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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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

DNA Tests Are Uncovering the True Prevalence of Incest

2024-03-18T11:52:55-04:00

When Steve Edsel was a boy, his adoptive parents kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings in their bedroom closet. He would ask for it sometimes, poring over the headlines about his birth. Headlines like this: “Mother Deserts Son, Flees From Hospital,” Winston-Salem Journal, December 30, 1973.

The mother in question was 14 years old, “5 feet 6 with reddish brown hair,” and she had come to the hospital early one morning with her own parents. They gave names that all turned out to be fake. And by 8 o’clock that evening, just hours after she gave birth, they were gone. In a black-and-white drawing of the mother, based on nurses’ recollections, she has round glasses and sideswept bangs. Her mouth is grimly set.

The abandoned boy was placed in foster care with a local couple, the Edsels, who later adopted him. Steve knew all of this growing up. His parents never tried to hide his origins, and they always gave him the scrapbook when he asked. It wasn’t until he turned 14, though, that he really began to wonder about his birth mom. “I’m 14,” he thought at the time. “This is how old she was when she had me.”

Steve began looking for her in earnest in his 20s, but the paper trail quickly ran cold. When he turned 40, he told his wife, Michelle, that he wanted to give the search one last go. This was in 2013. AncestryDNA had started selling mail-in test kits the previous year, so he bought one. His matches at first seemed unpromising—some distant relatives—but when he began posting in a Facebook group for people seeking out biological family, he got connected to a genetic genealogist named CeCe Moore. Moore specializes in finding people via distant DNA matches, a technique made famous in 2018 when it led to the capture of the Golden State Killer. But back then, genetic genealogy was still new, and Moore was one of its pioneers. She volunteered to help Steve.

Within just a couple of weeks, she had narrowed down the search to two women, cousins of the same age. On Facebook, Steve could see that one cousin had four kids, and she regularly posted photos of them, beautiful and smiling. They looked well-off, their lives picture-perfect—“like a storybook,” Steve says. The other woman was unmarried; she didn’t have kids. She was not friends with her immediate family on Facebook, and she had moved halfway across the country from them. One evening—a Saturday, Steve clearly remembers—Moore asked to speak with him by phone.

She confirmed what he had already suspected: His birth mom was the second woman. But Moore had another piece of news too. She had unexpectedly figured out something about his biological father as well. It looks like your parents are related. Steve didn’t know what to say. Do you understand what I mean? He said he thought so. Either your mom’s father or your mom’s brother is your father. A sea of emotions rose to a boil inside him: anger, hurt, worthlessness, disgust, shame, and devastation all at once. In his years of wondering about his birth, he had never, ever considered the possibility of incest. Why would he? What were the chances?

In 1975, around the time of Steve’s birth, a psychiatric textbook put the frequency of incest at one in a million.

But this number is almost certainly a dramatic underestimate. The stigma around openly discussing incest, which often involves child sexual abuse, has long made the subject difficult to study. In the 1980s, feminist scholars argued, based on the testimonies of victims, that incest was far more common than recognized, and in recent years, DNA has offered a new kind of biological proof. Widespread genetic testing is uncovering case after secret case of children born to close biological relatives—providing an unprecedented accounting of incest in modern society.

The geneticist Jim Wilson, at the University of Edinburgh, was shocked by the frequency he found in the U.K. Biobank, an anonymized research database: One in 7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis, was born to parents who were first-degree relatives—a brother and a sister or a parent and a child. “That’s way, way more than I think many people would ever imagine,” he told me. And this number is just a floor: It reflects only the cases that resulted in pregnancy, that did not end in miscarriage or abortion, and that led to the birth of a child who grew into an adult who volunteered for a research study.

Most of the people affected may never know about their parentage, but these days, many are stumbling into the truth after AncestryDNA and 23andMe tests. Steve’s case was one of the first Moore worked on involving closely related parents. She now knows of well over 1,000 additional cases of people born from incest, the significant majority between first-degree relatives, with the rest between second-degree relatives (half-siblings, uncle-niece, aunt-nephew, grandparent-grandchild). The cases show up in every part of society, every strata of income, she told me.

[Read: When a DNA test shatters your identity]

Neither AncestryDNA nor 23andMe informs customers about incest directly, so the thousand-plus cases Moore knows of all come from the tiny proportion of testers who investigated further. This meant, for example, uploading their DNA profiles to a third-party genealogy site to analyze what are known as “runs of homozygosity,” or ROH: long stretches where the DNA inherited from one’s mother and father are identical. For a while, one popular genealogy site instructed anyone who found high ROH to contact Moore. She would call them, one by one, to explain the jargon’s explosive meaning. Unwittingly, she became the keeper of what might be the world’s largest database of people born out of incest.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, Moore told me, the parents are a father and a daughter or an older brother and a younger sister, meaning a child’s existence was likely evidence of sexual abuse. She had no obvious place to send people reeling from such revelations, and she was not herself a trained therapist. After seeing many of these cases, though, she wanted people to know they were not alone. Moore ended up creating a private and invite-only support group on Facebook in 2016, and she tapped Steve and later his wife, Michelle, to become admins, too. The three of them had become close in the months and years after the search for his birth mom, as they navigated the emotional fallout together.

One day this past January, Michelle, who also works as Moore’s part-time assistant, told me she had spoken with four new people that week, all of them with ROH high enough to have parents who were first-degree relatives. She used to dread these calls. “I would stumble over my words,” she told me. But not anymore. She tells the shaken person on the line that they can join a support group full of people who are living the same reality. She tells them they can talk to her husband, Steve.

When Steve first discovered the truth about his biological parents, a decade ago, he had no support group to turn to, and he did not know what to do with the strange mix of emotions. He was genuinely happy to have found his birth mom. He had never looked like his adoptive parents, but in photos of her and her family, he could see his eyes, his chin, and even the smirky half-grin that his face naturally settles into.

But he radiated with newfound anger, too, on her behalf. He could not know the exact circumstances of his conception, and his DNA test alone could not determine whether her older brother or her father was responsible. But Steve could not imagine a consensual scenario, given her age. The bespectacled 14-year-old girl who disappeared from the hospital had remained frozen in time in his mind, even as he himself grew older, got married, became a stepdad. He felt protective of that young girl.??

As badly as he wanted to know his birth mom, he worried she would not want to know him. Would his sudden reappearance dredge up traumatic memories—memories she had perhaps been trying to outrun her whole adult life, given how far she had moved and how little she seemed connected to her family? A religious man, Steve prayed over it and settled on handwriting a letter. He included a couple of paragraphs about his life, some photos, and a message that he loved her. He left out what he knew about his paternity. And he took care to send the letter by certified mail, so that he could confirm its receipt and so that it would not accidentally fall into anyone else’s hands.

She never responded. But Steve knew that she had received it: The post office sent him the green slip that she had signed upon delivery, and he scrutinized her signature—her actual name, written by her actual hand. At 40 years old, he touched for the first time something his mother had just touched, held something she had just held. He put the slip inside the pages of his Bible.

Steve had never faulted his mother for leaving him at the hospital, and finding out about his paternity made him even more understanding. But the revelation also made him struggle with who he was. Did it mean that something was wrong with him, written into his DNA from the moment of his conception? On a podcast later, he admitted to feeling like trash, “like something that somebody had just thrown away.” Those first six months after his discovery were the hardest six months of his life.

Across human cultures, incest between close family members is one of the most universal and most deeply held taboos. A common explanation is biological: Children born from related parents are more likely to develop health complications, because their parents are more likely to be carriers of the same recessive mutations. From the 1960s to the ’80s, a handful of studies following a few dozen children born of incest documented high rates of infant mortality and congenital conditions.

But in the past, healthy children born from incestuous unions would have never come to the attention of doctors. As widespread DNA testing has uncovered orders of magnitude more people whose parents are brother and sister or parent and child, it’s also shown that plenty of those people are perfectly healthy. “There is a large element of chance in whether incest has a poor outcome,” according to Wilson, the geneticist. It depends on whether those runs of homozygosity contain recessive disease-causing mutations. All of us have some of these runs in our DNA—usually less than 1 percent of the genome in Western populations, higher in cultures where cousin marriage is common. But that number is about 25 percent, Wilson said, in people born from first-degree relatives. While the odds of a genetic disease are much higher, the outcome is far from predetermined.

Still, these numbers make people wonder. Steve was born with a heart murmur, which required open-heart surgery at ages 13 and 18, though he does not know for sure the cause; heart defects are among the more common birth defects in the general population. He and Michelle were also never able to have children together. Others in the Facebook group have shared their struggles with autoimmune diseases, fibromyalgia, eye problems, and so on—though these are often hard to definitively link to incest. Health problems arising from incest might manifest in any number of ways, depending on exactly which mutations are inherited. “When I go to the doctor and they ask me my family history, I wonder: How much do I need to go into it?” says Mandy, another member of the group. (I am identifying some people by first name only, so they can speak freely about their family and medical histories.) How much experience would a typical doctor have with incest, anyway?

After Mandy first learned that her father was her mother’s uncle, she went looking for stories about other people like her. All she could find were “gross fantasies” online and medical-journal articles about health problems. She felt very lonely. “I don’t have anybody I can talk to about this,” she remembers thinking. “Nobody knows what to say.” When she found the Facebook group, she could see that she was far from the only one like her. She watched the others cycle, too, through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

She does not know exactly what happened between her biological parents, but her mother was 17, and her mother’s uncle was in his 30s. The discovery, for all the hurt that it surfaced, has helped Mandy reconcile some of her childhood experiences. Unlike Steve, she was raised by her biological mother, and she believed her mother’s husband to be her biological father. He mostly ignored her, but her mother was cruel. She treated Mandy differently than she did her younger brothers. “At least now I have more of an answer as to why,” Mandy told me. “I wasn’t a bad kid and unlovable.”

Kathy was also raised by her mother, though she had an early inkling that her dad was not her biological dad. Their blood types were incompatible, and she heard rumors about her mother and grandfather. Although her mother’s family was violent and chaotic, she was close to her dad’s family, especially her granny on that side. “They’ve been my rock,” she told me. By the time Kathy took a DNA test confirming that her dad was not her biological dad, she had spent a lifetime distancing herself from her biological family and embracing one with whom she shared no DNA.

Hers was, in some ways, the opposite journey of adoptees such as Steve, who wanted so badly to know his biological family. But the two of them have become close. Kathy remembers how angry he used to be on his mother’s behalf. She told him that she used to be angry too, but she had to leave it behind. “It’s not going to bring me any peace. It’s not going to bring my mother any peace,” she recalled saying. And it wouldn’t undo what had been done to his mother by her father or her brother so many years ago.

In the end, Steve was able to identify his biological father, though not through any particular feat of genetic sleuthing. One day, two and a half years after his DNA test, he logged in to AncestryDNA and saw a parent match. It was his mother’s older brother. From the site, he could see that his father-uncle had logged in once, presumably seen that Steve was his son, and—even after Steve sent him a message—never logged back on again.

