Best of The Atlantic

Can One Man Hold Syria Together?

2025-03-24T05:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Moises Saman

At the end of January, Ahmed al-Sharaa stepped up to a podium in the presidential palace in Damascus, dressed in the olive-drab uniform of a military commander. Seven weeks had passed since he stunned the world by conquering most of Syria in an 11-day blitzkrieg that put an end to the 55-year dynastic rule of Bashar al-Assad and his father before him, Hafez al-Assad. In the interim, Sharaa had presented what seemed like another kind of miracle to Syrians: forbearance. Sharaa is a former jihadist and the founder of the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, a figure who once inspired terror. But in speeches and interviews, he has modeled an extraordinary restraint, promising to forgo revenge and rebuild Syria in a moderate and inclusive way.

Before him sat an audience of rebel commanders who had appointed him Syria’s transitional president earlier in the day. Speaking in a soft, somber voice, Sharaa compared Damascus to a grieving mother, tacitly casting himself as the loyal son who would nurse her back to health.

“Syria’s priorities are, first, to fill the power vacuum legally,” he said, and to “maintain civil peace” by “preventing manifestations of revenge.”

Even as Sharaa spoke, members of Syria’s Alawite minority, the sect to which the Assad family belongs, were being abducted from their home or from the street, sometimes by gunmen who claimed to represent the new authorities. Days later, their bodies would turn up, many of them bearing signs of torture. Sharaa’s government condemned these murders and referred to them as “individual incidents” that had not been carried out by any militias under its control. In Jableh, a city in the Alawite heartland on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, a retired military officer warned me ominously in January that the violence could escalate if the killings continued. “There are lots of weapons,” he said. “It could be hellfire.”

That fire broke out in early March. Assad loyalists ambushed government security patrols in the coastal province of Latakia, killing dozens in what appears to have been a coordinated assault. Sharaa called for reinforcements, and soon thousands of gunmen were pouring into the region, including foreign jihadists who had helped capture the capital in December. The hunt for remnants of the Assad regime’s armed forces—they’d quickly melted back into the hills—devolved into a savage ethnic-cleansing operation, with gunmen going from house to house and murdering entire Alawite families. More than 1,000 civilians were killed.

Sharaa responded by reasserting his promise to be a leader for all Syrians regardless of sect. He decried the assault on the country’s unity and promised to punish the perpetrators, including “those closest to us.” He appointed a committee with Alawite members to investigate the killings within 30 days and provide recommendations. Still, the tenuous calm that had followed Syria’s liberation in December was decidedly over.

Moises Saman / Magnum for The Atlantic

Fighters from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham guard a compound on the outskirts of Damascus.

Syrians are faced with a peculiar predicament: They have little choice but to trust a former terrorist with one of the most daunting state-building jobs in history. The risks of violence and religious hatred that he and his allies embody are now more vivid than ever. But the fact remains that Sharaa is Syria’s most powerful figure and its best shot at unity. He proved the point just after the massacres on the coast in March by reaching a deal to extend his government’s sovereignty to the Kurdish northeast, the last major region to resist his authority.

The task before Sharaa is staggering in its scale. It starts with the reconstruction of a pulverized country that is destitute and still cut off from the world by the sanctions levied against the Assad regime. Sharaa must convince the West that he is a reliable partner, despite the jihadist noises that some of his subordinates still make. He must also complete the job of taming and disarming the country’s disparate rebel factions, some of them jihadists with fresh Syrian blood on their hands. If he fails, Syria could collapse into anarchy and become an open field for all kinds of terrorist groups, including the ISIS militants now lurking in its far corners. That would pose a threat well beyond the Middle East.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle of all is overcoming the past. For almost six decades, Syrians have been taught to hate and fear one another. The Assad regime recruited Syrians to spy on one another and built an archipelago of prisons where torture and extrajudicial murder were the norm. This was the cauldron that spilled over during Syria’s civil war, which began in 2011, led to the rise of the Islamic State, and left more than half a million dead and millions more living abroad as refugees.

The one thing holding Syria together now is Ahmed al-Sharaa, who has taken on the near-impossible job of teaching his people to trust one another again. It is an unlikely role for a former jihadist. But he has projected himself as a model of renewal and reconciliation, a violent man who has transformed into a figure of peace and forgiveness.

Just how many people accept this premise is impossible to say, but almost everyone I spoke with in Syria seemed fascinated by Sharaa’s demeanor, his language, his deftly ambiguous braiding of Islamist rhetoric with talk of civil rights and freedoms. One Christian priest amazed me by comparing Sharaa to Saint Paul—who, he reminded me, set out for Damascus as a zealot intending to punish the Christians, but had a change of heart on the way. Even some of those who hate Sharaa concede that no one else has the power and charisma to contain Syria’s furies. If Sharaa can’t save them, perhaps no one can.

Moises Saman / Magnum for The Atlantic

Christian residents attend a funeral in Maaloula, northeast of Damascus.

When Sharaa swept into Damascus on December 8, he embodied a fear that has existed in the bones of Syria’s minority Alawite population for hundreds of years. This kind of thing follows a script, a relic from the Middle Ages: The conqueror sacks the cities; the rivers run red with blood. But that is not what happened.

Sharaa’s forces captured Aleppo—the first major city in their campaign—in November, and I immediately began texting Christian friends there, worried about the sectarian reprisals everyone had long feared in the event of a rebel victory. Instead, they told me that the fighters of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the main rebel militia that Sharaa commanded, had treated them respectfully. “They have been instructed not to interfere or hassle the Christian communities,” one contact texted me. “Things are calm here, food is available.” And so it went, with Sharaa’s forces showing remarkable self-control as they continued southward and took the capital.

This narrative may help explain why Syrians sometimes talk about Sharaa as if he were a figure out of myth rather than a flesh-and-blood man. Most of the people I spoke with didn’t much register that he was born in Riyadh in 1982, the son of an oil engineer and a geography teacher, or that he grew up in an affluent neighborhood of Damascus, where he was known as a shy, studious boy.

What does matter to them is that at 19, after coming under the influence of some radical Islamists, Sharaa went off to Iraq just before the American invasion of 2003 to take part in the fight against the occupiers. There he joined what would become the local al-Qaeda branch. Lurid rumors still circulate about his time there: He was a master bomb maker; he had a knack for persuading young men to become suicide bombers. A Syrian journalist who knows Sharaa told me these rumors are false. But there is no doubt that he was a natural leader with a gift for adapting to changing circumstances. After a long stint in American prisons in Iraq, he rose quickly in the jihadist movement, adopting the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani (in deference to his family’s origins in Syria’s Jolan region, now occupied by Israel). He allied himself with the notorious leader of ISIS and then broke away just before that group’s fatal decision to declare a caliphate. A few years later, he disavowed any relationship with al-Qaeda, reorienting his goal to the liberation of Syria.

After riding triumphantly into Damascus, he transformed again. The Ahmed al-Sharaa who has emerged in news conferences and interviews is an entirely different figure from the stone-faced jihadist commander of a decade ago. Instead of his old combat gear, he now often wears tailored suits, English leather shoes, a Patek Philippe watch. His expression is empathetic and mild. He has talked about the importance of moving beyond a revolutionary mindset, which “can topple a regime, but cannot build a state.”

Moises Saman / Magnum for The Atlantic

A defaced mural on a school in Damascus once glorified Hafez and Bashar al-Assad.

In retrospect, Sharaa’s historic conquest of Syria—the main source of his current authority—was clearly a walkover. When his offensive began in late November, the military backers of the Assad regime—Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah—caught the world off guard by abandoning it. But Assad’s own soldiers had abandoned him first. The retired military officer I met in Jableh told me that after the fall of Aleppo, he called an active-duty general to ask why the army hadn’t fought harder. The answer he got was, “You expect me to defend this son of a bitch?”

Sharaa knew what many others did not: The Assad regime had been quietly disintegrating for years. The regime had reclaimed Aleppo and other major opposition-held areas with the help of Russian air strikes in late 2016. But in the years that followed, the country sank ever deeper into poverty, and the victory over the rebels came to seem hollow. “From 2018 on, people were no longer with Bashar,” a former regime official told me in January. Assad’s wife, Asma, had become a particularly hated figure. Rumors that she had started forest fires on the Syrian coast and confiscated houses there gave baseless but eloquent expression to the public’s anger.

Osama Shahoud, who started working in the presidential palace for Assad and his wife in 2018, told me that the Assads seemed oblivious to the crisis. In the final weeks, Asma put Shahoud in charge of organizing the presidential archive. “I used to think sometimes, In what world is she living?” he said.

[Graeme Wood: The end of a 13-year nightmare]

On December 7—the day before the rebels took the capital—Assad called his staff at the palace and asked them to make plans for him to give a speech, Shahoud told me. At midnight he called again, asking for a photographer to be ready. By that time, Shahoud and his supervisor were the only two people left in the building. They would later learn that Assad was lying to them: He was already on his way to a Russian plane that would fly him out of the country. But Shahoud and his colleague didn’t leave the palace until an officer called and told them to, at 2:30 in the morning.

They emerged into a palace compound that was usually a hive of armed guards and security men but was now entirely empty. As they drove into the city, they found a scene of chaos: soldiers tearing off their uniforms, gunfire, honking, people fleeing on foot. “A car stopped near us, with bearded rebel guys in camouflage,” Shahoud told me. “They asked us for directions to the airport,” where Assad was rumored to be catching a military flight.

On that first morning, many feared the worst. Firas Lutfi, a Franciscan priest in the old city of Damascus, told me that a group of 20-odd Shiite men came to his church and said, “You have to protect us.” Father Lutfi told me he could not resist telling his visitors that a few hours earlier, these men might have disdained him as an infidel agent of the West. But he reassured them and even accompanied them to a Shiite mosque, risking his life. “There was shooting everywhere,” Lutfi said. Later that day, he found the entire foreign diplomatic community sheltering in the marble lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel.

But over the following days, a message spread: The rebels were not taking revenge. Jolani, as Sharaa was still known, had told them to treat the entire population with respect and forbearance. Shahoud, who had fled to his parents’ home on the coast, returned to Damascus a week later. He was surprised to find that his apartment had not been looted. His favorite café (the one where I spoke with him) was open. He even went to the palace and asked about getting his old job back. The HTS men who interviewed him said they would consider his application.

Moises Saman / Magnum for The Atlantic

Family members of Abdullah al-Naem mourn his death days after his body was found in a field outside an Alawite neighborhood in Homs.

The Alawites did not take long to start changing their minds about Sharaa. When I drove to the Syrian coast in mid-January, dozens of people had already been abducted and murdered. In Jableh, an Assad loyalist took six HTS fighters hostage and made a video calling for an Alawite rebellion to stop the killings. Hours later he was dead, his small band of former regime fighters overpowered by an HTS force. Few guessed at the time that much worse was still in store.

The violence had started in Homs, a city about 50 miles east of the coast with a long history of sectarian animosity. I attended a condolence ceremony there in January for Abdullah al-Naem, a 24-year-old man who had been abducted and murdered days earlier. His uncle, an elderly poet and author named Abdelkarim al-Naem, was sitting in a small salon surrounded by friends and relatives, a cloth draped over his head as a sign of mourning. He signaled for me to sit next to him and recited the facts: Abdullah had been standing by his family’s house in the early evening when someone drove up and called him by name. He got in the car and never came home. His body was found two days later near a mosque, his hands cuffed behind him, his face butchered so badly that he was almost unrecognizable. “There were five bodies in total,” the uncle said. “All Alawites.”

Abdullah’s father looked broken. He wept and trembled so violently that his daughters came forward to hold him up, their faces bathed in tears. “Yesterday four more were abducted,” one of the sisters told me. “I’m afraid if we complain, we will all be killed.”

Sharaa had disbanded the entire Syrian police force in December. Bearded militia fighters now control the streets, another sister told me, but they are impossible to tell apart from lawless gunmen. No one knows anymore who represents the state. Written warrants and due process were meaningless even under Assad; now the killers are free to abduct people with impunity.

The people gathered at the al-Naem family home said they could not understand why Sharaa had not done anything to help them. Some described him as a baffling figure whose reassuring speeches have no connection to their daily reality. Others saw him as a jihadist hiding behind a civil mask, a man who wants to see them all wiped out.

“Our fear is that Jolani will emerge from Sharaa,” an Alawite activist in Homs told me, too frightened to be quoted by name. “We want Sharaa to control Jolani.”

The identity of the killers in Homs has remained a mystery, but the motive was visible to anyone with a cellphone: Demands for the murder of Alawites were appearing online all the time. Many Sunni Muslims hold the Alawite community responsible for their suffering under Assad, when hundreds of thousands died. In Latakia, posters have appeared with quotes from the medieval theologian Ibn Taymiyya, in which he labels Alawites the enemies of Islam. That is a coded call for revenge, and one that conjures up a bitter history for Alawites. Their sect has long been denounced as a heresy by hard-line Sunni Muslims, and despite their association with the Assad dynasty, most Alawites remain poor even today.

Syrian Christians and other minorities have not been targeted for murder as the Alawites have, but they are suspicious of Sharaa’s Islamist bent. Sharaa has been strategically vague about the role Islam will play in the new Syria, saying it will be left “up to the experts” who write the new constitution. His own role, he said in an interview with The Economist in January, is merely that of an executive: “If they approve it, my role is to enforce it; and if they do not approve it, my role is to enforce that as well.”

Sharaa surely seeks to avoid alienating either the many Islamists in his camp or the Western countries that hold the keys to Syria’s financial future. For this reason, perhaps, he has promised to respect Syria’s diversity but has carefully avoided using the word democracy, which some Islamists see as irreligious. When pressed on this, he offered a calibrated response, saying the word had various definitions. “If democracy means that the people decide who will rule them and who represents them in parliament,” he told The Economist, “then yes, Syria is going in this direction.”

Sharaa’s graceful dodges have left many Syrians anxiously guessing how they will fit into the new nation. “I have met Jolani; he speaks very well,” Father Lutfi told me. “He gives the impression of a quiet man, a smart man. But what is the complete program?”

Moises Saman / Magnum for The Atlantic

Latakia, Syria

When Sharaa rode southward in December to take the capital, he was followed by a loose cavalcade of fellow travelers from Idlib, the opposition holdout province in the northwest, many in their own vehicles. Other Syrians trickled in from neighboring countries over the following days and weeks. Many had been living double lives for years, hiding from the regime or the jihadists or God knows who else. Coming home forced them to confront again the scale of their losses: families, houses, entire communities.

One of those returnees was a 41-year-old man known as Rami al-Sayed. Like Sharaa, he had taken on a new identity when he joined the rebels and fled his Damascus home. For nine years, he lived in a rural camp in Idlib. No one there knew his real name, Dia al-Sayed. His parents were still in Damascus, and his brother was in Sednaya, the most notorious of the regime’s prisons; if Sayed had spoken out about his opposition to Assad, he might have endangered their lives. So he kept a low profile, working as a photographer under his new name and using the money he earned to pay bribes that helped get his brother released from prison (the family paid a total of $55,000, an extraordinary sum in Syria). He posted often on a new social-media account, but never showed his face or dropped any hints about his real identity. “I was living with two personalities, one dormant, one active,” he told me. “I had psychological problems.”

Sayed witnessed the rebel offensive at close range in December and nearly died in a regime air strike near Aleppo. Once back in Damascus, he began documenting the Assad regime’s crimes—mass graves, prison torture rooms—and one day, he found something revelatory.

In one of the regime’s security headquarters, he stumbled onto a section of the building dedicated to disguises for paid informers. The first room looked like a barbershop or beauty salon, he told me, with six chairs and multiple mirrors, each of them surrounded by cosmetic tools: beards, mustaches, wigs of various colors and lengths. He saw nail polish, makeup, adhesives. In an adjoining room, he found a large collection of costumes: tattered clothes for beggars, work uniforms for mechanics and electricians, Western-style clothes like those worn by tourists, and traditional Arab garments such as abayas and hijabs. Another room was full of equipment for duplicating keys; an entire suite was dedicated to surveillance and wiretapping.

Those chambers, Sayed told me, represented everything he wanted to escape—the culture of secrets and betrayals that the regime had forced on the Syrian public. No one knows how many civilians the regime recruited as informers, but the number is believed to be in the tens of thousands.

Abulaziz Ketaz / AFP / Getty

Ahmed al-Sharaa addresses a crowd at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.

Those who believe Sharaa’s promises—and many do—will tell you that his transformation was neither sudden nor magical. It took place in Idlib, where he forged a proto-state and learned valuable lessons about power, loyalty, and the dangers of extremism.

When Sharaa first arrived a decade ago, Idlib was a dangerous backwater patrolled by dozens of rebel groups, including jihadists. Some of these militias hated one another as much as they hated the Assad regime. A friend from Idlib told me he lived in fear of the Islamist groups, which tried to kill him twice for his outspoken secularism—but that he admired Sharaa, who took charge of the province and “slowly and wisely cleaned it out,” killing or banishing the most extreme elements. Sharaa also created a military academy to discipline his jihadist fighters into soldiers.

Sharaa built a police force and a semblance of law and order with an Islamist cast. The economy picked up, with help from the Turkish government, which acted as a patron of sorts for HTS, and some humanitarian groups from abroad. Several people who returned to Damascus with Sharaa’s forces in December told me they missed the creature comforts of Idlib: 24/7 electricity, running water, high-speed internet.

Sharaa also created a semblance of pluralism. In March 2024, protesters began holding rallies against HTS in Idlib. Some were jihadists who found HTS too liberal; others were secularists who wanted more freedom.

“I think they dealt with these movements with rationality and morals,” Khaldoun al-Mallah, a doctor who lived there at the time, told me. HTS created something called the Diwan al-Mazalim, or bureau of grievances, based on an old Islamic tradition. “I visited it; I saw how it worked,” Mallah said. The HTS officials would listen to complaints and in some cases respond with reforms.

Mallah, who is a novelist as well as a surgeon, has unusual credentials for assessing Islamist behavior. He memorized the Quran as a youth, and when he dared to talk back to ISIS zealots in 2016, they knocked out all his remaining teeth. (He’d already lost half of them to starvation when the Assad regime blockaded his Damascus neighborhood and his weight dropped to 88 pounds.)

Dareen Khalifa, an analyst for the International Crisis Group, first met Sharaa in 2019 and has conferred with him repeatedly since. She told me that the changes in his thinking during the Idlib years were gradual and incremental. “He’s a utilitarian, conservative Islamist who has spent the past decade reading the politics of the region,” she said. “He’s a pragmatist.”

Moises Saman / Magnum for The Atlantic

The courthouse in Homs, once a symbol of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, has resumed operations in a dramatically altered Syria.

Even if Sharaa’s moderation is entirely genuine, it is not yet clear that he has the capacity to govern a nation as large and diverse as Syria. Sharaa is now running the country with a skeleton crew of people he has known and trusted for years, including his brother Maher al-Sharaa, the acting minister of health. Some of these men never got much formal education. It’s a bit like putting the Boston Police Department in charge of the entire eastern half of the United States.

Among other things, this means the government sends out wildly mixed messages about its intentions. In January, Fady Kardous, a Syrian Canadian lawyer who returned to Damascus after the liberation, told me he went to HTS seeking a permit to hold workshops on writing a constitution. Within a single hour, he received two different responses: One official welcomed his secular ideas enthusiastically, and a second told him firmly that the Quran would be Syria’s only constitution.

In much of the country, the only signs of authority, apart from bands of bearded gunmen at checkpoints, are members of the HTS da’wah office, in charge of spreading Islam with songs and recitations. I came across them in the main square of Homs, where a very young man was reciting the Quran through a sound system so loud, you could hear it hundreds of yards away. When he was done, they began broadcasting nasheeds, or Islamic anthems, which are grimly familiar to Westerners as the soundtrack to jihadist execution videos. One of the ones I heard in Homs included the line “We will liberate Tartous; we will slaughter the majous.” (Islamists use the word majous to denigrate those they see as heretics.) I approached the da’wah contingent after they had packed up their loudspeakers, and they described their mission to Islamize the country, smiling sweetly. “There is no need for fear,” one of them said. “We will not be strict or loose, but in the middle.”

Sharaa’s administrators are stretched so thin that in many places, they can barely maintain the trappings of a state. In Homs, I met the jurist Sharaa had recently appointed to run the city’s courts. Hassan al-Aqraa was a stout man with a bushy black beard and a lumpy nose that looked as if it had been mangled by shrapnel. He seemed alert and organized, but his only qualification was a degree in Islamic law and some time running a Sharia court in Idlib for Jaish al-Fatah, a rebel militia.

Moises Saman / Magnum for The Atlantic

Hassan al-Aqraa, pictured here in his office, was recently appointed to run the courts in Homs.

When I asked about the murders of Alawites, he acknowledged the problem, but said he had to balance it against a flood of complaints from people seeking justice for relatives killed during the war years, and those clamoring for the return of property illegally taken by the Assad regime. He said he was at pains to distinguish genuine political prisoners from common criminals released just after the liberation.

Sharaa faces an equally difficult task with Syria’s educational system. In January, he appointed a man named Walid Kaboula as superintendent of schools in the Latakia governorate, where Alawites have long been a majority. A video soon emerged of Kaboula delivering a sermon in Idlib in 2023 in which he said, “I ask almighty God to cleanse our eyes by purifying our country of the filth of the Alawites, the Shiites, and the Jews.” An uproar ensued.

But when I went to see Kaboula in Latakia, before the video had emerged, he seemed consumed by more concrete demands. The schools lacked paper and ink. There was no fuel for heating, and the teachers were being paid the equivalent of $20 a month, a wage that led them to demand bribes from parents.

I visited a school whose classrooms were crowded, cold, and dim; its hallways dirty; its doors and walls cracked and faded. My spirits lifted a little when I heard children’s voices in a rear courtyard chanting “Syria!” in unison. This was new: Until the liberation, they had to chant their loyalty to Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez, “our eternal leader.”

Even more dismaying than the schools is the condition of Syria’s hospitals. Many were destroyed during the war, and in the decade since, many more have been forced to close for lack of money. At the Ibn Sina psychiatric hospital, just outside Damascus, I found patients clustered behind a barred door, like prisoners, shaking against the cold. The hospital’s pharmacy is out of medications, even though many of its patients suffer from schizophrenia and other serious conditions. A nurse handed cigarette packs to patients who reached eagerly through the metal bars to take them. The hallway reeked of urine and disinfectant. “Our food is all donations,” another nurse told me. She said that most of the employees had left because they had not been paid since the liberation: “Who will stay with crazy people with no salary?”

Moises Saman / Magnum for The Atlantic

At the Ibn Sina Psychiatric Hospital outside of Damascus, patients lack medicine, and a nurse says most employees have left because they haven’t been paid.

For a brief moment early this March, Sharaa’s authority appeared to founder. The massacres on the coast cast doubt on his promise to forswear revenge. Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a strongly worded statement saying that the United States “stands with Syria’s religious and ethnic minorities” and calling for the interim government to take action. I heard from Syrian friends that the country’s other powerful minority groups, the Kurds and Druze, would be less likely than ever to cooperate with the new government.

Within days, Sharaa proved them wrong. He signed a landmark deal to absorb the Kurdish-led autonomous region in Syria’s northeast. The Kurds, whose substantial militia was armed and trained by the U.S. military to do battle with ISIS, had posed a real threat to Sharaa’s power. Now they’d agreed to rejoin the nation. Celebratory gunfire hailed Sharaa as a unifying figure.

Sharaa appears to have won over the Kurds by granting them considerable regional autonomy, and the agreement is vague, with further negotiations to take place later this year. The Kurds control most of Syria’s oil fields and may yet prove unwilling to give Sharaa what he wants.

Sharaa has tried unsuccessfully to make a similar deal with the Druze, who have also remained largely independent of Damascus. When I met the paramount Druze leader, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hajri, in his stronghold in southern Syria, he seemed profoundly distrustful of Sharaa. The Druze, he told me, would not hand over their weapons until there is a “state of law” in Syria and a true national army.

Still, the Kurdish agreement may give Sharaa the political clout he needs to instill discipline in his own ranks. The military force that captured Syria in December, with Sharaa at its head, is a fairly loose coalition of rebel groups. At its core are HTS and two closely allied groups from which most of his appointees are drawn. They are in turn allied with a larger but much less organized collection of Turkish-funded militias that operate under the name Syrian National Army. Some of these appear to have been the main perpetrators of the massacres in March.

Transforming these men into reliable soldiers will not be easy. One morning in Damascus, I was passing through Umayyad Square when I came across two dozen armed men in pickup trucks, gearing up for a raid. They were an almost ludicrously motley crew. Some of them were dressed head-to-toe in black, their faces masked by balaclavas. Others wore varying shades of camouflage. Some had brand-new Interior Ministry patches on their upper arms, and a few bore the logo of the Syrian Salvation Government, the authority that Sharaa ran in Idlib. They said they were on their way to seize and destroy one of the Assad regime’s caches of illegal drugs, and when my driver asked if we could ride along, they cheerfully agreed.

They drove fast out of the city, and soon we turned off into a gated compound that had been the domain of Maher al-Assad, the former dictator’s brother and a notoriously brutal military commander. The soldiers led us to a warehouse full of Captagon, an addictive stimulant that became the Assad regime’s main source of revenue in its final years. As we watched, the soldiers loaded up the drugs, piled them high in a nearby ravine, and, after dousing them with gasoline, lit a huge bonfire, the black smoke pouring into a clear blue sky. One officer, a man named Badr Youssef, seemed a little defensive as he told me about his unit’s activities, which seemed to consist of following tips about new Captagon sites and racing off to burn the drugs.

Moises Saman / Magnum for The Atlantic

Fighters from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham raid a compound where the Assad regime reportedly produced and distributed illicit drugs, including Captagon, an addictive amphetamine.

“After two months, there will be a new army,” he said. That will require a lot more training and money. Many of the militias within the rebel coalition earned money from smuggling, or manning checkpoints, or levying unofficial border taxes. It will not be easy to persuade men who have lived as freewheeling rebels to accept a soldier’s wages.

Money may be the biggest challenge of all for Sharaa. His country has been economically isolated from the rest of the world for more than 60 years, thanks to its own xenophobic policies and a wall of sanctions levied against the Assad regime. The European Union removed some restrictions on Syrian banks in February, but the Trump administration seems unlikely to follow suit, especially after the March massacres. The Americans and Europeans remain wary of Sharaa’s Islamist bent, and are busy with other priorities anyway, including Ukraine and Gaza. Sharaa has lobbied in vain for the U.S. to remove HTS’s designation as a terrorist group, another obstacle to investment. Even his pleas for emergency aid have not yielded much. His primary political backer, Turkey, doesn’t have a lot of cash to spare. The Saudis and Qataris have promised to help but have delivered little so far.

At least no one in Syria has the money to foment another war. But if Sharaa can’t find a way to make the country economically viable, his coalition of former warriors could begin to fragment. People who have studied Syria for years suggested this scenario to me again and again: not another civil war but a slow collapse into anarchy, not so different from what happened in Libya, with the country dissolving into a patchwork of enclaves run by local militias.

Moises Saman / Magnum for The Atlantic

Yarmouk Camp, in Damascus

Before I left Damascus, I went one last time to see Dia al-Sayed, the restless photographer who had returned from Idlib. We met in a refugee camp in his old neighborhood of Yarmouk, which had been a dense cluster of high-rises that had housed more than 1 million people before the civil war. Now it’s a forest of blasted concrete that reeks of cinders and urine.

Sayed wanted to show me the building where he’d lived through the first years of the war, but when we got there, we found that only a pile of rubble remained. I glanced down and happened to see what appeared to be a shattered human femur in the dust. We walked onward, and Sayed kept up a compulsive patter, describing an entire world that had vanished: a car market, a hospital, and, finally, his childhood home. “There was the living room, there the bedroom, there the kitchen,” he said.

When the future came up, he grew morose. His life had been on hold during the years he’d spent in Idlib, and he didn’t know where he could find a new community. Starting over at the age of 41 in a shattered country felt impossible, even to someone who had survived years of war and near starvation. “For me, this is the hardest period,” he said.

