not win. His regime is so brittle that it arrests and fines people who are overheard criticizing the war in restaurants, persecutes people for laying flowers on Navalny’s grave, orchestrates ostentatious shows of support. And someday it will be gone.