By then, his initial anger had started to dissipate. He still felt deeply for his birth mom. Michelle says that her husband has always been a sensitive guy—she makes fun of him for crying at movies—but he’s become even more empathetic. The feeling of worthlessness he initially struggled with has given way to a sense of purpose; he and Michelle now spend hours on the phone talking with others in the support group.

Steve has still never spoken to his birth mother. He tried writing to her a second time, sending a journal about his life—but she returned it unopened. He messages her occasionally on Facebook, sending photos of grandkids and puppies he’s raised. Every year, he wishes her a happy birthday. She has not replied, but she has also not blocked him.

When the journal came back unopened, Steve decided to try messaging his mother’s cousin—the other woman he’d initially thought could be his birth mom. He yearned for some kind of connection with someone in his biological family. He wrote to the cousin about his mom—but not his dad—and she? actually replied. She told him that she and his mom had been close as children, Steve recounted, but she did not know about a pregnancy. To her, it had seemed like her cousin one day “fell off the face of the Earth,” he says. She agreed to read his journal, and the two of them soon began speaking on the phone about their families.

Months later, Steve felt like he could finally share the truth about his biological father, and the cousin again accepted him for who he was. They met for the first time in 2017 when she was visiting a nearby town, and she later invited Steve and Michelle to Thanksgiving. Last year, she extended another invitation to a large family gathering. Steve’s immediate biological family was not there, but hers was, and they all knew about him and his mom and his dad. They greeted him with hugs, and they took photos together as a family. “It felt like a relief,” he told me, like a burden had been lifted from him. In this family, he was not a secret.??

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.

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.

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.

End the Phone-Based Childhood Now

2024-03-13T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Maggie Shannon

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Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you’ve likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.

The problem was not limited to the U.S.: Similar patterns emerged around the same time in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, the Nordic countries, and beyond. By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data.

The decline in mental health is just one of many signs that something went awry. Loneliness and friendlessness among American teens began to surge around 2012. Academic achievement went down, too. According to “The Nation’s Report Card,” scores in reading and math began to decline for U.S. students after 2012, reversing decades of slow but generally steady increase. PISA, the major international measure of educational trends, shows that declines in math, reading, and science happened globally, also beginning in the early 2010s.

[Read: It sure looks like phones are making students dumber]

As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likely to live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with. Many of these trends began with earlier generations, but most of them accelerated with Gen Z.

Surveys show that members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious. In an interview last May, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley’s preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. “Something has really gone wrong,” Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.

Generations are not monolithic, of course. Many young people are flourishing. Taken as a whole, however, Gen Z is in poor mental health and is lagging behind previous generations on many important metrics. And if a generation is doing poorly––if it is more anxious and depressed and is starting families, careers, and important companies at a substantially lower rate than previous generations––then the sociological and economic consequences will be profound for the entire society.

Number of emergency-department visits for nonfatal self-harm per 100,000 children (source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

What happened in the early 2010s that altered adolescent development and worsened mental health? Theories abound, but the fact that similar trends are found in many countries worldwide means that events and trends that are specific to the United States cannot be the main story.

I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online—particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. Life changed rapidly for younger children, too, as they began to get access to their parents’ smartphones and, later, got their own iPads, laptops, and even smartphones during elementary school.

[Jonathan Haidt: Get phones out of schools now]

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As a social psychologist who has long studied social and moral development, I have been involved in debates about the effects of digital technology for years. Typically, the scientific questions have been framed somewhat narrowly, to make them easier to address with data. For example, do adolescents who consume more social media have higher levels of depression? Does using a smartphone just before bedtime interfere with sleep? The answer to these questions is usually found to be yes, although the size of the relationship is often statistically small, which has led some researchers to conclude that these new technologies are not responsible for the gigantic increases in mental illness that began in the early 2010s.

But before we can evaluate the evidence on any one potential avenue of harm, we need to step back and ask a broader question: What is childhood––including adolescence––and how did it change when smartphones moved to the center of it? If we take a more holistic view of what childhood is and what young children, tweens, and teens need to do to mature into competent adults, the picture becomes much clearer. Smartphone-based life, it turns out, alters or interferes with a great number of developmental processes.

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world.

My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.

1. The Decline of Play and Independence

Human brains are extraordinarily large compared with those of other primates, and human childhoods are extraordinarily long, too, to give those large brains time to wire up within a particular culture. A child’s brain is already 90 percent of its adult size by about age 6. The next 10 or 15 years are about learning norms and mastering skills—physical, analytical, creative, and social. As children and adolescents seek out experiences and practice a wide variety of behaviors, the synapses and neurons that are used frequently are retained while those that are used less often disappear. Neurons that fire together wire together, as brain researchers say.

Brain development is sometimes said to be “experience-expectant,” because specific parts of the brain show increased plasticity during periods of life when an animal’s brain can “expect” to have certain kinds of experiences. You can see this with baby geese, who will imprint on whatever mother-sized object moves in their vicinity just after they hatch. You can see it with human children, who are able to learn languages quickly and take on the local accent, but only through early puberty; after that, it’s hard to learn a language and sound like a native speaker. There is also some evidence of a sensitive period for cultural learning more generally. Japanese children who spent a few years in California in the 1970s came to feel “American” in their identity and ways of interacting only if they attended American schools for a few years between ages 9 and 15. If they left before age 9, there was no lasting impact. If they didn’t arrive until they were 15, it was too late; they didn’t come to feel American.

Human childhood is an extended cultural apprenticeship with different tasks at different ages all the way through puberty. Once we see it this way, we can identify factors that promote or impede the right kinds of learning at each age. For children of all ages, one of the most powerful drivers of learning is the strong motivation to play. Play is the work of childhood, and all young mammals have the same job: to wire up their brains by playing vigorously and often, practicing the moves and skills they’ll need as adults. Kittens will play-pounce on anything that looks like a mouse tail. Human children will play games such as tag and sharks and minnows, which let them practice both their predator skills and their escaping-from-predator skills. Adolescents will play sports with greater intensity, and will incorporate playfulness into their social interactions—flirting, teasing, and developing inside jokes that bond friends together. Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and end up socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play.

One crucial aspect of play is physical risk taking. Children and adolescents must take risks and fail—often—in environments in which failure is not very costly. This is how they extend their abilities, overcome their fears, learn to estimate risk, and learn to cooperate in order to take on larger challenges later. The ever-present possibility of getting hurt while running around, exploring, play-fighting, or getting into a real conflict with another group adds an element of thrill, and thrilling play appears to be the most effective kind for overcoming childhood anxieties and building social, emotional, and physical competence. The desire for risk and thrill increases in the teen years, when failure might carry more serious consequences. Children of all ages need to choose the risk they are ready for at a given moment. Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independent exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults.

[From the April 2014 issue: The overprotected kid]

Human childhood and adolescence evolved outdoors, in a physical world full of dangers and opportunities. Its central activities––play, exploration, and intense socializing––were largely unsupervised by adults, allowing children to make their own choices, resolve their own conflicts, and take care of one another. Shared adventures and shared adversity bound young people together into strong friendship clusters within which they mastered the social dynamics of small groups, which prepared them to master bigger challenges and larger groups later on.

And then we changed childhood.

The changes started slowly in the late 1970s and ’80s, before the arrival of the internet, as many parents in the U.S. grew fearful that their children would be harmed or abducted if left unsupervised. Such crimes have always been extremely rare, but they loomed larger in parents’ minds thanks in part to rising levels of street crime combined with the arrival of cable TV, which enabled round-the-clock coverage of missing-children cases. A general decline in social capital––the degree to which people knew and trusted their neighbors and institutions––exacerbated parental fears. Meanwhile, rising competition for college admissions encouraged more intensive forms of parenting. In the 1990s, American parents began pulling their children indoors or insisting that afternoons be spent in adult-run enrichment activities. Free play, independent exploration, and teen-hangout time declined.

In recent decades, seeing unchaperoned children outdoors has become so novel that when one is spotted in the wild, some adults feel it is their duty to call the police. In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that parents, on average, believed that children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in front of their house, and that kids should be 14 before being allowed to go unsupervised to a public park. Most of these same parents had enjoyed joyous and unsupervised outdoor play by the age of 7 or 8.

But overprotection is only part of the story. The transition away from a more independent childhood was facilitated by steady improvements in digital technology, which made it easier and more inviting for young people to spend a lot more time at home, indoors, and alone in their rooms. Eventually, tech companies got access to children 24/7. They developed exciting virtual activities, engineered for “engagement,” that are nothing like the real-world experiences young brains evolved to expect.

2. The Virtual World Arrives in Two Waves

The internet, which now dominates the lives of young people, arrived in two waves of linked technologies. The first one did little harm to Millennials. The second one swallowed Gen Z whole.

The first wave came ashore in the 1990s with the arrival of dial-up internet access, which made personal computers good for something beyond word processing and basic games. By 2003, 55 percent of American households had a computer with (slow) internet access. Rates of adolescent depression, loneliness, and other measures of poor mental health did not rise in this first wave. If anything, they went down a bit. Millennial teens (born 1981 through 1995), who were the first to go through puberty with access to the internet, were psychologically healthier and happier, on average, than their older siblings or parents in Generation X (born 1965 through 1980).

The second wave began to rise in the 2000s, though its full force didn’t hit until the early 2010s. It began rather innocently with the introduction of social-media platforms that helped people connect with their friends. Posting and sharing content became much easier with sites such as Friendster (launched in 2003), Myspace (2003), and Facebook (2004).

Teens embraced social media soon after it came out, but the time they could spend on these sites was limited in those early years because the sites could only be accessed from a computer, often the family computer in the living room. Young people couldn’t access social media (and the rest of the internet) from the school bus, during class time, or while hanging out with friends outdoors. Many teens in the early-to-mid-2000s had cellphones, but these were basic phones (many of them flip phones) that had no internet access. Typing on them was difficult––they had only number keys. Basic phones were tools that helped Millennials meet up with one another in person or talk with each other one-on-one. I have seen no evidence to suggest that basic cellphones harmed the mental health of Millennials.

It was not until the introduction of the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008), and high-speed internet (which reached 50 percent of American homes in 2007)—and the corresponding pivot to mobile made by many providers of social media, video games, and porn—that it became possible for adolescents to spend nearly every waking moment online. The extraordinary synergy among these innovations was what powered the second technological wave. In 2011, only 23 percent of teens had a smartphone. By 2015, that number had risen to 73 percent, and a quarter of teens said they were online “almost constantly.” Their younger siblings in elementary school didn’t usually have their own smartphones, but after its release in 2010, the iPad quickly became a staple of young children’s daily lives. It was in this brief period, from 2010 to 2015, that childhood in America (and many other countries) was rewired into a form that was more sedentary, solitary, virtual, and incompatible with healthy human development.