The one thing that seemed to comfort Sayed was talking about Sharaa, whom he had met together with a delegation of Syrian photographers and reporters. He’d had mixed feelings going in. Sayed is not an Islamist, and has been critical of HTS. But he spoke about the meeting with a kind of rapture. Sharaa, he said, had answered questions thoughtfully, without the kind of prompting from advisers that some politicians rely on. He did not seem like a man from an Islamic background. “He said, I will build a new Syria; we want to turn the page. This is the time for Syrians to live.”

Sayed beamed as he described his encounter with the president. For a moment, he seemed to glimpse a new life and a new country. Then the moment passed, and he was the same divided, troubled man he had been before.

The Wild Trump Theory Making the Rounds on Wall Street

2025-03-24T07:00:00-04:00

To the untrained eye, Donald Trump’s tariff policy over the past two months has looked like an incoherent, inconsistent, self-destructive mess. But have you considered the possibility that it is, in fact, the first step of a carefully orchestrated master plan to revive American manufacturing, reduce the national debt, reconfigure the international-alliance system, and deliver the greatest geopolitical deal of the century?

That is the thrust of a new theory that has been gaining currency in Washington, on Wall Street, and in the financial press. The grand bargain that Trump is supposedly planning to strike has even been given a name: the Mar-a-Lago Accord.

The outline of the theory was first articulated not in a MAGA subreddit, but in a November paper by Stephen Miran, an economist who now chairs Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers. Many of the theory’s basic tenets have also been endorsed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. In its telling, Trump’s flurry of new trade barriers isn’t intended to achieve a particular strategic concession or short-term economic benefit. The goal is instead to force other countries to the table for a grand bargain. Claims that the tariffs are about fentanyl trafficking or illegal migration are simply a decoy, and their seemingly shambolic implementation is just a way to keep the rest of the world suspended in a state of shock and awe. Sure, there might be some bumps along the way, as consumers and businesses scramble to adjust to the new restrictions; the ensuing tumult might even trigger a global recession. But that’s by design. The more Trump can portray himself as a madman willing to tank the world economy, the more fearful and desperate other countries will become for any kind of reprieve.

[Rogé Karma: Trump’s most inexplicable decision yet]

Once foreign leaders are practically begging for an end to tariff-induced madness, Trump will summon them to his Florida compound, where he will outline a series of demands. First, America’s trading partners must engage in a coordinated effort to raise the value of their own currencies relative to the dollar, a move designed to make American goods cheaper to sell abroad. Countries that have large trade surpluses with the United States, such as Germany and China, may also be required to make major investments to build factories in the American heartland. Foreign central banks will agree to swap their existing holdings of U.S. debt with “century bonds” that don’t pay any interest for 100 years, in effect providing free financing to the United States. Countries that comply will be given relief from tariffs alongside a guarantee of military protection; countries that refuse will be faced with even steeper tariffs and no military support.

These hypothetical provisions tie together two of Trump’s longtime preoccupations: the scourge of the strong dollar and the free-riding of America’s allies. Because of high demand for the world’s global reserve currency, the U.S. dollar tends to be more expensive than it otherwise would be. This in turn makes American exports more expensive, putting American companies at a disadvantage. In Trump’s mind, this dynamic is wholly the result of foreign governments’ currency manipulation and is largely responsible for the decline of American industry. Trump also believes that those same governments refuse to pay their fair share in defense spending, forcing the U.S. to overspend to protect its allies—a project that has driven the national debt to unsustainable levels.

Trump’s grand bargain is designed to put an end to all of that. A weaker dollar will restore America’s manufacturing greatness. An influx of foreign investment will supercharge the U.S. economy. Interest-free financing will help tame the national debt and spread the responsibility of funding global security. Clearly drawn lines between America’s allies and its adversaries will usher in global stability. “Such an architecture would mark a shift in global markets as big as Bretton Woods or its end,” Miran writes, referencing the 1944 agreement that birthed the modern trade regime and the 1971 decision to move the world off the gold standard. The Mar-a-Lago Accord will enter the annals of history as the deal of the century.

[William J. Bernstein: No one wins a trade war]

This theory has somewhat implausibly gained adherents, if cautious ones, in respectable quarters. Multiple Wall Street firms have publicly briefed their clients about what the Mar-a-Lago Accord would mean for their investments, and dozens of credulous articles have been written about it. “What investors must grasp right now is that Trump’s recent actions are not ‘just’ capricious,” writes Gillian Tett, a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Financial Times. “His team’s vision has a potent internal logic. The current chaos is as much a feature as a bug.” The president’s critics “assume that Trump will huff and puff until reality exposes the emptiness of his economic rationale,” writes Yanis Varoufakis, the left-wing former finance minister of Greece, in an instance of international horseshoe theory. “They have not been paying attention: Trump’s tariff fixation is part of a global economic plan that is solid—albeit inherently risky.”

That’s one way of describing it. Another is that the Mar-a-Lago Accord theory is even more implausible than the more familiar theories of Trump’s actions that it seeks to replace. In its faith that Trump will one day dramatically unveil the product of his secret machinations, the Mar-a-Lago Accord theory has as much in common with QAnon as with economics.

To begin with, two of the principal goals are in direct conflict: Weakening the dollar would require foreign countries to sell off their large holdings of U.S. treasury bonds, but that sell-off would cause interest rates to rise, making the U.S. debt even more expensive to service. (This is where the magical “century bonds” supposedly come in: foreign countries lining up to give America enormous heaps of free money.) Even the core premise underlying the theory—that a weaker dollar is the key to reviving American manufacturing—is shaky at best. Almost every rich country, not just America, has seen a sharp manufacturing decline in recent decades, suggesting that the trend is about much more than the relative strength or weakness of a single currency. “It’s one thing if a plan makes sense in theory but not in practice,” Steven Kamin, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute and the former director of the Division of International Finance at the Federal Reserve, told me. “This one doesn’t even add up in theory.”

Perhaps the biggest hole in the Mar-a-Lago Accord narrative, however, was foreshadowed in Miran’s November paper. “There is a path by which the Trump Administration can reconfigure the global trading and financial systems to America’s benefit,” Miran writes, “but it is narrow, and will require careful planning, precise execution, and attention to steps to minimize adverse consequences.” If that’s true, then no one appears to have told the guy in charge.

Careful planning? Most of Trump’s tariff threats so far have been aimed at Canada and Mexico, which are outside the top-10 dollar-holding countries and therefore have little influence over its price, instead of countries such as Japan, India, and Switzerland, which hold lots of dollars. Precise execution? The Canada-Mexico tariffs themselves were announced, paused, unpaused, given sector-specific exemptions, then semi-re-paused in the span of six weeks, and Trump’s broader suite of tariff threats has been so haphazard that even key members of his own administration have been left completely unaware of what he will do next. Minimize adverse consequences? Far from grinding foreign countries into submission, the tariffs have prompted swift retaliation from allies and adversaries alike and produced a groundswell of anti-American nationalism even in a country as seemingly friendly as Canada.

In fact, Trump himself appears to have no interest in this plan. The president has never been shy about previewing the deals he wants to make (such as his promise to end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours) or floating strange ideas that no one asked for (such as turning Gaza into a resort), yet he has not so much as mentioned the idea of a Mar-A-Lago Accord in public. At times, he has even seemingly gone out of his way to undermine it. Earlier this year, when rumors circulated that the BRICS member countries might create a new currency for international trade—the kind of move that would weaken the dollar—Trump threatened them with 100 percent tariffs if they tried to replace “the mighty U.S. dollar.” Instead, Trump has said that on April 2—which he calls “Liberation Day”—he will impose “reciprocal tariffs” on individual countries to match the trade barriers they have set on the United States. That idea, too, conflicts with the supposed logic of the Mar-a-Lago Accord, because the stated goal isn’t a grand geopolitical bargain; it’s simply to pressure countries into dropping their tariffs on U.S. imports.

Trump’s apparent lack of interest in the master plan attributed to him is probably a good thing. If he did somehow pull off the Mar-a-Lago Accord, disaster could follow. “Success” would mean the destruction of the alliance system that has delivered unprecedented peace and prosperity since it was created after World War II. It would mean a period of international economic chaos as countries scramble to find alternatives to the dollar. It could even trigger a global financial crisis by undermining faith in the U.S. Treasury market, just as the devaluation of subprime loans undermined faith in the mortgage market in 2008, as Kamin and the economist Mark Sobel have written. “The dollar might indeed fall,” they observe, “but not in a way that Trump would like.”

For now, the Mar-a-Lago Accord remains less a genuine plan than a way for Trump’s backers to put a strategic spin on the president’s inchoate impulses. The attention it has received reflects the intense demand for some kind of coherent tariff rationale. But the wait for an explanation may be long.

Americans Are Living in Trump’s Dream

2025-03-24T07:00:00-04:00

In Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Lathe of Heaven, George Orr wakes to discover that he has the power to control reality through his dreams. Each night while he sleeps, the world changes in profound and unexpected ways. In the morning, Orr alone remembers reality as it was. Soon, Orr (named, one would assume, for George Orwell) finds himself under the care of a psychiatrist, who, realizing that Orr has these powers, tries to use them to turn the world into a utopia. This does not go well for the world.

It doesn’t go well because dreams have their own logic. They are nonlinear and to some degree nonsensical, and so directing oneself to dream of world peace may result in an alien invasion. Technically the dream has been fulfilled. Earthlings have stopped fighting with one another, but only because all of Earth is now ruled by an alien species. In this new dream reality, a world ruled by aliens becomes the only world you have ever known.

That is what the American experience is beginning to feel like in 2025: Not as if we are living in President Donald Trump’s reality, but as if we are living in his dream. As the showrunner and director of TV shows including Fargo, Legion, and the upcoming Alien: Earth, I think a lot about how audiences navigate the tension between horror and the absurd. Now we’re all in this liminal space of the president’s devising.

[Derek Thompson: The political fight of the century]

When the Trump administration pretends that the three branches of government are not and never have been equal, it creates a state of unreality in the minds of everyday Americans, similar to that of a dreamer in a dream. When the president and his proxies ignore both laws passed by Congress and Supreme Court decisions, they seek to replace the vérité of our shared history and experience with a fantasy, turning the stabilizing force of precedent into the quicksand of dream.

Only in a dream could the bicycle you’re riding become a pony. But if you tell the pony in the dream that he used to be a bicycle, he will deny it. I’ve always been a pony, he will say. And because this is a dream, you will accept that. But what if you’re awake and your government is doing things and saying things that seem nonsensical? What are you supposed to think when you search for the Gulf of Mexico on Google Maps and discover that it no longer exists? What happens if, as a next step, the history books are revised to erase all records of the name? In this new reality, that body of water has only ever been called the “Gulf of America.” You can imagine the argument that will happen years from now, where you swear there was once a Gulf of Mexico, but, for the life of you, you just can’t prove it.

Over the past two months, the rule of law in this country has been replaced by the rule of whim. The whim is not just that of one man but of a loose cabal of Cabinet members and “special advisers” who are combining revenge fantasies with small-government dreams, xenophobic visions, and cryptocurrency delusions. And so former national-security officials have had their security clearances revoked, government agencies have been fed into the wood chipper, “alien enemies” have been deported despite a judge’s court order, and a vaccine denier and pseudoscience champion has been confirmed as the secretary of Health and Human Services.

The only thing these dreamers have in common is that they want to control reality itself, to rewrite the past, present, and future simultaneously. Their actions create a maelstrom of daily news and revisionist history that the mind struggles to combine into a coherent reality. As a result, we are moving from a waking state to a dream state, where logic is flexible and anything can happen.

The movie Inception introduced us to a world in which corporate spies infiltrate the dreams of CEOs. Once inside, they steal secrets or, in the central action of the film, seek to implant an idea that the dreamer will, upon waking, turn into a reality. Inception, as they call this process, is considered almost impossible because of how difficult it is to make someone believe that an outside idea is their own. In this framework, however, the logic of the waking world is distinctly different from that of the dream. It assumes a waking world in which things make sense. Where facts have meaning. Not a world whose richest man brandishes a chain saw onstage and hires teenagers nicknamed “Big Balls” to gut the federal government, while the president of the United States reposts an AI video of the Gaza Strip as a luxury resort destination.

Inception did not envision a world in which only dream logic exists even when the dreamer is awake; a world where the federal government is trying to both shut down the Department of Education and weaponize it in order to remake how and what children in this country are taught. A world in which the president signs an executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act against immigrants from Venezuela, even though the country is not at war with Venezuela. In the administration’s dream logic, the executive order itself creates a preexisting state of war, allowing it to issue the order. The logic is circular. Without being at war, the administration cannot use the act to justify the deportations. Or whatever. The bicycle is a pony. The logic is dream logic.

[Read: Trump is breaking the fourth wall]

In the past century, authors in Russia, China, and other countries with totalitarian regimes have written about how absurd life becomes under autocracy. But until you experience it yourself, you can’t fully comprehend the illogic of it—or, I should say, the dream logic of it. It is a feeling as much as an idea, a surreal sense of unreality, from which the dreamer wills himself to wake up.

As the Austrian-born psychologist Bruno Bettelheim wrote about life under fascism: “Thus has tyranny robbed men of their sleep and pursued them even in their dreams.”

In this warped reality, rather than dreading sleep, we begin to dread waking up, because every day there is a new dream, one that, like George Orr’s, threatens to fracture our reality yet again. Our job over the next four years is to remember what life was like before the dream so that one day we can make the world a logical place again.

An ‘Impossible’ Disease Outbreak in the Alps

2025-03-23T08:30:00-04:00

Photographs by Elliott Verdier

In March 2009, after a long night on duty at the hospital, Emmeline Lagrange took a deep breath and prepared to place a devastating phone call. Lagrange, a neurologist, had diagnosed a 42-year-old woman with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. The woman lived in a small village in the French Alps, an hour and a half drive away from Lagrange’s office in Grenoble Alpes University Hospital. Because ALS is rare, Lagrange expected that the patient’s general practitioner, Valerie Foucault, had never seen a case before.

Snow fell outside Lagrange’s window as she got ready to describe how ALS inevitably paralyzes and kills its victims. But to her surprise, as soon as she shared the diagnosis, Foucault responded, “I know this disease very well, because she is the fourth in my village.”

ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, occurs in roughly two to three people out of every 100,000 in Europe. (The rate is slightly higher in the United States.) But every so often, hot spots emerge. Elevated ALS rates have been observed around a lagoon in France, surrounding a lake in New Hampshire, within a single apartment building in Montreal, and on the eastern—but not western—flank of Italy’s Mount Etna. Such patterns have confounded scientists, who have spent 150 years searching for what causes the disease. Much of the recent research has focused on the genetics of ALS, but clusters provocatively suggest that environmental factors have a leading role. And each new cluster offers scientists a rare chance to clarify what those environmental influences may be—if they can study it fast enough. Many clusters fade away as mysteriously as they once appeared.

After the call, Lagrange was uneasy; she had a hunch about how much work lay ahead of her. For the next decade, she and a team of scientists investigated the cluster in the Alps, which eventually grew to include 16 people—a total 10 times higher than the area’s small population should have produced. Even during that first call, when Lagrange knew about only four cases of ALS, she felt dazed by the implications, and by Foucault’s desperate plea for help. If something in the village was behind the disturbing numbers, Foucault had no idea what it was. “She was really upset,” Lagrange remembers. “She said to me, ‘This is impossible; you must stop this.’”

For some people, the trouble begins in the throat. As their muscles waste, swallowing liquids becomes a strenuous activity. Others may first notice difficulty moving an arm or a leg. “Every day, we see that they lose something,” Foucault said of her patients. “You lose a finger, or you lose your laugh.” Eventually, enough motor neurons in the brain or spinal cord die that people simply cannot breathe. Lou Gehrig died two years after his diagnosis, when he was just 37. Stephen Hawking, an anomaly, lived with ALS until he was 76.

Five to 10 percent of people with ALS have a family member with the disease. In the 2000s, advancements in DNA sequencing led to a swell of genetic research that found that about two-thirds of those familial cases are connected to a handful of genetic mutations. But only one in 10 cases of ALS in which patients have no family history of the disease can be connected to genetic abnormalities. “What we have to then explain is how, in the absence of genetic mutation, you get to the same destination,” Neil Schneider, the director of Columbia’s Eleanor and Lou Gehrig ALS Center, told me.

Scientists have come up with several hypotheses for how ALS develops, each more complicated and harder to study than genetics alone. One suggests that ALS is caused by a combination of genetic disposition and environmental exposures throughout a lifetime. Another suggests that the disease develops after one person receives six cumulative “hits,” which can be genetic mutations, exposures to toxins, and perhaps even lifestyle factors such as smoking.

Elliott Verdier for The Atlantic
Emmeline Lagrange stands in her office at Grenoble University Hospital.

Each time a cluster appears, researchers have tried to pin down the exact environmental hazards, professions, and activities that might be linked to it. After World War II, a neurodegenerative disease that looked just like ALS—though some patients also showed features of Parkinson’s and dementia—surged in Guam, predominantly among the native Chamorro people. “Imagine walking into a village where 25 percent of the people are dying from ALS,” says Paul Alan Cox, an ethnobotanist who studied the outbreak. “It was like an Agatha Christie novel: Who’s the murderer?”

Early research tried to pin the deaths on an unlikely culprit: the highly toxic cycad plant and its seeds, which locals ground into flour to make tortillas. Cox and his colleagues hypothesize that human cells mistake a compound called BMAA found in the plant for another amino acid, leading to misfolded proteins in the brain. Peter Spencer, an environmental neuroscientist at Oregon Health & Science University, has argued for a different explanation: The body converts cycasin, a compound also found in the plant’s seeds, into a toxic chemical that can cause DNA damage and, eventually, neurodegeneration. Each theory faced its own criticism, and a consensus was never reached—except for perhaps an overarching tacit agreement that the environment was somehow integral to the story. By the end of the 20th century, the Guam cluster had all but vanished.

Genetic mutations are precise; the world is messy. This is partly why ALS research still focuses on genes, Evelyn Talbott, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Pittsburgh, told me. It’s also why clusters, muddled as they might be, are so valuable: They give scientists the chance to find what’s lurking in the mess.

Montchavin was a mining town until 1886, when the mine closed, leaving the village largely deserted. In 1973, it was connected to a larger network of winter-tourism destinations in the Alps. On a sunny December afternoon, the week before ski season officially began, I met Foucault outside of the church in the center of Bellentre, a town of 900 whose borders include Montchavin and neighboring villages. The mountains loomed over us, not yet capped with much snow, as she greeted me in a puffer coat. She led me briskly up a steep hill, chatting in a mix of French and English, until we arrived at her home, which she occasionally uses as an office to see patients.

Foucault made us a pot of black tea, then set down a notepad of scrawled diagnoses and death dates on the table beside her. The first person Foucault knew with ALS lived a stone’s throw from where we were sitting, in a house down the hill; he had been diagnosed in 1991. The second case was a ski instructor, Daniel, who lived in Montchavin and had a chalet near Les Coches, a ski village five minutes up a switchback road by car. Daniel, whose family requested that I use only his first name for medical privacy, had told Foucault in 2000 that he was having trouble speaking, so she’d sent him to a larynx specialist. When the specialist found nothing wrong with his throat, Daniel was referred to a neurologist in Grenoble, who diagnosed him with ALS.

In 2005, after Foucault heard that the husband of one of her general-medicine patients had been diagnosed with ALS, she called her father, a heart doctor in Normandy. “It’s not normal,” he told her. A few years later, she saw one of her patients, the 42-year-old woman, in the village center with her arm hanging limp from her body. Even before the woman received her ALS diagnosis from Lagrange, Foucault suspected the worst.

Elliott Verdier for The Atlantic
Valerie Foucault stands in her backyard in Bellentre.

After her call with Foucault, Lagrange assembled a team of neurologists and collaborators from the French government to search for an environmental spark that might have set off the cluster in Montchavin. They tested for heavy metals in the drinking water, toxins in the soil, and pollutants in the air. When the village was turned into a ski destination in the 1970s, builders had repurposed wood from old train cars to build garden beds—so the team checked the environment for creosote, a chemical used in the manufacture of those train cars. They screened for compounds from an artificial snow used in the ’80s. They checked gardens, wells, and even the brain of one deceased ALS patient. Years passed, and nothing significant was found.

The day after I had tea with Foucault, I visited Lagrange at the hospital. Her voice faltered as she ruffled through the piles of papers from their investigation on her desk. She’d cared for most of Montchavin’s ALS patients from their diagnosis to death. She worked in Montchavin on the weekends and took her family vacations there. “I felt responsible for them,” she said. “People were telling me, This is genetic. They all live together; they must be cousins. I knew it was not so.” Lagrange’s team had tested the genomes of 12 people in the Montchavin cluster, and none had mutations that were associated with ALS. Nor did any of the patients have parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents with ALS.

But their lives did overlap in other meaningful ways. The first Montchavin cases worked together as ski instructors and had chalets in a wooded patch of land called L’Orgère, up the mountain. Many of them hiked together; others simply enjoyed spending time in nature. “We thought they must have something in common, something that they would eat or drink,” Lagrange told me, sitting in her desk chair in a white lab coat and thick brown-framed glasses. She handed me a daunting packet: a questionnaire she’d developed for the ALS patients, their families, and hundreds of people without the disease who lived in the area. The survey, which took about three hours to complete, asked about lifestyle, eating habits, hobbies, jobs, everywhere they had lived, and more. It revealed that the ALS patients consistently ate three foods that the controls didn’t: game, dandelion greens, and wild mushrooms.

Lagrange’s team didn’t immediately suspect the mushrooms. But Spencer, the environmental neuroscientist in Oregon, did after he saw one of Lagrange’s colleagues present on the Montchavin cluster at a 2017 conference. Having researched the role of the cycad seed in the Guam cluster, Spencer knew that some mushrooms contain toxins that can powerfully affect the nervous system.

Spencer joined the research group, and in 2018, he accompanied Lagrange to Montchavin to distribute more surveys and conduct in-person interviews about the victims’ and other locals’ diets— the pair had particular interest in people’s mushroom consumption. From the responses, the team learned that the ALS patients were not the only mushroom foragers in town, but they shared an affinity for a particular species that local interviewees without ALS said they never touched: the false morel.

Elliott Verdier for The Atlantic
The streets of Montchavin are quiet before ski season begins.

A false morel looks like a brain that has been left out in the sun. Its cap is a shriveled mass of brown folds, darker than the caramel hue of the true morel. One species, Gyromitra esculenta, grew around Montchavin and was especially abundant near the ski chalets in spring if enough snow had fallen the preceding winter. France has a rich foraging culture, and the false morel was just one of many species mushroom enthusiasts in Montchavin might pick up to sauté with butter and herbs. The false morel contains gyromitrin, a toxin that sickens some number of foragers around the world every year; half of the ALS victims in Montchavin reported a time when they had acute mushroom poisoning. And according to Spencer, the human body may also metabolize gyromitrin into a compound that, over time, might lead to similar DNA damage as cycad seeds.

No one can yet say that the false morel caused ALS in Montchavin; Lagrange plans to test the mushroom or its toxin in animal models to help establish whether it leads to neurodegeneration. Nevertheless, Spencer feels that the connection between Montchavin and Guam is profound—that the cluster in the Alps is another indication that environmental triggers can be strongly associated with neurodegenerative disease.

Once you start looking, the sheer variety of potential environmental catalysts for ALS becomes overwhelming: pesticides, heavy metals, air pollution, bodies of water with cyanobacteria blooms. Military service is associated with higher ALS risk, as is being a professional football player, a painter, a farmer, or a mechanic. Because of how wide-ranging these findings are, some researchers doubt the utility of environmental research for people with ALS. Maybe the causes are too varied to add up to a meaningful story about ALS, and each leads to clusters in a different way. Or perhaps, Jeffrey Rothstein, a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine neurologist, told me, a cluster means nothing; it’s simply a rare statistical aberration. “Patients are always looking for some reason why they have such a terrible disease,” he said. “There’s been plenty of blips like this over time in ALS, and each one has its own little thought of what’s causing it, and they’ve all gone nowhere.”

“A lot of people look askew to the idea that there are clusters,” Eva Feldman, a neurologist at the University of Michigan, told me. But she sees evidence of clusters all the time in her practice. Once, she saw three women with ALS who’d grown up within blocks of one another in the Grand Rapids area. Her research has shown an association between ALS and organic pollutants, particularly pesticides. Feldman thinks that the importance and scope of environmental triggers for ALS can be pinpointed only by investigating clusters more thoroughly. To start, she told me, doctors should be required to disclose every case of ALS to state officials. Feldman is also planning what she says is the first-ever prospective study on ALS in the U.S., following 4,000 healthy production workers in Michigan. She believes that clusters have significance and that because doctors can’t do much to stop ALS once it starts, “we would be naive to throw out any new ideas” about how to prevent it from occurring in the first place.

Even for the people whose lives were upended by the Montchavin cluster, the idea that mushrooms could be linked to such suffering can be difficult to accept. Those who ate them knew the mushrooms could cause unpleasant side effects, but they believed that cooking them removed most of the danger. When I asked Claude Houbart, whose father, Gilles, died in 2019, about his mushroom habits, she called her mother and put her on speakerphone. Claude’s mother said she knew Gilles ate false morels, but she never cooked them for herself or the family—simply because she didn’t want to risk upset stomachs.

Daniel, Foucault’s second ALS patient, also kept his foraging hobby out of the home. He never ate false morels in front of his wife, Brigitte, though she knew he picked wild mushrooms with friends. “I am a bit reluctant when it comes to mushrooms; I would have never cooked them,” Brigitte told me, sitting at her kitchen table in Montchavin, surrounded by photos of Daniel and their now-adult children. After Daniel died in 2008, Brigitte and her family spread his ashes in the woods where he’d spent so much of his time. “He didn’t want a tomb like everyone else,” she said. “When we walk in the forest, we think about him.”

Elliott Verdier for The Atlantic
Brigitte sits in her home in Montchavin.

Hervé Fino, a retired vacation-company manager who has lived in the Alps for 41 years, learned to forage in Montchavin. Bundled in a plaid overcoat inside a wood-paneled rental chalet, Fino recalled local foragers telling him that false morels were edible as long as they were well cooked, but he never ate the mushrooms himself, fearing their digestive effects. Fino told me about one of his friends who regularly gathered false morels, and once made himself a false-morel omelet when his wife was out of town. “He was sick for two days, very ill,” Fino said. Later, that same friend was diagnosed with ALS. He died by suicide.

In a gruff voice, Fino speculated about what besides the mushroom might have caused the disease. His friend fell into an icy-cold brook two days before he was diagnosed—“Perhaps the shock triggered the disease?” Another woman owned a failing restaurant next to the cable car—maybe the stress had something to do with it. He shrugged his shoulders. Those events didn’t seem right either, not momentous enough to so dramatically alter someone’s fate. Maybe no single explanation ever will. Claude told me she understands why people are skeptical. “Eating a mushroom and then dying in that way?” she said. “Come on.”

Before leaving Montchavin, I walked through L’Orgère, the area where the first ALS patients had their ski cabins. The windows were dark, and below, the village of Montchavin was mostly empty before the tourist season began. Clumps of snow started to fall, hopefully enough to satisfy the skiers. Recent winters in the French Alps have been warm and dry—not the right conditions for false morels. “There are no more Gyromitra in Montchavin,” Lagrange said. In her view, Montchavin has joined the ranks of ALS clusters come and gone; no one has been diagnosed there since 2019, and it’s been longer since Lagrange’s team has turned up a fresh false-morel specimen.

Even so, on my walk, I couldn’t help but scan for mushrooms, nor could I shake the feeling that my surroundings were not as benign as I’d once believed. Fino said he still keeps an eye out for false morels too. He would never pluck them from the ground to bring home, and yet, he hasn’t stopped looking. One day in 2023, after he parked his car near a ski lift, his gaze caught on a lumpy spot near his feet. Two dark-brown mushrooms stuck out of the damp soil.

Elliott Verdier for The Atlantic
Hervé Fino walks in the snow near Montchavin.