3. Techno-optimism and the Birth of the Phone-Based Childhood

The phone-based childhood created by that second wave—including not just smartphones themselves, but all manner of internet-connected devices, such as tablets, laptops, video-game consoles, and smartwatches—arrived near the end of a period of enormous optimism about digital technology. The internet came into our lives in the mid-1990s, soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. By the end of that decade, it was widely thought that the web would be an ally of democracy and a slayer of tyrants. When people are connected to each other, and to all the information in the world, how could any dictator keep them down?

In the 2000s, Silicon Valley and its world-changing inventions were a source of pride and excitement in America. Smart and ambitious young people around the world wanted to move to the West Coast to be part of the digital revolution. Tech-company founders such as Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin were lauded as gods, or at least as modern Prometheans, bringing humans godlike powers. The Arab Spring bloomed in 2011 with the help of decentralized social platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. When pundits and entrepreneurs talked about the power of social media to transform society, it didn’t sound like a dark prophecy.

You have to put yourself back in this heady time to understand why adults acquiesced so readily to the rapid transformation of childhood. Many parents had concerns, even then, about what their children were doing online, especially because of the internet’s ability to put children in contact with strangers. But there was also a lot of excitement about the upsides of this new digital world. If computers and the internet were the vanguards of progress, and if young people––widely referred to as “digital natives”––were going to live their lives entwined with these technologies, then why not give them a head start? I remember how exciting it was to see my 2-year-old son master the touch-and-swipe interface of my first iPhone in 2008. I thought I could see his neurons being woven together faster as a result of the stimulation it brought to his brain, compared to the passivity of watching television or the slowness of building a block tower. I thought I could see his future job prospects improving.

Touchscreen devices were also a godsend for harried parents. Many of us discovered that we could have peace at a restaurant, on a long car trip, or at home while making dinner or replying to emails if we just gave our children what they most wanted: our smartphones and tablets. We saw that everyone else was doing it and figured it must be okay.

It was the same for older children, desperate to join their friends on social-media platforms, where the minimum age to open an account was set by law to 13, even though no research had been done to establish the safety of these products for minors. Because the platforms did nothing (and still do nothing) to verify the stated age of new-account applicants, any 10-year-old could open multiple accounts without parental permission or knowledge, and many did. Facebook and later Instagram became places where many sixth and seventh graders were hanging out and socializing. If parents did find out about these accounts, it was too late. Nobody wanted their child to be isolated and alone, so parents rarely forced their children to shut down their accounts.

We had no idea what we were doing.

4. The High Cost of a Phone-Based Childhood

In Walden, his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of … life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” It’s an elegant formulation of what economists would later call the opportunity cost of any choice—all of the things you can no longer do with your money and time once you’ve committed them to something else. So it’s important that we grasp just how much of a young person’s day is now taken up by their devices.

The numbers are hard to believe. The most recent Gallup data show that American teens spend about five hours a day just on social-media platforms (including watching videos on TikTok and YouTube). Add in all the other phone- and screen-based activities, and the number rises to somewhere between seven and nine hours a day, on average. The numbers are even higher in single-parent and low-income families, and among Black, Hispanic, and Native American families.

These very high numbers do not include time spent in front of screens for school or homework, nor do they include all the time adolescents spend paying only partial attention to events in the real world while thinking about what they’re missing on social media or waiting for their phones to ping. Pew reports that in 2022, one-third of teens said they were on one of the major social-media sites “almost constantly,” and nearly half said the same of the internet in general. For these heavy users, nearly every waking hour is an hour absorbed, in full or in part, by their devices.

In Thoreau’s terms, how much of life is exchanged for all this screen time? Arguably, most of it. Everything else in an adolescent’s day must get squeezed down or eliminated entirely to make room for the vast amount of content that is consumed, and for the hundreds of “friends,” “followers,” and other network connections that must be serviced with texts, posts, comments, likes, snaps, and direct messages. I recently surveyed my students at NYU, and most of them reported that the very first thing they do when they open their eyes in the morning is check their texts, direct messages, and social-media feeds. It’s also the last thing they do before they close their eyes at night. And it’s a lot of what they do in between.

The amount of time that adolescents spend sleeping declined in the early 2010s, and many studies tie sleep loss directly to the use of devices around bedtime, particularly when they’re used to scroll through social media. Exercise declined, too, which is unfortunate because exercise, like sleep, improves both mental and physical health. Book reading has been declining for decades, pushed aside by digital alternatives, but the decline, like so much else, sped up in the early 2010s. With passive entertainment always available, adolescent minds likely wander less than they used to; contemplation and imagination might be placed on the list of things winnowed down or crowded out.

But perhaps the most devastating cost of the new phone-based childhood was the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face. A study of how Americans spend their time found that, before 2010, young people (ages 15 to 24) reported spending far more time with their friends (about two hours a day, on average, not counting time together at school) than did older people (who spent just 30 to 60 minutes with friends). Time with friends began decreasing for young people in the 2000s, but the drop accelerated in the 2010s, while it barely changed for older people. By 2019, young people’s time with friends had dropped to just 67 minutes a day. It turns out that Gen Z had been socially distancing for many years and had mostly completed the project by the time COVID-19 struck.

[Read: What happens when kids don’t see their peers for months]

You might question the importance of this decline. After all, isn’t much of this online time spent interacting with friends through texting, social media, and multiplayer video games? Isn’t that just as good?

Some of it surely is, and virtual interactions offer unique benefits too, especially for young people who are geographically or socially isolated. But in general, the virtual world lacks many of the features that make human interactions in the real world nutritious, as we might say, for physical, social, and emotional development. In particular, real-world relationships and social interactions are characterized by four features—typical for hundreds of thousands of years—that online interactions either distort or erase.

First, real-world interactions are embodied, meaning that we use our hands and facial expressions to communicate, and we learn to respond to the body language of others. Virtual interactions, in contrast, mostly rely on language alone. No matter how many emojis are offered as compensation, the elimination of communication channels for which we have eons of evolutionary programming is likely to produce adults who are less comfortable and less skilled at interacting in person.

Second, real-world interactions are synchronous; they happen at the same time. As a result, we learn subtle cues about timing and conversational turn taking. Synchronous interactions make us feel closer to the other person because that’s what getting “in sync” does. Texts, posts, and many other virtual interactions lack synchrony. There is less real laughter, more room for misinterpretation, and more stress after a comment that gets no immediate response.

Third, real-world interactions primarily involve one‐to‐one communication, or sometimes one-to-several. But many virtual communications are broadcast to a potentially huge audience. Online, each person can engage in dozens of asynchronous interactions in parallel, which interferes with the depth achieved in all of them. The sender’s motivations are different, too: With a large audience, one’s reputation is always on the line; an error or poor performance can damage social standing with large numbers of peers. These communications thus tend to be more performative and anxiety-inducing than one-to-one conversations.

Finally, real-world interactions usually take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen. But in many virtual networks, people can easily block others or quit when they are displeased. Relationships within such networks are usually more disposable.

[From the September 2015 issue: The coddling of the American mind]

These unsatisfying and anxiety-producing features of life online should be recognizable to most adults. Online interactions can bring out antisocial behavior that people would never display in their offline communities. But if life online takes a toll on adults, just imagine what it does to adolescents in the early years of puberty, when their “experience expectant” brains are rewiring based on feedback from their social interactions.

Kids going through puberty online are likely to experience far more social comparison, self-consciousness, public shaming, and chronic anxiety than adolescents in previous generations, which could potentially set developing brains into a habitual state of defensiveness. The brain contains systems that are specialized for approach (when opportunities beckon) and withdrawal (when threats appear or seem likely). People can be in what we might call “discover mode” or “defend mode” at any moment, but generally not both. The two systems together form a mechanism for quickly adapting to changing conditions, like a thermostat that can activate either a heating system or a cooling system as the temperature fluctuates. Some people’s internal thermostats are generally set to discover mode, and they flip into defend mode only when clear threats arise. These people tend to see the world as full of opportunities. They are happier and less anxious. Other people’s internal thermostats are generally set to defend mode, and they flip into discover mode only when they feel unusually safe. They tend to see the world as full of threats and are more prone to anxiety and depressive disorders.

Percentage of U.S. college freshmen reporting various kinds of disabilities and disorders (source: Higher Education Research Institute)

A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting “safe spaces” and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to “microaggressions” and sometimes claimed that words were “violence.” These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.

5. So Many Harms

The debate around adolescents’ use of smartphones and social media typically revolves around mental health, and understandably so. But the harms that have resulted from transforming childhood so suddenly and heedlessly go far beyond mental health. I’ve touched on some of them—social awkwardness, reduced self-confidence, and a more sedentary childhood. Here are three additional harms.

Fragmented Attention, Disrupted Learning

Staying on task while sitting at a computer is hard enough for an adult with a fully developed prefrontal cortex. It is far more difficult for adolescents in front of their laptop trying to do homework. They are probably less intrinsically motivated to stay on task. They’re certainly less able, given their undeveloped prefrontal cortex, and hence it’s easy for any company with an app to lure them away with an offer of social validation or entertainment. Their phones are pinging constantly—one study found that the typical adolescent now gets 237 notifications a day, roughly 15 every waking hour. Sustained attention is essential for doing almost anything big, creative, or valuable, yet young people find their attention chopped up into little bits by notifications offering the possibility of high-pleasure, low-effort digital experiences.

It even happens in the classroom. Studies confirm that when students have access to their phones during class time, they use them, especially for texting and checking social media, and their grades and learning suffer. This might explain why benchmark test scores began to decline in the U.S. and around the world in the early 2010s—well before the pandemic hit.

Addiction and Social Withdrawal

The neural basis of behavioral addiction to social media or video games is not exactly the same as chemical addiction to cocaine or opioids. Nonetheless, they all involve abnormally heavy and sustained activation of dopamine neurons and reward pathways. Over time, the brain adapts to these high levels of dopamine; when the child is not engaged in digital activity, their brain doesn’t have enough dopamine, and the child experiences withdrawal symptoms. These generally include anxiety, insomnia, and intense irritability. Kids with these kinds of behavioral addictions often become surly and aggressive, and withdraw from their families into their bedrooms and devices.

Social-media and gaming platforms were designed to hook users. How successful are they? How many kids suffer from digital addictions?

The main addiction risks for boys seem to be video games and porn. “Internet gaming disorder,” which was added to the main diagnosis manual of psychiatry in 2013 as a condition for further study, describes “significant impairment or distress” in several aspects of life, along with many hallmarks of addiction, including an inability to reduce usage despite attempts to do so. Estimates for the prevalence of IGD range from 7 to 15 percent among adolescent boys and young men. As for porn, a nationally representative survey of American adults published in 2019 found that 7 percent of American men agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I am addicted to pornography”—and the rates were higher for the youngest men.

Girls have much lower rates of addiction to video games and porn, but they use social media more intensely than boys do. A study of teens in 29 nations found that between 5 and 15 percent of adolescents engage in what is called “problematic social media use,” which includes symptoms such as preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, neglect of other areas of life, and lying to parents and friends about time spent on social media. That study did not break down results by gender, but many others have found that rates of “problematic use” are higher for girls.

[Jonathan Haidt: The dangerous experiment on teen girls]

I don’t want to overstate the risks: Most teens do not become addicted to their phones and video games. But across multiple studies and across genders, rates of problematic use come out in the ballpark of 5 to 15 percent. Is there any other consumer product that parents would let their children use relatively freely if they knew that something like one in 10 kids would end up with a pattern of habitual and compulsive use that disrupted various domains of life and looked a lot like an addiction?

The Decay of Wisdom and the Loss of Meaning

During that crucial sensitive period for cultural learning, from roughly ages 9 through 15, we should be especially thoughtful about who is socializing our children for adulthood. Instead, that’s when most kids get their first smartphone and sign themselves up (with or without parental permission) to consume rivers of content from random strangers. Much of that content is produced by other adolescents, in blocks of a few minutes or a few seconds.

This rerouting of enculturating content has created a generation that is largely cut off from older generations and, to some extent, from the accumulated wisdom of humankind, including knowledge about how to live a flourishing life. Adolescents spend less time steeped in their local or national culture. They are coming of age in a confusing, placeless, ahistorical maelstrom of 30-second stories curated by algorithms designed to mesmerize them. Without solid knowledge of the past and the filtering of good ideas from bad––a process that plays out over many generations––young people will be more prone to believe whatever terrible ideas become popular around them, which might explain why v ideos showing young people reacting positively to Osama bin Laden’s thoughts about America were trending on TikTok last fall.??

All this is made worse by the fact that so much of digital public life is an unending supply of micro dramas about somebody somewhere in our country of 340 million people who did something that can fuel an outrage cycle, only to be pushed aside by the next. It doesn’t add up to anything and leaves behind only a distorted sense of human nature and affairs.

When our public life becomes fragmented, ephemeral, and incomprehensible, it is a recipe for anomie, or normlessness. The great French sociologist ?mile Durkheim showed long ago that a society that fails to bind its people together with some shared sense of sacredness and common respect for rules and norms is not a society of great individual freedom; it is, rather, a place where disoriented individuals have difficulty setting goals and exerting themselves to achieve them. Durkheim argued that anomie was a major driver of suicide rates in European countries. Modern scholars continue to draw on his work to understand suicide rates today.

Percentage of U.S. high-school seniors who agreed with the statement “Life often seems meaningless.” (Source: Monitoring the Future)

Durkheim’s observations are crucial for understanding what happened in the early 2010s. A long-running survey of American teens found that, from 1990 to 2010, high-school seniors became slightly less likely to agree with statements such as “Life often feels meaningless.” But as soon as they adopted a phone-based life and many began to live in the whirlpool of social media, where no stability can be found, every measure of despair increased. From 2010 to 2019, the number who agreed that their lives felt “meaningless” increased by about 70 percent, to more than one in five.

6. Young People Don’t Like Their Phone-Based Lives

How can I be confident that the epidemic of adolescent mental illness was kicked off by the arrival of the phone-based childhood? Skeptics point to other events as possible culprits, including the 2008 global financial crisis, global warming, the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting and the subsequent active-shooter drills, rising academic pressures, and the opioid epidemic. But while these events might have been contributing factors in some countries, none can explain both the timing and international scope of the disaster.

An additional source of evidence comes from Gen Z itself. With all the talk of regulating social media, raising age limits, and getting phones out of schools, you might expect to find many members of Gen Z writing and speaking out in opposition. I’ve looked for such arguments and found hardly any. In contrast, many young adults tell stories of devastation.

Freya India, a 24-year-old British essayist who writes about girls, explains how social-media sites carry girls off to unhealthy places: “It seems like your child is simply watching some makeup tutorials, following some mental health influencers, or experimenting with their identity. But let me tell you: they are on a conveyor belt to someplace bad. Whatever insecurity or vulnerability they are struggling with, they will be pushed further and further into it.” She continues:

Gen Z were the guinea pigs in this uncontrolled global social experiment. We were the first to have our vulnerabilities and insecurities fed into a machine that magnified and refracted them back at us, all the time, before we had any sense of who we were. We didn’t just grow up with algorithms. They raised us. They rearranged our faces. Shaped our identities. Convinced us we were sick.

Rikki Schlott, a 23-year-old American journalist and co-author of The Canceling of the American Mind, writes,

The day-to-day life of a typical teen or tween today would be unrecognizable to someone who came of age before the smartphone arrived. Zoomers are spending an average of 9 hours daily in this screen-time doom loop—desperate to forget the gaping holes they’re bleeding out of, even if just for … 9 hours a day. Uncomfortable silence could be time to ponder why they’re so miserable in the first place. Drowning it out with algorithmic white noise is far easier.

A 27-year-old man who spent his adolescent years addicted (his word) to video games and pornography sent me this reflection on what that did to him:

I missed out on a lot of stuff in life—a lot of socialization. I feel the effects now: meeting new people, talking to people. I feel that my interactions are not as smooth and fluid as I want. My knowledge of the world (geography, politics, etc.) is lacking. I didn’t spend time having conversations or learning about sports. I often feel like a hollow operating system.

Or consider what Facebook found in a research project involving focus groups of young people, revealed in 2021 by the whistleblower Frances Haugen: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rates of anxiety and depression among teens,” an internal document said. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

How can it be that an entire generation is hooked on consumer products that so few praise and so many ultimately regret using? Because smartphones and especially social media have put members of Gen Z and their parents into a series of collective-action traps. Once you understand the dynamics of these traps, the escape routes become clear.

7. Collective-Action Problems

Social-media companies such as Meta, TikTok, and Snap are often compared to tobacco companies, but that’s not really fair to the tobacco industry. It’s true that companies in both industries marketed harmful products to children and tweaked their products for maximum customer retention (that is, addiction), but there’s a big difference: Teens could and did choose, in large numbers, not to smoke. Even at the peak of teen cigarette use, in 1997, nearly two-thirds of high-school students did not smoke.

Social media, in contrast, applies a lot more pressure on nonusers, at a much younger age and in a more insidious way. Once a few students in any middle school lie about their age and open accounts at age 11 or 12, they start posting photos and comments about themselves and other students. Drama ensues. The pressure on everyone else to join becomes intense. Even a girl who knows, consciously, that Instagram can foster beauty obsession, anxiety, and eating disorders might sooner take those risks than accept the seeming certainty of being out of the loop, clueless, and excluded. And indeed, if she resists while most of her classmates do not, she might, in fact, be marginalized, which puts her at risk for anxiety and depression, though via a different pathway than the one taken by those who use social media heavily. In this way, social media accomplishes a remarkable feat: It even harms adolescents who do not use it.

[From the May 2022 issue: Jonathan Haidt on why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid]

A recent study led by the University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn captured the dynamics of the social-media trap precisely. The researchers recruited more than 1,000 college students and asked them how much they’d need to be paid to deactivate their accounts on either Instagram or TikTok for four weeks. That’s a standard economist’s question to try to compute the net value of a product to society. On average, students said they’d need to be paid roughly $50 ($59 for TikTok, $47 for Instagram) to deactivate whichever platform they were asked about. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to try to get most of the others in their school to deactivate that same platform, offering to pay them to do so as well, and asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero. In each case, most students were willing to pay to have that happen.

Social media is all about network effects. Most students are only on it because everyone else is too. Most of them would prefer that nobody be on these platforms. Later in the study, students were asked directly, “Would you prefer to live in a world without Instagram [or TikTok]?” A majority of students said yes––58 percent for each app.

This is the textbook definition of what social scientists call a collective-action problem. It’s what happens when a group would be better off if everyone in the group took a particular action, but each actor is deterred from acting, because unless the others do the same, the personal cost outweighs the benefit. Fishermen considering limiting their catch to avoid wiping out the local fish population are caught in this same kind of trap. If no one else does it too, they just lose profit.

Cigarettes trapped individual smokers with a biological addiction. Social media has trapped an entire generation in a collective-action problem. Early app developers deliberately and knowingly exploited the psychological weaknesses and insecurities of young people to pressure them to consume a product that, upon reflection, many wish they could use less, or not at all.

8. Four Norms to Break Four Traps

Young people and their parents are stuck in at least four collective-action traps. Each is hard to escape for an individual family, but escape becomes much easier if families, schools, and communities coordinate and act together. Here are four norms that would roll back the phone-based childhood. I believe that any community that adopts all four will see substantial improvements in youth mental health within two years.

No smartphones before high school?

The trap here is that each child thinks they need a smartphone because “everyone else” has one, and many parents give in because they don’t want their child to feel excluded. But if no one else had a smartphone—or even if, say, only half of the child’s sixth-grade class had one—parents would feel more comfortable providing a basic flip phone (or no phone at all). Delaying round-the-clock internet access until ninth grade (around age 14) as a national or community norm would help to protect adolescents during the very vulnerable first few years of puberty. According to a 2022 British study, these are the years when social-media use is most correlated with poor mental health. Family policies about tablets, laptops, and video-game consoles should be aligned with smartphone restrictions to prevent overuse of other screen activities.

No social media before 16

The trap here, as with smartphones, is that each adolescent feels a strong need to open accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms primarily because that’s where most of their peers are posting and gossiping. But if the majority of adolescents were not on these accounts until they were 16, families and adolescents could more easily resist the pressure to sign up. The delay would not mean that kids younger than 16 could never watch videos on TikTok or YouTube—only that they could not open accounts, give away their data, post their own content, and let algorithms get to know them and their preferences.

Phone‐free schools

Most schools claim that they ban phones, but this usually just means that students aren’t supposed to take their phone out of their pocket during class. Research shows that most students do use their phones during class time. They also use them during lunchtime, free periods, and breaks between classes––times when students could and should be interacting with their classmates face-to-face. The only way to get students’ minds off their phones during the school day is to require all students to put their phones (and other devices that can send or receive texts) into a phone locker or locked pouch at the start of the day. Schools that have gone phone-free always seem to report that it has improved the culture, making students more attentive in class and more interactive with one another. Published studies back them up.

More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

Many parents are afraid to give their children the level of independence and responsibility they themselves enjoyed when they were young, even though rates of homicide, drunk driving, and other physical threats to children are way down in recent decades. Part of the fear comes from the fact that parents look at each other to determine what is normal and therefore safe, and they see few examples of families acting as if a 9-year-old can be trusted to walk to a store without a chaperone. But if many parents started sending their children out to play or run errands, then the norms of what is safe and accepted would change quickly. So would ideas about what constitutes “good parenting.” And if more parents trusted their children with more responsibility––for example, by asking their kids to do more to help out, or to care for others––then the pervasive sense of uselessness now found in surveys of high-school students might begin to dissipate.