Putting a Splintered Life Back Together

2025-03-24T11:00:00-04:00

In 1940, just before his death, the theorist Walter Benjamin conjured a famous metaphor for watching the past: the “Angel of History.” The angel was inspired by a print, Angelus Novus, by his friend Paul Klee, which features a great and beneficent being with his wings spread wide. Whereas we humans experience life as a chain of chronological events, the angel, Benjamin writes, faces the past and watches a tower of debris growing taller and taller, burying the victims of history. However much the angel wants to “make whole what is smashed,” he is helpless against the wind propelling him into the future.

The author who writes after great catastrophe frequently assumes the angel’s position: Many historical novels float above history, bearing witness but drawing simple lessons, or casting dogmatic judgment, from the safe vantage of the present. In these books, the crises of earlier eras are held at a distance. By charting the course from then to now, these authors find comfort in the fact that time passes on, leaving the past safely in the past.

Yet for those surrounded by the debris, history remains a living thing. Over the course of her life, the Japanese writer Yuko Tsushima, who was born just after World War II and died in 2016, witnessed firsthand how a nation and a society can transform completely without ever losing the scars of its past. In Wildcat Dome, published in 2013 and newly translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, she narrates more than half a century of her country’s history, from wartime defeat and American occupation to the political and social upheavals of reconstruction. But rather than holding herself at a remove, Tsushima imbues these traumatic and transformative decades with a vivid and disturbing vitality, and uncovers in the process an unsettled zone where nothing is made whole, and not even the dead can rest.

Read: The careful craft of writing female subjectivity

Wildcat Dome is told across the span of Japan’s postwar recovery, when it reinvented itself as an American ally and a cultural juggernaut. With the loss of its colonial empire, it became a junior partner in globalization, shipping its artistic and material products around the world. A common narrative holds that the cataclysm of Japanese defeat became a site of reinvention, allowing a peaceful democracy to rise from the ashes. Yet Tsushima begins her novel with a disaster that reopens the damage of the past for both its main character and his nation. It’s the spring of 2011, and an elderly man named Mitch has returned to Tokyo, the city of his childhood, after years spent abroad. Mitch’s life has been an accumulation of catastrophes both big and small. The son of a Japanese woman likely raped by an American GI, he is abandoned after World War II at an orphanage full of children with similar parentage. Growing up in the immediate postwar decades, these mixed-race children are a palpable reminder to their neighbors of Japan’s losses and occupation, a legacy as radioactive as atomic fallout.

At a young age, Mitch was crushed by a portable heater, leaving him with a lifelong limp that set him apart from friends and lovers, if only in his own eyes. Around him, Japan is rising and remaking itself. Yet Mitch cannot overcome his childhood agonies or mature with his peers or his country. What draws him back to Japan after decades abroad is another atomic catastrophe—the meltdown of reactors at Fukushima following 2011’s earthquake and tsunami. “For years,” Tsushima writes, “Mitch had denounced Japan, wishing this hateful country would disappear from the face of the earth.” Now that seems finally to be happening.

The greatest disaster of Mitch’s life is more intimate in scale. One day, a few years after his adoption by a local woman, Mitch is playing hide and seek with his adopted brother, Kazu, and their friend Yonko, when the three children witness the drowning of a young girl named Miki-chan. The murderer is Tabo, a disturbing, reclusive boy from the neighborhood surrounding the orphanage, and his crime is frightening and mysterious; none of the children seem to understand Tabo’s motive, not even the boy himself. Perhaps it was an accident, the children reason. Maybe he was provoked by the color of the girl’s orange skirt? Yet rumors soon begin to swirl, pinning the “accident” on this trio—these mixed-race children, viewed with suspicion, and their playmate. Mitch and Kazu’s beloved Mama protects them by shipping them off to a boarding school in England.

The children grow up, move forward with their lives, take on new names and countries. Yet nothing is fully within their control, as if they have been marked by that formative blight. Every decade or so, no matter how far apart Mitch, Kazu, and Yonko have drifted, they are drawn back to one another by some news story involving the murder of a woman who was wearing something orange. For these children of misfortune, the disparate crimes come to feel like “the same event repeating itself over and over, till it made you sick,” Mitch thinks. They are stuck, all “living alone at the bottom of this pond” with Miki-chan, unable either to drown or to surface. Unlike Benjamin’s angel, they cannot float above the events.

Read: The cult classic that captures the stress of social alienation

Tsushima knew what it was like to grow up on the outskirts of society. She was born in 1947, the daughter of a schoolteacher and the famous novelist Osamu Dazai. Shortly after her first birthday, Dazai and another woman killed themselves together, and Tsushima was raised, alone, by her mother. Her novels tell many stories of women struggling to rear children in the face of absent fathers and oppressive social obligations. As a single mother raised by a single mother, Tsushima knew that such experiences could be grueling. Yet in some of her works, including her 1980 novel, Woman Running in the Mountains, this break with convention comes to feel liberatory, like the promise of something wild and deep that allows the body to survive the convolutions of history.

Wildcat Dome is considerably less optimistic. The novel was first published two years after the Fukushima disaster and near the end of Tsushima’s life. In it, the author works to expand her own experiences of fatherlessness and social isolation into a story of her country’s predicament. She deploys an array of shifting perspectives, with chapters switching among time periods and points of view—first Mitch, then Kazu, then Yonko, even Tabo’s poor and infirm mother. For these characters, life is a series of strange and unpleasant transformations over which they have little control. In Wildcat Dome, objects speak, memories take on physical form, and metamorphoses abound. The beautiful blue sky pulls Kazu off a tree branch. After his death, he speaks to Mitch in the form of an irradiated beetle. Tabo turns, in his mother’s eyes, into a cold and unfeeling stone. History is a curse, and experience a prophecy.

Tsushima writes in a fluid, ambiguous present tense that muddles the distance between past and present, self and other. The reader is always right there with the character, suspended in a static moment of thought or trapped within their recursive stream of consciousness, circling revelation without ever arriving there. As one character remarks, “The end of the world is here, now.” And no matter how many times the world shuffles away from ruin, there is an absence of forward movement: Though Japan has emerged from the war apparently whole and strong, Fukushima is an eerie reminder of how close devastation really is. For Mitch, Kazu, and Yonko, things always feel like that, a permanent apocalypse they cannot escape.

In this frankly astonishing novel, to survive affliction is to remain forever unmoored. Mitch attempts to reinvent himself, in and out of Japan, with little success. His wounds cannot be healed, only endured. “Though it will be a miserable life,” someone commands him, “you must live it anyway.” Like Benjamin’s angel, he will be buffeted along by time, made to face backwards toward the steadily accruing wreckage of the world. Yet in telling his story, Tsushima does what the angel cannot, calling out to awaken the dead.

The Judiciary’s Last Stand

2025-03-24T07:17:44-04:00

President Donald Trump is at war with the rule of law in the United States. His assault is already the most hostile and sustained political attack on America’s legal and law-enforcement institutions since the Civil War. It is a war he declared before he began his first term, and one he pursued with tenacity once in office. It even had its own call to arms on January 6, 2021, or so many of his supporters believed. Exiled temporarily from the White House, Trump spent four years vowing to continue this war if he were reelected, and he has made good on that promise, targeting the foundations of almost every institution of law and justice within his reach as the chief executive.

As the former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, a well-known conservative jurist, said recently, Trump has “launched a full-frontal assault on the Constitution, the rule of law, our system of justice, and the entire legal profession.”

Trump has made great progress in this offensive in only a matter of weeks. Day by day, he has shown Americans what unraveling the rule of law actually looks like: He has issued trollish and almost certainly unconstitutional executive orders, unleashed verbal fusillades against jurists (as well as various law-enforcement officials and prosecutors), and forced government lawyers to stand tongue-tied as they struggled to answer simple questions from judges. He has sent his minions, including the vice president of the United States, out in public to argue that a president has the right to ignore court orders, making an eventual showdown with the federal bench practically inevitable.

Worse, Trump supporters have stepped up physical threats and various other forms of harassment against judges and their families. As The New York Times editorialized this weekend, the president is encouraging “a campaign of menace” against jurists, leading his allies to “then try to dehumanize the judges with whom they disagree and make them fear for their safety.”

[From the May 2025 issue: America is watching the rise of a dual state]

Trump has used this authoritarian approach, undergirded by his legendary shamelessness, to break through every line of constitutional and moral defense—impeachment, elections, even the humiliation of arrest and conviction—that would otherwise restrain a rogue president (or, for that matter, any ordinary American felon). The center is not holding, and the flanks are collapsing. Congress is fleeing the field. The voters, many of whom long ago became inured to warnings about Trump’s contempt for the law, may be anxious about his behavior, but millions are sticking with him.

The president and his lieutenants still face one more set of defenses obstructing their march: the courts. If he can overcome the federal judicial system, then America’s worst modern constitutional confrontation will be over and Trump will be its victor.

Trump’s intentions in this barrage against the rule of law are clear, especially after he decided to go to the Great Hall of the Department of Justice earlier this month and shout them triumphantly from behind the presidential seal. He celebrated his pardons of insurrectionists and seditionists. He gloated about stripping loyal citizens of their security clearances. He reeled through the names of Americans whom he called “thugs” and “bad people, really bad people,” who “tried to turn America into a corrupt Communist and Third World country.” He unloaded a series of stories and accusations, several of them exaggerations or outright lies. Trump, for example, referred to the “Biden crime family” and said that Joe Biden was not prosecuted because he was mentally incompetent; he claimed that the previous administration intentionally “imported” murderers and other criminals to America; he referred (yet again) to the duly convicted January 6 insurrectionists as “hostages” and claimed that the FBI had sent SWAT teams in after harmless grandmothers.

But the president, who railed on for an hour, wasn’t content merely to criticize his opponents and tear up their clearance paperwork. Instead, he left no doubt in his belief that the machinery of government is now his to be used against his enemies:

We will expel the rogue actors and corrupt forces from our government. We will expose and very much expose their egregious crimes and severe misconduct of which was levels you’ve never seen anything like it. It’s going to be legendary. It’s going to also be legendary for the people that are able to seek it out and bring justice. We will restore the scales of justice in America, and we will ensure that such abuses never happen again in our country.

This was not a policy statement or even a political speech. It was Trump’s plan of attack against the rights of his fellow Americans and the rule of law itself.

Trump telegraphed these moves far in advance. The president has long loathed any institution that threatens him or his interests, and since entering politics, he has engaged in constant public harangues against the judicial system and individual judges. These propagandistic assaults are a way of acclimating the public to the idea that judges are robed political saboteurs and their decisions and orders are little more than partisan blather—and that therefore their rulings may be ignored or defied at will.

To understand the breadth of Trump’s attack, consider the groundwork he and his supporters have laid down for years that have led to this perilous moment.

In the lead-up to the 2016 elections, for example, Trump claimed that the federal judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was presiding over a civil case involving the now-defunct Trump University, could not be impartial because he was of Mexican extraction. (Curiel was born in Indiana, but to Trump, apparently, Mexican heritage means “Mexican.”) Trump, however, wasn’t merely venting some of his habitual racism. The president was a poor businessman, but he is an excellent marketer, and he was expertly selling the idea to the American public that judges, particularly those from minority communities, cannot possibly be impartial, especially when the defendant is one Donald J. Trump.

Years later, Trump would do the same to Judge Juan Merchan, who was overseeing Trump’s felony trial in New York City. This time, however, Trump expanded his attacks to the judge’s family, claiming in 2024 that Merchan’s daughter was a “Rabid Trump Hater” and therefore Merchan was clearly biased. One of Trump’s former White House lawyers, Ty Cobb, explained Trump’s aims in going after Merchan and his family. “It’s clearly strategic,” he told Politico. “His attacks are designed around his traditional approach to delegitimizing the proceedings.” (After Trump’s speech at DOJ’s Great Hall, Cobb said the president “danced on the grave” of the department’s independence.)

Trump has also sought to impugn entire courts, particularly the venues where he’s lost cases. He has a special animus for the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most liberal federal courts. When he lost a case there in 2018 over his immigration policies, Trump reportedly turned to Kirstjen Nielsen, then his secretary of Homeland Security, and said, referring to the court: “Let’s just cancel it.” According to a book by the journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, he told Nielsen to write a bill, if necessary, to “get rid of the fucking judges” and send it off to the then-GOP-controlled Congress.

Last week, Trump set his sights on another federal judge, James Boasberg. When Boasberg ordered a halt to some of the administration’s deportation flights, Trump called him “a Radical Left Lunatic”—one of his favorite insults—and “a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama.” (Although Obama elevated Boasberg to the federal district court, the judge was first appointed to the D.C. superior court by George W. Bush.) Trump soon called for Boasberg to be impeached, prompting an unusual public comment from Chief Justice John Roberts, who said that “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”

When asked about Roberts’s rebuke, Trump responded with the non sequitur that Roberts did not mention Trump by name, as if that rendered the chief justice’s concerns irrelevant.

In his first term, Trump had to content himself with barking at judges and adjusting to the losses in court. But he and the people around him seem to have learned important lessons from their previous years in the White House. Within days of the election, the incoming administration began planning to seize the institutions capable of exercising legal and physical force against citizens—the Russians call them “the power ministries”—such as the Defense Department, the national-intelligence agencies, the Justice Department, and the FBI.

Presidents, of course, have every right to their Cabinet nominees, but Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI Director Kash Patel are not typical appointees. All of them, despite some careful circumlocutions and evasions during their confirmation hearings, obviously see their first duty as loyalty to Trump, not to the Constitution.

[Read: The ultimate Trump story]

The FBI is an especially worrisome case. Kash Patel, the new director, is not only a conspiracy theorist but, as my colleague Elaina Plott Calabro wrote last year, even some of his colleagues in Trump’s orbit consider him dangerous precisely because he appears to have no core political beliefs beyond pleasing the president. Patel, of course, affirmed at his hearing that he would preserve the independence of the FBI. Instead, as The Wall Street Journal reported, Patel immediately “cleared out all civil-service staff in the leadership suites and replaced them with political associates,” and relocated 1,500 FBI employees out of Washington without money to pay for their moves. He also promised to appoint a deputy from the FBI’s experienced ranks; within days of this vow, however, he welcomed as his new deputy director Dan Bongino, a rant-prone podcaster (and fellow conspiracy theorist) with no FBI experience. Patel called Bongino a “cop’s cop.”

Bondi, for her part, is presiding over an ongoing purge of the Justice Department. Many of these firings, a senior career Justice Department official told NBC News anonymously because of fear of retaliation, “seem designed to make room for someone who is a political loyalist, someone who will do the White House’s bidding, in an effort to reshape the department into something that it has never been before.” She has also engaged in openly partisan appearances in the media, continuing the tradition among Trump appointees of thumbing their noses at the Hatch Act, the law that prohibits government employees from using their office for political activity.

And as if to underscore the administration’s militant, almost martial sense of defiance, a Trump adviser recently raised the previously unthinkable possibility that Trump could just defy the courts and then dare them to see who has more power. Trump’s leverage, the unnamed adviser told Rolling Stone, rests in his command of the armed forces: “Are they”—meaning federal judges—“going to come and arrest him?”

The dismantling of America’s constitutional government is under way. The United States in 2025 no longer has an independently led national law-enforcement organization. It no longer has a Department of Justice whose leadership is following the mission to serve the American nation and its Constitution. The immense power of the Defense Department is in the hands of a talk-show culture warrior who intends to purge the officer corps of generals and admirals suspected of ideological unreliability. The Congress is dominated by men and women who either agree with this authoritarian project or are too scared to oppose it. The judges now stand alone—but their courage may not be enough to stop Trump.

America Is Done Pretending About Meat

2025-03-24T08:00:00-04:00

Making America healthy again, it seems, starts with a double cheeseburger and fries. Earlier this month, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited a Steak ’n Shake in Florida and shared a meal with Fox News’s Sean Hannity. The setting was no accident: Kennedy has praised the fast-food chain for switching its cooking oil from seed oil, which he falsely claims causes illness, to beef tallow. “People are raving about these french fries,” Kennedy said after eating one, before commending other restaurants that fry with beef tallow: Popeyes, Buffalo Wild Wings, Outback Steakhouse.

To put it another way, if you order fries at Steak ’n Shake, cauliflower wings at Buffalo Wild Wings, or the Bloomin’ Onion at Outback, your food will be cooked in cow fat. For more than a decade, cutting down on meat and other animal products has been idealized as a healthier, more ethical way to eat. Guidelines such as “Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants” may have disproportionately appealed to liberals in big cities, but the meat backlash has been unavoidable across the United States. The Obama administration passed a law to limit meat in school lunches; more recently, meat alternatives such as Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat have flooded grocery-store shelves, and fast-food giants are even serving them up in burgers and nuggets. It all heralded a future that seemed more tempeh than tomahawk steak: “Could this be the beginning of the end of meat?” wrote The New York Times in 2022.

Now the goal of eating less meat has lost its appeal. A convergence of cultural and nutritional shifts, supercharged by the return of the noted hamburger-lover President Donald Trump, has thrust meat back to the center of the American plate. It’s not just MAGA bros and MAHA moms who resist plant-based eating. A wide swath of the U.S. seems to be sending a clear message: Nobody should feel bad about eating meat.

Many people are relieved to hear it. Despite all of the attention on why people should eat less meat—climate change, health, animal welfare—Americans have kept consuming more and more of it. From 2014 to 2024, annual per capita meat consumption rose by nearly 28 pounds, the equivalent of roughly 100 chicken breasts. One way to make sense of this “meat paradox,” as the ethicist Peter Singer branded it in The Atlantic in 2023, is that there is a misalignment between how people want to eat and the way they actually do. The thought of suffering cows releasing methane bombs into the atmosphere pains me, but I love a medium-rare porterhouse.

[Read: The meat paradox]

Indeed, lots of people who self-identify as plant-eaters don’t really eat that way, Glynn Tonsor, a professor of agricultural economics at Kansas State University, told me. He runs the national Monthly Meat Demand Monitor, which asks survey respondents to self-declare their diets and then report what they ate the day before. “The number that tell me they’re vegan or vegetarian—the true number is about half that,” Tonsor said. In some years, the misalignment is even more glaring: In 2023, 7.9 percent of people who filled out the survey self-declared as vegan or vegetarian, but only 1.8 percent actually ate that way consistently. (The survey is partly funded by the meat industry.)

That dissonance is a function of how eating less meat has been wrapped in a conscientious and moral sheen. As I wrote last year, labeling items as “plant-based” has become so symbolic of health and goodness that it has been used to sell virtually anything, edible or not. The campaign against meat hasn’t just disappeared, of course. Go to any major grocery store, and you’ll still see plenty of shrink-wrapped Impossible Burgers.

But of late, the food landscape is starting to resemble a meatopia. Sweetgreen, a chain that rose to prominence by serving salads that appealed to aspirationally plant-based eaters, now runs ads spotlighting its “protein plates” piled with steak, chicken, and salmon. Dried meat sticks—think Slim Jims—are the fastest-growing snack category nationwide. Fast-food chains including McDonald’s and Carl’s Jr. have ditched their alternative-meat options.

[Read: Meat trimmings are a health food now]

There are a lot of different reasons for this meat renaissance: America has become obsessed with consuming more protein, a fad boosted by the growing numbers of people on GLP-1 drugs seeking out protein-rich diets. Plant-based meat once seemed to be on a path to becoming a dinner staple, but its popularity is in free fall due to concerns about its cost, taste, and healthfulness.

The embrace of meat isn’t just about food, but also about what meat represents: tradition, strength, dominance, muscles—values championed by the right. (There’s a reason that “soy boy” is a common pejorative to describe insufficiently masculine liberals.) Conservatives have long sought to turn meat into a front in the culture wars, even suggesting that Democrats “want to take away your hamburgers.” Last year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis issued a preemptive ban on the sale of lab-grown meat in his state, describing it as part of “the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish, or bugs.”

Trump’s reelection has bolstered the cause. The rise of meat-eating is part of the larger wave of right-wing influence on American culture. “Woke”—DEI, caring about the climate, eating plant-based—is out. Tradition, at least one specific version of it, is in. Last week, The New Yorker announced the “Revenge of the American Steakhouse,” which, to some, signals a “restoration of the proper order.” Efforts on the right to reestablish conventional gender norms create an environment for gendered eating habits to thrive. Men have long eaten more meat than women; half the nation’s beef is consumed by just 12 percent of the population, most of them men. Research shows that men who subscribe to traditional gender norms tend to eat more beef and chicken.

[Read: Americans stopped cooking with tallow for a reason]

Some of the most vocal support for the meat-forward lifestyle emanates from the so-called manosphere, a right-leaning internet subculture best known for men promoting different ways to become manlier. It is popular among the young men who voted for Trump in large numbers. Meat’s ascendance “coincides with the rise of the masculine influencers,” Timothy Caulfield, a professor at the University of Alberta who studies male health trends, told me. Many of the manosphere’s main characters frame meat-eating as an antidote to the left’s “attack on masculinity,” a recurring right-wing talking point.

Tucker Carlson’s documentary The End of Men calls on men to eat organ meat and raw eggs to boost their testosterone levels. (Little scientific evidence exists to support this.) Last year, Elon Musk appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and suggested that the climate impacts of industrial meat are overblown: “You can totally eat as much meat as you want,” he said. Both Musk and Rogan have promoted the all-meat “carnivore diet.” Other influencers encourage more extreme behaviors, such as eating raw beef testicles for a testosterone boost.

All of this is happening amid confusion about what it even means to eat well. The prevailing view among the medical and scientific community has not changed: Reducing consumption of red and processed meats is better for human and planetary health. But as pro-meat figures such as Kennedy and Trump challenge those views—not to mention the institutions that support them—the problems with meat-eating no longer seem as clear-cut.

[Read: The Jordan Peterson all-meat diet]

Perhaps the decline of plant-based eating was inevitable. Awareness of meat-eating’s many consequences first entered the public consciousness in the late 2000s, after the release of documentaries such as Food, Inc. and books such as The Omnivore’s Dilemma. But the backlash to meat may have taken off for a different reason, Bill Winders, a sociologist of food at Georgia Tech, told me: The Great Recession made meat more expensive. Nearly two decades later, the idea of a meatless future seems quaint. Knowing the reasons you should eat less meat goes only so far. I feel guilty eating steak tartare, but it’s still my favorite dish. The commonality of this experience can feel like a free pass. As Singer, the ethicist, puts it: “Most people can easily continue doing something they believe is wrong as long as they have plenty of company.” Now no one has to keep up the charade.

Americans Are Buying an Escape Plan

2025-03-22T09:00:00-04:00

Updated at 3:05 pm E.T. on March 22, 2025

Even as Donald Trump advertises his hard-line approach to border crossers, he is actively soliciting one particular group of immigrants: rich ones. In February, Trump proposed that America start offering a U.S. “gold card” for $5 million. “Green-card privileges, plus” is how the president described it: “It’s going to be a route to citizenship, and wealthy people will be coming into our country,” he said. Trump predicted that the United States could sell a million of these cards, enough to eliminate the national debt. Even Russian oligarchs could be eligible, he said—though (thanks to economic sanctions) “they’re not quite as wealthy as they used to be.”

Trump seemed to relish the scheme’s shock value. But these days, buying a visa or passport is not controversial: About half of the world’s nations already offer visas, permanent residence, or even full citizenship for sums ranging from the low five to low seven figures. The U.S. itself grants up to 10,000 residency permits a year under its EB-5 investor visa program, which Congress has approved until 2027 and costs applicants about $1 million.

But if Trump expects a flood of takers, he has it backwards: The international rich aren’t trying to come here, so much as Americans are trying to get out. U.S. citizens now represent the majority of clients looking for an exit, through foreign citizenship, permanent residence, or a visa that allows them to live abroad.

I have been writing about the world of millionaire migration for years. The market depends on a cottage industry of advisers, financial planners, and lawyers who help their clients navigate the paperwork and requirements, and I spoke with some of these experts in the weeks following Trump’s announcement. All seemed to think that only a handful of people would take Trump’s bait—mainly because there simply aren’t enough people rich enough to shell out $5 million with no return on their investment.

Dominic Volek, an executive at the consulting firm Henley & Partners, told me that his clients typically “look at investing 10 percent of their net worth on citizenship or residence.” To consider the gold card, they’d need “a liquid net worth of $50 million, and there are only around 300,000 people globally who have that kind of money.” Even then, gold cards will succeed only “if America’s relaxed about the source of funds,” another lawyer, Sam Bayat, who works with a lot of clients in the Middle East, told me. Shady Russian oligarchs, in other words, might be the target demographic, rather than an edge case.

The far bigger story is the reverse phenomenon: Thousands of Americans a year are applying to visa programs abroad, primarily in Europe—Portugal in particular—and the Caribbean, where island nations offer citizenship outright, sometimes upon purchase of property. An American doctor or dentist considering a second home in storm-addled Florida might now buy a $325,000 condo in St. Kitts and Nevis instead and, in the bargain, qualify for the island nation’s citizenship in as little as three months. A nature lover might look to Costa Rica, which grants residence (and a fast track to citizenship) for $150,000. Vanuatu will effectively sell you a passport for $130,000; Dominica’s costs $200,000.

[Alana Semuels: Should Congress let wealthy foreigners buy green cards?]

Historically, people have looked to buy a different citizenship because they live under undemocratic political systems, or because their passport makes it difficult to travel. (Afghans, for instance, can go to just six countries without a visa; Spaniards can go to 133.) Eric Major, the CEO of the immigration-advising firm Latitude, began his career helping rich Hong Kongers make exit plans to relocate to Canada or the United Kingdom ahead of the territory’s scheduled handover to China. “The smart capital, the top guys in Hong Kong in the 1990s, were all saying, ‘We gotta hedge,’” Major told me, referring to fears that China would crack down on business and political freedoms. Major went on to work mainly with clients from China, Russia, India, and the Middle East.

Today most of Major’s clients are American. Volek’s firm has more clients from America than from the next four biggest feeder countries (Pakistan, Nigeria, India, and the U.K.) combined. Fifteen years ago, the firm did not see much point in opening a U.S. office. This year, it’s launching its tenth. “I never would have imagined my No. 1 source market would become America,” Major told me. “But now the top brass of America is hedging.”

Hedging is the operative word: Few of these Americans are actually moving abroad at the moment. It’s about having options, Volek said: “It’s purely the realization that, ‘I’m wealthy and diversified in terms of assets, bonds, and equities, so why on earth would I have one country of citizenship and residence? It makes no sense.’”

The great American hedge began during the coronavirus pandemic. Overnight, U.S. citizens—even the entitled ultrarich—found themselves barred from entering other countries. “I’m worth $20, $50 million and I have a private jet and a home in Europe, and you’re telling me I can’t enter?” Volek recalls. That wasn’t something Americans “had contemplated before.”

The emergency passed, and international travel picked back up. But the sense of uncertainty has persisted—compounded by a spate of uniquely American tragedies: school shootings, high-profile displays of systemic racism, and the storming of the Capitol on January 6. Climate events such as hurricanes and wildfires have shaken homeowners, inflation has spooked investors, and the Trump-Biden-Trump whiplash has made politics feel more unpredictable than ever.

Now, as Elon Musk attacks the federal government’s social and regulatory programs, the U.S. is beginning to take on the contours of a nation without a clear future. “It’s the same push factors as other countries,” Major explained. “People don’t trust the government; they’re worried about the quality of the air; they want to educate their kids.”

It’s hard to exaggerate how meaningful this shift has been for the mobility industry. I’ve been talking to people like Volek and Major since 2012, and I published the first book on the market for passports in 2015. I would always run into the occasional American looking to expatriate, but they tended to be eccentrics, such as a man known as “Bitcoin Jesus” and subscribers to newsletters such as Nomad Capitalist. These Americans weren’t worried about gun violence and political stability. They were hard-core libertarians who wanted to avoid taxes at all costs. Many would go on to renounce their U.S. citizenship after acquiring their foreign one.

As the people looking to move have changed, so too has the mobility industry, which has far more options now and is far more accessible and socially acceptable. “The overall trend is toward more legitimacy and people realizing it’s totally normal” to pay to emigrate, Kristin Surak, a sociologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the author of The Golden Passport, told me.

[Jonathan Lemire: Elon Musk is president]

Americans without a ton of money are finding ways to access new passports by re-hyphenating themselves. Many are casting around for long-lost relatives through which they can claim Italian, Irish, Austrian, or German citizenship. Tracking down birth certificates from the old country and persuading embassies to accept them as proof of citizenship used to be logistically complicated; now there are consultants to help with that too. European countries have grown accustomed to American applicants who want to expand their options and lower the cost of college, health care, and child care.