It would be a mistake to overlook this fourth norm. If parents don’t replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.

The main reason why the phone-based childhood is so harmful is because it pushes aside everything else. Smartphones are experience blockers. Our ultimate goal should not be to remove screens entirely, nor should it be to return childhood to exactly the way it was in 1960. Rather, it should be to create a version of childhood and adolescence that keeps young people anchored in the real world while flourishing in the digital age.

9. What Are We Waiting For?

An essential function of government is to solve collective-action problems. Congress could solve or help solve the ones I’ve highlighted—for instance, by raising the age of “internet adulthood” to 16 and requiring tech companies to keep underage children off their sites.

In recent decades, however, Congress has not been good at addressing public concerns when the solutions would displease a powerful and deep-pocketed industry. Governors and state legislators have been much more effective, and their successes might let us evaluate how well various reforms work. But the bottom line is that to change norms, we’re going to need to do most of the work ourselves, in neighborhood groups, schools, and other communities.

[Read: Why Congress keeps failing to protect kids online]

There are now hundreds of organizations––most of them started by mothers who saw what smartphones had done to their children––that are working to roll back the phone-based childhood or promote a more independent, real-world childhood. (I have assembled a list of many of them.) One that I co-founded, at LetGrow.org, suggests a variety of simple programs for parents or schools, such as play club (schools keep the playground open at least one day a week before or after school, and kids sign up for phone-free, mixed-age, unstructured play as a regular weekly activity) and the Let Grow Experience (a series of homework assignments in which students––with their parents’ consent––choose something to do on their own that they’ve never done before, such as walk the dog, climb a tree, walk to a store, or cook dinner).

Even without the help of organizations, parents could break their families out of collective-action traps if they coordinated with the parents of their children’s friends. Together they could create common smartphone rules and organize unsupervised play sessions or encourage hangouts at a home, park, or shopping mall.

Parents are fed up with what childhood has become. Many are tired of having daily arguments about technologies that were designed to grab hold of their children’s attention and not let go. But the phone-based childhood is not inevitable.

The four norms I have proposed cost almost nothing to implement, they cause no clear harm to anyone, and while they could be supported by new legislation, they can be instilled even without it. We can begin implementing all of them right away, this year, especially in communities with good cooperation between schools and parents. A single memo from a principal asking parents to delay smartphones and social media, in support of the school’s effort to improve mental health by going phone free, would catalyze collective action and reset the community’s norms.

We didn’t know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It’s time to end the phone-based childhood.

This article is adapted from Jonathan Haidt’s forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

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.

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.

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.

You’re Probably Complaining the Wrong Way

2019-06-29T06:00:00-04:00

The words vent and complain are often used interchangeably, but really, they refer to two different forms of expression, each with its own aims. Venting is about seeking validation and sympathy, whereas complaining comes with a concrete end goal—in many cases, getting someone else to do something differently.

Generally speaking, the psychologist Guy Winch says, people do a lot of venting, but “we are afraid to voice complaints, and for good reason: It often doesn’t go well.” Because of how people typically present complaints, Winch says, they put their loved ones, friends, and co-workers on the defensive—and as a result they often don’t get what they want. Winch has a better way—one that he laid out in his book, The Squeaky Wheel, and to a crowd earlier this week at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic.

Winch recommends a formula called “the complaint sandwich”—a series of three statements calibrated to make people more receptive to changing their ways. The first “slice of bread” in the sandwich is a positive statement that will hopefully make the listener less defensive when the complaint itself arrives. For instance, in the case of a significant other who leaves dirty dishes in the sink, the complaint might start with something like, “You know, you are such a considerate partner in so many ways, and I love living with you.”

[Read more: The art of complaining]

“The meat of the sandwich is the complaint itself,” Winch said. “And here’s the trick: The meat has to be lean. In other words, all you need is the one incident to make your point.” Don’t present a compendium of every offense; just stick to the specifics of the present situation. In the case of the dish-leaver, that might sound like this: “I saw that your cereal bowl is in the sink from this morning.”

Just as it’s important not to include a list of frustrating incidents at this stage, it’s also important not to include a generalization about someone’s basic nature. The complaint You didn’t clean up after yourself veers unproductively into criticism when the clause because you’re so lazy is tacked onto the end of it. So focus strictly on what happened, Winch advised.

The final component of the sandwich is another positive statement, this time one that might motivate the other party to do things differently. This inducement could be something like, “If you could make an effort to put your dirty dishes into the dishwasher, it would make me so happy.”

These statements might be set up differently if complaining to a stranger rather than a loved one (a stranger might be less interested in making you happy), but the format remains the same. And in all cases, Winch says, it’s important not to yell or be sarcastic. “However angry or frustrated you are, if your tone is too sharp, you’re distracting from the message,” he noted. Then, down the line: “The minute you see any hint of an effort, you reinforce it like crazy”—that’s the best way to encourage more of the hoped-for behavior in the future.

These principles are not just useful in the interpersonal realm—Winch says that well-framed complaints can also bring about better results in customer-service scenarios. Applying the aforementioned tactics to corporate grievances requires a few twists.

First, specificity is especially important when dealing with companies. Winch says that many customer-service representatives use systems that have them choose from preset categories of complaints, so it can be harder to get a favorable result if you mention a bunch of different issues. For instance, if you’re trying to get a rental-car company to reverse an unexpected charge, don’t also go on about how uncomfortable the car’s seats were—it muddles the real reason you’re calling (and makes you sound as if you aren’t discriminating in what you choose to complain about).

Second, expressing empathy for a customer-service representative can help a lot. “They are usually a low-salary employee and their job is horrific. They really get cursed at all the time, every day,” Winch said. He added that when he calls a customer-service line, he often opens with something like, “I’m going to apologize ahead of time for sounding annoyed. I’m annoyed with this situation, not with you personally—so please forgive me if I sound frustrated.”

Third, unlike in the dirty-dishes scenario, the first person you reach at a company might not be able to do what you’re asking of them. If it becomes clear that they don’t have the authority to remedy the situation, you can ask to speak to a supervisor. But if the supervisor isn’t helpful either, Winch said, “I wouldn’t go slowly up the chain.” A strategy that he’s used “innumerable times” with great success is going straight to an executive—many email addresses are Google-able—with his complaint sandwich.

Sometimes, though, complaints—whether directed to people or companies—don’t get results. “There are some very difficult people that there are no right ways to address them,” Winch noted. There might well be situations where continuing to complain just isn’t worth it. But sometimes, Winch said, getting a complaint to finally land requires a very special type of person: a lawyer.

Why Is Everyone Watching TV With the Subtitles On?

2023-06-06T07:31:00-04:00

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

The first time it happened, I assumed it was a Millennial thing. Our younger neighbors had come over with their kids and a projector for backyard movie night—Clueless, I think, or maybe The Goonies.

“Oh,” I said as the opening scene began, “you left the subtitles on.”

“Oh,” the husband said, “we always leave the subtitles on.”

Now, I don’t like to think of myself as a snob—snobs never do—but in that moment, I felt something gurgling up my windpipe that can only be described as snobbery, a need to express my aesthetic horror at the needless gashing of all those scenes. All that came out, though, was: Why? They don’t like missing any of the dialogue, he said, and sometimes it’s hard to hear, or someone is trying to sleep, or they’re only half paying attention, and the subtitles are right there waiting to be flipped on, so … why not?

Because now I’m reading TV, not watching it. Because now, instead of focusing my attention on the performances, the costumes, the cinematography, the painstakingly mixed sound, and how it all works together to tell a story and transport me into an alternate world, my eyes keep getting yanked downward to read words I can already hear. My soul can’t bear the notion of someone watching The Sopranos for the first time and, as Tony wades into the pool, looking down to the bottom of the screen to read [ducks quack]. Subtitles serve an important purpose for people with hearing or cognitive impairments, or for translation from a foreign language. They’re not for fluent English speakers watching something in fluent English.

This monologue was all internal, though, because I’m in my mid-40s and don’t want to sound like an old man shouting at a cloud. We left the subtitles on that night, and I noticed that even though I knew every word of Clueless (or maybe it was The Goonies), I was still reading along. For the life of me I couldn’t understand how this didn’t drive everyone else crazy too. I said nothing, though. Millennials! What’ll they think of next?

Then, a couple of months later, over New Year’s Eve, my wife and I were about to start watching Don’t Look Up with another couple, Ken Leung and Nancy Bulalacao, when Nancy asked if we minded her turning on the subtitles. Ken is a cast member on the HBO series Industry, and Nancy works in New York theater production, and they’re both a bit older than us—squarely Gen X. They watch almost everything now with the subtitles on, she told us, even Ken’s own show, which is full of rapid-fire financial jargon coming at you in about a dozen languages and a riot of accents. She said it almost like a confession, as if bracing for judgment. But I was too stunned to judge.

Both of them have spent their entire adult lives working in movies, television, theater—the visual arts, where voice and imagery are sacrosanct tools of communication with the audience. Surely a screen actor like Ken would be aghast at the notion of so many people choosing to miss so much of the detail and nuance that he builds into his performances?

Nah. Following the story is the most important thing, he told me recently when I asked him about it for this article, and if you’re getting knocked out of the story because you can’t follow the dialogue, then by all means turn on the subtitles. It’s fine. You have his permission.

I grew alarmed by the way subtitles seem to be creeping into our homes—an addictive substance like TikTok, which, by the way, deserves some blame for this shift, conditioning multiple generations to watch content with text plastered all over it. A war is raging in living rooms and bedrooms across America—a Great Subtitle War. On one side: the bombastic visual effects of post–Game of Thrones mega-budget TV. On the other side: hearing the words. On one side: people like me, the purists and refuseniks. On the other: our friends and spouses, people who just want to follow the plot. The widespread use of subtitles felt, to me, like a lurch backward toward the silent-film era. But I didn’t want to be too doctrinaire. Maybe some exceptions could be made.

Then one night a few weeks ago, I walked into the bedroom to find my wife watching Abbott Elementary with the subtitles on. I’d lost her too.

Just three years ago, the South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho took the stage at the Golden Globes to accept the Best Foreign Language Film award for Parasite and made a heartfelt speech urging us all to watch more stuff with subtitles.

“Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles,” he said, “you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”

A month later, Parasite won the Oscar for Best Picture. About a month after that, the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic, and much of the world went into quarantine. Cooped-up Americans were primed for a little experimental viewing; demand for Asian-language content spiked in the U.S. in the months after Parasite became available for streaming, according to data from Parrot Analytics, an entertainment-analytics company. It spiked again, a Parrot spokesman told me, after the September 2021 premiere of Squid Game, another South Korean export, which probably did more than any other single work of culture to bring down Bong’s one-inch wall. The words at the bottom of the screen don’t appear to have distracted anyone from all that arterial spray.

Now subtitles are everywhere, and in fact, they may already be our default mode. According to Preston Smalley, Roku’s vice president of viewer product, a 2022 internal survey revealed that 58 percent of subscribers use subtitles: 36 percent of them switch the subtitles on because of a diagnosed hearing impairment; 32 percent do it out of force of habit. (The remaining third cite a stew of situational issues, such as kids sleeping nearby, other people in the room, and poor audio quality.) Many of the people using subtitles, in other words, do not need them.

And as it turns out, it is a Millennial thing, or at least Millennials are leading the way. A full two-thirds of Roku’s Millennial customers use subtitles, more than any other generation, including seniors, though Smalley attributes that in part to technical hurdles, which is a polite way of saying that older users don’t always know how to turn them on.

Watching a Korean-language film such as Parasite with subtitles, of course, isn’t the same as leaving them on for Abbott Elementary. One experience requires them for most English speakers, the other super does not. But they’re also exactly the same thing. You’re still reading words at the bottom of the screen, it’s the same eye movement, the same mental-conditioning process—so what’s the difference if the actual language being spoken is English or Korean or some distant alien tongue from the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Subtitles, in other words, are a door that swings both ways. They can usher you into a rich new cultural experience, only to flick you in the ear during the experience itself.

Once the subtitles are on the screen, my friend Ken said, you feel, subconsciously, that “there’s somebody else in the room. There’s a third person, and they’re telling you what’s being said—they’re being very quiet, they’re minding their own business, but they’re here.” And of course that affects the experience. Imagine, he said during our Zoom call, “if our conversation right now was being subtitled live.”

I get it; not everything is art. Most things we watch don’t require or deserve such reverence. You don’t need spotless mise-en-scène to get the full experience of Is It Cake? But what if it’s The Sopranos? My wife and I recently watched Dead Ringers, which was so visually clever and twisted and sumptuous that I can only imagine how great it would’ve been without subtitles. If you ask me, there’s no defense for anything that requires us to take our eyes off Rachel Weisz, let alone two Rachel Weiszes.

Set aside the qualitative debate over whether this cultural shift is better or worse—let’s at least agree that it’s different. Ken says he appreciates the way subtitles help him and his wife follow along, but he also now finds himself doing something he calls “lazy listening”: “You begin to rely on the subtitles,” he said, “and then without them, you’re suddenly like, I never had an issue hearing things before. How come I do now?”

The writer-director Hannah Fidell—whose Hulu series, A Teacher, starring Kate Mara as a predatory high-school teacher, was based on her 2013 indie film on the same subject—is likewise worried that subtitles are changing viewers’ habits. I assumed that a filmmaker would feel most violated on behalf of their camera shots, but Fidell was, if anything, more aghast at the trouncing of her sound mix. Subtitles make you literal-minded, she says, and oftentimes, the scripted words transcribed on the screen say one thing while the actor’s performance of them says another. I asked Fidell how she would feel if a friend turned on the subtitles while watching the pilot episode of A Teacher.

She went quiet for a moment. “I would be so pissed,” she said.

Game of Thrones, which premiered in 2011 and ended in 2019, shifted the home-viewing paradigm in any number of ways, but it was also the tipping point in this struggle between the audio and the visual. Game of Thrones, Andrew Miano, a longtime film producer, told me, is when we all started turning up the volume to hear the dialogue. Miano made The Farewell, starring Awkwafina, about three-quarters of which is in Mandarin with English subtitles. His issue isn’t with subtitles; it’s with the swelling ranks of always-on-ers, a group that now includes his wife. “It drives me crazy,” he said.

House of the Dragon—last summer’s Game of Thrones prequel—is what broke me. How was anyone supposed to follow that show without subtitles? House Targaryen. House Velaryon. Rhaenys. Rhaena. Rhaenyra. The Sea Snake. The Crabfeeder. Now three years have passed. Now 10 years have passed. Now a different actor is playing Rhaenyra, but the same actor is playing Rhaenys. Dragons shrieking and throwing flames over all of it. What the hell is going on here?

I still didn’t turn subtitles on, though, until halfway through the season, when the cast reshuffled after the second time jump and my options were either (a) turn on the subtitles or (b) pause and rewatch every scene multiple times, requiring an average of three viewing hours per episode. Besides, all of the shots on that show are too dark anyway.

The good news, according to Onnalee Blank, the four-time Emmy Award–winning sound mixer on Game of Thrones, is that it’s not your fault that you can’t hear well enough to follow this stuff. It’s not your TV’s fault either, or your speakers—your sound system might be lousy, but that’s not why you can’t hear the dialogue. “It has everything to do with the streaming services and how they’re choosing to air these shows,” Blank told me.

Specifically, it has everything to do with LKFS, which stands for “Loudness, K-weighted, relative to full scale” and which, for the sake of simplicity, is a unit for measuring loudness. Traditionally it’s been anchored to the dialogue. For years, going back to the golden age of broadcast television and into the pay-cable era, audio engineers had to deliver sound levels within an industry-standard LKFS, or their work would get kicked back to them. That all changed when streaming companies seized control of the industry, a period of time that rather neatly matches Game of Thrones’ run on HBO. According to Blank, Game of Thrones sounded fantastic for years, and she’s got the Emmys to prove it. Then, in 2018, just prior to the show’s final season, AT&T bought HBO’s parent company and overlaid its own uniform loudness spec, which was flatter and simpler to scale across a large library of content. But it was also, crucially, un-anchored to the dialogue.

“So instead of this algorithm analyzing the loudness of the dialogue coming out of people’s mouths,” Blank explained to me, “it analyzes the whole show as loudness. So if you have a loud music cue, that’s gonna be your loud point. And then, when the dialogue comes, you can’t hear it.” Blank remembers noticing the difference from the moment AT&T took the reins at Time Warner; overnight, she said, HBO’s sound went from best-in-class to worst. During the last season of Game of Thrones, she said, “we had to beg [AT&T] to keep our old spec every single time we delivered an episode.” (Because AT&T spun off HBO’s parent company in 2022, a spokesperson for AT&T said they weren’t able to comment on the matter.)

Netflix still uses a dialogue-anchor spec, she said, which is why shows on Netflix sound (to her) noticeably crisper and clearer: “If you watch a Netflix show now and then immediately you turn on an HBO show, you’re gonna have to raise your volume.” Amazon Prime Video’s spec, meanwhile, “is pretty gnarly.” But what really galls her about Amazon is its new “dialogue boost” function, which viewers can select to “increase the volume of dialogue relative to background music and effects.” In other words, she said, it purports to fix a problem of Amazon’s own creation. Instead, she suggested, “why don’t you just air it the way we mixed it?”

The silver lining of tech companies trying to fix problems of their own creation is that, every so often, they stumble onto an ingenious solution. Roku offers a replay feature in which the subtitles show up when you press the 20-second rewind button. It saved Miano’s marriage, and it might save yours. Roku also offers an “automatic speech clarity” feature, though Roku is more akin to an operating system for your television than a streaming platform—it’s just the middle man, sonically speaking—so the option is more of a bandage than a cure. Home-theater providers such as Sonos, meanwhile, offer their own dialogue-boost capabilities, in case you want to pay a second tech company to fix what the first one broke.

Or you can just turn on the subtitles. In any version of our streaming future, subtitles will be the simplest, most cost-effective solution, so maybe what the snobs among us should hope for is that the creators themselves will seize back some creative license over exactly how those words look on the screen. Brett Pawlak, the director of photography for Disney+’s new television series American Born Chinese, told me that although he doesn’t compose shots to leave room for words at the bottom of the screen, the rising ubiquity of subtitles reminds him of the creative hurdle presented about a decade ago, when some directors started incorporating characters’ text messages. The visual challenge, in other words, requires a visual solution.

The appearance of the subtitles on your screen also varies widely by platform—the streamers control that dial too—and some of them put more effort into the task than others. But their default typefaces are all clunky and robotic and bear no connection to the content. If they can beam Severance into our homes and invent dialogue-boost features, surely they can figure out how to let us pick our own typeface, or shrink the font size, or move the words to a different spot on the screen. You know who’d really benefit from that? Deaf people! Non-English speakers. Anyone who finds that subtitles make them feel included in the culture, rather than shut out of it. And maybe the ubiquity of words at the bottom of the screen will inspire filmmakers and showrunners to craft their own subtitles as a viewing option—you can watch this Jordan Peele art-house horror series with Hulu’s charmless sans serif or with Peele’s signature typeset.

Or, to echo Blank, you could just air it the way she mixed it. Her home still frowns on unnecessary subtitles, but that might change as streamer platforms continue to wreak havoc with her sound mixes. “The world is getting louder,” she said. And if subtitles offer us a way to turn down the volume a little bit, maybe that’s not so terrible. She knows a losing battle when she hears one.

Relativity and the Absurdities of Alice

1921-06-01T12:00:00-04:00

'Yes, that's it,' said the Hatter with a sigh. 'It's always tea-time and we've no time to wash the things between whiles.'

This sounded pleasant enough, but, of course, odd too, which was due to the fact that Alice lived before 1908. Since that time, and especially since 1913, a number of gentlemen wearing glasses and looking wondrous wise, and no doubt as wise as they look, have proved to us that it can always be teatime if we care to figure it out properly and get away from a commonplace three-dimensional existence.

To-day any budding physicist can tell you without cracking a smile that 'a conception of the physical world in its objective four-dimensional scheme would merely be an abridged statement of the correspondence of the subjective time-space experiences in the realm of the various senses, and nothing more.' Remember, it is not the Hatter speaking now, but the average serious-minded young man or woman at college, who has been taking notes of the lectures on Relativity given by the Professor of Mathematical Physics. The words used above happen to be those of an Oxford Don, but the professors at almost any other University can put the case just as succinctly. Perhaps at the University on the Cam they discuss gravitation, space, and time more than elsewhere, which is natural when we recall that Sir Isaac Newton himself and Lewis Carroll were once undergrads there and, later, professors. The Cambridge Professor of Astronomy is easily a leader in demonstrating the new Einsteinian theory of gravitation. Sir Isaac never had a theory of gravitation, only a law; but Einstein has both theory and law.

Our professor says that if we would only let him 'interpose some kind of dispersive medium, so that light of some wave-length could be found traveling with every velocity and following every track in space-time, then, if we were looking at a solid which suddenly went out of existence, we should receive at the same moment light-impressions from every particle in its interior, supposing them self-luminous. We actually should see the inside of it.' Now, this would surely have satisfied Alice, for she did so want to know what the flame of a candle looked like after it was blown out. But even Alice did not yearn to see the insides of things-in-themselves; and besides, if it is to be always tea-time, as these professors can easily bring about, it will perhaps be more pleasant not to see more than the insides of the tea-cups.