According to one estimate, about 40 percent of U.S. citizens might be eligible for European passports through their ancestors. Last year, Ireland received 31,825 passport applications from U.S. citizens, Austria naturalized 1,914 (virtually all as reparations for Nazi-era persecutions), and more than 6,100 Americans applied for British citizenship, with a noticeable uptick beginning in November.

“Americans have gotten very pragmatic,” says Audra DeFalco, who specializes in “citizenship by descent” at Latitude. “They’re retirees, people whose grandma was Polish and they really loved their grandma; some want to study abroad without having student loans.”

More and more, DeFalco says, the Americans with an exit plan are just people who have the time and resources to make one.

When I spoke with Charlie, a businessman from the Midwest who is in the process of obtaining a Portuguese “golden visa,” I was struck by what I saw in the background of his video. He wasn’t Zooming from a sterile condo in a glass tower in some anonymous global capital, or a fancy hotel room on his way someplace else. He was sitting in the cozy-looking living room of the suburban house he’d lived in for years.

“We have four kids and two grandsons, who all live very close, and we spend an inordinate amount of time with our family,” Charlie said. “It’s the central focus of our lives.” (He asked to go by a pseudonym in case speaking publicly would interfere with his visa application.)

Charlie’s done well enough as an entrepreneur to afford a pricey Plan B, but he isn’t a jet-setting oligarch or a paranoid crypto bro. He’s a Kamala Harris voter (“obviously”), he’s Jewish (“we go to synagogue on occasion”), and he loves living in America, where he’s part of a tight-knit community. Still, he’s almost at the end of the year-long process to purchase a Portuguese residence permit, which begins with investing about $540,000 in the country.

What pushed him to look outside the United States was his growing fear for his safety. Charlie told me that he feels threatened by both the Nazi-saluting right and the Gaza-protesting left. “I have enough knowledge of history to know and to believe that people who say ‘It could never happen here’ are daydreaming,” he said.

(I asked him why he hadn’t simply taken Israeli citizenship, which is available to all Jews, would cost him next to nothing, and was quite literally created for this purpose. “I don’t know that my wife particularly savored the idea of living there,” he said. “It wasn’t in her mind an ideal place.”)

Lately, though, his fears have gone way beyond anti-Semitism “to being scared of where our country is going and whether the forces of good will eventually win out over the bullshit that’s tearing down the government,” he said. He sees an escape hatch as common sense, not traitorous. He told me that he’d “even inspired” a few of his friends to look into it.

[Krishnadev Calamur: The EU wants to clamp down on the super rich’s visa of choice]

Mina Hsiao and Chris Carter are a couple nearing retirement age. They recently returned to San Diego after spending most of the past 16 years in Shanghai, but within months, they had applied for a visa to live in Sarawak, on the Malaysian island of Borneo. The permit lasts 10 years and costs about $33,500 a person. Applicants must also have health insurance and be able to financially support themselves.

The couple had been looking forward to their homecoming, but it quickly became clear that the U.S. they’d left was not the same country that was waiting for them. Hsiao felt unsafe as an Asian woman, particularly when she went out wearing a mask. Carter’s family was divided along political lines. Even their church felt like a minefield. “We were hopeful until November,” Carter recalled. “But after I saw how many people voted for Trump, after the first term, after January 6—and people of faith in the church embracing Christian nationalism …”

“The Christianity that somehow has morphed in this country is not our expression of faith,” Hsiao interjected. “We thought we were coming back to a psychological home, not just the comfort of language but also ideals—security, opportunity for all. And that wasn’t the case.”

How long do they envision staying abroad? “At least three years, nine months, and two weeks,” Carter joked. “But things will not go back to pre-Trump,” Hsiao added. “That’s our concern.”

Kate, who works at a pharmaceutical company in Boston, is establishing European residence through the same visa program as Charlie (and she asked me to use a pseudonym for the same reason). She moved to the United States from Ukraine in 2000 after her family struggled to adjust to post-Soviet turmoil, and got American citizenship soon after.

She is in her 50s now, and started thinking about relocating a few years ago, when she had some extra cash after downsizing her home. “I thought maybe Cape Cod would be a good investment,” she said, “but then my cousin, a lawyer in Manhattan, said, ‘Don’t do Cape Cod. Buy something in Europe and get a citizenship.”

Then, in January, she saw a message on social media about federal workers being asked “to stay loyal or resign,” Kate told me. She “completely freaked out” and sent it to her family, commenting: “Perestroika in one week.” She’s now in the process of applying for permanent residence in Portugal.

“I have my job in America, so there’s no rush to move,” Kate said. “But I fear civil war.” She told me she felt lucky not to be in Ukraine, “but seeing how polarized America has become—it makes me wonder about the way forward.”

Whether these Americans will really leave remains to be seen. Charlie said his greatest hope is that he won’t have to. But he finds comfort in knowing that he has the option of escape if the worst ever comes to pass, and in the idea that if he does have to go, he won’t be alone. He said he tells his family members: “If it gets so bad that we feel the obligation to leave the country, we believe it’ll be bad enough that they’ll want to go as well.”

A quote in this article originally misstated the number of people who have a liquid net worth of $50 million.

Three Very Different Ways to Live Honestly

2025-03-24T07:30:00-04:00

Abigail Hawkes earnestly dreams of disappearing. The teenage protagonist of Emily St. James’s new novel, Woodworking, can’t wait for the day when she can slip out of Mitchell, South Dakota, and make it to a big city like Chicago; once there, she imagines, she’ll shed her past and start over, and no one will know she’s transgender. Abigail has seen this vanishing act referred to as “woodworking” on the internet—picking up stakes, passing for cis, and fading into the woodwork. For now, Abigail is a pariah in her town and her school, facing discrimination both inane (locker vandalism, unsympathetic teachers) and terrifying (physical threats, a targeted bathroom ban). She’s been kicked out of her family home and is living with her sister. It was “a whole thing,” she says in a moment of profound understatement—a situation “so ridiculous” that she laughed in the face of her violent father. Yet beneath her adolescent bravado, she’s so unhappy that she’s willing to jettison her entire life thus far to get away from prejudice.

The anonymous woman who brought up woodworking online was warning readers like Abigail against it: “It destroys you. You can’t pretend you’re not who you are.” Abigail isn’t moved by this argument. She is open about being trans only because she’s been forced to be; she sees her public transition simply as a necessary first step toward the life she wants. But, as she quickly learns, no one gets to just come out once and be done with the whole mess. Many LGBTQ people face a lifetime of moments that require them to weigh honesty against safety—and transgender Americans are especially vulnerable in 2025, under an administration that has declared they don’t exist and demanded their disappearance from the military, schools, bathrooms, and public life writ large. Woodworking is set in the fall of 2016, just before Donald Trump’s first presidential victory, but its concerns are extremely of the moment. Yet the novel doesn’t feel prescriptive, because St. James explores momentous personal decisions dramatically rather than dogmatically, making clear through a variety of perspectives that there are no obvious choices—only trade-offs.

Queer life is often described with the binary metaphor of the closet: You’re in or you’re out, your identity hidden or declared. But that’s insufficient for many people, including Abigail. She’s already sacrificed security, rejecting her parents’ offer to take her back in as long as she pretends to be their son again. She won’t renounce her gender—but she’s all right with the idea of keeping her history secret. In Woodworking, St. James demolishes the simplistic closet concept, revealing lives that are marked by many transitions, and that pass through any number of gradations within the continuum of showing up, hiding, slipping under the radar, or openly demanding respect. Abigail will soon learn she’s not the only trans woman in Mitchell—and that the people around her will each decide on a different path.

The first person we meet is not Abigail but an English teacher who supervises Abigail’s time in detention (for calling her classmates “fascist cunts”). Everyone knows this teacher as the jovial, mustached Mr. Skyberg, whose first name appears in the novel only as a blank gray box. But the teacher quickly reveals something to the student that no one else on Earth knows: Skyberg is trans, too, and her chosen name is Erica. Erica is struggling: She’s divorced, in large part because she emotionally retreated from her ex-wife, Constance. Her only maybe-friend is her community-theater buddy Brooke Daniels, a member of Mitchell’s most powerful conservative Christian family. Erica believes it’s too late to transition and live as a woman, and definitely too late to woodwork. From her moderately safe hiding place, she feels as though she sees the world through a thick film (an effect St. James amplifies by narrating Erica’s chapters in the third person and Abigail’s in the first). Erica’s old name sounds “enveloped in fog” whenever someone says it aloud to her.

[Adam Serwer: The attack on trans rights won’t end there]

And yet she shares herself with Abigail because the thrill of being seen is intoxicating. Abigail claims to be put off by Erica’s sudden confession, but she is also genuinely glad to no longer be alone. The two form a strange, cross-generational friendship. The teacher has more life experience, but Abigail becomes, at 17, her mentor and mother figure, bringing Erica to a trans support group and complimenting the nail polish she’s been brave enough to wear in public. They discuss Erica’s work on a local production of Our Town that stars Constance, which is drawing the exes together. They talk about Abigail’s romance with Caleb Daniels, Brooke’s son, who initially hides their relationship out of shame and fear.

But by the middle of the novel, an unresolvable tension arises between Abigail and Erica. The former feels unsupported by her friend, left to weather transphobia on her own when someone else could be standing beside her. And Erica deeply envies Abigail’s open future, when her own feels so foreclosed. She is terrified that someone’s going to figure out her secret, and maintaining it requires more than silence: She knows that insufficiently masculine behavior courts rumors and harassment, and she has to actively pretend to be a different person to protect her relationships, her job, and her safety. Eventually, she panics, overwhelmed by the hazards ahead of her. “She had given it a try, and it had gone poorly, and now she was going to give up,” Erica thinks, looking at herself in the mirror. “There was power in knowing the obvious and choosing to ignore it.” She slams the door of self-knowledge behind her, losing Abigail’s friendship as she does.

St. James makes both choices seem reasonable, but irreconcilable—only to break the stalemate with a late revelation. Another woman in their town is also trans, but she woodworked years ago, and made decisions very different from either of theirs. She’s wedged so deeply into her conservative milieu that she now supports anti-trans candidates and causes. She has traded authenticity for stability, given up her old family for a new one, and made an uneasy peace with her own hypocrisy. Where another novel might conclude with either her downfall or her redemption, Woodworking chooses neither. Instead, the woman is left to live with the life she’s made, just as she has every day for decades.

Despite the precariousness of coming out, only one path really feels viable for the two main characters. Abigail realizes she can’t leave other trans women behind: “We’re all we’ve got,” she recognizes. “We have to take care of each other.” And Erica decides she must find a way to live, not just survive. One crucial scene midway through the story illustrates the pressure that’s been building up inside her and the benefit of letting it out. After deciding to deny her transness (which in turn alienates Abigail), Erica is miserable and exhausted. Remembering other people in her life who were punished for stepping outside gendered boxes, she weeps at the ways she’s contorted herself in order to stay locked inside her own. Then she sees Constance, and in a desperate flash, the words tumble out of her.

[Read: How gay culture helped everyone come out of the closet]

Why only then, years after they first met, after college, after their marriage and divorce, does Erica share her secret? Because she is done running, St. James suggests; because she wants to be seen the way Abigail is seen, at least by the person who’s come closest to knowing her. After that moment, Erica isn’t “out”—she’ll still need to tell her boss, her family, and her neighbors, or else let the rumor mill do its work. She’ll want to change her hair, her clothes, her grooming; she’ll have to deal with the guesses and questions of strangers; people will likely misgender her or misunderstand her, and they have the potential to do much worse. But during this quick, unrehearsed grasp at connection, readers see clearly why the rewards of that recognition are far higher than its cost.

Comedy’s Most Erudite Buffoon

2025-03-22T08:00:00-04:00

Conan O’Brien’s peak moment of triumph at the Academy Awards earlier this month followed one of his spicier jokes. “Anora uses the F-word 479 times,” the late-night veteran and first-time Oscar host said of the eventual Best Picture winner. “That’s three more than the record set by Karla Sofía Gascón’s publicist.” It was a roundabout way to reference the elephant in the room—the disgraced Emilia Pérez star’s social-media troubles. As the attendees gasped with shock and delight, O’Brien performed a jaunty variation on his “string dance,” a lanky jog-in-place motion accompanied by a resplendent grin; I smiled in recognition of the looseness. “I’m having fun,” he declared right afterward, and he meant it: He sealed his command of the show at that instant, and was successful enough that he’s already been hired to host the ceremony again next year.

The most notable part of this gag was not the joke itself, a standard late-night quip delivered with appropriate piquancy. What made it stand out was that O’Brien sold the line the same way he always has, since he began his on-screen television career in 1993: with joyful abandon. And his Oscars flex felt especially meaningful ahead of another upcoming career highlight: O’Brien is this year’s recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor (an honor handed to a comedy luminary every year by the Kennedy Center, at least for now). But he’s not receiving the award as a gold watch to recognize his semiretirement from television. No, 32 years after the premiere of his first talk show, and four after his last one drew to a close, O’Brien has become the rare performer whose success relies upon his consistency—even if that means he’s still whipping out the same old string dance.

A sense of defiance has long been baked into O’Brien’s signature move. Lorne Michaels, the creator of Saturday Night Live and the man most single-handedly responsible for O’Brien’s stardom, supposedly hated it. The journalist Susan Morrison’s recent biography of Michaels recounts how O’Brien ignored the note from his mentor (and Late Night producer), shrugging off Michaels’s suggestion that he lose one of his more whimsical flourishes. Instead, the host’s mesmerizing lift of the hips went on to punctuate his monologues over the years, to the approval of his audience. Going against someone like Michaels is a risky move for any comedian to make—but O’Brien’s career has been defined by his steadfast commitment to the bit, no matter how unusual or even off-putting. His mantra as a performer seems to be: If he finds it funny, someone else will. It’s an uncommon purpose in the business of comedy, and even more uncommon to stick with for as long as he has. But O’Brien understands himself better than anyone.

[Read: Conan O’Brien understood the assignment]

The comedian’s staunch love for the goofiest non sequiturs means he’s guaranteed to use them on even the most prestigious stage. During the Oscars broadcast, I was most elated at the gags that felt like they had sprung from O’Brien’s Late Night set decades prior—like a giant puppet of a sandworm from Dune playing “Chopsticks” on the piano. These were the instances of elaborate silliness he might have devised as a lowly comedy writer, before he’d ever been shoved in front of a camera; they fit just as well into his routine today.

O’Brien’s elevation from behind-the-scenes comedy nerd of choice (on SNL and The Simpsons) remains an improbable showbiz occurrence—one that he still litigates every chance he gets. It’s a regular conversation topic on his chat podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, which has become another hugely successful evolution in his broadcast career: When he’s speaking to practically any of his comedy peers, O’Brien still marvels at the divine kismet that led him to where he is now. He remains nostalgic about how he got the chance to succeed David Letterman as the host of NBC’s Late Night; he’s similarly never forgotten the scars of his first year on the job, when the reviews were scathing, the viewership numbers were shaky, and his contract was being renewed on a week-to-week basis.

Shouldn’t he be over all of that? After all, O’Brien has proved any doubters wrong repeatedly, through every peak and valley. Late Night went from being dependent on precarious renewals to a nightly powerhouse; he became a comedy figurehead at the cable channel TBS and, later, the streaming service Max, where he stars in a continuing series of travel documentaries that are essentially paid vacations. But it’s still easy to understand his never-ending agitation. Even after a decade-plus of O’Brien proving that his brand of absurdism worked with the mainstream, NBC couldn’t quite believe it; the network removed him as the host of The Tonight Show, a role he’d assumed in 2009, after just seven months. It was a short-lived stint that ended in an infamous blaze of glory, a final week of live shows full of his favorite recurring sketches, which doubled as a sort of Viking funeral for his dream job.

[Read: Conan O’Brien keeps it old-school]

O’Brien followed that debacle by launching a new late-night program on TBS—simply titled Conan—and has since wound things down a little more gracefully. He’s taken on slower projects, like his podcast; chat shows have become forgettable vanity projects for many celebrities, but O’Brien’s genuine, consistently funny take is an elite example of the form. The host has referred to the journalist Robert Caro as one of his favorite podcast guests—a more traditional interview than is typical for the show, staged between an ardent fan and his intellectual idol. But one of the show’s most viral clips is much more representative: The veteran SNL writer Jim Downey pretends to have never heard about Jeffrey Epstein’s misdeeds, to O’Brien’s bleating objections. The moment captures the tension in O’Brien’s humor, which mixes his natural affability with an impulsive streak; he manages to walk the line of faux outrage without alienating his guest or audience.

Since launching in 2018, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend has become so successful that the host has received some credit from industry analysts for the podcast boom that followed. Through it all, little about O’Brien’s approach to comedy has changed—listen to a monologue from 1993, 2003, or 2013, and compare it with his opening routine at this year’s Oscars. The only thing that’s really different is what he’s joking about.

That’s not to call O’Brien or his work stale—it’s more that the comedian has always managed to shape the current media moment around his own established persona. While his Late Night forerunner Letterman was probably the comedic polestar of Generation X—gruff, cynical, and biting the hand that fed—O’Brien became a bedrock influence for the next generation of Millennial comics. His mix of silly surrealism with an old-timey flair and knowing respect for the entertainment of yesteryear spoke to a generation caught in between digital eras: O’Brien could devise an extended Music Man parody on The Simpsons, and also wheel out a costumed character known as the Masturbating Bear or pull a lever that triggered Walker, Texas Ranger clips to play on Late Night. The characters and concepts he gravitated toward bordered on childish, but his progressively more dedicated fans would come to anticipate these zany touches with glee.

[Read: Long live the delightfully dumb comedy]

I sometimes wonder if the door is starting to close on O’Brien’s comic perspective as he grows older and broadcast formats shift. But he’s dependably found a way to fit it into new comedic spaces as needed, time and again. Early in his tenure on TBS, he launched a segment called “Clueless Gamer,” in which his producer Aaron Bleyaert tried to teach him how to play video games; each installment descends into a frustrated O’Brien lobbing a litany of insults at both the television and his co-host. What was clearly invented as an internet-friendly aside quickly became a popular series unto its own—even though O’Brien’s attempt at engaging with a younger generation’s interest was loaded with scorn. Or perhaps that’s why it was so compelling: “Clueless Gamer” distills O’Brien’s masterful use of his idiosyncrasies, and his ability to apply his point of view to the most dissonant of situations.

Similarly, O’Brien’s frenzied guest spot on the popular YouTube interview series Hot Ones in April 2024 endeared him to a new audience. He deliberately underlined his advanced age (at least, compared with Sean Evans, the show’s 30-something anchor) and brought a “doctor” along to support him as he devoured spicy chicken wings. Melding his particular style with the show’s sensibility, he produced a moment that was outrageous and scripted in a manner that no other guest had attempted. Critics have called his appearance the best episode in Hot Ones’ history, and the viral social-media boost it gave O’Brien likely helped him secure the Oscars gig months later. It’s difficult to imagine the dignitaries who preceded him—talk-show legends such as Johnny Carson and Letterman, or even Jay Leno—lowering themselves to that kind of madcap spectacle, or even engaging with such an unfamiliar type of comedic broadcasting. O’Brien tackles these frontiers with relish, but without sacrificing his core identity.

In her book, Morrison writes that Michaels first alighted on O’Brien as a possible new Late Night host because of his humor pedigree. Prior to his time on The Simpsons and SNL, O’Brien had served as the president of the esteemed Harvard Lampoon. His perceived classiness perhaps clashed uncomfortably with his silly string dancing for Michaels, but that duality has been the secret sauce of O’Brien’s success all these years. His is a sort of erudite buffoonery that consistently tap-dances between clever, self-aware, and patently stupid. He’ll eat your hot wings, or play your video games, or host the Oscars, and even while he’s doing a terrific job of it, he’ll act like the wheels are coming off the bus. More than 30 years after he first debuted on television, O’Brien still seems to be nervously glancing over his shoulder—always making sure he’s not leaving his true self, or anyone else, behind.

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

America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State

2025-03-23T08:00:00-04:00

On September 20, 1938, a man who had witnessed the rise of fascism packed his suitcases and fled his home in Berlin. He arranged to have smuggled separately a manuscript that he had drafted in secret over the previous two years. This book was a remarkable one. It clarified what was unfolding in Berlin at the time, the catalyst for its author’s flight.

The man fleeing that day was a Jewish labor lawyer named Ernst Fraenkel. He completed his manuscript two years later at the University of Chicago (where I teach), publishing it as The Dual State, with the modest subtitle A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. The book explains how the Nazi regime managed to keep on track a capitalist economy governed by stable laws—and maintain a day-to-day normalcy for many of its citizens—while at the same time establishing a domain of lawlessness and state violence in order to realize its terrible vision of ethno-nationalism.

Fraenkel offered a simple, yet powerful, picture of how the constitutional and legal foundations of the Weimar Republic eroded, and were replaced by strongman-style rule in which the commands of the Nazi Party and its leader became paramount. His perspective was not grounded in abstract political theory; it grew instead from his experience as a Jewish lawyer in Nazi Berlin representing dissidents and other disfavored clients. Academic in tone, The Dual State sketches a template of emerging tyranny distilled from bloody and horrifying experience.

As Fraenkel explained it, a lawless dictatorship does not arise simply by snuffing out the ordinary legal system of rules, procedures, and precedents. To the contrary, that system—which he called the “normative state”—remains in place while dictatorial power spreads across society. What happens, Fraenkel explained, is insidious. Rather than completely eliminating the normative state, the Nazi regime slowly created a parallel zone in which “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” reigned freely. In this domain, which Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” ordinary law didn’t apply. (A prerogative power is one that allows a person such as a monarch to act without regard to the laws on the books; theorists from John Locke onward have offered various formulations of the idea.) In this prerogative state, judges and other legal actors deferred to the racist hierarchies and ruthless expediencies of the Nazi regime.

[Timothy W. Ryback: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days]

The key here is that this prerogative state does not immediately and completely overrun the normative state. Rather, Fraenkel argued, dictatorships create a lawless zone that runs alongside the normative state. The two states cohabit uneasily and unstably. On any given day, people or cases could be jerked out of the normative state and into the prerogative one. In July 1936, for example, Fraenkel won a case for employees of an association taken over by the Nazis. A few days later, he learned that the Gestapo had seized the money owed to his clients and deposited it in the government’s coffers. Over time, the prerogative state would distort and slowly unravel the legal procedures of the normative state, leaving a smaller and smaller domain for ordinary law.

Yet, Fraenkel insisted, it was a mistake to think that even the Nazis would entirely dispense with normal laws. After all, they had a complex, broadly capitalist economy to maintain. “A nation of 80 million people,” he noted, needs stable rules. The trick was to find a way to keep the law going for Christian Germans who supported or at least tolerated the Nazis, while ruthlessly executing the führer’s directives against the state’s enemies, real and perceived. Capitalism could jog nicely alongside the brutal suppression of democracy, and even genocide.

Fraenkel was born in Cologne in December 1898 in the comfortable home of Georg Fraenkel, a merchant, and Therese Epstein. After his parents died, Ernst and his sister were taken in by their uncle in Frankfurt, where Ernst became interested in trade-union activism. Despite his socialist leanings, he joined the German army and was sent to Poland in April 1917. He later wrote that he’d hoped “the war would mean the end of antisemitism.” Fraenkel survived the trenches of the Western Front. After his discharge in 1919, he earned a law degree, and eventually secured work in Berlin as a labor lawyer.

The war did not, of course, end anti-Semitism, but his military service did save his livelihood, at least for a time. On May 9, 1933—only a few months after the Reichstag burned—Fraenkel and other Jewish lawyers received an official notice prohibiting them from appearing in German courts. But Nazi law made an exception for Jewish lawyers who had served in World War I. And so, while many fled, Fraenkel remained in Berlin, representing litigants such as members of the German Freethinkers Alliance, a leader of the Young Socialist Workers, and a man arrested for insulting a National Socialist newspaper as “old cheese.”

Often, he had to resort to unorthodox strategies. In the last of those three cases, Fraenkel persuaded his client to plead guilty, limiting his arguments to the sentence’s severity. This gambit worked: The man was duly convicted, and received a light sentence, avoiding the fate of others acquitted under similar circumstances. In at least one case, a Gestapo agent appeared as soon as the judge declared a not-guilty verdict, took the defendant into custody, and said, “Kommt nach Dachau” (“Come to Dachau”). Eventually, Fraenkel’s name made it onto a Gestapo list. He and his wife fled first to London, then to Chicago.

[From the February 1941 issue: A review of Ernst Fraenkel’s The Dual State]

Today, we are witnessing the birth of a new dual state. The U.S. has long had a normative state. That system was always imperfect. Our criminal-justice system, for example, sweeps in far too many people, for far too little security in exchange. Even so, it is recognizably part of the normative state.

What the Trump administration and its allies are trying to build now, however, is not. The list of measures purpose-built to cleave off a domain in which the law does not apply grows by the day: the pardons that bless and invite insurrectionary violence; the purges of career lawyers at the Justice Department and in the Southern District of New York, inspectors general across the government, and senior FBI agents; the attorney general’s command that lawyers obey the president over their own understanding of the Constitution; the appointment of people such as Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who seem to view their loyalty to the president as more compelling than their constitutional oath; the president’s declaration that he and the attorney general are the sole authoritative interpreters of federal law for the executive branch; the transformation of ordinary spending responsibilities into discretionary tools to punish partisan foes; the stripping of security clearances from perceived enemies and opponents; the threat of criminal prosecutions for speech deemed unfavorable by the president; and the verbal attacks on judges for enforcing the law.

The singular aim of these tactics is to construct a prerogative state where cruel caprice, not law, rules. By no measure does the extent of federal law displaced in the first few months of the Trump administration compare with the huge tracts of the Weimar’s legal system eviscerated by the Nazis. But it is striking how Donald Trump’s executive orders reject some basic tenets of American constitutionalism—such as Congress’s power to impose binding rules on how spending and regulation unfold—without which the normative state cannot persist.

The CEOs who paid for and attended Trump’s second inauguration can look forward to the courts being open for the ordinary business of capitalism. So, too, can many citizens who pay little attention to politics expect to be unscarred by the prerogative state. The normal criminal-justice system, if only in nonpolitical cases, will crank on. Outside the American prerogative state, much will remain as it was. The normative state is too valuable to wholly dismantle.

For that reason, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Trump’s lawyers—despite running roughshod over Congress, the states, the press, and the civil service—were somewhat slower to defy the federal courts, and have fast-tracked cases to the Supreme Court, seeking a judicial imprimatur for novel presidential powers. The courts, unlike the legislature, remain useful to an autocrat in a dual state.

Building a dual state need not end in genocide: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore have followed the same model of the dual state that Fraenkel described, though neither has undertaken a mass-killing operation as the Nazis did. Their deepest similarity, rather, is that both are intolerant of political dissent and leave the overwhelming majority of citizens alone. The peril of the dual state lies precisely in this capacity for targeted suppression. Most people can ignore the construction of the prerogative state simply because it does not touch their lives. They can turn away while dissidents and scapegoats lose their political liberty. But once the prerogative state is built, as Fraenkel’s writing and experience suggest, it can swallow anyone.

This article appears in the May 2025 print edition with the headline “A Warning Out of Time.”

What It Really Means to ‘Give Infectious Disease a Break’

2025-03-21T16:10:37-04:00

For most of the past century, the United States’ track record on infectious disease has been quite good. Thanks to major investments in public health, diseases such as smallpox, polio, yellow fever, malaria, measles, rubella, mumps, diphtheria, and tuberculosis have either been obliterated or become vanishingly rare. America “led the charge,” Aniruddha Hazra, an infectious-disease physician at UChicago Medicine, told me. The nation’s approach to public health was expected to help set the standard for the entire globe’s health.

That era might now be over. In recent years, the U.S. had already begun to neglect its public-health infrastructure, weakening defenses necessary for keeping infectious diseases at bay. Now the Trump administration is going beyond poor maintenance. It’s attempting active destruction.

In two months, the administration has slashed funding for biomedical research; stripped universities of grants; triggered the halt of clinical trials, domestically and abroad; gutted the public-health workforce; canceled or postponed vaccine advisory meetings to the government; and upended the normal practices of federal agencies dedicated to promoting American health. Cuts to foreign aid have marooned HIV and malaria medications in ports and storage facilities; an Ebola outbreak has been left to swell and spread. Domestically, the federal government’s response to a growing measles outbreak has downplayed the protective power of vaccines; Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, has suggested that H5N1 bird flu should be allowed to burn through the nation’s poultry; and the administration is reportedly mulling cuts to the CDC’s HIV budget for prevention of the disease in the U.S.

In November 2023, while campaigning for the presidency, Kennedy declared that he wanted the government to “give infectious disease a break for about eight years.” He and the rest of the Trump administration are more than making good on that promise, as they hamper infectious-disease research and the day-to-day work of surveillance and outbreak management. Donald Trump’s America isn’t just giving infectious disease a break. It’s pivoting away from guarding against pathogens to inviting them right in.

In an email, Emily G. Hilliard, HHS’s deputy press secretary, defended Kennedy’s actions, and said that the agency “is committed to promoting radical transparency so Americans can make informed choices regarding their health.” Kush Desai, a spokesperson for the White House, echoed this notion, and blamed “shoddy reporting about the Trump administration’s work” for low public trust in the health-care system.

Before the second Trump administration took office, the United States’ investment in keeping infectious disease at bay had already long been flagging. As the nation succeeded in minimizing infectious threats, people forgot to fear them. Since at least the late aughts, U.S. spending on nearly all aspects of public health has gone flat, or declined; after the start of the coronavirus pandemic, childhood vaccination rates dipped nationwide and failed to bounce back. COVID, rather than reaffirming the country’s commitment to public health, cemented many Americans’ antagonism toward it.

[Read: Inside the collapse at the NIH]

When most of a community buys into public-health interventions, almost everyone can stay safe. But the more people opt out, the more everyone’s health is put at risk. Many Americans have been making that choice more often as of late. During the pandemic, for instance, when calls to vaccinate repeatedly, quarantine, distance, and mask “bumped up against people’s autonomy,” many Americans chose to hew to what they considered best for themselves as individuals, Lisa M. Lee, a public-health expert and bioethicist at Virginia Tech, told me. Public-health guidelines are not scripture, and Americans will still find plenty of reason to debate when restrictions have gone too far, or when health officials have gotten the guidance wrong. But public health inevitably struggles in a nation where the attitude of “I don’t need to worry about what everyone else is doing; I can control my own health” has been hardening for years, Eleanor Murray, an infectious-disease epidemiologist, told me.

That individualistic perspective is now being translated into national policy, even as infectious threats continue to batter the country. After bird flu began to spread rapidly in dairy cattle, then infect farmworkers, the Biden administration lagged in its attempts to track and contain the virus, then largely left decisions about testing cows for the pathogen—the most effective way to track its spread—up to individual farmers. (Under Joe Biden, the Department of Agriculture disputed that its response was insufficient.) By the time the second Trump administration inherited the crisis, H5N1 had already killed an American—but still, the nation’s new leaders didn’t meaningfully step up the response. In the absence of sufficient cow surveillance, the virus has continued to transmit on farms; without more targeted protection of poultry and dairy workers—those most exposed to H5N1—people have continued to fall sick.

As the measles outbreak that began in Texas in January has grown—now to the point where the U.S. has logged more measles cases so far this year than it did in all of 2024—Kennedy has emphasized the importance of autonomy. Vaccinating the unvaccinated is the fastest way to stop a measles outbreak, and Kennedy has publicly acknowledged that vaccines protect individuals and “contribute to community immunity.” But he’s also repeatedly overstated vaccines’ risks and declined to directly urge parents to vaccinate their children. And his continued framing of the shots as a “personal” choice elides their protective benefits to everyone else. The unvaccinated child killed by the measles outbreak last month almost certainly would not have died had she been vaccinated. And she might never have been infected in the first place had vaccine rates been higher in her community.

The Trump administration’s actions, though, have shown flagrant disregard for the possibility of rising infection rates. Kennedy has pushed good nutrition and vitamin A supplementation as viable solutions to the Texas outbreak—suggesting, essentially, that the country’s approach to the disease should be to try to limit the damage of infections rather than prevent them. (Although vitamin A deficiency can worsen a case of measles, that sort of malnutrition is extremely rare in the U.S., and no supplement can prevent a person exposed to measles from catching it.) Meanwhile, the administration’s freeze on foreign aid halted PEPFAR, a program that has, for more than 20 years, helped deliver HIV antiretroviral drugs to vulnerable populations around the world, and saved more than 25 million lives. With that support gone, up to 20 million people living with HIV—more than 500,000 of them kids—may have been cut off from their lifesaving medications.

[Read: America can’t just unpause USAID]

The administration is also considering a major revamp of domestic HIV funding. Among the targets may be the CDC’s budget for HIV—the source of 91 percent of federal funding for HIV prevention in the U.S., aimed at tracking infections, increasing access to tests and drugs that can help avert new cases, and helping protect at least 1.2 million Americans estimated to be living with the virus. Strip away access to those sorts of crucial resources, and “my patients are going to die,” Jade Pagkas-Bather, an infectious-disease physician at UChicago Medicine, told me. (Hilliard, the HHS spokesperson, told me that “no final decision on streamlining CDC’s HIV Prevention Division has been made.”)

At times, the administration has verged on advocating for exposure to dangerous germs, Murray pointed out. Kennedy, for instance, has praised the benefits of acquiring immunity to measles through infection, saying that those defenses are longer lasting than immunity derived from vaccination—a statement that doesn’t account for the disease’s sometimes deadly and debilitating risks—and baselessly claiming that measles infection might also protect against cancers and heart disease. In recent weeks, he’s also encouraged poultry farms to simply allow the virus to rip its way through their birds—a proposal that could, at the very least, devastate flocks, and at worst, risk the virus morphing into a form that would be able to spread among humans.

In keeping with his original promise, Kennedy has found plenty of ways to limit biomedical research into infectious disease. The administration has forced the National Institutes of Health to defund research that focuses on LGBTQ populations—including several projects dedicated to HIV—as well as projects that mention vaccine hesitancy. (In an email, Hilliard defended the funding cuts as “part of a broader effort to redirect resources towards more urgent public health priorities—particularly the ongoing research into the safety and efficacy of vaccines.”) Among the grants rumored to be targeted next are hundreds of studies that involve mRNA vaccines, or work in South Africa, where many global-health projects are centered. Losing those projects might directly lead to more deaths. But the terminations send a subtler message, too, Hazra told me: that many of the already marginalized populations most affected by deadly infectious diseases must fend for themselves.

Abandoning the vulnerable, though, won’t make infectious problems disappear—quite the opposite. Left unchecked, diseases spill into new populations, and across borders. Diseases such as measles and polio have been declared eliminated from the United States. Without continued effort, they may not stay that way. And should those diseases reinfiltrate the country permanently, they will sweep over a population ill-equipped to fight them off again. The health infrastructure that the U.S. would have to marshal against them is already weak. More federal layoffs may be coming that could further shrink the public-health workforce. Biomedical research is being upended across fields. And should proposed cuts to Medicaid funding go through, the country will be even less equipped to deliver care to the people who most need it.

[Read: America is botching measles]

The administration’s actions all emphasize personal freedom. But those values aren’t compatible with a country free of epidemics. Infectious diseases, by nature, exploit individualism; their version of liberty is to find the unprotected, and spread more freely. The U.S. has the money, technology, and expertise to be a country minimally affected by infectious disease—as it was for decades. Its current leaders have stopped short of saying that they’d embrace a world rife with infectious death. But their actions suggest that those sacrifices are exactly the kind they are willing to make.

The Careless People Won

2025-03-22T10:00:00-04:00

Perhaps the biggest surprise of Careless People, the new tell-all memoir by the former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams, is that a book chronicling the social network’s missteps and moral bankruptcy can still make news in 2025.

The tech giant—now named Meta—seems determined to make this happen itself. The company filed an emergency motion in court to halt the book’s continued publication, and in numerous statements, Meta’s communications team has derided it as the work of a disgruntled ex-employee. All of this has only generated interest: On Thursday, the book debuted at the top of the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction and, as of this writing, was the third-best-selling book on Amazon.

A general theme of the pushback is that Wynn-Williams, who worked on global policy at Facebook, is guilty of the same sins she documents in the book. “Not only does she fail to take any responsibility for her role in all of this,” Katie Harbath, a former director of public policy at Facebook wrote on her Substack, “but she is also careless in her account. She also gives no recommendations on how to do things better other than to say they should be done differently.” Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, called the book “a mix of old claims and false accusations about our executives.” He has also shared posts from current and former employees that cast Wynn-Williams as an unreliable narrator. In one post, a former colleague expresses frustration that the book seems to take credit for his efforts at the company.

Given Wynn-Williams’s privileged position as Facebook’s first executive focused specifically on global policy, her perspective might differ from that of employees on other teams. Meta is a huge organization, after all. But the debates over the more gossipy anecdotes obscure the larger trends that surface through the book. I’ve never spoken with Wynn-Williams for a story or otherwise—she is currently under a gag order after Meta pursued legal action against her, claiming that the book violates her nondisclosure agreement—but her descriptions of Facebook taking actions in foreign countries without regard for consequences are similar to anecdotes told to me over the years by current and former employees. These stories are even more relevant in 2025, when tech’s most powerful figures have assumed an outsize role in American politics. All of us are living in a world that’s been warped by the architecture and algorithms of Silicon Valley’s products, but also by the egos of the people who have made fortunes building them.

I tore through Careless People despite being intimately familiar with many of the broad storylines—Facebook’s push into politics and the fallout from the 2016 election, its global efforts to expand in China, the platform’s bungled expansion in Myanmar that contributed to a genocide in the region. Wynn-Williams’s perspective provides crucial dimensionality to a well-trodden story, given her proximity to the company’s leadership.

But although it explores serious subject matter, the book is also not nearly as strident or sanctimonious as some other whistleblower memoirs. Wynn-Williams is comfortable reaching for an absurdist register: She recounts, for example, a scheduling nightmare that brought her to the brink of tears while trying to get Mark Zuckerberg a last-minute spot at the Global Citizen Festival in 2015: In her attempts, Wynn-Williams manages to anger an actor dressed as Big Bird and create logistical “issues for Malala and Beyoncé.” The spectacle culminates with a sweaty Zuckerberg onstage, “looking around desperately, like an animal in a trap.” The book is filled with similar anecdotes that capture the peculiar indignities of those catering to the whims of the most powerful people in the world. (When reached for comment, Dave Arnold, a spokesperson for Meta, referred to past statements the company has made about the book and cast doubt on Wynn-Williams’s status as a whistleblower: “Whistleblower status protects communications to the government, not disgruntled activists trying to sell books.”)

Early in Careless People, Wynn-Williams says Facebook asked her if “Mark should take credit for the Arab Spring.” In passages about Facebook’s expansion in Myanmar, she cites the executive team’s incuriosity about the country’s culture and politics. Later, when viral fake news stories on Facebook lead to riots and killings in Myanmar, Wynn-Williams details that the company had just one moderator who spoke Burmese, never posted its community standards in Burmese, and did not translate core navigation features of the platform into Burmese, including the button you use to report hateful content. News coverage in the aftermath of the genocide supported many of Wynn-Williams’s claims.

Wynn-Williams offers a few explanations for these problems over the course of Careless People. She suggests that executives like Zuckerberg simply don’t care about Facebook users once they’re on the platform. But there is also the company’s relentless pursuit of growth. Facebook’s obsession with gaining access to Myanmar and other Southeast Asian countries came around the same time that Facebook’s growth and stock were flagging post-IPO. Internally, stagnant user growth was referred to as “running out of road.” She describes Facebook’s growth team as willing to do almost anything to extend that road.

Nearly every insight and example provided in Careless People—the allegations that former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and the Irish prime minister secretly schemed on ways to dodge corporate taxes, the documentation of Facebook’s attempts to work with China to collect data on its citizens—traces back in one form or another to a blind obsession with scaling the business. All of it, of course, is meant to achieve Zuckerberg’s vague yet relentless mission to connect the world. When asked about these allegations, Arnold, the Meta spokesperson, told me, “We do not operate our services in China today. It is no secret we were once interested in doing so as part of Facebook’s effort to connect the world.”

[Read: New Mark Zuckerberg dropped]

Wynn-Williams’s assessment of Facebook’s mission aligns with what I know. In 2018, while reporting for BuzzFeed News, my colleagues and I obtained a memo written by Andrew Bosworth, one of Zuckerberg’s most loyal executives, outlining his personal strategy of growth at any cost. In the memo, Bosworth suggests that people could get hurt or killed as a result of Facebook’s expansions. Still, he is unequivocal: “The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.” This same tone of self-assuredness, short-sightedness, and binary thinking are present in most of the conversations with Facebook executives that Wynn-Williams writes about (on Threads, Bosworth called Careless People “full of lies. Literally stories that did not happen”). It’s captured memorably early on in the book, when Wynn-Williams details the company’s young policy team’s struggle to come up with a mission statement of its own:

[For] Mark and Sheryl, it’s obvious. We run a website that connects people. That’s what we believe in. We want more. We want it to be profitable and to grow. What else is there to say? There is no grand ideology here. No theory about what Facebook should be in the world. The company is just responding to stuff as it happens. We’re managers, not world-builders. Marne just wants to get through her inbox, not create a new global constitution.

Reading Careless People, I became fixated on a question: What is left to say about Facebook? The company has been through more than a decade of mega-scandals, congressional hearings, apologies, and Zuckerbergian heel turns. Many people have experienced the ways that the platform has algorithmically warped and influenced our culture, politics, and personal relationships. It is difficult to say something new about the company that has, in large part, succeeded in connecting the world. A book revealing, in 2025, that Facebook has behaved recklessly or in morally reprehensible ways feels akin to arguing at length that oil companies are substantially responsible for climate change—almost too obvious to be very interesting.

And yet, something about Careless People—beyond the court order, the messy PR spectacle, and Wynn-Williams’s formidable storytelling abilities—feels urgent, even necessary right now. It’s not just that Zuckerberg is in the news for cozying up to Donald Trump, though that’s part of it. Paging through the book makes clear that even recent history rhymes with the present. Careless People is a memoir, but even Wynn-Williams’s most personal anecdotes speak to the power and authority that tech executives, their platforms, and their massive fortunes wield over so many.

American politics, in the second Trump administration especially, is as much a tech story as it is a political one. Elon Musk’s dismantling of the federal government via DOGE is a product of the same Silicon Valley ideology that Zuckerberg coined with his infamous “move fast and break things” motto. Similarly, Musk’s self-described obsession with rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse to make the government efficient shares a platitudinal vagueness with Zuckerberg’s long-standing mission to connect the world. Both ideas sound good on paper but are ultimately poorly defined (and executed even worse), leaving the same question unanswered: connection for what? Efficiency at what cost?

[Read: The rise of techno-authoritarianism]

Careless People illustrates how this ideological vacuum is filled by its leaders’ fleeting whims and governed by their fragile egos. Zuckerberg, whose “disregard for politics is a point of pride” at the beginning of the book, is ultimately enamored by the power it brings. Slowly, Wynn-Williams notes, he becomes more involved in global affairs, eventually asking to make complex content-moderation decisions on his own. “In reality it’s just Mark,” she writes. “Facebook is an autocracy of one.”

The chaos of the past two months—the looming constitutional crises, the firings and rehirings—is what it feels like when a government is run, at least in spirit, like a technology company. Wynn-Williams’s book isn’t prescient; much of it is, as Meta notes, older news. What’s most disorienting about Careless People is that it is packaged as a history of sorts, but its real utility to the reader is as a window into our current moment, a field guide to tech autocracy.

In her epilogue, Wynn-Williams notes of the Facebook executives that “the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become.” Does that sound familiar? For now, the careless people have won. They’re in charge. The chaos Wynn-Williams has documented—we’re just living through a different version of it.

Chuck Schumer Is Cautious for a Reason

2025-03-21T05:00:00-04:00

When I walked into Chuck Schumer’s Brooklyn apartment, he was puttering around in his socks. This wasn’t household policy, the 74-year-old Democratic Senate minority leader assured me, so there was no need for me to shed my shoes. But, as a gesture of hospitality, he asked, “Do you mind if I keep mine off?” I didn’t seem to have any actual say in the matter, and so minutes later, we were lounging on the L-shaped sofa in his study, as he discoursed on the color of the walls—call it terra-cotta—that he told me he really likes, but his wife, Iris, doesn’t.

He had invited me over because there was a hole in his schedule. This was supposed to be the week that he embarked on a multicity tour for his new book, Antisemitism in America: A Warning. The launch was going to be his literary bar mitzvah, where he would bask in the glory of publication. Schumer had poured himself into the project, forcing himself to write intimately about his career, his faith, and his actual bar mitzvah, an event that had come to feel like an omen. Then, as now, the outside world trampled his big moment, and Schumer disappointed loved ones at the very moment he hoped to reap their praise.

As he tells the story, he was scheduled to become a man, in the eyes of the Jewish community, on November 23, 1963—a case of terrible timing, because Lee Harvey Oswald killed the president a day earlier. Even though nobody was in the mood to celebrate anything, his family plowed ahead with the event. And in front of a mournful congregation, Schumer choked. He humiliatingly fumbled through his Torah portion and had no fun at the party that followed. His abiding memory of the day is his father arguing with the caterer to recoup the costs for the after-dinner drinks that never were served.

[From the April 2024 issue: The golden age of American Jews is ending]

Similarly inopportune timing has wrecked the launch of his book. Days before its publication, he announced that he would be supporting a Republican continuing resolution that would prevent a government shutdown. The decision was wildly unpopular with his party’s rank and file, who accused him of squandering the Democrats’ last remaining source of leverage over the Trump administration.

On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart mocked him: “Senator Schumer, no disrespect, but you are a disgrace to Jewish stereotypes about financial negotiation.” Outside Schumer’s Park Slope apartment, on seemingly every mailbox and street sign, there were posters with his photo that read, Missing Backbone … If Found Contact Charles Schumer.

Schumer’s security team began to track specific threats against him. They worried that the furor over the shutdown would create a wave of protests that would test their ability to safeguard him. So Schumer accepted advice that he postpone his tour for a more placid moment in the indeterminate future.

With newfound time on his hands, Schumer and I began to kibitz. He splayed on his sofa, tucked his stocking feet under his knees and propped his head on his hand, striking a Cleopatra pose. He badly wanted to talk about his neglected book and not the continuing resolution. But I began to realize that the two subjects were, in fact, woven together. The book is unintentionally a political self-portrait. Schumer’s Jewish identity is at the core of his beliefs: that the viability of public institutions should be defended at all costs; that the fragility of Jewish existence, and of democracy, demands that he resist emotionally satisfying gestures, if they ultimately risk damaging those institutions.

Few American politicians are more unmistakably Jewish than Chuck Schumer. Soon after he joined the House of Representatives in the early 1980s, he recalls in the book, a woman in Queens rushed up to him: “You have more courage than any of the other members of Congress.” Schumer didn’t just take the compliment. He wanted to know why she was lavishing him with such praise. “You’re the only one who had the courage to wear a yarmulke,” she told him. To disabuse her of that idea, he bent down to show her “the appetizer-plate-sized bald spot”—his words—that she had confused for a skullcap.

Despite the expectations Jews might have had for him, he didn’t define himself that way. He told me, “I was always proudly Jewish, but I never emphasized Jewishness. When I ran for the Senate, I was really worried. How would these upstate people react to me?” (Perhaps he need not have worried; he defeated the incumbent, Alfonse D’Amato, after an only-in-New-York controversy over whether the Republican senator had called Schumer a putzhead, a riff on the Yiddish slang for penis.)

Decades passed, and his cautious attitude didn’t change. But then, on October 7, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel, and Schumer felt a new sense of responsibility. No Jew in American political life had ever held the power he then possessed. (The Democrats held a majority in the Senate, so he was running the chamber.) Witnessing the outpouring of anti-Semitism on the left, which focused its harshest criticisms on Israel rather than Hamas, Schumer felt compelled to fully embrace his identity, in all the ways he’d historically resisted.

His decision to expend so much time talking about anti-Semitism didn’t please his aides, who urged him to steer clear. On the political merits, his staff had valid arguments. Schumer planned on chastising the left, attacking members of the party he led. He writes that he was determined to make a fervent case for Israel, despite that country’s diminishing popularity among die-hard Democrats. He recalls telling himself, “You are no great Jewish sage or scholar, you are no King Solomon or Maimonides or Elie Wiesel, but for better or for worse, you are here, and you ought to try to do some good.”

[Read: Trump’s crocodile tears for the Jews]

What’s interesting about the book was that writing it didn’t just inspire him to more strongly identify himself as a Jew, but also prodded him to consider the Jewish roots of his approach to politics. (Full disclosure: At several points in his book, Schumer approvingly quotes an essay I wrote about Judaism in America.)

He began to think back to his time as a student at Harvard, in the late ’60s. Even though he protested against the Vietnam War, just like his classmates, he didn’t like how they took over buildings in the name of the movement. In the book, he recalls, “I was never going to be on the side of the radicals. I was going to take my own path and try to work through the system and get results, even if it meant compromise and concession from time to time.”

Schumer’s recollections of that era mirror his current difference of opinion with his base over the government shutdown. “Even if I failed and they shut me down and some of them told me I was a sellout,” he writes, “I would try to convince them to seek progress with me on the issues we both cared about. It was more of a human principle and less of a political one.”

When I brought up this passage, he told me that this human principle grew subconsciously, at least in part, from his Jewishness. Schumer viewed the preservation of American institutions as a matter of Jewish preservation, because those institutions were equipped to protect religious minorities. They were the source of America’s exceptional tolerance of Jews: “One of the great things about America is we’ve always had these norms, and we don’t want them broken,” he said, “because they protect all Americans, but particularly Jewish people, who have been so subject to problems and vilification through the centuries.”

In the past few weeks, many of the American institutions he reveres, and the constitutional system designed to insulate them, have come under intense pressure that they might not withstand. And, apropos of Schumer’s book, Trump has created conditions for anti-Semitism to flourish. The president has surrounded himself with a disturbing collection of appointees with records of repeating old canards about Jewish power.

As Schumer explained the president’s attitude toward Jews, he told me a story that he’d left out of the manuscript: After Trump came to office in 2017, he invited congressional leaders to meet with him. “There’s a spread in the White House, and the first thing he says to me is, ‘Chuck, have a pig in the blanket. They’re kosher.’ First, I’m not sure they were kosher. Second, what was he thinking? He’s a Jew.” (I reached out to the White House for comment on this anecdote and have not yet heard back.)

Trump, in his autocratic mode, seemingly ascribed himself the power to determine what’s kosher and not. And more than that, he’s determined that he has the ability to determine who’s a Jew and not. Last week, he bizarrely declared that Schumer “is not Jewish anymore.” In the words of the president of the United States, “He has become a Palestinian.” (“Don’t tell my mother,” Schumer told me in response.)

The president was assuming a posture that rarely ends well, in which the regime separates the good Jews from the bad ones. By deeming them religious reprobates, the regime is signaling that they are the acceptable ones to abuse.

Does Schumer’s institutionalism have the fortitude to resist Trump? When he voted to prevent the government shutdown, he was acting not just on instinct, but on intelligence gleaned from Republican sources, who told him that the administration was baiting the Democrats into shutting down the government. The White House had a plan for how it would use the cover of a shutdown to accelerate its assault on the government, while pinning blame for the crisis on the Democrats.

But Schumer was also acting on instinct. As he remembers the radicals at Harvard, he says, “I saw how their zeal and fury led them to be not only demeaning to other students but disruptive, which was ultimately counterproductive. They turned too many people off.” In the end, he was right, and they were wrong. The backlash against antiwar protest helped doom ’60s liberalism, ending the Great Society and stalling the advance of civil rights.

As I sat with him on the sofa, I received an alert from Axios: “Schumer faces growing House Dem calls to step down.” But he seemed unfazed. “The higher you go on the mountain, the more fiercely the wind blows,” he told me. “The only way to protect yourself from these fierce winds is to have your own internal gyroscope. That’s what motivated me in how I voted.” The same instinct motivated him back at Harvard, he said. “I hated the Vietnam War, but I felt there was a right way.” He was now lying on his back, his feet propped up, the knot of his tie dangling at his torso, a man either oblivious to the revolt brewing against him or at ease with his own political choices.

What the JFK File Dump Actually Revealed

2025-03-22T12:00:00-04:00

In 1962, the CIA had a driver’s license made for one of its officers, James P. O’Connell. It gave him an alias: James Paul Olds. We know this because the document containing the information was released to the public in 2017—part of an effort to declassify information related to John F. Kennedy’s assassination. But now, thanks to an executive order from President Donald Trump calling for the release of all the classified information pertaining to the incident, we know a bit more. It was, specifically, a California driver’s license.

This is an irrelevant detail in an irrelevant document. As far as anyone knows, O’Connell had nothing to do with the assassination; the inclusion of his story was probably just a by-product of an overly broad records request. But there it was on Tuesday evening, when the National Archives and Record Administration uploaded to its website about 63,400 pages of “JFK Assassination Records.” Given Trump’s order, the release of all this information sounded dramatic, but much of what has been revealed is about as interesting as that driver’s-license detail. Many of these documents were already public with minor redactions, and many of them have almost nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination and never did. This is why the Assassination Records Review Board, which processed them in the 1990s, labeled so many of them “Not Believed Relevant.”

Hundreds of thousands of such documents have been released since the ’90s, including thousands released during Trump’s first term and the Biden administration. (This is thanks to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which was passed in response to overwhelming public interest in the case after the release of the Oliver Stone movie JFK.) But one of Trump’s 2024 campaign promises was to release all the rest; he said that it was “time for the American people to know the TRUTH!” His health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—John Kennedy’s nephew—has been animated about the issue and framed the secrecy around the last files as evidence to support his conspiratorial view of history.

[Read: RFK Jr. won. Now what?]

There are still some documents that the Archives could not make public, because they are subject to IRS privacy laws or because they come from sealed grand-jury proceedings. These may come out eventually, but they will likely follow the same drip, drip, drip as all the rest. It seems possible that the public’s curiosity will never be fully satisfied, at least in my lifetime. A new batch will always come out, but there will always be something left.

I’m one of the people who cares a lot about the Kennedy assassination. I’m currently finishing a book about the case. On principle, and out of selfish personal interest, I agree that the government should make all of the documents public if it can. Of course I scanned this new batch to see whether there was anything exciting. There wasn’t, but some of it was kind of funny.

In many cases, the removed redactions reveal proper nouns that a reader could have easily inferred before or that seem totally inconsequential. For instance, there is a 1974 memo about the Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt’s history with the CIA. A previously released version of the document mentions that the Office of Finance had asked a CIA station whether Hunt had received payments from it while he was living in Madrid. We did not know which station had been asked. Now we know it was the Madrid station. (Wow!) A 1977 document about the New York Times reporter Tad Szulc includes a rumor about Szulc being a Communist; in previous versions of the document, this information was “apparently from a [REDACTED] source.” With the redaction removed, we now know that it was “apparently from a British source.”

Some of it was less funny. The files also contain the unredacted personal information—including Social Security numbers—of dozens of people, seemingly published accidentally, though the National Archives site now suggests this was an inevitable result of the transparency effort. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged the problem to The New York Times on Thursday, saying, “At the request of the White House, the National Archives and the Social Security Administration immediately put together an action plan to proactively help individuals whose personal information was released in the files.” The National Archives did not respond to my request for comment.

In my scan, I came across the late-’70s personnel files of dozens of staff members of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, all of which contained Social Security numbers. A good number of those people are likely still alive. The document dump contains the Social Security number of a journalist who was active in the anti-war movement during the ’60s. There are, by my count, 19 documents about his personal life and employment history; none of the documents about him appears to have the faintest relevance to the assassination. Bizarrely, the new release also contains an unredacted arrest record for a Dealey Plaza witness who testified in front of the Warren Commission in 1964. This record—for the alleged theft of a car in 1970—has nothing whatsoever to do with the assassination of President Kennedy. Yet it is reproduced in full and it includes the man’s Social Security number and a full set of his fingerprints.