Alice's friend the March Hare had a watch which he looked at gloomily. He had used butter on it, the best, too; but, as the Hatter said, 'Some crumbs must have gotten in as well.' But that is a trifling matter compared with the six clocks that our professor has on his mantel, all good time-keepers and set right. Yet he can make you view them in such a way that the clock on the extreme left indicates noon, the clock next to it points to eleven, the third clock to ten, and so on. If the mantelpiece were long enough and he had clocks enough, he could turn to-day into yesterday; and, we could all say together, 'How queer everything is today, and yesterday things went on just as usual.'

On this side of the Atlantic, a professor at Columbia tells us in a snappy little volume that, if we could only look far enough straight before us, we would in time see our back hair, if we had any. Or if a man goes to the top of a high mountain and aims a gun in any direction and shoots, provided the bullet goes fast enough, it will whiz round the world and on its return hit him behind the ears. Which goes to prove that it may be dangerous to stand back of some marksmen.

Or, again, let a man start for Arcturus. By terrestrial chronology, it will take one hundred years, traveling at the rate of one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles each second. When he arrives at Arcturus, some professor of mathematical physics at the leading University will say, 'How do you do? I timed your start. Of course you have not had breakfast yet?' The explanation is that, traveling with the speed of light, the yard-stick or light year shortened almost to zero in the line of travel. Now here we have one way of getting eternal youth.

Alice longed to be able 'to shut up like a telescope'; and she thought she could if she only knew how to begin. That's just it. One must know how to make the right beginning. And the modern theory of general relativity does seem to prove that we have never started right on earth. We thought we were standing still, while all the time we were hurrying so fast that it makes one's hair stand up on end just to think of it. Why, since you began this article, say five minutes ago, you have flown through space thirty-eight hun-dred miles.

And that is not all. For no one can be sure of his shape now; because size depends upon speed. All motion is relative. If Alice had moved fast enough she could have diminished her weight. All students of physics to-day know mass and energy are essentially same thing.

Einstein's law is practically this: 'The gravitational mass of a body is equal to its inertial mass.' If, when we were reading Alice long ago, we had in a moment of forgetfulness written the above on our final examination papers in mechanics, it is a certainty that would have cost us our degree. What distress of mind it would have our old instructor if we had said things—that is, assuming that professors really feel keenly such errors! And to-day the point of view has changed. If a conscientious old instructor in mathematics insists that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, he will soon be enlightened. Or if someone quotes Herbert Spencer's dictum that the proposition concerning parallel lines not meeting at infinity is undemonstrable, because no one could go there, mathematical proof forthcoming to show that the lines may meet because of a warp in space which makes them geodesics. Up to now lived in a three-dimensional world, but the coming generations will be only with a fourth.

Now the greater part of the mass is due to concealed energy. What will happen when we come into knowledge of the control of sub-atomic energy? for these small fry move with terrific velocities. Shall we soon be able to release this energy, and later to harness it? Some marvelous discoveries are being made. Alice in dreamland underwent remarkable transformations but the physicists are changing substances and analyzing the structure of atoms in a way that makes Lewis Carroll's wildest flight of fancy seem humdrum. Even the grin of the Cheshire cat, which remained after Pussy faded out, is simplicity itself compared with a hydrogen atom losing its electrons and becoming a different gas. The chemists construct all nuclei out of hydrogen nuclei, which means that the ninety-two elements, some not yet found on earth, can be traced back to a common ancestor—the hydrogen or helium nucleus.

And here, strangely, Einstein's work has a direct application. It seems that the mass of a helium nucleus is not just the sum of its four alpha particles plus two electrons, but an extra mass due to the energy of formation. (It is C. G. Darwin speaking reviewing the work of Aston and others with positive rays.)

Surely we are near the transformation of the elements. We can now knock off a few hydrogen particles from nitrogen and oxygen. A new mechanics—the mechanics of the atom—is here; and the old laws of classical dynamics must yield, for they fail to meet requirements. Nearly every month a new chap-ter is written in this story of the structure of matter. We have moved—we no longer live in Flatland. We do not have to measure our angles according to Euclid: he has had his day. Even that greatest generalization of the human mind, Newton's law of attraction, proportional to the masses and inversely as the square of the distance, gets a jolt. For light seems to have pressure and weight. Sunshine actually punches the earth with a fist that weighs one hundred and sixty tons. A ray of light from a star grazing the edge of the sun is bent, not because of refraction, but is pulled in by gravitation as if it were a stream of bullets. The bending has been measured. At the last total solar eclipse, two parties sent out to Brazil and Africa by the Royal Astronomical Society secured about a dozen photographs in the twelve minutes the eclipse lasted. The positions of certain stars (about seven), are displaced. The shift is not just the amount which a gravitational pull on the light would produce, according to the old law of gravitation, —and Sir Isaac himself hinted that such a thing might occur, —but twice the amount, which fits in nicely with the new law of gravitation, and is very close to what Einstein had said in advance it would be.

May we not say with Alice, 'Curioser and curiouser! Now, I am opening it'? Gravitation fades out of the scene as a force, and becomes a distortion of space in the presence of matter. It makes one think of the Cheshire cat and its grin.

The new law also accounts for the discrepancy in Mercury's perihelion, which has bothered astronomers for some years. It may, however, be said that most of us did not worry much over this erratic swinging of the long axis of the planet's orbit.

But to return to Alice: Rule 4 read that 'all persons more than a mile high should leave the Court.' Now we know how to get around this rule. On the trip to Arcturus, we saw that change of mass with speed is the same as the time-length change. Hence, if a person moved so fast that his mass was doubled, his size would be reduced one half.

Shades of Augustus De Morgan, return from the mists beyond the Styx! They say, but do not yet prove, that the ratio of the circumference to the diameter is altered, when we introduce matter at the centre. Let us suppose that they succeed in squaring the circle—then what becomes of the Budget of Paradoxes?

A resounding chorus smites the air. Minkowski, Lorentz, Larmor, Planck, Silberstein, Eddington, Cottingham, Crommelein, Davidson, Schlick, Slosson, Weyl, and all the rest sing in a hearty bass, Space and Time are deprived of the last vestige of physical objectivity.' Einstein's tenor rings clear above the rest: 'Let those who are unfamiliar physics no longer feel like the wanderer who was unable to see the forest from the trees.

What Has Happened to the American Dream?

1961-04-01T12:00:00-05:00

On January 4, 1961, the New York Herald Tribune carried on page 9, subordinated in space to a story on a castle for sale for $12 million, a news item from Russia. It described the new propaganda drive which is in line with the world Communist manifesto recently published. This manifesto declared “the United States is the bulwark of world reaction and the enemy of all the peoples on the globe.”

Writers, lecturers, and agitators are being trained in special schools to spread this propaganda wherever they can. How many Americans read that news item? How many of them glanced at it and shrugged or laughed and dismissed it from their minds? How many of them were aware of the slow and relentless effect of Soviet propaganda among the uncommitted nations of the world and its effect on our standing among many peoples? I don’t know, but I am sure that there were not enough. Not nearly enough. We are facing the greatest challenge our way of life has ever had to meet without any clear understanding of the facts.

There is in most people, at most times, a proneness to give more credence to pleasant news than to unpleasant, to hope that, somehow or other, things “will come out all right.” But this was not the frame of mind that created the United States and made it not only a great nation but a symbol of a way of life that became the hope of the world. One can fight a danger only when one is armed with solid facts and spurred on by an unwavering faith and determination.

On my first visit to Russia I had watched the training of small babies. On my second trip, I studied the older children, their conditioning, their discipline, their docility, their complete absorption in the Communist system. Every child learns his Marxism backwards and forwards. By the time he leaves school, he is prepared to take not only his skills but his political ideas with him, wherever he may be sent, to whatever part of the world.

Wherever I went in Russia I found no personal hostility. But there was an unshaken conviction that the United States not only threatens but actually desires and seeks war. Here we are, equipped with the best communications in the world, and yet we have not learned how to use them in a way that can reach people.

Today, we are one of the oldest governments in existence; ours has been the position for leadership, for setting the pattern for behavior. And yet we are supinely putting ourselves in the position of leaving the leadership to the Russians, of following their ideas rather than our own. For instance, when the Russians set up a restriction on what visitors to the country may be allowed to see, we promptly do the same thing here, in retaliation. Whenever we behave in this manner, we are copying the methods of dictatorships and making a hollow boast of our claim that this country loves freedom for all. We owe it to ourselves and to the world, to our own dignity and self-respect, to set our own standards of behavior, regardless of what other nations do.

By practicing what we preach, putting democracy to work up to the very hilt, showing the world that our way of life has the most to offer the men and women and children of all countries, we may regain our lost leadership. Against those mindless millions we can oppose the unleashed strength of free men, for only in freedom can a man function completely.

When I visited Morocco in 1958 I had my first opportunity to see for myself the difficulties that arise in the transition stage between colonialism and independence. The troubles that Morocco was encountering were, it seemed to me, fairly typical of the basic difficulties of all young nations in transition.

As the French withdrew from Morocco, taking their nationals along, the villages found themselves stripped of teachers and of doctors. Countless villages were without a single person trained to give medical assistance. The Moroccans themselves were not yet prepared to replace the doctors, the teachers, the civil service employees with their own men. It may be decades before they are ready to do so. Where, then, are the necessary people to come from? I feel that in that answer lies the key, or one of the major keys, to the future.

The great problems seem to be that, while people may be able to fight successfully for freedom, they may not yet be prepared to set up a stable and functioning independent government. The French pulled out, but the Moroccans had no one to replace them. They were totally unprepared for self-government. They were, in fact, much worse off than they had been a year before.

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Today, this is happening again, in the Congo with the withdrawal of the Belgians. The time for colonization has gone forever, but some intermediate transition system is essential if chaos is not to follow.

A recent Afro-Asian resolution in the United Nations reveals the difficulty of the position by these words: “Inadequacy of political, economic, social or cultural preparedness” shall not serve as a pretext for denying independence. Now, it is certainly true that such a pretext has often been used in denying the right of self-determination. But it is equally true that without some basic qualifications, self-determination will lead to self-destruction.

In the Near East one finds the fluctuating and uncertain position of young countries which are in transition from the ways of the past to those of the future, with no certain path to tread and with the ultimate goal still obscure. That is becoming the situation of an increasing number of infant nations as they shake off the fetters of colonialism, or of ancient laws and customs, and grope for their own place in the sun. And what that goal is to be, what kind of place they are to occupy, what political philosophy they will choose in the long run will depend in great part on how we, in this country, prepare to meet the challenge.

Is what we are doing good enough? Have the changes that have revealed themselves in recent years, particularly in Africa and the Near East and the Latin American countries, shown overwhelming evidence that we are doing an intelligent job, an adequate job? I am afraid not. Genuinely afraid.