[From the February 1964 issue: A eulogy for John F. Kennedy]

Relatively few of the documents even mention Kennedy. I saw only one addressed to him: a June 30, 1961, memo from his special assistant, confidant, and eventual biographer, Arthur Schlesinger about the growing power of the CIA. Most of it has been public since 2018, but the version released on Tuesday removed a final redaction about the agency’s extensive use of State Department jobs as cover for its agents. Schlesinger informed Kennedy that about 1,500 CIA agents abroad had State-provided cover stories at the time—too many, in his opinion; he wrote that “the effect is to further the CIA encroachment on the traditional functions of State.” The Paris embassy had 128 CIA people in it at the time, he added as an example. “CIA occupies the top floor of the Paris Embassy, a fact well known locally; and on the night of the Generals’ revolt in Algeria, passersby noted with amusement that the top floor was ablaze with lights.” Again, this is at best “kind of interesting” and at most trivia. It doesn’t meaningfully affect the historical understanding of President Kennedy’s tense relationship with the CIA, which is very well documented elsewhere.

After decades of releases, it may be that these are the only kinds of secrets the Archives still hold about the Kennedy assassination—tiny bits of color on things that are already well understood and boring details about people whose connections to the event are minimal if they even exist. But there’s no way to know until we see everything … if we see everything, if we ever can. Even then, when the count of secret things ticks down to zero, how will we know that was really, really all? We won’t, of course. We never will.

The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem

2025-03-20T07:30:00-04:00

Updated at 5:40 p.m. ET on March 21, 2025

Editor’s note: This analysis is part of The Atlantic’s investigation into the Library Genesis data set. You can access the search tool directly here. Find The Atlantic’s search tool for movie and television writing used to train AI here.

When employees at Meta started developing their flagship AI model, Llama 3, they faced a simple ethical question. The program would need to be trained on a huge amount of high-quality writing to be competitive with products such as ChatGPT, and acquiring all of that text legally could take time. Should they just pirate it instead?

Meta employees spoke with multiple companies about licensing books and research papers, but they weren’t thrilled with their options. This “seems unreasonably expensive,” wrote one research scientist on an internal company chat, in reference to one potential deal, according to court records. A Llama-team senior manager added that this would also be an “incredibly slow” process: “They take like 4+ weeks to deliver data.” In a message found in another legal filing, a director of engineering noted another downside to this approach: “The problem is that people don’t realize that if we license one single book, we won’t be able to lean into fair use strategy,” a reference to a possible legal defense for using copyrighted books to train AI.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Court documents released last night show that the senior manager felt it was “really important for [Meta] to get books ASAP,” as “books are actually more important than web data.” Meta employees turned their attention to Library Genesis, or LibGen, one of the largest of the pirated libraries that circulate online. It currently contains more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. Eventually, the team at Meta got permission from “MZ”—an apparent reference to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—to download and use the data set.

This act, along with other information outlined and quoted here, recently became a matter of public record when some of Meta’s internal communications were unsealed as part of a copyright-infringement lawsuit brought against the company by Sarah Silverman, Junot Díaz, and other authors of books in LibGen. Also revealed recently, in another lawsuit brought by a similar group of authors, is that OpenAI has used LibGen in the past. (A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation against the company. In a response sent after this story was published, a spokesperson for OpenAI said, “The models powering ChatGPT and our API today were not developed using these datasets. These datasets, created by former employees who are no longer with OpenAI, were last used in 2021.”)

Until now, most people have had no window into the contents of this library, even though they have likely been exposed to generative-AI products that use it; according to Zuckerberg, the “Meta AI” assistant has been used by hundreds of millions of people (it’s embedded in Meta products such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram). To show the kind of work that has been used by Meta and OpenAI, I accessed a snapshot of LibGen’s metadata—revealing the contents of the library without downloading or distributing the books or research papers themselves—and used it to create an interactive database that you can search here:

There are some important caveats to keep in mind. Knowing exactly which parts of LibGen that Meta and OpenAI used to train their models, and which parts they might have decided to exclude, is impossible. Also, the database is constantly growing. My snapshot of LibGen was taken in January 2025, more than a year after it was accessed by Meta, according to the lawsuit, so some titles here wouldn’t have been available to download at that point.

LibGen’s metadata are quite disorganized. There are errors throughout. Although I have cleaned up the data in various ways, LibGen is too large and error-strewn to easily fix everything. Nevertheless, the database offers a sense of the sheer scale of pirated material available to models trained on LibGen. Cujo, The Gulag Archipelago, multiple works by Joan Didion translated into several languages, an academic paper named “Surviving a Cyberapocalypse”—it’s all in here, along with millions of other works that AI companies could feed into their models.

Meta and OpenAI have both argued in court that it’s “fair use” to train their generative-AI models on copyrighted work without a license, because LLMs “transform” the original material into new work. The defense raises thorny questions and is likely a long way from resolution. But the use of LibGen raises another issue. Bulk downloading is often done with BitTorrent, the file-sharing protocol popular with pirates for its anonymity, and downloading with BitTorrent typically involves uploading to other users simultaneously. Internal communications show employees saying that Meta did indeed torrent LibGen, which means that Meta could have not only accessed pirated material but also distributed it to others—well established as illegal under copyright law, regardless of what the courts determine about the use of copyrighted material to train generative AI. (Meta has claimed that it “took precautions not to ‘seed’ any downloaded files” and that there are “no facts to show” that it distributed the books to others.) OpenAI’s download method is not yet known.

Meta employees acknowledged in their internal communications that training Llama on LibGen presented a “medium-high legal risk,” and discussed a variety of “mitigations” to mask their activity. One employee recommended that developers “remove data clearly marked as pirated/stolen” and “do not externally cite the use of any training data including LibGen.” Another discussed removing any line containing ISBN, Copyright, ©, All rights reserved. A Llama-team senior manager suggested fine-tuning Llama to “refuse to answer queries like: ‘reproduce the first three pages of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”’” One employee remarked that “torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.”

It is easy to see why LibGen appeals to generative-AI companies, whose products require huge quantities of text. LibGen is enormous, many times larger than Books3, another pirated book collection whose contents I revealed in 2023. Other works in LibGen include recent literature and nonfiction by prominent authors such as Sally Rooney, Percival Everett, Hua Hsu, Jonathan Haidt, and Rachel Khong, and articles from top academic journals such as Nature, Science, and The Lancet. It includes many millions of articles from top academic-journal publishers such as Elsevier and Sage Publications.

[Read: These 183,000 books are fueling the biggest fight in publishing and tech]

LibGen was created around 2008 by scientists in Russia. As one LibGen administrator has written, the collection exists to serve people in “Africa, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, China, Russia and post-USSR etc., and on a separate note, people who do not belong to academia.” Over the years, the collection has ballooned as contributors piled in more and more pirated work. Initially, most of LibGen was in Russian, but English-language work quickly came to dominate the collection. LibGen has grown so quickly and avoided being shut down by authorities thanks in part to its method of dissemination. Whereas some other libraries are hosted in a single location and require a password to access, LibGen is shared in different versions by different people via peer-to-peer networks.

Many in the academic world have argued that publishers have brought this type of piracy on themselves, by making it unnecessarily difficult and expensive to access research. Sci-Hub, a sibling of LibGen, was launched independently in 2011 by a Kazakhstani neuroscience student named Alexandra Elbakyan, whose university didn’t provide access to the big academic databases. In that same year, the hacktivist Aaron Swartz was arrested after taking millions of articles from JSTOR in an attempt to build a similar kind of library.

Publishers have tried to stop the spread of pirated material. In 2015, the academic publisher Elsevier filed a complaint against LibGen, Sci-Hub, other sites, and Elbakyan personally. The court granted an injunction, directed the sites to shut down, and ordered Sci-Hub to pay Elsevier $15 million in damages. Yet the sites remained up, and the fines went unpaid. A similar story played out in 2023, when a group of educational and professional publishers, including Macmillan Learning and McGraw Hill, sued LibGen. This time the court ordered LibGen to pay $30 million in damages, in what TorrentFreak called “one of the broadest anti-piracy injunctions we’ve seen from a U.S. court.” But that fine also went unpaid, and so far authorities have been largely unable to constrain the spread of these libraries online. Seventeen years after its creation, LibGen continues to grow.

[Read: There’s no longer any doubt that Hollywood writing is powering AI]

All of this certainly makes knowledge and literature more accessible, but it relies entirely on the people who create that knowledge and literature in the first place—that labor that takes time, expertise, and often money. Worse, generative-AI chatbots are presented as oracles that have “learned” from their training data and often don’t cite sources (or cite imaginary sources). This decontextualizes knowledge, prevents humans from collaborating, and makes it harder for writers and researchers to build a reputation and engage in healthy intellectual debate. Generative-AI companies say that their chatbots will themselves make scientific advancements, but those claims are purely hypothetical.

One of the biggest questions of the digital age is how to manage the flow of knowledge and creative work in a way that benefits society the most. LibGen and other such pirated libraries make information more accessible, allowing people to read original work without paying for it. Yet generative-AI companies such as Meta have gone a step further: Their goal is to absorb the work into profitable technology products that compete with the originals. Will these be better for society than the human dialogue they are already starting to replace?

This article has been updated to include a comment from OpenAI.

A Rapper for the Ketamine Era

2025-03-21T07:00:00-04:00

For years now, one of hip-hop’s most common debates has been: Who is the next Kendrick Lamar? The question reflects eternal anxiety about rap’s future as a storytelling medium. When the now-37-year-old Super Bowl headliner blew up in the early 2010s, he was hailed as a new-school evangelist for old-school lyricism. But hip-hop’s post-Lamar years have seen a surge of interest in—to use an insulting term—“mumble rap”: party music that doesn’t overtly seem writerly and in many cases doesn’t strain to say much at all.

Lamar’s participation in three songs on Playboi Carti’s new album, Music, suggests that the divide between these two approaches might not be as stark as it seems. A 29-year-old Atlanta native, Carti’s music scans as anti-meaning, all muttering and vibes. He’s the undisputed main character of hip-hop for listeners his age and younger, and Music, his first album since 2020, is racking up something close to Taylor Swift–level sales figures. This popularity might seem to reflect all sorts of ready-made concerns about Gen Z’s interest in immediacy over depth. Yet the frequently stunning Music is still, in its way, telling a story suited to its times.

To describe Carti is to describe an absence. He likes to style himself as a vampire—black leather, red contacts—while revealing little of himself online. His concerts are smoke-drenched rituals designed to spur moshing, and his music is all about sensation. His beats have lots of detail but no fixed center, creating rhythms that call to mind choppy waves or a record that’s stuck in a groove. A synth or guitar is always prickling in the background, casting a putrid haze. His rapping has a frail, slithering quality; his vocal tone morphs between cute squeakiness and ragged rottweiler growls. When I listen, I don’t imagine a person performing. Rather, I feel like I myself have been reduced to a pinprick of consciousness that’s bobbing through a dream.

With each release, that dream has gotten darker and denser. Music, Carti’s fourth proper album, is a 30-song chunk of noise. It opens with a riff that sounds like it’s being played by a welding machine, paired with Carti gasping his lyrics as if in agony. The effect is assaultive but clever, jolting listeners’ reflexes and then toying with their attention. Every few seconds of the album, some new provocation hits the ear: Maybe the beat switches, or Carti’s collaborator DJ Swamp Izzo shouts his own name, or a verse stops a few syllables earlier than expected. “Crush” builds up megatons of energy with the help of gospel choirs; “Evil J0rdan” creates a polyrhythmic effect out of what seems to be a ringing phone.

Harsh as these songs are, the slogan “I Am Music”—written on the album cover—works on a few levels. It matches a tattoo that Lil Wayne, a croaky-voiced influence on Carti, has on his face. It’s an assertion of Carti’s eminence in popular music, as attested by the album’s features by hip-hop’s reigning guard: Lamar, Future, Travis Scott, The Weeknd, Young Thug, Lil Uzi Vert, Ty Dolla Sign. (Ye has been whining on X about being left off.) It also speaks to Carti’s core competency, the attribute that coheres his chaos: musicality, the ability to create a sense of movement and drama with pure sound.

[Read: The next great American mega-genre]

Musicality, to be clear, is different from songwriting ability. If you focus too closely on any piece of Music, the magic dissipates. Many tracks amount to a quirky beat and a few seconds of vaporous rapping. Lyrically, Carti rambles in a not particularly distinctive, sometimes stomach-turning way about violence and sex. (In 2023, he was arrested for allegedly beating his pregnant girlfriend; his lawyer said the accusations were false.) The guest verses tend to highlight Carti’s deficiencies, though in the case of Lamar, it’s the featured rapper who ends up looking worse: Lamar’s goofy character work seems belabored next to Carti’s antimatter-like presence.

Still, one lyrical theme does tie together Carti’s sound and content, such as it is: drugs. The old standbys of party rap—molly, cocaine, lean—show up again and again. But so does the trendy drug of our time, ketamine, which detaches the user’s subjectivity from their sense of self, making them feel more like an object than a person. Drug-inspired music can be tedious music, like listening to someone describe their own dream, but Carti’s substance obsession is central to his project. This is music about, and that conveys, being high all the time. There’s not a moment of lucid reflection or respite to be found in an hour and 16 minutes of music.

This feeling of being buffeted from one thrill to the next is probably what makes Carti the great rapper of the generation raised on the endless scroll. But he’s not just reproducing the fleeting pleasures of drugs and distractions; the music’s bleak, overwhelming, depersonalizing roar is so rich that it amounts to an art piece about those things. If you let it, Music will plug up your thoughts and deliver you into the churning present, a reality without narrative—and in doing so, tell a tale about how it feels to live right now.

The Supply Closet That Film Geeks Love

2025-03-20T16:29:25-04:00

At this year’s South by Southwest festival, in Austin, film premieres weren’t the only major events. The buzziest affair, arguably, took place inside a truck: a facsimile of the Criterion Collection’s fabled office closet, bursting with select editions of its deep and idiosyncratic film catalog. For three minutes each, movie lovers could enter the Criterion Closet truck to rifle through the company’s expansive archive of canonical works, plucking DVD and Blu-ray copies to purchase and take home. Part of the fun is that the experience is captured on video, giving visitors their own personal installment of the beloved “Criterion Closet Picks” YouTube series, which features famous artists explaining their favorite selections.

The hundreds of festivalgoers waiting their turn suggest a draw beyond the physical pleasures of picking out and buying a handful of Criterion films, though. The real appeal of the Criterion Closet is emotional. It’s a place to let your movie obsessions—your obscure taste, your love of cult classics, your knowledge of directorial deep cuts—run wild and then be recognized for them.

Bob Stein co-founded the Criterion Collection in 1984 with the modest goal of releasing contemporary and classic films on home video. He dressed them up with stunning dust jackets and booklets, and they came with special features such as audio commentaries. Over the following decades, Criterion’s catalog expanded from a few hundred entries on LaserDisc to more than 1,600 across DVD and Blu-ray. The brand is now synonymous with an impressive swath of cinema: films that are challenging and avant-garde; that were once maligned but have developed loyal followings; that threatened to be lost to time.

At one point, the New York–based company needed storage for its growing stockpile. The discs ended up in a humble supply closet in the office, which has since become both an archival treasure trove and a destination for those in the know. In 2010, Criterion began uploading videos to YouTube of the most notable people to peruse the closet’s offerings: filmmakers, actors, other influential cultural figures. Viewers can now watch well-known names such as the director John Waters, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, and the actor Zoë Kravitz gleefully traipse through this cinephile’s Candyland, given free rein to pick through the extensive library. As they talk about why a particular selection intrigues them, the famous visitors flash the disc covers at the camera. Inevitably, they leave with an armful of DVDs, composed of films they love and others they want to see; the complete list is revealed at the video’s end.

[Read: A streaming service for cinephiles]

The “Closet Picks” videos have helped Criterion grow “from a more insular, cinephile-first cult favorite to a more mass phenomenon,” as GQ noted in a story about the series last year. The most popular installments garner hundreds of thousands of views and generate viral clips in part because of their savvy choice of featured guests. It’s not unusual for an actor or a director to appear while promoting their latest film, yet fail to mention it—they’re too dazzled by all the beautiful DVDs.

Instead, the joy of watching the series lies in the visitors’ authentic, unvarnished delight. Take the actor Ayo Edebiri’s entry, from July; the Bear actor’s love of film is well documented, and in her video, she buzzes with anticipation, immediately addressing viewers who she knows would feel similarly upon entering the closet: “I’m on these sales,” she says, referencing Criterion’s frequent discounts. “I’m getting these 50 percent off DVDs, just like you are.” Edebiri brings along a list of her intended picks, including the black comedy To Sleep With Anger and the heist thriller Thief—two wildly different choices that speak to her wide-ranging tastes. Hundreds of posters on Reddit and YouTube expressed how much they could envision themselves as the ecstatic star, right down to her outfit: “Between the prepared list on her phone and the Radiohead t-shirt I feel like this was the closest the comments section has been to having one of us in the closet,” reads one YouTube reply.

The videos, at their best, help transform famous figures into more personable ones. The directors Josh and Benny Safdie almost can’t get the words out quickly enough as they rhapsodize about Mike Leigh’s harrowing dramedy Meantime and recall how Charlie Chaplin’s silent-era masterpiece The Kid made Benny cry. Their trip to the closet, in a way, gives new context to the Safdie brothers’ work, as viewers realize that the makers of the stress-inducing black comedy Uncut Gems are in fact goofy, sincere film nerds.

Many guests also approach the Criterion Closet as if it’s a hallowed institution. The actor Gael García Bernal veers into philosophical territory with his choices; when he grabs the Italian neorealist triumph Blow-Up, he discusses how its themes of surveillance and paranoia resonate with him. He relates his yearning for the era before cellphones and the idle time that came with it, a wistful and humanizing admission.

The “Closet Picks” series lets these textured portraits emerge from visitors and viewers alike. The comment sections have cultivated a community of discerning movie lovers, filled with people sharing their takes on each guest’s picks. They mimic the warmth of video stores, those communal spaces where like-minded cinephiles could congregate and bond by debating the best Alfred Hitchcock movies or gushing over auteurs such as Akira Kurosawa and John Carpenter. The fervor around the video series and the Closet truck underscores, ultimately, how few offline places there are today for movie lovers to come together.

The Criterion Closet is, in some ways, an exclusive club; you need to be invited to the company’s office, which typically means being a recognizable figure in the entertainment industry. Yet “Closet Picks” manages to convey the thrill that comes with discovering great art, as well as those who share your love for it. The series does something potent with something very simple: When we see a person we admire geek out over cinema’s transformative power, they’re revealing how they came to see the world—and how we all might fit into it.

The One-Size-Fits-All Narrative of Your 20s Needs to Change

2021-06-12T08:13:00-04:00

“This is the time of your life,” the nurse said to me as she searched for a vein. At 27, I finally had health insurance and could get the colonoscopy that doctors had been suggesting for years, so I was feeling pretty good about things—as good as one can feel after having spent the previous 12 hours in the bathroom. But she wasn’t referring to the procedure; she was talking about my age. Even at this very odd, very vulnerable moment, I represented to her freedom and opportunity—your 20s, supposedly the time of your life.

Many people roll their 20s through a sugar coating of nostalgia. But framing young adulthood as the best time of life is a little grim, as it puts a limit on growth. This glorification of youth also seems to assume that everyone has the same resources; moves on the same timeline, in the same way; and has the same kind of life, one filled with adventure and experimentation.

This decade is supposed to simultaneously be a golden age of rootless freedom and fearless exploration and, somewhat contradictorily, the time when you’re meant to figure out your career, your relationships, and your life goals. That’s a lot of pressure.

Over the past few years, I’ve spoken with dozens of 20-somethings from all different backgrounds and in all sorts of circumstances to learn how they understand this time in their life. The young adults I talked with didn’t articulate far-flung fantasies of a #bestlife as Instagram illustrates it. They described a desire to simply feel like enough. They wanted more nuanced conversations about what making your way in the world as a young adult actually means.

Fifty years ago, the sociological markers of adulthood included finishing high school, entering the workforce, moving away from home, getting married, and having children. Now, according to a 2017 study, Americans consider the most important adult milestones to be graduating from college or another postsecondary program and achieving financial stability, both sometimes impossible feats. As the researchers Alexis Redding and Nancy E. Hill recently noted in The Atlantic, the ability of young adults to enter adulthood has always been tied closely to how well the economy is doing.

[Read: The real reason young adults seem slow to ‘grow up’]

And the economy is not in our favor. Though we’re the largest part of the workforce, young Millennials own less than 5 percent of the wealth in the United States. When Baby Boomers were in their 20s, they controlled about 21 percent. According to the Economic Policy Institute, from 1979 to 2019, productivity rose 72 percent in the U.S. while hourly pay increased only roughly 17 percent. During the pandemic, young people have been unemployed at more than double the national average, and rates of uninsured young adults have risen, according to data from the Center for Law and Social Policy.

We all might be grappling with the chaos of finding ourselves and all that comes with it—dating, changing family dynamics, work stress—but the stakes are not the same for everyone. “Defining adulthood for oneself has in many ways become one of the pressures of this developmental period,” Dalal Katsiaficas, an educational-psychologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me. “Those with the most power and privilege in our society tend to narrate endless options of what adulthood can look like.” Meanwhile, many of those who are more marginalized describe what she calls “foreclosed” opportunities—some feel locked out of ever achieving adult status, while some take on adult roles much earlier than others.

I’ve been running on a treadmill with little sense of direction, just forward, forward, forward, misguidedly believing that when I “figured it out,” whatever it was, I would finally feel released from the sensation that I was the only one who was lost. I felt disappointed in myself when I dropped out of college, when I lost jobs, when I Googled what a 401(k) was. My missteps felt like personal failures instead of a normal part of life—that is, until I started having honest conversations with other people in their 20s.

The narrative of the wild-and-free 20-something is far from reality for many. "Someone who is white in their 20s already sort of has more privilege than someone who is of color, so they have more social mobility and more opportunity to accumulate generational wealth," Zaria Howell, 21, told me.

Howell is about to graduate from college, and finding the perfect job isn’t necessarily their top priority. They’re thinking holistically about community, joy, and fulfillment. They are also looking beyond their 20s. “I think it’s harmful to, say, you know, forget about this whole lifetime that you have to accomplish your goals, to meet new people, to travel to new places, to learn new things.”

Robert Zambrano, 25, told me that he failed out of college because of personal issues, and was subsequently forced out of his family home. For three years, he was in an electrical union, training to be an electrician, but he found breaking into the old boys’ club difficult. “Every moment we examine the broader mainstream portrayal of twenty-somethings, it just continually fails to match any reality that we live in,” he wrote me by email.

That includes the trope that all of young adulthood is blissful Instagramming and soul-searching, as if 20-somethings aren’t also caretakers, breadwinners, and parents. LaTesha Harris, 23, began working as a young teenager, helping her mom with rent and utility bills. “Adulting has been very much tied to financial burden,” Harris told me. The majority of people she knows, she said, have no money, no respect from anyone older, no autonomy in the workplace. “It’s like there are a lot of things to realize about yourself and also the world in this time period,” Harris said. “Because that’s such an overwhelming task, I can't see how anyone would consider this the best time in your life.”

[Read: When are you really an adult?]

Showlin Salam, 26, did everything young people are encouraged to do: She pursued an education as a first-generation student while working full-time, graduated, and got married. Up until recently, she was a frontline worker doing 12-hour days at a pharmacy, where she dealt with customers who spit and coughed on her. Despite reminders to “take care of your mental health,” she was given no resources to do so, and is experiencing anxiety and depression. The “You’re young; it’ll work out!” talking point isn’t helping. Young people aren’t searching for glamorous versions of happiness, Salam told me. Instead, she feels like she’s barely hanging on. “I’m looking for being content, and just finding joy,” she said. “That’s what we are looking for, as Millennials and Gen Z, because of this instability that we're living in right now.”

The one-size-fits-all narrative of your 20s needs to change. Reports on young adults moving in with their parents at record rates spin that as a moral failure, rather than an economic side effect or a choice made for cultural or family reasons. Remarks about young people being lazy ignore how few jobs are available. Quips about students needing to work overlook how many are working—and how many are still experiencing basic-needs insecurity. Moans about 20-somethings not having kids rarely mention the child-care crisis.

According to Katsiaficas, we need policies that support affordable education, living wages, student-debt relief, and a sense of safety and belonging in society—quality-of-life issues that, once addressed, would allow people of all ages to imagine futures that are self-directed. “These are basic needs that have been steadily eroded for young adults,” she said.

We are growing into ourselves across a whole lifetime, not just throughout one decade. Let’s all retire the idea of our 20s as a #bestlife—and just strive for a good one.

American Civilization

1862-04-01T12:00:00-04:56

A certain degree of progress from the rudest state in which man is found, — a dweller in caves, or on trees, like an ape, a cannibal, an eater of pounded snails, worms, and offal, — a certain degree of progress from this extreme is called Civilization. It is a vague, complex name, of many degrees. Nobody has attempted a definition. Mr. Guizot, writing a book on the subject, does not. It implies the evolution of a highly organized man, brought to supreme delicacy of sentiment, as in practical power, religion, liberty, sense of honor, and taste. In the hesitation to define what it is, we usually suggest it by negations. A nation that has no clothing, no alphabet, no iron, no marriage, no arts of peace, no abstract thought, we call barbarous. And after many arts are invented or imported, as among the Turks and Moorish nations, it is often a little complaisant to call them civilized.

Each nation grows after its own genius, and has a civilization of its own. The Chinese and Japanese, though each complete in his way, is different from the man of Madrid or the man of New York. The term imports a mysterious progress. In the brutes is none; and in mankind, the savage tribes do not advance. The Indians of this country have not learned the white man’s work; and in Africa, the Negro of today is the Negro of Herodotus. But in other races the growth is not arrested; but the like progress that is made by a boy, “when he cuts his eye-teeth,” as we say, — childish illusions passing daily away, and he seeing things really and comprehensively, — is made by tribes. It is learning the secret of cumulative power, of advancing on one’s self. It implies a facility of association, power to compare, the ceasing from fixed ideas. The Indian is gloomy and distressed, when urged to depart from his habits and traditions. He is overpowered by the gaze of the white, and his eye sinks. The occasion of one of these starts of growth is always some novelty that astounds the mind, and provokes it to dare to change. Thus there is a Manco Capac at the beginning of each improvement, some superior foreigner importing new and wonderful arts, and teaching them. Of course, he must not know too much, but must have the sympathy, language, and gods of those he would inform. But chiefly the sea-shore has been the point of departure to knowledge, as to commerce. The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most. The power which the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him very fast, and the change of shores and population clears his head of much nonsense of his wigwam.

Where shall we begin or end the list of those feats of liberty and wit, each of which feats made an epoch of history? Thus, the effect of a framed or stone house is immense on the tranquillity, power, and refinement of the builder. A man in a cave, or in a camp, a nomad, will die with no more estate than the wolf or the horse leaves. But so simple a labor as a house being achieved, his chief enemies are kept at bay. He is safe from the teeth of wild animals, from frost, sun stroke, and weather; and fine faculties begin to yield their fine harvest. Invention and art are born, manners and social beauty and delight. ’T is wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log-hut on the frontier. You would think they found it under a pine-stump. With it comes a Latin grammar, and one of those towhead boys has written a hymn on Sunday. Now let colleges, now let senates take heed! for here is one, who, opening these fine tastes on the basis of the pioneer’s iron constitution, will gather all their laurels in his strong hands.

When the Indian trail gets widened, graded, and bridged to a good road, — there is a benefactor, there is a missionary, a pacificator, a wealth-bringer, a maker of markets, a vent for industry. The building three or four hundred miles of road in the Scotch Highlands in 1726 to 1749 effectually tamed the ferocious clans, and established public order. Another step in civility is the change from war, hunting, and pasturage, to agriculture. Our Scandinavian forefathers have left us a significant legend to convey their sense of the importance of this step. “There was once a giantess who had a daughter, and the child saw a husbandman ploughing in the field. Then she ran and picked him up with her finger and thumb, and put him and his plough and his oxen into her apron, and carried them to her mother, and said, ‘Mother, what sort of a beetle is this that I found wriggling in the sand?’ But the mother said, ‘Put it away, my child; we must begone out of this land, for these people will dwell in it.’” Another success is the post-office, with its educating energy, augmented by cheapness, and guarded by a certain religious sentiment in mankind, so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea, over land, and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look upon as a fine metre of civilization.

The division of labor, the multiplication of the arts of peace, which is nothing but a large allowance to each man to choose his work according to his faculty, to live by his better hand, fills the State with useful and happy laborers, — and they, creating demand by the very temptation of their productions, are rapidly and surely rewarded by good sale: and what a police and ten commandments their work thus becomes! So true is Dr. Johnson’s remark, that “men are seldom more innocently employed than when they are making money.”

The skilful combinations of civil government, though they usually follow natural leadings, as the lines of race, language, religion, and territory, yet require wisdom and conduct in the rulers, and in their result delight the imagination. “We see insurmountable multitudes obeying, in opposition to their strongest passions, the restraints of a power which they scarcely perceive, and the crimes of a single individual marked and punished at the distance of half the earth.”

Right position of woman in the State is another index. Poverty and industry with a healthy mind read very easily the laws of humanity, and love them: place the sexes in right relations of mutual respect, and a severe morality gives that essential charm to woman which educates all that is delicate, poetic, and self-sacrificing, breeds courtesy and learning, conversation and wit, in her rough mate; so that I have thought it a sufficient definition of civilization to say, it is the influence of good women.

Another measure of culture is the diffusion of knowledge, overrunning all the old barriers of caste, and, by the cheap press, bringing the university to every poor man’s door in the newsboy’s basket. Scraps of science, of thought, of poetry are in the coarsest sheet, so that in every house we hesitate to tear a newspaper until we have looked it through.

The ship, in its latest complete equipment, is an abridgement and compend of a nation’s arts: the ship steered by compass and chart, longitude reckoned by lunar observation, and, when the heavens are hid, by chronometer; driven by steam; and in wildest sea-mountains, at vast distances from home,

The pulses of her iron heart
Go beating through the storm.

No use can lessen the wonder of this control, by so weak a creature, of forces so prodigious. I remember I watched, in crossing the sea, the beautiful skill whereby the engine in its constant working was made to produce two hundred gallons of fresh water out of salt water, every hour, — thereby supplying all the ship’s want.

The skill that pervades complex details; the man that maintains himself; the chimney taught to burn its own smoke; the farm made to produce all that is consumed on it; the very prison compelled to maintain itself and yield a revenue, and, better than that, made a reform school, and a manufactory of honest men out of rogues, as the steamer made fresh water out of salt: all these are examples of that tendency to combine antagonisms, and utilize evil, which is the index of high civilization.

Civilization is the result of highly complex organization. In the snake, all the organs are sheathed: no hands, no feet, no fins, no wings. In bird and beast, the organs are released, and begin to play. In man, they are all unbound, and full of joyful action. With this unswaddling, he receives the absolute illumination we call Reason, and thereby true liberty.

Climate has much to do with this melioration. The highest civility has never loved the hot zones. Wherever snow falls, there is usually civil freedom. Where the banana grows, the animal system is indolent and pampered at the cost of higher qualities: the man is grasping, sensual, and cruel. But this scale is by no means invariable. For high degrees of moral sentiment control the unfavorable influences of climate; and some of our grandest examples of men and of races come from the equatorial regions, — as the genius of Egypt, of India, and of Arabia.

These feats are measures or traits of civility; and temperate climate is an important influence, though not quite indispensable, for there have been learning, philosophy, and art in Iceland, and in the tropics. But one condition is essential to the social education of man, — namely, morality. There can be no high civility without a deep morality, though it may not always call itself by that name, but sometimes the point of honor, as in the institution of chivalry; or patriotism, as in the Spartan and Roman republics; or the enthusiasm of some religious sect which imputes its virtue to its dogma; or the cabalism, or esprit du corps, of a masonic or other association of friends.

The evolution of a highly destined society must be moral; it must run in the grooves of the celestial wheels. It must be catholic in aims. What is moral? It is the respecting in action catholic or universal ends. Hear the definition which Kant gives of moral conduct: “Act always so that the immediate motive of thy will may become a universal rule for all intelligent beings.”

Civilization depends on morality. Everything good in man leans on what is higher. This rule holds in small as in great. Thus, all our strength and success in the work of our hands depend on our borrowing the aid of the elements. You have seen a carpenter on a ladder with a broad-axe chopping upward chips and slivers from a beam. How awkward! at what disadvantage he works! But see him on the ground, dressing his timber under him. Now, not his feeble muscles, but the force of gravity brings down the axe; that is to say, the planet itself splits his stick. The farmer had much ill-temper, laziness, and shirking to endure from his hand-sawyers, until, one day, he bethought him to put his saw-mill on the edge of a waterfall; and the river never tires of turning his wheel: the river is good-natured, and never hints an objection.

We had letters to send: couriers could not go fast enough, nor far enough; broke their wagons, foundered their horses; bad roads in spring, snow-drifts in winter, heats in summer; could not get the horses out of a walk. But we found out that the air and earth were full of electricity; and it was always going our way, — just the way we wanted to send. Would he take a message? Just as lief as not; had nothing else to do; would carry it in no time. Only one doubt occurred, one staggering objection, — he had no carpet-bag, no visible pockets, no hands, not so much as a mouth, to carry a letter. But, after much thought and many experiments, we managed to meet the conditions, and to fold up the letter in such invisible compact form as he could carry in those invisible pockets of his, never wrought by needle and thread, — and it went like a charm.

I admire still more than the saw-mill the skill which, on the sea-shore, makes the tides drive the wheels and grind corn, and which thus embraces the assistance of the moon, like a hired band, to grind, and wind, and pump, and saw, and split stone, and roll iron.

Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods themselves. That is the way we are strong, by borrowing the might of the elements. The forces of steam, gravity, galvanism, light, magnets, wind, fire, serve us day by day, and cost us nothing.

Our astronomy is full of examples of calling in the aid of these magnificent helpers. Thus, on a planet so small as ours, the want of an adequate base for astronomical measurements is early felt, as, for example, in detecting the parallax of a star. But the astronomer, having by an observation fixed the place of a star, by so simple an expedient as waiting six months, and then repeating his observation, contrived to put the diameter of the earth’s orbit, say two hundred millions of miles, between his first observation and his second, and this line afforded him a respectable base for his triangle.

All our arts aim to win this vantage. We cannot bring the heavenly powers to us, but, if we will only choose our jobs in directions in which they travel, they will undertake them with the greatest pleasure. It is a peremptory rule with them, that they never go out of their road. We are dapper little busybodies, and run this way and that way superserviceably; but they swerve never from their foreordained paths, — neither the sun, nor the moon, nor a bubble of air, nor a mote of dust.

And as our handiworks borrow the elements, so all our social and political action leans on principles. To accomplish anything excellent, the will must work for catholic and universal ends. A puny creature walled in on every side, as Donne wrote, —

— unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!

but when his will leans on a principle, when he is the vehicle of ideas, he borrows their omnipotence. Gibraltar may be strong, but ideas are impregnable, and bestow on the hero their invincibility. “It was a great instruction,” said a saint in Cromwell’s war, “that the best courages are but beams of the Almighty.” Hitch your wagon to a star. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone. Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find all their teams going the other way, — Charles’s Wain, Great Bear, Orion, Leo, Hercules: —every god will leave us. Work rather for those interests which the divinities honor and promote, — justice, love, freedom, knowledge, utility.

If we can thus ride in Olympian chariots by putting our works in the path of the celestial circuits, we can harness also evil agents, the powers of darkness, and force them to serve against their will the ends of wisdom and virtue. Thus, a wise Government puts fines and penalties on pleasant vices. What a benefit would the American Government, now in the hour of its extreme need, render to itself, and to every city, village, and hamlet in the States, if it would tax whiskey and rum almost to the point of prohibition! Was it Bonaparte who said that he found vices very good patriots? — “he got five millions from the love of brandy, and he should be glad to know which of the virtues would pay him as much.” Tobacco and opium have broad backs, and will cheerfully carry the load of armies, if you choose to make them pay high for such joy as they give and such harm as they do.

These are traits, and measures, and modes; and the true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops, — no, but the kind of man the country turns out. I see the vast advantages of this country, spanning the breadth of the temperate zone. I see the immense material prosperity, — towns on towns, states on states, and wealth piled in the massive architecture of cities, California quartz-mountains dumped down in New York to be re-piled architecturally along-shore from Canada to Cuba, and thence westward to California again. But it is not New-York streets built by the confluence of workmen and wealth of all nations, though stretching out toward Philadelphia until they touch it, and northward until they touch New Haven, Hartford, Springfield, Worcester, and Boston, — not these that make the real estimation. But, when I look over this constellation of cities which animate and illustrate the land, and see how little the Government has to do with their daily life, how self-helped and self-directed all families are, — knots of men in purely natural societies, — societies of trade, of kindred blood, of habitual hospitality, house and house, man acting on man by weight of opinion, of longer or better-directed industry, the refining influence of women, the invitation which experience and permanent causes open to youth and labor, — when I see how much each virtuous and gifted person whom all men consider lives affectionately with scores of excellent people who are not known far from home, and perhaps with great reason reckons these people his superiors in virtue, and in the symmetry and force of their qualities, I see what cubic values America has, and in these a better certificate of civilization than great cities or enormous wealth.

In strictness, the vital refinements are the moral and intellectual steps. The appearance of the Hebrew Moses, of the Indian Buddha, — in Greece, of the Seven Wise Masters, of the acute and upright Socrates, and of the Stoic Zeno, — in Judea, the advent of Jesus, — and in modern Christendom, of the realists Huss, Savonarola, and Luther, are causal facts which came to forward races to new convictions, and elevate the rule of life. In the presence of these agencies, it is frivolous to insist on the invention of printing or gunpowder, of steam-power or gas light, percussion-caps and rubber-shoes, which are toys thrown off from that security, freedom, and exhilaration which a healthy morality creates in society. These arts add a comfort and smoothness to house and street life; but a purer morality, which kindles genius, civilizes civilization, casts backward all that we held sacred into the profane, as the flame of oil throws a shadow when shined upon by the flame of the Bude-light. Not the less the popular measures of progress will ever be the arts and the laws.

But if there be a country which cannot stand any one of these tests, — a country where knowledge cannot be diffused without perils of mob-law and statute-law, — where speech is not free, — where the post-office is violated, mail-bags opened, and letters tampered with, — where public debts and private debts outside of the State are repudiated, — where liberty is attacked in the primary institution of their social life, — where the position of the white woman is injuriously affected by the outlawry of the black woman, — where the arts, such as they have, are all imported, having no indigenous life, — where the laborer is not secured in the earnings of his own hands, — where suffrage is not free or equal, — that country is, in all these respects, not civil, but barbarous, and no advantages of soil, climate, or coast can resist these suicidal mischiefs.

Morality is essential, and all the incidents of morality, — as, justice to the subject, and personal liberty. Montesquieu says—“Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free”; and the remark holds not less, but more, true of the culture of men than of the tillage of land. And the highest proof of civility is, that the whole public action of the State is directed on securing the greatest good of the greatest number.

Our Southern States have introduced confusion into the moral sentiments of their people, by reversing this rule in theory and practice, and denying a man’s right to his labor. The distinction and end of a soundly constituted man is his labor. Use is inscribed on all his faculties. Use is the end to which he exists. As the tree exists for its fruit, so a man for his work. A fruitless plant, an idle animal, is not found in the universe. They are all toiling, however secretly or slowly, in the province assigned them, and to a use in the economy of the world, — the higher and more complex organizations to higher and more catholic service; and man seems to play a certain part that tells on the general face of the planet, — as if dressing the globe for happier races of his own kind, or, as we sometimes fancy, for beings of superior organization.

But thus use, labor of each for all, is the health and virtue of all beings. Ich Dien, I serve, is a truly royal motto. And it is the mark of nobleness to volunteer the lowest service, — the greatest spirit only attaining to humility. Nay, God is God because he is the servant of all. Well, now here comes this conspiracy of slavery, — they call it an institution, I call it a destitution, — this stealing of men and setting them to work, — stealing their labor, and the thief sitting idle himself; and for two or three ages it has lasted, and has yielded a certain quantity of rice, cotton, and sugar. And standing on this doleful experience, these people have endeavored to reverse the natural sentiments of mankind, and to pronounce labor disgraceful, and the well-being of a man to consist in eating the fruit of other men’s labor. Labor: a man coins himself into his labor, — turns his day, his strength, his thought, his affection into some product which remains as the visible sign of his power; and to protect that, to secure that to him, to secure his past self to his future self, is the object of all government. There is no interest in any country so imperative as that of labor; it covers all, and constitutions and governments exist for that, — to protect and insure it to the laborer. All honest men are daily striving to earn their bread by their industry. And who is this who tosses his empty head at this blessing in disguise, the constitution of human nature, and calls labor vile, and insults the faithful workman at his daily toil? I see for such madness no hellebore, — for such calamity no solution but servile war, and the Africanization of the country that permits it.

At this moment in America the aspects of political society absorb attention. In every house, from Canada to the Gulf, the children ask the serious father, — “What is the news of the war today? and when will there be better times?” The boys have no new clothes, no gifts, no journeys; the girls must go without new bonnets; boys and girls find their education, this year, less liberal and complete. All the little hopes that heretofore made the year pleasant are deferred. The state of the country fills us with anxiety and stern duties. We have attempted to hold together two states of civilization: a higher state, where labor and the tenure of land and the right of suffrage are democratical; and a lower state, in which the old military tenure of prisoners or slaves, and of power and land in a few hands, makes an oligarchy: we have attempted to hold these two states of society under one law. But the rude and early state of society does not work well with the later, nay, works badly, and has poisoned politics, public morals, and social intercourse in the Republic, now for many years.

The times put this question, — Why cannot the best civilization be extended over the whole country, since the disorder of the less civilized portion menaces the existence of the country? Is this secular progress we have described, this evolution of man to the highest powers, only to give him sensibility, and not to bring duties with it? Is he not to make his knowledge practical? to stand and to withstand? Is not civilization heroic also? Is it not for action? has it not a will? “There are periods,” said Niebuhr, “when something much better than happiness and security of life is attainable.” We live in a new and exceptional age. America is another word for Opportunity. Our whole history appears like a last effort of the Divine Providence in behalf of the human race; and a literal slavish following of precedents, as by a justice of the peace, is not for those who at this hour lead the destinies of this people. The evil you contend with has taken alarming proportions, and you still content yourself with parrying the blows it aims, but, as if enchanted, abstain from striking at the cause.

If the American people hesitate, it is not for want of warning or advices. The telegraph has been swift enough to announce our disasters. The journals have not suppressed the extent of the calamity. Neither was there any want of argument or of experience. If the war brought any surprise to the North, it was not the fault of sentinels on the watch-towers, who had furnished full details of the designs, the muster, and the means of the enemy. Neither was anything concealed of the theory or practice of slavery. To what purpose make more big books of these statistics ? There are already mountains of facts, if any one wants them. But people do not want them. They bring their opinions into the world. If they have a comatose tendency in the brain, they are pro-slavery while they live; if of a nervous sanguineous temperament, they are abolitionists. Then interests were never persuaded. Can you convince the shoe interest, or the iron interest, or the cotton interest, by reading passages from Milton or Montesquieu? You wish to satisfy people that slavery is bad economy. Why, the “Edinburgh Review” pounded on that string, and made out its case forty years ago. A democratic statesman said to me, long since, that, if he owned the State of Kentucky, he would manumit all the slaves, and be a gainer by the transaction. Is this new? No, everybody knows it. As a general economy it is admitted. But there is no one owner of the State, but a good many small owners. One man owns land and slaves; another owns slaves only. Here is a woman who has no other property, — like a lady in Charleston I knew of, who owned fifteen chimney-sweeps and rode in her carriage. It is clearly a vast inconvenience to each of these to make any change, and they are fretful and talkative, and all their friends are; and those less interested are inert, and, from want of thought, averse to innovation. It is like free trade, certainly the interest of nations, but by no means the interest of certain towns and districts, which tariff feeds fat; and the eager interest of the few overpowers the apathetic general conviction of the many. Bank-notes rob the public, but are such a daily convenience that we silence our scruples, and make believe they are gold. So imposts are the cheap and right taxation; but by the dislike of people to pay out a direct tax, governments are forced to render life costly by making them pay twice as much, hidden in the price of tea and sugar.

In this national crisis, it is not argument that we want, but that rare courage which dares commit itself to a principle, believing that Nature is its ally, and will create the instruments it requires, and more than make good any petty and injurious profit which it may disturb. There never was such a combination as this of ours, and the rules to meet it are not set down in any history. We want men of original perception and original action, who can open their eyes wider than to a nationality, namely, to considerations of benefit to the human race, can act in the interest of civilization. Government must not be a parish clerk, a justice of the peace. It has, of necessity, in any crisis of the State, the absolute powers of a Dictator. The existing Administration is entitled to the utmost candor. It is to be thanked for its angelic virtue, compared with any executive experiences with which we have been familiar. But the times will not allow us to indulge in compliment. I wish I saw in the people that inspiration which, if Government would not obey the same, it would leave the Government behind, and create on the moment the means and executors it wanted. Better the war should more dangerously threaten us, — should threaten fracture in what is still whole, and punish us with burned capitals and slaughtered regiments, and so exasperate the people to energy, exasperate our nationality. There are Scriptures written invisibly on men’s hearts, whose letters do not come out until they are enraged. They can be read by war-fires, and by eyes in the last peril.

We cannot but remember that there have been days in American history, when, if the Free States had done their duty, Slavery had been blocked by an immovable barrier, and our recent calamities forever precluded. The Free States yielded, and every compromise was surrender, and invited new demands. Here again is a new occasion which Heaven offers to sense and virtue. It looks as if we held the fate of the fairest possession of mankind in our hands, to be saved by our firmness or to be lost by hesitation.

The one power that has legs long enough and strong enough to cross the Potomac offers itself at this hour; the one strong enough to bring all the civility up to the height of that which is best prays now at the door of Congress for leave to move. Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue. This is a progressive policy, — puts the whole people in healthy, productive, amiable position, — puts every man in the South in just and natural relations with every man in the North, laborer with laborer.

We shall not attempt to unfold the details of the project of emancipation. It has been stated with great ability by several of its leading advocates. I will only advert to some leading points of the argument, at the risk of repeating the reasons of others.

The war is welcome to the Southerner: a chivalrous sport to him, like hunting, and suits his semi-civilized condition. On the climbing scale of progress, he is just up to war, and has never appeared to such advantage as in the last twelve-month. It does not suit us. We are advanced some ages on the war-state, — to trade, art, and general cultivation. His laborer works for him at home, so that he loses no labor by the war. All our soldiers are laborers; so that the South, with its inferior numbers, is almost on a footing in effective war-population with the North. Again, as long as we fight without any affirmative step taken by the Government, any word intimating forfeiture in the rebel States of their old privileges under the law, they and we fight on the same side, for Slavery. Again, if we conquer the enemy, — what then? We shall still have to keep him under, and it will cost as much to hold him down as it did to let him down. Then comes the summer, and the fever will drive our soldiers home; next winter, we must begin at the beginning, and conquer him over again. What use, then, to take a fort, or a privateer, or get possession of an inlet, or to capture a regiment of rebels ?

But one weapon we hold which is sure. Congress can, by edict, as a part of the military defense which it is the duty of Congress to provide, abolish slavery, and pay for such slaves as we ought to pay for. Then the slaves near our armies will come to us: those in the interior will know in a week what their rights are, and will, where opportunity offers, prepare to take them. Instantly, the armies that now confront you must run home to protect their estates, and must stay there, and your enemies will disappear.

There can be no safety until this step is taken. We fancy that the endless debate, emphasized by the crime and by the cannons of this war, has brought the Free States to some conviction that it can never go well with us whilst this mischief of Slavery remains in our politics, and that by concert or by might we must put an end to it. But we have too much experience of the futility of an easy reliance on the momentary good dispositions of the public. There does exist, perhaps, a popular will that the Union shall not be broken, — that our trade, and therefore our laws, must have the whole breadth of the continent, and from Canada to the Gulf. But, since this is the rooted belief and will of the people, so much the more are they in danger, when impatient of defeats, or impatient of taxes, to go with a rush for some peace, and what kind of peace shall at that moment be easiest attained: they will make concessions for it, — will give up the slaves; and the whole torment of the past half century will come back to be endured anew.

Neither do I doubt, if such a composition should take place, that the Southerners will come back quietly and politely, leaving their haughty dictation. It will be an era of good feelings. There will be a lull after so loud a storm; and, no doubt, there will be discreet men from that section who will earnestly strive to inaugurate more moderate and fair administration of the Government, and the North will for a time have its full share and more, in place and counsel. But this will not last, — not for want of sincere good-will in sensible Southerners, but because Slavery will again speak through them its harsh necessity. It cannot live but by injustice, and it will be unjust and violent to the end of the world.

The power of Emancipation is this, that it alters the atomic social constitution of the Southern people. Now their interest is in keeping out white labor; then, when they must pay wages, their interest will be to let it in, to get the best labor, and, if they fear their blacks, to invite Irish, German, and American laborers. Thus, whilst Slavery makes and keeps disunion, Emancipation removes the whole objection to union. Emancipation at one stroke elevates the poor white of the South, and identifies his interest with that of the Northern laborer.

Now, in the name of all that is simple and generous, why should not this great right be done? Why should not America be capable of a second stroke for the well-being of the human race, as eighty or ninety years ago she was for the first? an affirmative step in the interests of human civility, urged on her, too, not by any romance of sentiment, but by her own extreme perils? It is very certain that the statesman who shall break through the cobwebs of doubt, fear, and petty cavil that lie in the way, will be greeted by the unanimous thanks of mankind. Men reconcile themselves very fast to a bold and good measure, when once it is taken, though they condemned it in advance. A week before the two captive commissioners were surrendered to England, every one thought it could not be done: it would divide the North. It was done, and in two days all agreed it was the right action. And this action which costs so little (the parties injured by it being such a handful that they can very easily be indemnified) rids the world, at one stroke, of this degrading nuisance, the cause of war and ruin to nations. This measure at once puts all parties right. This is borrowing, as I said, the omnipotence of a principle. What is so foolish as the terror lest the blacks should be made furious by freedom and wages ? It is denying these that is the outrage, and makes the danger from the blacks. But justice satisfies everybody, — white man, red man, yellow man, and black man. All like wages, and the appetite grows by feeding.

But this measure, to be effectual, must come speedily. The weapon is slipping out of our hands. “Time,” say the Indian Scriptures, “drinketh up the essence of every great and noble action which ought to be performed, and which is delayed in the execution.”

I hope it is not a fatal objection to this policy that it is simple and beneficent thoroughly, which is the attribute of a moral action. An unprecedented material prosperity has not tended to make us Stoics or Christians. But the laws by which the universe is organized reappear at every point, and will rule it. The end of all political struggle is to establish morality as the basis of all legislation. It is not free institutions, ’t is not a republic, ’t is not a democracy, that is the end, — no, but only the means. Morality is the object of government. We want a state of things in which crime shall not pay. This is the consolation on which we rest in the darkness of the future and the afflictions of today, that the government of the world is moral, and does forever destroy what is not.

It is the maxim of natural philosophers, that the natural forces wear out in time all obstacles, and take place: and it is the maxim of history, that victory always falls at last where it ought to fall; or, there is perpetual march and progress to ideas. But, in either case, no link of the chain can drop out. Nature works through her appointed elements; and ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.

Since the above pages were written, President Lincoln has proposed to Congress that the Government shall cooperate with any State that shall enact a gradual abolishment of Slavery. In the recent series of national successes, this Message is the best. It marks the happiest day in the political year. The American Executive ranges itself for the first time on the side of freedom. If Congress has been backward, the President has advanced. This state-paper is the more interesting that it appears to be the President’s individual act, done under a strong sense of duty. He speaks his own thought in his own style. All thanks and honor to the Head of the State! The Message has been received throughout the country with praise, and, we doubt not, with more pleasure than has been spoken. If Congress accords with the President, it is not yet too late to begin the emancipation; but we think it will always be too late to make it gradual. All experience agrees that it should be immediate. More and better than the President has spoken shall, perhaps, the effect of this Message be, — but, we are sure, not more or better than he hoped in his heart, when, thoughtful of all the complexities of his position, he penned these cautious words.

When the KKK Came to D.C.

2025-03-23T07:00:00-04:00

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.

A century ago, in 1925, the Ku Klux Klan came to Washington, D.C. The Klansmen had arrived in early August: the Kleagles and Dragons and Exalted Cyclopes, regalia folded and packed, families in tow. Loyal men came from the South, as expected, but that was not where the group’s true strength lay. The Invisible Empire sent agents from all four corners, from New Jersey and Ohio and California and pretty much everywhere else.

An all-woman Klan band arrived from Cumberland, Maryland. A marching troupe paraded in from Fort Worth, Texas. Caravans of cars choked the highways heading into Washington, D.C., and specially chartered trains full of Klansmen spat out wave after wave of people into Union Station. Steamboats ferried groups up the Potomac from Virginia. The hordes of loyal Knights camped in Bethesda, Maryland, or at the crossroads of 15th and H Streets Northeast, in D.C., or across the river at the horse-show grounds. They crashed in boardinghouses and in hotels and with friends. In all, the members and their retinue numbered at least 30,000, not counting the horses.

They would march that weekend. There was talk that the New Jersey contingent had hired a plane that would fly a giant illuminated cross over the city, like a sign of some perverse providence. But as it turned out, that was just talk.

The Klan had been preparing for some time. The organization was not very tight-knit, and the planning was fractious. Hiram Wesley Evans—the group’s national leader, known as the Imperial Wizard—had originally discouraged the event, but he’d eventually relented to local members in D.C. He’d lived in Texas, where he’d personally overseen racial terror and violence. He’d been present in 1921 when Klansmen in Dallas abducted Alex Johnson, a Black bellhop, and flogged the man and branded his forehead with acid, after Johnson was allegedly found in a white woman’s hotel room.

But now, with the Klan reaching for a new level of national legitimacy, Evans found it useful for the group to avow a more moderate—or at least less overtly violent—platform. If the Klan was to march through the nation’s capital, it would request the proper permissions and allow police oversight. The D.C. march was supposed to be peaceful: no vulgarity, no fights, no brandings, no lynchings. The Klan wanted to appeal to American patriotism and dazzle onlookers with its showmanship—this was to be a pageant, not a pogrom.

Even so, many residents of D.C. were not so easily sold. The federal bureaucracy had become the beginnings of a multicultural haven, providing jobs that helped build a Black middle class and opening up roles to Jews and Catholics. This was a city whose architecture bore the handprints of slaves, and where cathedrals would soon dot the stunted skyscape. The city’s ethnic and religious minorities understood well that no matter how much the Klan polished its image, its swords still cut. Sales of guns in the District soared, and newspapers reported that “the negroes” were “arming and awaiting eventualities.”

Other groups appealed to President Calvin Coolidge to stop the march, but to no avail. Klan leaders in D.C. planned—perhaps hoped—for confrontation, and the city sent out its entire police force and mobilized Marines from Quantico. But on the day of the event, white reporters said they could barely find any spectators from the supposed lesser race and figured they were hiding. One Black newspaper told a different story, of Black people going about their day as normal, peering at the commotion with “amused contempt.”

The sky was heavy on the afternoon of the demonstration. Storm clouds were gathering. But the Klansmen carried on with confidence; the winds had been blowing in their favor for years. A decade prior, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation had become the country’s first blockbuster. The silent picture had enjoyed screenings right here in Washington, D.C., both for President Woodrow Wilson and for other members of government. The film’s portrayal of the Lost Cause myth and of heroic avenging Klansmen had helped re-create the KKK, which had mostly dissolved in the 1870s.

Hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of white Protestant men and women joined this new Klan in the following years, including Evans himself. Much of the country and the world was in a similar mood. The Red Summer of 1919, when anti-Black riots and massacres gripped dozens of cities, had come and gone, and the Black neighborhood of Greenwood, in Tulsa, had recently been burned. The Blackshirts paraded on Rome, and just a month before the Klan’s planned march, the first volume of a book called Mein Kampf began appearing on German bookshelves. The Scopes trial had just concluded; the Klan had been one of the early organizations calling for the inclusion of creationism in curricula.

Still, even up to the last minute, there were factional disputes about whether to go on with the D.C. parade at all. Perhaps, after having gotten there with little opposition, with city officials helping and thick crowds of white spectators appearing, the coming march somehow felt too easy for Klan leaders, for whom membership had always been a thing to hide, if only for appearances’ sake. Maybe there were some in the ranks of the Empire who’d expected to be shut down—a grievance to add to the list. But the weather held, and the road beckoned.

The triumph began at the Peace Monument, a marble complex built to honor men who’d served in the Union Navy during the Civil War. At its peak was an intricate white sculpture of a woman, referred to as Grief, crying on the shoulder of another, representing History. History held a tablet honoring the men who’d given their lives for the Union: “They died that their country might live.” Statues of Peace and Victory flanked the monument’s east and west faces, looking out to spaces where other features had been planned by the sculptors but never finished.

On the morning of the march, men who bore the inheritance of Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the most notorious Confederates, gathered below the monument to prepare. A color guard of robed men riding atop black horses and carrying “a gorgeous American flag” struck out first, reportedly the first time anybody had ever preceded the police escort in a Pennsylvania Avenue parade, according to The Washington Post. As Evans would later remark, the Klan “always followed the flag.”

They followed the flag up Pennsylvania Avenue, the great road of democracy, in the direction of the White House. Side to side, covering the breadth of the avenue, men, women, and children marched, keeping their bared faces trained ahead. Many wore white hoods and robes, some with fringes and regalia colored brightly to mark various groups, orders, and ranks. Drummers and marshals helped them keep pace, and many Klans and auxiliaries put on special performances for the applauding crowd.

Some participants marched with military precision—some groups had dusted off actual kits from the Great War, and marched with their old comrades in arms. Groups of women and children marched. More than 100 attendees passed out from the sticky August heat, but the mood was otherwise exultant. The Klansmen sang hymns and marching songs. Behind men and banners that proclaimed white superiority, some bands played jazz.

Above all, according to the Post, “there was a profusion of flags.” According to The Baltimore Sun, there were 900 or so large flags, “the greatest number, perhaps, which were ever massed in a single spot.” Many marchers carried and waved small American flags, while new Klans and regiments were announced by larger flags, held high. Many units marched with flags that were so comically gigantic that they could not be waved, and had to be carried horizontally by teams of marchers. One group of women carried a flag that could cover the foundation of a good-size house today; spectators threw money on it, netting the flag-bearers some $200. There was to be no mistaking it: These were the most American of Americans. Under Evans, their platform, succinctly, was “Americanism.”

After about four hours, the march reached its end, under the stone obelisk dedicated to George Washington. Speakers held forth. The Grand Kleagle of the District of Columbia promised that the rain from the heavy clouds would not come; God had ordained it so. By the time A. H. Gulledge, an official orator for the Klan, took the stage, the ordination had evidently worn off. “This is the proudest day of my life,” Gulledge told the soaking crowd. “I never dreamed it would come so soon—a day when so many native-born, gentile, white Protestant American citizens might march down Pennsylvania Avenue unharmed and unmolested.” They had all come, Gulledge said, “to renew our pledge of allegiance to the greatest government man ever built,” a government that was finally allowing people like them their birthright freedom of speech.

Gulledge refuted any claims of “malice” or “hate” on the Klan’s part, saying that his group just wanted to put an end to the mixing of races—a phenomenon that had caused only strife and the disinheritance of white Protestants. In this, his words encapsulated part of the brewing philosophy of Evans. “We found our great cities and the control of much of our industry and commerce taken over by strangers, who stacked the cards of success and prosperity against us,” Evans would write in the North American Review the next year. “Shortly they came to dominate our government.” Evans was skeptical of the assimilability of Jews, Catholics, and recent immigrants, and believed that Black people were simply naturally inferior to their white betters.

Evans blamed Jews and Catholics for constantly criticizing that which was American. “Nothing is immune,” he wrote, “our great men, our historic struggles and sacrifices, our customs and personal traits, our ‘Puritan consciences’—all have been scarified without mercy. Yet the least criticism of these same vitriolic critics or of their people brings howls of ‘anti-Semitic’ or ‘anti-Catholic.’” For him, the way forward would be “Americanism”—for real Americans to proudly wear their real Americanness, to claim their dominion, to find their forgotten greatness.

The next evening, the organizers held a “Klan spiritual” and burned a towering cross in Arlington, but most of the visitors had already gone home. The marchers had made their way back to Union Station. Night trains sped home in the darkness. A group of white-robed boys helped direct traffic out of the city. Klansmen went back to their lives as policemen, doctors, teachers, dentists, carpenters, politicians.

When the next editions of newspapers arrived, many breathlessly covered the spectacle, estimating crowd sizes and marveling at the composure of the Klansmen. Black newspapers, however, played a different tune. According to The Washington Tribune, the march was huge but “unimpressive,” with “apathetic” spectators and little city enthusiasm. The Chicago Defender carried a brief blurb about the Klan’s “gala day,” but other events had pushed it below the fold: The front page centered the lynching of Walter Mitchell, a 33-year-old Black man in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, by a white mob. Mitchell had been falsely accused of accosting a young white woman, and the mob had rushed the jail, kidnapped him, paraded him through the streets, and hanged him from a tree. One headline was grim and sardonic: “Missouri Carries Out American Democracy.”

Related:

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Photo Album

A fishing boat passes icebergs that broke off from the Jakobshavn Glacier on March 5, 2025, in Ilulissat, Greenland. (Joe Raedle / Getty)

Take a look at the view from Greenland, a self-ruling Danish territory that has recently undergone a national election, seen protests seeking autonomy from Denmark, and become a prominent target of President Donald Trump’s.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Elon Musk’s Soap Operas for Conspiracy Buffs

2025-03-23T06:00:00-04:00

Ever since he bought Twitter in 2022, Elon Musk has been titillating his fans with wild conspiracy theories from supposedly secret files. Now that Donald Trump is back in office—and has granted the world’s wealthiest private citizen free rein to dismantle federal agencies—Musk’s conspiratorial musings are no longer just entertainment for the extremely online. Internet fantasies have become a sufficient pretext for crippling the government.

“There are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,” Musk recently posted on the platform now called X, alongside a screenshot suggesting that millions of people in the program’s database are over 120 years old. In reality, the undead were an artifact of the Social Security Administration’s archaic records system. They weren’t getting checks. But the argument that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency had uncovered massive fraud captivated his fans, and the claim went viral.

Even though the Social Security administrator quickly got to explaining the facts, highlighting data from a 2023 public audit, Trump picked up the idea and falsely claimed in his speech to Congress earlier this month that Social Security abuse is rampant. As Trump and Congress consider whether to shrink a popular part of the safety net to accommodate tax cuts, fraud claims make a convenient excuse.

In recent weeks, Musk and his online allies have flooded X with similarly dubious allegations of corruption and incompetence at USAID and other agencies. (No, USAID didn’t “fund celebrity trips to Ukraine,” but Musk circulated a fabricated video making that claim.) Viral claims rile up the MAGA base, who demand accountability.

[Renée DiResta: Rumors on X are becoming the right’s new reality]

Since Trump’s reinauguration, the extremely online MAGA right has developed a passion for long-standing, easily accessible internet databases of government spending. Intrepid online sleuths boast about unearthing a budget line or a government contract whose existence had previously eluded them: The agency is hiding something. A piece of data, selectively disclosed and stripped of its broader context, is breathlessly promoted on X as proof of malfeasance: This is what they don’t want you to see. Viral outrage becomes the distribution strategy, and anyone questioning the ominous claim is in on the conspiracy: The media are covering up the truth. The outrage needs to last only long enough for Musk or Trump to boldly reveal the next step in their rapid unscheduled disassembly of government—a contract canceled, a program gutted, civil servants fired, Social Security benefits potentially interrupted. Then the cycle resets: That was just the beginning.

At this point, the process is self-perpetuating. Musk himself has become a credulous amplifier of even the wildest claims. On March 2, two days after Donald Trump excoriated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, Musk helped spread a rumor that Ukraine was somehow exploiting Social Security. Initially, an account called DataRepublican had posted screenshots from a government database showing payments to recipients in that country. Musk responded, “That’s weird.”

His attention algorithmically boosted the original post. It also prompted the influencer Mario Nawfal to amp up the outrage factor: “🚨🇺🇦U.S. SOCIAL SECURITY PAYMENTS SENT TO UKRAINE—WHY?” he posted. The Social Security Administration, Nawfal continued, “needs to explain how Ukraine became a recipient of U.S. retirement funds while Americans struggle.” As the X posts gained traction, some commenters in the replies tried to explain that a small number of American retirees are expatriates; some may even live in Ukraine—a plausible explanation that seemed not to have occurred to Musk or Nawfal.

Musk’s interventions in public policy are governed by the same logic he used in 2022 when publicizing the so-called Twitter Files. His handpicked authors wrote serialized installments, in the form of winding Twitter threads and Substack posts, that drew on leaked internal documents from the social-media platform. Musk hyped them as evidence that tech executives had colluded with powerful institutions to suppress conservative speech and manipulate the national discourse. “Government paid Twitter millions of dollars to censor info from the public,” Musk insisted, a claim later refuted by his own corporate lawyers.

These were soap operas for conspiracy buffs. The leaks of internal emails, Slack chats, and other documents transformed mundane corporate processes and communications into sinister conspiracies, elevating routine policy debates into moments of high drama. The Twitter Files writers, I should note, gave this treatment to projects my former team at the Stanford Internet Observatory had worked on jointly with Twitter; at one point, the writers advanced the theory that I was a secret CIA plant.

The Twitter Files sought to find evidence to support the preexisting right-wing belief that the government was secretly in cahoots with Big Tech. Ironically, Big Tech has now quite demonstrably gotten into bed with the government. Last year, Musk became the largest donor to the Trump campaign, buying his way into political power like no tech CEO had before him. After Trump won, he put Musk in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, whose acronym refers to an internet-famous meme of a Shiba Inu dog. The acronym was an unmistakable sign that the extremely online right was now in power.

[Read: Another edgelord comes to power]

The demand for what might be called the “Government Files” became apparent quickly. Some Musk fans clamored for the declassification of federal files on the politically connected sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal case; Trump played to the same crowd on Tuesday when he released files on the John F. Kennedy assassination—files that so far have proved anticlimactic. Others hoped for Files projects that would reveal the inner workings of the supposed “deep state.” As Musk’s team got to work, he and the Trump White House began to amplify stories of things his DOGE investigators were finding—such as $50 million in spending by USAID, supposedly on condoms in Gaza.

In some cases, as with the Ukrainian Social Security payments and various USAID contracts, much of the information that is purportedly being exposed was already public, present in reports or databases that most people simply hadn’t bothered to look at. The act of surfacing information lends an air of revelation. Extremely online crowds are not passive audiences; they eagerly seize the chance to play detective and uncover forbidden secrets. Individual participants’ outraged social-media posts take off almost at random, and they may be rewarded with a reply or quote-tweet from Elon Musk and other influencers—catapulting the authors to momentary virality or even, potentially, monetizable clout.

The problem, however, is that many of the supposed finds are misinterpretations. The line item widely described as “$50 million in condoms for Hamas” actually referred to an initiative to stop HIV in Africa. Another day’s viral post showed a screenshot of a 2023 expenditure and proclaimed, “🚨#BREAKING: Jeffrey Epstein was being paid by USAID as a Director.” The red siren was unwarranted: The infamous sex trafficker had died four years earlier.

Mistakes like this have real consequences. As online mobs demand vengeance for things that never happened, agencies or individuals named in made-up scandals go silent. Careers are upended, initiatives derailed, and important work is cast aside. Nuanced issues that could have been the subjects of practical reform are instead prosecuted as culture-war grievances.

In recent weeks, some of the very same people behind the Twitter Files allegations have become prominent voices in spreading wild theories about entities targeted by DOGE. “Both USAID and the CIA Were Behind the Impeachment of Trump in 2019,” the writer Michael Shellenberger proclaimed recently on his Substack. The agencies, he declared on X, were supposedly part of “an illegal regime change effort at home”—a truly incendiary, and utterly baseless, allegation. The same commentators who misread Twitter’s emails are suddenly experts in the complexities of federal procurement, international development, and interagency coordination, and their follower counts have continued to surge upward.

The incessant Files-style drama of the second Trump administration isn’t just misleading; it’s also incoherent. Every unpublicized grant or procurement line item is treated as proof that the system is both incompetent and omnipotent, hopelessly bureaucratic yet somehow pulling off sprawling conspiracies. Will distrustful Americans eventually realize that most of these “scandals” don’t amount to anything? Or will the absence of evidence be reframed as the evidence of wrongdoing? Someone from the deep state got there first and destroyed all the proof!

[Read: Musk comes for the ‘third rail of American politics’]

Musk and his scribes wanted the Twitter Files to produce earth-shattering revelations of censorship. What the documents mostly showed was that platform executives had to make tough calls in real time—and that some of those calls were wrong in hindsight. The true lesson wasn’t about systemic corruption; it was that running an online platform is complicated.

What started as misinterpretations of content-moderation policies has escalated into misinterpretations of Social Security payments, foreign aid, procurement, economic policy, and the fundamental functions that keep the country running. There will always be some silly grant or unnecessary bureaucracy in government. The application of technology can help fix those problems. But that’s not what Musk is doing. The goal of the Twitter Files—and now the Government Files—was never to provide authentic transparency or deliver reform; it was to discredit organizations and their leaders.

Musk and his fans have a saying: “We are the media now.” Born in the alternate reality of QAnon, it became a rallying cry for trusting alternative sources of information. But the stakes have moved beyond delegitimizing media or content-moderation policies. Musk and his allies are the government now. They are making decisions that affect lives, livelihoods, and national security. And if their reality continues to be dictated by misleading Files fantasies and misdirected outrage, Americans will face a problem far worse than bureaucratic inefficiency: government incapacity—the deliberate dismantling of the ability to govern at all.

The Beauty and Weirdness of the E-bike

2025-03-22T09:00:00-04:00

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning

E-bikes can add a layer of richness to your life—especially if you name them. “On a chilly morning last October, my 8-year-old daughter and I took our new e-bike, which she had named Toby, on its maiden voyage to school,” Elizabeth Endicott writes. “To amuse ourselves, we’d brought along a life-size Halloween skeleton, which sat in the back with my daughter, arms outstretched in a friendly wave. Along the way, people honked, smiled, and stopped to chat. I felt connected to our neighborhood in a way I hadn’t ever experienced.”

In addition to being an environmentally preferable alternative to cars, e-bikes are a proven source of joy: “Study after study shows that people with longer car commutes are more likely to experience poor health outcomes and lower personal well-being—and that cyclists are the happiest commuters,” Michael Thomas wrote in 2023. But the machines aren’t for everybody: In 2022, Ian Bogost argued that “something is ontologically off with e-bikes, which time and adoption alone can’t resolve.” Below is a reading list on the beauty and the monstrosity of the e-bike.

On E-bikes

An E-Bike Transformed My Family’s Life

By Elizabeth Endicott

Getting around on one might be a bit slower than in a car, but it’s also so much richer.

Read the article.

The Real Reason You Should Get an E-bike

By Michael Thomas

It’ll cut your emissions. It’ll also make you happier.

Read the article.

The E-bike Is a Monstrosity

By Ian Bogost

Neither bicycle nor motorbike, the two-wheeler’s future demands an identity of its own.

Read the article.

Still Curious?

Unfortunately, the electric scooters are fantastic. In 2018, Robinson Meyer asked: Can electric scooters succeed despite their essential dorkiness?
How school drop-off became a nightmare: More parents are driving kids than ever before. The result is mayhem.

Other Diversions

P. S.

(Courtesy of Mary Beth)

Each week, I ask readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Mary Beth, 64, from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, writes: “I was sitting on a sunny beach in Croatia and watched as a storm, north of us, was moving our way. How beautiful the dark-gray clouds and rain looked against the blue-green shade of the water and jutting landscape.”

I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks. If you’d like to share, reply to this email with a photo and a short description so we can share your wonder with fellow readers in a future edition of this newsletter or on our website. Please include your name (initials are okay), age, and location. By doing so, you agree that The Atlantic has permission to publish your photo and publicly attribute the response to you, including your first name and last initial, age, and/or location that you share with your submission.

— Isabel

The Danger of a Flood of Anti-Trump State Lawsuits

2025-03-21T16:19:00-04:00

Who will defend the federal government against itself? Donald Trump’s administration is waging an aggressive campaign against the executive branch as it has long existed. Democratic leaders in Congress have demonstrated in the past week that they have neither the ability nor the will to slow Trump down. Individual federal employees—such as former Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger, whom I profiled last week—have sued, but such suits take time and money that few individuals possess.

State attorneys general, though, see an opportunity. This month, the chief law-enforcement officers of blue states have been working to enforce federal laws against the federal government, and they’ve had some success.

Last week, a federal judge in Maryland ordered the government to temporarily rehire thousands of probationary federal workers in many departments. The judge, James Bredar, concluded that the administration had mass-fired workers using bogus claims of performance issues rather than the required procedures for a reduction in force. “The sheer number of employees that were terminated in a matter of days belies any argument that these terminations were due to the employees’ individual unsatisfactory performance or conduct,” he wrote.

That’s plain enough. What is interesting is that the suit was brought not by the workers who’d been fired but by Democratic attorneys general in 20 states. In order to convince the court that they had standing to intervene, even though the workers are private citizens employed by the federal government, they alleged that their states were harmed in various ways, focusing on how the failure to provide the legally required notice of the terminations left states scrambling to provide services to the workers. They also argued that the layoffs harmed the states because of lost income taxes. Bredar was fairly skeptical of some of the economic arguments but found that the states nonetheless had standing to sue.

The probationary-workers case is just one of several such lawsuits. In another last week, 21 states petitioned courts to prevent the Education Department from firing hundreds of workers. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to review rulings by lower courts, which were successfully petitioned by state attorneys general, that block his executive order purporting to get rid of birthright citizenship. If you’re not a fan of the Trump administration, these developments may seem like great news. But what’s legal for the goose is also legal for the gander, which is why state lawsuits on federal issues are something that should perhaps give all Americans pause.

States have long sued the federal government over alleged impositions on their prerogatives, but in 2007, after Massachusetts sued the EPA for failing to regulate carbon dioxide, the justices ruled for the state and said that states have special standing to sue in federal court to ensure that federal agencies are following federal laws. State attorneys general were more than happy to take advantage of the new leeway.

“What we’ve seen since around the George W. Bush administration is this massive increase in state lawsuits,” Tara Leigh Grove, a law professor at the University of Texas, told me. “It’s just the name of the states that change from administration to administration.”

That time period coincides with increasing partisan polarization. Although attorney general is ostensibly a lawyerly position, an old joke runs that AG is an abbreviation for aspiring governor. Having a big legal fight with a president of the opposing party is a good credential to have as a candidate. In 2013, then–Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott described his job this way: “I go into the office in the morning, I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home.” Since then, he has landed a new job—as governor of Texas.

Two partisan organizations, the Republican Attorneys General Association and the Democratic Attorneys General Association, have grown in importance in recent years, raking in millions in outside contributions. These groups are subject to the same capture by special interests that has come to dominate other areas of politics, with the same warping effect on their incentives that it has everywhere else.

Even when attorneys general aren’t motivated by base partisanship (in both senses of the word base), they don’t necessarily represent the interests of all Americans. What is valuable and important to constituents in Nevada may be very different from what’s valuable and important to those in South Carolina. This is why we have a federal government that sets national policies, but in a moment of tumult, state attorneys general are one of the few forces that can battle Washington.

Grove told me she understands why Trump critics might see lawsuits by state attorneys general as a godsend. The administration is taking many actions that “neither Republican nor Democratic administrations have thought to do, and that’s really, really jarring,” she said. “There’s a desire for a check in the system, and right now, a lot of people are looking to the courts as the key check to the system.”

But not all checks are created equal. One of my enduring interests in the Trump era has been the ways in which he forces the country to choose between bad and worse situations. For example, charging a former president with crimes sets a dangerous precedent that could precipitate political retribution, but not charging a former president who allegedly absconded with documents and attempted to subvert an election sets an even worse one.

Something similar, though less drastic, is at play here. Is it better for states to have no recourse at all, or to have recourse that the other political side can use to tie you in knots? You might have approved of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton using such suits to hamstring Joe Biden’s administration—but if so, you might be less enthused about Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown using the same methods to prevent Trump from enacting his priorities. And the flood of state lawsuits producing nationwide injunctions has made it more difficult for presidential administrations of either party to implement their agenda.

Some scholars see more positive effects. They note, among other things, that state and federal implementation of laws is so intertwined that attempting to disentangle the interests of each is practically impossible. They also celebrate state lawsuits as a tool of dissent—for example, from the excesses of the Bush-era Patriot Act. But enlarging the power of states cuts both ways. Progressives have historically been skeptical of states’-rights arguments, in part because they were once used to defend racist policies within state boundaries. In a nationally polarized environment, where states are asking courts to block laws nationwide, the effect is even broader. One state’s dissent is another state’s outrageous obstruction.

Grove wrote a law-review article in 2016 arguing for more stringent limits on state standing. “It’s been really interesting, the different reception that that article has gotten over the years,” she told me drily. When it was published, during the Obama administration, progressives agreed with her; once Trump took office, suddenly it was conservatives who most appreciated the argument. The valence flipped again during the Biden presidency. Maybe there should be a golden rule of state lawsuits: Sue your political opponents as you would like to be sued.

Related:

Democratic states’ new anti-Trump strategy (From 2024)
The law can still constrain Trump.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

The Pentagon was scheduled to brief Elon Musk today on a military plan for the possibility of war with China, according to The New York Times. After the story published, Donald Trump denied it, and Musk met with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth instead.
In a Truth Social post, Trump asked the Supreme Court to stop any nationwide injunctions from federal judges who have ruled against his administration’s actions.
Trump announced plans for America’s $1.6 trillion student-loan portfolio and special-education services, which are currently overseen by the Department of Education, to be managed by other government entities.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: How do we know when, or whether, to change our mind? Perhaps being persuadable is overrated—at least if it means “coming to accept the unacceptable,” Boris Kachka writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic

Forever 21’s Brief, Hideous Life

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

Forever 21 opened in my hometown when I was in middle school, when the opening of a new store at the mall was still a big deal. When the sign first went up, nobody knew what “Forever 21” was. I remember thinking that it would be a store marketed to retirement-age women who felt young at heart—Forever 21! This was wrong, but not so far off: Do Won Chang, one of its founders, has said he chose the name because 21 is “the most enviable age.” And it is, especially if you are 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, or 20.

Read the full article.

The Danger of a Too-Open Mind

2025-03-21T13:05:00-04:00

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.

At a moment when just asking questions can feel synonymous with bad-faith arguments or conspiratorial thinking, one of the hardest things to hold on to might be an open mind. As Kieran Setiya wrote this week in The Atlantic on the subject of Julian Barnes’s new book, Changing My Mind, “If a functioning democracy is one in which people share a common pool of information and disagree in moderate, conciliatory ways, there are grounds for pessimism about its prospects.” But what should the civic-minded citizen do with that pessimism? Knowing about our tendency toward rationalization and confirmation bias, alongside the prevalence of misinformation, how do we know when, or whether, to change our minds?

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

Another article published this week presents a possible test case. The Yale law professor Justin Driver examines a new book, Integrated—and, more broadly, a surge of skepticism over the effects of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision that ordered the racial integration of American public schools. The book’s author, Noliwe Rooks, was “firmly in the traditional pro-Brown camp” as recently as five years ago, Driver writes. But America’s failure to accommodate Black children in predominantly white schools, combined with the continuing lack of resources in largely Black schools, led Rooks to conclude in her book that Brown was in fact “an attack on the pillars of Black life”: that integration, as carried out, has failed many Black children, while undermining the old system of strong Black schools.

Should this case of intellectual flexibility be celebrated? It certainly makes for a lively debate. Driver calls Rooks’s “disenchantment” with the ruling “entirely understandable,” but he sticks to his own belief that Brown has done more good than harm, and he makes a case for it. For example, Rooks portrays Washington, D.C.’s prestigious all-Black Dunbar High School as a hub of the community, staffed by proud and dedicated educators. Driver complicates the history of those “glory days” by quoting its most prominent graduates: “Much as they valued having talented, caring teachers, these men understood racial segregation intimately, and they detested it.” And he notes that, beyond changing education, “Brown fomented a broad-gauge racial revolution throughout American public life.” He demonstrates that we can absorb new information—in this case, evidence of the many shortcomings of American school integration—without forgetting the lessons of the past.

Barnes makes a similar case in Changing My Mind, a book that is, in fact, mostly about why the novelist hasn’t altered his opinions and ultimately doubts that trying to is worth it. To adopt new beliefs, he writes, we would have “to forget what we believed before, or at least forget with what passion and certainty we believed it.” Setiya chides Barnes for his view that, given our hardwired biases, we might want to give up on being swayed at all. But he concludes that such stubbornness is “not all bad.” Perhaps keeping an open mind is overrated—at least if it means “coming to accept the unacceptable,” as Setiya puts it. And how should a person determine what’s unacceptable? “When we fear that our environment will degrade,” Setiya writes, “we can record our fundamental values and beliefs so as not to forsake them later.” Once we know what our principles are, we can more easily weigh new information against our existing convictions. Without them, it would be easier to change our minds—but impossible to know when we’re right.

Illustration by The Atlantic*

It’s Hard to Change Your Mind. A New Book Asks If You Should Even Try.

By Kieran Setiya

The novelist Julian Barnes doubts that we can ever really overcome our fixed beliefs. He should keep an open mind.

Read the full article.

What to Read

Witness, by Whittaker Chambers

This 1952 memoir is still thrust in the hands of budding young conservatives, as a means of inculcating them into the movement. Published during an annus mirabilis for conservative treatises, just as the American right was beginning to emerge in its modern incarnation, Witness is draped in apocalyptic rhetoric about the battle for the future of mankind—a style that helped establish the Manichaean mentality of postwar conservatism. But the book is more than an example of an outlook: It tells a series of epic stories. Chambers narrates his time as an underground Communist activist in the ’30s, a fascinating tale of subterfuge. An even larger stretch of the book is devoted to one of the great spectacles in modern American politics, the Alger Hiss affair. In 1948, after defecting from his sect, Chambers delivered devastating testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee accusing Hiss, a former State Department official and a paragon of the liberal establishment, of being a Soviet spy. History vindicates Chambers’s version of events, and his propulsive storytelling withstands the test of time. — Franklin Foer

From our list: Six political memoirs worth reading

Out Next Week

📚 Free: My Search for Meaning, by Amanda Knox

📚 Sister Europe, by Nell Zink

📚 Twist, by Colum McCann

Your Weekend Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Jake Rosenberg / Netflix.

What Impossibly Wealthy Women Do for Love and Fulfillment

By Sophie Gilbert

Watching the show, I found myself stuck on one question: Whom is this for? Is there an underserved niche of Santa Barbara moms with their own pristine vegetable gardens who have previously been too intimidated to attempt baking focaccia? And yet, as With Love, Meghan went on, it started to hit a few of the classic pleasure points. A beautiful woman with a wardrobe of stealth-wealth beige separates and floral dresses? Check. A fixation, both nutritional and aesthetic, on how best to feed one’s family, down to fruit platters arranged like rainbows and jars of chia seeds and hemp hearts to sneak into pancakes? Check. A strange aside where she details what it meant for her to take her husband’s name? Ding ding ding: We’re in tradwife territory now. This is absurd, of course. Meghan isn’t a tradwife; if anything, she’s a girlboss, a savvy, mediagenic entrepreneur with a new podcast dedicated to businesswomen and a nascent retail brand. So why does she seem to be trying so hard to rebrand as one, offering up this wistful performance of femininity and old-fashioned domestic arts that feels staged—and pretty familiar?

Read the full article.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight.

Explore all of our newsletters.