To me, the democratic system represents man’s best and brightest hope of self-fulfillment, of a life rich in promise and free from fear; the one hope, perhaps, for the complete development of the whole man. But I know, and learn more clearly every day, that we cannot keep our system strong and free by neglect, by taking it for granted, by giving it our second-best attention. We must be prepared, like the suitor in The Merchant of Venice — and, I might point out, the successful suitor — to give and hazard all we have.

Man cannot live without hope. If it is not engendered by his own convictions and desires, it can easily be fired from without, and by the most meretricious and empty of promises.

What I learned on these trips around the world has been much on my mind. Why, I wondered, were we not more successful in helping the young nations and those in transition to become established along democratic lines? Why was it that the Russians were doing so much better? The answer can be oversimplified, and an oversimplification is false and misleading. But part of the answer, and I think a major part, is that Russia has trained its young people to go out into the world, to carry their services and skills to backward and underdeveloped countries, to replace the missing doctors and teachers, the scientists and technicians; above all, to fill the vacant civil service jobs, prepared not only by training for the job itself, but by learning the language, by a complete briefing in the customs, habits, traditions, and trend of thought of the people, to understand them and deal with them. Where the young Russians go, of course, they take with them their Marxist training, thinking, and system.

And our young Americans? Are they being prepared to take their faith in democracy to the world along with their skills? Are they learning the language and the customs and the history of these new peoples? Do they understand how to deal with them, not according to their own ideas but according to the ideas of the people they must learn to know if they are to reach them at all? Have they acquired an ability to live and work among peoples of different religion and race and color, without arrogance and without prejudice?

Here, I believe, we have fallen down badly. In the last few years I have grasped at every opportunity to meet with the young, to talk with college students, to bring home as strongly as I can to even young children in the lower grades our responsibility for each other, our need to understand and respect each other. The future will be determined by the young, and there is no more essential task today, it seems to me, than to bring before them once more, in all its brightness, in all its splendor and beauty, the American dream, lest we let it fade, too concerned with ways of earning a living or impressing our neighbors or getting ahead or finding bigger and more potent ways of destroying the world and all that is in it.

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No single individual, of course, and no single group has an exclusive claim to the American dream. But we have all, I think, a single vision of what it is, not merely as a hope and an aspiration, but as a way of life, which we can come ever closer to attaining in its ideal form if we keep shining and unsullied our purpose and our belief in its essential value.

That we have sometimes given our friends and our enemies abroad a shoddy impression of the dream cannot be denied, much as we would like to deny it. The Ugly American, impressive as it was, struck me as being exaggerated. True, one of the first American ambassadors I ever met in an Eastern country was appallingly like a character in the novel. There are doubtless many others, too many others, men who accept — and seek — the position of representative of their government abroad, with no real interest or respect for the country they go to, and no real interest or respect for the image of their own country which they present to other people. Such men buy their positions by gifts of money to their party or seek them because of the glamorous social life they may lead in exotic places. “Oh, you must go there. You’ll have a wonderful time. And the polo is topnotch.”

They often do not know the language of the country; they are not familiar with its government or its officials; they are not interested in its customs, or its point of view.

The Russians, and I say it with shame, do much better. They are trained in the language, history, customs, and ways of life of a country before they go to it. They do not confine themselves to official entertaining but make a point of meeting and knowing and establishing friendly relations with people of all sorts, in every class of society, in every part of the country.

When we look at the picture of Russian greed in swallowing one satellite nation after another and contrast it with the picture of American generosity in giving food, clothing, supplies, technical and financial assistance, without the ulterior motive of acquiring new territory, it is stupid and tragic waste that the use of incompetent representatives should undo so much useful work, so great an expense, so much in the way of materials of every kind.

Of course, what the Russians have accomplished in training their young people for important posts in the underdeveloped countries — which, I must repeat, may affect the future course of these countries — has been done by compulsion. That’s the rub. For what we must do is to achieve the same results on a voluntary basis. We do not say to our young people: “You must go here and take such a job.” But we can show them that where we fail, the Russians will win, by default. We can show them the importance of acquiring the kind of training that will make them useful and honorable representatives of their country wherever they may go abroad.

Perhaps the new frontier today is something more than the new revolution in textiles and methods and speed and goods. It’s in the frontier of men’s minds. But we cannot cast an enduring light on other men’s minds unless the light in our own minds burns with a hard, unquenchable flame.

One form of communication we have failed in abjectly: that is in the teaching of languages. Most school children have several years of inadequate teaching in one language or another. I say inadequate because the study of a language, after all, is inadequate if one cannot learn to read and write it, to speak and to understand it. During the last war, the government found a simplified and most effective method of teaching such difficult languages as Japanese and Chinese to American GIs. In a matter of weeks they had mastered more of the language than formerly they would have acquired in the same number of years. And yet in our schools the old cumbersome, unproductive methods are still in use.

It seems to me so obvious that it should not need to be said that we must increase and improve the teaching of languages to our young people, who will otherwise find themselves crippled and sorely handicapped in dealing with people of foreign races and different cultures.

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These are things our children should be told. These are the conditions they are going to have to meet. They ought to be made to understand exactly what competition they will encounter, why they must meet it, how they can meet it best. Yet I rarely find, in talking with them, that they have been given the slightest inkling of the meaning of the Soviet infiltration of other countries, or that the future the Soviets are helping to build is the one with which they will have to contend. I rarely find that anyone has suggested that our own young people should have any preparation whatsoever to cope with the problems that are impending.

That is why, in the course of the past several years, I have fitted into my schedule, whenever I could, occasions to talk with the young. Sometimes they come up to Hyde Park by the busload to ask questions or to discuss problems. Sometimes I talk at their schools or colleges.

The other night, three boys from Harvard, one of them my grandson, came to see me. The head of the temporary government of Tanganyika had requested that some American students be sent there to teach English to their students, so that when the latter came to America to study they would be able to understand and communicate without difficulty. The young American students were also to participate in work projects and live in the native villages, where they could study conditions.

Thirty Americans, as a pilot project, were needed, and the cost for each was estimated at $1500. There was, I am happy to say, no problem in getting recruits. The difficulty came in raising money. The big foundations turned them down, whether because the project seemed unimportant, whether because of the youth of the people involved, or whether because they had failed to draw up a sufficiently complete, telling, and comprehensive prospectus of their plans, I do not know.

I was greatly interested, for it is out of such undertakings that bridges of understanding are built. I urged them to draw up the clearest possible statement of their plan and then to ask for scholarships. Certainly there must be thirty people willing to finance one scholarship each, in order to establish bonds of friendship and cooperation with a young nation.

Of course, there are great numbers of American college students with little information about and even less interest in the world in which they live. They are absorbed in their own concerns, in the social activities and the sports of their colleges, or in planning for their future careers. All this is natural enough. The trouble is that, on the whole, college students in some other countries start much earlier to relate themselves to their world and to become informed about the conditions which they must learn to meet in life.

What can we do to prepare young people to carry the American dream to the world in the best possible way? What I would like to say is this:

Today, our government and the governments of most of the world are primarily concerned — obsessed — by one idea: defense. But what is real defense, and how is it obtained? A certain amount of military defense is necessary. But there comes a point where you must consider what can be done on an economic and cultural basis.

It seems to me that, in terms of atomic warfare, we should henceforth have a small professional army of men who have voluntarily chosen this profession as an obligation to their country. But what then? What about the hundreds of thousands of young people who leave school every year, either from high school or college? Are they, from now on, to have no participation in contributing to the welfare of their country?

Far from it. As matters stand now, we draft young men into the service, train them until they are useful, and then let them go. This seems to me monstrous waste.

It is my own personal conviction that every young person should be given some basic military training that might, eventually, be useful to his country. This could easily be handled either in school or at college. Instead of calling up all young men for compulsory military service, why should it not be possible to offer a counterproposal along these lines:

If you do not want to spend two years of compulsory military training, here is an alternative which is open to you. Whether you finish college or high school, you may decide what country you would like to spend two years in. You will be given two years of basic training, either during school hours or in the evenings. If you want to go, say, to Africa or one of the underdeveloped countries, you will, from the age of fifteen or seventeen, be taught the language, the history, the geography, the economic background of the country. You will be prepared to take with you a skill, or be trained for the most crying need in many transition nations — to fill the civil service jobs that Russia is now so rapidly filling. Or, if you are preparing for a profession, you may make use of that. New industries are needed in these countries; there are technical needs in almost all areas. The economy has to be bolstered in countless ways. New techniques are required in agriculture. And nearly all of these countries need teachers badly.

For people in young nations, which are still in a transition stage and setting up governments, such a course of action on our part could be more valuable than a large standing army or economic aid, particularly when in the new country there is no one capable of administering the aid effectively. Obviously, like anything else, this new concept cannot be carried out well without preparation and the clear thinking out of economic problems, based on comprehensive knowledge of the conditions of the country.

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If we could achieve — and why not? — a cooperation between universities and government, we might be able to equip some of our young people to take up the slack in underdeveloped countries and to bring our skills and our attitudes and our principles to them as free men.

These two-year volunteers could be doctors, engineers, teachers, scientists, mechanics, and administrators. It is possible that a system of scholarships might be worked out, which would enable us to use some of our young talent and ability in helping young countries get established. In such cases, there should be some sort of guarantee, some sort of facilities put at the use of these people when they return to their own country, to enable them to get jobs at home. This service, of course, could be in lieu of military service, but, it seems to me, it would be far more valuable.

The present long period of basic military training, which removes our young men from civilian life for two years and then returns them to it, seems to me a wasteful and pointless procedure. Certainly it could be made possible for them to have much of this basic military training that is required while they are in school. But military service, in an atomic, specialized age, should, like other professions, be on a voluntary basis and become a chosen career.

I have said that the Russians have accomplished by compulsion what we must accomplish voluntarily. But there is one element of this Russian training that is of paramount importance. They have taught their young to feel that they are needed, that they are important to the welfare of their country. I think that one of the strongest qualities in every human being is a need to feel needed, to feel important. Too often, our own youngsters do not feel that they are really essential to their country, or to the scheme of things. We have not had enough imagination to show them how very much we need every one of them to make us the kind of country that we can be.

If many of our young people have lost the excitement of the early settlers, who had a country to explore and develop, it is because no one remembers to tell them that the world has never been so challenging, so exciting; the fields of adventure and new fields to conquer have never been so limitless. There is still unfinished business at home, but there is the most tremendous adventure in bringing the peoples of the world to an understanding of the American dream. In this attempt to understand and to give a new concept of the relationships of mankind, there is open to our youngsters an infinite field of exciting adventure, where the heart and the mind and the spirit can all be engaged.

Perhaps the older generation is often to blame with its cautious warning: “Take a job that will give you security, not adventure.” But I say to the young: “Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, and imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of a competence.”

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.

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.

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.